Traffick - Internet Search Enlightenment: "Geez, the Search Guys Really Don't Talk to the Ad Guys, Do They?
Anyone in the SEO game is by now reading Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog, and well they should. The 'real insider Googleplex scoop' is so often what emanates from Matt - and for those of us who don't get to 'that part' of the conferences, it's really illuminating reading.
I did scratch my head at Matt's helpful post about how to write queries. 'At Google,' he writes, 'we use [ and ] to mark the beginning and end of queries.'
Those of us over here in paid search world, of course, think [ and ] refer to an exact match in the AdWords interface."
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Google Techs, Entrepreneurs Match Wits
E-Commerce News: Portals & Search: "Efforts to outsmart Google gall some webmasters such as Shari Thurow, who believes the best way to increase a site's search engine ranking is to offer valuable content and products. She describes the Black Hats as 'pathetic algoholics' because they are so obsessed with trying to figure out Google's algorithms.
Google knows it can't entirely avoid Black Hats.
"There are people who make their entire living off of Google, which is fine, as long as they don't push things too far," said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality.
But he said webmasters searching for secrets are better off looking elsewhere.
"Everything you ever wanted to know about Google is right there on the [online] forums that the webmasters run," Norvig said. "There is a lot of truth in there, but there's also a lot of crazy stuff. We just don't tell them which is which." "
Google knows it can't entirely avoid Black Hats.
"There are people who make their entire living off of Google, which is fine, as long as they don't push things too far," said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality.
But he said webmasters searching for secrets are better off looking elsewhere.
"Everything you ever wanted to know about Google is right there on the [online] forums that the webmasters run," Norvig said. "There is a lot of truth in there, but there's also a lot of crazy stuff. We just don't tell them which is which." "
Google Loosing Ground in China
Google Loosing Ground in China - Forbes.com: "A survey by a Chinese Internet research group has found that Google is losing market share to its biggest Chinese rival, Web search engine Baidu.com. "
Monday, August 29, 2005
Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?
Slashdot | Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?: "Google appears to be purchasing dark (unused) fiber optic cable across the United States with the intention of building its own alternative parallel internet that would presumably be called GoogleNet. Possessing such a thing could allow Google to offer internet access in the form of free wifi or other means and create a powerful captive marketing audience which Google could monopolize. Outside of these marketing opportunities, such a development in infrastructure could help reduce Google's long-term content delivery costs were it to take on more bandwidth-intensive activities in the future.' "
Google Groups : SEM 2.0
Google Groups : SEM 2.0: "RE sadness over Google messing with organic search: I'm reminded of the comment by a dot-com exec to a journalist, circa 1999, when asked if he was going to 'sell out' to a megacompany: ''Sell out?' This is a business, not a rock band! Of course I'm going to sell out!'
Google's IPO was their way of saying that it's a business, not a rock band. Nothing in business is sacrosanct, and I expect the public will catch on before too long. "
Google's IPO was their way of saying that it's a business, not a rock band. Nothing in business is sacrosanct, and I expect the public will catch on before too long. "
New Google Search Engine Results to Include Additional Site Links?
New Google Search Engine Results to Include Additional Site Links?: "The Google search engine results pages have remained relatively constant from a 'look and feel' perspective for some time. That is: title tag of the resultant site is listed first - hyperlinked to the entry - then a portion of the page or body text with the search term(s) bolded in the text - then the proper URL of the entry - followed by the file size and date.
.....
I searched under the phrase 'Top 10 Web Hosting'. It was then that I saw something that I had never before seen in a Google search engine result. In addition to the 'standard' search engine result as described above, there were 2 additonal lines of hyperlinked text...the first additional line contained four additional anchor text links (Partner5 - Web Designers - ASP Web Hosting - Partner2). Each link was directing to a separate page. Now instead of the 'standard' single URL/single link listing, I was looking at a single listing that was linking out to 5 separate pages. The last line of the search result (More results) linked to to the following Google search: 'site:www.top10webhosting.com top 10 web hosting'. This search shows the entirety of Google indexed pages for the site....
According to my search engine expert sources, this is typical of a 'test' that Google conducts from time to time. It may or may not indicate that the changes will become permanent. However, it is often the case that proposed changes will appear in this 'test' mode prior to a system-wide rollout.
It appears that the links in the first additional line are being scraped/spidered from the original listing page. I surmise this as the title tags of the linked pages are slightly different in syntax than the anchor text of the SERP links. However, the anchor text and links from the original result page (standard listing page) are identical to the anchor text and links in the additional line.
Will Google be creating multiple links per result across all listings soon? What would the listing for a site that has dozens of subcategories and sub pages (like eBay) look like under this paradigm? Will webmasters scramble to groom their internal links from their homepages - adding new anchor text and links? No one knows for sure, but it is interesting to see this type of test appearing at this time"
.....
I searched under the phrase 'Top 10 Web Hosting'. It was then that I saw something that I had never before seen in a Google search engine result. In addition to the 'standard' search engine result as described above, there were 2 additonal lines of hyperlinked text...the first additional line contained four additional anchor text links (Partner5 - Web Designers - ASP Web Hosting - Partner2). Each link was directing to a separate page. Now instead of the 'standard' single URL/single link listing, I was looking at a single listing that was linking out to 5 separate pages. The last line of the search result (More results) linked to to the following Google search: 'site:www.top10webhosting.com top 10 web hosting'. This search shows the entirety of Google indexed pages for the site....
According to my search engine expert sources, this is typical of a 'test' that Google conducts from time to time. It may or may not indicate that the changes will become permanent. However, it is often the case that proposed changes will appear in this 'test' mode prior to a system-wide rollout.
It appears that the links in the first additional line are being scraped/spidered from the original listing page. I surmise this as the title tags of the linked pages are slightly different in syntax than the anchor text of the SERP links. However, the anchor text and links from the original result page (standard listing page) are identical to the anchor text and links in the additional line.
Will Google be creating multiple links per result across all listings soon? What would the listing for a site that has dozens of subcategories and sub pages (like eBay) look like under this paradigm? Will webmasters scramble to groom their internal links from their homepages - adding new anchor text and links? No one knows for sure, but it is interesting to see this type of test appearing at this time"
Friday, August 26, 2005
Google aims for Web developers' hearts and minds
Google aims for Web developers' hearts and minds | CNET News.com: "Google aims for Web developers' hearts and minds"
MediaPost Publications - When Is Arrogance Good? - 08/26/2005: "When Is Arrogance Good? by Mark Naples
Remember when Google's Search Engine didn't accept advertising? Many of us were using it for some time before there were such things as paid search, let alone sponsored links. Why did we use it? Because it was a better search engine which delivered better results in a simple, elegant interface. Google built a tremendous brand well before they monetized it. Of course, this was done by design.
In some ways, what Google did was to leverage Geoffrey Moore's "Early Adopter" strategy, designed primarily for B2B markets and make it work in the consumer market. Surely you recall having read his "Crossing the Chasm"? Build the brand and make its applications as user-friendly as possible, well before undertaking any monetization strategies. What they did was nothing short of well-executed genius applied in ways well beyond what any early adopter acolyte could have anticipated. Of course, others got there first. But, that's another column.
Think of how Google has been replicating that endeavor in the past 18 months, but toward a different product. With Gmail, Google Sidebar (which used to be called Google Desktop Search), and now their own Instant Messenger beta, Google has been providing free and useful applications that will put Google code on millions of users' hard drives.
Not only are they expanding their brand, they're expanding their footprint in ways that are meaningful to users' hearts..."
MediaPost Publications - When Is Arrogance Good? - 08/26/2005: "When Is Arrogance Good? by Mark Naples
Remember when Google's Search Engine didn't accept advertising? Many of us were using it for some time before there were such things as paid search, let alone sponsored links. Why did we use it? Because it was a better search engine which delivered better results in a simple, elegant interface. Google built a tremendous brand well before they monetized it. Of course, this was done by design.
In some ways, what Google did was to leverage Geoffrey Moore's "Early Adopter" strategy, designed primarily for B2B markets and make it work in the consumer market. Surely you recall having read his "Crossing the Chasm"? Build the brand and make its applications as user-friendly as possible, well before undertaking any monetization strategies. What they did was nothing short of well-executed genius applied in ways well beyond what any early adopter acolyte could have anticipated. Of course, others got there first. But, that's another column.
Think of how Google has been replicating that endeavor in the past 18 months, but toward a different product. With Gmail, Google Sidebar (which used to be called Google Desktop Search), and now their own Instant Messenger beta, Google has been providing free and useful applications that will put Google code on millions of users' hard drives.
Not only are they expanding their brand, they're expanding their footprint in ways that are meaningful to users' hearts..."
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Google IM (almost) gets the message, users say | CNET News.com
Google IM (almost) gets the message, users say | CNET News.com: "Across the Web, many consumers hailed the software's quick download time, which takes a few seconds over broadband and about three minutes over a typical modem, according to the Google Talk Web site. They also applauded its minimalism. "
Inside AdSense - Google AdSense team blog
Inside AdSense: "Which is why we're proud to announce the launch of Inside AdSense here at adsense.blogspot.com. We think you'll find it useful and fun. We'll cover all of the items listed above, plus anything else that can help you to grow your AdSense revenue.
You can look forward to posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff. We hope you'll visit often.
If you have suggestions for our blog, please send them to inside-adsense@google.com.
Posted by Gokul - AdSense Product Manager 8/24/2005 04:39:00 PM "our system now supports cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. This lets advertisers try out their best ideas while we make sure that that the right economic incentives are in place.
Regardless of bidding method and format, all ads compete for placement on a page - and that means the winning ad meets a high bar for user value . Since site-targeted CPM ads and keyword-targeted CPC ads compete for every slot on a publisher's site, this improves how you make money.
For many publishers, site targeting actually serves as a sales team. When advertisers want to buy space on your site, tell them, "Just bid directly on our site using Google AdWords site targeting!" And the ads placed by our system will run alongside ads targeted directly by marketers"
You can look forward to posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff. We hope you'll visit often.
If you have suggestions for our blog, please send them to inside-adsense@google.com.
Posted by Gokul - AdSense Product Manager 8/24/2005 04:39:00 PM "our system now supports cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. This lets advertisers try out their best ideas while we make sure that that the right economic incentives are in place.
Regardless of bidding method and format, all ads compete for placement on a page - and that means the winning ad meets a high bar for user value . Since site-targeted CPM ads and keyword-targeted CPC ads compete for every slot on a publisher's site, this improves how you make money.
For many publishers, site targeting actually serves as a sales team. When advertisers want to buy space on your site, tell them, "Just bid directly on our site using Google AdWords site targeting!" And the ads placed by our system will run alongside ads targeted directly by marketers"
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Google Rumors: To Launch Instant Messaging Tomorrow
Google Rumored To Launch Instant Messaging Tomorrow: "Google Rumored To Launch Instant Messaging Tomorrow
Google to Deliver Instant Messages from the Los Angeles Times has unnamed sources telling the paper that Google will launched an instant messaging service called Google Talk as early as tomorrow. Aside from IM, the tool would also offer voice chat similar to what Yahoo Messenger currently offers."
Google to Deliver Instant Messages from the Los Angeles Times has unnamed sources telling the paper that Google will launched an instant messaging service called Google Talk as early as tomorrow. Aside from IM, the tool would also offer voice chat similar to what Yahoo Messenger currently offers."
Google changes irk advertisers, please publishers | CNET News.com
Google changes irk advertisers, please publishers | CNET News.com: "Publishers who have seen a bump in revenue through Google's advertising program are heaping praise on recent changes, while some advertisers complain of increased costs.
Google last Tuesday changed the way advertisers using its AdWords program bid on keywords, creating a minimum bid for each one based on a quality score it determines for the keyword. Google's policy statement says the change allows advertisers to resurrect keywords that previously had been disabled because of low click-through performance. "
Google last Tuesday changed the way advertisers using its AdWords program bid on keywords, creating a minimum bid for each one based on a quality score it determines for the keyword. Google's policy statement says the change allows advertisers to resurrect keywords that previously had been disabled because of low click-through performance. "
Somebody loves googleFriday, August 19, 2005
Google Tests New Results Pages
MediaPost Publications: "Google Tests New Results Pages"
"SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE IS TESTING a new way of returning natural search results, a source at the company confirmed Thursday. The new method involves inserting another set of results that are related to the user's queries within the natural listings. For example, a search for 'us' might return results related to the United States, and the abbreviation 'U.S.' at the top of the natural results, but then insert results relating to the keywords 'US Weekly' on the bottom of the organic results page. A Google source called the pages an 'experiment,' only being served to a select group of users on a test basis. The source added that the additional set of results for related terms are not sponsored by advertisers. -- Shankar Gupta"
"SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE IS TESTING a new way of returning natural search results, a source at the company confirmed Thursday. The new method involves inserting another set of results that are related to the user's queries within the natural listings. For example, a search for 'us' might return results related to the United States, and the abbreviation 'U.S.' at the top of the natural results, but then insert results relating to the keywords 'US Weekly' on the bottom of the organic results page. A Google source called the pages an 'experiment,' only being served to a select group of users on a test basis. The source added that the additional set of results for related terms are not sponsored by advertisers. -- Shankar Gupta"
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Google plans big new stock sale
Google plans big new stock sale | CNET News.com "On Thursday, the eve of the first anniversary of its IPO, Google announced plans to sell 14.2 million shares of common stock on the public market, as seeks to raise more capital.
Google, which last year raised $1.7 billion with its long-awaited IPO, is hoping to raise in excess of $4 billion in this secondary offering, based on the current market price of $285 a share, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange commission.
"We anticipate that we will use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital and capital expenditures," Google stated in its SEC filing. "In addition, we may use proceeds of this offering for acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets."
Google, which last year raised $1.7 billion with its long-awaited IPO, is hoping to raise in excess of $4 billion in this secondary offering, based on the current market price of $285 a share, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange commission.
"We anticipate that we will use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital and capital expenditures," Google stated in its SEC filing. "In addition, we may use proceeds of this offering for acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets."
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal
Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal: "The search giant quietly acquires the startup, netting possibly a key player in its push into wireless, 'the next frontier in search' "
Google vs. Geico: Geico Spin Machine Undermines Google Victory - 08/17/2005
MediaPost Publications: "Google won a decisive victory in the most important part of a the trademark infringement lawsuit brought by Geico. But you'd never know that by looking at some of the headlines to emerge this week, which cast the decision as a loss for the search giant."
Monday, August 15, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
ZDNet UK Begs Google for Forgiveness
Slashdot: "prostoalex writes 'In light of the recent CNet ban by Google folks at ZDNet UK are now not sure whether they will get the same treatment, being a CNet company. But, just in case, they apologize profusely:
'Acting under the mistaken impression that Google's search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable. Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people's perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.'' "
Wanted at Google: A few good chefs | CNET News.com: "Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story"
Google: An Apology - ZDNet UK Comment: "Google has decided that search engines should not be used to collate data. We wish to say sorry for believing otherwise"
'Acting under the mistaken impression that Google's search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable. Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people's perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.'' "
Wanted at Google: A few good chefs | CNET News.com: "Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story"
Google: An Apology - ZDNet UK Comment: "Google has decided that search engines should not be used to collate data. We wish to say sorry for believing otherwise"
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Google's Bad PR Day : summary of recent stories
Google's Bad PR Day : Internet Search Engine News Jim Hedger reports: "Google has had another bad day on the public relations front yesterday. Three stories about Google made search marketing headlines which, for a company as interesting and innovative as Google is fairly typical...
The first and possibly most damaging item comes in the form of a directive issued to Google employees banning them from speaking with representatives of one of the Internet’s most popular news services, C-Net news.
Another headline yesterday noted that Google has issued an update for its popular toolbar. In this update, the controversial AutoLink feature of the toolbar is automatically enabled. AutoLink was included in the third version of the toolbar. When active, AutoLink adds links to a document if content in that document triggers it. Currently limited to proving links to FedEx (package tracking numbers), Amazon.Com (triggered when a book title or ISBN is mentioned), Google Maps (when street addresses are placed on a document), and vehicle histories (when a vehicle ID number is entered), AutoLink actively alters web documents, regardless of who created them. While the feature is said to assist Google users, the bottom line is that it will force content change on documents created, for the most part, by private webmasters.
A third headline yesterday led to an article about the troubles Google’s former National Sales Director, Christina Elwell faced when she told her former employer she was pregnant with quadruplets and coping with medical issues arising from the pregnancy. Just a few months earlier, Ms. Elwell was singled out for praise at a national sales meeting as a strong contributor, one of the people who made last year’s IPO successful. After telling her supervisor she was pregnant, Ms. Elwell was informed her position was terminated and offered a lesser role (which was eventually filled by someone else). "
Jim Hedger concludes: "It is however highly unlikely Google will emerge from this year with their “do-no-evil” reputation intact."
The first and possibly most damaging item comes in the form of a directive issued to Google employees banning them from speaking with representatives of one of the Internet’s most popular news services, C-Net news.
Another headline yesterday noted that Google has issued an update for its popular toolbar. In this update, the controversial AutoLink feature of the toolbar is automatically enabled. AutoLink was included in the third version of the toolbar. When active, AutoLink adds links to a document if content in that document triggers it. Currently limited to proving links to FedEx (package tracking numbers), Amazon.Com (triggered when a book title or ISBN is mentioned), Google Maps (when street addresses are placed on a document), and vehicle histories (when a vehicle ID number is entered), AutoLink actively alters web documents, regardless of who created them. While the feature is said to assist Google users, the bottom line is that it will force content change on documents created, for the most part, by private webmasters.
A third headline yesterday led to an article about the troubles Google’s former National Sales Director, Christina Elwell faced when she told her former employer she was pregnant with quadruplets and coping with medical issues arising from the pregnancy. Just a few months earlier, Ms. Elwell was singled out for praise at a national sales meeting as a strong contributor, one of the people who made last year’s IPO successful. After telling her supervisor she was pregnant, Ms. Elwell was informed her position was terminated and offered a lesser role (which was eventually filled by someone else). "
Jim Hedger concludes: "It is however highly unlikely Google will emerge from this year with their “do-no-evil” reputation intact."
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis - JenSense.com
Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis - JenSense.com Pearls from: "Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis...$1M a year in Google Adsense (or why 2,739 is my favorite number) - The Jason Calacanis Weblog - calacanis.weblogsinc.com _
What single change do you think made the biggest leap in your AdSense income?
1. Taking off the borders around the advertisement
2. Making the links the same color as the links on the blog
What is the best piece of advice you have for a publisher brand new to AdSense? What would you have done differently when you started with AdSense, knowing what you do now.
I would have run four ads per page, taken off the borders, and made the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would have also made channels for each position and blog so I could track things better.
How many times do you login to AdSense a day? Are you a stats junkie who checks every ten minutes? Or do you check only once or twice a day?
I have about 50 saved Adsense reports in a folder on my Opera browser. Every day I click on it and autoload the 50 pages. I then scan and look for trends. Sometimes I find a CTR spike or an eCPM of note. However, it's pretty steady at this point
"
What single change do you think made the biggest leap in your AdSense income?
1. Taking off the borders around the advertisement
2. Making the links the same color as the links on the blog
What is the best piece of advice you have for a publisher brand new to AdSense? What would you have done differently when you started with AdSense, knowing what you do now.
I would have run four ads per page, taken off the borders, and made the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would have also made channels for each position and blog so I could track things better.
How many times do you login to AdSense a day? Are you a stats junkie who checks every ten minutes? Or do you check only once or twice a day?
I have about 50 saved Adsense reports in a folder on my Opera browser. Every day I click on it and autoload the 50 pages. I then scan and look for trends. Sometimes I find a CTR spike or an eCPM of note. However, it's pretty steady at this point
"
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Adsense changes update from Google
: "There have been many improvements to AdSense over the past few months � some of them immediately obvious and others that may have slipped by you unnoticed. We like to keep you up to date with all these changes, so we have outlined the major changes below. In most cases, we have provided links to more information about the subject, but there is still a lot to read in this email! So settle in and read on for the full story."
Google Anticipated Microsoft Exec Fight - Forbes.com
Summary so far.....Google Anticipated Microsoft Exec Fight - Forbes.com: "Newly released court documents reveal that Google Inc. anticipated a fight with Microsoft Corp. when it hired a top executive away from the software behemoth to launch a new research and development center in China. "
Monday, August 01, 2005
Urchin and GoogleAnalytics.com.
Cre8asite forums. Google - Urchin and GoogleAnalytics.com. [ Search Engine Optimization, Usability and Web Design. ] bragadocchio posts about a thread at Threadwatch called GoogleAnalytics.com - Urchin on it's Way?, about a new domain name that Google registered, in light of Google's purchase of Urchin.
He also links to a patent application release with Urchin's name on it at: United States Patent Application: 0050165889: "United States Patent Application" System and method for monitoring and analyzing internet traffic - this " at how data from specific users is kept together using a "Visitor Centric Data Modeling" approach. It also provides some interesting techniques for trying to identify who thoses visitors are."
He also links to a patent application release with Urchin's name on it at: United States Patent Application: 0050165889: "United States Patent Application" System and method for monitoring and analyzing internet traffic - this " at how data from specific users is kept together using a "Visitor Centric Data Modeling" approach. It also provides some interesting techniques for trying to identify who thoses visitors are."
Slashdot | Google Patents RSS Advertising
Slashdot | Google Patents RSS Advertising: "IO ERROR writes "Google [1]filed a patent application for targeted advertising in RSS feeds about a year and a half ago. The USPTO has now assigned it a number and [2]placed it online. The patent application covers both targeting in RSS feeds and geotargeting by IP address. It gives some insight into how Google's ad servers work."
United States Patent Application: 0050165615: "Embedding advertisements in syndicated content Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older. "
United States Patent Application: 0050165615: "Embedding advertisements in syndicated content Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older. "
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit
Shenanigans....Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit | CNET News.com: "A former Google sales executive has filed a lawsuit against the search giant, alleging it engaged in job discrimination while she was pregnant with quadruplets. "
Monday, July 25, 2005
Google - Record Number of Searches in Q2
E-Commerce News: "While Google's market share for search increased from the first quarter, when it was 35.9 percent -- as did Ask Jeeves' share, which climbed from 5.3 percent, and AOL's, which jumped from 9.1 percent -- Yahoo's share fell from 31.2 percent and MSN's from 16.3 percent.
"
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About Google Scholar
About Google Scholar: "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Google buys Brazil firm for research center
Google buys Brazil firm for research center: "Web search leader Google said Wednesday that it bought Brazil's Akwan Information Technologies, which it will use to set up a research and development center for Latin America. The small Brazilian company develops information search systems for companies"
Optimizing for Google AdWords' New Quality Score System
Optimizing for Google AdWords' New Quality Score System: "by Greg Ives - KeywordRanking
In the coming weeks, Google will release a new method for deciding when your ads show up. Out with the old system of 'on hold, in trial and disabled' keywords and in with 'the quality based system,' where keywords are either active or inactive...
There are several issues that will be challenging for marketers.
Inexperienced advertisers will likely increase their max CPC to retain their paid search rankings. This only provides a short term solution that will drain your budget and leave your ad costing too much.
Increasing CPC is one thing you can do in order to attain active status, but the correct thing to do prior to spending more money per click is to improve your quality score through optimization.
In addition, inexperienced advertisers are likely to erase existing keywords that aren't activated but could easily become so by changing the structure of the account, budgeting, etc (see below). This could lose them some easy return on keywords that convert.
To keep your keywords activated an experienced agency will:
* alter the structure of the account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords
* alter campaign budgeting
* refine content targeting
* optimize for your max CPC
* select proper keyword matching
* ensure rotation of quality ad text
* proper keyword selection
* build out campaign negative keywords
* implement content website exclusion"
In the coming weeks, Google will release a new method for deciding when your ads show up. Out with the old system of 'on hold, in trial and disabled' keywords and in with 'the quality based system,' where keywords are either active or inactive...
There are several issues that will be challenging for marketers.
Inexperienced advertisers will likely increase their max CPC to retain their paid search rankings. This only provides a short term solution that will drain your budget and leave your ad costing too much.
Increasing CPC is one thing you can do in order to attain active status, but the correct thing to do prior to spending more money per click is to improve your quality score through optimization.
In addition, inexperienced advertisers are likely to erase existing keywords that aren't activated but could easily become so by changing the structure of the account, budgeting, etc (see below). This could lose them some easy return on keywords that convert.
To keep your keywords activated an experienced agency will:
* alter the structure of the account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords
* alter campaign budgeting
* refine content targeting
* optimize for your max CPC
* select proper keyword matching
* ensure rotation of quality ad text
* proper keyword selection
* build out campaign negative keywords
* implement content website exclusion"
Monday, July 18, 2005
Google PageRank
SiteProNews: "Google PageRank
Update Analysis By Dave Davies
The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a largër stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:
1) Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or
2) The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or
3) The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.
Concludes: "if you've noticed that everyone around you has stayed the same or increased in PageRank try to remember this, there's nothing you can do about where you're currently positioned in regards to PageRank and it will probably be another 3 months before Google updates the public PageRank again so ... start building some good quality (high relevancy, solid PageRank) links. Work towards an increase in the next update.
Panicking now won't help, intelligent reaction will."
Update Analysis By Dave Davies
The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a largër stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:
1) Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or
2) The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or
3) The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.
Concludes: "if you've noticed that everyone around you has stayed the same or increased in PageRank try to remember this, there's nothing you can do about where you're currently positioned in regards to PageRank and it will probably be another 3 months before Google updates the public PageRank again so ... start building some good quality (high relevancy, solid PageRank) links. Work towards an increase in the next update.
Panicking now won't help, intelligent reaction will."
Monday, July 11, 2005
Google Doesn't Know it All
Steve Rubel points readers of his blog Micro Persuasion to: Google Doesn't Know it All: " Can't Find It On Google where people can talk about what they can't locate using the search engine."
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Google wins copycat Web domain dispute
Google wins copycat Web domain dispute - BizReport: "The National Arbitration Forum said on Friday that Google Inc. has rights to the Internet domain names googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com, which are similar to its own google.com domain...
The NAF hears thousands of domain disputes each year under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in a dispute process that is an alternative to trademark lawsuits."
The NAF hears thousands of domain disputes each year under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in a dispute process that is an alternative to trademark lawsuits."
Friday, July 08, 2005
London blasts rock the Net; sites, blogs respond
Internet Daily: "News Web sites in the United Kingdom were hammered for almost four hours after the London bomb blasts occurred.
Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., said the average measured U.K. site took four times longer than normal to respond.
Hardest hit were the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk), Sky News (www.sky.com/skynews/home) and the Financial Times (www.ft.com).
'The average response time for a home page on the Internet is two to three seconds,' Patel said in an interview. 'So that means some sites took up to 10 seconds. That's doesn't seem significant until you realize the hardest-hit sites were experiencing such traffic they dragged down the average of the 37 other sites [in the Keynote (KEYN: news, chart, profile) U.K. "
Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., said the average measured U.K. site took four times longer than normal to respond.
Hardest hit were the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk), Sky News (www.sky.com/skynews/home) and the Financial Times (www.ft.com).
'The average response time for a home page on the Internet is two to three seconds,' Patel said in an interview. 'So that means some sites took up to 10 seconds. That's doesn't seem significant until you realize the hardest-hit sites were experiencing such traffic they dragged down the average of the 37 other sites [in the Keynote (KEYN: news, chart, profile) U.K. "
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Google, partners to back broadband venture -WSJ
Internet News Article | Reuters.com: " Google Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Hearst Corp. are investing about $100 million in Current Communications Group, a start-up that offers high-speed Internet connections over electricity lines, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. "
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Keeping an Eye on Google
Keeping an Eye on Google: "A new report offers fascinating, in-depth insights on how users interact with Google search results, based on studies using eye-tracking technology.
The report, from Enquiro, Did-It and Eyetools, is a comprehensive white paper that builds on an earlier press release that described Google's 'golden triangle' of search results.
The study found that most viewers looked at results in an 'F' shaped scan pattern, with the eye travelling vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right, as if something caught the participant's attention.
The new study expands significantly on the initial findings, offering a detailed look at the methodology used and much more granular conclusions examining all aspects of Google search results. For example, the study showed that searchers react to organic results differently than they react to sponsored listings. "
The report, from Enquiro, Did-It and Eyetools, is a comprehensive white paper that builds on an earlier press release that described Google's 'golden triangle' of search results.
The study found that most viewers looked at results in an 'F' shaped scan pattern, with the eye travelling vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right, as if something caught the participant's attention.
The new study expands significantly on the initial findings, offering a detailed look at the methodology used and much more granular conclusions examining all aspects of Google search results. For example, the study showed that searchers react to organic results differently than they react to sponsored listings. "
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
July stock of the month: Google
July stock of the month: Google - Internet Services - Internet - Analyst: "Google's surge past $300 a share in June helped push the dollar volume trading of the stock to $112 billion according to data compiled by the Hulbert Financial Digest, making it the July stock of the month for Trading Strategies."
Friday, June 17, 2005
Google mobile search: Google Blog
Google Blog: The world in your pocket"Steven Schirripa, Software Engineer
Since millions of people across the globe already use mobile phones like there's no tomorrow, we're launching Mobile Web Search in many languages. Try it the next time you visit Google on your mobile phone - you'll see a new option to search the Mobile Web. How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites. And so your phone can now be that much more useful."
http://mobile.google.com/mobile_search.html
Currently results in error message
www.internetnews.com Reports : "Aiming to make search easier for users on the go, Google (Quote, Chart) released Google Mobile Web Search on Thursday.
The new service points users of Internet-enabled mobile devices to a special index of Web pages that have been optimized by their publishers for the small screen. The XHTML-based service takes advantage of the alignments of text, graphics and tables that mobile-aware publishers have created to make them easier to navigate on a mobile phone.
Nishar didn't discount the possibility of including ads in Mobile Web Search results. "We haven't started doing that," he said, "and Google does not make forward-looking statements." But he said that mobile ads could be delivered as an extension of the company's existing technology."
Since millions of people across the globe already use mobile phones like there's no tomorrow, we're launching Mobile Web Search in many languages. Try it the next time you visit Google on your mobile phone - you'll see a new option to search the Mobile Web. How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites. And so your phone can now be that much more useful."
http://mobile.google.com/mobile_search.html
Currently results in error message
www.internetnews.com Reports : "Aiming to make search easier for users on the go, Google (Quote, Chart) released Google Mobile Web Search on Thursday.
The new service points users of Internet-enabled mobile devices to a special index of Web pages that have been optimized by their publishers for the small screen. The XHTML-based service takes advantage of the alignments of text, graphics and tables that mobile-aware publishers have created to make them easier to navigate on a mobile phone.
Nishar didn't discount the possibility of including ads in Mobile Web Search results. "We haven't started doing that," he said, "and Google does not make forward-looking statements." But he said that mobile ads could be delivered as an extension of the company's existing technology."
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Problems With Google Sitemaps
DMNews.com: "By: Stephan Spencer Netconcepts"
Outlines what he sees as two major problems, one of which he has a solution for sale....
"First, it doesn’t solve the duplicate pages problem that a great many dynamic sites have. Even the Google Store suffers from this....
Duplicate pages, on its own, may not sound like a problem for Webmasters as much as it is for Google itself, which has to dedicate additional resources to maintain all this redundant content in its index. However, it does have serious implications for Webmasters, because it results in PageRank dilution -- where multiple versions of a page split up the “votes” (links) and PageRank score that a single version of the page would aggregate.
This brings me to the second, related problem with Google Sitemaps: It doesn’t do anything to alleviate the phenomenon of PageRank dilution. PageRank dilution results in lower PageRank, which in turn results in lower rankings. For example, consider that the above-mentioned Google Store’s product page (the “Black is Back T-Shirt”) is in Google’s index five times instead of just once. So each of those five variations earns only a fraction of the total potential PageRank score that it could have earned if all the links pointed to a single “Black is Back T-Shirt” page"....
He suggests both of the above issues could be rectified: by extending robots.txt with some additional directives "that specify:
· Which parameter in a dynamic URL is the “key field.”
· Which parameter is the product ID and which is the category ID (specifically for online catalogs).
· Which parameters are superfluous or that don’t significantly vary the content displayed.
Armed with this information, Googlebot will be able to not only eliminate duplicate pages but also intelligently choose the most appropriate version to save in its index and then associate with that page the PageRank of ALL versions of the page. The days of session IDs killing a site’s Google visibility would be over! Google admits in its Sitemaps FAQ that session IDs are still a problem even with the advent of Google Sitemaps:
Question: URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them? Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site. "
Outlines what he sees as two major problems, one of which he has a solution for sale....
"First, it doesn’t solve the duplicate pages problem that a great many dynamic sites have. Even the Google Store suffers from this....
Duplicate pages, on its own, may not sound like a problem for Webmasters as much as it is for Google itself, which has to dedicate additional resources to maintain all this redundant content in its index. However, it does have serious implications for Webmasters, because it results in PageRank dilution -- where multiple versions of a page split up the “votes” (links) and PageRank score that a single version of the page would aggregate.
This brings me to the second, related problem with Google Sitemaps: It doesn’t do anything to alleviate the phenomenon of PageRank dilution. PageRank dilution results in lower PageRank, which in turn results in lower rankings. For example, consider that the above-mentioned Google Store’s product page (the “Black is Back T-Shirt”) is in Google’s index five times instead of just once. So each of those five variations earns only a fraction of the total potential PageRank score that it could have earned if all the links pointed to a single “Black is Back T-Shirt” page"....
He suggests both of the above issues could be rectified: by extending robots.txt with some additional directives "that specify:
· Which parameter in a dynamic URL is the “key field.”
· Which parameter is the product ID and which is the category ID (specifically for online catalogs).
· Which parameters are superfluous or that don’t significantly vary the content displayed.
Armed with this information, Googlebot will be able to not only eliminate duplicate pages but also intelligently choose the most appropriate version to save in its index and then associate with that page the PageRank of ALL versions of the page. The days of session IDs killing a site’s Google visibility would be over! Google admits in its Sitemaps FAQ that session IDs are still a problem even with the advent of Google Sitemaps:
Question: URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them? Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site. "
Monday, June 13, 2005
SEO for Google - Google Search Engine Optimization Tricks
SEO for Google - Google Search Engine Optimization Tricks A selection of search operands : "Enter just the word http for your search to find the top 1000 PageRanked sites.
Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.
Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:
link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
related:url same as 'what's related' on serps.
site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.... "
Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.
Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:
link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
related:url same as 'what's related' on serps.
site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.... "
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Google AdSense: Tips from Google
Google AdSense check out their illustration in answer to: "Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
The best placement for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content...'heat map' illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colours fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.
While this heat map is useful as a positioning guideline, we strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behaviour on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages.
For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads can answer that question for them."
Oddly enough blogger will not allow Google adwords within a post so it cannot appear directly below the rext....
The best placement for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content...'heat map' illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colours fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.
While this heat map is useful as a positioning guideline, we strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behaviour on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages.
For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads can answer that question for them."
Oddly enough blogger will not allow Google adwords within a post so it cannot appear directly below the rext....
Friday, June 10, 2005
Google Enterprise Solutions : Google Mini
Google Enterprise Solutions: "The Google Mini:
Now indexes and searches up to 100,000 documents
Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
Costs just £1,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage. "
Now indexes and searches up to 100,000 documents
Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
Costs just £1,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage. "
Danny Sullivan on Google Sitemaps Pings and General Compatibility
searchenginewatch.com/blog
He points out that a most important point : "is that Google Sitemaps is new, not necessarily set in stone, and certain to develop. I'm just glad to finally have something that lets webmasters -- any webmaster -- feed URLs into the major search engines for consideration. We haven't had this for free, for everyone, since Infoseek back in like 1998 or 1999."
In summary as at Google Sitemaps (BETA) Help: "a simple text file listing all your URLs one by one is fine. Specific FAQ info is here. Also worth noting there are many different alternative formats you can use, including RSS 2.0. FAQ on that here. As for pinging, while you cannot ping that individual pages have been updated, you can ping that your sitemap overall has been updated. "
He points out that a most important point : "is that Google Sitemaps is new, not necessarily set in stone, and certain to develop. I'm just glad to finally have something that lets webmasters -- any webmaster -- feed URLs into the major search engines for consideration. We haven't had this for free, for everyone, since Infoseek back in like 1998 or 1999."
In summary as at Google Sitemaps (BETA) Help: "a simple text file listing all your URLs one by one is fine. Specific FAQ info is here. Also worth noting there are many different alternative formats you can use, including RSS 2.0. FAQ on that here. As for pinging, while you cannot ping that individual pages have been updated, you can ping that your sitemap overall has been updated. "
Google's Boubon update review
Cosmetic Changes at Google Precede Larger Overhaul: "By Jim Hedger - June 08, 2005 Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday...
For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on “ethical SEO” practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on “supplemental listings”, crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.
Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time.
As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google’s teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex. "
For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on “ethical SEO” practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on “supplemental listings”, crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.
Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time.
As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google’s teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex. "
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Spam Recognition Guide for Raters
Changes are highlighted with UPDATE throughout the document
Introduction
During the course of rating, you may encounter results that Google considers spam. Some are obvious but others are less overt. Provided here is an overview of spam recognition tools for use in rating projects.
Before familiarizing yourself with tools aimed at detecting spam, i.e. deceitful web design, please read Google’s policies on quality web design http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality . In particular, pay attention to:
• The distinction between pages designed for human viewers and those set up for search engine robots
• The specific enumerated manipulative techniques for which sites may be “punished” by Google.
If you are not sure of your spam detection skills yet, you may want to subject every result page that comes up for rating to a checklist of all potential manipulative techniques that this guide explicates. With experience in spam identification, the spam-spotting techniques presented below become easy to use. You will have seen patterns of honest pages and deceitful pages; questionable results will jump at you “asking” to be checked for evidence of spamming. If unsure, do not hesitate to ask questions!
Note on Foreign Language spam: If a page in another language uses an obvious spamming technique, do label it as spam. Spam identification often does not depend on linguistic issues. However, if you are unable to make a determination, feel free to rate the result as Foreign Language. The same logic applies to Offensive pornographic results that are neither invited nor tolerated by the query. If you can make determination independent of the language, please do so.
Common Spam Techniques Sneaky Redirects
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result.
When you click on the link: URL A may appear in the address bar of the browser for a brief moment, but you are sent to URL B. You might see other, transient URLs before the page finally loads with URL B visible in the address bar. One URL may sneakily redirect to a number of rotating domains, so clicking on the same result several times may land you on pages under different URLs. Those pages may or may not look the same.
What's probably going on: Domain B wants to extend its reach in our index, so it creates Domain A. Google indexes and scores the content on Domain A, yet the user is redirected to Domain B. The webmaster presents one content to the search engine robot and another to the users.
Examples:
Result URL What visiting the page takes you to1
http://www.lasik-eye-surgery-laser-eye-surgery.com/ http://1800contacts.com/ or http://www.visiondirect.com/spanish/scripts/ default.asp?AID=9483447&PID=858188
http://www.juvenews.com/pics-of-car-wrecks.html http://www.ofhg.com/sexsites/index.html
http://www.theii.net/information-on-the-great-pyramid-at-giza.html http://www.scbgalleries.com/freeporn/index.htmlor http://www.scbgalleries.com/pornogallery/index.html, or http://www.scbgalleries.com/openadult/index.html, or http://www.ofhg.com/freeadult/index.html, http://www.ofhg.com/gallery/welcome.html, http://www.ofhg.com/sexsites/index.html...
http://pregnancy.pregnancy-pampers.co.uk/ http://uk.pampers.com/en_GB/signup.do
http://children.pregnancy-pampers.co.uk/ http://uk.pampers.com/en_GB/signup.do
1. Hotlinks have been disabled for some porn pages whose content is apparent from the URL structure.
Question: Are all redirects spam?
Answer: Absolutely not!
For example, http://www.film.com redirects to movies.real.com, but not in a sneaky manner.
For another example, consider www.compaq.com. Compaq is a now a Hewlett Packard company. www.compaq.com redirects to http://h18000.www1.hp.com/ in a legitimate manner.
100% Frame
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result.
When you click the link: URL A appears in the address bar of the browser. The page uses a frame that occupies all (or nearly all) of the browser window. Page B fills this frame. You need to reveal the page information for page B. In Internet Explorer, point to any place on the main page (other than an image) inside the frame with your cursor, right-click and choose “Properties”. Check Address: ( URL).2
What's probably going on: Domain B is a legitimate commercial site that wants to extend its reach in Google’s index, so it creates Domain A. Google indexes and scores the content on A, yet the user is shown Domain B in the 100% frame. Again, what’s created for search engine robots differs from what is created for human visitors.
Example: http://www.catwalk4u.de/ (right-click on the web page body and choose “Properties” in IE, and note the URL, which may be one of a number of rotating sites, including http://www.link-diener.de/mode.html , http://www.trixo.de/mode.html and http://www.looking4links.de/mode.html ).
Hidden Text / Hidden Links
What you'll see on the result page: You may notice large blank areas on the bottom or/and the top of the page. Using the keyboard shortcut for Select All on the page (CTRL-A in Internet Explorer) may reveal text or links that are hidden from the user (example: white text on white background).
2 Certain pages, primarily those that contain objects that can be copied, disable this feature.
What's probably going on: The webmaster hopes that adding more text to the page will increase the number of ways in which users can find the page searching on Google. Stuffing the page with text may put off site visitors, so the webmaster chooses to hide the text and/or links. Google scores content that the user never sees; what’s being created for search engine robots differs from what is intended for human page viewers.
Example 1: http://www.marantz.com/ -- observe pristine white space and then do select-all to reveal white-on-white text.
Example 2. On the bottom of these pages observe hidden text in a very small font size:
http://www.jobjobbed.com/
http://free-web-hosting-inc.com/fort_wayne_indiana_web_hosting.html
Porn on Expired Domains
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result. It has a relatively “benign” domain name, with no reference to porn or adult content.
When you click the link: The page has porn content.
What's probably going on: An adult content webmaster purchased Domain A after its former owner allowed his/her ownership to lapse. In Google, Domain A has some lingering good reputation in the form of PageRank. Webmasters linking to Domain A aren’t always on top of their links, and their “votes” for Domain A based on old, benign content can continue indefinitely, to the adult content webmaster’s benefit. Google is counting incoming hyperlinks that the new, adult content webmaster never earned, and search relevancy can be skewed.
Secondary Search Results / PPC
We want to mark as Offensive the pages that are set up for the purposes of collecting pay-per-click revenue without providing much content of their own. You will see such cases most frequently in conjunction with “search results” feeds. Please read the whole section.
What you'll see on the result page: Usually, the page presents its own set of search results. Or, the page may look like the top-level page of a legitimate directory (tree structure) but clicking on a few selections reveals ads disguised as results. Or, you see copied content from a legitimate, credible resource, without value added by the copying site, plus a PPC program in place.
What's probably going on: The owner of the site gets paid whenever users click on these secondary results. You may be able to reveal this pay-per-click scheme by pointing your cursor to secondary links without clicking on them. Observe the status bar and you may see that clicks go through espotting, overture, or another advertising company.
Let us take a look at an example:
http://www.startcool.de/Dir/Medien/Fernsehen
This site is simply a copy of the Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ), but has a PPC program on the right (Google AdSense); the presence of AdSense PPC on top of the ODP content makes this site (every page on it) Offensive. Think about what the incentives are for creating a copy of the Open Directory Project; ODP is a free resource that does not accept advertising. By copying the search feed of DMOZ, sites can get contextual advertising on a pay-per-click basis. Google does not encourage creation of duplicates, so we are asking you to mark such result Offensive. Of course, had the result been a page on the Open Directory itself, it would have to be rated on the merits to the query.3 As you see, pages with the same content may be assigned vastly different ratings based on the absence or presence of a ppc program.
Here is an example of a page with ‘search results’ (ads):
http://www.toxiclemon.co.uk/s.php?av=custom&ver=27617&set=uk-only&qkw=lastminute&qcat=web
Note that the links on the page go through go2net.com. Also note: some ‘search result’ pages disguise the nature of what they do more than others. On Toxic Lemon pages, a more experienced user realizes that the results are essentially ads (Overture, Espotting are known providers of contextual ads), but this does not salvage the rating for this page. You can safely label all pages from Toxic Lemon Offensive, even if they are in another language.
Standard directories, or sites with results links that neither go through affiliate PPC programs nor redirect you through one of those programs, are usually not Offensive. One example of a non-Offensive directory is a directory that is clearly built by the site itself, not copied (http://www.joeant.com/DIR/info/get/5704/48827 ); also, a directory that charges for membership, not for clicks, is not Offensive. Consider for instance a directory of realtors that accepts entries for a yearly fee.
Please note that when you hover the cursor over links on the page you are examining, you are not always seeing the “true” URL in the status bar below. This is because it is possible to fool users by rewriting the URL reported in the status bar using Javascript, so take some extra time to understand where the links on the page are taking you.4
3 ODP (DMOZ) results are not Erroneous.
4 If you use Mozilla, you may have access to extra tools for spam evaluation. Write to us for specific instructions, please.
Some common PPC and Search Engine feed domains:
searchfeed.com findwhat.com espotting.com overture.com go2net.com
More examples:
http://www.toxiclemon.co.uk/t/fancy-dress-shops/angle-dress-fancy-little-shop.htm
http://www.widgets.ws/widgets/us+robotics+modems
http://www.skc-networks.com/search.php?keywords=1260%20free%20nokia%20ri
http://hockey-apparel.discgolfnet.com/tennessee-titans-super-bowl-screen-saver.html
http://www.investment-wonder.com/top-search/investment/Group-Investment-Susquehanna.htm
http://www.carzilla.us/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=motorcycle+rally
http://www.paley.com/search/Washing%20Machines.html Clicking on ‘results’ on this page takes the user through affiliate.espotting.com; scroll to the bottom of the page on http://www.espotting.com/affiliate/account/login.asp and you will see that Espotting.com engages in exclusive pay-per-click partnerships with European sites. Another example:
http://www.shopguide.co.uk/Washing-Machines/
http://www.milipics.com/
http://www.tools-directory.us/dir/matsushita_compressor/index.shtml
Thin Affiliate Doorway Pages
We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones are Offensive. Please read the whole section.
UPDATE Please read Appendix I at the end of the Guide. Appendix I applies the distinction between thin content and added value affiliates to the case of Hotel Booking Sites.
Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user.5 A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we’re attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman.
Observe where the links on the site take you. If the links are overwhelmingly leading you to one affiliate program, this is a strong signal that the site is a Thin Affiliate. Likewise, if the pages on the site are homogenous, and the links go to one or more affiliate programs, this is also a strong candidate.
In assessing sites for a Thin Affiliate rating, it is urged to click around the site (preferably during a “Sanity Check” in another browser) to determine if the links are affiliate in nature (or Pay-Per-Click, in the section that follows).
Here is an example of a Thin Affiliate:
http://diesel-shoes.01shoes.com/Diesel-Mens-Retro-Shoes.htm
This page has a number of marketing snippets for individual shoes, and a “More Information” button. Clicking on More Information button launches a popup window that takes you first through qksrv.net (Commission Junction), then to zappos.com. Zappos is known to have an affiliate program.
Clicking around the various navigational links on 01shoes.com shows more of the same design: a picture, a marketing snippet, and the link to Zappos via the Commission Junction; so, the correct rating is “Thin Affiliate.”
The qksrv.net redirect is important to note, because online merchants often use a third party affiliate provider to take care of the link tracking and payment. Thus the presence of these domains in the links on a page, or in redirects, can strongly suggest a Thin Affiliate classification:
qksrv.net
bfast.com
myaffiliateprogram.com,
webmasterplan.de
zanox-affiliate.de
Here’s another example, this one using bfast:
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1358.htm ,
5 Usually the commission is not paid unless the user ultimately makes a purchase; contrast this with the pay-per-click schemes, discussed above.
Point you cursor to the link that says Click here to buy … and observe the status bar window on the bottom of your window: you will see “http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click”
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1367.htm
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1362.htm
The www.internetshopping.ws site has nothing but affiliate links: no content, no service to users.
The following is an example of a site that was built using the Amazon API.
http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html
Note that all of the exits on the site for buying the product lead to Amazon. All of the content on the product page, including reviews, pricing, release dates etc. are available as part of the feed. The site adds nothing to the content that can be found on Amazon; it has no content value, nor does it add any service value to the user. A Thin Affiliate.
Here is an example of a site that should not be labeled Thin Affiliate:
http://www.bookfinder4u.com/detail/0767914104.html
At first cut it may look like yet another thin affiliate doorway to Amazon or B&N, but bookfinder4u.com is providing a value-added service to visitors by offering a comparison of prices between different online merchants. Ultimately you will be taken to Ecampus.com, Half.com, Amazon or another affiliate online bookseller, but the fact that they have their own price comparison infrastructure is the differentiator. To appreciate the difference, ask yourself this question: would any user want to go to www.bookfinder4u.com rather than directly to Barnes & Noble? To http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html rather than to Amazon? The answer to the former question is Yes, because at Barnes & Noble, the user would not be able to see any direct price comparison between the B&N’s price and competitors’ prices for any given item; the answer to the latter question is No or Indifferent between the two. Surely, most naïve users may not even be aware when they are redirected, thrown from one site to another, etc. But if they were advised of what is going on, would then make an informed choice to go to a totally thin, no-unique-content affiliate doorway?
Another example of a page that does not fit the criteria of affiliate spam: http://www.mothering.com/books/books.shtml#adoption gives a list of links that all lead to Powells.com, an on-line bookseller site. Clearly the Mothering magazine earns something when the readers buy books from Powells; however, equally clearly, the page is not set up for the sole purpose of generating affiliate links: browse the site a bit and you will discover that it has rich contents. Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site’s existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?
Another Example: http://books.webwab.com/item_512913.htm (clicking around on that site, you'll realize that every page simply leads to overstock.com pages)
More Examples: http://www.thenewwidgetsite.com/prod/Kitchen-Etc/3-M-Command-Adhesive-Designer-Small-Hookss{1}Pack-of-2.html PPC and A Thin Affiliate; a spam page with evidence of multiple spamming techniques is not a rare exception. http://www.computermonitoruk.co.uk/
http://www.malls.cheap-money.com/
http://www.mabuy.com/News--Politics-magazines/The-New-Yorker.asp - a doorway to Amazon and to Ebay.
At times the result page does not fall under any of the above categories yet still strikes you as “fishy”. In those cases we invite you to run the query on Google setting your preferences to show the top 20 results.6 View the first result page and try to find the URL you are rating. (You won’t always be able to, as the result sets may have changed). If it is not in the current top 20, please rate the questionable result on the utility scale and move on. If it is in the top 20, examine the result set observing, where available, the following features:
o Do most of the top results resemble each other, and the result you are rating, in the snippets, titles, and/or URL structure?
o Do the result pages, when you click on them, resemble the result page you are rating in content? Contact information? Nearly identical, templated design? Affiliation with the same commercial entity?
o What about the snippets for your URL? Do they contain dictionary-like lists of words? Repeated text?
If your answer to several of the questions above is Yes, please rate the suspicious result as Offensive. If suspicion seems unjustified – all checks come out negative – please do not give the Offensive rating. Not sure? One attribute, for example repeated text in the snippet, may or may not be a spam signal. So, send a question!
6 http://www.google.com/preferences?q=gf&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Go to Number of Results and set to Display 20 results per page.
UPDATE Appendix I.
Hotel booking sites: spam or not?
Rating hotel booking sites is not easy. The technical questions – is it a real agency or just an affiliate? – has to be balanced against the user value considerations. We will address this issue now by giving examples of what is and is not spam.
First off, be more stringent when hotel booking sites come up as a result to a location query than when they come up to a hotel query. In other words, if you are dealing with a borderline case, resolve your doubts in favor of the Offensive rating if the query is for a location. Why? It is especially undesirable to have hotel booking sites crop up to queries that might presuppose hotels in the location of search, but might also look for a million other aspects of the location, such as reviews, transportation, a municipal site, a good resource on local history and geography, and the like. In a borderline case to a clearly hotel query (examples of such a query: [holiday inn, Cortland], [crowne plaza northstar hotel minneapolis], [Boston Park Plaza]), you may be more lenient. This is because the user intent is more unequivocally to get information on the hotel of choice, or to get a list of hotels in a location of choice. It can be argued that an opportunity to get a good deal on booking, the opportunity that some of the sites offer, is enough to warrant a merit-based rating for a hotel site.
Further, since there are affiliates and affiliates, it is important to differentiate between those who provide value added and those that just copy content and features off a feed to gain affiliate revenue without investing in offering unique and helpful services for the users.
As a fine example of the former, value-added sites, consider
http://www.europeforvisitors.com/europe/articles/amsterdam-3-star-hotels.htm
This site has a wealth of original articles (just do a few quick clicks around). Granted, most of the links on the above URL go through venere.com to get booking revenue, but the site as a whole offers a lot more than just stock hotel descriptions and booking links. Also, the comments and the apparent hand-selection of links is a definite value added service by the webmaster.
[holiday inn, Cortland]
http: //traveldeals.sidestep.com/
Hotel_Deals/New_York/Cortland/All/
Holiday_Inn_Cortland?tk=EIKTDHHPXXXX0000002
This site offers the users a download of an application to compare prices side-by-side and search travel sites. Not all users will find the application trustworthy, or worthy the extra time in learning how to use it in general, but we clearly do have an added service here – it’s not just the same content off a feed. Hence, rate on the merits (Relevant).
[Boston Park Plaza]
Vital: http://www.bostonparkplaza.com/ or http://www.bostonparkplaza.com/default.asp?sID=home
(remember, duplicates get the same rating) Not all hotels have their own homepages; for those that do, be sure to identify the uniquely authoritative nature of those pages by giving them Vital or Useful (as the case may be) ratings. It is sometimes difficult to do the differentiation because you see the same images on the official site, on the site of true travel agents, and finally, on the multiple affiliate sites…
Let us know walk through a handful of results to this query and make a determination on spam versus relevance rating.
http://www.reservation-services.com/bostonparkplaza.html
What immediately strikes as unusual is the candor in the disclaimer: “The telephone number, fax number and email addresses on this site DO NOT connect to the hotel.” Many affiliate sites list contact information right under the name of a hotel, so that users may be under the impression that they can call the hotel direct. Also, this site has its own staff: http://www.reservation-services.com/about_us.html ; the names of the management staff are provided. This is a piece of evidence in favor of merit-based rating: this is not just a site that is set up as a middleman between the customer and the true reservation site. Finally, prominently behind the logo you see the link to “Become An Affiliate” – follow the link and see the offer the site makes to hotels. Clearly the site acts as a travel agent between the customer and the hotel, not as an affiliate of another booking site. So we are almost ready to give a relevance rating… but wait, let us go back to http://www.reservation-services.com/bostonparkplaza.html and check for hidden text. Sure enough, a few hidden keywords just below the copyright statement. Offensive. Find a few other hotels on this site and check for hidden text – you will see the same keyword white-on-white under the copyright statement.
http://boston.hotelguide.net/data/h100012.htm
Initially seems a borderline case. You see ppc (AdSense) on the right frame. You also see links to other sites bundled together: MetroGuide, EventGuide, DiningGuide, etc. (left frame); clicking on the first three displays information specific to Boston, so availability of these sites can be considered a value added. Nice to have also: links to local restaurants and nightlife. Are they an affiliate though? Yes; try to book and you will land on
https://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/bookit?SID=HG8&Dest=BOS&LKF=HGD&LANG=en&PROD=HOTEL+&DispCurr=
USD&ITRK=dbP&qKey=
YO330518800604&HtlId=NC+PARKP&Smk=N&Screen=0
www.180096hotel.com , travelnow.com, ian.com and hotels.com are all one group. So you see that hotelguide.com has NO booking capability on its own and is signed up as a travelnow affiliate. And yet it is not spam. Why? It offers a video, an unusual and valuable added service. It subscribes to a travel video library http://www.travelago.com/ to get additional content and service.
This is enough to salvage http://boston.hotelguide.net/data/h100012.htm from the Offensive classification. Please rate on the merits to the query, taking into account that a video might make this site more helpful than other similar ones.
To reiterate: the added value provided by, first and foremost, the video, and also
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-397998-the_boston_park_plaza_hotel-i
This is to remind you that special service pages that Yahoo provides, such as Movies, Finance, Travel, and others, should always be rated based on the merits to the query and not as Erroneous (of course not as Offensive either). In your merit rating, consider how helpful independent reviews by others might be to those who plan their voyages:
“Old gross bathrooms, stained carpet, chipped paint on walls, moulding falling off of walls, radiator falling off of wall. Room was the size of a dorm room. The only good thing going for this place is the location. We paid about $190.00 a night - NOT WORTH IT!!”
D) http://www.boston.the-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers.htm
You see lots of links to other hotels. These seem placed for search engine spiders, not human visitors. The goal of the site is to get all of the hotels indexed. Evidence of spam. Pictures are nice, but where do they come from? Check the properties of any image and you will see they come from travelnow
example: http://images.travelnow.com/hotels/thumbs/NC_PARKP-rooms-1-thumb.jpg
Let us try checking rates and we get to travelnow right away http://www.travelnow.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?cid=46844&ID=122147
so this is an affiliate of travelnow that adds no value, presents the feed available by signing up as a travelnow affiliate with nothing else. Images come as part of the feed. Spam – Offensive.
E) These two are not spam:
http://travel.ian.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?cid=54608&hotelID=122147&city=Boston&stateProvince=MA&country=US
and http://www.hotels.com/best_hotels/us/ma/boston/boston_park_plaza_and_towers.jsp Ian.com
and hotels.com with its Benny the Bellhop logo, and travelnow.com are a group that does the reservations
see https://www.travelnow.com/itinerary/reserve.jsp?cid=4684
They spawn affiliates but are not affiliates themselves (a critical distinction). Whitelist them, please.
https://www.travelnow.com/itinerary/reserve.jsp?cid=46844 Tripadvisor
as you know, is whitelisted for the added value it provides in the form of reviews and rate comparisons.
http://boston.guide-to-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers-hotel.html
Again see a link to popular hotels by cities: Las Vegas, New York, etc. Cannot be there for the user (you usually are intent on going to Boston when you search for [boston park plaza] and not anywhere else) so must be placed for the spider. Is this site getting all content from an affiliate feed? Let us try sending a piece of the snippet to Google: [“The Boston Park Plaza and Towers is a traditional, landmark hotel”]
Sure enough, http://travel.ian.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?
cid=54608&hotelID=122147&city=Boston&stateProvince=MA&country=US
displays the same snippet. This is where the content comes from (you can see in Google listing to the search many more affiliate pages with identical information.
Let us try booking on
http://boston.guide-to-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers-hotel.html
And we immediately land on
www.180096hotel.com: http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/
chkrates?SID=BIO&Dest=BOS&LKF=BIO&TRK=_B4_link&PROD=
HOTEL&Month=05&Day=29&Year
=04&Nights=02&Adults=02&Children=00&Beds=1&Smoking=&LANG=
So the content is off a feed, the reservations are through travelnow, is there anything added? Rating information, may be? In fact, the feed gives the rating information for the affiliates themselves, as a confidence index of the hotel’s promptness in remitting the affiliate fee to the affiliate sites; it has nothing to do whatsoever with the guest satisfaction level.
Finally, if the site offers others to become its affiliates, it cannot be an affiliate itself.
For instance, on the now whitelisted site www.180096hotel.com, notice the link to “Affiliate With Us ” :
http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/hotelinfo?
SID=R10&LKF=MT4&HotelId=NC+PARKP&HName=
BOSTON+PARK+PLAZA+AND+TOWERS&Dest
=BOS&displayAd=false
One cannot both be an affiliate of others and offer affiliation opportunities. So the presence of the link to become an affiliate is your hint that the site has its own booking functionality and can complete transactions for its visitors.
searchbistro.com
Introduction
During the course of rating, you may encounter results that Google considers spam. Some are obvious but others are less overt. Provided here is an overview of spam recognition tools for use in rating projects.
Before familiarizing yourself with tools aimed at detecting spam, i.e. deceitful web design, please read Google’s policies on quality web design http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality . In particular, pay attention to:
• The distinction between pages designed for human viewers and those set up for search engine robots
• The specific enumerated manipulative techniques for which sites may be “punished” by Google.
If you are not sure of your spam detection skills yet, you may want to subject every result page that comes up for rating to a checklist of all potential manipulative techniques that this guide explicates. With experience in spam identification, the spam-spotting techniques presented below become easy to use. You will have seen patterns of honest pages and deceitful pages; questionable results will jump at you “asking” to be checked for evidence of spamming. If unsure, do not hesitate to ask questions!
Note on Foreign Language spam: If a page in another language uses an obvious spamming technique, do label it as spam. Spam identification often does not depend on linguistic issues. However, if you are unable to make a determination, feel free to rate the result as Foreign Language. The same logic applies to Offensive pornographic results that are neither invited nor tolerated by the query. If you can make determination independent of the language, please do so.
Common Spam Techniques Sneaky Redirects
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result.
When you click on the link: URL A may appear in the address bar of the browser for a brief moment, but you are sent to URL B. You might see other, transient URLs before the page finally loads with URL B visible in the address bar. One URL may sneakily redirect to a number of rotating domains, so clicking on the same result several times may land you on pages under different URLs. Those pages may or may not look the same.
What's probably going on: Domain B wants to extend its reach in our index, so it creates Domain A. Google indexes and scores the content on Domain A, yet the user is redirected to Domain B. The webmaster presents one content to the search engine robot and another to the users.
Examples:
Result URL What visiting the page takes you to1
http://www.lasik-eye-surgery-laser-eye-surgery.com/ http://1800contacts.com/ or http://www.visiondirect.com/spanish/scripts/ default.asp?AID=9483447&PID=858188
http://www.juvenews.com/pics-of-car-wrecks.html http://www.ofhg.com/sexsites/index.html
http://www.theii.net/information-on-the-great-pyramid-at-giza.html http://www.scbgalleries.com/freeporn/index.htmlor http://www.scbgalleries.com/pornogallery/index.html, or http://www.scbgalleries.com/openadult/index.html, or http://www.ofhg.com/freeadult/index.html, http://www.ofhg.com/gallery/welcome.html, http://www.ofhg.com/sexsites/index.html...
http://pregnancy.pregnancy-pampers.co.uk/ http://uk.pampers.com/en_GB/signup.do
http://children.pregnancy-pampers.co.uk/ http://uk.pampers.com/en_GB/signup.do
1. Hotlinks have been disabled for some porn pages whose content is apparent from the URL structure.
Question: Are all redirects spam?
Answer: Absolutely not!
For example, http://www.film.com redirects to movies.real.com, but not in a sneaky manner.
For another example, consider www.compaq.com. Compaq is a now a Hewlett Packard company. www.compaq.com redirects to http://h18000.www1.hp.com/ in a legitimate manner.
100% Frame
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result.
When you click the link: URL A appears in the address bar of the browser. The page uses a frame that occupies all (or nearly all) of the browser window. Page B fills this frame. You need to reveal the page information for page B. In Internet Explorer, point to any place on the main page (other than an image) inside the frame with your cursor, right-click and choose “Properties”. Check Address: ( URL).2
What's probably going on: Domain B is a legitimate commercial site that wants to extend its reach in Google’s index, so it creates Domain A. Google indexes and scores the content on A, yet the user is shown Domain B in the 100% frame. Again, what’s created for search engine robots differs from what is created for human visitors.
Example: http://www.catwalk4u.de/ (right-click on the web page body and choose “Properties” in IE, and note the URL, which may be one of a number of rotating sites, including http://www.link-diener.de/mode.html , http://www.trixo.de/mode.html and http://www.looking4links.de/mode.html ).
Hidden Text / Hidden Links
What you'll see on the result page: You may notice large blank areas on the bottom or/and the top of the page. Using the keyboard shortcut for Select All on the page (CTRL-A in Internet Explorer) may reveal text or links that are hidden from the user (example: white text on white background).
2 Certain pages, primarily those that contain objects that can be copied, disable this feature.
What's probably going on: The webmaster hopes that adding more text to the page will increase the number of ways in which users can find the page searching on Google. Stuffing the page with text may put off site visitors, so the webmaster chooses to hide the text and/or links. Google scores content that the user never sees; what’s being created for search engine robots differs from what is intended for human page viewers.
Example 1: http://www.marantz.com/ -- observe pristine white space and then do select-all to reveal white-on-white text.
Example 2. On the bottom of these pages observe hidden text in a very small font size:
http://www.jobjobbed.com/
http://free-web-hosting-inc.com/fort_wayne_indiana_web_hosting.html
Porn on Expired Domains
What you'll see on your Quest page: URL A is shown as a query result. It has a relatively “benign” domain name, with no reference to porn or adult content.
When you click the link: The page has porn content.
What's probably going on: An adult content webmaster purchased Domain A after its former owner allowed his/her ownership to lapse. In Google, Domain A has some lingering good reputation in the form of PageRank. Webmasters linking to Domain A aren’t always on top of their links, and their “votes” for Domain A based on old, benign content can continue indefinitely, to the adult content webmaster’s benefit. Google is counting incoming hyperlinks that the new, adult content webmaster never earned, and search relevancy can be skewed.
Secondary Search Results / PPC
We want to mark as Offensive the pages that are set up for the purposes of collecting pay-per-click revenue without providing much content of their own. You will see such cases most frequently in conjunction with “search results” feeds. Please read the whole section.
What you'll see on the result page: Usually, the page presents its own set of search results. Or, the page may look like the top-level page of a legitimate directory (tree structure) but clicking on a few selections reveals ads disguised as results. Or, you see copied content from a legitimate, credible resource, without value added by the copying site, plus a PPC program in place.
What's probably going on: The owner of the site gets paid whenever users click on these secondary results. You may be able to reveal this pay-per-click scheme by pointing your cursor to secondary links without clicking on them. Observe the status bar and you may see that clicks go through espotting, overture, or another advertising company.
Let us take a look at an example:
http://www.startcool.de/Dir/Medien/Fernsehen
This site is simply a copy of the Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ), but has a PPC program on the right (Google AdSense); the presence of AdSense PPC on top of the ODP content makes this site (every page on it) Offensive. Think about what the incentives are for creating a copy of the Open Directory Project; ODP is a free resource that does not accept advertising. By copying the search feed of DMOZ, sites can get contextual advertising on a pay-per-click basis. Google does not encourage creation of duplicates, so we are asking you to mark such result Offensive. Of course, had the result been a page on the Open Directory itself, it would have to be rated on the merits to the query.3 As you see, pages with the same content may be assigned vastly different ratings based on the absence or presence of a ppc program.
Here is an example of a page with ‘search results’ (ads):
http://www.toxiclemon.co.uk/s.php?av=custom&ver=27617&set=uk-only&qkw=lastminute&qcat=web
Note that the links on the page go through go2net.com. Also note: some ‘search result’ pages disguise the nature of what they do more than others. On Toxic Lemon pages, a more experienced user realizes that the results are essentially ads (Overture, Espotting are known providers of contextual ads), but this does not salvage the rating for this page. You can safely label all pages from Toxic Lemon Offensive, even if they are in another language.
Standard directories, or sites with results links that neither go through affiliate PPC programs nor redirect you through one of those programs, are usually not Offensive. One example of a non-Offensive directory is a directory that is clearly built by the site itself, not copied (http://www.joeant.com/DIR/info/get/5704/48827 ); also, a directory that charges for membership, not for clicks, is not Offensive. Consider for instance a directory of realtors that accepts entries for a yearly fee.
Please note that when you hover the cursor over links on the page you are examining, you are not always seeing the “true” URL in the status bar below. This is because it is possible to fool users by rewriting the URL reported in the status bar using Javascript, so take some extra time to understand where the links on the page are taking you.4
3 ODP (DMOZ) results are not Erroneous.
4 If you use Mozilla, you may have access to extra tools for spam evaluation. Write to us for specific instructions, please.
Some common PPC and Search Engine feed domains:
searchfeed.com findwhat.com espotting.com overture.com go2net.com
More examples:
http://www.toxiclemon.co.uk/t/fancy-dress-shops/angle-dress-fancy-little-shop.htm
http://www.widgets.ws/widgets/us+robotics+modems
http://www.skc-networks.com/search.php?keywords=1260%20free%20nokia%20ri
http://hockey-apparel.discgolfnet.com/tennessee-titans-super-bowl-screen-saver.html
http://www.investment-wonder.com/top-search/investment/Group-Investment-Susquehanna.htm
http://www.carzilla.us/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=motorcycle+rally
http://www.paley.com/search/Washing%20Machines.html Clicking on ‘results’ on this page takes the user through affiliate.espotting.com; scroll to the bottom of the page on http://www.espotting.com/affiliate/account/login.asp and you will see that Espotting.com engages in exclusive pay-per-click partnerships with European sites. Another example:
http://www.shopguide.co.uk/Washing-Machines/
http://www.milipics.com/
http://www.tools-directory.us/dir/matsushita_compressor/index.shtml
Thin Affiliate Doorway Pages
We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones are Offensive. Please read the whole section.
UPDATE Please read Appendix I at the end of the Guide. Appendix I applies the distinction between thin content and added value affiliates to the case of Hotel Booking Sites.
Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user.5 A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we’re attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman.
Observe where the links on the site take you. If the links are overwhelmingly leading you to one affiliate program, this is a strong signal that the site is a Thin Affiliate. Likewise, if the pages on the site are homogenous, and the links go to one or more affiliate programs, this is also a strong candidate.
In assessing sites for a Thin Affiliate rating, it is urged to click around the site (preferably during a “Sanity Check” in another browser) to determine if the links are affiliate in nature (or Pay-Per-Click, in the section that follows).
Here is an example of a Thin Affiliate:
http://diesel-shoes.01shoes.com/Diesel-Mens-Retro-Shoes.htm
This page has a number of marketing snippets for individual shoes, and a “More Information” button. Clicking on More Information button launches a popup window that takes you first through qksrv.net (Commission Junction), then to zappos.com. Zappos is known to have an affiliate program.
Clicking around the various navigational links on 01shoes.com shows more of the same design: a picture, a marketing snippet, and the link to Zappos via the Commission Junction; so, the correct rating is “Thin Affiliate.”
The qksrv.net redirect is important to note, because online merchants often use a third party affiliate provider to take care of the link tracking and payment. Thus the presence of these domains in the links on a page, or in redirects, can strongly suggest a Thin Affiliate classification:
qksrv.net
bfast.com
myaffiliateprogram.com,
webmasterplan.de
zanox-affiliate.de
Here’s another example, this one using bfast:
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1358.htm ,
5 Usually the commission is not paid unless the user ultimately makes a purchase; contrast this with the pay-per-click schemes, discussed above.
Point you cursor to the link that says Click here to buy … and observe the status bar window on the bottom of your window: you will see “http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click”
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1367.htm
http://www.internetshopping.ws/1362.htm
The www.internetshopping.ws site has nothing but affiliate links: no content, no service to users.
The following is an example of a site that was built using the Amazon API.
http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html
Note that all of the exits on the site for buying the product lead to Amazon. All of the content on the product page, including reviews, pricing, release dates etc. are available as part of the feed. The site adds nothing to the content that can be found on Amazon; it has no content value, nor does it add any service value to the user. A Thin Affiliate.
Here is an example of a site that should not be labeled Thin Affiliate:
http://www.bookfinder4u.com/detail/0767914104.html
At first cut it may look like yet another thin affiliate doorway to Amazon or B&N, but bookfinder4u.com is providing a value-added service to visitors by offering a comparison of prices between different online merchants. Ultimately you will be taken to Ecampus.com, Half.com, Amazon or another affiliate online bookseller, but the fact that they have their own price comparison infrastructure is the differentiator. To appreciate the difference, ask yourself this question: would any user want to go to www.bookfinder4u.com rather than directly to Barnes & Noble? To http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html rather than to Amazon? The answer to the former question is Yes, because at Barnes & Noble, the user would not be able to see any direct price comparison between the B&N’s price and competitors’ prices for any given item; the answer to the latter question is No or Indifferent between the two. Surely, most naïve users may not even be aware when they are redirected, thrown from one site to another, etc. But if they were advised of what is going on, would then make an informed choice to go to a totally thin, no-unique-content affiliate doorway?
Another example of a page that does not fit the criteria of affiliate spam: http://www.mothering.com/books/books.shtml#adoption gives a list of links that all lead to Powells.com, an on-line bookseller site. Clearly the Mothering magazine earns something when the readers buy books from Powells; however, equally clearly, the page is not set up for the sole purpose of generating affiliate links: browse the site a bit and you will discover that it has rich contents. Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site’s existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?
Another Example: http://books.webwab.com/item_512913.htm (clicking around on that site, you'll realize that every page simply leads to overstock.com pages)
More Examples: http://www.thenewwidgetsite.com/prod/Kitchen-Etc/3-M-Command-Adhesive-Designer-Small-Hookss{1}Pack-of-2.html PPC and A Thin Affiliate; a spam page with evidence of multiple spamming techniques is not a rare exception. http://www.computermonitoruk.co.uk/
http://www.malls.cheap-money.com/
http://www.mabuy.com/News--Politics-magazines/The-New-Yorker.asp - a doorway to Amazon and to Ebay.
At times the result page does not fall under any of the above categories yet still strikes you as “fishy”. In those cases we invite you to run the query on Google setting your preferences to show the top 20 results.6 View the first result page and try to find the URL you are rating. (You won’t always be able to, as the result sets may have changed). If it is not in the current top 20, please rate the questionable result on the utility scale and move on. If it is in the top 20, examine the result set observing, where available, the following features:
o Do most of the top results resemble each other, and the result you are rating, in the snippets, titles, and/or URL structure?
o Do the result pages, when you click on them, resemble the result page you are rating in content? Contact information? Nearly identical, templated design? Affiliation with the same commercial entity?
o What about the snippets for your URL? Do they contain dictionary-like lists of words? Repeated text?
If your answer to several of the questions above is Yes, please rate the suspicious result as Offensive. If suspicion seems unjustified – all checks come out negative – please do not give the Offensive rating. Not sure? One attribute, for example repeated text in the snippet, may or may not be a spam signal. So, send a question!
6 http://www.google.com/preferences?q=gf&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Go to Number of Results and set to Display 20 results per page.
UPDATE Appendix I.
Hotel booking sites: spam or not?
Rating hotel booking sites is not easy. The technical questions – is it a real agency or just an affiliate? – has to be balanced against the user value considerations. We will address this issue now by giving examples of what is and is not spam.
First off, be more stringent when hotel booking sites come up as a result to a location query than when they come up to a hotel query. In other words, if you are dealing with a borderline case, resolve your doubts in favor of the Offensive rating if the query is for a location. Why? It is especially undesirable to have hotel booking sites crop up to queries that might presuppose hotels in the location of search, but might also look for a million other aspects of the location, such as reviews, transportation, a municipal site, a good resource on local history and geography, and the like. In a borderline case to a clearly hotel query (examples of such a query: [holiday inn, Cortland], [crowne plaza northstar hotel minneapolis], [Boston Park Plaza]), you may be more lenient. This is because the user intent is more unequivocally to get information on the hotel of choice, or to get a list of hotels in a location of choice. It can be argued that an opportunity to get a good deal on booking, the opportunity that some of the sites offer, is enough to warrant a merit-based rating for a hotel site.
Further, since there are affiliates and affiliates, it is important to differentiate between those who provide value added and those that just copy content and features off a feed to gain affiliate revenue without investing in offering unique and helpful services for the users.
As a fine example of the former, value-added sites, consider
http://www.europeforvisitors.com/europe/articles/amsterdam-3-star-hotels.htm
This site has a wealth of original articles (just do a few quick clicks around). Granted, most of the links on the above URL go through venere.com to get booking revenue, but the site as a whole offers a lot more than just stock hotel descriptions and booking links. Also, the comments and the apparent hand-selection of links is a definite value added service by the webmaster.
[holiday inn, Cortland]
http: //traveldeals.sidestep.com/
Hotel_Deals/New_York/Cortland/All/
Holiday_Inn_Cortland?tk=EIKTDHHPXXXX0000002
This site offers the users a download of an application to compare prices side-by-side and search travel sites. Not all users will find the application trustworthy, or worthy the extra time in learning how to use it in general, but we clearly do have an added service here – it’s not just the same content off a feed. Hence, rate on the merits (Relevant).
[Boston Park Plaza]
Vital: http://www.bostonparkplaza.com/ or http://www.bostonparkplaza.com/default.asp?sID=home
(remember, duplicates get the same rating) Not all hotels have their own homepages; for those that do, be sure to identify the uniquely authoritative nature of those pages by giving them Vital or Useful (as the case may be) ratings. It is sometimes difficult to do the differentiation because you see the same images on the official site, on the site of true travel agents, and finally, on the multiple affiliate sites…
Let us know walk through a handful of results to this query and make a determination on spam versus relevance rating.
http://www.reservation-services.com/bostonparkplaza.html
What immediately strikes as unusual is the candor in the disclaimer: “The telephone number, fax number and email addresses on this site DO NOT connect to the hotel.” Many affiliate sites list contact information right under the name of a hotel, so that users may be under the impression that they can call the hotel direct. Also, this site has its own staff: http://www.reservation-services.com/about_us.html ; the names of the management staff are provided. This is a piece of evidence in favor of merit-based rating: this is not just a site that is set up as a middleman between the customer and the true reservation site. Finally, prominently behind the logo you see the link to “Become An Affiliate” – follow the link and see the offer the site makes to hotels. Clearly the site acts as a travel agent between the customer and the hotel, not as an affiliate of another booking site. So we are almost ready to give a relevance rating… but wait, let us go back to http://www.reservation-services.com/bostonparkplaza.html and check for hidden text. Sure enough, a few hidden keywords just below the copyright statement. Offensive. Find a few other hotels on this site and check for hidden text – you will see the same keyword white-on-white under the copyright statement.
http://boston.hotelguide.net/data/h100012.htm
Initially seems a borderline case. You see ppc (AdSense) on the right frame. You also see links to other sites bundled together: MetroGuide, EventGuide, DiningGuide, etc. (left frame); clicking on the first three displays information specific to Boston, so availability of these sites can be considered a value added. Nice to have also: links to local restaurants and nightlife. Are they an affiliate though? Yes; try to book and you will land on
https://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/bookit?SID=HG8&Dest=BOS&LKF=HGD&LANG=en&PROD=HOTEL+&DispCurr=
USD&ITRK=dbP&qKey=
YO330518800604&HtlId=NC+PARKP&Smk=N&Screen=0
www.180096hotel.com , travelnow.com, ian.com and hotels.com are all one group. So you see that hotelguide.com has NO booking capability on its own and is signed up as a travelnow affiliate. And yet it is not spam. Why? It offers a video, an unusual and valuable added service. It subscribes to a travel video library http://www.travelago.com/ to get additional content and service.
This is enough to salvage http://boston.hotelguide.net/data/h100012.htm from the Offensive classification. Please rate on the merits to the query, taking into account that a video might make this site more helpful than other similar ones.
To reiterate: the added value provided by, first and foremost, the video, and also
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-397998-the_boston_park_plaza_hotel-i
This is to remind you that special service pages that Yahoo provides, such as Movies, Finance, Travel, and others, should always be rated based on the merits to the query and not as Erroneous (of course not as Offensive either). In your merit rating, consider how helpful independent reviews by others might be to those who plan their voyages:
“Old gross bathrooms, stained carpet, chipped paint on walls, moulding falling off of walls, radiator falling off of wall. Room was the size of a dorm room. The only good thing going for this place is the location. We paid about $190.00 a night - NOT WORTH IT!!”
D) http://www.boston.the-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers.htm
You see lots of links to other hotels. These seem placed for search engine spiders, not human visitors. The goal of the site is to get all of the hotels indexed. Evidence of spam. Pictures are nice, but where do they come from? Check the properties of any image and you will see they come from travelnow
example: http://images.travelnow.com/hotels/thumbs/NC_PARKP-rooms-1-thumb.jpg
Let us try checking rates and we get to travelnow right away http://www.travelnow.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?cid=46844&ID=122147
so this is an affiliate of travelnow that adds no value, presents the feed available by signing up as a travelnow affiliate with nothing else. Images come as part of the feed. Spam – Offensive.
E) These two are not spam:
http://travel.ian.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?cid=54608&hotelID=122147&city=Boston&stateProvince=MA&country=US
and http://www.hotels.com/best_hotels/us/ma/boston/boston_park_plaza_and_towers.jsp Ian.com
and hotels.com with its Benny the Bellhop logo, and travelnow.com are a group that does the reservations
see https://www.travelnow.com/itinerary/reserve.jsp?cid=4684
They spawn affiliates but are not affiliates themselves (a critical distinction). Whitelist them, please.
https://www.travelnow.com/itinerary/reserve.jsp?cid=46844 Tripadvisor
as you know, is whitelisted for the added value it provides in the form of reviews and rate comparisons.
http://boston.guide-to-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers-hotel.html
Again see a link to popular hotels by cities: Las Vegas, New York, etc. Cannot be there for the user (you usually are intent on going to Boston when you search for [boston park plaza] and not anywhere else) so must be placed for the spider. Is this site getting all content from an affiliate feed? Let us try sending a piece of the snippet to Google: [“The Boston Park Plaza and Towers is a traditional, landmark hotel”]
Sure enough, http://travel.ian.com/hotels/hotelinfo.jsp?
cid=54608&hotelID=122147&city=Boston&stateProvince=MA&country=US
displays the same snippet. This is where the content comes from (you can see in Google listing to the search many more affiliate pages with identical information.
Let us try booking on
http://boston.guide-to-hotels.com/boston-park-plaza-and-towers-hotel.html
And we immediately land on
www.180096hotel.com: http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/
chkrates?SID=BIO&Dest=BOS&LKF=BIO&TRK=_B4_link&PROD=
HOTEL&Month=05&Day=29&Year
=04&Nights=02&Adults=02&Children=00&Beds=1&Smoking=&LANG=
So the content is off a feed, the reservations are through travelnow, is there anything added? Rating information, may be? In fact, the feed gives the rating information for the affiliates themselves, as a confidence index of the hotel’s promptness in remitting the affiliate fee to the affiliate sites; it has nothing to do whatsoever with the guest satisfaction level.
Finally, if the site offers others to become its affiliates, it cannot be an affiliate itself.
For instance, on the now whitelisted site www.180096hotel.com, notice the link to “Affiliate With Us ” :
http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/hotelinfo?
SID=R10&LKF=MT4&HotelId=NC+PARKP&HName=
BOSTON+PARK+PLAZA+AND+TOWERS&Dest
=BOS&displayAd=false
One cannot both be an affiliate of others and offer affiliation opportunities. So the presence of the link to become an affiliate is your hint that the site has its own booking functionality and can complete transactions for its visitors.
searchbistro.com
Discussion cont. eval.google.com - Google's Secret Evaluation Lab..
www.webmasterworld.com/forum30 eval.google.com - Google's Secret Evaluation Lab.. Googleguy said: "when Henk van Ess submitted his own blog to Slashdot, he asserted 'Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google,' and that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn't true at all."
Hess replied:"Google Guy, do I read between the lines that you think my postings are irrelevant and misleading? That would be a shame."
Google Guy: "I don't believe they're irrelevant, but yes: I do believe that the assertions you've made are misleading."
A must read thread....
Hess replied:"Google Guy, do I read between the lines that you think my postings are irrelevant and misleading? That would be a shame."
Google Guy: "I don't believe they're irrelevant, but yes: I do believe that the assertions you've made are misleading."
A must read thread....
New SEO jargon - Google esp
www.seo-scoop.com arising from Henk van Ess's blogging re Google evaluators and the surrounding buzz some google insider jargon throws some clues as to what can help or hinder a site in Google rankings...: "
Negative - Thin affiliates: Doorways that send visitors to affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user
Positive - Added Value Affiliates: Provide a value-added service to visitors in addition to affiliate links and affiliate content...would still be good sites even without the affiliate links
Rating Search Results:
The following are categories of ratings where search results are evaluated, and each result is considered to be one of the following (from best match to worst match).
Vital: The result (web page) uniquely matches the query. For example, if the user typed the query "Office Max", then a vital result that should show up at the top of the SERPs would be www.officemax.com
Useful: The result is very good and deserves a high position. Useful results should be highly satisfying for the user: if the query is informational, they should be very informative; if the query is transactional, they should allow the user to complete the transaction.
Relevant: A Relevant result is relevant to the query, but may only cover one important aspect of the query, whereas a Useful result would cover the query more broadly and more thoroughly.
Not Relevant: This result is generally not helpful to the user but is still connected in some way, however remotely, with the query.
Off Topic: Completely unrelated to the query
Offensive: what Google would consider a spam page, would either have no merits for ANY query, or may have merits for one query, but definitely NOT for this query
Query Types:
Navigational Query: a query that normally has only one satisfactory result.
Informational Query: a query about a topic where the user expects to be provided with information on the topic
Transactional query: a query where the user expects to conduct a transaction"
Negative - Thin affiliates: Doorways that send visitors to affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user
Positive - Added Value Affiliates: Provide a value-added service to visitors in addition to affiliate links and affiliate content...would still be good sites even without the affiliate links
Rating Search Results:
The following are categories of ratings where search results are evaluated, and each result is considered to be one of the following (from best match to worst match).
Vital: The result (web page) uniquely matches the query. For example, if the user typed the query "Office Max", then a vital result that should show up at the top of the SERPs would be www.officemax.com
Useful: The result is very good and deserves a high position. Useful results should be highly satisfying for the user: if the query is informational, they should be very informative; if the query is transactional, they should allow the user to complete the transaction.
Relevant: A Relevant result is relevant to the query, but may only cover one important aspect of the query, whereas a Useful result would cover the query more broadly and more thoroughly.
Not Relevant: This result is generally not helpful to the user but is still connected in some way, however remotely, with the query.
Off Topic: Completely unrelated to the query
Offensive: what Google would consider a spam page, would either have no merits for ANY query, or may have merits for one query, but definitely NOT for this query
Query Types:
Navigational Query: a query that normally has only one satisfactory result.
Informational Query: a query about a topic where the user expects to be provided with information on the topic
Transactional query: a query where the user expects to conduct a transaction"
$80bn Google takes top media spot
BBC NEWS | Business: "After its shares hit an all-time high on the New York markets on Tuesday, Google is now worth $80bn (44bn).
This takes it ahead of media leviathan Time Warner, which is valued at $78bn.
The valuation comes in spite of the fact that Google's annual sales total just $3.2bn, a fraction of Time Warner's $42bn...
Initially, Google got 10,000 queries per day compared with 200 million today."
This takes it ahead of media leviathan Time Warner, which is valued at $78bn.
The valuation comes in spite of the fact that Google's annual sales total just $3.2bn, a fraction of Time Warner's $42bn...
Initially, Google got 10,000 queries per day compared with 200 million today."
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Google launch beta Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps - Welcome!: "Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
With Google Sitemaps you get:
Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
Fresher search results
A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes
Creating your sitemaps is easy
Use the Sitemap Generator to create an XML Sitemap or submit a simple text file with all your URLs.
Get started today — it's free
Send us your sitemap today and help increase the visibility of your web pages."
Google Sitemaps Help
Google Sitemaps FAQ
Google Groups : google-sitemaps
Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com blogs Q&A session with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps.
Google Blog: "Posted by Shiva Shivakumar: We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It's a beta 'ecosystem' that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index."
With Google Sitemaps you get:
Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
Fresher search results
A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes
Creating your sitemaps is easy
Use the Sitemap Generator to create an XML Sitemap or submit a simple text file with all your URLs.
Get started today — it's free
Send us your sitemap today and help increase the visibility of your web pages."
Google Sitemaps Help
Google Sitemaps FAQ
Google Groups : google-sitemaps
Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com blogs Q&A session with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps.
Google Blog: "Posted by Shiva Shivakumar: We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It's a beta 'ecosystem' that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index."
Google shares growth
Net Stocks: "Throughout the last six weeks, or since mid-April, Google shares have increased by about 7% a week, or 44% altogether..."On Friday, UBS became the second bank to establish a $350 target, but the first to establish a 2007 per-share outlook. CSFB slapped a $350 price target on Google earlier this week.
UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter predicts Google can earn $9.02 per share in 2007."
UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter predicts Google can earn $9.02 per share in 2007."
Friday, June 03, 2005
Buzz buzz buzz Google Secret Lab...not so secret
Whooaa, so Google employees have access to an intranet...
Henk van Ess's Search Bistro Ess shows one way too get picked up by /. immediatly...
"It's one of the best kept secrets of Google. It's a mystery on Webmasterworld. Also in Europe (France) they don't know what to expect from that odd URL http://eval.google.com. Click it and you get ...nothing. The site reveals itself only if you have the proper login and if you use a network known by Google. Residues of Eval.google are found on the web, but the full content of the mystery site has never been published before. Here it is: the real story about Eval.Google. They use... humans!"
Whooaa,so Google employs humans for QC...stop press news! Really? I don't think so...from a selection of the current positions available....
One example from Google Job Opportunities: "Quality Rater
This is a temporary assignment at Google through ABE Services.
This assignment can be located in the USA or Canada.
ABE Services is recruiting part-time remote workers to help with search quality evaluation on a project basis for Google, Inc., the search engine company based in Mountain View, California. Candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests. Specific areas of expertise are highly desirable.
Participants in web evaluation projects must have a high speed internet connection. All work will be performed in the U.S. or Canada, and participants must be able to demonstrate legal eligibility to work.
In particular, applicants will be asked to draw on experience living, studying, and keeping in touch with a country's (web) culture and language. We are currently recruiting candidates with experience in the U.S. and Canada as well as candidates with experience in countries outside of the U.S. and Canada. For example, did you spend time living in Asia or Europe, move to the U.S., and continue to exist in both cultures? In addition, higher education that spans more than one country and one culture is also relevant. Please feel free to describe in your cover letter any applicable experiences.
Please ensure that your resume mentions any English or non-English language skills, for example, ENGLISH or JAPANESE or FRENCH, etc. If your language skills are English only but include relevant experience in regions outside the U.S. and Canada, you may wish to include the geographic regions of expertise (i.e. U.K., Ireland, South Africa or another English speaking country).
For immediate consideration, please send a text (ASCII) or HTML version of your resume to jobs@google.com."
The sits vac list also includes:
Testing
• Ads Quality Rater
• Ads Quality Rater - French Language
• Ads Quality Rater - German Language
• Quality Evaluation Associate/Administrator
• Quality Evaluator
• Quality Rater
• Quality Rater, Chinese Language
• Quality Rater, Dutch Language
• Quality Rater, French Language
• Quality Rater, German Language
• Quality Rater, Japanese Language
• Quality Rater, Korean Language
• Quality Rater, Italian Language
• Quality Rater, Spanish Language
• Search Quality Evaluation Research Associate
• Search Quality Evaluation Research Assistant
BTW Even Steve Rubel follows Ess to his shakey screenshot when Google jobs more or less spell out the tasks...Micro Persuasion: Bloggers Uncover Secret Google Project
Henk van Ess's Search Bistro Ess shows one way too get picked up by /. immediatly...
"It's one of the best kept secrets of Google. It's a mystery on Webmasterworld. Also in Europe (France) they don't know what to expect from that odd URL http://eval.google.com. Click it and you get ...nothing. The site reveals itself only if you have the proper login and if you use a network known by Google. Residues of Eval.google are found on the web, but the full content of the mystery site has never been published before. Here it is: the real story about Eval.Google. They use... humans!"
Whooaa,so Google employs humans for QC...stop press news! Really? I don't think so...from a selection of the current positions available....
One example from Google Job Opportunities: "Quality Rater
This is a temporary assignment at Google through ABE Services.
This assignment can be located in the USA or Canada.
ABE Services is recruiting part-time remote workers to help with search quality evaluation on a project basis for Google, Inc., the search engine company based in Mountain View, California. Candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests. Specific areas of expertise are highly desirable.
Participants in web evaluation projects must have a high speed internet connection. All work will be performed in the U.S. or Canada, and participants must be able to demonstrate legal eligibility to work.
In particular, applicants will be asked to draw on experience living, studying, and keeping in touch with a country's (web) culture and language. We are currently recruiting candidates with experience in the U.S. and Canada as well as candidates with experience in countries outside of the U.S. and Canada. For example, did you spend time living in Asia or Europe, move to the U.S., and continue to exist in both cultures? In addition, higher education that spans more than one country and one culture is also relevant. Please feel free to describe in your cover letter any applicable experiences.
Please ensure that your resume mentions any English or non-English language skills, for example, ENGLISH or JAPANESE or FRENCH, etc. If your language skills are English only but include relevant experience in regions outside the U.S. and Canada, you may wish to include the geographic regions of expertise (i.e. U.K., Ireland, South Africa or another English speaking country).
For immediate consideration, please send a text (ASCII) or HTML version of your resume to jobs@google.com."
The sits vac list also includes:
Testing
• Ads Quality Rater
• Ads Quality Rater - French Language
• Ads Quality Rater - German Language
• Quality Evaluation Associate/Administrator
• Quality Evaluator
• Quality Rater
• Quality Rater, Chinese Language
• Quality Rater, Dutch Language
• Quality Rater, French Language
• Quality Rater, German Language
• Quality Rater, Japanese Language
• Quality Rater, Korean Language
• Quality Rater, Italian Language
• Quality Rater, Spanish Language
• Search Quality Evaluation Research Associate
• Search Quality Evaluation Research Assistant
BTW Even Steve Rubel follows Ess to his shakey screenshot when Google jobs more or less spell out the tasks...Micro Persuasion: Bloggers Uncover Secret Google Project
Sunday, May 29, 2005
The mania spreads....Toolbar greyed for all sites?
Up to 16 pages on Webmaster world...webmasterworld.com: "Toolbar greyed for all sites?
Google's toolbar not showing PR anymore?"
Google Search: define: mania an affective disorder in which the victim tends to respond excessively and sometimes violently
Google's toolbar not showing PR anymore?"
Google Search: define: mania an affective disorder in which the victim tends to respond excessively and sometimes violently
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Laugh? I nearly.......
Marissa (BETA): "Hi, my name's Marissa. I'm head of consumer web products for a company you may have heard of. There's absolutely nothing wrong with our products, even though they're perpetually in beta, the user experience is perfect I tell you, perfect. Or it will be as soon as those webmaster thingies modify the web for us. Oh yeh, and this blog's a parody of me!"
Pagerank toolbar all greyed out.
Cre8asite forums Long expected... "Most sites have the Google toolbar greyed out at the moment - something afoot?"
Let the fun begin...
Let the fun begin...
Friday, May 27, 2005
Digital Envoy trade secrets case against Google
CNET News.com
"A lawsuit accusing Google of misappropriating trade secrets from geo-location specialist Digital Envoy may proceed, a district court in Northern California has ruled.
Last Friday, the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., denied Mountain View, Calif.-based Google's motion for summary judgment on claims that the search giant breached its contract with Digital Envoy, based in Georgia. However, the court dismissed several of Digital Envoy's charges, including claims of unfair competition, on the grounds that the two parties were not direct rivals, according to the court document."
"A lawsuit accusing Google of misappropriating trade secrets from geo-location specialist Digital Envoy may proceed, a district court in Northern California has ruled.
Last Friday, the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., denied Mountain View, Calif.-based Google's motion for summary judgment on claims that the search giant breached its contract with Digital Envoy, based in Georgia. However, the court dismissed several of Digital Envoy's charges, including claims of unfair competition, on the grounds that the two parties were not direct rivals, according to the court document."
Google Strategy > Interview: Google CEO Eric Schmidt Talks Business Technology
InformationWeek: "Google CEO Eric Schmidt Talks Business Technology May 26, 2005 The strategy involves putting more of Google's Web-site capabilities into low-cost appliances for the workplace.
By Thomas Claburn
Following the introduction of the Google Desktop Search for Enterprise software at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in San Francisco on May 18, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn to discuss his view of the business-technology market and how Google might change it. Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, was there, too. The interview began with a question about IT productivity, following Schmidt's public comments earlier in the day about "end-user dissatisfaction with IT.""
By Thomas Claburn
Following the introduction of the Google Desktop Search for Enterprise software at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in San Francisco on May 18, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn to discuss his view of the business-technology market and how Google might change it. Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, was there, too. The interview began with a question about IT productivity, following Schmidt's public comments earlier in the day about "end-user dissatisfaction with IT.""
Monday, May 23, 2005
Growing pains at Google?
CNET News.com Charles Cooper writes: "Google reminds me a lot of Microsoft, especially during the early days before Bill Gates became a Davos fixture and started hanging with Bono. The common theme: loads of smart people running around chockablock with big ideas about how technology's going to change the world..."
He concludes: "One Google insider privately told me the higher-ups don't believe in sharing information they aren't required to by law (especially when it comes to a snoopy press). They're wrong about playing it so close to the vest, but I understand why. Google's on a roll now, but I guarantee that mind-set will get an update after the company's first lousy quarterly report hits the wire.
But these are mere quibbles, and people will forgive Google a lot because they love the story. There is a natural frisson surrounding the company, an upstart that has come so far, so fast. This is indeed an interesting company--arguably the best story to come out of Silicon Valley in the last decade.
How management performs will determine whether Google remains Silicon Valley's best story a decade hence."
He concludes: "One Google insider privately told me the higher-ups don't believe in sharing information they aren't required to by law (especially when it comes to a snoopy press). They're wrong about playing it so close to the vest, but I understand why. Google's on a roll now, but I guarantee that mind-set will get an update after the company's first lousy quarterly report hits the wire.
But these are mere quibbles, and people will forgive Google a lot because they love the story. There is a natural frisson surrounding the company, an upstart that has come so far, so fast. This is indeed an interesting company--arguably the best story to come out of Silicon Valley in the last decade.
How management performs will determine whether Google remains Silicon Valley's best story a decade hence."
Friday, May 20, 2005
Google Blog: on personalised home pages
Google Blog: A method to our madness: "A method to our madness: 5/19/2005 02:58:00 PM: Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products, and Jessica Ewing, Product Manager
Does Google have a strategy, or are we just a bunch of mad computer scientists running around building whatever we want? Today this question gets an answer: we've launched our personalized homepage via Google Labs. It's part of a strategic initiative we refer to as 'fusion' to bring together Google functionality, and content from across the web, in useful ways.
The personalized homepage is a complement to the existing Google homepage - not a replacement. Keep using the original Google homepage if you want to. (We expect many people will.) But if you're keen to organize and customize your information, take a stab at designing your own homepage. You can add Gmail, news, stocks, weather and more. Plus you can add great content from websites like the BBC and Wired. We're incorporating feeds from just a few other sites today, but we envision being able to accept any standardized feed very soon."
Does Google have a strategy, or are we just a bunch of mad computer scientists running around building whatever we want? Today this question gets an answer: we've launched our personalized homepage via Google Labs. It's part of a strategic initiative we refer to as 'fusion' to bring together Google functionality, and content from across the web, in useful ways.
The personalized homepage is a complement to the existing Google homepage - not a replacement. Keep using the original Google homepage if you want to. (We expect many people will.) But if you're keen to organize and customize your information, take a stab at designing your own homepage. You can add Gmail, news, stocks, weather and more. Plus you can add great content from websites like the BBC and Wired. We're incorporating feeds from just a few other sites today, but we envision being able to accept any standardized feed very soon."
Monday, May 16, 2005
Google to Expand Overseas Business
BizReport: "Speaking at Google's first annual meeting since going public, chief executive Eric E. Schmidt told shareholders he anticipated that the company, which gets almost all of its revenue from advertising sales, would see a shift that would reflect its increasing global presence. The company's latest financial results show that it generates slightly less than two-thirds of its revenue domestically.
'This week, we got the necessary permit to open an office in China,' Schmidt said. 'As the Internet penetrates these countries, Google's market share will follow.'"
'This week, we got the necessary permit to open an office in China,' Schmidt said. 'As the Internet penetrates these countries, Google's market share will follow.'"
GOOGLE Buys Dodgeball.com,
MediaPost MediaDailyNews: "GOOGLE SAYS IT SNAPPED UP Dodgeball.com, a two-person start-up that created a mobile messaging service to enable users to alert friends as to where they're socializing. The service received plenty of buzz in New York City. The two guys who founded the company did so while they were New York University grad students. Dodgeball was uniquely promoted by the talented new media creative Doug Jaeger and his company, The Happy Corp. Dodgeball.com allows users to broadcast their location and send text messages to groups of friends. It can be used as a dating or hookup service, or just to let friends know which bar or party you're going to. It's the perfect social lubricant for 20-somethings and teens, those hard-to-reach, hard-to-target folks. "
Google Film Reviews: results
Mike Skweir writes at Slashdot: Google Adds Movie Ratings, Times and Reviews " He wanted to find out more about the movie 'Kicking & Screaming'... so he Googled it his results show several reviews, movie ratings and the ability to search for a theatre in the area. He adds that by entering your zip code, it returns movies on in that postcode area.
Example: Google Reviews: Kicking & Screaming (2005)
Example: Google Reviews: Kicking & Screaming (2005)
Friday, May 13, 2005
Google AdSense: New Features
Google AdSense - Google AdSense: What's New: "As part of our goal to improve the monetisation of your sites, Google has introduced a number of new features for advertisers, which will directly impact you as an AdSense publisher...
Site targeting: focusing on the audience...Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites
CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue... set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you will earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.
Expanded text ads: testing new formats... text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit
More image ads: include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers...and ..wide skyscraper (160x600) format to make a total of 5 ad formats supporting image ads
Site targeting: focusing on the audience...Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites
CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue... set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you will earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.
Expanded text ads: testing new formats... text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit
More image ads: include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers...and ..wide skyscraper (160x600) format to make a total of 5 ad formats supporting image ads
Under 200 At 1st Google Shareholder Meeting
Forbes.com: "Google Inc. shareholders got a free lunch Thursday at the online search engine leader's first annual meeting as a public company. There were plenty of leftovers. Fewer than 200 people attended the meeting at the company's Mountain View headquarters...
Despite its unconventional reputation, Google put on a straight-laced show. CEO Eric Schmidt and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent most of the 90-minute meeting fielding a wide variety of shareholder questions, ranging from concerns about stiffening competition from Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. to Google's policy on employee stock options...
Google's shares have more than doubled from the IPO price of $85, even after declining $2.57 Thursday to close at $228.72 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
The lofty share price prompted a shareholder question about whether the company might split the stock to make it more affordable for individual prices. Brin said it's unlikely the stock will be split anytime soon."
Despite its unconventional reputation, Google put on a straight-laced show. CEO Eric Schmidt and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent most of the 90-minute meeting fielding a wide variety of shareholder questions, ranging from concerns about stiffening competition from Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. to Google's policy on employee stock options...
Google's shares have more than doubled from the IPO price of $85, even after declining $2.57 Thursday to close at $228.72 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
The lofty share price prompted a shareholder question about whether the company might split the stock to make it more affordable for individual prices. Brin said it's unlikely the stock will be split anytime soon."
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Google Patent Analysed - SEO implications
wwwcoder.com: "Cracking the Google Code::Under the GoogleScope::Google's US Patent confirms information retrieval is based on historical data.
Publication Date: 5/8/2005 9:51:18 PM
Author Name: Lawrence Deon
Deon takes Google's definition of their United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005 abstract: "A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.” and concludes that:
"Google’s sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world… …if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out … guess again. He states that Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation...
The filing unquestionable provides SEO’s with valuable insight into Google’s tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google’s information retrieval is based on historical data.
He asks: "What exactly do these changes mean to you?"
Answer: "Your credibility and reputation on-line are going under the Googlescope!"
The article sets out further details of how Google determines link spam, on page spam, site age and many more ...
Article has been picked up by Slashdot Slashdot | Cracking the Google Code... Under the GoogleScope
Related posts:
Google in the news: United States Patent Application: 0050071741
Google in the news: New factor in Google Algo? Aging Delay for New Sites
Rand Fishkin has put together another detailed interpretation of the patent: SEOmoz | Google's Patent: Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data
Section one - Overview of the 5 Most Critical Concepts from this Paper - is a must read. It clearly explains his interpretation of the patent of:
1) Google's Concept of "Document Inception: Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.
2) How Changing Content can Affect Rankings: "for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn't need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it..."
3) Spam Detection & Punishment:
"Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their "bad list"
Growth of off-topic links
Speed of link gain
Percentage of similar anchor text
Topic/Subject shifts or additions
4) What Google is Attempting to Measure:
Domain information
Information on User Behavior Online
Data contained on your computer
4) The Impact of this Patent he concludes that analysing Google results etc in view of the theories arising from this patent will prove/ disprove previous conjecture about Googles algos...
Publication Date: 5/8/2005 9:51:18 PM
Author Name: Lawrence Deon
Deon takes Google's definition of their United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005 abstract: "A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.” and concludes that:
"Google’s sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world… …if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out … guess again. He states that Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation...
The filing unquestionable provides SEO’s with valuable insight into Google’s tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google’s information retrieval is based on historical data.
He asks: "What exactly do these changes mean to you?"
Answer: "Your credibility and reputation on-line are going under the Googlescope!"
The article sets out further details of how Google determines link spam, on page spam, site age and many more ...
Article has been picked up by Slashdot Slashdot | Cracking the Google Code... Under the GoogleScope
Related posts:
Google in the news: United States Patent Application: 0050071741
Google in the news: New factor in Google Algo? Aging Delay for New Sites
Rand Fishkin has put together another detailed interpretation of the patent: SEOmoz | Google's Patent: Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data
Section one - Overview of the 5 Most Critical Concepts from this Paper - is a must read. It clearly explains his interpretation of the patent of:
1) Google's Concept of "Document Inception: Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.
2) How Changing Content can Affect Rankings: "for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn't need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it..."
3) Spam Detection & Punishment:
"Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their "bad list"
Growth of off-topic links
Speed of link gain
Percentage of similar anchor text
Topic/Subject shifts or additions
4) What Google is Attempting to Measure:
Domain information
Information on User Behavior Online
Data contained on your computer
4) The Impact of this Patent he concludes that analysing Google results etc in view of the theories arising from this patent will prove/ disprove previous conjecture about Googles algos...
Monday, May 09, 2005
Google search down
Google search finds outage | CNET News.com: "Google's Web site was inaccessible for a brief time Saturday and some visitors reported being rerouted to another site, leading some to believe that the search giant had been hacked.
The site was down from 3:45 to 4 p.m. PST, Google spokesman David Krane told The Associated Press.
'It was not a hacking or a security issue,' Krane. He said the problem was related to the DNS (Domain Name System), which routes one's Internet protocol address to the appropriate Web site that the user wants to visit. If the DNS system goes down, Web pages requested usually do not appear or take a long time to load. "
The site was down from 3:45 to 4 p.m. PST, Google spokesman David Krane told The Associated Press.
'It was not a hacking or a security issue,' Krane. He said the problem was related to the DNS (Domain Name System), which routes one's Internet protocol address to the appropriate Web site that the user wants to visit. If the DNS system goes down, Web pages requested usually do not appear or take a long time to load. "
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Google isn't always No. 1
Google isn't always No. 1 - May. 3, 2005: "A new study of national advertisers and interviews with a handful of marketing agencies indicate that the Internet giant could have a customer service problem.
"Google has always been bad -- worse than bad even," said Dana Todd, the president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)...
Independent media analyst Jack Myers, in his fourth annual 'customer satisfaction' survey of online sales groups, also found that advertisers aren't entirely happy with Google's service... as Google looks to broaden its services beyond paid search, Myers suggests the company first has some work to do with advertisers.
Google finished a solid No. 5 overall, better than its seventh-place finish in 2004. Yahoo! was No. 2. Of the nine categories measured, Google's sales team edged out Yahoo!'s crew in one category: product knowledge. Google finished third. Yahoo! ranked fourth.
What caught Myers's attention was Google's ranking in one of the most important categories: "responsiveness and accessibility." Google was No. 18, down from 11th place the year before...
Todd, the SEMPO president, attributes Google's poor image to the fact that the company has viewed itself as and acted like a technology company. Google has tried to automate as many processes as possible and that, according to Todd, doesn't work in the advertising world."
"Google has always been bad -- worse than bad even," said Dana Todd, the president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)...
Independent media analyst Jack Myers, in his fourth annual 'customer satisfaction' survey of online sales groups, also found that advertisers aren't entirely happy with Google's service... as Google looks to broaden its services beyond paid search, Myers suggests the company first has some work to do with advertisers.
Google finished a solid No. 5 overall, better than its seventh-place finish in 2004. Yahoo! was No. 2. Of the nine categories measured, Google's sales team edged out Yahoo!'s crew in one category: product knowledge. Google finished third. Yahoo! ranked fourth.
What caught Myers's attention was Google's ranking in one of the most important categories: "responsiveness and accessibility." Google was No. 18, down from 11th place the year before...
Todd, the SEMPO president, attributes Google's poor image to the fact that the company has viewed itself as and acted like a technology company. Google has tried to automate as many processes as possible and that, according to Todd, doesn't work in the advertising world."
Thomson Directories ito sell Google AdWords to SMEs
Revolution Web Site: "By Daniel Farey-Jones - Revolution - Thomson Directories is to sell Google's AdWords targeted pay-per-click text ads service to UK small and medium-sized businesses. The alliance means that Thomson's 500-strong sales force will offer Google AdWords as an integral part of its ThomsonLocal.com online directory and WebFinder.com search engine marketing offerings...
Laurence O'Toole, business information and new media director of Thomson Directories, said: 'This partnership will allow our customers to take advantage of the extensive reach of the Google network, which will aid them in attracting more targeted leads.'"
Laurence O'Toole, business information and new media director of Thomson Directories, said: 'This partnership will allow our customers to take advantage of the extensive reach of the Google network, which will aid them in attracting more targeted leads.'"
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Europe Uniting Against Schmidt's Google Print Project
Had to post this just because it references my favourite author/ book/ short story for a philosophical (fictional) angle on knowledge..... although the reporter does not mention the librarian...many of whose real life counterparts seem obsessed also with Borges.
Forbes.com: "In The Library Of Babel Argentinean erudite Jorge Luis Borges proposed the idea of a boundless athenaeum, where man could find any book at will. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) announced a library-indexing project last year (see: 'Book 'em, Google'), but the search giant's Borgesian aspirations seem to have got a few backs up in Europe, which is rallying to an alternative. France's decision to create its online Babel of European literature received critical backing from Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain this week. "
Forbes.com: "In The Library Of Babel Argentinean erudite Jorge Luis Borges proposed the idea of a boundless athenaeum, where man could find any book at will. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) announced a library-indexing project last year (see: 'Book 'em, Google'), but the search giant's Borgesian aspirations seem to have got a few backs up in Europe, which is rallying to an alternative. France's decision to create its online Babel of European literature received critical backing from Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain this week. "
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search
SEO Blog looks like blogs have had a PageRank update....
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Guardian on Google local with Yell
Guardian Unlimited | Online | Google to go local with Yell: "Any company can access BT's directory of UK business numbers. But Google decided to make a deal with Yell rather than formatting BT's information itself."
Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart
Wired News: "By Adam L. Penenberg: On one hand, you have a company that rose up from modest beginnings to become one of the richest businesses in America (indeed, the world), and in the process revolutionized the use of technology to create a new way to do business -- helping people find what they want.
And then you have Google..."
And then you have Google..."
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