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Analytics: Email Schedule & PDF Export are BACK!
I can’t believe it, after thousands and thousands of complaints, including my very own blog post, Google have rolled out an update and Email Report Scheduling and PDF Exporting are back!
Both features are in BETA mode, so expect a couple problems, but wow, I’m over the moon that they’re back. These are two features that I used to use religiously, and I know that many other SEOs and website authors did as well.
Well done Google (took long enough)!
Google showing latest posts in sidebar
I spotted this a couple of hours ago, some of the top social type websites, when searched, are having their latest posts displayed on the side of the Google search results page (SERP).
Google have been up and down with social things for a long time now, from including Facebook and Twitter results to including all sorts of bits and pieces, now I guess we’re seeing their next attempt at including things that they feel people would want to engage with and most importantly, WANT to see.
Upon searching for “mashable”, you’ll see the following:
The only thing that I can think of is that it takes up a lot of real-estate space, which will push out, soon apparently to be, Google+ snippets as well as Google AdWords adverts.. wonder if that’ll make AdWords even more expensive? Then again, brands shouldn’t be bidding on other brand’s names anyway so I guess it’ll protect them?
This isn’t the only term that is bringing up latest posts, you’ll have to explore a little to see what else you can find – if you do come across one, pop me a comment, I’d love to know!
Pagination and SEO – the real deal
One topic in SEO that has driven so many opinions is that of pagination and the effect it has on SEO, from opinions about duplicate content to internal link dilution to rel setups – all the opinions I’ve read have sound arguments, but now it’s time to listen to Maile Ohye, a Google employee for six years who works with Search and Webmaster Tools, give us insight into pagination and SEO:
Learn something useful?
The ultimate landing page infographic
If you’ve launched a product, needed highly optimized landing pages or just used landing pages for something to bring in more traffic, then you’ll be familiar with things such as A/B Split testing and the likes. But, perhaps you could save some time with your testing by launching a great landing page from the beginning.
Here’s a fantastic landing page infographic:
Click to enlarge
Yahoo’s in bed with Twitter?
Since Google no longer shares much insight when it comes to Twitter and Facebook in search results, it doesn’t surprise me to see that Yahoo is shifting up next to Twitter and showing Twitter results in their search results.
As you can see, there’s a tab called “TWITTER” that you can click on, and this tab reveals tweets related to your search result, in this case, “Lady Gaga”. Further to this, you can choose to see official tweets, Hollywood insider tweets and everyone’s tweets:
What can’t be established at this point is what determines which tweet’s should be shown and which ones shouldn’t – there must be a Klout like algorithm tied into Yahoo’s search algorithm somewhere, but nobody’s figured anything out yet.
Imagine they pull a Google and launch Yahoo+ in 6 months time ;)
New Analytics gives us some new features
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about Google Analytics no longer offering email report scheduling or PDF exporting. Unfortunately I’m not seeing these features yet, but there are some nice new inclusions that are worth mentioning since the design updates Analytics rolled out.
Advanced Segment Sharing
You are now able to share advanced segments. If you’ve worked with advanced segments, then you’ll know from the previous versions of Analytics that is was possible to share segments with others and so forth. This feature is back, so we can look forward to lots of excellent advanced segments!
Dashboard Sharing
This is absolutely awesome, you can now share your Dashboards! What a brilliant feature seeing that Analytics offers such great Dashboard setup tools these days.
Report Time
This is a cool feature, Analytics now shows when a report was last generated, meaning you can see if it’s been a while and run the report, whilst testing this I also noticed that there is a new “LOADING” bar which appears when running a report, it turns Analytics into that much more of an application when I see things like this – very useful.
On February 27th, Google announced these changes and also mentioned a few other things so I recommend taking a read of this article if you want to stay completely on top of things.
I really hope they bring back Report Email Scheduling and PDF exports.
4 awesome articles I found today
I spent a lot of time looking for great content during the course of today in-between duties. I wanted to share these with you as I feel they’re incredibly good:
- Using the Rel Author Tag can boost your traffic – Read!
- To raise VC or not to raise VC – Read!
- This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post – Read!
- How to arrange your iPhone Home Screen to get things done – Read!
I really recommend having a read of these articles, huge insights. If you’ve come across a really great article, please don’t hesitate to drop it in a comment below!t
PHP check a website’s Twitter mentions
I started experimenting with social signals as ranking factors in Search Engines; by social signals I mean the count of mentions a website has on a social network such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+ and so forth. I correlated a lot of metrics using a spreadsheet, which was time consuming so I decided to write a script to do it for me. I am 80% complete with the entire script so I’m not going to publish it all, but rather just a taste of what I’m doing.
The code below, when executed on Apache, will crawl Topsy and return the number of times a chosen website has been mentioned on Twitter. This code needs to be run in conjunction with a form that passes a text field with the domain name, so you may have to code that up quickly or later the code to bypass the domain inclusion.
Here’s the code:
$domain_name = $_POST['domain']; echo "Results for " . $domain_name . ": "; // build search queries // cURL contents of queries // Find match on Topsy for Twitter function grab_contents($url){ ?>
$domain_name = strtolower(trim($domain_name));
$topsy_twitter = 'http://topsy.com/s?q='.$domain_name;
$topsy_twitter_contents = grab_contents($topsy_twitter);
if(preg_match('/Search results 1<\/strong>-10<\/strong> out of (.*?) tweets/sim', $topsy_twitter_contents, $regs)){
$indexed_pages = substr($regs[1], 0, stripos($regs[1], " "));
$indexed_pages = strip_tags(str_replace(",","",$indexed_pages));
echo "Twitter Mentions: " . $indexed_pages;
}else{
echo "Twitter Mentions: 0";
}
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
As I mentioned, I’ve adapted this to cover an assortment of social networks and am deciding whether I should compile it into an advanced WordPress Social Metrics Plugin.. watch this space.
Hot: Google Any Duration Search launched!
I’ve just spotted something new when performing a search on Google – you know how you can choose “Past hour”, “Past 24 hours”, “Past week”, “Past month”, “Past year” and so forth once you’ve performed a search? Well, Google’s rolled out even more real-time stuff where you can refine your search results in Short (0-4 min), Medium (4-20 min) or Long (20+ min).
I gave it a bash and it’s fantastic for finding breaking news, definitely something I’ll be using form now onwards.
This is another step towards showing search results in even more real-time than ever before. We all know Google’s making big changes and although this isn’t a big change, it’s a darn useful one for those of you who want to know what’s happening right this minute.
Interested in Google stuff, join the iMod Google+ Circle.
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