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Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

September 27, 2012

Google is 14 Years Old and Under Arrest

Well I guess ’14′ is not a very important number, since Google’s own birthday doodle is an animated GIF:

Does that really say PooP?

.. unless you count this ’14′ year old girl with ’14′ million views?

That’s evil Google, even if you didn’t actually make that the top search result for ’14 years old’, it’s very evil.

Stop! Jail Time!

Speaking of unintentional evils, Google’s chief executive in Brazil, Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, was arrested and then released after a Brazilian court found him guilty of violating South American pre-vote election laws.

Fabio’s crime? He denied a request to have politically sensitive videos removed from YouTube.

The same judge also ordered a .5 million dollar per day ‘penalty’ for Google to pay if it continues to host the videos!

Since the videos are not in English and most of the news sources are English, finding these ‘horrible’ videos isn’t very easy.

Here’s one explaining a connection between the candidate for Mayor, Alcides Bernal, and a money laundry scheme with a co-operative taxi service.

My Portuguese is pretty non-existent, but even without Google Translate, it’s pretty clear that the candidate for Mayor isn’t being promoted favorably in this video.

Google is facing similar political pressures over the recent anti-Muslim videos, including fines, however they are all currently being left online by YouTube/Google as it’s very clear that no rules of the service have been violated and removing the videos would merely make people want to share them even more.

Bearded Sikh Woman Teaches Reddit A Lesson

In fact these political types could learn a great lesson from a young Sikh woman who recently was ridiculed for not tending to her facial hair/beard over on Reddit’s r/funny boards.

Ugly remarks like: “Transgender Sikh Dwarf” didn’t phase Balpreet!

Rather than get upset, Balpreet Kaur, took the attention as an opportunity to register with Reddit as a new user and explain herself in a calm respectful manner.

This resulted in a huge cultural awareness among the thread readers, and she is currently being hailed as an outstanding example of how to handle criticism.

Here’s the full story (with twitter reactions) over on CBC News.

You go girl!

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:36 pm

Categories: Google,Internet Law,Misc,Net Neutrality,Privacy,Search Engine News,Twitter,YouTube
Tags: Alcides Bernal, Balpreet Kaur, reddit —

September 26, 2012

Microsoft Data Center Wasting Energy to Avoid Fines

As a follow up to my previous post on Internet pollution which discussed the amount of electrical consumption and wasteful energy practices by data centers; a post from the NY Times today really summed up the national mentality towards the consumption of energy and the wastefulness of the industry.

The Microsoft Redmond Quincy data center, which is the home of Bing and Hotmail and other cloud based servers, had a contract with a Washington state utility which contained clauses that imposed severe penalties for the under-consumption of electricity.

Microsoft was fined $210 000 for not meeting its “power-use target”. In an effort to avoid such a sizable penalty this year, Microsoft deliberately consumed millions of watts of power within three days in a “commercially unproductive manner” to avoid the fine being levied against them. The Washington utility board capitulated and reduced the amount to $60k. While the Redmond center claims that it is moving to a carbon neutral footprint, this squandering of energy shows that both groups care little for the environment and are more concerned with the almighty dollar.

With industry becoming ever increasingly more environmentally conscious, such blatant wastefulness cannot go unchecked. It seems that both the power company and the consumer are at fault in this situation. You cannot blame Microsoft for trying to save money; yet why is the power company charging such outrageous amounts for “under-consumption” in the first place? This model forces unneeded energy consumption for the sole purpose of avoiding a fine. This entire model is flawed as it has no regard for the environmental impact for this amount of wastefulness.

With alternate energy technologies becoming commonplace and affordable, we can only guess as to why data centers continue to waste such copious amounts of energy with such blatant disregard to the environment. Certainly the same laws that apply to more traditional dirty industries needs to be applied here as well.

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 11:48 am

Categories: Bing,Green Tech,IT Industry
Tags: dirty industry, energy waste, microsoft, quincy data center —

September 25, 2012

The Schmidt has hit the fan…

Last night in Japan, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, spoke openly about Google Maps and Apple products without holding much back.

It all started with a simple question of if Google was working on a ‘Maps’ application for the iPhone5 (or iOS 6).

Schmidt’s response was very frank and left no wiggle room for the press:

“We have not done anything yet.”

If that wasn’t open enough the questions pushed on about Google’s involvement with the choice to remove the “Maps” app and switch to Apple’s own rudimentary ‘Navigation’ app.

Eric continued to oblige with another great reply:

“We think it would have been better if they had kept ours. But what do I know?”
…
“What were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It’s their call.”

It could just be me, but when the executive chairman employed by one of the most successful and important companies on the planet tosses out a phrase like ‘But what do I know?’, there’s very little modesty and a lot of sarcasm involved.

Further questions seemed to annoy Eric and he did make it clear that the two companies have an open dialog, stating that they ‘talk daily’, in one form or the other.

After a bit more ‘Apple’ questions, Mr.Schmidt gave what could be considered an annoyed remark:

“Apple is the exception, and the Android system is the common model, which is why our market share is so much higher…”

He went on to indicate his feelings that Android’s success was often ignored by the media, which he claims is often:

“obsessed with Apple’s marketing events and Apple’s branding.”

Indeed with over 500 million users of the Android OS (including more than just phones), the numbers are on Google’s side.

To get things back on track, after-all Mr.Schmidt was in Japan to show off the latest Nexus tablet, Eric finished the press conference with a quick demonstration of a Nexus tablet controlling Google Maps via movements of the tablet.

This allows the user to ‘look around’ the map in a more natural way that is lots of fun and very intuitive.

As a final jab Eric tossed out:

“Take that Apple,” .. adding quickly, “That was a joke by the way.”

But the Joke is on Apple; As they deal with the throngs of die-hard fans who paid way too much for easy to scratch (or pre-scratched) phones, that leak light, and can’t run the best mapping apps.

Good times!

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:14 am

Categories: Google,IT Industry,Misc,Operating Systems,Technology
Tags: android, Eric Schmidt, Google Maps, Google Nexus, iOS 6, iphone 5 —

September 20, 2012

Dublin the Airports: iOS 6 Maps is Rotten

Apple’s extra Airport..

Was anyone expecting Apple to replace Google’s Maps application with something superior? Apparently, the iPhone user base and Apple actually expected this to happen.

If you look at the most extremely biased sites reviewing the new ‘Apple’ Maps app for iOS 6 you will see guarded optimism and lots of ‘reasoning’ clash with angry rants from amazed and disappointed users.

One thing I don’t see is anyone calling it the ‘Maps app that Apple bought from TomTom’ the best I’ve seen is a mention that they relied heavily on TomTom and OpenStreetMap for data alone.

Instead I see a very consistent collection of sympathetic remarks like: ‘this is beta, it can only get better’, ‘for a first attempt this is outstanding’, ‘people will question anyone who takes their own path..’

But Apple isn’t taking their own path, they are merely attempting (badly) to replace something that wasn’t really broken.

Sure, Google wasn’t toiling endlessly to include all the updates it was adding to the Android version of Google Maps.

I’m guessing Apple really expected Google to beta test ideas on the Android and then polish them up and finalize them on the iPhone?

So sure, Google put Android development first, and there were things that Google Maps did better on the Android, but that still doesn’t mean it ‘had to go’.

Apple could have offered both solutions in a ‘use what you like’ approach to pleasing it’s user base, but this is a company making headlines for outrageous profits and the working conditions of it’s manufacturing partners.

Removing the choice to pick another company’s solution would clearly explain why Apple didn’t take a settlement from Samsung and wanted to ban their phones. Apple want’s profits, and if Apple wants really happy customers they could lower prices and focus on better apps vs. removing the best ones for inferior versions.

And in other News

Google has blessed a new meta tag!

meta name=”news_keywords”

content=”Apple Maps, iOS 6, Google Maps, Android, TomTom, Google news meta tag”

Do you publish content that you would call ‘news’?
Would you like Google to better understand the topic of your posts?
Would you like the freedom to ignore keyword use in a topic for style reasons?

Then brothers and sisters, this new meta-tag is what you’ve been waiting for!

The format is very simple, and it belongs near the top of your page content, usually in the <head> … </head> section.

Here’s an example:

<meta name=”news_keywords” content=”10 keywords, separated, by commas, just like, meta keywords, etc..”>

That’s some ‘easy breezy’ SEO optimization, and it’s great if you are indeed publishing ‘news’; Not just ranting about Apple.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:51 am

Categories: copyright,Google,Google,Internet Law,Operating Systems,Rankings,Search Engine News,seo articles,SEO Tips,Technology
Tags: android, Apple Maps, Google Maps, iOS 6, meta tag, news_keywords, TomTom —

September 18, 2012

Google-a-gram? Insta-oogle? Google-Shop?

Do you like pictures? Pretty pictures?

Google just purchased an online graphics startup called ‘Snapseed‘, adding the outstanding features of it’s tools to Google’s already growing list of image editing options.

While we like to get people’s attention, this news does not require Snapseed to suddenly be elevated to the status of ‘Instagram rival‘ just for the sake of writing an article.

In fact Snapseed was popular with photographers, not just ‘people taking pictures of their cats’; Something which already declassifies it from comparison to Instagram; Above and beyond the fact that photographers actually paid for Snapseed’s services.

In fact I don’t even need to pretend that:

‘Google and Facebook Inc are locked in a battle for social network followers‘

..to bolster this article either, but thanks for your attempt at ‘journalism’ Reuters.

The truth is that G+ isn’t for the MySpace holdouts, nor has it been designed to force people off of FB.

Heck I’m sure there’s users of both systems who will never make the switch and I’m just as sure that the developers working on G+ are fine with that.

You heard it here folks:

Google+ is not Facebook.
Does Facebook allow me to video chat with my GMail contacts?
Can anyone guarantee efforts on Facebook will always be favored by Google?
Do FB business pages give me the same professional exposure that a company page on G+ would provide?
Would it be worth it to setup rel=author links for employees FB profiles when G+ is far more business worthy?
Etc.. etc..

People keep saying things like, “Google is playing catch up in social…“, which is true if you completely ignore the innovations and ways that they are leading social tech.

Google already has some great graphics options like SketchUp:

.. and SVG Edit which is great for HTML5 authoring:

(This is a 3kb SVG script)

.. and Picasa for photos:

(Which in version 3.9 has a lot of image filters already!)

Heck, speaking of Picasa and Google+, with Picasa installed locally I can organize/edit photos on my desktop and have that organization flow seamlessly to email contacts/friends/public.

With multiple PCs at my disposal, having my efforts tied to a single online sharing point is ‘huge’ to say the least.

In fact, some tools, like SVG Edit, are directly available online, making it a very accessible tool for quick web design work on-the-fly.

If Nik Software’s Snapseed adds even more options to the process then I’m super happy to be a G+ user.

Thanks for all the free love Google!

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:43 pm

Categories: Facebook,Google,Google+,html 5,Misc,seo articles,social media,Technology,web design
Tags: Instagram, Nik software, Picasa, Sketch Up, SnapSeed, SVG Edit —

September 13, 2012

Mmmmmm Bacon..

Did that get your attention? Some crispy fresh smoky bacon?

It’s a pity then that the story isn’t about hot pork but instead about degrees of bacon.

Degrees of Kevin Bacon to be exact.

Google has given us yet another nerdy Easter Egg, not unlike the StarCraft inspired ZergRush or StarFox inspired BarrelRoll, Easter Eggs. (Shame on PCWorld for their typo this morning!).

If you add ‘bacon number’ to an actor’s name in a Google Search, Google will tell you the degrees of separation between the actor and Kevin Bacon.

Heck it even works with actresses!

Try a Google search for: “Oliva Wilde bacon number”

..you should get a Bacon Number of “2″!

This is because Oliva worked with Ryan Reynolds in ‘The Change-Up’..

Ryan Reynolds is working with Kevin Bacon on the action/comedy film ‘R.I.P.D.’ that’s coming out in early 2013.

Thus Oliva Wild’s ‘degree of separation’ with Kevin Bacon would be a 2.

All Oliva needs to do now is add her Bacon number to her profile page like so:

Since you’d need to be pretty famous to have a Bacon Number I expect that it will be *the* thing to have, if you’re a movie star.

Fat Hacker – Cosmo the God & UGNazi

This is not my best segway(seguay?) between stories, but I was simply blown away by the tale of a chubby 15 year old hacker in California who is in jail for widespread hacking and mischief.

This inventive teen, with poor supervision, has managed to hack a wide cross-section of some of the worlds biggest companies including:

Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft

`Cosmo`, as he is called online, likes to point out that none of these hacks were particularly tricky, and is calling on companies to fix their easily exploitable systems, while he sits in a juvenile detention center after admitting to many of his `hacks`.

The story I read on Wired.com was so well written I’m not even going to try and do any excerpts, I’m just going to drop the link and insist you give it a read.

Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth

Nicely done Mat Honan, from a victim to a sympathizer, all in one interview. This is great investigative journalism, and we need more like it.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 1:01 pm

Categories: Coding,Google,internet security,just for fun,Misc,Search Engine News,seo articles,SEO Tips,social media,Technology
Tags: Bacon Number, Cosmos the God, Degrees of Bacon, UGNazi —

August 30, 2012

Bing Maps : 500 Terabytes Better

Donald Sutherland from the 1978 version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers

There’s fat ladies crooning in the shower, swine are airborne, and I found something in Bing that’s better than the same option in Google!?

Don’t send NASA to check for alien life/body-snatchers, it’s just a few really small perks that I’ve come across and they are pretty darn specific.

500 Terabytes of new image data

Microsoft started it’s ‘Global Ortho Project‘ in early 2010 with the very ambitious goal of mapping the Continental United States and Western Europe at a resolution of 30cm.

The concept is simple, just fly around with high resolution imaging devices, in this case the ‘UltraCamG‘ which Microsoft acquired in 2006 after purchasing Vexcel Imaging, GmbH in Austria.

The data is thus detailed, and current, a great thing when you are competing with Google’s constantly updated (~2 weeks) satellite images.

With a deadline of June 2012 the project is wrapping up almost on time and today the news sites are abuzz with the headlines that the project is completed and available to Bing Maps users.

For a comparison of the results here’s a look at the Beanstalk Office in Google Maps and then in Bing Maps:

Beanstalk’s Office in Google Maps

Beanstalk’s Office in Bing Maps

Can you see the difference? Even if Bing didn’t have the resolution bonus, they own their image data so they aren’t required to spam their name all over the map like Google has to with the Landsat image data.

I’d love to show off the difference between Google’s Streetview and Bing’s Streetside view, but Microsoft apparently couldn’t afford to send someone by to take some images of our office <rasberry>so I’m not going to be bothered to show that off</rasberry>.

Traffic Data?

While writing this article I stumbled upon another difference between Bing and Google, there’s traffic data for the highways in my city on Bing, but Google has no data for my city (the capital city of this entire province), instead they spent the time to build traffic data for our sister city, Vancouver.

Talk about a let-down from Google, and a surprising plus from Bing. Tsk tsk..

On that side of things though, Google’s traffic info is much better than Bing’s. Google Maps even lets you pick a day of the week and hour of the day for planning ahead vs. making the assumption that you’ll only looking moments before you travel, or as you travel.

Overall the user experience with Bing Maps still lags behind Google Maps, with each attempt to zoom/pan/adjust on Bing Maps feeling like a blurry and slow mess due to the bitmap labels that stretch vs. re-size.

I even loaded Bing Maps in Internet Explorer (64 bit version) and Google Chrome to make sure I gave them the best chance to compare to the very peppy results with Google Maps.

Building Maps

As I was wrapping up this piece I noticed that there was a funny ‘block’ covering one of the malls in town when using Bing Maps.

Being a curious fellow I clicked it and found that they have mapped out the mall’s floor plan and allow you to see where each store is located, floor by floor!

The Bay Center Mall in Bing Maps Building View

Oooh! A 4hr 40% off Sale!? I could get some cheap studded ballerina shoes!

To be really honest, both Bing and Google are developing some unique features that helps maintain the competition between them which is excellent for the consumers who can use either service or both.

Now if only I could get a service to tell me where my pens have gone..

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:29 pm

Categories: Bing,Browsers,Google,Google Chrome,Internet Explorer,Search Engine News,seo articles,SEO Tips,Technology
Tags: 500 Terabytes, bing, bird's eye, Global Ortho Project, maps, street view, Streetside, traffic —

August 28, 2012

Litigation vs. Innovation – The Apple Way

I’m really ashamed of my days of being an Apple loyalist, encouraging people to consider Apple solutions, and fighting for the ‘little guy’ computer company.

That ‘little guy‘ I once championed, has since grown up to be a thug making immoral decisions that I no longer agree with.

Apple is causing me deep personal embarrassment as they strut about the digital playground smashing things that compete with their creations.

A scene from the movie The Dictator where he wins by shooting his competition

You know something’s wrong with a company’s decisions when you’re watching a Sacha Baron Cohen movie (The Dictator) and the opening scenes of winning a race by shooting the competition reminds you of Apple’s choices to force litigation/product bans vs. accepting a financial settlement with Samsung.

Samsung will fight the decision and have already announced that they will counter-sue Apple.

Since Samsung successfully defended themselves in many countries (Germany, Korea, Netherlands, and United Kingdom), winning court battles which ruled that they did not copy Apple’s designs, a counter suit and appeal are likely to change the situation drastically.

On top of everything else, jurors in this recent court case are already making headlines stating that they were unable to properly review all the evidence, and ignored the prior art evidence that proved Apple clearly copied others in it’s iPhone design.

The jury actually took a defensive role, putting themselves in the mindset of innovators defending their patents. Velvin Hogan, the 67 year old jury foreman, stated that the jury :

“wanted to send a message to the industry at large that patent infringing is not the right thing to do, not just Samsung.”

With any luck, the same feelings will hold true as Motorola (Google-rola?) continues it’s legal action against Apple’s unpaid patent uses.

Since the patents in the current lawsuit are non-essential, one would assume that Google-rola has the opportunity to give Apple a taste of how it feels to block a company’s products via legal nonsense.

However, the likely result will be that even after (2?) years of trying to get Apple to pay the licensing fees, Google-rola won’t turn-down an offer of fair payment, just to block all product sales, unlike Apple.

Speaking of a ban on products, Samsung is already talking about releasing updated products that are completely free of Apple’s patent bans.

Zero Day Java Vulnerability

According to a few reputable sources online, there’s a new browser-based exploit for Java that is ‘in the wild’ and a patch won’t be coming very soon.

When someone says ‘in the wild’ it means that there’s reports of the exploit being used publicly, which means that there’s a high risk of contact.

In this case the exploit has been used to remote-control Windows based PCs that visit websites with hidden code on certain pages. The hacker in this case picked a Chinese proxy/IP and the ‘control network’ is also believed to be located in Singapore.

Since ‘wise’ hackers usually pick a point of origin outside their own country, this info actually points to someone non-Chinese as the source of the hack.

While that exploit only works on Windows computers, the payload is totally independent of the hack, so the same strategy will work on any computer and any browser.

To avoid getting hit, you may want to disable JavaScript:

In Chrome:
- type “chrome://plugins/” into your address bar
- or just Right Click and “Copy Link Address” then paste it into your address bar.
- on the plugins page, scroll down to Javascript and disable it.

In Opera:
- go to “opera:plugins”
- or Right Click and “Copy Link Address” into the address bar
- on the plugins page, scroll down to Java(TM) Platform
- click on Disable
- also scroll down to Java Deployment Toolkit
- click on Disable

In Firefox:
- press the Firefox button
- go to Add-ons
- go to Plugins
- click the “Disable” button next to anything named “Java”

Finally if you are using Internet Explorer, you probably don’t care, but here’s some recent instructions stolen from the help desk over at Indiana University:

To enable or disable Java in Internet Explorer:

From the Tools menu (or the Tools drop-down), select Internet options.

Click the Programs tab, and then click Manage Add-ons.

Highlight Java Plug-in.

Click Disable or Enable (located under “Settings” in version 7), as applicable.

Click OK twice.

To enable or disable JavaScript:

From the Tools menu (or the Tools drop-down), choose Internet options.

Click the Security tab.

Click Custom Level…

Scroll to the “Scripting” section of the list.

For “Active Scripting”, click Disable or Enable.

Click OK, and confirm if prompted.

Close and restart your browser.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:57 am

August 21, 2012

The most valuable company ever? It’s Microsoft, not Apple.

Crushing your head..

The slew of now redacted articles claiming that Apple managed to take the title of ‘most valuable company in history’ is further proof that the internet is packed with people who will post anything without considering the facts.

Sure if you compare 1999 dollars to 2012 dollars with no adjustment in value for inflation (?!) Apple looks pretty impressive today, but if you want to say ‘Most valuable company of all time’, you have to factor ‘time’ into the equation.

After accounting for inflation the race between Apple and Microsoft isn’t even close, with Microsoft in the lead by over $230 billion even by conservative estimates.

At one point this morning I saw an article offering the corrected values and stating that, ‘Bill Gates would be upset that IBM was handicapped by inflation‘! This was quickly corrected after comments pointed out a few errors, ‘Bill Gates ran Microsoft, not IBM, and Bill Gates is still alive, stop talking about him like he’s Steve Jobs.‘.

I wanted to pounce on the author, calling them out for reporting on tech history they clearly never paid any attention to, but the sad truth is that it was a senior author who probably wrote the post before getting his morning coffee.

Most Valuable How?

“Money aside, what tech company is the most valuable?”

This was a good question that came up in the reaction threads to the news that Apple is doing so well financially.

If Apple went bankrupt the entire user base would have tons of options for Android tablets/phones/MP3 players/personal PCs. Linux would flourish a bit, and China would have a lot of people looking for employment. Not really a big deal.

If Microsoft went bankrupt there would be over a billion desktop PCs needing new OSes, millions of email/web servers that would need to be migrated to Linux, Hotmail/Bing/MSN/Maps users would have to upgrade to GMail/Google search/GTalk/Maps, and millions of cell phone users would either need to buy new phones or at the very least switch off Microsoft Exchange services and move over to GMail.

Sure as a web developer, we’d produce a lot more web-content without IE compatibility issues, and that’s just a quick ‘glance’ at the issue, so I could be overlooking massive problems on either side, but from a glance, the ‘value’ is clearly not in Apple’s favor, in both money and services.

Speaking of big money tech business..

Facebook is still making headlines for losses, this time one of the earliest investors, ex-PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, has jumped ship selling over 20 million shares.

When one of your primary investors pulls out and cashes in, it’s a pretty clear signal that you’ve peaked and the road ahead is looking very questionable.

Peter Thiel’s projected total for this cash out comes close to $400 million, which is a bit less than the stock options he sold when the company went public in May.

At this point investors are speculating that Peter has sold nearly all his Facebook stock, and he is apparently investing heavily in 3d Meat Printers.

Actually printing a full ‘steak’ is years away, but when they get there I want a steak where the fat is perfectly balanced with the meat ‘Kobe style’, and each little fat cluster is the shape of a tiny unicorn.

Nom nom..

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:30 am

Categories: Bing,Browsers,Google,Internet Explorer,seo articles,Technology
Tags: 3d Meat Printing, Apple, FB Stock, microsoft, Peter Thiel —

August 16, 2012

You don’t want the next Penguin update…

Is Matt Cutts just goofing around or is he really trying to scare us?

The statement in the title of this article, from Matt Cutts, has the SEO world looking for further information as to just how bad the next Penguin update will be.

During the SES in San Francisco this week Matt Cutts got a chance to speak about updates and how they will effect SEOs. One of the things he was quoted as saying really caught my eye:

You don’t want the next Penguin update, the engineers have been working hard…

Mr.Cutts has recently eaten some words, retracting his statement that “too much SEO is a bad thing“, and explaining that good SEO is still good.

Even with attendees saying that he spoke the words with no signs of ominous intent, how do you expect the SEO world to take follow up statements like:

The updates are going the be jarring and julting for a while.

That’s just not positive sounding at all and it almost has the tone of admission that the next updates are perhaps going to be ‘too much’ even in Matt’s opinion, and he’s one of Google’s top engineers!

My take is that if you are doing anything even slightly shady, you’re about to see some massive ranking spanking.

Reciprocal links, excessive directories, participating in back-link cliques/neighborhoods, pointless press releases, redundant article syndication, duplicate content without authorship markup, poorly configured CMS parameters, etc.. These are all likely to be things, in my opinion, that will burn overly SEO’d sites in the next update.

The discussion also made it’s way to the issues with Twitter data feeds. Essentially since Google and Twitter no longer have an agreement, Google is effectively ‘blocked’ from crawling Twitter.

On the topic of Twitter crawling Matt Cutts was quoted as saying:

..we can do it relatively well, but if we could crawl Twitter in the full way we can, their infastructure[sic] wouldn’t be able to handle it

Which to me seems odd, since I don’t see any other sites complaining about how much load Google is placing on their infrastructure?

Clearly the issue is still political/strategic and neither side is looking to point fingers.

With Twitter’s social media relevance diminished you’d think +1′s would be a focus point but Matt Cutts also commented on the situation stating that we shouldn’t place much value on +1 stats for now.

A final point was made about Knowledge Graph, the new information panel that’s appearing on certain search terms.

Since the Google Search Quality team is now the Google Knowledge Graph team Matt Cutts had some great answers on the topic of Knowledge Graph, including the data sources and harm to Wikipedia.

There had been a lot of cursing about Google simply abusing Wikipedia’s bandwidth/resources but it was made clear during the session that Wikipedia is not traffic dependent because they don’t use ads for revenue.

Essentially, if Wikipedia’s data is getting better utilized, and they haven’t had to do anything to make it happen, they are happy.

If you wanted to get more details there’s lots of #SESSF hashed posts on Twitter and plenty of articles coming from the attendees.

I’m personally going to go start working on a moat for this Penguin problem..

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:56 am

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