Disruptive Conversations

What is the impact of "duplicate content" on the search engine ranking of your web content? What are the different ways you can wind up with duplicate content? And perhaps most importunely, how can you correct the issue?

Over at the SEOmoz "Daily SEO Blog", Dr. Pete has written a truly MUST-READ piece for anyone working with web content:

Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World

It is a LONG, comprehensive piece that explains how Google's recent "Panda" update impacts scoring of "duplicate content" and what you can do about it. He covers:

1. What is Duplicate Content?
2. Why Do Duplicates Matter?
3. Three Kinds of Duplicates
4. Tools for Fixing Duplicates
5. Examples of Duplicate Content
6. Which URL is Canonical?
7. Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates

The article has a great series of examples and links out to all sorts of resources to learn more. Although SEO has been part of what I've done for many years, I definitely learned a few new things from this piece. It's definitely worth a read!

Kudos to "Dr. Pete" for writing - and sharing - such a useful piece.

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Google announced a few minutes ago that they are rolling out new capabilities to the chat services inside of Google+. When the expanded gets out to all users over the next 48 hours, you will be able to chat with someone as long as you both have each other in a "circle".[1] What I found more intriguing was this note:

When you and your contacts have each other in Circles, you'll be able to chat with them across Google properties such as Gmail, Google Plus, iGoogle, Orkut, and the Google Talk Client.

So your Google+ contacts will now be integrated very tightly with your Gmail and other contacts and you will be able to chat with them from whichever service you are in at the moment. Multiple interviews with folks at Google have said that Google+ was the path to further tie together the various Google services... and now we're seeing that in action.

More info here:

• Chatting with Mutual Circles from Google+, Gmail and Google Talk (Google+ post and discussion)
  
  
• About Chat with Mutual Circles (Google Help topic)

[1] i.e. you have added them to a circle and they have added you to a circle - it won't work if only one of you has added the other to a circle.

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In this week's For Immediate Release episode #623, my report covered:

• The freak October New England snowstorm and the value again of social networks in crisis situations
• My view on the Klout kerfuffle and how Klout is violating historical integrity
  
  
• The awesome visualization power provided by Google+ Ripples (and examples thereof)
  
  
• Google Search Results and authorship - new ways to assert your authorship of content in ways that will show up in Google search results. Some articles about this:
  • http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/improving-look-of-authorship-in-your.html
  • http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/set-up-authorship-using-just-your-email.html
  • http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1408986

And if you listened to the very end of my report you would have heard an additional contribution from a "helper". :-)

You can, of course, listen to the episode online now.

Matt Cutts at Google recently posted this useful video explaining what "cloaking" is ... and why it is bad for both the user experience and also for SEO / search engine results. He also explains how cloaking is different from providing distinct content for mobile audiences versus regular visitors.

I'll admit that I've never had enough interest in "gaming" Google to go to the desperate measure of this kind of cloaking... but obviously people are out there and doing it:

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Well, Google's iPhone/iPad/iOS app was there for a little bit in Apple's AppStore... but now it's been pulled down because of "a bug that broke notifications". I did download the app a few hours ago to my iPhone and iPad and saw the errors mentioned in the blog post on both the iPhone:

and the iPad:

It's too bad, because in my initial usage, the app seems to work very well. Here's a shot of my inbox that looks like, well, pretty much any other email inbox:

As Google's blog post indicates, the app has some cool features and use of gestures. I'll be using it for the next few days to see how it works.

Meanwhile, Google's team is obviously going off to make the notifications work!

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Have you wanted to put a web address (technically called a "URL") in a printed newsletter, article or other document so that readers could go to that website? But when you look at the web address, it is a big long ugly address that no one in their right mind is going to type?

There's an easy solution!

Driven mostly by the character limitations of social networks like Twitter, there is an entire series of services out there that offer "URL shortening"[1]. The first that many of us found was TinyURL.com, which still works great. Personally, my choice these days has been bitly, primarily because it provides tracking statistics on the number of people who use your link. There are literally another 100 or so URL shortening services out there that you can choose from.

Regardless of what service you choose to use, the steps are basically the same.

1. Identify the long URL you want to shorten

For example, say that you wanted to include in a newsletter, article, church bulletin or similar printed document the link to this TIME Magazine special report on "The World at 7 Billion". Unfortunately, TIME's website uses absolutely hideous URLs:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097720_2097782,00.html

That's a URL that not even an engineer could love! It's too long, so it will probably split across lines if it is in a printed newsletter... and it has all those numbers which would be extremely easy for someone to mess up if they were actually to try to copy this URL from the newsletter. Imagine if you were going to put this into a printed newsletter with text like this:

To learn more about challenges facing the world as we now have more than 7 billion people on this planet, read the TIME Magazine special report at http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097720_2097782,00.html

How many readers are really going to be able to copy that into their browser without any errors? How many will even try?

2. Enter the long URL in a URL shortening site

On you have identified the long URL, you just need to go to whatever shortening service you want to use (TinyURL in this case) and enter in the long URL (I just do a copy/paste from the browser address window):

Once you click the button to shorten the URL, you'll get back a screen like this containing your shortened URL:

In this case that big long hideous URL was shortened to just:

http://tinyurl.com/3hy8poy

That's it!

3. Copy the short URL into your print newsletter/document

Now all you need to do is copy that short URL into your newsletter text. For instance, here's that same text as above:

To learn more about challenges facing the world as we now have more than 7 billion people on this planet, read the TIME Magazine special report at http://tinyurl.com/3hy8poy

MUCH better! Odds are that most folks can enter that URL successfully into their browser and get to the article.[2] You can, of course, even make it a bit more readable by dropping the "http://" off the front of the URL if you can safely assume of our readership that the "tinyurl.com" would clue them in that this is a web address.

You're done!

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Bonus: Creating an even-more-readable custom URL

Now, "tinyurl.com/3hy8poy" is probably something that most people could easily copy over into their browser, but what if you could make it even easier for readers to remember the URL?

Note in the TinyURL.com site this box for a "Custom alias":

What you can do is enter whatever text you want in that box, and, if that URL is available, the TinyURL.com service will use that text as the shortened URL. For instance, I tried "7billion" and "7billionppl" but both were already taken. However, "7billionpeople" worked:

So now I can give out this URL to point to the article:

http://tinyurl.com/7billionpeople

Let's take a look at my proposed printed newsletter text again:

To learn more about challenges facing the world as we now have more than 7 billion people on this planet, read the TIME Magazine special report at http://tinyurl.com/7billionpeople

Now that ought to be something that people can easily remember and/or copy over into their browser without any errors.

Notice...

... my customized URL was longer than the original shortened URL.

That's okay! It's far shorter than that big ugly URL used by TIME's website, and it is far more "readable" than the random group of letters and numbers originally provided by TinyURL.com.

Remember... the goal is to put something in print that people can actually be successful in typing into their browser address window. If you have to make it a little bit longer in order to make it more readable, that may be okay.[3]

One final note - URLs from a shortening service generally CANNOT be re-used. Once the shortened URL (custom or randomly generated) has been created, it is fixed forever and always to point at whatever longer URL was entered in the service. I say this because if you are playing around to see what kind of custom URLs might be available, you need to make sure that the real longer URL is what you are shortening... because you won't have a second chance.

Again, there are at this point literally hundreds of URL shortening services out there. They all work pretty much the same and will let you make your print newsletters/documents MUCH more readable - and make it so that readers just might actually type in the link and go do the site you are referencing!

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[1] For those who want more details about the "URL shortening" process, there is a lengthy Wikipedia article on the topic.

[2] One reason that I'm a fan of using bitly for URL shortening versus TinyURL.com is that bitly tracks who actually uses your URL and shows you statistics and charts so you can see that your URL is actually being used. Now, unlike TinyURL, you do have to register for a free bitly account in order to use their service.

[3] And I could have spent some time trying to find a shorter URL that wasn't taken... but there's a tradeoff between shortness and readability. "7billipeople" was probably available, too, but people aren't going to recognize that

Image credit: chrisdlugosz on Flickr

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... some way to search through a large Ripple to find a name (like yours, if you shared the post), so that you could see where that person was in the big giant picture. For instance, in this massive Ripple experiment that I referenced in my post about Ripples:

Right now there's no easy way I've seen to find a person in a Ripple of this size...

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There is a fundamental rule in database theory that when data is recorded in a database, it is "immutable". It cannot be changed. Applications may act on the data, but the integrity of the underlying data is intact.

Consider a database tracking temperatures over time. The temperature sensor at my house might record into the database that it is 31 degrees F right at this time and date.

That data should always remain intact.

If I query the temperature database tomorrow for today's temperature at 8am, the database should say that it was 31 degrees F. If I query the database 5 months from now... or 5 years from now... the database should always spit back the 31 degree temperature.

The historical answer will always be identical.

This is just a fundamental principle of databases that are tracking data over a period of time.

Klout's Revision of History

In the ongoing kerfuffle about Klout's changes to their "influence metric", nicely summarized by Mathew Ingram over at GigaOm (lots of links to read), one point I haven't seen made is this:

Klout revised its (and your) history!

Consider this... back on Monday when I wrote about how I disliked the way Klout is treating its metric like a game, I included this screenshot:

Now consider this screenshot taken right at this moment that shows my current Klout score and the trend of my score over the last period of time:

Hmmm... where is that "62"?

Instead Klout now shows that my score was 59-ish.

They changed my history.

Now, in my case, I don't really care. My life will not be any better or worse based on whatever changes happen to my Klout Score. Makes zero difference to me.

But for all those people complaining on the Internet about how their Klout score dropped dramatically... not only did it drop, but...

YOU NEVER HAD THAT HIGHER SCORE!

You might claim you had a Klout score of 50, 60, 70, 80, whatever... but nope, you didn't... the chart shows quite clearly that your score never achieved whatever milestone you thought it did.

Oops.

Changing Algorithms Without Changing History

Now I personally have no issue with Klout changing their algorithm to make it better. In fact, I applaud them for doing so. Algorithms need to change as more experience is attained and more data is collected.

I want better metrics.

So change the algorithm. Go ahead.

But personally I'd love history to be kept intact. Show the change in the algorithm NOW. Sure, the trend graph would show a big drop. Okay. Then, like in Google Analytics, we can all make a notation that the algorithm was changed on such-and-such a date and our score now reflects the new algorithm. No big deal.

The Counterpoint

But what if the algorithm had a fundamental error in it? Shouldn't you go back and revise all the data?

Consider my temperature example - what if I found that the thermometer in my house was actually off by 4 degrees? That it was actually 4 degrees colder outside that it was showing?

Wouldn't it make sense to go back and change all the historical readings for that sensor to be 4 degrees colder? (Assuming I could pinpoint the time at which it started being inaccurate... or just made the assumption that it had always been inaccurate.)

And yes... there's certainly a school of thought that says you should go back and revise history. The other school of thought would be to leave history alone and indicate that from this point forward the sensor data will now be more accurate.

It's obvious which school of thought Klout fits in.

Klout's Ecosystem "Problem"

The "problem" Klout has... and I put "problem" in quotes because it's the kind of "problem" any small startup would LOVE to have... is that they've had a lot of companies and developers using Klout's APIs to build other applications and systems that interact with Klout's metric. In fact, Klout is claiming over 3500 "partners and developers".

And you have to imagine that some % of those developers are engaging in tracking Klout scores over time. They want to track the trend of their own score... or their competitors score... or their clients' scores... or whatever.

All of that trend data just got rendered inaccurate.

It doesn't matter if Application X says that your client had a Klout score of 43 last week.... the official Klout database now says that the client's score was really 32... and it never was 43.

Oops. Now the application has "bogus" data.

Klout's Reporting Problem

Plus, if you were presenting reports or charts regularly to a client (or your management) showing them their Klout score, now you have to go back to the client and say "I'm sorry, but Klout revised their algorithm and you never had that score I told you."

You look like an idiot for trusting a metric that changes like this.

Of course, you're not alone, as Bob LeDrew so eloquently pointed out in his post yesterday "A Klout Upside The Head"... obviously many people are taking Klout's metric very seriously. (And way more seriously than I would even remotely consider.)

The fact that some people are using Klout's metric for business decisions would, in my mind, point to Klout needing to consider historical accuracy/integrity a bit stronger.

Sure, change the algorithm if you need to... but keep the history intact so that your partners and users don't look like idiots.

A Wake-up Call?

In the end will this kerfuffle make people be a little bit more critical of the Klout Score?
Will people realize it is only one of the metrics they should consider?
Will they take a look at other metrics that are emerging?

As the CEO of (Klout competitor) PeerIndex noted yesterday, there are many different ways of defining "influence"... and the market and all these companies are very young.

Will people realize that they shouldn't blindly rely on one simple metric?

While I'd love to believe people might - and we can only hope that at least some people will, I guess I'm cynical enough to think that people want nice, simple, easy metrics... and Klout is delivering that. Give it a few days for all this to blow over and sadly people will probably be right back caring about their Klout Score.

Only now perhaps they'll take occasional screenshots to be able to back up later claims about the score whenever Klout does its next revision of history...

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Want to see a VERY cool way of visualizing the spread of a post on Google+ out to other G+ users? Using the new "Ripples" featured announced today, this is very trivial to do. Check out this example (of a post that is deliberately being shared around to test Ripples):

Now, if you follow the link (or click on the image) to the actual Google+ page, you can then move around the image, zoom in on certain sections and do all the typical kind of movement you might expect in a Google product.

But where it gets even cooler is down at the bottom of the page where you can "watch the spread":

Press the "play" icon and you can watch the spread of the story as it goes throughout Google+. It's a very cool way to visualize how the story moves through G+.

Now, there is a caveat here. The post must be shared PUBLICLY in order for it to be included in the Ripples visualization.

This makes sense in order to protect where people have shared a post with only a smaller circle. But what this does mean is that if you want to try it yourself and see a Ripples view, you need to share an item out and include "Public" in the sharing:

Now here's a second example of an actual post (versus a contrived example) that was shared out widely. In this case it is a post/rant by Felicia Day expressing irritation about sites that don't use RSS. Note a couple of interesting aspects of the visualization:

• There's a big circle where Wil Wheaton shared it out and then obviously had it re-shared by many.
• In the timeline, look at the gap where Susan Beebe then created another bubble of sharing of the post.

Again, watching the spread is rather fun on this post:

Now, to view the Ripples on any post on Google+, you simple go to the "down arrow" in the upper right corner of any post to get the "options" menu, and there at the bottom will be "View Ripples":

Incidentally, that post from Chris Brogan also has an interesting sharing pattern:

It may be some time before we understand the full value of this Ripples mechanism, but already I can see that it can be useful in helping understand how messages flow. And certainly as Google+ starts to expand out into business usage, I could see charts like these being very useful for PR/communications staff or firms to be able to measure and show the sharing that a particular piece of content gets.

What do you think? Have you tried out the Ripples yet? Do you see value in them?

P.S. Naturally you might want to discuss this post on Google+ since it is about that service...

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UPDATE #1, Oct 27th: Since I included all these well-shared posts as images, I thought I would also show you that Ripples starts working as soon as your post is shared once on Google+. Here is the Ripple for this blog post after I put the link in Google+. As you can see, it has so far been shared exactly once:

Now, of course, if any of you reading this post share my post inside Google+, then the Google+ activity page should update to show the other shares.

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UPDATE #2, Oct 28th: I meant to point out in the commentary on "watch the spread" that this was very similar to the playback feature in Google Wave. I didn't... but TechCrunch did.

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In one image, this is perhaps what annoys me most about Klout's Klout Score metric:

Yes, even more than the fact that Beyonce can have a Klout Score of 50 without ever having tweeted (or even knowing if that Twitter account is, in fact, actually Beyonce's). Even more than that, this bothers me:

Your Klout Score fell -1 points in the past day. Share more content and engage with your network to increase your score!

Not that my score fell. As you might have guessed, I really don't care about what my score is.

What bothers me is the implication by the second sentence that you should care about your score and that you should take actions to increase your score.

Now... DUH!... I do understand why Klout does this. They of course want you to care about your score so that you can nurture it and further buy into all their programs so that they can someday attain their motto of being "the standard of influence".

I get that.

But it doesn't mean I have to like the attempts at psychological manipulation.

What annoys me is that this attitude feeds right into those people who want to "game the system"... to figure out ways to influence the influence measurement so that they can rise higher.

It's a game to some people.

And that's fine.

Farmville is a game, too... and some people enjoy playing that.

The issue is that those of us out here in the PR/marketing space would like influence measurement metrics that we could use ... and that we can grow to trust as having some value. (In the sense of being part of the equation of assessing someone's influence online.)

But it's annoying when the company behind the metric tries to get people to play that game... to try to get them to take actions to increase their score. If history has shown us anything, it is that some people out there will ALWAYS try to game the system... it's just part of human nature.

But does the company behind the metric need to encourage that behavior?

Why not just truly rate people based on the content they produce and the interaction they have with other people online?

This is what annoys me most about Klout. Influence measurement shouldn't be treated as a game.

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