If you like to post sexually explicit content on your Blogger blog, you might want to think about making the switch to Tumblr.
Google has announced that it is banning “images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity” on its Blogger platform, effective March 23. According to Google, if you operate a blog with sexually explicit content, your blog will be made private on March 23. Google’s not going to remove your content, but your blog will only be viewable to you, other admins, or users you share it with specifically.
If you want to keep your blog from going private in a few weeks, Google says you need to start cleaning it up. Any blogs created after the March 23 cutoff will be up for removal if they contain adult content.
There is one exception to this – and it has to do with the context of the nudity.
“We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts,” says Google.
Of course, this will no doubt lead to some bickering between Google and its bloggers, as the line between pornographic and artistic is rather undefined at times.
In 2013, Google cracked down on blogs that monetized from adult ads, but allowed bloggers to continue to post adult content as long as it was marked as such.
This decision could drive bloggers elsewhere – most likely Tumblr. If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, it’s a porn free-for-all. As long as your Tumblr blog is properly marked as NSFW, then you can “go nuts, show nuts, whatever” (those are Tumblr’s actual words).
This week, Flipboard launched a new web version. It’s available for the desktop for the first time after being mobile-only since 2010. While it already has millions of users from phones and tablets, this opens it up to more people, and to more usage from existing users. Think about those who spend all day on a computer at the office. It seems like as good a time as any to consider how you might be able to get some traffic to your blog or website from it.
“By developing for mobile first (Flipboard was originally built for the iPad in 2010), we saw that content could shine again in a clean and uncluttered environment,” wrote Flipboard’s Mia Quagilarello in a blog post. “The Web evolved, too, with things like responsive design making for easier (and prettier) reading and navigation.”
Nearly a year ago, Onswipe released some data finding that Flipboard drives the most traffic to publishers among four popular news apps on the iPad. In fact, it wasn’t even close.
A lot has changed with Flipboard since then, and the good news is that most of it should only help you.
Feeds
Flipboard lets you submit your content through a feed, which can greatly help your content gain exposure if they accept it.
“Optimized RSS provides users with a superior reading experience and is much easier to maintain than your website’s HTML/CSS,” the company says.
Also helpful to know is that it considers multimedia content in the RSS feed to be a great way to “enhance the reading experience,” so it it supports not only articles but MP4, YouTube and Vimeo video formats as well as MP3 and SoundCloud audio formats.
“We use social media to grow your audience by sharing your content with Flipboard users, who then share it with their friends,” the company says in an FAQ document. “Flipboard provides a platform for deep content engagement across a growing audience of social influencers and enthusiastic readers. Our readers make over 10 million social recommendations a month via the app to their friends.”
To get your content promoted within Flipboard, you’ll first need to provide the service with a Flipboard-optimized RSS feed. Requirements include: the entire body copy of your articles (rather than just headlines/summaries), at least one image per article (no less than 400 pixels wide), at least 30 items, and updates pushed via PubSubHubbub (it prefers Superfeedr).
Flipboard leverages HTML5 and microformats for design elements like pullquotes, media RSS (for images, video, and audio), and GeoRSS for geotagging within RSS. You can learn more about feed optimization here where it includes an example feed and details on feed structure, content markup, etc. There’s a feed validation tool here.
“People use Flipboard to search and discover content in a variety of formats, including RSS, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram and more. Displaying full article content within the app is possible via optimized RSS, and we require this at a minimum before considering your content for promotion within our Content Guide,” the company says.
Magazines
Another way to get your content seen throughout Flipboard is to create “magazines,” and include your articles within them. This is a feature Flipboard introduced a couple years ago, which lets anyone curate content based on any topic they like. You can create a magazine, give it a name and description, and add all the content your heart desires. This can include your own content and/or content you come across on the web or within Flipboard itself.
In October, Flipboard said that people had made over ten million magazines. This is when they introduced the third generation of the app (the second having introduced magazines themselves), which included the ability to follow topics ranging from very broad to very niche. You’re probably going to want to follow all the topics you can that are related to the magazines you’re working on.
Another nice thing about magazines is that they’re indexed by Google:
Creating magazines is easy. Just go to your profile on Flipboard and it’s pretty self-explanatory. Name it, add a description, and add content. You’ll probably want to include keywords in the title and description to help users discover your mags in search. In some senses, you can almost think of these like Pinterest boards.
Flipboard actually blogged specifically about titling magazines about a week ago, offering up a bunch of things to keep in mind and possible approaches. They’re mostly about staying on topic, but also standing out from the crowd.
“The takeaway is that you’ll be found in search by title or by topic, so it’s good to keep your magazine name easy to understand and to include a magazine description or tagline,” it concludes.
As it mentions, you can always change the name later if you like.
Go to the magazine editor tool at editor.flipboard.com to view analytics and make changes to settings. Make sure your magazine is in the right category.
With the analytics tool, you can view articles by day (number of items flipped into the magazine), viewers by day (number of people who have seen items you flipped), and page flips by day (number of views of items you have flipped into the magazine).
“Updating your description and continuing to flip into a well-performing magazine can keep its momentum going,” wrote Flipboard’s Jenn de la Vega in an October blog post. “If a magazine is not getting as many views or interactions as the others, try switching up your sources or reevaluate its focus. In any case, it will be exciting to watch your magazines fuel Flipboard’s topics and get more visibility than ever before.”
You can also invite contributors, so you might want to invite colleagues to help you add content.
You can also rearrange the order of content, and set the cover story (again, not unlike Pinterest boards).
Harsh Agarwal at ShoutMeLoud.com recommends regularly commenting on stories in Flipboard to drive additional visibility for your profile (which could lead to some new magazine followers).
“This is probably most underused technique on Flipboard, but you can use it now to get more eye-balls to your Flipboard profile,” he writes. “Flipboard lets you comment on any post that you are reading and your comment is visible to only Flipboard users. You can use this technique to get more visitors to your Flipboard profile and convert them into followers.”
The blog Ethical Entrepreneur once ran a post which claimed that it was able to quickly double its website traffic thanks to Flipboard magazines. Here’s an excerpt from that:
Well not too long ago Flipboard rolled out a new feature called Flipboard magazines that lets you save and curate content into your very own magazines. Admittedly when the feature rolled out I played around with it and quickly forgot about it. I created one or two magazines and just kind of ignored it. I checked back a few months later only to notice that I had hundreds of subscribers! Wow.
A few weeks ago I launched The Ethical Entrepreneur website and I immediately created an Ethical Entrepreneur Flipboard magazine. Not only was I “flipping” in interviews that I conducted but I also started to curate other great entrepreneurial content that I wanted people to read. Within a few short days I had hundreds of subscribers to my Ethical Entrepreneur magazine. Then I started to notice my blog traffic was increasing. In fact the traffic doubled within a few days. Keep in mind the website is only a month old. I checked my analytics to see where the traffic was coming from. Guess what? The traffic was coming from Flipboard!
Some think it’s best that magazines feature a mix of your own content and content from others, but ultimately the choice is up to you. Some think simply replicating your blog in Flipboard magazine form is perfectly fine. It seems to be working for JeffBullas.com, which is seeing increased traffic from Flipboard:
Marketing your brand is about being everywhere in a wide range of media formats to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your web properties. So create your own Flipboard magazine for your blog. Load up your articles and you have your blog in a magazine format. Flipboard just happens to make it look sensational! As Flipboard is now not just an app now but also on the web you have added another distribution point to amplify your content in another format.
On the flipside, digital marketer Howard Huang doesn’t think just pushing your own content is the best way to go. He writes:
I don’t recommend this because sharing content that is only your own confines you into your own corner of the web and may limit your ability to attract engaged followers faster. You want to curate a well balanced portfolio of content related to your topic from all over the internet as well as your own.
He also recommends basing magazines on “laser focused topics”. For example, instead of a magazine on as broad a topic as Golf, you might publish one on “Putting Green Techniques”.
It probably depends on your topic and your ultimate goal.
Need some inspiration for how to approach magazines? Flipboard has some videos showcasing some creators’ takes on it:
Web Tools
Flipboard offers several tools which you can utilize to help you improve your experience creating magazines and to promote them. The Flip Button lets Flipboard users who land on your content add that content to their magazines. The Profile Badge lets you display a link to your Flipboard profile, and the Magazine Widget is a nice way to link to your own magazines from your site.
Beyond Flipboard’s own tools, third-party tools from companies like AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny, and Shaeaholic enable you to give your website visitors another easy way to share to Flipboard alongside other social networks. Flipboard has a guide to these tools here.
You’ll also want to use either the Flipboard bookmarklet or the Chrome extension, which both let you easily add any content from around the web to your magazines. Update your magazines regularly. These can also be found at the link above.
Promoted Items
Last month, Flipboard announced Promoted Items, which lets brands distribute articles, videos, products, or photos in Flipboard. Advertisers can promote items from their magazines or content from their website.
“As brands continue to become content creators we want Flipboard to be an easy place to extend distribution of their stories, products, research papers, films and photography,” said Christine Cook, head of advertising partnerships at Flipboard. “Brands that already have content in brand magazines on Flipboard can now highlight the best pieces more broadly across Flipboard and reach an audience of millions.”
“For the past seven years, we’ve worked closely with brands to create content that our readers can easily discover, no matter where they are,” said Emily Allen, SVP of Ad Strategy at Business Insider. “Promoted Items allows us to extend our sponsored content’s reach to millions of Business Insider followers on Flipboard monthly. It’s a powerful vehicle for increasing discovery.”
These are all things you can keep in mind if you wish to draw some extra traffic and/or business from Flipboard, especially now that it’s more widely available than ever before.
Are you a Flipboard user? Do you curate magazines? How do you use Flipboard to drive traffic to your website? Discuss in the comments.
Nearly a year ago, LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform to all members in the U.S. in English, enabling the average Joe to write posts as if they were Richard Branson.
During that time, however, there have only been a million posts made. That’s the milestone LinkedIn just announced. According to the company, members publish over 40,000 posts per week, on average.
To put that into perspective, WordPress revealed earlier this week that there were 555,782,547 blog posts created on WordPress.com blogs in 2014. That’s over 1.5 million per day. I don’t think anyone would have expected WordPress-like numbers from LinkedIn’s first year as a publishing platform, but the comparison illustrates how wide that gap really is.
Of course LinkedIn’s platform has been much more limited in terms of markets, but that’s about to change. The company is now opening up the platform to all members in English-speaking countries, which it says accounts for 230 million of its 330 million members. The rest will get access in all languages LinkedIn supports in the coming months.
In other words, while I still wouldn’t expect WordPress-like numbers, next year we should be talking about a much larger number of LinkedIn member posts.
“Posting on LinkedIn is a powerful way for members to underscore their expertise in their respective fields, extend their professional reputations beyond LinkedIn, and have valuable conversations with the largest group of engaged professionals ever assembled,” says LinkedIn’s Akshay Kothari.
“Now, these members will have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of their peers – people like Tom Stevenson in the UK, who shared How to Negotiate Like Harvey Specter; India’s Avinash Murthy, who analyzed the ALS #IceBucketChallenge social media phenomenon; Paul Petrone in the US, who articulated The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day; and Emma Hill in Australia, who provided experience-based advice on the recruiter/hiring firm relationship,” adds Kothari.
Here’s a look at some best practices for LinkedIn publishing:
We may be nearly a week into January, but there are still some interesting year-in-review posts coming out from major Internet companies. On Monday, Amazon gave us a look back at third-party seller performance in 2014, for example.
Now, Automattic is sharing some numbers for WordPress.com blogs, and they’re quite “Im(Press)ive” as the company puts it. There were a total of 18,300,771 new blogs created throughout the year. That’s up 12.5% compared to 2013. In case you’re wondering, that works out to nearly 50,000 new blogs per day.
Wow.
Now just imagine how many posts there must have been on WordPress.com blogs in 2014. Actually you don’t have to, because they gave that number too. 555,782,547. That’s over 1.5 million per day with 47 million published from mobile devices.
WordPress also gives us a 24.5 trillion bytes of data per hour stat.
“Those bytes aren’t just little packets of code winging around the internet’s series of tubes (at least, they’re not just that),” writes Automattic’s Michelle W. “They carry stories. Memories. Voices. Relationships. Experiences. They’re your essays, your photos, your poems, your drawings. Every time a piece of what you’ve created pops up on someone’s screen, you expand someone’s universe, just a little, and they expand yours — which is the real power of WordPress.com, and of the internet.”
She also drops some additional stats: “Behind everything Automattic does are 301 Automatticians: 66 Happiness Engineers responded to your requests for assistance 365,212 times; Every one of our 134 developers worked on the improvements and enhancements we’ve been rolling out over the past few weeks; 9 systems engineers kept everyone’s sites running fast and secure; 8 editors shepherded over 22,000 of you through Blogging U. courses; 24 themers made 96 stunning new layouts and dozens of customization improvements available.”
As reported earlier, Automattic has launched a new in-person event series for WordPress.com bloggers, where they can learn from WordPress experts.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com, announced the launch of a new event series called Press Publish. This will give bloggers the chance to learn and network with so-called WordPress.com experts.
“These events will focus on inspiration and tools from WordPress.com, though people blogging on any platform will be welcome,” says Jen Mylo in a blog post. “Speakers will be a combination of awesome WordPress.com bloggers and staff members including folks from the Happiness Team, Blogging U, and the Theme Team — in short, the WordPress.com experts.”
The series will kick off with conferences this spring in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix. The Portland event will be on March 28, and the Phoenix one will be on April 18.
“We’re putting together the program now, and will start announcing speakers, schedule, and pricing later this month,” says Mylo. “In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about bloggers/speakers or topics that we should have on our radar.”
Bloggers can subscribe to the Press Publish site for further updates.
StumbleUpon announced the launch of a new content program called #StumbleBloggers, which it says will gather fresh pages and sites from bloggers and leverage StumbleUpon’s platforms and tools to feature the best posts from participating sites.
Sites can submit their content using a Google form, and StumbleUpon will add pages to its official lists, which the company describes as “a curated Stumble journey”. StumbleUpon will feature the lists for all StumbleUpon users and amplify them across its apps, email newsletters, and social channels. Those it likes the most will also get promoted from its official social accounts.
For this month, StumbleUpon has selected two themes: The Holidays and Teach Me Something Awesome. Bloggers can submit one page per theme. You can submit an existing post or create a new one. If it’s not appropriate, they may not accept it. The criteria for this months themes are as follows:
The Holidays [Submissions due Tuesday, 12/9]: Recipes, Gift Guides, DIY, Short Stories, Photography, Humor, etc.
Teach Me Something Awesome [Submissions due Tuesday, 12/16]: Productivity & Tech Tips, Fitness, Hacks, Recipes, Fashion Secrets, DIY, Science, Travel, Quizzes, Entrepreneurship, Quotes, etc.
The program launched with partner Blog Meets Brand.
Pinterest announced that launch of the “Pin It” button for Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.org, and Wix.
“We talk about the Pin It button a lot around here, and that’s because it’s a pretty big deal,” says Pinterest’s Bill Rastello. “It’s what Pinners use to save things they find around the web, an easy-to-add tool that gets your business on Pinterest.”
“These new integrations will make adding the Pin It button to your site a snap,” he adds.
To add it on Tumblr, you’ll need to add a JavaScript line. Go to “Customize,” then “Edit HTML” Find the code here.
For Blogger, the button is now one of the default sharing buttons. It will automatically pick up the first image in the post.
For Wix, the button is now native to the page editor. It will create a Pin based off the image and description you specify, and will link back to the page of the site you’re on when you click it.
Pinterest says it will be adding more integrations in the future.
Getty Images, long known for suing people for using its photos on blogs, has surprised the Internet by making millions of them free to use. The photography giant announced that tens of millions of its photos are now embeddable, which means you can feel free to embed them on your blog. Just make sure you’re using the photos the way you’re allowed to.
You may only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest). Embedded Getty Images Content may not be used: (a) for any commercial purpose (for example, in advertising, promotions or merchandising) or to suggest endorsement or sponsorship; (b) in violation of any stated restriction; (c) in a defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful manner; or (d) outside of the context of the Embedded Viewer.
That last one is important. You can use these photos, but you better make sure they’re within Getty’s embed code.
To find something you can use, go to gettyimages.com, hover over an image in the search results or on the image detail page, and click the embed icon. The viewer includes the photographer and the image collection, as well as link to the image page on Getty’s site. There, those who wish to use it commercially can obtain the relevant licensing information.
Here’s what the embeds look like:
How about that?
“With people increasingly turning to imagery to communicate and tell their stories online, the embed capability opens up Getty Images’ award-winning imagery for seamless sharing,” the company said in an announcement. “Through the embed tool, individuals can draw on Getty Images’ latest news, sports, celebrity, music and fashion coverage; immense digital photo archive; and rich conceptual images to illustrate their unique passions, ideas and interests. This innovation opens one of the largest, deepest and most comprehensive image collections in the world for easy sharing, thereby making the world an even more visual place.”
CEO Jonathan Klein said, “Images are the communication medium of today and imagery has become the world’s most spoken language. Whether via a blog, website or social media, everyone is a publisher and increasingly visually literate. Innovation and disruption are the foundation of Getty Images, and we are excited to open up our vast and growing image collection for easy, legal sharing in a new way that benefits our content contributors and partners, and advances our core mission to enable a more visually-rich world.”
Just to be crystal clear here, note that he said “blog, website or social media.”
It is a definitely a new day.
Of course you won’t be able to embed any photo of Getty’s, but as the pics above illustrate, the embed code is available on a wide range of photos, including celebrities.
The new offering certainly has plenty of benefits for Getty. It will get plenty of links and branding out of this. It’s also great for the photographers, as it will get their names out there, and ensure that credit is given where it’s due.
Getty says the embeds will provide people with a “simple and legal way to utilize content that respects creators’ rights, including the opportunity to generate licensing revenue.”
“You have to adapt to survive,” said Kevin Mazur, celebrity photographer and director, and co-founder of WireImage Inc. “Evolving to embrace technology that encourages responsible image sharing is the way forward for the industry.”
The embeds are supported anywhere HTML can be used. WordPress, which has 75 million users, is already telling users about the feature.
“This new Getty Images embed capability will open users up to a huge new creative repository in a simple, legal way,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, senior vice president of commercial services at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. “We look forward to seeing all the amazing ways that our users can take advantage of this new access.”
WordPress says you can actually just grab the image URL from Getty, and copy that directly into you post.
But it doesn’t matter what blogging platform you use. If it uses HTML, you can use the Getty embeds.
Go ahead and go over to gettyimages.com, and search for something. There’s a good chance you’ll get some results, and good ones at that. This has the potential to significantly increase the quality of you blog posts.
Was this a good move by Getty? Do you expect to use the embeds? Let us know.
LinkedIn announced that it is opening up its publishing platform – previously only available to “Influencers” like Richard Branson and Conan O’Brien – to all members.
Now, when you publish a post on LinkedIn, the content becomes part of your profile, and is shared with your trusted network. According to LinkedIn, it “has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled”.
Given how much LinkedIn has been utilizing email to spread influencer posts, I can’t help but expect LinkedIn to include users’ posts in personalized emails to people in your network. This is just speculation though.
Along with the opening of the platform comes the ability to follow members that aren’t in your network, and build more followers without direct connections.
“Members can continue to share their expertise by posting photos, images, videos and their original presentations on SlideShare,” notes LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky. “Every professional has valuable experience to share. Trying to grow your business by reducing customer attrition? Read the post from Monica Adractas, head of customer retention at Box, on churning out churn. Just starting a career in sales? Read the post from Brent Beshore, the founder/CEO at adventur.es, on how to sell anything. Need a science-based planning tool for river restoration? Read the post from Glen Leverich, senior geomorphologist at Stillwater Sciences, on A Science-based Planning Approach for Riparian Restoration.”
LinkedIn first launched the Influencer program in 2012. The average post, the company says, drives over 31,000 views and get over 250 likes and 80 comments. It also announced the addition of a few new influencers to the program including: Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, CEO of AOL Brand Group Susan Lyne, and CNBC host Suze Orman.
The new publishing capabilities will become available to everyone over the course of the next few months.
Some popular viral content sites have suffered drastic traffic declines since Facebook implemented its News Feed algorithm changes in December, which some have dubbed, for all intents and purposes, Facebook’s “Panda” update.
Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider shared some traffic charts for such sites, including Upworthy, Elite Daily, and Distractify. They’ve all been on the decline since Facebook implemented its changes. Upworthy, one of the most well-known of such sites, has seen a 46% decline in traffic over two months, though the site’s co-founder told Carlson it’s more about Upworthy having a “crazy spike” in November than any ill effects from the Facebook update. As noted in the report, the last two months were better than October for the site.
But there’s no question many Pages have experienced a dramatic decline in News Feed visibility since the changes. Some perhaps deservedly so (for Facebook’s purposes at least), and others not so much. In fact, the update is not entirely unlike Google’s Panda update in that way.
Another way in which the two are alike is that neither initially penalized what many would deem the primary examples of publishers producing the types of content that the updates seemed designed to penalize. Demand Media’s eHow was the most widely noted example of a “content farm,” which is basically what Panda was supposed to go after, but the update did not hit the site at first (though that would change later).
BuzzFeed is likely the most widely noted example of a publisher putting out the type of content Facebook seemed to want to reduce in the News Feed, but as Carlson points out, it has only grown its traffic since the update.
Let’s look at some things Facebook said when it announced the update. Engineering manager Varun Kacholia said, “Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”
Perhaps BuzzFeed more often publishes lists of memes or silly photos than just singular memes or silly photos, but most would probably assume this stuff would fall more into the category of things Facebook wanted to show less of as opposed to the “high quality articles” category. You what I’m talking about. Take, for example, this gem from BuzzFeed’s homepage from a couple hours ago:
Just look at all that early Facebook engagement. 227 shares and 772 likes. Again, I stress, that’s only a couple hours old.
Clearly this is the kind of high quality stuff Facebook is looking for.
Carlson raised the question: What makes BuzzFeed so special? You know, compared to other sites like Upworthy and the like. One theory he brings up is that BuzzFeed “pays to play”. They create advertorials on their site, and buy Facebook ads to drive traffic to them. Apparently not incredibly enthusiastic with this explanation, BuzzFeed CEO offered an alternative in an email to Carlson, which is basically that Facebook wants sites like BuzzFeed to “invest in better and better content” that makes its network more valuable.
Carlson also got a quote from Facebook on the matter saying that, “Organic News Feed ranking is not impacted at all by ads. We try to show people the things they will find the most interesting based on what and who they interact with, not who spends money on Facebook.”
Yes, BuzzFeed has content that one would consider actual journalism. It’s certainly not the vast majority of what BuzzFeed has to offer (I have no idea what the site’s ratio of silly lists to actual journalistic pieces is), but it does have it. But so do other sites that have seen less visibility in the Facebook feed.
What this is really about is likely Facebook’s shockingly unsophisticated methods for determining quality. The company has basically said as much. Peter Kafka at All Things D (now at Re/code) published an interview with Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom right after the update was announced.
He said flat out, “Right now, it’s mostly oriented around the source. As we refine our approaches, we’ll start distinguishing more and more between different types of content. But, for right now, when we think about how we identify “high quality,” it’s mostly at the source level.”
That’s what it comes down to, it seems. If your site has managed to make the cut at the source level for Facebook, you should be good regardless of how many GIF lists you have in comparison to journalistic stories. It would seem that BuzzFeed had already done enough to be considered a viable source by Facebook, while others who have suffered major traffic hits had not. In other words, Facebook is playing favorites, and the list of favorites is an unknown.
Just to make this point clear, Kafka asked in that interview, “So something that comes from publisher X, you might consider high quality, and if it comes from publishers Y, it’s low quality?”
Backstrom’s answer was simply, “Yes.”
So as long as BuzzFeed is publisher X, it can post as many poop lists as it wants with no repercussions, apparently. It’s already white-listed. Meanwhile, you can be publisher Y and beak the news about the next natural disaster, and it means nothing. At least not until Facebook’s methods get more sophisticated.
Well, we already knew Facebook liked BuzzFeed. A couple months before the News Feed update, Facebook was already talking up how BuzzFeed could increase its referral traffic by 855% by posting more frequently.
The real question is: how can you prove your site’s value to Facebook? It’s going to be hard to prove it with engagement when Facebook’s not showing your content to people in the first place.
Do you think Facebook’s algorithm will get better at determining what content is of a higher quality? What are some signals it should consider beyond source? Share your thoughts.
Update: BuzzFeed’s “The Definitive Ranking Of Poop” now has over 500 Facebook shares and 1.2 Facebook likes in just over three hours.
Update 2: A day later, and the shares are up to 2K with likes at 7.7K.
Update 3: Early on day three: still in the 2K range for shares with likes up to 8.8K.
Google is reportedly getting ready to launch a new content recommendation tool for publishers that would point their website visitors to more of their articles.
Search Engine Journal shares a snippet from an email it and other Google partners have been receiving:
Our engineers are working on a content recommendation beta that will present users relevant internal articles on your site after they read a page. This is a great way to drive loyal users and more pageviews.
It’s unclear exactly what this will look like, and what the recommendations will be based on, but SEJ’s Matt Southern notes it is based on a different algorithm than one Google was using for mobile sites last year.
You may also recall another time Google offered a content recommendation tool via its +1 button:
Google has been warning webmasters about guest blogging abuse for years now. This week, head of webspam Matt Cutts basically declared guest blogging dead.
“Stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done,” says Google’s Matt Cutts.
In light of Cutts’ comments will you be wary of contributing guest content on other sites? Of publishing guest content on your site? Share your thoughts on the subject.
Cutts took to his personal blog on Monday to share an email he received from a “content marketer” offering a guest blog post in trade for “a dofollow link or two in the article body,” which Cutts calls a “clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines.”
Obviously they didn’t realize who they were emailing unless it was a joke.
Cutts says Google has been seeing more and more reports of this type of thing.
“Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains,” he writes. “We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking “guest post outsourcing” and writing articles about “how to automate guest blogging.”
“So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy,” he adds. “In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.”
Early comments were a little critical of this stance. One equated it to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” in the sense that this takes too broad a view, and would be detrimental to guest bloggers who actually offer legitimate, quality content on legitimate, quality sites.
“Maybe Google needs to up their game and ability to decipher what is quality or not,” suggests Matt Sells, who made the baby/bathwater analogy. “Everyone should not be punished for the wrongdoings of some.”
A bit later, Cutts ended up updating his post, toning down the message significantly.
He said, “I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”
The title now stands as “The Decay and fall of guest blogging FOR SEO”.
“I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs,” he added. “High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful. I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to ‘guest blogging’ as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.”
The message may have been toned down, but will webmaster reaction? There’s already talk of disavowing links from old guest blog posts. How many will go overboard? How many will seek to have Google ignore perfectly legitimate links they’ve earned by writing high quality content for fear that it will ultimately hurt them in Google, and end up shooting themselves in the foot? You know, like when they were/are getting rid of other legitimate links in hopes that it will somehow make Google think higher of their sites.
No related Google update was announced or anything, but if such an update were to launch, it would be interesting to follow how well Google could determine what is good vs. what is bad.
The subject of guest blogging has been coming up more and more lately in Google’s messaging to webmasters. Long story short, just don’t abuse it.
Matt Cutts talked about it in response to a submitted question in a recent Webmaster Help video:
He said, “It’s clear from the way that people are talking about it that there are a lot of low-quality guest blogger sites, and there’s a lot of low-quality guest blogging going on. And anytime people are automating that or abusing that or really trying to make a bunch of link without really doing the sort of hard work that really earns links on the basis of merit or because they’re editorial, then it’s safe to assume that Google will take a closer look at that.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that you make it your only way of gathering links,” Cutts added. “I wouldn’t recommend that you send out thousands of blast emails offering to guest blog. I wouldn’t recommend that you guest blog with the same article on two different blogs. I wouldn’t recommend that you take one article and spin it lots of times. There’s definitely a lot of abuse and growing spam that we see in the guest blogging space, so regardless of the spam technique that people are using from month to month, we’re always looking at things that are starting to be more and more abused, and we’re always willing to respond to that and take the appropriate action to make sure that users get the best set of search results.”
Facebook announced that it has updated how it ranks stories in the News Feed to surface what it deems to be more relevant news, as well as what your friends have to say about it.
Specifically, Facebook says it is paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from the News Feed on mobile. There’s good news for publishers in that they’re going to start showing more links to articles, especially on mobile, where nearly half of Facebook users are accessing the social network exclusively.
“Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme,” says Facebook software engineer Varun Kacholia in a blog post. “Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”
“To complement people’s interest in articles, we recently began looking at ways to show people additional articles similar to ones they had just read,” Kacholia adds. “Soon, after you click on a link to an article, you may see up to three related articles directly below the News Feed post to help you discover more content you may find interesting.”
Here’s what that looks like:
Earlier this year, Facebook introduced the concept of “story bumping” to the News Feed algorithm. This is when Facebook “bumps” up a story in the News Feed because it’s getting a lot of likes and comments.
Facebook is now updating bumping to highlight stories with new comments. So now, you’re more likely to revisit a story that you saw before if your friends have commented on it.
“Our testing has shown that doing this in moderation for just a small number of stories can lead to more conversations between people and their friends on all types of content,” says Kacholia.
Facebook recently told publishers that posting more frequently increases referral traffic by over 80%.This was based on testing with 29 partner media sites.
An October Pew Research Center study found that half of U.S. Facebook users use the social network to get news.
Medium, the blogging platform developed by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams last year, is finally opening its doors to the public – but there are still a handful of restrictions.
For the uninitiated, Medium is a blogging platform that is closely tied to users’ Twitter accounts. It allows users to publish longer-form thoughts, complete with images, links, etc. Medium allows users to “recommend” posts that they like, and trending posts are shown to users on a homepage. Medium also features “collections” that users can follow and contribute to – for instance “Best Thing I Found on the Internet Today” and “Comedy Corner.”
“Not too big, not too small” is the platform’s slogan.
If you head on over to Medium.com, you’ll see a prompt at the bottom left-hand corner that says “sign up via Twitter.” Once you do that and confirm access through your Twitter account, the green button will change to say “request writing access.” From there, you’re just an email confirmation away from posting on Medium.
Why does Medium want you to have a confirmed email address?
“Why, you ask? Connecting with other readers and writers is a big part of the Medium experience. We’ll email you about interactions with other people on Medium. We also regularly invite users who read to write on Medium. We’ll email you when you’re invited to write,” says Medium.
Before today, access to write on Medium required an invite. The Next Web was tipped off to the open registration in a weekly email to users.
You can only post to Medium if you’re on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Sorry IE users. Also, mobile creation is a no-go, for now.
“Creation is not yet available on mobile devices, so even if you can post on the web, you won’t be able to post on your mobile device. We’re working on this,” says Medium.
Google has slowly but surely adding Google+ integration with its ages-old blogging platform, Blogger. On Monday, the company announced that users can now share blog posts to Google+ automatically.
This is one of those things that seems like a no-brainer, and a surprise that Google didn’t enable a long time ago, but either way, it’s here now.
“Notifying your followers that you’ve published a new blog post not only gets the conversation going, it encourages them to reshare your content with others,” says software engineer Marc Ridey. “In this way it’s critical for growing your blog’s audience and engagement. But it takes time. And we want to give you that time back.”
You just have to connect a Google+ page or profile to your blog, and the feature will start working the next time you publish a post.
“If you’d rather not share to Google+, or you’d prefer to be prompted each time, you can adjust your preferences in the Google+ tab of your Blogger Dashboard,” says Ridey.
Google announced that it will start showing a new “In-depth articles” section in search results when users search for some “broad topics”.
We wrote about the feature when Google was testing it a couple months ago, but now Google is making it a real feature. Here’s what it looks like:
Interestingly, Google says only 10% of people’s daily info needs “fit this category” of needing more than a “quick answer”. That seems like a pretty low number, particularly after the Panda update.
While I don’t think that this necessarily means that Google is going to be giving special treatment to content written by Googlers, it’s interesting that they would highlight the Eric Schmidt example, given how often the search engine is criticized for displaying its own results.
Google’s Pandu Nayak, who announced the feature on the Inside Search blog does at least note that it will also surface content from lesser-known publications and blogs. It will be interesting to see how often this really occurs.
Google also has a post up about the feature on its Webmaster Central blog, where Nayak says, “These results are ranked algorithmically based on many signals that look for high-quality, in-depth content. ”
Webmaters are encouraged to provide schea.org article markup, authorship markup, rel=next and rel=prev for paginated articles (as well as looking out for rel-canonical mistakes), provide info about their organization’s logo and obviously create in-depth content. Links to more info on all of this stuff are available in the post. More info is also available in Google’s help center.
The feature is only available on Google.com in English for now.
Google has some new rules for the kinds of links it allows (or doesn’t allow, rather). The concepts are actually not exactly new, but Google has updated its official documentation to reflect its views of certain kinds of links.
Are you concerned with following Google’s rules for links on the web? Does Google have too much power over how people treat their content? Let us know what you think in the comments.
As you may know, one of the things Google says in its Quality Guidelines to avoid is participation in link schemes. Google has updated the link schemes page, as Search Engine Land (tipped by Menaseh) recently reported.
Now included as things that qualify as link schemes are:
Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links
Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank
Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.
Google talked about the topic in several videos (which you can watch here if you want to spend the time doing so).
In one video, Matt Cutts said that it can be good to have a reputable, high quality writer do guest posts on your site.
He also said, “Sometimes it get taken to extremes. You’ll see people writing…offering the same blog post multiple times or spinning the blog posts, offering them to multiple outlets. It almost becomes like low-quality article banks.”
“When you’re just doing it as a way to sort of turn the crank and get a massive number of links, that’s something where we’re less likely to want to count those links,” he said.
“Generally speaking, if you’re submitting articles for your website, or your clients’ websites and you’re including links to those websites there, then that’s probably something I’d nofollow because those aren’t essentially natural links from that website,” Google’s John Mueller said in another video.
In another video, Mueller said, “Think about whether or not this is a link that would be on that site if it weren’t for your actions there. Especially when it comes to guest blogging, that’s something where you are essentially placing links on other people’s sites together with this content, so that’s something I kind of shy away from purely from a linkbuilding point of view. I think sometimes it can make sense to guest blog on other peoples’ sites and drive some traffic to your site because people really liked what you are writing and they are interested in the topic and they click through that link to come to your website but those are probably the cases where you’d want to use something like a rel=nofollow on those links.”
Cutts said in a recent interview with Eric Enge, “The problem is that if we look at the overall volume of guest posting we see a large number of people who are offering guest blogs or guest blog articles where they are writing the same article and producing multiple copies of it and emailing out of the blue and they will create the same low quality types of articles that people used to put on article directory or article bank sites.”
“If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems,” he said. “On one hand, it’s an opportunity. On the other hand, we don’t want people to think guest blogging is the panacea that will solve all their problems.”
Advertorials are another thing Google has been cracking down on recently. Cutts put out a video specifically addressing this topic a few months ago.
“Well, it’s advertising, but it’s often the sort of advertising that looks a little closer to editorial, but it basically means that someone gave you some money, rather than you writing about this naturally because you thought it was interesting or because you wanted to,” he said. “So why do I care about this? Why are we making a video about this at all? Well, the reason is, certainly within the webspam team, we’ve seen a little bit of problems where there’s been advertorial or native advertising content or paid content, that hasn’t really been disclosed adequately, so that people realize that what they’re looking at was paid. So that’s a problem. We’ve had longstanding guidance since at least 2005 I think that says, ‘Look, if you pay for links, those links should not pass PageRank,’ and the reason is that Google, for a very long time, in fact, everywhere on the web, people have mostly treated links as editorial votes.”
John Mueller from Google makes it clear that Google wants all links in these press releases to be nofollowed. He did say having a URL at the end should be okay but when he was grilled about it again, he said it is best to nofollow the links. John even said press releases should be treated as advertisements and thus links in those releases should be nofollowed.
I asked John why all of a sudden the change in policy for press releases and John said that it is because SEOs were using these more and more in a way to promote their site [artificially in the Google search results] and Google needed to clarify their stance on them.
Google did remove a few to make room for the new ones. Now gone are “linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank” and “links that are inserted into articles with little coherence”.
I guess it’s game on with those. Just kidding.
What do you think of Google’s updated language for links schemes? Do any of the changes concern you? Let us know in the comments.
Bing has launched a new image search feature that allows you to filter image results by license. You can elect to see only results in the public domain, those that are “free to share and use,” “free to share and use commercially,” “free to modify, share, and use,” and “Free to modify, share, and use commercially.”
This could prove to be an incredibly useful tool for bloggers and media publications who don’t have licensing deals with image services. It could prevent situations like this lawsuit BuzzFeed is currently facing.
Today, we are excited to offer the “Search by License” feature for Bing image search. At Bing, we love helping creative artists whether you’re a blogger, teacher, student or even a small business owner looking to market your latest creation. We understand how frustrating it can be to when you come up with just the right blog post or the perfect poster for your class project, only to realize you don’t have the appropriate rights to use them the way you intended to. Searching for photos online should be a simple and pleasant experience leaving you with just as many hair follicles as you started with!
And so today we invite you to try out the new license filter on Bing Images. Whether you are a blogger who loves to write, a teacher helping students with a project or a publisher looking to create commercial flyers, we have made it easier and faster for you to fetch licensed pictures for your work. Previously, you had to find photos and then individually cycle through the details of each photo to verify if there is any license information. Now, Bing has simplified this process to allow you to filter by usage rights and only see images that have a Creative Commons license.
Microsoft has also made the feature accessible in Office 2013, where you can search from Bing directly from the application.
Google has a similar feature, but it’s buried in the advanced search settings, and a little bit harder to find.
WordPress might have quite a bit to gain by Yahoo’s purchasing of Tumblr for $1.1 billion. As noted, a bunch of Tumblr users are already freaking out about Yahoo buying the massively popular blogging platform (and the promise of new ads coming into the feed likely isn’t doing anything to slow the freak-out down).
Even before the acquisition was officially announced this morning, on onslaught of users importing Tumblr blogs to WordPress already began. That is, at least, according to WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.
He writes, “Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.”
Despite what would appear to be a mass exodus of users leaving Tumblr for WordPress, Mullenweg appears to think that’s not the case. After he initially wrote the post, he updated it to say, “Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”
He then pointed readers to the comments on this post, where he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”
Even still, other blogging platforms are likely to get a little bump out of this.
It’s official. After rumors swirled last week, Yahoo and Tumblr have announced an agreement that will see Yahoo acquire the popular blogging platform for approximately $1.1 billion (all cash). For comparison, that’s just a little more than Facebook wound up paying for Instagram last summer.
In a blog post, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promises that Yahoo “won’t screw it up.” Yahoo plans to run Tumblr independently, and Tumblr founder David Karp will reamin in his role as CEO. Mayer says that Yahoo will be helping Tumblr to “get even better, faster.”
Karp is even more adamant that Tumblr will stay the same:
“Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing.” he says.
As for why? Here’s what Mayer had to say about how the two companies will work together:
“In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.”
She goes on:
“Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design – and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.”
Here’s how Mayer made the announcement (with a gif!):
“As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down. F*ck yeah,” says Karp.
