Search Engines
Google Announces Interest Based Advertising
A lot of bloggers use Google Adsense, so this is an announcement from Google which is likely relevant to you. I got an email last night which stated:
We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.
In short, Google is going to track users across websites which run Google ads. By seeing what kinds of sites the user typically visits, they will change the ads visible on your site to suit their interest. Advertisers who use the Adwords system will be able to choose demographics based on interest.
Adsense users will not have to change any code on their sites. However, it may be necessary to made an edit to your site’s privacy policy to include the fact that ads may be interest based.
If you don’t wish to be involved in interest-based ads, you can opt out. In your Adsense account settings, you’ll see preferences for internet-based ads. Choose “Do Not Show Ads Based on user interest categories”.
Privacy buffs may raise an eyebrow to this, however this is not new technology. It is just using a cookie to track anonymously and nothing is personally identifiable. Plus, Google has the Ads Preferences Manager so that you can control which interest categories you fall into.
More on Google’s official blog announcement.
10 Point Crash Course in Blog SEO
Getting your blog into the search engines is important. That’s obvious. I think a lot of beginning bloggers tend to over-think it, though. In this post, I’m going to give you a rapid-fire overview of what I think is important for you to think about moving forward when it comes to getting your stuff into the search engines.
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Does Online Video Sacrifice SEO Benefits?
I am a big believer that social media (and I’m going to include video and blogs under that header) has gone a long way to make SEO a much less important thing. That said, though, there is no doubt that SEO is still alive and well. Videos, though, aren’t indexable. Are you wasting your SEO efforts by using video?
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Are Adsense Publishers Scared About the Economy?
I got an email from the Director of Adsense and it starts out as follows:
We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.
The email goes on to talk about advancements to the Adsense system. It also says that Google’s success is tied to mine and they’re dedicated to helping me succeed. Thanks, Google.
But, it left me wondering: Why did they think it was necessary to send this email?
It sounds to me as if Google might be a little worried about Adsense publishers ditching them. Google has lost just a little bit of search share, but not enough to worry about. In fact, I personally think Google is poised to do very well in an economic downtime.
It is almost as if Google is trying to say “Hey, little child, we’ll make you feel better. We’ve got it all figured out. Stick with us and you’ll see.”
I’ve heard Brian Clark refer to Adsense as the blogger welfare program. Perhaps it is. But, the case remains that Google Adsense is a powerful juggernaut on the Internet and one that dishes huge amounts of money in the proper circumstances. Selling direct advertising will always outperform Adsense, however Adsense is a good, dependable fallback – IF you have the traffic.
As for this email, I think it was rather useless for Google to send. I don’t think people are going to ditch Adsense because of the economy. Google can deliver affordable, targeted traffic to an advertiser. That means demand isn’t going anywhere, which means there will always be Adsense publishers making money with their program.
Lively.com? What the F**k Is Google Thinking?
Remember Orkut? The social network might be popular in Brazil, but it is a tiny fish when compared to Myspace or Facebook.
Now we have Lively, a new virtual reality site which, as Andy Beal puts it, will be the the Orkut to Second Life.
My question? WHY?
As Google posts in their blog,
A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions?
This is a 20% time project.
My opinion is that virtual reality is destined for a small niche of the Internet. It is rather 2006, actually. And even if I am wrong on that point, one overriding point remains: Isn’t Google supposed to be a search company?
There are so many other truly useful things Google could be working on and releasing. I need a to-do list application, not a cartoon character.
Writing Headlines For Social Media or Search Engines?
The other evening, I attended a search engine optimization meeting here in the Tampa area. It was organized by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal. Since he does SEO for a living, I asked him his thoughts on how social media was changing the field of SEO. One of the questions that I raised was the tradeoff between writing a blog headline for social media purposes or for the search engines.
There are two very different forces at work.
When you write a blog headline for a search engine, the focus is on keywords. You want to use keywords in your headline which the search engine will then relate to your article. You obviously would want to use keywords which people would use to search for your topic.
But, when you write for social media, your headlines needs to be attractive to real people, not a search algorithm. You may deliberately push some buttons or use some words designed to raise an eyebrow.
One example is an article I wrote on this blog. It is called The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark. Obviously, this is a provocative headline. It was written more for social media purposes, however. When people see this headline over on FriendFeed or on Twitter, they are curious because I am using the word "FriendFeed" along with a sexually charged word like "orgasm". They click and read and, yes, people did exactly that (especially on FriendFeed). However, the word "orgasm" is not particularly well suited to the search engine. A search for the word "orgasm" is likely to pull up all kinds of sites which have very little to do with FriendFeed (to say the least).
So, in my case, I wrote the headline for social media. It was written to entice real people to click and read. However, if you try to find the article on Google, a search for "FriendFeed" does not yield my article in the first few pages of results. And a search for "orgasm", well, yields something completely different. A search for "friendfeed orgasm" obviously pulls up my post in the #1 position, but who the hell would search for that?!
Nobody.
Techniques I’ve Used
Social media is a VERY "right now" medium. Generally, social media sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. can result in a big boost in traffic at the beginning of a blog post’s life. Search engines, though, are more long term.
So, with that in mind, perhaps one way to deal with this is to write your headline for social media at the outset. Sure, it will get indexed that way and you can get some benefits from being noticed in the social media. Then, once that buzz has worn out, change your blog headline to something more search engine friendly.
You can also use plenty of H1 and H2 tags in your blog post, using good keywords, and help balance out the effect of a social media friendly headline with the search engines. Search spiders place rank on keywords used in header tags.
Search engines also look at keywords IN YOUR URL. So, you can manually alter the "slug" of your post to make it use good keywords, but the visible headline is more social media friendly.
I’d welcome input from any other bloggers or SEO guys. I’m a pro blogger, but I know enough SEO to be dangerous and that’s about it. So, feel free to chime in.
Google Just Won’t Launch What Matters – To Do List
I saw the story about Google launching Friend Connect. Cool. Yeah, whatever. My question is when are they going to finally plug the gaping hole in their Google Apps package: the to do list.
I am a Google whore. I love the company’s products. They are generally well executed. But, it just floors me that they haven’t yet released a todo list application to integrate with Gmail and Calendar. To me, this is just one of those “DUH” things.
There has been talk about it. According to a story on ZDNet several months ago, Google has even addressed it:
Hey everyone – thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to- do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to- do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.
Please be patient – we’ll have more to talk about soon.
Google secret sauce? They don’t need to rule the world with this thing. Just put something up there. Right now, I am using Remember The Milk and using their Firefox plug-in to embed it into Gmail. It works, but it sucks that I have to use another service. And if I’m on another computer, my todo list is no longer embedded into Gmail because I don’t have the extension.
I know this has been talked about before, but that proves my point. What is taking so long?
Perhaps I shouldn’t bitch about not getting something I’m not paying for. At the same time, though, it shouldn’t take this long to create a todo list app – special sauce or not.
Microsoft-Yahoo Story DOMINATES Techmeme
Like a lot of bloggers, I follow Techmeme to get the buzz in the blogopshere. Today, the story about Microsoft bidding to buy Yahoo is completely DOMINATING Techmeme. I think every blogger, and probably their grandmothers, are talking about this story.
To illustrate, look at this compiled screenshot of Techmeme as it is right now. The area in highlight is completely dedicated to blog coverage of this story.
I don’t believe I have seen a story take this much real estate on Techmeme since perhaps the Facebook Beacon fiasco.
A Momentary Venting By Dave
You know, it would be nice if Techmeme got its stories from more than just Technorati. Well, they probably do. But, PCMech.com is BY FAR my largest blog site and I would venture to say that it is more popular than most of the blogs that show up on Techmeme. However, Technorati, being the absolutely pathetic service that it is, can’t seem to manage to index PCMech properly.
Every time it has indexed PCMech, it is because I have contacted their support department and bitched. They then send the spiders to PCMech and they never return.
As a result (I’m guessing), PCMech never appears on Techmeme even though we are independelty covering a huge selection of the stories that make it onto Techmeme.
WebbyOnline, on the other hand, is my smallest blog. It, though, is beign indexed properly by Technorati and, therefore, appears on Techmeme.
Obligatory Linking
Now, just to illustrate my theory above, I am going to link to a few of the blog stories now on Techmeme and see if WebbyOnline appears on Techmeme. In the past, WebbyOnline has appeared on Techmeme for less popular stories even though this blog gets only a fraction of PCMech’s traffic. But, because Technorati indexes this site properly, this site gets onto Techmeme while PCMech doesn’t.
WTF.
Technorati’s spiders are – sorry – total shit. No other way to put it.
Here’s those links:
- Microsoft’s Public Pronouncement of Intent to Buy Yahoo
- You Had To See This Coming – Yeah, I agree. The writing was on the wall.
- Yahoo to "Evaluate" the Offer. Yeah, I bet, especially now that everybody has their drool pans out over the story.
- What Would MicroHoo Look Like?
UPDATE – That Didn’t Take Long!
Here is an image of WebbyOnline – showing up on Techmeme. Meanwhile, I have a front-page story on PCMech about this and it’s nowhere to be found.
Damn you Technorati!
Google Presents…
From Google’s official blog:
Starting today, presentations — whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor — are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it’s time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching.
I checked it out. It’s cool. Now, is it going to be the Powerpoint killer some have made it out to be? Hell no. Powerpoint has a LOT of capability that Google Presentations doesn’t have. That said, what makes Presentations cool is the collaborative aspect. For example, multiple people can work on the same slide at the same time. And, when presenting, it integrates with Google Talk to allow live conversation right along with the presentation.
I smell future use of this for doing webinars.
Has Google Penalized Your Site?
YoungEntrepreneur.com has posted a quick piece about Google penalizing your site. In it, they mention that Google has, last week, reinstituted the practice of emailing webmasters in the event that they are blacklisted. They were doing that originally, but they had stopped in favor of simply posting notices into Webmaster Tools. The problem is that not all site owners are using Webmaster Tools, so they decided to start email again. Good move.
Google penalizing your site would suck in a big way. Google is the #1 search engine, and speaking for my own sites, Google is responsible for well over half of my total site traffic. If I were to be penalized by Google, my business would take a large hit. So, why might they penalize your site? Sizlopedia has posted a “top 10″ list which is worth reading. He clarifies a little more, but here is the list:
- Short-term domain registration. In other words, registering your domain for only a year.
- Duplicate content.
- Link buying / selling. I do not know if this would affect things like Text-Link-Ads, but I rather doubt it.
- Hidden text or hidden links,
- Excessive use of keywords.
- Automated redirects or doorway pages
- Linking to banned sites
- Getting linked TO from bad sites
- Not complying with the Google Webmaster Guidelines
- Link Building Campaigns. John Chow, for example, got bit by Google when their algorithm apparently caught on to the fact that he was promoting doing site reviews strictly for the linkbait.
We all like Google, but Google didn’t get into that position by sitting back and letting spammers get into the database. Sure, a Google search today will, of course, lead you to spam sites – sites that paid SEO-types to get them into that position even if they are not the most relevant. SEO has a role, but there is no doubt that much of the SEO industry just goes to lessen the value of the internet for the purposes of making money. I don’t like it, but I understand why people do it. Google will continue to do what they can to minimize search engine spam. So, it is wise to be in tune to the reg flags and keep your site on Google’s good side.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
