Published on January 12, 2012
in Ideas.
I do believe that the government will one day put significant sanctions on Google Search. Arrington writes maybe..
For every Netscape there are a bunch of small companies that are killed or adapted when they were competing against Microsoft. In the extreme situation. Do or die. You have to find another way to succeed. It’s not easy. It doesn’t feel good, but for many companies, especially the small ones, that’s the only option. If you’re waiting for the government, you’ll likely be out of money before any action is taken.
Published on January 11, 2012
in Ideas.
Many webmasters have struggled with getting a site to rank as well as it previously had after it was impacted by Panda. I’ve been working on a HubPages subdomain with a team of people on a subdomain that saw a recovery when it was moved to a subdomain, a subsequent crash, a subsequent recovery and another crash.
These articles were initially very specific about Rolex watches. Many were combined and updated, several unpublished after the last crash. There was a total of about 50% reduction in pages. While I think the account once received traffic for terms that may be a little reaching. I think it does deserve to rank for how to spot a fake rolex.
The next step is to remove more content accept for the pages that answer the queries the page receives very well. I’ll ask for all pages to be unpublished 404′ed with a time on page of under 1.5 minutes. Then we will give it another few weeks.
Published on December 5, 2011
in Ideas.
One of my highest visited Hubs fell out of Google’s index. It’s a bit strange where the Hub was about gift ideas for 8 year old girls. It was ranking near the top of the results. When that Hub fell out, my gift ideas for 7 year old girls started to rank for the 8 year old term, but on the second page.
Google keeping track of billions of pages is bound to lose one or two and when the titles are so similar, that’s bound to cause some issues as well, but this piece of content was getting twice as much traffic as any other page I have. It hurts to lose it - it was about 15% of my total traffic.
So, the question is can the page be resurrected. Does it need inbound links, fresh content, and more comments. I’ve linked it from this post and I updated the content. Let’s see what happens in a week.
Published on October 5, 2011
in Ideas.
In one of the most interesting tests we have done at HubPages is a small test with video. My first video is about how to make apple pie following a traditional homemade pie recipe. The video is embedded in the page and follows a microformat that should be ingested by Google. I’m looking to see a few things from this test. Will the video show up in the video results quickly, will the text show up in the organic rankings? I’ll be following how this content performs closely.
Published on June 6, 2011
in Ideas.
Today there are several things I’d purchase. For example, I’d buy an RWS air gun at the right price. I’m also looking for a natural gas barbecue. Preferably the small Weber Sumit, but others will do. I’m also looking for a built-in 36 inch counter depth refrigerator and an electric washer and dryer. I’d also buy a golf club cover that fit my driver, a blendtec blender, a pizza stone, two front car tires and a trip to Hawaii to relax after we get through Google Panda.
To find the physical goods, and since I’m very price sensitive, I use Craigslist RSS feeds (buying used saves a ton of money) that perform searches for the items I want. To have this work well, you have to know the brand at a minimum and it helps to have more details. When an item becomes available, it shows up in my RSS reader. The problem is I know that there are multiple brands of washers and dryers that I’d be happy with, but I just don’t know what they are, so I have one RSS search looking for Whirlpool Duet. I’d really like a Craigslist service that works like a massive retailer where you can do all the product research, but instead of buying it, you click notify me when one is for sale. That would make it easy to find multiple brands that I’d be happy with and save me the time. Until then, I’ll shop on Amazon and when I find an item I like, I’ll make the RSS feed on Craigslist and add it to my reader.
Published on June 3, 2011
in Ideas.
Over the last several years I’ve thought quite a bit about the signals a person makes online and how that relates to their online reputation. The way we think about reputation management is at the author level. HubPages uses HubScore that is on a 1 - 100 scale. 100 is the most trusted and 1 is untrusted. The higher the HubScore, the more internal promotion an author gets on HubPages.
We do it at the author level because it’s too difficult to determine the trust of any single document. I suspect Google Panda isn’t able to operate at the single document level either.
There are two main aspects to the HubPages author reputation system. One is related to the content that author creates. The other is related to how that author interacts with other people and documents. Think of it as a community score. These two scores flow back and forth and work very well as a directional guide.
+1 may be Google’s way into collecting data beyond the content that an author creates. This creates the basis for their community score. They’ll be able to develop trust signals based on who you +1 and who +1s your work. Before you +1 something it’s a good idea to be aware of how it may impact you. You probably don’t want to be giving out +1s for the hell of it, but instead giving really high quality content +1s only. If you do it this way, it could increase the value of your +1s.
I think it’s interesting to think about all the pieces of a person’s online reputation that can be calculated today. Facebook and Twitter certainly have some interesting data. Think about how Twitter might calculate reputation. Do you follow people on Twitter that you are genuinely interested in following, do you retweet information from other high quality users, do high quality users follow you. Conversely, do you follow people indiscriminately, are your followers low quality. These are key indicators.
Author reputation is already a big piece of the social space, I suspect it will be critical to SEO in the future as well. Use your +1s wisely.
Published on May 24, 2011
in Ideas.
HubPages redirects all www.hubpages.com to hubpages.com with a 301 redirect. However, someone must have fed google a ww.hubpages.com link. We use relative links, so the site shows about 90K ww pages in the google index. The interesting thing is that many of these pages are ranking better than the hubpages.com version of the page. Before Panda, we never noticed any of these pages existence. We now handle this by redirecing ww and wwww to Hubpages.com.
Published on May 15, 2011
in Ideas.
Email has been the best way of growing social engagement on a website. Today there is a bit of a conversation going on about the topic. Whether it’s notifying a participant that they were tagged in a photo or letting them know someone responded to their question or comment. The key is sending the right notifications at the right interval. Send emails people don’t find useful or send too many emails and they turn them off, send emails people want to get and they open them and click through at very high rates.
From my experience, Facebook sends five emails about an item, and if you haven’t clicked through or responded, then the emails stop. If you respond or click through, the emails keep coming. You also have pretty granular controls to opt out of emails. I still get FB emails, although my preference for these types of notifications is to get them as notifications on my phone.
Groupon was sending me email every day about local deals. They didn’t seem targeted, and they annoyed me, so I turned them off. Interestingly, FB has been sending me deal emails daily now. They have started to annoy me as well, so I’ll turn them off.
I think the next wave of email and notifications will be less about making sure the email has been delivered by avoiding junk filters and more about sending the person the right emails that they will find useful. This is where we are spending our resources at HubPages. A smart way to send emails to people that they will open and most importantly, to stop sending mails they don’t respond to, so we can stop sending before they turn us off.
Published on May 3, 2011
in Ideas.
I’ve been frustrated by Google’s recent search engine algorithm update call Panda. A few days ago, I wrote a hub. That hub was indexed by Google, but when I search for the first sentence of the hub, I can’t find it in the first ten pages of Google’s results.
Today, I copied my original hub and pasted it into a knol. I’m curious which will rank higher.
Update: The Hub and Knol were indexed. The knol ranks higher.
Published on March 11, 2011
in Ideas.
If you want better relationships with your wife, kids, family or friends
If you want better relationships with your community, neighbors, teachers or church
If you want better relationships with your co-workers, partners, clients or customers
It starts with where you spend your time.
