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Google shuts down Lively

Pawel Szulencki — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:55:04 +0000

Google announced that they have decided to shut down Lively platform in the end of his year.

despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams - Google blog.

Furthermore:

We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.

Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. Thank you for sharing this experience with us. We’ve learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Lively - Lively.

Basically it means that Google decided to focus more on improving its search results rather than developing extra projects on a side. As long as it helps users, its the right decision.

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Google shuts down Lively

Transform your marketing

Pawel Szulencki — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:27:33 +0000

Watch this amazing video of Seth Godin and understand the future present look of (online and offline) marketing.

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Transform your marketing

Jerry Yang quits Yahoo!

Pawel Szulencki — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:38:14 +0000

Jerry Yang has quit Yahoo! as Chief Yahoo and CEO. Jerry Yang have been the CEO of Yahoo! since June 2007. After Google-Yahoo! ad deal was broken, many people have expected that Jerry Yang will be held responsible for that. Yahoo! have lost lots of money, time, technology benefits and reputation because of that deal breakdown and now its time for Jerry to step out as Yahoo!’s CEO.

In official statement we can read that:

As you’ve no doubt already read, I’ve decided that I will step down from my role as Chief Executive Officer after my successor has been selected. [...] despite the tough external environment that we face, I truly believe we’ve made tangible progress in bringing our strategic vision to life. Most significantly, we’ve rewired our entire network to create a Yahoo! that has opened its doors to outside publishers and developers.

And now I believe the time is right for us to bring in a new leader –- someone who will build on the important pillars we’ve put in place and who will take the reins on the critical decisions our company faces. As for me, I’ll be returning to my role as Chief Yahoo and board member once my successor is named. I’ll go back to focusing on our global strategy, product excellence, technology innovation, and working with the Board and our executive team to help Yahoo! realize its full potential - Yodel Anecdotal.

What does it teaches us? It doesn’t matter if you created the worldwide company, you can be always exchanged.

What is the biggest difference between Google and Yahoo!? Google knows its strategy and is consistant, Yahoo! have too many strategies.

I can only say this: good luck to the next Yahoo! CEO.

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Jerry Yang quits Yahoo!

Glync - new SEO Firefox extension

Pawel Szulencki — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:25:53 +0000

Glync is a new Firefox extension that adds historical graph to the External Links page in Google Webmaster Tools meaning that you can visualize the inbound link growth over the time. It can help you see how many links are you attracting and whether you are improving your sites visibility on the Internet or not.

There are two versions of the extension:

Free- tracks your Google Webmaster Tools links,

Professional - tracks your Google Webmaster Tools links and Yahoo Site Explorer links, displays Google PageRank of all your sub-pages and links pointing to those sub-pages,

Click on image to enlarge.

Its a cool extension that in a easy way presents data from your Google Webmaster Tools and helps you see in fast way what is happening to the number of inbound links pointing to your site: whether they are increasing over time or decreasing.

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Glync - new SEO Firefox extension

Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash

Pawel Szulencki — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:08:18 +0000

Google introduced the ability to track Adobe Flash content with use of Google Analytics software.

This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

The documentation of usage of Google Analytics for Flash is available on a special Google Code website, the open source of the entire AS3 code base under the Apache 2 License is available on this Google Code website and finally the tracking libraries for both Flash and Flex are available to download at Google.

I think its great that Google enables tracking of Flash websites or even parts of websites. It is mainly possible thanks to the ability to index Flash files, which became possible earlier this year. Now they want to also track those indexed Flash files and i think its a great idea. After all there are tons of Flash files on the Internet just waiting to be tracked down

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Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash

SEO duplicate content issue caused by multiple URl parameters

Pawel Szulencki — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:41:58 +0000

E-commerce websites have that in common that they present information in a dynamic way. That means that the content may be served via multiply number of different URL’s with different parameters which may cause a duplicate content issue.

For example:

http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx?DeptID=62438&CatID=63100&GrpTyp=P RD&ItemID=14ad0e8&attrtype=&attrvalue=&CMID=62438%7c63096&Fltr=&Srt=&Q L=F&IND=2&CmCatId=62438|63096|63100

and

http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx?ItemID=14ad0e8&ItemTyp=G&GrpTyp=P RD&ShowMenu=T&ShopBy=0&SearchString=Secure+Sleeper&RefPage=SearchDepar tment.aspx&s4PageSize=15&CmCatId=searchresults&Search1Prod=True

are the same product but accessed via different way: once by going through the categories tree and another way by searching for that product with build-in search engine. And as you can see those two URL’s have different parameters (everything that follows http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx? is a parameter), yet they present the same product (content).

And that is the problem. Visitors can reach the same product, but depending on the route they take, they will end up on different URL address. For search engines it is a duplicate content.

How to fight with e-commerce duplicate content issue

The best solution would be the use of static URL addresses instead of dynamic ones. That would make sure that each URL serves a certain product and that this is the only URl serving the same product.

That is the best solution, but hard to achieve. In reality, a website with tenths of thousands items could not create a static url for each product. Daily changes to the item availability, new products, special offers, limited series and so on would make this task very hard to achieve.

So how to solve it?

Remove unnecessary parameters - that will lower the distinct number of URl’s presenting the same content and help search engines spider the website
Create a sitemap - create a sitemap (html and xml versions) and present the URL’s you would like to present your products at. That will help sarch engines determine the “correct” URl address and remove the other possible duplicated URL’s with different parameters.
Implement mod-rewrite - rewrite all possible URL’s to static ones
301 redirect - redirect the duplicated URL’s to one version, so even if visitors reach your product via different ways they will end up at the same URL

How Google handles various parameters causing duplicate content issue:

When we [Google] detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
We select what we [Google] think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
We [Google] then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results- Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Conclusion

If you can, do not use URL parameters as it can cause a duplicate content issues. If you must, try to limit the number of parameters you use to absolute minimum. Also create a sitemap with preferred URL addresses to help search engines determine which URL to keep in its indexes and present to users.

The use of different URL parameters causing that different URL’s show the same content is very dangerous, especially to large websites with lots of items. So take it seriously and plan your URl structure before you make the website. That can help you save time and nerves.

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SEO duplicate content issue caused by multiple URl parameters

Google office in NYC

Pawel Szulencki — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:50:56 +0000

Have you ever wandered how do Google offices look like? Now take a look at that short video of Google’s office in New York City.

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Google office in NYC

Google Voice Search for Apple iPhone

Pawel Szulencki — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:38:45 +0000

What do you think of that? Isn’t it simply amazing?

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Google Voice Search for Apple iPhone

On-demand indexing in Google Site Search

Pawel Szulencki — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:24:20 +0000

Google Site search (http://www.google.com/sitesearch/) is a business service by Google that lets companies create a custom search results just for their company website with use of Google search technology. And now Google introduced a new function - on-demand indexing. It means that you can tell Google to index you website in search for changes on your website but you don’t have to wait when the robot comes itself. It visits your site on-demand, instantly after you hit the “Index Now” button..

On-Demand Indexing is like a turbocharger for Google Site Search, ensuring that your newest pages appear in search results on your website fast. Whether you’re promoting a new line of products, sharing breaking news or reports, or updating your site in time for the holiday season, On-Demand Indexing puts businesses in control with an “Index Now” button, giving them the flexibility to quickly update search results whenever they have new content to update or add.

Its a great improvement to Google Site Search. Now everyone is waiting when, or if Google enables this function for all webmasters and not only to those using Site Search feature. Implementing such feature in the Webmaster Tools for instance would benefit webmasters as their websites would be up to date. Always when they need, they could re-index their website.

Google would also benefit from that as they would present more up-to-date results making their search engine more relevant.

[Update] Google Webmaster Central Blog says the following:

With On-Demand Indexing, you can now tell us about the pages on your websites that are new, or that are important and have changed, and Custom Search will instantly schedule them for crawl, and index and serve them in your CSEs usually within 24 hours, often much faster.

meaning that the crawl itself is not instant, but the schedule for indexing is instant. That is a step forward anyway as now you can tell Google to index your website and they will do it within reasonable period of time. At least you know when to expect when the next crawl is going to be.

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Yahoo! deals launched

Pawel Szulencki — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:10:14 +0000

Yahoo! have recently launched a new service by Yahoo! Shopping, called Yahoo! Deals.

Yahoo! Deals (http://deals.yahoo.com/) is a collection of discounts, promotional offers and other “hot offers” for various products across online and offline stores updated daily to bring the cheapest products to the users.

Our new Yahoo! Deals site will save you both time and money as you scout the best online and offline bargains.

What can you find at Yahoo! Deals:

Daily Deals – the best deals from Yahoo! partner sites such as Woot!, Amazon, Dell, BradsDeals, and dealnews. The deals are updated daily.
Coupons – selection of latest online coupons that will save your money in shops like Macys, the Gap, Land’s End, Nike, Apple, and Toys R Us.
Storewide Sales – collection of special promotional codes, sales discounts and more.
Weekly Ads – offline electronic circular offers in digital form. Shops available: Macy’s, Staples, Target, JCPenney, and Lowe’s. Other function, Cheap Gas Finder, helps locate the best price per gallon of gas in desired neighborhood.

I think its good service by Yahoo! aimed at US market. People love to get bigger discounts, cheaper products, better services for free.

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Yahoo! deals launched