In 2013 Google moved to what it called the Internet of things. The move was a change in policy, which announced Google’s use of three sources of information to obtain knowledge for search results. The new sources were Wikipedia, CIA world Fact Book and Freebase. Wikipedia appears to be the dominating source. Google’s dependence upon Wikipedia cause this accident to happen.
House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.) on Thursday went after Google for displaying “Nazism” as one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party.
A search on the site for “California Republican Party” apparently returned with a sidebar result listing Nazism as an ideology alongside “conservativism” and “market liberalism.”
McCarthy noted the sidebar in a tweet at the company.
“Dear @Google, This is a disgrace #StopTheBias,” McCarthy tweeted, accompanied by a screenshot showing Nazism listed among the California Republican party’s ideologies alongside values like “conservatism” and “market liberalism.”
Ideologies associated with the California GOP are no longer visible in the sidebar on Google’s results page when users search “California Republican Party” or in similar searches.
The sidebar, which Google calls the “knowledge panel,” is often populated by content from Wikipedia; however, no mention of Nazism is visible of the California GOP’s page there. The party’s Wikipedia page’s edit history, though, shows that “Nazism” was briefly added to the page on Thursday.
Google blamed the result as online “vandalism” from outside the company that slipped through its safeguards.
“This was not the result of any manual change by anyone at Google. We don’t bias our search results toward any political party. Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, including Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here. This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information,” they added.
The mistake comes in advance of California’s statewide primary elections, which are set for next week.
Other conservatives expressed outrage over Nazism appearing, including President Trump.
Anyone can post a Wikipedia article. ABCO Technology’s web development program will teach you how. If you are interested in learning advanced website techniques for promoting your business online, call our campus. You can reach us by telephone between 9 A.M and 6 P. M Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email all questions to :- info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Building engaging and highly visible webpages today!
Just how powerful is YouTube in 2018? According to a solid infographic, which was released earlier in 2017, there are some highly incredible statistics:
◾YouTube is available and used in 88 countries around the world
◾It is the second largest social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook (2 billion) and more than twice the number of Instagram (700 million)
◾500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
◾Mobile viewing makes up half of the site’s streaming.
In other words, YouTube is POWERFUL. Not only has it been steadily growing since its initial launch in 2005, it has become the single biggest and most important video service on the web. While there are others that have come in its wake, none have reached the same level of popularity.
With that fact in mind, it is no wonder that so many people are looking to boost the effectiveness of their content on the platform. However, with so much use comes other struggles, like being seen in the crowd. If 720,000 hours are uploaded in a day, you have to do everything known to marketers to stand out and be noticed.
Here are five optimization tips for your YouTube channel and videos that will help you to start doing better in search, get recommended, and gain more traction.
Find the sweet spot with your video title length
There are several things to consider when coming up with the video title:
◾How engaging and catchy it is for the eye
◾How many important keywords you use within your title (those keywords are going to help you rank that video in both YouTube and Google search)
◾Which part of the title is immediately visible when people search YouTube or see your video thumbnail in YouTube-generated related videos.
YouTube suggested
Taking all of the above in the account, the sweet spot for your video title is going to be around 100 characters. That is enough to give a unique, descriptive title while still showing in search without a cut off.
Make sure your title not only describes what is happening in the video and contains key phrases you have already researched, but it is also attention grabbing enough that people will want to click on it.
When crafting a video title, consider including the following:
◾Include the important names and entities (your interviewee, event name, branded hashtag, featured brand name, etc.)
◾Location (especially if you are targeting a specific locale)
◾Your important keyword you’d like the video to show up for.
To distinguish that important keyword, use keyword clustering technique that allows you to see core phrases behind obscure keyword variations. My own trick is to use Serpstat’s clustering feature that allows you to group keywords by how many identical URLs rank in Google for each specific query:
Clustering
You can read more on how Serpstat clustering feature works in this guide.
You may also to match each keyword group to appropriate keyword intent to make sure your future video content will cover the immediate need and prompt engagement.
Make your descriptions longer
Video and channel descriptions are another valuable resource for drawing traffic to all of your content. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters, which is between 500 and 700 words.
The rule of thumb is obvious: The more original content you have below your video, the easier for search engines it is to understand what your video is about and what search queries to rank it for.
Not every description needs to be that long, but aiming for around 2,000 characters for videos and 3,000 for channels is a good place because it gives you the space necessary to optimize your keyword use and give some context to viewers. More is fine, but make sure you aren’t filling it with a lot of pointless stuff.
Make the first 150 characters of a description count
Of the words you write, the first 150 characters are the most important. That is because YouTube cuts it off with a (More) tag after the point, so the viewer has to specifically opt in to reading the rest. Not all of them are going to do that.
You should make sure those first characters tell the viewer what they really need to know in order to connect with what they are reading. From there you can focus more on keywords and the rest of the description, as it will still count the same towards searches.
It is also a great place to link out to other channels, your website, etc. Make sure your call to action (CTA) is in the first words, such as liking, subscribing, learning more, etc.
Have a good, high-resolution thumbnail
Thumbnails are pretty standard for monetized video channels at this point. You have probably noticed that they follow a certain pattern: silly face, bright colors, something odd in the background, over the top. Sure, it seems annoying. But they follow the formula because the formula works.
Now, you don’t have to do the same thing. You just want to make sure that you have an eye catching, visually stimulating thumbnail in the recommended 1280 x 720 size. There are a few generators out there to help you make one, but my thumbnail maker of choice right now is Adobe Spark.
Adobe Spark
Keep in mind that you want a standard format across all of your thumbnails. For instance, if you do your face on one then you should do them on all. If you use some kind of animation or logo, use that.
You want to be immediately recognizable to anyone who follows your channel right from the suggested videos sidebar, or the search results. If you have old videos, go back and upload thumbnails to each one to start getting some better click results.
Furthermore, make sure your thumbnails are readable: Viewers should be able to easily see what it is about at a glance when seeing it in the right-hand column of the suggested videos or on a small mobile device.
Utilize playlists – I mean it!
Playlists are incredibly helpful. First of all, they help you group together certain videos right on your channel. So let’s say you did a series on how to increase your YouTube views and it was split into ten videos. You would create a playlist on your channel titled “Super YouTube Tips” so that people could find them all in one place. But that has an additional benefit.
Search leans towards introducing playlists right at the top of the results page. It also allows people to specifically search for playlists. That is great because it can introduce viewers to multiple videos instead of one and many will choose to pop on a playlist and watch straight through everything there.
If you do a creative series with a continued plot you will find this is a huge help and makes it a million times easier to sort it out, even if YouTube messes with your order on your channel (an issue more than one content creator has had in the past, take it from me).
To sum that up, YouTube playlists help you:
◾Increase your chances to rank your video content for a wider variety of phrases (which is also helpful for brand-focused results)
◾Improve engagement rate with your videos by giving your audience collections of videos so that they can sit back and watch endlessly. And we know that engagement is the crucial ranking factor when it comes to YouTube rankings.
To illustrate the point, here’s a quick example of how we were able to grab two spots for our show name with the playlist:
Playlist ranking
Bonus tip: Feature your videos on your site
Finally, an obvious but often missed tactic is to increase your YouTube channel performance by prominently displaying your videos on your site. It’s simple: the more people watch your videos (especially if they watch more of each of your videos), the more exposure YouTube offers to your content through suggesting your videos as related.
One of the most effective ways to generate more views for your channel is to promote your videos outside of YouTube, i.e. use your blog and social media channels. There’s a variety of WordPress themes that aim at doing exactly that: promote your YouTube channel prominently on-site.
Furthermore, promote your videos on social media as much as it makes sense for your audience to build additional exposure, links, and re-shares.
ABCO Technology has a powerful web developer program, which includes search engine optimization where this information is covered in detail. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us by phone at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who can successfully qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Bulletin is a new app published by Google, which allows everyone quickly to create and post news stories which will appear both in the app and on the web…
“Bulletin stories are public and easy to discover: on Google search, through social networks, or via links sent by email and messaging apps” Source: Google Bulletin App
Bulletin is currently on trial in two locations in the US: Nashville, TN and Oakland, CA.
Google has termed this new type of news ‘Hyperlocal’ and it’s aimed at people being able to create posts quickly about what they encounter in their immediate area.
Why?
Between Facebook and Google local news has truly suffered. Print media in general has experienced large financial losses and this has been very severe for smaller local news media outlets as well. Online players in this space such as The Gothamist have also collapsed leaving a vacuum in the area.
The bigger question here should really be why Google would want to fill that space. Call me a cynic but I think it’s unlikely that it’s due to some altruistic need on Google’s part to fill the space which it helped to destroy.
If this was the case, if Google was seeking to help replenish local news, then it could instead promote local news sources more heavily over national ones, as Facebook has recently announced it will be doing. Instead Google has seen an opportunity, reinforced by the rise of other locally focused sites such as NextDoor.com.
nextdoor.com
Google has been part of the undoing of a media format and there is now the opportunity to step in and fill that void. But that still creates the question…
Why should Google care about local news at all?
The more personalized the advertising, the more likely we are to respond to it. This includes the source of the advert. You’re more likely to listen to the advice of a friend about their experience with a company than the information on the company blog. This goes for local news ads as well.
According to Local Media Works local media is not only the most trusted source of information but also the best at driving customer interaction. In other words ads served on local content are more effective.
It combines personalization (adverts tailored to you) and contextualization (ads shown at the right time) for incredibly effective advertising. It also, importantly, gives Google an additional data collection point.
Each story you post provides key information beyond just geo-targeting. For example, post a story which shows an event at your local pet store and you might start getting shown ads for dog food.
Even without posting a story, but by just interacting with the content, this provides additional data, showing businesses and geographic areas you’re interested in without Google ever needing to record your physical visit to those places.
What’s the harm?
Some existing sites which specialize in the ‘hyperlocal’ have already encountered issues in how different sections of the same community interact. For example Nextdoor.com has had problems with neighbors ‘racially profiling’ people within their own communities.
It takes more than geography to make a community and there are often existing divisions within a small or ‘local’ area. This could be exasperated by the ‘echo chamber’ problem we already see across search and social platforms. Through personalization of content we don’t see outside of our own world view. In other words the content we see serves only to reinforce rather than challenge our beliefs.
Picking up your local newspaper or reading their stories online is more likely to show you information from across the full demographic of your community. In the case of hyper localization of online content, however, it may serve only to provide us with information from a subsection of our community rather than representing its full diversity.
Editorial standards and fake news
We also need to stop pretending that everyday people are as good of a source for information as trained journalists. Bulletin celebrates the quickness and ease of posting on its platform. It does not, from what I read in the promotional material, mention editorial guidelines or validity of content. Any journalist with a news organization has to adhere to editorial standards, research what they are writing and will at least attempt to convey news with some depth.
If Google chooses to show Bulletin stories in the same section as they show other news stories, – and I’m not sure where else it would show them – then it’s promoting them to the same level as actual editorial content without any of the checks and measures.
My final thoughts on this
I don’t think Google has deliberately set out to replace local news, I certainly don’t think they intended to harm the industry. However it would appear that local news is in decline and there is a gap in the market for Google to step into with Bulletin. The way it’s done this is typically clever, moving yet more content off proprietary sites which can show advertising or generate revenue in whatever way they darn well like, right on to a platform owned and controlled by Google (ahem AMP, cough cough).
Google has also embraced the idea that we can all be part of the news. We can all share events locally and connect with each other through our local postings. After the failure of Google Plus I’m not sure how far the ‘connecting’ side of things will go but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but the ramifications for local news sites could be severe, especially if Google prioritizes content from its own service over that of other providers. It’s also creating further problems with placing equal or even more weight on unverified and unchecked content compared to that of a reputable publisher.
This could end up as little more than another version of Yell, mostly used only by businesses to promote events, or it could really take off like a localized version of Twitter with people in masse connecting and sharing within their communities. The crucial thing is that it doesn’t become a replacement for all local news.
#ABCO #Technology teaches a course for web development, which includes social media strategies. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
