Category Archives: Google

The Google Tango

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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).

tango
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.

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All You Need Is .. Google – Hear the Buzz

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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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Blogging For Maximum Google Visibility

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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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Google Chooses Big Ugly

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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.

big ugly google

Below the Search box, the buttons also are increased in size and are now more square:

big ugly buttons

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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Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

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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.

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Content May Be The SEO King But Check The Palace Architecture

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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
SEO Trio
Plus – Visibility Plus – Appeal Plus – Authority
Minus – Barriers to search engines Minus – Spam Minus – Penalties
eyes
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.

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Google, Apple In Conflict While Microsoft, Yahoo Agree

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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:

Google Apple Fight

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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Wot No Google Local Search

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chad
Wot No
google
Local Search

The character on the right appeared in the most unusual places during Word War II asking similar very basic questions. You might have called him Kilroy if you are in the US or Chad if you are in the UK.

The comment is particularly surprising currently since there is a great deal of discussion and concern about Google Local Search and how it works.  You may therefore be a little surprised to find that it does not exist.  It is widely acknowledged that providing local results when people search for stores or suppliers is very important.  Not least because you can then show relevant advertising close to the point of purchase decision.

It is even more surprising because the opposition does provide local search facilities.  Just type in local.yahoo.com and you will be shown the following search screen.

local yahoo

It is very similar to the format for a Yellow Pages search for local suppliers.  It would seem to be the natural way to help people find what they are looking for in their neighbourhood.

With Microsoft’s new entrant Bing, you can also arrive at a somewhat minimal local search page by typing in local.bing.com.  This is presumably a work in progress since it is somewhat sparse and even enigmatic.

localbing

Now try to get a Google Local Search by typing local.google.com and you are in for a disappointment.  Here is what you see. 

localgoogle

The word local does not appear at all.  Google has decided that you really preferred to do a search among their Maps.  Indeed it is impossible to find a link to Local Search on any of the desktop PC search pages.

Google has accepted the much bigger challenge of trying to guess in the Universal Search Page whether or not you may wish to be seeing local results.  If Google guesses this is so, then towards the top of the search results they will show a block of local services that may fit your search.  Why they have gone this route, only they can say.

local google results

The only place you can find a link to Local Search is on the Mobile Search Results web page as shown on the right. Even then, you are just served up a list of local results without any opportunity to give a more precise indication of where you are located. Given the interest in Local Search and the need to get it right, this guessing on the part of Google hardly seems adequate, since it is not very reliable. Perhaps it is time for Google to follow the others and provide the obvious way for people to do Local Searches.

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SEO Factories Lose Their Edge

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Even back in 2005, Stoney deGeyter had the following thoughts on Finding the Perfect SEO Firm:

SEO companies come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your solo SEOs that either

  1. do everything themselves and/or
  2. sub-contract out many aspects of each campaign while maintaining a tight control on the quality and results of the project.

Then you have your big SEO firms that employ 20+ employees that handle various aspects of your account. These firms can often turn into SEO factories and can lack the ability to treat each client individually, because everything is done in bulk.

Since then, Google has certainly made it even more difficult for that ‘bulk’ approach. In this guest post, Christine Adams gives a current view on how those SEO factories are making out.

Introduction

In the last five years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become better known among mainstream professionals across multiple industries. In its infancy, SEO was not widely understood, which allowed for dubious companies to take advantage of website owners who were flush with cash and desperate to increase traffic. Today, many more people who own websites are at least familiar with search engines like Google. They have a basic understanding that adding meta tags alone will not provide the rankings and traffic that a comprehensive SEO campaign can provide and are savvy enough to avoid scammers.

SEO service providers who offered legitimate services and could show results began to see real profits. In recent years, Fortune 500 companies like Reuters-Thompson / Findlaw and LexisNexis have launched Internet marketing divisions and picked up significant sales in the SEO and Internet marketing industry. These large firms are in a position of (nearly) unlimited resources, with sales reps all over the country soliciting the clients with the biggest pockets. With so much fresh meat, these companies have found themselves with a problem; how to fill more orders with a minimum increase in staffing.

Scaling SEO

In the attempt to make SEO scalable, large Internet marketing firms have had to rethink how they do SEO. Instead of assigning a number of clients to one SEO specialist – which would limit profitability by having to hire a new SEO specialist for every x number of new clients – the SEO client has become just another cog on the assembly line. Instead of qualified professionals, large firms have enough clients where they can hire less qualified workers and train them to do one task only – i.e. only doing meta tags, or only doing article writing. In theory, this seems much more efficient; in practice, SEO and “efficiency” don’t go hand in hand.

By giving the same links and the same exact treatment to each client, certain risks present themselves. Let’s look at two cases;

Closed-Network Reciprocal Links

One of these Fortune 500 companies has recently moved to reduce costs and increase efficiency by using web properties they already own; their sites and their clients’ sites. Links to other clients are placed on each client’s ‘resource’ page, essentially creating a closed network of reciprocal links. Should Google find some sites spammy, the entire network is ‘infected’.

Buying High PR Links

Another large firm that did over $17M in SEO sales in 2008 found traditional SEO means unscalable as well; their solution was to buy paid links in bulk on high PR sites from a third party service and outsource content writing. The obvious problem with this solution is that this isn’t really SEO, as you’re only providing temporary links, which result in temporary rankings. Once you stop paying for the text links, you lose all rankings. On the other hand, this firm might benefit from this effect, as it would keep customers paying!

In reality, both of these ‘solutions’ for scaling SEO are bad for the customer, as each company has put all its eggs in one basket. A good SEO campaign should contain a diverse array of white-hat (Google-approved) links and should be able to change strategy on the drop of a dime to keep up with ever changing search engine algorithms. Are workers with limited training on assembly lines able to change gears the day, week or month after search engines change algorithms? Me thinks not.

Christine Adams is a SEO specialist at Sequoia Marketing and a contributing writer to SEO blogs, including LawyerSEO.org.

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SEO Gets Simpler In 2009

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During the last 12 months at least, some SEO clients have apparently been paying sizeable fees for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work that was completely ineffective.  That really is the bottom line on a development that Danny Sullivan describes in a post entitled, PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting!

Earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought.

Google helped advanced the notion of using nofollow to flow PageRank. No one was forced to do it; no one is being punished that it might no longer work. But Google did help put it out there, and that’s why it should have spoken up sooner when it took nofollow out as a sculpting tool. Instead, it said nothing about the change that happened sometime from May 2008 or earlier.

.. and why did Google not spill the beans earlier:

At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time.

Danny Sullivan then provides the following view on how it all now works:

Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. In general, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Google might decide some links don’t deserve credit and give them no PageRank. The use of nofollow doesn’t ‘conserve’ PageRank for other links; it simply prevents those links from getting any PageRank that Google otherwise might have given them.

I was moved to write this post today by an e-mail message I received from Dan Thies of SEO Fast Start.  He revealed that he was in two minds as to whether he should roll back the Site Structure chapter in SEO Fast Start, and basically go back to what he was teaching in 2006. He has some concerns about what some folks have done with "PageRank sculpting" since he has seen more mistakes than good implementations with that technique.

Dan Thies is the author of a free 97-page ebook, SEO Fast Start 2008, that you can download. Interestingly the preface includes the following:

The 2008 edition is not much different from last year’s – because if you’re not trying to game the search engines, very little changes. Heck, if you had a copy of the November 2001 edition, your site wouldn’t exactly burn down if you followed what I wrote then.

It appears that once more that French phrase applies that translates as, The more it changes, the more it stays the same.  I still believe that the word PageRank is being used in at least two senses in these discussions.  Underlying this is the basic PageRank measure that applies to all URLs as suggested in the PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis.  Thereafter that basic value is used within the keyword search algorithms in a modified way as Danny Sullivan pointed out above. 

Even if PageRank sculpting is no longer the hot topic it was, there are still key issues to address with the most important being to Avoid Duplicate Content Problems.

Other resources you may find helpful are:

Never forget that of course SEO is only part of the answer to getting better business results online.  You really have to start off with the right strategy and follow through to good usability of the website and making the sales. The series of articles on Marketing Right Now is a useful primer on the total process.

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