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.
As an SEO who loves 12 volt tech, cars, and robotics, I tend to focus on these updates from Google’s self driving car project. This morning I came across a video showing off the first official self driving car ‘user’ Steve Mahan, who is legally (95%) blind.
My only disappointment with the video was that Steve’s user # at the end of the video:
“#0,000,000,001″
..would only indicate ‘billions’ and not a ‘googol’ of users like :
“#00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001″ See how witty that would have been?
Okay I also wasn’t impressed with the parking, just getting the car into the slot like that reminds me of driving past the local bingo hall. Where’s the pride in parking accurately?
After seeing this sort of result from Google’s innovations it’s really sad to hear rumour that Google is pushing to trim the fat and look at reducing all the innovations it’s known for. Considering the volume of ‘Google is evil‘ and ‘Google just wants to steal our info‘ rumours that keep going around, hopefully the users can see that actions are more honest than words?
A Minecraft Demo Video?!
Yes indeed! I managed to find no solutions to the darkness issue, so I took a video of something that looks great when it’s dark: Lightning!
In fact one of the fellows who’s helped with the detailing stole our thunder over on Reddit’s r/minecraft, but we’re cool with it. Would have been nice if he’d link over to the contest page, but we understand. *sob*
The video, even as dark as it is, does give a sneak peek of the Beanstalk we’ve been building on the demo server. Hopefully we’re providing inspiration vs. stealing all the good ideas.
Speaking of ideas, we are still fishing for some good ways to detail the Goose nest and how to make ‘leafs’ that look thin on the Beanstalk. Serious brownie points are available for anyone who shares a way to get around those hurdles so we can focus on other parts of the maps.
I know we’ve been anti-Google the last few weeks, but Google’s upcoming IO conference really did sell-out, in 20 mins no less!
With only 5,500 seats the 20 minute sell-out wasn’t too shocking, but the $2,000 EBay auction for a Google IO ticket took me by surprise. I tried to go find it for a confirmation picture but it was already nuked. Even at the full price of $900 a pop, the scalping price was over double! Heck educational admission ticket prices are only $300 each!?
If you’re wondering ‘what the heck is Google IO?’ that could be our fault, because our post about it last year, Ooh Shiny! ChromeOS & ChromeBook, was totally about the new ChromeBook and not the conference.. Oh man!
Each year Google hosts it’s Input/Output conference to not only share a vision of what’s ahead for Google, but also to get some feedback from the developers and users that work with Google’s solutions.
As is the case each year the team of nerds over at Google have put together a ‘chrome experiment‘ for anyone with a Google account.
The splash page for the Google IO event experiment teases us with the following:
“Brush up on your geometry, dust off your protractor, and architect a machine only you could have dreamt of. Join developers tackling our latest Chrome Experiment for a chance to have your machine featured at Google I/O.”
… yet the site seems a wee bit too popular at the moment, refusing to proceed into the actual site no matter how many times your click it. I’ll have to keep trying but right now it looks like I’ll have to come back and update after lunch.
If you REALLY wanted to click something to fiddle with in your browser, and it has to work right this second, well try Browser Quest from Mozilla Labs! While the game is currently still up and running I expect it will completely flat-line as it reaches peak popularity. I am running around as DobbieBobkins if you get in.
Browser Quest is an HTML5 site, with everything using the latest web-tech available. Don’t let those 8-bit graphics fool you, this is a modern technical demonstration. I’ve seen the game work with the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera, just fine, though Opera was loading like dirt because of some broken plugins.
Speaking of coming back to things. I keep saying that we will have more on the Beanstalk Minecraft map contest, including some videos to inspire folks with ideas.. Sadly I am SO out of date with video capture that it boggles the mind.
Apparently my problem with recording is missing codecs, so I installed the FFdshow package which supposedly contains the right codecs to maintain the correct color space and gamma values in my source videos. If that sounded like Spanish, in a nutshell I’m fixing some dark video issues.
Here’s my last upload fresh off the preview screen, and it’s STILL TOO DARK?
So, for now, today’s post is more of a bookmark, with some Google IO teasing, to be visited again after lunch when things are less popular.
UPDATE: Okay I got into the Google IO on my lunch and did a Bean experiment:
Thanks to the recent (April/March) Google updates, ‘tread lightly’ has never been better advice to anyone in the SEO industry.
Between extra offers in my inbox to ‘exchange links’, ‘sell links’, ‘purchase links’, that all seem to be coming from GMail accounts, and reports of simple Java-script causing pages to drop from Google’s index, I’m about ready to dig a fox hole and hide in it.
First off, lets talk about how dumb it is to even offer to sell/buy/exchange links at this stage of Google’s anti-spam efforts.
Even if the offer came from some part of the universe where blatantly spamming services, using GMail of all things, was not the most painfully obvious way a person who SHOULD be hiding every effort could get detected, it still doesn’t bode well for the ethics of the company trying to sell you some ‘success’ when they can’t even afford their own mail account and have to use a free one.
Further, if the offer came from someone who was magically smart enough to send out all the spam and not have it tracked, if they are at all successful what you’ll be doing is adding your site to a group of sites ‘cheating’ the system. The more sites in the ‘exchange’ the more likely it is to get you caught and penalized. So technically, any success there is to be had, will also be your successful undoing.
Secondly, lets consider how you would try to catch people buying/selling links if you were Google? It’s an invasion of privacy to snoop through someone’s GMail to see if they bought/sold links, but if Google sends you and email asking to purchase a link on your site, is that an invasion of privacy or just a really accurate way to locate the worst spam sites on-line? The same would go for selling a back link to your site, just send out an email, wait for positive responses from the verified site owner, start demoting the site. Talk about making it easy for Google.
Heck as an SEO trying to do things the right way, if I get enough offers to sell/buy links from a particular spammer, wouldn’t it be worth my time to submit a report to Google’s quality team? I think the ‘lack of wisdom’ of these offers should be very obvious now, but they still persist for some curious reason; Perhaps they are all coming from those relentless Nigerian email scammers?
Java Script?
The next issue is on-page Java Script with questionable tactics. I know Google can’t put a human in-front of every page review, even if they actually do a LOT of human based site review. So the safe assumption for now is that your site will be audited by ‘bots’ that have to make some pretty heavy decisions.
When a crawler bot comes across Java Script the typical response is to isolate and ignore the information inside the <script></script> tags. Google, however, seems to be adding Java Script interpreters to their crawler bots in order to properly sort out what the Java Script is doing to the web page.
Obviously if a Java Script is confusing the crawler the most likely reaction is to not process the page for consideration in SERPS, and this appears to be what we’re seeing a lot of recently with people claiming they have been ‘banished’ from Google due to Java Script that was previously ignored. We even did some tests on our blog late in 2011 for Java Script impact and the results were similar to what I’m hearing from site owners right now in this last update.
So, the bottom line is to re-evaluate your pages and decide: is the Java Script you’ve been using is worth risking your rankings over?
If you are implementing Java Script for appearance reasons, using something very common like jQuery, you probably have nothing to fear. Google endorses jQuery and even helps host an on-line version to make it easier to implement.
On the flip-side, if you are using something obscure/custom, like a click-tracker/traffic Java Script which is inserting links to known ‘SEO’ services, I’d remove it now to avoid any stray rounds from Google’s anti-SEO flak-cannon.
I did toss some Minecraft demo map videos on-line last night/this morning, but they didn’t turn out so swell for a bunch of reasons and I’m just going to re-record them with better software. Stay tuned!
Finding a balance between quality content and optimization has always been a challenge to those in the SEO industry. Most of us at some point have been guilty of over-optimizing sites; either due to lack of knowledge of best practices, or as a deliberate rank sculpting technique. As a follow-up to my post on Monday regarding upcoming penalties from Google for sites that are "overly-optimized" (Newest Panda Attacks Onsite Optimization), I came across this post on SEO by the Sea in which Bill Slawski goes into more detail regarding the anticipated rollout of the Google algorithm. I have posted a portion of his post here for your convenience.
Regarding Matt Cutts statement that Google may come up with an "over-optimization" penalty in the future to help sites that aren’t showing up as highly in search results because of other sites that might have excessive links pointed to them or contain specific keywords more often, you can get the sense that this is something Google has been aiming at for years by looking at many of the patent filings and whitepapers from the company.
An aim of good SEO is to improve the quality, relevance, and usability of pages for visitors, so that the objectives of the owners of those pages are furthered, and people actually looking for what is offered on those pages are more likely to find those pages. Optimization, as a term, means to make something the best that you can, and in SEO usually aims at making a page the best that one can in terms of satisfying people using a query term that the page is about, to meet their informational or situational or transactional needs.
Some people promoting web pages attempt to use tactics like over stuffing a page with a particular keyword or pointing as many links to it as possible that use that keyword in anchor text, without necessarily attempting to make that particular page one that will satisfy visitor’s needs.
So a penalty like this might do things like ignore the value of anchor text in blog comments or forum signatures pointing to pages, lessen the value of links between sites that are related in some manner, lessen the value of keywords or related terms that appear on the same page at a very high rate, or apply some other similar approaches.
That doesn’t mean that the value of thoughtfully created, high quality pages, following best SEO practices will be harmed. The goals of that type of SEO align with the goals of search engines in helping people find pages that help meet their needs.
I anticipate a lot of upcoming discussion on this algorithm change if/when it is implemented. In much the same way that the original Panda received a lot of cooler talk, this latest rollout is going to cause many waves in many pools.
Google’s technology has reached a point where they have to take all the light bulbs out of shared data centres and equip technicians with ‘helmet lights’ to keep their infrastructure solutions a secret.
Long have I pondered how they initially got passed the data storage hurdle during their early years.
As an SEO, I’d LOVE to have the sort of storage to keep all my data on-hand in a giant database that’s constantly refreshing and crawling for new info. Due to the cost of HDDs I’ll have to keep running Google queries or head over to sites like Majestic where the data runs deep and fast.
At one point I even hypothesized that Google had a smart-load system that could bring storage medium (magnetic disc platters/DVDr discs) on-line quickly from a very fast storage mechanism. So while all my recent email is stored on fast access media, and when I do a search for old mail that search is running from an index, when I go to open some old mail, that delay you get is from the loader fetching the offline storage.
I doubt that any of the ideas I had were even close to the real secret, heck Google probably just had a very friendly storage deal with a major manufacturer until they were able to start making their own solutions. Yes, Google makes a lot of it’s own hardware now, and a custom built storage solution would not be shocking to me at all.
Remember about 2 years ago when REALLY big drives started becoming cheap and common? Remember when it suddenly became impossible to find a drive with less than 320GB of storage? That was roughly the time that PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology hit mainstream hard disk manufacturers.
PMR drives were not only bigger (the single plater size was suddenly 320GB+) but at the same rotational speeds (~7200RPM) they were also faster, lighter, and cheaper. The instant these drives came to market I took the time to memorize the model #s of drives with the new tech so as to avoid buying the outgoing/older drives.
Enter HAMR: heat-assisted magnetic recording
Today Seagate announced significant forward progress with HAMR drives:
“one terabit per square inch”
In 2007 Seagate’s own estimates on PMR were that the density would peak at 1Tb/inch², a goal they have only now hit with HAMR. In fact in 2007 when Seagate was actively researching HAMR technology they were estimating a peak density of 5Tb/inch²!
What does all this really mean? In August of 2011 Seagate was boasting of a .722Tb/inch² capacity which resulted in 3TB hard disk models hitting the market.
Seagate claims the recent stride in density should ‘nearly double’ the capacity of current drives. If this all pans out I am putting a 6TB HDD on my wish list for XMas this year.
Don’t forget about our Beanstalk Minecraft Map Contest, now with ~$300 worth of prizes going into the competition it’s better than ever!
I’ll try to get some demo videos on-line this week for inspiration, and until then, good luck!
Technology news was a real mixed bag this morning. Google’s official move to HTTPS forced searches was front page for the last few days, but is it news?
I can’t mention Ion Cannons without including this pic. Sorry.
No. Not really. We mentioned the Google HTTPS move with a heap of sarcasm back in October 2011 when the HTTPS only work began. Back then it wasn’t very exciting news either, all it means is that services ‘spying’ on Google searches can no longer do that with such ease.
Technically it’s also paving the way for some innovation down the road but that’s a wait and see spin off from the move. In all honesty I’d rather spend 8 mins watching the team handle search quality issues and see what sorts of discussions go on behind the scenes:
How’s that for transparency?
Ion Cannons?
I’m shooting this news piece down but it’s not really that bad of a headline.
Twin Creeks Technologies has successfully built a particle accelerator so powerful (100mA at 1 MeV) that it can produce solar panel medium at 200 micrometer thickness at very low costs. Here’s an image of the ‘Hyperion Particle Accelerator’:
The result is an estimated cost of $0.40 per watt for domestically manufactured solar panels. This is currently almost half the price of solar panels which are built in Chinese factories and shipped across the ocean in diesel burning ships.
So I will grant this headline some reprieve, it’s far more interesting than Google’s announced HTTPs only for search queries, but is it just an attempt by solar panels to get back into the spotlight (oh man) after the recent news about heat-conversion LEDs? It certainly would be nice to have a cheap solar panel solution if we are able to abundantly produce light from free heat energy?
For years now Chrome has been staring down it’s nose at the other browsers when it comes to security. In fact for the last 4 years, Chrome has been entered into HP’s Pwn2Own security competition, and nobody has successfully hacked it, unlike competing browsers.
This year Google’s Pwnium competition, which offers $1 million for successfully demonstrated exploits, has managed to finally uncover 2 vulnerabilities in the browser’s ‘sandbox’.
The successful hacker, Sergey Glazunov, has earned himself $60,000 for demonstrating his exploit, and a heap of recognition that will no doubt ensure Mr.Glazunov of a promising future in the IT industry.
Sergey’s exploits were patched in just under 24hrs, and now the browser is even more secure than it was previously. Obviously even at $60,000.00 this was a great win for both Google and it’s users. Finding/fixing exploits before they can be used in the wild makes me all warm and fuzzy.
This leaves $940,000.00 of unclaimed cash rewards to anyone else who can find a way to exploit Chrome’s many layers of security.
Happy Sun Spot Day!
Today is also a special day for technology around the planet as we are just getting hit by one of the largest solar flares in 5 years, part of a slightly early 11 year sun-cycle that last ended in 2002.
At the moment the flare activity is a diminished threat based on expectations, or in laymen’s terms it’s currently looking like a dud.
This could change at any moment however and tomorrow is expected to be the peak of flare activity coming from sun spot AR1429. This sun spot has been growing since March 2nd and at this point it’s 7 times the size of planet Earth. It is so large that amature observers are able to photograph the sun spot without a telescope. Here’s an image of sun spot AR1429 that David Tremblay of Alto, New Mexico, took earlier today during a dust storm:
While there’s no immediate health risks associated with these flares, our technology isn’t immune to the interference, and sensitive transmissions, such as GPS and flight navigations systems could be compromised at any moment during this event. There is even some concerns about power failures and large outages in the power grid.
NASA as always is the best spot to nerd out and view the event, they even have a 2048×2048 resolution MP4 you can watch if your computer can handle it. Just click the image below to get to the current NASA news page.
How do you feel about the US ‘owning’ .COM (and .cc, .net, .name, .org, and .tv) regardless of the international needs of the internet?
Well the U.S. government feels pretty good about it and is exercising a controversial level of control over these TLDs by squeezing the US based VeriSign.
The logic is: if the businesses that control the domains are operating on US soil then it’s American controlled.
There has always been a desire to de-Americanize the internet by restructuring core components outside of US controlled entities but the cost and fears of this sort of uber-nationalist attitude have been ever-present roadblocks. It is sadly ironic then that the US itself isn’t safe from the whims of the local government.
Why so much attention when this has happened hundreds of times previously?
Last week a Canadian registered .com (BoDog.com) was taken offline by federal US authorities because the site was making it possible for American citizens to gamble on-line with payouts.
BoDog.com’s business practices are not illegal globally however and having the site shut down by US authorities has a lot of people, myself included, complaining that this is going way too far.
The reason BoDog.com went down under US pressure is because it was registered with DomainClip in Canada which is merely a VeriSign subcontractor. Even then, you have an international business shuttered by the whims of one country’s governmental policies.
VeriSign is throwing it’s hands up in the air proclaiming innocence and pointing out that they are just abiding by court orders that the US based company is lawfully obligated to follow.
So does this mean that you should toss your SEO campaign aside and find a way to register the site outside of VeriSign’s control? Not necessarily.
Unless you are running a site that isn’t US based at all, or likely to come under fire from the US Government, there isn’t much to fear from this situation, at present. If you run an international gambling site and you made the mistake of registering it with a VeriSign affiliate, then you might want to go change it, quickly.
Personally, if this sort of activity continues unfettered, I expect to see a strong push for the ITU to take over some or all of ICANN’s roles. The internet isn’t just an American thing, it can’t be, and the international community won’t tolerate meddling much longer before some sort of action is taken.
And finally, on a different topic, yet similar struggle for control, I have to give Bing a mention for this amazingly bad anti-Google ‘Googlighting’ video:
Yep. Bing used YouTube to burn Google.
For anyone too young to remember 80s television, this was a parody of Moonlighting (TV series) and boy did they do a bad job of Bruce, not that their version of Cybil was much better..
Most companies can survive simply by putting their best foot forward. Bing seems to think this isn’t enough and that we need to be informed of how dumb we are buying using Google’s framework of tools.
Google was so moved by this advert that Mark Striebeck, the manager of GMail, wore a similar tie at a recent Google technology demonstration to show some good sportsmanship.
Today I saw the start of a graphical ad campaign by DuckDuckGo aimed at explaining how search personalization creates a ‘bubble’ that traps your search ability. Here is the link to the ad-site if you want to give your brain a wash.
Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying,
“a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”
The heart of the matter isn’t new, TED’s got a pretty decent presentation from a ‘user’ perspective dating back to May 2011:
So what’s DuckDuckGo squawking about?
I think it’s time to burst their bubble by taking a look at the options we have and why the suggestion of ‘try something new’ doesn’t really ‘fit the bill’.
It is very true that search engines know a lot of ways to customize search results based on information that the browser gives the sites you visit. You have some options depending on what you need to accomplish.
For every-day searches:
Use the browser you use the most often.
Your search results will be relevant to you if you use Google or Bing.
DDG results will be relevant to the way DDG thinks results should be filtered because they are avoiding personalization.
For research based searches in your location:
Use ‘incognito’ or ‘private browsing’ modes. (* see below for Google tip)
Your search results on major search engines will not be related to your personal tastes, just your location/language.
DDG won’t change search results according to their advertising.
For research that is not based on language or location:
Use a fresh browser, switch your language on a system level, and use a proxy to make your queries from multiple locations.
Search results will need to be combined and compared at this point because there will be differences each time.
From what we’ve seen, this level of unique information does elicit a variety of search results even from unbiased search engines because language and location are very large factors in search queries.
* When searching with Google you can add “&pws=0″ to the search URL to see the search without personalization. This only turns off the ‘personalized web search’ function so the results will still be in your language and relevant to your location.
You could also add a short-cut to your browser so that you can search with personalization turned off by default, change the default language, location, etc..
While changing the search parameters is only ‘mostly effective’ I will be doing a follow-up post, complete with video guides, on how to do this and how to make it simple with shortcuts in the address bar.
If you still want to guess at the macro images from last month you aren’t too late. We are accepting guesses until we announce the winner next week, so feel free to go back to the old posts from last month and let us know what your little eye spies.
PS: There have been two versions of Minecraft 1.2x released today so far, some features weren’t even in the public builds so there’s some fresh bugs and features to explore. We have been waiting for this version to release to announce a new contest based on Minecraft! Stay tuned for full details in a post to come very soon!
It has been just over one year since the Panda Algorithm produced a prolific amount of pandemonium across the World Wide Web. I came across this great infographic posted on Search Engine Land created in conjunction with BlueGlass SEO detailing how Panda works, what it impacted and the stages of the updates implemented from Panda 1.0 through to Panda 3.2.
Here are some of our past blog posts detailing the Panda Updates as they came out, along with strategies and tactics to counteract the effects of the Panda Algorithm updates.
