Tag: Search

Paid Links Scandal Gets Marketing Firm iAcquire De-Indexed From Google

Earlier this week, we posted an article about an investigation from blogger Josh Davis, which exposed marketing firm iAcquire for allegedly purchasing backlinks for clients. Davis’ report caught the attention of Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts:

Follow @JoshDJosh Davis @JoshD
Search Secrets: How a prominent SEO company is covertly purchasing backlinks for a Fortune 1000 corporation. http://t.co/2cgosTu8 #LongRead

Follow @mattcutts Matt Cutts
@mattcutts @JoshD nice write-up. Most people don’t go the extra mile to call up and try to get comments from the other side.
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Follow @williamalvarezWilliam Alvarez @williamalvarez
iAcquire buying and selling links on behalf of their clients http://t.co/C5BRz7gB . Obviously @mattcutts read this already, right?

Follow @mattcutts Matt Cutts
@mattcutts @williamalvarez yup
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Now, it turns out that iAcquire has been de-indexed from Google (along with other parties involved in the scandal, according to Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz). Schwartz even got iAcquire’s Director of Inbound Marketing to mention this on Twitter:

Follow @rustybrickBarry Schwartz @rustybrick
@iAcquire was deindexed by Google? https://t.co/pMxyj6MH cc @iPullRank

Follow @iPullRank MyCool King
@iPullRank @rustybrick sure was. There’s no network for them to kill so that’s them throwing their hissy fit.
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On the topic of whether or not its better for companies to run their own SEO in-house, Davis told WebProNews, “It is hard to say. From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”

As far as trust a firm not to engage in paid linking on your behalf, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”

May 25, 2012
Google Penguin Update: Webmasters Wondering If Another One Came Out

Update: Google says there has not been another one.

As usual, webmasters are speculating about the latest big name Google algorithm change as some have experienced sudden traffic issues. This has happened quite frequently since last year’s Panda update was launched. Sometimes it was Panda, and other times it wasn’t.

Now, there is talk in the WebmasterWorld forum that there may have been another Penguin update. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation one way or another, and will update accordingly.

In one forum thread, member Tedster writes, “A number of members who were hit by Penguin are now reporting some movement in various threads. Can anyone else see evidence of a Penguin refresh?”

Some are seeing lower traffic, but assuming it’s because of the coming holiday weekend. However, user Anteck writes, “Getting loads of zombie traffic, suddenly the majority of visitors arnt converting. Googles up to something. All Australian sites. No holidays here.”

There is also some speculation that the Knowledge Graph came into play. Member Rasputin writes:

I would say that our ‘penguin’ sites recovered a few % around the 19th May while non-penguin sites fell a similar amount at the same time (no changes made – they are mostly old, small sites), but the variation after a few days is small enough that it could possibly just be seasonal variation.

It is also possible that the introduction of Knowledge Graph is distorting the figures for our (travel) sites that fell a small amount around the same time (or the sunny weather in the UK could have got people away from their computers…)

Google, by the way, appears to consider Knowledge Graph one of its crowning achievements. CEO Larry Page was sure talking it up this past week.

Either way, it’s put a little less emphasis on Google+ profiles for some search results, though it’s still thrusting them in the spotlight for others (like Mark Zuckerberg’s).

It’s hard to believe, but here we are close to the end of May already. Before too long, we should be seeing a new giant list of Google algorithm updates for the past month.

Image: The Batman Season 4 Episode 2 (Warner Bros.)

May 25, 2012
Google+ Gets A Little Less Emphasis From Google Search

Beyond algorithm updates, Google has made at least two major changes to its search engine this year: Search Plus Your World and the Knowledge Graph. The former was designed to offer users a search experience more tailored to their own personal web experience and social connections. The latter was designed to give users the info they’re looking for without having to click off the results page to another site (while helping Google understand the meaning of the search in cases where there are more than one meaning).

When Search Plus Your World launched, it came with boxes on the right-hand side of some results pages. These were called “People and Pages” boxes. As Matt McGee at Search Engine Land points out, the new Knowledge Graph boxes (which CEO Larry Page calls “Knowledge Panels”) have replaced the “People and Pages” boxes.

Before, for example, when you searched for a term like “music,” Google would show the “People and Pages” box, highlighting specific musicians’ profiles on Google+. Now, they’ll show specific musicians, but rather encourage you to click, bringing up another search results page for that musician (complete with that musician’s own personal knowledge panel).

If you click on Chris Brown from there, you get something like:

So, that’s one way Google has toned down the Google+ in its search results. Of course, with this strategy, Google can point you to a page with an AdWords ad for an “ad related to Chris Brown”. Google+ still doesn’t have ads, so financially, this should work better for Google.

In March, Google made an algorithmic change, which seemed to favor Google+ profiles less as well. That changed was billed as:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

When Search Plus Your World first launched, Twitter complained about Google favoring Google+ pages over more relevant Twitter pages. The aforementioned change seemed to have remedied that. Google+ profiles seemed to be ranking over more relevant profiles in less cases.

Another famous example was when Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile over his Facebook profile. That was also no longer the case. However, the Knowledge Graph has thrust Zuck’s content free Google+ profile back into the spotlight:

If you click on the picture of Zuckerberg in the Knowledge Panel, it takes you to his Google+ profile, though the Facebook Profile still ranks over the Google+ profile in the organic results.

May 24, 2012
Yahoo Axis For Chrome: It’s No Yahoo Axis For iPad

Yahoo has launched a new web browser called Axis. You can download it for iPhone or iPad as a full browser. The desktop version, however, comes as a browser add-on. There were some issues with the Chrome launch, but that appears to be resolved now. You can download it here.

First, check out Yahoo’s video showing it off:

Now, let’s check out reality.

Having now played around with Axis for the iPad, iPhone and Chrome, I can tell you, this works much better as a mobile browser than as a Chrome add-on.

Chrome is already super fast at the search process. Axis slows it down. I’m finding that sometimes it even takes a long time just to load the search box. Then, if you click the search box, and start typing, you’ll find that you’re just adding on to the previous query. If you’ve already performed a search with the Axis search box, you’ll find that you have to take an extra step and get rid of the previous query, whereas if you just search from Chrome’s omnibox (the address bar), you can just click and type, searching without any hassle whatsoever.

I’m not sure this helps you “rip through the web,” as portrayed in the video above (though it’s funny that this web ripping is portrayed by a guy punching through glass screens).

Even if you’re a fan of Yahoo search, it’s actually easier and a better user experience to simply switch your default browser in Chrome to Yahoo, and continue to use the omnibox.

In addition, Axis adds another bar to the bottom of your browser, taking up more screen real estate. The ability to slide horizontally through search results hardly seems worth the trade-off.

Those are my first impressions. I don’t want to discourage you from trying it out yourself though. See what you think, and let us know.

May 24, 2012
CDNPAL Kickstarter Project Aims To Build Search Engine Using Facebook’s Open Graph

This week, we reported on a Kickstarter project called Gooey Search, which strives to be a “Google on steroids (with privacy). While poking around through Kickstarter, we noticed another search engine project in the works called CDNPAL, billed as “an American search alternative to Google.”

“There are problems with PageRank and Rankdex in that pages linked to by high ranking websites may not be indicative of a positive reference to that linked page or document,” the Kickstarter page says. “For instance, you can have a link from your high scoring website saying, I really hate x,y,z and that linked page will now inherit a higher rank from the page even though that was not the intention.”

“The other problem is UGC or user generated content, where a website may have a high ranking score based on its popularity, but the authors are random people who arbitrarily join the website, and those people who have little or no history with the score instantly inherit the ranking mechanism,” it continues. “Another stinging problem with the PageRank system is that false or misleading information can rise to the top of search results due to the purely automated nature of the sorting of World Wide Web content.”

This is how they’re putting it for those who don’t understand the details of how search works:

So what we are really saying is that for the past 15 years the web has been largely dominated by Google’s way of organizing what you search for. We have a new way of organizing the World Wide Web that we think will work better.

Here’s a video from the guys behind the project, describing their efforts:

CDNPAL re-indexes web pages as Open Graph objects, which users can use in social graphs “in conjunction with your own social information or to use in any way from presentations to applications,” the page explains.

“At this point, we have modified the crawler to only grab Open Graph information, or create it from document data, for later compilation,” the page explains in an update. “The crawler also records network properties such as the location of the remote website server, and the contact information such as geo-location of the OG content by business address, or other location hints. By focusing only on what we want to achieve and leaving traditional search behind we have a greater chance at giving users something brand new.”

Here’s a flow chart diagramming the process:

So far, the project has attracted 15 backers at $269. It has 9 days to go to hit its goal of $100,000. Money isn’t all the project needs, however. They’re also calling for developers to help write code.

“One of our large problems is the high cost of educated and or experienced Java programming labor in Southern California and the legal overhead of having employees and the paperwork,” says CDNPAL. “So we have some programmers we work with out of the country, but ultimately we need people here that we can do status meetings with [us] every day. We are also Java programmers and need to make our team bigger.”

I find it interesting that they’re using the Open Graph as the basis for the search engine, while there is a fair amount of speculation (and possibly some evidence) that Facebook is working on search itself.

Do you think Facebook’s Open Graph is a good approach to search?

May 23, 2012
Bob Moog Doodle Hits Google Homepage

Yesterday, the Bob Moog Google doodle hit Google’s home page in some parts of the world (where it was already May 23), but now it’s up for the rest of us.

The doodle honors the birthday of Robert Arthur Moog, who founded Moog Music and invented the Moog synthesizer. Here’s how Google portrays Moog with its new Knowledge Graph results:

Appropriately, the doodle is playable, not unlike Google’s previous Les Paul doodle. I wonder if the Moog doodle is a productivity killer too.

It should be noted that the doodle’s interactivity does not work for everyone. So far, it’s unclear why this is the case. We tested in in the office, with the same browsers on identical machines. For some it worked, and for others, it didn’t. When it doesn’t work, it just clicks through to Google’s search results for “Bob Moog”. This is essentially how Google’s non-interactive doodles work.

Like the Les Paul doodle, you can also record your music with the Moog doodle. Perhaps this one will get Rickrolled too.

Google’s interactive doodles are generally among their most popular. Beyond these two, the Pac-Man and Freddie Mercury doodles stand out in one’s memory:

Earlier this week, Google ran a doodle created by a second grader who won the company’s annual Doodle 4 Google contest.

Now, enjoy Junip enjoying a Moog:

May 23, 2012
Do You Trust Your SEO Service Not To Do Paid Links?

Josh Davis at LLsocial.com put together a pretty in depth report on what appeared to be a Fortune 1000 company purchasing links, violating Google’s Webaster Guidelines. It turned out, as he shared in an update, that the company purchasing the links was a separate company from the Fortune 1000 company. There was some confusion, as the company had sold certain assets to another company, and formed a company with a very similar name. In light of all that, we’ll just omit the name of the company for this article.

Still, the whole thing is a pretty interesting story, and we’ve had a conversation with Davis on the subject that is still worth sharing. The whole thing even caught the attention of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam:

Follow @JoshDJosh Davis @JoshD
Search Secrets: How a prominent SEO company is covertly purchasing backlinks for a Fortune 1000 corporation. http://t.co/2cgosTu8 #LongRead

Follow @mattcutts Matt Cutts
@mattcutts @JoshD nice write-up. Most people don’t go the extra mile to call up and try to get comments from the other side.
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The whole thing started when Davis was sent an email from a third party offering to pay him for placing a link to one of the company’s pages. Davis determined that this third party was linked to “a prominent enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company,” which would lead one to believe that it is part of the efforts of the SEO agency the main company (the beneficiary of the link) had hired.

I’m not going to rehash the entire thing here. If you want to know more about it, I suggest reading Davis’ report, but the whole thing raises some questions about hiring outside agencies to do your SEO. Google even had to penalize itself when a marketing agency had solicited paid links for Google’s Chrome browser. Google’s Chrome landing page suffered a 60-day penalty. Questions were raised about how this may have impacted Chrome’s market share.

Google takes this stuff seriously (even if the lines around paid links are blurry at times).

Davis tells WebProNews it’s difficult to tell if these links help the company at hand. “If you look around the [company’s] site you will see that they have extensive onsite SEO optimization. They also have the advantage of businesses websites placing a [company] badge which links back to [company].”

“That said, some of their subpages don’t have many inbound links which may be the point of hiring an agency to do offsite SEO,” he adds.

We asked Davis if he thinks there is a lot more of this paid linking for big companies going on than most people realize.

“I think it is pretty dangerous to do paid backlinking explicitly for a large company, but I have come across some other smaller companies which seem to be doing it (maybe one other large one, but I am still researching that),” Davis tells us. “At 3000+ words I wasn’t about to try to tackle other companies, but it is possible it is going on.”

One might wonder if in-house SEO is the way to go, if it’s SEO companies responsible for engaging in paid linking on behalf of clients, without the clients knowing. There are surely many, many white hat SEO companies out there that would never do this, but how does a business know that they won’t be getting something like this?

“It is hard to say,” says Davis. “From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”

As far as trust, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”

The company in question, according to emails Davis received, is looking into the situation further. Something tells me that Google is too.

Follow @williamalvarezWilliam Alvarez @williamalvarez
iAcquire buying and selling links on behalf of their clients http://t.co/C5BRz7gB . Obviously @mattcutts read this already, right?

Follow @mattcutts Matt Cutts
@mattcutts @williamalvarez yup
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May 22, 2012
Google: There Was No Penguin Update

You know that Penguin update we’ve been talking about for the past month (and to some extent even longer)? Well, that doesn’t exist. That is, according to one Googler.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land shares an amusing story about how one Googler claimed that Google had no such thing. While he doesn’t share any names, he indicates that someone who worked for Google was asked about the Penguin update, and pointed towards some search results on the topic, and responded:

“I assure you 100% that there has been nothing at Google referred to as ‘Penguin.’…If you notice on those search results you sent me, not a single source is from Google itself…From what I just saw on this whole Penguin thing–it sounds to me like a lot of SEO companies that use shady and unethical practices are upset that their loop holes have been cut out!”

Google announced the update, which came to be known as Penguin, on 04/24, in a blog post titled, “Another Step To Reward High-Quality Sites“. This appeared to be the update Google’s Matt Cutts “sort of pre-announced” at SXSW. The update was being called the “Webspam update” at first, but then, in a conversation Sullivan had with Google, he revealed that it was called Penguin.

Right around that time, Cutts also tweeted this picture:

Of course Googlers like Cutts and Amit Singhal have openly discussed the Penguin update. In fact, both have even indicated that it has been a success.

At SMX London, Singhal engaged in a keynote interview with Sullivan, and mentioned that nobody at Google understands everything at Google. I guess that is being illustrated pretty well here.

Lead Image: cheezburger.com

May 22, 2012
Matt Cutts Shares Something You Should Know About Old Links

Google’s Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing something that’s probably on a lot of webmasters’ minds these days: what if you linked to a good piece of content, but at some point, that content turned spammy, and your site is still linking to it?

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site A’s end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site B’s content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

“OK, so let’s make it concrete,” says Cutts. “Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think it’s good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybody’s happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didn’t pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and it’s doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.”

“It’s not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems,” he continues. “But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your site’s reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.”

“And so it’s not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that you’re going to run into an issue,” he concludes. “At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldn’t worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you don’t know about every single site, and you don’t re-check every single link on your site, that’s not the sort of thing that I would worry about.”

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites they’re linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

May 22, 2012
Ark: More Evidence That Facebook Is Interested In Search?

Ark, a new people search service, launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. It claims to let users search over a billion people bsaed on over 30 filters (such as location, high school, college, employment, interests, etc.). It indexes over a billion profiles across networks including: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, Orkut, and others.

This video shows what it does:

While the product launch is interesting itself (it has even raised a $4.2 million seed round of funding), TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reports that Facebook expressed interest in a possible acquisition of the company at one point. There has been plenty of speculation that Facebook could get into the search game, and compete more directly with the likes of Google (not to mention the speculation around a potential AdSense-like ad network), and this will surely only fuel such speculation.

Constine writes, “Facebook was so impressed with how Ark repurposed its data that the social network loosely discussed the possibility of buying the startup or at least acq-hiring its founders. There was no offer extended, but Riley [co-founder, Patrick] tells me, ‘We didn’t even take it that far. We weren’t interested. We wanted to build something bigger.’”

Let’s not forget that Facebook was recently reported to have been working on an improved search engine. This may come as an internal search engine, but with over 900 million users, why would it have to be external to compete with Google? Let’s not forget that many Google users are using the search engine while signed in too.

Ark itself, in addition to just letting you search for people, is planning on letting you search your own social data, similar to services like Wajam or Greplin, according to Constine. The service is currently open to sign ups until TechCrunch Disrupt ends on Wednesday.

On a side note, it’s interesting that Ark has a Penguin for a logo, considering the connotation this bird carries in the search industry.

May 22, 2012
So.cl Does Not Have Any Impact On Bing’s Social Graph

Earlier, we looked at So.cl, Microsoft’s new(ish) social network, which seems to be something of a testing ground for interactions between search and social media.

While some of So.cl may look familiar to Bing users (or those who have read about the recent Bing redesign), and some of the features may one day make their way to Bing, So.cl currently has no impact on Bing’s current social features.

Duane Forrester answered a user question on Twitter:

Follow @mwilton13 Mike Wilton
@mwilton13 @DuaneForrester will this so.cl thing impact the social graph of Bing search at all?
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Follow @DuaneForrester duane forrester
@DuaneForrester @mwilton13 So.cl is not included at this time. We focus on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn & Google+ currently.
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It is nice to see where Bing’s social efforts are focused.

It’s just been a Duane Forrester kind of day. We also looked at some advice he gave regarding Google’s Penguin and Panda updates in a different article, as well as his suggestion that you should be using Pinterest.

On that note, its interesting that Pinterest isn’t mentioned on Forrester’s list of Bing’s social focal points. Perhaps he was hinting at the future. A Pinterest-based image search integration could be cool.

May 21, 2012
Google AdWords, AdSense Ads Get Some Changes

Google is now showing text that says “Ads related to” (and then whatever the search query was) when it displays AdWords ads at the top of search results pages.

For example, here, you see “Ads related to shoes”:

This was pointed out by Thomas Ballantyne at Dreams Systems Media on Friday, and confirmed by Search Engine Land as having rolled out (as opposed to being a test) today. Pamela Parker shares a quote from a Google spokesperson, saying, “As part of our ongoing efforts to show ads that are relevant and informative, we are including more information about why users are seeing certain search ads.”

Additionally, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google has removed arrows to scroll through AdSense ads, which were introduced in 2008.

Last week, Google introduced some refinements to AdSense reporting, including the ability to view all-time reports, access reports from the My Ads tab and download CSVs in the correct local formatting.

May 21, 2012
Gmail Gets Better At Autocomplete Search

Google announced today that it has made some improvements to autocomplete predictions in Gmail. Specifically, they will now take into account the actual content of your emails.

“For example, you might now get lax reservation or lax united as predictions after typing ‘lax’ if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently,” explains Gmail software engineer Isaac Elias.

Google says it will be rolling out the improved autocomplete feature in English over the next several days. More languages will come in the next few months. It won’t be available in Google Apps at first, but will be sometime in the future.

Last week, we saw Gmail get some new Google+ integration. This includes new Google+ profile picture displays for your Circles, and Circle support in search and filters. You can now find messages from specific circles by typing circle:[circle name] in the search box. You can also find mail from circled contacts by searching with has:circle.

In addition to that, if you conduct a contact search, results will now feature the contact’s profile picture, along with the emails.

May 21, 2012
Google Penguin, Panda, Matt Cutts & Amit Singhal In Lego Art Form

Aaron Wall at SEOBook commissioned an art project, which features a number of Lego art-style pictures of various Google employees and SEO celebrities, as well as some Google update-specific pieces. We already looked at Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt (who was portrayed again as an evil ice cream man).

Here are the artist’s renditions of Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, the two most recognizable faces behind the Penguin and Panda updates:

Matt Cutts graphic by SEOBook.com

Matt Cutts graphic by SEOBook.com

Amit Singhal graphic by SEOBook.com

Cutts and Singhal have both called the Penguin update a success.

Here are the Penguin and Panda pics:

Penguin Update graphic by SEOBook.com

Panda Update graphic by SEOBook.com

Even the old school Florida update made an appearance in the project:

Florida Update graphic by SEOBook.com

Then there’s the “Google Got Caught Pushing Illegal Drugs Update”:

Google AdWords Drugs Update graphic by SEOBook.com

I don’t think that was Google’s official name, but it refers to when Google had to forfeit $500 million as the result of a settlement with the Justice Department in relation to ads for Canadian pharmacies. The investigation behind this had authorities tracking a fugitive to Mexico, and he had advertised the unlawful sale of drugs using AdWords.

May 21, 2012
Google Suggests Closing Old Listings In Places When Changing Addresses

SEO Barry Scwhartz blogged about moving to a new office, saying that Google suggested he close his listing and open a new one. However, in doing that, there’s no guarantee that he would retain any reviews that had ben posted.

He shares what a Google rep told him: “If you mark the old listing closed, and create a new one, I can’t say your reviews will definitely move to the new listing (I can’t make guarantees with Places). You could try just editing the address on the old listing, if you’re concerned about the reviews, but you might run in to address issues.”

It seems odd that Google would suggest this to somebody over simply editing their address. When asked about this, Google told us, “A business owner also has the option to edit the address on their existing Google Places listing.” They pointed to this page about doing just that:

But if you’re moving, what about the people who are looking for you in your old location? Schwartz notes that Google is supposed to be launching a “We’ve Moved” option, but apparently that’s MIA so far.

May 21, 2012
You Should Use Pinterest, According to Bing

Bing’s Duane Forrester, who for all intents and purposes, is the search engine’s counterpart to Google’s Matt Cutts (they sometimes speak together at conferences), posted to the Bing Blog over the weekend, to give some advice on recovering from Google’s Penguin and Panda updates.

In addition to being one of the faces of Bing, he’s also “The Online Marketing Guy” according to the domain name of his personal blog.

There is a section in his Penguin/Panda advice post called “Exercises in the Obvious,” and the first thing mentioned is Pinterest.

“Pinterest,” Forrester writes. “It didn’t take long for the Pin It button to start popping up on websites. And it didn’t take a passing grade on the MENSA quiz to see it coming, did it? Rapid growth, huge adoption, media buzz, your friends recommending it, and so it goes. An exercise in obviousness that you’d better pay attention to this little gem.”

This is only one of his “obvious” points, but it’s interesting that he would call out this social network as the first point of obviousness.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the service, for sure. Last week, reports emerged that the company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Its monthly active user base is still trending upwards, though it looks like it might be losing some steam with the Facebook-connected user base. Perhaps that’s worse news for Facebook than it is for Pinterest.

May 21, 2012
Microsoft’s So.cl Social Network No Longer Just For Students

Remember Microsoft’s So.cl social network? It has now launched to the public. You can sign up and use it if you want.

Socl was spotted back in November, originally under the name Tulalip, and then Microsoft officially announced it in December, as a way to give students a new way to learn. It was initially made available to students at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University.

At the time, Microsoft said, “So.cl has been designed for students studying social media to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate. They can build posts with many elements—photos, video, text, and more—and share them with colleagues. They also can find students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals. So.cl might even give students the ability to create their own social tool, customized for their own community.”

To use the service, you can either sign in with Facebook or your Windows Live ID. When you go to sign in using Facebook, it says:

So.cl is an experiment in open search. That means your searches on So.cl are viewable by other So.cl users and will also be available to third parties.

So.cl does not automatically post your searches, comments, or likes to your Facebook stream unless you choose this option. Also, we don’t contact your Facebook friends unless you invite them.

Then, you’re asked to choose interests (not unlike StumbleUpon) and follow the most popular users on So.cl:

Then, you’re taken to your home page, where you can “explore the best of So.cl”. The top bar and notification counter looks somewhat like Google’s:

If you click on one of the categories, you get a newsfeed for the category. This is comprised of searches that people have performed and posts that people have made to that category. For the ones based on searches, it tells you what they searched for, and then gives you a specific link (I’m not sure if this is the top result for the search, the one that person clicked on, or what). It’s a different experience. That’s for sure.

If you search for something, you’re presented with a set of results from both Bing, and feed results from So.cl. You can add results to your posts, not unlike Bing’s social features. When you’re ready, click “done” and it will post your update, with results.

They may still have some bugs to work out. When I tried to post the one from the screen cap above, it didn’t really give me any indication that it was actually posted. When I went to “My Posts” it was nowhere to be found. It’s also telling me that I have 0 interests. Then why did I accept all the suggestions it gave me at the beginning? It also says I am following 0, even though I also elected to follow the popular people it suggested.

Another feature of the service is called “Video Parties,” which appear to be Microsoft’s version of Google’s Hangouts. Here’s what the site says about them:

Watch videos with your So.cl friends in real time by creating a party in So.cl. Note: Video Party allows other users to see the videos that you have posted or viewed

It appears that users get 10 invitations to start with.

So, it seems this is about more than a tool for students now. It’s unclear whether Microsoft is really trying to build its own social network like Google has done with Google+, or if this is really just a testing ground for social Bing features. It seems like the latter.

For one, they’re letting you sign in with Facebook from the get go. This could make the whole thing more useful, since everyone is already on Facebook. Think about how much more complete Google+ would be if it had all of your Facebook friends. Of course, if it has all of your Facebook friends, what’s the point in using both? That’s where things get a little hazy with Socl too. It seems to be largely about search, and BIng is obviously Microsoft’s baby in that department (complete with a fresh, socially-focused redesign, no less).

Lili Cheng, one of Socl’s creators, reportedly said that they’re using Socl as “an experiment with the search + social networking experience from Microsoft Research,” and that we’ll see “other experiments in Socl over time.”

Have you tried Socl yet? What is your impression? Let us know in the comments.

May 21, 2012
Can Negative Parameters Tell You If You Were Hit By Google’s Penguin Update?

Barry Scwhartz posted this week about a Google query hack, which may or may not enable you to confirm that your site was hit by Google’s Penguin update. Schwartz credits WebmasterWorld member Martin Ice Web with the find.

The user added a negative parameter for amazon with his keywords, and Google returned his site to pre-Penguin rankings. “For example, he search for [blue widget -amazon] and his rankings pre-Penguin showed up on Google for the query [blue widget],” Schwartz explains.

It didn’t seem very reliable at first, so I didn’t bother to cover it. Even Schwartz noted that it failed on some of the queries he tried. However, the comments on his article have poured in since then, and it sounds like it has worked for quite a few people, so perhaps it’s worth taking a look at.

One commenter notes that other negative keywords seem to work as well, such as “-ebay”.

Remember, if you believe that you were unfairly hit by the Penguin update, Google has a form where you can complain. Of course, it’s likely that Google disagrees. After all, they consider the update to be a success.

View our Penguin coverage here.

May 18, 2012
Facebook IPO Highlights How Bad Facebook Is For Realtime Search

Facebook may be a much bigger social network than Twitter, but when it comes to realtime search, Twitter is far superior.

There’s been plenty of speculation that Facebook could one day enter the search market, and compete with Google on the search front. We’ve contributed our fair share of this speculation. I’m not going to rehash the whole argument here (I did that here), but a recent study indicates that Facebook could have 22% of the search market right out of the box, if a Facebook search engine launched.

More Facebook IPO coverage here.

With the company being public now, the speculation will no doubt only continue to come out of the woodwork. Facebook and Google are going to be competing more and more in advertising and social media, so it seems logical that Facebook eventually tackle search in a more direct way, especially considering that it has some very valuable data about web users (over 900 million of them, apparently), which Google simply does not have access to, despite its increased efforts to inject social into search.

There is a lot of potential for Facebook in search. However, it’s just that. Potential. Right now, Facebook search is next to useless, unless you’re looking for specific people, pages, apps, groups, etc. Searching through public posts is pretty much pointless right now. You can probably get more out of a “site:facebook.com facebook ipo” Google search.

This morning, I searched Facebook’s public posts on Facebook for “facebook ipo,” hoping to get a feel fro what users have to say about it. Facebook lets me see close to 30 updates at once – probably not the best representation of the entire Facebook user-base.

Compare that to Twitter search, where the updates roll in faster than I can read them.

Obviously, Twitter has the edge because it is public by default. Most tweets are available for anyone to see, but there is a lot of Facebook content that is public (granted, Facebook’s searching posts by friends is where it holds greater value to the user), and Facebook simply doesn’t let you seen more posts at once. You’re simply left to hope the ones Facebook is showing you at any given time are helpful to your query. It’s not like Google, where you can just click through various pages.

As I saw someone else point out, you can learn a lot more about what people really think about the Facebook IPO from Twitter reaction, rather than Facebook reaction.

May 18, 2012
Is Googlebot Getting More Human-Like?

Google may be getting better at crawling javascript and Ajax.

In a Tumblr post, developer Alex Pankratov wrote this week about spotting an “ajax request issued from document.ready() callback of one website’s pages.”

“This means that the bot now executes the Javascript on the pages it crawls,” Pankratov wrote. “The IP of 66.249.67.106 is crawl-66-249-67-106.googlebot.com and the A record is a match, so this is in fact a Google Bot.”

He then shows a line, which he says “is fetched via Ajax by a Javascript function in response to the menu item click,” and adds, “Also, note the x argument – it is dynamically added and only by that specific function. This means that the bot now emulates a user clicking around the site and then seeing which actionable items lead to which additional pages.”

Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica equates this to Googlebot learning to read interactive pages more like humans. “It appears Google’s bots have been trained to act more like humans to mine interactive site content, running the JavaScript on pages they crawl to see what gets coughed up,” he writes.

Google has indicated that it is getting better at handling javascript and AJAX. Here’s a video Google’s Matt Cutts put out about how Google handles AJAX a while back:

Cutts was asked, “How effective is Google now at handling content supplied via Ajax, is this likely to improve in the future?”

He responded, “Well, let me take Ajax, which is Asynchronous Javascript, and make it just Javascript for the time being. Google is getting more effective over time, so we actually have the ability not just to scan in strings of Javascript to look for URLs, but to actually process some of the Javascript. And so that can help us improve our crawl coverage quite a bit, especially if people use Javascript to help with navigation or drop-downs or those kinds of things. So Asynchronous Javascript is a little bit more complicated, and that’s maybe further down the road, but the common case is Javascript.”

“And we’re getting better, and we’re continuing to improve how well we’re able to process Javascript,” he continues. “In fact, let me just take a little bit of time and mention, if you block Javascript or CSS in your robots.txt, where Googlebot can’t crawl it, I would change that. I would recommend making it so that Googlebot can crawl the Javascript and can crawl the CSS, because that makes it a lot easier for us to figure out what’s going on if we’re processing the Javascript or if we’re seeing and able to process and get a better idea of what the page is like.”

Speaking of Googlebot, Google also put out a new video about the hardware and software that run it.

Update: Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says, “Google has been doing this for a while. Back in 2009 GoogleBot was executing JavaScript and in November 2011 Google began doing so with AJAX.”

May 17, 2012
Why Google Can Use Knowledge Graph For More Than Search

Google revealed its Knowledge Graph this week, as a way to deliver better search results based on data, with less reliance on keywords. It’s still in the process of rolling out.

It’s possible that we may see the Knowledge Graph provide content in other areas throughout the Googleverse, however.

Christopher Dawson at ZDNet made a great point about Knowledge Graph, in that “This is why they changed their privacy policy.”

I don’t know that this is the sole reason they changed their privacy policy, but the policy consolidation can only help Google utilize the Knowledge Graph throughout its various products in interesting ways, much like Google is already trying to do with Google+. If Google considers Google+ to be the “social spine” of the greater Google, than perhaps Knowledge Graph could eventually be seen as the “intelligent spine”.

“Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook,” said Google’s Amit Singhal, announcing Knowledge Graph. “It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.” Emphasis added.

Under Google’s new privacy policy, it should have no problem using the data that’s tuned to what people are searching for, and using that to offer more knowledge-driven (possibly with some personalization) features throughout other Google products.

In fact, it looks like Google already announced at least one integration with another Google product. Google made an announcement this week, even before the Knowledge Graph was revealed, that seems to utilize it, as Dawson points out. On the Google Docs blog, the company introduced the Research Pane for Google Docs/Drive. It’s touted as “a new feature that brings the web’s wealth of information to you as you’re writing documents.”

The announcement does’t specifically mention Knowledge Graph, but it does talk about “bringing knowledge from the web to Google documents.” And it looks very Knowledge Graph-esque (right down to the Taj Mjal example, which Google also used in its Knowledge Graph announcement):

What’s to stop Google from harnessing its Knowledge Graph in other products? I can imagine a lot of interesting Google Maps integrations, for example. Google Earth, for sure. How about Google Play, considering music and movies are part of the Knowledge Graph? I can imagine a similar integration in Google books. Google News? How about related news stories based on news about certain “things” in Google’s Knowledge Graph? There could be some fun Google Calendar integrations based on significant birthday and events in the Knowledge Graph. And why not a feature similar to the Google Docs Research Pane for Blogger?

That’s just a few possibilities off the top of my head. I’m sure Google and its engineers (not to mention with feedback from users) could think of a lot more interesting and creative ways to harness Knowledge Graph throughout Google products, and I’d be very surprised if they’re not working on more as we speak.

May 17, 2012