Sentiment in Search – Are All Votes Created Equal?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Travis Loncar

I think you’ll agree that an ever-changing search algorithm is dynamic in its engineers’ consistent efforts towards development, refinement, and ultimately, improvement. The end goal of any algorithm update, however large or small, is certainly not detraction from quality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. An update is made, we can assume, to improve upon the quality of the results – no matter how insignificant-seeming the percentage of results affected. When I search “all about poodles,” I want to learn all about poodles – not play minesweeper with pop up and banner ads. Mind you, overall improvement does not necessarily translate to individual ranking increases; we know this all too well. With positive change comes almost certain hardship for those that are oppositely negative. Fortune favors the brave – yes. Similarly, though, misfortune handpicks the irresponsibly audacious. Just ask BMW or J.C. Penney – both of which have suffered the unrelenting punitive blows of Google’s “manual action.”

An algorithm update, in some sense, is the addition of an automation process to carry out an action that was previously executable only by handpicking or “manual action.” As you can imagine, penalizing (or rewarding) sites on a case to case basis is both laughably uneconomical and far too permissive of subjective, human analysis. It’s fairly intuitive, then, that the more frequently a particular rule needs applied, the more likely it is that that rule will become an integral part of the algorithm. For instance, when I search to learn more about our fluffy, white friends, the results at the top of the SERPs are largely informative and (more importantly) exactly what I’m looking for. Before Panda (which came with harsh penalties for websites with thin content), I might not have been so lucky. Anyways, that’s for another day. For now, we’ll focus on sentiment in search. Where is it going? Where has it been? And can its analysis be translated effectively and efficiently into the current search algorithm? Let’s have at it!

The Current State of Sentiment in Search

First off, let’s define the “sentiment” of an online vote (be it a link, review, service testimonial, etc.) as the connotation (positive, negative, or neutral) with which said vote is casted. While the link is traditionally recognized as the primary vote metric, developments in social technology and online listing review systems have broadened the user’s ability to convey relative, measurable sentiment within minutes (or even seconds). If you liked Christina’s recent blog post on ‘keyword not provided‘ or tweeted about Jim’s take on flow visualization in GA, you’ve engaged socially in conveying positive sentiment, or casting a positive vote for the respective post. On the other hand, if you found such disfavor in the stale-tasting coffee at the local donut shoppe that you felt obligated to share that negative experience with potential customers online (perhaps through a Google Places listing review), you’ve conveyed negative sentiment, or casted a negative vote for that business.

While we can’t be sure how these signals are weighted in the current algorithm, we can certainly infer that the integration process is well under way. With Google’s release of the +1 button and specific markup for reviews and rich snippets, it’s a reasonable assumption to make that the link is no longer the lone indicator of online sentiment. Notice, though, that the majority of these indicators are geared towards users sharing positive experiences (perhaps with exception to negative reviews). Although many custom blog platforms allow users to cast a negative vote for a given post with a thumbs-down, major social platforms (from which search engines actually collect data) like Facebook have yet to implement such an option. How, then, without clear-cut social signals, do we derive negative sentiment from a given comment or review? And perhaps more importantly, how do we go about deriving negative sentiment from the original vote metric – the link?

Sentiment Analysis – A Work in Progress

To preface this section, I’d like to recommend some light reading – a New York Times article (which Robbin suggested to me) that inspired this post (as it probably has many of the more recent debates on sentiment in search). The article details the much-chagrined success story (and subsequent fall) of an online eye glasses vendor who utilized the power of negative votes (provided by intentionally provoked customers) to leverage his company’s organic search presence. I’d like to spare you another poodle analogy, but honestly, I can’t resist. This should paint a fairly representative picture of the article (for those of you who are saving it for a rainy day).

If a fictitious John from John’s Poodle Emporium trains his dogs to be utterly disobedient to their renters, there’s a good chance that John’s business is going to receive plenty of negative reviews online. With no sentiment analysis, though, a review is a review and a link is a link. Online poodle forums and blogs are abuzz with horror stories about John’s Poodle Emporium (occasionally even linking to his site). Little do they know, they’re fueling the very fire that they seek to put out – sending link juice from relevant websites onto John’s site. John punks his Poodle-loving patrons and moves onto the next group of clients the town over (who haven’t bothered to check out some online reviews). All the while, his rankings are shooting through the roof, providing him with a healthy influx of new customers to mistreat intentionally.

Okay, back to reality. That was bad, but you get the idea. While Google affirms that the the real vendor’s rankings should be attributed to link juice from high authority news outlets (like the New York Times), citing the presence of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute on many of the negative review sites, the causation is there, nonetheless. Be it direct or indirect, in this case, negative sentiment yielded positive results.

How Do We Combat This?

Needless to say, the article prompted almost immediate action from Google. After doing their due diligence, they found that cases similar to that in the New York Times article were not as uncommon as they had originally thought. As we discussed earlier, a high volume of problematic, penalty-deserving websites can often complicate manual action. However, when all of these websites are linked by a common infraction, the likelihood that the penalties can be distributed algorithmically is much higher. In this case, the search engineers at Google were able to implement a quick, algorithm-intensive fix that penalizes online vendors who treat their customers poorly or unfairly. While we can’t be sure that this solution is completely free of sentiment consideration, we can be sure that sentiment analysis is not the foundation of the underlying framework. In fact, Google has admitted that although they have a “world-class sentiment analysis system,” they’ve yet to find a way to effectively implement that system within the current algorithm.

The Way of the Future?

It seems simple, doesn’t it? Just introduce an algorithm update that mandates that all crawls take into account the sentiment of the text surrounding a given link. If the connotation of the “context clues” is primarily positive, treat the link as a positive vote. If negative, weight the link with a negative value. Simple enough, right? Actually . . . not so much. We could pick the simplicity of this solution apart all day, so I’ll spare you the countless refutations in place of one (for which I’ll pose a rhetorical question). Aren’t some of the most important modern issues also the most polarizing issues? And, in our context, should a website pertaining to one of these issues be devalued because the negative sentiment nearly washes the positive? Hardly, in my opinion. A vote, whether positive or negative, is still an indication of care. As long as people care about a given issue or web page (and are willing to pay testament to their sentiments), as things stand, the results that they see will be based on sheer popularity.

With all that we’ve considered, many points remain mute. Incorporating user sentiment in search, whether socially, through review aggregators, or by sentiment analysis, is a tricky little game. Considering the tremendously impactful implications that a major sentiment-related algorithm change could have, it’s a game that needs to be played with the utmost tact and care. That said, I’m rather confident that user reviews, testimonials, social votes, context clues surrounding links, and even the sentiment of anchor text will continue to play larger roles in both organic and local rankings. Undoubtedly, the technology behind these metrics (and consequently, their popularity among users) will continue to develop in the future. This puts further onus on coinciding algorithmic development targeting search sentiment. Again, the end goal is better results for the user – or better information about poodles for curious dog lovers. If, by implementing a functional, discriminatory sentiment analysis system in the search algorithm, we’re able to achieve this, then I’m all for it. Personalized search is the way of the future. Sentiment analysis is just another step in the right direction . . . well, at least on the timeline.

What are your thoughts on sentiment in search? Are all votes created equal, or should positive and negative sentiment play a role in valuing a link? Have you observed any noticeable ranking changes since you’ve enabled social “voting” on your pages? Share your thoughts and experiences!

View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Search Engine Optimization, Usability

Do you need a Custom CMS?

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio

NO.

As tempted as I am to end the blog post after that first word/sentence, I owe it to you to explain. It seems recently (in the past year) I’ve run across a number of sites that use custom built content management systems (CMS). Two in particular are client sites. Although they each have varying degrees of awfulness, it got me thinking about why web designers and developers feel the need to create custom CMSs for sites that would be better off using an opensource CMS, like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Although I could speculate about why I think developers create custom CMSs, it would be just that – speculation (and it would most likely just anger the designer/developer community). Instead, I asked a web designer I know to help me understand why custom CMSs are even considered anymore, given the easy access to numerous free alternatives. He helped me come up with the following list of reasons for a custom CMS:

• Security through obscurity – hackers are writing scripts for popular CMSs, not custom CMSs.
• Custom functionality – sometimes the purpose or function of a site is specialized enough that a custom CMS doesn’t address the site requirements in the most efficient manner.
• Cleaner code – sometimes a site may be so simple and focused that you don’t need all the bells and whistles of WordPress or Drupal, and the code can be cleaner and less bloated.
• Any other reasons? Let me know in the comments.

Those are all valid reasons, but to how many sites across the web would they apply? Not many, I think. The kinds of sites that I do see getting custom CMS treatment tend to be of the garden variety business web sites. You know the kind, less than 100 pages, typical online brochures with a home page, about us, products/services, contact, TOS/privacy policy page and not much more.

These are the sites that clearly do NOT need a custom CMS. Yet time and time again, I see business owners that don’t know any better, and they end up with a poorly performing site (especially from an SEO perspective). To give an example, one custom CMS I worked with didn’t even provide the ability to change title tags, meta descriptions, or URLs (all things that are easily done in WordPress, for example).

So, if you’re redesigning your site, here are some things to keep in mind if your design company is pushing a custom CMS:

• They lock you in – anytime you need an update to the system, you have to go to them. Those updates can get pretty expensive (good for your design company, bad for you).
• Bugs – if they’re building the CMS from scratch, there will be bugs. Are they willing to fix those? For free? For how long?
• Fit and Finish – your brand new custom CMS will not be as polished in terms of look and feel or usability, because it hasn’t undergone multiple updates that pass through hundreds of developers with feedback from thousands.
• Functionality – they may not include critical functionality (like the ability to write custom title tags and meta descriptions for each page, custom URLs, etc.). Even worse, they may charge you extra for this functionality and call it an “SEO package.” Don’t get me started on that one.
• Documentation – there may not be any well written documentation on how to use it, make changes, etc.
• Migration – once you realize how much better you would be with an opensource CMS, it can be a nightmare to migrate your site from a custom CMS. (see reason #1)

Here’s some more food for thought. WordPress has five lead developers, three designers, nine contributing developers, two documentation and support specialists, eight developer emeriti and countless testers. It was first released on May 27, 2003 and has since been updated 59 times, averaging a major release every six months or so. That’s nearly 7 ½ years of development (for free). Can your web developer offer that?

Additionally, if you need custom functionality for your web site, or you don’t want it to look like a cookie-cutter site, there are endless possibilities for customization. Instead of creating a custom CMS, your designer could create a custom theme, or your developer could write a custom plugin. But even that is often unnecessary when you consider the number of plugins already created for popular opensource CMSs:

• WordPress: 11,704 plugins
• Drupal: 6,739 modules
• Joomla: 6,002 extensions

So, do you need a custom CMS? I think I answered that in the first sentence.

Am I wrong or missing a side of the story? Please tell me so in the comments.

View Comments (21 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Search Engine Optimization

Twitter’s Link Service & You

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio

Twitter recently announced a couple of updates that caught my eye. The first one deals with new authorization rules for Twitter applications. Although this one is less interesting to me, it does explain why Twitterrific stopped working on my iPhone this past Monday. (They may have fixed it by now, I don’t know. I already switched to Twitter’s own Twitter iPhone app, which I actually like better anyway.)

The second update that potentially has more impact, from an SEO and analytics perspective, is regarding their link service. Here’s the section of the e-mail they sent out that explains this update:

Update 2: t.co URL wrapping

In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for me?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time.

This raises some questions.

They say “when you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service…” Does this mean a series of redirects? How will this effect the referral data and any potential link juice or other social signals the search engines may take into account?

Also, that third bullet point at the end got me excited. So Twitter will be collecting click-through data on links (if they weren’t already). Unfortunately, they won’t be sharing that data with just anyone. You’ll have to be signed up for one of their “eventual commercial accounts service,” according to their blog post on this topic.

Where does this leave URL shortening services like Bit.ly?

Take a look at the second bullet point above, where Twitter talks about removing the obscurity of shortened links. That certainly doesn’t sound too friendly toward Bit.ly, ow.ly, tinyurl or any other link shortening services. Twitter does make mention of this in more depth on their help center page about the link service. Specifically, they state:

You can still use a URL shortener (like bit.ly) to shorten links.

If you’re wanting to shorten links to share with others, please see this help page on using URL Shorteners. You can continue to use a URL shortener to shorten links, and any tracking metrics (like those from bit.ly) will continue working as before.

The link service at http://t.co is only used on links posted on Twitter and is not available as a general shortening service.

Confused yet? I sure am. Will my bit.ly link be wrapped in a t.co link (whatever “wrapped” means)? Will the t.co link redirect to the bit.ly link which will redirect to the actual page? That doesn’t seem very efficient. Will link juice pass through the t.co service? Too many questions and not enough answers.

Not to be all negative, I have to give Twitter credit for trying to make the web a safer place. The primary purpose of this link service is to “protect users from malicious site that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks and other harmful activity.” That’s a noble directive and one that I can support.

View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Industry News, Miscellaneous

Google Cracking Down on Web Spam

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio

In an unusual show of transparency, Google has announced a list of specific items that will cause your web site, or specific pages of your site, to be algorithmically removed from their search results. Read the full announcement here.

According to a Google representative, this more aggressive stance on web spam comes from over 14 months of testing and research that shows an 18.2% increase in more relevant sites in the search results when filtering out sites and pages that have the specific features listed.

Here are the items that will cause your site/pages to be removed from the search index:

• If your pages contain a significant amount* of duplicate content
• If a significant number* of your pages have duplicate title tags
• Pages that use a meta refresh or javascript redirects
• If a significant portion* of the links to your site are from blog or forum comments
• Pages that link out to more than 100 other pages
• Domains hosted in China
• Pages with more than 5 “no followed” links.

* Although no specific numbers are mentioned, the announcement does give details on how they determine what a significant number is.

View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Online Competitors Vs. Industry Competitors

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Christina Keffer

If you own a nail factory, your competitors are other people who make nails right?  They make nails to build buildings with and supply contractors who build houses. And they also sell five different shades of green metallic polish and have more sizes of acrylic applications than you. Oh, and how could I forget hoof nippers? How many hoof nippers for farriers do you have, Nail Factory Owner Guy(or Girl)?  Did that stop making sense to you? To clarify the issue, here’s the Google search result page for the key phrase “Nail Supplier”

Clearly, the owners of that nail factory had no idea what they were up against online. If they came to me and asked me to tell them why they weren’t ranking higher than their industry competitors even though their websites stunk, I would tell them that their competitor for that term is really EZNails Beauty Supply. After they finished laughing at me, I would try to explain that it’s true because — wait for it — online competitors are not always industry competitors!

But Beauty Supplies? Really?

Yes, really. Online competition transcends the boundaries of industry competition and falls messily into the world of words. Online, a nail factory is not competing against EZnails for market share… they’re not even competing with them for customers. A contractor looking for wholesale 10 penny nails is not going to spend his money buying 10 inch long acrylic claws instead. He’s going to take one look at that results page, sigh in resignation, and refine his search using industry specific terms. What that nail company is REALLY competing for is high rankings for the key phrase “Nail Supplier.” (Incidentally, here is the search results page for the keyphrse “10 penny nail supplier.” Way more reasonable.)

There are other less hilarious instances of industries competing with sites that do not belong to industry competitors. It happens in the medical industry all the time. In a search for “Pediatricians, PA” there is not a single actual pediatric practice until the very bottom of the page.

Pediatricians are competing with these directories for the attention of potential patients. Several of these directories have paid ads so they even make money off the leads.

Now that I know who my online competitors are, what do I do?

There are two options here.

1. Beat these sites at their own game. Now that you know what you’re up against, it might be the time for that redesign, or forking over the money for SEO.
2. The other, less costly, less time intensive solution is to redefine your online competitive space. Remember that contractor who sighed in disgust and searched for a more industry-specific term? Find those long-tail terms and optimize for them instead of bashing your head against a wall of acrylic nail-selling beauty supply stores.

Both of these solutions involve redefining your web presence to a certain extent. Look at it this way. If you were a mom and pop cake bakery in Pittsburgh and there was another cake bakery across the street, wouldn’t you constantly strive to outstrip them by making sure your window display was better, more artistic, and with more icing in hopes of catching that fickle bridezilla’s attention? Though you’re competing for (and with) words in the online arena, the idea is the same.

Polish your content the way you would polish the glass windows of your store front, since it’s through these portals that your potential customers see who you really are and what you have to offer.

View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability, Writing for the web

Using Bit.ly for Spying, Link Building and Happiness

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio

Bit.ly Education – Part 2

This is the second of a 2-part post on using bit.ly. Part 1 – Bit.ly for Beginners – explained the basics of Bit.ly.

In the comments of the first post, Tim Wilson astutely observed the transparent nature of Bit.ly. Namely, you can get information (traffic, referrers, locations, conversations) about any Bit.ly link simply by taking the short URL and adding a “+” at the end (minus the quotes). For example – I shared yesterday’s post via Twitter using the shortened version of the URL – http://bit.ly/dwSQo4

Just for fun, you can see how many clicks that Bit.ly link received by going to http://bit.ly/dwSQo4+ (notice the plus sign at the end).

Are your wheels spinning yet?

Competitive Intelligence

You have a competitor that you keep tabs on, right? Maybe you have a Google Alert set up for their name, or maybe you follow them on Twitter (and monitor social media mentions of their name or product). Now you can track how effective they are at leveraging social media and see if specific campaigns they are running are having success. Or you can compare your own campaigns to theirs to see how you stack up.

There are two ways to do this. The first way is if you can find Bit.ly shortened links to your competitor’s pages. You might find these in their Twitter stream or on their Facebook fan page, or maybe you see someone else mention your competitor’s site with a Bit.ly link. Just take that Bit.ly URL and add the “+” (like mentioned above). Instant gratification! You can see how many clicks they’ve received, how many people have retweeted or shared the short URL and the conversations surrounding the link. If your competitor has a Twitter account, you can also go to Bit.ly Twitter search and do a search for from:twitterusername – here’s an example. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If your competitor doesn’t Tweet or you can’t find any Bit.ly links to their pages, you just have to do some more reconnaissance. Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are the most popular. You can use a tool like Top Pages from SEOmoz (Pro Membership required) or search Google for site:yourcompetitor.com – along with the SEO for Firefox plugin (to quickly see the most linked to pages). Take the pages that are the most popular (i.e. most linked to) and shorten them yourself using Bit.ly. You’ll quickly see if anyone else has shortened that same URL, and if so, all the traffic information along with it.

Link Building

Let’s visit Bit.ly Twitter search again, this time with our link building hats on. This nice Bit.ly feature, although somewhat hidden, lets you search Twitter for Bit.ly links about anything and compare their click through and traffic data. For example you can do a search for a topic like Google Analytics and get a quick glimpse at what Google Analytics-related content has been popular recently.

Once you see what’s popular (I hate to use the term viral) you can decide on a similar topic for a future blog post. After you’ve written and published this post, finding people to spread the word is simple. All you have to do is go back to that Bit.ly search you did for Google Analytics, find a popular post (one that has received a lot of clicks) and click on “Info.”

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Now just scroll down a bit and look at the “Conversations.” You should find plenty of Twitterers who have shared a post on a similar topic as yours. Chances are, they’ll be willing to share yours too, if it’s good. All you have to do is let them know about it.

click to enlarge

Finding Influencers

Don’t believe the numbers you see on Twitter. Just because someone has 10,000 followers doesn’t mean that they’re popular or that anyone is listening to them. In a lot of cases, they’re just using shady techniques to get a lot of followers to make themselves look good. These are not the people you want to target to help spread the word about that awesome article you just wrote.

But how do you find those people with influence? These are people that, regardless of the number of Twitter followers they have, can get a lot of people to click on links that they tweet and retweet. I’d rather have someone with 500 followers tweet a link to my post (if 10% of their followers regularly click through and retweet) than someone with 5,000 followers, who can only get a 0.1% click through rate and no retweets. Here’s a good example – you’d think that with nearly 7,000 followers, this twitterer would be able to get more than a handful of people clicking on his links. C’est la vie!

So how do you find these influencers? There are some tools out there to guage a twitterer’s influence, like TweetStats and Twitalyzer, that arguably do a better job of this type of analysis. However, Bit.ly can give you a more detailed look at which posts/tweets a person was able to attract a lot of attention to.

For example, let’s say I wanted to know if Danny Sullivan would be able to attract a lot of eyes to this post if he tweeted about it (hint-hint, nudge-nudge). I can see he has a lot of followers (about 30,613) but does anyone read his tweets or click through on his links? Let’s find out by going back into the Bit.ly Twitter search and doing the following search – from:dannysullivan. (You can do this for anyone by searching for from:twitterusername, remember?)

Here’s a few of his recent tweets that include Bit.ly links:

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This is good, but we can do better. If you click “info” on one of the results to get the details, you’ll see that Danny is a registered user of Bit.ly.

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If you click on the user name, you’ll get all of the Bit.ly shortening history. So we can see that Danny does have a lot of influence, which is no real surprise.

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Problems

All of the above information is great, but it’s limited to the people who use Bit.ly it to shorten their links. Although Bit.ly is on of the most used shorteners, there’s certainly no shortage of options – is.gd, kl.am, tinyurl, cli.gs, ow.ly, goo.gl, etc.

Also, just because someone uses Bit.ly to shorten their links, doesn’t mean that they’re a registered Bit.ly user. A lot of apps (TweetDeck, twitterfeed, etc.) integrate Bit.ly to shorten links. This means you won’t be able to determine a person’s influence as easily through Bit.ly, like we saw above with Danny Sullivan.

View Comments (9 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Bit.ly for Beginners

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio

Bit.ly Education – Part 1

This is the first of a 2-part post on using Bit.ly. Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – takes a deeper dive into this URL shortening service and shows how you can be Super Spy. Eat your heart out Bond.

I’ve talked previously about using Bit.ly to measure traffic from Twitter. Now let’s take a closer look at this URL shortening service. Bit.ly is an online service that allows you to take a long URL (http://www.example.com/blog/page/category/year/month/day/article/id=123456) and shorten it (to something like http://bit.ly/8FapX). Why would you want to do that? Simple. When you’re tweeting a link to your latest blog post, you have only 140 characters. Every character is precious, and if you can tweet a link that has 19 characters instead of 74 characters (like in the example URLs above) you have more space to craft a catchy line to get people to click through.

When someone clicks on the Bit.ly shortened version of your URL, they are then redirected to your original long URL. Bit.ly is kind enough to use a 301 redirect, which means that when search engines find links to the short URLs, they’ll credit those links to the long URL – your page. Don’t forget, links (quantity and quality) weigh heavily on how high your page and site rank in the search engines.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to providing a short URL for your page, Bit.ly also gives some great information on traffic to that short URL (hence, your page). Here’s the rundown of what you can see:

1. Number of times your shortened URL was clicked on
2. Number of times other Bit.ly shortened versions of the same page were clicked on
3. Watch in (near) real time as people click on your Bit.ly link
4. Referring sites/applications from which your shortened URL was clicked
5. Location (country) of the person clicking on your shortened URL
6. Conversations – the tweets that include your Bit.ly link

(click to view larger)

When you create an account with Bit.ly (which takes about 30 seconds and only requires a user name, email and password) you also get access to these nice features:

History – Bit.ly keeps track of your shortened URLs and the data about them. They also show you how many clicks (across all shortened links) you’ve had in the past week and your most clicked Bit.ly links in the past hour.

Twitter Integration – You can tweet from straight from Bit.ly

Bit.ly Sidebar – A nice tool to quickly and easily shorten and share links from any web page

Stay tuned for Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – where I’ll show you how to use Bit.ly to spy on your competitors and find influential Twitterers.

BONUS: As a sneak peak into the next post, try this: find a tweet that interests you that includes a Bit.ly link. Click on the Bit.ly link. Copy the page’s URL and go to Bit.ly. Shorten the long URL. See how many people have clicked on that other person’s Bit.ly link? We’re just getting started…

View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Tracking Google Sidewiki

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio

First of all, for those that can’t keep up with all the latest and greatest features that Google keeps rolling out, a brief explanation of Google Sidewiki is in order. Sidewiki is a new feature that lets users who have installed the latest version of the Google Toolbar add and view comments on any page on any website they visit. The comments show up right alongside the page. Here’s a quick look at what one of those cutting edge users will see if they visit the LunaMetrics Blog page:

A couple of things to note:

• anybody can leave a comment on your website (can we say reputation management nightmare?)
• the comments can include links (with the commenter’s choice of anchor text)

It’s that second point that piqued my curiosity – what would happen if someone clicked on a link in a Sidewiki comment to your website? Well, with some help from Analytics Ninja John Henson we dug deep to find out the details.

First of all, you’ll notice that links in the Sidewiki comments initially link to something like

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2007/08/08/regular-expressions-for-ga-bonus-iii-lookahead/&usd=1&usg=AFQjCNEJnC7BWykRg1GKn52tQTpdd0RmQw

I’m not sure what “usd” and “usg” represent exactly – bonus points to anyone in the audience with ideas on this in the comments.

So what happens when we click on the link and it takes us to that URL? Google is 302 redirecting to the actual page. “Interesting,” you say, “but how will it appear in my analytics?”

It appears that, along with the 302 redirect, Google is setting the referrer to

google.com/sidewiki/entry/106935257806183022682/id/65RQs-s3d9nGKlxKN-7XTSvgaHI

So, if you go into your Google Analytics, you can see visits from links within Sidewiki comments by digging into your Traffic Sources > Referring Sites, clicking on google.com and looking for /sidewiki/…

Bonus tip:

You can easily find out who left the comment with a link to your site. See that number after /sidewiki/entry/ (in the example above, it’s 106935257806183022682)? Take that number and add it to the end of www.google.com/profiles/[enter numbr here]

Here, I’ve made it easy for you – www.google.com/profiles/106935257806183022682

As you can see, the number is the ID for my Google Profile page (because I left the comment). In fact, if the person has created a “friendly URL” for their profile page (like www.google.com/profiles/jim.gianoglio) then instead of a number after /entry/ you’ll get their Google Profile page name. Pretty nifty, eh?

Other Observations

Google is indexing these Sidewiki pages. That’s right – when you leave a comment, it’s not just an addition to an already existing page – you’re actually creating a unique page. Need proof? Go to Google and do the following search: site:google.com/sidewiki/entry

So far, about 1,210 Sidewiki comments have been indexed. If you visit a sidewiki page with the Google Toolbar installed, you get redirected to the page on the actual website (with the Sidewiki comments opened up). But if you visit a Sidewiki page without the Google Toolbar installed, it takes you to the Sidewiki URL – you can still see the comment and the actual page, but you’re not on that website, you’re still on Google. They also prompt you to “Share your own insights as you browse the web. Download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.”

What does this all mean?

How can this information be used (aside from impressing all your friends at the next party)? For starters, you can use this as part of your online reputation monitoring. Granted, you’ll only see anything if someone links to you in their Sidewiki comment, and if someone actually clicks on that link. Nonetheless, if enough people start using Sidewiki, this is something you’ll want to monitor.

If someone is linking to you in a Sidewiki comment, maybe they’ll also link to you on their blog/website (link building opportunities, anyone?). Being able to see who’s leaving the comments (by tracking them back to their Google profile page) is a good start.

We’re still looking at ways that this data might be useful. What are your thoughts? How would you use this information? (Please share your expert opinion in the comments!)

Of course, it’s easy to see how spammers might try to use this to litter the web with links for viagra, porn and poker. It will be interesting to see how Google deals with this.

View Comments (10 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News, Miscellaneous, Web Analytics

Sitemaps – Do You Need Them?

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio

Do you have a sitemap on your website? More importantly, do you need one?

Before I answer that question, let me point out that there are two types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. The first is an actual page on your website that lists all the other pages of your website – often broken into sections. For an example, check out this sitemap. This type of sitemap is intended primarily for human visitors (not robots) to your site. The second type – XML – is only seen by the search engines robots. It too is a listing of all the pages of your site, with some additional information.

HTML Sitemaps

So, what’s the point of a sitemap page? Do visitors to your site even look at it? To answer these questions, I took a quick look at the analytics for about a dozen sites (that range from 5,000 visits a month to over 100 million). What I found from this (less than scientific) analysis is that the number of pageviews of the sitemaps pages ranged from less than .01% of total pageviews to 1.24% (with the average being .26%). See the screenshots below for a better idea of the actual numbers:

Even if only a quarter of one percent of your pageviews are to the sitemap page, depending on the amount of traffic to your site, that could be a substantial number.

(As a side note, if you’re getting a significant amount of pageviews on your sitemap page, that’s a good indicator that people can’t find what they’re looking for. Perhaps you should rethink your navigation or how you present your content.)

Aside from helping that small percentage of people who actually use it, a sitemap page has other benefits. If you have pages that are buried deep within your site, a sitemap can keep them a minimum number of clicks away from the homepage. Why is that important? It helps those pages receive link juice from the home page, as well as helping the search engines find pages that they otherwise might not see.

XML Sitemaps

So what about XML sitemaps? Basically, they can be used to let the search engines know about all of your pages. Google has some helpful information about when XML sitemaps are useful, including:

• if your site has dynamic content
• if your site is new and/or has very few links pointing to it
• if you have a lot of content pages that are not well linked from other pages on your site

Additionally, XML sitemaps let you specify information about your pages that help guide the search engines, including how frequently the pages are updated, the date each page was last modified, and the relative importance of each page. This information will help the search engines decide how frequently to crawl your pages.

Additional Resources

XML-Sitemaps.com – this online tool lets you create XML and HTML sitemaps for free (up to 500 pages)

XML Sitemap format – explains the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol

Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker – Bill Slawski dissects a whitepaper from Google about the effectiveness of XML sitemaps

Increasing Search Indexing Coverage With an XML Sitemap – an XML sitemap Q&A from former Googler Vanessa Fox

View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability

Back to Basics: Optimizing Your Title Tag

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio

This post is a look back at the basics for those who may just be joining us (sorry analytics ninjas – you’ll have to wait for the next advanced, brain-swelling post on GA from John or Jonathan).

I am always surprised when I see a website that has the same title tag for every single page. Unfortunately, it’s more common than you may think. It seems to affect small businesses more frequently, but no website is immune.

What do I mean by the title tag, you ask? Simply put, it’s a title for the page that describes that page’s content. The title tag goes in the head section of the page’s HTML, and looks something like this:

<head>
<title>Increase Your Site’s Conversion Rate with Web Conversion Consulting</title>
</head>

OK, I see your eyes glazing over – that means you want real world examples, right? People see your title tag everyday in two main places – their web browser and in the search engine results:

So what’s the big deal with the title tag? Of all of the things you can change on your website, changing the title tag will have the most impact on how high you rank for the keywords you’re targeting. It’s also what searchers look at when deciding which result to click on.

For sites that suffer from this affliction of title tag duplication, this is the easiest, quickest way to increase traffic to your site. We have a client (I won’t shame them in public) that had this problem, and after changing their titles on each page they saw a 60% increase in traffic from people searching for products and services related to their industry. Previously, the only traffic from search engines came when someone searched for their company name. That would be like Nike only showing up if someone searches for “Nike” and then after changing their title tags they suddenly start showing up for the search term “shoes.”

Believe it or not, there’s even a Google Analytics tie-in here. The title tag shows up in your GA in the “Content by Title” report.

If all of your titles are the same, you’ll not have much use for this report, because it will just show you all of the pageviews for your site lumped together under the same page title. But when your pages each have different titles, you can see the pageviews segmented by each page (by title, of course). You can basically get the same data by looking at the “Top Content” report, but that shows you the pages’ URLs instead of page titles, which isn’t nearly as pretty.

View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Miscellaneous