Course Correction and Next Steps

Posted on by Peter

We tried really hard, but we’ve discovered that we’re not going to be able to pull off a “Limited” release cohesively. What that means is that it was becoming way too much work to turn off unfinished features already partially tied into the new system in order to allow authors access to a limited set of features without things blowing up. We want to invest our time in bedazzling everyone with stuff that will get the town talking, not offer something that’s standard on many sites albeit with a new coat of paint.

The course has been corrected, and we’re now working on a launch strategy that’s all-or-nothing, which will add some additional delays for our authors. I realize this is frustrating for those loyal to SR and looking forward to checking out all the cool new stuff, but what we’re creating here really hasn’t been done for our industry before, and it’s taking quite a bit of testing and changes to get everything to work together in a way that’s compelling and makes sense.

The thing we’re working on right now is the new toolbar, which will be the instant feedback that’s necessary for a successful online game. Any game designer worth their salt will say that instant feedback is integral to making a game successful, and incorporating features with sounds and visual cues on a website has taken some time, but we’re almost finished.

We still have quite a few pieces to go for other interfaces and features, but as each day progresses we are coming closer and closer to our goal, and that’s first allowing our beta testers early access to help refine the features, and then allowing all authors to play the publishing game and earn fantastic rewards.

We plan for Beta tester access towards the end of November for raw features, and full game access in December for all existing authors. January will mark the ability for new authors to sign up, and is going to be a huge party for everyone that will include prizes, cash, and contests galore. Not only is 2012 the 5 year anniversary for SharedReviews, but January will be our first official month of the Publishing Game that’s taken almost a full year of design, development and planning.

We appreciate everyone’s patience, and we’re hoping to reward that loyalty in some pretty fantastic ways.

Subdomain Reputation – Author / Content URLS moving to Subdomains

Posted on by Peter

At the end of February of this year, Google released their first “Panda” algorithm changes, which were intended to flag individual pages that were low quality. We applauded the effort by Google, since Panda was designed to help clean up plagiarizers, content farms filled with shallow repetitive content, and spam websites / blogs from search engine results.

Their strategy was to analyze webpages on a particular domain name, and look for “signals” that indicated the page was of low quality. This included the actual html markup of the page, advertisement numbers and placement, content analysis (depth, structure, readability, errors etc…) and a slew of other signals that could tell them whether a page was good or bad. They then looked at all the pages of the domain, and used the number of “flagged” low quality pages to give the overall domain a thumbs up or thumbs down. This meant that pages would no longer be treated as independently as they once were, and a few bad pages could pull an entire domain name down in rankings.

We never felt that SharedReviews should be lumped with low quality sites since we have always taken plagiarism and low quality content very seriously. From a shoot first ask questions later approach to plagiarism, all the way to suspending accounts where we felt the author just didn’t have the skills necessary to publish content that would be of value to readers, we have taken a “responsible” approach to our participation in the online content and publishing vertical. Unfortunately, our experience with Panda has been contrary, and we have seen dips and losses of traffic that correlated perfectly with each of the different “Panda Updates” that Google has released since February.

The losses have been so bad that we decided to go back to the drawing board, and see where we went wrong. The first things that jumped out to us was the actual HTML markup of the site, rendering speed, and the difficult to use navigation. We decided to do a complete site re-design, which we worked diligently on for many months, culminating in the public release of the new site redesign over a month and a half ago. We also identified what we felt were pages with low quality content, and blocked all search engines from accessing them until the author updated and improved the article (roughly about 15% of all content published on the site). After releasing the new site that is more usable, faster, more attractive, more consumable, and without any markup errors, I can confidently say that this does not appear to be why we were flagged. We even contacted Google directly and have had a confirmation that there were no manual spam actions taken against SharedReviews, but they provided no further feedback outside of a “canned” list of items we already addressed in the new design. Unfortunately, we have yet to see any recovery for the significant efforts we made to make our site better. From a reduction in bounce rate, to more time on site, to faster page speed, our readers seem to have liked the changes, but the “Panda” hasn’t.

Looking at the handful of sites that have seen confirmed recoveries from Panda, there were no real consistent items they all addressed that we missed, as far as we can tell anyways. Looking at the biggest winners and losers from each of the algorithm changes, we saw sites like blogger.com gaining huge increases in traffic (a Blogging platform known for spam and low quality content), while other good quality sites were being hit and experienced penalties for no explainable reason (Good quality unique content, good page markup, good navigation and speed etc…)

Blogging platforms, similar to us, have many different authors, with tons of different content published in tons of different verticals, but weren’t being hit negatively… why? Well, we came to one answer, and that answer was subdomains. You see, search engines treat subdomains effectively as separate websites. So if subdomain1.sharedreviews.com/article1 was flagged as “bad”, but subdomain2.sharedreviews.com/article2 was good, the bad article wouldn’t negatively impact the good article because it was considered a separate website.

We could continue to keep all articles on one domain, and try to identify bad content on an ongoing basis, but we felt that policing this on the scale we need was almost impossible since our first attempts just haven’t returned the results we needed. This is why, like popular blogging platforms, we will be moving all authors to their own subdomain. Starting in November (the actual date hasn’t been set yet), each author will have a 2 week window to modify their account nickname, which will be the new base for their account subdomain. For example, my account nickname is “Peter”, and if I do not change my nickname all of my public profile pages and content urls will be moved from http://sharedreviews.com/url to http://peter.sharedreviews.com/url. This will allow for some very cool new features such as the ability to tie in your own webmaster tools or analytics access for improved optimization, but most importantly it will allow our best authors to shine on their own without a negative impact from authors who have not made the same effort, or do not posses the same level of skill to attract and keep readers.

The new publishing game that we’re releasing is heavily dependent on readers and traffic, and we hope the addition of new custom sub-domains will provide our best authors the ability to receive the recognition and monetary rewards they deserve.

Re-Publishing SharedReviews Author Content and the new Creative Commons License / Attribution Requirements

Posted on by Peter

One of the major changes you may have noticed with the new site design, is a little logo that appears in the footer of each page that links to our license page for re-publishing content that is copyright protected by SharedReviews.

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit company committed to the right for others to disperse original, copyrighted works to learn from and expand upon without legal consequence. We wanted to provide our authors and readers the ability to re-publish author creatives in order to create a way to give our authors more exposure for the great content they publish on our platform.

Of course, there are both conditions and limitations, the first of which is that content can only be re-published on sites that are non-commercial. This means that if a blog, or website earns money in anyway (ads, affiliate, e-commerce etc…) they may not re-publish author content without purchasing a commercial syndication license from SharedReviews. We will be offering an automated means of doing so very soon.

The second, and most important caveat is attribution. You can read the specifics here, but basically every single work you re-publish needs to have a highly visible dofollow link to the original source page on SharedReviews. When using other content publishing platforms, some of these automatically add a (rel=”nofollow”) attribute to all outgoing links you include. Unless you have control in order to remove or modify this attribute to a “dofollow”, this is a breach of our attribution requirements, and our content cannot be re-published on those platforms. As an author, if you find your full content re-published on any other site without a dofollow backlink, make sure to let us know so we can provide tools to help you defend your rights.

The third caveat is that no more than 10 content items may be re-published on a specific domain at any given time. Although there will not be a pay-for option to increase these numbers, special licenses that increase this allowance are available to sites that receive a minimum of 5,000 daily unique visitors. If you are an author, and want to re-publish your own content on another platform that doesn’t offer a unique domain name (example: contentplatform.com/author_name/content) you need to be very careful since any other author accounts would be included in the 10 maximum figure. As long as you keep the number to under 10 at any given time, and meet our attribution requirements, you can change the selection up as you see fit.

All revenue generate from both Commercial Syndication, and Exclusive Rights (another new service being launched that allows other sites to purchase content already published on SharedReviews, more on this soon) will be shared with authors. The former through site-wide earnings such as trophies or the monthly reader rewards, and the latter directly with the author of the content being purchased. Add to this a new “pay for content” service we hope to launch in January that will allow third party websites to order / purchase unique content from our top authors, and you can start to see the direction we are going in order to ensure our writers and authors are rewarded more than any other platform online today.

We are always interested to hear feedback and suggestions on our plans, so if you have any, make sure to let us know here or in the forum when it is opened within the next few days.

This is just embarrassing…

Posted on by Peter

I know, this is just becoming embarrassing, but we’re still not ready to open the doors even for a limited set of features. We are close, but I’m not going to estimate another date/time without being 100% sure. I will be posting a blog update every day until the time/date is published.

Where we’re at today:

We needed to enable email notifications for the limited feature set we’re going to support, so there’s been tons of work on preparing the new email template and testing it. As most who work with HTML emails know, testing and perfecting the template isn’t easy, and can be quite time consuming. We’ve just completed this part for password retrieval, the new feature to change your email address, and private message notices.

Both the forum and the new private messaging interfaces (with the new text editor support) are done, and ready, but we’re still working on preparing the Friend Management interfaces and the new dashboard. I’m hoping it will all be ready by the end of the weekend.

Just 24 hours longer

Posted on by Peter

Internal testing is going well, just a couple of minor issues with the new text editor that are causing a few delays.

We did want to give beta-testers some time to earn some beta-tester cash for finding bugs, so we’re delaying general access for another 24 hours until Thursday October 13th at 8pm EST. Thanks for the patience!