One of the great things at Airbnb, is that once every months, there is a formal Friday, which means the majority of the employees dress up in their best suits to make a smashing appearance. Flip Flops & Fleece will be thrown under the bed for one day. And once every quarter, a special theme is giving all those working at Airbnb the opportunity to put their best in impressing their colleagues. Today, with the launch of the new movie from Leonardo Di Caprio, after the book The Great Gatsby, the Formal Friday theme at Airbnb was: The Great Gatsby.

Usually, a theme Formal Friday also means all three founders of Airbnb are in San Francisco, and are dressing up like anybody else in the office. Airbnb is not such a formal company where the founders hide themselves in a private office. No, Brian Chesky, Joe Gabbia and Nathan Blecharczyk can be found in between all the other employees everyday. A perfect opportunity to shoot some pictures with them for the Formal Friday; The Great Gatsby...

Nathan Blecharczyk and Dennis Goedegebuure at Airbnb HQ

Nathan Blecharczyk and Dennis Goedegebuure at Airbnb HQ

Brian Chesky and Joe Zadeh (Joebot) at Airbnb HQ at The Great Gatsby Formal Friday

The Great Gatsby Formal Friday at Airbnb HQ with Brian Chesky and Joe Zadeh (Joebot).

Joe Gebbia Airbnb

Not only for The Great Gatsby formal Friday will Joe Gebbia; CPO for Airbnb, wear a bow tie. Many days on the week, not only on Fridays, Joe can be spotted with a bow tie dressed up!

With a lot of chatter on Twitter, it's probably safe to say that we are on track to see a large update hitting the search results just in time for the annual SMX Advanced in Seattle (from the chatter, it's most likely going to be a Penguin update). Like clockwork, Google gives the SEO's something to talk about, and since this is the advanced version of the SEO/SEM conference, it's a big update. Apart from all the discussions on the version number, it's incredible to see how SEO's stumble over each other to write "the news" what Matt Cutts have said online, and what you could expect from the next update.

Matt Cutts fro Google Tweets about Penguin 2.0

 

SEO's across the world are loosing their heads, and take the words of Matt Cutts all as a mantra. They shiver in fear on how the wrath of The Google might come down on their site, causing all kinds of trouble. But as my buddy Ryan ranted already:

We need to stop analyzing every word @mattcutts says like it’s some lost scripture and start paying attention to the meaning of what he says....

...

Remember when Matt said that Page Speed was a “all else being equal we’ll return the faster site” type of factor? That fits perfectly with the tree and dynamic weights I just talked about.

Instead of looking at the big picture, the meaning, and the reasoning behind what Matt says, we get too caught up on the literal definitions. It’s the equivalent of thinking David and Goliath is a story about how there are giants in the world rather than a story about how man’s use of technology helps him overcome challenges and sets him apart from beasts. We keep taking the wrong message because we’re too literal.

 

But I think some website owners should be afraid of what's coming down the pipeline, because if your site back-link profile looks like this, it might still works at the moment, but for how long...?


Does this look like a Penguin back link profile?

 

The funny thing is, the linking this site has done, still works like crazy. Check the sites visibility in search using the tool from Search Metrics. As you can see, the X-axes are not corresponding on the same timeframe, however, you can clearly see the search visibility of this site increased with the large jump in back-links in January of this year.

searchvisibility-spam

The next Penguin update will be larger than the previous ones. Next Penguin update will be a larger one than just a data refresh

Next Penguin update will be a larger one than just a data refresh

 

So, if you are already getting a ton of link removal requests, expect your inbox to show a flooding of new link removal requests rather sooner than later! Will you comply with the request, or have the requestor take more aggressive steps, like legal threads and stuff. I've heard of some very aggressive take down requests, even with authoritative domains. So far, I've received only one take down request, but have not taken the link down, since it was purely editorial. If the webmaster has screwed up their own link profile by being way to aggressive, that would be their problem. So I stand by Kim here, No I Will NOT respond to your disavow link paranoia. Bug off! 

So bring it on.. I'm ready for another Penguin update!

Black & White Penguin with a red bow tie

 

With the launch of a new city in the Neighborhood projectLos AngelesAirbnb just launched the largest number of city Neighborhoods so far, 61. I really enjoyed day dreaming with the great pictures of Neighborhoods like MalibuSanta MonicaVenice or Hollywood. Maybe one day we will have the chance to move and live in Los Angeles, which has always been a secret dream for me. But then again, San Francisco is also not too shabby! I love walking around in the Richmond District, and get a sense of the Asian, Russian mixture of the Neighborhood and make great street pictures.

Another dream home town for me has been New York. Maybe a little bid too much out of our league, as living in a Neighborhood like TribecaSoHo or West Village with 3 kids is just very difficult. Let alone we would ever be able to afford a Townhouse at the Upper West Side! Brooklyn seems to become the new hot spot in New York, especially as the New York Times just published an article on how Hispters are taking over Neighborhoods like Williamsburg, or how they call it Will.I.Amsburg. But enough for the dreams I might have when winning the lottery, what I thought would be interesting to talk about what to search for or to look at for you as a marketeer to plan a content calendar for the pages you have on your site. To conduct this research, I'm using the following tool:

  • Google Analytics; with the in-page analytics reporting

You Like this so far, please share:

How To Use In-Page Analytics To Direct Your Content Marketing

In page analytics are an often overlooked tool for conducting user research, and a great way to get new topics to write more on. And the best thing is, your users already told you those topics are the ones they are interested in! From the Google help document (underline and red mine)

In-Page Analytics is available under the Content section on the Standard Reporting tab. It lets you make a visual assessment of how users interact with your web pages

So looking at which Neighborhoods  in New York we would need to write more about, I pulled up the In-Page analytics on the New York Neighborhood page, and used the Color bubbles to showcase popular Neighborhoods based on what the users have clicked on.

Neighborhood heatmap

Where the colors give the scale of popularity relative to each other. This means, the warmer the color, the more clicks the link got in the time period I checked (data was for the month of April).

What stands out, is that there is one Neighborhood in particular popular, and the only one which gets a red color: Upper East Side. Some Neighborhoods didn't even got a color, so it's safe to say, these are the least well known, or not so popular neighborhoods in New York; these are:

Honestly, I never heard of these either, except for the name civic center, which we have here Civic Center in San Francisco as well.

Popular New York Neighborhoods Stacked Up

So pulling all the New York Neighborhoods in a spreadsheet, and making a bar chart of the results, it shows how all the Neighborhoods stack up on popularity:

Popular New York City Neighborhoods stacked up

 

Now it's only a matter of creating a massage map per Neighborhood and research the topics before the editor can start writing.

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You can access the report in Google Analytics in two ways:

  • In Standard Reporting > Content, click In-Page Analytics.
    This option opens the report on the page you identified in your profile settings.
  • In the Pages report (Standard Reporting > Content > Site Content > Pages), when you drill in to a specific page, click the In-Page tab.
    This option opens the report for that page.

With Posterous closing, a race started a couple of weeks ago to move the Airbnb blogs from Posterous to WordPress. Lucky me, I have a number of years experience with WordPress, and more lucky me, I know people who even have more experience with WordPress and WordPress hosting. The Airbnb blogs are now running on the following stack:

teach them young So yesterday evening, I was busy checking all the migrations with my little man with me. Teach them young they say..

Just in time for our major Trust announcement this morning. Now, all we need to do, is create a new child theme, so that we can style the blogs completely according to Airbnb standards... So much opportunity to expand right now, having full control! Love it!

Other blog we migrated is the Nerds at Airbnb! Worth it to check out if you are into coding

#TornadoWeek Hashtag Pushing

by Dennis April 30, 2013

Check out this creative way of getting people to engage with your brand on Twitter. The Weather channel is having their Tornado week. And now you can make the interns suffer from high winds. The only thing you would need to do, is tweet with the hashtag #tornadoweek in your tweet I can’t wait for [...]

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Always Be Linking, Especially with Students

by Dennis April 12, 2013
Berkeley MBA students at Airbnb HQ

One thing I’m trying to learn fast, as this is a big black spot in my SEO skillset; Link Building. First rule of Link Building: ABL Always Be Linking ABL Tweet this quote: Tweet Take up every opportunity to gain a true endorsement in the form of a link. And what better opportunity to get [...]

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Ever Seen The Northern Light

by Dennis April 12, 2013

My buddy Marcel, a colleague here at Airbnb went to Alaska to take pictures of the Northern Light. Apparently the Aurora is extremely beautiful this and next year due to the 11 year cycle of the Sun storms. Check out his write up, awesome pictures.. Best Kept Secrets to photograph the Northern Lights in Alaska- [...]

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eBay’s Paid Search Study Alternatives Motives for Publishing Ineffectiveness

by Dennis March 14, 2013

I couldn’t hide from all the chatter around the white paper about eBay’s paid search campaigns today. All kinds of people with little knowledge on internal optimization within eBay are jumping on this story to give their perspective. The overall message they are so loudly shouting into the world is how bad eBay really is [...]

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Instagram SEO, This is How You Boost SEO Traffic Through Instagram

by Dennis March 8, 2013

Say what Instagram SEO?, Yes you can use Instagram to boost your SEO traffic. However, not in the traditional way of boosting your SEO rankings or visibility, but in a much smarter way; boost the search volume of your #1 rankings! Let me explain; If you like this, why not Tweet this post Tweet  I’m [...]

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What Happened to Interflora SEO Posts

by Dennis March 3, 2013

And just like that, Interflora is back in the search engines. What would it take for a mom-and-pop site to come back so quickly after being penalized? But I just wonder, where has Martin McDonald post on Interflora SEO penalty gone? Really weird, as with all the number of links pointing to Martin’s post, you would [...]

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