Google Says ...

Switching to new SEO Theory blog

2006-12-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

I've long been wondering if I should not stop focusing on Google (with this blog) and expand the scope of my SEO blogging to cover all the major search engines. In fact, at least one Googler has suggested in my comments here that would be preferable.

So, while I'll still have many things to say about Google in the future (including, I hope, many positive things), I'll be saying them as part of a much broader commentary on search engines. Accordingly, I have set up a new blog on SEO Theory and will subsequently share my search engine-related thoughts there.

And I thought I should explain my situation a little better. In September I was offered and accepted a position as Director of Search Strategies with an Internet Marketing firm here in Seattle. We discussed my online visibility and how that might impact relationships with clients, or just my job performance in general. At the time it was agreed that I should become less active in the online SEO community.

Since then, I've been told it's okay to discuss SEO principles in general, but obviously with the expectation that I stay focused on my job. So I still won't be nearly as active and visible in the forums as I once was. But I plan to be more active on SEO Theory than I have been on Google Says ... over the past few months. I'll leave this blog in place for as long as the service allows it, since there are inbound links to the articles.

Thanks to all of you who have stopped by to share your thoughts with me. I hope you'll find the new SEO Theory blog to be at least as valuable and interesting.

SEO Discussion Search Tool and Google Woes

2006-12-08T02:04:00.000-08:00

I have been creating custom search engines with Google's little Custom Search Engine tool. All that prevents me from turning them out en masse is the amount of time I have to spend evaluating Web sites. I look at hundreds of sites whenever I create one of these search engines.

The latest one is mostly for my own personal benefit because I'm sick and tired of sifting through listings I cannot see the real content for without having to register for memberships. That bugs me. I don't have time to buy my way into every crowded venue that may occasionally generate some useful information.

In fact, I treasure SE Roundtable because they often save me the trouble of having to find interesting forum discussions. And then encapsulate the important points pretty well, too.

In that vein, it would be nice if Threadwatch were more like the original site Nick Wilson created. Nick didn't always appreciate having me around (or maybe he did in a link baity way) because I tend to disagree with most SEOs' conventional wisdom (usually for good reason), but he had a great resource. Nowadays, Threadwatch is mostly a rant-center, albeit an important one as long as its signal-to-noise ratio remains relatively high.

So, I set up an SEO Discussion Search engine at my SEO Web site (which, for all intents and purposes, is in an imposed stage of dormancy since I am now the Director of Search Strategies for an Internet Marketing firm -- those pesky non-compete contracts keep me a little idle in the evenings).

Anyway, I scoured the Web for interesting SEO blogs and search engines. I wanted SEO communities that were open to public scrutiny, relatively active, and/or extremely useful. By that I mean I deliberately included a few sites that don't get much traffic (or at least not much comment) but which still produce a lot of worthwhile information. Bill Slawski's SEO By the Sea blog is a must-read for anyone who likes to prognosticate about where search technology may take us -- and that is my full-time job, now.

I left out some of the more popular SEO blogs because I know someone out there has already indexed them in an SEO blog CSE and because I didn't feel those blogs really contribute much useful information for search engine optimization. For example, Danny Sullivan is extremely popular, but Daggle.com is not loaded with deep insights in search. I did include Searchengineland because it will soon be loaded with search news.

But the purose of this CSE is not really to help people find the latest search news. Rather, I am constantly searching forums and blogs for specific things I know I have read somewhere at some time. I just cannot remember where or when. By narrowing the index to a handful of sites, I reasoned, I may have a pretty good chance of finding what I am looking for.

And since I am sure other people share that occasional frustration, I decided to expand the list of included blogs and forums to make sure the search engine has a pretty solid coverage. I tried not to exclude anyone's site on the basis of personal bias, but frankly some sites are so in-your-face with ads or nonsense or vitrolic ramblings I just don't see any value in them. So a few very well-known, very popular sites joined the other excluded very well-known, very popular sites solely because I just don't see any value in them.

I don't ever search those sites for anything useful. Take that however you want to.

Nonetheless, in setting up this new search engine, I have noticed some more issues I'd like to see resolved or at least clarified. For example, if I specify a sub-directory on a large content domain, how much of that domain will actually be included? Google made it easier to include sub-domains in an index but I'm not sure of what is actually being indexed if I just specify part of a domain.

And while Google also made it possible for people to include subscribed links to their custom search engines, what I would like is the ability to override Google's filtering for the CSE.

You see, one of the very best SEO forums for years has been Spider-Food, launched by J.K. Bowman about six years ago. J.K. is no longer as active in SEO as he once was, but he stays in touch with a core group of old buds (including me). A few years ago, Spider-Food was penalized by Google for using hidden divs -- J.K. was pretty good at both the White Hat and Black Hat stuff before anyone used such nicely worded cliches to distinguish between people who followed the search engine guidelines and people who exploited the algorithmic holes.

So because Spider-food had thousands of inbound links, J.K. pretty much ignored the Google ban. But when he stopped actively participating in the forum himself, people began dropping off. J.K. always said I had a lot to do with keeping the forums active. I usually publish my most original research there, for example. But in my opinion, J.K. is and will always be the life and heart of Spider-Food. He had a very no-nonsense approach to SEO and he was especially good at the under-the-hood SEO that few people today really appreciate.

Most of J.K.'s advice was sound and ethical, and much of it would still apply today. And for over a year J.K. has been promising to remodel Spider-Food, clean it up, and ask for reinclusion. He's just a bit too much of a perfectionist, I think, as well as dragged down by other demands on his time.

Well, Google has for years indexed the Spider-food forums and I've been able to find the threads I needed to get to through Google. Not any more. I don't know if the delisting is permanent or temporary. I'm not sure of why it happened, although I know that spammers were hitting the forums pretty hard the past few weeks. J.K. finally took steps to prevent the robots from dropping any more links. But maybe he acted too late.

I don't know.

All I know is that a great resource has been delisted. Since Google just rolled out some sort of update a couple of weeks ago, and since they usually recrawl the Web after they finish an update, I'm hoping to see Spider-food come back into the index. I know it's penalized, but as long as I can do site searches, that's fine by me.

But let people sit up and take notice, because Matt Cutts did warn the SEO community a few months ago that some very serious changes were on the way. This past week at SES Chicago Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz was quietly told clean up the outbound links in your profiles or suffer some consequences. I have no doubt the Googler who conveyed that warning was doing so out of a legitimate concern to help a widely valued resource from losing search engine value.

Nonetheless, it comes across as an act of bullying. While I have always maintained that Google has every right to do whatever it pleases with its search engine, Webmasters have a right to do what they please with their Web sites. Before there were search engines there were Web sites and even without search engines there are still Web sites. But as the lines of communication open up between Webmasters and search engines, pre-emptive warnings about impending algorithmic doom only confirm what conspiracy theorists have said for years: Google acts like it owns the Web.

In fact, without the Web there is no Google, and Google cannot honestly reach into every Web property and contact the right person. For example, if they were to try to send me a warning email as they send such emails to some Webmasters, it would never reach me. I've disabled all the traditioncal admin accounts because of email spam. Many other Webmasters have, too.

I'll know if Xenite.Org hits the skids only after the fact. Shame on me for linking to sites I think are valuable but which Google may not.

Now, in Rand's case, he was apparently told that some really undesirable sites were being linked to through SEOMoz. I don't link to sites like that. I suppose I'm not in any danger from that kind of algorithmic assessment. And I've been gradually closing off directories where I don't feel Google needs to be going over the past year anyway. Old URls that no longer exist except to redirect people following old links don't really need to be indexed by the search engines. Nonetheless, my redirects have always led me to wonder when or if the axe will fall.

Frankly, if a Googler were to say to me, "Dude, fix your site or get axed," I'd say, "It's your search engine but my site."

Google only sends me a fraction of the traffic I receive. I, on the other hand, provide Google with a lot of great content. It's more their loss than mine. Besides, I could easily enough build up content on other domains that would tell people where to find my orphaned domain. I've been promoting Web sites far longer than Google has been around.

But what is the happy medium? After all, I see the Google warning to SEOMoz as a friendly interventive action intended to benefit the entire Web community. The problem is that not everyone will get such friendly warnings, and the ominous clanging of shuttered windows and doors in various blogs and forums reflects the essentially suspicious attitude of many people toward Google.

Which leads me back to Spider-food.

I want to include their threads in my custom search engine. I'm not asking Googe to lift the ban completely. I just want access to good content -- content that I believe does not violate Google's guidelines. The forums are hosted on a sub-domain.

After years of my openly complaining about how Google has treated sub-domains as if they are independent domains, has Google changed the status quo? Or did the spam robots that hammered an innocent forum get it delisted?

Or am I simply jumping the gun and the forums will be recrawled and reindexed soon?

Well, I have to get some sleep. Thanks for listening to my rant.

And I hope that the CSE I set up does, actually, help other people in the SEO community. Even the folks who didn't make the cut. I was just trying to create a tool with a different value from the one I had already read about.

Google's Supplemental Pages and other neat things

2006-11-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

When I signed off a couple of months ago, I did say I would probably occasionally post something new. I've been working as the Director of Search Strategies for a Seattle-based Internet Marketing firm, and one of my responsibilities is to keep an eye on the SEO community.

While my company is not particularly interested in what most SEO theorists have to say, I do need to stay aware of the community's concerns and current theories.

I have to admit that I was surprised to see hardly anyone react to the apparent update Google rolled out this week. It was breifly mentioned on SERoundtable and maybe a couple of other places, and that was it. Well, I suppose most people were either pre-occupied with the holidays or else they have simply gotten used to see the results change.

But I've noticed an increasing amount of discussion about Google's Supplemental Pages, and to be honest I find the answers being given to the usual questions somewhat inadequate. I feel the inadequacy is due more to boredom than anything else. Forum regulars are simply tired of speculating about the Supplemental Index, so they are now handing out brief, trite responses.

With one exception, who shall go unnamed, although I pretty much consider the guy to be an idiot, that is. The exception suggested one of the most outlandish ideas I've seen from him in quite a while. Well, after rolling my eyes I thought, "I could write a better answer than that in my sleep".

So I challenged myself to do it (while awake, though). And all that is to say that I have now posted a more in-depth discussion of Google's Supplemental Pages on my SEO site. And while I am at it, I might as well point out that I have slightly reorganized the site, moving this new page and a couple others into a new SEO Information section.

The bottom line: if you want to move a page from Supplemental Results to the Main Index, point a few good links at it. The links can come from anywhere, including your own pages, as long as the linking pages are not in the Supplemental Index. So far, that has worked for me, even if I'm wrong to suggest that the links must come from pages in the Main Index.

I met some Googlers at the Seattle MindCamp a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't sure what to say to them. When they asked me what I do, all I could think of was, "I manipulate your search results", which is entirely true. But since they manipulate their own search results (I mean that in a good way), I figured it was a safe response.

So, I hope everyone in the U.S. (or from the U.S.) who celebrates our Thanksgiving holiday has had a good holiday weekend so far, and I wish you all the best.

I may post something here again before the end of the year, but I cannot be sure of that.

Farewell for now...

2006-09-26T18:35:00.000-07:00

Things have moved so quickly for me since the end of August. I have more projects to complete than I have time to work on them.

This week I accepted a position with an SEO-related firm that is doing the kind of work I enjoy and have been seeking out. They specifically like my theoretical approach, although they keep their clients' best interests at heart (no so-called "black hat" SEO).

Unfortunately, I won't be able to maintain this blog. I'll leave it up for posterity's sake, and perhaps to make an occasional (very occasional) comment in the future.

I have been gratified by the interest in my work and my ideas expressed by so many of you.

Thnak you all.

Interviewed by Sootle...

2006-09-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Sootle Web Directory has been publishing a series of interviews with SEOs. They asked me for an interview and I am officially SEO Interview Part Five.

Thanks to Darren at Sootle Web for the interest. Other interviewees so far have beedn Bill Slawski (number four), Michael Grey (number three), Dave Davies (Beanstalk - number two), and Joe Balestrino (number one).

Each interviewee is asked six SEO questions.

Great series, Darren! (And not just because I'm included -- you have some top-notch names in the list.)

The uneveness of Google blogging

2006-09-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

It's tough when you put all your eggs into one basket. I've occasionally wondered if I should not have called this blog "The Search Engines Say..." because Google doesn't always say anything noteworthy from my point of view. I don't want to do a roundup of every announcement that Google makes, either officially or unofficially. But Google being Google, it seems worthwhile to me to say something about their ponderances and pronouncements on occasion.

I have, however, noticed a pattern that demonstrates just how large and cumbersome Google is becoming. Some of their blogs are updated frequently and some of them are updated about every time a remake of "King Kong" is produced.

The main Google blog sometimes carries posts that don't seem very relevant to me. Such as today's Congratulations, Luis von Ahn post. Alan Estace, Google's VP of Engineering, claims that Google has built upon von Ahn's work, and they extend worthwhile recognition to him. But one does not get a full sense of how much people at Google feel they owe to von Ahn.

Maybe I should say I don't get that sense because I'm so used to reading gushing fan site copy that when someone sings a simple verse of praise, I react with a jaded, "That's it?" It's a worthy note, but doesn't shed much light on Google's mysterious ways to an algorithm chaser like me.

Nonetheless, at least the official blog gets updated on a frequent basis. That's important. It keeps many people coming back. There are other Google blogs that don't update very frequently. Surprisingly, one of those infrequently updated blogs is Blogger Buzz. Their last post as of this writing is September 11's Flickr Support for Blogger in Beta. Seems to me they could find something more to say for Blogger users. I'm not very good about digging into manuals and FAQs any more. I'd rather read about all the cool stuff I should be doing with my blog in contemporary posts.

The Google Analytics blog posts an update about once a week. That's almost enough to keep me coming back, but I have to admit that there are weeks where I forget to do that. So, I did see last week's Spotlight on: How to read the ROI column but I didn't really get excited. I actually liked the Tip: Tracking 404 Pages post more because I do have a lot of 404 issues and I should be paying closer attention to them. Analytics might be a better tool for that than sifting through my error log.

Google Base is not as consistent as Google Analytics in updating their blog. The Open House tip they shared yesterday is actually very intriguing. Can the highly competitive real estate industry benefit that much from Google Base? I may have to go out and recruit a few real estate sites just to test it. contact me if you want help promoting a real estate site. I'll give it some thought.

Normally, I shy away from real estate, as do so many other people. It's a tough, tough field. I do better with promoting insurance Web sites. But I digress. Google Base's blog offers helpful tips on how business site operaors can maximize their visibility in Google, and I wish they offered just a little more frequent information. 2 posts a week would be good for me, even if some of them repeat previous topics or just recap information from the past 3 months.

In fact, I think a quarterly recap of topics would be a good idea for all the Google blogs.

Pacing is a real issue for these blogs. For example, Google Checkout had a flurry of posts last week but has been dry ever since. That's not a good thing.

Google Code updates its blog quite often, but it took me a while to realize they did because their home page looks more like an information portal. Did you know that they have posted a Summer of Code update? BTW guys -- your permalink page layout doesn't look so good in my browser. The solution is not to tell me to switch browsers. Still, one of the great things about this post is that they point you to Drupal's project list, where you can download and test new software.

Speaking of coding, there is now a Google Data APIs blog. Leslie, I hope you and your team see what I am getting at here. Consistency is more important for building a readership than waiting for that whambang product release or update that absolutely has to be mentioned. Pace yourselves with the new blog. I would aim for 1-2 posts per week.

Google Enterprise does a good job of posting to their blog frequently. New version of Google Search Appliance! is one of those whambang product release announcements I referred to in the previous paragraph. But they posted about the Xythos OneBox and Webinar on Sunday and did a post on Friday, and so on. They keep the information flowing and I look forward to seeing what comes next from that blog.

The Google Maps blog is another of their 1-2 times a month updaters. How many people noticed that they posted an announcement about New Satellite Imagery and Performance on Friday, September 15? This post will give that post its first Permalink. Their last post occurred on September 6. Rip Van Winkle would not be likely to check in on a blog so seldom updated.

I have pretty much given up on Google Reader's blog. It hasn't had a post since August 3. Is that all there is to say? No tips on great feeds to find, or ways to find feeds, or how to manage your feeds? Come on, guys, surely you use your own tool, right? Share something.

Same for you, Google Scholar Blog. I'm tired of seeing the N-Gram headline. The joke was funny the first time I read it on August 3 and cute the next time I read it. Now I want more.

I don't understand the Google Video Blog, so I don't even read it -- oh, wait. You can't read it. That's the issue.

Google Web Toolkit blog almost had a September update. Only 11 more blogging days left in the months, folks.

I'm not sure I want to link to Google AdSense blog's September 19 post because I think I'm going to do this. It just sounds too cool to pass up. But it will depend on how complicated it really becomes in the implementation.

Alas! My most favorite of Google Blogs, Inside Google Book Search, has not updated since September 12. What happened, guys? You had a great thing going! I hope you didn't get banned from Blogger or something. That would just be so unfair. Inside Google Book Search is the most innovative of the Google blogs. They actually show people how to use their product 9 different ways from Molly. It's a great propaganda tool for a controversial service because it really does show the value the service provides.

The Google Desktop Blog is another disappointment. No posts since September 5.

And just as I was about to complain that Webmaster Central's blog isn't updating enough, Amanda posted their very cool and informative Debugging Blocked URLs tips. Because of Webmaster Central's name, this blog has the potential to become the most closely read blog of the group, as far as search engine optimizers and Web site promoters are concerned. That's the power of branding. But the power of expectation will impel the Webmaster Central staff to be more active on the blog if they want to keep their audience happy.

The real reason for this roundup is that Google hasn't given me much to write about lately. Sure, Matt Cutts wrote about Changes in URL queries yesterday, but frankly I found that topic to be a little boring. It's not really controversial. We see Google make changes to its interface every day. Changing a query syntax once in a while is no big thing, and I can easily accept the reasoning Matt offers.

In fact, this recent change will probably make my URL reference research a little easier. Unlike some people in the SEO industry, I have sense enough not to expect Yahoo! to tell me which links Google has indexed.

That whole concept still scares me, because those people get paid to do research. That's like looking at the Democratic Party's mailing ilst to see who contributes to the Republican Party.

So, Google, here are your orders: Post more stuff on your blogs. Say something. Give me a purpose, because I really don't know how to change the name of this blog to "The Search Engines Say...".

Using Google To Help Others

2006-09-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Google announced a United Negro College Fund scholarship program last week. I think our higher education system is way too expensive and am always happy to see more scholarships appear.

But in thinking about what other types of scholarship programs I could imagine Google funding (say, for Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, unwed mothers, orphans, and victims of drunk drivers -- not necessarily in that order), it occurred to me that there is one important segment of American society that never gets any attention: experienced workers whose skills are no longer required. I'm not just talking about unskiled laborers. I'm talking about college graduates.

Last year, Bill Gates whined about a shortage of skilled IT workers in the United States. Don't be fooled by the low percentages for unemployed IT workers mentioned in the article. In 2001, 500,000 American IT workers permanently lost their jobs. Estimates published since then indicate that as many as 400,000 of those workers have been unable to return to the IT field.

Many of those jobs went to India because the cost of hiring Indian programmers is considerably less than the cost of hiring American programmers. Now, I've been to India in a professional capacity and the programmers I met there struck me as being competent, capable programmers. Nonetheless, there is a growing backlash among Americans against the outsourcing of jobs to India. To his credit, Mr. Gates doesn't want to outsource jobs to India -- he wants to bring Indians to America on H1-B work visas and pay them American salaries.

In the meantime, approximately 400,000 former American tech workers find it very difficult to get jobs because they are "overqualified and will leave at the first good opportunity". Try submitting a resume that shows 25+ years' experience (including management positions) in the IT field to an unrelated industry and you'll see what the problem entails. There is a great deal of technical experience and skill languishing in this country because CEOs like Bill Gates are too cheap to invest in teaching skilled programmers how to work in a new language.

Google and other large corporations could give thought to tapping an immense resource of experienced talent that is currently not being exploited.

But enough about scholarships. Google AdWords' Blog has launched the first in a series of blog tips about how to create effective video ads. I don't think many companies have thought about what it would take to sell video ad space on their Web sites, but I've often wished I had the resources to put together some randomly available videos fo Xenite.Org. In about 3 years, these tips may look naive and misguided to experienced hands, but for now they are all that business advertisers have to work with in this emerging field.

If you operate a large multimedia site, think about how embedding cross-promotiona video ads in your own content can help you improve your on-site conversion ratios.

In August, Inside Booksearch published Finding Gems In Your Library. I have now seen this feature in action. I mainain a discussion group about Middle-earth and occasionally post news stories to the list. Tonight I shared a story about Amanda McKittrick Ros, an author whom J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends (the Inklings) read for amusement. I wanted to see if Google Books had any of her works (they don't, although they do have my first book Visualizing Middle-earth).

When I scroll down the first results page for Amanda McKittrick Ros, however, I see three searches of library catalogues. I shared that search with people on the Endor list and I think this marks the first time I have recommended Google Books to people. Don't assume I'm now wholly in favor of the service, but it would be crazy to pretend it is not there.

Google Enterprise says Xythos has developed a Google OneBox module without having to use a Google Search Appliance. If they share enough of their technology in their October 18 Webinar, other developers may be able to follow their lead.

And, finally, Google Webmaster Central reports that the login function for Public Search Service has been temporarily disabled. It's interesting that Google says they are not aware of any malicious exploits of the search function. But I have to wonder if this update was inspired by SEOMoz's 20 government links in 20 minutes post. There are Googlers who read SEOMoz. If they noticed that Public Search was being exploited, SEOMoz may have just helped Google close what could have become a serious loophole.

If you've never looked into what Google Webmaster Central offers, check out their resources. They make the SiteMaps Site Status tool available for free without requiring a login. Many people who don't trust the service may want to reconsider using this tool.

While it's true that Google most likely saves the queries, I doubt they use them to tag sites that are not compliant with Webmaster guidelines. They aready have filters to do that.

Inside Google Magazine...

2006-09-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

Google needs a monthly magazine. Google needs a consumer-oriented voice that can do two things: tout the strengths of Google and Google products and services; and present a more balanced assessment of the various controversies that surround Google.

This year, Google has found itself buried in legal actions and news stories over several topics. While the corporate attorneys would prevent Google from speculating madly in print (and I'll adress what I mean by "magazine" in a moment) and thus poisoning their legal options, a Google Magazine or Inside Google would give alternative voices a fair platform in which to present their concerns. Not to argue their legal cases in front of the public, but to help explain what's stake if Google prevails in some way.

This is a bold step for a corporate entity, but it's a step that would help Google build trust around the world. And they badly need trust for their long-term financial success. Google is now large and ponderous in some ways. If they roll over they are almost certain to crush some little person who cannot run out of the way fast enough.

But while a monthly print magazine would be interesting, I think it would be better if Google distributed a .PDF or Flash magazine from Google.com. The front page. And they should set a standard for the publishing world by publishing the November issue in November (I'm sick of buying next month's magazine this month -- that makes absolutely no sense and no one is fooled by it).

The reason why Google needs to set up an autonomous media production group is that their "official" Web sites are so loaded with propaganda that no one trusts them. In fact, even their employees' private Web sites are viewed with considerable distrust. I have no idea of why people say Matt Cutts cannot be trusted. He has never been caught in a lie but a lot of people in the SEO world say, "You cannot trust Matt Cutts". I mean, literally, they say that in the open on forums.

Who has Matt betrayed, and why doesn't that person come forward to warn the rest of us?

If you look at Google Book Search's Legal section, Google makes an amateurish attempt to bamboozle visitors into believing that everything is okay and authors and publishers are really not going to get hurt by the Library Project, etc.

Oh, and just to be fair, after you read all the testimonials about how great Google Library Project is, there are two bare links leading to specific statements from opposing groups. It's like doing a search for some product you think you have heard about, finding a page listed in the search engines that says it sells the product, and then you click on the link only to find an endlessly scrolling page loaded with fake testimonials from anonymous people. You have to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll to get down to the, "And it just costs $49.99 to buy this cheap crap!" button.

Google, you can do better than that. You owe it to us, your using public, to do better than that.

The closest thing to a magazine right now is the collection of Google blogs, but they are not updated on a consistent basis. Google Book Search Blog is updated frequently, with loads of great content. I like this blog because it takes marketing seriously. Okay, I just criticized them for playing fast and loose with the facts on their legal page. But overall, the Book Search people seem to understand marketing better than all the other sections at Google.

Look at the "Useful links" they post in the margin. They index the official Google Book Search site for you, point right to interesting and useful content. How much better it would be if they pointed to this month's latest Inside Google Magazine articles.

I would look for this magazine every month. What's more, Google could sell advertising in it. What would you pay for each download, Mr. Business Operator, Ms. Business Founder? Would you want to put your smiling face in front of 10 million people a month. Of course you would. There's a medium for Google advertising waiting to be invented.

There are a lot of powerful things Google could do with a monthly multimedia magazine. I think the Internet is ready for it. In fact, if they don't do it, someone soon will. PodCasts and Google Video becoming passe. A downloadable magazine with embedded video content would be the utmost cool thing.

Until next year, when we would have to have Google television for cell phones.

Think about it Eric. I'm available if you want to talk....

Google expands its crusade to legitimize Google Book Search

2006-09-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

Note: I have toned down some of the rhetoric. I hope it's clear I am expressing opinions and writing for effect.

I think Google is cranking up the volume on Google Book Search. In doing so, they are relying on the age-old principle of, "The more you say something, the more acceptable that saying becomes". Another variant is, "The more often you repeat a lie, the more believable it becomes". I'm not suggesting that Google is lying about anything -- far from it. But propagandists have long understood that repetition is critical to establishing believability and credulity.

Advertisers and marketers study how effective repetition is. We have to constantly find new ways to repeat a message because people ultimately tune out the message, although some experts suggest that even when repetitive messages become white noise they still have a subliminal impact.

Google is not being subliminal or subtle at all in its campaign to establish the legitimacy of Google Book Search. This week they are playing the liberal card with a Google Blog post titled Celebrate Your Freedom To Read. The post, written by Leslie Burger, President of the American Library Association, is a clever use of a conservative voice to make a liberal point: let's all oppose banned books.

I wonder if the ALA would support adding The Satanic Bible or Al-Qaeda's training manual to the works of literature that high school students should have access to.

It's not a question of whose morals are right, but of whose books are more popular with decision-makers. American schools have been banning books for as long as we've had American schools. The ALA advocates the popularization of reading banned books outside of school during Banned Books Week. But they try to direct your attention toward banned books that are at least acceptable to a sizable minority, if not a majority of Americans.

All this liberal-versus-conservative controversy fits nicely into Google's campaign to persuade everyone that Google Books really is a great thing for us all. As I have said previously, I am ambivalent about the service. Google really doesn't seem to appreciate just how important intellectual property rights are to other people. On the one hand, they strive to hide the secret sauce that controls their search results. On the other hand, they have an active policy of intimidating authors by reporting all DMCA requests to the Chilling Effects Web site. Chilling Effects is a very deceptive site. It presents itself as a moral watchdog. But the site's primary function appears to be to bully people into not protecting their intellectual property rights, and Google seems to support that bullying wholeheartedly without reservation.

So the message Google sends to everyone is, "We get to protect our intellectual property rights, but we're going to trample yours and make you look like petty little self-important twits for wanting to protect your own."

Is that harsh? Well, let me praise Google for how they are conducting their propaganda campaign. It's an advertising campaign. It's a branding campaign. It's an educational campaign.

Google Book Search is a powerful resource and I hope that ultimately a lot of people benefit from it. I'm not about to boycott the service just because it may be violating intellectual property rights. I'll leave it to the courts to figure out what the boundaries of my rights are. I hope and trust the various parties suing Google really do have my best interests at heart -- or at least share interests with my own.

But the Google Book Search campaign demonstrates in a positive way (in my opinion) just how effective repetition can be. They are using both the Google Book Search blog and the official Google Blog to tell people they can Explore Banned Books Through Google Book Search. They are showing Web marketers how you can assemble multiple voices of influence to hammer a message home repeatedly.

In time, as Google brings more voices of moral acceptance to its side, the message will become acceptable to many people -- eventually it will become persuasive. People will become so used to hearing and seeing the message that they'll accept it as part of their normal world experience. And when a message becomes normal and comfortable, it feels safe. And when a message feels safe, it becomes believable.

Google doesn't have to be right about anything. All it has to do is keep pressing home the message that Google Book Search is useful and valuable and eventually everyone will be saying it's useful and valuable.

How useful and valuable won't really matter. I say it's useful and valuable, but I also say it's a bit snarky. After all, Google is encouraging millions of students across the United States of America to read books in violation of their school districts' policies (these books can be read online, and therefore from school computers).

That is a little short-sighted on Google's part. But then, bullies and visionaries alike seldom think about whether what they are doing is wrong.

The lesson I want Web marketers to take away from this post is that you can employ powerful propaganda and marketing techniques to brand your service or products. Google is providing a textbook example of how to do this. But I hope you choose not to pick a morally divisive service to promote. Google is large enough that it can afford to tick off a few people.

Most small business operators cannot really afford to take that risk.

Google refines the art of content spamming...

2006-09-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

Not to be mean, as Google's tools are well-intentioned and actually neat. But I find that more and more Google stuff is geared toward helping people create mashups (Web pages consisting of gizmos supplied by other Web sites). The Web went through a mashup movement in the late 1990s, and it was not a very pretty thing to see.

In fact, you could say that in some respects Xenite.Org is The Web Site That Mashups Built. You name it, I put a third-party service on Xenite at one time or another: forums (through frames), Internet TV shows, Internet RPGs, Internet radio (I still miss my Xenite NetRock, NetCountry, and NetJazz services), scrolling/blinking/flashing news, comics, polls, and stuff I cannot even remember.

I love the creative environment one finds on the Web, but one day as I went looking for free content for Web sites, I realized that all the free content sources I was finding offered the same stuff, which had by this point pretty much become garbage. The Internet TV and radio services shut down or were sold; I installed UBB and later VBulletin so I could run forums off my own server (actually, I started with forum scripts from Matt's Script Archive); comic artists stopped updating their strips.

And science fiction and fantasy news was pretty much absorbed by SciFi.com. No one else could really turn it out fast enough. A few fan mega sites produced their own feeds -- and I once actually had the largest science fiction news resource on the Web -- but people got tired of writing news stories. They stopped updating their RSS feeds. The RSS-to-Javascript tools I used went offline.

Today, Xenite.Org relies more on original content than it ever did before because I simply got tired of yanking pages that no longer worked. You cannot rely on other people to keep the feeds coming, not unless you pay them. And I just don't think there are enough unique services for everyone to provide truly unique mashups.

So, when I see that Blogger now lets you draw images from Flickr, I think, "Okay, that's cool but still pretty tame." It would, in fact, be nicer if they could fix their image upload problem (because I haven't been able to upload any images).

And when I looked at Google AdSense's plug for Google Related Links, I wanted to say, Been There, Done That. Related Links aren't all they are cracked up to be. A lot of times, you get one cheesy video that has nothing to do with your topic. I know darned good and well there are a lot of Lord of the Rings videos available on Google video. Why do I get only 1? And why does only 1 headline show up in the News?

That is just so...lame. I'm supposed to impress people with this stuff? What would happen if I stack Related Links boxes on top of each other?

On the other hand, I noticed how Colin Colehour suggests using Google Base to upload genealogy records. Now, that could be kind of cool. My father sent me a family genealogy a few years ago that one of my uncle's sister's cousins's mother's brother's son's something or other did up. The history goes back a fair number of generations to some guy named Martinez who jumped off a ship near California.

But the last time I looked at Google Base, you could only post something for 30 days. What is the point, guys? I don't want to have to devote the rest of my life to logging in to Google every 30 days just to renew a genealogy listing. I'd feel so Lost doing that.

So, while Google has introduced some neat ideas, I don't think any of them really go far enough. Here are a few suggestions that I would recommend:

Google Base should let you download W3C-compliant HTML code that you can place on your own Web site (better yet, let Google Base push it to your Google Pages inventory). I realize people want to be found in Google Base, but after that first 30 days, a lot of us are going to say, "Eh. Not worth the trouble." It would be great if we could say, "At the end of 30 days, create this page at Google Page with this content."

Related Links should allow you to design a custom channel that displays 1-4 listings in the box where you can qualify the sources by domain, keyword, or something more detailed than just on-page content. Especially if your on-page content is a mashup (and my Lord of the Rings news page is now a mashup because -- surprise! -- I got tired of writing original content).

What Google really needs to do is create a Google Channels service where you can create a mashup-in-a-box combining content from all over the place. And allow people to make the channel distributable. I mean, let me add it to an inventory of predesigned channels that other people can subscribe to and add to their own Web pages. That's what was so great about Netscape's RSS-driven MyNetscape. They allowed us to create channels that people could add to their start pages. It was just so righteous.

I'd still like to feature up-and-coming comic artists on Xenite, but I'm tired of looking for them. Google, while you're adding services just to please me, let's see Google Comics, a combination between Google News Search (fed by preselected channels) and Google Base (timed content contributed by people who care enough about their work to jump through all the hoops). You might be able to use the Google Coop technology to produce it. I'm not sure. When I signed up for Google Coop and saw all the rigmarole I had to go through to produce a mashup, I immediately became depressed and closed the browser window.

It's got to be simple, smooth, and provide an immediate reward. By allowing people to distribute their content to other Web sites, the Google Mashup Express will stay fresh and innovative. It will blow the old free- and pay-syndication content services out of the water.

And when you've destroyed the competition, Google, you can monetize Google Channels. I hereby confer all rights to the trademark to Google, Inc. provided they deliver on my eensy, teensy little request and give me the service.

NOTE: Today is September 11, 2006. Five years ago, Osama Bin Laden proved he has no love for God or Man and no future in Paradise.

Who does Google trust now?

2006-09-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

What SEOs and Search Engines say about TrustRank and PageRank

Let me say up front that, so far as I am concerned, no one outside of Google is in a position to say definitively or authoritatively how Google determines trust. Nonetheless, many SEOs have been making very ignorant comments about Google and "trust" over the past 18 months or so. The problem began with everyone commenting on Google's listing TrustRank as a service mark. This was a curious situation because the expression TrustRank was coined by Yahoo!, who published a paper in conjunction with Stanford University introducing the TrustRank methodology for calculating PageRank more reliably.

Many of those SEOs have wrongly assumed (and stated repeatedly) that PageRank serves as the basis for Google's search results rankings. PageRank has apparently always been factored into the algorithm wherever possible, but Apostolous Gerasoulis of Ask has long claimed that Google never fully implemented PageRank anyway.

Matt Cutts has indicated that Google's internal PageRank drives their crawling priorities. I think this is probably for the main index only, but maybe it also drives the Supplemental Index crawling as well.

Google's apparent historical trust in sub-domains

It became apparent to me by early 2005 that Google had begun shifting its priorities in late 2004 (and perhaps earlier that year) to favor pages from older domains that I called Trusted Content Domains. I coined that expression to distinguish those domains from Spam Domains. Spam domains typically fall into one of two groups: 1-page doorway domains that redirect to primary content domains and domains that host a lot of worthless content.

I found that I could add content to an existing domain and see it rank well within a week to a few weeks, while people creating new domains were making no progress after several months. This was a marked change from the way my new-page content achieved rankings a year before. However, it very closely resembled the behavior of sub-domains coming off of primary domains going back to 2001 (see my comment on Aaron's post). I have complained in numerous public forums since 2001 that Google would automatically trust sub-domains. They never seemed to care, and a lot of sub-domain spam has been around for years because of that oversight.

In essence, Google has always seemed to confer without question to sub-domains the ability to achieve high rankings in search results. For technical reasons, I long resisted the temptation to hang sub-domains off Xenite.Org. I found that sub-directories often served my purposes, even though they took a little longer to establish relevance. However, though I am now starting to work with more sub-domains, I am concerned that Google may now be implementing serious sub-domain analysis and filtration. I may or may not inadvertently trip some filters simply through inexperience and experimentation.

How Google Determines Search Results

Because of SEOs' ridiculous infatuation with link-bombing based "optimization", the importance of relevance has long gone unheeded in the SEO community. Sergey Brin and Larry Page established that determining relevance was the core factor of their ranking methodology in their original paper about Google, but the inconvenient fact has been swept under the rug of ranking-through-link-spam.

In January 2006, Matt Cutts published an article in Google's newsletter for Librarians in which he recapped Google's basic ranking strategy. Matt naturally discussed the PageRank algorithm because it is so often referred to, but he emphasized that PageRank is not the key to ranking in Google's search results. In fact, Matt literally wrote that, "in order to present and score" results for a query, Google picks pages that "include the user's query somewhere" and then ranks "the matching pages in order of relevance".

The SEO community continues to look in the wrong direction

Despite this apocalyptic revelation, SEOs have continued to pound the podium in favor of link building. And I will admit to helping them pound the podium with all my link-building articles, although I have tried to point out that links are important for other reasons.

I write about link-building for one reason: since I know how to do it better than most SEOs, I felt it might help to establish my linking credentials in a community obsessed with links. Most of the more popular link schemes owe something to my research over the years anyway -- it's just that the young SEOs are too consumed with their snide tirades to do the research to find out where all their cherished strategies came from.

I didn't invent these linking schemes, but I helped test and prove their effectiveness back in the day when they could truly be efficient and effective. And, sad to say, I probably am one of the grand-daddies of link farming. But you can blame Inktomi for being so darned frustrating. Most of you have no idea of what it really means to have to rank on the basis of linkage. I do. I hope we never have to return to those kinds of search engines.

The consequences of all the bad SEO practices since 2001

When Adam Mathes coined the expression "Google bombing", he was only giving a bad name to a practice that actually went back to the days before Google. Adam noticed how effective the technique worked for bloggers, but spammers had been link bombing both Google and Inktomi for years. Well, after the media had their day with the new buzz word, a new generation of SEOs began building their business models on the foundation of link building.

After four years of thousands of SEOs blogging, writing articles, and sharing link-based ranking techniques in forums, FAQs, and eBooks, a large community of business decision-makers has been misled into believing that linkage is the key to ranking on Google. And what is truly sad is that it appears to be more true today than it was two years ago only because Google had to react to the massive onslought of manipulative linking that has mangled its relevance scoring.

All "white hat" SEOs who practice link-building are as guilty as all "black hat" SEOs and spammers of burning down the trees in our forest and destroying the environment in which we optimize. It will be years before SEOs take responsibility for their ill-considered practices. Black hats at least snicker at the idea of ethical optimization and shamelessly promote their Web sites in whatever way they can. They work on volume and build their networks and just adapt to the algorithm changes.

But the rest of the community has bogged itself down in a blind tradition that was a terrible solution to a non-existing problem in the first place. Now they are chained to the link-building treadmill because even the SEOs who realize there is more to search engine optimization have to deal with unrealistic client demands and expectations. The machine has lurched into high gear and tumbled out of control. Maybe a few of the operators notice they are no longer in charge, but most still mindlessly wade through SEO forums blathering about PR (Toolbar PageRank), "quality links", sending out reciprocal and 1-way link requests, and now TrustRank.

How Important Has Trust Become?

Because of SEO "best practices" based on link-building, Google has gradually gone into high anti-link building gear. Since early 2004 the so-called Sandbox Effect has been debated and tested and evaluated in six thousand directions. Consensus now seems to be settling on the idea that new domains are sandboxed because they lack links from Trusted Content Domains. I credit John Scott with being the first to offer the most reasonable explanation, though he now feels somewhat differently about what causes the effect (things do change).

Since mid-2005, Google has implemented filters against fake link directories, scraped content sites, and RSS-feed driven sites. When I warned Danny Sullivan about these kinds of sites in early 2005, he expressed complete and total ignorance of the problem. Swept up in the fake link directory blitz, however, were many "low quality" SEO directories -- directories set up by people for various reasons, including accruing PageRank, helping other sites build up linkage, and gaming Google.

Another problem that began to get attention from SEOs in late 2004, and which has gradually increased in severity, is the transfer of many legitimate content sites to the Supplemental Index. Only over the past few weeks have I found enough bits and pieces from Google to assemble a coherent idea of what the Supplemental Index may be.

With the rollout of Big Daddy in early 2006, Google exacerbated Webmaster frustrations by increasing main index crawling and decreasing supplemental index crawling. Suddenly, everyone started talking about trust as if they knew what was going on. Remember that I said at the beginning of this post that I don't believe anyone outside Google knows what is going on.

How can trust be algorithmically determined?

But several of us have tried to guess what is happening. Todd Mailcoat suggests that it's a trust filter based on Web site age, number and age of backlinks, and total "trustscore" of those backlinks. He adds: "Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality". However, we know that Google ignores identified paid links among others, so "total number of backlinks" isn't helpful. Nor do I believe that age really matters as much as I once did.

Neither age of site nor age of links pointing to the site should really matter to how much a site can be trusted. A spammy link that sits around for 3 years is still a spammy link. A spammy site that sits around for 5 years is still a spammy site. I think Todd's third point is closer to the truth, and is really the only one required to explain what Google is doing.

But is Google scoring by trust or is it just trusting pages to confer PageRank and Link Anchor Text? In a follow up to his earlier Google Librarian article, Matt Cutts wrote "if more people trust your site, your site is more valuable" (implying that PageRank is used to help determine trustworthiness) and "we examine the content of neighboring pages, which can provide more clues as to whether the page we're looking at is trusted".

Another point Matt recently made was that the sudden appearance of hundreds of thousands of pages can trip a trust filter. That's a high threshold, but I'm sure it's that high for a reason.

Looking for trust in all the wrong neighborhoods

But what constitutes a "neighboring page" for a new domain? Any new page on an existing domain already has neighbors in its sibling pages (found in the same physical folder or directory) and cousins (found in other folders and directories on the same domain or sub-domain). New domains have to be placed into neighborhoods before they can have neighbors. Such neighborhoods are most likely only defined by linkage.

One simple possibility is that if a trusted "expert" or "hub" page links to a new domain, that expert/hub can be used to determine who the neighbors are. But even one expert's opinion isn't very informative. I think that Google looks for a variety of trusted expert opinions. These experts will include well-known human-edited directories with clear, definitive categories, but I think the expert votes also will come from some of the second-tier content sites. Any Web page that links to a group of related Web pages is usually considered to be an expert.

Until Google can form a collective opinion about where a new domain's "neighborhood" is, it isn't in much of a position to determine if that domain can be trusted. So, while many SEOs might be quick to say, "See? We do need to submit links to directories!" Maybe, but would you as a surfer want to trust a site only listed in directories? Why does no one else link to the site? You need more than one kind of expert opinion, in my opinion. Dan Thies suggested as much in late 2005 at the Highrankings Forum (and perhaps elsewhere).

"Well then," some hardcore reciprocators might say, "We just need to submit to directories and get reciprocal links from related pages."

Moving into the wrong neighborhood

But the problem is that Google looks for "excessive reciprocation". Some reciprocation is expected and tolerated. This is the World Wide Web, after all, where sites are expected to link to each other. But if you can only get links from directories and reciprocating sites, you're still not collecting independent opinions or votes of confidence from true authorities.

Authority pages has become another SEO buzzword, and I have seldom seen anyone in the SEO community use the expression in a way that conveyed a clear meaning to me. I am sure most people who speak of authority pages have a clear idea of what they mean, and can probably articulate that idea. But I have found no real consensus on what the SEO community collectively means.

I'll go with the traditional HITS definition: an authority page is linked to by many experts. But some experts are more trustworthy than others, and those experts are often linked to by many authority pages. It's all very circular, of course, but I think it's important that new domains be linked from authority pages in clear context. That is, a reciprocal link won't do the trick. You need to have content surrounding or adjoining the link that is relevannt to the link anchor text.

But let's back up a moment. Is it not possible that there are sham experts and authorities? Absolutely. So you need to ask if Google hasn't found a way to favor some neighborhoods over others. One potential trust-impacting factor is who you link to. Matt Cutts has been reluctant to explain why spammy-looking links on one page may be trouble and why similar appearing links on another page seem okay.

Neighborhoods must be bubbles of tightly connected Web sites, and the neighborhoods that are most trustworthy are probably linked to by many other neighborhoods. So now we're venturing into the realm of speculation with the concept of NeighborhoodRank. Does Google tag neighborhoods as being more or less trustworthy? If so, then it may be that an entire neighborhood has to gain trust before its member pages earn trust.

Why link baiting works

This may explain why Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz is able to boost sites past the Sandbox Effect so quickly. When he creates Link Bait, his sites draw linkage from both new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods, and the old neighborhoods undoubtedly include a lot of trusted neighborhoods. His Link Bait domains are therefore drawn into the better neighborhoods because of where they link to and from whence their inbound linkage comes.

In other words, successful Link Bait doesn't have to wait for its neighborhood to be approved for trust. It simply joins one or more already established good, trusted neighborhoods.

Why reciprocation sometimes fails

And that may explain why link reciprocation doesn't always work. Some people complain that after gaining several hundred reciprocal links, they still seem to be sandboxed. In evaluating the backlinks for many such sites, I often find they link out to and receve links from what I personally would deem to be low quality sites, many of which appear not to be trusted.

I have my own test for deducing whch sites may be trusted and which sites may not be. I don't disclose the test publicly because I don't know how accurate it is and I don't want to give away a possibly useful idea to people whom I don't want to help. My test is quick and simple, but even if it's on the right track I doubt it is 100% reliable. I am developing a couple of other tests to see if I can establish a consensus of results.

In the meantime, the continued emphasis on building links in quantity probably only maginifies the problem for most SEO'd Web sites. The more links the SEOs seek out from "tried and true" sources, probably the longer it takes to get sites to move past the Sandbox Effect. There will be differing degrees of success. Some SEOs most likely have very good sources of linkages. Most prbably do not.

Are Supplemental Index Pages 'bad neighborhoods'?

I don't believe so. I think these pages represent documents that have not yet earned trust, but that doesn't mean they are considered to be 'bad'. Matt suggested to one person on his blog that "the best way I know of to move sites from more supplemental to normal is to get high-quality links (don’t bother to get low-quality links just for links’ sake)".

I have more to say about Google's Supplemental Index at my SEO Web site.

Final Word

The bottom line is that we still don't know what Google is doing, but we all agree that they are now being strongly influenced by a need to distinguish which sites can be trusted from those that cannot be trusted. I think there are some highly implausible and convoluted theories being proposed by other people right now. The more complicated a proposed explanation becomes, the less likely it is to be correct. For now, I think Google is looking at aggregate linking relationships to determine where community trust really exists. It's very, very difficult to fake trust from a broad variety of sources.

Simply getting links from free directories, article submission sites, reciprocal links, and other popular link sources will probably gradually extend the length of time new sites require to earn trust if for no other reason than that they will only very slowly naturally attract links from trusted neighborhoods.

The real question comes down to this: if I am correct, or close to correct, in my analysis, how long will it take for spammers and SEOs to develop methodologies that effectively poison the "good" (trusted) neighborhoods and force Google to develop some filtration methodology?

I think maybe a year, perhaps 18 months. Until then, those SEOs who have inventories of trusted link sources will hoard their wealth and be very, very reluctant to share the gold. After all, the more people who know where to get the good links from, the less likely those link source will continue to be valuable.

Google shares the love...

2006-09-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

The more I read about Google's activities, the more impressed I have become with TSETSB. There are some things Google does that I don't approve of.

Two brief rants before we get to the Google raves

For example, I will never forgive them for Web Accelerator, which I continue to block from my network at the server level. Web Accelerator eats up bandwidth and Google has yet to offer an effective means of compensating Webmasters for needlessly wasted bandwidth. In Google's defense, I will say that their technology only incorporates an incredibly stupid standard that was proposed by people who should have known better than to come up with such a dumb idea. Maybe that's why it's so popular, I don't know. But I fear the day is coming when I'll be blocking all FireFox users from Xenite.Org. Unless they want to pay for subscriptions to our content.

I also complained about Google's removing the fetch date from their cache. I get so many hits from Googlebot in my server logs, figuring out when they actually fetched a file is not easy for me. And when other people ask me to do research on their sites, I am now almost completely blinded in one eye thanks to this ridiculous "improvement" from Google.

Google snuggles with the guv'mint

But enough whining and moaning. There are a lot of great things Google has done, is doing, that I can talk about. For example, I notice they are snuggling up with the U.S. Government these days. Adam Lasnik is teaching a class on search optimization to government Web designers at Washington University. And Google (Enterprise) has been named most influential commercial company providing technology to the Federal IT market. It was only a matter of time, I suppose.

But the ever impressive and highly innovative Google Book Search people (who, theoretically, should be on my list of demons because I have published books) have now announced that DIANE Publications has made its entire inventory of reprinted government publications available on Google Book Search. You know, we taxpayers paid for all that data collection and reporting, so it's about time we get access to it. This is actually a public service from Google that should help historians and people who are curious about what sort of publications the government has spent their money on in the past.

Lesson for Business: Share what you do!

What can smaller businesses learn from Google Book Search and Google Enterprise? I'd say that if you have partnerships with larger entities where your services or products are playing a significant role, you should be writing about those relationships on your corporate blogs. Put feature articles on your Web site. Mention your hallmark accmoplishments in your company history page. Tell people what you are doing for others, so they can get an idea of what you may be able to do for them.

After hours with Googlers, innovation, and invention

Innovation, of course, doesn't have to come from the corporate production process. One Googler offers a tip for organizing temporarily necessary cell phone numbers. Leave it to someone associated with search to think of prefixing names in a phone list.

Another Googler provides a fantastic report on Maker Faire, where innovation comes to life. The report will take a week for anyone to evaluate, but it's loaded with details, pictures, and video. Oh, my!

Significant revelations from Google

But now we're getting down to today's good stuff.

Google revives Tesseract OCR

First up, Google Code recently announced that Google had revived Hewlett-Packard's OCR technology (HP retired Tesseract in the mid-1990s). Think this is how Google has been scanning all those books? It doesn't matter, because as I pondered over the meaning of this post for the umpteenth time, today it hit me: Google may eventually be able to read all those graphics people use on their front pages. You know what I mean: the huge image files that say, "Michael Martinez is the best SEO in the world and you really should be paying him to help you rank at Google".

How many SEOs have complained about having to work around those Greeting Card images? Well, prognosticating what Google will do with its technology is not very productive, but if they are not thinking about how to scan Web greeting images and masthead graphics, they should be. Because there are just too many people who don't understand that a search engine cannot index the text embedded in a .GIF or .JPG.

Vanessa explains SiteLinks

The Webmaster Central Blog explains one of those curious SERP features that have puzzled, bemused, and bedazzled SEOs for years: SiteLinks (love the name, btw). SiteLinks are those sets of tightly compacted deep links that occasionally are included in a site's listing.

Google provides four levels of recognition for a Web site:

A simple listing for a single page in relation to the user's query.

Two listed pages, one indented under the first, in relation to to the user's query.

Two listed pages as above, but with an additional tag offering "More pages URL"

One or two listed pages as above, but with a compact list of SiteLinks providing quick access to deeper content

SEOs have lusted after those impressive SiteLinks results ever since they first started appearing. My most important site, Xenite.Org, has so far only achieved level three recognition despite many deep links and deep referrals. A lot of my pages come up in Google SERPs. But it takes more than what I've got so far to hit level four recognition.

NOTE: Some people might argue that having pictures from your site featured above search results, such as for Lucy Lawless, is a fifth level of recognition.

In any event, Google says that SiteLinks are completely automated. Maybe they are, but if any SEOs can figure out how to trigger their generation in SERPs, I think those SEOs will make even more money than before. Frankly, I haven't really tried to figure out the process.

And now, for the gold: Sharding

Do you know what shards are? I only have the vaguest idea, myself. I've watched a number of videos of Googlers making presentations. I've read some technical stuff. But I've never seen a shard in action. Google's database is so large it cannot all be contained on one server. Google reportedly uses up to 1,000 PCs to resolve any query. The database is spread out across some or all of those PCs in what Google calls "shards".

Last month, a Google went to a BarCamp and made a presentation called Scaling Data On The Cheap. Yup, he talked about shards.

Slide shows don't tell you a great deal when you cannot hear what the speaker has to say. But we can infer a few (possibly very incorrect) ideas from the slides. For example, it appears from one slide that a table could be replicated in multiple shards, split across multiple shards, or comprise a single shard by itself.

Google's original architecture (most likely no longer in use, at least going back to the January 2006 Big Daddy update, if not earlier) used many tables. There would have to be one or more master tables just to tell the various programs where all the other tables are. The paper says they had identified about 14 million words. Each word would have to have its own index. Rare words (occuring in the fewest documents) would have the smallest tables.

I can envision some programmatic advantages to replicating rare word tables across multiple shards, pairing some rare words with others in specific shards. And obviously large tables for the most common words would probably have to be split across multiple shards.

There is probably only minimal value to an SEO in knowing and understanding how shards actually work, but the slide show implies a great deal of redundancy has been built into Google's system architecture. It's like they have a lot of floppy database thingees that they lay partially across each other like blankets.

Well, it's food for thought, but I've already spent too much time on this post.

Getting down to Google Base icks...

2006-09-06T00:13:00.000-07:00

Google's AdWords Blog actually shares some interesting information. I don't mean that to sound like a bad thing, but since I don't run AdWords campaigns I don't really read the blog. Shame on me.

So, in Why is the location under my ad?, they explain that if you target your ads by location, then users who are identified by the Google system as coming from that area will be told the ad is relevant to their community. I like that. Can't imagine why anyone would complain, but sometimes business people have a very different set of expectations from me.

In their Get your products into our search results with Google Base post, they share the following advice:

Your site may already be included in our crawl index, but we want to ensure that you also know how you can supplement these results with Google Base - you can submit the products or services that you offer directly to Google Base making them eligible to show on Google.com when a user searches on a relevant query.

What the heck? Seeing as I'm now promoting my SEO Consulting services on a full-time basis, I thought I'd give the system a try.

Unfortunately, the user interface burped. I created a few attributes for my ad, picking from their list suggested attributes. When I clicked on PUBLISH, the system came back and said there was a problem. They lost the label for two of the attributes and combined their data into one unnamed field.

I didn't feel like trying again, so I edited the surviving data, put in a new label, and clicked on PUBLISH again. This time the ad went through safely and I'm good to go for 30 days.

I appreciate the Googlers' giving me advice on how to promote my consulting services, but as a programmer with many years' experience I couldn't help but cringe when I saw the bug. I hate it when I find bugs in my own software after it's been deployed. That's just one of the risks programmers face, but it's still annoying.

Browsing further through the blog, I noticed their Printable coupons for local businesses post. OH..MY..GOD.

Why hasn't anyone in the SEO community made a big fuss over this feature? I know some people who need to take advantage of this service.

Hm. I wonder if I can do that....

Anyway, the AdWords blog has turned out to be very useful and interesting to me just in a few minutes' time. That ain't bad for clicking on a previously unvisited link.

Well, in other useful Google blogging, Vanessa Fox discusses better details about when Googlebot last visited a page. She says that Google Cache will now reflect when Googlebot last sought information about a page, rather than when it was actually downloaded.

Um...that's not very helpful to me. I can see how some Webmasters may be pleased with knowing that Googlebot stopped by on September 1, but it won't explain to them that they are looking at a page copy from April 26. Let me explain why this can be a problem.

Googlebot comes by on April 25, fetches my page, and then I update it on June 12. Googlebot dutifully grabs the page on June 12 and then my server crashes. I restore from a backup made on June 11 and my server will think the page hasn't changed when Googlebot comes back on June 15.

Now, ideally, I want my June 12 version of the page. But for reasons beyond my control I cannot reproduce that page until, say, August 15. If Google dutifully indexes and caches the page in a matter of days, they are out of sync with my restored Web page.

Does this scenario happen? Well, server crashes happen all the time. It's anyone's guess as to how backups are restored and how the servers figure out whether to send a code 304 (Not Modified) or not. But it's a hole in the methodology and the blog doesn't address it to allay my fears and concerns.

I can also tweak my server and screw up its ability to send a code 304 at the right time. What if I accidentally configure my server to send a code 304 every time? Now Google's cache is telling me it visited the page on August 18 but I'm still seeing the restored June 11 backup. What's up with that? After August 15, I think I should be seeing my August 15 update, but because I've misconfigured my server, Google says it visited the page on August 18 and grabbed the pre-August copy from the restored June 11 backup (in truth, it grabbed nothing but I don't know that).

My point is that most Webmasters don't read the Google blogs and they are not going to understand what they are seeing with these dates.

In my opinion, the reported date needs to be the date the file was pulled. If Google really feels anyone needs to see from Google's side when Googlebot last dropped by, the ideal thing to do is show both dates (in my humble opinion).

Sorry, Vanessa, but this latest improvement is an "ick" in my book.

Introducing...Google User (or not)

2006-09-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

Seems like Google is trying to bend over backwards to prove its services are really all about the user experience.

A few days ago, they invited Philipp Lenssen to write about '55 Ways To Have Fun With Google'. In one fell swoop, they pretty much promoted everything about their business through a custom-written user testimonial. Will Philipp sell a few more copies of his book? Probably.

The Google Enterprise Blog featured a Map of Whole Foods. Talk about some major exposure. Okay, maybe a lot of people don't read the Enterprise Blog, but it's the flagship of the Google star fleet (how could I let an opportunity for a pun like that pass me by?).

The Whole Foods app entry should drive some curious traffic to the company's Web site. Maybe a lot of those people will be interested in organic foods. I don't know. But it's exposure that is hard to get in today's search-dominated Web.

Google Book Search, possibly the most innovative blog in the Google stable, has announced that you can now add Google Booksearch to your site. Folks, this is a significant tool that many hobbyists will latch on to. Business sites will eventually figure out ways to use it, too. I've already got some ideas rolling around my head. I just need time to site down and play with it ("site down" is not a typo).

An earlier blog post from Google Books a couple of weeks ago also has me thinking. They announced Authors@Google. You know, anyone with a video camera can now create a featured speakers program that is hosted by YouTube, Google Video, and similar services. Just stick your company logo on a wall somewhere, stand in for a minute to introduce your guest speaker, and then let him or her plug a book, business, or concept.

Did I say that Google Book Search is the most innovative of the Google blogs? Let me put this as delicately as possible: if you're an SEO and you don't read this blog, you're an idiot. There, I've said it. Many SEOs think I believe all SEOs are idiots. Well, that's not true. Just SEOs who think PageRank converges to an average of 1 and SEOs who don't have sense enough to read Google Book Search. You don't stay ahead of the pack by running with the crowd. Get out there in front and take some chances. Read things the other people don't read.

Speaking of Google Book Search, Philipp Lenssen's guest post on the official Google blog got me to thinking about Google's Public domain treasures, where you can download public domain books. A savvy Web marketer would publish a book and make it freely available for download from Google Books. It should not be long before we see books promoting "Buy my services!" on every page becoming available on Google Books. If only I were as smarmy as some of the other Web marketing gurus out there.

When Google renamed Site Maps as Webmaster Central, I noticed a lot of snickering among SEOs because it just didn't seem like a Webmaster Central type station. Nonetheless, Vanessa Fox is posting some great content on the Webmaster Central blog. Her article on how accented characters and interface languages impact search is a must read for anyone dealing with international language sites (and custom language sites, assuming you want to optimized for constructed languages that use accented characters).

A lot of recent Google blog posts have emphasized the user experience and how users can benefit from Google's services. What we can take away from this sampling of posts is that any business with a service or product can enhance its visibility and traffic by providing insightful, innovative, and intriguing tips and suggestions on how to utilize those services and products.

And for those of you still living in the SEO dark ages: such content produces a lot of linkage.

Remember: it's all about the user experience. Make that a good experience, and the users will love you.

More Google tips from Matt Cutts

2006-09-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutts went on a tear this week and posted several interesting items on his blog about Google and other search engines. In Video: Datacenter comments Matt listed the major points he covers in his latest video. (Philipp Lenssen has transcribed the video and Matt offered some clarifications.) What SEOs should take away from the video includes:

Data center IP addresses can point to more than one data center

Google redesigned its supplemental index earlier this year to use a different architecture from the main index

The site: command only presents an estimate of what Google has indexed

Another software infrastructure update that affects crawling for the main index is being gradually rolled out

In the comments section for his post, Matt elaborates on some other issues:

To Google, there is no distinction between "internal" and "external" backlinks

Finding pages in the supplemental index probably only indicates a lack of PageRank and links for many people

The main index is smaller than the supplemental index

If you see differing estimates with the site: command, the lower numbers are more likely correct

In Handling noindex meta tags Matt describes a case study he did. He found that if you include noindex in your robots meta tag, both Ask and Google will exclude the page from their indexes completely. MSN will index the URL but nothing else. Yahoo! ignores the instruction.

In Scoble visiting the Plex Matt notes that a URL with "cns!" followed by a long string of numbers, letters, and characters may look like a session ID to Google and other search engines. He also reiterates the helpfulness of repeating keywords from the title element in the page's URL, a point he has made in previous discussions. In the comments, Matt elaborates by saying, "including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way".

I've incorporated some of Matt's comments in these posts and others into new sections on my (new) SEO Consulting site. Look at the SEO Fundamentals, SEO Theories, and Search Engine Facts pages.

Google Page killed my Analytics

2006-08-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

I was curious about whether it was now possible to sign up for Google Pages. After poking around, I discovered that if you have a Google Mail account, you can get a Google Page account. To get a Google Mail account you have to have a cell phone.

I have a cell phone.

So I gave Google my cell phone number and got my Google Mail account. I gave Google my Google Mail account and got a Google Page account.

Then, just to make sure everything was still good with the rest of my Google activities, I tried to log into my Google Analytics account. My old login and password were not accepted.

That was not good.

So then I decided to log into my Google Groups account. Google explained that all my subscriptions had been transferred to my new Google Mail account (I didn't recall them asking me if I wanted my other Google accounts to be affected). Google now gave me the option of not transferring those subscriptions, and I took that option.

At which point Google informed me that I would have to recreate the old account in order to preserve the subscriptions. So I recreated the old account, verified that my Groups subscriptions were preserved, breathed a sigh of relief, and then remembered that I had problems with Google Analytics.

Immediately upon logging into Analytics, I was informed by Google that all my old data was gone, but that it might be restored if I nicely requested reactivation of the old account.

I've been tracking Google Analytics' performance since the beginning of the year in a year-long evaluation of the service. I have their code installed on many pages. Naturally, I sent off the request to have the old account reactivated and am still waiting to hear back from them.

But now 8 months' data is lost to me, perhaps forever, and Google didn't even so much as put a big warning box in my face when I signed up for the Google Mail account to advise me that I was about to (almost irrevocably) alter my many relationships with Google.

I think a somewhat less streamlined approach to consolidating users' Google experiences would be in order.

Matt Cutts to SEOs: It's the content, stupid!

2006-08-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

Matt is too nice a guy (or too professional) to be insulting and derisive in his blog or other online/public comments to the SEO community. But he has dealt the self-deluding SEO community a long-needed intellectual bloody nose by showing them that one doesn't need to rely upon links to rank well for expressions in Google.

In his August 21, 2006 blog post offering SEO advice, Matt demonstrated how one can easily rank for a popular expression ("SEO") while explaining how he used a previous blog entry to target a longer expression.

Delivering a 1-2 punch to the generally ignorant SEO community on the power of content hasn't gone unnoticed. In comments posted as followups to his blog, and on numerous blogs elsewhere, SEOs have been rationalizing how Matt is bending his own rules and suddenly revealing that "content ranks again" (tip: it always ranked, except where it was overwhelmed by massive numbers of links).

Just because SEOs have trained themselves only to rank by endlessly (and generally needlessly) building links upon links has never meant that Google was scoring only by links, mainly by links, or wantonly by links. In fact, the overemphasis on linkage has long been a self-defeating strategy for many SEOs, who have devoted much of the past three years complaining about how it's becoming more difficult to garner high rankings quickly through linkage.

This is the power of momentum in ideology: once nonsense takes on the authority of fact, the fiction outweighs all sensibility and reason. It's highly doubtful that Matt's SEO 101 lesson (develop content that is relevant to a query first and worry about linkage later) will part the waters, but it should at least make a splash that is heard around the world for a brief moment in time.

The momentity of the task is made more clear by the naive comments posted by Greg Boser (aka "Webguerilla") in his Amish Gokarts and Mini Bike Furniture post on August 23, 2006. Within a day, dozens if not hundreds of SEO blogs around the world have picked up Boser's inaccurate analysis and hailed it as another marvel of great SEO reverse engineering. Boser's conclusion that a host serving two domains from the same IP address is responsible for a Go Kart site ranking well for "Amish furniture" fails to take into consideration two links that Boser clearly didn't know how to find.

When one of the A-listers of SEOdom fails to pinpoint two or three obvious and easy-to-find links that clearly demonstrate why the Google algorithm would mistake a site for being relevant to "Amish furniture", it's time to ask if these people are really worth the money they are being paid by good businesses for their advice and consulting services.

Search engine optimization is still very much a smudgy art. Hopefully, search engineers like Matt Cutts will continue to emphasize the importance of looking at all the factors that have been openly documented for at least 8 years.

The SEO world has blathered on about inbound links and PageRank, completely blinding itself to the importance of outbound links and on-page content. Frankly, this lesson has come about five years too late.

Let's hope it doesn't take five more years for the next lesson to rattle the cages and foundations of the myths that SEOs have built their reputations on.