Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
That’s the lead for the cover story of the current Forbes magazine (registration required).
Whoa! Overreacting much? David Utter of WebPro News responds with some great quotes and links to other bloggers’ responses.
Yahoo and MSN — which recently announced a partnership on IM platforms — both have lots of demographic data on their IM users and are looking at ways to use this to target their marketing.
I don’t know what Reprise Media’s relationship is to either or both of them, if any, but the direct marketers trade pub quotes the company on the partnership:
Why agree to combine two of the biggest [IM services] now? Because there’s finally a way to monetize all that cross-platform activity.
Say what? Monetize cross-platform activity? Let me translate: There are lots of Yahoo and MSN IM users talking to each other. So where’s the ka-ching?
And they say we marketers speak in jargon.
Updated: Feb 12, 2006:
If you’re looking for definitions of commonly used marketing jargon, try the glossary at marketingterms.com.
So WebPro News asks, are you paying attention to the practice of Google Bowling, where competitors sabotage your organic rankings by involving your website in unsavory SEO practices to get Google to penalize you? Sounds scary. The problem: That’s nonsense.
Questionable inbound links generally do not carry any link value. But there’s no evidence that Google penalizes a site for its inbound links. I don’t believe they’d do that for precisely the reason the author gives: it’s too easy (and too obvious) a way to game the engines and hurt your competitors.
The only reason Google will actively penalize you for the types of links coming into your site is if you are involved in a shady linking scheme. For example, a lot of spammers use triangle linking: Site A links to B; Site B links to C; and Site C links back to Site A. This way there’s no “reciprocal linking” which has long caused inbound links to lose value.
Still, the search engines have enough data to easily sniff out these A-B-C schemes and considers them “bad neighborhoods.” It can tell that there is an unnatural pattern because all the links only go to each other and because there are no links coming into the bad neighborhood from the rest of the web.
It’s close to impossible to get someone else’s website (over which you have no control) involved in this kind of scheme without the webmaster’s knowledge (since it involves putting links to other bad neighborhood sites on the site).
So if you’re a webmaster, don’t fall for any “Pay $9.99 for thousands of links instantly” come ons. And don’t link to sites that you don’t think are of value to your customers.
How one goes about soliciting legitimate and valuable inbound links, well that’s a different topic. Probably one of the hardest SEO things to do. But as for the search results being manipulated by malicious competitors - you can rest easy that it just doesn’t work like that.
Updated Nov. 24:
There some related discussion on the subject of whether competitors can hurt your site’s rankings on a Oct. 12 SearchEngineWatch discussion thread. One of the posters tells of some experiments he has run to test the theory.
Apple just sent out a press release announcing that they’ve sold more than one million video downloads through the iTunes Music Store. Story at Engadget, among many other places.
How’s that related to search? It’s not. But remember, this blog is all about content.
The Copyright Society on October 24 held a panel discusion about the Google Print for Libraries project and his organization’s lawsuit, The Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (PDF, 741k)
The event was called Google Print for Libraries: Fair or Foul? Paul Aiken, Executive Director of The Authors Guild, delivered this speech:
Last Thursday, Google delivered stunning financial news. It reported a 700% increase in third quarter profits. Its earnings now dwarf those of another company that relies chiefly on advertising for its income, the New York Times. The Washington Post reported that Google’s earnings are now more than 10 times that of the New York Times. Google’s market capitalization, now exceeding $100 billion, is 25 times that of the New York Times. Google’s market cap even exceeds that of Time Warner — that combination of AOL, Time Warner cable, film studios, TV and radio networks and book and magazine publishing — beating it out by 25%.
In the book industry, some of us think of Barnes & Noble as big. Google is 40 times bigger. Or we think of Amazon as our Internet champ. Google has its value five times over. Yahoo is in the same business as Google, pretty much, and eBay is no slouch as an Internet company. Combined, they’re worth about the same as Google.
And good for Google. Really. It seems they’ve found the best Internet business to be in: searching the Internet. They’ve come up with clever search algorithms, securing hard-earned patents to protect some of them. They’re pursuing their business aggressively and by all accounts intelligently.
We’re all for profit. Nothing warms an author’s heart more than healthy semi-annual royalty statements. Helps pay the rent and put the kids through college. It keeps the author plugging away, trying to create more works that readers will value. Profit also puts a spring in the step of book publishers. It encourages them to take a chance on a new author, or to give a good author with a so-so sales record another shot. Profit is good.
So it’s cheering news that Google sees value in feeding copyrighted books by the million into its banks of computers, that teams of Ph.D.-laden mathematicians and engineers would be tweaking their search algorithms, to help its users find book excerpts. Google seems to have figured something out: there’s a demand for searching those books, a demand that warrants the investment of tens of millions of dollars. A demand that Google is determined to satisfy, because Google, a sensible, profit-seeking enterprise, believes its investment will pay off in increased visitors to its site, and increased ad revenues. Google senses a competitive advantage
We get it. We bet Google is right. If books were digitized and searchable on the Internet, we bet Google could make a pretty penny by allowing its legions of users to search that database. And what a mind-boggling database! An assemblage of the nation’s copyrighted books, the result of the efforts and investments of hundreds of thousands of authors and thousands of publishers, served up in handy excerpts by Google’s generous computers.
But here comes the bad part. Google says that its copying of these books — that its scanning of countless copyrighted volumes, then using optical character recognition technology to digitize the text of those works to create files to assemble into a new, unimaginably vast database, surely one of the largest databases ever assembled — that all of that copying and use of these works, would be fair use, so it doesn’t need a license from anyone for this copying. For good measure, it’s handing over a digital copy to its partner libraries, and telling them its OK to post the works to their websites. That, too, I guess, is fair use.
Since there’s no license needed, in Google’s view, Google doesn’t have to give pesky rightsholders contractual assurances about the security of their database. Could a backup tape go astray from Google or one of its partner libraries, unleashing a couple hundred thousand copyrighted works onto the Internet? Sure seems possible. We’re asked to trust that that’s under control. The list of companies, meanwhile, that lose critical data grows daily. What successes do hackers have at breaking in to the sites of Google and its partner libraries? There’d be no contractual need to report this, so it would likely go unreported. Security experts tell us that most data losses to hackers go unreported, and we don’t doubt it. No contract, no reporting, no control. “Trust us” security.
What about other companies that want to do the same thing? When we first filed suit, we mentioned to reporters our concern that others would see the same business opportunity and join in. We mentioned the obvious players: Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo. Yahoo, of course, has since jumped in, but they tell us they’re seeking permission to use copyrighted works. But if Google gets away with it’s vast database, Yahoo won’t stand still. They’ll make their own database, just to keep pace. Microsoft, too, has a search engine to feed and the resources to do so. Amazon has been investing heavily in its search engine, and has a certain interest in books.
So we might have four or more companies, each pursuing private gain, happily digitizing the stacks of libraries. We’d have to trust each of them, naturally, and no doubt their partner libraries, not to misplace backup tapes or let down their guard against hackers.
That seems kind of inefficient. Wouldn’t it make more sense for, say, Yahoo and Microsoft to buy the digital database from Amazon? Still fair use, right? Copyright law wouldn’t impose such a wasteful burden of redigitizing on each of these companies. And there are dozens of other search engines, large and small. Seems “unfair” to cut them out.
Specialized databases wouldn’t be far behind. WebMD would want to digitize a couple medical libraries for excerpting by its users. Fair use, of course. eterinarians, chemists and electrical engineers have their needs and websites, too. These digital databases would all be secure, not to worry. Trust us, but don’t audit us.
What about uses by the partner libraries? Again, the only contractual obligation imposed on libraries – at least in the sample available to us from the University of Michigan contract with Google – allows the University of Michigan to post the works at its website. No mention in the contract of limiting browsers to so-called fair use snippets. The contract also contemplates sharing the works with other academic libraries. No biggie.
Fair use is a handy concept. Just keep the excerpts shortish and the databases big. And watch the copies proliferate.
So Google’s found the best way to make money on the Internet: searching the Internet. To make copyrighted books fit into its business model, it wants to pull books onto the Internet. It’s a fine idea, mostly, but we’re saying you can’t simply cut authors and publishers out of this venture. Do it the right way, with proper contracts and proper controls. We want to be dealt in. It’s the best business on the Internet.
Notice how he barely mentions “fair use.” Instead he warns of security issues because Google Print isn’t hack proof, and paints a picture of a brave new world in which authors don’t get paid. Hacker boogeymen and starving artists are certainly more compelling than the minutiae of copyright law or technical explanations of how search engine indexing works, but that isn’t much of a legal argument.
For a different perspective from search engine expert Danny Sullivan, see my post GooglePrint: Finding Not Reading. He explains that when a search engine indexes a page, there exists no copy of the page anywhere. Just data on what words are contained on that page and where they are in releation to each other. It is impossible, therefore, to piece together an entire book from snippets.
(And these hackers Aiken talks about, the ones he thinks can so easily get into Google’s database and post copyrighted material on the web for free … I wonder if I can commission them to steal the Google algorithm while they’re at it.)
Don’t get me wrong… I think there may be legitimate legal arguments to be made, but I wonder if the Authors Guild stance isn’t indicative of not quite “getting” the direction the world is headed.
I’ve seen conflicting reports on whether MSN is gaining or losing market share. But after about 8 months of running its own search engine with a proprietary algorithm, what’s interesting is not that MSN Search is still not even close to catching up to Yahoo and Google, but that MSN is losing money. Microsoft’s CFO Chris Liddell said the revenue decline resulted not from any change in market share, but rather from the company’s inability to translate searches into revenue as much as it would like.
Given a choice between increasing profits from their search business and giving Google a bloody nose right now, or worse, we can be sure it’s not an easy decision. Microsoft is the latest high-profile company to line up against Google Print by joining up with the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance.
Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books in the first year, which will be about $5 million, assuming costs of about 10 cents a page and 300 pages, on average, per book. (Yahoo is paying for digitization of 18,000 books.)
According to Internet Search Engine Database, Google has announced that the third part of Jagger will be introduced early next week, though they aren’t saying what this phase will entail.
Usually, after any update, it takes one or two weeks for the re-ranking (not to be confused with a Google Dance) to sort itself out, so we won’t find out right away either. It goes to show that when it comes to SEO you’re much better off worrying about the things you can change (your website) instead of things over which you have no control (Google’s algo updates). With the sites I manage, I can be reasonably sure that if they disappear right after an update, there’s a good chance that they’ll be right back where they were, if not higher, in a week or so.
That’s probably of little comfort to businesses that rely heavily on organic search for generating income and, in fact, I was approached last week by a partner who had lost rankings for keyword phrases that he should have dominated. “Just wait and see,” unfortunately, isn’t really what someone in that position wants to hear, so luckily I was able to give him some practical (”actionable” in corporate-speak) suggestions for improving his pages.
The search engine algorithms are already pretty sophisticated, and it’s my belief that it is pretty much only the filters that are being finetuned. If every algorithm update is designed to further separate the content wheat from the spam chaff, it’s going to get harder and harder to “trick” the engines. Instead, you want to work with them to help them find you and understand what you’re about. While it’s true that they might not be able to figure out your tricks immediately, I believe we’ve reached a point where transparency is being rewarded.
Besides, convention has it that it takes Google only six weeks to figure out and counter new spam methods. Once your site is identified as spam you might as well start anew on a fresh domain that isn’t tainted. Who has the energy to watch their work crash and burn every month and a half?
It’s been shown that once animals understand what they are supposed to do to receive a reward, rewarding them irregularly rather than consistently is much more effective in reinforcing that behavior. Animal behavior studies have shown that some animals who are rewarded inconsistently for pushing a lever (for example) become obsessed with that behavior… As opposed to the test subjects that were rewarded consistently — those animals behave more rationally.
This explains some web marketers’ obsessions with algorithm updates and their rankings. As long as the engines keep them guessing, SEOs will keep pounding away at that lever.
P.s. The term “algoholic,” to described algorithm-obsessed SEOs, was coined by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs and made its national debut, I believe, at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.
I was going to pull together some of the major articles on the Google Print controversy, but then I found DigitalKoans, which has a great bibliography on the topic, as well as a ton of other content about e-publishing. Good stuff here, although I do agree with the person who left the comment about presenting the bibliography in chron order.
Breaking news: Yahoo, according to Yahoo, is more popular than Google.
