Archive for the ‘notifications’ tag
Pinterest App Updates Accentuate Social and Search Features
Pinterest today released updates for its mobile apps that allow users to mention social contacts and receive notifications, as well as access searches they’ve made previously on other devices.
Pinterest follows Facebook in adopting the “@” mention convention first pioneered by Twitter. The mention feature is supported by augmented notifications. Users can opt to receive notifications only within the app or to see push notifications without opening the app.
Pinterest rolled out Android and iOS updates simultaneously, suggesting that its apps are performing well on Android. But iOS users get an additional feature in their update: Pinning from websites. To access the feature, users hit the “+” sign and type in a URL box that appears. (Pro tip: Go to the website first and copy the URL, then simply paste it in the Pinterest app.)
iOS users can also invite other members to co-curate boards with them using the mobile app.
Both updates also introduce a simple form of cross-device synching: The user can see and access searches s/he has previously conducted on the Pinterest website. The search function also adds auto-complete, sparing users some stabs at the mobile keyboard.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Make Your Notifications Less Intrusive with These Soothing Alerts [Exclusive Lifehacker Download]
Yesterday, I ripped the sound out of my computer and discovered I really liked it that way. Quiet is great. Unfortunately, it’s not practical or realistic. In order to take a step towards compromise, I decide to create a set of (21) notification sounds that wouldn’t be quite so intrusive. If you want your alerts to be a little more soothing, you can download them for free. More »
August 2012 Google Webmaster Report
It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster report where we share all the latest Google SEO related topics of the past month and recap you on anything particularly new going on in the search results.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has chatter about the PageRank update and then some discussion around weird messages about blocked pages in Google Webmaster Tools, and finally the normal ranking fluctuation chatter. Outside of that, the start of the month has been pretty quiet.
In terms of the most important Google SEO related topics, here they are in some order:
Updates:
- Official: Google Panda 3.9 Refresh
- Korea & Japan Get Google’s Panda Algorithm
- Google PageRank Update: August 2012
Link Notification Debacle:
- Google’s Cutts Explains Untrusted Link Notifications
- Google Sends Out Notifications For Links They Ignore
- Google Sends Out New Batch Of Unnatural Link Notifications
- Want Me To Remove That Link? Pay Me $500!
Google SEO Advice:
- Google’s Cutts: Links Still More Powerful Than Social Signals
- Google: Infographic Links To Be Discounted
- Want To Disavow Links In Google Now? 404 The Target Page
- Google: Ignored Links Can Confuse Google’s Algorithms
- Google On JavaScript & Responsive Web Design
- Google: Don’t Wait For Your Penalty To Expire
- Google: Wouldn’t It Be Annoying If USPS Did Multiple Sites?
- Google: Aggregated Statistics Is Not Great Content
- Google: 2-3 Sentences Of Unique Content Is Enough
- Google: We Show Better Titles Than Your Title Tags
Google Webmaster Tools:
- Structured Data Dashboard On Google Webmaster Tools
- Google’s New Advanced Index Status Report
- Author Stats Returns To Google Webmaster Tools
- See Your Newest Links In Google Webmaster Tools
- Google Previews Added To Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors
- Google Webmaster Tools Now Adds Crawl Error Alerts
For the past month’s report, see the July 2012 Google webmaster report.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Did Negative SEO Beat SEOmoz?
In August, a huge negative SEO debate sparked up and it resulted in Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz offering his site up as a sacrificial lamb to the negative SEOs out there to try to see if they can’t hurt SEOMoz’s rankings by implementing negative SEO techniques.
A week or so ago, SEOmoz received and unnatural link warning. SEOmoz explained it is likely because of the negative SEO challenge, where Google saw a ton of bad links coming in and issued the notification because of it.
But did it hurt SEOmoz? It doesn’t appear so.
(1) The warning went out the same time everyone else got that new batch of link notifications – meaning, Google doesn’t penalize for those specific links but rather just warns you that you have a nice number of links they are ignoring.
(2) SEOmoz shared their traffic from Google and there was no change at all:
Now the question is, did negative SEO beat SEOmoz’s link graph? It depends on how you define beat?
(1) Yes, they did get tons of bad links to their site.
(2) Yes, they did get a link notification.
(3) No, their rankings did not suffer.
(4) No, this notification is not a penalty notification.
What do you think? Tons of discussion at SEOmoz and Cre8asite Forums.
SEOmoz Tries To Automate Google Update Notifications With MozCast
Dr. Pete at SEOmoz announced they introduced a new tool to try to track the daily fluctuations at Google in weather report style. This is meant to try to help the SEO community figure out if their site dropped or climbed and no one elses did or if they are in good company…
Annoy Your Friends On Facebook With Bing Facebook Tagging
Bing added one more feature to the Bing Social Bar – the ability to tag friends so they see your questions and suggestions you post on Bing to Facebook.
I hate being tagged on Facebook but I might be out of the norm.
I guess this is a useful feature.
You search for something, can’t find the best answer on Bing and decide to ask it on Facebook and call out some friends who you think are experts in the area. It will add notifications to your friends notification menu and encourage (annoy) them to answer.
What do you think of this feature?
Here is a video of how it works from Bing:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Google’s Cutts Explains Untrusted Link Notifications
On July 20th, Google sent out a batch of new link notifications that scared the webmaster community. Google then informed us we can relax about those notifications because they are ignored links that don’t specifically hurt your site.
Still, there was a lot of confusion…
Google’s Cutts Explains Untrusted Link Notifications
On July 20th, Google sent out a batch of new link notifications that scared the webmaster community. Google then informed us we can relax about those notifications because they are ignored links that don’t specifically hurt your site.
Still, there was a lot of confusion. So over the weekend, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a detailed blog post on what these notifications means. He wrote:
In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a siteâs overall ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole.” The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that other messages have, which tries to convey that we’re addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.
Cutts Says Do Not Ignore The Links
Matt Cutts said do not ignore the links despite what we thought Google told us to do on that Friday.
These new messages are worth your attention. Fundamentally, it means we’re distrusting some links to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might be might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.). So while the site’s overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able to rank for some phrases. I wouldn’t classify these messages as purely advisory or something to be ignored, or only for innocent sites.On the other hand, I don’t want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank for queries like [buy viagra].
Anyway, Matt goes into more details on the Google Webmaster Blog.
A WebmasterWorld thread has Tedster saying he would still focus his time and resources on other things and not go after removing links in this link unharmful notifications.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
SEOs Eagerly Waiting A Penguin Refresh
It has now been over 9 weeks since we had a Penguin refresh and SEOs and webmasters are getting antsy.
They want to know when the next Penguin refresh will be. Typically Google pushes out Panda and possible Penguin updates every 3-6 weeks but it has been over 9 weeks now.
The original Penguin update was on April 24th and the refresh was May 25th. Since then nothing.
The question is why hasn’t there been an update for so long?
Some speculate that Google doesn’t want to send out an update until the disavow link tool is out and some are saying because all the confusion around the new link notifications.
Is the wait killing you?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld?
Image credit to ShutterStock
I Know What You Did in the Last 60 Seconds
Our actions can come back to haunt us – as movie makers, novelists and storytellers the world over remind us. But what happens when the time between action and reaction reduces. What happens if we don’t have a whole summer to forget about what we did, why we did it and how it happened?
Welcome to the world of social media.
Following up on this infographic on the volume of data and activity that takes place across the web each and every minute, I thought it might scare/intimidate/excite you to know that happens to that data. The folks at Baynote have pulled together this infographic that goes some way towards explaining how your data, information and behaviour is mapped against a series of business outcomes:
- Target advertising
- Location based services
- Notifications
- Lead generation
- Account authentication
But the big question for brands and for marketers is not even “what did you do”. It is “are you ready to be held to account for your actions”. It seems that despite our personal use of social media technology, precious few companies are ready for the social web at an organisational level. How about you?