With all that has happened this week, I am surprised there is anything in our field to post. The excitement in the air in palpable, the media channels are in an uproar and with protests against school fee increases in Britain, global protests for the release of Julian Assange, cyber warfare over Wikileaks, and the half dozen issues firing up all edges of the US political sphere, political disenfranchisement seems to be the theme of the end of 2010. All in all, there is an air of cataclysm enveloping the world (Warcraft references appropriate, but not intended).
Yet still, here comes posts on social media trends for 2010, confirmation on the uselessness of Toolbar Page Rank, GA tips and tricks, and more.
Internet Marketing and SEO
- We start the week off with Logic + Emotion’s Six social media trends for 2011. They really seem to think that tablets are going to take off, which I find interesting. Myself, I think we’re going to be waiting another year at least, two years maybe, before that happens. Tablets just don’t fill an existing niche right now that smartphones/laptops don’t fill better. Maybe in another year, after Apple has pushed its model all the way, and early adopters start adopting uses that don’t currently exist.Wow. That’s a lot of words for a single trend.They also talk about Google returning to focusing on indexing, social media integrating into business models, and a host of other things.
- As if it needed to be official, John Muller has, over at Webmaster Central, stated that Toolbar PageRank is useless. It gets updated 3-4 times a year, and to quote the man himself: “Changes in Toolbar PageRank will not change anything with your site’s crawling, indexing, or ranking…”
Technology
- SEO Roundtable has pointed out that Google Webmaster tools has been updated with two new reports: top page queries and URL redirects.
- Six Revisions has a Comprehensive Guide to CSS Resets, which talks about why you should use them, the various resets available, and how they differ.
Web Analytics
- Tek3D has a great post for GA newbies, explaining why Google turns up as both organic and a referrer source in your reports. This is, of course, because there’s a lot more to google than just organic search results, and when visitors come in from other Google-related sources (eg. Google Reader), they count as referred traffic. What I hadn’t realized, however, is that Google Image Search counts as referrer traffic, and not organic. Perhaps some one could explain, for me, why?
- Ever wanted to track ID anchored links (you know, https://site.com/index.html#1)? Search Engine People explain that you can with a bit of javascript.
User Experience
- Badscience has a great article on the illusion of control, and how we can convince people that they can influence the outcomes of otherwise random events, with some minor nudging.
- And to balance out the illusion of choice, psyblog has the illusion of truth.
Miscellaneous links of the week:
- Silicon.com reports that Google is seeking to produce “search without search”, second guessing what you’re going to look for before you look for it. I wonder how quickly it’ll start predicting that I want to look up Glee or Big Brother, and then I’ll disable it…
- Help Net Security has a pretty great run down of “hacktivism”, the Operation Payback DoS attacks, and the technology behind this all.
