Facebook Content Comes to Yandex Search Results

Yandex has announced a deal with Facebook, one that gives the Russian search giant gain direct access to public Facebook data.

Posts by Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey will be available for indexing by Yandex as soon as it has been published.

Seeking to collaborate with major search engines, the full access to the “firehose” of data directly from Facebook only augments what Yandex has already been doing with data from Twitter, LiveJournal, and other social networks.

Facebook content from the aforementioned countries will pop up in Yandex’s Blogs search results, joining results from other blogs, microblogs and social networks.

“Yandex will use data from Facebook’s public firehose feed to improve the quality of its search results,” according to a Yandex spokesperson. Yandex plans to incorporate various content formats that have had “particular resonance” on Facebook.

“The popularity of materials on Facebook will be taken into consideration when ranking search results,” according to Yandex.

Yandex stressed that only content published to Facebook as "public" will be indexed. Anything marked as private won't be indexed.

In the U.S., Bing is the only search engine that has access to Facebook data and have incorporated likes, shares and recommendations into search results since 2010. Google and Facebook had a parting of the ways around that same time, culminating with Google removing Facebook information from the built-in Android Contacts app.

Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. However there are mumblings that Yandex has free access to the data. Either way, the deal is quite interesting.

Last year, Yandex released a social search app called Wonder, designed to search public social media posts. Facebook complained and blocked Wonder, eventually leading to the complete shutdown of the social search.

Buying Pinterest Followers: A Good or Bad Idea?

Pinterest is growing to be the most engaged social media network in the world. I love Pinterest and have spoken on the topic several times annually for the last two years.  What’s the #1 question I get asked by attendees? Whether or not they should buy Pinterest followers.

Getting a large following on Pinterest isn’t easy, especially if you’re a business without a strong following online.  It’s true that some businesses purchase Pinterest followers. But is this a good idea?

In my research I’ve found that you can purchase Pinterest followers from $10-85 per 1000 followers, with the average price around $20/1000.

Screenshot: buycheaplikes.com

Pros of Buying Pinterest Followers

Well, the most obvious benefit is that you look like you or your business is popular. This works on new Pinterest folks who haven’t checked out your account before (unless they look at your re-pins).

Buying Pinterest re-pins will make your pins look like they are very active.  These tend to come from inactive accounts, but it will still make you look very active and this is good for faking that you’re amazing.

Above is a screenshot of Organize’s Pinterest account, a company I help out with.  Did I purchase followers with this account?  Nope. I’ve built this account from the ground up.  I’ve worked on this for a long time and put in countless hours to be able to get 10k+ followers.  You’ll notice that my followers are very active and actively re-pin things that I do.

Why didn’t I buy followers? I’ll explain the cons of buying followers below.

Cons of Buying Pinterest Followers

When you purchase Pinterest followers and/or re-pins, to your Pinterest friends you will look like you are killing it. But your robot “friends” will see right through you.

Pinterest’s algorithm (much like Facebook and other social networks) works on popularity signals. This basically means that when your posts attract a lot of engagement, Pinterest will show you more often and at the top of the stream. If you post something and nobody likes or re-pins your shares, you’ll become less relevant.

Facebook used to refer to the concept of filtering content based on popularity factors as Edgerank. I’ll call Pinterest’s ranking on pinners and pins as Pinrank.  The more people that follow you that don’t indicate your pin is important, the more your Pinrank will go down. The more your Pinrank goes down, the less your pins will show up at the top of the Pinterest search results to popular pinners. (So if you’ve purchased Pinterest followers make the effort to keep your Pinrank up or you’ll be worse off than before.)

It reminds me of the old question “Would you rather have a million friends or 5 amazing friends”. Most people (especially ranking robots) say that it’s better to have 5 amazing friends.

Another reason not to buy Pinterest pins or followers is you run the risk of getting your account banned by Pinterest.  I’m aware of 2 or 3 accounts that were banned due to buying followers.  This is in violation of Pinterest’s Uses policy.

One account that got banned was for a company that had hired a full-time employee to manage their Pinterest account. After 8 months, the employee purchased about 10K followers and subsequently got the account banned.  The company lost everything, including the money they paid for the followers.  I wonder how many people have had this happen.

Another con for buying followers on Pinterest is traffic related reasons.  We all know that social networks influence traffic.  I’ve found and tested that when I buy pins I see an increase in traffic for 2-3 days then almost all the traffic will go away.  This potentially will hurt your search results and could cause ALL your traffic to go away because of spamming.

So should you buy Pinterest followers?

My personal recommendation would be to do everything legit and to not purchase Pinterest followers.  I think it’s just a safer bet, long term.  It’s much like black hat SEO.  You might get away with it for a while, but eventually you’re going to get caught.

Is Google Search Updating? January 8th & 9th

I am seeing early signs of a possible Google update underway today. The WebmasterWorld thread started to get some chatter yesterday of people noticing shifts in the search results.

One WebmasterWorld senior member said, "Jez, something without doubt is happening. We've seen all the tell tale signs."

Most of the tools that track these updates are not currently updated for today. DigitalPoint (see sidebar) and Algoroo are and show signs of an update:

 

Another WebmasterWorld member said:

Is something brewing? I am getting a lot of foreign visitors hitting my site. Usually a sign of something in my recent experience. We are probably due a Penguin refresh perhaps.

Have you noticed major changes in your rankings and Google referrals yesterday?

Google’s Matt Cutts On Publishers With Duplicate Content: Use The Canonical Tag

In a video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt said publishers who publish similar or duplicative stories on different URLs may use the rel=canonical tag to help consolidate the PageRank of the stories and avoid any issues with Google.

Matt Cutts did say that duplicate content won’t hurt you unless you are doing it for spam-related reasons. Cutts also did say that 25% of the web is duplicative, so you really don’t have to worry about it. But I guess in this case, to help with rankings, you may, as a publisher, want to use the rel=canonical tag to help Google know which is your primary page.

Of course, a site like this has dozens of articles on the topic of duplicate content. So should we use the canonical tag to point to one story or a category? Likely not.

WordStream Updates Its Free Google AdWords Performance Grader: Now With Mobile And Automatic 30-Day Reporting

WordStream has released a revamp of its AdWords Performance Grader, the instant AdWords account auditing tool, now dubbed AdWords Grader Plus. WordStream says the free tool, launched in August 2011, has already been used to analyze accounts representing three billion dollars in total advertising spend. The company has refined the tool based on that wealth of past audit history to give advertisers performance benchmarks within their own industries.

The three main new features in AdWords Grader Plus include a new performance tracker, mobile readiness review and improved benchmarks.

The performance tracker automatically re-analyzes advertisers’ accounts every 30 days. The report tracks performance changes over time, including Quality Score, which Google does not provide automatically. Advertisers can opt-out of this service or choose to run updates more frequently.The new Mobile PPC Readiness Score assesses an advertiser’s mobile optimization efforts, including whether the account has mobile preferred ads, mobile sitelinks and mobile call extensions set up.

Larry Kim, WordStream’s founder and Chief Technology Officer says the tool’s industry benchmark data has also been refined — incorporating the data the tool has gleaned from the thousands of accounts it has already analyzed — to give advertisers a better sense of how their accounts stack up to others in their industries. The benchmarked KPIs include Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity and wasted spend.

“Now that we’ve graded over $3 billion in total AdWords spend, we have even more insight into the metrics and characteristics that define a healthy PPC account,” said Kim in a statement. “Our new benchmarks reflect that wealth of data, and the new features address the need for businesses to allocate spend to the growing mobile channel as well as to monitor their account performance over time.”

The AdWords Grader tool is certainly a brilliant customer acquisition tool for WordStream — once an advertiser sees how much work needs to be done on an account, he or she just might be inclined to sign up for WordStream’s paid search management software. Kim, though, says that the company has invested a million dollars into the tool, and that it’s used by a broad spectrum of advertisers as well as agencies. “We see agencies using it for clients because it gives them an immediate starting point of where to focus their efforts,” said Kim by phone.

The reporting tool continues to provide analysis in these areas:

• Wasted spend and the use of negative keywords to control spend
• Quality Score for text ads and the keywords targeted
• Click-through rates on ads
• Impression share for ads
• Long-tail keyword optimization
• Text ad optimization
• Landing page optimization
• PPC best practices synopsis

To run a report, an advertiser provides contact information and Google AdWords login credentials through OAuth secure authorization — WordStream does not share or save the login information. The report is generated near instantly.

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Launches New Social Search App Jelly

Building on the concept, “If you have a questions, there’s somebody out there that knows the answer,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and former Twitter colleague Ben Finkel have launched Jelly, a social search app that uses your social networks to deliver results.

According to  the announcement today on the company’s blog “Jelly is designed to search the group mind of your social networks — and what goes, around comes around. You may find yourself answering questions as well as asking.”

Claiming to be a “new way to search,” the app can be downloaded from iTunes orGoogle Play. Users submit questions within the app which can then be answered by anyone in their existing social networks. Questions can also be forwarded outside of the app, opening up queries to a much broader audience. Beyond simply submitting questions, the app lets users perform searches using images:

Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question. You can crop, reframe, zoom and draw on your images to get more specific.

Biz Stone is listed as Jelly’s co-founder and CEO alongside co-founder and CTO Ben Finkel. Finkel was the co-founder of Fluther, a Q&A service that was acquired by Twitter in 2010. After being acquired by Twitter, Finkel worked for Twitter managing new user experience on the social network’s growth team.

While Jelly claims that the algorithms of today’s complex search engines are “no match” for the “experience, inventiveness, and creativity of the human mind,” it’s worth mentioning an entire catalog of social Q&A solutions  – Ask.com, Quora, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers and even Facebook – have all failed to succeed in this social search segment.

Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Adds Mobile Stats & No Longer Rounds Data

John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst,announced on the Google Webmaster Blog that they are no longer rounding the search query data within the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report.

John said, “data in the search queries feature will no longer be rounded / bucketed,” and you will start to notice these changes in Webmaster Tools in the next few days.

Here are before and after shots of the data, as you can see the new report shows 15,026,995 impressions and the old one showed 14,000,000 impressions:

Google also announced a way to better see your mobile site statistics and analytics within Google Webmaster Tools. There is a new mobile filter that gives you:

• Queries where your m. pages appeared in search results for mobile browsers
• Queries where Google applied Skip Redirect. This means that, while search results displayed the desktop URL, the user was automatically directed to the corresponding m. version of the URL (thus saving the user from latency of a server-side redirect).

Prior to this Search Queries improvement, Webmaster Tools reported Skip Redirect impressions with the desktop URL.