Google launch the Knowledge Graph for mobile and tablet devices. Check out this article by Junyoung Lee, Google Engineering Manager, to learn more.

Have you ever had a question pop into your head at an unexpected time? Maybe when you’re talking with a friend over lunch, watching TV at home, or reading a magazine on the bus? On smartphones and tablets Google is great for these types of situations because it puts the information of the entire web at your fingertips. Today, we’re making it even faster and easier to get answers and explore no matter where you are, with the launch of the Knowledge Graph on desktop, smartphones, and tablets.

On wireless networks and on small screens, every page load and every pixel matters when it comes to speed and ease-of-use. So we strive for efficiency and try to make the most of touch-based interactions when integrating information from Knowledge Graph into our mobile and tablet search experiences.

For example, say this fall I’m heading to Chicago for a friend’s wedding, and I’ve heard I should check out Millennium Park while I’m in town. A quick search on Google brings up Knowledge Graph information embedded within the results. This initial peek shows what people are often interested in about Millennium Park.

Tapping or swiping on the content from the Knowledge Graph instantly shows me more useful information. I can see if there’s an event going on while I’m in town, and get some ideas for other Chicago attractions I might want to visit based on what other people have searched for on Google.

When searching on my tablet, I can swipe the rows of images to explore more related content.

Now let’s take another example. Say I’m searching for [andromeda], which could be the galaxy, the TV series, or the Swedish band. The Knowledge Graph distinguishes between each of these meanings and shows me an interactive ribbon at the top of the search results that I can swipe and tap to select just what I’m looking for. That means less typing.

These features are currently rolling out to most Android 2.2+ and iOS4+ devices. On Android, the feature is available through Google in the browser and the Quick Search Box. On iOS, the feature is available in the browser and will be coming soon to the Google Search App.

Posted by Junyoung Lee, Engineering Manager

Inside Search

SEO jobs to 'suffer' but mobile, open source jobs to fly
By Nur Bremmen: Staff reporter If you're in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) game, you may need to think about a career change. A recent report from Freelancer.com suggests that SEO jobs in the future will “suffer”. Why? Well, says Freelancer.com, …
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At the Search Engine Optimisation Workshop we can help you promote your website with major search engines. Saturday 2 June at £7 If you would like to know more about E-commerce for small and homes businesses, we have a short course running every …
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Different news outlets have been discussing if Facebook is weak in mobile, and that it needs to do more to address this issue. 

The question here is, if Facebook is actually really weak in mobile.

As we have analyzed on Socialbakers, Facebook has 488m mobile users. Most of the traffic actually on smartphones, where you can also build interesting mini-applications, games, and other things.

If we would identify three key issues that Facebook mobile has, there would be three categories and angles to looking at the state of Facebook mobile: 

1) Features and innovations

Facebook has created a mobile platform and a mobile Connect platform. Thats probably the best thing it ever did, allowing companies like Instagram to actually grow, having to then buy them for 1bn in equity and cash.

That allows other companies to create innovation on Facebook’s behalf, and then Facebook potentially snagging the talent or buy (Gowalla, …).

Until today, there was also no way of discovering apps other than from the newsfeed. With the new Facebook app store, that gets solved, and a lot can be addressed with that. 

2) Experience

Facebook has had some rough moments with its mobile experience. It started off quite low-end and it built up from there.

The current iPhone version of Facebook is nice, but the experience is horribly slow and needs a lot of work. It doesn’t help, that the experience is a little different on every platform.

For example, you still can’t properly upload an album from a Facebook iPhone app. Not very convenient.

Obviously the limitations of HTML5 don’t allow Facebook to create a proper HTML5 version with say photo uploads, and Facebook has urged companies and W3C to fix this, and I think thats a great, but getting it there might be harder and take time. 

3) Monetization

The question is: Is Facebook really weak in mobile? Well, for one thing its surely weak in mobile monetization. I am sure that for every person using Facebook on their mobile phones, Facebook is actually probably losing more money than its gaining.  

If I would actually sum where the largest Facebook problem is, it would not only be the Experience, but more importantly in monetization.

Facebook doesn’t really have a way to monetize mobile, and the new Appstore doesnt fix that entirely.

Still, it will have to monetize its 488 million active users on mobile. They have the new newsfeed ads, and lets see how those work out. But as of right now there are no alternative monetization options.

Time will show if Facebook will really grow up to put up the features, experience, and monetize well enough. For now, we can take a look at some statistics and develop some fun innovations for Facebook mobile, because thats really missing! 

 

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web.  
 

Google can help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.  In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.  It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST and watch as Google showcases how two businesses, Top Mast Resort in Massachusetts and Sava’s Restaurant in Michigan, go mobile and build mobile-friendly sites–live on air.

You’ll see how Top Mast is preparing to take advantage of mobile travel purchase intent – which is five times higher than online travel purchase intent, according to InsightExpress.  You’ll also see Sava’s move ahead of 95% of restaurants that do not have mobile-friendly sites, according to a study by Restaurant Science.

Finally, you’ll hear from the CMO of Dudamobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in

1. Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST
2. Go to the Think with Google Google+ page
3. Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream

Be sure to set a reminder in your calendar! If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them with the hashtag #GoMoSite as a comment on the Google+ page.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Sources: (1) Gomez 2011 (2) Nielsen February 2012

Inside AdWords

Posted by Suzzicks

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is the third and final installment in this mobile SEO blog post series, covering the impact of the new Google smartphone bot and how you can use it to make the most of your mobile content. The first article in the series discussed how the new smartphone bot works and which sites will be most affected. The post from last week discussed how to author redirects correctly to ensure that your mobile content will be properly indexed by the smartphone bot. This final post will review common search engine indexing problems that mobile sites and mobile platforms have, and how you can prevent them.

Some SEOs insist that we must believe what Google tells us about how and why they index things the way they do; that indexing is consistent, predictable and flawless. Unfortunately, that is not the case, especially in mobile where there are more pages and more potential for things to go wrong. Believing that indexing will always happen correctly, and that you need not mitigate risk factors for mis-indexing will not create the ideal SEO scenario. It will leave your sites (mobile/desktop/tablet) exposed when there are changes to the algorithm, or when new crawlers are evaluating your site for the first time.

If you are trying to ‘dot all your ‘i’s’ and cross all your ‘t’s’ in the world of mobile search engine indexing, here is what you need to know to prevent mis-indexing:

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google has never and will never like duplicate content. Google’s new smartphone bot, and their decision to index and cache mobile redirects may be a way for Google to avoid or minimize the need to index entire mobile pages (possibly), but it is still hard to tell how it all works. Adding mobile pages into a mix will always presents the RISK that something will be misunderstood as ‘duplicate’ and cause problems.

To keep Google happy, in the mobile world it is especially important to avoid the sneakier kinds of duplicate content that some webmasters forget about, otherwise known as DUST. The acronym stands for Duplicate Url Same Text [Acronym shared with my by the awesome Lindsay Perkin-Wassle, of Keyphrasiology]. DUST happens any time more than one version of a URL will resolve in the address bar but the browser shows the same page. The easiest example to understand is a page rendering with or without inclusion of the ‘www’ in the URL (the canonical v. non-canonical discussion usually stops here), but DUST can also be seen when there are multiple versions of a home page or category level page, as in the examples below:

In the mobile SEO world, it is quite common for mobilization platforms to control the servers and databases that generate the mobile content, and they are infamous (maybe only in my mind) for generating lots of DUST. Even the best mobilization platforms typically have minimal understanding of SEO; they try to set their servers to be very flexible with what page requests they can correctly render, and render as many different variations of a URL as possible. Instead of doing this, the platforms should be setting up the servers to 301 redirect any version of the URL that is not the canonical ‘chosen’ to redirect to the ‘chosen’ version of the URL. This is also how you can set up your own servers to prevent DUST.

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. This means that it will probably also have a heightened the sensitivity to errors that are present on a site or in a redirect.

In general having lots of errors on your site can hinder crawling and indexing and cast your mobile site (and possibly desktop site too) in a bad light. Be sure that you check the content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, especially if you are generating dynamic mobile pages or using a hosted mobile solution to generate your mobile pages. To make finding and fixing 404s easy, you should set your mobile content up in a separate Webmaster Tools account. This way, you can see just the errors and information related to the mobile content, and not have to subtract out desktop figures to generate meaningful information.

Many 404’s in mobilization platforms are caused by improperly expired mobile content, but you should also watch for 404 errors caused by a lack of capitalization normalization and trailing slash rules set up on the server. See the example below, where one version of a URL is working fine, but the same URL with a capital letter is understood as missing, and being redirected to the mobile home page. (This is also DUST – your server can automatically normalize URLs to remove capitals.)

Capital letters in the URL cause a 404 or redirect to the mobile home page:

The presence or absence of trailing slashes can also cause problems, as shown below:

Whether the page is 404 or just redirecting to the home page, this is a problem. Stuff like this REALLY happens all the time, especially when the mobilization platforms are in charge of the server, so if you are working with an external mobilization vendor, go check this stuff out when you are done reading the article. Error-based redirect to the home page could be somehow mis-indexed as the mobile redirect.

Mobilization platforms will usually not archive mobilized pages for long periods of time, especially for sites that generate new content on a daily basis, but they also generally don’t have a proper mechanism to expire the content in a way that is good for SEO so a very similar scenario could happen with a 404 error on a page that has expired.. Mobilization platforms will generally just remove the content and leave a 404 error, which makes the mobile site look bad, because as you are constantly generating new content, you are also constantly generating new 404 errors at the same rate.

What if Google took the 404 errors on the mobile pages seriously? What if Google somehow associated the errors on the mobile pages with the corresponding desktop pages even though they were still live and fine? Hopefully Google would not let the 404 on the mobile page drag down the credibility and rankings of the desktop page that was redirecting to it, but it is not worth the risk! If you are worried about it, there is a Mobile SEO Tool to help you check indexing of one domain across the desktop and WAP index. 

When you are optimizing your mobile content, the best bet is to always play it safe, and keep your content and your server settings as neat and tidy as possible. Avoid the risk of mis-indexing by checking your URLs and watching for errors. When you add more pages and more redirects, and potentially even more servers and different companies to the mix to achieve a good mobile user experience, you increase the risk of mis-indexing.

Thanks for tuning in to this mobile SEO series about optimizing for Google’s new smartphone bot! If you missed the previous articles, they cover important information like how the new bot works, which sites will be affected and how to generate the right kinds of redirects to ensure that your content is correctly indexed by the new bot. Good luck with all of your SEO efforts and stay mobile!

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