[written by Brendan Irvine-Broque, courtesy of networkedblogs.com]

Google’s November 2011 changes to its web crawler have created new opportunities and liabilities for all websites implementing Facebook Comments, with important implications for SEO. Webmasters who properly implement and manage Facebook Comments stand to gain, but the recent changes could significantly hurt the rankings of sites who do not properly prevent and manage spam.

Google announced last November that it had begun indexing Javascript and AJAX content, without requiring webmasters to implement workarounds. While Google has not yet claimed to be indexing 100 percent of Javascript and AJAX content, it became clear soon after the change that Facebook Comments, which is displayed using AJAX and HTML5, are now indexed by Google. Continue reading »

[written by Matt Wilson, courtesy of prdaily.com]

Consider this proof that communicating with people on Facebook doesn’t end with their clicking the “like” button: On average, only about 7.5 percent of a brand’s Facebook fans even see its daily posts, according to PageLever’s statistics released over the summer. For brands with more than 1 million followers, the number’s even lower, at fewer than 3 percent.

Writing this week at Inc.com, blogger Erik Sherman says those figures prove that customers aren’t as willing to interact with brands on social media as many may think. But he also contends that the statistics shouldn’t discourage brands from being on social media. Continue reading »

[written by Jack Ashman]

On an average day in 2011, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 8 years of video content were added to YouTube and 140 million tweets were sent.

Social media plays a big role in our lives in 2011, but what is it that we are talking about? As the year comes to a close many social networks are giving us summary data of trends of use. Here is a run-down of our year online according to the social networks so far: Continue reading »

[written by Matt Polsky, courtesy of briansolis.com]

By now, many of us have already started setting up our Google+ business pages, and have noticed that there’s nothing overly special about these business pages yet, since they currently lack a vanity URL, have no setting for multiple admins and closely resemble a personal page. However, they will be connected back to Google’s search engine in a way that removes the noise made by competitors.

Towards the end of October, I did a simple search using the + operator, which has long been used as a way of identifying words that are required to appear in the desired results. Instead of receiving my query, I was given an error message saying, “The + operator has been replaced. To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks.” Continue reading »

Reaching 500 twitter followers for Grocery Gateway was great! What was even better? When Grocery Gateway sent 50 scrumptious killer brownies as a surprise! The idig team was virtually in a sugar coma today from this delicious (and unexpected) treat. Grocery Gateway, you rock our world.