Archive for September, 2008

In honor of Google’s 10th Anniversary Celebration and inspired by the "Google is turning 10. See what’s happened in the past 10 years." Prominently displayed under the search box all week, I decided to take a little excursion into the outer realm of Google’s returns to find a few fun entries and facts from the 10th page of Google’s results for some of its biggest players.

Google
Interestingly enough when you Google the word Google, the 10th page introduces us to Johnny who says he can help us Hack Google. Nice.
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/

We are also finally given access to http://www.google.com.my/ on page 10. Apparently Malaysia gets nose-bleed seats in Google and in the UN.

And one that actually made me laugh is http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/m/index.cgi

Which despite undergoing a server update, provides us with a link to Amazon.com where we can buy Books on how to use Google as well as on Tantric Sex. Is that some sort of commentary on search engines and delayed gratification? Hmmmm…

Sergey Brin

Where do you want to go if you’re from Portugal and you want to find out more about Sergey Brin?
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

Well this Portuguese Wikipedia page graces page 10 for his moniker, so Desculpa-me meus amigos, you’ll have to dig.

One of the other interesting items you can find out here in the depths of the Serps is what Sergey looks like in Roller blades

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2008/09/sergey-brin-nee.html

and apparently his wheels need rotating?

And of course here we can get our hands on one of many notices about the news of Sergey’s impending plan to temporarily abandon cyberspace for a multi-million dollar trip to Outer space.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/11/1456244

Larry Page

In case you like to take the scenic route, the 10th page takes you to:

http://www.amazon.com/Larry-Page-Sergey-Brin-Innovators/dp/0737738634

Where Amazon conveniently allows you to pick up the Larry and Sergey biography "Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys " and guess what?! It’s on sale and eligible for Super Saver Shipping! Come on guys, news this big ought to at least make page 7.

We also have a Webmasterworld thread where Larry’s genius is debated by guys named Cabbie and Subway. Porn is misspelled and George Bernard Shaw comes up at least once…

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34476.htm

There is also a highly informative notable biography on Google’s founder’s:

http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ow-Sh/Page-Larry-and-Brin-Sergey.html

It covers how they met, a few of the legendary Google pranks and is of course tastefully sprinkled with Adsense.

And last but not least a tribute to Google’s leader of our little SEO tribe, Mr. Matt Cutts.

For anyone who forgot the dark day that Dark SEO came into Matt’s life, then out in page-ten-land there is this little reminder of the fact that Matt does indeed have a sense of humor when it comes to cloaking..

http://www.utheguru.com/matt-cutts-blog-has-been-hacked

And thanks to this enlightening interview with Matt, http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html  I now know that Matt likes spiders, the non-algorithmic kind, and that he called Sowbugs cute.

and lastly I couldn’t help but become enthralled by this tenth page post on SEOscoop.com

http://www.seo-scoop.com/2008/01/24/matt-cutts-why-am-i-still-being-punished/

This one of many "Why haven’t I gotten my PR back even though I no-followed my paid links" blog posts where Matt, rather kindly, engages in a very informative dialogue about the whys and wherefores of the still absent Green bar. He makes it clear that when reviewing a re-inclusion request, Google is much like a new home buyer with the tendency to look under the bed and deep in the closet for junk in placers where the owner hasn’t been in years. The moral of the story? Sweep out ALL of your corners before having an Open House with a Google Engineer. The information is gold, but as for its application? Well the Post ranks in the top 100 for Matt’s name…but it is sporting a spiffy PR 0.

While there is plenty more in the nether-regions, these were a few of my favorites, happy tenth anniversary Google, I have no doubt the next 10 will be even better, at least I hope so, my job depends on it.

Ninja Jen

*** This contest is over. The winner was Risa Borsykowsky, a professional web designer from RB3 Web Design and Search Engine Optimization. Thanks Risa! ***

I’m seeking a logo for a new website and foundation called "Give A Little Bit".

I can pay $200 for the winning logo…

…or…

you can get a link on their "Thank-you.htm" page.
It will say "Logo created by ….." and will link to your site….hum…is that considered selling links??

The winner will be chosen Monday morning, and will be published on Monday Night at http://givealittlebit.com (coming soon).

To submit a logo, email it to my first name at webuildpages.com

Thanks!

Rhea Drysdale Joins We Build Pages! 

I’m excited to announce that Rhea Drysdale has joined We Build Pages. I’m sure Rhea, like Pat, will enjoy all that Upstate New York can offer. I know Rhea and her husband are surfers…..shouldn’t be too hard to learn to snowboard …hehe.

 Check out the Press Release on Rhea Joining We Build Pages.

PS. Stay tuned for more big news like this coming soon

Yesterday QualityGal gave a few thoughts on the recent comments about Michael Gray’s take on Guy Kawasaki accepting a camera for the review…and how they feel Google should treat this (the ole paid link debate stuff).

It’s a debate that I’m personally happy to stay out of….though I know how Yahoo would try to treat this…..hey, the world will never be perfect…ya can’t always get what ya want…but if you try some times, you might just find…you can get what you need…oh yea!…

But since QualityGal talked some on paid links yesterday (and I’ll try to stay out of that), maybe I can talk some of Google’s Quality Raters today (FYI, there may possibly be over 10,000 of them) - QualityGal can’t really comment; she’s a stickler about her NDA.

Today I saw that Barry Schwartz had noted a post by Scott Huffman on the Google Blog on how Human Reviewers are used to help Google with their Algorithms.

Now QualityGal may have a lot of experience rating web pages, but don’t think that she’s ever told me any Google secrets…..I had already given a few presentations at SEOClass on "What a Human Reviewer Might Look At" before ever hiring QualityGal. I know a lot of what the human reviewers might be looking at…I may have come across some documents online…I’ll plead the 5th on that…

Anyways, there’s really no "hidden secrets" in any of these documents that I many or may not have read…there’s no "oh, here’s something one could exploit"….if anything, it shows that the human review is very very hard to "exploit"….you need to provided the searcher what they are seeking.

I can narrow all the documents I may have ever read about the human reviewers down to this basic point.

Serve the User’s Intent for the Phrase Searched.

As Scott said on the Google Blog today,

First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s "intent" — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games, … ? This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.

In the old days at We Build Pages if a client said they wanted to target one specific page to rank great for "Widgets," "Green Widgets," and "Small Widgets," we might have said "sure" if we felt the traffic was good, felt we could achieve it, and felt they’d get their ROI. These days, we’d take our analysis one step further to ask "Does this page serve as a great page for the user intent for each of those phrases?" …and to take that a step further to ask, "How good is that page compared to the other pages in the top 10 for each phrases?"

We’ve also brought QualityGal into several meetings with clients to help explain to them that it’s not the best thing to target a page that doesn’t match the user’s intent. We can change the page or the targeted page (and give ideas for solutions)…but we really want to match the user’s intent…it’s the best thing for everyone (the user, Google, the site…and the SEO).

That may sound simple, but you’d be amazed at how many people only think of keyword popularity, or ROI, rankings, yada yada metrics…yet they leave out "user intent" in their analysis …and ranking #1 for that dream phrase isn’t utilized if it doesn’t match the users intent…and worse case, the human reviewers may collectively vote that you’re type of page isn’t they type that should be on the first page….that’d suck.

As I was leaving a comment on Graywolf’s post about Guy Kawasaki and Link Payola, I realized I had more than a few words to say on the matter.

Google’s policy on paid links is impossible to enforce. Or at least it’s impossible to enforce fairly and consistently.

If I review an amazing product that was given to me for the purpose of reviewing it, does it make my review any less valuable? Any less relevant? No, of course not.

If someone gives me money to review their website - and let’s face it, just linking to someone is a form of review because you always check out a site before you link to it - it’s no different. As long as I’m not misrepresenting the site I’m linking to, I don’t see the harm.

There are billions of web pages online, and sometimes it takes a little motivation to get someone to look at and link to one of those pages. Money can be the motivation. Or a free product or service. And people need the motivation, because little sites won’t get recognized without someone linking to them.  The search engines will ignore them if no one links to them, but no one can link to them unless they can be found in a web search. Catch-22?

I think that Google should take the cue from Yahoo, who doesn’t care if a link is paid or not, as long as it has value for the user. Because seriously? If I’m looking for product reviews, I don’t care if the person reviewing it got the item for free, as long as they’re being honest and upfront about everything. As long as it lists pros and cons, that review is valuable to me, and I don’t want Google removing it from my search results just because it was paid for.

And if I’m looking for health information, and I follow a link to a helpful health website from another helpful health website, I would likely neither know nor care if the originating website had gotten some form of monetary compensation for placing the link.  If it helps me, that’s all I care about. But if Google’s going to penalize people for placing paid links, I might not be able to find either one of the helpful health websites in my web search. And for what?

If Google is really all about serving user intent, they need to focus more on worrying about their users.  Otherwise, this is all about AdWords. AdWords and AdSense provide relevant contextual paid links for many Webmasters out there.  The paid links they’re penalizing are really only cutting out Google as the middleman - and that doesn’t hurt anyone, except perhaps Google’s profit margin.

But back to Graywolf and Guy Kawasaki.  I don’t think Guy has done anything wrong, and I know that Graywolf doesn’t think that Guy has done anything wrong either. He’s just pointing out the flaws in the paid link penalties Google is handing out.  In the end, I hope Guy doesn’t get penalized; I hope the penalties disappear. And I’m not saying this because of Jim and his elite team of link ninjas.  I’m saying this as an Internet user who only wants access to the best information - whether the person providing the access has been paid for it or not.

For several months, our Content Creation Services have been closed to clients.  When my predecessor left the company to move across the country, the "Sorry…" notice appeared to let clients know that the service was no longer available.  When I started, it was up in the air as to whether or not we would offer Content Creation to clients again.

But now, We Build Pages has once again opened its doors to clients who need content.

I’ve got a team of writers who produce quality content.  I’ll accept nothing less.  I’ve got a smaller team of editors who make sure that everything is top quality.

We can take on large projects or small. We offer volume discounts for large projects.  (Large projects also keep my writers busy, which makes them happy!)

If you’re looking for linkbait, we can create that for you, too. (* Note: We can write linkbait pieces for you, but we do not promote them.)

So if you need content and want to help keep my writers and me busy,  drop by our shiny new Content Creation page and let me know what we can do for you!

Dear SEO Spammers,

If you are going to send out emails for your SEO services to get websites to rank on Google and Yahoo, don’t pick a website that is noindexed. (How did you even find it? Oh wait, that’s right. Google indexed it anyways.)

Assuming I did want this site (not the site I use for my writers) to rank on the search engines, what do you think about this sales pitch?

Dear Business Owner,

75% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I could get as much as 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by promoting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is consistently on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term "SEO Company". We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can rank for your main keyword terms as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical "white hat" Search Engine Optimization methods that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This search engine optimization program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month to month program (no long term contracts)
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Simply reply to this email and I would be delighted to send you a custom proposal
_________________________________________________________

Warm Regards,
Ron
[Jim removed address for them]
_________________________________________________________

P.S. This is an advertisement and a promotional mail strictly on the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act of 2007 . We have clearly mentioned the source mail-id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject lines and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your mail address through our own efforts on the web search and not through any illegal way. If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with "Remove" in the subject line and we will take care that you do not receive any further promotional mail.

*giggle*

He never mentioned the name of his high ranking SEO Company. [Jim edited this part too ...But the company has quite the bad reputation when I searched there name online]

The red flags abound.

I wonder if anyone has actually "hired" him.