Problems with canonicals and email list building – Monday December 28th Roundup

Christmas is over! With wayyyyyyy too much Turkey left, a combination of bright warm sun and ice cold temperatures, and bruises all the way up and down my right hand side thanks to a combination of my bicycle and black ice, it’s hard to think that I’m going to be returning to work in a week.

Not a whole lot going on this week, for obvious reasons. Some emial list building advice, the problems with canonicals, average browser window size, and how children use search engines are our highlights.

• We start the week off with a new addition to the blog: Audettemedia and How rel=canonical is Breaking Sites. Truth be told the headline should be “how rel-canonical can break sites”, as there’s nothing wrong with the tag when used well.
• From Mailchimp: how to grow your email list in three steps.
• This one deserves an anecdote: back when I used to do social media marketing for a startup in Vancouver we decided to experiment with making fake profiles. I had a legit one which was growing at a snail’s pace and I decided to see if I’d be more successful if I were female instead of male. We created a profile based on pictures of an attractive blond girl we knew, and wrote it with a touch more geekiness than mine. The results were hilarious, with the profile growing at rates that astounded us, and driving quite a bit of quality traffic to the site. Social media today confirms this effect, noting that Women get 2/3 of profile views on social media. My only question is whether these numbers are offset by the millions of spammy twitter accounts that use a cute name, a female profile image, and then mass follow people.

• E-nor last week decided to talk about screen size, based on a new Google tool. In classic e-nor (and VKI) fashion the title is massive, combining keywords and CTA’s “Improve Your Conversions: Design Meets Data Using Google Browser Size and Google Analytics“. Before people start taking this as a perfect data set, let me remind you all that Google’s tool, while certainly providing valuable data, is likely going to vary a bit from your own. Why? Because I am willing to bet you that the Google Earth homepage (which this data is based on) gets hits from a very different audience source than your site. Useful as a general guide, but, as E-Nor suggests, use it in combination with your own data.
• From Luna Metrics last week: Matching Keywords with Landing Pages.

• UXMatters has a good little how to on Testing Content Concepts
• Finally the New York Times has a neat story on research by Google and UoM on how to help children use search engines.

• e-marketer asks how alike are Android and iPhone users? Predictably pretty similar.
• Finally one for the consumerism of the holidays: UXMatters on Snap! Photography and the Culture of Instant Gratification