The Google Quality Guidelines Violation

The penalty for violating Quality Guidelines occurred when Google hired two top marketing agencies to promote the Chrome web browser using video content. 

Google reportedly bought online video ads from a digital media agency called Essence Digital. Essence then reportedly hired another company called Unruly to carry out Google’s video ad campaign. The end result was that a number of blogs wrote positive posts (with the video embedded) about Google Chrome for compensation – the reward was apparently Amazon gift cards.

These blog posts were of inferior quality, said little about Google Chrome but did include links back to Chrome web pages.. Google then issued a statement that addressed the issue:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

The Google Wrist-Slapping

Google has now slapped its own wrist over this Chrome pay-for-blogging flap. It is downgrading the search result ranking of the company’s own Web browser, Google Chrome, for 60 days.  The punishment imposed on Chrome will significantly lower the results ranking of the main download page for the browser.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side will need to  submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

The Irony of this Google Wrist-Slapping

Ignoring any Google internal politics that may be involved here, there is a certain irony in the events here.  This involves the following steps:

1. Google builds a search engine based on an algorithm that puts weight on the number of back links to web pages
2. The Online world reacts to this as everyone tries to create massive numbers of back links to their web pages sometimes by paying
3. Google attempts to stop this tsunami of back links by adopting quality guide lines to ‘outlaw’ paid links
4. Google inadvertently violates its own quality guidelines as many others innocently do
5. Google penalizes itself to set an example

Google is behaving like King Canute here and its action will have no long term effect.  Better by far than taking step 5 when step 4 occurred, would be to rethink step 1 when step 2 occurred.  Google continues to promote the PageRank concept as if it has marketing effectiveness.  Most knowledgeable observers of this scene suggest it should be buried.  That would be the way to avoid embarrassing wrist-slapping incidents like this.

Post from: BPWrap

The Irony Of Google Slapping Its Own Wrist Over Chrome Paid Links

Technorati Tags: browser, Chrome, download, PageRank, penalty, quality guidelines

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The question is could that momentum drive it to emulate in size the Facebook empire? There were rumors that the number of active users of Google Plus was dropping.  Was there a fatal flaw in the way Google Plus had been conceived?

One Google engineer inadvertently went public with his concerns about this fatal flaw.  However Steve Yegge is an engineer and sees things very much from the technical standpoint.  He felt that the lack of a platform which would encourage many developers to provide content was the fatal flaw of Google Plus.

It is certainly true if you wish to copy the Facebook model that the platform should exist.  However Google is tapping in to different aspects of social activity.  Here in Google Plus we are talking entirely about the sharing aspect of any digital content including video.  Social activity is very much about communicating and thus the two go together hand in hand.  Google has yet to show all the ways that sharing can be enriched and complemented by other data and information that Google can easily provide.

This positive view is shared by Jon Evans.

I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, my last post there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” – but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo my Twitter stream.

He and I hold very similar views.  Although the present version of Google Plus is very much a work in progress, I think early signs indicate that this all is heading in the right direction.  I use social media to stay in touch with others.  I rarely get involved in games.  Already I am finding that Google Plus is the most likely way I can be aware of important things that are happening among Internet aficionados.

Post from: BPWrap

Can Google Plus Get There From Here

Posts from the Archives

• February 2, 2005 -- Google Should Welcome MSN Search (0)
• August 29, 2006 -- Internet Marketing Strategies – An Idea Whose Time Has Come (3)
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• October 12, 2007 -- TransCanada Experiences (3)

It links in with a topic where in the past I seemed to be taking a contrarian view.  Subdomains or Subdirectories, that is the question.  What is the appropriate architecture for a ‘website’ that includes a number of web pages. Should they all be in subdirectories or subfolders of the main domain?  or is it more appropriate to create subdomains and put similar web pages into appropriate subdomains.

The definitive view on that is usually quoted as the article on
Subdomains and Subdirectories by Matt Cutts on December 10, 2007.  He said the two were equivalent and you could do either.  His usual preference was to go with what he regarded as the simpler approach, that is to use subdirectories.

Spring 2010

I took the opposing view because the Keyword Search Engine Report Pages (SERPs) treated the two differently at the time (and usually do so now).  A maximum of two entries would be shown from a single domain and its subdirectories.  However any number of entries from different subdomains could appear in a SERP if they were deemed relevant by the search algorithm.

I set out my logic for thinking this in an initial post, An Outside-In View Of Websites.  I then expanded the arguments in two articles on the Search Engine People blog, An Outside-In View of Subdomains – Questions and Answers.

I summarized my view as follows:

Subdomains have the appearance of independent ‘websites’ since they can appear in the SERP ranking lists as additional entries even though the main domain itself may already be represented by two entries.

It is almost as if the Google algorithms assume a slightly greater separation between web pages that appear on different subdomains.  This extra appearance for a subdomain in the SERP does increase the possibility that a prospect may click through to some other part of the domain space.

I was also expressing a counterview to the argument that in addition to Page Authority (for a single web page), there was also Domain Authority, which gave an extra boost to all web pages on the domain and on any subdirectories.  However the view was that this Domain Authority would not migrate sideways to other subdomains of the same domain.  This view does not seem to cover the fact that www.domain.com is itself a subdomain and there is also a URL domain.com, which might perhaps be regarded as the pure domain.

Summer 2011

Roll forward a year.  This spring, Panda rolls out and many very large websites are hit. Their rankings fall dramatically as does their visitor traffic.  For example, articles on the HubPages website saw a 50% drop in page views after Google’s Panda updates.  But there can be life after death.  As the Wall Street Journal reports, Site Claims to Loosen Google “Death Grip”.

HubPages.com, one of the largest sites hit hard by Google’s new “Panda” ranking algorithm change may have found a solution. The site, which has content on everything from fly fishing techniques to “generally accepted auditing standards,” has some low quality content but also original, high-quality articles, yet the entire site was punished by the new Google ranking system.

In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Paul Edmondson, CEO, suggesting that he might want to try subdomains, among other things.

The HubPages subdomain testing began in late June and already has shown positive results. Edmondson’s own articles on HubPages, which saw a 50% drop in page views after Google’s Panda updates, have returned to pre-Panda levels in the first three weeks since he activated subdomains for himself and several other authors.

“Our change is very positive for excellent authors, and not positive for weaker authors,” Edmondson said. “This is exactly what Google should want,” he said.

This result would seem to confirm that subdomains do have that degree of separation from the main domain whereas the subdirectories that were being used were closely associated with the domain.

That would certainly seem to be the simplest explanation for what we are seeing.  However the related articles below from very knowledgeable SEO experts show their skepticism that this is in fact the case.  They are sticking with the historical, majority view.  Time will tell which is the correct view.  … and of course, Google may also move the goalposts and change how they handle subdomains and subdirectories.

Related Articles:

• The Panda Fix from Hubpages by Dave Harry Thursday, July 14, 2011
• HubPages Adds Subdomains, Claims Google Panda Recovery, But…  by Danny Goodwin, July 15, 2011

Post from: BPWrap

Subdomains or Subdirectories One More Time

Technorati Tags: Hubpages, Matt Cutts, subdirectory, subdomain

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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.

Before Using Adwords

Before going to Google Adwords, before even considering any aspect of SEO, take these three factors under close, careful consideration:

1. What does your site offer – There is no limit to how many correct answers you can have to this question. Try to be as general for some and as specific for other answers as possible. Cover everything.
2. What ideal audience is your site for – Does your site provide more basic knowledge for beginners to your topic or does it go in-depth for the knowledgeable gurus? Essentially, you want to refine your ideas from the previous step to get a general picture of who your readers mostly are.
3. What is your potential audience – Look beyond your target audience in this step, and think about how you can make your content more valuable and accessible for those who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for (in other words, those who are just Googling the type of content you provide). Look beyond your industry jargon, and think of general (usually uninformed) keywords that would attract guppy readers.

After taking the above factors into consideration, you should have a good list of keywords for your site. Your list should include a variety of word combinations and keyword lengths (long-tail and short-tail keywords).

Using Adwords

Now, you can finally go to the Google Keyword Tool. Using your list, start typing some of your keyword phrases into the “Word or phrase” query. Don’t worry about filling in the “Website” query, and check the box that says “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” Also, be sure to check the “[Exact]” option under “Match Types.” If you leave these boxes unchecked, you would get results of what Google thinks is related to the input terms, which can help brainstorming. But at this point, we want to determine the value of our specific keyword list.

Now, you should be confronted with a huge list of data. The numbers under “Global Monthly Searches” are the amount of searches all over the Earth averaged over 12 months while the numbers under “Local Monthly Searches” are referring to the location specified (default as United States…if only you could specify states and cities). The “competition” indicator is price per click (PPC) competition only.

Now that you have all of this information associated with your list of keywords, I recommend using a spreadsheet to see each word’s (or word combination’s) search volume and competition rate. I would highlight the terms that relate the most to the subject and theme of your site. Delete any words that your site won’t have sufficient content to support. Of course, try to keep a good mix of broad and targeted keywords.

In general, when looking at your results, you want to consider:

• Looking for the keywords with high local monthly searches but lower competition.
• Evaluate which of the keywords fitting the above criteria have the higher Estimated Average CPC value.

Keywords chosen through this criteria will give you the largest return when it comes to Adsense revenue. Again, terms with high search volume and low competition are key.

Implementing Keywords

After your list is narrowed to 10-20 focused keywords, your keyword research is done! Now you have to implement these keywords into your site (many of them are probably already on there). You may need to create new pages or add content to existing ones. Try to focus on using three to five keywords per page. Too many different keywords will probably dilute the page and lower its rank in search engines. Don’t ever mindlessly spam keywords as Google will slam your rank for this.

Remember also to include your keywords into HTML elements of your site such as:

• Headings
• Alt text
• Title tag
• Meta description tags
• Navigational links
• Anchor text

By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

Post from: BPWrap

Keyword Research: Using Google Adwords

Technorati Tags: Adwords, keyword, Keyword research, Search engine optimization

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Google could be an organization that is ruled by the functioning of the Intelligence Trap, as Edward de Bono defined it.  In other words people so highly intelligent that they too quickly accept their first hypothesis on how things function.  They move to defend their first hypothesis rather than continuing to probe on why other hypotheses might fit the circumstances better.

Luckily in early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.  Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app. They wanted to build better bosses.

Perhaps only a data-mining giant like Google would have followed this approach.  They began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.

Later that year they produced the following list of directives in order of importance – as well as a few managements pitfalls it found.

Eight Good Behaviors

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being.
4. Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

Three Pitfalls of Managers

1. Have trouble making a transition to the team
2. Lack a consistent approach to performance management and career development
3. Spend too little time managing and communicating

What is important in that list of Good Behaviors is the order.  It runs quite counter to how Google behaved in much of its 13-year history to that point.  Particularly in the early years, Google had a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.

In that list, technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you.” Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

What is not mentioned in this article but is equally important is that this ensures more people who are ‘close to the coal face’ as Shell describe it are having their voices heard.  The more customer inputs are heard within the organization, the more likely it is that the organization will be delivering what customers really want.

For a similar perspective just remember what Commander D. Michael Abrashoff was saying some 10 years earlier on Grassroots Leadership.

He commanded the USS Benfold, a $1 billion warship, which was in 1999 one of the U.S. Navy’s most modern, most lethal fighting machines.  This is how he described his management approach.

“In most organizations today, ideas still come from the top. Soon after arriving at this command, I realized that the young folks on this ship are smart and talented. And I realized that my job was to listen aggressively — to pick up all of the ideas that they had for improving how we operate. The most important thing that a captain can do is to see the ship from the eyes of the crew.”

It’s taken Google another ten years to prove this same approach by extensive analysis but at least they’ve got there in the end.  Of course knowing these preferred behaviors for managers is only a small part of the challenge.

Much bigger is to get the cultural change within the organization so that these behaviors become the way of life for managers.  It takes real talent in managers to have faith that your team will deliver better results if you give them the responsibilities.  Undoubtedly some hired for other skills will not be able to make that cultural change.

Post from: BPWrap

Google Rules on People Management

Technorati Tags: Googleplex, Grassroots Leadership, New York Times, USS Benfold

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The second context, which is the topic of this article, is the duplicate content that is created by WordPress.  There may be many arguments why duplicate content is good for human readers, but it certainly creates problems with the search engines.

The reasons for these problems are really at the heart of a post that Matt Cutts did some years back speaking of his enthusiasm for blog posts and how well Google was handling them.  Minty Fresh Indexing he called it.  The reason why Google was handling them so well was the relatively new BlogSearch and its ability to deal with news feeds.  As he said, a post could be visible in a keyword search within an hour or two as opposed to the much slower spider crawling entry of static web pages.

What was not so clear at the time was the associated problem that news feeds provided a parallel content stream that was almost exactly the same as the blog itself.  In this post we will discuss ways that have been suggested to solve this duplicate content problem and describe the gap that has still been left in creating a complete solution.  We will then offer a  solution to fill that gap.

The Classical Way to Reduce WordPress Blog Duplicate Content

Blogs came with major pluses and major minuses.  They naturally have a large number of internal hyperlinks which helps the search engine spiders to identify the full blog structure rapidly.  On the other hand they also produce a large number of similar pages, which may cause confusion in keyword searches when different web pages come up with the same content.  In particular, the blog Home Page presents particular problems.

Blogs started off as journals or in other words a chronological listing of items the author found worth recording.  In WordPress,  to avoid the Home Page becoming inordinately long, WordPress offers some code which allows an article to be split to give only a short introductory excerpt and to then give a Read More link to read the remainder of the article.  A blog Home Page setup using this More link looks a little like a newspaper front page.  It has a series of teaser items which require you to go to another page in the blog to read the full continuation of the article.

With physical newspapers, this approach of ‘Continued on Page Twelve’ seems the right compromise.  The newspaper reader can then rapidly scan all the items on the front page and move to whichever article takes their fancy.  Physically it would be difficult to maneuver a huge newspaper front page that had all the articles printed out at length.

Applying the same teaser items approach for a blog home page is not necessarily a way human readers will find satisfactory.  One can navigate rapidly through a very long scrolling web page if you know that an article is to be found in its entirety farther down the front page.  However adopting that approach which does not use the More link presents its own problem.

Many recommend having full post entries in the RSS newsfeed since readers of the newsfeed may prefer to stay with the newsfeed rather than switching across to the blog to read each individual article.

In this case, the news feed and the Home Page will be remarkably similar content.  Several different solutions have been proposed to deal with these kind of problems and we will list them here.  However they leave a gap, which we will describe.

Solutions To WordPress Duplicate Content Problems

Some of these cover other issues in addition to the duplicate content problem but largely they cover the same ground..

How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe
November 30th, 2006 – Oleg Ishenko – A good discussion of the Read More approach and related issues.

Make WordPress Search Engine Friendly
March 19, 2007 – a video from Michael Gray

SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide
March 2007 – Jim Westergren

Fighting Duplicate Content On WordPress
July 25, 2007 – Chris Walker

Avoid WordPress Duplicate Content Problems With Google
an earlier post on this blog on June 3rd, 2009 – using the robots.txt file for the duplicate content problem.

A Search Engine Visibility Gap Sometimes Left By These Solutions

The following logical steps will show you the gap in search engine visibility that can develop where both the Home Page and the RSS Newsfeed contain full posts.

1. To avoid duplicate content being indexed, the robots.txt file disallows the feed from being crawled by the robots.
2. When a new post is added, the search engines are pinged.
3. When the Google robot checks the source of the ping the news feed is excluded from the crawl.
4. Accordingly the post content in the feed cannot be included in the Google BlogSearch results, which are based entirely on news feed content.

I base my statements on personal experience but others may find the logical steps controversial.  The following references show the debate that has gone before on this.

Search Engine Optimization for WordPress

The WordPress Codex gives as an example WordPress robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed

Adding A Robots.txt File Has Increased My Google Traffic By 16% In 4 Days
12 April 2007 – Everton notes that the following robots.txt has increased Google traffic by 16% in 4 days.  His robots.txt file includes the following

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed/

Feeds in the search results?
03 October 2007 Joost de Valk offers the following assurance:

If you’re afraid blocking indexation of your feed might cause you to loose traffic from Google BlogSearch and/or Technorati, it won’t. Google BlogSearch uses FeedFetcher, which doesn’t observe robots.txt, and neither does Technorati. They both seem to be under the impression that pinging a blog search engine is enough consent to get it indexed, while others have suggested that pinging Technorati on behalf of others might be a nice way of improving your Technorati authority.

Webmaster Central Discussion
28 August 2009 – In a discussion on robots.txt disallowing certain URLs, a celebrated Google Employee, JohnMu, offered the following:

Generally speaking, I would also recommend not disallowing access to your feed since this is used by Google BlogSearch.

Overall I would rely on this more recent information from a Google employee than an outsider’s judgment, however much I do respect that individual.

Unfortunately JohnMu’s advice would leave us with both the Home Page and the RSS News Feed visible to the search engines and representing duplicate content.  How do we avoid that and still make sure that blog posts are found in Google BlogSearch?

Does Feedburner Provide A Solution To This Google BlogSearch Gap?

One way that might come to mind is to register (burn a feed) with what is now Google Feedburner.   The feeds created on Feedburner are then equivalent to the Feeds that are produced by the blog itself.  However they would still represent duplicate content just like the original feeds so that is not a solution.

A Duplicate Content Solution With The LMNHP Approach

The LMNHP Approach, in addition to the other advantages it gives for search engine visibility of the original blog posts, provides a solution for the duplicate content BlogSearch problem.  With LMNHP, there is now no regular web page on the website that is similar in content to the RSS News Feed with its string of full post entries.  The ‘front page’ of the blog contains only a single blog post entry.  In consequence the RSS News Feed does not need to be blocked from robots and is available to the Google Blog Search process as JohnMu recommended.

As far as I am aware, there is no other solution to this duplicate content problem if the blog Home Page contains a series of full posts and the RSS news feed also contains the full posts.  This points once more to the somewhat illogical structure of the Blog Home Page, whether it contains full posts or a series of teaser items.  The simplest answer once more is to adopt the No Home Page approach.

Post from: BPWrap

Google Duplicate Content And WordPress – An Unresolved Problem

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, lmnhp, newsfeed, robots.txt, RSS

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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

Technorati Tags: electric car, Golden Ears Bridge, Google Maps, sergey brin, 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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Post from: BPWrap

All You Need Is .. Google – Hear the Buzz

Technorati Tags: Google Buzz, Local Business Center

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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.

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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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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