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Google+ Local Allows Multiple Locations

Finally Google+ Local has listened to businesses that have multiple people in an office building or location and is now allowing more than one Google+ Local page per address.

Previously if you were a real estate agent located in an office the first person who grabbed that location in Google+ Local owned it and you could not set up an account to show your business. What was worse was if someone other than the legal business owner grabbed the location, you were stuck!

Now Google has allowed multiple businesses who may be in different suites, cubicles or floors to now verify an address. That’s great news for many small businesses and consultants.

Here’s what Google says specifically that is a nice new change:

“Individual practitioners may be listed individually as long as those practitioners are public-facing within their parent organization. Common examples of such practitioners are doctors, dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. The practitioner should be directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours. A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations.”
“Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances.”

To find out more about the Google+ Local guidelines, please visit this Google information page.

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April 8, 2013 is the Big Day for Skype and Microsoft

April 8th, 2013 will be a big day for Skype and Microsoft. That’s the day that Microsoft pulls the plug on Live Messenger and other Live products in favor of Skype. Personally I loved the Live products. I used Live Mesh and Live Messenger for business and found both easy to use. Plus I used Live Mesh remote desktop when I traveled to connect to my computer all for free.

I like Skype but have not used it much, however I have already started to move ahead of the April 8th deadline to embrace these new products. When you set up Skype you are now asked to login with your Live ID which then migrates all your Live Messenger settings.

Here are just a few things you will be able to do with the new Skype:

• Broader device support for all platforms, including iPad and Android tablets.
• Instant messaging, video calling, and calling landlines and mobiles all in one place.
• Sharing screens.
• Video calling on mobile phones.
• Video calling with Facebook friends.
• Group video calling.

You can read more about this important new update in this interesting article.

What I find very exciting is to consider what Microsoft will be doing with Skype in the future. Will we see Bing Ads integration for click to call options for advertising? Will we see Skype used on Facebook as Bing tighten their partnership? Who’s to say what’s in store, but this is just the start of an exciting new integration with Skype and Microsoft products.

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Using HubSubHubBub to Tag Your Content for Google

Writters Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content
Writers Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content

On Monday I spoke a little about HubSubHubBub which Google recommends as a way to push out to the Web and tag your unique content to protect your AuthorRank for organic placement. In this post I want to dive a little deeper into this topic to help you understand how using these tools can help you with organic placement.First, I recommend that if you are a blogger that you set up your feed to be delivered by Feedburner which is a Google property. It is easy to set up and account and migrate your blog feed to Feedburner. You’ll end up with a feed that looks like this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority instead of a WordPress generated feed that would look like http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/feed.xml. Make sure to select in the publicize tab to connect your feed to PingShot so you are pushing your content out.

Second, use the FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to override all settings in your blog platform to point to your new Feedburner RSS feed. It is simple to do once you have your Feedburner account set up.

Third, set up an account at FriendFeed. This is a fairly old application but one that I like and with the ability to push content to it now with Feedburner it operates as a hub for HubSubHubBub which will tag your content. At Feedburner make sure to link not your blog URL, but rather to link your Feedburner feed URL. This action completes the process to tie everything neatly together.

Here’s a great article I found that taught me how to take these steps for my own blog as part of my research for this post. I’d like to thank Jorge Escobar for his excellent article and tips. You can also watch this video about HubSubHubBub to understand why using these protocols are now best practices for any blog and writer.

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Google and Unique Content Authorship

This is a very interesting video from Matt Cutts about who gets credit for content when someone steals your content.

If you wrote content, someone steals and changes a date stamp to appear that they were the originator of the content what can you do. Matt addresses several scenarios in this excellent video.

First, Google will try to see who is the content owner by not only the actual content, but by co-citation on the web. I personally feel this is also why posting your blog out on Twitter and Facebook is important to link your content to your own web properties.

Second, taking time to let other sites know via a DCMA notice that they need to remove your copyrighted content although time consuming can be well worth the time. I have actually had web hosts take down full websites until the owner removed the infringing content. That is sure to get a thief’s notice when they will not respond to your take down notice!

If you can’t see the YouTube embedded video from Matt Cutts watch it online at YouTube.

Third, consider using PubSubHubBub protocols to push your content from your blog out to interested parties tagging your content early on the Web before scrapers can get it.