Articles Tagged with Social Media

How To Change Your Profile Pic On A Google+ Local Page

Published on

Plus sign imageChanging the profile pic on a Google+ (personal) profile is easy. Changing it on a Google+ Brand page is easy. But changing it on a Google+ Local page? I spent a good while trying to figure out how to do it, and seeing as a Google search on the topic yielded no helpful results (other than an article on Google+ Help, which wasn’t even the 1st result), I thought I’d blog about it.

It’s easy once you know (really easy), but what makes things confusing is the fact that your page may already have a profile pic – via Google Places. But if you actively start using the Google+ element of your Google Places/Google+ Local page (i.e. writing posts in the ‘Posts’ section), that section might have a default blue icon that Google shows when you don’t have an avatar…

So in other words, if you have a profile pic on the Google Places side of things (in the top section) of your listing, but not on the Google+ side of it (bottom half of the ‘Posts’ section, each time you submit a new post), then here’s the fix…

And nope, you can’t click the avatar in the top-right of the screen – that won’t work this time…

Google+ profile vs. Google+ Local screenshot
…Trust me, I tried.

Click to read more!

Should You Remove Bad Links? A Twitter & Google+ Debate

Published on

So this morning I woke up, opened Tweetbot on my mobile and found out that I’d received 29 @mentions from 3 people…

Earlier in the day yesterday, I left this reply to a tweet by @barriemoran about lifting penalties:

I’ve done a bit of manual action work myself (as Morgan Freeman can tell you!) and I always try to remove as many links as possible as part of the process. However I admire Leeds-based SEO agency Branded3 and @Tim_Grice‘s bold claim that “Branded3 [have] had over 60 manual penalty recoveries without removing a single link” (source). I threw @Branded_3 into the tweet as I was curious if they’d chip in with a response on the topic, which they did (in the form of Tim). Dozens of @mentions later…? Well…

Boxer image
* DING DING! * Ladies and gentlemen, in the red corner, we have Barrie and @ChrisLDyson, arguing that you should definitely try and remove links as part of the process. And in the blue corner (very apt, given their branding!), we have Tim on behalf of Branded3, suggesting that simply disavowing is enough and link removal isn’t necessary (and that they have 60+ success stories to prove it)…

Click to read more!

Why I Prefer A Full URL Slug

Published on

Slug!Recently I noticed a difference in the way that the URLs of my blog posts were being generated and presented. Some of the ‘gubbins’ words such as “the” and “a” (I believe articles is the correct grammatical term) would be taken out when I generated a draft, so for example, for a post called “Why I Prefer A Full URL Slug”, instead of the URL being /why-i-prefer-a-full-url-slug/, it would be /why-prefer-full-url-slug/.

I checked my plugins, immediately suspecting that it was a change made to the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast (which is awesome, by the way). I couldn’t find anything related to it in its settings, so I let it go, manually ‘beefing out’ the URL each time I drafted a new post. However, a few weeks later, I checked Yoast SEO looking for another feature and came across this…

Yoast Permalinks screenshot(Click to enlarge)

This feature of the plugin “helps you to create cleaner URLs by automatically removing the stopwords from them.”

In the words of the mighty Partridge: “A-HA!” Bingo. Unticked. Job done. All is well.

Here’s the thing though… It’s ticked as the default, suggesting that most people prefer it this way, and/or that it is the standard as far as SEO is concerned.

Always enjoying an opportunity to be controversial, I disagree!

Click to read more!

Why Sharing The Source Is So Important…

Published on

Please Donate sign imageA couple of weeks ago I published a rant, talking about how it bugged me when people on social media (usually Twitter) shared something without quoting/sharing the source, so it looked as though they were passing it off as their own creation or that they were the one to first find and share it (whether intentionally or unintentionally).

At the end of the day, a rant is a rant – it’s just a moan about a niggle. It’s just annoying.

However yesterday I saw an instance of it where a massive opportunity was lost, where a charity could have benefitted greatly. This is more than just annoying – it’s upsetting…

Last night my friend Ian Daniels (@surfpunkian) – who I had the pleasure of finally meeting IRL at last week’s BrightonSEO – retweeted a tweet by @AndrewGirdwood:

The link goes on to show a series of photos of a dog and elephant who are friends. Aww!

I was curious to learn more about the duo so I Googled “dog elephant friends” and ended up on YouTube. There’s actually a few different videos of different pairs dog and elephants who are friends (who knew!) but eventually I found this one:

Click to read more!

How Many Times Should You Tweet a Blog Post? Experts Weigh in…

Published on

To tweet or not to tweet (three times)…

A few days ago, I tweeted these two tweets via my Twitter profile (try saying that when you’ve had a drink or two!):

Here’s a recent example:

I was curious to know if people thought tweeting about a new blog post three times (instead of just twice) would be considered overdoing it. On the one hand, it’s very easy to miss a tweet in a busy stream, but on the other hand, if someone does happen to see it three times, is it going to annoy them?

The responses I got back were pretty surprising, which you can see in the Storify Wakelet story below…

Click to read more!