Posts tagged opinion

Google Turning the Lights Out on Organic Data – Opinion by Tony Verre

News – Google, in an effort to secure better user privacy, is effectively turning the lights out on signed-in Google Account users in Google Analytics as well as other analytics packages. And, true to Google nature, this change doesn’t affect Paid Search, just organic.

The Double Standard

Google makes the double standard seem easy. Paid search (PPC) is also personalized to the user’s search history and IP address. But, true to Google’s nature, this gets to slide through the gates of “privacy”. I’ll let you connect the dots Aaron Wall-style. You don’t have to look to hard to see this move places PPC data on a pedestal; it’s unfiltered by privacy now and you get true conversion data from them.

What This Means to SEOs and Online Marketers

While I don’t have the percentage of users that query while signed in, it’s fairly safe to assume that a good chunk of users do travel from, say, Gmail to Google to query. And any other host of Google applications to Google. And when that happens, it’s light’s out on organic search data. You don’t the referring keyword/keyword phrases used to find your site, your products, and your services. *BLINK*. Gone. As if it never happened.

Certainly, as the post mentions, you’ll get your visitation data, your segment data. However, here is the big piece: when it’s a signed in visit (organically), everything goes bye-bye, including conversion data. So if everyone who visits your site isn’t signed, then your data should remain unaffected by this. But, if even one person visits your site signed into their account, the keyword(s) and conversion are not associated.

Harder to Craft Strategy Now?

I would say so. A lot of SEOs use the organic keyword data and conversion data to determine if a given strategy is working, and to determine if progress on that strategy is being achieved. It helps us establish a bottom-line assessment. Not only does it hurt search marketers, it hurts companies and businesses on every level (big and small). This change is going to make it harder to craft precision strategy on an organic level because the data is skewed and it could be harder to determine whether or not your strategic efforts were successful.

It doesn’t put us back to the Stone Age, so let’s be real about that, but it put a pretty big crimp in data-backed strategy.
Moreover, those who used analytics just to surmise if people/consumers and how people/consumers found them for something other than BRAND terms, just got a punch in the face [read Mom and Pop shops who can’t afford an online marketing services and help]. The web might be a key component to survival for them, and taking away accurate data in the name of faux-privacy is a pretty big deal.

Where to Go from Here?

Like Panda, we are all going to have to see how this shakes out. We will have to see how the data is affected by this change. It doesn’t appear to have been implemented yet, testing out being signed in to my account. But, when it does hit, everyone is going to have to take a deep breath, step back, and watch it for a couple days.

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Facebook Gestures: How Users Could Be Sharing Their Opinion

Facebook “Likes” have become a universal way to share or promote a piece of content on a blog or website (or Facebook itself). There are even T-shirts with the Like button printed on them.

[caption id="attachment_96182" align="alignright" width="301" caption="Like t-shirts...



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Sung Shi Kyung shares his opinion on the Seo Tae Ji/Lee Ji Ah scandal – allkpop


allkpop
Sung Shi Kyung shares his opinion on the Seo Tae Ji/Lee Ji Ah scandal
allkpop
by phenom on May 19, 2011 at 7:41 am On the May 18th broadcast of MBC's “Knee-Drop Guru“, singer Sung Shi Kyung revealed his thoughts on the Seo Tae Ji/Lee Ji Ah scandal. When the subject of why he keeps his dating history so private came up,

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Need A Quick Opinion From Your Friends? Try Swayable

swayable150.jpgIf you’ve been out shopping and needed help making a decision, you’ve probably done this: taken pictures with your cellphone and emailed or texted them to a friend for their input. Should I buy the black boots or the brown ones? Should we buy the futon or the hide-a-bed?

That’s the experience that led Lindsey Harper to found Swayable. She was shopping for a car rack and wanted her husband’s input: Thule or Yakima? The process of snapping two separate photos and sending two separate emails was “clunky.” So she set out to make the process easier.

How she did so is an interesting story in itself. But first, a little about the app.

Sponsor

You can create a Swayable via the Web or via your iPhone (iTunes link). To do so, you simply snap or upload 2 photos of the things you need to choose between. You can opt to make this public or private (if you choose the latter, only people with the URL will be able to see the Swayable and vote). Then you can share the Swayable to your social networks, by email, and via SMS or you can embed it into a website.

Then the voting and the commenting begins, all in real-time. The iPhone app has push notifications, so you needn’t keep the app open while your friends weigh in.

You can also vote on the Swayables that others have submitted as well.

Swayable_ss.jpg

One look at that screenshot reveals which demographic has already adopted Swayable. Yes, it’s the tween and teen market. Armed with their phones and their love of Justin Bieber, you’ll find that there is a rich trove of “which haircut do you like better?” sorts of questions on the site. (Don’t let that dissuade you from trying Swayable. You can filter your searches, so you needn’t see these sorts of celebrity dilemmas.)

That wasn’t the usage that Harper anticipated when she sought a better way to make car rack purchasing decisions, but it’s certainly where Swayable has seen a huge amount of traction.

The app isn’t simply notable for its teenage girl fanbase. We’ve written about Harper before for her use of Mechanical Turk in building the product. A sole female founder without a technical background but with a lot of experience in project management, Harper has outsourced the entire development of the iPhone and Web app, its design and UX. She still uses Mechanical Turk for moderating and flagging inappropriate comments and images.

Harper says that an Android app is in the works, but her focus right now is on perfecting the iPhone and Web apps and making changes based on user feedback. Could a Justin Bieber-only Swayable app be in the works? Let’s make a Swayable and vote!

Discuss



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HP Group PPC Managers Give Their Opinion on Adwords Call Metrics – Online PR News (press release)


PRLog.Org (press release)
HP Group PPC Managers Give Their Opinion on Adwords Call Metrics
Online PR News (press release)
Essex Based HP Group SEO specialists give their opinion on Google's introduction of Adwords Call Metrics and the impact this could potentially have on paid
SEO Experts QueryClick.com Discuss Google Place Search and The Heightened SourceWire (press release)
Dubai: SEO International, UAE becomes a Google AdWords Certified PartnerPRLog.Org (press release)
10 Things I Hate About Google!Search Engine Watch
Catalogue e-business -Search Newz -DirectNews
all 18 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

The Impact of Google Instant New Search on SEO – RantRave | Published Opinion.


CBC.ca
The Impact of Google Instant New Search on SEO
RantRave | Published Opinion.
Since Google finishes your search for you, it's possible that millions of sites that used good keyword analysis and SEO are going to lose out.
Google Instant Will Save You Seconds, But Not For SEOPC World
How Will Google Instant Affect Your Company's SEO?ReadWriteWeb (blog)
Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant? Google's Matt Cutts Says Not so FastGather.com
TechCrunch -Damego -WebProNews (blog)
all 1,115 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

Opinion Crawl Tracks and Semantically Analyzes Sentiment on Twitter and News

I have reviewed several tools to analyze sentiment: their methods varied from manual sentiment setting to textual analysis, emoticons and symbols. Today we are looking at a semantic sentiment analyzer: Opinion Crawl which uses SenseBot (we have mentioned previously) as the semantic analysis engine.

Opinion crawl has two large section we’ll review separately: the sentiment tracker (for hot topics news broken into categories) and sentiment search.

Opinion Crawl Sentiment Tracker

The main page displays key topics grouped into categories:

  • Current events (Oil spill, Afghan war),
  • Political figures (Barack Obama),
  • Entertainment (Lady Gaga, The Last Airbender),
  • Companies (Goldman Sachs),
  • Economy (Unemployment, Chinese economy),
  • Products (iPad), etc.

Clicking on a topic takes you to the blog which is automatically generated every day. The blog tracks the sentiment trend on a large number of Web publications and provides a daily/weekly/monthly view. For example, clicking on “The Twilight Saga” (it’s not that I am a fan, it’s just that I found that example most interesting) takes us to this page that visualizes:

1. Daily Sentiment:

Daily sentiment

2. Sentiment Trend

(Trending of positive/negative/neutral and overall mentions over a period of time):

opinion crawl

3. Positive-to-Negative Ratio

(Relation of positive mentions to the negative ones)

Positive-to-Negative Ratio

Opinion Crawl Search

There are 2 search buttons on the main page: Sentiment in the news and Sentiment on Twitter. They allow you to get an ad-hoc reading of the sentiment on a small number of recent news items or tweets. (Note that the ad-hoc analysis presumes that the topic you are searching for is in the news or is being actively tweeted about.)

The result is displayed as a snapshot of the current sentiment as a pie-chart; latest news and images on the topic.

Sentiment search

One of the most useful features I loved was a semantic cloud consisting of key concepts extracted from the news or tweets. The concepts allow you to see which issues may be driving the sentiment in a positive or negative direction.

Opinion crawl semantic cloud

Analysis of Twitter consists of searching the tweets on a topic and analyzing their text. Many tweets do not have enough textual content – they may just contain a URL pointing somewhere and a couple of words. So the engine needs to extract a decent volume of tweets and parse them for sentiment expressions, and for key concepts that are being discussed (semantics).

Twitter sentiment often swings widely throughout the day, whereas the news sentiment is more stable.

Compare the Twitter sentiment for “Old Spice”, especially the sematic cloud with the above screenshots – amazing!

Twitter sentiment

A pleasant surprise was that the tool was quite reliable at identifying the current sentiment, you may want to give it a try and let me know your thoughts!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Opinion Crawl Tracks and Semantically Analyzes Sentiment on Twitter and News



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John Dvorak’s Second Opinion – MarketWatch


One.com
John Dvorak's Second Opinion
MarketWatch
While SEO is nothing new, it seemed to get a head of steam a decade ago when some prankster discovered "Googlewashing." By setting up some Web pages with
High Position SEO makes alliance with Kwik Car Rental LimitedPR Urgent
SEO Experts Company: Webdhoom that provide SEO services India.FPRD (press release) (blog)
Hotel SEO: The Absolute Best Way to Attract New BusinessThe Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog)
One.com -SEO Consult (blog) -USA Today
all 27 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

Montreal SEO Company Offers Second Opinion Services – MMD Newswire (press release)

What is the SEO opinion of interstitial ads?

Does anyone have any facts or guidance on the SEO impact of using interstitial ads? They appear on a number of “big budget” sites like top-tier newspapers, magazines and video sites yet my guess is that Google and others would take a less favorable view of small sites using these ads. They are quite admittedly annoying, but can be profitable and beneficial in some situations.

Does anyone have any first-hand experience working with these ads and the results (good, bad or non-existent) from the various search engines?

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