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
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, http://site.com/index.html#1)? Search Engine People explain that you can with a bit of javascript.
User Experience
Miscellaneous links of the week: