Much like the “nofollow” tag, the “standout” tag belongs to the HTML rel category, and much like it suggests, it’s intended for the most pop-worthy content, although, there’s nothing to stop people from putting the rel=”standout” tag on all of their content. One would guess Google is prepared for standout tag spam, and the inclusion of the tag doesn’t guarantee first page status on Google News. According to the Google News blog, the tag exists as a suggestion:

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show [emphasis added] the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results.

The blog entry also suggests using the standout tag — which looks like this: — while linking to content being referenced as well as on your own:

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.

While that stanza contains a “we believe” in reference to trust-earning, it’s clear Google is relying on this trust when it comes to picking which content is actually standout worthy. If you run a content spam site, one that survived the Panda purge, and you’re making liberal use of the standout tag, it’s doubtful it will make much of a difference in how the content is perceived, especially as Google refines the weight it gives links containing the tag in question.

In what looks like an effort to proactively address standout tag spam, Google suggests news organization only use the tag once per day:

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

In other words, don’t spam with the standout tag, otherwise, we’ll ignore you; but please, use it when you’re linking to quality content.

Pretty simple, right?

With that in mind, how long will it be before we see the first “Standout Tag Spam on Google News” article? Before the end of the coming week? Once again, for those who may have missed it, the syntax for the standout tag is as follows:

link rel=”standout” href=”http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html”

Thoughts on the standout tag? Let us know in the comments.

But the problem with mentions is that they can feel clunky, and can unnecessarily lengthen a post.  Nobody wants to produce a clunky, long post – much less read one.  I have plenty of friends with long names, or those who use their middle names, or those that make up middle names (you know who you are).  No offense, but if I want to mention you in my status update, I don’t want “Jessica Danger Womanofyourdreams Johnson” taking up real estate in my post.

To that end, Facebook is now allowing the shortening of @ mentions within posts.  My long named friend above can be shortened to “Jessica Johnson” or even “Jessica.”  They will still be tagged in the post, linked, and notified.  Here’s how it works in practice:

Any friend’s name can be shortened to names that are adjacent, meaning my good friend “Karl Thomas Wetzel” above could be shortened to “Karl,” “Wetzel,” “Karl Thomas,” or “Thomas Wetzel,” but not “Karl Wetzel.”  You can also only shorten friend’s tags, not events, groups, pages etc.  Unfortunately, that means that every time I feel like @RIDING IN ON A UNICORN AND STABBING SOMEONE IN THE FACE, it’s going to be a long post.

Another @ mention feature that was being tested is now rolling out live for everyone.  You don’t need to use the @ sign to tag friends.  If you start typing a friends name with a capital letter, Facebook will drop down the tag menu after 5 letters for a person’s name longer than 5 letters, and after the completion of their name for those with less characters.

Like I’ve said before, it’s the little things, Facebook.  And this will help to shorten and de-clunkify tagged posts.  And anytime we can de-clunkify Facebook, that’s a good thing.

Hat tip to Inside Facebook

Google talked a little about how local search ranking works today in a blog post on its Lat Long Blog, which included the below video of Google Product Manager Jeremy Sussman discussing the basics. 

"Say you’re in Union Square in New York City, and you want to find a nearby coffee shop, so you go to Google and type in ‘coffee shops in Union Square, NYC’. You’ll find a list of just what you typed in – local coffee shops near Union Square with all the basic information you would expect to find, such as name, address, and phone number, and if they exist, you’ll also find reviews, ratings, and links to other relevant resources," he explains. "These organic listings are free to both the user and the business. We give you the best results we can find."

"Now, there are a variety of relevance factors Google uses to match or answer your search query, in this case, locating coffee shops near Union Square. Three of the key factors are: relevance, prominence, and distance," he continues. "Relevance is showing you only coffee shops and not unrelated businesses such as retailers, dry cleaners, and so on. Prominence is determined by how well known or prominent certain coffee shops are, based on sources across the web. Distance is easy. We calculate how far each coffee shop is from Union Square. And if you don’t specify Union Square in your search, we’ll show you coffee shops based on your general location."

Google recently launched Hotp

ot, a social recommendation engine for local search. You can read more about that here. Hotpot listings can show up anywhere business listings show up in Google search results. 

"Do the Hotpot ratings and review impact order and ranking of the local businesses you see on Google? Absolutely," says Sussman. "That’s the whole point…if you signed in to post ratings and reviews and to receive personalized recommendations in your search results. We do this to deliver more relevant search results and provide a more tailored experience based on your preferences."

In case you were wondering whether or not claiming a page will influence ranking, Sussman says, "A business claiming a Place Page does not result in preferential treatment. Of course more detailed information about your business helps us do a better job connecting people to the businesses they’re searching for."

Finally, he makes it clear that neither Tags nor Boost (a couple of Google’s local advertising options) influence local search ranking or where listings appear in Google or Google Maps results. Google does say, however, that the ranking of Boost ads in the ‘Ads’ section of the Google.com and Google Maps results pages is based on relevance and quality factors.

In a discussion with Robert Scoble recently, I suggested that Twitter also consider hiring a digital anthropologist or sociologist, to not only analyze and comprehend data, but also effectively observe cultures and shifts within this burgeoning online society in order to participate in and ultimately shape its transformation.

As shared in Twitter’s post announcing this year’s top trends:

Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology.

Twitter is indeed a human seismograph, a reflection of current events as well as a real-time indicator of our focus and attention. Whether we agree or align with Twitter’s trending topics, they do in fact represent popular interest at any given time. In 2009, Twitter’s data concentrated on one particular topic that also demonstrated how diversified cultures, societies, beliefs, and politics can converge into one global community.

Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly. Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.

If for but a moment, through services such as Twitter, we become one…

As a seismograph detects and records the intensity, direction, and duration of a movement, Twitter captures the activity and reaction of people around events as they happen. In practically every instance, a spark triggered a social tsunami of tweets and retweets that echoed into history books of socialized media.

Twitter Trends of 2009

News Events

1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People

1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies

1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows

1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues)

1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology

1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags

1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

Comments

Should English to English page translations inherit domain authority from another domain? I don’t want to out anybody, but I see way too many tag pages ranking in Yahoo!’s search results. The easiest way they can improve their search results is to simply delist any page with tag in the URL.

If they continue down this path inside a few months they will link to nothing but internal site search / tag pages on other sites. Where is the value, innovation, or thought process in that? What percent of Yahoo! searchers want to see WordPress.com tags pages and how many Yahoo! Pipes pages are tagged with a brand name? What does a searcher do when they land on a page like this?

If you are going to trust user generated content on authority sites, expect a lot of users to create content just for Yahoo!.

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John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like ‘keywords’ helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging ‘keywords’ to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn’t looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes – it won’t count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google’s Googlebot, affect a single robot’s actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nofollow: don't follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nosnippet: don't show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets")

noodp: don't use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site's title and description?")

noarchive: don't display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages")

unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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Tag:

In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

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Tag:

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Danny introduces Guillaume Bouchard the CEO of NVI Solutions who is the first speaker of this session.

About Social bookmarking, Guillaume says it is when Internet users can store, organize, search and share bookmarks. Thanks to "nofollow" links, there is lesser less link juice. Popular social bookmarking sites are Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Furl.

On the other hand, bookmarking sites also use tags. This is a collaborative practice through which you can identify content in a certain way. These help in:

• Indexing your site better on search engines.
• Receiving a high number of organic incoming links.
• Creates a strong presence within social communities.
• Promotes brand awareness.
• boosts traffic from alternate sources.
• impacts traditional media.

How To tag Effectively

• Find out how people are tagging the sites you want to remember later.
• If you are clueless and doubtful, choose the tag that is most popular and relevant in the tag clouds.
• Avoid separating tags with commas.
• Set a list of standards by which you want to exchange with others.

Manual Tagging

• It should have been online for more than 10 years(hyperlinks, anchor text, keywords).
• Design your own set of tags to represent your content.
• Incorporate images, boost high participation rates by letting users personalize and make. their own tags that they associate to the given image.
• These should also be submitted to del.icio.us, stumble, and flickr.

Automatic Tagging

• Automatically, through an algorithm it extracts tags from the content
• This can incorporate different user’s users tags
• This does not grow or expand due to human creativity.
• This is all about the user experience.
• A great example is FaceBook.




• However, automatic tagging is considered more "blackhat".

Abuse & Content Degradation

• Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags
• As social bookmarking and tagging sites become more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content unless their algorithms get a lot smarter
• Leading social marketing sites use tagging

Technorati

• A search engine for blogs that works on a tag based system. Popular blogs get ranked on the basis of unique links.
• Start a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high -profile tas, and claim it through Technorati
• If you receive a high amount of pings in a short period of time, it means you will feature in the popular section of the site for searches, blogs, videos, movies and news.

Flickr

• Submit photos that make sense to the industry that you are trying to reach.
• Select the correct tags from the list of popular tags
• If you want your images to appear in Technorati, tag them appropriately and make them public.
• Use the photostream on your blog
• Make other users link and comment on your images with the same tags that you initially selected.
• Make friends and share pictures.

YouTube

• Mashups area hit here.
• In YouTube content has more importance than the tags used.
• Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other social marketing sites to promote your video.
• Ask friends to comment on your videos.
• Pass on your video to friends.

FaceBook

• Make attractive and interesting corporate profiles.
• Brainstorm on widgets and use the application that is exclusive to your industry.
• Offer a good enough reason to join your community.
• These groups needs a moderator.
• Invite people in your company.

Next up was Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service who gave the audience a comprehensive tour of del.icio.us. Michael compared tags to old-fashioned Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox bookmarking albeit with more flexibility and community features. A really great thing of del.icio.us is its feature that lets it subscribe to tags. Michael says tags are like labels, but one must keep a check of the commas. Different groups of people will have a different perspective of your pages, giving your pages more "tags".

Obviously, you want to be in the ‘popular’ page. As this can bring in as much traffic as Digg. The benefit of del.icio.us is that it has a wider demographic reach and has less to do with techie things. Like Digg, you too can do a ‘shoutout’ in del.icio.us, this is not as powerful but is pretty effective. del.icio.us does not apply the ‘noFollow’ tag, so you wouldn’t be receiving any link love. However, there will be incoming traffic. A word of caution : Separate words should have a ‘+’ as tag delimiter and not space.

How to Expand Your Exposure

Find the type of posts that people are bookmarking for your subject. Tailor-design your content to fit popular tags. Your page should integrate bookmarking widgets and buttons, good titles, careful timing and advised tagging. Remember that del.icio.us updates its popular page every 4 hours. Time your bookmarking efforts in such a way that you can take advantage of update timeframes. Make your friends influence the suggested tags. Lastly, do not create multiple sock puppet accounts, they will get discontinued.

Last speaker of the session is Neil Patel, the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services who is here to discuss StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has over 3 million users and brings in over 12,000 visitors per day. And the best part? The traffic lasts long. This is great for branding. The demographic of users show more men and lesser females. However, users are aged 45 and above. Meaning, they have more money to spend.

First, you got to install the toolbar in order to use it. There is a feature of an "I like" or "I don’t like" thumbs up or down icon. The more thumbs up you get, the higher the incoming traffic.

Second,Create an account, make friends and send stories to them. At StumbleUpon, titles don’t carry much weightage as here the pages are being served. However, keywords are required for StumbleUpon. Review carries equal importance as topic or tags. Sending stories to your friens is not considered spamming as it is a StumbleUpon service.

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Tag:

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

Example tags for the sports site, on a golf post about the Tiger Woods video game, may be: Tiger Woods, EA Sports, Playstation 3, PGA Tour, XBOX, Wii, Video Game.

Tags and categories are very similar in nature, however categories are meant to be the high level, overarching areas of your blog. Each category will contain many posts on one topic. Tags are assigned on a per-post basis and are words or phrases specific to that post and that may only be once in the entire blog.

Whether you use tags or categories, you can’t really go wrong. Both are organizational features and both will gain additional exposure in search engines. What’s important is that you are using them to organize your posts and increase the usability of your blog.

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