Google Places Update: How to Find Missing Google+ Local Listings

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How to Recover Missing Google Places Listings

[deprecated, 2019, due to Google+ shutdown]

This morning Google started rolling out a global update to Google Places. The entire service has finally merged with Google+ Local. If you try to go to the normal Places login, you’ll be automatically redirected to a gateway to Google+. For most people this isn’t a problem, but if the email address you use to manage your Places listings doesn’t already have G+ activated, you’re probably going to find a screen like this where you should see your business listings.

Empty Manage your pages

If that’s the case, don’t panic. You can still recover your work. This morning, we received a Google Places verification post card for a client. They are eager to gain a presence on Google Maps so that they can start gaining leads. Unfortunately, the client’s listing was in the middle of the verification process when update hit.

01-Verification-Postcard02

This client’s listing was brand new, and, as mentioned before, had yet to be verified. It wasn’t already a part of the G+ Local ecosystem, which meant that we thought we lost all the work we’d done to create their local listing. But after exploring the new dashboard and Google Maps, we found a way to reconcile what would have been yet another stray listing.

If you have a Google Places listing that you need to recover, follow these steps:

1. Go to your old Google Places dashboard

Sign into the Google account you use to manage your listing. Since you can’t access the Google Places dashboard using http://www.google.com/places you’ll need to go here.

<https://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en&utm_campaign=ww&utm_source=placepage-badge&utm_medium=et>

02 Unverified Listing in Places Dahsboard

2. Enter your verification PIN

Enter your verification PIN to verify your listing. You should be redirected to the standard verification screen for Google Places.

03 Listing Verified

3. Submit your Places listing for early upgrade

Once your listing is verified, go back to your Google Places dashboard by clicking the logo on the upper left side of the PIN verification screen. You should be redirected to your dashboard and find your listing marked as “Pending: Being reviewed.”

04 Listing Pending Review

If you look at the top of the page you’ll also notice a message explaining that Google Places is being upgraded to Google+ Local. Follow the link in the message to go to Google’s article explaining the changes in detail.

05 Update Message

 

At the end of the article, there is a field to submit your page for early upgrade to G+ Local, under “Who can use the new Places dashboard?”Submit your listing, and wait on Google to update your Places listing to a Google+ Local listing. (This is probably a good idea because it sends a signal to Google that your listing is monitored by a real human being, and that you care enough about your listing to proactively submit it to G+ Local.)

06 What’s happening to Google Places for Business

4. What if my previously verified listing disappeared?

If your listing was previously verified and you know the URL, recovering your listing is simple. First, sign into the Google account you use to manage your listing. Next, go directly to your listing and click on “Manage this page.” If you don’t know where this is, you can find the button in the lower right sidebar.

01 Manage This Page Button

You should be redirected to the old Google Places dashboard where you can still send verification postcards.

06 Google Places Dashboard with Pending Listings

Don’t forget to take the time to also submit your unverified listing for an early upgrade, lest you lose hours of work.

At the end of the day, to succeed in this new local search environment that Google+ Local offers, you must make sure that your Places listing is managed by an active account, currently enrolled in G+.

Infographic: Urban Mining

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Billions of dollars worth of precious metals are used every year to manufacture the cellphones, laptops and other electronics we use on a daily basis. As these computers and gadgets reach the end of their life cycles, they get scrapped or put in storage until they can be recycled in a process known as “urban mining.” Our friends at Gold & Silver Buyers highlight just how much gold and silver can be retrieved from scrapped electronics and how valuable urban mining can be when compared to traditional mining.

Gold & Silver Buyers Infographic

How to Share the Urban Mining Infographic

Contact info@goldandsilverbuyers.com for more information about how you can display this infographic for free on your own website.

We’ve also included a thumbnail if you wish to share this post on Facebook or Google+!

Urban Mining Thumbnail

Pubcon Austin 2013

Pubcon Roundup Austin 2013: 100 Top Tools, Tips, and Tricks

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We’ve assembled a non-exclusive list of 100 great tips and tricks from the event from all the Pubcon sessions we were able to attend. We aren’t going for depth here–we are expressing what we feel are the best ideas in a super-concise format. Each of the ideas here are pretty powerful and can easily warrant hours of additional research. If we haven’t attributed a tip to you and you’d like a mention/link–please email emilyhurn[at]tastyplacement.com.

Pubcon Keynote

Social Media Marketing Tips

  1. Sponsored Facebook posts are rarely the best ad to employ on Facebook, you want to use the more advanced tool set. (Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics)
  2. If you make a claim in a Facebook ad, don’t say “We can help you save money on insurance.” Don’t even say “We can save you 15% on your insurance.” You need to be more specific — “Save 17.3% in just 3 minutes!”
  3. You Get 60 Minutes of News Feed Fame: 40 to 80% of your traffic is generated in the News Feed. Keep your tidbit trending with shares & comments. (Dennis Yu)
  4. Photo Fetish: 60% of consumption on Facebook is photo views. Start snappin’. (Dennis Yu)
  5. Photo posts are 7x more engaging than status posts; comments have 4x the weight of ‘likes’. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  6. Use Power Editor to run ads https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/. (Dennis Yu)

FB Advanced Editor

  1. Set ads to display in the News Feed, NOT in the right sidebar. (Dennis Yu)
  2. Ads must have social action. Use sponsored stories in combination with ads.
  3. Number one thing to do on Facebook = sponsored stories (the story gets placed higher in the newsfeed or where ads are usually placed)
  4. Amplify your message. Get your targeted audience to interact & push into conversions.
  5. Every object in FB has an ID. Use graph.facebook.com/anybody to view user IDs. Grab the IDs and target individual users for ad campaigns. (Dennis Yu)
  6. Where does the magic happen? In the News Feed! 65% of likes, 35% of comments, & 45% of likes on a mobile device are generated from the News Feed. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  7. Once a fan opts out of seeing your posts, your posts will never organically appear to them again unless either 1. the fan decides to opt in again or 2. you have a promoted ad. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  8. In edgerank, marking a post as ‘spam’ carries the highest negative weight. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  9. The newsfeed placement of relevant stories is customized specifically for the user – engagement is key. (engagement > relevancy)
  10. Make posts during weekends or outside business hours for higher response rates. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  11. Fan count numbers mean nothing if there is no reaction/interaction involved. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  12. “Make Insights your bitch!” Use Facebook Insights to check your organic results. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  13. Social Media is an audience response channel. Interact with your clients. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
  14. Sometimes it’s just more cost effective to automate some of your social messages.
  15. No one moves without influence – get your content into the stream of an influencer. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
  16. Fan exclusives boost your likes. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
  17. Strategic viral posts can boost your affinity and increase the reach of your marketing messages. (Joe Youngblood, Senior Account Executive, WrightIMC)
  18. Unless you promote them, nobody will see your apps.
  19. You’re not competing against your brand’s rivals, you’re competing against your fans’ friends and grandmothers for space in their news feed. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
  20. You can check the emotional impact of your headlines: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm (Susan Young, CEO, Get In Front Communications, Inc.)
  21. Listen to your audience – check out subreddit for idea generation. (Joe Youngblood, Senior Account Executive, WrightIMC)
  22. An individual’s Facebook account is capped at 5,000 friends. By that measure, Dennis Yu has reached the limit of human popularity.
  23. “Talking About You” is a bogus metric. (Dennis Yu)
  24. Instead of typing out all those tedious letters in Facebook.com, like some animal, use fb.com instead.
  25. Make your response time within 24hours. Half an hour is excellent. (Casey Markee)
  26. Content which stimulates conversation extends your reach and is a step closer to conversion. (Bryan Cheney)
  27. Fill out your content production by planning a social media calendar. (Bryan Cheney)
  28. Customer referral programs are the affiliate marketing of the social media age.
  29. Pay attention to personal behavior, you are being lead around by things curated by your friends. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
  30. Pinterest. Get on board! Why? Pinterest increased over 1,000% in 2012 & it drives referral traffic. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
  31. With Pinterest, “visual content is KING.” Make your Pinterest content relevant – even slightly. Find an idea that can go into multiple boards, push your content at specific times/days (6am/pm eastern time) & get on Community Boards to increase your reach into the millions. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
  32. Use http://tineye.com/ to check for attribution of images and posts on Pinterest.
  33. Facebook is an image sharing network. 250 million photos are uploaded per day on Facebook & 70% of all activity is related to an image, photo, graphic, or video. (Kate Buck)
  34. How to Repurpose Content Across Social Media (by Kate Buck): Create image, embed in blog post, pin from blog, tweet from pin, share on instagram with link to blog post, share to FB page (or upload directly), later…pin from instagram web, upload to Twitter directly (this works with YouTube videos as well)
  35. Want to see how your site is doing across all social media platforms? Use http://socialsiteexplorer.com/ (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
  36. Perfect Pinterest “Instructographic”: You need a large title, step by step instructions, and use up to 5,000 pixels. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)

WordPress Tips

  1. Don’t use the default username “Admin” when setting up a WordPress site–that lets hackers get one step closer to getting into your WordPress installation (Michael David and Matthew Bey of TastyPlacement).
  2. Never store a database backup on your server. Your WordPress database contains an encrypted version of your password that can easily be hacked
  3. You can easily block bad bots with your .htaccess file (all WordPress installations have this file already), full tutorial here.

Block Bad Bots

  1. Use the Yoast SEO plugin to control your Open Graph and Twitter Card markup.
  2. Keep your WordPress index clean by no-following your category and tag pages.
  3. Yoast SEO’s title tag features are unreliable on some themes. Always double check the source code of the header to make sure it’s correct.
  4. Don’t bang on the post publish button, since that repeats the ping.
  5. You know what’s pimpin’? Blog post thumbnails. Do ‘em up right!
  6. Link Building
  7. When the link is epic, like from a college professor, don’t worry about whether the link is perfectly within your niche (Jim Boykin).
  8. Internet Marketing Ninjas have a soon to be publicized tool which will automatically categorize your backlinks.
  9. When using the link disavowal tool, start off by disavowing the nofollowed and dead links. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
  10. Repetitive anchor text might not be a problem if it’s for a non-valuable keyword. (Jim Boykin)

Local Maps and Marketing Tips

  1. If you are having trouble verifying a merger between Google+ and your Google local page, initiate the postcard for the 2nd time after 15 days elapses and it’ll be verified automatically…(Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
Merge Google+

Greg Gifford really took this to the next level

  1. To rank better locally, try having more local content. Blog about local events and your community. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  2. To distinguish between a local campaign and your national rankings, try listing a 1-800 number sitewide, and your local phone numbers on individual location pages.
  3. The merging of Google+ for Local and Google Places is inevitable, but it’s not yet helpful to merge those two accounts manually. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  4. Local keyword optimization for your website is vital for the rankings of your local listings.
  5. It’s still a matter for debate whether it’s better to have your multiple location addresses on separate pages. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  6. Geo-tagging can help improve your PlaceRank. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  7. A Google My Map may help your local ranking.
  8. Make your site a genuinely useful local resource directory.
  9. Is your location too remote? Try a virtual office closer to downtown. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  10. You want an awesome local strategy? Emulate Obama’s. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
  11. Manage multiple listings in Google Places. Manage brands through G+ for local.
  12. Your places description is seen by a lot of customers, so it needs to be copy that sells, not just keywords and location. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
  13. Info not updating on Google? Poke your listing. Show that you are active. Don’t make any new changes, and click submit. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
  14. At least one listing category needs to be a default, the rest can be keywords. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)

Miscellaneous Tips

  1. With an enhanced Adwords campaign you can put phone numbers in an ad, as well as a Google supplied tracking phone number. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
  2. Rel = Publisher ties your Google Business+ page to your whole site, while Rel = Author ties your personal Google+ page to individual articles (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  3. Through rel=’author’, author headshots are connected with articles in SERPS. When searching for a brand, rel=’publisher’ pulls up your G+ summary page for that particular brand (in the knowledge graph area). (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  4. If you are an author churning out content that doesn’t get links, you are not an influencer. Consistent & valuable information is key. (Bonnie Stefanick, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  5. Power is moving away from pagerank/individual pages to the author. (Bill Rice, Kaleidico)
  6. As of 2012, only 9% of tech blogs have implemented rel=’author’. Which means that Google has very little data for this right now but their plans have not been abandoned (in fact, it has been an ongoing project since 2007).
  7. You might not know this, but you may be implementing rel=’publisher’. Google is actively implementing it through the G+ button, by default. (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  8. Host content on your website to grow your domain & presence, then link to your Google+ page. (Bonnie Stefanick, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  9. It takes time to build your authorship, but you can lose it very fast. When you are claiming your article Google associates it with you, therefore building your profile. Only claim what you are comfortable with to be safe. (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
  10. Panda vs. Penguin: Panda focuses on sites providing bad user experience & low quality content while Penguin looks for unusual linking patterns, keyword stuffing & over optimization. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
  11. Got an unnatural link warning in Webmaster Tools? The process for recovering is to: clean up links, disavow (Google Disavow Tool), & request reinclusion. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
  12. You can fit 110+ characters in Title Tags. Measure Title Tag length in pixels, not characters. http://bit.ly/titletaglength (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
  13. Use all available Analytics & Insight tools. They are free!
  14. Keep your agency engaged in the industry: hold a couple of lunches, several webinars and events a month, and attend a conference a quarter. (James Loomstein)
  15. Google Pagespeed Insights: if your results are less than 70, you are not going to rank very well. (Aaron Shear, CEO, Boost Search Marketing)
  16. Gain more real estate with your listing by adding Rich Snippets. It’s simple – you only add one line of code to your site. (Aaron Shear, CEO, Boost Search Marketing)
  17. For phone support for local verification with Google places or Google+ Local), go to: bit.ly/localphonehelp Go through the steps, click on “Call Us” and a Google employee will call you directly. (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
  18. Author rank is a leg up opportunity for a small business. (Nathaniel Broughton)
  19. Having problems with Google + or Local listings updates, and are an AdWords user? Call the AdWords Rep, say you are pulling your Ads…the problem will be fixed fast. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
  20. The authority/reputation of reviewers is important. Having an active Google account is something Google is paying attention to when looking at reviews. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
  21. Keep up with the industry by spending time every day on Google Reader, catching up with the literature. (James Loomstein)
  22. Keep tabs on your clients by setting up Google Alerts for their brand name, industry keywords, competitors, and their employee names. (James Loomstein)
  23. No one to call at Google? Visit this forum: productforums.google.com/d/forum/business (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
  24. If your Google+ business email doesn’t match your Google+ Local email, you can’t respond to reviews. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
  25. Never REPOST a good review off your google+ page, exact duplicates will be removed. (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
  26. Location-based keywords in good reviews can bump you up in local searches for that particular location. Same goes for product/service keywords (ie. the ‘best widget’). This should all happen organically.
  27. Make sure landing pages are mobile-optimized. Create Mobile Ads with Call To Action buttons. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
  28. Get your site, business ready for Google’s Knowledge Graph, list your website/business in Freebase.com, some data is believed to feed into Knowledge Graph. (Bill Hartzman of Tandem Interactive).
  29. Think of social ranking factors as the Three Amigos: 1. The number of plus ones (velocity of and authority of +1 user) 2. The number of shares on Google+ 3. The CTR from search results (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)

 Conversion Science Tips

  1. Your goal in ecommerce is to increase your conversion rate without decreasing average order size/value (AOV). Solution? Optimize for revenue per click (RPC), not conversion rate (Brian Massey, the conversion scientist).
  2. When representing small businesses, it’s important for a marketing agency to communicate that the campaign never ends. (Nathaniel Broughton)

 

How to Get a Google Maps Business Panorama, a Step-by-Step Guide

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Awesome New Google Business Panoramas Extend Street View Technology

We recently noticed business panoramas appearing on Google Places/Maps pages for a number of businesses in Austin, TX. These business panoramas operate just like Google Street View, and in fact, in some cases you can follow the street view right through the doors of a business and into the inside. You can try it by visiting local restaurant J. Blacks Google Places Page (just follow the arrows out the door!).

Here’s a screenshot of our new panorama, and it links to the panorama itself:

Google Maps Panorama

 

How to Get Google Business Panoramas for Your Places Listing

We got our panorama up in about 8 days from start to finish–you’ll need an outside vendor to do it. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

  • Start with a Google Places page. You’ll need a verified Google+ Local/Google Places/Maps listing. If you’ve got duplicate listings, you’ll want to clean that up first. Also, if you have multiple locations, you will need to secure (and pay for) separate panoramas.
  • Find a Google-authorized provider. You can’t shoot these panoramas yourself. You need to select from a list of authorized providers (“Trusted Photographer”) and make your own deal with them. You can go here to find a Google Trusted Photographer in your area.
  • Arrange your photo shoot. You’ll arrange a time and price with the Trusted Photographer. We got an appointment the next day from Olive Tree Photography in Austin (sadly, as of 2015, Olive is no longer offering this service), and they came out the next day.
  • Your Photographer does the rest. Your Trusted Photographer has a special camera, special software, and back-door access to your Google+ Local page, so they’ll make the upload to your page on their own. Ours was posted in 6 or 7 days after the shoot. We also got about 20 high-quality still shots for our local page. Check with your provider, this service might be optional, but ours was included in our price of about $270, we opted for a bare-bones service. The range will generally be $250 to $650.

About the Photo Shoot

We were obviously interested in the technology involved, and were expecting a camera more like the spaceship-shaped cameras used on Google’s mapping vehicles, but the camera setup was surprisingly compact and ordinary looking:

 

Google-Photo-Shoot

 

Pictured above is the Olive Tree team at work. The entire shoot took about 25 minutes.

The SEO and Marketing Benefits

We see the business photos as obviously beneficial to a company’s marketing program. Google Maps is still the king within the world of local listings, at least for the time being, and having a view of your business available to new customers is a great way to introduce yourself.

Furthermore, we surmise that adding this feature to a Google+ Local page serves to enhance the listing, which is always beneficial for ranking within the local system. It may also serve to give the listing further verification and authority.

In short: it’s a no-brainer.

Embedding the Panorama

More good news: you can embed the panorama just as you would embed a map. You simply browse to your panorama and play with it until you have the exact orientation you want and then click the link icon at the upper left of the panorama window. You’ll see the familiar link menu pop up. You can see our panorama embedded on our TastyPlacement team page.

If you do choose to go forward with a panorama, good luck with your photo shoot!

 

Setting Up a Stripe.com Single Payment Page for WordPress

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Stripe.com handles credit card payments at 2.9% (the same as PayPal) and let’s you integrate a single payment page or popup page within your WordPress site. Stripe is setup not as a total ecommerce solution, but rather is a better fit for single payments or donations. It has the advantage over PayPal in that customers aren’t required to sign up for an acount and aren’t taken to a separate gateway to make a payment.

Another option for payment solutions for those willing to attempt to gsayPal and Stripe in terms of price, as it’s only 25 cents per transaction. Dwolla offers the simple integration of a button and a WordPress plugin as well, but it does require that customers go through a signup process.

Stripe works well and is very easy to integrate with the WP-Stripe plugin which allows for installation vis shortcode or template insert.

Stripe.com Installation for WordPress

Here we’ll cover the installation of the plugin and how to set up Stripe.com for WordPress.

Lets start within WordPress. Login to your site and navigate to Plugins. Click Add New and Search for “WP Stripe.”

Click Install > Okay > Activate Plugin

Install-WP-Stripe

Then under the Settings tab of your WordPress admin, select WP Stripe.

Then select the WP Stripe Settings Tab.

WP-Stripe-Settings

In order to start taking payments and test payments, you need to go register an account at Stripe.com.

Register-Stripe.com

Once you’ve registered and logged in. You’ll be able to grab your API keys at this link: Stripe API Keys.

Take those API Keys (both the live and test keys) and copy/paste them into your WP Stripe settings area within your WordPress Dashboard. Then click Save Changes.

stripe-API-keys

Then you want to create a new page and enter the WP Stripe short code [wp-stripe]

Publish the page and it will look something like this:

stripe-button

One neat thing about Stripe is that it includes a popup form so that you really don’t have to modify any CSS if you’d rather not. Unlike a heavy eCommerce cart, Stripe is a fairly lightweight solution, so other than the plugin, with this particular type of integration, all the heavy lifting is done through Stripe.com which also means better security.

To test Stripe, (highly recommended) before sending clients to the newly created payments page, use the following dummy info.

Card Number 4242424242424242
Card Month 05
Card Year 2015
CVC Number 123

After you run the test, you should see the amount of test money you sent show up both in your WP Stripe area of the WordPress admin and in the Stripe dashboard as well.

Pro tip: If you want to eliminate the optional check box that asks to display recent donations or payments in the payment popup window, simply uncheck “Enable Recent Widget?” in the WP Stripe admin area.

That covers basic setup of WP-Stripe for a WordPress website. For more advanced tutorials and documentation Stripe has a well organized Developers portal. You can find an archive of our WordPress tutorials here.

Author: Ryan Howard is a TastyPlacement alumnus who now runs a digital refinery offering WordPress designs, local search marketing, ecommerce SEO services, and social media strategy.

Monitor Size Statistics for Web Design & HTML

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Updated for 2012

Have you ever wondered how many 800 x 600 website viewers are still roaming the internet? More than you might think. More importantly, have you ever wondered about the monitor sizes of the viewers of your own site? The capability to discern your own user statistics (monitor sizes, and a lot more) is well within your grasp–in fact, you may already be missing it.

Browser/Monitor Sizes on the Internet Generally

It’s helpful to know the monitor dimensions of internet users generally; this lets you plan your designs to deliver a good experience to website visitors. W3Schools keeps a running tally of monitor sizes that visit its website but the statistics do not appear to account for mobile websites, so just remember that you need to account for mobile website visitors separately.

For 2012 (January through November) we see the following statistics on about 73,000 visitors:

Monitor Size Statistics

A few details are worthy of mention. First, recent years have seen a proliferation of browser/monitor sizes. We see a nearly endless “long-tail” of single instances of very unusual browser sizes like 1795×1011 and 1540×963, just to name a few. These odd sizes make statistical analysis a little foggy. Generally though your top 10 or 15 monitor sizes are going to give you a fair sense of who’s visiting.

Now, just for reference, the statistics above are a far cry from what we reported in 2008:

Screen Resolution Visits
1.

1024×768

 383 37.73%
2.

1280×800

 147 14.48%
3.

1280×1024

 114 11.23%
4.

1440×900

 82 8.08%
5.

1680×1050

 59 5.81%
6.

1280×768

 50 4.93%
7.

1920×1200

 42 4.14%
8.

800×600

 38 3.74%
9.

1152×864

 35 3.45%
10.

1280×720

 11 1.08%

Browser/Monitor Sizes of YOUR Website Visitors

Since we first wrote this post in 2008, Google Analytics has gone through a few redesigns–GA still offers the capability of showing your website visitors’ browser size, it’s just a little harder to find.

Instructions:

[icon_list style=”check”]

  • Sign in to Google Analytics and click the “Standard Reporting” button on the top bar.
  • On the left navigation, click “Audience” to expand sub-menu and then click “Technology” to expand sub-menu
  • Click “Browser & OS”; the main window will now display a table showing browser statistics
  • Click on “Secondary Dimension” at the top of the table as shown in the screenshot and scroll down to select “Screen Resolution”
  • The table will then display your visitors’ monitor sizes.

[/icon_list]

Analytics

Handy, huh? And don’t be surprised if you see a few 800 x 600 viewers still kicking around.

Pubcon Austin 2013

Tutorial: Block Bad Bots with .htaccess

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In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to block bad bots and spiders from your website. This is a standard safety measure we implement with our WordPress SEO service. We can save bandwidth and performance for customers, increase security, and prevent scrapers from putting duplicate content around the web.

Quick Start Instructions/Roadmap

For those looking to get started right away (without a lot of chit-chat), here are the steps to blocking bad bots with .htaccess:

  • FTP to your website and find your .htaccess file in your root directory
  • Create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
  • Browse to this page on AskApache that has a sample .htaccess snippet complete with bad bots already coded in
  • You can add any bots to the sample .htaccess file as long as you follow the .htaccess syntax rules
  • Test your .htaccess file with a bot spoofing site like wannabrowser.com

Check Your Server Logs for Bad Bots

Bad Bots Server Log

If you read your website server logs, you’ll see that bots and crawlers regularly visit your site–these visits can ultimately amount to hundreds of visits a day and plenty of bandwidth. The server log pasted above is from TastyPlacement, and the bot identified in red is discoverybot. This bot was nice enough to identify its website for me, but DiscoveryEngine.com touts itself as the next great search engine, but presently offers nothing except stolen bandwidth. It’s not a bot I want visiting my site. If you check your server logs, you might see bad bots like sitesnagger, reaper, harvest, and others.  Make a note of any suspicious bots you see in your logs.

AskApache’s Bad Bot RewriteRules

AskApache maintains a very brief tutorial but a very comprehensive .htaccess code snippet here. What’ makes that page so great is that the .htaccess snippet already has dozens of bad bots blocked (like reaper, blackwidow, sitesnagger) and you can simply add any new bots you identify.

If we want to block a bot not covered by AskApache’s default text, we just add a line to the “RewriteCond” section, separating each bot with a “|” pipe character. We’ve put “discoverybot” in our file because that’s a visitor we know we don’t want :

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(verybadbot|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

If you are on the WordPress platform be careful not to disrupt existing entries in your .htaccess file. As always, keep a backup of your .htaccess file, it’s quite easy to break your site with one coding error. Also, it’s probably better to put these rewrite rules at the beginning of your .htaccess file so no pages are served before the bots read the rewrite directives. Here’s a simplified version of the complete .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 403 /403.html

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(black.?hole|blackwidow|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

# ISSUE 403 / SERVE ERRORDOCUMENT
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

Here’s a translation of the .htaccess file above:

  • ErrorDocument sets a webpage titled 403.html to serve as our error document when bad bots are encountered; you want to create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
  • RewriteEngine and RewriteBase simple mean “ready to enforce rewrite rules, and set the base URL to the website root”
  • RewriteCond directs the server “if you encounter any of these bot names, enforce the RewriteRule that follows”
  • RewriteRule directs all bad bots identified in the text to our ErrorDocument, 403.html

 Testing Our .htaccess File

Once you upload your .htaccess file, you can test it by browsing to your site and pretending to be a bad bot. You do this by going to wannabrowser.com and spoofing a User Agent, in this case, we spoofed “SiteSnagger”:

If you installed properly, you should be directed to your 403 page, and you have successfully blocked most bad bots.

Some Limitations

Now, why don’t we do this with Robots.txt and simply tell bots not to index? Simple: because bots might simply ignore our directive, or they’ll crawl anyway and just not index the content–that’s not a fix. Even with this .htaccess fix, it’ll only block bots that identify themselves. If a bot is spoofing itself as a legitimate User Agent, then this technique won’t work. We’ll post a tutorial soon about how to block traffic based on IP address. But, that said, you’ll block 90% of bad bot traffic with this technique.

Enjoy!

Google Announces New Link Disavowal Tool

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Google’s Matt Cutts announced at the PubCon marketing conference that Google is rolling out a new much-anticipated link disavowal tool. Bad links from poor quality sites can harm a site’s rankings in Google, and Google has implemented this tool to let webmasters remove bad links from their link profile. TastyPlacement has been able to use this tool for clients at risk of being associated with spammy or shady sites. This feature can be extremely helpful in our WordPress SEO Service when we are identifying specific client issues.

The tool will operate by uploading a txt file that contains a list of domains that a webmaster wishes to disavow. There will also be a domain: operator that will let a webmaster disavow all links from a domain.

Here’s a sample of what a disavowal tool text file would look like:

http://www.shadysites.com/bad-post
http://www.shadysites.com/another-bad-post
domain: http://wwww.reallyshadysite.com

The tool is ostensibly live at the following domain:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Cutts warns that it’s always better to have bad links removed rather than disavow links with the tool, but recognizes that’s not always possible.

Infographic: Testing Negative SEO

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Does Negative SEO Really Work?

Negative SEO is an undertaking whereby a business competitor attempts to harm the search ranking position of a competing website through the procurement of junk and spam links. Our study shows that Negative SEO is very real, and can be accomplished for very little money.

Infographic: Testing Negative SEO

Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.

Embed Code

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<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-negative-seo.jpg" />
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alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin-based search marketing firm.</a> To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-negative-seo">
Negative SEO Study</a> and infographic.</div>

About the Study: The Details

After the webmaster warnings of March 2012 and the Penguin update of April, like many in the SEO community, we wondered if negative SEO (NSEO) was now a possibility. For years Google had abided by the principle that nothing external to a site could harm it directly, ensuring that sites would be safe from the malice of competitors. Evidence for NSEO had been initially unreliable and anecdotal, so we decided to try it ourselves.

The Experiment:

For ethical reasons we didn’t use a competitor’s site, but chose an internal property, Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com, for the experiment. This site ranked well for its domain name keyword match and a number of lesser terms, and has enjoyed a stable position in its market for years. This site because it is the SEO equivalent of the proverbial “Los Angeles dog walker.” It is not a particularly powerful site, but it is positioned in a market where it could easily provide a small business owner with a comfortable living.

The NSEO:

We chose the following negative SEO techniques for our study:

  • 45,000 Comment links. Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $15
  • 7000 double-tiered forum profile links. Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $5
  • Sidebar blog links on four trashy blogs, yielding nearly 4000 links (although it appears that only 100 of those links have been indexed to date). Anchor text “Pool Cleaning Houston.” Cost: $20

The Execution:

The initial purchase of 45,000 comment links was a disappointment. The seller of the service had marketed the links as NSEO, but it soon became evident that few of the comments were being accepted by moderators, and even fewer were dofollow. The followup purchase of 7000 forum profile links seemed more promising. This was not billed as NSEO, but as a positive, albeit black hat, Scrapebox service. Then a week went by and our site failed to be destroyed.

We had built a relationship with the webmaster of the trashy blogs when we asked him to remove the sidebar links he had sent to one of our clients. He removed the links for a fee, and when we asked, he put on new links to Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com for a similar fee. Within a few days the links delivered a killing blow.

The Results:

The bulk of the traffic for the site comes from the search “Pool Cleaning Houston.” For a week after the blast of thousands of NSEO links, the ranking actually went up from position #3 to #2. Then we followed up with the blog sidebar links. By the next day Pool-Cleaning-Houston.com was off the front page and essentially invisible to potential customers.

Besides the primary keyword, there were another 51 minor keywords tracked during the study. 26 went down noticeably, 21 stayed the same throughout, and 5 keywords improved slightly. Taken on average, the keywords dropped about 2.5 spots (among the keywords that did drop, the average decline was closer to 9 positions).

The total rankings of all the keywords clearly shows the effects of NSEO not just on selected searches, but on the overall ranking power of the site. For a period of three days following each NSEO burst the site improved slightly in the SERPs, and then abruptly lost the ground it had gained and then some.

Conclusion:

It is now cheap and effective to destroy the livelihood of a small business. In a local market it could cost as little as $20 a month to knock a competitor off the first page of search returns. This low cost makes NSEO accessible to virtually anyone, from unscrupulous companies, to disgruntled employees, spiteful customers, or even idle pranksters. It’s too early to make a definitive claim about the exact causes of the Google algorithm penalty, but an effective NSEO campaign may include the creation of a backlinks profile with artificially repetitive anchor text, as well as links from a bad neighborhood.

Want an Infographic for Your Site?

Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!

…and the thumbnail!:

Negative SEO

Freddie Mercury’s Guide to SEO

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Want to be an awesome SEO or digital marketer? Seek out Those of Epic Awesomeness and learn from them. If you think like a legend in your work life, your work will be legendary. And, after what must be my 5000th listening of A Night at the Opera, I started thinking about what lessons Freddie Mercury can teach internet marketers.

Surround Yourself With Great People

Freddie Mercury had great co-workers. Guitarist Brian May played for a decade on a guitar he built with his father in the family tool shed. The guitar had an advanced tremolo system that wasn’t available at the time. Brian’s guitar fueled millions in record sales for Queen. Today, Brian owns his own guitar company that produces a commercial replica of his homemade guitar.

Queen’s bassist John Deacon began tinkering with piano in the mid-70s. Almost immediately after beginning to learn the new instrument, he crafted the now-iconic song “You’re My Best Friend.” John has said, casually, “basically that’s the song that came out you know when I was learning to play piano.” The song was a major hit, and helped push Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” album to triple-platinum sales.

Great people produce great things. You can’t do everything alone, so partner up or populate a staff with people of great talent and your work product will be great.

Appreciate Your Clients, They’ll Bring You Fame and Fortune

You are nothing without your clients (or your readers and buyers as the case may be). Freddie honored and loved his fans. “You brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it; I thank you all,” he insists in “We Are the Champions.” Your clients are gold. Treat them that way and you’ll enjoy riches and be a champion for years to come.

Build on the Past, but Be Original

Queen regularly employed elements of the past in their music. They drew heavily upon the growing heavy metal movement (at the time pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath) but also included less-expected elements like classical and opera. “It’s unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear,” Freddie once remarked. He also once said that “the whole point of Queen was to be original.” Queen knew where to ground themselves and where to branch out and be original. The resulting effect was a supernatural but radio-ready rock sound.

You can do the same. Web marketing draws on a foundation of concepts that originate with traditional advertising. Web marketers must honor well-settled advertising concepts like calls to action, customer conversion, branding, etc. After all, the psychology of the buyer hasn’t changed much since the beginning of time. But web marketing presents infinite opportunities to be original. When you blend a solid marketing foundation with creative and innovative ideas, you will excel, and you will succeed. Don’t simply imitate the successes of others, build on the successes of others with your own spin.

Be Fabulous and Think Big

“I always knew I was star, and now, the rest of the world seems to agree with me,” Freddie once mused. No one ever accused Queen or Freddie of thinking small — even before they were famous. In marketing as in rock music, it’s the big ideas that get the most attention. If you are building a website for a client or for one of your own properties, make it the best-in-class for that space. Queen wasn’t done with a song until they had lavished it with operatic 4-part harmonies. Aim high and people will love your product.

If you have an idea for a blog post article, why not go for broke and develop it into a full-scale infographic? We re-learned this lesson recently when our infographic study of social media impact on search signals went viral, earning us thousands of social media mentions and hundreds of links from the SEO and entrepreneurial community. Had we issued that material as a blog post, it might have been lost in the shuffle of thousands of other blog posts. We took the route a champion would take and it paid off.

When web content goes viral, it’s the same as when a band gets famous: when people love something, they tell their friends.