Get RSS feed
Getting Ranked via Google Local ...With No Content At All
I did a search on [Washington DC SEO] in Google and found a local listing in the #1 spot. Not surprising with Universal Search and the inclusion of a city name clearly indicating that there's a geographical component to the query.
(Actually, I used to have a first page ranking in Google for Washington DC SEO and a #1 spot for the same phrase in Yahoo and MSN.)
So if you're a small business looking for SEO services, you might think, "wow, this guy must be good; he's #1 in Google after all!"
Here's the funny thing: There's no there there. The site has no content on it. This is what you get when you click on the link:
Luckily for him, the OneBox listing includes a phone number, so the guy might still be getting clients (yeah, right!)
Is that all it took to be #1 for "Washington DC SEO" - registering an address with Google Local Search? I'd be all over that, but I don't think I want to make it that easy for any old stalker to know my address. What a shame.p.s. I'd upload a screen shot, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do screen grabs on my new Mac. :(
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Over-optimization of a Wikipedia Article
Does an over-optimization penalty exist? And what counts as over-optimization? I came across this discussion on on the "950 penalty" on Webmaster World. They posit that too many internal links with optimized anchor text is what triggers an over-optimization penalty. And maybe they are onto something.
This week I was testing the effect of increased cross-linking on a Wikipedia page -- by finding related articles and linking back to the target, by adding the target to more relevant categories -- and I probably doubled the number of internal pages linking to the one I wanted to boost.
Instead of boosting the page in the SERPs, it appears this effort might have torpedoed the page. This morning it was nowhere to be found in the top 100 results anywhere. It's not a competitive term, and none of the other results appear to have changed dramatically, so it seems reasonable to me to assume it was something about this page, not the results in general, and that there was a causal relationship between the links and the drop.
I'm not entirely surprised that "excessive" interlinking could hurt; I'm just surprised that (what I'd consider to be) a moderate amount of interlinking could get a Wikipedia page penalized so quickly. I truly believed pages on that domain were more robust and could stand up to that strategy. (After all, there is a ton of internal linking and all internal links on Wikipedia use optimized anchor text.)
Well, time to undo some of those links and see if it comes back.
Update: March 2
I removed most, but not all, the internal links and the listing came back rather quickly, though in a lower position than before.
On an upbeat note ... I managed to get a Wikipedia page erased from Google, temporarily? Damn, how awesome is that?
Labels: Google, link-building
Posted by Melanie Phung
2007 Search Statistics
ComScore's Year in Review press release seems to underscore the principle that the rich keep getting richer: Google, of course, saw more gains, as did Wikipedia (which some conspiracy theorists seem to think is in cahoots with Google somehow) and Craigslist.
Facebook traffic jumped 81% year over year to 34.7 million visitors, now that registration is open to non-students (including quite a few pets, if Stewie's ever growing circle of Facebook friends is any indication).
The release goes on to say that "the top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear." Not to be outdone by current events of any gravity, sites devoted to celebrity entertainment news, "from Britney Spears' meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smiths death," kept up with an equally impressive 32% increase in visitors.
In total -- including all searches for Britney, Anna Nicole and even "poop porn" -- more than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. last year, with Google representing a 56% share of the market.
Labels: data, Google, social media, user behavior
Posted by Melanie Phung
What Happened to the Supplemental Index (aka Google Hell)?
Breaking news: there's more FUD about showing up in Google results!!! SSDD, as they say.
Google has announced they're getting rid of the supplemental index, but I honestly don't see what the big deal is. If your pages were crappy (or irrelevant or obscure or esoteric, or whatever gets them banished into the supplemental index), why would placing them into the main index make them any more likely to rank well? In other words, if your page is no good, what's the difference between being in the supplemental index and being ranked #568 on some long-tail query?
"Oh, but supplemental results aren't recrawled as often." Right, but so what? No guarantee you'll get crawled more often just because they combined the two indexes/indices now. "Oh, but my site didn't deserve to be in the supplemental index in the first place!" But the point is that Google thought it did; and Google is still not going to think you deserve to rank well.
All the things you needed to do to get out of Supplemental Hell are the same things you're still going to have to do to get found and showing up high in the results... and now you're competing with that much more garbage in the main index.
The only stuff of mine I ever saw in Google's Supplemental Hell was a lot of duplicate content stuff that I never wanted crawled in the first place. If anything, this change will make it harder for me to get Google to spend its resources on the pages I want it to be indexing. As far as I'm concerned, Google is just dumping garbage back into the main index.
Not an improvement for webmasters or searchers.
Original Google Webmaster Central post here:
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Paid Links Lose Value (Or: Google Says, I Told You So)
Google has been warning the SEO community it would put the smack down on paid links. The message started coming in loud and clear earlier this year with the Google guys and gals talking at conferences about how the GOOG don't like no bought links, and that sparked a lot of debate on all the forums: Just how would search engines distinguish paid links from "natural" links?
Then, in case you weren't listening, Google started a de-PageRankifying campaign that was sure to get the community talking: first it dropped the Toolbar PageRank of paid directories (presumably those that had been created for SEO purposes) and then, more dramatically, it stripped major general-interest sites like the WashingtonPost.com of their precious green Toolbar pixels.
"You listen' now, punks?" asked Google.
That, all the savvy SEOs knew, was just a shot across the bough bow, because does WaPo really care about how many green pixels it gets in the Toolbar? Does that change the economics of their business? No. But...with the holidays coming and Google having a reputation for making big, disruptive algo changes right before the big shopping season, I for one warned that sites utilizing paid linking as part of their link strategy would see the effects soon.
And in three... two ... one:
Here's are the Google rankings of one site for its top keywords and keyword phrases -- check out what happened to that site's rankings since Friday (I was out of the office on Monday, so it might have happened as recently as yesterday). [ed. I should note that none of the affected pages themselves lost any Toolbar PR, because the TBPR thing is only symbolic. It's the rankings (and therefore traffic) that actually matter.]
Just eyeballing this chart, it looks like paid links were stripped of their link juice, but not that the buyers of those links were heavily penalized. In the example above, most of the rankings dropped only a page -- that's significant, don't get me wrong, but it's not as bad as the dread Minus 30 penalty, or an outright ban. Unlike the Minus 30 penalty, there isn't going to be an opportunity to beg forgiveness. The links that were devalued can be removed, but that won't help get your rankings back up. In fact, it's entirely possible that Google isn't done with this update yet and that further drops in these sites' positions will occur.
But not everyone loses out in this latest rankings shuffle, obviously. Some sites -- those that didn't participate in detectable paid linking -- get to move up a couple of spots. (Well la-dee-da, lil' Goody Two Shoes.)
But, you knew the "buy yourself top organic rankings" strategy wouldn't last in the long run.
Or maybe I speak to soon... also possible that this was a one time index clean-up and not a permanent change to the algorithm, in which case you could continue to discreetly buy links on other sites that haven't been outted yet. hmmm.... I'm not saying that paid links are the best value for your money right now, but people tend to overreact to changes in the search engine landscape. I really wouldn't advise you to pull the plug on every paid link you have out there; knee-jerk reactions to an algo shift aren't going to help. There's no way that Google figured out every single link that's been paid for on the entire Internet ... point of the hyperbole: some of those paid links might still be worth quite a bit. The trick is knowing which ones.
I also want to know how this is going to effect business of the big text link brokers. Are people going to stop buying text links now? I for one still think there's plenty of opportunity there, as long as sites selling links stop being so frickin obvious about it. Like the WashingtonPost - they put the same block of paid link on ALL of their tens of thousands of pages. Of course that was going to be detected!
How 'bout you? Are you changing your strategy? And how do you hope to make up for the lost rankings now that the paid links aren't boosting your position (assuming you paid for links, that is)?
Updated December 7: May I Have This Google Dance?
Less than 2 weeks after I published the post above, a funny thing happened. All the rankings came back to what they were before and have been holding steady since. I think they listened to me when I said "good things come to those who don't panic." (Paid links are dead! Long live paid links?)
Labels: Google, industry buzz, link-building, monetizing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Pretty Quiet on the Blogging Front
It's the end of the month and I realized I've barely posted at all in the last few weeks. There are at least half a dozen posts started but never finished just sitting in the queue, but a heck of a lot of good that does anyone.
So, yeah, I've been pretty busy. Lotsa stuff going on at work. I can't really talk about it (shhhh) but I'll mention that I had to lay off two of my staff, which was really hard to do. I'm also spending more time on brand management (again) and product merchandising, the latter of which generates a greater sense of urgency going into the holiday season than SEO projects do. (Xmas SEO? Puh-leeze, we took care of that back in July. J/K)
Obviously the big SEO chatter this month was about the contentious paid links debate and the related issue of several major sites (like the WashingtonPost.com, for example) losing a lot of PageRank. Bruce Clay does a nice job of rounding up relevant posts on the subject here and here. If you haven't been following the debate, you might want to start with Rand's roundup of the links session at SES San Jose.
Other news some of you may find interesting is that Google seems to be changing the way it displays sitelinks (at least intermittently). Here's an example of the new 8-link layout I'm seeing a lot in Google's sitelinks:
I'm hopeful that I'll be able to start blogging again more regularly soon, once the work drama subsides (assuming it does).
Labels: Google, industry buzz, link-building, navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
What Info is Google Using to Display Sitelinks?
Over many months, I've noticed that Google Sitelinks (the list of internal or secondary links that display under the first result of a search) can differ dramatically. Sitelinks seem like one of the most inconsistent result types being displayed.
Following are some examples.
A search on "Sears" brings up the Sears homepage with Sitelinks that match the general navigation. Aside from the fact that no second page from the Sears.com domain shows up on the first page of results, this search engine result is displaying precisely as one would expect: Sitelink destinations match the main navigation and the anchor text for the links match the alt attributes for the navigation images (since the nav is not plain text).
In this next example, two results show up for a search on "Drs. Foster and Smith" (a pet supply web site). Second result is a duplicate of one of the Sitelinks, which makes sense. Interestingly, the anchor text within the Sitelinks portion of the results is inconsistent.
The link to "Cat Supplies" matches the destination page's title tag, whereas the "Dog Supplies" link matches the anchor text of the navigation link. The "Fish" Sitelink matches neither the anchor text of the site's navigation nor the page's title tag, though the second result, which goes to the same fish page, does use the title tag. The final Sitelink, Clearance Outlet, is not a link found in the site's main navigation, though it is on the main page of the site.
A search on "drsfostersmith", which is the domain name of the previous company, brings up the same result and the same sitelinks, but with a different Title link for the main result! The second result following the Sitelinks was not from this domain.
A search on the brand name "T-Mobile" brings up two results from the http://www.t-mobile.com/ domain -- neither of which uses the respective pages' title tags in the results display. As would be expected, the Sitelinks go to pages that are located on t-mobile.com's main navigation and uses text that is either anchor text or alt tag text for those links.
The second result, however, is NOT one of the Sitelinks, and is actually a 302 redirect to another domain. Neither the page titles, nor Sitelinks anchor text, are pulling from Page Title tag (in either the first or second result):
For a search on the brand name "Wirefly," two results from the wirefly.com domain are displayed. The second result is also one of the Sitelinks, with all but one of the Sitelinks being ones found in the the site's main navigation.
Both the Sitelink anchor text and the title of the second result appear to be pulling the page's Meta Title, again as expected; however, in the case of the former, the Meta Title isn't current and doesn't match what was indexed in the general results (note use of Cingular versus AT&T):
Conclusions, Conjecture and SWAGs about Google Sitelinks:
- Google explains that Sitelinks are created by "analyz[ing] the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time."
- However, Google Sitelinks are not necessarily the pages with the most internal links pointing to them (i.e., pages from the main navigation). It's not entirely implausible that Google is analyzing user behavior (via the Google Toolbar) to determine which "shortcuts" are most likely to help users locate the information they are seeking. (Take a look, for example, at the Sitelinks that show up for a search on "Yellow Pages"; the pages that are displayed --pages about New York and LA -- aren't favored by the site's structure, but are very likely heavily trafficked pages.)
- Anchor text of the Sitelinks results may or may not match the text used to link to those pages within the domain.
- Anchor text of Sitelinks may or may not be pulled from the pages' meta title tags.
- The data for Sitelinks appears to be pulling from a different "index" than the main results, since title tag changes are updated in the main results more quickly than in Sitelinks.
- Your site does not need to have two of its pages showing up for a brand-name search in order to have Sitelinks displayed.
- Conversely, having two pages from a domain show up for a branded-keyword search does not guarantee display of Sitelinks.
- Short of re-architecting your site, there doesn't seem to be a way to control which pages will show up in Sitelinks or what the anchor text for those links will be.
- Sitelinks tend to show up most often for searches on brand names, but not exclusively. I've seen examples where generic search phrases result in Sitelinks being displayed for the top result, but the keywords have tended to be used as part of the domain name.
More info about Google Sitelinks can be found on SEObytheSea.com, where Bill Slawski looks at Google's patent application.
Updated: March 12, 2008
New post about additional search boxes now being displayed within the SERPS, inside the Google Sitelinks area.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Search Engine Market Share for May 2007
Nielsen//NetRatings today reported its market share data for the top 10 search engines. Google, no surprise, continues to lead with Nielsen NetRatings reporting 4.03 billion searches having been conducted on Google last month. That translates to nearly 45% year over year growth and 56.3% of total U.S. market share.
Yahoo Search is in second place with a little over 1.5 billion searches and 21.5% of the total. MSN trails a distant third with only 8.4% of all U.S. searches conducted on the Windows Live search engine. Rounding out the top 5 search engines are AOL Search and Ask.com, with 5.3% and 2.5% of search market share, respectively.
At the bottom of the list is the search aggregator Dogpile, which saw fewer net searches than the previous year, with year over year growth a -10.6%.
HitWise, a competing market research firm, also released its May search data today. According to HitWise, in May Google captured a whopping 65.1% of all U.S. searches, up from 59.3% last year. The number of searches attributed by HitWise to Yahoo are in line with Nielsen's data: 20.9%, a figure that's down slightly from May 2006. And MSN/Live Search garnered 8.4% of searches, down from 12.1% of marketshare 12 months prior.
Ask.com fared a little better based on HitWise data, with 3.9% of the market compared to 2.5% that Nielsen reported. Either way, IAC's Ask.com continues to lose market share to the bigger players.
Labels: data, Google, user behavior, Yahoo
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google to Start Purging Personal Data
Google announced it will begin deleting personally identifying information from its computers 18 to 24 months after it gets logged, addressing a major privacy concern of consumers and government officials alike.
According to a Google FAQ document about the new policy: "We had previously kept the logs data for as long as it was useful. When we implement this policy change, we will continue to keep server log data so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses, but we will anonymize our server logs after 18-24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer."
Source: Beta News
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google - an Irregular Verb
I get the Google Friends newsletter. I thought this was a cute story, but what I found most interesting is the use of "google" as a verb. For a company that doesn't want its tradename used as a verb, to the point of having its lawyers send cease and desist letters, it certainly seems counterproductive to publish a newsletter that appears to encourage it:
We admit it: we love learning about all the things people use Google to do. Such as ... how to find a lost tortoise. Here's a story we got from Jim Lyness: "After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead, and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night, and into the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife Susan and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door?As for my success story, I googled "Google sues media for using google as a verb" to find the article I needed for the link in the first paragraph.
Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang -- we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys' bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter! "
If you have a story about how Google search has made an impact on something on your world, we'd love to hear it. Use either of the links below - either submit your tale through a web form or upload your story on video to YouTube. (If you shoot video, be sure to tag it "google testimonial" when you upload it.)
Web form: http://www.google.com/contact/success.html
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Auto-Correcting Typos: RAZR not Razor
I noticed this a while ago and thought maybe it was just a test, but Google has started auto-correcting without prompting for certain types of misspellings. In the example below, Google simply assumed I meant 'sprint razr' when I typed 'sprint razor' -- so it's showing me the results to a search different than the one I entered! Very different results if you search "sprint razor" (same search but with quotes) and slightly different even if you choose sprint AND razor (which isn’t supposed to change the results since "and" is supposed to be treated like a stop word).
I’ve also seen what looked like similar highlighting of variations without actual reordering of results. In the example below, I searched for 'cingular razer', and Google's results highlight both 'razor' and 'razer'.
But I think the highlighting of the search term misspelling in the snippet and title is a separate from auto-correcting search queries.
This is a big step forward in the search engines' efforts to "think like a user." Afterall, if a user types 'sprint razor' he's not looking to see how many pages use the term 'sprint razor'; he's more likely looking for the Sprint RAZR product, and that's what the results reflect.
Although I'm sure continual refinements will need to be made and a lot of assumptions will be incorrect at first, I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of cleaning up the SERPs. If this trend continues, it will help businesses avoid having to optimize for common misspellings of their keywords in addition to their regular target search phrases. Even better, it means Google will stop rewarding sites that don't spell things correctly.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Talking to a Google Engineer
In a departure from my usual snarky self, I'm genuinely thrilled to say I had the opportunity today to talk to one of the Google engineers who works on organic search. It was an hour-long web/teleconference during which we talked about pretty basic SEO (most of which everyone on my team obviously already knew, but there were a couple of gems in there that surprised me), and then we actually walked through part of our e-commerce site evaluating certain pages and things that could be improved. Again, no huge surprises there. But it was great validation to have him praise all the things we've been fighting so hard for (and that we still should implement those things we haven't gotten to yet).
The funniest part, however, was at the very end when I asked him to tell me about the minus 30 penalty, and he immediately said "there are things I cannot talk about" (read: I will neither deny nor confirm the existence of this alleged penalty).
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
December Search Stats - comScore and Compete
According to just-released data from Compete, Google continues to gain search market share at everyone else's expense (yawn, what else is new), everyone but AOL that is. Now there's a twist. Is AOL the little search engine that could? Well, no. While it's market share might not have declined last month, it's still in a distant fourth place, with no hope of catching up, unless something dramatic happens in the search landscape. And then there's the issue of AOL not using proprietary search technology.
ComScore released its own market share findings this week as well. According to comScore's press release,
In December 2006, Google Sites captured 47.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.4 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites grew 0.3 share points, maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.4 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent).
ComScore further says, "Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago."
More info on these data at Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google SOAP Search API to Die a Slow Death
I missed this earlier: apparently Google is killing its search API. Not a blow to the spine kind of killing, but a removing the feeding tube kind of slow but assured death. That's going to be a problem for those of us who rely on the search API to track our rankings (since you can't track manually as many keywords and domains as I do). Read the discussion on Search Engine Watch, to get other SEO's opinions on this development.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Related Searches on Google
I've only noticed this in the last few days, although I'm sure others have been posting about this already (I'm a little behind on my industry reading), but Google seems to be testing the display of related search terms (again). This is something that MSN/Live and Yahoo have been doing for a long time, and a feature I always found particularly helpful as a searcher. Should drive traffic for these tail terms, which might make you happy if you rank well for these types of secondary phrases but not the general one.
In "related news" (har har), Google has also been displaying links from old news stories:
Happy Festivus!
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Forcing Googlebot to Observe the Sabbath
Just when it starts to seem like I haven't learned anything interesting in a while, I come across a thread called "Cloaking for Religious Reasons."
Is there ever a good reason to engage in cloaking for the purpose of fooling Google? Even if God insists?
Turns out no -- the problem being discussed could better be solved a different way (The problem: having to take down an e-commerce site in observance of Sabbath but needing to avoid search engine spiders replacing the entire site in their indexes/indices with the store's "we're currently closed" page. The solution: returning 503 errors).
Now I finally understand why B&H Photo wouldn't let me place orders on their site at various times in the past. Turns out it wasn't random... it was Saturday!
Labels: cloaking, Google, googlebot
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google-YouTube Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theories about Internet abound, but here's one that doesn't involve Google in cahoots with the CIA or invading UFOs.
Based solely on an anonymous posting on Mark Cuban's blog (Blog Maverick), industry is now discussing whether its possible that Google paid off media companies to keep them from going after its recently acquired video-sharing site YouTube on copyright issues.
An unnamed source emailed Cuban, who posted it on Blog Maverick as something he felt was semi-credible, to say that Google agreed to pay a flat $500 million to media companies that had wanted to sue YouTube for copyright infringement.
The media companies would turn their attention away from YouTube to pursue other multimedia sharing sites hosting copyrighted material. This would allow YouTube ample time to remove infringing material safe in the knowledge that their competitors won't be able to keep offering the good stuff either. Because let's face it, what draws traffic to YouTube and sites like it is not the home videos of cats doing somersaults but stuff that you really ought to be paying to see.
As for the second gunman... The deal would allegedly screw artists and performers out of their fair share of royalties and allow the media companies to pocket the entirety offer.
This theory comes right on the heels of 1) Cuban saying anyone who buys YouTube is a moron, and 2) Google buying YouTube.
So, the revised analysis is as follows: anyone who buys YouTube is a moron, unless they've already conspired with their would-be opponents beforehand.
Read the email to Cuban.
A previous Blog Maverick post on the subject:
The Coming Dramatic Decline of YouTube
Labels: Google, industry buzz
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Earth Does Space
The Wirefly X Prize Cup is taking place this weekend and Google Earth created a special page to showcase its 3D rendering of the event.
There will be a Wirefly X Prize Cup blogger live "on the scene" to blog about the events as they happen, too. Not nearly as exciting as Anousheh Ansari's blog from space, but probably more detailed, I anticipate.
Playing the part of the Wirefly X Prize Cup blogger: Jon Gales, whom I've profiled here last year.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Rumor Mill: New "Minus 30" Penalty
There're now strong rumors of a new Google penalty called "the Minus 30 Penalty" - talk is of it being an over-optimization penalty, but you know how reliable these conjectures are.
The interesting thing is that the penalty is not a ban, but a bump down of 30 spots. So it's nearly impossible to tell if you dropped because of a penalty, your own on-site issues, changes by your competitors, etc (whereas with a ban it was pretty clear what happened and steps you could take to lift the ban).
Goddamn moving target... it's almost as if Google just wants to make our jobs more difficult, go figure.
Updated: There's vigorous discussion on Threadwatch where speculation is that this penalty is only for minor infractions and will be lifted as soon as the "problem" is fixed, and/or that it is a time-limited thing that goes away after some time (although what the point of that would be from Google's perspective, I don't know).
Other rumors in various forums is that this is a replacement for the Google Sandbox, which seems unlikely to me since the Sandbox filter serves a different function. Remember, this "minus 30 penalty" is hitting sites that were ranking well, and then inexplicably dropped, rather than brand new sites. Matt Cutts, to date, has not addressed questions about the minus 30 penalty on his blog.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
You Typed "Prodigal." Did You Mean "Dictionary"?
For a while now Google has made results for "alternative searches" available (aka "middle of the page results") when it thinks there might be ambiguity in the search term. But this is the biggest leap I've ever seen:
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Search the Daqmey pat in tlhIngan Hol!
I can only assume "Daqmey pat" means "the Web" and "tlhIngan Hol" is "the Klingon language." Of course, Google in Klingon, that's what the Web's been missing! How else would a Klingon search for adult naghmey beQ?
See for yourself: juHDaqlIj mojlaH Google! (translation: ??)
Be careful about clicking around on the links; I think one of those links sets Klingon as your default language.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
'google,' (goo-gul) tr. v.
On Thursday, Mirriam-Webster announced the list of words it is adding to its dictionary this year. Among them: To google, a transitive verb meaning to use the Google search engine to obtain information about [a person or thing] on the world wide web.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
KinderStart Suit a Non-Starter
KinderStart, the company that sued Google for deindexing its website and is trying to get others to join it in a class action, is getting its day in court.
In advance of the hearing scheduled for June 30, KinderStart put out this very funny press release:
At 9:00 a.m. on Friday, June 30, 2006 in United States Federal Court, 280 S. First Street, Courtroom #3, San Jose, California, a drama will play out between KinderStart.com (a site for kids zero to seven and their parents) and the giant of the Internet, Google, controlling up to 80% or more of 'Net searches worldwide.Oh, how ridiculous is this, let me count the ways. Let's just overlook the hyperbole and melodrama of the copywriting, and skip right over to:
The hearing is open to members of the press and the public. Cameras are not permitted in the courtroom.
If the Federal judge rules in favor of KinderStart on any of the nine counts, sunlight will finally begin to lift the dark and secret shroud that covers the Googleplex.
Google's co-founder Larry Page declared that a search engine should be "like the mind of God."
"It's clear Google is acting like god as they determine what we mortals shalt and shalt not see," stated Victor Goodman, Founder of KinderStart.com.
Goodman continues, "Is this company that censors speech and ideas in China now doing it in the USA? Google decides what news we get, what sites come up, and what sites disappear—in effect, what we buy and think. This case is about far more than Kinderstart; it is about our freedom to know, speak and choose without a self-appointed Gatekeeper."
KinderStart.com is the lead plaintiff in a class action filed in Federal court on March 17, 2006.
- Google is not the Internet, it is a company with a proprietary product. It owns the product and the intellectual property of that product. Although it is available for free (if you don't count having to look at ads), it is not a public good.
- There is no such thing as an inalienable right to be indexed. Do alcohol and tabacco companies sue Target because Target "acts like a god" by choosing not to stock those products?
- "Censorship" is when the government interferes with freedom of expression in the public sphere. Otherwise it's called editorial discretion. The Chinese censorship issue is not only a red herring, but also a false analogy.
- And, anyway, what are they trying to accomplish here? On the off chance that they win the class action and Google is forced to reinclude all the de-indexed sites, it will open the floodgates to so much spam that it can't possibly benefit any legitimate sites.
For background:
- http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1736677,00.html?gusrc=rss
- http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=10593
- http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060322KinderStartAndGoogleDifferOnOpinion.html
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Grouping Made Room for Three
I'm seeing more Google weirdness: the other day, I was doing a vanity search on Google the other day and noticed that there were three results from this blog on the first page.
This is unusual because Google will ordinarily only display 2 results from the same domain on a single search results page, and group them together. It will display the higher ranking page according to where it fits algorithmically and display the next ranked page from that site indented underneath the first.
So if you have pages that independently would rank #1 and #7, Google will display them as #1 and an indented #2. If you have pages that alone would rank #2, #3 and #10, Google's search engine results page will only display #2 and #3 (indented), giving the #10 spot to the next result that is not on your domain.
For searchers this is useful because you don't need to skim hundreds of listings from the same site. It's significant for SEO because it means you will always need multiple domains if you're tracking to dominate the entire first page of results for a given search -- any one domain will yield at most 2 positions.
(Each results page does this independently, so if you have spots #10, #11 and #12, you'll still see your best listing in the #10 spot, with #11 at the top of the second page and #12 indented below, leaving opportunities to gain more spots on subsequent pages -- assuming a standard results display setting of 10 results per page. If the user has Google set to display 100 results, however, then you're limited to a total of 2 spots in the top 100 positions.)
I've seen multiple indented listings from the supplemental index, but never the main search results. If, however, this wasn't just some flukey thing and Google is thinking of displaying more than two sites per domain per results page, that could impact an SEO strategy that relies on multiple pages from multiple sites being optimized for the same keyword. Even if the new limit were 3 instead of 2, that means in theory you could dominate the entire first page using only 4 domains instead of the 5 separate domains currently needed. You would still need to optimize 10 pages total, but 10 pages on 4 domains might be easier to optimize than 10 pages from 5 domains. Might be. Might not. Either way, that would be an impressive feat.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google at Nearly 60% Marketshare
Hitwise released search engine marketshare figures for the month of May: Google reeled in 59.3% of all searchers for the four-week period. Yahoo took 22% of search queries, while 12.1% of searches were conducted using MSN Search. These numbers refer to U.S. search activity.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Dude, Google's Got Dell
According to Ben Charny of eWeek's Google Watch column:
Recent comments by Google execs make it clear that Google views Dell Computers as its secret weapon against chief nemesis Microsoft.
In fact, there's lots of evidence pointing to an important nexis between Google's recently rebuffed anti-trust allegations about a new Microsoft Web browser and the three-year-long deal Google recently reached with Dell Computers.
The Dell deal will help Google counter Microsoft's built-in advantage (of having it's own browser) by making Google the first thing seen by tens of millions of new Dell users. With the partnership, Google gets the same, if not a better, advantage without actually having to go out and build a competitor to Internet Explorer.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Trends: Yahoo Trending Up
Google released some pretty cool stuff earlier this month, including Co-Op (already everyone is talking about how, or if, it's possible to effectively spam it). But what I've been having endless fun with is the much-appreciated Google Trends. You can track the popularity of certain search phrases over time and even compare terms.
The news indicator on the right is still not very good -- often highlighting fairly irrelevant news and ignoring significant changes that just beg for an explanation. In the graph below, for example, why didn't Google Trends try to find some news that corresponded with the big spike in searches on the term "Google" in mid-2005? And the one Yahoo news item it does highlight is about the Google rival missing its financial target. Compare that with the news highlighted about Google. Hmmm.
Related link: BlogPulse from Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Eyes Consumer-Generated Media
CEO Eric Schmidt said during a press event that Google intends to start focus on consumer-generated media (CGM). The company not only wants to help users create content, but also organize and search for work created by fellow users. A new feature, called Google Co-op, allows users to search specifically for user-generated content and "annotations."
MediaPost Publications reports:
Greg Sterling, principal analyst for Sterling Marketing Intelligence, said Google's emphasis Wednesday on consumer-generated content marks a turning point for the company, which traditionally has been relatively weak in the medium. "They didn't anticipate the rise of MySpace, and I thought that that was an area where Yahoo was investing very heavily," he said. "Every new company that comes into view has some sort of social layer, and they really hadn't done much. This seems to be a much broader and bigger push and a recognition of that."
Labels: Google, social media
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google's Name Change
Google, for reasons having nothing to do with the flak it's catching about Sino search censorship, changed the name of the Chinese-language version of Google. The new name is Gu Ge (pronounced "goo guh") and means "Harvest Song" -- the translation is supposed to invoke "rural Chinese traditions to describe a fruitful and rewarding experience."
Not exactly breaking news at this point, but I wanted the opportunity to bust a myth.
Before everyone goes snickering about previous international marketing faux pas, realize that like all truly great anecdotes, neither the Coca Cola tadpole nor the Chevy "no go" Nova tales are entirely true. Gotta love Snopes.com.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
comScore Releases March Market Share Stats
comScore's latest release shows that the number of search queries rose and, once again, Google not only leads the pack but takes market share from its competitors.
Other highlights:
- Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10% from last month and 15% from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past 12 months.
- Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million).
- The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo, which combined for more than 95% of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9%, while Yahoo captured 46.5%.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google's Interpretation of 'noindex'
I asked around regarding my observation that Google is displaying pages in results even if they use the robots noindex meta-tag, and someone pointed me toward Matt Cutts' March 17 blog post titled Googlebot Keep Out:
You might wonder why Google will sometimes return an uncrawled url reference, even if Googlebot was forbidden from crawling that url by a robots.txt file. There’s a pretty good reason for that: back when I started at Google in 2000, several useful websites (eBay, the New York Times, the California DMV) had robots.txt files that forbade any page fetches whatsoever. Now I ask you, what are we supposed to return as a search result when someone does the query [california dmv]? We’d look pretty sad if we didn’t return www.dmv.ca.gov as the first result. But remember: we weren’t allowed to fetch pages from www.dmv.ca.gov at that point. The solution was to show the uncrawled link when we had a high level of confidence that it was the correct link. Sometimes we could even pull a description from the Open Directory Project, so that we could give a lot of info to users even without fetching the page. I’ve fielded questions about Nissan, Metallica, and the Library of Congress where someone believed that Google had crawled a page when in fact it hadn’t; a robots.txt forbade us from crawling, but Google was able to show enough information that someone assumed the page had been crawled. Happily, most major websites (including all the ones I’ve mentioned so far) let Google into more of their pages these days.
That makes great sense in theory, but what Google is telling users is that it thinks, it's guessing, that this page which it hasn't even looked at is very relevant... and not just very relevant but more relevant than all the other pages it has actually indexed. It's one thing if they dig down deep on searches that don't yield very many results, but to list these types of pages on the first page of results on searches that have tens of thousands (or more) results is just odd.
Nevermind that one would think a "noindex" robots meta tag means the search engine wouldn't index the URL (not just that it wouldn't index the page's content). Okay, so the page will still show up in the index. And while Googlebot didn't technically crawl the page, it will go ahead and return it in results based on... on...? keywords in the URL? What?
I'm not sure what the take-away is here (because this makes no sense); except that if you have a webpage that you don't want users to find, don't rely on robots exclusions to keep your page from showing up in the results (well, actually, don't post anything you wouldn't want people to find on the Internet).
Updated June 19: Looks like Google is indeed indexing pages that are tagged "no follow." See this recent Webmaster World discussion.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Not Honoring 'noindex'?
Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?
What gives? Has Google started ignoring noindex?
Two thoughts: 1) Get ready for some aggressive del.icio.us tag spamming, and 2) how do we avoid getting in trouble for duplicate content if we can't keep Google from indexing dupe pages using the standard robots exclusion?
Update: This question was answered in my subsequent post, Google's Interpretation of 'noindex'.
Updated June 19: Looks like Google is indeed indexing pages that are tagged "no follow." See this recent Webmaster World discussion.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Base Results Integrated
Search for apartments for rent in Google and you might notice an option to refine your search - with a link to Google Base. Google's integration of real estate content from Google Base is being called a threat to the classifieds space.
Just for giggles, I added a listing for my blog to Google Base on Tuesday. The Internet being the wonderful censor-less medium it is, I editorialized a bit. Lo and behold, just three days later, this shows up on the first page of results when I did an ego search in Google:
Unexpectedly, the same result also made its way into Alta Vista results.
(Except for this Google Base listing, Alta Vista's results look remarkably similar to Yahoo's.)
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Holds 75% of UK Market Share
According to the marketing analysis firm WebSideStory, Google referred 74.67% of all U.K. visitors to other sites on the web in February. That's compared to under 10% of UK market share for its nearest competitor Yahoo.
"Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google," said Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for WebSideStory.
Rounding out the Top 5 in terms of search referrals were Yahoo (9.30%), MSN (5.46%), AOL (4.21%) and Ask Jeeves (2.28%).
Posted by Melanie Phung
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
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
Mazda to Consumers: Go Google Pontiac
Over a WebProWorld, it's been reported that Mazda's marketing people have taken advantage of the search-savvy Pontiac commercial with a rather crafty strategy of their own.
Mazda is buying PPC ads for the keyword "Pontiac" and inviting a comparison between Pontiac and Mazda. They are riding the coat tails of Pontiac's SEM spending, since the latter is encouraging everyone to google them (If I'm using it as a verb, it's lower case, right?). The organic positions are still held by Pontiac-related sites though, and the price of those PPC ads will go up as the two car makers jockey for top position. So while Mazda's strategy is very clever, it's not likely to yield them a huge amount of free or low-CPA traffic.
Labels: contextual ads, Google, search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Another Day, Another Dollar for Google's Execs
Brin, and his fellow Google execs Schmidt and Page, are the lowest paid CEOs on earth -- they make a dollar a year ... if it weren't for the fact that they have tons of Google stock, which has been mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase "$600 a share."
Updated February 12:
My prediction that Google was going to lose its golden boy status is coming to pass much faster than expected; GOOG's stock price is down to $360 a share. Still not bad for a stock that IPO'd at $85, but not good news for those who bought when GOOG was approaching $500 just last month.
Labels: Google, monetizing, navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
GM Commercial: Google Pontiac
You know when it's time to give your in-house search marketers a big bonus when you want your customers to visit your website and you don't have to give a URL, you just tell the audience to "Google us." According to a The Search Insider article, a new 30-second TV spot produced by GM ends with this unusual call to action, and a screenshot of the Google interface with "Pontiac" typed in the search field.
The article goes on to explain:
GM's campaign implies tremendous authority and trust in the Google brand. It's almost as if Google is moving into the territory of J.D. Power & Associates as the ubiquitous barometer of customer satisfaction, so often plugged into automotive advertising. GM sales and marketing chief Mark LaNeve said in a recent Business Week article by David Kiley: "We're touting Google, frankly, because it stands for credibility and consumer empowerment, and we like the association."
... While association with Google's credibility is understandable, no responsible brand manager would widely promote a search for his brand, without some degree of confidence that the results will support the brand objectives.
Tell me about it.
Update: Feb 1
I just saw the commercial. Slick.
Labels: Google, search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Music Search Controversy
Google's new Music Search is stirring up the hornets' nest again. Even though song lyrics and tablature have been posted practically since the beginning of the Web, music publishers and producers are now seeing this content as a bigger threat. That's because Google Music Search makes this even easier to find, they claim.
Unlike some controversial services, which aggregate information that, though public, is hard for the average person to find -- like if you wanted to View Criminal Records of your neighbors, for example -- I don't think Music Search is that much better than what anyone could easily find using any regular search engine. It's not the next Napster by a long shot... or Google Print for that matter. It didn't take any advanced searching skills to find lyrics before, so the fact that the Music Publishers' Association and National Music Publishers' Association are just now raising a stink about it strikes me as funny. Just plays into that pervasive misconception that Google is The Internet, or at least that things aren't worth paying attention to unless Google is paying attention to them.
But I'm a big fan of consistency, and I appreciate the issue of intellectual property rights, so I'm not saying the publishers aren't justified. Just about a decade too late figuring out that they've completely lost control over the publishing of lyrics.
Maybe Google can change the name of Music Search. After the much maligned Google Print became Google Book Search, it seems like the scanning controversy dropped off the radar as far the mainstream media are concerned. Maybe if they change the name to Song and Album Search, everyone will just forget the whole thing.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Testing Nav Placement
It's always interesting to see examples of Google testing changes to the interface. Since only a very small percent of searchers are included in the tests, it's rare that the average searcher notices the change. If Google ends up not liking the results, whatever it was they were testing just quietly disappears.
Today it's reported that Google is playing with moving its navigation from the top of the results page to a column left of the results.
Hop on over to Blogoscoped for a screenshot of this latest Google test.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
More Google Analytics Accounts
My second Google Analytics account is allowing me to add additional profiles now - although both accounts are still limited to 5 sites each. New sign-ups are still suspended. The sites on the second account are very low profile with negligible traffic, so if there's any prioritization going on in expanding user profiles this might mean the
Internal Search Box Displayed in Google Sitelinks
On Monday, while doing client research, I discovered that Google is now displaying a site search box underneath Google Sitelinks in results for some general queries.
Sitelinks for navigational searches are becoming more common and you've long had the option to see "more results from [domain]" if you had an indented result -- the "more results" link would show you results from the query you had just conducted but limit them to just pages from that domain -- but a search box within the results is much more interactive. A search box basically prompts you to refine your search, but do so only within the most authoritative site.
Even more fascinating to me, however, is that this internal site search is displayed not just on results where the search was clearly navigational -- like a search on "Intel" might have been.
Doing searches on bible-related phrases (don't ask, it was for a client), I saw the same thing for queries that seemed pretty general.
I ran queries on [online bible], [bible search], [bible passages] and even queries using advanced operators and still got not only Sitelinks but also a separate query box for searching that specific site.
Imagine how powerful this type of display would be if you're an e-commerce retailer! It immediately gives your site an appearance of even more authority and people can search your site without even needing to click away from the SERP.
Queries conducted with this Sitelinks search box also get saved to the user's Google Web History if they're logged in. Something you wouldn't get if they used the search box inside your site.
Neither of the two sites given in the examples use the Google Search Appliance - so whether you use the Google enterprise system for your internal search doesn't appear to be a factor in getting this to show up for your results. (The Google Search Appliance is a horrible choice for site search, btw. Not at all suited for site owners looking to provide on-site search functionality.)
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung