And what could be the reason for the upcoming change?  Unfortunately,  no specific details were divulged yet from the email sent to ad agencies. Facebook just wanted to give them advance notices as this might affect their advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy. This is particularly so since Facebook is recommending that ad agencies start using the phrase – “Find us on Facebook”  or “Like us on Facebook” instead of  the current “Became a fan.”

In addition, the email also explained that the new “Like” button will be different from the current “Like” button that Facebook users click whenever they like particular updates of their friends.

Facebook believes that by changing the “Become a Fan” button to “Like”  will increase engagement between consumers and brands as it offers a simple, consistent way for Facebook users to connect with the things they are interested in. Facebook did some research and found out the users are more likely to “Like” something instead of becoming a fan.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Facebook to Change “Become a Fan” Button to “Like” on Fan Pages

There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ – it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge – all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).

Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.

Step 1 – Download the internal links

Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:

Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":

This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note – for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).

Step 2 – Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics

This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics – go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.

Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).

Step 3 – Put both sets of data in excel

Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel – I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:

Step 4 – Vlookup ftw

Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:

Note – that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.

Step 5 – Categorise your urls

Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:

If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.

Step 6 – Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness

Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:

It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:

And:

Step 7 – Combine the two pivots

Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:

Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.

Conclusions

25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic

So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight – afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.

Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic – Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

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CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

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Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for Wordpress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review.

Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors – March 2010

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After a couple months of using it, it started to play up, not connecting to the network and such like. Usually a reset would fix this.

About 9 months on and the box now refuses to connect to the network and won’t even reset. Before contacting Sling Media for support, I take a look around online and found forums full of people with the same problem. A hardware issue that means replacing the unit. Sigh, not ideal. After leaving it plugged in (not working) for a few weeks, I came back and now no lights come on. The unit is dead.

I call up Sling support but am told that they can’t help me until I register the product online. Why they can’t do it over the phone I don’t know, not a great start. After registering online, I call back and am advised that the product only has a support/warranty period of 90 days. I’ve never bought an electrical product before that didn’t have at least a 1 year warranty! If I want any support now, I need to pay 29.99. Thing is, It’s quite clearly a hardware fault so even if I pay this rip off charge, I won’t get anywhere unless they agree to replace the unit.

If possible, buy an alternative to the Slingbox or other Slingmedia products. Their support is practically non-existent and based on the number of people complaining about the same hardware issues, there’s obviously common faults. If there support had actually made any kind of attempt to help then I’d have considered buying another one, even with its faults. But now there’s no chance I’ll pay out more cash for any Slingmedia product.

This will only last for a while until Megaupload changes their site so take advantage.
Just note this is not a real premium account and you can only download one file at a time (even though you get the premium speed and do not have to wait).

For example, if this is your download link:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HN0L1QBM

Just add “mgr_dl.php” after the “.com/” so the new link becomes:

http://www.megaupload.com/mgr_dl.php?d=HN0L1QBM

No captcha, No countdown, Full speed.

Try it on these links or add “mgr_dl.php” to any link… it works perfectly for me!

In this post I am going to use the term linkwheel.  I don’t know who came up with that term first.  I think I first saw it on some marketing literature from lemonarian.  In that context, linkwheeling is a specific formula for linking between particular hosts and a money page, to create some sort of circle of authority, aka “How To Rank #1 in Google in 30 Minutes”.  Marketing spin.  I will use the term linkwheel generically to describe any non-reciprocal interlinking between parasites.

What are parasites?  Any host which allows us to register a profile, create a blog, post to a blog, comment, start a thread, respond to a thread, share an article etc.  Examples of parasites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Ezine Articles, Tumblr, Blogger, Pligg sites, Wordpress MU hosts, and so on.  Parasites are different from our own sites where we control the hosting, the code, the domain, and have editorial control over all content.

Simply, any site we don’t own which lets us add our links and content. We can linkwheel our own sites but that is outside the scope of this blog post.

One of the questions I get asked most often by people using Link Farm Evolution is,

“How should I setup or pattern my links?”

The following is a simple pyramid link structure for Link Farm Evolution.

Click the image to see the full pyramid structure

Let’s break it down as it should be constructed.

First, we build from the top down, primarily for efficiency.  Whenever possible, finish what you start, then move on.  It is very hard to scale when we leave unfinished business in our wake.  This requires being organized with content, keywords, tags and anchors in advance.

Second, I think it is important to parasite on a trusted host or in a trusted network.  This means that the link to your money page comes from a decent source, and that all less valuable mass linking you do is laundered through the parasite rather than pointing directly to your site.  This level can be a linkwheel or single trusted parasite host.

Wetpaint, Webgarden, Weebly, Vox, Wordpress, Multiply, xFruits, Virb etc. can all be used as trusted parasites for this level.  There are many, many more such parasites.

Third, your Link Farm Evolution WPMU blogs.  In some cases, you can linkwheel these via the blogroll, but I have been really down on mass interlinking for the last half year.  If you link everything too tight, it is easy to spot your network, and stupidly easy for the SEs to wipe it out.  The power of WPMU is having so many different hosts, templates and ip addresses in your backlink profile.  That provides a lot of diversity and differentiation.  It also makes your backlink profile look more natural.

Fourth, Pligg stories.  In my diagram, they are only linking to the WPMU blogs.  You can also story your parasite(s).

Fifth, Pligg comments.  Link up out of Pligg to WPMU and your trusted host.

It is as simple as that.

Where do you start?

KISS.  Start very simple and small.  A money page, a single level one parasite, and then follow the chart.   The ratios on the chart aren’t fussy, but it’s not a bad place to start.  Understand how to build a small pyramid, adjust it to your expectations and results, and refine your approach.

How do you scale?

Build one pyramid to your money page, then build another, and another.

Click on the image to see the full pyramid mininet.

Why not just build huge pyramids?

By building smaller networks, we don’t get lost pursuing projects that don’t have a clearly defined end.  We can measure, monitor and evaluate a smaller network, or series of smaller networks much more easily than a big lump of hundreds and hundreds of links.

Summary

Building these one way link pyramids give us structure, control, easy maintenance and fast deployment.  Because they are compartmentalized, we can lose one, and replicate it quickly again, we can double up on the same titles and anchors to push harder for a particular ranking.  Competitors will have trouble seeing the scope of our link power by passing it through tiers and maintaining discrete networks will keep them from being able to map out our approach easily.

Post your questions in the comments if you have any, and I will follow up with another post to answer them to the best of my ability.

Notes in the margin

Titles are important.  Your blog titles (blog names) should be less than 15 characters if possible.  Anything longer makes for messy urls.

coloradolawyer.blogsite.com
blogsite.com/coloradolawyer

instead of

denvercoloradodrinkanddrivelawyer.blogsite.com
blogsite.com/denvercoloradodrinkanddrivelawyer

Pligg story and blog post titles should probably be under 50 characters.  I shoot for 40, but you might be able to cheat all of the way to 60.  Smart titles look better in the SERPs, they have a higher keyword density, they match more long tail searches, they attract organic clicks, and they look natural which is great for camouflage.  If your content is absolute dross, at least make your titles decent to give yourself a fighting chance.

Titles and short copy can be scraped from PPC ads

Know your action words!  Get, find, buy, now, review, purchase, order, order online, cheap, discount, sale etc.

If you are short on inspiration for titles, look at Google’s Sponsored Listings on the SERPs.  I borrow PPC ad copy all of the time.

Quality matters.  Quality content and links will last longer and perform better.  Link Farm Evolution is automation.  It mass produces links and completes registrations.  So the question always is, how do you balance one against the other.  No one can answer that for you.  It is different for every niche and keyword and search engine.  The trick is to get out there and start building links, start building these supports to raise your money pages higher in the SERPs and attract more organic traffic.  The discovery process differentiates what you are doing from what your competitors are doing.  That marginal advantage helps you rank high and make money while others rank low and make little.

The magic in the formula is your experience and creativity.

This is a guest post by guerilla. His new project is Web Automation Lab.

The new health insurance bill that just passed forces a fine of up to $700 per year if you don’t have insurance.

It also states the insurance companies cannot decline coverage for pre-existing conditions.

So: no need to buy insurance. Just pay that fine every year. Pay out of pocket for your minor medical needs every year. Then if you get sick or get into an accident where you need insurance, you buy it on the day you get sick: they can’t turn you down.

It’s like buying fire insurance the day after you house burns down.

All you suckers who are actually paying for insurance before you need it (you know, the way insurance is suppose to work) will be in effect paying my catastrophic risk premium.

Great law there: because the problem with health insurance was that it was too affordable.