Tag: website

SEO Doesn’t Auto Post Anymore

I don’t auto post to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Plus or LiveJournal. I stopped about a year ago, and since then, I’ve stopped crossposting to everywhere except the places I actually frequent. That’s not to say I don’t skim Tumblfeeds (the spam monsters than they are) or check in on my LJ communities. It means that I no longer have any code that automatically posts to those places when I make a new blog post. Any time you see a link to my posts on another site, made by me, that means I took the time to log in and fill in the data by hand.

Why? Well, I’ll jump around chronologically and tell you that a pair of articles hit my feed recently. First, one about how “3rd party APIs […] are punished in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm” (Source: Edgerank Checker — Does Using a 3rd Party API Decrease Your Engagement Per Post?) and the second, which linked back, said that pages that auto publish lose 70% of ‘likes’ and comments. (Source: Insider Facebook — Study: Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70%)

Both of those back up what I’ve always said about SEO and HEO. If you want people to come to your site, you have to engage with them. That means you need to interact, not spam, and converse. Find out what they like and how they like it. They hammer home a point that was obvious to many of us old hats know, but many young bucks ignore. You have to be in touch with your readers, and no automated system in the world can do that for you.

Now, certainly, I use tools like Google Analytics’ Campaign feature, and Crowdrise, to help me determine what posts of mine are popular, when and where, and attempt to comprehend the why of it all. It’s a very fuzzy science. I know I hit paydirt when my @-replies on Twitter are coming so fast I can’t keep up, and my comment-feed is burning a hole in my screen. But until we perfect an AI that knows, before I do, what I want, we’ll never have one that can predict accurately what we need to do to make our sites popular. And we all know that popularity is the end game.

Popularity has a strange converse, though. For example, you may think that auto-tweeting your blog posts is a great idea to get the content out there and read. This is true, but I found that the more I auto-tweeted, the more splogs came to my site! That’s right, I was increasing the attack of content scrapers, and tweet bots that spam, which in turn decreased any SEO benefit I might have acquired. Sucks, doesn’t it? Thankfully, manually crafting a quick tweet, and taking the time to phrase it right, got me more traction than anything else.

The other massive downside to auto-posting on social networks is that you rarely get to make the post look the way you want to. I want to pick which image I’ve attached to be the thumbnail, and I want to make sure my custom excerpt (which I always write) is picked up, and I want to maybe put in an extra explanation on G+, but not on Tumblr or Facebook, and … you know, I want people to know I’m thinking about them.

There is a huge desire to share everything with everyone. To tell your friends in one social network the same things you tell them in others. And for self-promotion, this is big as well. But as the media is learning, a blanket advertisement like you see on TV doesn’t work so well anymore. How many commercials can you remember well? I can remember the Old Spice guy and the Most Interesting Man in the World (also a couple weird phone commercials), but we don’t always remember the products, nor do we actually always buy the product being advertised. I don’t use Old Spice or Dos Equis. Still, blanket ads are hard to land, since you don’t know who’s going to read your site. Similarly, blanket ‘Hey look at me!’ is hard to make efficient, because you’re not reaching out to your audience and making them a part of your process. You’re shouting at them, not talking with them.

What about those of us who aren’t advertising. If you’re crosslinking just to share with friends, an automated system seems fine, except these are your friends and don’t you want to be personal with your friends? Don’t you think they deserve the time and effort of a real ‘Hey, this is what I’m up to!’ instead of a blanket letter? Wouldn’t it be nice to say “Bob, I thought of you when I wrote this because of that conversation we had about …” Or if you send it to a group of your friends and Bob’s, then Bob feels great because you’ve brought him into the conversation and your friends know you think about them.

The funny thing about this is I also stopped scheduling posts. I used to set posts up to run once a week, minimum, even if I was going to be off line. Now, because I want to interact with people, I post them only when I know I’ll be around.

The next time you see a social media post of mine, linking back to a blog post, know that I took the time and effort to link it. If it’s styled pretty, I did that on purpose. I try to make it personal and not just slap a link up, and I think that effort shows, and comes back to me in pageviews, comments and likes.

17 October, 2011
BuddyPress Overkill

For a lot of people, BuddyPress is overkill. Personally I love it, it’s great to make your own ‘Facebook’ or ‘Ning’ type site. But there’s a time and a place for everything. BuddyPress’s intention is to let you build your own social network. This means that it’s a Big Dog type application, that it has a lot of bells a whistles. And while you certainly can install it and only activate a few, if you’re only doing it to use one of those things, it may be overkill.

I’m going to take this one by the numbers. Or rather, by the features listed on BuddyPress’s site!

I need to stress, since some people miss the point of these posts, that if you’re only going to use one feature of a product this big, you should reconsider if it’s the best use of your time. If you only want to use one for now, and plan to grow, that’s different altogether. In each of my examples, I’m presuming that the user plans to only use that one specific feature, and I will address alternatives.

Activity Streams

This is actually my favorite thing about BuddyPress. If you post in a blog, or a group, or a forum, all of that gets pulled into ‘Sitewide Activity.’ That’s right, every last bit of your site is on one big page! Now, if you’re only using WordPress as a blog (no groups, no forums, JUST a CMS/blog), you’d think “I want this because I want a page that lists all my comments from all my posts!” To an extent, you’re right. There isn’t a better way to do this! Or is there?

There’s already a widget in the default WP install and theme for ‘Recent Comments’ which shows all comments, right? And there are plugins that can show Recent network wide comments too. So if you’re really lazy, why not use Widgets on Pages and call it a day?

Extended Profiles

If all you need is fancy profiles, BuddyPress is way overkill. In fact, for super cool profiles, most people use a plugin to extend the defaults! What’s the alternative? There are a lot of profile related plugins in the WordPress repository, and it just matters what you want. Personally, I’d caution against using those default Yahoo/AIM ones in our current profiles, as they may be going away. By the way, many of those profile plugins can add in extra fields to use on registration as well, like Cimy User Extra Fields.

Local Avatar

This isn’t a promoted feature of BuddyPress, but I’ve seen a lot of people do this. Yes, BuddyPress can let you use local avatars for your users, this is true, however so can plugins like Add Local Avatars. Frankly, I’m a proponent of Gravatar, since it works, and much like YouTube, I’m no longer responsible for you uploading nudie pics. Keeps legal brouhahah off my back.

Friend Connections and Private Messaging

While there are plugins like Private Messaging for WordPress out there, I have to hat-tip BuddyPress for a fully integrated front end PM system. This is one of the moments where, hands down, I would seriously consider using BP just for one feature. Ditto Friend Connections. I’ve just never seen its equal, and since the odds are most people would be using it for both friends and PM, it’s a great reason for BuddyPress.

WordPress Blogging

I don’t even know where to start. Someone insisted the only way to use WordPress for blogging was to install BuddyPress. It was a moment where I wanted a button to press to make a giant mallet jump out of his monitor and bash his head in for not reading. (By the way, you also don’t need MultiSite to use BuddyPress anymore. It works just fine with single site.)

Groups

This is tricky. Part of me wants to say ‘Just make a page and let people comment’ because, to some degree, that’s all a group really is. It’s a fan page (ala FaceBook) which shows posts in reverse order. Like a P2 blog. Which means that it’s not insurmountable to make a single page for your site that behaves that way (or a subsite running P2 if you went the MultiSite way). But is that the best way?

Forums

If you just want a forum, just install bbPress. Nuff said. Now, knowing that bbPress 2.0 is now a 2.0 plugin, and that BuddyPress is still on 1.2 (I think), and that the import from bbPress 1.x to 2.0 is a bit iffy, I would really be cautious about using bbPress if I know I want to upgrade to BuddyPress in the future. Connecting the bells and whistles are interesting.

What about you? What reasons have you seen people use to justify BuddyPress when it was clearly overkill?

2 October, 2011
How 17 Famous Website Looked In The Past: In The ’90s. You’ll Be Amazed | ImmatureBusiness

Remember those times in the ’90s when you had to type WWW. and websites looked dull, boring, and full of moving and annoying flash banners. I’m sure nobody wish to go back to those times. Now, websites are focusing more and more on the user experience, loading speed, and subtle ways to locate ads without distracting the content or function.

via How 17 Famous Website Looked In The Past: In The ’90s. You’ll Be Amazed | ImmatureBusiness.

26 September, 2011
Custom Post Types Are Not Posts

This confuses the heck out of a lot of people. Custom Post Types are’t posts they are post types.

Otto wrote a very nice primer on WordPress 3.0 and CPTs which points this out. Nearly a year later, people are still getting it wrong becuase they refuse to let go of the word ‘post.’ It was, in retrospect, probably a poor choice of names. Ditto Post Formats, in my opinion, but there we are.

I blame the naming, really. “Custom Post Types” makes the implication that these are “Posts”. They’re not. “Post Type” is really referring to the internal structure of WordPress. See, all the main content in WordPress is stored in a table called “wp_posts”. It has a post_type column, and until now, that column has had two main values in it: “post” and “page”.

So now, with CPTs, we can make new ‘post types’ and name them whatever we want. It’s very important to note that the column name of post_type is why we call these Custom “Post Types.” If you can let go of the (very logical) connection of ‘Custom Post Type is a type of post’ and start thinking of it as ‘Custom Post Type is a new Post Type’ then you’re halfway to victory.

If you’ve ever used a Wiki, there is no real post hierarchy like there is with a default WordPress installation. In WordPress, you always have the ability to frame your post URL slugs with date, or even category(As of WordPress 3.3, it’s not as disastrous as it was to use /%category%/%postname%/ in your URLs.), as it happens. Look at MediaWiki. Everything is pretty much top-level. You don’t sort by subfolders, or categories, or anything. All the URLs are domain.com/post-name.

What about SEO? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: SEO doesn’t care. Google doesn’t care if your URL is domain.com/foobar or domain.com/2001/foobar – Your readers might care (which is why I advocate using at least the year in your URLs for HEO), but Google, not so much. If they did, why would MediaWiki be ranked so high on most searches? No, what SEO cares about is your content, your context, and your relationships.

That really begs the question of why would anyone use CPTs at all? Last year, Otto advocated you don’t use them if you’re just blogging. He’s right. You shouldn’t. But I use them here to make custom pages for my plugins, and I use them on another site to record all the questions people send me. They’re unorganized, when you compare them to posts. But I can, and have, added in taxonomies support to sort them. Thanks to people like Justin Tadlock, there are tutorials on how to correctly make your Custom Post Type and I know to just add 'taxonomies' => array( 'post_tag', 'category '), to let my CPT use tags and categories. Want to limit it even more? How about linking specific post types and taxonomies!

Some great examples of CPTs are things like bbPress 2.0, the new forum plugin from WordPress, but also this is the future of BuddyPress! People use them to create movie databases, actor pages, a FAQ, or pretty much anything that needs its own structure. What shouldn’t you use CPTs for? Basically if you want something to act like a blog, don’t use CPTs. If you want something to live on it’s own, like a forum, a wiki, a Facebook page, then you want a CPT. If you want multiple blogs, with unrelated, unconnected, content that just happens to have the same author, we call that MultiSite.(See? There are great reasons to use MultiSite!)

But they’re not for everything, and never will be, any more than WordPress is right for everyone. So let go of the ‘But they’re posts!’ argument, because you are flat out wrong. They’re post types. Not posts.

26 September, 2011
United States Patent: 8010458

An online social network is provided in which members of the online social network control who may view their personal information and who may communicate with them. The members control who may view their personal information by setting a visibility preference. A member may not view another member’s full personal profile if the measure of relatedness between the two is greater than the visibility preference of the other member. The members also control who may communicate with them by setting a contactability preference. A member may not communicate with another member if the measure of relatedness between the two is greater than the contactability preference of the other member.

via United States Patent: 8010458.

It’s official. The US patent office is useless.

2 September, 2011
Share My Content (But Leave My Style Alone)

This came up at WordCamp Chicago. We were in the unConference, talking about BuddyPress, when John James Jacoby asked how many of us use Blackberry Pie. This is a WordPress plugin that lets you include Tweets into the content of your post, bringing the style (avatar, CSS etc) from Twitter. Then he asked if that would be cool to see in WordPress, where we could bring any other WP content to our sites.

A lot of people liked that idea. I visibly cringed. Sam “Otto” Woods made a joke about how that would bring splogs to a new level. But I was stuck on thinking about copyright and bandwidth.

The basic idea is sound and, I agree, really cool. If I can link to my site on Google+ or Facebook, and it pulls in a picture, couldn’t it pull in my formatting too? That would mean when you quote from my site, it looks like my site! The problem I see, is that the reason Facebook and Google can get away with embedding the picture is that they are copying your picture to their server and displaying it from their sites.

How do I know that? Because I have hotlink protection and I know it works. So the only way for these sites to cache my images is to come and scrape what they see IN the post. (I’m pretty sure this is why the ‘featured image’ in WordPress doesn’t always show up on a Facebook link. If you have the image inside the post, it always shows up. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Simplest answer: they’re content scraping.) It’s nice to see that technology being used for good. Of course, if you extend the thought, you’ll realize how many servers these sites must allocate just to storing snippets of other people’s data.

If your server cannot do that, then you should not be trying to emulate them.

People forget just how much work went into making Google and Facebook able to do that! They aren’t aware of how many servers, and how many people maintaining the servers, it takes to support that level of infrastructural deployment.(Mind you, WordPress has about 4 or 5 people to Facebook’s couple hundred, so it’s not about the amount, but the people.) This makes the problem two-fold. Either you must have your server set up to handle the caching, or you steal the CSS (and thus bandwidth) from someone else.

Okay, okay, so CSS bandwidth is a drop in the bucket compared to images, I know. And maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but we already know exactly how dangerous it is to have your site heavily linked. I’ve suffered the Digg/Slashdot/ma.tt effect before, and been nailed with 300% traffic. Thankfully I built this server with that end-goal in mind, and the last time it happened, no one noticed. Which is as it should be. But if I was still on my old shared host, I’d probably have died.

This cuts back to why certain things are made plugins/add-ons and others are default a part of a product. When you support ‘all’ things, you have to limit your product to what actually is supportable. Microsoft Office works on most systems, but it doesn’t work on all, and it has known conflicts. Because of those conflicts, there are features Microsoft knowingly left out! They would rather support as much as they can for as many people as they can. If your product is a niche product, you can get away with only supporting certain things, but a web app (Drupal, WordPress, etc) cannot. (And this is why you won’t see caching built into WordPress. Too many different server setups!)

In the end, I think that embedding contextual content in a site is a nice idea, but unfeasible. You’ll never be able to support all possibilities, and you’ll never be able to do it in a way that ensures you stay on the right side of the law. If you want to link to someone, make a quote, link back, and use it as a part of your site, branded your way. If the look and feel of the post is important (like Twitter or YouTube), then hope they’ve come up with a way where they want you to be able to embed the content in your site.

Until then, share my content, but leave my style alone on my site, where it belongs.

13 August, 2011