Interview with Udi Manber, Google Vice Pres of Search Quality

This was a really nice interview by Popular Mechanics and worth a read.

A few notable points:

"I wish people would put more
effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting
the right keywords onto their pages."

"Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm. "

"At Google we do not manually change results....We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm."

"The results we show you are based not only on what we know of the Web, but also what other people have searched for."

China #1

I thought this was a notable milestone, the US getting passed up for the number of internet users by China. At 220 million people online, that is only 17% of the Chinese population vs. 71% of the US population with 217 million surfers.

Widgets, SEO, and Google's Opinion

I watched this for the last few months as it developed. A web developer working for SEOMoz left to go work with a younger start up company, a free dating site called JustSayHi. He posted on the Moz blog about his link building technique, which was essentially to create widgets that were quizzes. A user would then peel off some HTML code that they could paste on their site that was their quizz score. His topics were a wide range of things like, 'How many 5 year olds could you take on in a fight' or 'How well could you survive a zombie attack'. His successful campaigns resulted in great rankings for the very competitive terms, 'free online dating' and 'online dating'.

The dating site was owned by a larger company which owned a network of other sites. They liked his link building success and asked him to do the same for a number of their other sites, namely payday loan sites and education sites. He added links to those sites into his widgets off the dating site. Google took notice and JustSayHi was penalized. After unsuccessful and not completely truthful reinclusion requests to Google and personal emails to Matt Cutts, they simply decided to scrap the old domain and start fresh with a new domain.

He continued his same strategy with the new dating site, OnePlusYou, similar widgets, linking back to OnePlusYou using terms like 'online dating'. Low and behold, out of the blue they got a note from Google basically saying, 'Watch yourselves, you are creating off topic links and this is considered gaming the system'.

All this bring us to this latest blog post on SEOMoz which summarizes in more detail what I just described. All this is notable for 2 things:

• If you spread your tactics out there for all to read on a site like SEOMoz, you will be noticed
• Matt Cutts is very clear in his comments what is acceptable for widgets, keep everything on the topic related to your site and make it worthwile for users
  

Matt's comments:

"Our reconsideration request was truthful but not as forthcoming as it might have been."

I'll
just highlight this point. If your reconsideration request gets a
personal reply from me, it's safe to assume that I'm paying close
attention to that situation. If that's the case, I recommend being very
careful to be clear when communicating.

A reconsideration
request that is technically true but leaves out what we consider to be
vital details comes across to us as "Maybe they don't know about these
other domains, so let's not mention them." That's why we recommend to
provide as much information as possible when requesting
reconsideration.

And:

Jeremy, I'll try to post on
that at some point, but clearly some widgets are less helpful than
others. When you wrote about this back in January:
http://www.xuru.com/linkbait-gone-spam/ , I think you made a pretty
good point that "Find Ultrasound technician schools
near you" with the link going to
http://www.medical-assistant-training-schools.org/ultrasounddiagnosticschools.htm
is not that helpful, and that a zombie apocalypse widget has very to do
with payday loans. If you were trying to promote your ultrasound
technician school, you probably wouldn't think it was fair if a
competing site ranked highly only on the basis of widgets.

And
Loren at
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-loves-transparent-links-hit-counter-spam/5615/
made another really good point when he called up people that had
installed widgets and asked them if they knew that they were linking in
such a way. One person replied "I had no idea - I looked for a free
counter and placed it on the site - how did you find out that it linked
to jerks?… I have removed the counter from my site including (I hope)
all the html they provided to paste on my site for the counter, thank
you for pointing this out."

Final note, I suppose that JustSayHi might not have had a better option that to simply start over. Though I would expect that Google would have simply devalued those widget links, they obviously took a harder look in this instance. What is a site owner to do? It's not like you could go out there and shut off all those widgets that you have out there in the wild. If Google is truely penalizing you in part for those, you can't make them go away.

Google Now Filling in Forms and Crawling Those Pages

From the Google Webmasters Central Blog, Google states that they are doing limited testing on high quality sites of automatically filling in forms to discover new pages. Sounds like they use onpage content to establish terms to enter into the form and they are avoiding any personal information related forms of those which require a login.

Obama vs. Clinton, Stats

The Compete analysts just did a post for their blog covering the primaries and overall attention, Obama and Clinton. Most of the data we see is a fairly narrow view, ie specific poll data, web traffic stats, etc.

It seems clear that in the relatively new field of using web data to gage candidate interest there is a serious gap in the quality of the data and actual interest. Best example for this season was the Ron Paul campaign. Time and again his web traffic numbers were stronger and faster moving than any other Republican candidate and just as strong as the democratic candidates. Apparently, the best explanation I heard in the end was that Paul's support base was simply more skewed to be proactive on the internet.


This Compete article takes a more holistic view, showing a number of metrics, not just web metrics, side by side.

Informational, Navigational, or Transactional?

A recent study by Penn State on the types of queries of search engine users has identified that 80% of all queries are Informational, with the remaining 20% being evenly split 10% and 10% between Navigational and Transactional. Penn State Web Search Study Press Release.

Google Introduces Previous Query

In what is likely to be one of the biggest changes to Organic Search in a while, Google will be adding a user's previous query data to shape the results of organic results. In other words, if you search for 'SEO' then search for 'Blog', your second search will be tailored more to SEO related blogs. Google has been employing this for Adwords so I guess it was just a matter of time. The real implication and where it will theoretically improve the quality of results for searches is in single word queries. So, in reality, optimization for multiple keywords is the direction of things to come.

This is not based on personalized search, but on cookies, so its not like users can really opt out of it. SearchEngineLand broke the story and covers it well.

Trademark SEO

I got a kick out of this one and you have to hand it to the guy, trying to trademark SEO. Apparently he has gotten quite far in the process, though you cant imagine what he would do with it. SEOMoz covers the Search Engine Optimization trademark drama.

Who Says Google Won't Control The Internet?

Google just launched Google App Engine, a developer tool to create your own web apps and they will host them for you.

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of
storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We
expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million
pageviews per month

Global Internet Ad Spend

Attended a conference yesterday in which one of the sessions a presenter mentioned that the total online ad spend per year is about $500 billion. I just ran across this piece from CNN Money which discusses a recent JPMorgan study (could not find a copy of it) called the 2008 Global Internet Snapshot. The CNN piece mostly addresses the mobile phone market, but there was this:

He highlights a stat showing that the global population of people
connected to the Internet - now 1.3 billion - has had a compound annual
growth rate of 20.3% for the past eight years. Meanwhile, Internet ad
spending of $40 billion remains only 6.6% of the global total of $605
billion and is growing at an annual rate of 33%.