The Search world is all a-twitter with the news that the Google Spam team has downgraded the search rankings for the Google Chrome group because their actions resulted in bloggers being paid to write posts that included links to Google Chrome web pages. That is in violation of the Google Quality Guidelines.
That is a question that many observers are asking. Google wished to create a strong property in the social media world after its various social media flops such as Orkut. After all if you want to make money, you should be where the people are. So Google Plus came charging out of the stable and very quickly had the largest number of adherents in the shortest period of time. Larry Page said there were 40 million users of Google Plus.
Perhaps it’s the buzz around the launch of Google Plus, but some other hot topics seem to have gone off the boil. Perhaps the most lively this year was the effect of the introduction of the Panda algorithm to grade the quality of web pages. An interesting development on this seems to have happened without too much comment as yet.
This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley
In any search engine optimization (SEO) guide, they will tell you to do keyword research, using Google Adwords. Most guides won’t give you any more detail than that. “Just type in your keywords and Adwords will give you keywords,” or something to that extent, is the general gist. In actuality, keyword research is much more complicated and requires a complete understanding of the function of your site as well as your potential readership. There are a variety of steps that go into keyword research.
Adam Bryant has an intriguing article in the New York Times covering Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss. As a Google-phile rather than a Google-phobe, it covers a topic that I am delighted is being covered by Google.
Of all the topics that come up frequently in SEO discussions, duplicate content is at the head of the list. It comes up in two contexts. The first concerns all those scraper sites that are created by spammers to create backlinks and do this by stealing copy from the original, legitimate authors.
What image does that Google Tango call to mind? Perhaps it was of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin ordering three electric Tango vehicles. Brin and others have been heavy into electric cars recently. Brin is invested in Tesla, the manufacturer of the Tango, and has ordered three Tangos (all the luxury T6000 model, which cost $148,000 each).
What we had in mind was the other Tango. For those who are not into ballroom dancing, that’s the evocative South American dance with the rhythm, Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow. That seemed an appropriate description of Google’s speed of action on a variety of operations. Of course Google prides itself on delivering search results on complex keyword searches in a fraction of a second.
Google can also react fast to signals that are sent directly to it. This means that for blogs, indexing of blog posts can be very fast given that RSS news feeds provide an immediate signal when new posts have been added.
That is a process that Google finds very effective. That is why Google is pushing for a new system that will allow the Google Index to Go Real Time.
Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. The PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, could be used by Google for indexing the web instead of crawling the links. PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format whereby a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Google would ask every website to declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document.
So much for the Quick, Quick but why the Slow, Slow for Google. This is because there are some processes that operate on a much slower time cycle. Perhaps one of the most extreme is Google Maps. Google can partially blame the map database sources it uses. However there are some examples that are almost ludicrous. The biggest local example of that is hard to miss. The data for the Golden Ears Bridge across the Fraser River took almost 9 months of operations before Tele Atlas updated its map index as of March 31. Mapquest picked it up immediately. At the time of writing some 12 days later, Google Maps still has not picked this up.
The other area where Slow, Slow applies is the speed at which new web pages not included in RSS news feeds get into the Google index. In some cases, this can be measured in months. Here the enormous and explosively growing size of the Internet limits what is possible. Even if a URL to a web page is found, it may be some time before the spiders or crawlers can revisit to fully identify what is located at that URL.
In this case, Google had a choice on whether its index should be Big and/or Fast and/or Accurate. In practice given the Internet dynamics, only two of these are attainable at the same time. Google has chosen Big and Accurate and the result is as fast as they can make it, which is still very slow.
We are now promised that a new process, Google Caffeine, is being slowly rolled out. However this will probably deal with the way search results are developed rather than the way web pages are added to the index. It seems likely that we must stay satisfied with the Slow, Slow rhythm for the speed at which web pages are included in the index.
Nevertheless Google offers sufficient processes that go at the Quick, Quick pace so must of us will continue to be happy with the Google Tango.
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Watchers of the Internet scene were aware, as Taiyo Johnson reported, that local businesses no longer need a website. In its Local Business Center, Google works hard to develop listings for all local businesses. Now the Google Local Business Center is turning into a small business blog dashboard. Each business has a Place Page.
As Google advises, you can now post to your Place Page.
Posting to your Place Page allows you to give Google Maps users recent updates about your business. These posts can be changed quickly, so posts to your Place Page allow the Local Business Center to keep up with the pace of your business. Once you post a message expect 5-10 minutes before it shows on the Place Page.
If you found that a somewhat surprising development, then hold on to your hats since Google now seems to be trying to supplant Facebook and Twitter in offering a new type of social media, Buzz.
Google Buzz is Google’s attempt at tackling the latest social networking craze. While Google has tried before at taking this market over with its own services such as Orkut, Knol, Picasa to name a few – none are even close to being true rivlas with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
So Google Buzz will let you see all your contact’s status updates from a wide variety of networks and allow you to see them all from the comfort of your own Gmail account. This means it is in pretty close competition with sites like Friendfeed as well as Facebook – who has also started to integrate messages from other locations. I guess if you can’t beat them – join them, take all their stuff, put it all on your site… and call it Google Buzz!
Provided you’re happy to go with Google as your Internet infrastructure, it all looks pretty appealing. However the rocky progress of the Local Business Center shows that relying on computer based systems without human over-ride can produce very problematic results. It will be interesting to see whether Google can finetune Buzz and get it to appeal on a consistent basis to its users. First signs leave that as a big question mark.
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If you are concerned to bring lots of traffic to your online property, then there’s no discussion about which is the better choice. A blog will perform very much more strongly than a website for reasons we will shortly discuss. Indeed if blogs had come along before websites, there would now only be a small fraction of the websites we see on the Internet.
The biggest reason why blogs outperform websites is that blogs are proactive while regular websites are reactive. A blog can signal to Google or the other search engines the instant that new material has been added. On the other hand, if you change a web page, Google will only be aware of the change the next time one of their spiders happens to check out that specific blog post. That factor alone has an enormous impact on the search engine visibility of blog posts. However the specific visibility of any particular blog can be improved or diminished by more detailed decisions on particular features of the blog.
By observation, this search-engine visibility of blog posts is greatly speeded up now with the adoption by Google of its new search infrastructure, ‘caffeine’, during the summer. You can check this by doing Google Alerts on keywords in your post and seeing how rapidly these are triggered. It really is most impressive.
Two particular practices can materially improve blog posts visibility.
Regular blog posts have a number of important benefits, all of which ratchet up the search engine visibility:
The other useful way of strengthening important blog posts is to add links to them from other blog posts. Although internal links are probably not as important as external links, they do provide paths for spiders to follow and will encourage more thorough indexing.
Although blogs do have this inherent search engine visibility, it is possible to severely handicap how visible the individual blog posts will be. The key parameter here is the number of times a new blog post appears on the blog front page. It turns out that the extremes reduce the impact of individual blog posts.
With a static home page, new individual blog posts only appear as singles or as entries within category or tag pages. Although they may be no less visible to humans or search engine spiders that follow the news feeds, general readers visiting ‘the blog’ may never click on a link to spot the latest web page.
If one goes with the default home page of a blog, where say 5 or 10 blog posts may appear in sequence, then again the potential search engine visibility of the individual blog posts is reduced. By showing only say 3 or even only the latest blog post, that content gets the added advantage of recency coupled with the greater ‘PageRank’ strength of the home page.
Sometimes these ‘big picture’ questions about the basic blog site architecture get forgotten, However by making some right choices, the overall search engine visibility of the total blog content can be significantly improved. That is something no blog owner should casually overlook.
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Google has a bigger Search Box and many observers find it big and ugly. It is surprising how a move from a 13-pixel font for the search box, up to 17 pixels can have such a visual impact. This same font size is used for the list of possible searches that is presented by the Google Suggest process. If this change is not yet apparent in your part of the world here is what the Google Search Box with the Google Suggest list looks like.
Below the Search box, the buttons also are increased in size and are now more square:
It is surprising how that I’m Feeling Lucky button survives. Even more so when you realize that whenever this button is clicked, it may well cost Google in lost advertising revenues.
The thinking behind this change is not at all clear, given so many adverse reactions.
The official word is that the Google Search Box is now S-U-P-E-R sized. Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience introduces it as follows:
For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use.
It is perhaps something that only its Mother could love.
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