Review Your Ad Placements.
I wrote in a previous post about Facebook ad targeting, and how I believed a handful of advertisers were focusing their ads on individuals with “engaged” as their status because of the wedding-related sites that were advertising which I had not previously seen ads for.
Today, I would like to remind everyone to check their search query placement report in Google’s AdWords program, as you never really know where your ads are showing unless you check! Why the reminder? Because a well-targeted(?) ad came into one of my Gmail accounts. I was perusing the spam folder for anything I might have missed recently, and at the top is the following ad:
Now perhaps a recipe site doesn’t much care that they’re showing up for “spam” in my spam folder. They may even like that. It certainly got my attention and gave me a chuckle. But still, do you know where your ads are showing?
Measuring Success of Selfless Social Media.
I was recently forwarded a quality blog post about a comment that Senator Obama made in a debate about disability. The comment and post were specifically about the Terri Schiavo matter. Though I made some minor changes to the title of the post on a couple of the social news sites I submitted the story to, I left it virtually untouched and basically pulled a quote from the body of the post as the description.
I submitted to:
Digg
Care2
Mixx
Propeller
Stumbleupon
Reddit
Now, with the political and election focus these days, and that Obama is arguably the frontrunner, I thought it would do decently well on Propeller and Digg. I figured the dark horses were Mixx and Care2. Now, because I have no access to analytics data on the site I submitted, I certainly don’t know which one drove the most traffic, or the most quality traffic, but the results are as follows:
6 Diggs.
18 Notes on Care2.
0 Votes on Mixx.
2 Votes on Propeller
0 Reviews on Stumbleupon.
0 Points (2 Comments) on Reddit.
This was submitted on a Friday evening, perhaps the worst time to submit to social news sites. Regardless, based solely on votes, it’s clear that you must submit content to sites that have a niche focus as well as to generalized sites. And why must we submit sites that we have no control over? Because if we don’t, social news site algorithms can de-emphasize the power of your submissions, and you’re less likely to gain friends and votes.
Blank Lines in Code Detrimental to SEO?
Can blank lines in your code affect your SEO efforts?
I’m always looking at websites and monitoring potential “competition” to my employer’s growing business. Today, I come across a marketing agency that offers SEO services along with a “proprietary content management system.” Now, there are plenty of capable open-source content management systems, and some very capable, well developed commercial solutions. Usually, one or the other serves the purposes of companies and nonprofits alike. Any proprietary solution as part of a marketing team would need a closer look. Who is the developer? How often are updates made and how simple is it to modify things? And amongst many other questions, what type of code does it create? Is it valid code?
This agency uses the CMS for their own website as well as the clients who need a new CMS. Being a curious person, I took a peak under the hood at the resulting code. I was surprised to see massive numbers of blank lines of code! The code had over 3800 lines, and at one point, there was a gap of 2000+ blank lines. When I removed the blank lines, I was able to get the code down to an even 600 lines, and I probably could’ve pushed it into fewer than that.
Now, I’ve been through an SEO course (or three), and do this stuff for my employer all of the time, and we always encourage proper structure of code, including minimizing code bloat and excessive blank lines. But never, have I come across documentation that says a spider won’t read blank lines or that poorly constructed HTML code will affect your SEO efforts. Flash, Javascript, and forms may (and DO!) cause issues, but I’m talking plain HTML without that stuff.
So I reached out to some industry colleagues to ask them, “Have you ever found evidence or read anything that says the length of code affects spiderability and SEO efforts? I’m referring to massive amounts of blank lines.”
Response? No evidence, and no documentation, but it can’t be a good idea. Spiders can be programmed in different ways, and because we’re not the search engine spiders, we can only guess what a search engine spider might do. It’s possible that when a spider comes across a slew of blank lines, that it may be programmed to stop or give up. And why risk what we don’t know for sure? Best bet: Reduce the code and don’t give the spider a reason to stop moving about your pages.
