Google Helpouts, Responsive vs Mobile SEO, Authorship Issues, Speedlink 45:2013

Hi everyone! Hope you had a great and productive week.

“It’s time to make getting good help a whole lot easier, says Udi Manber, VP Engineering of Google.” Aside from Twitter´s IPO, the Google Helpouts launch is also one noteworthy news. To cut this short, here´s a small excerpt of what Google Helpout is about:

Today, we’re announcing Helpouts — a new way to get and give help over live video. Our goal is simple: help people help each other. We want to use the convenience and efficiency of the web to enable everyone, no matter where they are or what time it is, to easily connect with someone who can help.

Real help from real people in real time

Interesting right? And while all this sounds good, there are cases that the “help” will not come for free, so do a bit of search and watch out for “reviews”. Do you want to give your own helpout? Helpouts gives you an opportunity to use your knowledge to teach others, plus, you can also get paid. What do you think? For now I think it´s a cool, idea. Let´s see.

Another interesting article I stumbled upon this week was that of the Google “Authorship” issue. While setting up the authorship markup is relatively easy and all seems well, there may just be a few more issue that you may not know of.

To make sure that all is well, head over to SEL´s how to troubleshoot authorship issues in case you have one.

Finally, Cutts takes on a question about responsive design and its impact on SEO, if any. While the video is quite short, he does mention about an interesting aspect when not using a responsive design, i.e., a mobile version of your site instead. Example would be “m.iblogzone.com” or any other variant which does not use the same URLs. Matt says that:

“…if you do a mobile version of your site, and you don’t do the rel=’canonical’ and all those sorts of things well, you might, in theory, divide the PageRank between those two pages, but if you’ve got responsive design, everything is handled from one URL, and so the PageRank doesn’t get divided. In that case everything works fine, so you don’t need to worry about the SEO drawbacks at all.”