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).

Courtesy of Camille Cusumano

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.

Post from: BPWrap

The Google Tango

Related Posts

• April 21, 2009 -- Google Profiles – Work In Progress (5)
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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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Post from: BPWrap

All You Need Is .. Google – Hear the Buzz

Posts from the Archives

• May 26, 2007 -- Tagging – Humans versus Robots (2)
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• December 21, 2005 -- Wikipedia plans site shake-up (0)
• May 31, 2004 -- Did Your Company Name Work Better Before The Internet? (0)

Blogs versus websites

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.

Blogging is Proactive

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.

Ways to improve your blog visibility

Two particular practices can materially improve blog posts visibility.

• Regular blog posts, even if short
• Add links to blog posts to interconnect

Regular blog posts have a number of important benefits, all of which ratchet up the search engine visibility:

• The RSS news feeds are pinging the search engines more frequently
• Web pages that change more frequently encourage the search engine spiders to crawl the web pages more frequently

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.

What to avoid with your blog

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.

• Having a static ‘Home page’
• Having too many blog posts on the ‘front page’

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.

Conclusion

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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Post from: BPWrap

Blogging For Maximum Google Visibility

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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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Post from: BPWrap

Google Chooses Big Ugly

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Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

Post from: BPWrap

Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

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• June 30, 2009 -- SEO Factories Lose Their Edge (10)
• June 19, 2009 -- SEO Gets Simpler In 2009 (23)

Where should effort go to be highly visible in keyword searches with Google? A precise answer probably demands an evaluation of all the Google Search Engine Ranking Factors like that done by SEOmoz. However the Google search debate normally seems to revolve around Content or Links.

Mark Jackson stated quite categorically The Golden Rule of SEO: Content is King. Aaron Wall also commented that although there are those who push for linking, Content is King when you get down to it.

The debate is ongoing and there are even those who stay on the fence and declare both content and inbound linking is king.

How should you budget your effort then in trying to improve rankings in Google keyword searches? Should it be equal effort on content and links or some other ratio?

That is a false dichotomy since there is another equally important website dimension that does not even feature in this debate. Indeed if you look at the hot issues in the past two months in SEO, that third dimension has been the one the experts have been talking about. The third leg of the tripod is the website architecture. It deserves equal effort as illustrated in the following table, which is derived from a chart in an article on Key SEO Services. In this table, the Plus value is a reminder of the Upsides that can be created by working on this aspect. The Minus value indicates the Downsides if this aspect is handled poorly.

Triple Power SEO
Architecture	Content	Links
Plus – Visibility	Plus – Appeal	Plus – Authority
Minus – Barriers to search engines	Minus – Spam	Minus – Penalties
Monitor     >>     Measure     >>     Manage     >>     Improve

It is somewhat surprising website architecture gets so little air time given its importance. It can be complex but a great deal of improvement can be obtained with very simple methods. It is likely that the vast majority of websites that do not perform well in Google keyword searches suffer from website architecture problems. Yet much progress can be made with some of the most basic tools.

For example, the Xenu Link Sleuth (TM) will find broken links on web sites, which can be a major problem for the search engine spiders. It crawls the website in exactly the way a search engine spider does. Google itself provides a great deal of information through its Google Webmaster Tools website. If you have Google Analytics or Google Adsense ads on your website, then both give statistics that often pinpoint problems in the website architecture. Efforts put into correction efforts will have clear and certain results, unlike those hoped for when efforts go into content or links.

The aim of this article was to discuss the high level allocation of effort rather than to provide a compendium of website architecture problem areas and solutions. For the latter we can recommend an article by Richard Baxter, Diagnose Critical Website Architecture Issues for SEO. He also has a slide show of the presentation he gave at SMX London 2009 on the same topic. It’s very good value if you want pointers on how to put effort into this priority SEO dimension.

Post from: BPWrap

Content May Be The SEO King But Check The Palace Architecture

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All the headlines this morning confirm that Microsoft, Yahoo agree on long-sought search deal:

Microsoft Corp. has finally roped Yahoo Inc. into an Internet search partnership, capping a convoluted pursuit that dragged on for years and finally setting the stage for them to make a joint assault against the dominance of Google Inc.

The 10-year deal announced Wednesday gives Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience, adding a potentially potent weapon to the software maker’s Internet arsenal as it tries to better confront Google, which is by far the leader in online search and advertising. Microsoft didn’t have to give Yahoo an upfront payment to make it happen, as many Yahoo investors had hoped.

It will take up to 2 years to get put in place, so don’t expect sudden changes. It’s the kind of headline to yawn about.

There’s another headline that really should be getting all the attention: Google Pulls Apple from Search Results. Since it is the kind of headline that cool thought may attempt to bury, here is the start of the story:

Perhaps the final paragraph of the story, although humorous, may correctly indicate the seriousness of this item:

Some industry analysts think the retaliatory moves could result in all-out war like back in 1939, when a Polish sausage company stopped using pork from Germany. In response Germany invaded. “We don’t want another situation like that,” said Bank of America’s George Pendry.

It all confirms that the company which has set as its high ideal to catalogue all knowledge while doing no evil is driven by the advertising bottom line. Relevancy of results takes second place to that.

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Google, Apple In Conflict While Microsoft, Yahoo Agree

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• October 31, 2009 -- Blogging For Maximum Google Visibility (4)

Summary

The SEO world continues to be shaken by the hints offered by Matt Cutts last week on the nofollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. Many seem shaken but perhaps people have made assumptions about PageRank that are not true. It is difficult to prove how things really work since Google remains cagey on what really happens. Here we offer a Null Hypothesis, a simple explanation, that people may wish to consider. This should only be replaced by a more complex view, when that can be proven to be better.

Introduction

Andy Beard is a keen observer of the Google scene and poses the key question following the Matt Cutts revelations last week: Is PageRank Sculpting Dead & Can Comments Kill Your PageRank?

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became “trendy”), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

Important articles he cites on this are:

• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
• Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow
• No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow
• Is What’s Good For Google, Good For SEO

Not everyone is so concerned and Andrew Goodman frankly states, PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance.

How Is PageRank Calculated

The Google website is strangely obscure on how PageRank is calculated. There are a few explanations in Google Answers (no longer supported) by others on such issues as My Page Rank and Page Rank Definition – Proof of convergence and uniqueness. Phil Craven offers a reasonably straightforward account in Google’s PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it. That includes the following:

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites.

The KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart)

The problem in trying to estimate how the Google PageRank process works is that PageRank is only one of over 100 or more factors involved in how web pages rank in keyword searches. Any attempt to prove a given assumption about PageRank involves a typical statistical analysis where one tries to infer an explanation from somewhat fuzzy data. That is where the KISS principle comes in. In such a situation, we should perhaps rely on the approach favored by some great minds.

Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

Occam of Occam’s Razor

A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Albert Einstein

The Null Hypothesis is presumed true until statistical evidence indicates otherwise.

Sir Roland Fisher

Given the Matt Cutts suggestions that some find perplexing, what is the simplest explanation of the Google PageRank process that could explain what is involved?

The Null Hypothesis

What the PageRank process attempts is mind-boggling. It aims to attach a PageRank value to any hyperlink in the total space of web pages and their inter links. It involves an iterative calculation since the values are interdependent. This PageRank can be considered as the probability that a random surfer (human or robot) will pass down that link as compared with all the other links in the total space (graph).

As Matt Cutts reminded us last week, even if a web page is excluded by its owner using a robots.txt file, it may still get into consideration if it is included in a sitemap file or has a link coming in from another external web page. Having an extra indicator on each link indicating whether it is influential in passing PageRank would increase the complexity of the data enormously. Given that, we propose the following Null Hypothesis (See foot of article for definition of this expression). This of course could be abandoned in favor of a more complex explanation if that could be proven statistically with sufficient confidence or if Google chose to provide a more correct explanation of what is done.

The Null Hypothesis runs as follows. The whole process splits into two phases. The first phase looks at all web pages (URLs) and all associated links to determine the PageRank of each web page and thus the contributions that would flow down each link. There are no exclusions and this calculation process handles all URLs in the total Internet space (graph). Modifiers that website owners may have applied such as robots.txt files or tags such as noindex, nofollow, etc. do not get involved at this stage. For all URLs and links without exception, values such as those illustrated below would be calculated.

The second phase of the process involves how these PageRank values are then used within the search algorithms. Here whatever is specified via robots.txt or nofollow tags would apply. The PageRank contribution from nofollow-ed links thus would not be included in the calculation. Also any filtering factors that Google may wish to apply for bad neighborhoods, etc. would only apply in this second phase. The underlying web pages and links would still have a first-phase PageRank calculated but this would in no way influence the second phase results.

This two-phase approach would seem to square with what we have been hearing recently. It is offered very much as a Null Hypothesis, so if someone has an Alternative Hypothesis, we look forward to hearing it. Over to you.

Implications of this Null Hypothesis

In the mean time, if this explanation is true, some obvious considerations apply. The basic PageRank calculation is determined by the total set of URLs and links. The PageRank value for a URL is never changed by modifications that apply in the second phase. All that happens in the second phase is that some of the PageRank contributions are ignored. So the effective PageRank that a URL has in the second phase is always less than or equal to what it had in the first phase. A URL can be more prominent solely because others become less prominent.

Significant changes can only come about through influences that affect the first phase. These relate to the site architecture rather than the interlinkages. That is after all what Matt Cutts was recommending.

Footnote:
See this link for an explanation of Null Hypothesis.

Post from: BPWrap

PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis

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Perhaps the previous post about Google Profiles was read in the right places.  Things seem to be happening.  That old Sergey Brin profile has now been blocked rather than being deleted.  For the rest of us, profile deletion seems to be on the way.  Here is what is currently being displayed.

Profiles: About profiles

A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. You have control over what others see. Your profile won’t display any private information unless you’ve explicitly added it.

At the bottom of the page, you will also find the following, which seems to be new:

You may also be interested in…

Other helpful articles:

• Profiles: Deleting a profile
• Profiles: Receiving messages through your profile
• Profiles: About the My Links section

Although the Deleting a profile page at the moment suggests you will find a link at the top-right of your Profile Edit page to delete a profile, that is not currently the case.  Presumably that will be corrected shortly. See update below as of April 23.

The last link is of interest since it introduces the Google Social Graph (API).  Here is how that page starts:

Build critical mass on your website

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

It’s all fascinating stuff.  Very much Work-in-Progress, but the best advice seems to be "Watch This Space".

Update as of April 23: The delete link has now appeared: at the bottom right rather than the top right, although the web page still indicates top right. Nevertheless we are almost there.

Post from: BPWrap

Google Profiles – Work In Progress

Related Posts

• April 12, 2010 -- The Google Tango (2)
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In a recent post I suggested that Google might replace Facebook.  I was talking about Google Profiles but I must apologize for my over-enthusiasm.  As I begin poking around in the Google Profile world I find there are some very loose ends.

To help you better understand my concerns, perhaps you would like to check out whether Google knows about you, or at least has a profile on you.  That may be the biggest surprise you’ll get from this post but there are more to come.  Why not search for yourself and then use your back button to come back here:

Here is how Google describes some features of  Google Profiles:

A Google Profile allows you to control how you appear on Google and tells others a bit more about who you are. With a Google Profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You have control over what others see.

That sounds good as far as it goes.  However it mentions that if you’ve been writing reviews on Google Maps, creating articles on Google Knol, sharing Google Reader items, or adding books to your Google Book Search library, you may already have a Profile.

The Google Profiles team clearly see all this as a work in progress.

We’re still working to improve profiles on Google. Please submit your suggestions and comments to help us decide where to go next.

Perhaps before you get too involved, you might wish to check out how well this Profile system is supported in Google.  (Note that these are comments as of today and the profiles might be changed in the future.)  Larry Page does not seem to have a profile.  Eric Schmidt does have a profile which could be described as adequate.  Sergey Brin on the other hand rather surprisingly has his profile in Portuguese.  Here is how it looks today, although clearly it may have changed by the time you go to see it. (Now blocked – see Google Profiles Update April 21

Whether this is to appeal to the Brazilian members of Orkut, I am not sure.  However Sergey Brin seems to like to leave a historical trail since his web page at Stanford is still to be seen.

More seriously I believe Google profiles have some more major problems.  Search for Matt Cutts and you will find there are two profiles for him.  My friend Donna Fontenot also has two profiles although at least in that case they are the same.  One problem here seems to be that there is no way of removing a profile as far as I can see.  If you set up a separate Gmail account and mistakenly allow it to be treated as a profile, then that is one way you may end up with two profiles.

The problem is one of Identity Consolidation. This is the ability for a user to indicate that one or more identities, profiles or URLs across different sites all represent that same user. It is also known as profile aggregation or profile equivalency.

It is suggested that identity consolidation should be done in a user centric way without any "surprise" or automagic identity consolidations. Users get upset when identities/profiles they thought were different (say, because they were on different sites) are unexpectedly auto-collapsed/consolidated. Users do not expect sites to share information behind the user’s back (like their email addresses).  That seems to be the problem that Google is running into.

One way that can be used to limit this is the "me" rel value, which is used to indicate profile equivalence and for identity-consolidation.  rel="me" is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person.   The code looks as follows:

If you use that approach, then you can really optimize your appearance when visitors check you out in a new Firefox plug-in called identify.  You can read more about this approach in a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick.  It is based on the Google Social Graph API, which tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person.

British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I’ve seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology, called simply Identify.  This Firefox plug-in can draw from any web page that has links tagged rel="me". Just click the control key and the "i" key to get a pop-up offering information put together from all around the web about the person the page is associated with. It works on Twitter profile pages, LinkedIn pages, blogs with good markup and other profile pages.

It is better to use the alt key and the "i" key but apart from that minor quibble with what is reported here, Identify really is impressive.  Perhaps Google Profiles with more of an Identify appearance may yet be that FaceBook killer that we were talking about earlier.

Post from: BPWrap

Google is no Facebook killer

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