Why Your Google+ Authorship Isn’t Showing: New Changes

Frustration is when your Google+ profile picture is no longer appearing in SERPs because Google messed with the requirements of Google+ Authorship, yet again.

According to these instructions from Google, you have to jump through the following hoops:

1. Have a decent profile picture of your entire face. There are articles out there talking about how if even the tip of your head isn’t appearing in the photo, the entire authorship won’t trigger. So, make sure your entire ugly mug is there from top to bottom. Maybe show some neck, too.
2. Visit the Edit section of your Google+ profile. Make sure your profile is set to be visible to “Public.”
3. Here’s a tricky one. You have to be a contributor to whatever domain name is featured in your address. So, if your Google+ profile is bound to the email address “myname@bluewidgets.com” and you own “bluewidgets.com,” make sure you are set as a “contributor” to your the domain name “bluewidgets.com” (this is set in the “Settings » Links” section). Also, this “contributor to” record must be set to be visible to “Public.”
4. Every article that you want your Google+ picture to be seen next to in SERPs must include a “by” line somewhere on it that simply says “by Firstname Lastname,” and your first & last name must appear exactly as it does on your Google+ profile (this is a new change!)
5. Google requires that you add a markup link to your Google+ profile on these pages, as well. The link is simply one that points to your profile with a “?rel=author” directly after the link. So, it would look like this: “https://plus.google.com/u/0/1234567890?rel=author”. Google doesn’t really say where you’re supposed to put this hyperlink, but most people just hyperlink their full name as seen in step #4 above.
6. Lastly, if any page is marked as “NOINDEX,” it will never trigger.

If you’ve lost your Google+ Authorship in SERPs, it’s probably because you didn’t perform one of these tasks. It’s not your fault, because #4 on the list is a brand new one, and it probably broke tons of authorship results when it was made mandatory.

So, go through all these steps, wait it out a little, and your authorship should be back.

Top 4 Things That Google Panda Should Kill

Google Panda exists to punish sites that give a poor user experience, violate Google’s terms of service, and in general, promote SERP results that give a better experience to the user. So, why the hell do these following things still exist?

Crap Content Sites

…that’s what I call sites like eHow, Mahalo and Fixya. The first two on that list have teams of writers who create short, barely-helpful blurbs about long-tail niche topics on ad-riddled pages that exist just to game search engines.

Mahalo got wrecked in search results, and rightfully so. eHow still deserves this treatment, but they keep flying under Google’s radar.

A new site I’ve been noticing is “Fixya,” which seems to spam the internet with keywords pertaining to “how to fix” topics. Worse yet, their pages have no content - the entire first half of the page includes ads and worthless content that mentions whatever query you searched for, with a confusing list of things that appear to be “articles” underneath it, which take you to similar questions that were asked, that went unanswered:

“Continue To Site” Ads

It’s inconceivable how these ads still exist in this day of age. They’re those annoying ads you encounter after you find a result in a SERP, click the site you intend to visit, and you’re faced with a page showing an ad where you have to click a link to skip the ad and continue on to the site.

How on earth is anyone still getting away with this without a Google penalty? Oh yeah, they’re “Forbes,” and other major brands. That’s how.

Terrible usability that technically blocks the content that you intended to see in the first place. Seems like the quintessential thing Panda was designed to combat.

Cluster Results

Matt Cutts himself said that “cluster results” will get hit with the next algorithm update, but they seem to have been around for far too long. A cluster result is when the same site appears multiple times in a SERP.

In this example, the same site appears four times in a row for a keyword I searched for. One of those results is even for something called “Blank Page.” For some extra credit, notice how the top Fixya link is for a “tags” page. It’s not even a web page!

eBay & Amazon Given Extreme Favoritism

Only affiliate marketers will care about this topic. It’s probably the most controversial one so far, but it’s not hard to see how Amazon, eBay and other services that have the biggest affiliate programs in the world are now being given top-of-page-1 favoritism, blowing past all of those hard working affiliates who are devoting their careers toward promoting products on these sites. You’ll see this for a broad spectrum of keyword terms.

Is it fair when an Amazon.com product page that has maybe one sentence of content (along with a bajillion links pointing elsewhere on the site, and ads galore) outranks an affiliate site with 600-700 words, featuring an in-depth review of the product, with an affiliate link pointing to the product on Amazon?

I say “no,” and it’s not just because I’m an affiliate marketer. As a customer, I’d rather see an actual review of a product than an Amazon page with zero content and a dizzying array of “customers also bought” links and ads. Google is supposed to be showing helpful results. Many times, you’ll even see an eBay or Amazon search results page within a SERP. That’s not helping anyone - people already know Amazon and eBay exist.

Nothing has to be “fair” on Google, but the way Google conducts itself begins to tell you the direction it’s going in, and so far - things are really looking bad for affiliate marketers.

Will these things change with the upcoming Panda and Penguin updates? It’s a waiting game at this point.

Which CMS Is Best For You?

I went on yet another website rebuild consultation, and the same old “CMS” question resurfaced: “what software should we use to build the new website with?” In my mind, it’s an easy answer (*cough cough Wordpress*), but surprisingly - many business owners haven’t heard of any of today’s popular site-building software packages, including WP.

The CMS Trap

One thing’s for sure, I’d avoid those off-the-shelf CMS packages like the plague. In three separate instances during my career, I saw how damaging they wound up being on a company’s budget. Here’s a worst case scenario for you, based on what I saw as a marketing director at a former major corporation:

1. The CMS package is purchased for a fixed price (let’s say, $15,000).
2. You have to hire a developer just to install it, and then, configure its settings with your server (there goes $1XX * X-amount of hours for the IT contractor).
3. You have to hire a development team to create the custom site template. This team includes both programmers and web designers, and you pay them by the hour. Most development companies who cater to corporations charge $150-$250 per hour.
4. Once the site is up and running, you’ll check out the administration panel, and realize that you need a computer science degree to figure out what the hell you’re looking at. The limit of what you can actually update on your own are simple text and images within the body area. Everything else is “baked in” to the template that the team scripted for you. Want to add a front page slider, call out box, or module to the sidebar? That’s going to involve custom programming — at an hourly rate.
5. Worse yet - the CMS, in and of itself, is no better than an open-source one like Wordpress or Drupal, which are 100% free with free updates, free plugins, a templating system that any dummy can learn, and a huge community of support.

Technically, you’re now married to the IT team who installed your CMS. It’s what I like to call ‘highway robbery.’

This is a trap that companies fall into (knowingly, or un-knowingly) ALL the time. The thing is, many companies already have an IT department who will be instructed to make these changes, but if IT is busy — or if there is no IT — you’re forced to pay that astronomical hourly rate with a qualified developer of the CMS you chose, and that bill runs into the tens of thousands by the time it’s ready for launch. Worse yet, it keeps racking up, even afterward.

Why do companies still go ahead with it, knowing that the off-the-shelf CMS they choose is about to cost a fortune? It’s because the person pulling the trigger on this decision is most likely a VP who has no computer knowledge whatsoever, and is just using a business mindset to figure in what is thought to be an “unavoidable cost that is expected with building a website.” It’s wrong, because there are better free alternatives that will save the company tens of thousands of dollars.

IT Influence in CMS Selection

The other biggest reason why companies go through with a needlessly expensive solution is because the head of IT has a strong opinion about what platform should be chosen, typically with an IT-level of “corporate paranoia” that is unwarranted, which greatly influences the final decision.

I started out in college as a CS major, so I can somewhat sympathize with the decisions that IT makes and their reasoning for it, but surprisingly — most higher-up IT employees don’t even really know about Wordpress or Drupal whatsoever. They’re quick to choose some whacky .ASP-based CMS, and they’re always paranoid about security. However, a PHP and CSS-driven site created by Wordpress can be locked up just as tight.

The Best Free CMS?

So, what are the best free CMS solutions? Honestly, the list never changed in the past 5 years or so. Here they are:

• Wordpress: Free, lightweight, open source, easy to modify, easy to update, free updates for life, and it’s not going to disappear any time in the distant future. Personally - if I’m doing a contract web design job, I tell clients off the bat that I solely work with Wordpress. It’s for their own good, after all :)
• Drupal: Still the “Wordpress alternative,” with the same list of benefits. This CMS, however, appeals more toward the IT/developer crowd and has a steeper learning curve.
• MODX: Works very similarly to Wordpress in the sense that you can pick it up and start using it immediately. It has a huge community and tons of downloadable extras, like the other two CMSs listed above.
• Joomla: I’m personally not a fan of Joomla. It’s a fat pig of code, it’s not easy to update (neither in terms of the template, nor actual software upgrades itself), but it is another very expandable platform with lots of really great site themes that the IT crowd typically favors more than the design crowd.

Google Penguin Update for May 2013: What To Expect

Matt Cutts released this video on May 13th, talking about the upcoming Penguin update (rumored to happen on the 15th), as well as a bunch of other things in the pipeline.

These are the major points covered:

1. Assuring webmasters that if you’re working hard to create a truly “good” site, then Google will be aligned with your goal (We’ve heard this many times before with less than stellar results).
   
   
2. Pengin 2.0 will be released — it is a web spam targeter, specifically against black hatters. Cutts warned those who “hang out on black hat forums, trading tips,” and about how they are going to have an “eventful summer” this year.
   
   
3. Paid ads that pass page rank will be targeted. (Hey Google - can you finally put TextLinkAds out of business? Thanks).
   
   
4. Refining query results for niche markets that are traditionally flooded with black hatters — Cutts used the “payday loan” market as an example.
   
   
5. Denying value to link spammers and rolling out an early phase of a new link analysis algorithm that will be more prominent in the future.
   
   
6. Detecting hacked sites in a better way than before, and communicating the issue to webmasters so that they can go to Webmaster Tools and get more info about how to fix them.
   
   
7. Doing a better job of detecting “authorities” in certain niches and boosting them (this is downright scary, because I think we all know who will benefit from this). Identifying “signals” that might help sites previously affected by Panda (once again, subjective).
   
   
8. Targeting results where one domain appears several times in a row (it’s about freakin’ time).

Overall, these changes were communicated to stretch into Summer 2013. There was a heavy emphasis on link spam throughout the video, and rightfully so - Google has been too exploitable by black hat linkwheels and blog networks. Here’s hoping that they’ll demolish these tactics.

How to Use A Custom Domain Name With Tumblr

Just this week, I decided to migrate over from a self-hosted Wordpress blog to a Tumblr account (which wound up making life so much easier in regard to updating this blog), and figuring out how to hook up a domain name to it was pretty challenging.

This tutorial is for anyone looking to use a domain name instead of the default “myname.tumblr.com” subdomain, which looks pretty unprofessional if you’re planning on running a notable blog.  In this tutorial, I’ll be using GoDaddy and WHM/cPanel (for self-hosted sites) as an example, although it will apply toward any domain registrar.

1. Get into your domain’s DNS Records section. If your domain name was never used for anything and is sitting in a domain registrar account (like GoDaddy), get to that domain’s details page and look for the section that says “DNS Manager,” and enter it:
   
   
   

   
   Above: GoDaddy’s DNS Manager can be found at the center/bottom area of the domain details section for your domain name.
   
   If your domain is actually in use and is hooked up to a live website, you’ll have to go into that website’s server account in your cPanel admin section:
   
   

   Above: cPanel’s DNS editor can be found when you enter the section for your website’s hosting account in cPanel, and look for “Simple DNS Zone Editor.”

2. Add the “A” Record: Within your DNS Settings area, you should see three sections: one for “A”, one for “CNAME”, and one for “MX.” We’re now looking at the one for “A (Host)”.
   
   Tumblr wants you to create a new A record with the IP address they specify, which you can find here. At the time of me writing this tutorial, that IP address is “66.6.44.4”. So, to create a new A record, click the “Add” button by the “A” section and enter “@” for Host, and “66.6.44.4” for “Points To.” It should look like this, when done:
   
   
3. Add the “CNAME” Record: The next record you’ll have to add is in the next section of your DNS Settings area, the “CNAME (Alias)” section. This section usually already has a lot of stuff already entered into it, but don’t worry about it. Click the “Add” button for it, and add a new record, entering “www” for the “Host,” and “@” for “Points To.” It should look like this, when done:
   
   

   
   You may have noticed that Tumblr’s instructions say to type “domains.tumblr.com” into that “Points To” section, and why I said to put a “@” in there, instead. The “@” simply tells the system to refer to the “@” record we created in the “A” record step before this one.

4. Test Your Domain: Simply type in your domain name and see if it correctly points to, and replaces, your old Tumblr subdomain. You’re officially done, and your domain is now set to your Tumblr account.
   
   If you look at your Tumblr account’s settings, then click your blog name in the sidebar, a ‘test your domain’ option will also let you check and see if the domain works. Note that this can take up to 72 hours to start showing that it is successful.

That’s everything involved in getting a domain name for your Tumblr account! A Tumblr account using a domain name will function like any other website using one, and it will have the same chance of ranking in search engines as any other website would.

One more thing… if you’re moving over a domain from an active website to a Tumblr account, keep in mind that you will lose all search engine rankings from that old site UNLESS you do a server-side 301 redirect of the old site’s pages over to the new Tumblr account. If you’ve deleted that old server account and are using a domain registrar like GoDaddy to point your A and CNAME records to Tumblr, then you’ll lose your search engine rankings for good, as there will be no way to ever do a 301 redirect.

Without redirects in place from your old site, people will see 401 errors when they visit old pages within your website, since those pages aren’t there anymore. With that being said, this is really something you’ll want to do — even if you simply redirect the old categories of the site over to your home page at a bare minimum. These redirects would be done on your web hosting account through cPanel — here are the instructions.

10 Free Plugins That Make Wordpress Do Things It Should Have Already Done

There are many things Wordpress should have done “out of the box” that it simply does not — and that’s what these plugins accomplish. As great as Wordpress is, it’s very easy for any web designer to get roadblocked by glaring issues that prevent Wordpress from being a true CMS, especially for those detail oriented OCD-stricken designers who need very specific, nit-picky things to happen that can’t be done as-is.

Without further interruption, here’s a list of the top 10 free Wordpress plugins that make WP do the things it should have already done by default:

1. Allow HTML In Category Descriptions: Depending on your Wordpress theme, your category pages — when visited directly (mysite.com/my-category-name/..) — can display whatever text you inputted within the category’s “Description” box. However, it strips out all HTML, meaning that you can’t use anything but plain text in them. Because of this — any visitor who looks at your category pages is seeing a very ineffective, ugly, unhelpful page. This plugin restores full HTML within these boxes, giving you the freedom to customize the look of your Wordpress category pages with heading tags, images or whatever else you want.
   
   
2. Remove Slug From Custom Post Type: Some specialty Wordpress themes will force a custom post type, so that your URLs look like “mysite.com/category/hats”. With this plugin, you can eliminate that forced “/category/,” so it looks like “mysite.com/hats”. From there, the Wordpress posts within /hats/ will make the URLs look like “mysite.com/hats/baseball-caps” - it’s just cleaner!
   
   
3. WP .htaccess Control: If you’ve ever wanted to remove custom baked-in taxonomies from your default Wordpress URLs, like the /tags/ part of “mysite.com/tags/cars” or the /author/ part of “mysite.com/author/my-name”, this plugin lets you do it. It gives you more options for creating cleaner URLs in specific cases where they’re needed.
   
   
4. Per-Page Widgets: If you thought that having the same site-wide widget display the same content for every single page or post on the website was bad for SEO and usability, then you’re right. This plugin lets you create widgets that can only be assigned to one specific page or post that you specify. Now you can really create highly relevant, content-rich pages and boost your site’s internal linking structure!
   
   
5. Wordpress SEO by Yoast: This is the best SEO tool for Wordpress, hands down. It allows you to do things that Wordpress’ dev team inexcusably didn’t include in their software, like set individual pages, posts and sections to NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW, force rewrite META Titles, set up your site with Google+ authorship, declare canonicals and more. When installed, it will drop in a new admin control panel on every single Page & Post of your Wordpress installation where you can fine tune these SEO and site functionality aspects.
   
   
6. Page Tagger: We still can’t add tags to Wordpress Pages - only to Wordpress Posts - and this is ludicrous. This plugin adds the same functionality of Post tags to your Pages.
   
   
7. PHP Code Widget: You may have noticed (and gotten frustrated over) the fact that Wordpress widgets don’t allow anything but plain text. This plugin will allow them to accept any kind of HTML or PHP. Be free, and make the widgets you’ve always wanted!
   
   
8. Allow PHP In Posts And Pages: Posts and Pages only accept plain text and basic HTML. Borrowing from the concept of #7 on this list, this plugin will allow you to insert PHP (or the full spectrum of HTML commands) directly into a post or page by defining it as BBcode via the plugin’s admin section, and simply inserting its custom, individual BBcode snippet wherever you want your custom code to actually appear on a Post or Page.
   
   
9. Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin creates a compliant XML sitemap of your entire site that you can hook up to your Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts. Best yet: every time you create a new page or post in Wordpress, it automatically gets added to the XML file in your FTP space without any manual work on your part.
   
   
10. Breadcrumb NavXT: Breadcrumbs (if you didn’t know, those link trails that look like this: Home » Products » Hats) are an integral part of your website’s usability and internal linking structure. They don’t even exist in Wordpress, by default. This plugin will add them in for you.

Get Notified When People Leave Facebook Page Messages

With the sheer number of ways that people can contact us these days, sometimes we forget to check them all — I’m guilty of this with my Facebook Page.

If you own your own Facebook Page, it has the ability to get separate “emails” that only go to its own email inbox, separate from your Facebook account. This is a nice little feature that Facebook added in the Spring of 2012. The only issue is that you’ll never know that a new message came in unless you visit your own page and look at the ‘log’ of messages, or hook up your actual Facebook profile to get notifications that something new happened.

Here’s how to do it:

Edit Page » Edit Settings » Your Settings » click the “Onsite Notification” box.

Once you do this, you’ll receive notifications under your “globe icon” within Facebook that you have new messages that were sent to your page. If you don’t have one yet, be sure to check out my resource about how to create a Facebook Page over on Squidoo!

Wordpress’ Duplicate Slug Issues

It’s well into 2013, and Wordpress still has a terrible age-old flaw that makes creating a true eCommerce site frustrating: you can’t have more than one exact category or page “slug.”

A “slug,” in Wordpress terms, is simply a category, page or post name. Some might call it part of a “vanity URL.” For instance, “mysite.com/new-cars/honda” — where the category “new-cars” and the sub-category “honda” are slugs. Let’s say you have this set-up on your site, but you also want to create the same URL structure for your “used cars” section, “mysite.com/used-cars/honda.”

Wordpress will not allow this to happen, because that single word “honda” was already used. So, you’ll have to add something more to the word “honda” to get it to work. In other words, you’d be forced to do something like this: “mysite.com/used-cars/used-honda”. Ugly, dumb, nonsensical, and a potential issue with keyword stuffing.

I had forgotten about the issue of Wordpress not allowing multiple slugs while creating a classifieds website using the Classipress theme. The site I’m working on needs products that start off in two “buckets,” where the classified ads poster chooses the US or Canada. That would start off the URL with /us/ or /canada/, then continue with the product — and that is exactly where the slug discrepancy comes in to play.

Since a classifieds site involves unavoidable instances of duplicate paths (it’s the same site, duplicated for the US and for Canada), there’s no way to get around the slug issue, unless I put “-canada” after every single path in the URL. Since that isn’t an option, more drastic measure is to consider a brand new site just for Canada, which seems like a great idea until you think about how it would be considered a “duplicate site” destined to get Google slapped, unless the entire site were canonized to the US site. This becomes even more of an issue due to the fact that my exact domain name is available in its .ca form, but since I’m not a Canadian resident, I can’t register the domain.

Not allowing webmasters to have more than one instance of the same slug is an issue that users have complained about many, many, many (did I mention many?) times for years, and it still hasn’t been fixed. Since this is a core Wordpress functionality, there can never be a plugin to get around it that won’t be risky or ‘break’ a site with a future Wordpress upgrade, so, it’s up to Wordpress’ team to do something about it. If this is also an issue you’re having, please share it on Wordpress’ Requests and Feedback forum. The only way to get seen and heard by Wordpress is when enough people complain about an issue.

How My Top Affiliate Site Recovered From Google Panda

Enough with the negativity (there’s so much of it in the affiliate marketing industry these days) - here’s some good news, for once.

My biggest affiliate site of all time started off as a simple Build A Niche Store site, back in 2007. That was the time period that saw the rise of affiliate marketing. The internet was a frontier for those who knew SEO — it was a place where a guy in his basement could beat a Fortune 500 to the top of Google page 1 with some know-how.

This particular site became my empire. With a $0 budget and commonplace white-hat SEO tactics, I dominated a niche that was a major industry. I beat out incredible odds to hit the top of Google for major two-word keyword terms that brought in astounding amounts of money through eBay’s affiliate program. Just this one site alone was paying off more money than I made at my full-time job, most months. As you’ll see in the chart below, my single best day of traffic was on March 27, 2011, with 2,177 visits. Perhaps that’s not a lot, but this was high converting traffic for a very expensive product:

Then, as you can see, something unbelievable happened between January 5 to January 13th, 2012. A monumental dip in traffic, comparable to a stock market crash. January 13th saw visits hit only 230. The traffic seemed to ramp up slightly until April 25 - April 28, 2012. It never recovered after that, and it kept getting worse and worse, to the point where the site was about to go extinct in Google search results.

This, of course, was equivalent to getting fired from your job. You wake up the next day incomeless, overwhelmed with fear.

I took it upon myself to finally get rid of Build A Niche Store. The CMS had obviously been blackballed by Google. It was a simple affiliate website builder that too many spammers had used as a tool to mass produce thousands of garbage “thin affiliate” sites, all of which had a ‘carbon footprint’ readable by smarter, upgraded search engines like Google. It was time to move to Wordpress, and it had to be done quickly.

I made several major decisions when I re-built this site:

1. Started all over with a newly-registered .com domain name (the original site was a .us) and 301 redirected every individual page over to the new .com site. The old site was an “exact match” .us domain (kind of like DomesticCars.us), and the new .com domain is a “branded word” one (kind of like CarWorld.com).
2. Switched from Build A Niche Store to Wordpress.
3. Used PHPBay Pro with Stealth Module - a script that displays eBay affiliate links but hides them from being crawled on each page (this script was written to protect affiliate marketers from being “blackballed” by Google for simply having affiliate links on their pages)
4. Heavily modified a Wordpress theme using the data from Google Analytics to see which sections of the site were being used the most by visitors, made the entire site be much easier to navigate. Added custom widgets to each individual page, so that all pages had more content that pertained solely to them, rather than having the sidebar have “site-wide” content.
5. Deleted over 300 web pages from the old site, which had almost no content on them. 301 redirected those old page links over to the relevant sections of the new site. Re-wrote all content on every single page so that each page now had a minimum of 150 words per page.

The new site was up on February 2, 2013. With the 301’s in place, the remainder of whatever traffic was still going to that old domain ‘took’ to the new domain immediately. It took search engines about 2 weeks to finally stop showing the old domain name in search results, and start displaying the new domain name.

Overall, here were the results, from February 2, 2013 to today (May 11, 2013):

The site’s already knocking on the door of 600 visitors per day - that’s nearly a 160% gain of traffic.

There’s obviously no way to pinpoint which of those major edits was responsible for the site’s rise in success — perhaps, all of them worked together, but I do feel as though the deletion of those 300 or so pages of garbage content or pages that just had a title and affiliate links only was the big one.

Also, that Stealth Module I installed is hiding eBay links entirely from search engines. So, all they see on my pages are the content, links to articles and tags. Nothing else. It’s a genius plugin. Perhaps someday search engines will get through it and see the links, but perhaps not - this script was made pretty well. It’s nice to not be discriminated against for having affiliate links on a website, and I know that’s exactly what Google Panda was all about. It had nothing to do with “thin content” and everything to do with the presence of affiliate links. Google doesn’t want “affiliate storefronts,” but real storefronts. The argument for or against them could go on for days, but that’s another topic.

Hope this gave some insight into the direction you might want to take with your ‘dead and dying’ affiliate websites.