Twitter is allowing brands to create Facebook/Google+ style brand pages. This feature, along with a redesign focused on usability & discoverability of content, was rolled out this week
Twitter is following in the footsteps of Google who recent launched Google+ brand pages.
An entertaining and slightly ominous cartoon about Google+, Google’s best effort to date at competing with Facebook:
Learn the first steps to turn your Toronto small business website into a sales rep that creates new prospects for you.
With concerns that web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages and impacting the relevancy and usefulness of its search results, Google has taken action against content farms and scraper sites, changing its ranking algorithm to take out such material. Google says the changes impact 14% of its US-based search results.
Content farms are article-based websites. Generally, a farm site collects and posts content that is related to popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics). Content is generated specifically tailored to those searches and usually little time or money is spent generating that content, either by the site owner or the article writers.
eHow.com (despite their protests) is considered to be a content farm – Some content is well written and informative; the rest is derivative, poorly written and information-poor, with these articles typically posted with the goal of obtaining a link back to the author’s personal website. This means that websites dependent solely on self-generated article links from content farms will see their personal search engine rank drop as well.
“Scraper” sites pull content in from other sources. Some websites do this legitimately, such as using RSS feeds or aggregating content under fair use guidelines. Other sites simply “scrape” or copy content without modification from other sites using automated tools. It is these latter sites that Google is targeting.
The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content, with scraper sites falling in rank.
Google has implemented these two changes on their US site, with plans to implement worldwide.
Increasingly, Google is prioritizing local businesses in search results, and this will impact Toronto small business. Given that:
Google is guessing that when you search for something, you want something nearby, and will present search results based on that premise.
The net result is that small business websites highly optimized for a search term may find themselves pushed off Google page one by a long list of local business listings.
Here are some strategies to offset you potential loss of ranking in Google:
Associated Press: U.S. Web surfers are spending more time on Facebook than searching with Google
According to new data from researchers at comScore Inc., people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook — or about 9.9 per cent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month, surpassing the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 per cent, people spent on all Google sites combined, including YouTube and Gmail e-mail.
U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo sites, or 9.1 per cent of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing.
In August 2009, U.S. web surfers spent about five per cent of their online time on both Facebook and Google and almost 12 per cent on Yahoo.
ComScore bases its findings on a combination of reports from a panel of two million users around the world and data from websites’ servers.
The time spent posting photos, updating status messages and scrolling through news from friends has at least grown to rival just about everything else people do online.
Google has set up a central hub that brings together all the information about Google products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community.
From the Financial Post Feb 24/10
From his office in Silicon Valley, Patrick Pichette has a unique view of the business landscape in his home country of Canada.
What he sees is a country in danger of missing out on international opportunities afforded by the Internet and the digital revolution that could turn Canadian businesses into global champions.
Yesterday, the Canadian-born chief financial officer of Web giant Google Inc. — a post he once held at BCE Inc. — was in Toronto to speak to a gathering of business leaders about using the Web to think beyond the borders of the Great White North.
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