Here is a link to the original 720p mp4

Some of the points raised in the video

1. We need to avoid a cartel of top sites with limited access, especially with Ggoogle and Facebook currently buying ads from each other in the free market.
2. Identity is important and both Twitter & Facebook fail to provide a method of bi-directional ownership – the “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet fails by linking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ to a Quora topic page about him… not his actual profile (if he has one) – it is possible for Google to do fairly well with some cases, e.g. if I have authorship with my blog, and I have bi-directional links between my blog and Twitter, that might count
3. Google+ profile owners shoud get a choice of which links might be used
4. If you want to give Google hints, you really should fill out your profile better

A few of the links from the video

The evil don’t be evil bookmarklet
John Batelle’s post
Danny’s post

Experiment for yourself, but also understand that Google’s results are personalized and regional. E.g. I fully expect to have competition in the UK SERPs for the first twitter listing for Andy Beard, as there are at least 2 Andy Beards I know of there, and at least 2 others in the US.
Identity is a big part of Web 3.0 and both Facebook and Twitter currently fail in the ability to accurately verify a chain for most people.

The intent of the bookmarklet is to focus on the “user”

I want users to be directed to the profiles and services I vouch for
I want users to go to links that have been verified with a robust identity as being mine

Full coverage on Techmeme

Google +1 & The Problem With Canonicalization Of Votes

I’ve ripped the relevant section out of the original post so we can now look at the current state of play.

You will see that the value of both Google +1 buttons is now the same, as Google now treat them as the same page, even though one of them is a redirect.

This seems to work for lots of types of redirects, parameters for tracking etc, which is what made it important to support in the first place.
So now you have every reason to add specific tracking parameters to the URLs that get added to Google+ so that you can track the way they are shared and the traffic that generates.
You could even use a URL shortener like bit.ly to make your URL with parameters a little shorter.

What I haven’t yet tested are how subsequent redirects of the canonical page get handled, and what if any safeguards have been implemented to reduce abuse. I also haven’t tested how many redirects will be followed.

This was still an issue back at the beginning of Novemeber when I mentioned it on the G+ Developers group. No… I didn’t submit a bug ticket as suggested. I don’t consider myself enough of a dev to create a ticket with sufficient clarity on someone else’s product. I have to assume G+ product managers and evangelists monitor feedback for features to some extent.

This may have been announced as a fix sometime, but a search for Google+ canonicalization brings up such as messy SERP I gave up digging.

I would love to know who to talk to about geting uQast videos supported in Google products… everything currently strips out the iframes and I am assuming the logic is being shared between platforms (Google Reader, Google+, Google Currents etc.)

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>

With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>

At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time

p.s. I know Google is having a bit of a bad day about their new Search + Your World introduction – I persoanlly love it

Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.

Policing every piece of content produced by marketing partners (affiliates etc) on the offchance that they inadvertantly linked directly to the traffic or buzz benifitiary without using a nofollow or otherwise blocking the direct link is commercially untenable.

In the following video I have outlined what has led to this unreasonable decision being made, and elaborated a little on some of the commercial implications not just for competitors in the online advertising space, but even for Google services such as Google Publisher Network, Google Affiliate Network & Doubleclick.

Here is a 720p 1280×720 mp4 of the above video (looking forward to supporting this in a player real soon now)

Sincerely

Andy Beard

Here is a specific example

This is an Amazon widget

Wow it is promoting a really cool Google phone!

Here is another iframe creative

Here is a text only link

T-Mobile G2 with Google Android Phone (T-Mobile)

So far I haven’t broken Google’s new interpretation of the webmaster guidelines

I love Amazon

Oops… sorry Amazon that wasn’t an affiliate link, but an editorial link… Google will now feel that they have to remove the Amazon home page from the search engine results and Amazon won’t sell 20M Kindle Fires this year… Just 19.8M – or maybe 21M if they replace the Amazon home page with the Kindle Fire product page. (yes I realise they are very similar)

Whilst pureists might argue that this wasn’t a video CPA advert but an affiliate link, a huge amount of the sites that Google filtered this year as poor quality thin affiliates were using Amazon and other affiliate networks for monetization. The purpose quite often for the content was to drive traffic to the ads in small quantities.
At scale the revenue from 1000s of websites earning just a few dollars a month above the hosting and domain costs add up.

Another comparrison is Google’s own Adsense program and the vast numbers of poor quality sites that have arisen because of it. The good often (in search visibility) outweigh the junk MFA (made for adsense) sites, but it really is a chicken & egg situation. The webmasters target specific topics and even optimize content not just for SEO, but to pull up the highest paying and possibly even specific advertising creatives for products, maybe even video content, and they get paid for clicks on that content.
If I write a blog about Android phones and included an Adsense advert at the bottom of each post, allowed video and display ads, the situation wouldn’t be vastly different to some junk content followed by a video embed of a Google commercial I was being paid for on a CPA basis.

People in the past made complete websites dedicated to the promotion of Google pack, their Adsense program etc, and even offered incentives such as training in online marketing, or included the Adsense registration links as part of the course material… of course without disclosure as that wasn’t allowed.

Google… Please Reinstate Chrome

Here are the links referenced in the video

Matt’s post on Google+
Aaron’s's post Sponsored By Google that started this huge mess.
Danny’s post on all the thin content
Unruly Media is clearly CPA (grats on $25M funding guys)
Wikipedia on CPA (will Wikipedia be the only independent content site soon?)
Wikipedia on Online Marketing advertising models
Andrew Girdwood proving Google has used this form of CPA before
Danny with Google’s statement throwing their agency and Unruly under a bus
Google’s staement and effect (from Danny) – Statement saying this was a violation of their guidelines, possibly from someone who hasn’t read them recently.
My post on Google pack and word of mouth marketing
Google’s policy statement for their Google pack CPA campaign No mention of not giving editorial links etc
The CPA video embed (the iframe contents) – I am not going to drag an individual blogger who may have given a quite nice editorial link to Google Chrome through the coals
The Unruly Media terms of service which have now been enhanced – the nofollow statement is a new bullet point – it shouldn’t be needed as payment is not for the content of the blog post, or links, but based on CPA actions with the video.
Webmaster help forums on Affiliate links Google repeatedly avoids answering questions regarding the use of nofollow with affiliate links and other forms of display advertising.
How to report paid links and selling links that pass pagerank

Disclosure: I work for an online video & affiliate marketing startup called uQast but I am posting this on my personal blog and the words and opions expressed here are my own and my volition and not of my employer (does that remind anyone of Matt’s disclaimer?) – I have been involved in affiliate marketing for 7 years and the issues discussed here have been a topic of this blog since I started publishing it in 2005.

Small update: just added a download link for the MP4 version in HD 720p

As Twitter’s search is still so terrible at finding things I am adding the conversation here.

New rel="author" support http://goo.gl/FCK3l ( @mattcutts is this suitable for cross domain attribution too for syndicated content? )

June 7, 2011 5:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AndyBeard

Andy Beard

@AndyBeard for now it's same-site, just to be safe. My (personal) guess is we'll see if that can be expanded over time in a trusted way.

June 7, 2011 5:38 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mattcutts

Matt Cutts

@mattcutts thanks for the clarification & intended current use

June 7, 2011 5:42 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AndyBeard

Andy Beard

@AndyBeard sure thing. Remember, rel=canonical also started as same-site only, then as we trusted it more, it became cross-site.

June 7, 2011 5:46 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mattcutts

Matt Cutts

@mattcutts I can't sneak a rel="canonical" into an author bio link, or ask content partners such as @WebProNews to include it

June 7, 2011 5:50 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AndyBeard

Andy Beard

My last point is at least partially related to Google’s Panda update because it is quite frequently seen, possibly more than before, that original content doesn’t rank yet scraped copies of it does.

There are reasons why that happens, but a microformat rel=”author” and possibly something new… rel=”original” for a link to the canonical source would be useful.

Something like this would be easier to implement than the metatag alternative currently in testing with newspapers. ( original-source & syndication-source )

This is something really easy to get implemented in a number of CMSs, though in most cases it would be theme dependent not something that is part of core.

But one thing I haven’t read about anywhere are the technical implications of +1 and the way it deals with canonicalization of votes, which currently is significantly inferior to both Facebook and Twitter.

There are all kinds of reasons why a publisher or ecommerce store might want to include parameters in the URLs people bookmark.

• Various kinds of tracking data
• Geotargeting
• Dynamic landing pages based upon advertising campaign (even with Adwords)

A user lands on a page, and you want to ensure that whatever they bookmark or share with friends or family is the exact same content/offer that they saw themselves, or that the initial source for the traffic is correctly counted to evaluate advertising campaigns.
This is especially important with affiliate marketing if you are a vendor who wants to ensure that affiliates get attribution for the traffic/customers they send.

• You see people use multiple browsers on one PC, and cookies are not necessarily shared
• Then you get people who have multiple computers in their home
• Then you have tablet PCs… someone might find a product on their desktop PC, but when they want to share the product with a significant other before making a purchase, they might do so on their iPad, loading a page from shared bookmarks.
• As mobile browsers become more powerful, a phone could also be the device used for bookmarking.

I don’t think it is possible to get everything perfect, to get correctly attributed tracking, ensure bookmarks are handled correctly etc (especially when paramters that remain visible can affect conversion), but I personally feel it is important to do whatever you can to ensure valid tracking data and attribution.

Facebook & Twitter – 2 Different Methods

Both Facebook & Twitter allow you to define tracking parameters or links for their share buttons, but they do it different ways.

With Twitter it is defined within the Twitter button by defining the url and counturl parameters.

The URL is whatever link you want shared, and the most popular way to use it is probably a tracking service such as bit.ly, but at the same time adding additional Google Analytics tracking variables to the URL that is bookmarked within bit.ly.

This is what the Twitter code looks like

					<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
					<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fpage13312&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fintro%2F&text=How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet&count=horizontal&via=uQast&related=uqast%3AWebinar" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet</a>

And this is the result (this uses my affiliate link for uQast, but notice that the count shown is an aggregate canonical value because of the defined counturl

How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet

With Facebook it is a little different – within the button code you include the tracking link you want to share, and the “counturl” is actually grabbed from the Facebook Open Graph meta data on the destination page.
Facebook also pull in the thumbnail and descriptions from that meta data.

This is what the code looks like

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like ref="13312" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312" send="false" width="120" show_faces="false" layout="button_count" ></fb:like>

The result is an aggregate count even though every shared URL from the like button could be completely different.

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>

With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>

At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time

This is how a +1 ends up on a Google profile (this is my primary Andy Beard profile)

Lets see how Google fairs with my +1 test

First of all my profile URL is

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy

But from a search result Google themselves redirect to

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about

And if I want to ensure the English version of a page is shown then I have to add an additional language parameter.

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about?hl=en

These redirects are a fact of life on the web and so are additional parameters for all kinds of things, but Google +1 doesn’t allow for it, even for a Google URL

Google +1 is broken even for Google’s own pages

In addition they really should take advantage of the thumbnail defined in the Facebook Open Graph, as they currently just scrape the first image on the page.

The Solution For Google +1

It is actually fairly simple for Google to fix this.

They are already looking at the destination page, and all they have to do is look for a canonical link tag in the header for which URL to count… anyone who cares about correct canonicalization for their pages who uses various tracking parameters is likely to already be using link canonical… after all it is stronly promoted by Google themselves as a way to get attribution for the correct link.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/" />

You would have thought issues like this would have been fixed during the initial beta period – when news of Google +1 first came about, there was a call for interested websites to sign up early maybe to give feedback… I signed up at that time but from the looks of things on the Google announcement post that was mainly as a PR exercise to get large publishers using Google +1.

Google +1 is really easy to set up, there are also some quite powerful features I haven’t explored yet for triggering various actions similar to a Facebook like button

However as currently implemented it is almost like a negative advert if you implement it with any kind of dynamic URLs showing effectively the same content.

Canonicalization is just as important in social media as search.

p.s I have given up trying to get a “+” to appear correctly with a retweet button with WordPress.

I went as far as trying to use the unicode version within the title but that ended up as the raw text, and then WordPress didn’t save the unicode anyway.

+1.... out

Watch this video for the details

To check the cached Google page you will have to switch off javascript using something like the web developer toolbar for Firefox.

Google is not being blocked as there is a cached page, but the cached page is not what is given to users, even when not logged in.

The pages are significantly different in structure.

Google have quite extensive webmaster guidelines including a special on on cloaking and sneaky javascript.

Just to qualify the value of this video – some people rightly or wrongly look on me as an SEO expert – I don’t proactively consult partially because I don’t believe my own opinions half the time and in the past I have spent a great deal of time trying to prove myself wrong.

Ultimately even Google engineers directly involved with webspam or working directly on Google’s algorithms don’t know every aspect of how Google’s algorithms might work in every eventuality, and some results or side effects may be unintended.

It could well be that Twitter left old Twitter in place because Google was having problems crawling the new primarily javascript Twitter. From my perspective the mistake was to do a funky javascript redirect and having a significantly different link graph, but there could easily be something I have overlooked.

If you have relatively stable search traffic volume it is fairly easy to detect and I have a custom report set up to do the sleuthing work.

I have actually added an extra dimension to the custom report to examine the effect on individual pages

To save you a little work you can just click this link and my custom report will be added to your Google analytics.

To use this you will then need to select the custom report and then compare date ranges. Google made the update around Wednesday/Thursday last week and currently it only affects US traffic.

I believe the “äjustment” is based on site authority which I like to liken to the quality score used in Adwords – it makes search traffic from Google more expensive for lower quality sites. This is similar to the way some other Google penalties work.

But that is just for users… how about website owners, developers and SEOs?

Search Monkey Markup

The Yahoo Search Monkey team today sent an email to their developers.

Dear Developer, We recently announced that the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences will be closing down as of October 1, 2010. As a result, third-party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results. Developers who wish to retain their code should export it using their favorite copy/paste tool before then. We’ve been very pleased with the benefits that the SearchMonkey program has provided to Yahoo! Search users over the last two years and want to share our plans for SearchMonkey with respect to the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. In keeping with previous efforts to bring structure to the Web, our enhanced results program will continue as we transition organic search listings to Microsoft. As part of the enhanced results program, we will be adding new entities (including people, Q&A, and real estate) to power both additional enhanced results and object filters within Yahoo! Search. All of the existing enhanced result templates will continue to be generated from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds, and Yahoo! will continue to show this structured data on the Yahoo! Search results page, along with Microsoft’s organic listings. Over time, some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform. Webmasters will continue to have the ability to affect the presentation of a search result through page markup on their site (microformats and RDFa). We know many people enjoyed being part of the SearchMonkey developer community, and we want to give a heartfelt thank-you to all of the developers and webmasters who have participated over the last two years. We look forward to continuing to work with developers to explore new and interesting ways to incorporate useful applications into the search experience. Sincerely, The Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

This means that search monkey markup for things like video live on and continue to have value.

Don’t know anything about search monkey markup? How about this tutorial on how to mark up a Youtube Video with RDFa and Search Monkey.

That isn’t the only way to get videos discovered – I just came across Amit’s relatively new Video Sitemaps plugin which seems to work ok for Youtube videos in some situations – just needs more development work to get it working for other videos such as those I host myself.

So what was I testing?

Well some things are really messed up with Google indexation currently.

As an example:- all these “unimportant” pages that Google seem to want you to not stick a nofollow on… such as contact pages or various terms of service.

A long time ago I used to have a link to my contact page in the footer of every post, including when it was syndicated. I used to nofollow that link, but I still had other links to it, though the links may have been after the nofollow link in the sidebar.

But for a good 2 years or so I have only used a link that passes juice to things like my comments policy and contact page.

My contact page has a couple of editorial links out in the wild, my comments policy also has a few, but it is not something I would link build to deliberately – the same goes for my about page.

My contact page isn’t optimized for Andy Beard as much as it could be (the first page of results for [Andy] is highly competitive) but for a search for something like [Contact Andy Beard] you would expect it to rank.

So if you search for [Contact Andy Beard] in Google…. my home page ranks first, and my comment policy ranks second.

Oh and the page is cached – I am not worried about the cache date, the page doesn’t get updated very often.

It is quite possible I could dig up a reason why it isn’t ranking… maybe because at times I have had a trailing slash… and at other times I haven’t… but the same would be true of my comments policy page.

If you examine backlinks, you will see some hijacking of my sitewide links by bit.ly on a few redirects but those pages seem on the whole to be OK ranking in Yahoo, Bing and Google… not for anything special but they are there.

My contact page does appear in both Yahoo & Bing.

Has anyone else seen this Google promotion Of Webmaster Tools in the SERPs?

This is an extension of the tests Google seem to be doing with the number of search results that I spotted over the weekend.

Here we have 2 search listings.

The first listing is the new one with 20 positions that I seem to be part of a test group for using Google.com.

The Second listing is the one I get for Google.co.uk and is what I regard as “normal” – 10 listings and what I have historically had for white space.

You will need to open each image in a new browser tab so you can easily switch between them.

The search results are different anyway, as one is UK and the other US… so different sites appear in different places.

What you really need to look at is the amount of white space.

I set the fold line at 570 based upon this research of Clicktale data

In the same study of page scrolling, fold locations of viewed screens were captured, based on screen resolution and browser used. It’s a sad, sad thing, but the single highest concentration of fold location (at around 600 pixels) for users accounted for less than 10% of the distribution. This pixel-height corresponds with a screen resolution of 1024×768. Browser applications take away varying amounts of vertical real estate for their interfaces (toolbars, address fields, etc). Each browser has a slightly different size, so not all visitors running a resolution of 1024×768 will have a fold that appears in the same spot. In the ClickTale study, the three highest fold locations were 570, 590 and 600 pixels—apparently from different browsers running on 1024×768 screens. But the overall distribution of fold locations for the entire study was so varied that even these three sizes together only account for less than 26% of visits. What does all this mean? If you pick one pixel location on which to base the location of the fold when designing your screens, the best-case scenario is that you’ll get the fold line exactly right for only 10% of your visitors.

I chose an ego search because I knew there weren’t any ads immediately above the listings.

What difference does a couple of extra lines of white space make?

1. Readability

It makes the top results a lot more distinct thus might concentrate clicks to the top listings even more, or maybe result in more advert clicks.

2. Less Above Fold

It will tend to push listings down a little – for smaller resolution screens that might mean very little, as you are likely to only have 4 listings above the fold anyway.
For a larger resolution screen, say one that you could previously see all 10 listings, you might only see 8 listings now.

They are also doing some funny things with AJAX that are messing up the use of the Google Global plugin – sometimes when I refine a search it isn’t causing a change in the URL bar, thus when I try to switch location using Google Global I get the previous search term.

Update

There is speculation that Google will announce something regarding this tomorrow 8th September 2010 (more on Techmeme)