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WTF: Googlebot of Doom
There's a great story on The Daily WTF about the Google spider wiping out every page of a company's CMS-built website. How is that even possible? It had to do with someone copying and pasting a "delete this page" hyperlink from the CMS into the content of the published page. The way search engine spiders index the web, as we all know, is to "click" on every link it finds, so that's what Googlebot did. Result: poof, pages gone.
(I was originally made aware of the story in the current Stepforth Weekly, one of my favorite SEM newsletters.)
Posted by Melanie Phung
Y! Weather Report: 75% Chance of Updates
If you're starting to see significant changes in your Yahoo rankings, that would be because Yahoo just did a big index update. (Rumor has it they may be kicking out non-relevant sites en masse.) The comments on the Yahoo Search Blog -- where the Weather Report was announced (after the fact) -- aren't showing the kind of love Y! was getting a while back ... when Yahoo was building a lot of good will in the search community by being more transparent than the frustratingly enigmatic Google. Back when they were giving Weather Reports before they made updates.
Labels: Yahoo
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Accidentally Deletes Own Blog
This is really funny. It looked for a while like the Google blog had been hacked. Turns out the suspicious outage was not caused by a security issue. Did someone at Google think the Official Google Blog was a splog?
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google's Market Share Up Again
ComScore released its new search market share figures and Google gained 6 points at the expense of Yahoo and MSN Search, for a total U.S. market share of 42.3%. Yahoo had just 27.6% of searches overall and queries on MSN fell to 13.5%. Ask.com gained market share, capturing 6% percent of all searches being performed by Internet users, up from 5.3% a year ago.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan goes on record to say Google could eventually be serving up results for 70% of all searches conducted in the United States.
However, as Rohan points out, market share data doesn't necessarily translate directly into revenue. But c'mon now: 70%! Seventy percent? That's crazy talk.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Bubble 2.0
Om Malik, in a March 20 blog post titled Social No-Working, writes, "not a day passes when we hear about a new social networking company stake its claim to be the next MySpace." His reaction to a recent slew of news regarding yet more social networking sites enjoying large rounds of funding: we're in the middle of a "Social Networking bubble."
People who have little or no handle on consumer are getting funded, or offering funding. Designing high-end switches and getting kids to switch from MySpace - two entirely different tasks. Anyway this insanity is understandable. WSJ has an article about start-ups getting showered by money, some getting unsolicited emails from VCs offering barrel loads of cash. The trend "absolutely harkens back to the bubble days" of 1999 and 2000, Tom Blaisdell, a general partner with DCM-Doll Capital Management, tells the WSJ. I let him have the final word on this.The post includes some comments from the very entrepreneurs Malik is criticizing. Interesting stuff. Think he's right about the bubble?
PS: In case you were wondering when there will be a market top -- look for a journalist quitting his job to start a social network!
Posted by Melanie Phung
When Fake News Is News
It has recently come to the public's attention that it's possible to publish "fake news" and have Google News index and display it -- even if the fake news is about Google itself. To which I say... yeah, duh!
ZDNet reports that the press release, written by a high-school sophomore, claims the author was hired by Google to work on a Gmail security flaw. Google's response was to set up a college fund for the kid. Actually, not really, I'm just kidding. It was the fake press release that attributed this quote to Google CEO Larry Page: "The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education." To repeat: this kid does not work for Google, never has.
While some reports make it appear that Google has cut all relationships with i-Newswire as a result, it's more likely that Google News specifically is no longer accepting automated i-Newswire feeds. The site is not banned in the main Google index. i-Newswire is tightening up its editorial standards, and I imagine they'll be back in the news index eventually.
There are a variety of services that allow you to send press releases for free and even the paid services cost as little as $10 per release, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people abuse them. This has been going on for a while, actually. What's different this time is that Google was the subject of the press release, and to paraphrase: "If it bleeds (or it's about Google), it leads."
(For what it's worth, I've tested quite a few of these services, including i-Newswire, and PRWeb is the one I like best. PRWeb also just entered a partnership with Topix.net, another very popular news aggregation site, so this is probably one of the more valuable wires to submit to for SEO purposes.)
Once Google News has your release indexed, it'll show up in news search based on the time stamp. Yahoo News usually includes this type of content in its "blog search" results but in a separate section to the right of the screen, reserving the main results section for a (loosely) pre-qualified set of sources.
That's why Yahoo News has always been the far superior service for news aggregation. The aspect that makes Yahoo so vexing from a regular search engine perspective -- that listings are heavily determined by human editors, not algorithms -- makes Yahoo News not just more credible, but (usually) also more interesting.
Google maintains the advantage of timeliness though. A search this morning on "Google News prank" pulls up much better results in Google.com and Google News than it does in Yahoo News.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Should Yahoo Go Into Print Journalism?
Technology journalist Dan Gillmor is prodding Yahoo to buy the San Jose Mercury News, one of the now-defunct Knight Ridder's chain of newspapers.
Gillmor says the move could "turn the Bay Area -- far and away the best place for this in America -- into a living laboratory of tomorrow's journalism."
Yahoo could become the international test bed for the transition we all know is coming in print journalism. (One place it could start is fulfilling the promise of the under-utilized SiliconValley.com asset that Knight Ridder has failed to nurture.) Again, the shift to online is clearly happening even though papers have some future ahead of them. Yahoo, better than most -- if it cared -- could help make that transition the kind that honors the reasons we all should care so much about the future of quality journalism. If Silicon Valley and environs aren't the best place in America to start, what is?
Posted by Melanie Phung
Managing Your Online Image
On the Web, it's easy for your image to spin out of your control. Just ask the talentless hack or our favorite miserable failure. My recent post about using bloggers to your PR advantage touches on this subject as well (although I actually started this particular post months ago).
Even assuming a large group of people aren't colluding to Googlebomb (or "link bomb," if you prefer) your site, and you aren't in crisis control mode for some reason, there are still things you can and should do to optimize for your company or product brand name; you want to make sure that people who do a keyword search on your brand name see what you want them to see.
The Basics
First order of business when managing your image online is to have your corporate homepage rank #1 for searches on your company name. If you don't, then at best you're missing an easy way to reach visitors who are already looking for you; at worst, you give your competitors and detractors an opportunity to blemish the first impression many of your customers are going to have.
No-brainer steps would be including your company name in the site's title tags, making sure you have an About Us page, and getting listed in relevant Internet directories. That's low-hanging fruit. Depending on your name and industry that might be enough to snag you the top two spots.
Press Releases
Write well-optimized press releases and get them widely distributed on the web-based PR wires. Don't forget to link your company's name to your website - the lede and the boilerplate are two obvious places where you can and should mention your website's URL.
Adding these press release to your own website will increase the amount of relevant high-quality content you have. Submitting them for web distribution gets them distributed to Google, Yahoo and Topix. Good, newsworthy releases can get picked up by both bloggers and traditional journalists, with even more opportunities to get links to your site. Think of well-optimized press releases as the gift that keeps on giving.
Now you're cooking
For the hardcore SEO campaigns, when the top 2 spots aren't enough, you need to get pages on other websites optimized for your name. Leverage what relationships your company already has. If you have distributors, partners, or affiliates, see if they'll create a page about you on their site. Get some of your best customers to write testimonials on the popular reviews sites like Epinions or Amazon.com -- these pages will already start off fairly well optimized since your name will be in the title tags, your name and logo will appear on the page, and it'll probably include at least one link to your site. Being on a popular domain gives the page an advantage as well. These types of pages can easily rank for your name once you get some good customer-generated content on them.
These are just some ideas for dominating the whole first page of results when people search on your brand. I'm sure there are many more unique opportunities in your vertical if you spend some time looking for them. Get creative. (However -- and this should go without saying -- don't go on any indiscriminate comment spamming sprees. It's not effective either in terms of SEO results or considering conversion... and the resulting mess will be hard to clean up, as I know from experience.)
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Bowling Skepticism Redux
A couple of months ago when "Google bowling" was the hot buzz phrase whipping lots of marketers into a panic, I scoffed. I still scoff, but I have to do so less vehemently since Rand Fishkin (of SEOmoz.org) says he's seen it work. I hate to believe it, but if randfish says it's possible, then it seems less incredible.
There's a significant caveat: it doesn't work with established sites; i.e., those sites you'd target for Google bowling in the first place. If you're targeting a site with established rankings, you'd just be helping them.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Is ODP Down With Me?
A couple of months ago I blogged about the quality standards DMOZ editors are expected to uphold. It painted the Open Directory Project in a pretty positive light, which at least one person took exception to. In fact, most marketers are frustrated with DMOZ (read: its editors) for having "huge egos" and entirely too much power.
I still intend to enumerate the problems I have with DMOZ and its processes, but that's going to end up being a pretty long post actually.
So for now there's just an update about this here site's inclusion in the Directory: My site is still not listed, but last month my site was moved from the category to which I submitted (/Computers/Internet/Searching/Weblogs) to /Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Weblogs, where it sits unreviewed. I guess I could quibble and say that my blog is not about Web design promotion, but neither are most of the sites listed in that category. I'd be in good company if only my site ever gets reviewed and approved.
Labels: DMOZ
Posted by Melanie Phung
Windows Live is Live (in Beta)
So MSN is going to replace MSN Search with Windows Live Search. Windows Live Search is in beta at www.live.com. It's a radical break in terms of branding, both in terms of the name and the new clean look. If you prefer the clutter of the old SERPs, MSN Search is still available for now.
The Live Search interface let's you decide if you want to see snippets in the results (or just the title and URL) or determine the size of the thumbnails in image search). The most unique thing is that it doesn't break the results into pages with 10 results per page; instead there's this slider thing that basically let's you scroll down the entire list of results inside a frame. The frame displays 4 to 6 results (depending if you collapse the snippets or not) at a time. I think that feature going to take some getting used to. I'm pretty confident that it's not going to grow on me -- I've always disliked having to scroll within a frame.
The nice thing aesthetically, though, is that it all fits above the fold and is beautifully sparse. (I wonder if it will stay that way; Microsoft isn't known for keeping things clean and simple, as this video so aptly satirizes.)
Plus there are a lot of customization options, including the ability to restrict searches to a set of your favorite sites, which is a feature I really like. (Kind of like Rollyo let's you do with Yahoo Search results. You can check out my searchroll for SEO hearsay here.)
Posted by Melanie Phung
PR Firms Leverage (Co-opt?) Blogs
Wal-Mart has been outted as cozying up to bloggers. Actually, the article is very PR-firm-friendly, saying basically that if the line between PR firms and bloggers is blurred it's because the bloggers are failing to properly reveal their sources. It could have turned into a mini-scandal, but both sides appear to have come out of it relatively unscathed. (Jeremy Zawodny's rant notwithstanding.)
The PR firm behind Wal-Mart's blog outreach is Edelmann, coincidentally the firm Steve Rubel just joined.
Rubel runs Micropersuasion.com, one of the most popular blogs on the Web, which looks at how online trends are influencing marketing and public relations. (Full disclosure: several months ago I asked Rubel if he'd do an interview for this blog, but he declined.)
Steve Rubel participated in an online chat at the Washington Post to discuss Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making, a Washington Post article that was published before the Wal-Mart story ran in the New York Times.
During his chat, Rubel answered some of my questions... sort of. To my question "when do you face bad buzz head on?" he answered "before it's too late, but not too early." Insightful.
When I asked if there was anything he would have done differently, and what the plan is now that they've been "outted," Rubel says, "We will continue to build relationships with bloggers and strive to make them as transparent as possible."
Increasingly, PR firms take the same approach toward bloggers as they do journalists in traditional media. The expectation is that the same standards (of journalistic integrity) apply, but I don't think we're quite there yet. I think public relations firms that pursue an aggressive blog outreach strategy are going to have to take some responsibility for making sure their bloggers aren't just shilling. Otherwise it will reflect poorly on everyone involved and undermine the influence of citizen journalism.
Added March 21: The Economist ran an article February 9 about how corporations can use negative blog chatter to their advantage, The Blog in the Corporate Machine.
Labels: search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung
All the Cool Kids Are in Austin This Week
Suddenly, there's a flurry of blog updates from SXSW. I'm jealous; I think SXSW would have been more fun than SES NY was. It'll be all Internet geek stuff for a few days and then starting on Wednesday we'll find out what new music is going to be hot. I think this is the only time you'll ever hear me say that I wished I were in Texas.
Posted by Melanie Phung
My Site Has a TBPR of 5/10 ?!
The point to stress is that PageRank doesn't determine how a page is going to rank for any given search; it's a common misconception because the name PageRank implies something about the ranking of a page. Actually, PageRank is named after Larry Page, its inventor (with a small dose of irony, I'm sure).
So, given that PageRank measures link popularity, how is it that the Google toolbar last week indicated my blog's homepage had a PageRank of 5?
The point I'm trying to underscore is that Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) is iffy at best. The toolbar is only updated very sporadically throughout the year, while actual PR is, we are led to assume, recalculated continually. Regardless, whether it was calculated yesterday or three months ago, it is highly improbable that www.all-about-content.com rates a 3, much less a 5. (PR values are exponential, so a value of 5 is many times more significant than a PR3.)
I think this example is pretty convincing proof that you shouldn't put too much stock in TBPR.
The usual disclaimer: I may or may not be right about the specifics (not that my post contains all that many specifics). If you're interested in how PageRank is calculated and/or the debate over whether PageRank as displayed on the toolbar has any meaning at all, there are more authoritative sites than mine that can provide deeper insights. You can find them by googling the term "PageRank."
Posted by Melanie Phung
Washington Post Partners with Del.icio.us
My little local paper, the Washington Post, which has always pushed the envelope when it comes to trying new technologies and new ways of interacting with its readers, recently signed a partnership with del.icio.us.
Registered del.icio.us users can bookmark washingtonpost.com articles right from the page. Each article includes links for tagging del.icio.us, as well as Technorati trackbacks.
This is a good example of an old media outlet "getting" the Web. Instead of getting defensive (like European publishers, or the NY Times, which started restricting access to some articles to non-paying users), the Washington Post is embracing new ways to leverage the Internet for its own advantage.
Labels: link-building
Posted by Melanie Phung
5.3 Billion Searches in February
Statistics are no fun if everyone agrees. Nielsen/Netratings says Google captured 48.5% of the 5.3 billion searches conducted in February. According to Nielsen's numbers, both Google and Yahoo (at 22.5%) increased their share at the expense of MSN Search. AOL Search (6.6%) and My Way Search (2.7%) come in at numbers 4 and 5. Not making an appearance on this top 5 list is Ask.com.
5.3 billion searches were conducted in February, up from 3.8 billion during the same period last year. Nielsen attributes this growth largely to the increased number of searches per user, particularly image searches and shopping searches: "In February 2005, the average Web user ran 33.2 searches; by this February, that number had climbed to 43.1 searches, increasing 30% year over year. In contrast, the number of unique searchers increased year over year by just 6%."
Labels: data
Posted by Melanie Phung