Google + Social Analytics and more – The Monday July 11th Roundup

A late roundup today, as I’ve been traveling all day and have just gotten access to wifi again. Off to Ottawa to meet the rest of my team, and hopefully get a look at a bit of the heart of Government in Canada.

This week the subject on everyone’s lips is still Google+, and as such we have more on the new Google Analytics Social Plugin, Google’s dropping of 11+ million .co.cc domains from their index, yahoo shutting down site explorer, and more…

Create

• We start the news with some pretty big news on the domain name front: apparently Google is dropping .co.cc domains from its index. The Register predicts that this will mean 11+ million domains dropped.
• Ajaxian has a short piece on the potential power of the intent tag, and a link to some more information about it.

Attract

• It’s finally happening, Yahoo is shutting down Site Explorer. I can hear the SEO’s of the world sighing in unison. Despite its patchy results, Site Explorer was a useful tool for link analysis. MS Webmaster Tools is supposed to pick up where it left off, but SEO Roundtable doubts that we’ll see the same kind of competitive link analysis that Site Explorer offered.
• I really do enjoy Michael Gray. He seems to full of hyperbole and generally angry, yet somehow he has this odd habit of being right… This time he’s posting on Google’s new pre-loading of pages in Chrome, explaining how this hurts publishers and helps Google’s own advertising. Ok, explain might be the wrong word. Angrily rants? However, he does illustrate the problems that this system is going to cause, making this a good read.

Analyze

• There is an inconvenient truth about cookies. In the EU, new legislation will make it illegal to set cookies without asking the user permission. They also have a link to guidelines from the UK Information Commissioners Office
• The Google Analytics Blog has a post on the new Google Analytics Social plugin, which gathers data from the likes of Google+ and Twitter. Facebook isn’t mentioned, of course, likely due to a combination of their relationship with Google right now, along with their attitudes on allowing users to export data.

Optimize

• L3 Analytics has a comparison of methods to increase conversions. This isn’t a comparison of specific tools, but rather a comparison of the potential value in increasing marketing or optimizing page content. Apparently there was some kind of editorial mix up, so you may want to read the last 5 paragraphs first.
• Not the usual Optimize content, but this is such a pet topic of mine that I couldn’t not include it (yay double negatives!). Inspired Mag has a history of typography trends, which gives a pretty rad outline of some early typographic ideas. Honestly, the post could be longer (I want more!) but it’s worth a read either way.