WebProNews

Tag: Search

  • Google +1 Button for Websites Coming June 1

    Google +1 Button for Websites Coming June 1

    Just as Twitter has launched its “follow” button, another social button is on the way tomorrow. That would be the Google +1 button, which was announced two months ago, and could have a significant impact on search rankings for websites.

    Apparently the PR company of one of Google’s launch partners, Clearspring, wrote TechCrunch an email, saying, “I understand that Google planned to reach out to you about the new Google +1 button for websites that they’ll be unveiling shortly. I thought you might be interested in speaking with Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, about the company’s role as a launch partner for Google +1.”

    Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land says he’s confirmed with Google that it is indeed launching the +1 button for websites tomorrow. If you’re unfamiliar with the button, this video will basically get you up to speed:

    Google has said flat out that the button will be used as a ranking signal.

    What remains to be seen is how well the button will be adopted by users. It will be adopted by publishers, no question. Anything that might help draw an increase in search rankings and traffic will be used heavily. Will readers and searchers care enough to use it to any great extent? Who knows? Users click the Facebook “like” button because they actually like content or because they want to show their friends, who are on Facebook. When the goal is to suggest that the content may show up in someone’s search query, I have to wonder how much the average user will care. I guess we’ll see. And soon.

    Here are some questions that remain. Either way, you may be making some slight design adjustments for new buttons this week.

  • Bing Maps Streetside View Comes with Some New Views

    Bing has launched some changes to its Bing Maps street imagery with Streetside View. “With these updates you can quickly and seamlessly pan the neighborhood, check out a business down the block, or make a ‘u-turn’ to cross the street, among other things,” a Bing representative tells WebProNews “So whether you need to see a straight, flat area in New York, or a steep, winding road in San Francisco, your online mapping experience is more immersive than ever.”

    “These changes represent a significant enhancement for desktop browsers, enabling you to quickly pan up and down the street to see the neighborhood and find businesses,” explains Bing’s Chris Pendleton. “We are doing this by providing street level panoramas so you can take a virtual walk through the streets with a view of locations and landmarks. As you slide the street level imagery sideways, the view of the sidewalk is seamlessly constructed including an overlay of business listings, street names and store fronts.”

    “In the past you explored Streetside imagery by navigating between ‘bubbles,’ or discrete 360 degree views, and moving down the street was accomplished by jumping from bubble to bubble. This works, but makes it difficult for you to get a sense for a larger area like a city block. Moreover, it’s hard to pick out storefronts farther away since you really only see the ones directly perpendicular to your viewpoint with great clarity,” says Pendleton. “This new style, on the other hand, keeps the immersive experience but adds smooth left/right panning navigation that makes it easy to find what’s nearby more quickly. The street flows by as a series of smooth ground-level photographs so now you simply pan up and down the street to see the neighborhood and find what you are looking for.”

    @stefanweitz
    Stefan Weitz    Get up close and personal with that gyro shop – new BIng Maps view: http://binged.it/lIrJDq 4 hours ago via Seesmic Web · powered by @socialditto

    The street map remains above the imagery, so if you get lost in your streetside journey, you shouldn’t have much trouble figuring out where you are. Below the imagery, you will also see an overlay of the names of businesses and bus stops.

  • DaniWeb Forum Hurt By Google Panda. Why?

    DaniWeb Forum Hurt By Google Panda. Why?

    If you feel your site was wrongfully hit by Google’s Panda update, there might be hope for you yet. We recently looked at a couple sites who have seen some minor recovery since being hit hard by the update, and since then, we’ve spoken with Dani Horowitz, who runs the IT discussion forum DaniWeb (one of those sites) about what she’s been doing to get back into Google’s good graces.

    Should forum content rank well in Google search results when relevant? Comment here.

    DaniWeb’s US traffic went from about 90,000 visitors per day down to about 40,000 per day after the update, she tells WebProNews. This sent her into “complete panic mode”.

    “I just went into crazy programmer SEO mode, just removing duplicate content and things like that,” she says. She thinks duplicate content may have been a big factor, but duplicate content and its relationship to backlinks, specifically.

    “We syndicate our RSS feeds, and there are a lot of websites out there that syndicate our content, duplicate our feeds legitimately…they just take our RSS feeds and they syndicate that,” she explains,noting that many of these sites were linking back to DaniWeb.

    “My hypothesis right now is that Google Panda figured out all these sites are really content farms – are really just syndicators, and we just lost half our backlinks,” she says. “So I think it might not necessarily be that Google is penalizing us for being a content farm, but that Google is penalizing all the content farms that are syndicating our content, effectively diminishing the value of half of our backlinks.”

    What DaniWeb Has Done to Aid Recovery

    First off, she says she entirely redid the site’s URL structure. The actual URL of every single page has changed, Horowitz says.

    She removed tag clouds, which were at the bottom of every single page, saying that Google frowns upon these because they can look like keyword stuffing. “What I went and did was made my tag clouds actually populate via javascript in such a way that it actually improves page load time for the end user because they’re no cache, except Google can’t actually spider the actual tag cloud pages, because I added them to the robots.txt file.”

    It’s been established that Google takes page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, so certainly this could only help (though it does make you question Google’s whole philosophy of “creating pages for users and not for search engines”). In fact, Horowitz recently showed the correlation of pages Google was indexing with the improvements in page load time:

    Pages Crawled vs load time from daniweb

    Horowitz says she added a robots.txt to all search results pages, because Google also frowns upon actually having search-like pages in its index. Google wants to be the search engine itself, and point to the content – not to other search results.

    She made heavy use of nofollow and noindex tags. “Basically what I did was I took hundreds of thousands of pages out of Google’s index from our domain, but hopefully the advantage being beneficial to the end users…”

    Specifically, she noindexed forum posts with with no replies, hoping that Google will recrawl, and start indexing them after they do get replies. She notes that this is simply an experiment.

    Finally, she made the Facebook and retweet buttons more prominent. Clearly, Google is moving more and more toward social as an indication of relevancy, so this can’t hurt either.

    Horowitz notes that it is entirely possible that the uptick in post-Panda traffic might also be related to other updates Google has implemented since the Panda update. They make changes on a daily basis, and it could simply be that DaniWeb was positively impacted by a different tweak.

    Forums and Their Value to Search Results

    With the Panda update being all about the quality of search results and the content they deliver, we asked Dani about her thoughts on the value that forums have in this department.

    “Forums are in my opinion the best way to get content online, and to get the answers to questions that people want online, where you have not just a single publisher or an editor and team of staff writers, but actually [are] able to poll the entire Internet and [are] able to get expertise from anyone who has it,” she says. “I definitely think that forums are growing. They’re not going to end anytime soon,” she adds, noting that they may change in format.

    “It is a double-edged sword, because you have all this great content that’s contributed by the people who know the content best – know the answers best – as opposed to being limited by a team of staff writers, but the flip side is you have people who are not talking in 100% U.S. English, and you have people that don’t have correct grammar, and you have spelling mistakes,” she continues. “So now, we’re leaving it up to Google’s algorithm to try to figure out which…if someone is querying Google…which page has the correct answer. Is it the page that is written by some staff writer that doesn’t necessarily have a complete interest in the topic, but does have a three-paragraph/five-paragraph article that’s written in full-sentence English or is it written by someone who’s a complete expert in the topic, and knows everything…but maybe isn’t a native English speaker and is writing in broken english with lots of spelling and grammar mistakes. It’s hard to have an algorithm try to figure out which is the better result to show.”

    Google did include the question, “Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?” in its recently released list of “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article”.

    Better Google Results?

    When asked if she thinks Google’s results are better now, she told us that the rankings for DaniWeb content have gotten a bit weird. She says that they were ranking for “round robin algorithm” (a computer science term that would make sense in terms of DaniWeb’s content) before the Panda update, but not after the update. Meanwhile, DaniWeb started ranking for the odd keyword “rectangle” after the update (though this was no longer the case after she posted about it in the Google Webmaster forum).

    “Before Panda, we were ranking number one for some really great articles that were very relevant,” she says. “Post Panda all of our number one rankings for all of these great articles went down, but we started ranking for some really weird stuff.”

    She also noted that her experience searching with Bing “sucked”.

    Recovery?

    To be clear, it’s not as if DaniWeb has experienced a full recovery since the uptick in traffic began. “We’re still nowhere near where we were before,” she says. “We’re still down nearly 50% but literally we just stopped the bleeding, and there’s [been] a very small improvement week after week the past three or four weeks, but if nothing else, it’s not going down anymore…”

    She’s still looking at other things that can be done, and concentrating on building backlinks – trying to create great linkbait.

    Do you think DaniWeb should have lost Google rankings? Tell us what you think.

  • Human Content Creation Still Safe For The Time Being

    An article at Harvard Business Review takes an interesting look at “seven things human editors do that algorithms don’t (yet).” They boil down to: anticipation, risk-taking, the whole picture, pairing, social importance, mind-blowingness, and trust.

    Clearly there’s still room for humans on the web. In search, that’s good news for Blekko, which brings the old human-edited approach back into the mix of an industry that has largely been dominated by the algorithm for the last decade, though the jury’s still out on whether it will ever be as effective as Google.

    In terms of content creation, we’ve already seen the beginnings of what the algorithm can do. Look at Demand Media’s business model (at least for the content portion) – it’s largely algorithm based, though it still uses humans to write and edit the content.

    The future content farm may be a different story though. We’ve also seen the absence of human intervention in content creation. Look at what Narrative Science is doing. The company, run by a former DoubleClick executive, describes itself in the following manner:

    “We tell the story behind the data. Our technology identifies trends and angles within large data sources and automatically creates compelling copy. We can build upon stories, providing deeper context around particular subjects over time. Every story is generated entirely from scratch and is always unique. Our technology can be applied to a broad range of content categories and we’re branching into new areas every day.” 

    Look at what IBM has been able to accomplish through machine learning with its robot Watson. How long until a bunch of Watsons are creating content for the web (and creating other Watsons, for that matter)?

    The good news is it might still be a while before robots replace us all. Back to the points made in the Harvard Business Review, by Eli Pariser, he notes that algorithms aren’t yet good at predicting future news, to the extent that humans are.

    As far as risk-taking, “Chris Dixon, the co-founder of personalization site Hunch, calls this “‘he Chipotle problem,’ he writes. “As it turns out, if you are designing a where-to-eat recommendation algorithm, it’s hard to avoid sending most people to Chipotle most of the time. People like Chipotle, there are lots of them around, and while it never blows anyone’s mind, it’s a consistent three-to-four-star experience. Because of the way many personalization and recommendation algorithms are designed, they’ll tend to be conservative in this way — those five-star experiences are harder to predict, and they sometimes end up ones. Yet, of course, they’re the experiences we remember.”

    Would you trust content created by algorithms or do you put your trust in humans?

  • Google Launches Flight Search Feature (Not Powered by ITA)

    Google is now showing which airlines serve particular routes in search results. Google will of course be getting much more into the flight search game now that it has closed the ITA Software acquisition.

    The company says it is “eager to begin developing new flight search tools”. This particular one, however, does not utilize ITA’s technology.

    Here’s the kind of thing you might see in Google results now:

    Google Does Flight Search

    “For example, if you search for [flights from san francisco to minneapolis], you’ll see a selection of non-stop flights and the airlines that offer them,” explains software engineer Petter Wedum on Google’s Inside Search blog.”

    Users can click on “schedule of non-stop flights” to see all flights.

    “You can also see all the destinations with non-stop flights from a particular airport,” says Wedum. “If you’re in Buffalo, New York and need ideas for a weekend getaway, search for [flights from buffalo] to see popular travel destinations from Buffalo.

    Users can click “Show all non-stop routes,” to get a full list of destinations, and then you can find further flight details.

    The feature is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Catalan.

  • The Latest On Panda Straight From Google

    The Latest On Panda Straight From Google

    Google’s Matt Cutts engaged in a live chat with webmasters on YouTube, and had some things to say about the Panda update.

    Barry Schwartz posted the above video, capturing a Panda-related segment of the chat, in which Cutts discusses the update.

    “It came from the search quality team,” he says. “It didn’t come from the web spam team, so web spam engineers have been collaborating with search quality folks on it since the initial launch, but it originated from the search quality team, and it’s just an algorithmic change that TENDS to rank lower quality sites lower, which allows higher quality sites to rank higher, so it’s not a penalty, and I talked about how algorithms are re-computed, so there’s been no manual exceptions.”

    “I don’t expect us to have any manual exceptions to Panda,” he says. “This is something where the signal is computed, and then when the signal is re-computed, if the sites are slightly different, then that can change the sites that are affected, and we’re going to keep iterating.”

    “So we’ve had Panda version 1 in February and Panda version 2 in April I believe, and…possibly March…and that started to use blocking of sites along with some other signals,” he continues. “And then we’ve had smaller amounts of iterations…”

    Referring to before the update came about, he says, “We had heard a lot of complaints. We’ve been working on it even before we’d heard a lot of the complaints to try and make sure that lower quality sites were not ranking as highly in Google search results.”

    He then mentions the list of questions Google released a few weeks ago for content providers to ask themselves about their own content quality. The list, he says, “Helps to step into the Google mindset and how we think about these sorts of things.”

    In the talk, Cutts mentioned that the update will still roll out internationally in other languages in time, “maybe in the next couple months”. So far, it’s been launched globally, but only in the English language.

  • Google Correlate Launched – Google Trends in Reverse

    Google just launched a new Google Labs product called Google Correlate, which looks at search trends, and attempts to apply them to real-world situations. The official description for Google Correlate is as follows:

    Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

    It uses search activity data to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series – the results of which can be viewed on the Google Correlate site (or downloaded as a CSV file).

    “Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse,” Google says on an FAQ page. “With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a data series of activity (over time or in each US state). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern.”

    Google Correlate

    Users can upload their own data sets. When you upload one, (by US State or Time Series), Gogole Correlate will compute the “Pearson Correlation Coefficient” between your time series and the frequency time series for every query in its database.

    Google provides a tutorial on how to use it here. There’s also a whitepaper.

    Google suggests the time series data can be used to find things like what search terms are more popular in the winter, more likely to be issued in 2005, match the pattern of actual flu activity, etc. The state data can be used for things like what terms correlate with the state’s latitude, the annual rainfall in the state, being in New England, etc.

    Interestingly the Labs experiment has its own Labs section, which so far only consists of one thing: search by drawing. It’s pretty cool. You can simply draw a pattern on the graph, and it will give you web search activity that closely matches the pattern you drew. I drew some random pattern, and Google found that it closely resembled US web activity for media player 10 codecs, for example.

    Google Correlate Drawing

    Google says the data for Google Correlate is available from January 2003 to the present, with data being updated on a weekly basis.

  • Google Panda Update Gets Animated (And Kind of Weird)

    Google Panda Update Gets Animated (And Kind of Weird)

    I stumbled across the above video today, uploaded by a HubPages author. HubPages, as you may know, was one of the sites hit hard by Google’s Panda update, and its CEO Paul Edmondson has been rather vocal about the update since it hit. Recently, he wrote a piece about it, bringing Google’s competitive practices into the conversation.

    He has also compared HubPages content strategy to that of Google’s own YouTube, questioning why they were treated so differently. Interestingly enough, between the initial U.S. launch of the Panda update and the global launch, a Googler wrote a guest post on the HubPages blog talking about how to write quality content for AdSense.

    The video, which was uploaded by Paul Michael Willis, carries the following description:

    Parody cartoon of Google Panda Algorithm attack on online content farm writers to shut them down and improve for Online retailers and Advertisers.

    Here is its companion piece at HubPages.

    Thanks to YouTube’s suggestions, this other animated video about the Panda update was also brought to my attention. This one is slightly more amusing, though that’s mostly due to the use of robot voice to convey sexual arousal (ok, and the fact that sexual arousal even enters the equation in a video about the Google Panda update). The description on this one, uploaded by YouTube user Jmgrp, says:

    Google’s recent Farmer update slammed down content farms like e-how, Demand Media, and eZine Articles. Of these many farmer boys, one goes to Google to meet in a therapeutic setting. Google SEO answers the many questions on the Farmer Update to the Google algorithm. This is a spoof video, people. A spoof. Any simularity to content real or imagined is just that, imagined. Not real. Repetitive. Farmer update, farmer update. Farmer update.

    This one was uploaded in early March. I believe this is back before the “Panda” name was revealed, and som were referring to the update as the “Farmer” update, in relation to its dealing with content farms.

    I don’t expect that you’ll see these videos get the acclaim of the Next Media Animation videos, but I don find it fascinating that people would actually take the time to create animated spoof videos about a Google algorithm update.

  • Matt Cutts Explains Porn Sites and PageRank

    A Google Webmaster video released today aims to answer the burning question surrounding porn sites’ lower PageRank.

    The question asked of Google’s Matt Cutts was as follows:

    What are the technical reasons porn sites have such low PageRank? None go over PR6. A lack of links from trusted sites? Rampant link exchanges with low quality sites? Penalties for affiliate links? Or is there a general penalty on the industry? Studio 3X, New York

    Matt Cutts says that his best guess is that it has to do with popularity vs. links. Google doesn’t have some sort of anti-porn rule, its just that PageRank looks at the number of links and the quality of those links to a site, not really the popularity of the site.

    He says, “People very rarely link to porn sites, even though a lot of people visit a lot of porn sites.” If PageRank equaled popularity, then porn sites’ PageRank would be right at the top.

    Watch the whole webmaster video below:

  • Windows Phone Mango Brings New Search Elements to the Table

    Microsoft revealed the next version of its Windows Phone mobile operating system today. The release is going by the code name “Mango,” and it includes hundreds of new features, according to the company.

    “When we looked ahead to the next release, we wanted to stay true to the principles of Windows Phone 7 – that software should get out of your way and quickly connect you to the things that matter most,” said Greg Sullivan, senior product manager of mobile communications at Microsoft. “Mango builds on the work that we did in Windows Phone 7 and extends a lot of key scenarios around communications, apps, and Internet experiences – with even more capability and a deeper level of integration.”

    The OS comes with an interesting “App Connect” feature that connects apps to search results and is designed to surface app “when and where they make sense.”

    A user can search Bing for a movie, for example, and the search results deliver things like show times and theater locations, but App Connect may add functionality from the Fandango app that lets you purchsae the ticket right from there.

    “It’s like having a great butler or a valet that you’ve known for 30 years who can anticipate your every need instead you doing all the work yourself,” Sullivan said. “Windows Phone stitches all of this together for you and connects the applications you have on your phone, or that we have in the marketplace, to the rest of what you’re doing, in a way that’s much, much deeper than any other platform. So you can go from Binging to buying in seconds.”

    The OS also comes with a “People Hub,” which puts together contacts from various ways you may connect with people: Facebook, Twiter, Email, LinkedIn, and Windows Live Messenger. “Our friends are people – they’re not apps,” Sullivan said. “Mango makes it super easy to put people first then lets users chose the way they want to communicate.”

    Other interesting search elements Mango brings to the table include:

  • Local Scout prioritizes hyper-local search results based on user preferences and recommends the closest restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy-to-use guide.
  • Visual search enables users to initiate a Bing search by photographing barcodes, QR codes and Microsoft Tags (without using a third-party app).
  • Music search allows users to search Bing and get detailed information about music (like song title, artist and album title) by simply holding the phone up to a speaker.

    • How well all of these features actually work remains to be seen, but it all sounds pretty good in theory.

    More features are discussed here.

    Al Hilwa, Program Director for Applications Development Software at IDC tells WebProNews, “Much is heard about what Microsoft is not doing right or how far behind it is in mobile. Behind in the market it is for sure, but what we have seen and are seeing from the Windows Phone team is the kind of stuff needed to win in the big ecosystem battle. The market is moving fast and it appears like there is no time to catch up, but in reality, we are entering a decade-long transition in devices that will turn software models around like tumbleweed, and it is important for the players to take their time and think through their strategies.”

    “Microsoft’s biggest weakness appears to be the lack of tablets, but in reality, even the fast market responses to tablets from the Android world have so far let the iPad continue to walk-way unchallenged,” he adds. “Microsoft appears to be making its bets in the tablet space with its big-guns, namely the full Windows Ecosystem. Windows 8 is the opening salvo, which we are likely to hear about in the fall.”

    “The Nokia deal changes the game and puts Windows Phone on the map, we are all waiting for the first phones. To win, they have to address low-end and high-end phones early. For Mango, I like the larger language and geo portfolio and the new OEMs on board with the platform,” says Hilwa.

    “If Windows Phone 7 attempted to match the state of the art of the year in 2010, we have seen in Mango the outlines of a release with features that finally begin to pull ahead of the competition.”

    “I like the integration of developer apps into many aspects of the phone, such as Hubs and Bing Search in the browser,” he says. “Mango also brings social networking and email features to new levels. I like the new email features like thread grouping, pinnable folders, server searching, IRM, etc…”

    Mobile is essential to the future success of Bing. Mango will extend Windows Phone’s global reach, so that should certainly help spread Bing use even more, in addition to the recent partnerships with Nokia and RIM.

    The new Windows Phone OS will be available in the fall.

  • EzineArticles CEO: Panda the Greatest Wake-Up Call Ever to Happen to Us

    EzineArticles CEO: Panda the Greatest Wake-Up Call Ever to Happen to Us

    In a recent article, we looked at some efforts by EzineArticles to get its users improving the quality of links in articles, which could in turn help the site perform better in Google. This wasn’t the way the topic was approached by EzineArticles itself, but as a site that was hit hard by the Panda update, it’s not hard to put the pieces together.

    CEO Chris Knight chimed in on the subject in the comments of the article. “We’re convinced that landing page quality scoring (something we’ve been doing for years) is as important to the trust relationship being built with our users as the content by itself,” Knight tells WebProNews.

    “Last month, we made a huge crack down by rejecting all content where the link in the resource box wasn’t relevant enough to the article topic (we call it a link-relevancy-rejection) and we’re continuing to sweep our history to isolate articles that were written about one topic and then link to a completely unrelated topic (this causes a trust violation with our users and therefore must be a practice that ends),” he adds “It was our fault for accepting this type of content because we had previously only focused on the quality merits of the article alone with only mechanical formatting QC on the links themselves. This is a new era though and what was ok last year, isn’t ok any more this year.”

    Chris Knight of EzineArticles Talks Impact of Google Algorithm Update“It makes sense that the bar should be raised so that when our users leave EzineArticles.com to surf your website, that you continue to deliver them a quality experience,” Knight says. “If our user hates your website because it’s an MFA or you’ve got multiple exit-pops or you’re an affiliate marketer with no intention to build an on-going relationship with your client base…this reflects poorly on us.”

    Knight also put a positive spin on the whole loss of search traffic thing – a survivor’s stance, if you will.

    “You’ve called us a ‘Panda victim’ but I see Panda as the greatest wakeup call that has ever happened to us,” he says. “No doubt we’d prefer to have been giving better guidance from Google, but over-time, the best sites with the best quality end-to-end user experience will rise up and I’m confident we’ll rebuild market trust.”

    After the Panda update first rolled out, EzineArticles announced it was reducing the number of article submissions accepted by over 10%, particularly articles that “are not unique enough”. The company also said it would no longer accept article submissions through a WordPress Plugin, that it would reduce the number of ads per page., that it would raise the minimum article word count to 400, that it would “raising the bar” on keyword density limits, that it would remove articles considered “thin and spammy”, and that it would put greater focus on rejection of advertorial articles.

    That was apparently just the beginning.

    “We’re a radically different company today because of the 125+ quality changes we’ve made in the past 2 months that normally would have been made over a longer period of time…and there’s several hundred more quality control mods on deck for both us and to help our members meet the new standards,” Knight tells us.

    Knight raised a fair point about monitor size and perception of ads, after we pointed out that the site was running articles with what seem like an excessive amount of ads, especially compared to the article’s content. We looked at this example, with not a great deal of article length, but with four Google ads at the very top, three above the content body, six other ads below it, two more Google ads below those ads, some “related” links, five more ads below those, then ten Google ads to the right.

    I had written that the ads on the right stretched a vertical length twice the amount of the body itself. “We did remove 40% of the ads above the article body (there used to be 5 ads above the body and now there are 3) but I get your point,” he said. “We’re also split-testing ad layout changes constantly via different segments.”

    “As for the example article you used, you must have a monitor and resolution that only a minority of our users have,” he added. “Majority of our users see an article body that is bigger than the ads because their resolution and monitor size isn’t as big as yours. In addition, lower word count articles have less ads. Our solution to your perception that our ad density is too high or wraps the length of the body (only on 24-30″ wide monitors running double the resolution that the majority of folks have or use) is to move to a fixed width layout.”

    He linked to a new layout template, and said, “And very soon, the article view template will have the new fixed width template plus several new major modifications to assist us with delivering a higher numerically-qualified positive user experience.”

    Either way, it seems like there are still quite a few ads on most of the articles I’ve looked at. In a list of “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article” recently released by Google, there is one that says, “Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

    As Knight said, EzineArticles has reduced the number of ads, and I believe articles used to have more ads within the article bodies, which they no longer do. Certainly a step in the right direction.


  • Google Panda Victim EzineArticles Calls on Users to Improve Link Quality

    Google Panda Victim EzineArticles Calls on Users to Improve Link Quality

    Since Google’s Panda update, we’ve been looking at a lot of the sites negatively impacted, as examples to learn from. Determining what these sites have been doing wrong can help us understand how other sites may be viewed in Google’s eyes.

    We’ve also been looking at what some of these sites have been doing to try and recover some of their lost search traffic. Some sites have indeed seen an uptick in search referrals, after being victimized by the update.

    EzineArticles has been one of the more widely-publicized victims of the update, and also one of the most vocal in terms of reaching out to its users in efforts to improve content. On the company blog, there have been numerous tips and guidelines discussed in recent months. This continues with a new post from a managing editor, who discusses landing page quality for article contributors.

    The editor lists a few “article rejection-worthy scenarios,” including: linking to a site unrelated to the article content, duplicating article content on landing pages, having more than one exit pop-up, having limited or poor user-navigation or forcing users to affiliate pages without transparent intent, and having a poor or unbalanced ad-to-content ratio.

    In terms of navigation, the editor specifically mentions slow-loading landing pages.

    While much of the guidance EzineArticles has been giving to users of late has been focused on the content that actually appears on EzineArticles itself, it is interesting to see them now turning focus to the content that EzineArticles is linking to.

    In other words, the goal is not only to improve the site’s content, but to improve the content that is being associated with it in the eyes of the search engines.

    Linking out to poor quality content is not good SEO. This isn’t new to Panda. It’s a pretty old, well-known element of the game. EzineArticles’ reminder of this to its users somewhat reflects a point we discussed in another recent article. Panda victims will do well not only to dwell on the Panda update specifically, but to get back to SEO basics.

    Remember, Google has over 200 signals, and just because your site may have gotten hit by the Panda update, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other SEO practices you couldn’t be doing better – practices that may have benefited you all along, pre and post Panda.

    The point about site speed is a valid one too. We know Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. We don’t know the weight of it (though DaniWeb has some interesting stats related to this). If Google views the landing page as a less quality page because of the page load time, it can’t help the article linking to that page either.

    So, if EzineArticles is able to get its users to take quality more seriously on their own sites, it could go a long way in helping Google’s perception of EzineArticles itself. Whether or not users will follow the advice and this will happen, remains to be seen.

    It’s worth noting that EzineArticles is still running some pretty ad-heavy content. At the time of this writing, this is the top article on the site. There are three Google ads above the content body, six ads directly below it, two Google ads below those ads, a bunch of “related” links below those, and five more ads below those. To the right of the article body there are ten Google ads, stretching a vertical length of about twice the amount of the body itself. Oh, and there are 4 more Google ads at the very top of the page, above the title. This seems to be the basic article template the site is running with.

  • Getting More Facebook Likes and Search Traffic

    Getting More Facebook Likes and Search Traffic

    Did you know there are small adjustments you can make to your use of Facebook’s Like buttons/social plugins that can have an incredible impact on your traffic?

    Facebook can provide a level of engagement between businesses and consumers that you simply didn’t see much before it was around. Naturally, as a result, Facebook has proven to be an indispensable marketing tool and driver of website traffic. Granted, the content has to be compelling, but you already know that.

    Is Facebook one of your main sources of traffic? Let us know.

    Getting Traffic from Facebook

    Danny Sullivan posted a slew of Facebook Like button/social plugin stats that came directly from Facebook itself. Here are a few of the stands-outs:

    – The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.

    – Users coming to the NHL.com from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.

    – ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The Huffington Post are said to have more than doubled their referral traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins.

    – Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button in April 2010 and has maintained those levels since.

    – Outdoor sporting goods retailer Giantnerd.com saw a 100% increase revenue from Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button.

    – American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors

    According to what Facebook told Sullivan, Like buttons get 3 – 5 times more clicks if versions that show thumbnails of friends are used, they allow people to add comments, they appear at both the top and the bottom of content, and they appear near visual content like videos or graphics. He looks at a specific example with Metacafe, which originally had a Like button at the bottom of its videos, but after adding one to the top in addition to it, tripled its number of daily likes and doubled its amount of referral traffic from Facebook.

    That’s a pretty huge impact from such a simple adjustment.

    Sullivan also references the recent Buddy Media report we covered last month, looking at Facebook’s EdgeRank (the basis for the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what shows up in users’ News Feeds), and how to optimize your Facebook activity to get seen in the News Feed more often, which is obviously going to help with traffic. Buddy Media, which in case you’re not familiar with, is a company that’s built a business out of creating Facebook tools for businesses, and counts major brands like Target, Johnson & Johnson, and ABC among its clients.

    In the report, they suggested brands do the following on their Facebook Pages to get in the News Feed more and boost their “EdgeRank”:

    1. Ask questions
    2. Post games and trivia
    3. Interact with fan engagement
    4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
    5. Incorporate relevant photos
    6. Relate to current events
    7. Incorporate videos
    8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
    9. Include links within posts
    10. Be explicit in your posts

    In terms of getting Facebook referrals, don’t forget about Facebook’s recently launched “send” button, which can drive really targeted traffic.

    Facebook Send Button
    Facebook and Search

    Clearly Facebook itself can be very powerful for driving traffic directly to your content, but it also has the potential to be pretty powerful indirectly through search. It looks like this will only increase as integration gets more mature.

    Of course Bing has ramped up its integration of Facebook. It’s displaying Likes in search results, where applicable. It’s showing actual sites your friends have “liked” (not just individual pieces of content). “Likes” are influencing search rankings in Bing on a personalized basis (and this is a powerful way to crack into the personalized SERP, which is no easy SEO task). Bing is using Facebook data to show “well-liked content” from sites across the web. It’s showing Facebook posts from brands when the brand is searched for. It’s letting users have conversations about some results with Facebook friends (mainly in travel for the time being). Bing has a feature that lets users share shopping lists with friends.

    Facebook Likes in Bing

    Bing uses Facebook in other ways, and will continue to add even more. Bing Director Stefan Weitz said in an interview with Inside Facebook, “It’s more than just Likes now. We think of people as having characteristics and attributes, not just actions. Now we’re considering what other meta data can we use that people will give us access to so we can continue to personalize search.”

    He says 80% of people delay making a purchase online until they can talk to a friend. I’m not entirely sure where he’s getting this information, but 80% is pretty high, and Facebook is the online destination where many, many people have the easiest access of the largest group of their true friends (and family).

    “Core search stuff has been taken care of by intelligent organization,” Weitz said. “But how do people sort through all the links and make a decision? You do all the research, but at the last minute you walk away from the purchase process because you’re not convinced until you get a social recommendation.”

    “Stuff that was previously in your brain is now in a format that machines can read. Friend connections are a new way of thinking about ranking search,” he said. “Meanwhile, humans are creating 5 billion gigabytes of data every two days, and machines are losing their ability to categorize it all. How can PageRank handle a Yfrog image? It probably doesn’t have a title, or caption, or anything else that could help index it. But if a friend Likes it, that’s important.”

    Then there’s Google.

    We’ve talked about Google’s lack of Facebook integration plenty of times, but that’s not to say Google doesn’t use Facebook data at all, and that a healthy Facebook presence can’t help you get more search referrals indirectly.

    In a discussion with Eric Enge, SEO vet Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz said, “Google and Bing both have data deals with Facebook. The Facebook growth team, which is their marketing team, was at SEOmoz a couple of weeks ago and we were talking in-depth. There was NDA stuff I can’t go into, but one thing they noted, that is public, is that Google gets considerably less data about the social graph from Facebook than Bing does. However, they get more than what is just in the open graph API.”

    The Open Graph API itself has some pretty valuable data at the personalized level. It would be very interesting to know more about that “NDA stuff”. Perhaps in time.

    “When you talk about signals, I think Google is able to see deeper into the social graph via Facebook data than any of us can test on our own. Many people have concern around abuse,” said Fishkin. “For example, what if I get ten thousand random people to go Like my page. There are probably very good signals about the authenticity of social sharing that Google is able to get through Facebook, and Bing maybe even more so.”

    While Google may have access to some amount of Facebook data, it is the lack of integration that really hurts it in the relevancy game. Even still, the data isn’t being totally ignored. You can actually look at your “social circle” in the Google Dashboard, and see the ways Google is connecting different people to you – depending on who your friends are, there is likely a fair amount of Facebook connections in the mix.

    For example, Google lists Michael McDonald as one of my “Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts”. It says it is getting his content from a few different sources, including Facebook – that’s because he has his Facebook connected to his Google Profile, and I am friends with him on Facebook. So, theoretically, if Google deems a search result for some query I enter to be relevant, and McDonald has interacted with that content through Facebook, it could show me that, and perhaps make me more likely to gravitate to that particular result, rather than another result on the page. The more Facebook interactions you can get, the better your chances of this happening with consumers would be.

    Google also includes data from Facebook in its realtime search, which is available to users as a search option via the left-panel or sometimes, when Google deems it appropriate, as its own snippet in the regular web SERP.

    If your content appears in Google News, it’s also possible that Facebook shares can help you get into the news snippets on the regular web SERPs when they appear. If you’ll notice that the stories appear here often display something like this “shared by 5+” That number appears to come from the same realtime search data, which includes Facebook. Theoretically, if you get more Facebook shares here, it can increase your chances of getting great SERP position. That’s shares from Facebook Pages, however, which is important to keep in mind.

    “We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links,” Google said late last year.

    Then, you have the simple fact that Facebook Pages tend to rank pretty well for brand searches. There’s a good chance that any consumer looking to engage with your brand will look to do so via a Facebook Page, as it offers a clear line of communication. If they “like” the Page while they’re on it, you obviously have a direct line to them anytime you have an update to post (provided you’re able to find your way into their News Feed). That may or may not be a link back to your site.

    It all starts with getting people to engage with your content and share it with their Facebook friends. Find compelling ways to get people to do this with the placement of buttons, and the promotion of your own Facebook presence. If you can do those two things effectively, you’ll be off to a good start. Then, it should simply be a matter of putting out stuff that people actually want to share and engage with.

    What are some ways you keep people engaged with your content via Facebook? Share here.

  • Sparkbuy Becomes Part of Google

    Google has acquired Sparkbuy, a laptop and TV comparison shopping site, for an undisclosed sum. Sparkbuy, which never even emerged from beta status, has discontinued operation as a site, but the three people who ran it will now be working for Google.

    The team, led by CEO Dan Shapiro, who is also on the boards of PhotoBucket, Bonanza (formerly Bonanzle), and WashingtonTechnology.org, posted the following message on the SparkBuy site:

    We are pleased as punch to announce that Sparkbuy has been acquired by Google.

    I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves.

    When we built Sparkbuy way back in the waning days of 2010, we wanted to make it really easy to find the gadget that’s perfect for your needs. Our idea was that you could combine huge piles of structured data with an intuitive interface, et voila: a few clicks to find the electronics widget with exactly the features you want.

    Have you tried to find a great laptop or TV recently? Crazy hard.

    But when people started actually using Sparkbuy, we started to see that the opportunity was bigger. In fact, it was much, much bigger. There are so many “crazy hard” search problems out there we know it could take ages for us to deliver what our customers are asking for. So when Google showed up and suggested we could work together to turbocharge our efforts, we just couldn’t pass it up.

    We’re stoked about the opportunity to share our vision for search with a broader audience. And while we won’t be offering services at sparkbuy.com any more, stay tuned for truckloads of new awesome from our team at Google.

    The other member of the team are Scott Haug and Isaac Myers.

    @shaug
    Scott Haug    at the google campus in mountain view. feels more like a university than a company. 16 hours ago via Twitter for Mac · powered by @socialditto

    @icelarctica
    Isaac Myers    Hah! Google Buys Seattle’s Sparkbuy to Improve Consumer Electronics Search http://t.co/9aRlID9 16 hours ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    Danny Sullivan says “a person familiar with the purchase” told him some of Sparkbuy’s user interface ideas will make their way into Google Product Search.

  • Are Some Sites Recovering From The Google Panda Update?

    Are Some Sites Recovering From The Google Panda Update?

    It would appear that some of the victims of Google’s Panda algorithm update are starting to see at least slight recoveries after using some elbow grease. A couple examples of sites that have gained some attention for upswings in traffic post-Panda, after getting hit hard by the update, are DaniWeb and One Way Furniture.

    Have you seen any recovery in search traffic since Panda hit? Let us know.

    DaniWeb Sees an Uptick in Traffic Post-Panda

    DaniWeb is an IT discussion community site. It’s a place where people can go to discuss issues related to hardware, software, software development, web development, Internet marketing, etc. This is exactly the kind of site that can actually provide great value to a searcher. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had some kind of frustrating software issue only to find the solution after a Google search pointing me to a discussion forum with people openly discussing the pros, cons, and merits of a given solution or idea. The very fact that it is a discussion forum means it is a potentially great place for different angles and ideas to any given topic, with the ongoing possibility of added value. More information means you can make better informed decisions.

    Sure, there is no guarantee that all of the information is good information, but that’s the beauty of discussion. There is often someone there to shoot down the bad. The point is, many searchers or search enthusiasts might take issue with a site like Daniweb being demoted in search because of an algorithm change that was designed to crack down on shallow and lesser-quality content.

    The good news for DaniWeb, and anybody that finds it to be a helpful resource, is that since being hit by the update it is starting to bounce back. To what extent remains to be seen. Time will tell, but Dani Horowtiz, who runs the site, recently revealed a Google analytics graph showing an upswing:

    Daniweb traffic Panda and Post-panda

    “The graph indicates a slight dip towards the end of February when just the US was affected by Panda, and then a huge dip when Panda went global,” she says. “However, you can see that over the past couple of weeks, traffic has been on the upswing, increasing day after day. We’re not yet near where we were before Panda, but there definitely is hope that we will get back there soon.”

    @DaniWeb
    Dani of DaniWeb.com    DaniWeb has recovered from Google Panda … Sorta http://bit.ly/liGYiT 3 days ago via twitterfeed · powered by @socialditto

    She is careful to note, “Many algorithm changes have already gone into effect between when Panda first was rolled out and today. Therefore, I can’t say without a doubt that our upswing is directly related to us being un-Pandalized in Google’s eyes and not due to another algorithm change that was released. In fact, in all honestly, that’s probably what it is.”

    Still, it should serve as a reminder that Panda isn’t everything. Google has over 200 ranking signals don’t forget.

    One Way Furniture Slowly Climbs Back Up

    If you’re a regular reader of WebProNews or have been following the Panda news, you may recall earlier this month when NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been feeling the wrath of the Panda, mainly due to its use of un-original product descriptions, which the e-commerce site was drawing from manufacturer listings.

    Internet Retailer Senior Editor Allison Enright spoke with One Way Furniture CEO Mitch Lieberman this week (hat tip to SEW), and he said that the site is slowly climbing back up in the search rankings. “It’s been extremely challenging, but exciting, too,” he is quoted as saying. “Even in a downturn like this, it is exciting to see the effects of what you are doing to get you back to where you were.”

    How They Are Doing It

    So great, these sites are evidently working their way back into Google’s good graces. How does that help you? Luckily, they’ve shared some information about the things they’ve been doing, which appear to have led to the new rise in traffic.

    “In a nutshell, I’ve worked on removing duplicate content, making use of the canonical tag and better use of 301 redirects, and adding the noindex meta tag to SERP-like pages and tag clouds,” says Horowtiz. “I’ve also done a lot of work on page load times. Interestingly enough, I’ve discovered that the number of pages crawled per day has NOT decreased in tandem with Panda (surprisingly), but it HAS been directly affected by our page load times.”

    Look at the correlation between DaniWeb’s pages crawled per day and time spent downloading a page:

    Pages Crawled vs load time from daniweb

    “I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks,” says Horowitz. “Like many other content sites out there, we are constantly scraped on a regular basis. A lot of other sites out there syndicate our RSS feeds. It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm [appropriately] hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

    According to Internet Retailer, Lieberman fired the the firm he was using to get inbound links before and hired a new one. He also hired some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being “friendly to search engines.” Enright writes:

    “For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly, Lieberman says. “We decided to change it all up,” he says. “What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.”

    …

    OneWayFurniture.com is also slimming down content that causes pages to load more slowly because this also affects how Google interprets the quality of a web page. “We’re focused on the basics, the structure of the site and on doing things that are not going to affect us negatively,” Lieberman says.

    More Things You Can Do to Recover from Panda

    In addition to the things dicussed by Horotwitz and Lieberman, there are plenty of other things to consider in your own SEO strategy that migjht just help you bounce back if you were negatively impacted by the Panda update.

    First off, simply check up on your basic SEO practices. Just because you got hit by the Panda update doens’t mean there aren’t other totally unrelated things you could be doing much better. Remember – over 200 signals. They’re not all Panda related.

    You should also keep up to date on future changes. Read Google’s webmaster blog and it’s new search blog. Follow Google’s search team on Twitter. Read the search blogs. Frequent the forums. Google makes changes every day. Stay in the loop. Something that has worked for years might suddenly stop working one day, and it might not get the kind of attention a major update like Panda gets.

    Panda doesn’t like thin content, so bulk it up. Dr. Peter J. Meyers, President of User Effect, lays out seven types of “thin” content and discusses how to fatten them up here.

    Some have simply been relying more heavily on professional SEO tools and services. SEOMoz Founder Rand Fishkin said in a recent interview with GeekWire, ““I can’t be sure about correlation-causation, but it seems like that’s [Panda] actually been a positive thing for us. The more Google talks about their ranking algorithm, how it changes how people have to keep up, the more people go and look for SEO information, and lots of times find us, which is a good thing.”

    You may need to increase your SEO budget. Like search strategist Jason Acidre says on Blogging Google at Technorati, “This just shows how imperative it is to treat SEO as a long-term and ongoing business investment, seeing that Google’s search algorithm is constantly improving its capability to return high-quality websites to be displayed as results to their users worldwide. As the biggest search engine in the world is requiring more quality content and natural web popularity from each website who desires to be on the top of their search results, it would certainly require quality-driven campaigns and massive fixes on their websites, which of course will necessitate them to upsize their budgets to acquire help from topnotch SEO professionals.”

    “Authority websites that were affected by this recent Google update are losing money by the day,” he adds. “They are in need of high quality service providers who can actually meet their needs, and in order to get the kind of quality that can be seen genuinely useful by both users and search engines, they’ll probably need to make a much expensive investment on content management and link development, as this campaign would require massive work and hours to really materialize.”

    Set up alerts for SEO elements of your site, so you’re constantly up to speed on just what’s going on. Arpana Tiwari, the Sr. SEO Manager of Become Inc. has some interesting ideas about this.

    We all know that Google loves local these days. Local content even appeared to benefit from the Panda update to some extent. If you have anything of value to offer in terms of local-based content, it might not be a bad idea to consider it. Obviously quality is still a major factor. The content must have value.

    Then of course there’s Google’s own “guidance”. Don’t forget the 23 questions Google laid out as “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article”.

    The silver lining here for Panda victims is that there is hope of recovering search visibility from Google. Nobody said it is going to be easy, and for a lot of the victims, it’s going to be harder than others. Let’s not discount the fact that many of the victims were victimized for a reason. Google’s goal is to improve quality, and much of what was negatively impacted was indeed very lackluster in that department.

    Serious businesses will continue to play by Google’s rules, because today, Google is still the top traffic source on the web. It’s simply a vital part of Internet marketing, and the Internet itself is a much more significant part of the marketing landscape than it has ever been before.

    Impacted by Panda? What are some things you’ve done to aid your recovery? Share in the comments.

  • Panda Effects? eHow Not Ranking for Likely Google Trend

    Panda Effects? eHow Not Ranking for Likely Google Trend

    Looking at Google Trends today, I noticed that the phrase “how to write a resume” made the list. I couldn’t help but wonder if Demand Media’s eHow was dominating the search results for the query, given the site’s general how-to nature and history of ranking well in Google.

    Demand Media recently revealed that its search referrals had dropped by 20% folloiwng the Panda update, but it has still been ranking in numerous areas. I have no idea if eHow was ranking for this particular query pre-Panda, but it’s hard for me to imagine that even if it wasn’t the top Google result it wasn’t somewhere on the first page. Just a hunch.

    Google Trends How to write a resume

    Even knowing about eHow’s Panda hit, I was surprised to find when visiting the SERP for the query that eHow was nowhere to be found on the first page. What I found was actually how-to-write-a-resume.org ranking at the top. I let some time pass (a couple hours or so) to tend to some other content before writing this, and page one has already changed, and now has a Mahalo article at the top. This is interesting in itself for a couple reasons. For one, I have to wonder why Mahalo suddenly jumped up there, while when I looked at the query before, it was ranking on page two or three. Secondly, Mahalo was another one of the big Panda victims.

    At the time of this writing, I’m not seeing an eHow result until lower page 5, and it even has the exac title, “How to Write a Resume”.

    If you search that on eHow’s site, you’ll find that they have numerous articles on the topic. I will say that Mahalo’s content in this particular case does seem to be somewhat “deeper”. Is it the best result for the query? Hard to say.

    Just a post-Panda observation.

  • Fame Trumps SEO in Battle of David Leonhardt Rankings

    All those of you with common first and last names like John Smith or Jessica Jones or Bob Johnson will appreciate how hard it is to rank for your personal brand – your name. There must be hundreds of people active on the Internet who share your name.

    And any reader with a name like Drew Barrymore or Larry Page… well, you know the chances you’ll ever rank well for your name.

    But perhaps the worst off are those with common first and last names who also share their name with a huge celebrity. Think Dan Brown or George Harrison or Megan Fox.

    David Leonhardt Posers

    Well, this is a personal story. If you search “David Leonhardt” right now, you will see there are three of us with the exact same name with a presence on the Internet. (Guess who the two imposters are.)

    When I first started on the Internet, the guy with the domain name ranked #1 – DavidLeonhardt.com ranked at the top for “David Leonhardt”. In fact, the David Leonhardt Jazz Group held several top-10 rankings, as he was in fact the original David Leonhardt active on the Internet.

    As I grew increasingly active, some pages related to me started to rank in Google’s top ten for my name. Yay!

    But another dude who writes for the New York Times was also getting active, so he also was breaking into the top 10 in a big way.

    This New York Times David Leonhardt was in fact causing problems for me offline, too. A friend saw his by-line in the Toronto Star (I think it was) and the topic was even related to my happiness book, and a friend thought it was my article.

    Even worse, my brother saw one of his articles in the Globe and Mail (I think it was) and again the topic was related to my happiness book. This time my brother thought it was my article.

    And just over a month ago, this New York Times guy who shares my name (never asked my permission, mind you) goes and wins himself the Pulitzer Prize for “Commentary”. Thanks a lot!

    As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am all over on the Internet, commenting on blogs, active in social media, building links, networking – you don’t get more active than me.

    And the winner is…

    So let’s take a look at what Google thinks of all of us David Leonhardts. This is a snapshot at the time of writing…

    1. New York Times writer
    2. New York Times writer
    3. New York Times writer
    4. New York Times writer
    5. New York Times writer
    6. Me
    7. Me
    8. Jazz Group
    9. Me
    10. New York Times writer

    What can we conclude by this case study?

    We know that the domain name is important, as is anchor text – and surely the David Leonhardt Jazz Group has plenty of inbound links with “David Leonhardt” in the link text. (I did not check, but I do know he owns a number of other name-related domains specifically for wedding performances, etc.)

    We also know that activity, inbound links, social media signals – all the stuff that I am doing just naturally every day (with a bit of SEO-savvy thrown in) are also important.

    But it appears fame trumps SEO. New York Times David has six out of ten positions, including the top five. I am holding my own, sort of, perhaps down just a bit from my peak a couple years ago (I think I had as many as five spots at one point, including the third place ranking). And the once dominant Jazz Group David risks being pushed off the top 10 completely.

    The lesson: If you want top rankings, get famous. Do things that win you real acclaim out in the real world, and Google will reward you on the Internet for your renown.

    Originally published at David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

  • Google To Use Phone Contacts in Social Efforts?

    Google To Use Phone Contacts in Social Efforts?

    Would you like to see your phone contacts become part of your Google social circle? It’s possible that this may be on the horizion. Google’s former CEO and current Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt talked about using phone contacts as part of the company’s social efforts in a London Evening Standard article. Here is the relevant snippet:

    What about Facebook as a competitor? Schmidt believes Google has a future in social networking – but of a different sort. “We are particularly good at search, advertising, maps, YouTube, navigation, other internet services. What we are doing is basically trying to get people to either give us or discover their ‘social graphs’ … A simple version of your social graph is your friends on Facebook – and an even more interesting list of your social graph is the people on your phone, right? By the way, who has the largest number of phones, smart phones?” He grins like a digital Cheshire cat. “Mm, we do.”

    Hat tip to Matt McGee, who brings up some privacy concerns related to this concept, saying, “Google has previously used personal contact information to try building a social graph. That happened during the Google Buzz launch, when Gmail contacts were automatically added to users’ Buzz network. That prompted immediately negative backlash in some quarters, not to mention a number of lawsuits and an eventual settlement with the FTC.”

    Google is certainly no stanger to government scrutiny, and it’s not hard to imagine something like this coming up with regards to phone contacts and Google’s use of them. Still, use of phone contacts from Android devices makes plenty of sense to me. Perhaps they should go about it in more of an opt-in way than they did with the Buzz launch, but people in your phone contacts are people (and businesses) you are connected with. As long as it’s done in a way that the use has control, I don’t see a problem with it. Many phones are already synching phone contacts to Facebook data anyway.

    Google is already using your Gmail contacts as part of your social circle, which it draws from in its delivery of social search results.

    Whether or not Google should still be considered a “search company” is debatable. On the one hand, search is at the core of most of the company’s efforts. On the other hand, the company has its hands in so many different cookie jars, to say it’s simply a “search company” seems to dilute the signifiance of this. “Search” has been eliminated as a product group within the company in favor of a “knowledge group,” according to a recent report from TechCrunch, though just the other day, Google launched its first official blog dedicated solely to search. Either way, it’s clear that Android is a very important part of Google’s strategy, and one that the company has put a great deal of resources into. It only makes sense that the company leverage this as much as possible to improve its core business.

    The lines between phone communication and communication through Google are already getting much blurrier anyway. Android users are searching on Google, and they already have click-to-call features. They use Gmail and various other Google products on their phones. Then there’s Google Voice. Google is already a large part of the phone equation for many people. This could end up being a powerful weapon in the company’s battle in the social space.

  • Google Search Suggestions Generate Controversy in Argentina

    Google Search Suggestions Generate Controversy in Argentina

    A court in Argentina granted an injunction filed by Argentinian Jewish organization DAIA to have Google block certain sites from its search suggestions in its Argentina search engine. The organization has deemed the sites to be anti-Semitic and offensive, and the court evidently agrees.

    CNN is reporting that Google is not changing anything until it gets an official order from the court.

    “The common denominator on these sites is the incitement of hate and the call to violence,” DAIA is quoted as saying. “In none of these cases are there discussions or criticisms from the academic, technological, political or philosophical perspectives.”

    Google says:

    “If you recently used Google to search for the word ‘Jew,’ you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

    …

    “Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

    According to CNN’s report, Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America. A report from comScore came out earlier this week looking at Google’s search market share in Latin America. Of the six markets the firm measured, Argentina had the lowest percentage of Google users at 89.4% (still pretty high).

    This is certainly not the first time Google’s search suggestions have generated some controversy. One example that comes to mind was about a year and a half ago when Alex Wilhelm at TheNextWeb discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion. With most major religions, you would get suggestions from Google when you typed queries like “christianity is” or “judaism is”. Google was not, however, showing any suggestions for “Islam is”.

    Not long after the story made the rounds, Google started showing suggestions for the query. The top suggestions were then “islam is bullshit,” “islam is false,” “islam is not a religion,” and “islam is a lie”.

    Google - Islam is...

    Testing it today, the top one is “islam is” followed by “islam is evil”.

    Testing the query “jew” from here, I am seeing “jewish,” “jewel,” and “jewish hospital”. It’s worth noting that suggestions (at least here in the U.S.) take location into account too.

  • Reasons Google Might Skip Your Canonical Tag

    Reasons Google Might Skip Your Canonical Tag

    This week, Google’s Matt Cutts has been discussing rel=canonical, providing some info that webmasters might find pretty helpful. “A user submitted a question to Matt, which said, “It takes longer for Google to find the rel=canonical pages but 301 redirects seem to lose impact (link juice) over time. Is there similar churn with rel=canonical?”

    He addressed this in the above video. Cutts’ response was to say that some people ask how much PageRank/link juice if they lose if they use a 301 redirect, and that they lose just a “tiny, little bit” or “not very much at all”.

    “If you don’t lose any, then there’d be some temptation for people to use 301 redirects for all the stuff on their site rather than links, since some amount of PageRank always sort of evaporates or disappears whenever you follow a link – people would say, ‘Oh, why use links and not just use 301 redirects for everything?’” he says.

    In regards to 301 redirects vs. rel=canonical, he says in general, he would use 301 redirects if you can, because they’re more widely supported, everyone knows about how to follow them, and any new search engine is going to have to handle those. Also, if you can have it work within your own CMS, he says, then the user’s browser gets carried along with the redirect.

    Cutts also took to his personal blog to discuss rel=canonical a bit more, and said that Google actually doesn’t use it all cases. “Okay, I sometimes get a question about whether Google will always use the url from rel=canonical as the preferred url. The answer is that we take rel=canonical urls as a strong hint, but in some cases we won’t use them,” he says.

    This applies to cases where Google thinks you’re “shooting yourself in the foot by accident,” like pointing it to a non-existent/404 page, or if they think your site has been hacked and the hacker added a malicious rel=canonical.

    Google will also not use rel=canonical if it is in the HTML body or if it sees “weird stuff” in the HEAD section of the HTML. “For example, if you start to insert regular text or other tags that we normally only see in the BODY of HTML into the HEAD of a document, we may assume that someone just forgot to close the HEAD section,” he says, suggesting that you make rel=canonical one of the first things (if not THE first thing) in your HEAD section.

    Here’s what Cutts had to say about the canonical tag when it was announced and WebProNews interviewed him about it a couple years ago:

  • Yahoo and Its Unfortunate Demise

    Yahoo and Its Unfortunate Demise

    What happened to Yahoo? The Internet company that used to be feared by the likes of Google and Microsoft is now said to be dying. Yahoo’s recent years have brought it a search deal with its longtime competitor Microsoft, multiple changes with management, massive layoffs, and the shut down of many properties.

    Is there one event that stands out in your mind that began Yahoo’s fall? Please share your thoughts.

    Sage Lewis of SageRock Digital Marketing Agency spoke to WebProNews after he wrote a compelling post about the death of Yahoo. He told us that, while he doesn’t blame the demise on a single event, the incident involving the Chinese reporter that was sentenced to prison after Yahoo turned over his email messages to the Chinese government disturbed him.

    When then-CEO Jerry Yang testified at the congressional hearings shortly after the China ordeal, Lewis said, at that point, he realized that Yahoo was “closed-down, vision-less, and cowardly.”

    As mentioned earlier, Yahoo has made extensive cuts in its talent pool and properties in order to focus on its “core strengths.” While most businesses can identify with this way of thinking, the circumstances surrounding Yahoo seem to be different. According to Lewis, successful Internet companies take risks, innovate, and even though they fail sometimes, they aren’t afraid to try.

    “You don’t get a sense that they’re [Yahoo] trying… as you see them make moves, or make changes, they seem tepid to me. They seem minor and, once again, conservative,” he said.

    He further said that he is surprised that Flickr and Yahoo Site Explorer still exist. On that note, Yahoo also announced that its search marketing blog would be closing at the end of this month.

    Although the finger of blame can be pointed in many directions, Lewis credits part of the problem to the internal culture of Yahoo. It still has a lot of intelligent people, but it doesn’t appear to have the same ambition that its rivals have.

    “Nobody is feeling great about Yahoo except maybe the top executives and some lawyers,” he pointed out.

    Even with Microsoft as the underdog in search, Lewis said you could tell that it is excited and motivated about its projects. Yahoo, on the contrary, doesn’t make this same impression on people.

    In order for the company to turn around, he said, “There would have to be this complete shift from the top of change and optimism and hope and love… love of what they do.”

    As for current CEO Carol Bartz, he believes she will be gone within the next year to 18 months.