Jan 25
Jan 24
You know that the search giant focuses on getting users to the sites that best answer their queries. If you’ve been trying to rank for a while, you probably also know that Google cares about the user’s experience once they arrive at the site. This fact drives most of their algorithm changes. It’s why Panda devastated content farms; the thin content these sites often provided helped relatively few searchers, and cluttered the search results with low quality pages. Google’s newest algorithm change also stems from searcher concerns. You can read their blog post covering the issue. But you almost…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials
Tags: AbovetheFold, Excessive, Google, Penalize
Jan 24
If you were sick last week or on vacation or in a coma you missed A LOT of Google news. Here is a must read recap of articles on Google, Google changes and Google news. Industry Related – Google PR Nightmare: Search Giant Apologizes for Evildoing – SEJ Google+ – “Ask On Google+” Links Appearing In [...]
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Jan 18
This is an interesting play:
BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients.
The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the “BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator”. The first pilot project has focused on measuring advance demand for hotel stays and tourism interest in Spain by using search engine data.
Private investors get to see that search data before anyone else does. If you have a retirement plan invested in stocks, then you are at an asymmetrical information disadvantage because Google is providing an in-depth look at that search data to competing investors who can trade on the information before it is public.
Is search traffic a big deal? Is there enough signal there to matter? Yes. And yes.
I read an investment report earlier today about a company where the hedge fund’s rating & valuation was largely based on / justified by the SEO strategy of the underlying company & their current Google rankings…the report even had keyword ranking charts in it!
Was Google paid for giving BBVA access to the above data? Or was it thrown in as a freebie in exchange for getting over 100,000 BBVA workers to switch to the cloud & go Google on the enterprise software front?
If Google has over 90% search marketshare in many EU countries & is willing to leverage proprietary search data to win contracts in other fields, how does anyone compete against that data bundling?
Further, think of all the damage hedge funds & huge banks have done to societies the globe over this past decade & now Google is directly helping the bad guys.
That is Google’s approach to their proprietary information: if you invest in their ecosystem and use their analytics tools you can’t get your own analytics data (as they have to protect “user privacy”), but they will gladly sell that same data off to someone else.
If there is no public outrage at this “test” then the data units will start getting more granular. Rather than measuring categories Google may sell data on a per-site or per-company basis. Looking at how Google has consistently disintermediated “partners” everywhere else, if Google is feeling bold they may suggest that selling the data to others also permits Google to trade on the data as well.
What’s far scarier than an angry search engineer looking at your large paid link buy or a rogue Google “contractor” hacking up your site? A Google hedge fund with a substantial short position on your stock. 
Recall that Eric Schmidt has stated:
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market…” Eric Schmidt continues, “and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
Based on Mr. Schmidt’s above comment, is it reasonable that Google now profits off leveraging their data for securities analysis? What made the above clearly illegal & what is going on now above board? What’s the difference between them? Perhaps a “contractor” layer?
At the same time Google runs sweeping ad campaigns reminding people how Google protects them online, while hosting banking data in the cloud & making themselves a juicier hacking target.
Google warns publishers against using paywalls because it is a poor user experience while wiping out competing lead aggreagtors with new guidelines that are likely impossible to comply with. Sites like Highbeam Research get smoked by algorithms like Panda & the Google works with the folks who already have the legislature in their pocket to get them more data. The lesson here from Google is to provide a clean front end user experience and then sell the data back out the other end.
Everything is fine. Keep shopping (on Google.com + your Android phone)…Google will ensure the data is monetized to its full potential.
Categories:
google
Jan 18
Often, as I stated above, link wheels are used as a black hat strategy. Now, Google doesn’t like spammy manipulation of their search results. They hate it, in fact. So if you’re going to follow the black hat approach, you’ve got to know that Google’s algorithm is designed to try and find you and delist you. That’s not really a great way to put together a long term business, in my opinion. For those that don’t know what a black hat style link wheel is, allow me to explain. There are plenty of user generated content sites on the Internet that can rank quite well on Google for a variety of reas…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials
Jan 18
As promised earlier, Google has voiced its opposition to two bills currently being discussed in Congress that the company says — and countless critics around the world agree — would censor the web and hurt U.S. businesses. While some sites like Wikipedia are going black for the day on…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tags: Bing, Blackens, Carry, Google, Logo, Protest, SOPA/PIPA, Usual, Yahoo
Jan 17
Posted by randfish
Last week, Google rolled out "Search Plus Your World," an update to Google's universally popular search engine that biases logged-in users to receive socially shared content and markup in the results. Danny Sullivan wrote two excellent must-read pieces on the topic – Google's Results Get More Personal and Real-Life Examples of How "Search Plus" Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy. Thank God for Danny. If it wasn't for his tireless coverage, I'd feel obligated to spend hours writing those pieces myself (and they probably wouldn't be as good).
SEOmoz received a lot of requests for coverage, but typically we don't like to rush into writing about a new service/technology/change until we've got at least a few days of playing with it, watching the tech news cycles spin and evaluating how it might change practices for inbound marketers. To be honest, we still don't really know – our own accounts sometime get access to SPYW, and other times it seems to go missing (right now, for example, my Gmail account, which was showing SPYW results all last week, is suddenly back to regular, non-personalized Google). However, we felt that this was a momentous enough to shift to warrant a video on the changes and some discussion.
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It's my opinion that if SPYW continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it's been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers. In 2009 and 2010, Google's integration with Twitter was remarkable – helping content get indexed in seconds, earning featured spots for logged-in users who were connected to each other on Twitter and showing up in all sorts of specially-marked-up results. Google's taken that much, much further with SPYW, and while I'm no particular fan of using your market power to force users onto a platform they may not want, I'm also a realist. When I see this:
I know that as a marketer, there's missed opportunity if I'm ignoring Google+ (the search above is done totally logged-out).
BTW – if you liked the video above and Whiteboard Fridays in general, check out our SEOmoz Google+ page which features a few more and will continue to host some unique, interesting content that doesn't necessarily make it to the blog. Like everyone, we're still experimenting with G+, and suggestions are welcome!
Look forward to your thoughts around the necessity of Google+ (and watch this space as we plan on having some more tips + tactics on that front soon).
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Jan 16
Most SEOs and webmasters have experienced this on one of the sites they’ve worked on. Many call it the Google traffic tease, where you are doing okay and then Google sends you a ton of traffic for 3 or so days…
Jan 16
Back in June when Google +1 was first introduced (the voting on links, not the full Google+ experience) I wrote about an issue I had with the new service.
Google +1 & The Problem With Canonicalization Of Votes
I’ve ripped the relevant section out of the original post so we can now look at the current state of play.
You will see that the value of both Google +1 buttons is now the same, as Google now treat them as the same page, even though one of them is a redirect.
This seems to work for lots of types of redirects, parameters for tracking etc, which is what made it important to support in the first place.
So now you have every reason to add specific tracking parameters to the URLs that get added to Google+ so that you can track the way they are shared and the traffic that generates.
You could even use a URL shortener like bit.ly to make your URL with parameters a little shorter.
What I haven’t yet tested are how subsequent redirects of the canonical page get handled, and what if any safeguards have been implemented to reduce abuse. I also haven’t tested how many redirects will be followed.
This was still an issue back at the beginning of Novemeber when I mentioned it on the G+ Developers group. No… I didn’t submit a bug ticket as suggested. I don’t consider myself enough of a dev to create a ticket with sufficient clarity on someone else’s product. I have to assume G+ product managers and evangelists monitor feedback for features to some extent.
This may have been announced as a fix sometime, but a search for Google+ canonicalization brings up such as messy SERP I gave up digging.
I would love to know who to talk to about geting uQast videos supported in Google products… everything currently strips out the iframes and I am assuming the logic is being shared between platforms (Google Reader, Google+, Google Currents etc.)
Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana
As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.
This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.
http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312
This is how that button should be encoded
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script> <g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.
If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script> <g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time
p.s. I know Google is having a bit of a bad day about their new Search + Your World introduction – I persoanlly love it
Tags: Google, Google+1
Jan 15
Google announced that they have made several improvements to the search app for Android.
The changes include:
Faster, smoother performance, with an updated and simplified user interface.
Suggestions for your search grouped by type…
