Google on SEO, WebP, and dark patterns – The Monday Oct 4th Roundup

It’s October again. Seems like only last week I was complaining about September. This week The Social Network opened up (that’s the Facebook movie) and Lawrence Lessig says it’s Evil. Can’t wait to see that on its poster: “wonderful entertainment. But its message is actually kind of Evil” – Lawrence Lessig

This week we’ve got a host of stories from Google’s own guide to SEO, the release of WebP, dark patterns, and more.

• We start the week with something surprising and baffling: Google has released their own guide to SEO.
• Next up SEO Sage (I’d never heard of them before) has released a post on using Google Insights for keyword research.

• Google released WebP last week. This alternative to jpeg uses predictive coding to predict values in a block, producing smaller file sizes at the same quality.
• SEO by the Sea, this week, took a look at a new Google patent that would place links to Google Maps into webpages with address information. I am not sure how this would work, but it sounds awfully invasive.

• Kaushik recommends giving your boss/client less data. No, seriously. Its not a bad idea either, since what he’s actually recommending is that we specify our data, instead of just throwing meaningless data out. In other words, like how one might edit a sentence in order to get to the point, he says that we should edit our data.
• More google: this time using exclusionary filters in GA to work out where traffic is coming from. What I find odd about this, though, is the use of advanced segments. In this case wouldn’t it just be easier to use filters?

• Elasticpath is a proponent of one of my favourite usability best-practices: reducing the length of sign up forms. In this case they recommend  placing your EULA in the form and then have a button that says “I read and accept” instead of a required checkbox. Not sure how this would work with the likes of, say, the 50+ page apple EULA’s, but for those of us who have a less mind-numbing legal department…
• 90% of Everything looked at Goodreads.com last week, analyzing how they use the ‘friend spam’ dark pattern. A nice little lesson on how companies often use design patterns for somewhat nefarious ends.

• PSKL has released a paper on iPhone application privacy issues stemming from the transmission of a unique device identifier (UDID) from each device to the application developer. They found that 68% of free applications on the top App Store lists were transmitting identifiers back to their developers.
• ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter is now selling promoted tweets. For $100,000 you too can buy the top spot on Twitters search results page, and more. The idea is to allow brands to associate themselves with twitter trends.