WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • Why Google Is Picky About Profile Pictures

    Google is kind of anal about profile pictures. We already knew this, but it has been confirmed with a new post from MG Siegler on his personal blog.

    He tells the story about how Google deleted his profile photo, which featured Siegler flipping off the camera. Google deleted it, he re-uploaded it, and they deleted it again. Since then, he has re-uploaded it with a Google+ logo over the finger, as pictured below:

    MG Siegler <a href=Google+ profile” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/mg-siegler-finger.jpg” title=”MG Siegler Google+ Profile” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”332″ />

    “My problem isn’t so much with the fact that I couldn’t have a profile picture of myself giving everyone the finger — which I can and do on Twitter and elsewhere — it’s that no one bothered to tell me or warn me before they just went into my account and deleted the picture,” writes Siegler. “What if this was the only place I had stored the picture?”

    “Bigger picture: this seems like a ridiculous thing for Google to be policing,” he adds. “At first, they were all about ensuring that everyone was using their real name on Google+. After a shit storm about why that was stupid, they backed off. They should back off here as well because, honestly, who gives a shit? If my profile picture offends people, let them un-Circle me or whatever.”

    Why Google gives a shit: just like Google+ itself, Google profiles have a lot to do with search – the one area where Google absolutely cannot fail.

    Earlier this year, we were setting up Google’s authorship markup for our writers here at WebProNews. More background on what this is here. One of our writers, Josh Wolford, happened to have the following image as his Google Profile pic at the time:

    Zombie josh google profile pic

    He was a Zombie for Halloween, and he liked the picture (presumably, he still does), so he had it as his profile picture.

    So, when we set up authorship for Google, Josh received a message from Google’s Sagar Kamdar shortly thereafter, requesting that he switch the picture. Google wanted more of just a regular headshot, from what I gather, at least for authors, because they appear in search results, as an indicator of trust. The thinking is, as I understand it, that if you get a bunch of weird and/or offensive pictures coming up in search results it reflects poorly on the quality of these search results, even if the content is just fine.

    The concept is debatable, but this appears to be Google’s line of thinking. I’ve reached out to Kamdar for further comment, and will update accordingly.

    Update: Josh dug up the message for me. Here’s what Kamdar said:

    “As a quick thumbnail, I’m a PM on the Google Search team responsible for our authorship launch.”

    “We noticed you’ve set things up correctly on your end. However, while we’re in this limited testing, we’re trying to make sure that we’ve got the best author pictures we can get–is there any way you could have a non-zombie picture for your profile?”

    So, perhaps moving beyond the “limited testing phase” this won’t be as much of an issue, but after the Siegler’s story, I have to wonder.

    Now, in Josh’s case, Google didn’t simply delete his picture, but he also wasn’t making a gesture that many people consider obscene, like flipping the camera off.

    This may not be exactly the same thing as what happed in Siegler’s case. In fact, Siegler shares a comment he got from Google’s Alex Joseph, who said:

    As the first point of interaction with a user’s profile, all profile photos on Google+ are reviewed to make sure they are in line with our User Content and Conduct Policy. Our policy page states, “Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content.” Your profile photo was taken down as a violation of this policy. If you have further questions about the policies on Google+ you can visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html,or click the “Content Policy” link located in the footer of Google+ pages.

    So while these cases may be slightly different, they both point to a larger point about the image Google wants its profiles to represent.

    Siegler is an author. He writes content for the web (and often popular content at that). I don’t know for certain whether he has Google’s authorship markup set up or not, though Google may have deleted his picture either way.

    On the web, everyone is an author, potentially. All you have to do is add the markup, connect it to your Google Profile, and you can be considered an author too, and try to boost your credibility with Google, which could help you in search.

    For Google, search is still the company’s bread and butter, even while it offers so many other products. Google has been rigorously launching algorithm updates all year with the sole goal of improving the quality of search results. Authorship, as it relates to search, is another factor for improving quality, and establishing trust and authority.

    But again, the censorship of Profile photos is a debatable practice when it comes to authority and trust. I don’t think I’m too far off in saying that MG Siegler has become one of the more authoritative voices in tech journalism, and just because he is holding up his middle finger in his profile pic, that doesn’t change. Isn’t your profile part of how you wish to represent yourself on the web? If this is the kind of image Siegler (or Wolford) wishes to present for himself, why isn’t he allowed to do so?

    Well, it is Google’s web property, so they do get to make the rules. It wouldn’t be the first time people disagreed with one of Google’s policies.

  • Googler: Mozilla A Partner, Not A Competitor

    Last week, Google and Mozilla renewed their deal, which makes Google the default search option in the Firefox browser. The deal is worth about a billion dollars, according to reports.

    Since the deal was announced, there has been a lot of discussion about Google essentially funding its competitor in the web browser market, as money from the deal is pretty much the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat.

    It’s very possible that Microsoft would have taken the opportunity to boost Bing’s market share without the Google deal in place. Others have noted how much more Google is paying this time around than its previous search deal. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that a big part of Google’s strategic thinking is about keeping that part of its search market share. There are still a ton of people using Firefox, despite Chrome’s growing popularity.

    Peter Kasting, a software engineer and founding member of Google’s Chrome team, who also designed and built Chrome’s omnibox (the address bar that lets you conduct a search), takes issue with this whole “funding a competitor” mentality, insisting that rather, Google is funding a “partner”.

    He posted a rant about this on Google+ (h/t: 9to5Google), where he said:

    People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end.

    But that was not the end. He continued:

    So it’s very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they’re spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla’s commitment to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater increases in the rate at which the web advanced.

    Nor was that the end of the post, but that pretty much covers the meat and potatoes.

    Apparently a lot of people went on to criticize Kasting’s post and general mentality, basically implying that he’s living in a fantasy land, though browsing through the comments on the post, I see a fair amount of support for his points, or belief at least. Even tech columnist MG Siegler, who’s post in particular was the catalyst for Kasting’s rant, said, “We’re not saying opposing things at all, I totally buy all of this. But there are a few other sides which can’t be ignored.”

    In a follow up post, Kasting went off on another rant about people’s perception of him being “hopelessly naive and idealistic.” In that one, he says:

    Let me be clear: I’m not denying that Google makes money, or claiming that isn’t a factor in decisions. But the “realists” (as multiple people proudly declared themselves to be yesterday) are so busy patting themselves on the back for “seeing through” Google’s actions to expose what they think is the short-term, exploitative focus driving everything that they completely miss the possibility that people in for-profit corporations can actually care about humanity, the world, ethics, doing the right thing, or hell, even long-term strategic planning. You don’t have to be an idealist to see why, for a company that benefits when people use the web, making the web better is a good long-term move; or why a company that wants its users’ trust and loyalty would benefit from not secretly spying on everything they do.

    What do you think? Is Google’s main motivation simply making the web better?

  • Did Bing Win The 2011 Rivalry With Google Despite Market Share?

    According to recent numbers from comScore, Google sites controlled 65.4% of core search share in November in the U.S. Yahoo sites controlled 15.1%, and Microsoft sites controlled 15%. With Bing powering Yahoo search on the back-end, let’s call that about 30% for Bing. Less than half of Google’s share. That’s pretty close to how it was at the beginning of 2011.

    Can Bing ever compete with Google in search market share? Tell us what you think.

    ComputerWorld has an interesting article citing a couple of analysts who think Bing won the search rivalry in 2011, though acknowledging that the market share hasn’t changed much over the year.

    Microsoft’s winning of the rivalry, is said to be in terms of overall growth and strategic moves. The strategic moves highlighted in the piece are mainly deals with Facebook and Twitter, which Google does not have. Google used to have a deal with Twitter but that went away earlier this year.

    Google’s lack of the Twitter firehose, has resulted in its lack of realtime search, and while the company has indicated the feature would come back, more supported by Google+ (and other sources), it still seems pretty clear that Twitter is a much better indicator of what’s going on in real time than Google+ (though recent numbers suggest some pretty impressive growth for Google+).

    My gut tells me that most people missing this feature from Google are more likely to turn to Twitter itself than to Bing, but I could be wrong.

    Both Google and Microsoft appear to agree that social is an increasingly significant factor for ranking content. This is one main factor of Google+, let’s not forget. Google introduced the +1 button to influence search even before launching the larger Google+ product.

    For all of the success Google+ has had in its early stages, it’s no Twitter in terms of readily available real-time, public updates, and it’s no Facebook in terms of size and breadth of users. Google would love for it to be both, and who knows? Maybe one day it can be, but that day is looking to be a while away at this point.

    Of course Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and others) all have the potential to show search engines how good other web content is.

    “Today it’s much easier to see the accumulated results of ‘likes’ and ‘tweets’ as they pile up the numbers, indicating a kind of popularity,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester in a recent blog post discussing the importance of social to search. “Even those new to a topic can see that an article with 100,000 likes must have something going for it.”

    “And while the obvious, visual signals of this popularity may come and go in the SERP results, the effect of those gains in exposure certainly can influence how an item ranks,” says Forrester. “Given no other signals for a new piece of content, a strong social signal can help your item get noticed and possibly take an early lead in rankings, allowing other signals to accumulate and either support or refute the assigned rankings. That’s right, just like a big hit of social exposure can help you rank, a lackluster result can leave us wondering if you should be ranking.”

    “This doesn’t mean you need to panic if every tweet or post doesn’t suddenly go viral,” he notes. “There’s also the long term effect of interacting with your followers, the links they spread on your behalf, the consistency you show and so on. And let’s not forget that there are still a ton of other factors to weight in before you’re ranked, so don’t sweat the slow starters.”

    But back to the rivaly between Google and Bing. Google just secured a major (and expensive) deal with Mozilla to remain the default search on Firefox. If Microsoft had made the deal instead of Google, it could have been a huge boost for Bing’s market share, and a big score in that rivalry, but Google was willing to plunk down, reportedly, close to a billion dollars to stay on Firefox, while also basically keeping a competitor in the browser market alive. Google’s own Chrome, by the way, is doing pretty well in that department.

    Google still has to deal with regulatory scrutiny over competitive practices in search – scrutiny that Microsoft is heavily pushing for. What comes of this remains to be seen in its entirety, and the results could impact search market share in the end. Maybe.

    Microsoft has its massively popular Xbox brand to help it in its Bing efforts, and I would expect the company to continue to leverage that brand power to help Bing more as time goes on. Xbox recently got a new application platform, which could be huge for all of that, while fueling the Xbox brand itself among the more casual gamers and non-gamer audiences. More potential Bing users.

    Bing is also pretty heavy into marketing Bing, though interestingly Google has gotten much more into marketing its products lately as well (particularly on TV).

    It’s going to be interesting to see if the market shifts in one way or another over the course of 2012. Will it or will it just be the same percentages this time next year?

    Do you think Bing can grow its market share significantly in 2012? Do you use Bing? If so, what has been the main factor influencing your choice? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google Flight Search Not Popular With Competitors

    Google Flight Search Not Popular With Competitors

    The holidays are obviously a big time of year for air travel, which means they’re also a big time of year for flight search. It seems only fitting that it is a good time for travel sites to complain about Google.

    OK, that pretty much goes on all year ‘round.

    Earlier this month, Google began showing its flight info (introduced back in September as the product of the company’s acquisition of ITA Software) right in regular search results for certain travel-related queries. Flight search was initially available via the left-hand navigation panel on Google searh result pages, but now these kinds of results are just the default search experience when Google thinks the users is looking for this kind of information.

    “For example, if you search for [flights from San Francisco to Las Vegas] you’ll see a table that shows available flights, including duration and prices,” explained Emmet Connolly, UX designer on Google’s Flight Search feature. “You can adjust dates on the page, or click any flight to further research and book your trip.”

    google flight search results

    A new Wall Street Journal report says that the “top travel websites,” rely on Google for 10% to 20% of their traffic, citing Compete data, and that these sites are being pushed down Google’s SERPs in favor of Google’s own Flight search info. Obviously, they’re not happy about this.

    There’s another interesting snippet from that report, talking about how Google said in talks with the Department of Justice around its ITA acquisition, that it would “build tools that drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites, and that competitors think Google is not living up to this promise. The report says:

    Google acknowledges it has failed to make good on assurances it would link to the travel sites, but the company says it had no choice. “The airlines told us that they would not give us [travel data] if we provided booking links to” online travel agencies, Jeremy Wertheimer, ITA’s founder and now a Google vice president, said at an online travel conference last month.

    It’s important to note that the DoJ did not require Google to link to the travel sites.

    Google has been in antitrust discussions with regulators throughout the year, and last week, Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee put together a letter calling for an FTC investigation of Google, with an emphasis on the company’s search results. You can read that here.

    Google paid $700 million to acquire ITA Software.

  • Google On Targeting Parts Of Your Site To Different Locations

    Google recently put out a new webmaster help video with Matt Cutts discussing how to target parts of a site to different locations.

    The exact question Matt addresses in the video is: “Webmaster tools allows site owners to specify a geo location for targeting. How can this be done for multiple locations?”

    “It turns out there’s a very easy way to do it,” says Cutts. “If you have a domain, you can add, for example, sub-domains or sub-directories as separate sites in Webmaster Tools.”

    “And then once you have those added as separate sites, you can geo-locate or geo-target those individually,” he adds.

    Watch the video for the rest of his explanation.

  • 2011: Year Of The (Google) Panda

    2011: Year Of The (Google) Panda

    Perhaps the biggest story line in Internet search this year has been the ongoing saga of the Google Panda Update. Let’s recap, and look ahead to next year.

    Has Panda been the most significant thing to happen in search this year to you? If not, what was? Let us know in the comments.

    At the beginning of the year, there was a lot of attention being payed to the quality of Google’s search results, as the content farm movement was reaching a high search result saturation point. There was also a lot of criticism. Eventually, Google finally took action. It launched in February (globally in April), and initially earned the nickname “Farmer” update. I believe this was coined by Danny Sullivan. Then Google came out and let the world know what its real name was: Panda, named after a Google engineer that goes by Panda.

    “He was one of the key guys,” explained Google’s Amit Singhal in an interview with Wired in early March. “He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible.”

    So, whether you think Panda has been a great thing for search, or it has ruined your life and/or business, I guess you have this guy to thank. Though, I’m sure if he didn’t come up with it, someone else at Google would have come up with something similar. The criticism was getting pretty strong, and Google can’t afford to lose users due to poor search quality. Though Google does many, many other things and offers many products that people use on a daily basis, search and advertising are still Google’s bread and butter, and Google’s quality has still kept it high above competitors in search market share.

    We’ve probably posted close to a hundred Panda-related article at WebProNews this year, if you count the ones leading up to it, about content farms and their effects on search, and the ones about the update before it actually came to be known as Panda. I could probably turn them into a book if I wanted, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but let’s go through some highlights.

    Google “Panda” Algorithm Update – What’s Known & What’s Possible was an early look at some things that were evident, and what people were speculating about what might be hurting them with the Panda update. There were a lot of good comments on this one too, for further discussion.

    Suite101, was one of the sites hit hard by Panda. In that Wired interview, Matt Cutts actually mentioned them by name, saying, “I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.”

    Suite101 CEO Peter Berger responded with an open letter to Cutts. You can read it in its entirety here, but it concluded with:

    Another level of depth may be added to this discussion if the word “quality” were more fully defined. “Quality” without much more precisely defining it, especially when the quality mentioned does only seem to be a quality signal relating to a given search query, leaves a lot still misunderstood…

    HubPages, which eventually had some recovery success attributed to the use of sub-domains, noted a lack of consistency on how Google viewed quality. According to CEO Paul Edmondson, some of the site’s best content had dropped in rankings, while others went up.

    Dani Horowitz of DaniWeb, which recovered, dropped, and recovered again, shared some interesting stories with us about how some of her most relevant stuff stopped ranking where it should have, while other less relevant pieces of content (to their respective queries) were ranking higher.

    Google, however, has always acknowledged that “no algorithm is perfect.”

    Panda hit a lot more than content farms, and sites that in that vein. E-commerce sites were hit. Coupon sites were hit. Affiliate sites were hit. Video, news, blogs and porn sites did well (at least initially).

    Oh yeah, Google’s own properties didn’t too bad either, though some of its competitors did well also.

    There was a lot of surprise when Demand Media’s eHow wasn’t hit by the Panda update, as this was essentially known as the posterchild for content farms, but that didn’t last. In a future interation, eHow eventually got hit, which led to the company deleting 300,000 eHow articles and launching a content clean-up initiatve. Yahoo just did something similar with its Associated Content this month.

    Eventually Google simply put out a list of questions that all sites should consider when thinking about creating “quality” content. The moral of the story is that, no matter what kind of site you have, if you heavily consider these things, you should have a better chance of beating the Panda update, because you’ll be creating good, trustworthy content. Those questions were:

    • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
    • Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
    • Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
    • Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
    • Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
    • Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
    • Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
    • Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
    • How much quality control is done on content?
    • Does the article describe both sides of a story?
    • Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
    • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
    • Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
    • For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
    • Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
    • Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
    • Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
    • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
    • Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
    • Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
    • Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
    • Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
    • Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

    Other fun Panda nuggets:

    Panda reference in Google Earth Day Doodle

    Google Panda Update Gets Animated (And Kind of Weird)

    Google Panda Update: A Delicious Set of Resources

    Google tells you exactly where to let them know when you’ve been hit by Panda

    Hitler Not a Fan of the Google Panda Update

    Panda Bread: The Ultimate Treat For The Panda Enthusiast

    So here we are, almost through with 2011, and we’ve seen numerous iterations of the Panda update. We’ll continue to see more next year most likely. Google has said flat out, that it is done with them for the rest of 2011 though.

    In 2012, we can look forward to not only more Panda updates, but more focus on “above the fold” content from the sound of it, and who knows what else Google will have up its sleeve. The most important things to remember are that Google makes algorithm changes every day (over 500 a year), and there are over 200 signals the algorithm uses to determine rankings. Any of these signals or tweaks can help or hurt you. Stay on top of what Google is doing, and keep a focus on quality, and you should be fine. Remember, if you want Google’s RESPECT, you better RESPECT Google.

    Panda has affected a lot of websites. It’s cost people jobs, forced companies to rethink their content strategies, and even inspired people to offer rewards for help recovering.

    You can view all of our Panda coverage from throughout the year for more details, advice, case studies, parodies, and just about anything Panda-related that came up.

    Has Panda improved Google or hurt it? Let us know what you think.

  • Best Google Doodles of 2011

    Best Google Doodles of 2011

    When you think about it, Google Doodles are some of the most-viewed artwork around. The basic formula is simple: Take a significant event for the date in question and spell “Google” in an artistic but (mostly) still recognizable fashion. But Google has a knack for these little Doodles, and people just eat them up.

    And there have been some pretty great Doodles in 2011. Of course everyone has a different opinion on which Doodles are the best, just like folks have a difference of opinion on any sort of artwork. That obviously means that this “best of” list is nowhere near objective – these are definitely my opinions (and remember, I’m American!). Having said that, I think that the following list is a fairly comprehensive list of some of the better attempts this year.

    So let’s get to it (in no particular order):

    Google honored the 164th birthday of the great American inventor Thomas Edison. The Doodle was animated, featuring a telegraph machine that types out “G” in morse code as well as a glowing light bulb.

    The 183rd birthday of the author Jules Verne was celebrated with an interactive Doodle that allowed users to navigate 20,000 leagues under the sea. You can play around with it in full view HD here.

    Charlie Chaplin’s birthday got some special treatment, as Google unveiled a short video of a Chaplin-lookalike interacting with a Google logo.

    Google honored the 226th birthday of “Birds of America” author John James Audubon with one of the prettier Doodles of the year. It was also one of the most abstract, as much of the lettering is a little tough to make out.

    One of my favorite offerings of 2011 was the set of Roger Hargreaves Doodles. The “Mr. Happy” and “Little Miss Sunshine” author received 16 different Doodles, portraying various characters from his beloved children’s books. See them all in the video below:

    The now famous Les Paul Google Doodle allowed you to not only interact with a guitar, but record your songs as well. This led to numerous YouTube videos of people playing famous songs using the playable Doodle, and it turned out to be a major productivity killer. This Doodle was probably the most popular one of the entire year.

    Legendary humorist Mark Twain received a massive Doodle fit for widescreen. The Doodle portrayed a few instances from a famous scene from his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Why do the work when you can trick other into doing it for you?

    Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham received one of the most buzzed-about Doodles of the year. The animated Doodle takes us through five famous dances from her career – and is truly a pleasure to watch.

    Another abstract Doodle comes from Turkey’s National Sovereignty and Children’s Day. Toys are aligned to form the subtle resemblance of the famous Google logo.

    This Doodle for Jordan Independence Day is just beautiful:

    The Freddie Mercury Google Doodle needs no description. Just pure, unadulterated awesome.

    Another wonderful interactive Doodle celebrated Gumby creator Art Clokey. The Doodle featured all the favorite characters from The Gumby Show – The first “G” is a block, and the first “O” morphs into Gumby’s nemeses, the Blockheads. The second “O” turns into Prickle, the yellow dinosaur. The second “G” is Goo, a flying blue mermaid. The “L” is Gumby himself and the final “E” is his sidekick Pokey the pony.

    A recent Doodle that ran in Switzerland, Austria and Germany honored the 83rd birthday of Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His unmistakeable design is seen in the Doodle, which highlights some of his most famous architectural accomplishments.

    What were your favorite Doodles of 2011? I’m sure I overlooked some great ones – so call me on it. Did I make any egregious omissions? Let us know in the comments.

    [Lead image is the Jim Henson Doodle]

  • Google’s Advice For Testing Your Site

    Google’s Advice For Testing Your Site

    This week, Google put out a post on the Webmaster Central Blog, discussing user research and testing for your website. More importantly, how to do so without having to spend a lot of money.

    While I’d certainly encourage you to read the post in its entirety, there’s a section specifically about “simple” testing, and this is basically a set of tips that pretty much anyone can do. Google’s tips for this are as follows:

    • Sample size: Just five people can be a large enough number of users to find common problems in your layouts and navigation (see Jakob Nielsen’s article on why using a small sample size is sufficient).
    • Choosing your testers: A range of different technical ability can be useful, but be sure to only focus on trends—for example, if more than 50% of your testers have the same usability issue, it’s likely a real problem—rather than individual issues encountered.
    • Testing location: If possible, visit the user in their home and watch how they use the site—observe how he/she normally navigates the web when relaxed and in their natural environment. Remote testing is also a possibility if you can’t make it in person—we’ve heard that Google+ hangouts can be used effectively for this (find out more about using Google+ hangouts).
    • How to test: Based on your site’s goals, define 4 or 5 simple tasks to do on your website, and let the user try to complete the tasks. Ask your testers to speak aloud so you can better understand their experiences and thought processes.
    • What to test: Basic prototypes in clickable image or document format (for example, PDF) or HTML can be used to test the basic interactions, without having to build out a full site for testing. This way, you can test out different options for navigation and layouts to see how they perform before implementing them.
    • What not to test: Focus on functionality rather than graphic design elements; viewpoints are often subjective. You would only get useful feedback on design from quantitative testing with large (200+) numbers of users (unless, for example, the colors you use on your site make the content unreadable, which would be good feedback!). One format for getting some useful feedback on the design can be to offer 5-6 descriptive keywords and ask your user to choose the most representative ones.

    Google calls this simple testing the most useful for actually seeing how your site’s fucntionality is working.

    Indeed, fresh perspectives that aren’t so close to the site can be incredibly useful.

    The post has various other tips worth considering.

    Keep in mind that Google is all about user experience, and considers this stuff greatly in search rankings.

  • Google Rich Snippets: Take Better Advantage Of Them

    Google has put out a series of videos to help you better take advantage of their rich snippet offerings. Doing so can help your content stand out in search results, and inspire more clicks and search traffic.

    In an increasingly difficult SEO landscape, anything that can accomplish that has got to be worth doing (within the rules). Here’s the entire series embedded for your educational enjoyment:

    And here’s a bonus video from last year from Matt Cutts, talking about how long it takes for rich snippets to appear:

  • How Can Google Help Your Website in 2012?

    How Can Google Help Your Website in 2012?

    Google uses Google+ probably more than anyone else out there (except for maybe Robert Scoble), and regardless of whether or not you have added it to your daily social networking routine, it continues to provide a great channel for getting to know Google better.

    That doesn’t just go for helping your search rankings (which it can), but it provides a direct line of communication with many, many Googlers. It’s a great place to get advice from Google, and to share feedback. And it’s not just empty feedback. They’re actively participating in meaningful conversations with users, and have shown that they are taking ideas into consideration (for example, see recent Gmail integration).

    This week, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller posted the following in a Google+ update:

    “Google has tried a lot of new things this year when it comes to webmaster support — such as the hangouts in a variety of languages. Which parts do you all think we should work on next year? How can we make it easier for you all to make awesome websites, which are easily findable in web-search?”

    “More hangouts? videos? more documentation? more detailed examples?”

    This seems like a good opportunity to not only to raise this question ourselves with our readers, but to spread the question further, because you can actually participate in this conversation and possibly have an impact on future Google offerings, which can in turn benefit your site in the long run, and after a crazy year of algorithm changes, I’m sure many of you are looking for any leg up possible.

    Google has already been hosting a slew of webmaster hangouts on Google+, and if you haven’t been taking advantage of this, why not? You are getting free access to some advice right from the horse’s mouth.

    If you read WebProNews regularly, you should also know that Google puts out a lot of webmaster videos, generally starring Matt Cutts. We cover them fairly frequently, because they’re generally full of helpful knowledge for webmasters. Even when they contain things you already knew, sometimes it helps to be reminded of certain things, or Cutts might present the topic in a slightly different light than you looked at it before. It’s a good idea to watch these videos.

    Here are some of the responses Mueller has received to his question so far:

    Thomas Morffew: More people like you John, that are real faces, and available to help.

    Sandip Dedhia: I agree with +Thomas Morffew, more Googlers who are open to speak about issues which webmasters are facing. In post panda era most of the replies on webmaster forum are so generic that it is hard to make out what is the exact cause of penalty or search traffic drop.

    I would suggest some case studies around those websites who managed to recover from different penalties, like the reasons of penalty and steps they took to recover from that penalty.

    Ramon Somoza: Certainly some assistance for multilingual sites would a great help.

    Lincoln Jaeger: There could be more direct interaction going on through the webmasters console, with regards to flagging up issues, for example.

    Bret Sutherland: When will Google shopping/product search get staff who are open and responsive?

    Do you agree with any of these commenters? Have other ideas?

  • Blekko Gets Search Index Update, Redesign

    Blekko announced an update to the search index, a site re-design and the addition of automated slashtags to over 500 categories.

    “That means users will get the benefit of curated search results (i.e. no spam!) for over 500 search categories, regardless of whether or not they manually append a slashtag to their query,” Blekko says in a blog post.

    “As we head into 2012, our mission at blekko is more important than ever,” Blekko says. “If you think about it, prior to the internet the newspaper was the offline equivalent of the search engine. It was the starting spot where people went to get their news, job listings, personals, movies listings, classifieds, etc. Competing editorial voices were a hallmark of competition in the newspaper business and readers benefited because they had choice.”

    They point to searches for “how to clean gutters” and “good table manners” to show off their new indexing.

    Blekko

    Then, they suggest trying out their 3 Engine Monte tool, which lets you compare results with Bing and Google.

    Blekko says it purposefully biases its index away from sites with low quality content, and that it’s source-based rather than link-based. “We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low quality content. “Regardless of how many people link to healthspamsite.com, we believe sites like the Mayo Clinic, NIH.gov, etc. are better sites. On blekko, brands trump links,” Blekko says.

    Blekko secured a $30 million round of funding in September, which CEO Rich Skrenta told WebProNews the company would be used to expand and grow the service through hiring, infrastructure ,marketing, etc.

  • Google Launches Search Cartoon Caption Challenge

    Google announced the launch of a search caption challenge. The challenge is to come up with the most creative captions for a series of cartoons where characters are searching Google. It’s as simple as that.

    “Cartoon caption contests have a long history dating back at least to the 1930s, as can be seen in this example I found from Ballyhoo magazine,” explains Google VP of Engineering and Cartoons Udi Manber. “For our modern version, we worked with artists like Matthew Diffee, Emily Flake, Christoph Niemann, Danny Shanahan and Jim Woodring, who created cartoons that place characters in unusual, interesting and funny situations—all with a common twist. In each cartoon, one of the characters is doing a Google search. We’ve left it to you to imagine what they’d be searching for at that moment, and left the caption blank for you to fill in with your answer.”

    There are 23 of them to choose from. Here are a few samples:

    Google search caption

    Google search captions

    Google search captions

    You can find them at Google’s Inside Search site, where you can submit your captions.

    Your caption will appear on the site, and you can share it with friends with a unique link. At the site, users are also encouraged to vote for their favorite submissions.

  • Google Mozilla Deal Renewed To Keep Google Default Search In Firefox

    The future of Google’s relationship with Mozilla was called into question earlier this month. It looked like the deal might not get renewed, which brought about some speculation that Microsoft could jump in and pick up some easy search market share for Bing. That could have been a very big deal for Bing, if all of that had played out.

    Now, you can forget about all of that. It’s not happening. Google and Mozilla have renewed their deal.

    Mozilla has posted the following message on its blog:

    We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

    “Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

    “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

    The specific terms of this commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.

    Well, at least Firefox can still use Bing if they want. In fact, Mozilla even has a special version of Firefox for “Bing enthusiasts.”

    At the beginning of the month, a report came out indicating that Google Chrome had overtaken Firefox in users.

  • Is Google Hurting Free Market Competition?

    Is Google Hurting Free Market Competition?

    Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee have put together a letter calling for an FTC investigation of Google, with an emphasis on the company’s search results.

    Do you think Google is anticompetitive? Let us know in the comments.

    Here’s the letter in its entirety:

    Google FTC Letter 12 19 11

    Note that the letter refers to Bing as “a partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo”. And that this is the only competition Google has. I’m not sure this is an accurate portrayal of the search industry. Bing is not a partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo. It’s Microsoft’s search engine. They are separate. Sure, they do have a partnership, and Bing powers the back-end of Yahoo, but they are still two different search engines. Granted, they are sharing an advertising platform now. Furthermore, there are other search engines out there, though their market share isn’t nearly as great.

    Newer kinds of search engines have popped up in recent memory. Blekko and DuckDuckGo spring immediately to mind. Just because people aren’t using them as much as Google, doesn’t mean they aren’t free to compete. They aren’t being used nearly as much as Bing either. Bing has proven that marketing a search engine and making strategic partnerships can go a long way in gaining market share in the search industry.

    The reality of the Internet and the search industry is much broader than competition among search engines. The fact is that people are obtaining information in a lot more ways now. They’re relying on search less for some of that. They’re turning to social media and different apps. A lot of iPhone users may be turning to Siri now. That’s just an example. Smartphones and tablets have opened up the world to a whole new world of apps for consuming information online. That itself could be just as big of an obstacle for Bing as anything.

    For that matter, it could be a benefit for Bing if they play their cards right. If people have to rely on the traditional search engine less for some types of information consumption, perhaps there are opportunities for Microsoft to innovate more in the app world. I do believe the direction they’re going with Xbox and Kinect can have some pretty big ramifications. I wonder what a Bing-infused Xbox mobile device could accomplish for their share of the search market. Getting Xbox Live features on mobile devices is a start, but what about something more like what Sony is doing with the Playstation Vita, only Xbox style, taking advantage of the new Xbox platform.

    A representative for the FairSearch Coalition sent us these comments on the letter from Rick Rule, head of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division from 1985-1989, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, and outside counsel to Microsoft:

    Senator Lee is right to call for careful scrutiny of Google, given the numerous allegations of antitrust violations by the company. The antitrust laws of this country prohibit companies like Google that dominate important parts of our economy from using their market power to destroy competition and to deny consumers of choice. Decisions from conservative courts make clear that the antitrust laws apply just as much to the new economy as to the old. If a company like Google is allowed to flout the rule of law, then free-market competition will suffer.

    Senator Lee’s letter to the FTC shows that the Senator understands that promoting sound antitrust law enforcement is an important bulwark against the inevitable calls for regulation. Senator Lee’s letter is in line with the views of conservative judges and free-market heroes, like Judge Bork and Judge Posner.

    I too am a conservative who believes in the supremacy of free markets. I worked for President Reagan as the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. We understood then, as Senator Lee understands today, that in order for free-market competition to work, consumers and producers must be able to respond to the market’s “invisible hand” free from artificial restraints imposed by government, by cartels, or by monopolists like Google. The troubling allegations that Google uses its market power to impose such restraints are too numerous to ignore. As Senator Lee’s letter demonstrates, conservative principles demand that Google be held accountable to the rule of law.

    They also sent us these comments from Mark Corallo, former Press Secretary and then Public Affairs Director for the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General John Ashcroft (2002-2005). He’s currently a spokesman for FairSearch:

    Senators Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT) sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz requesting that the FTC conduct an investigation into Google’s business practices. They should be applauded. The rule of law is non-partisan. And that is all they are requesting of the FTC – make sure that Google is following the law.

    Considering the grilling they gave Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Senate hearing back in September, the news is not that these two Senators have concerns relating to Google’s leveraging its market dominance in anti-competitive and potentially illegal ways. The news is that the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Antitrust Subcommittee put it in writing and asked for action. When two senators not only agree on an issue but are willing to do something about it, the seismic tremors can be felt from the halls of the FTC right on up to Google’s executive suites. And that’s nothing compared to the shockwave that Google’s multimillion dollar lobbying team is feeling from all sides – after all, they’re paid to cut off these types of legitimate inquiries.

    Citing testimony from their September 21 hearing, Senator Kohl and Senator Lee rightly raised several issues of concern that merit investigation. Among those concerns are:

    Erik Schmidt’s admission that Google has a dominant position in the search market: “I would agree, Senator, we’re in that area”;

    The dramatic changes in Google’s business model from delivering search results based on popularity to steering users to its ever increasing Google-owned Internet properties;

    The suppression of natural search results in favor of Google links; and

    The damage to competition and innovation that is the lifeblood of the internet economy and inevitably the American economy.

    The Senators ended the letter rging the FTC to take a closer look:

    “We believe these allegations rgarding Google’s search engine practices raise important competition issues. W are committed to ensuring that consumers benefit from robust competition in oline search and that the Internet remains the source of much free-market
    innovation. We therefore urge the FTC to investigate the issues raised at our sbcommittee hearing to determine whether Google’s actions violate antitrust law or substantially harm consumers or competition in this vital industry.”

    My translation for the layman: “How can we trust Google?

    FairSearch’s official statement is as follows:

    FairSearch.org applauds Senators Kohl and Lee for urging the Federal Trade Commission to conduct “a thorough investigation” of allegations that Google’s business practices leverage the company’s monopoly power in ways that are contrary to antitrust law. This bipartisan letter validates the many concerns held by the members of FairSearch.org and thousands of other companies about the impact Google’s anticompetitive behavior has on innovation and consumer choice. We agree with the Senate Antitrust Subcommitee leadership’s conclusion that, given the inconsistent testimony of Eric Schmidt and the concerns raised by witnesses like Yelp and Nextag, Google can no longer simply be trusted to not abuse its dominant position in online search. We continue to encourage the FTC, along with state Attorneys General and the European Commission, to respond to the Senators’ call to investigate, as antitrust scrutiny is vital to ensuring consumers reap the benefits of robust competition and innovation in online search.

    In October, FairSearch released a 44-page paper about Google’s “anticompetitive conduct”.

    In June, Google put out a blog post discussing five principles that “will stand up” to scrutiny related to competition:

    1. Do what’s best for the user. We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience. Not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.

    2. Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. Today, when you type “weather in Chicago” or “how many feet in a mile” into our search box, you get the answers directly—often before you hit “enter”. And we’re always trying to figure out new ways to answer even more complicated questions just as clearly and quickly. Advertisements offer useful information, too, which is why we also work hard to ensure that our ads are relevant to you.

    3. Label advertisements clearly. Google always distinguishes advertisements from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and new types of content, we will continue to be transparent about what is an ad and what isn’t.

    4. Be transparent. We share more information about how our rankings work than any other search engine, through our Webmaster Central site, blog, diagnostic tools,support forum, and YouTube. We also give advertisers detailed information about the ad auction and tips to improve their ad quality scores. We’ve recently introduced even more transparency tools, announcing a major change to our algorithm, providing morenotice when a website is demoted due to spam violations, and giving advertisers new information about ads that break our rules.

    5. Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. We want you to stay with us because we’re innovating and making our products better—not because you’re locked in.

    And of course, Google always like to play the “competition is only a click away” card.

    That’s a valid point though, is it not? Tell us what you think.

    Related reading:

    Google Panda Update: Antitrust Connections Being Tossed Around

    Google Could Face Massive Fine Over Antitrust Complaint in Europe

    Google Antitrust Complaint Filed With FTC

    FairSearch Releases 44-Page Paper About Google’s “Anticompetitive Conduct”

    Google: Here’s Who Doesn’t Think We’re Anticompetitive

    FairSearch Blasts Google with “Searchville” Site

    Google to FTC: These 5 Principles Will Stand Up To Your Scrutiny

  • According To Bing, 46% Of Men Plan To Dress Like George Clooney For New Year’s

    Bing recently put out its list of top searches for 2011. Now, they’re sharing results from a survey about what people thought about 2011, as well as the year ahead.

    This is a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults. See if you can spot the silly results.

    – 65 percent of 18-24 year olds were positive about 2011 and are hoping for much of the same in the New Year.

    – 76 percent of 45-54 year olds said that it was a hard year and they’re hoping 2012 will be better.

    – Losing weight is the top New Year’s resolution for 35% of men

    – Same for 47% of women

    – 32% of respondents don’t plan to make a New Year’s resolution at all

    – 44% plan to spend New Year’s Eve at the beach, in the mountains, or somewhere away from the crowds.

    – 34% indicated that tablets are the number one piece of technology they would like to buy in 2012

    – 24% said a 3-D TV.

    – 35% said they’d like to spend New Year’s Eve with Sandra Bullock when asked about which celebrity they’d likd to do so with.

    – 14% said Katy Perry

    – 12% said Prince Harry

    – 46% of men will be guiding their New Year’s Eve fashion choices baed on “George Clooney’s classic style.”

    – 33% of women will be basing theirs on Pippa Middleton.

    – 26% plan to mirror their New Year’s resolution diets after Jennifer Lopez.

    I’m just going to stop there.

    Something tells me that this survey is not incredibly indicative of society as a whole, as much as I’d like to believe that nearly half of all men plan to dress like George Clooney on New Year’s Eve.

    Image Credit: http://cooltattoopictures.co.uk/ (Man dressed as George Clooney’s character from From Dusk Til Dawn)

  • Skyword Gets $6 Million Investment From Cox

    Skyword Gets $6 Million Investment From Cox

    Update:Following the publication of this piece, we were reached by Skyword, who appears to take exception to being linked to the “content farm” label. I think people have somewhat different ideas of what the term means. Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt has stated publicly, for example, that the company does not (and did not) run a content farm, Yet, this is the first company many people think of when they hear the word.

    Anyhow, here is what Skyword CEO Tom Gerace tells us about Skyword. He says it is not a platform for content farming, but…

    It is quite the opposite – we allow high quality content producers to compete with content farms by efficiently producing quality content that is optimized for search and the social web.

    I guess in this case, quality is the differentiator. He continued:

    Skyword operates a content production platform that is used by some of the best recognized media companies and brands to produce their digital content. In most cases, Skyword clients (which include The Wall Street Journal Digital, education.com, ImpreMedia) use Skyword to manage their own editors and writers. In other cases, Skyword assists with writer recruitment and management as well as editorial services.

    Skyword’s platform integrates with client CMS systems, allowing Skyword clients to manage their content production, optimize their content for search and the social web and track the performance of their content in reaching and engaging audiences. Skyword analytics then allow their clients to better understand what content their customers are consuming to improve the performance of their content over time.

    Original Article: Skyword announced that it has raised $6 million through an investment from Cox Media, indicating that companies still see value in the content farm model.

    Skyword has been labeled a content farm, but it is a bit different than a lot of the other sites commonly referred to as such. It doesn’t flood the search engines with pages from Skyword.com or its own properties.

    Skyword labels itself “The Leader in Search-driven media”. It’s actually more a platform for “content farming” than a content farm itself. Rather, it pairs its writers with brands who need content. Here’s what it tells writers:

    Writers, use your talent and creativity as a Skywriter to create content for the websites of leading consumer brands and media companies. Learn the latest digital media skills, including cutting edge methods to drive traffic to their content from search and the social web. Expand your resume and build your online writing portfolio by contributing to some of the top brands and media sites on the web. Apply to become a Skywriter where you can share your perspective on popular topics or current news events across a variety of writing programs.

    Here’s what it tells brands:

    Brands and media companies spend $18B annually on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to reach consumers when they search. By creating quality content that matches consumer search queries precisely, we help enable brands to reach the same searchers on the exact same searches through natural search—at half the price.

    Skyword for brands

    “Brands are becoming publishers at an increasing rate, with many making moves into the digital publishing space for the first time. The investment from Cox Media Group positions Skyword to capitalize on the continued growth of the $41B content marketing space, while further enhancing our ability to deliver strong results to our customers while they create exceptional content for theirs,” said Skyword CEO Tom Gerace.

    “Cox is very excited to be investing in Skyword. Our hope is that our long history and their entrepreneurial spirit will make for a great combination and we will both learn more about this rapidly evolving market,” said Cox EVP Alex Taylor. “Skyword’s unique digital content platform allows brands and media companies to not only reach their customers directly with quality content, but to also interact with them like never before. Most importantly, their leadership team is passionate and impressive, and I know they will make a big impact on their customers.”

    In addition to the Cox investment, an undisclosed representative from Cox will join the Skyword Board of Directors, which is currently made up of Jim Manzi, former CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and current chairman of Thermo Fisher, Former Senator Bill Bradley, currently of Allen & Company, Bill Kling, founder and President Emeritus of American Public Media Group, and Gerace.

  • Bing Catching Up To Yahoo

    Bing may already be powering Yahoo search, but it is still behind in terms of where people are actually searching from. That may soon change, however (at least in the U.S.).

    comScore has released its monthly U.S. Search Engine Rankings report, and it shows Microsoft sites gaining on Yahoo sites. In terms of explicit core searches, Microsoft is right on Yahoo’s tail.

    Search Share

    Search Share

    In terms of total core search queries, it’s not quite as close, but again, the gap is narrowing.

    Search Share

    Search Share

    It goes without saying that Google is still the frontrunner in both categories by a pretty wide margin.

  • Beyond Google Zeitgeist: A Lot Of Local Searching

    Google released its annual Zeitgeist this week. We covered this here, but here’s a video reminder:

    Today, Google Director of Product Management Johanna Wright took to the official blog to point out how popular local searches have been. “Looking at these lists, I was surprised to see that, from city to city, almost all the terms across all the lists were related to local news, education, civic services or entertainment and activities,” she says. “I wanted to take a minute to take a deeper dive into these specific local trends that you won’t see published in Zeitgeist.”

    These local trends?

    “In nearly every single U.S. city we looked at, the top ten local terms showed that people were using Google to find local news stations and learn more about educational organizations,” she says. “Searches for school districts, universities and local libraries made the list in ten states, from the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis, MN to the Chicago Public Library in Illinois.Pittsburgh, PA was the most media-hungry city in Zeitgeist this year, with all of their top 5 terms related to local news stations, while in New York City and Houston, TX, no news sources made the top ten lists.”

    Another key trend was regional differences within states. 40% of terms for Orlando, FL, for example, were related to education, but in Miami, no education-related terms whatsoever made the list.

    Other major trends seen in different cities included heavy searching for local civic services, local unemployment and job-related queries. Other local-related trends in heavy searching included lotteries, amusement parks, sports teams, etc.

    The point Wright is trying to make, as best as I can tell, is that Google is an important tool for people looking for local information. I think that was pretty obvious already, but seeing the trends laid out does kind of emphasize this point.

    Why do you think Google keeps making all of these local-related acquisitions? Recent examples would be Clever Sense and Zagat. This is another reason why a Google acquisition of Foursquare might not bee too far fetched.

  • Google+ Search Results: Now You Can Filter By Location

    Google just added a new search feature to Google+ that allows you to filter search results by location. And here’s how you do it:

    First, perform a search within Google+. It could be anything – from sunsets, to football, to food and more. Once you reach the results page, click the “from everywhere” tab at the top of the results. There, just enter a city or a zip code to filter.

    The location filter does a good job of targeting the specific areas that you want to browse. It pulls in surrounding areas as well – for instance, a search for “Food” in “Los Angeles” fetches results from the cities of Pasadena and Long Beach (both in Los Angeles County).

    Here’s what it looks like in action, as you’ll see a search for football narrowed down to “Green Bay” shows a top post of a pic from Lambeau Field.

    Of course, for a post to appear in the location-specific search results, the user will have had to tag the post with a location. This, at least initially, is leading to the location filters bringing up a lot of Google place check-ins.

    This search update is part of Google’s #seasonforshipping, an initiative they announced earlier this week where they plan to “ship new improvements to Google+ every single day”

  • Google Gets Better At Crawling Smartphone Content

    Google Gets Better At Crawling Smartphone Content

    Google announced some improvements for how it indexes smartphone content in mobile search. Googlebot-Mobile will now crawl with a smartphone user-agent in addition to its previous feature phone user-agents.

    This, the company says, will allow it to increase its coverage of smartphone content, which means a better search experience for smartphone users.

    “The content crawled by smartphone Googlebot-Mobile will be used primarily to improve the user experience on mobile search,” explains software engineer Yoshikiyo Kato. “For example, the new crawler may discover content specifically optimized to be browsed on smartphones as well as smartphone-specific redirects.”

    “One new feature we’re also launching that uses these signals is Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages,” adds Kato. “When we discover a URL in our search results that redirects smartphone users to another URL serving smartphone-optimized content, we change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the final destination URL. This removes the extra latency the redirect introduces leading to a saving of 0.5-1 seconds on average when visiting landing page for such search results.”

    Google stresses that webmaster should treat each Googlebot-Mobile request as they would a human user with the same phone user-agent. Google references a blog post from the Webmaster Central blog earlier this year about making sites more mobile friendly.

    In that, Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far wrote, “To decide which content to serve, assess which content your website has that best serves the phone(s) in the User-agent string.”

    The new smartphone user-agent strings are as follows:

    Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

  • Google Authorship Clicks And Impressions Added To Webmaster Tools

    We know that who you are is more important in Google now. Google has been pushing authorship markup for months. This ties you, as an author of content, to your Google Profile, which is linked to from a picture of you that appears next to your content in Google search results.

    Google has been clear about aiming to turn this into a ranking factor, if it isn’t already. It gives Google more information about the credibility of a piece of content. If it knows more about who wrote it, it can keep that in perspective. We don’t know how big a role this plays, exactly, but given the emphasis Google has been placing on the concept in recent months, you’d probably do well to put some emphasis of your own on it.

    Google announced the launch of author stats in Webmaster Tools. These show how often content is showing up – by author – on Google search results pages, allowing you to track clicks and impressions.

    “If you associate your content with your Google Profile either viae-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page,” writes software engineer Javier Tordable on the Google Inside Search blog.

    The image at the top is what Matt Cutts would see here.

    @mattcutts
    Matt Cutts    I love Google’s new “author stats” feature: http://t.co/E5DO9MK8 Shows you helpful info without extra noise. 10 hours ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    To see your own, you can log into Webmaster Tools with the same name you use for your Google Profile, and go to “author stats” under “labs” on the left-hand side.

    Keep in mind that being under the “labs” label means it is still in its experimental stage, so there is the possibility that there are bugs.

    For more on setting up your authorship, read these articles.