FRUITION

Penguin 2.0 Google Update

Brad Anderson — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:35:27 +0000

Google’s latest offsite (link building) algorithm update, dubbed ‘Penguin 2.0,’ was released Thursday, 5/23/2013. If you have noticed any wild swings in traffic, and or your search engine rankings on Google, you may have been impacted.

This post is more to start a conversation than to be a definitive source of information about Penguin 2.0.

Most large, well-known brand sites are doing just fine, as usual. Some not-so great, spammy sites continue to rank well, unfortunately. These sites have a few things in common including:

They participate and host forums and include a link to the forum in the footer of their sites. The forums hosted are often labeled something like “Powered by XYZ.” This is further evidence that Google continues to favor sites that foster active conversations about their subject matter. By hosting a forum, the site positions itself as an authority on their topics.
Exact match anchor text is back in play. Exact match anchor text means that a link from one site to another is linked by a keyword phrase vs. the company name or the words ‘click here.’ Sites that have exact match anchor text links over 37% are ranking well.
Sites that have no site wide links are ranking well. The exception to this rule is the previously mentioned forum links in the footer.
Sites that link to two competing sites vs. one are ranking well. For instance, if a site A is a news site that links to two sources of information to illustrate a point, site B and C, it will rank better than if it just links to site B as a source. Varying the link text slightly by using a plural version of a word to differentiate is better.
Sites that have a limited number of inbound links from reputable websites are ranking well. For example, websites with links from very well-known sites like NYTimes.com or TechCrunch.com continue to rank well. Links from wikipedia seem to act as a safety measure to limit the severity of a Penguin 2 penalty.
There seems to be some cross over with sites that were previously impacted by Panda. For example Hubpages seems to have made a big gain back where as Tumblr got destroyed (or that could just be because Yahoo bought them).

Stay Tuned for Comparisons of Websites that were Negatively Impacted by Penguin vs Websites that were Positively Impacted

We will have more data to share as time goes by and the sample size of our data grows. Use our FREE Google Penalty Checker if you think you’ve been hit with a penalty.

Discuss your questions, comments and findings below.

Fruition Attending the World Trade Day 2013

Brad Anderson — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:41:34 +0000

Today, members of the Fruition team will be attending World Trade Day 2013 at Infinity Park in Glendale, Colorado, just a few miles away from our home office in Denver. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the conference, which features the most current innovations in technology for business through a series of speakers, open forums, and interactive demonstrations. The theme for 2013 is “Plug In to the Global Economy: How Technology Impacts Trade.” Representatives from major firms like Microsoft, Google, and IBM will be on hand to show off the latest and greatest alongside IT pacesetters from local Colorado businesses. We’re looking forward to learning from these global technology visionaries and applying new concepts to the already exceptional work we do for Fruition clients. If you’ll be at Infinity Park tomorrow, make sure to look for Kara and Jen at Fruition’s blue booth. We’ll be offering free access to our exclusive Google Penalty Checker tool, so come introduce yourself and find out if your website is “in the penalty box.” If you can’t make it to our booth, log into our Google Penalty Checker tool here and check back on the blog for a recap of what we learned at the show. A link to the show can be found here, with the day’s agenda outlined here.

SEO is like dating – Get a big sample and zero on what works

Brad Anderson — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:51:09 +0000

Recent advertising has suggested that through the use of analytics they can hone in on the individual interests of customers. Interestingly the very definition of analytics includes large data sets to allow for generalization of our results. This means that analytics is specifically designed to allow us to see the big trends that can be proven to be true of the whole population. Though the advertisement appeals to many potential customers and clients, it is misleading at best.

The reason we need large data sets is so we can establish a relationship between our sample and the population. The population in many internet contexts is every web user, or every website. Clearly, we cannot collect data on every one of them (though perhaps Google does). What we do instead is collect data on a large number of websites. We could look at a single website, but any results would be anecdotal at best. George Burns lived to the age of 99, yet smoked constantly for over seven decades. This one example would suggest that smoking extends your life. Obviously, Mr. Burns was either lucky or should have lived longer. If instead of one person we considered 10,000 people we would find that smokers live shorter lives than nonsmokers. A larger sample gives a better understanding of the true relationships in data.

In SEO we look at many web sites to take advantage of a large sample size. We look at sites on various subjects, usually our clients or their competitors. We look at web sites that we own and can modify in many ways to help us determine the effect of specific changes to sites. We also look at sites that are large and represent the ideal site in some way, like Ebay or Amazon. Our goal is to get a fuller picture of the way that Google ranks websites. Data from all of these various sites allow us to make inferences about the true form of Googles algorithm.

From a practical perspective, determining Googles website ranking method could be compared to trying to determine the characteristics one person looks for in a mate. There are many things that go into such a decision, but many of those characteristics are related. Intelligence, education, wealth etc… are all very interrelated. Though Google is large and very popular, it is one perspective, and therefore we present Google with many different websites and see how much Google likes them. We then make adjustments and see what kind of change occurs. For our relationship example, we parade many suitors in front of our target and see what she likes. Later we take the same guy and change his clothes; does our girl like him more or less? Now for the tricky part, Google changes things from time to time. Our girl has a different type every now and then. To counter these changes we are forced to continually track Google and watch for changes in ranking to sites which have not changed. Though no computer program can really determine human likes and dislikes, enough data can allow us to get close.

The key weakness of our analogy comparing mating preferences to Googles algorithm is that unlike relationship stuff, the Google algorithm is by necessity quantifiable. Because the Google algorithm is designed to let a computer simulate human preference we can similarly design a program to interpret the algorithm. We are not really looking for what makes a good website. Rather our goal is to determine what Google thinks makes a good website. This is a difficult, but possible task.

Responsive Websites – Build for Mobile First

Brad Anderson — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:01:33 +0000

If you’ve ever tried visiting a website on your smart phone or tablet that wasn’t optimized for mobile use, you know how frustrating the experience can be. Website elements like navigation, hover-triggered features, sliders, flash script, and small buttons can quickly deter mobile users from spending time on your website. An alarming numbers of website users are now viewing websites on their smart phones and tablets, especially when they’re searching for quick information like hours of operation, business location, services, directory information, and more. Also, if you’re running any ads through social media websites or Google AdWords, those ads seen on mobile devices will direct your users to your poorly-optimized website and will affect your ad conversions and waste your ad budget. Some businesses will hire agencies to create a completely different website just for mobile, but this can quickly become expensive, time consuming, and difficult to manage when updating. Unlike separate websites built just for mobile, a responsive website is one that changes proportion and layout depending on the user’s screen size to optimize the experience for whatever device they’re using. That means you only have one website to worry about, and your users get the exact same content no matter how they view your site.

Benefits of responsive website design include

Better Mobile SEO – Google highly recommends businesses invest in creating a responsive website versus a separate mobile website. This is better for your SEO because unlike separate mobile websites, you just have one URL and one set of HTML. This makes it easier for Google to crawl and index, and will also consolidate your mobile and PC traffic to boost your rankings even more. Also, since Google is focusing on “sharability” and user experience more and more, when one person shares a page from a responsive website the site looks good on a desktop or tablet as well. Faster Load Times – If you visit a responsive website on your mobile device, the website is optimized for the phone or tablet you’re on and will load as quickly as possible. That’s because website designers and programmers upload scaled-down versions of logos, menus, pictures, and more so your signal strength isn’t overwhelmed by large images and multimedia content that would only load fast with high internet bandwidth. Easier Maintenance of the Website – Because you only have one website that scaled up or down depending on the device, you only need to upload content and changes to one place. If you had a separate mobile site, you’d have to manually mirror all of your changes and content across multiple websites. This creates a bigger margin of error and a potential for your users to see wrong or outdated content. Responsive Works on All Devices – Responsive websites aren’t just for iPhones and iPads. They’re also optimized for use on Android devices, other brands of tablets, other brands of smart phones, and desktop computers. Having assurance that your website works no matter what device is used to view it makes the website easier to manage in less time. The longer you wait until optimizing your website for mobile use, the more customers and money you could be losing. As mobile device use continues to climb, mobile experience is becoming more and more essential to all businesses, and the ones that don’t optimize their websites for mobile traffic will lose money and visibility online. Fruition’s team of website experts can help convert your current site into a responsive one, or create a new responsive website from scratch! Contact us today to get started.

Thoughts from SES New York

Jonathan Mills — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:09:31 +0000

On March 25, 2013, four members of our Fruition team traveled to New York City to exhibit at the 2013 Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference. We spent three days immersed in everything SES had to offer— attending speaker sessions on current trends, catching up with current clients, meeting lots of new people, and showing off our Google Penalty checker! Here are the takeaways from the event:

Our Google Penalty Checker tool is awesome.

Prior to SES, our SEO experts developed the Google Penalty Checker, an accurate and user-friendly tool that requires only a few pieces of information and can instantly identify Google penalties that may have been imposed on your website. These penalties range in severity and affect your website’s search engine ranking. We debuted the Google Penalty Checker at SES, and business owners crowded around our booth to see if their websites were “in the penalty box.” Some were able to confirm suspicions of a Google penalty, and others were completely stunned to see that their sites had been hit, but everyone was surprised to find out that the tool is FREE! The feedback we received confirmed our hopes that our Google Penalty Checker would be a simple and effective way to provide insight into your website’s search engine performance. If you didn’t have a chance to see us at SES, you can check your website’s penalty status with our free Google Penalty Checker tool here.

Consumers are engaged on multiple screens at once.

Most of us can probably relate to this scenario: you’re watching a show on TV and something in the show (or a commercial) prompts you to pull out your laptop and visit a website. And while that’s going on, you answer a text message from a friend. Consumers are increasingly engaged in two or more screens at once, and cross-promotion across digital forms of advertising could be very effective for your business. Seamless integration between clever traditional advertising, a well-designed website, and an intuitive mobile or responsive website is the key to communicating with modern consumers who are plugged in across all mediums. A consistent message and a professional presentation of your product, service, or brand is your competitive advantage over others who are vying for your customers.

Social media is travelling full speed ahead.

If there was any doubt in your mind about social media’s staying power, it’s time to let it go. Social media is booming on all fronts, and it is imperative for business owners to increase their commitment to enhancing their social media presence. Twitter in particular is recognized as the “second screen” that users are utilizing. Social media platforms are quickly becoming the most direct outlets for relevant communication with current and potential customers, and search engines are placing more importance on social media profiles as they rank your website. There’s simply no excuse for having nonexistent or lackluster social media engagement, especially if your business engages in e-commerce. Social commerce—using social media to promote user contributions and interaction in online shopping—is the next movement for e-retailers to invest in as buyers increasingly depend on recommendations and input from peers in their purchase decisions.

Businesses need to implement a company-wide understanding of SEO efforts.

I attended a session that predicted the development of a Chief Keyword Officer role in enterprise-level corporations. This executive would be responsible for advocating SEO efforts within the company, training employees on how they can improve SEO in their roles, and assigning ownership of targeted keywords to specific departments for better execution. While your company may not be ready to fill the position of CKO in your office, the underlying concept still holds. it’s important to treat SEO as any other organizational initiative and make strides to ensure that there is a top-down understanding of what SEO is, what you’re doing to optimize your search engine rankings, and how each person in your company can help the cause.

The Fruition team is sharp.

Our experience at SES confirmed that Fruition has a team of rock stars. Conversations with managers of Bing & Google and other conference attendees reiterated that we’re on the right track with our SEO initiatives. SEO is constantly changing, and it was motivating to know that not only are we tracking the right components but that we’re actually staying ahead of the curve. Although it would be easy to show off our technical expertise with SEO jargon and complex terminology, we recognize that our clients are diverse—from IT professionals to marketing managers to CEOs. It’s our challenge to communicate with our audience in a way that makes sense. Our business development team co-hosted a “Meet the Experts” session during the show and counseled SES attendees on innovative and effective ways to generate leads. It’s our challenge to identify what’s important to our clients—generating leads, improving site traffic, increasing sales—and talk to them in terms of their own key performance indicators. We’re fortunate to have a well-rounded team of our own to make these connections with our clients. Overall, we had a very successful and enjoyable time at SES 2013 in NYC, and we’re looking forward to sending our team to more conferences to make personal connections in the industry. Continue to follow our website and blog for information on where you can find us in the future. Questions? Contact our team.

Why We Love Magento

Chance Carlin — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:23:01 +0000

A Powerful E-Commerce Platform for Businesses Large and Small

Magento is a fairly new e-commerce shopping cart that made its debut in 2008. Since then it has quickly become one of the leading e-commerce platforms used on the web today. Magento offers two paid versions, MagentoGo for small businesses and Magento Enterprise Edition for larger corporations. Magento also offers a free and open source version called Magento Community Edition. We’ve found the Community Edition extremely adaptable and able to meet the needs of the majority of our customers who are looking to upgrade or create a new online retail shop. Because it is open-source, many great extensions have been created to extend the functionality of the Magento Community Edition. However, without any upgrades, Magento still offers an impressive list of features out of the box.

Base features Magento offers without any customization:

Payment Gateways - A group of pre-installed payment gateways are included in a fresh Magento install, including Zero Subtotal, Authroize.net, Google Checkout and PayPal. Additional gateways are supported through 3rd party extensions or can be custom coded if needed.
Shipping – Magento is built with USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL shipping calculators that allow store owners to always offer up-to-date weight based shipping prices for customers at checkout. Store owners can also set up table based shipping rates dependent on weight, price or quantity.
Gift Cards and Coupons – Magento has built in functionality for both of these. You can easily assign gift cards or coupon codes in a number of different ways to increase conversions.
Catalog Rules Discounts – Magento has the ability to set pricing rules based on specific product attributes or prices. An example would be running a special on any item in your store over $150. This can be created as a special that requires the customer to have a unique coupon code or it can be applied to any product from the store’s catalog that fits the criteria. You have the ability to schedule these specials to begin or end on a set date and time or they can run indefinitely. Magento makes it easy to save specials and reuse them at any time in the future.
Cart Rules Discounts – These discounts are similar to catalog rules, but apply to specific details of a customer’s shopping cart. For example, if a customer spends over $300 they get a set percentage or fixed price discount, or maybe free shipping. You have the ability to start and end these specials at a set date and time and can save specials and reuse them at another time.
Step one for creating a new cart rule in Magento. Pick a name, date and group the rule effects.

Step two for creating a new cart rule in Magento. Choose the conditions that need to be met for your customer to receive their discount.

Step three for creating a new cart rule in Magento. Define the discount that will apply to the customer if their cart meets the requirements.

Step four for creating a new cart rule in Magento. Create labels that you and your customers will see so you can keep track of how many discounts have been used.
Customer Groups – Magento allows for specific customer groups to be created, for example: Retail, Wholesale and Distributor. Each group can have their own pricing, benefits and tax class. You can also run promotions that target specific customer groups as well.
Multi-Store Setup – Magento is very scalable. With the community edition of Magento you have the ability to run multiple stores on one Magento installation and you can share products between the different stores while assigning different prices, languages, product descriptions, product names and many other attributes for each store view.
Cross Sells / Up Sells – By tagging products and associating them with other products Magento allows store owners to create blocks throughout the site that will allow you to market additional products that customers might also be interested in or that complement/add to products already in their cart.
Layered and Filtered Navigation – Magento has a very powerful layered navigation system. The categorization of products and all the attributes assigned to products automatically become ways in which we can build navigation and also allow customers to fine tune their searches.
Grouped and Bundled Products – Magento allows for complex grouped and bundled products.
- Grouped products allow you to display more than one product on a product page. Customers can add quantities of each available item to their cart on a single page. Think of building your own living room set: a full set would include a couch, a loveseat, an ottoman, two end tables and a coffee table; with bundled a bundled customers can pick and choose which items they would like to add to their set.
- Bundled products are a bit more complex. A bundled product acts as its own SKU, or its own individual product. Like a custom computer purchase, you can require certain pieces of the overall bundle, and also give options for components, i.e. Hard Drive: 500 Gig or 1TB, Processor i5 or i7, etc. All these options come together to make your single SKU “awesome-comp-005” product.
SEO – Magento offers some great tools to help with SEO and analytics. You can easily create custom rules for page titles and pull special descriptions from products that serve as page descriptions. Landing pages and category pages are all set up to be SEO ready as well. Magento also utilizes canonical URLs so Google’s indexing is more keyword specific. There are a number of free and paid SEO extensions that can help make all of this even more robust.
Multiple Languages – Magento also offers multi-language support. For popular languages, the language packages will translate close to 100% of your Magento labels making it easier to expand your e-commerce sales to a broader community.
Email Marketing Integration – Magento offers several extensions that allow you to integrate your store contacts with email marketing campaigns through third parties. Out of the box, Magento works with MailChimp, a very popular email marketing service provider.

Here are a few basic extensions we install on most Magento builds for added functionality:

Help Desk - We like to include a help desk extension that makes it easier for your customers to contact customer service. This extension allows your customers to easily create tickets through their account dashboard and it tracks all correspondence, even via email, in a simple back-end interface. Your customer service team can set up custom ticket statuses and create departments which will make managing customer inquiries much simpler than managing them through emails or phone calls.
Abandoned Cart Re-Marketing – Abandoned carts can often be recovered with a follow up email from the store. The extension we like to use can attach coupons to these emails to further help your customer make the decision to purchase. This extension can also be used to send emails for a variety of other reasons: birthdays, date since purchase, date since customer login, a customer group change… etc.
WordPress Blog Integration – Integrating a blog into Magento is pretty simple. We take a new installation of WordPress and it automatically gets themed exactly like your Magento site. You have the blogging power of WordPress inside your Magento e-commerce site. You can even one-click login to your blog through the Magento admin.
Data Feed Manager – This extension is an essential. With a data feed manager, you have the ability to have your catalog listed on Amazon, Google Shopping, EBay, Shopping.com, Bing Shopping, Yahoo! Shopping and more. After making sure your feed is 100% optimized it will run automatically and can be set to add or remove items based on a number of different rules. As your prices change and you cycle through inventory, your feed will always stay up to date with your current store catalog.
Advanced Gift Cards – Selling, tracking and generating gift cards online is more complicated than it sounds. This extension makes them easy to manage and is a great add on to Magento’s native gift card functionality.

With all these features, it’s easy to see why Magento has quickly climbed the ladder to compete with other leaders in e-commerce technology. Without much customization Magento offers a strong set of tools that will help take your online store to the next level. Fruition can help you make your move to Magento by assisting in planning your catalog architecture, creating a cutting edge design, optimizing your products and pages for SEO and developing an e-commerce site that will keep you and your customers happy as your store continues to grow. Contact us today for a free consultation!

Show Fruition Your Negative SEO Examples

Brad Anderson — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:39:08 +0000

Introduction – Negative SEO Examples Project

Fruition is looking for examples of a negative SEO campaign that was “successful” at hurting a website’s Google rankings. We know of several attempts that were unsuccessful but none that actually hurt a real website. From the submissions that we receive, we will evaluate each to determine if there is the potential for taking legal action to uncover who launched the negative SEO attack(s) against your website. If we find out who did, we will be publishing that information in a well known magazine.

What will happen?

If we find a good candidate we will take the initial legal steps which include filing a complaint to track down who messed with your website. There are no guarantees that we will find out who did it or that we will be successful in removing the Google penalty (if it hasn’t been removed already). If you are unsure if you have a Google penalty then you can check out Fruition’s Google Penalty Checker Tool that is free.

Why are we doing this?

First, we love data. Getting at data that isn’t publicly accessible is fascinating. The power of a subpoena helps get this data! Second, we haven’t see a negative SEO action be successful (no this isn’t an invite to destroy our site with bad links; we know you can do it, please don’t). Third, we have a close association with an IP law firm that is going to work with Fruition’s president (who is an attorney by trade) so the costs will be minimized for us.

What you could get out of this?

You could get Fruition’s team of SEO experts and an outside legal team to work on your penalty at NO cost to try and determine who attempted to hurt your website. Again, there are no guarantees that we will be successful.

What are some signs that you were hit by negative SEO?

Bad Backlinks. An insane quantity of backlinks with exact match anchor text or really bad anchor text such as words associated with things that catholic priest are known to do. Use Google.com/webmastertools to see these links. You can also use majesticseo.com or ahrefs.com to better see the data. You may also find that your website is ranking for bad keywords that you don’t want to rank for. A note of caution is needed here because this could also mean that your website was hacked.
Blatant Plagiarism. Take a snippet of content from your site and search for it in Google. If you see it on thousands of pages it’s possible that people were coping the content to make your site look like it is a scraper.
Other things that we aren’t going to mention. There are several other tricks that we have seen attempted to negatively impact a website’s rankings. We are not going to list those here because we have not seen them widely discussed. There is no reason to spread the fire.

Who we won’t work with?

We won’t take on a case where you spammed the hell out of your own site, got penalized by Google, and now can’t get the penalty removed. We will be asking you to sign a document that affirms that your negative seo wasn’t in fact just your own SEO that got out of hand. If we later find out that you did it you’ll be responsible for the legals bills.

Conclusion and Action Items

If you think your website was hurt by negative SEO let us know about it below. We will examine every website. If it looks like a good candidate for working out the negative SEO we will contact you to discuss the next steps.

Don’t “Enhance” AdWords Until You Read This!

Todd Atkins — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:58:18 +0000

By Todd Atkins Recently, Google released information about a big upcoming Google Adwords update that will be launched around June 2013. The update will affect how Google Adwords will segment mobile campaigns and different types of advertisements targeted at users with mobile devices. Google’s new update will allow advertisers to target mobile and tablet users more ‘efficiently’ with ads based on context – like location, device type, and time of the day in a single campaign.

Optimizing for Mobile Users

Google says that this update is due to the recognition that users are becoming increasingly more mobile, and using a variety of devices to find information and view ads. No argument there. Google is trying to optimize the AdWords experience to account for this type of user behavior, and allow advertisers to capitalize on the many ways internet users experience online ads. This update has three main parts:

Campaign and budget management. Advertisers with a local presence can increase bids based on searcher’s location or type of device.
Ads based on context. Advertisers can change ad content based on the type of mobile device.
New conversion types. This will add click-to-call and app download data from mobile devices into Adwords performance data.

Currently, this update is optional, but will become mandatory around June 2013. AdWords users can switch over to this new platform while it is still optional to test the new mobile-targeting features. These are all good features for some advertisers, and may be very useful for those who want a simplified approach to managing AdWords.

Enhancement? Think Again

Google’s update for mobile devices is well-intentioned, but unfortunately will ultimately do more harm than good for most power users. In almost every Adwords campaign I’ve worked with, mobile devices and tablets perform much worse than computers and laptops, and often times need to be shut off completely, or have bids reduced by 50%-80%. However, Google is now removing these options as a “simplification” and “enhancement”, when in reality it will likely increase costs for advertisers because Google is taking away both the ability to control bids at the keyword level for mobile and tablet traffic, and also the ability to control daily budgets for these devices. Currently, advertisers have the ability to assign separate budgets and keywords for mobile and tablet devices by breaking them out into separate campaigns. Yes, this makes the whole system more complicated, but the trade-off is a lot more flexibility and ability to optimize your campaign. Many businesses either have no need or desire to target mobile or tablet users, and/or the performance of these campaigns isn’t worth the budget and effort involved in running them. The ability to control and/or remove mobile and tablet traffic from a campaign and to assign unique budgets and bids for mobile and tablet devices is important to avoid wasting budget on this traffic which tends to under-perform regular computer and laptop traffic on a cost per conversion basis.

Enhancement for Google, Negative for You

Google’s Adwords update will make the following negative changes:

For mobile traffic – You will no longer be able to have mobile-specific campaigns nor the ability to control bids at the keyword level. However, you will be able to adjust bids up or down on a percentage basis (based on the bids you set for computers) at the entire campaign level.
Tablets will be combined with desktop and laptops, which means that you will not be able to have tablet-only campaigns, not be able to adjust bids for tablet traffic at all, and not be able to opt out from tablet traffic. This is especially bad because tablets statistically tend to perform even worse than mobile on a cost per conversion basis.

Paranoid? Maybe, but we speculate that this is a way for Google to force people to spend more money on AdWords budgets since it will be difficult or impossible to opt out or bid lower for lesser quality traffic. AdWords Express is like this as well. We highly recommend that advertisers should resist this change until Google forces them to switch in June.

What the AdWords Update Should Include

Don’t get me wrong, some of these new features can be really powerful to some, perhaps many, users. Google’s update does provide many valuable features to localized businesses that gain a lot of value from mobile and tablet traffic, however this does not reflect the majority of AdWords users and will ultimately negatively affect campaigns for most businesses. Google should edit their update to allow the ability to opt-out of mobile and tablet traffic, include the ability to bid for unique keywords for mobile and tablet devices, and include the ability to adjust budgets individually for mobile and tablet rather than including those devices in with other segments of traffic. (In other words, they should leave these existing features in the system as they are now and not take away control from advertisers and try to spin it as an “enhancement”.)

What Can You Do to Help?

The PPC and online marketing communities are buzzing with frustration about this change, and petitions are circulating to ask Google to rethink this update. Online marketing professionals are hoping that the uproar and petitioning will cause Google to wait on the release of this update to amend it to serve the majority of AdWords advertisers better, and rethink removing these important features that advertisers rely on. Please call Google directly at 866-2-Google and tell them not to take away your ability to manage mobile and tablet traffic, and then sign the AdWords Update petition on change.org here to send a message to Google that this update needs to be amended.

Adjusting for the new Google Plus cover photo size

Sara — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:59:38 +0000

Last week, Google Plus made a pretty striking change to the layout of profile pages for both individuals and company pages. The dimensions of the cover photo used to take up a pretty small amount of real estate on profile pages, at a long and narrow 940×180 pixels. The new cover photos? They’re huge. At 960×540 pixels, they are the largest cover photos on any of the major social networks – Facebook’s comes in at 851×315. In addition to the cover photo size, there are some other formatting changes that you should take a look at if your business is on Google Plus.

The profile photo is now displayed as a smaller, circular avatar. In status updates and interactions around Google Plus, the profile photo still appears as a square.
Page title, page +1s, and additional company/brand information (including the website and location/hours of operation if your page represents a local business) are transposed over the cover photo, as well.
The lower third of the cover photo has a dark gradient applied to make it easier to see the information that is now displayed over the lower part of the cover photo.
The map is no longer visible on the main “Posts” profile page – users must navigate to the “About” page to find it.
For local businesses, it is much easier for customers to figure out how to leave your business a review – the “Write a Review” button is visible on all navigation tabs within a profile.
Options to get directions, “star” the business, add photos or share the page are also available to users on all navigation tabs within a profile (if the page is a verified local business).

Though Google Plus recommends uploading photos that are 960×540 pixels, you are allowed to upload images that are at least 480×270 pixels. Also worth noting is that even if you upload an image that is at the recommended dimensions – 960×540 pixels or smaller at 72 ppi – these images can end up looking blurry or pixelated. We recommend uploading images that are 2120×1192 pixels if you have images or graphics large enough to work within those dimensions. The larger size will ensure that your new cover photo will look sharp and crisp, even on retina displays. We’ve created some Photoshop templates that you can use to create your new Google Plus cover photo, both in standard and high-res versions. Feel free to download them! Google Plus Cover Photo Template – Standard Google Plus Cover Photo Template – High-Resolution Have questions about profile setup, branding or imagery on Google Plus or other networks? Give Fruition a call – we have great social media and graphic design teams that can help your business make the most of social media marketing!

Cloudflare Outage

Brad Anderson — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:23:33 +0000

Sunday’s early morning wake-up call from Cloudflare certainly wasn’t fun. But before we get into any of that if you’re thinking about trying Cloudflare you should. It’s a fantastic service that is the future of front line website defense and it’s available now. For Fruition, the outage was first detected when our Pingdom alerts and PagerTime pages started beating us over the head at 3 am. Not getting any hardware alerts is a good thing. Those didn’t come but sometimes it all just blows up before the alerts get sent out. After doing some digging through the Splunk server it looked like everything was fine. A quick ssh into the server via my phone from my now disgruntled better half and a quick short key to show what’s running on the server and everything looked fine. Yet, several dozen client sites were still down. That meant crawling out of bed for the laptop. We’ve been through DNS outages before. Several years ago Ev1servers in Houston had an explosion that destroyed their DNS servers. That sucked for them because they had an explosion and an entire datacenter knocked out. That sucked for me because I was in Mexico at my best friends wedding sitting on the beach (that was before you had to get armored cars and a seal team to go to Mexico).

Cause of the Cloudflare Outage

So back to what caused the Cloudflare outage? Well, I wish I knew. Cloudflare has some short tweets about it and what looks like a very detailed blog post that you can see a snippet of on Google but their blog provider Posterous is also down. I can’t say I know anything about Posterous but if Cloudflare is using them they can’t be half bad? For our clients that were down Sunday morning we’re of course sorry and we’ll keep updating you via our regular channels and do a summary of Cloudflare’s problem when we know more. For those of you that are thinking about trying out Cloudflare do it. It’s great and you won’t regret it.