Google Doodle, Gibson Les Paul Electric Guitar

Google puts up a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar doodle today to celebrate the 96th anniversary of Les Paul, the father to electric guitars.

Play Gibson Les Paul Electric Guitar

Google’s Gibson Les Paul electric guitar doodle is playable on Google’s web search home page www.google.com. When you hover the guitar strings with your mouse, you will notice the movement and color changes of the guitar strings and the sounds that the guitar makes.

Playing Gibson Les Paul electric guitar:

Still playing the guitar:

Still playing Gibson Les Paul electric guitar

Wikipedia provides a brief history of Gibson Les Paul electric guitar:

The Gibson Les Paul is a solid body electric guitar that was first sold in 1952. The Les Paul was designed by Ted McCarty in collaboration with popular guitarist Les Paul, whom Gibson enlisted to endorse the new model. It is one of the most well-known electric guitar types in the world, along with the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster.

Other Google Doodles

Google did put up other Doodles over the years:

Posted on June 9, 2011
Category: Google | 2 Comments

Schema.org, Microdata Markup Standards for Webmasters

Schema.org offers a shared collection of schemas (or html tags) that webmasters can use to markup web pages.

Websites’ pages are often generated dynamically into HTML from structured data that are directly extracted from databases.
With Schema.org’s markup standards, Google, Yahoo and Bing can understand the information on web pages through the original structured data and provide rich snippets within organic search results.

Microdata

Schema.org uses Microdata.

We’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. We’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats.

Microdata is a set of tags that is compatible to HTML5 that allows you to display rich snippets for markup types including:

Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries

Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject

Event

Organization

Person

Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant

Product, Offer, AggregateOffer

Review, AggregateRating

To markup web page’s content using Microdata:

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets allow webmasters with websites containing structured data/content (including review sites, etc) to label their content so each piece of text represents a certain type of data. The structured data/content won’t appear to visitors to webmasters’ sites, but will help Google better understand and present information from webmasters’ web pages within Google SEO results.

Google supports 3 types of Rich Snippets formats:

Microdata
Microformats
RDFa

Before officially launching Schema.org, Google first introduced Rich Snippets in 2009:

Introducing Rich Snippets – May 2009
An update on Rich Snippets – October 2009
A new Rich Snippets format: Events – January 2010
Microdata support for Rich Snippets – March 2010
Rich Snippets go international – April 2010
Recipe view, based on Rich Snippets markup – February 2011

Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Posted on June 8, 2011
Category: SEO | 1 Comment

Facebook Addon Intel the Museum of Me

Intel’s the Museum of Me Facebook Addon allows you to create a slideshow that displays how your social network on Facebook looks like.

Enter the Museum of Me:

Exhibition:

The exhibition is a journey of visualization that explores who I am:

My Location:

My keywords:

More of my keywords:

Videos, images:

My friends on Facebook:

Photos of my friends:

Install Intel’s the Museum of Me Facebook addon to create your own Facebook slideshow.

Posted on June 4, 2011
Category: Social Media Marketing | Leave a Comment

Add Google +1 Button to Websites

Google +1 Button is now available for webmasters to add to websites:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Google +1 Buttons on your web pages allow visitors to your site to recommend your content to other people. Google’s +1 annotations currently show up in SERP in US English language’s www.google.com.

Google +1 button is available in 4 different sizes:

15px (small)
20px (medium)
24px (standard)
60px (tall)

To add Google +1 Button to your sites, insert this Javascript tag in your web pages’ head or just before close body tag:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

Insert this tag at where +1 Button should appear:

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

Posted on June 2, 2011
Category: Google SEO | 1 Comment

Google Doodle Happy Childrens Day

Happy Children’s Day! Google puts up a logo (Doodle) on www.google.com and across many other Google country-specific web search sites to celebrate the Children’s Day today.

Wikipedia says about the Children’s Day:

“Children’s Day”, as an event, is celebrated on various days in many places around the world, in particular to honor children. Major global variants include an International Children’s Day on June 1 as adopted in the former Communist bloc, and a Universal Children’s Day on November 20, by United Nations recommendation.

In the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China), Children’s Day is celebrated on June 1 and is formally known as “the June 1 International Children’s Day”.

The World Conference for the Well-being of Children in Geneva, Switzerland proclaimed June 1 to be International Children’s Day in 1925.

Posted on June 1, 2011
Category: Google | Leave a Comment

Blekko Mobile App for Android

Blekko slashtag search engine offers Android mobile app:

http://blekko.com/ws/+/blekkoapp

What Can You Do on Blekko’s Android Mobile App?

Blekko.com’s Android mobile app allows users to:

Search Blekko (with or without slashtags) on your Android mobile phone
Add websites or search results to your slashtags
Mark websites or search results as spam results
Review Blekko’s SEO reports in real-time

Blekko’s Android Mobile App Download

Download your Android mobile app from the Android Market.

Signing-in to your Google account is required to initiate the Android app download.

Blekko’s iPhone Mobile App

Apple’s iPhones mobile app is also available for download from the iTunes Store.

Posted on May 30, 2011
Category: Blekko | 1 Comment

SES Conference Shanghai 2011

SES (Search Engine Strategies), one of the leading search and social marketing conferences, was held in Shanghai on 24 and 25 May 2011.

One of the panel speeches at SES Shanghai:

“Simultaneous translation box” at one of SES’s conference rooms:

SES Workshops

SES also offers 3 workshop sessions (one half-day workshop session and two morning workshop sessions) that were conducted by search/social industry experts:

Eddie Choi, SES advisory board and Frontiers Digital managing director:

Social marketing analytics – Applying key learnings and technologies from the US market to China – Now it’s the time to include social media analytics in your web analytics strategies

Eden Lau, Brandtology co-Founder and Managing Director of North Asia:

Social and mobile marketing metrics and trends to for successful consumer engagement

Aaron Kahlow, Online Marketing Summit chairman and founder:

Search and social media – A global perspective on what drives results for APAC / US marketers and how it applies to all markets

Upcoming SES Conferences

Upcoming SES conferences that will be held in other locations of the world in 2011:

SES Toronto: 13-15 June, 2011
SES San Francisco: 15-19 August, 2011
SES Hong Kong: 20-21 September, 2011
SES Chicago: 14-18 November, 2011

History of Search Engine Strategies (SES)

Search Engine Strategies was founded by Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Watch:

SES has been a conference series focused mainly on SEO and PPC, but also web analytics and social media marketing in recent years.
The first SES conference was held in November 1999 in San Francisco, California.

Posted on May 24, 2011
Category: SEM | Leave a Comment

www.Youdao.com, Youdao Chinese Search Engine

Youdao (www.Youdao.com), 163.com’s Chinese search engine, was officially launched in December 2007.

Youdao search engine is the 6th largest search engine in China, with search market share behind Baidu.com, Google.com.hk, Sogou.com, Yahoo.cn and Soso.com.

Youdao’s SERP

Youdao search engine’s search engine results page (SERP) consists of:

A: Youdao’s search box
B: Youdao’s organic search results
C: Other vertical searches, including image search, news search, blog search, answers search
D: Search by day, by week, by month, or by year
E: What everybody has been searching
F: Your search history
G: Related searches

Youdao’s Spider, Youdao’s Index Update

Youdao’s spider (or user agent) is YoudaoBot. How Youdao.com’s spider and index update work:

To get included into Youdao’s index, your site will need to have inbound links pointing to it from other websites that are already in Youdao’s index.
Normally, not every web page of your site will be included in Youdao’s index – Youdao’s index only includes web pages that are above a certain level of quality.
How often a site gets updated in Youdao’s Index depends on how often a webmaster updates his/her site’s content.
Youdao’s spider (YoudaoBot) normally do not crawl a web page more than once within 8 hours and understands the IF-MODIFIED-SINCE in the HTTP header
Optimize SEO META tags to allow better crawling and ranking on Youdao search engine.

Submit site to Youdao

Webmasters can manually submit websites to Youdao, through Youdao’s site submission page.

Youdao Robots.txt

To block Youdao’s spider (or YoudaoBot) from crawling part of your website, use Robots.txt:

How Robots.txt works on Youdao.com is similar to how Robots.txt works on Baidu.com. Review Baidu Robots.txt.
Place Robots.txt at the root directory of your site:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

Nofollow for Youdao

Youdao understands nofollow attribute.

To disallow Youdao’s spider (YoudaoBot) from following links on a web page and passing link juice (similar to Google PageRank) through to other web pages, use:

<META NAME="YoudaoBot" CONTENT="nofollow">

To disallow Youdao from passing link juice through an individual link (on the “link” level), use:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>

Youdao Vertical Searches

Besides web search, Youdao search engine offers vertical searches including:

Image search (image.youdao.com/)
Video search (video.youdao.com/)
News search (news.youdao.com/)
Music search (mp3.youdao.com/)
Blog search (blog.youdao.com/)
Map search (ditu.youdao.com/)
Reader (reader.youdao.com/)
Bookmarks (shuqian.youdao.com/)
Forums (tie.youdao.com/)
Dictionary (dict.youdao.com/)
Translation (fanyi.youdao.com/)
Shopping search (gouwu.youdao.com/)

Youdao provides desktop tools including:

Toolbar (toolbar.youdao.com/)
Desktop Dictionary (cidian.youdao.com/)

View the entire list of Youdao vertical searches (and/or products).

Posted on May 20, 2011
Category: China Search Engines | Leave a Comment

Google PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting used to be one of the SEO techniques for webmasters to control link juice flow with nofollow attribute and to increase Google PageRank at the link level of web pages.

Google PageRank Sculpting Revised

How Google PageRank Flows between Web Pages:

A decay factor of 10-15% loss applies to each time PageRank (link juice) passes from one web page to another.
The rel=nofollow attribute is a method to indicate no PageRank (link juice) should be passed through to the web page being linked to from your web page.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains how nofollow should be used on SEOmoz’s Blog:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

Let’s revise Google PageRank Sculpting. PageRank Sculpting can be used as:

“Siloing” – Only pass link juice to web pages on your site with the same theme to improve ranking for keywords and keyword groups, that are both general and targeted keyword phrases.
Signals to GoogleBot crawl prioritization for your site’s web pages.

Changes to Nofollow Attribute, PageRank Sculpting

Matt Cutts explains how nofollow attribute works after Google made algorithmic change to how Nofollow attribute passes PageRank (link juice) between web pages:

For example, your web page has 10 PageRank points (from inbound links pointing to the web page). You set up 5 links pointing to other web pages on your site and 5 outbound links to other websites. You blocked PageRank from passing through the 5 outbound links with nofollow attribute.
Before Google’s algorithm change, you could pass 2 points to each of the 5 web pages of your site, with a total of 10 PageRank points staying on your own site’s web pages.
After Google’s algorithm change in 2008, you could only pass 1 point to each of the 5 web pages of your site, with a total 5 PageRank points staying on your own site’s web pages. The other 5 points are lost.

On a Google Buzz post Matt Cutts explains nofollow is great for:

Links to sites that you do not trust
Links to sites that you do not want to vouch for
Paid links

As Webmasters, you should not add “nofollow” to all outbound links on your site.

Other SEO Techniques

Webmasters should avoid keyword stuffing and consider using other SEO techniques before applying nofollow attribute to websites.

Posted on May 15, 2011
Category: Google SEO | 1 Comment

t.QQ.com, Weibo.com, t.Sina.com.cn in China Microblogging

China’s microblogging services/platforms, Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ Weibo both initially launched microblogging services on sub-domains:

Sina: t.Sina.com.cn
Tencent QQ: t.QQ.com

Since then Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ Weibo both have quickly grown their user base. Sina decided to rebrand and move to new domain name Weibo.com.

t.Sina.com.cn – Sina’s old Weibo domain name which is still available to users after the new domain has been introduced
Weibo.com – Sina Weibo’s new domain name
t.QQ.com – Tencent keeps running Weibo on this subdomain name

t.Sina.com.cn vs Weibo.com vs t.QQ.com

Baidu’s search trends, Baidu Index (index.baidu.com), shows search traffic of the domain names in this order (from highest to lowest):