Posts tagged: webmasters

Google Integrates +1 Button Sharing Ability With Google+ Accounts

August 24, 2011, by No comments yet

By: Ryan Miller

Until yesterday, Google’s +1 Button for website publishers and the Google+ profile accounts were completely separated.  You could +1 a link, but it would only be added into the +1 tab on your profile, with no further interaction available. If you wanted to share a link with your circles on Google+ you had to manually copy the link and submit it into your stream.

Today, Google announced they are rolling out [link needed] the ability to use +1 Buttons to share content with your circles via your stream on Google+ Profiles. This makes the +1 Buttons much more valuable for publishers and bringing the +1 Button a little closer to operating like Facebook’s Like and Share buttons.  

 So how does it work? Visit your favorite website that has the +1 Button installed, find a page you want to share and click the +1 button. This will add the link to your +1 Tab under your Google+ Profile, as it always has.

Now, the dropdown box will change, and give you the opportunity to share the link to your Google+ stream, though you do not have to share websites you +1. You will be given the full functionality of sharing a link as if you were on your Google+ account, including adding comments, and choosing what circles you want to share the link with.

After you’ve filled out the information, share the link and it will instantly be added to you stream.

 

While this functionality makes it a lot easier to share content with your circles, there is still some disconnect between the +1 Button and activity on your Google+ stream.  Currently, it appears that any additional +1s the link receives within your stream, will not translate to the total number of +1s seen on the corresponding page, unlike the current incarnation of Facebook total Likes, which combines the number from all sources.  It is unknown at this time whether that will change in the future.

If you have not already added the +1 Button into your website, this new integration is a great reason to embrace +1. If you already have the +1 Button on your site, there is nothing you need to do to your code, as Google is rolling out the update to operate within the already existing embed code.  Google is rolling this change out over the next day, so if you do not see it now, you will very shortly.

Ryan Miller is the SEO Manager for Advance Internet. You can follow him on Twitter @cromiller and see what he’s sharing using the +1 Button by adding him to your circles on Google+.

Putting the Dashes vs Underscores in URLs Debate to Rest (Again! 2011 Edition!)

August 17, 2011, by No comments yet

By: Ryan Miller

One of the more debated issues when building a website’s URL structure is whether to use dashes or underscores as a separator.  The debate and issue has been contested for years, and stemmed from an announcement that Matt Cutts made back in 2007 saying that Google was now treating both dashes and underscores as separators, only to have Google come back a week later saying they were still not treating underscores as separators.

It has now been four years, and Matt Cutts has returned to finally put the confusion and debate to rest in a must-see four minute video on YouTube:

In essence, Google *still* sees dashes as word separators and underscores as a phrase joiner and there are no plans in the foreseeable future to change that.  This means that if the structure of the URL was the only ranking factor, a URL that contained the text “horror-movies” could rank for a search of “horror” or “movies” while a URL with the text “horror_movies” would only rank for a search of “horror movies”

Of course we know that the URL structure is only a very small piece of Google’s ranking algorithm. For webmasters who are just beginning to build a website, it is recommended that dashes be used within the URLs. However, if you have an established website that uses underscores and is ranking well within Google, trying to change to dashes could do more damage than good to your website.

So hopefully this will finally end the confusion and debate; dashes and underscores are still seen as performing different functions in the eyes of Google.  But what of Bing you ask?  Bing, as they have since they were Live Search, does not differentiate between dashes and underscores in their URL ranking features.

Ryan Miller is the SEO Manager for Advance Internet. You can follow him on Twitter @cromiller and add him to your circles on Google+