Get RSS feed
Marketing Jargon Translated
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.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Bowling? I Don't Think So
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.
Labels: Google, industry buzz, link-building
Posted by Melanie Phung
1 Mil. Videos Downloaded From Apple Site
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.
Labels: data
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Print for Libraries: Fair or Foul?
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.
Labels: intellectual-property
Posted by Melanie Phung
Microsoft Joins Yahoo Project
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.)
Labels: industry buzz
Posted by Melanie Phung
Coming to a Google Near You: Jagger Pt. 3
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?
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Pavlov's SEOs
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.
Posted by Melanie Phung
More on Google Print
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.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Yahoo Wins the Yahoo War
Breaking news: Yahoo, according to Yahoo, is more popular than Google.
Posted by Melanie Phung
There's A Party Going On
... and I wasn't invited! The invite-only Google Zeitgeist conference is taking place in Mountain View as I type. Maybe my invite got lost in the mail. Or maybe Google is just bitter because I blew off the Google Dance in August.
Posted by Melanie Phung
GooglePrint - Finding Not Reading
In response to Danny Sullivan's piece on why Google Print's caching is different from reprinting copyrighted work, Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs writes: "The thrust of Danny's argument, and I agree 100%, is that indexing the content of a book so that it becomes searchable is not the same thing as creating or publishing a copy of the book. He is correct about that, but his post perpetuates a misunderstanding about how search engines work."
Someone's saying that Danny Sullivan is presenting incorrect information on how a search engine works?? Them there's fightin' words. Okay, to be fair, he's just clarifying a point in a fairly extensive piece. Both are worth reading if you want some insight into how a search engine queries its index.
Eric Schmidt's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Google Print argues "fair use" from a less technical perspective:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/point-of-google-print.html
In related news: The Open Content Alliance is scheduled today to demonstrate technologies it will use in its own book-digitizing project. The Open Content Alliance -- which is backed by Yahoo! -- operates under an opt-in premise, rather than Google Print's opt-out, and I think we're going to see a pretty big war between the two camps. We'll see how this plays out. More on this later.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
You Always Remember Your First Time?
It must not have seemed momentous because I don't have a clue about my first time ... the very first time I conducted a web search that is. There's a potentially fun thread getting started over at the Search Engine Watch forum on this topic.
Labels: navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
State of the Blogosphere
Superb overview of the current blog landscape by Technorati's Dave Sifry:
http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/10/53.html.
Among the data he shares:
- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
- About a new weblog is created each second
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
- Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day
- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
Posted by Melanie Phung
Yahoo's Video Search
YSearchblog posted a great look at how to use Yahoo Video Search to subscribe to podcasts for your video iPod.
And if you're wondering why it took me so long to even mention Yahoo Search... that's because, I admit it, I don't pay as much attention to it. Not because I think #2 doesn't matter, but because Yahoo handcodes the top 20 results for the top 6% of search terms. Since that 6% includes those terms relevant to my job, it's just not imperative that I follow Yahoo as closely.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Some Info Shouldn't Be Search-Optimized
To make up for yesterday's bad advice, a real tip: did you know that you can type "inurl:password" into the Google search box to find all URLs that contain a password string? Hopefully you're not entering your passwords into unencrypted forms, but the "inurl" operator is just one of many tools available to searchers and hackers alike.
And it's one of the examples given in the useful but not-too-overwhelming October 4 SEO Chat article: Hiding Your Sensitive Data From Google and the World.
A Richness of Embarrassment
Don't worry; the powers that be over at the Googleplex are aware of the security issues. CNet published sensitive information on Google exec Eric Schmidt in July -- to demonstrate how easy it is to find such information using the Google search engine. In response to which the search giant blacklisted CNET reporters for a year. (What got less publicity is that Google eventually backed down after a few months.)
Posted by Melanie Phung
Submit Anything You Want Saved
I think I'm starting to put together the big picture. Google announced it will take 300 years to index all the world's content. Which is pretty ambitious. In order not to let down shareholders, it will have to destroy all the information it can't index.
That still leaves quite a bit of content that is capable of being indexed, however, and they are going to have to provide additional tools and vertical searches.
Google already knows what you have on your desktop, in your transcripts, in your email and is keeping its eye on that pesky little Microsoft.
Google Everything Under the Sky is still in beta, but browse the new interface and check what information it doesn't yet have, like bank account passwords, your prison diaries, etc. ... before evidence of your existence is erased permanently. You can make it easy by posting everything on a crawlable webpage and submitting the link to Google. You information will be harvested within a week.
Posted by Melanie Phung
What's In a Name?
We've got people naming their baby Google (good luck to ya, kid) and debates about whether last weekend's shift in search engine results should be called an "update" or a "tweak" or mini-"Dance". In the SEO community, people feel pretty passionate about the semantics and all flock to the forums to engage in debates on the subject.
Personally, it doesn't make a difference to me. If I did my job right, my sites continue to do well. If the rankings fall due to a change by Google, then it really doesn't matter to me whether it technically qualifies as update. It's just time to figure out what I need to be doing better vis-a-vis the competitor. Same as any other day.
I did learn something interesting in this week's cyberchatter. But, first, let's back up. When a Google update is spotted, like a hurricane, it gets named... but only if it's determined to be a bona fide update (and with a sustained wind speed of 64 knots). SEOs talk about updates the way the public talks about hurricanes. You know where Katrina hit, what the landscape looked like afterwards, and you can imagine the kind of work that needs to be done to clean up the mess. Mention the Florida Update to anyone in the SEO industry; everyone will know exactly what you're talking about and what happened to their sites as a result.
So back to the trivia: Contrary to what you might think, it's not Google that gives the updates their names. That falls to a guy who runs WebmasterWorld.
I don't know why he gets to do this. And I don't know why he called last weekend's update Jagger (although there seems to be at least one theory). But he did, so that's what we all call it now.
Posted by Melanie Phung
New Google Patents Filed
New patents can give us a clue to what a search engine may be up to (although sometimes they're just red herring). Yes, I did actually read the entire patent application filed by Google for information retrieval based on historical data, which was released in the spring, but I think I'm going to skip these six:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=28815
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Say It 5 times Fast: Blogspot Splog Bomb
Big to-do in Blogland this week. Some are saying Google has allowed the criminals to take over the asylum. Seems someone was crafty enough to find a way to automate the creation of thousands of blogs on Blogspot aka Blogger (a free blog creation and hosting site owned by Google). Those blogs then steal content from elsewhere on the web to lure users to the site and then bombard them with Google AdSense ads.
Since the blogs have no real content and are designed just to make money via commission on the ads, they're called spam blogs (= splogs). The result? Lotsa (more) crap on the Internet.
Not familiar with splogs? I dare you to click the "next" button on the upper right of this page to get sent to a different blog. Odds are that if you do this a couple of times, you'll find some pretty obvious examples. Unless Google has cleaned up the mess already.
Recourse
Matt Cutts - a V.V.I.P. over at Google - gives this tip on spotting and reporting splogs:
You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense. If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and click "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw". Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field.
Updated Oct. 21
Seems like a lot of the spam has been cleared out so it's not as easy to find. I'm linking to an example so you can see what blog spam might look like.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Whole Books About Search and Searching
Excellent. The folks over at Search Engine Watch have compiled their book reviews on a single page, so you can see at a glance what each of the significant books on search have to say. I just ordered The Search by John Battelle (used in hardcover from Amazon for $12.01) and am hopeful that it is as entertaining as the reviewer makes it sound.
Posted by Melanie Phung
MSN Does Something Better Than Google?
Worth noting: If you do a search on "google blog" (without the quotes), The Official Google Blog doesn't show up until #7 (which is below the fold on many screens).
Perusing the better ranking sites, I came across this item: MSN Search has cool feature that Google doesn't have: Solve For X! That's right, boys and girls, another way to cheat in your trig class.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Ways to Enhance Your Google Apps
PCMag calls the article Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google, but they aren't really hacks. Mostly plug-ins and advanced user settings for Gmail and Google Desktop. Check it out.
O'Reilly, publisher of the book Google Hacks, just posted some of their favorites on their site. Some of these acqually qualify as hacks. This item comes courtesy of the Unofficial Google Weblog.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
SEO Stands for Suchmaschinenoptimierung
Search's the thing. Anyway, as the description block above says, occasionally I'll post search-related things that aren't all blah blah blah or white hat this and black hat that. Y'know, little things that I come across on a day-to-day basis that I thought were interesting.
p.s. And if you think you already know everything you need to know about SEO, take the SEO/SEM Exam and prove it. Good luck and see you on the leaderboard (or to be less subtle: I'm on the leaderboard. nyah nyah).
Labels: blogging, navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Forbes Equates Blogs With Lynch Mobs
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.
Labels: blogging
Posted by Melanie Phung