Mobile ads drain your smartphone battery life

Whereas many blogs have been laying the focus on Free Apps that would be draining your smartphone battery life, the real culprit are the ads. Recent tests have shown that those the ads in those free apps spend more energy than actually running the app itself. Which is a major problem, not for the app builders but for the mobile ad agencies such as Google, to name just the most important one.

I for one will mostly buy apps, just because I want the full monty not just the freebie part of an app. If you like an app, why stick to a limited version anyhow. And for the cost you shouldn’t bother either, most of the time you only have to pay not even a dollar/euro to get the full package.

But this aside, what is actually draining the battery life? A research team at Purdue University has found that the energy used to produce those ads can account for as much as three-fourths of the total energy used to run the apps. Note that the survey (hosted on the Microsoft Research servers – let’s hope this did not influence their results) only counts for none-iPhone smartphones, but you can be pretty certain that the same applies there as well. The energy consumed goes into serving up ads or tracking and uploading user data. The 3G connection that downloads the ad stays open for around 10 seconds, even if it’s finished downloading. The Purdue University calls this the ‘tail energy’ and it consumes another 28 per cent of the app’s energy.

So who is to blame? According to the research team the error should be found in inefficiencies in the third-party code that developers use to generate profit on free apps. In other words, the Googles of this world criple your smartphone battery life because of inept coding.

You would have thought that a party like Google would have enough engineers around to take care of this problem, but so far, nothing seems to be moving there.

First this though, as far as SEO goes, the Google Plus profile pages no longer have PR and Google Plus has turned off the dofollow links from their comments (just like it did on YouTube). Why Google exactly changed it’s policy, we’ll never know. My guess is that Google Plus was using this very dodgy tactic to attract webmasters to help it compete with Facebook. Like I said, very dodgy way of trying to get your social solution used.

Google Plus (G+) is a waste of SEO-time - heading for the deadpool ?

What still helps is getting G+ ‘likes’ because Google is using these into their search engine query results. Or at least they want to use it because there is little to no adoption of G+ buttons on sites and if used they show little to no interaction movement with internet users. And that lack of human interest in Google Plus and that G+ button is a MAJOR problem for Google.

Sure, certain researchers (like U.S. analyst Paul Allen) say that Google’s social networking site will have more than 400 million registered users by the end of 2012. But surely, Allen is confusing ‘users’ with ‘members’. A ‘user’ would indicate that he or she actually ‘uses’ the services. Hardly anyone is actually ‘using’ it as such, reducing every profile to just a membership and that’s it.

Continue reading “Google Plus (G+) is a waste of SEO-time – heading for the deadpool ?” »

Don't push your readers into 'liking' you this way

Some websites do whatever they can to make you like them on Facebook. Even if it means destroying the readability of the website itself.

Here’s an example which I found on the Canadian website, immigrer.com. When you visit the website you get a Facebook like pop up in an overlayer which you cannot click out. The only way to pass this hurdle is by liking the page OR by waiting – you won’t believe it – 30 seconds! Note that the screenshot shows 20 seconds because I first couldn’t believe this was actually happening.

‘Luckily’ enough, the whole thing is capped per browser session, but as a negative user experience it can really count.

30 seconds is an eternity if you are browsing the web – and it strikes me as odd that Google ranks this website constantly at the number 1 spot for various keyword researches. Google is always full of the ‘experience’ on a website, but this looks like a very bad experience. On top I’d like to see the bounce rate, which must be enormous.

On the whole it displays a desperate attempt to get people to connect to a page on Facebook. Is it effective? I doubt it. The people who click on the like button will be annoyed that they have to do it and won’t be your most loyal fans.

A perfect example of how not to use social media even when technically everything is possible.

Does a Google sandbox exist for new sites? If your SEO-guy is an amateur yes

Over the past 10 years, I have have talked to many SEO companies, checking out if they had any new insights. Most of the times, if not all always, they talked about the Google Sandbox when it came to launching new websites. That sandbox would make it impossible for your site to be indexed quickly.

Weird, since I started with my first site in 1997 I have never had any problem getting sites indexed, and usually within 24 hours after launching them.

Don’t get me wrong, that sandbox does exist, but it doesn’t have to. Indeed, new sites, no matter how well optimized, will not rank high on Google (it’s a different story on MSN and Yahoo where they are rather quickly indexed) and will often not get indexed for months. Some SEO-people claim that Google can keep your site in limbo for 6 to 8 months. If you planned a quick-win online, that isn’t particularly encouraging, is it?

So why did this never happen to me? If you take Search Engine Optimization seriously, you will always have pretty ‘good ranking link domains’ (not link farms mind you) at hand, which you own and curate. With good ranking link domains I mean proper well visited, indexed websites that act as a gateway for Google to check out new links and domains via proper syntaxes and content. Problem is, lots of SEO-people are either juniors working for a bigger company (and often only capable of telling you what the books thought them) or freelance people with little or no own properties online from where they can ‘push’ an indexation.

The result of this : you get forced to start buying links in order to push Google to index your website. In other words, you’re already doing something wrong (in the eyes of Google) before you started. Of course, don’t believe Google is God, their ‘don’t do evil’ mantra vanished from their websites a long time ago. And if you think you should screw them by buying links, by all means do. But, that should not be your decision to make if your SEO partner has done a proper job.

My advice : check out a new SEO-partner, ask him/her for sites he/she (or her company) own and run themselves. Are these sites well indexed, well visited ? If your SEO-partner-to-be has no own websites that can give you a nice introduction link, you should start wondering how he/she will get your website up and running in no time without buying links. You should also start wondering if that SEO-partner is capable of helping you…at all.

Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?

Many SEO gurus have wondered whether social media links are taken into account by search engines AND if they can increase your search rankings. Well, too bad if you never bothered too much about social media when being an SEO professional, because the Googles and Bings of this world do take them into account and they can increase your search rankings.

That’s a B.I.G. B.O.M.B. drop, for many.

On the whole, search engines such as Google and Bing consider social media links to be very interesting indications as to whether a link should be given some extra (social) value or not (aka ‘link juice’). That they are being considered is theoretically not really logical – I agree – since most, if not all, social media links are ‘not followed’. However, from a semantic side it would make no sense taking that specific ‘rel’ into consideration when evaluating links which are (re)tweeted or shared.

Especially in the case of Twitter, you can expect its firehoze to affect real time (news) search results. It’s still unclear how Google does this since they no longer have a deal with Twitter to tap into their tweet firehoze, but the fact is that they do use Twitter in their search rankings. As far as sharing links on Facebook and retweeting links on Twitter, there will be link juice passed on if there is a lot of sharing and retweeting happening. And that is a massive change for many in the SEO industry who up until now contented themselves with onsite and off site SEO/linkbuilding.

Continue reading “Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?” »

Here’s a question which was asked to Google’s Matt Cutts in August of last year. It’s an SEO question – or rather an SEO suggestion – that I have heard a lot in the past years but which basically makes no sense practically if Google knows what it does, and Google often does.

“If we add more than one link from page A to page B, do we pass more PageRank juice and additional anchor text info? (Also can you tell us if links from A to A count?)”

Matt Cutts was a bit vague in his answer on the first part (on the second as well actually) as you can see in the video below. Notice also the words ‘original formulation‘, ‘original pagerank‘ which are used in his explanation.

Continue reading “Do multiple links from page A to page B increase pagerank ?” »

Several major UK entertainment industry groups have accused Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content. The groups involved include the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Premier League, the Publishers Association and a TV/film trade group called the Pact.

And they have a very valid point. On September 26, 2011 for instance, the BPI made test searches on Google for the name of each of the UK’s top 20 singles and albums, followed in each case by the word ‘mp3′. On average, 16 of the first 20 Google results for charts singles and 15 of the top 20 search results for chart albums linked to known illegal sites. You could say it’s a matter of smart SEO from the side of the illegal websites, but that’s not the complete story as Google still offers results for combinations that can only lead to illegal sites (Apple still doesn’t use ‘torrent’ as far as we know, nor does Amazon).

Continue reading “Google and Bing caught in the act of directing users to illegal content in 80% of the cases” »

Things are not looking splendid for Google+. The network is, despite the (forced) growth of users, bleeding in activity.  Except for a few hardcore anti-facebookers, nobody is actively using the service, and you can hardly build a community on that lot… Add to that a continuous outage problem: the very unresponsive share field when you actually try to share links, trouble finding the link’s meta data, disappearing profiles, etc…

You would almost believe that Google announced its G+ importance on SEO-level just to lure the SEO-people worldwide into posting on the network. Not that it would have any effect if nobody is actually using the service after all.

In a desperate attempt to get the service known (that doesn’t mean being used, mind you!) Google has now used David Beckham in an advert to promote Google+. Watch the advert above… find the hotspot!

We aren’t convinced this will be the trigger for G+ to gain momentum amidst its silent user database though.

Rue des Bouchers, Brussels

Who would have thought that your online (visual) reputation can screw your offline reputation big time when you have a bar or restaurant? Wake up, because now that Google Street View is active, nothing is safe anymore. And that isn’t all that bad really. Since going to restaurants is something we really like doing at muztec, we also have gotten into the habit of checking out the ‘looks’ of the restaurants recommended to us before we go and visit them.

Imagine your picture on Google Street View giving a very lousy first impression of your business? That means an online reputation going to shreds, visually speaking. And since more and more people are doing what we do: checking out how things look like on the exterior BEFORE going in, you are probably also missing out on offline reputation credits.

Can you get your online reputation cleaned up?  Perhaps, but it depends very much on the location. Google’s Street View cars are driving all the time, but if your restaurant or bar is located in Belgium and looks like a real mess from the outside, then you’re in some trouble. As you can see on this list of locations where Google’s cars are driving around, none will be hitting Belgium again anytime soon.

New York has been updated a couple of times, but most non-US countries that have Street View still have the original images from the launch.

There’s always a good side to things, you can make sure that things look topnotch the next time a Google Street View car drives by. That clean-up of your establishment should start right now before you miss the 2nd round though.