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.
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?
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!
Do you have a general distrust of the local area network? Store all your SEO research, metrics, stats, etc.. on a USB flash drive and end up lending it to mischievious co-workers? So you know what it’s like to lose a flash drive to someone’s pocket?
Well those days are over my friends, the chicken foot USB drive is both comical and functional:
Not only is it IMPOSSIBLE to miss it’s presence protruding from a PC, but it’s also a good laugh when people do a double take wondering why there’s a chicken jammed head-first into your PC.
Plus if someone pockets the drive, the odds of it making a trip through the laundry are much slimmer than a traditional USB flash drive.
You can’t put a price on this kind of functionality folks!
After going through a bucket of pens I’ve become very wise to the powers of the co-worker pockets.
“You want to borrow a pen to go over a webmaster tools checklist? Sure!”
Still upset that Google changed the + functionality in searches? Haven’t tried the verbatim search option, or you have but it didn’t match what you were expecting? This is a blog post for you, the dear + lover seeking to restore your lost Google-Fu.
Lets say you were hoping to search for a place to store some chickens, you could search for chicken coop, chicken coup, chicken coupe, and probably a ton of other variants while always getting the result for “chicken coop”.
Great times! Now what if you were searching for a not so famous musical group, from the deep south, with ‘Chicken Coupe’ as the only part of the name you can recall? Searching for Chicken Coupe would get you the above results and wishing you could get an exact match.
In Google Adwords the exact match is done by putting square braces [around] a word. Sadly, putting square braces around a chicken coupe still doesn’t get the result we want?
Until Google realizes they passed up a handy way to keep their tools in harmony, the result we want is still two more clicks (seriously) away.
The first step is to let Google know we mean business by clicking on ‘More search tools’.
Why this is located at the bottom left of everything?
Google is concerned about our neck and spine health? First person with a theme or script to put these options on the first page gets an honourable mention…
EDIT: Adding ‘&tbs=li:1′ to searches seems to be a quick way to toggle verbatim?
So if you have custom search engine entries, you could add a ‘v’ short cut set to something like this (Chrome syntax):
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&gl=us&num=50&tbs=li:1
A ‘v’ entry with the above code would look like this:
(Each time you type ‘v’ the browser will search for the next word using the ‘verbatim’ search option)
The next (and final) step:
Now that you’ve forced Google’s hand into showing you more search options..
.. you should see ‘Verbatim’ at the bottom of the list?
Click on that link and the results should change?
If all went well you should be a lot closer to the music you had in mind when you started this search.
This is also VERY handy if you use Google to spell check exotic/localized words.
Just keep an eye out for the blue ‘learn more’ bar and it will tell you when you are doing a verbatim search.
At the end of this month major traffic watchers and statistical houses started releasing data showing that for the first time, Internet Explorer is below the 50% market share level for internet browsers.
out·fox (out-foks) tr.v.out·foxed, out·fox·ing, out·fox·es
To surpass (another) in cleverness or cunning; outsmart.
pol·ish (polish) v.pol·ished, pol·ish·ing, pol·ish·es Phrasal Verb: polish off Informal
To finish or dispose of quickly and easily.
The Data
As anyone experienced with data will tell you, the flaw is in the details.
Data can only be as complex and smart as the sources it’s coming from, which is always a problem. So as you gaze at the various data sources, remember that nobody can really track every browser session, the best they can try for is a ‘fair average’.
To that end here’s one of the best charts I could locate:
First thing to note is the decline of IE, but more interesting is that Chrome, and Safari (hiding behind the others) are gaining ground while FireFox is losing some ground. Technically Safari is growing faster than Chrome, but when you consider that Safari is the default browser of all those iOS devices selling like hot-cakes, the fact that Chrome’s growing almost as fast, really tells us something.
I know there’s been some ‘landmark’ moments in browser shares before. I think I’ve even blogged on here about it before, but this is a unique moment that I don’t think we’ll see again for some time.
Short lived losses?
Windows 8 will be a really big win for IE market share.
This is how Windows 8 will greet the user by default:
..notice the inception of Microsoft Bing, inside Microsoft IE, inside Microsoft Windows 8?
I’m sure milk comes shooting out of Google’s nose when they see stuff like this going on with new products that will be sold to the world.
I won’t rant on this point, I’ll just remind readers of the post I’ve already made on Windows 8 earlier this year.
In a nutshell I’m almost tempted to print the above image (here’s a larger version) and stick it on the wall because once Windows 8 rolls out I don’t think we’ll see that blue section that small for a long time.
SEO News is often dry and since the search engines drive the news, there can be some slow days for discussions on topic. Today was a perfect example of headlines that just don’t make the grade, but at least they had a common theme: Back to the Future?
Quantum Levitation brings the hover board closer to reality:
In this video we see how ‘quantum locking’ (or flux pinning) can work with a superconductor to ‘levitate’. That’s the gist I got from it, yet the whole time I’m thinking about how I’d love one of those hover boards from Back to the Future:
(Yeah those are tin pie pans..)
Coming Soon: Electric Deloreans!
The DeLorean Motor Company “DMC” announced a DMC-12 Electric Delorean:
..okay so that’s where the McFly references ended.
While you could do a web search from the dash of an electric car, it’s not very web related? To tug us a bit closer back on topic, yet not entirely, I’ll close with a reminder about Google’s remote desktop beta extension for Chrome.
All you need is a Chromebook or Chrome browser on both ends, start a sharing session, send the code to the other end, and viola, you’re connected.
This does away with IP addresses, running services, or trusting one of the 3rd party commercial vendors with secure access to your machines.
Since this is a challenge/response setup in the beta phase, Google’s solution won’t be replacing large IT support offerings, but for 1-on-1 support it’s very handy.
Next time a client asks me about some SEO statistics on their PC, instead of describing what I think they can see over the phone, I’ll give this a whirl so we’re both on the same page.
One of the biggest SEO stirrings this morning is over the “30million“ that Yandex just invested in Blekko. If you haven’t heard of either one, don’t sweat it, my spell check is painting red squiggly lines under both of them too.
Why so negative? Well Blekko is trying to ‘get started’ in a game that’s already been in play for some time. When you look at the competition’s investment in search engine work it’s a bit like France suddenly saying they’re ready to join WWII. In this case ‘better late than never’ really doesn’t fit the situation.
Why is a new contender such a bad idea? Take a moment to compare search results on Google, Bing, Blekko, and Yandex for a major site, something that’s been around for some time, had some serious competition and SEO efforts.
This site (Beanstalk) in particular is a great example, we’ve had thousands of our pages duplicated over the years, so try a search for ‘seo services’ or a keyword we really should be at the top of the rankings for. Blekko won’t show us in the top 20, heck even if you search for “beanstalk” we’re #4 because of ‘duplication’ penalties. To Blekko, crawling the web with fresh spiders, all the duplication looks the same, they can’t tell who owns the content or who published it first, they would have to use Google or some really well developed search engine to get that data.
The fact that Yandex’s CEO, Arkady Volozh, will be joining Blekko’s board is interesting. It’s notable because if Yandex could work out a deal to improve Blekko’s crawl data using the much better indexes over at Yandex, then they could make up for some lost time.
It’s not all bad over at Blekko, in fact it’s interesting to see what information they are sharing with searchers in an attempt to explain their anti-spam approach to search results. Have a look at the SEO link in any Blekko search result:
Clicking that link will take you to a metrics page where Blekko seems to explain it’s result/ranking for that site. The tools they offer on these screens, including drilling down to backlinks by site, are fantastic:
I’ve seen worse services from paid products pitched at professional SEOs!
If the crawl data wasn’t so poorly pulled together and had better history, it would be at the top of my list for SEO tools. It certainly is a great free way to see some SEO statistics from a fresh perspective, even if you can’t really get an accurate picture from the limited index.
I will admit it, I have a very ‘frugal’ attitude towards information and the internet. So when Google bought Zagat it was the first I’d heard of the long running rating service.
For those who are web-frugal like me, it may come as a surprise that this paid food review service has managed to go from a printed format to on-line. Most attempts along those lines die quickly when it becomes obvious there’s a niche for the information. However Zagat’s originators were very clever in how they have gone digital and it’s worked very well indeed:
A paid member of Zagat gets a selection of discounts and promotions which quickly pay for the perks that come with paying $25 a year. Free members have to include payment details which helps to force genuine/honest sign-ups for the most part. This keeps the information useful, while still providing enough access to retain the casual user who might never pay, but is likely to contribute.
With any luck Google will quickly merge this product into their services, allow you to login with your Google profile, and eventually apply all these great search features to the entire database of eateries.
As much as I like to ‘skim’ the net for free, without coughing up any info or details, I decided to try out Zagat’s 7 day offer.
The 1st Challenge:
A hamburger in downtown Victoria BC should be an easy challenge for a city packed with pubs?
Apparently not, since the only result was an “Eclectic / Int’l, Vegetarian” with an impressive almond burger. I’ve had non-meat hamburgers, but ‘Vegetarian’ is not what I was looking for and certainly the last place I’d suggest given my years living here.
The 2nd Challenge:
Pretending I was the average homesick traveller with no idea of the city’s offerings I decided to search for some ‘American’ cuisine.
Thinking of all the steak houses, and US brands operating in the city core, I was sure I’d get a good list to pick from, yet Zagat disappointed me again. This time they suggested a ‘Barbecue, Creole’ dive outside of the city core which is famous for it’s unpretentious ‘here’s sum meat’ approach to dinning. If I had typed in ‘budget BBQ’ that is the only way I would have anticipated such a result.
The 3rd Challenge:
I’d tried something specific, I’d tried an entire country, lets just see what they can list?
Well at first I felt I’d hit the jackpot, look at all the results! Then I started clicking on the places Zagat was suggesting and they were all over in Vancouver, an entirely different city, not even located on the same landmass as my city and currently selected location?
So that’s when I started to see the problem, tried a blank search for “Victoria, Canada” with a radius of 15 miles, and the result was only 29 restaurants..
At that point I started fiddling with the sliders/filters:
Food
Decor
Service
Cost
Distance
% liked
Relevance
Reviews
etc..
Wow!
This is what I want!
Give us tools for doing specific searches!
I need these tools for more than just food, and now I can see another reason (beyond challenging Yelp!) why Google bought Zagat.
Sure my local city needs more reviews to help things along, but that’s not Google or Zagat’s fault, we just need to start discussing something we do every single day.
I know that personally I will give this service a few reviews, once I find a place to have lunch.
Yesterday I went public and openly admitted I’d managed to overlook Google’s all-in-one solution to Zynga, Microsoft, Grooveshark, Foursquare, etc..
The fact that I’ve played with Google’s ChromeOS makes this all the more amazing..
Google wants to make it possible to use a browser as your operating system, experiencing the entire internet via the world wide web.
I doubt that in 1989 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed adding the WWW specification to the internet he could have imagined it becoming a single point of access to the extreme of causing confusing between the two technologies. Yet here we are with an entire OS written around booting into a web browser.
The result of this enormous effort to solve the world’s problems inside a browser makes Android, ChromeOS, and the Google Chrome browser much more useful/powerful than even I had expected.
Chrome web store is more than just games.
Yes, you can play Angry Birds, PacMan, SuperMario, and modern versions of PaperBoy until you’re divorced and homeless, but there are really handy applications and tools in the web store.
The two SEO applications that I’d like to take a minute to highlight are not all there is to offer, just the first two really handy apps that I’ve used and recommend.
First app is the SEO SERP Workbench, a tool for watching both websites and keyword phrases. This tool has all you need to track your position, your competition, and your market in real-time and historically.
The interface is clean and simple, skipping a lot of pointless options that would inhibit less experienced users, and it works great. The only gripe I have with the tool is that it looks to give you ‘worst case’ results by fetching it’s info from a US based IP address on Google data centres in the US. If you were a UK site looking for UK rankings, this tool would not give you the correct results for your location.
The second app is ShiftEdit, an on-line tool for developing website code. It has (S)FTP support for direct edits, upload support for existing disk based projects, and it’s code engine can edit/markup PHP, Ruby, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The beauty of having a single point of access for editing, where all you need is a web browser, is a dream come true for most developers. Accessibility is a huge annoyance for me and having a tool I can access from anywhere makes it far more useful and productive. If Adobe is reading this, it’s time you made an on-line version of Dreamweaver with full interoperability between the desktop version. Personally, I know that’s an upgrade I’d actually appreciate paying for.
I could go on all day discussing the Chrome Web Store, but I have to get some work done, and then get back to beating my CanvasRider high score on the Whistler Mt. sketch by Jon312.
Just when I was wondering what Google’s been doing to tie it’s products together for the uninitiated, they launch the ‘What do you love?’ service.
I could hyperlink the URL, but it’s super easy to memorize, just wdyl.com
(as in What Do You Love)
*UPDATE: If this does not work for you, try it again tomorrow. I’m getting reports that the host name is broken for external DNS? Personally I’m using Google DNS which is 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for the primary/secondary DNS addresses.
This is tying together the following services:
Google Translate
Google Trends
Google Books
Google SketchUp
Google YouTube
Google ImageSearch
Google Alerts
Google Maps
Google PatentSearch
Google Moderator
Google Chrome
Google Gmail
Google Voice
Google Groups
Google Calendar
Google Earth
Google News
Google Blogger
Google Mobile
And more products as they are released..
What do *I* love? Google! (It’s not a very interesting result when you put ‘Google’ into the WDYL tool, oddly enough?)
Just typing in random words can be fun, interesting, and even educational. I have to admit that as much of a ‘fanboi’ as I am with Google, there’s a few services I haven’t explored enough and this one site bridges that gap for me. From an SEO stand-point, there’s really no harm in trying your keywords in this new tool to see what comes from it. Worst case you may find some new avenues to look into for your business and on-line rankings?
Oh and for something just a bit different, on the topic of new stuff from Google, OK Go and Philbus have whipped up a treat. For users of Chromium browsers (including Google’s Chrome (yes they are slightly different)) this latest ‘Chrome Experiment’ can be a lot of fun, if a bit excessive for the purpose.
I should mention it’s showing off Chromium’s multi-threading, so if you have a slow machine or don’t have multiple cores in your CPU, you may want to skip this? All is not lost – Chrome Experiment
