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Blog
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Best of the Week | Google Algorithm Update: Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages, and much more…
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Google Algorithm Update: Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages!
One of the most annoying search results will now be blocked by Google. We can all cheer a collective “hooray”!
What are Doorway pages? In short, they are web spam. Designed to game the system, these pages rank high in search results, click baiting the searcher to an irrelevant page or site. Google described examples of doorway pages on their blog for clarity:
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
- Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
- Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
Google has not officially announced a release date for the doorway page penalty algorithm update, but they did state they are “continually working on ways in which to minimize the impact of webspam on users”.
SEO Managers and/or Webmasters are advised to review the Google questionnaire to make sure your website does not qualify as a doorway page. Check them out below:
- Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
- Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
- Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
- Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
- Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
If you find yourself answering “yes” to one or more of these questions, take action before Google penalizes your website.
If you have any questions about doorway pages, Contact Position².
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Pinterest Launches A Shiney New Algorithm Called Pinnability
Pinterest is beginning to poise itself as a search engine, or what they call a “discovery engine”. Taking cues from Facebook, Pinterest is now serving up what they call a “home feed”. This feed is powered by Pinterest’s Smart Feed algorithm that was launched in 2014.
So what is Pinnability? It’s a collection of machine learning models that allows Pinterest to serve a smart feed on a Pinterest user’s homepage. Pins used to be in chronological order, but now it’s the job of Pinnability to order pins based on a relevance score, or more specifically, a personalized relevance score. Pinterest states that filtering by chronological order isn’t enough to help Pinterest users see pins they really want to see.
Pinterest has a Pinnability diagram on their blog to show the logic of this machine learning model.
Machine learning models have always played a significant role in the development of Pinterest. Pinnability is powered by smart feed, the technology that brings flexibility and control over the composition of the home feed. Pinnability and smart feed work together to estimate the probability of a Pinner interacting with a Pin, with pins receiving high relevance scores shown first. The personal relevance score includes all Pins that users follow as well as Pinterest’s ‘Picked for You‘ recommendations. The algorithm takes into account ‘training factors’ like Pin quality, historical popularity, authenticity, and relevance. The demographics and the activity levels of Pinners are carefully analysed and entered into the mix. And the result is a personal relevance score for each Pin. So in theory, pinner interaction improves because their feed is more interesting and useful due to the personalization.
Per Pinterest’s statement on the subject, “We continue to refine Pinnability and have released several improvements to-date. With each iteration, we’ve observed significant boosts in Pinner engagement, including an increase in the home feed repinner count by more than 20 percent. We’ve also observed significant gains in other metrics including total repins and clickthroughs.” Which means their accuracy of recommendation quality is still a work in progress.
For more information on Pinterest and social media marketing, Contact Position². We love giving free audits!
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74 Nambiar, Co-founder of Position2 wins Confederation of Indian Industry (Southern Region) – Emerging Entrepreneur Award – 2014
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has conferred its prestigious Emerging Entrepreneur Award on 74 Nambiar, Co-founder & MD Global Delivery of Position². Six emerging industrialists from across the southern states of India were awarded in recognition of their overall achievements.
The award was instituted by CII five years ago with the objective of encouraging entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Over 270 companies were part of the screening process and the criteria included parameters like number of years in business, revenue, growth and also looked at softer factors like uniqueness of the business model and social initiatives.
Reacting to the award, 74 said, “It’s a proud moment for me and the entire Position2 team. Such recognition always encourages companies like us who are part of the growing digital economy. I would like to thank CII, my family, friends, all my Position2 team members – past and present – clients and partners. We function in an ecosystem where we all help each other!”
About Position2
Position2 is a demand generation firm, which provides solutions in the area of content marketing, lead acquisition and marketing operations. The company’s single-point-of-access service provides clients with streamlined and integrated solutions for all online marketing needs including creative, pay-per-click campaigns, search, web development, media, marketing automation and web analytics.
Backed by Accel Partners, the company has two offices in India and the US with an impressive client base focused on Fortune 500 companies and SMB companies in B2B technology, consumer products and Internet industries.
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Best of the Week | Position2 jQuery Plugin for Form Validation, and much more…
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
Best of the Week Video
Watch this Whiteboard Friday video hosted by Rand Fishkin where he elucidates ways to write killer headlines and title tags for SEO, and beyond.White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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Position2 jQuery Plugin for Form Validation
Without form submissions, a primary tool for extracting useful data that you use to generate leads and expand your business offerings, your website visitors would simply come and go. But building effective form submissions with flawless form validation processes can be a real struggle for webmasters and even web designers. To build a validation form from scratch that can pass all the checks and be market ready you simply need to have extensive Java Scripting knowledge and experience. A JavaScript developer with three to four years’ experience needs one to two hours to program a complete jQuery code for a customized form validation.
That’s why Position2 has designed a simple plugin to help you achieve the same task in less than ten minutes. All that you need to know is simple HTML programming and you are good to go.
You can customize the form to your specific requirements:
- form field validations
- custom error messages and error handling
- custom data entry patterns
You can download the plugin here. It’s free. The documentation is available here.
We hope you save time and enjoy working with the jQuery plugin for form validations.
Contact us if you have any doubts/feedback regarding our plugin.
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Mobile World Congress 2015 – Mobile Advertising
For the first time the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which just wound up in Barcelona in early March, anointed mobile marketing and advertising as a standalone entity. Talks were given that highlighted the finest work in mobile advertising. And a lot of new trends and technologies that will have a major impact on the mobile landscape took center stage.
Mobile Marketer’s Takeaway
Some of the important points for the mobile marketer to consider:
- The rise of social media
- The inevitable fragmentation of social attention
- How cross-channel attribution demands more attention
- The emphasis on data-driven creativity
1. The Rise of Social Media
In a world where more people own cell phones than toothbrushes, most major social platforms have transitioned to the mobile platform. Mobile ads now account for 69% of advertising revenue for Facebook. Tools like Facebook Atlas emerge. It targets people across multiple devices to support people-based marketing campaigns. It’s a customer tracking tool that does not rely on cookies and finds a lot of use in mobile advertising. This is a radical shift that paves the way for a holistic mobile marketing experience.
2. The inevitable fragmentation of social attention
The breakneck speed at which the social landscape expands and proliferates has given rise to dedicated messaging apps. As a consequence, dark social (which is social sharing that can’t be tracked using web analytics, because sharers are sending content off the social platform via email or IM, for example), may account for as much as 70% of social sharing on the Internet today. This is a challenge Mobile marketers need to size up and understand. Truly knowing what users are talking on social platforms supports better targeting.
3. Cross-channel attribution
Cross-channel attribution uses advanced analytics to track various marketing touch points across channels. US adults have an average of three connected devices and they all offer crumbs of data from the channels. Consumers today easily switch between devices. They might browse and add a product to the shopping cart on a smartphone. When they switch to their desktop they expect the same shopping cart with all the history to be carried across, seamlessly.
It’s imperative that brands and companies ensure a fluid online journey that is commensurate with what the customer needs. That is the only way for digital marketers to aid conversions, establish customer satisfaction, and ascertain return visits.
4. Data Driven Creativity
Data-driven creativity meets programmatic buying to deliver a 360 degree customer experience. It’s the new world of the buying and selling of media in an automated, data-driven way.
It makes it possible to deliver personalized ad messaging on a massive scale, an experience that is in sync with the customer’s needs, thus ensuring a deeper brand engagement.
Share your thoughts on the just concluded Mobile World Congress 2015!
Contact Position² to deploy a ‘mobile first’ marketing strategy for your B2B brand now!
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Best of the Week | Optimize your Website for Complete Google Search, and much more…
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
From the Position² Blog This Week: Optimize your Website for Complete Google Search
Google is the de facto gateway to the Internet. It is thus incumbent on you to optimize your website for complete Google search like video, image, news, et al. Find out how you can achieve this for enhanced visibility in this insightful blog now.
Best of the Week Video
Watch this video to learn more about the most important performance statistics for your AdWords, and where to find them.Persona Based Lead Scoring: The Mystery and the Method Download this White Paper and learn: - Classify leads based on behavior and demographic details
- Develop a consistent methodology to proffer quality leads to sales
- Employ data integrity and tracking
- Deploy marketing automation to improve efficiency and cut costs.?
Download the complimentary persona Based Lead Scoring White Paper now
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Facebook Offers Digital Marketers More Data Insights
Facebook has recently introduced access to data that will provide insights on who is saying what about anything on Facebook…but keeping it all anonymous.
This new data mining service for marketers and advertisers is called Topic Data. Marketers will be able to scrape user posts for keywords and phrases so they can home in on their target audience. It’s important to note that marketers will not be able to target ads directly, but Topic Data means decision-grade data that will help marketers with their strategies and roadmaps.
Usability
Facebook is leveraging a platform to keep the data actionable, scalable and anonymous through a partnership with DataSift. Facebook is promising their advertisers that Topic Data will mean ‘actionable insights’, and DataSift appears to be the right choice claiming they enable companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from public social conversations. The partner has as their tagline that they, “Translate data into action with the privacy-first Human Data platform”.
Availability
Topic Data is in beta, so Facebook is only available to a limited number of UK and US DataSift clients. The data Facebook is making available is also limited. The roll out will expand after Facebook can determine that Topic Data is indeed useful to marketers. Hopefully later this year the beta program will be available to a wider audience. Position2 will keep you posted.
If you are interested in Facebook advertising, Contact Position². We manage and scale Facebook advertising for super-ambitious brands!
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Changing US smartphone dynamics: A by-the-numbers opportunity
A quick look at comScore’s Q4 data spells out a digital marketing fact of life: It’s no longer a “mobile too” world out there. It’s all about “mobile first”.
- United States smartphone penetration jumped to 76%
- 3% of total US population now owns a smartphone
- 84% of all US social media users access the platform via a mobile app or browser
This does not presage the end of the desktop or the laptop. But it does underline, with data, that users want access to the Internet anytime, anywhere, with any device – but primarily with a smartphone.
And of that Internet usage? A lot of Facebook time, followed by You Tube. And making a first time appearance to the Top 15 Smartphone Apps list: Pinterest.
What are people doing on their smartphones?
Social networking, watching videos, searching for information, messaging, accessing email are all top activities on the smartphone. This spells opportunity for digital marketers, and the platforms know it. Facebook has made advertising easier to its massive, lucrative audience thanks to the mobile app it recently released to manage your ads. Twitter, with a 23.6% share, has improved ad campaign tracking tools, giving you a new and better way to manage your Twitter ads.
Smartphone sales are going one way – Up
Of the 1 billion+ smartphones sold worldwide in 2014, Samsung lead the pack. Apple, on the other hand, cornered nearly 90% of the global smartphone profits.
Here is a breakdown by brand of worldwide smartphone sales in 2014:
As smartphone dynamics change so too must your digital marketing campaigns. Mobile centric is the way to go. It’s all in the numbers.
Contact Position² for all your media and advertising needs targeted towards your mobile customer!
