Improve Your Search Ranking with New Google Disallow Links Tool, Use Carefully

Suppose someone, universally known for his bad character, went around saying nice things about you. You might wish for him to stop already. That’s the idea behind Google’s newest tool.

The Disallow Links Tool allows site owners to disavow links to their websites that may be damaging their standing in Google’s search results. Google said that, if a site believes its ranking is being damaged by “low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.”

Apply with Care

At the Pubcon search and social media conference taking place this week in Las Vegas, Google webspam team leader Matt Cutts warned webmasters to be careful in using the new tool. “Most sites shouldn’t use this tool,” he told the conference. “Start slow.”

Accompanying the tool is a more specific warning notice. “If used incorrectly,” Google wrote, the tool can “potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results.” The technology giant added that it recommends sites “only disavow backlinks if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.”

On Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the company said that if a site hasn’t been notified of a “manual spam action based on ‘unnatural links’ pointing to your site,” then the tool is not something to use.

A Suggestion

If a site is convinced those links are causing problems, the procedure is to upload to the Tool a plain text file containing only the links to be disavowed, with one link per line. The tool will request that Google ignore specific links as it determines search results. However, the company said it is a “strong suggestion rather than a directive,” and that it reserves the right to trust its own judgment. The disavowal will take place after the next crawl and indexing by Google.

Links are a key determinant in how Google ranks websites in search results. From the company’s beginnings, the idea was that links between pages could be good indicators about the relevance of a given page to the search query. Google has noted that inbound links are only one of 200 factors used for ranking through its PageRank algorithms, but “linkspam” that uses “unnatural links” have become a major technique that some sites use to rig the process.

If Google detects evidence of paid links, link exchanges or other link schemes that violates its guidelines, it sends a warning message to the receiving site, recommending that as many spammy or low-quality links be removed as possible. The search giant said that the new tool should be used only after other efforts, such as contacting those offending sites pointing to yours, have failed.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Support.com Turns Data into Actions -- and Results

A customer represents two things: an immediate dollars-and-cents sales opportunity, and a store of valuable data, including buying habits, behaviors and opinions. Technical support company Support.com has some ideas on how to use this data to improve the way your employees influence customer experience.

When a Stranger Calls, Data Answers

We thought it was fitting to take a closer look to see how a tech support company uses data to improve the way their personal technology experts turn data into actions and the impact these actions have on customer experience and satisfaction. We spoke with Paul Vaillancourt, senior vice president of Contact Center Operations at Support.com to learn more.

Support.com provides remote technology services to consumers and small businesses directly via an online portal and channel partners (which include retailers and anti-virus companies). Personal Technology Experts must pass rigorous testing and training before helping customers.

Unlike other companies, everything at Support.com is analyzed. From the moment a call is answered to the moment the case is resolved, calls are recorded, scrutinized and archived on-site. Additionally, because one single system is used, data is instantly available, eliminating time it may take to transfer data from one CRM into another.

Influencing the Behaviors of Others

How tech experts are trained can determine whether companies meet their overall goals and whether customers’ problems get solved. As a result, when Support.com noticed a higher than normal attrition rate, they focused their attention on the training process to better understand how they can improve the effectiveness of tech experts.

First, they listened. Before tech experts get to answer actual customer calls, they undergo rigorous training and then a nesting period, during which they role-play. They listened to what those who decided to leave said in their exit interviews, as well as to feedback they received from others. They learned that experts were overwhelmed by the complexity of their tool set. As a result, Support.com changed how they introduced experts to calls, having them listen more to actual customer calls before they role-played (which they did more of as well).

Then they created a goal. Goals were actual behaviors, rather than a metric. Instead of saying that they wanted to decrease the length of the call by two minutes, they said: we want experts to solve problems quicker. In order to solve problems quicker, it was important to understand how experts could glean better information from callers. They determined that not enough probing questions were being asked. Sure, experts were active listeners, but they weren’t necessarily asking questions that could uncover useful information in a timely matter. Once experts were properly trained to listen for keywords and specific prompts, call times were shortened.

Finally, they give constant feedback. PTE’s are given score cards which contain six weeks' worth of data, including average call length, call disposition, contacts per hour, attendance and a quality score. The score card also compares an expert’s results to other experts as well as company goals, so individuals can see how their behaviors impact overall goals.

Creating a Culture of Intentional Actions (and Outcomes)

What Support.com’s process for listening, analyzing and producing actionable insights really highlights is the impact that a company culture built around data can have on customer experience. Every company says that they are dedicated to ROI — but not every company invests in the actions of their employees to really understand how behaviors translates into outcomes.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Adobe Edge Animate Seeks to Unleash the Beauty of the Web

The Web has been called many things both good and bad, but “beauty” is not a trait often associated with cyberspace. Adobe is seeking to change that with the release of Adobe Edge Animate 1.0, a set of Web design applications and services it says will allow designers and developers to “more easily create beautiful websites, digital content and mobile apps.”

Adobe Edge Animate, which also serves as Adobe Edge Preview 7 (Preview is now known as Edge Animate)  leverages standard Web development languages such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Notable features include a timeline editor that allows the editing of property-based keyframes with enhanced easing equations, an intuitive Webkit-based interface, reusable symbols, native HTML support, resizable layouts and mobile-ready content.

Adobe Travels to the Edge of Web Design

As reported by CMSWire in August 2011, the initial version of Edge Preview which later developed into Edge Animate was intended to be an HTML5 web motion and interaction design tool that allows web designers to bring animation, similar to that created in Flash Professional, to websites using standards likes HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Adobe cited “rapid changes around HTML5” as the impetus for adopting an open development methodology for Adobe Edge. Since then, the product now known as Edge Ainmate has evolved quite a bit, no doubt aided by the extensive public preview/feedback period.

‘Doubling Down’ on HTML

With Edge Animate 1.0, Adobe is “doubling down" on HTML, according to Webmonkey. While a Webmonkey article on the new solution expresses disappointment that Animate fails to output canvas or sustainable vector graphics, compliments Edge Animate 1.0 for helping “Flash refugees” create standards-based animations for sites, apps and other digital content.

“Today’s web developers shouldn’t need the same archaic text editors we used to build the Web fifteen years ago,” the article concludes. “Tools like Edge Animate … may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they go a long way toward helping people who want a more intuitive way to create cool stuff on the Web and that’s almost never a bad thing.”

The first release of Edge Animate, normally priced at US$ 499, will be made available for a limited time as part of a free Adobe Creative Cloud membership. When the free intro period ends it will be available as a standalone app for US$ 500 or as part of the US$ 50/month Creative Cloud subscription. It is compatible with Windows and Mac OS and available in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti Is The Stephen Hawking Of Radical Skateboarding Birds

Buzzfeed has hired a team of data scientists and is acquiring Facebook data company Kingfish Labs in an attempt to understand why things go viral. But can data replace creativity?

When Jonah Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post, search engines were the defacto traffic directors of the web. And his success was often tied to the rankings of HuffPo pages in search results.

“Partly it was the right keywords, partly it was being fast when the story would break, partly it was knowing which sort of nouns were important and how to write headlines and make an authoritative page,” he says. “And the thing that was unfortunate about all of it was that the person who decided whether you were successful or not was a robot. “

By the time he started Buzzfeed in 2008, times had changed. Social rivaled search as a way to discover content, and it proved a much more difficult puzzle. Instead of predicting the actions of methodical robots, Peretti now believes success lies in understanding what makes real human beings share a piece of content with their friends.

His new operating question is, “what makes something go viral?”

Jonah Peretti

There is no black-and-white answer. But Buzzfeed—best-known for photo-heavy listicles such as “11 Totally Radical Birds On Skateboards”--has hired a team of four data scientists to find the grey ones. It’s built a proprietary data analytics platform that turns the site into one giant experiment in virality.

Most websites rely on third-party tools such as Chartbeat and Pars.ly to analyze their traffic. But for Peretti, data analytics are just as much part of a website as the content they monitor. As he sees it, Apple builds both the hardware and the software that runs on it; Buzzfeed makes both the content and the tools that analyze it. On Friday, it announced the acquisition of Facebook-data company Kingfish Labs, the maker of a dating app called Yoke, to help study what makes Facebook sponsored stories go viral--a move that highlights its desire to be both a content company and a data company.

In addition to its own site, Buzzfeed's tools are also measuring traffic on sites such as Time Magazine, the Huffington Post and Fox News, which exchange their data for use of Buzzfeed’s data dashboard tools and alerts that tell them when one of their stories has viral potential. Together, the sites account for about 300 million unique views each month in addition to about 20 million unique views each month on Buzzfeed. That's a lot of data.

"What [we] do is take huge amounts of data and build models that tells us what it takes for content to go viral," explains Ky Harlin, a data scientist at Buzzfeed. "We then use these models to analyze real-time data, generating "scores" which indicate the potential of an article to go viral."

Editors use these scores when deciding how to promote each piece of content. The theory is that more “seed views” on content with viral potential will ultimately result in more traffic than content that gets clicked but not shared. All web publishers know this. Few have been able to quantify viral potential before it’s obvious.

Most still use clicks as their main metric. Buzzfeed is more interested in where the clicks come from. An overlay its editors can see on the homepage, for instance, assigns each article a “viral lift” score. This shows how many times one piece of content is shared (and clicked) per view it gets directly from the website or an ad (a “seed” view). While an image of a woman in a bikini might get a lot of clicks, it won’t get shared. Those radical birds on skateboards might ultimately get more attention on social networks. Buzzfeed tries to arrange its homepage so articles with the most viral power are most prominent. Birds before bikinis.

“It’s less about changing the content that is created and more about predicting early when something is taking off and being able to promote that more to people,” Peretti says.

But as many a failed marketing YouTube marketing campaign suggests, predicting what will be viral is impossible. It’s not that Buzzfeed has discovered an exact recipe for cracking the viral code. Rather, it’s using machine learning tactics to maintain a constantly evolving model.

“The way content went viral six months ago is not the same thing that makes it go viral today,” Harlin says.

“There’s art and science to it,” Peretti adds. “Which I think is a lot more fun business to be a part of, even if its less predictable...The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can’t replace the creative ideas.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com