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I was tempted to title this blog post ‘Why it’s cheaper to just block France‘ but that implied a lot and wasn’t as much fun as ‘Google’s Map Scam’ (translation).
Ever since the days of Google suggest, there has been some serious merde tossed at Google by French businesses and organizations. I think we all remember the famous French victories search?
Well apparently that algorithm has caused quite a stir for the French as they actually sued Google to get them to remove ‘Arnaque’ from showing in a suggest result for ‘cnfdi’ because it looked bad! Seriously, the French are complaining that the suggest results are too ‘honest’ and they took legal action to have Google give a fake result for that suggest query:
Then again in late 2011 Google lost a French court case over a suggest result that added the French version of ‘crook/swindler’ to the end of a search string for a French insurance company. The sum of that settlement was almost $65,000 and again, the problem is that Google isn’t censoring it’s information enough.
If that wasn’t bad enough, this week a French mapping company that offers similar services to Google Maps has won a settlement of over $660,000 against Google for providing it’s mapping services for free. Yep, once again, Google’s too honest/generous and France wants justice!
From my personal perspective, if I was Google, I’d just give France the same treatment as China, setup some massive IP block restrictions, and then go get some freedom fries with my spare time and money.
We keep optimizing our meta tags, keywords, link structure, content densities, markup, etc.. etc.. But how does Google optimize itself for us? If this is any sort of ‘relationship’ what’s Google been doing for us lately?
Anti-Spam DMARC Efforts
One of the big problems with promoting on-line is the folks who don’t care about courtesy or the rules and they just spam everyone/anyone. The best way to cope with this is to never buy products we have seen ‘spammed’; Yet this has been a nerd mantra for so long, and clearly the consumers never got the message because spammers still get paid.
Because of all the abuse, legit advertisers have a bad reputation even before they get started. This is why we have captchas, whitelists, RBLs, and many many other annoying services that some people actually pay to use.
Major email providers like Google and Microsoft (including Yahoo!/Hotmail), are working to ally with major online sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, and more to work on the DMARC system to cope with not only spam, but phishing, fraud, password scams, ID theft, etc..
In a nutshell DMARC is:
..a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.
Essentially it’s going to make ‘authenticated’ mail much more commonplace in hopes of raising the global bar on email authentication to help eliminate the spam problem. Still too long winded with the explanation?
Here’s an illustration of DMARC:
New Privacy Policy
I’ve witnessed a lot of complaining about this move, and yet I haven’t seen one logical complaint I could ally myself with. Personally, I’m a GMail user who has already invested the deepest amount of privacy I can into Google just by using GMail. Each time Google releases a new product, if I use the same Google account as I do with other Google services, I ‘expect‘ it to be smart and use what Google knows about me to the fullest.
If I wanted a privacy division between Google Maps and GMail, I’d make a separate account and use multiple logins so that if I am hunting for the closest guitar shop I won’t have to deal with Guitar adverts getting special preference when I am logged into GMail. In fact, if I was looking for a gift for someone and I really loved the focus Google has on ‘me’, I might just use a fresh browser instance to keep Google from getting confused.
Fresh browser instance?! I know, that’s jargon and we promised to explain ourselves, so a quick demo of this is to load Chrome (sorry Moz lovers) and then right click on a normal link. In the right click menu you should see this:
This will open a Chrome Incognito window :
Sites in this tab will not see browser history!
Try visiting your popular sites to test!
If all goes well, as long as you use the incognito window, you will be able to use Google services, and others, without them easily tying the info to a particular account.
Keep in mind that the alternative to a unified privacy policy is a system where the users have to read each privacy policy for every Google service to make sure they understand each service. Then, if you wanted your data to be shared between services you’d have to not only go and manually ‘share’ the information, but you’d also better be praying or something to find a way to motivate Google spend the time to enable the link between services because as we know already, Google doesn’t waste much resources on things that aren’t going to be popular. When you make something like this automatic it changes the entire functionality of that idea and what would otherwise be a ‘wasted effort’ suddenly becomes a ‘big win’.
Kicking Keister in Kenya
If you haven’t read about the Mocality debacle, you really aren’t missing that much, it’s more of a ‘How the heck?’ than anything.
In a nutshell:
There was a Google contractor in Kenya using Google IPs and identifying themselves as a Google entity that had been ‘scraping’ the sign ups from Mocality and stealing them away with lies.
When Google first heard of the situation there was a “No freaking way, let us investigate and get back to you.” response from the powers within Google looking into the issue. As things unfolded it became clear that Mocality was indeed providing honest information and that something very bad was happening over in Kenya under Google’s name. Google’s own team leads were ‘mortified’ over the details of how the situation unfolded.
At this point the head of the Kenyan offices for Google, Ms. Olga Arara-Kimani, has resigned stating she felt personally that ‘the buck‘ stopped with her and she wanted to take full responsibility.
While no official statement has come from Google there are signs that the investigation is over and that Google is already implementing measures to prevent something like this from happening again. I expect we’ll hear a few more details as things unfold.
How’s Chia Bart? Well he’s in limbo, and I haven’t started the re-plant. Time for a vacation I think?
Google announced Tuesday that it will be combining more than 70 current privacy policies to make a blanket privacy canon that will allow Google to access and use a user’s information over any of the company’s platforms such as Gmail, Google+ and YouTube. Google users will not have the option of opting out of this new privacy policy.
Google’s director of privacy, product, and engineering, Alma Whitten blogged to clarify the changes that will become effective March 1:
What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.
This is also part of an ongoing struggle between various search engines and social media sites that are directly competing with Google to collect user data. This information is like gold for advertising companies that target advertisements based upon consumer internet habits, trends and searches. Free speech advocates and analysts see this as a step towards users losing their anonymity.
In the first minute of the offical ‘hard hitting’ video called ‘Focus on the user’ they stab at the heart of the Google+ social search issue:
They do a search for ‘cooking‘
Then they click on the ‘most relevant cooking result within Google+‘
Afterwards they compare that with a search for ‘Jamie Oliver‘ and complain:
‘cooking‘ isn’t very relevant to the latest info from ‘Jamie Oliver‘
Don’t believe me that they did this? Go watch it again, they actually want us to feel outrage that ‘cooking’ doesn’t link us to the most relevant info for ‘Jamie Oliver’.
The authors of the plugin fully admit that they are getting the results info from Google itself, and just don’t want to say the words “Google is simple showcasing it’s services” instead they want to make it out to be a matter of ‘evil’ and ‘holding back’. If they didn’t at multiple times in the video slip up and show how you can still get the top results without using their plugin I’d say they had a case.
As much as there is to roll my eyes at, from an SEO standpoint, everything about focusontehuser.org is brilliant. The back-links must be pouring in, and I saw a very clever ‘click here to get your results to show’ link in the video that could be a real profit mill for them (their marklet’s broken right now or I’d investigate).
Don’t get me wrong, I know this scripting project was backed by Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace (it’s still going), so it already had some deep pockets, but in my opinion, it looks like the devs had some deeper ‘evil’ ideas?
While we are still on the ‘Google+ Social is Evil’ topic, the changes to support nicknames, pseudonyms, and maiden names is apparently done and now you can socialize however you wish on Google+. A more ‘evil’ company would have stuck to the original, and far more profitable design which requires valid names and serious privacy commitment.
I know this is the part where I slap up a picture of Chia Bart’s amazing growth and progress.. but someone decided to help him out and drain his water tray so he’s really wilted right now and I’m trying to get some life back into him. Perhaps I’ll do an update after lunch if he perks up?
Bart sprang back a fair bit, had to zoom to see the wilt!
Tomorrow, January 18th, is SOPA blackout day, and lots of very popular sites are committing to participate in the blackout.
How can web companies, such as SEOs, and supporters (like us) maintain workflow in the midst of a major blackout?
We’ve got some tips!
I need to find things mid-blackout!
While some sites will be partially blacked out, a lot of the larger sites will be completely offline in terms of content for maximum effect.
This means that during the blackout folks will have to turn to caches to find information on the blacked out sites.
If Google and the Internet Archives both stay on-line during the blackout you can use them to get cached copies of most sites.
If you’re not sure how you’d still find the information on Google, here’s a short video created by our CEO Dave Davies to help you along.
I want to participate without killing my SEO campaign!
If all your back-links suddenly don’t work, or they all 301 to the same page for a day, how will that effect your rankings?
Major sites get crawls constantly, even 30 mins of downtime could get noticed by crawlers on major sites.
A smaller site that gets crawled once a week would have a very low risk doing a blackout for the daytime hours of the 18th.
Further to that you could also look at user agent detection and sort out people from crawlers, only blacking out the human traffic.
If that seems rather complex there’s two automated solutions already offered:
sopablackout.org is offering a JS you can include that will blackout visitors to the site and then let them click anywhere to continue.
Simple putting this code in a main include (like a header or banner) will do the trick: <script type="text/javascript" src="//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js"></script>
Get a SOPA plugin for your WordPress and participate without shutting down your site. It simply invokes the above Javascript on the 18th automagically so that visitors get the message and then they can continue on to the blog.
I’d be a rotten SEO if I suggested you install an external Javascript without also clearly telling folks to REMOVE these when you are done. It might be a bit paranoid, but I live by the better safe than sorry rule. Plus just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to track your visitors.
How’s Chia Bart doing? .. Well I think he’s having a mid-life crisis right now because he looks more like the Hulkster than Bart?
To all my little Bartmaniacs, drink your water, get lots of sunlight, and you will never go wrong!
As an ongoing effort by Google to increase transparency for changes to their algorithms, Google has been documenting and publishing the updates for public consumption. The following is a recap of algorithm changes made by Google in December of last year.
While looking at a list of the December algorithm updates from Google, I thought it would be interesting to show the code names associated with them. Codenames are given to updates because they are easier to remember and because they are fun to come up with.
Updates with codenames:
Launch Codename/Project Codename
Update
Notes
SIMPLE
Image Search landing page quality signals.
An improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search.
CONCEPTS/MEGASITELINKS
More relevant sitelinks.
Improved algorithm for picking sitelinks.
GREENCR
More accurate country-restricted searches.
Uses several signals to better determine where web documents originate; improving accuracy.
LEAF
Better spam detection in Image Search.
Extending algorithms used to detect spam in Image Search
FOBY
More accurate byline dates.
Improvements to how dates are determined and associatiated for documents.
LIVE RESULTS
Live results for NFL and college football.
Live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results
LYNDSY
Related query improvements.
Makes search results more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
BASCHI/CONTRA
Better lyrics results.
Improves result quality for lyrics searches.
PHO VIET
Better spell correction in Vietnamese
More accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
MATTER
Improvements to image size signal.
This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search.
SWEATNOVEMBER/SYNONYMS
Improved Hebrew synonyms.
Refines how Hebrew synonyms are handled across multiple languages.
HOENGG/SAFESEARCH
Safer searching.
Better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.
OLD POSSUM/SKIP REDIRECT
Faster mobile browsing
Uses final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results bypassing redirects to load target page faster.
Other Updates
Soft 404 Detection: Some websites are configured to return a different status code instead of a standard 404 error when a visitor requests a page that is missing. This update improves detection of these soft404s, aka "crypto" 404s.
More rich snippets: This update was to improve the process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets.
Better infrastructure for auto-complete: This was an infrastructure change to improve how the auto-complete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes.
Google Instant enhancements for Japanese: For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
Improved dataset for related queries: Sometimes Google will include results for queries that are related to your original search; this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
Tweak to +1 button on results page: This change now shows the +1 button only appear when you hover over a result, or when the result has already been +1’d.
Upcoming events at venues: This change to the Places Panel allows for the display of up to three upcoming events.
Encrypted search available on new regional domains: Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for sign-in users. It is not the default on other regional domains (google.fr for France for instance.) Users in the UK, Germany & France can opt in by going to an SSL version of Google Search for their regional domains (ex. https://www.google.fr).
We will be posting monthly blog posts detailing the various updates to Google algorithims as soon as they are posted by Google every month. Stay tuned!
You know that look your pets give you when you are vacuuming?
No not this look:
More like the ‘I will eat you if you get any closer’ look.. ?
That was the look on my face as I read reports today that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has formally requested that the FTC investigate Google’s new social search features for anti-competitive nature and privacy violations.
So what this did is prove? In my personal opinion it proves that someone at EPIC is either a complete fool or funded by Facebook. Here’s why it’s so amazing:
If I want to ‘violate privacy’ in the eyes of EPIC I’d do an image search (on any search engine) for ‘teen mirror facebook’ and I’d get a slew of images teens have taken of themselves in front of a mirror and posted to Facebook. That’s all I’d have to do, and by EPIC’s standards I’ve ‘violated privacy rights’ by getting access to these pictures which are marked ‘public’ on Facebook. This would be no different from me choosing to see search results from my Google+ interests.
If I wanted to make my browser anti-competitive in the eyes of EPIC I’d go into my search settings and I’d add a modifier for my search engine URLs that would add ‘facebook’ as a verbatim keyword that must be in every search result. By clicking those options I’ve now set my browser up for a big fall and stern letters should be written to the FTC immediately to urge them to spend millions of dollars investigating these horrible anti-competitive atrocities. Again, this is no different from me deciding to specifically look at Google+ results when searching.
Heck now that I’ve pointed out that browser software has pre-meditated options to allow anti-competitive behaviour, I guess EPIC will be writing letters to the FTC demanding to have the browser manufacturers investigated to put a stop to people having access to features which allow them to choose a particular service over another.
If my hair wasn’t so short I think I’d be pulling it all out right now in dismay over such examples of non-thought. Perhaps I’ll go trim Chia Bart instead, he’s almost getting ‘shaggy’ now.
If I took even more pictures we could animate Bart!
Yesterday we covered the hot topic of Google’s social search from a very ‘news’ perspective. If you haven’t watched the tour video take a minute and hit play on the video below.
The truth is that Google is rolling this new search functionality piecemeal just in the same way as most of the recent features. So if I try to explore the option from my work account I get no offers and I’d have to cheat to go play with it right now.
However, on my personal account the option comes right up and my personal account has a smaller social circle than my work account so it seems to me that it’s just a work-in-progress at the moment.
A visit to the Google Inside Search site gives us a bit more confirmation:
If you aren’t seeing the features of Search plus Your World, don’t worry, we’re rolling them out over the next few days.
.. so if you’re not getting the option to try it out, it should come along soon!
Here’s a ‘hands on’ example of ‘Search plus Your World’ for a phrase I personally talk about a lot, ‘minecraft’:
The first thing that occurs to me is that Danny talks about Minecraft WAY more than anyone else, but the second thing that gets my interest is that there’s nothing in the results that I wouldn’t have read or couldn’t get from poking my head into Google+.
Going back to that video from Google that we linked earlier, I have to admit this looks like a very over-hyped feature where 90% of the interesting parts of the video aren’t things we can do with the new search feature. This almost feels like a Microsoft product that was invented by marketers as something to market with zero user interest?
Well that’s my opinion dealt with, but what about SEO factors of this new feature?
A ton of questions come to mind that need to be answered, here’s a few :
Who stands to gain from these types of searches?
What sites will be negatively impacted?
What should websites be doing to take advantage of this new feature?
The first one’s easy, Google, and particularly, Google+ will gain the most from this new search behaviour. Google has always wanted you to find what you want within their domain/services, and limiting your search to a Google owned property, selling it as a great feature, works so well for Google’s overall goals. If you don’t believe that Google wants to keep you inside their services, as you use Google products challenge yourself to consider ‘What more could Google do to keep me inside their networks?’ and I think you’ll start seeing all the efforts they are making to give you what you want instantly vs. leaving Google to visit an external site.
Social media sites that were getting a lot of commercial traffic/advertising will be the hardest hit by this move. If a client came to me and said “We’re on all the big sites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Squidoo, etc.. but we haven’t bothered with Google+.” I would be forced to assume they were Australian with such an opposite approach. The same thing would follow with campaign strategies where a company looking at time spent vs. returns would be silly to start a social media campaign anywhere but on Google+ first.
If you have a website that isn’t already following the guidelines for linking between Google+ and your site, you need to start there and then work on building up followers. Ideally you want people talking about your products/services more than your competition so I’d strongly urge someone within your company to engage in Google+ social media efforts on a weekly basis if not more. While it’s pointless to have infinite reach and zero relevance, you also want to be very ‘friendly’ doing whatever it takes to get people to take enough interest in your company pages to follow, +1, add to circles, etc..
In fact the last bit of advice will be a recurring theme for early 2012 where we will be looking at super organic ways to get your product/services out to relevant sections of the internet.
A good example would be a product that is easy to find on-line, but very technical/tricky to work with. Selling the product puts you in the same group as everyone else selling that product, but offering expertise on that product will raise your profile quickly while generating interest/informing potential clients. If you can get links from grateful recipients the effort will pay for itself, and the people you come in contact with are very likely to draw in more clients due to the way that social media is sharing business leads via friend connections.
Typical of Spring, the sooner you plant this ‘social seed’ the sooner it will grow into something that can support your on-line efforts.
Speaking of growing, Chia Bart is getting a little leafy already!
In a further effort to make search results more relevant to it users, Google will begin to provide more personalized search results for users of the fledgling Google+ social networking service. The new service will draw search results by drawing on the photos, news and comments posted from within the Google+ network and should be rolled out in the next few days.
A new service called "Search, Plus Your World" will display users own content from Google+, along with posts from friends, said Amit Singhal, who focuses on improving information retrieval at Mountain View, California-based Google. If someone searched for a dog, for instance, pictures of friends’ dogs might show up first in their search results.
"At Google, we always want to return the most comprehensive and relevant answers to your questions, and many times those answers are in the open public Web, but many times those answers are in your own personal content," Singhal said. "This is the first time we’re bringing personal content right into the results page."
Other changes to the Google search include a new feature called “Profiles in Search” which will include an auto complete function that will display links to your friends (from Google+) accounts while typing in queries in to the search box on Google. The new service will also offer suggestions of people to follow. This information will be drawn from Google+ accounts or from Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa.
Despite its best efforts, Google still struggles to compete with the social media giant Facebook. As of October 2010, Google had 40 million users, compared to the 800 million Facebook users.
Happy 2012 everyone! I hope everyone had a safe and responsible new years while still having as much fun as those who didn’t!?
I know safety and responsibility were duly addressed as this is pretty much how I celebrated 2012:
My resolution for 2012 is to celebrate harder.
This new year of technology will bring many many things for website owners, promoters, and the users. Yes, there will more than just calendar panic, and while we’d love to tell you to hurry up and get your site to #1 on Google before the world ends, there will be insights into improvements and new options for promoting your company, products, and services on-line.
So what’s sprouting today? I have to be honest here and admit I’m still unpacking xmas gifts and sorting myself out from the holidays.
One work related gift was a ‘Chia Bart’ from a secret Santa (thanks Dave!):
I was just telling a client that people love to watch things grow and improve, we’re kinda wired biologically to do that. In his case the products he sells grow and they are FASCINATING to learn about so I’m hoping they take my advice and start publishing more info.
As proof of how easy and interesting it is to watch something grow, I’ve decided to track ‘Chia Bart’ via the blog and let everyone share the fun of giving clay a hair cut.
Week One:
At this point I made the pancake syrup out of the seed mix and I applied it to the head leaving it to ‘stick’ while I was off on vacation.
Normal Chia Pets are sprouting between day 3-5, with the instructions for Bart saying 1 week to sprout.
Looking at the picture I have to wonder if the holidays or dry air didn’t ruin my first attempt?
Bart sprang back a fair bit, had to zoom to see the wilt!
If I took even more pictures we could animate Bart!
Bart’s beans are sprouting!
