Chris Faron

Google travel portal getting ever closer?

chris — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:19:49 +0000

With the launch a while back of the Google Hotel Finder experiment (search for hotels in certain neighborhoods in the USA), Google Hotpot (a platform to review hotels and restaurants), hotel price ads (that shows price and availability for hotels) integrated into Google maps, the much rumored search giant’s expected entry into the travel space, just got much closer with the recent changes in the Google places layout.

This is how the result for the keyword “b&b venice” looked like before:

Note that the result was showing 115 reviews on that particular Place Page. These reviews where taken from the major travel portals/OTA sites like Expedia, Booking and Tripadvisor, etc.

Now take a look at the same result today:

The reviews from third party sites are not shown, instead they have been replaced with Google only reviews. This must be an attempt by Big G to give more incentive to users to write reviews directly on the Places page.

And finally the other change for all you SEO’s out there, the “Reviews from around the web” situated at the bottom of the Google place result was an indication of the citations (known to be part of the Google places algorithm) has disappeared!

Google travel portal getting ever closer? is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

Social media: new rules of the game=personalization

chris — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:00:17 +0000

At a recent event here in Italy (Ca Foscari Digital Week) on the changes in digital media, I thought I would highlight a few key points of the workshops that I attended. First was the “Social media: le nuove regole del gioco” ( Social media: the new rules of the game ).

What was highlighted first was the increase in popularity of sites where users can create personalized one off designs or mix and match existing garments to create that special look.

polyvore.com

A social media site were you can create your own fashion style from anywhere on the web. After creating your design the site offers links to the merchants site where you can purchase online the garment.

nikeid.nike.com/nikeid/

This mini-site from the famous sportswear and equipment supplier Nike, allows you to create / design and customize shoes to match your particular style by selecting the materials, design and colours. This is worlds apart from the usual mass produced shoes found in all the major chain stores.

louisvuitton.com/us/personalisation/mon-monogram

Create a unique bag by personalizing a various handbags.

shoesofprey.com

This site allows you design your own hand made womens shoes.

create a unique bag by personalizing a Speedy handbag

Social media: new rules of the game=personalization is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

Google Panda update missed this one

chris — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:18:23 +0000

With all the talk about the new panda update penalizing sites that have low quality content, I was surprised to find a very poor result in the first spot in Google for the key phrase [google buys beatmyquote] . Clicking on the link to a Smart Company result takes the user to a virtually blank page (apart from the ads and an excerpt). This page /Search.html?keyword=BeatMyQuote is clearly an auto-generated page that shouldn’t be indexed at all.

The link on this page points to an article about how Google penalized a site that it had just acquired for violating the company’s webmaster guidelines. Now considering with the above search, a user would most likely be looking for a news or blog post about Google’s recent acquisition of BeatThatQuote.com, this doesn’t seem to be the best result for a number 1 spot in Google.

Google Panda update missed this one is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

Google Search results with only 3 normal organic listings

chris — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:00:09 +0000

More bad news for SEO specialists still concentrating only on organic results in Google (surely not….). It seems Big G is testing first page results with only 3 “normal” organic listings and 7 map integrated ones. Considering the map listings are appearing for more and more listings, this is going to make it even harder for us poor SEO guys!

Here are the screen-shots of the (at the moment beta) listings using a UK ip address:

Google Search results with only 3 normal organic listings is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

Google quality rater paid me a visit?

chris — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:53:43 +0000

While going through my Google analytics data for one of my domains, I noticed a very strange URL as a referral. It was domain.com/this_page_should_not_exist.fake (no page extension like html, etc). Being a curious type and working in SEO meant a further investigation was on the cards. I checked the location of the visitor which was San Francisco, where Google has one of it’s offices. Next was the operating system used which was Linux, which is in the most part what Google employees are using, which is said to be a customized version of Linux Ubuntu.

Also the other strange thing about this saga is that the domain in question is not in English, so it would be very unlikely that a user from San Francisco, using Linux (used more o less by only 1-2% of the total users), visiting a non existent URL. All this leads me to believe a Quality rater, working for Google is testing various sites to see the server response codes when a user calls a non existent page (which should be a 404 of course), probably to see if any funny busy (Black-hat SEO) is going on.

Google quality rater paid me a visit? is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

Piwik the open source alternative to Google analytics Pt1

chris — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:51:37 +0000

Piwik is a free site statistics analyzer which is a valid alternative to the well known Google analytics product. Being open source means that not only is it free but you have the freedom to modify the underlining code to your specific requirements. I’ve been testing this product since 2009 and I must say the latest stable release (v1.1.1) on the 4th Jan 2011 is quite impressive in terms of graphics and functionality.

Like Google analytics Piwik is a javascript tag based solution which as the advantage of tracking real visitors rather than automated bots but has the drawback that any visitor to your site with JavaScript disabled (certain mobile phones for example) would not be tracked at all, there is a solution to this using an Simple Image tracker (inside a no-script tag) which in testing tracked correctly a normal browser with JavaScript disabled but with a Nokia E71 mobile smartphone it was completely invisible.

In my next post I will go into detail all the features of Piwik, in the meantime check out their site and download it at piwik.org

Piwik the open source alternative to Google analytics Pt1 is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

The affiliate marketing minefield

chris — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:52:12 +0000

From a publishers point of view, an affiliate is someone that promotes products and services of an advertiser in exchange for a commission on leads or sales. A publisher displays an advertiser’s ads, text links, or product links on their Web site, in e-mail campaigns, or in search listings. The affiliate is paid a commission by the respective advertiser when a visitor takes a specific action such as filling out a contact form, subscribing to something or making a purchase. Usually this commission can vary from 4% up to 30%.

Types of links that can be placed on your site can be image banners (in a variety of sizes), text links, product links, and other advanced link types, such as search boxes.

I’ve been working with many affiliate marketing programs over the years with very much mixed results. In 1999 (let’s say the boom years of the Internet) I started using one of the biggest players called CJ which are a great company with a large range of advertisers that you contact via their “CJ Marketplace”, their back-end control panel is top notch including ad impressions, amount of clicks, click through rate, slice and dice reporting statistics and lastly an affiliate university to learn how to optimize revenue. Other good companies I’ve worked with include Tradedoubler and Zanox (a German company that covers all European markets).

When building a site it’s important not to place only affiliate links, especially the links with product descriptions which are usually supplied via a feed to all affiliate publishers which can cause a lot of duplicate content issues, which can be filtered out by the major search engines. Also, there is a lot of talk about how Google doesn’t like “thin affiliate” sites (sites than have little or no original content). In cases such as these, I advise the web site owner to add other useful content like product reviews, technical analysis, etc.

Recently a new Facebook group has been launched to combat affiliate marketing scams & frauds, where users can report scammers, shady affiliates, non payers and bad networks in the affiliate industry.

AFFSpace Scammers and Fraudsters
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=105742222822311

The affiliate marketing minefield is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

SEO Duplicate Content checker tools

chris — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 21:10:09 +0000

Duplicate content or pages with similar content is a major problem on the web both for users and for web designers and SEO specialists.

There are many tools around the web to help alleviate the problem. These are my favorites:

Webconfs Similar Page Checker after entering the 2 urls outputs the results as a percentage.

Duplicate Content Tool Shows some interesting data like Total HTML similarity, Standard text similarity and Smart text similarity which analyses the main content of the page stripping out the footer, navigation, etc.

ilCaimano Page Compare tool, in it’s current version still in beta compares the Html and the text profile (with the HTML stripped out).

Another tool (aptly named “Similarity Analyzer” ) that I used to use along time ago is from an Italian site called tool.motoricerca.info

SEO Duplicate Content checker tools is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter