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Express Yourself with Google’s New Blogger Template Designer

Written on March 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Don’t go for second best baby

Put your blog to the test

You know, you know, you’ve got to

Make Blogger express how it feels

And maybe then you’ll know your blog is real!

I used to be a Blogger fan. However, just like my love of Madonna, I stopped liking Blogger when it started looking tired and old.

Well, Google has announced a new Blogger Template Designer, that might help breathe a little life into the service that arguable plays second-fiddle to WordPress.

With the new Blogger Template Designer you can–you guessed it–completely customize the look and feel of your blog–something my friend Vinny Lingham has being doing for years over at Yola.

Anyway, spam-scrapers bloggers can now enjoy these features:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

This video explains it further:

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Express Yourself with Google’s New Blogger Template Designer

Video: Does Google Own Us?

Written on March 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Here is a short but very well-done video on how much Google knows about us, possibly implying that Google owns their users. Clearly, this topic is not new, but the video was really well done.

The video is from the show “Hungry Beast” that airs in Australia on the ABC, 9PM Wednesdays. For more information [...]



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Video: Does Google Own Us?

Did Google Ignore an Italian Takedown Notice?

Written on March 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

The verdict on the Italian YouTube court case verdict seemed pretty clear: sentencing Google execs to jail time for an invasion of privacy in a video posted (by someone else) on the UGC site was, well, “absurd,” as we said two weeks ago.

But some new evidence is coming out that may just justify at least the “guilty” verdict from the Italian court—since that’s all the Italian judge released (i.e. he didn’t publish his reasoning). According to TechDirt, there are now reports that Google may have ignored a takedown notice on the video.

…Oooooor not. While Google Translate is woefully inadequate in translating the Italian article intelligibly, it appears that the takedown requests in question (if they exist) might actually be from users—i.e. people without legal standing—via the site’s feedback form. Although that could certainly alert the company that inappropriate content had been submitted by a user, it’s a far cry from an official legal filing.

It’s also hard to tell because Google hasn’t apparently responded adequately to requests from the prosecution to provide copies of any legal takedown notices (although I believe the article says they have provided a copy of one such filing: “Google Inc. has sent not only evasive replies on the comments made [on the video page] but also on removal requests (having produced only one on that SB)”). Furthermore, the EU has no guidelines on what constitutes a sufficiently fast response to a legal takedown notice (or even a clearly defined process for filing takedown notices).

Still, it hardly makes sense to sentence executives who probably never saw any takedown notices (whether or not they were filed), didn’t abuse the child in question, didn’t tape said abuse and didn’t post the video, to jail time for invasion of privacy. TechDirt points out a fine for ignoring (or losing) a takedown notice would be a far more appropriate penalty.

What do you think? Did Google receive a takedown notice? Who should be punished, and how?

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Did Google Ignore an Italian Takedown Notice?

Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

Written on March 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by jennita

SMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That’s the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

There were quite a few live blogs of the event, but I had a few favorites from the interview that I wanted to call out.

1. He made it very clear that Microsoft is focused on the big picture and not just immediate goals. He spoke about continuing to move forward with a positive momentum and a differentiated point of view.
2. When the question came up of “Can you be #1 in the U.S.?” he essentially said “YES!” [and yes he said it with that exclamation] However he made it clear that it was a tricky question. If you say yes, you sound arrogant but if you say no you sound unsure of yourself. You don’t do things to come in second!
3. Danny asked “Is Yahoo! going to survive as a search player? You want to beat them aren’t you just going to kill them?” Ballmer could really only answer one way “No.” He stated that they wanted Yahoo! to do a good job, that there was lots of flexibility written into their contract and there was advantage to having the power of 2 as opposed to the power of 1.
4. When asked whether he was going to get on Twitter he said “I’m more of a webpage than a bunch of short tweets.” But then acknowledged that he did have a stealth Twitter account however only the people in his neighborhood followed him.
5. His favorite thing on Bing are the Bing maps. [completely agree here... the maps are amazing!]
6. What he thinks is the biggest opportunity in search: to “Help people get done what they’re trying to get done.”
7. Oh! And he gave us all his personal email account. You’ll have to watch the video to get that though.

All in all it was quite enjoyable to watch, although I was a bit unprepared (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) for the yelling. Ok, I don’t think in his mind he was yelling, he was just talking VERY LOUDLY. But sitting right up front, I think we all sat back in our chairs a bit when he got excited and started to get louder. You can see the full video of the keynote below.

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution

Now that personalization has become an opt-out rather than an opt-in, I was really interested in what this session had to offer. The only speaker, Brian Horling who works in Personalized Search at Google, first gave a very informative presentation, then fielded quite a few questions from the audience. I really enjoyed having just one speaker who was focused on the topic at hand. The top takeaways that I got were some of the differences between a logged out user who gets personalized search versus a logged in user. Let me break it down a bit.

First of all, both types of users are thought of as two different identities to Google. Let’s say you’re logged in, and then log out, they don’t view you as the same logged in person. At that point they do look at the cookies set on your computer which tell gives them information on what you’ve searched for previously, which results you’ve clicked on, etc. For signed in accounts, your web history is saved indefinitely, but your non-logged in identity is only saved for 180 days.

Every user using search has the potential of seeing personalized search in some way whether it’s geo-location, web history, social search, etc. Personalization occurs about 1 in 5 queries for a user and the changes tend to be restricted to only a few results.

How can you control the personalization of your searches?

• Use search details
• Disable it by appending &pws=0 on searchs (you can find the bookmarklet to do that here)
• Edit or disable your web history

If you haven’t looked at the “view customizations” link I highlight above before, you should definitely check it out. Pretty interesting what’s going on there.

One thing that came up in this session was how do you explain to a client that the results they’re seeing aren’t the same as what everyone else sees. Although in some cases that would probably be a good thing since they’re seeing better rankings since they search and click on their sites more often than the average user.

How do you feel about personalized search? After this presentation I found that I was much more open to the idea than I was previously. I think because I felt like I finally understood a bit better where the data was coming from and how to turn it off. But what about you?

And so on…

The other session I really loved was “Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks” but as I was putting this post together I realized that should really a be a post in and of itself. It was great to hear from a Google rep about how certain sitelinks show up and ways you can enhance your site to ensure proper sitelinks. I have tons of screenshots and examples, so I’ll put them into a full post. Plus I’d really like to get Jerry Dischler (the Google guy) to answer a few of my questions. So watch for that one!

The best swag of the conference goes to Yahoo! for not only giving away these awesome coffee mugs, but for setting up a full-on coffee shop with baristas to make us our much needed lattes!

I really wanted to show the videos from the SMX Ignite as that was one of my favorite parts of the day. But unfortunately the videos aren’t live yet. Here’s a link to where they should be. Maile Ohye’s “DateRank: PageRank for singles” was my personal favorite, although all the speakers were exceptional.

Dana Lookadoo and I interviewed a number of people in sort of a Jay Leno “man on the street” sort of way. We hope to have the interviews up tomorrow.

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Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings in Google Local

Written on March 2, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: seo

Posted by randfish

This post is short and easy to follow, just like the tactic it recommends. Most everyone who optimizes for Google Local (aka Google Maps) is familar with David Mihm’s excellent and oft-referenced Local Search Ranking Factors. In that document, and in many places where local results are analyzed, it’s clear that getting your business/website into more listings, in a consistent fashion is a very good thing.

Yet, somehow, this obvious tactic has gone missing from many GG Local optimization recommendations.

Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference

Written on February 22, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

When the internal Google remote quality rater guidelines leaked online there was a core quote inside it that defined the essence of spam:

Final Notes on Spam
When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

With the above quote in mind please review the typical Mahalo page

Adding a bit more context, the following 25 minute video from 2008 starts off with Matt Cutts talking about how he penalized a website for using deceptive marketing. Later into the video (~ 21 minutes in) the topic of search results within search results and then Mahalo come up.

Here is a transcription of relevant bits…

Matt Cutts: Would a user be annoyed if they land on this page, right. Because if users get annoyed, if users complain, then that is when we start to take action.

And so it is definitely the case where we have seen search results where a search engine didn’t robots.txt something out, or somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there and they say search results or some comparison shopping sites don’t put a lot of work into making it a useful site. They don’t add value.

Though we mainly wanted to get on record and say that hey we are willing to take these out, because we try to document everything as much as we can, because if we came and said oh removed some stuff but it wasn’t in our guidelines to do that then that would be sub-optimal.

So there are 2 parts to Google’s guidelines. There are technical guidelines and quality guidelines. The quality guidelines are things where if you put hidden text we’ll consider that spam and we can remove your page. The technical guidelines are more like just suggestions.

…

So we said don’t have search results in search results. And if we find those then we may end up pruning those out.

We just want to make sure that searchers get good search results and that they don’t just say oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost, and I didn’t find what I wanted. Now I am angry and I am going to complain to Google.

Danny Sulivan: “Mahalo is nothing but search results. I mean that is explicitly what he says he is doing. I will let you qualify it, but if you ask him what it is still to this day he will say its a search engine. And then all the SEOs go ‘well if it is a search engine, shouldn’t you be blocking all your search results from Google’ and his response is ‘yeah well IF we ever see them do anything then we might do it’.”

Matt Cutts: It’s kinda interesting because I think Jason…he is a smart guy. He’s a savvy guy, and he threaded the needle where whenever he talked to some people he called it a search service or search engine, and whenever he talked to other people he would say oh it is more of a content play.

And in my opinion, I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search.

And if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say ‘you know, you need to have this much content on the page.’ So I think various people have stated how skilled he is at baiting people, but I don’t think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search or that even he seems to be moving away from ok we are nothing but a search engine and moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value.

One quick thing to note about the above video was how the site mentioned off the start got penalized for lying for links, and yet Jason Calacanis apologized for getting a reporter fired after lying about having early access to the iPad. Further notice how Matt considered that the first person was lying and deserved to be penalized for it, whereas when he spoke of Jason he used the words savvy, smart, and the line threaded the needle. To the layperson, what is the difference between being a savvy person threading the needle and a habitual liar?

Further lets look at some other surrounding facts in 2010, shall we?

• How does Jason stating “Mahalo sold $250k+ in Amazon product in 2009 without trying” square with Matt Cutts saying “somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there” … Does the phrase without trying sound like value add to you? Doesn’t to me.
• Matt stated that they do not want searchers to think “oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost” … well how does Mahalo intentionally indexing hundreds of thousands of 100% auto-generated pages which simply recycle search results and heavily wrap them in ads square with that? sounds like deceptive & confusing arbitrage to me.
• Matt stated “and if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say ‘you know, you need to have this much content on the page,’” but in reality, that was a response to when I highlighted how Mahalo was scraping content. Jason dismissed the incident as an “experimental” page that they would nofollow. Years later, of course, it turned out he was (once again) lying and still doing the same thing, only with far greater scale. Jason once again made Matt Cutts look bad for trusting him.
• Matt stated “I don’t think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search” … and no, its not pure search. If anything it is IMPURE search, where they use 3rd party content *without permission* and put most of it below the fold, while the Google AdSense ads are displayed front and center.
  • If you want to opt out of Mahalo scraping your content you can’t because he scrapes it from 3rd party sites and provides NO WAY for you to opt out of him displaying scraped content from your site as content on his page).
  • Jason offers an “embed this” option for their content, so you can embed their “content” on your site. But if you use that code the content is in an iframe so it doesn’t harm them on the duplicate content front AND the code gives Jason multiple direct clean backlinks. Whereas when Jason automatically embeds millions of scraped listings of your content he puts it right in the page as content on his page AND slaps nofollow on the link. If you use his content he gets credit…when he uses your content you get a lump of coal. NICE!
  • And, if you were giving Jason the benefit of the doubt, and thought the above was accidental, check out how when he scrapes the content in that all external links have a nofollow added, but any internal link *does not*
• Matt stated “[Jason is] moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value” … and, in reality, Jason used the recession as an excuse to can the in house editorial team and outsource that to freelancers (which are paid FAR LESS than the amounts he hypes publicly). Given that many of the pages that have original content on them only have 2 sentences surrounded by large swaths of scraped content, I am not sure there is an attempt to “add a lot of value.” Do you find this page on Shake and Bake meth to be a high quality editorial page?
• What is EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS when they claim to have some editorial control over the content is that not only do they wrap outbound links which they are scraping content from in nofollow, but they publish articles on topics like 13 YEAR OLD RAPE. Either they have no editorial, or some of the editorial is done by pedophiles.
• Worse yet, such pages are not a rare isolated incident. Michael VanDeMar found out that Mahalo is submitting daily lists of thousands of those auto-generated articles to Google via an XML sitemap…so when Jason claims the indexing was an accident, you know he lied once again!

Here Jason is creating a new auto-generated page about me! And if I want to opt out of being scraped I CAN’T. What other source automatically scrapes content, republishes it wrapped in ads and calls it fair use, and then does not allow you to opt out? What is worse in the below example, is that on that page Jason stole the meta description from my site and used it as his page’s meta description (without my permission, and without a way for me to opt out of it).

So basically Matt…until you do something, Jason is going to keep spamming the crap out of Google. Each day you ignore him another entreprenuer will follow suit trying to build another company that scrapes off the backs of original content creators. Should Google be paying people to *borrow* 3rd party content without permission (and with no option of opting out)?

I think Jason has pressed his luck and made Matt look naive and stupid. Matt Cutts has got to be pissed. But unfortunately for Matt, Mahalo is too powerful for him to do anything about it. In that spirit, David Naylor recently linked to this page on Twitter.

What is the moral of the story for Jason Calacanas & other SEOs?

• If you are going to create a thin spam site you need to claim to be anti-spam to legitimize it. Never claim to be an SEO publicly, even if you are trying to sell corporate SEO services.
• If you have venture capital and have media access and lie to the media for years it is fine. If you are branded as an SEO and you are caught lying once then no soup for you.
• If you are going to steal third party content and use it as content on your site and try to claim it is fair use make sure you provide a way of opting out (doing otherwise is at best classless, but likely illegal as well).
• If you have venture capital and are good at public relations then Google’s quality guidelines simply do not apply to you. Follow Jason’s lead as long as Google permits mass autogenerated spam wrapped in AdSense to rank well in their search results.
• The Google Webmaster Guidelines are an arbitrary device used to oppress the small and weak, but do not apply to large Google ad partners.
• Don’t waste any of your time reporting search spam or link buying. The above FLAGRANT massive violation of Google’s guidelines was reported on SearchEngineLand, and yet the issue continues without remedy - showing what a waste of time it is to highlight such issues to Google.

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Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference

Funny Dilbert SEO Comic Strip Cartoon by Scott Adams

Written on February 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

And all this, only to find out there was a missing ingredient the whole time

Of course, if Dilbert had a text version of the cartoon and perhaps a more relevant alt tag in his embed code that would help too. Just saying

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Funny Dilbert SEO Comic Strip Cartoon by Scott Adams

Killer Google AdWords Guide for Affiliates

Written on February 16, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

My wife used to tell me that I would give too much away…and then she pens something like this AdWords affiliate guide. It doesn’t seem fair

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Killer Google AdWords Guide for Affiliates

YouTube Feels the Need . . . the Need for Speed

Written on February 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

And thus concludes probably the only time in my life I’ll intentionally quote Top Gun.

Yesterday, YouTube released a Speed Dashboard to clock how fast your video downloads are coming through. In addition to displaying your Internet speed, the dashboard also offers comparative data. For example:

The comparative data comes from not only other customers of your ISP but other YouTube users in your neighborhood with different ISPs—in case you wanted to know just how fast the Joneses can watch the latest Weezer single.

Says YouTube:

The goal with this dashboard is to give you insight into what your YouTube speed looks like compared to the YouTube speed of users in other regions and different ISPs. We may also list the YouTube speeds for users in you neighborhood but with different ISPs. The speed numbers are calculated by measuring the speed at which YouTube video is received by the browser. This is then averaged over the previous 30 days provided you’ve used the same browser during this time period.

It’s always good to check up on your ISP and make sure you’re getting Internet speed in the tier you’re paying for—and to compare other ISPs if you want a faster connection. But speed isn’t apples to apples when it comes to Internet subscriptions: YouTube doesn’t tell you how much they’re paying, what else they’re using their bandwidth for while viewing videos, or how much bandwidth they’re paying for

What do you think? Will YouTube help people to switch, or ISPs to speed up the Internet?

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YouTube Feels the Need . . . the Need for Speed

Whiteboard Friday - How Search is Changing

Written on February 11, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses recent changes that seem to signal the coming of another big shift in how the engines determine results. With the incorporation of social networks into results, increased personalized search, and even Google Buzz, the social graph is clearly becoming a more and more important factor for the engines. What will these changes mean for online marketers and how can you take advantage of them? Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday and find out…

And here, for your browsing pleasure, are some of the resources Rand mentioned in the video…

• Video intro to Google Buzz:

• Royal Pingdom says Twitter now processing more than one billion tweets per month.

• The New York Times analyzes the sharing of articles online.
• Mashable reports Facebook passes 400 million users.
• Search Engine Land looks at Google’s social search features.

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Whiteboard Friday - How Search is Changing