Dec

26

Top social marketing sites & applications for 2007

Filed Under Social Marketing | Comments Off

Here’s one party’s list of which ones the top 100 are for 2007, thanks to Scott for pointing it out:

 Top Web Apps and Sites for 2007

I’ve been very resistant to the whole concept of “social marketing,” and Web 2.0 but it’s started to become more interesting lately, overcoming a persistent stubborn streak.  I think it might be the thought of having to deal with blog comments (spam)  that’s made it seem distateful.

Dec

14

Google duplicate content penalty for identical page titles and meta descriptions?

Filed Under Google | Comments Off

 There’s been a lot of concern over this for quite a while,  with the recommendation being that each page on a site should have a unique page title and meta description that relevant to that particular page.  However, with what happens when they’re identical, I don’t think I’d call it a penalty, but a filter in operation. 

Other than one (sometimes two slip through), when doing a site: search they’ll get filtered with what I call the “similarity filter” so you’ll see one (occasionally two) but have to click on that link they provide to see additional pages that have been excluded because they’ve been omitted for being very similar to the one shown.

I tested this on a site this summer, with pretty fast results. The web designer had run identical page titles and meta tags throughout the site, and put in a drop-down navigation list at the page top that was parsed as plain text, plus a “byline slogan” also across the entire site on the top of pages.

One page by one page, I removed the drop-down list, replaced the “motto” text with a graphic, and gave each page a unique page title and meta description.

One by one, as this was done to pages, they popped out from behind that “similar pages” link and showed up with a site: search.

It was a short term gig to fix a serious indexing issue that needed a difficult mod_rewrite solution, that was fixed, and just a few site pages were worked on by me,  so there are still plenty of pages on that site that still have that similarity problem and did not, do not,  and will not rank for the search terms relevant to the still_unfixed pages.

That’s all you can do is tell people what they need to do, but it’s up to them to actually do it. Way too cliche, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

I’ve got a page up with a list of links to white papers and patents on duplicate content. One of these days I’ll go through them and condense down and write up what seem to be the more important parts.

Dec

10

PHP Title and Meta Tag Generator

Filed Under Technical | Comments Off

Many thanks go to Hawkee.com for putting up the code for a php meta tag and title generator  per request.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to generate page titles and meta description tags without having to edit individual pages in an editor one at a time and then upload by FTP, and this will simplify the process (once I get it down how to use it).

Dec

9

Shopzilla Publisher Program

Filed Under Contextual Advertising | Comments Off

Thanks to Blog Oh Blog for publishing information about the new Shopzilla Publisher Program, which will include a variety of options, including contextual advertising.