I was amazed when one of my Google Alerts came up with a Miss SEO pageant that was being held.
For such a young industry the world of SEO has matured remarkably fast, but of course, the Miss SEO pageant has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization and all to do with Miss Southeast Ohio!
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Google recently posted a basic guide to SEO. I just had chance to read it and can highly recommend it.
It is crisply written, doesn’t include a lot of unnecessary ‘filler’ and as a result is a fast read. It includes the basic information that every site owner should know about.
My wife, Sian, turned right on a red light recently, without coming to a complete stop. In California this is equivalent to running a red light. The local police force were kind enough to send us several photographs to prove the point and even invited us to visit a Web page so that we could see the whole sorry incident on video. The cost for all this unwanted attention was a $400 fine and a day in driving school.
Sian duly went back to school (driving comedy school – which was not funny in the slightest), filled in the paperwork and mailed in my credit card details to pay the fine.
Yesterday she received the following e-mail:
Sorry, we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on October the 19th in time
because the recipient’s address is not correct.
Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office.
If you do not receive package in ten days you will have to pay 6$ per day.
Your UPS
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Viruses found in the attached files.
The file UPS_INVOICE_9871.zip: Trojan horse Generic12.GVO. The attachment was moved to the Virus Vault.
You will probably see immediately that this is yet another lousy spam, but being slightly sensitized to the traffic situation and the fact that if her paperwork (which she sent be registered mail) did not arrive, the court paperwork had threatened all sorts of nasty retributions, Sian believed that it may have been her court paperwork that was undelivered. Had her AVG virus protection not done such a fine job in detecting the virus laden spam e-mail, she might have clicked on the attachment and her computer could have become a personal information dispensing liability, without her even knowing it.
Apart from the unhappy coincidence that this spam arrived soon after an important document had been mailed, I think part of the problem is that we have got rather good at dealing with Spam. On my server Spamassassin (equipped with Razor) does a sterling job at deleting Spam and the Thunderbird e-mail client, gets rid of most of the rest. Consequently it is easy to get a little complacent when a malicious spam does arrive.
The following are lessons from this incident:
I just checked a flight at flightview.com and when I clicked on ‘live view’ I was invited to download the Java plugin. It appears to work fine.
SEO commentators have long held that Google imposes a ‘duplicate’ content penalty on sites that have more than one instance of substantially the same content. Google’s
The crux of the article is that, except for duplicate content that breaches Google’s webmaster guidlines, there is not really a penalty at all. Rather Google ‘collects’ the similar pages into a ‘cluster.’ They then decide which of the pages in the cluster should be shown to the searcher based on several factors, including link popularity. The article states that Google’s idea of what is the best page may be different from yours.
The ramification for the web master are to avoid creating duplicate content because it is likely that only one of the duplicate pages will get into the index. The article also cautions that Google will use your bandwidth when spidering multiple copies of essentially the same page.
Google Labs have developed technology to analyze audio contained within YouTube videos and make it searchable.
Initially they have set up a Google Elections Video Search gadget which focuses on the the US election.
The implications of this technology are huge. Videos have always been a very compelling way of disseminating information but the words included in the audio were not included in the Google index. Currently YouTube users have to provide textual information in the form of a description and tags. As videos begin to be analyzed the entire textual content will become part of the index.
Google search is good – the best available. I use it all the time, but recently three articles set me thinking about the future of search and the level of innovation in search accuracy.
I always remember, as a school boy being told about Philipp von Jolly, a German mathematician and physicist, who advised Max Plank in 1878 not to go into physics, saying, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.” Obviously in the light of all the discoveries in the last 125 years, a very silly thing to have said.
I suspect that Marissa Meyer realized that saying 90% of search is already “sown up” was also a rather daft thing to say too. A few days later, on September 10th she wrote an article for the Official Google Blog in which she stated: “Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool…….. However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work.” (My emphasis added). Perhaps that is a way of really saying that Google only has 5 – 10% of the solution?
Marissa’s article in the Google Blog contains lots of examples about why the Google search engine is so clever – and it is. The trouble is, there are so many flaws in the results I see every day. It seems that despite the many clever semantic and data driven analyses that Google now employs, it is fundamentally based on a bedrock of on-page word analysis and links information.
It is the reliance on links as a factor in determining ranking that I have a problem with. Take Web page A. It it contains much useful and unique information but finds itself in a competitive market, competing against many other Web sites. It garners a few back links from people who happen upon it, but way fewer than Web page B. We page B also contains some useful information, but perhaps not as much as Web page A and certainly not as unique, but Web page B has found ways of generating links. Nothing unseemly like buying links or anything else that would upset Google, but they have been able to get themselves included in hundreds of directories, they found the secret of getting into DMOZ and dropped nearly 300 bucks to be added to the Yahoo! directory. Web site B has a few friends in th DIGG and Stumbleupon communities, and so that has helped too. Basically they have found a few cool tricks and spent some money. Now in this scenario I suspect that Web page B would rank significantly higher than Web page A and as such Google is doing a disservice to those searching for the unique and useful information.
In the world of blogging it is natural to link to Web pages containing useful information. For most run-of-the-mill Web sites that provide useful information in, often competitve markets, linking to other sites in not normal behavior. Academia thrives on referencing the world of other academics. The world of industry and small business does not.
Have you ever searched for a hotel on Google? Say you know which hotel you are going to stay at and you want to look at the hotel site to find out more information about the swimming pool or when the bar closes. In my experience, the likelihood is that long before the actual hotel’s Web site is listed, you will find pages of Web sites that include very basic information about the hotel you are looking for (such as travel sites) but they assiduously avoid providing a link to the actual hotel.
Have you ever searched for a plumber in your local small city? If you search for plumber wasilla you get 31,800 hits. I didn’t look at them too carefully, but I bet that you have to go through many directories and sites that have cunningly created pages with every city in the USA included in them, before you arrive at an actual plumber in Wasilla.
Why does Google place any reliance on DMOZ? The directory is out of date and there have been allegations of corruption. The only reason people are so keen to be listed there is because they believe the back links are valuable.
There is clearly a lot of search innovation going on, but a lot of it is based on the ‘mashup’ mentality, that may create interesting niche products, but will not create breakthrough innovations. It is going to be difficult to fight against the giant (), but deciding that Google has ‘locked’ up search will result in less competition and search innovation will slow, not to mention the possibility that search may start to cost money. Who remembers when Microsoft Windows used to be free?
Google Chrome is a new, yet to be released open-source Web browser from Google. According to Google, the main reason for its existence is to provide a firmer foundation for increasingly complex, mission critical and JavaScript driven applications (such as Google Apps). As they say, a normal HTML Web page crashing a browser is one thing, losing an important document that you are working on is quite another.
It seems that some of the most important design features of the product is multi processing, so that one process does not have to wait until another one is finished before it starts. This is achieved by giving each process its own memory. This will also improve memory managment so that when a process is closed all the memory used is released back to the computer. Apparently the current crop of browsers is not so good at this, which can result in them crashing after to many tabs have been opened and closed.
They have also realized the increasing importance that Javascript is playing in Web page and Web app design, and have developed a virtual machine to ensure that it runs better. This is all explained in comic book format here.
I look forward to trying Chrome out – hopefully it will render CSS flawlessly.
Earlier this week, Social Target (http://www.socialtarget.com/), an independent social media research and consulting firm, announced the publication of the second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis.
According to Social Target’s press release, the report includes information on social media monitoring and analysis tools from the following companies:
Andiamo Systems, Attensity, Attentio, Beyond Analysis, Biz360, Brandintel, Brandwatch, BurrellesLuce, Buzzcapture, BuzzLogic, CIC, Collective Intellect, ComMetric, Converseon, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, Digital Influence Group, Digital PR, Distilled, Dow Jones & Company, eCairn, EmPower Research, Ethority, evolve24, FirstRain, InfoNgen, Integrasco, Intelligence Technologies, J.D. Power and Associates, Jodange, Kaava, KDPaine & Partners, Lexalytics, Linkfluence, Market Sentinel, MediaMiser, MetaTale, Metrica, Millward Brown Precis, MotiveQuest, Netemic, NetEquity, New Media Strategies, Nielsen Online, Onalytica, Quirk eMarketing, Radian6, Relevant Mind, Report International, RepuMetrix, Reputation Institute, ReputationHQ, Scanblog, SentimentMetrics, Socialware, Synthesio, Techrigy, TNS Cymfony, VICO Research & Consulting, Visible Technologies, Waggener Edstrom, Whitevector, WiseWindow (All trademarks are the property of their respective owners).
I started going through all the different tools by visiting each company’s Web site, in turn. There is a lot of useful information ou there, but it set me thinking that this approach is likely to lead to analysis paralysis.
Surely a better approach is to brainstorm the information that you need, make a list and then set about finding a tool or tools that provide that information.
In addition, many of the tools above assume that you are a well known brand or company getting thousands of social media references daily. For smaller entities the sort of output that these tools produce may be either non-existent or less valuable.
The Live Search Webmaster Center Blog reported yesterday that the backlinks feature has been made actionable again. The linkdomain attribute feature had been taken away in 2007 and then later a subset of back link information was included in the Live Search webmaster tools.
The new feature appears to return accurate results and gives the option of showing ALL backlinks, or excluding/including links from specific top-level-domain (e.g. .co.uk, .edu, .gov etc) domains, subdomains or domain folders. For example, you can use this filter to find all the backlinks coming from .co.uk or .gov sites.
The Live Search Webmaster Center blog posting goes on to elucidate some of the advantages of backlinks, including:
Since the number of backlinks can be very large, the tool also gives you the opportunity to download the backlinks into a CSV file for further analysis.
