Track Your Search Engine Rankings

It's pretty intuitive that higher rankings should result in greater website traffic. But in the world of SEO, lots of things are bandied about as facts, when actually they are often just one person's opinion that kept getting repeated until enough people parroted it to make it sound authoritative. That's why it's always important to look for evidence that an assertion is true.

So do higher rankings result in more visitors? A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out these graphs tracking performance of one of the websites I manage, over a six month period:

The colored lines in the first graph illustrate the site's ranking on Google for its most important keyword phrases. The second graph shows visits and page views. Looking at the dates, you can see that a change in rankings precedes a change in the number of visits - so you can assume causation, not just corrolation. So there - not that I was going out on a limb, but here's evidence to back my claim that rankings do make a difference.

Additional clarification and answers to questions that ought to be asked:

Q: How did you create these graphs?

I use WebPosition Gold to track rankings. I output the data into an Excel file and then create a PivotTable. From the Pivot table I create a graph of the position my site held for a particular keyword phrase, using date as the x-axis and ranking as the y-axis. This will give you an easy-to-read look at upward or downward trends in positions.

If the analytics program you're using on your site can't generate something like my second graph for you automatically, just take the traffic data it does give you and plop it into an Excel file. Make another PivotTable to chart visits/page views over time and then superimpose the two for a clear view of how rankings affect your site.

Voilá, you've made your case that additional resources should be devoted to SEO.

Q. Isn't it true that search engines penalize marketers who use WebPosition Gold?

WPG has a bad reputation among SEOs - with Google going so far as mentioning this product specifically as something that shouldn't be used for optimization - but my use of WebPosition Gold is very conservative. I only use it to track positions, never to submit anything to a search engine.

I also don't believe Google will "penalize" a site for any practices that can be faked by someone who isn't in control of the site; otherwise everyone would be using this or similar software to get their competitors' sites banned. By using a Google API key, I also avoid tripping Google's CAPTCHA, which you'd otherwise do if you send too many automated queries in too a short a time. I've never run into any problems using WPG this way.

Q. Why did you only track Google positions?

The particular site's rankings in Yahoo are fixed. They haven't changed at all in 6 months, so I can factor them out when looking at at causal relationships. For simplicity's sake, I didn't include MSN Search because it doesn't refer very much traffic to my site. You will want to monitor all three before you can determine whether to include them in your analysis.

If you are running PPC campaigns, you have to be able to filter ad-referred traffic out for this rankings-versus-traffic comparison to be at all meaningful.

Q. The keyword legend is illegible. What keywords are you tracking?

Can't give away all my secrets now, can I? Anyway, does it really matter?

Q. Okay, but how did you decide what keywords to track?

I use a very unscientific calculus of two variables: which phrases are referring the most visitors to my site and which phrases, overall, Internet users are searching for the most. The former set of data you can get from your log files or analytics software. The second can be found using tools like WordTracker or Oveture's keyword suggestion tool.

Q. What happened in late September that caused such a dramatic drop in your rankings?

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure, but it happened before the Jagger Update came out. In fact, the site's return to the top of the SERPs coincided with Jagger, so it doesn't appear to have been any type of penalty caused by the update. (shrug)

I could speculate that it had something to do with Jagger raising the importance of links from "authority sites" - so those authority sites needed to be scrubbed before Jagger started. That's why my site jumped around before the real search results reshuffle - Google needed to run the site through some special filters to confirm the site belonged among those sites whose links would be worth more. I could speculate. But I have absolutely no evidence for this - in fact, it's not even an educated guess, I just made it up - so this entire paragraph is just a bunch of nonsense. Goes to show that you can't believe much of what is written online about SEO.

Posted by Melanie Phung

What the SEs Are Saying About Each Other

MSN on Google - First Gates dismisses Google as copycat. Now MSN Search rep says results are "at least as good" as Google's. Audience laughs.

Google retorts to Yahoo - Not that we're saying it matters, but we're bigger, nyah, nyah.

Yahoo on Google - Yahoo Search employee Jeremy Zawodny says Google is merely building Yahoo 2.0

Google's Matt Cutts talks to Google Blogoscoped about various things, including giving props to Yahoo's Web 2.0 successes.

Microsoft blogger and evangalist Robert Scoble warns that Google Maps is leaving competing Microsoft and Yahoo products in the dust.

I can't find anyone talking much about MSN Search, except Microsoft, which just goes to show, IMO, that like the rest of us, neither Google nor Yahoo see the #3 engine as a major threat.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Index Size and Results Returned

Since the consensus is, more or less, that the size of an engine's index doesn't matter, it's the results you get, sometimes it's just fun to experiment to see both the number of results returned and what the highest ranking sites are for a keyword that likely isn't the subject of anyone's SEO efforts.

This weekend, a search on ".com" yields:

• In Google - 6,450,000,000 results.
  Top 3: Yahoo, CNN, Amazon
• In Yahoo Search - 10,700,000,000 results.
  Top 3: DotComArchive.org, Wikipedia entry on "dot-com", FuckedCompany.com
• In MSN Search - 2,751,291,895 results.
  Top 3: Microsoft Component Object Model, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Maps

Scroll down to see a comparison of PageRank (according to the Google Toolbar) and inbound links to each page (using the advanced link: operator in Google and in Yahoo's Site Explorer). Couple of things to keep in mind: the PageRank score displayed by the toolbar isn't the actual PageRank used in the Google algorithm. Real PageRank is recalculated continuously, whereas the Toolbar is only updated once every couple of months. Also, Google only displays a "sampling" of backlinks, not all the links it's aware of.

	ToolBar PageRank	# Google Backlinks	# Yahoo Backlinks	# MSN Backlinks
Yahoo.com	9/10	1,150,000	30,495,373	5,013,640
CNN.com	9/10	159,000	4,489,621	1,768,335
Amazon.com	9/10	797,000	1,465,973	936,637
DotComArchive.org	7/10	5	104	1,059
Wikipedia entry	6/10	85	946	1,532
FuckedCompany.com	7/10	2,340	80,759	29,750
Microsoft COM	7/10	338	3,757	4,658
Microsoft IE	10/10	36,300	1,183,240	1,155,307
Google Maps	9/10	79	1,050	2,719

Posted by Melanie Phung

Search Driving Traffic to Shopping Sites

Google and Yahoo Search sent 25% more visits to the 10 leading shopping comparison sites for the week ending Nov. 19 than for the same period in 2004, according to Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence firm. Furthermore, comparison shopping sites are taking a bigger share of shopping-related searches on the major search engines leading up to the 2005 holiday shopping season.

While Hitwise does cite increased user familiarity and comfort with the major shopping sites, it is not clear whether the 25% increase in traffic is also due to the increased PPC spending or organic SEO strategies, or both.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Searching for Holiday Gift Deals

Wondering where to shop? eBay is the place to go find anything new and used, popular and obscure. The site boasts 168 million users with 60 million listings (including five million new listings per day). Nearly $1,400 worth of good are bought and sold every second. With numbers like these, eBay is often considered a barometer of consumer shopping trends (source). Shopping.com (an eBay company) also features a Consumer Demand Index to help you identify currently popular items.

But this holiday season, you might also want to try some other aggregator sites and/or marketplaces that will help you in your search for the perfect gift at the right price:

• For CDs and DVDs try Shopping.com (an eBay company) - With a pool of 60-plus online vendors for music and movies, this site ranks well on both availability and pricing.
  


• For electronics products, as well as jewelry, visit BizRate.com - Good search functionality and a clean layout make it easy to sort through brands and styles, as well as compare merchant ratings.


• Toy shoppers should try PriceGrabber.com - A site with one of the largest range of toy products. Create a "shopping agent" to notify you of price drops.


• For books, Amazon.com is an obvious choice but don't stop there. If you want to do your part to support independent stores, don't overlook Powells.com, which has a great selection and a money-back guarantee. Campusi.com, on the other hand, is an aggregator site that will help you find rare and out-of-print books from 50,000 different sources.


• Cell phones? Glad you asked. Visit Point.com for frequently updated "scoops" on new price drops of popular model wireless devices from online retail stores like Wirefly.com, Buy.com, Radio Shack and others. Wirefly.net also lists current best sellers, in case you need help picking a phone.
  

The first four recommendations come courtesy of Real Simple magazine.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Well, Well, Well - 3 Holes in the Ground

Or rather, three security holes in Google products found this month. And, well, actually make it four (eh, see what I did there?). Considering the rate at which the company has been putting new applications on the market, it shouldn't be too surprising to find a few bugs, I suppose. But the folks at the Googleplex have not been forthcoming about the security flaws found in GMail, Sitemaps, Google Base, and Google mini, which to many folks doesn't sound like a do-no-evil kinda stance to take.

See also the Jan. 2005 story in The Register about a GMail/Froogle security issue.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Spam Techniques Defined

The nine-page paper Web Spam Taxonomy (PDF), authored by Zoltán Gyöngyi and Hector Garcia-Molina, was presented earlier this year. Zoltán Gyöngyi -- a grad student at Stanford -- also co-authored the paper on link spam detection I blogged about earlier this month. Gyöngyi and Garcia-Molina propose a taxonomy of current spamming techniques and define web spam as "all types of actions intended to boost ranking (either relevance, or importance, or both), without improving the true value of a page."

That seems awfully broad to me. One perfectly ethical or legitimate SEO technique, for example, is to clean up sloppy or deprecated code. This is primarily intended to make the page easier for a search engine spider to read and has nothing to do with changing the information being presented to the user. It may also constitute a usability improvement, but does that add to the "value" of the page? Being easier to find, as a result of SEO, doesn't make a page more valuable -- that would be circular since search engine position is ideally determined by the page's value. So technically, strictly speaking, altering code to make it W3C compliant is spamming.

The authors also claim on page 2 that "most SEOs engage in practices that we call spamming" [emphasis added]. But the techniques they go on to define are certainly not practices that I engage in, and are generally dismissed by nearly all SEOs I know of.

Those techniques include term spamming, which consists of:

• Body spam. In this case, the spam terms are included in the document body. This spamming technique is among the simplest and most popular ones, and it is almost as old as search engines themselves.


• Title spam. Today’s search engines usually give a higher weight to terms that appear in the title of a document. Hence, it makes sense to include the spam terms in the document title.


• Meta tag spam. The HTML meta tags that appear in the document header have always been the target of spamming. Because of the heavy spamming, search engines currently give low priority to these tags, or even ignore them completely.


• Anchor text spam. Just as with the document title, search engines assign higher weight to anchor text terms, as they are supposed to offer a summary of the pointed document. Therefore, spam terms are sometimes included in the anchor text of the HTML hyperlinks to a page.


• URL spam. Some search engines also break down the URL of a page into a set of terms that are used to determine the relevance of the page. To exploit this, spammers sometimes create long URLs that include sequences of spam terms.


• Repetition of one or a few specific terms. This way, spammers achieve an increased relevance for a document with respect to a small number of query terms.


• Dumping of a large number of unrelated terms, often even entire dictionaries. This way, spammers make a certain page relevant to many different queries. Dumping is effective against queries that include relatively rare, obscure terms: for such queries, it is probable that only a couple of pages are relevant, so even a spam page with a low relevance/ importance would appear among the top results.


• Weaving of spam terms into copied contents. Sometimes spammers duplicate text available on the Web and insert spam terms into them at random positions.


• Weaving is also used for dilution, i.e., to conceal some repeated spam terms within the text, so that search engine algorithms that filters out plain repetition would be misled.


• Phrase stitching is also used by spammers to create content quickly. The idea is to glue together sentences or phrases, possibly from different sources.

Web Spam Taxonomy also discusses other spam categories and techniques including: cloaking, using CSS for keyword stuffing, link farms, exploiting PageRank of expired domains, JavaScript redirects and others. It's a good overview of current spam techniques (most of which, however, have become much less effective at least in Google since the Bourbon and Jagger updates this year). Check it out.

Labels: spam

Posted by Melanie Phung

Search Use Catching Up With Email

The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day, up from 38 million in June 2004.

Overall, among Internet users, there is now little difference between the size of the email-using population and the size of the search-engine using population -- 91% of all Internet users have sent or received an email at some point, compared with the almost equal 90% who had used search engines.

Of the 94 million American adults who use the Internet on an average day, 77% will use it for email, 63% will perform searches, and 46% of surfers who will use it to gather news.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Advertise On This Site

Check out what's new at Google AdSense. OnSite Advertiser Sign Up is described thus:

Your content is valuable. And starting within the next two weeks, advertisers will be able to bid for placement on your site right from your web pages. With Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, a new feature of AdSense, your AdSense ad units will display an 'Advertise on this site' link that takes interested advertisers to a page which you can tailor for your business.

Please note: If you're already displaying AdSense on your site, you'll have to opt out of this new program.

But that's not all. Google is going full out with its advertising programs. It has created a referral program for AdSense publishers to recruit new publishers: When someone who clicked on one of your referral buttons reaches $100 in AdSense commissions, Google will pay you $100 too.

Recommended reading:

• Google AdSense Optimization Tips
  
• 15 Common Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers that Violate Terms of Service
  
• This 8-part series from ProBlogger.net: AdSense Tips for Bloggers
  
• Interview with Jason Calacanis
  

For homework, go through these articles and identify everything I'm doing wrong with this blog.

Labels: contextual ads, monetizing, navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung

More on Privacy

Last week, TechWeb ran a story: "Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: "neck snap break" and "hold" before she was killed." His search history is being used as evidence against him.

Lessons to be learned: killing people is always a bad idea. And being a Mac user still doesn't make you invincible.

Also see: Don't Count on Your Anonymity

Posted by Melanie Phung

Fun With Google

Someone is setting out to write a book: 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google and soliciting feedback. An earlier post highlights some classics. I also like Guess the Google game. Play them at work at your own risk.

Labels: Google

Posted by Melanie Phung

AOL Asks, "Want a Better Internet?"

Apparently people do ... According to LightReading.com, AOL is losing customers at a rate of 300 an hour!

Posted by Melanie Phung

Free Web Analytics Help Advertisers

Google is giving away the web analytics program formerly-known-as Urchin.

The company wants to give online marketers and publishers analytics tools to have a better sense of what customers want, said Paul Muret, Google engineering director, who was one of the founders of Urchin. "With this knowledge, businesses can create more accurate advertising and build better web sites," said Mr. Muret.

It boggles the mind the amount of content, as well as what kinds of user behavior data, Google is going to have at its fingertips. Don't think for a moment there isn't a strategy behind an offering like this - Google is in the money-making business after all.

So popular was this announcement, timed to coincide with PubCon, that enough people rushed to sign up that it caused problems for existing (paying) users.

Posted by Melanie Phung

The Sandbox Exists

Barry Schwartz reports in Search Engine Journal that Matt Cutts, a Google spokesperson, has confirmed what most of us already knew: the Sandbox exists -- but only in some industries. (Sorry for the heresay, but you need a login to access the original thread on Webmaster World.)

Posted by Melanie Phung

No More Google Print...

... but would a rose by any other name...?

Google is renaming its book-scanning project Google Book Search. Type in http://print.google.com and it redirects to http://books.google.com. The explanation given on the Official Google Blog:

Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit -- which of course it won't.

More important, the change reflects our product's evolution. When we launched Google Print, our goal was to make it easier for users to discover books. Now that we're starting to achieve that, we think a more descriptive name will help clarify what our users can do with it: namely, search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to buy or borrow them.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Forbes Email Time Capsule

Only two weeks left to think of something really profound to say to your future self.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Earning a Living on AdSense Commissions ...

... is not something I'll be doing any time soon, or ever. But it can be done. Want to know how?

So far I've only written about really annoying ways some people try to make money using AdSense, but there are of course people ("publishers" in the jargon of the industry) who are doing quite well with sites that are 100% legitimate.

Today, while putting in some serious SE-elbOw grease at work, I bumped into a guy whom some might call a minor celebrity in the blogging world -- not only for being one of those people who actually earns a substantial AdSense income, but also for making it look so easy.

"Look" being the operative word. Jon Gales is sometimes described as a kid who makes really good money just hanging out on his parents' couch while the AdSense revenue pours in. There's more to it than that.

Jon was kind enough to agree to an interview for this little blog -- sometime in the next couple of weeks, when I come up with some interesting questions that haven't been asked before. If you'd like insights into how he does what he does, or have any other question, post a comment here or use the feedback form.

p.s. Keep in mind that AdSense TOS preclude him from discussing click-throughs and other performance metrics.

Posted by Melanie Phung

All Your Base Are Belong to Google

Google Base is out of beta Beta into actual Beta. If you thought I was exaggerating when I wrote Submit Anything You Want Saved, take a gander at Google's newest offering.

Google Base is a repository for users to post pretty much anything online -- poems, recipes, job postings, as well as products ... and just for the hell of it, why not also a map of the human genome. When it was being previewed last week, it was being called a competitor to Craig's List, but simply by the nature of being a Google product, this is already much, much more. IT World writes:

Google appears to have made its most concrete move to date into the realm of user-generated content and tagging, popularized by services such as the Del.icio.us social-bookmarking site.

["User generated content" is the buzzphrase of the day. Yahoo, which has been better thus far in fostering a community among its users, also just launched a user-generated shopping portal (the too-cute-for-its-own-good "Shoposphere") in time for the holiday shopping frenzy.]

Labels: Google

Posted by Melanie Phung

IM Overtaking Email

Not about search, but just Internet user behavior, here's a bit from the WebProNews email newsletter: IM Becoming Medium Of Choice

Instant messaging is overtaking email as the preferred way to communicate, especially among teens and young adults. Overall, IM's are up 19 percent year over year, with many Americans sending as many, if not more, IM's than they do emails, according to AOL's Instant Messaging Trends Survey.

• Across the globe, 300 million people regularly use instant messaging
  
• 38% of survey respondents send more IMs than emails
  
• 66% of teens and young adults send more IMs than emails
  
• 58% of IM users use it to interact with colleagues
  
• 29% of IM users use it to interact with customers
  
• 12% have used it to avoid face-to-face confrontation
  
• Nearly half of IM users ages 13-21 change their away message every day

According to IDC (in an Oct. 5 and a Nov. 4 WebProNews article), nearly 12 billion instant messages get sent each day; 1 billion of that is over enterprise systems.

Labels: data

Posted by Melanie Phung

Soundbite of the Day

"Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google."

The quote is attributed to David Yoffie, who is cited as a professor at Harvard Business School, in a recent NYT article. But what's more interesting IMO is that Yoffie is currently also a member of the Intel Board of Directors.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Yahoo Search Update #5

There was another update to Yahoo Search last night. Like last time, the search engineers over at Yahoo would like your feedback.

Labels: industry buzz

Posted by Melanie Phung

Searching for a Date or Mate?

Keynote Systems Inc (an online market research firm) on Nov. 3 released its study rating the top online dating sites based on the customer experience of two groups of people: new prospects and existing members.

According to Keynote's findings, the sites with the best customer experience for prospects were:

1. Yahoo Personals
   
2. True.com
   
3. LoveHappens (a Tickle site)

The best sites for repeat searchers of true love (or whatever) were:

1. LoveHappens
   
2. AmericanSingles.com
   
3. Yahoo Personals

For those of you interested in the online dating industry more than online dating itself, Online Personals Watch has a good newsletter with interviews, trends, event announcements, and the like. The site also tracks the top sites by traffic (as reported by HitWise). The top three by that criterion currently are:

1. Yahoo Personals
   
2. Match.com
   
3. eHarmony

Posted by Melanie Phung

Step One of Understanding SEO

People often assume that search engine optimization is about figuring out specific tricks for each search engine. But the truth is that there are many web professionals who don't ever worry about actively optimizing their sites, who are nonetheless doing a much better job than many marketers. That's because they build sites for an audience of human beings, not focusing on spiders and bots.

My advice to anyone interested in getting started learning about SEO is to stay from any advice you read or hear until you've learned everything you could possibly know about website usability. Be leery of any type of optimization that flies in the face of usability.

The principles of usability, especially Section 508 guidelines to help visually impaired web users, are among the most fundamental principles of SEO as well.

Here's a good place to start:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo

Posted by Melanie Phung

Sandboxed or Blacklisted

I started writing this yesterday, but it looks like Google has gone ahead and indexed nearly all of the pages in this blog (49). So it looks like a safe guess to say that you can get an entire blog into the index in about a month. I don't expect the site to actually start ranking well for general keywords, but the fact that it's back in the index is great news. Here's what I had written:

[As of Nov. 11] Google has relegated this blog back to "URL display only" status. I don't know what that's actually called, but it's how you can tell that a site is out of favor.

It's been 3-4 weeks since I started this site. It took a couple of days for Google to find me (which gave me "URL display only" status). After a little over a week, I think, the homepage got indexed. That means the site shows up in searches, even if only very obscure phrases in quotes, with the blog title and a snippet. URL-only status means the site only shows up when you use the site advanced operator (site:all-about-content.com) and doesn't show anything about the site except the URL.

This fits the pattern. According to conventional SEO wisdom All About Content is now in "the Sandbox," the name for a suspected Google age delay filter: According to the article What is the Google Sandbox Effect?:

Some programmers have viewed Google as uncomfortable to rank newer websites until they have proven their viability to exist for more than a period of "x" months. Thus the term "Sandbox Effect" applies to the idea that all new websites have their ratings placed in a holding tank until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.... The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days ...

Either that or someone has determined this site is spam and All About Content has been blacklisted. I guess time will tell.

Well, looks like time has told. The blog is showing up in search again. As a matter of fact, it's finally showing up on Google searches on my name, which is a new development.

Also see: Google's Giant Sandbox, Google's Delay for Aging Delay for New Sites, and Google Sandbox Defined. You'll see that there's a ton of disagreement on the Sandbox theory.

Posted by Melanie Phung

The Splog Police

Here's a guy with way too much time on his hands:
http://fightsplog.blogspot.com/

Labels: spam

Posted by Melanie Phung

Adding Value to the Web (Not!)

This is the kind of thing that gives people the idea that Internet marketers are slimy: an auto blog generator.

The blog generator site pitches to owners of the kinds of spam blogs -- AdSense splogs -- I explained in my October 20 entry, Say It 5 Times Fast: Blogspot Splog Bomb

There's a second type of splog I didn't mention. This splog is a subset of sites that don't target searchers directly, but rather are created as a way to artificially inflate the number of hyperlinks pointing to another site, the target site.


That's because search engine algorithms favor sites that have a lot of links pointing to them. Inbound links are considered a sort of "vote" for the target site. However, links are not all worth the same and the less authoritative the page the link is coming from, the less value that link has. So this type of web spam, like the ad-based splogs, also requires the creation of a lot of sites (a brute force strategy) to accomplish the spammers' goals.

Creating fake sites solely for the purpose of improving the popularity of other sites -- which themselves can be legitimate, content-rich sites -- is obviously not something of which the search engines approve and a strategy that has been hit hard by recent algorithm updates.

Read more about the importance of links in Link Popularity Explained.

Labels: spam

Posted by Melanie Phung

Algorithms and Equations

If the marketing aspect of SEO is a little too touchy-feely for you, take a look at these two recent academic papers:

• The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines (article | abstract and links to full text)
  Rather than high-ranking pages being made more popular by their popularity (and thus surpressing lower-ranking sites), U.S. and German researchers show that search engines actually have an egalitarian effect that increases the traffic to less popular sites.
  
  
• Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation (Discussion | PDF)
  This paper introduces the concept of spam mass, a measure of the impact of link spamming on a page's ranking, and a methodology for identifying pages that benefit significantly from link spamming.
  

Posted by Melanie Phung

Ten Top 10

1. Ten Technorati hacks
   
2. Ten issues facing Web 2.0
   
3. Top 10 blog design mistakes
   
4. Top 10 website design tips
   
5. The 10 best journalistic blogs
   
6. Top 10 Most Common English Grammar Mistakes by Web Authors
   
7. The 10 most prevalent Internet hoaxes
   
8. The top 10 most visited websites related to computers and the Internet
   
9. Top 10 podcasts
   
10. Top 10 Web fads
    

Posted by Melanie Phung

Effects of Jagger So Far

Enough time has probably passed since the recent Google and Yahoo updates (they were both relatively minor), so I think it's safe to assess how my work sites are doing. Two of my sites that had the most SEO done on them were rock solid, retaining their page 1 rankkings. Another one improved, even though what I've been able to affect there has been minimal. Most of my SEO for this site has concentrated on the next version scheduled to be released soon.

There's one site that wasn't doing all that well in the first place because the information architecture is a disaster. I did what superficial things I could, but it dropped off the radar almost entirely. The site I created for the purpose of experimenting with not-so "best practices" techniques is not only not ranking well, it actually looks like it has been banned from Google.

White Hats 1; Black Hats 0.

SearchEngineWatch.com has a great article with a ton of links about Jagger.

Labels: industry buzz

Posted by Melanie Phung

Detritus on the Side of the Information Superhighway

Perseus Development conducted a random survey and determined that 66% of blogs have not been updated in two months. This represents 2.72 million blogs that are essentially abandoned. Of these, 1.09 million were one-day wonders and never updated. At this rate, a new blog is abandoned every 2 minutes, 24 seconds.

If trends remain constant, nearly 13.1 million Technorati-tracked blogs are abandoned by their authors every two months, of which 5.3 million blogs are abandoned after a single post.

Read more about the state of the Splogosphere in ClickZ's article Search v. the Splogosphere.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Yay! Yipee! Yahoo!

This blog was accepted to the Yahoo Directory within 24 hours of my submitting it. It's under Computers and Internet> Internet> World Wide Web> Weblogs> Computers and Technology. And Yahoo has indexed 11 pages of this blog as of today.

Is this a big accomplishment? No, not at all. But keep in mind there are only four people reading this blog, and I have yet to make more than a dollar on ad revenue in any seven consecutive days. Baby steps.

p.s. oooh, and I'm indexed by Google already. That sometimes takes a while.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Correction to November 1 Entry

Just received an email from Danny Sullivan letting me know I misunderstood Google's intent in my Out of Print Does Not Equal Public Domain post. I posted an update at the bottom of the entry.

Now that it seems Google has no intention of publishing books still under copyright, never had, this debate really isn't interesting to me anymore. My thinking now is: what's the big deal?

Updated (again) Nov. 8:
Okay, upon closer read it seems the email said that only works in the public domain are going to be published in whole. If digitization is not included in "publishing," then that doesn't change my objection. The issue is still the fact that Google plans to scan books regardless of copyright, no?

Here are two quotes from a Nov. 2 article in E-Commerce Times that support my original contention:

...the search giant disclosed on its company blog that it plans to focus primarily on digitizing books that are either out of print or in the public domain.

Again, my question, if Google does not believe it is violating any copyrights, why the emphasis on out of print? Either it is fair use or it isn't - whether it's out of print doesn't matter.

Posted by Melanie Phung

Amazon Joins the Book Scanning Fray

First Google, then Yahoo, followed by MSN. What's the next major commerical brand in this series? If you said Ask Jeeves - nope, not this time. I'm not talking about marketshare of search queries; this tidbit is about book scanning (of course, what else).

Amazon.com announced on Thursday, November 3, that it is also going to scan copyrighted books and make them available through search via their site. The online retailer will offer paid access to parts or all of the book, and the payment will depend on the book, and on how much of the book someone wants available. CMP reports:

The Seattle-based online retailer said customers would have the option of "un-bundling" any of hundreds of thousands of books in its Amazon Pages program. Researchers, for example, could choose to buy just the pages or sections they need and read them online.

According to The Street, a financial news organization, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have no objection, because Amazon is working with publishers and authors to gain permission.

Yet what Amazon is proposing should be more objectionable than Google's project to those critics who say you can't just cut up a book and post pieces of it without context (as quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article).

Not to mention: what happened to the security and hacker concerns, as voiced by The Authors Guild's Paul Aiken? I don't think anyone would argue that Amazon's servers are more secure than Google's.

But the timing is perfect for a less aggressive solution from a company that has good relationships with publishers already. Because Amazon is playing nice, it probably won't be facing the far-flung arguments with which Google is contending (and which, to me, seem born out of desperation).

Posted by Melanie Phung

Why Search Results Are Similar

A MetaFilter user asks why MSN live.com search results are so similar to Google's when doing the "miserable failure" search. Other users respond pretty accurately on why that's not surprising.

The so-called Google Bomb works on all the search engines including Google despite, not because of, Google's algorithm. Suffice it to say, the same basic principles apply on all search engines, but it's only noteworthy when it happens there because Google has the most aggressive filters (hence the moniker Google Bomb).

What did catch my interest, however, was this comment by scheptech:

... googles [sic] results are taken to be the search standard so any variance from googles [sic] results is, sort of by definition, taken to be an inaccuracy.

Thought provoking. And a discouraging thought to competing search engines, if it's true that searchers think in terms of accurate and inaccurate results, instead of useful or not (which is much more subjective and fluid).

Posted by Melanie Phung

Paying Users to Search

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says internet search engines will have to start paying customers to use their service as the market becomes increasingly competitive. This at a time when it's clear the Redmond company is gunning for Google.

Posted by Melanie Phung

New Google Patent: Personalized Results

One of the members of the Search Engine Watch forum tells that Google has filed for yet another new search patent, this time to serve organic search results based on user profiles:

This is a bit different than their Google AdWords patents as this time the user profiles may be used to manipulate organic ranking in a new algo.

Kinda like Personalized Search, but the end user is not aware of the personalizarion [sic].

Such profiles are created by Google and gathered from previous queries, web navigation behavior via tracked links and possibly sites visited which serve Google ads, computers with Google Applications installed such as Desktop Search, Google Wi-fi Connection or Sidebar, and personal information which Google identifies which may be “implicitly or explicitly provided by the user.”

Read the new Google Patent: Personalization of placed content ordering in search results

I haven't read it yet to see exactly how "placed" content is defined, but I suspect it's not going to include organic anytime soon.

Labels: Google

Posted by Melanie Phung

What Your Blog Is Worth

• Based on Technorati rank
  
• On the blog market

My blog is worth the same as the Technorati blog!

Labels: blogging, navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung

Yahoo Search Results Updated

Yahoo updated its search results Wednesday night. Interested in user feedback.

And in unrelated observations: Yahoo is marketing its Yahoo Search function to Australians and New Zealanders who are using Yahoo to do a keyword search on Google. Apparently this qualifies as clever.

Labels: industry buzz

Posted by Melanie Phung

You Can't Not Try It. Not After All This!

http://print.google.com

Posted by Melanie Phung

Gates Disses Rival for Its "Me Too" Products

Did Bill Gates keep a straight face during his interview with Computing Magazine when he dismissed Google as a serious competitor because the search giant is derivative?!

Which Google products are you talking about? Seriously? Other than search, which are you talking about? Google Talk? Wow. A total "me too" product. Even Gmail - what is the unique thing?

Does he think he owns the "taking existing ideas and expropriating them" market?

Posted by Melanie Phung

Watch For a Big IPR Ad Campaign

Unnamed organization sources [discretion requires that both the organization and the source(s) remain unnamed] have said a major public awareness campaign is going to launch next week to bring the issue of intellectual property rights (IPR) to the fore.

Although the campaign is to encompass patents, trademarks and copyrights, I think what will resonate the most is the messaging around trademark infringement. To most people, counterfeit toasters that explode are just so much more interesting than some particular way a thought is expressed on paper (or the Web, as it were).

For this reason, and also because the debate is somewhat complicated and actually arguable from both sides, I can't imagine any reference will be made to the on-going Google Print controversy.

My prediction is that the campaign will, however, include references to Gillette razors, tennis shoes, prescription meds and possibly, but not necessarily, software piracy. Also expect shots of mom-and-pop store owners who have been irreparably harmed by IPR crimes.

This campaign is going to generate a lot of earned media - at least among the Beltway beat reporters. A connection will not be drawn between the two issues explicitly, but I think it's possible that this 3-day/$100k media campaign might indirectly draw attention to the Google Print-copyrights argument. Watch for increased mainstream media attention on Google Print in the coming weeks after this campaign airs.

So, remember, you heard it here first: A large advertising campaign by an undisclosed organization may or may not have a negligible (or substantial) effect on the volume of Google Print coverage either here in Washington or nationally.

Please also keep in mind that this type of critical, in-depth reporting does come at a cost and at great risk to this intrepid blogger. So if you'd like to support the continued publication of stories like these, please make your check or money order out to "Melanie Phung."

Good night and good luck.

Updated Nov. 8: View the ads.

Posted by Melanie Phung

An All-About-Content Milestone

Ladies and gentleman, this blog has received its very first comment. And in related news, my AdSense revenue is up to $0.79 today. Please join me in celebrating.

Labels: navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung

Out of Print Does NOT Equal Public Domain

Evil? No. But unprincipled disingenuous maybe. Google has resumed its scanning for Google Print but is now making clear that its first focus is and always was on out-of-print books. But I have a feeling that what they hope to imply is that in the short term, they only plan to scan out-of-print books, as a way to mollify critics. If they can pull that off, they already have a foot in the door for going ahead with currently in-print books as well. And/but, since the books we're talking about in this case are already out of print, that wouldn't be a problem right?

Except that the one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other. "Out of print" does NOT mean that the work is no longer protected by copyright. If Google truly believes that authors should not have a problem with digitization of their books and that they are not outside the bounds of copyright principles, then why make a big deal out of focusing on out-of-print books?

If they make the argument that a) users can only see snippets of the book, which isn't useful enough to undermine the original work and therefore qualifies as fair use, and that b) one of the goals is to help drive book sales by letting searchers find titles that they'll eventually want to buy ...

... then wouldn't there be more internally consistent logic in starting with books that are still in print? A snippet for which you cannot get context, or discovery of a monograph that can't be acquired, surely is not more useful than a searchable index of commonly read, in-print books.

Google has made its position clear. If Google Print in no way violates copyright law, then they really ought to stick with that, instead of confusing the issue.

Updated Nov. 7
Just got an email from Danny Sullivan, who says that Google hasn't said their focus is out-of-print books, but just out-of-copyright books (to make available in whole). "They've consistently said they'd only republish books that are out of copyright." Google is scanning a lot of books (starting with old books), but is supposed to be republishing only copyright books online.

Okay, so I'm placated. ... or confused! So what exactly are Google Print's opponents all bent out of shape about? Is or isn't Google going to make copyrighted books available for keyword searches?? And isn't the lawsuit and copyright debate about the scanning in the first place?

Labels: intellectual-property

Posted by Melanie Phung

Don't Count on Your Anonymity

Can a corporation force a service provider to reveal the identity of a customer? And then use that information to... oh, say, fire that person? Public Citizen says no way. And from what I know so far, I really hope the court agrees.

Here's the story: In July 2003, an Allegheny Energy employee posted anonymous criticisms of the company in a Yahoo message board room. He said some not so nice things about Allegheny and used a racist term to describe the company’s diversity program, which he called a waste of money. Okay, so he's not a nice guy, but...

Three months later, the company files a lawsuit against “John Doe” (in a random jurisdiction) as an excuse to subpoena Yahoo to reveal John Doe's identity.

After they found out who he was they dropped the suit and fired the guy.

The reason Allegheny filed a lawsuit against "John Doe" was only to find out who he was? And on top of that, a court helps this ploy along by forcing Yahoo to disclose what by all rights is proprietary information.

Hm.

A dramatic reminder that one should always be very, very careful about what content one posts in a public forum. (And face it, if it's on the Web, it's public.)

Posted by Melanie Phung

Still Better Than a Card Catalog

MSN is contributing to the Open Content Alliance, as I mentioned previously, but they still plan to launch an independent MSN Book Search. In an infotoday.com article, the author says that "internal research at Microsoft indicates that more than 50 percent of people’s online queries go unanswered today on Web search engines."

This low success rate is part of the rationale for getting into a book scanning project. Ostensively because more content should result in more answers.

Boy, remember when doing research meant going to the library and searching through a card catalog? Even when they upgraded to searchable electronic catalogs ... hours searching in the stacks inhaling dust. And if I found half the answers to specific questions I had that would have been a miracle.

You might argue: well, but at least if you did find the information, it wouldn't all be just lies, libel and invective. You could trust the information has been vetted. Sure, except if I ever found what I was looking for in the stacks, it was usually too outdated to be of much use. And forget checking it against half a dozen other sources.

P.s. Watch for MSN to really push the "only with copyright owners' permission" angle when talking about their book project. They're going to be able to piggyback "messaging" to strengthen their fight against illegal copies of their software. In fact, it might be worth some investment for Microsoft to tout their opt-in-only plans even if they didn't have any actual interest in full-text book search. If only to make a strong point about copyright violations (read: software piracy).

Posted by Melanie Phung

Stealing From Google?

In his provocatively titled blog post Stealing From Google?, at Information Week's site, Thomas Claburn poses the question:

Given implicitly that search engines generate their revenue from contextual ads, would it be akin to "stealing" to use a web browser plugin that blocks all those search-generated ads?

He writes that it's possible to argue "that [he's] violating the unwritten contract to be receptive to advertising when accessing ad-supported content." Which amuses me. Unwritten TOS? No such thing, in my opinion. Although I'd be fine if they added this to the terms of service.

I responded to his blog post (I won't bother double posting it), but like a true techno-idiot I misspelled the URL linking back here. Sigh. There's just no helping some people.

Labels: contextual ads

Posted by Melanie Phung