4 Good Reads About Google’s Panda Updates

27 Jan

It’s being reported around the web that Google is rolling out the next iteration in a series of algorithm updates that are focused on returning higher quality search results.

The Panda updates are meant to penalize black-hat SEO practices and prevent low-quality, keyword-laden material (written by content farms and spinners) from dominating search results.

If content used to be king, now content is a supreme being — and it’s all about quality.

Below are four useful links packed with tips about the Google Panda updates. Many businesses may need to update their existing content and rethink their SEO and content strategies in light of the changes.

  1. Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed
  2. Are You Making These 7 Panda-Punishing Content Mistakes?
  3. More Guidance on Building High Quality Sites
  4. How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts with These 13 Questions

Photo via mozzercork.

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What Do You Think of Youtube’s Redesign?

14 Dec

If you’re interested in the  Youtube.com redesign, then check out The New York Times article about the widespread backlash against the changes.

I spend an ample amount of time on Youtube looking for videos to embed on client’s websites and  I do miss the old willy-nilly look and feel of the site. Somehow I trained myself to navigate gracefully through all of that viral video clutter.

But now Youtube  looks like most other web properties: corporate and sterile.  I guess I am really mourning the loss of web site design circa 2005.

Here’s a really amusing quote from the New York Times piece about the impetus for Youtube’s design changes. The writer is talking about how Youtube did not make the changes with its users in mind, but instead with money on its mind:

“The more important audience lies in the advertising, media buying and television businesses, among the executives who have been watching homemade videos accrue millions of views and crying in anguish, ‘Nobody’s making any money off of this!’ They probably don’t even mind that they’re not making money; they just wish that someone were making money.”

(Related: In the past I’ve written about homogenous-looking social media logos.)

Photo credit: skippyjon

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How You Can Tell that Cyber Monday Is Getting Out of Control

28 Nov
Gmail Ad on Cyber Monday

My Gmail login page on Cyber Monday.

Are there always ads on my Gmail login page, or only on Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday is the online shopping holiday on the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend. Marketers have been tracking sales on Cyber Monday for about six years.

The trend involves workers returning to their offices on Monday and crusing online retail sites. It is a continuation of the consumer madness of Black Friday and also a fun way for food-coma victims to transition back to work (by spending their hard-earned money on shiny new things they don’t need!)

To read more about Cyber Monday, check out this infographic from Mashable.com.

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Do You Agree that Word Clouds Are The “Mullets of The Internet?”

14 Oct

I am guilty of perpetuating Internet Mullets with my resume word cloud.

There’s a great piece on Nieman Journalism Lab about Jacob Harris’ hatred of word clouds. Harris, a journalist and software architect for The New York Times, argues that in terms of data visualization, word clouds just don’t deliver any valuable information. He gives some great examples of articles that use word clouds versus articles that use other more successful forms of data visualization.

I agree with Harris about word clouds popping up too frequently in journalism, but think that word clouds can be used as an online self-promotion tool for freelancers. If you go into your resume and remove all the non-descriptive words and leave all the action verbs and descriptive nouns you can turn that into a word cloud resume. I wrote a post about self-promotions for freelancers that describes this idea further.

Perhaps Harris would condone my use of a word cloud resume. He concedes that word clouds are useful for textual analysis. For example, if a Phd student wants to show how many times an author uses a specific word in a great work of literature (although arguably you could use a simple chart.)

Harris says that the biggest problems he sees with word clouds, is when a news organization uses a word cloud in a situation where textual analysis is not appropriate, like in a war analysis. Seeing how many times Iraq War coverage mentions the words “car” or “blast” really doesn’t give readers any new insight into the conflict.

Here is one choice passage from Harris’ post where he compares reading word clouds with looking at tea leaves:

I’ve seen this pattern across many news organizations: reporters sidestepping their limited knowledge of the subject material by peering for patterns in a word cloud — like reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. What you’re left with is a shoddy visualization that fails all the principles I hold dear.

The best part about Harris’ blog post is at the end, when he taunts the “sadistically inclined” readers who may go ahead and make a word cloud out of his post with this.

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