YouTube Solicits Ideas For Partner Program

YouTube Partners are, pretty much by definition, some of YouTube's most important users.  They create original content, don't violate copyright laws, and have huge audiences.  It makes sense, then, that YouTube is now looking hard for ways to improve its Partner Program.

The hunt has taken the form of a crowdsourced project.  Just as the Ideas Page for YouTube was created not too long ago for the sake of the whole site, the new Product Ideas Page for the YouTube Partner Program covers this single subject.  People can submit ideas and vote on which ones they think are best.

It's an effective process.  On the YouTube Biz Blog, Filipe Lima noted with respect to the first effort, "It was a success, receiving almost 3,000 ideas and more than 300,000 votes.  We even launched a few features that directly addressed some of the requests - namely, an HTML5 Beta (there were many HTML5 advocates who participated) and a sneak peek of our new cleaner video page (some desired a 'less cluttered' YouTube)."

So now we'll see where round two takes us.

The deadline for both new submissions and votes is April 12th.  If you have any suggestions, get them in earlier, though, for the sake of giving them more time to become popular.

Twitter Inspects Links To Prevent Spam, Abuse

Clicking on links that different people send can often be a cross-your-fingers experience, considering that there are malicious tricksters, unknowing victims, and hijacked accounts to watch out for.  So Twitter's attempting to make the experience less dangerous by checking (and sometimes rewriting) the links found in direct messages and email notifications.

Del Harvey, Director of Trust and Safety at Twitter, explained on the official corporate blog, "[W]e're launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks.  By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter."

Harvey later continued, "For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications."

This move is bound to ruffle a few users' feathers - changing the text in private messages is a sort of bold step - but on the whole, it should prove welcome enough.  A safe environment is in just about everybody's best interests, from regular users to marketers to Twitter itself.

Let's just hope the new feature works well and doesn't create a false sense of security.

Matt Cutts: Google Probably Won’t Call PageRank Something Else

Update: Matt Cutts says they probably won't rename PageRank. However, he agrees with Peter Norvig that people obsess about it too much.

Original article: Last year, Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Note: Watch our exclusive interview with Google's Matt Cutts at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.webpronews.com.

A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I'm not so sure that's the case.

Note: Watch Norvig's keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. "There's a technical formula that's PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that's just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There's all these other things that come in, but they don't have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that's where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that...We'll get some marketing guys on it."

I don't know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company's repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

WebProNews will be doing a live interview with Google's Matt Cutts today at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.webpronews.com. Perhaps he will offer his thoughts on the subject.

Do you think PageRank needs a different name? What would you call it? Give your suggestions here.

Site Speed Tips for When Google Uses That as a Ranking Factor

Last year, Google's Matt Cutts dropped the bomb (to put it in the exaggerated tone that many took the news in), that Google was considering taking site speed into consideration as one of many potential ranking factors for search results.

Is your site's performance up to snuff? Comment here.

This of course freaked a lot of people out, but as Matt and Google as a whole has maintained, this would not trump relevance. It would be taken more into consideration when there are two sites of relatively equal relevance, but one site loads faster and delivers a better user experience. Matt reiterated this point in an interview we did with him this week at SMX.

WebProNews also chatted with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google at SMX, about website performance (speed), how that pertains to search rankings and the user experience, and some tips for making sure your site is up to speed, so to speak.

Stream videos at Ustream

As far as site speed as a ranking factor, Ohye pretty much makes the same point as Cutts, and it's probably not going to be something where all of a sudden all of the faster sites are ranking better and the slower ones are doing worse. But it does enhance the user experience, and she refers to a study that found that an optimized site actually increased conversions by 16%. So if you're not optimizing your site's performance for Google, maybe that's a good enough reason on its own.

Watch the video to get some specific advice regarding some simple adjustments you can make to your site that can make a big difference.

If you're one of those freaking out about getting your site performance optimized, you may feel better after hearing what she has to say, and realize that it might not be as big a deal as you thought.

By the way, Cutts also mentioned that the speed thing is completly independent of Caffeine.

Do you think site performance is a manageable attribute of your search engine marketing strategy? Discuss here.

Next Page »