For the past couple years, a theory has been growing vaguely in the back of my mind, but recently I’ve finally been able to shed some light on it. In a nutshell, as the Web becomes more ubiquitous in my every day life, I’ve felt a ramping level of stress and mental fatigue – and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Blastoff: Will they really pay you to shop?
By Joshua Wood distancetohere.com
Do you want to have fun? Save Money? Make Money? All of these things and more are the goal of Texas-based startup Blastoff, LLC. At first glance, Blastoff appears to be just another company looking for an easy share of a multi-million dollar online marketing industry. They will offer cash-back to members who shop through their network of online retailers, and a percentage of the sales generated by referrals also gets handed back up to the referrer. So when you invite your friends, and they shop online through Blastoff Network partners, not only do they get cash-back on every order, but so do you. But is Blastoff just another incentive-based marketing scheme, or is it something more? Being the skeptic that I am, I did not put much faith in the idea of a multi-level social network centered around online-shopping… But since I’m a member of Prepaid Legal, I have access to a preview-account of the Blastoff Network anyway – so I figured I would take a look. (more…)
Google: The Duplicate Content Myth
Greg Grothaus of Google’s Search quality team posted a video on the Google Webmaster Central Blog dispelling the duplicate content penalty myth. The video is a reproduction of a talk he gave at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last month on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues.
In the video, Greg explains that Google does not automatically penalize you for having duplicate content on your web site as many have believed. Many have accepted this myth because of Google’s search feature that hides similar pages from the user. However, it has never been Google’s intention to penalize well-meaning webmasters who might happen to have multiple copies of the same page by accident. Anyone who has been developing web sites for a while (specifically dynamic ones) will tell you that it’s quite common to have several different variations of the same URL. Greg crystalizes this with the following example:
These URLs are all different:
- example.com/
- example.com/?
- example.com/index.html
- example.com/Home.aspx
- www.example.com/
- www.example.com/?
- www.example.com/index.html
- www.example.com/Home.aspx
The URLs are all slightly different, but they are all displaying the home page of example.com, which is obviously not duplicate content. Google, in its infinite wisdom, understands this and will even attempt to pick the best url and combine all of the extras into one listing in search results.
However, just because there is no penalty for duplicate content does not give us an excuse to become lazy about keeping our URLs and URL re-writing techniques as clean as possible. You are still at a major disadvantage if people are linking to different copies of the same page, in that the link juice that could be captured by one single url on your web site is now being dispersed among two or more. Greg rightly states that if you have two identical pages with slightly different links, and 10 people are linking to one and 10 to the other, your listing is going to have half the rank from incoming links that it should. This is called dilution of link popularity. In addition to problems with linking, multiple URLs could also result in user-unfriendly URLs in search results, as well as inefficient crawling by search engines: you want them digging for new content, not re-reading the same thing.
The anti-Twitter pack: Quitter
Everyone who is fed up with the narcissistic micro-blogging phenomenon that is Twitter, air your protest proudly with this icon pack for the anti-twats.
If you are a victim of Twitter-addiction, use the Quitter pack to ease the withdrawal of tweet-cessation.
How to use:
- Download the icon pack from janlukacs.ro
- Replace Twitter icon on blog with Quitter
- Let the healing begin
(don’t forget to follow me)
Liking comments on Facebook
Just a quick observation I made this morning – maybe I’m behind the times. Facebook users can now “Like” comments of content they “Like”. Sounds a bit circular, doesn’t it?
This is how it works: A friend posts a picture of a kitten taking a bath in a bowl of oatmeal on your wall. You find it adorable, but since Facebook doesn’t have an “Adorable” button, the next best thing is to “Like” it. You also leave a comment reaffirming this mixup, and even go so far as to explain why, in your opinion, Facebook MUST create a “Love” button. Naturally all of your friends love your idea, but – because Facebook has not received your suggestion a million times yet – must also settle for “Liking” your comment.
Personally, I’ve been suggesting a feature that allows users to “Like” their friend’s “Likes”. Perhaps some of the more obnoxious Facebookers would get caught in an infinite loop.