Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.

Google Outs a Family Secret

Victorian doctors prescribed morphine like today's doctors do hydrocodone, especially to young middle- and upper-class women. As a result, thousands were committed to "the shadows of addiction."

George Sand, Louisa May Alcott and Mary Todd Lincoln were all morphine addicts. So was playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother, as depicted in Long Day's Journey Into Night. My own maternal grandmother was one.

Family secrets have always been hard to keep, but Google's made them harder.

Researchers at Rutgers University used Google to unearth the long-buried fact that Thomas Edison's first wife died in 1884 of a morphine overdose, even though "congestion of the brain" was recorded as the official cause of death.

Here's how:

• Using Google, they first found an article in an unidentified newspaper that said Edison had tried to revive his comatose wife with electric shocks. Edison was an expert in electricity.

• Using NewspaperArchive.com, the researchers next found another (unsigned) article alleging Mary Edison was a morphine addict who died of an overdose. They also found an interview Mary had given the same paper, and concluded the same reporter who conducted the interview wrote the story about her death.

• Using Google Books, the researchers then discovered “congestion of the brain” was a Victorian euphemism for "overdose." They also discovered electric shock—Edison's expertise—was prescribed in medical books as a way to revive victims, and concluded Mary indeed OD'd.

Clicks Don't Tell the Whole Story

Facebook's advertising director says digital ads can't be proven to drive sales, according to Business Insider.

Although counting digital ad "clicks" today remains most advertisers' yardstick, Facebook's Gokul Rajaram told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt, "there's really no correlation between clicks and whether people actually convert."

Rajaram suggested that digital ads should not be judged by today's measurement model, but by how they build brand awareness slowly over time.

"We need to move towards a more sophisticated, multi-touch model and figure out how to accrue value at each touch point," he said.

Plus ça change.

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Learn to Love Tofu

I've just concluded my first month as a Vegan and resigned myself to loving Tofu.

As a marketer, Tofu should be part of your daily diet, too.

Tofu is an acronym that stands for “top of the funnel.”

The top of the funnel, of course, is your lead-cistern.

According to inbound-marketing agency FiveFifty, 97% of first-time Website visitors are top-of-the-funnel people.

They're "just looking" and far from ready to buy. 

So, if your content appeals only to bottom-of-the-funnel people, you look a little desperate.

"Remember the last time you were shopping at a retail store, and the sales representative kept asking if they could start a dressing room for you?" FiveFifty asks. "If you’re just browsing, their attempts to close a sale can feel overly pushy."

To make delicious Tofu, you need to prepare "buyer personas" that include the demographics, pain-points and priorities of your leads.

"The world’s best Tofu is based on answering real-life questions people have when they first come to your company's Website," FiveFifty says.

Google+ Boosts SEO

Social media maven Courtney Kettmann, writing for Socialmouths, says that Google+, because it's owned by Google, will boost your company's search engine rankings.

"Posts and accounts will appear high in Google search results," she writes. "This is beneficial to a business, as it can help improve the SEO of a company’s Website."

The extra search-engine hits "alone make Google+ essential for a business," according to Kettman.

Google+ posts with images and videos score particularly high among visitors, she notes.