Linking to Google PlusOne, without embedding the button (for privacy reasons) - google-plus

It seems that Google only offers code to embed the +1 button.
However, there are heavy privacy concerns (plus quite some load time) associated with it.
For some pointers about the privacy and legal issues associated with Facebook like and Google +1, see: Like button and privacy concern
A common workaround seems to be a two-click solutionGerman (also discussed on slashdotEnglish), where the first click enables the button (loading the javascript from Google), the second then is on the regular +1 button.
However, I do not want to implement this two-click solution either. Largely because the Google +1 button is ugly as hell, and doesn't fit to the page layout.
What I'm really looking for is a separate web page, where the user can essentially confirm that he likes the page. This page can live on google.com, and essentially this would be the second click. I'm not trying to trick people into +1'ing the page. The second click is all fine with me. I just don't want to force them to load the plusone button (and I don't like its looks).
There seems to be the option of
https://plus.google.com/share?url=<URL>
which however is a share on Google+, not a +1.
I've seen this URL, too:
https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=<URL>
(see e.g. here: Adding a Google Plus (one or share) link to an email newsletter) but I cannot submit this form (i.e. doesn't seem to work).
The best working solutions seems to be the two-click approach. :-(
Update: the url, https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=<URL> actually does seem to work. It was just my privacy proxy breaking it. Then it seems to be more of a "Google+ share" dialog. I'm not yet happy with this result (in particular, since this doesn't seem to be an advocated approach for Google, and they can at any point consider to ban the site, I guess)

The only officially supported method of +1'ing a URL is with the +1 button. Either always loading or loading it on a second click.

The approach that I'm now looking into is fairly trivial:
I've set up a Google Plus page for the web site, and the "plus" button sends user there. In fact just like the Facebook icon I'm using. Then the users get the full choice of interaction options, including +1, but also circling and sharing.
First of all, this obviously should not violate any g+ policies. Secondly, it is a fairly transparent behaviour for the users. The "plus" button takes them to Google plus, where they see the usual plus UI.
Secondly, it's still just two clicks to "+1". So it is not worse than any other data privacy compliant solution.

I found the solution here.
The problem is, social sites accepts your own "share" forms, but only if the link is URL encoded.
In Wordpress, a custom Google+ button that I'm using without the official API, and it's currently working, is this following code:
google+
Hope it helps, go to the link above for a list of the rest of the social sites links. :)

Related

Google+ Share link does not work with my Website

i have a problem with sharing links of my website in Google+. So, if i want to share a link of my website (http://www.droidwiki.de/Hauptseite) G+ say, that the webpage can not be loaded. Same problem is with the Google +1 button on the page. If someone click this button, it appears a red exclamation mark. Sometimes, only the URL, but no opengraph data will show, but the most time, it only doesn't work. Other websites work perfectly with the account.
The same pages work without errors on facebook, will show the title of page and the opengraph description.
Have anybody the same problem, or a solution?
Thanks!
I'm not seeing any of the errors you're reporting.
While OpenGraph is supposed to work with Google's bot, it often doesn't work that well. Best practice is also to include schema.org microdata so Google's plus bot and search bot process it. See https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/ for details and http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets for a tool to help you test your markup.

Google +1 button on Google sites

I have a google site and I want to add several «+1»-buttons on one page.
As I understood, all different buttons must be related to different URL's, so I created one more page with a «+1»-button, which can be simply added.
Now I want to have the same button on the main page, how can I achieve this?
I've already browsed many things about it, f.ex., https://developers.google.com/+/web/+1button/
but I can't add Javascript on Google sites!
That's ridiculous, it has information about how to add it for other sites, but not for their own.
I re-read the documentation here:
https://developers.google.com/+/web/+1button/#plusonetag-parameters
The ability to control each button individually is available in platform preview only.
Sorry.

Javascript served tooltips - bad for Google / SEO?

I have a client who wants a feature on his site that he has seen on a competitors. It is essentially a group of icons where, when you mouseover them, an extended tooltip appears with content, links, etc...
The tooltips are not hidden divs. The tooltip content appears nowhere in the source code of the page itself. I believe the text of the tooltips is being called from an external file (e.g. an XML file or some such thing) via javascript.
My question(s) are this:
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even affect SEO efforts at all?
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
Many thanks!
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even
affect SEO efforts at all?
It wont affect SEO efforts in the slightest
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
No.
I should also point out from an accesibility point of view this is pretty bad practice as well.
a) No, all content loaded from external scripts won't be considered relevant for SEO. So it's just like you don't have extra content.
If your text is in display: none or visibility: hidden , it will affect SEO but make sure that user have access to the content.
b) No because you just want to give extra information and it won't be used by Google. Google takes content as spam when it is hidden and user doesn't have access.

Googlebot and "hidden" content inside dynamically shown (js based) tabs within a page - Impact on SERPS?

Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.
To explain this further, imagine the following:
<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
Tab one
Tab two
From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?
Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?
Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?
Thanks.
I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.
However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.
Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.
Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.
p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).
In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.
As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.
Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.
The hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have this kind of menu. I suppose the hidden tabs are not keywords stuffed and useful for the users, so you shouldn't worry about this - it is useful for the user and googlebot!

Bring Safari to front

I'd like to bring Safari to the front (switch to) but without using a URL, instead I'd like to see the "pages" view so the user can pick an already loaded page. Is this possible?
We open links in Safari and if the user returns to the app and selects the link again, I'd rather let them pick which Safari page to browse instead of opening a new one. I know that if the same URL is called it will open the correct page but the user may have navigated within the original site so the url no longer matches.
Thanks,
Rick
I don't think that its possible, i would use a UIWebView inside your app in order to get that experience you want, you can find the UIWebView apple docs here (http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/uikit/reference/UIWebView_Class/Reference/Reference.html) and also the equivalence of c# methods here (http://tirania.org/tmp/rosetta.html) hope this helps
Alex
Your app doesn’t get control of Safari’s UI. You might, however, be able to design your site so that it handles navigation via Javascript—AJAX and whatnot—so that the actual page URL doesn't change, and thus so that the page, re-opened from your app, brings up the existing Safari page. Of course that introduces further problems with your pages no longer being bookmarkable, but you might find that an acceptable tradeoff.