Google suggests Islam is nothing

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Google's search Suggest function treats Islam a bit differently from the other major religions of the world. It's willing to suggest "Christianity is bullshit" or "Judaism is false," but if you begin to ask what Islam is, it won't suggest a thing.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

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Google book scanners apologize to Chinese scribes

Sorry for the poor communication - not the scanning

Google has publicly apologized to the Chinese Writers Association for inadequate communication with local writers over its Google Book Search project, an effort to digitize millions of texts inside various research libraries.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

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Google promotes Ad Planner through Webmaster Tools
Google is sending messages to webmasters to promote adplanner. I got two messages today. << Dear Webmaster Tools User, If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site's visibility with advertisers in Google Ad Planner, a free media planning tool used by tens of thousands of media planners and buyers. This is done through the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, a section within Ad Planner that lets you take charge of your site profile. THREE STEPS TO VIEW YOUR SITE PROFILE To see how your site profile looks in Google Ad Planner, follow these steps: 1. Visit www.google.com/adplanner 2. Type your site's URL into the blue box that says "View a site listing" 3. Hit "enter" to get to your site's profile If your site profile is not complete, don't worry, we have lots of ways for you to add information to the profile. EIGHT WAYS TO UPDATE YOUR SITE PROFILE Use the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to make your profile more complete. For example, you can claim your domains or subdomains, write a site description, provide a URL for advertising, and update your site's content categories and ad specifications. You can also opt-in your site's Google Analytics data, invite additional users to edit and maintain your site, and promote your profile with a Google Ad Planner Site Badge. GET STARTED Sign in with your Google Account today at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to get started. -- The Google Ad Planner Team >>
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Google Maps Hack: Weather Bonk - Live Weather, Forecasts, WebCams, and more on a Google Map
Weather Bonk – Live Weather, Forecasts, WebCams, and more on a Google Map
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Eric Ward Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: December 22, 2008

Eric Ward founded the Web's first link building and web promotion services, called NetPOST and URLwire, in 1994. Today Eric offers those services as well as training and private consulting to help companies learn how to generate links, publicity and online buzz for their Web content. Eric has developed content linking strategies for PBS.org, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The New York Times, TVGuide.com, and Weather.com.

Eric won the 1995 Tenagra Award For Internet Marketing Excellence, and in 1997 was named one of the Web's 100 most influential people by Websight magazine. Eric also writes the LinkWeek column for search industry news site SearchEngineLand.com, and has written for Web Marketing Today, ClickZ, MarketingProfs, and Ad Age Magazine. Depending on the weather, Eric resides in Knoxville, Tennessee or Seagrove Beach Florida.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Let's talk about some of the challenges inherent in getting links to very large sites that are content rich. How do you, as a link builder, think about a plan to help these people?

Eric Ward: Clients that are content rich are great because they have all of the things they needed to accomplish a terrific inbound link profile. They just want to improve it and they want it to be better. I guess one of the ways I approach it is even though it's a big, successful site, sometimes you can be so big and so successful that you forget how you got to be that way in the first place.

You can almost take things for granted at a certain point. One of the first areas I look at is if they made their content as portable and as linkable as possible for the people who are already on their site. You work so hard to get these people to your site, so we want to know which pages of your site are the most likely and logical to be shared. Ask yourself on any given page of your content, what can a person do while on this page?

I don't necessarily just mean the obvious like bookmark this page, or share this with a friend, or add this to your Google bookmarks which are all fine. It's almost expected nowadays that you would have some sort of code on your page that allows a person with a mouse in their hand to very quickly take that piece of a page and move it into the bookmarking programs that they use. . Unfortunately, I think web sites emphasize this too much. People think that the thing should be socialized, and no one probably will.

So, with a big site, I just look at it from the standpoint of a user on the site. So if I am on a page that I like, what are the things that I might want to do at this page, and what are the things that they are allowing me to do? And, even without those Chiclets, even without the little buttons if you are a Digg power user, it doesn't mean it's not going to happen.

Who knows what content might have never been famous without Chiclets. People's attention's spans today are very small. If I've got to open a new tab or open a new window, then I could type in Digg.com and openit and sign into my user account. It's a difference between something that takes five seconds and something that takes a minute. And, I understand that, that's a deal breaker. So, that's the first thing I do.

Eric Enge: So let's say somebody puts deli.cio.us, Magnolia, StumbleUpon, and other strictly bookmarking sites chiclets on their page (we will lead Digg and Reddit and social news sites out of it for the time being), what's your experience with how that kind of bookmarking ultimately helps the linked profile?

Eric Ward: I don't know the answer to that exactly. The fact that it happens I think is meaningless. I think any engine looking to analyze the social links profile has to care about whether or not it can trust the signal it's getting, no matter where it comes from. It has to look for different things from a StumbleUpon.com/user/whomever, and stumbleupon.com/user/eward.

One of those profiles could be extremely useful to Google, whereas another one might have absolutely no value whatsoever. I can't sit here and say that I know every single factor that Google considers, but I think there are some pretty obvious ones. I think that the collection of sites bookmarked start to tell a little bit about a particular user.I could be really vigilant about bookmarking every site devoted to lung cancer that is from the CDC, or the National Library of Medicine, or Harvard Medical School. I could have 300 links from dot govs, dot edus, and then one of them could then be my site for a mesothelioma lawyer.

What I am trying to do with a bookmark account or a StumbleUpon account is make it look as though it is credible. But, I had an agenda with the idea that maybe I can just bookmark so much quality that I can stick my client's sight in here, and then that will work.

It might possibly work for a while, but unless you are really tending to the garden, that's all you do. If you are not continuously modifying, updating, and working your StumbleUpon account, then you are starting to send a signal to Google that you really don't care that much about it and Google really shouldn't trust it much.

There will be a trail that will tell things about you, including the frequency with which you update your user profile, or add new content. You could try anything you want to try to do to gain. I guess what I am saying is that I really feel bad for anybody whose inbound link profile is based upon something that's fake.

Eric Enge: Sure, absolutely. There is a secondary question here which is, is there any sense that people see something in StumpleUpon or deli.cio.us or something like that and later link to it?

Eric Ward: Yes it is certainly possible. I have the toolbar in place myself, and I regularly look though it. As much as I am online, I am not a bookmarker. I don't have time to bookmark cool pages for other people to see. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I just don't care. I also think you have to remember that with the signals that you get, people get really excited about things.

Then their life intervenes, they grow up, they decide what they don't need and they no longer feel the need to share every minute of what they do in their blog. They are passionate about this bookmark account, and then they are not so. I mean it's like the world is filled with ghost blogs; the world is filled with ghost bookmarking accounts as well.

It's just the nature of the web. It's up to the engines to figure out when they are crawling something that has some value to us. If I am Google, I personally don't feel that there is anything to make me feel as though I should rank aside based on a social media inbound link profile.

That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I don't think that Google wants that to happen, or we'd feel comfortable with the idea that that could happen. So, I think they are all very cool services. There are always people who just immediately ask how this plays into their search ranking. They want to try to understand that maybe there is that group of people who immediately want to abuse it. But, if I am Google, and I don't have a PhD, I don't know anything about algorithms, but I don't consider the social media sites as a factor.

Eric Enge: Alright. So, what are some of the other things to think about then?

Eric Ward: I think social media is one of the ways I may find a passionate influencer or somebody passionate about a subject that's already there. I am not going to create my own StumbleUpon account just to bookmark a site for a client. What you can do is, if you have a site about fitness training for example, you can look for people with profiles that have a lot of health and fitness sites. Then you can try to contact them and let them know what you have.

This is really back to link building as public relations again, it's just that my influencer here happens to be a heavy duty StumbleUpon user. What influence does that have on your search rankings? Nothing frankly, unless of course, they end up linking to you.

But even if it doesn't, the person you contact might have forty or fifty people sharing his StumbleUpon links with. Or, maybe he also has a deli.cio.us account, or Magnolia, or Reddit, or whatever. But, still what I try to do is look for the person who is already passionate about that topic, because he can carry my message a lot further than I can.

If I have an awesome site about subject x, I've got to find people passionate about subject x that are also passionate about the web or about one of those tools, and then get the word out to them. It will either work or it won't. I think that's a more honest approach to me, rather than immediately going and creating a bunch of sock puppet accounts just to bookmark this one site. I'd love to see the statistics on what percentage of social bookmarking accounts are logged into less than one time once a month.

I don't think that there is ever any harm in creating an account just to try to familiarize yourself with the lay of the land within a particular social world, whether it's bookmarking or whatever. I do that myself, because I have to understand. Nothing would be worse to me to just say that's crap, it doesn't work or that's a waste of time when I have never even touched it.

So, I want to look at these things, and this is how I came to my belief that Nofollowed or not Wikipedia has got has a tremendous amount of power from a link building standpoint. I don't ignore a Wikipedia because there is no search ranking benefit. My personal opinion is that I do not believe that rankings on any major engine are yet influenced enough where a person working as third party on behalf of content can work their way on to page one just by social media alone. You could probably pay somebody to get to the Digg homepage, and from doing that you get 15,000 visits. And that's cool because it's totally different than working your way up to Google's main page just by having a link from the Digg homepage.

Eric Enge: So, let's take a different slice at our large site problem for a moment. Say a site has 10,000 links. One of the things that occurs to me when you look at that is that your strategy is always very dependent on the nature of the content they have and those kinds of things. But, if they have 10,000 links today, one strategy would be to get them similar quality links, in which case I am guessing that they have moved their traffic needle. We are not going to move their traffic needle with 500 more links with the same quality as the 10,000 they already have, right?

Eric Ward: I would agree with that.

Eric Enge: So, I was thinking within terms of if they have 10,000, if we stay with the similar quality approach, I'd probably need to add 3,000 links. But of course, the other option is to go for higher quality links so that you can be more rifle shot oriented. Does that kind of thinking make sense in your mind?

Eric Ward: Well, it's certainly not easy. I guess one thing you could always do with them is ask which content on their site is the oldest versus the newest. What are the things that have shown the ability to attract links? For example, I have a client that's in the building supplies industry. Right now the idea of sustainability, all things green is a very hot subject area that lends itself to passionate content creators, vertical engines, vertical guides, librarians devoting massive amounts of resources to subject guides about that.

If you create a page that is something that you legitimately do and do well that can be link worthy, you might want to look at what content is worth investing in as part of a more strenuous link building effort. There are people that want to renovate their house and they don't want to do it with anything that's going to hurt the environment.

If you've got content that you can create, you can probably attract a nice collection of links from people who are interested in this type of thing because that's something that people can get passionate about.

Eric Ward: Sometimes you can do back link analysis just to see where you're getting nibbles.

Eric Enge: Well, I think one of the things that you talked about before that was important was the notion of making it easy for people. When you have a site that gets 10,000 links already, you want to make it easy for those people to link to you if that's what they are interested in doing. So, if you have an information rich site and it's been getting a lot of its revenue from AdSense, for example, you probably don't want the AdSense ad to be the first occupy all the space above the fold.

I spend time thinking about quantity oriented tactics and quality oriented tactics. What should I try to do to get many hundreds or thousands of links, versus what I might do to get very high quality links. If there is a way to persuade significant pages on the MIT website (a PR10 domain) to link to you that are very high quality links, and it's probably worth a lot of individual attention.

Eric Ward: Right. I'd agree with that completely.

Eric Enge: Right. And then, on the quantity side, if I am trying to get thousands of links, I am clearly not going to do that by hand emailing everyone.

Eric Ward: When people ask me about getting clean links too fast, I tell them that it's impossible. If you are getting legitimate links, you are not going to get them too fast.

Eric Enge: There are general approaches like implementing a PR campaigns. Or if you can manage to get into a major magazine somehow, then you might get a bunch of links fast. Or if you're using Digg and have content that is suitable for those audiences, maybe something gets hot there, and can produce a pile of links. Or, maybe a widget strategy would work also, as a way of syndicating your content.

Eric Ward: Oh sure, yes. I think the greatest value is recognizing when you are dealing with a client who has content for which something like a widget is even worth discussing or not. Let's say you have no links, a brand new site, the best content ever about whatever the subject is, and you want links fast. First of all you have to make sure that the people you are about to try to attract to your site could take it and run with it. You have to give them the ability to help you meet your goal of attracting links.

Certainly if press and publicity works for you, go out with that. You've got to try to reach the masses if your goal is mass links. But at the same time that's going on, you can't just assume that people most likely to be passionate about your content are going to come across it because you've sent out a press release out or you've enabled it to be bookmarkable. In my opinion, someone still has to go out there and find those people most likely to care and contact them.

You will know fairly quickly if they think you have great content. If you've got really good content, it really shouldn't be that hard. In my opinion if you do it properly you will get the links that you deserve to get. It's not like you should have to pull teeth and beg for links. If you do then something is wrong with your content.

I find the biggest challenge for me is getting to the people who can make a decision as link building is becoming more popular, and people are getting hammered with requests for stuff that's just off topic and not relevant. It's getting tougher and tougher to get the highest and most trustworthy links.

Eric Enge: One of the things that you've touched upon here that's worth expanding on is the role of content. I mean you can have a site that has really good solid content, but it's not remarkable. You can get links to a site like that, but it's challenging.

Eric Ward: Say a dentist has a website, and he is a good dentist and he loves dentistry and he cares about what he does. He has a nice website and he really cares about your root canal. And, he wants you to know everything about your root canal and he has written some awesome content about your root canal, but so have 17,000 other dentists.

What you have to do sometimes is realign expectations and ask yourself why people are visiting your site. What you really care about is dental health in Knoxville, Tennessee or the best dentists in Knoxville? In other words, helping them to realize that they don't need 5,000 links, what they need is 17 links from the right people in the region that they are trying to appeal to.

I mean no matter how passionate you are about a subject, you are going to reach a person that with something they care about. It's like the fine folks that make Compound W, the wart remover; can they do everything they possibly can do to create a website devoted to the art and science of wart removal, but you have to think about who is going to link to that type of content.

It's about not being afraid to tell the client what they face; the client that thinks that just because he is a good dentist, his site should be in the top five needs a dose of reality.

It's not easy to have to explain to the client that it's not because he has done anything wrong.

Eric Enge There has to be something unique and different if you are trying to reach the top in a very competitive area. On the other hands, Poughkeepsie root canal is probably not that competitive of a term, and you can probably accomplish what you want without having to be quite so remarkable.

Eric Ward: Right, I totally agree. In fact you might not need to be remarkable at all. For companies who are good at what they do, but, for no fault of their own, just don't have a particular truly differentiating content message, it is going to be hard. You are basically always going to be looking for some sort of trick, or you are going to be hoping that you understand a little bit more about how Google works than the next guy.

Ultimately there is nothing different enough about your site to send a true signal to Google. So, really all you can do is hope to get in the flow of what Google is looking for. So, when someone does a search on Root Canal Poughkeepsie it looks like there are these seven places where the site showing up has got reviews. Well, I need to encourage reviews then.

Maybe I need to offer some incentive. Maybe I need to give every client that walks out my door a little appointment card with a little note that says, want to receive 10% off your next cleaning? Go to ratemydoc.com and type in my name and my address, and enter a review of what you think about me and print out your page. And if you come in with that next time you get 10% off or a free cleaning or something like that.

You could argue that's a paid link, and that's fine. And so, this is now more to marketing than link building, and it's not even public relations. There it's more about taking what's not necessarily remarkable, but recognizing what it is that Google is looking for.

Eric Ward: Ask yourself if there is a way that you can get in that trust flow. If you have great content already you don't need to focus on content. Then you just have to decide what's the best way you can rank without having to use pay per click.

You could invest all your time and effort on that and have 57 reviews, and see your site actually show up in the top ten reviews and be very proud of yourself. And then, the following Monday is when Google decides that in general for Poughkeepsie dentists, they are not going to show that box anymore.

So you've got to hope that those individual sites, ratemydoc, or ratemydent, or rootcanaldocs, are doing a great job of getting in front of users. All the work that you did to get in there hoping to influence Google's results is gone now. You may have to explain these types of challenges to your client and tell them, you've got an awesome site, I am not arguing that with you, but so do 1500 other dentists in this county.

Therefore, here is how we need to approach this. If we are going to rank well organically, and if we have nothing that's going to separate us from anybody else content wise, what other choices do we have if we don't want to pay for pay per click? We can go local. We can try the social media angle and hope that Google might give us a little more credit for having a bunch of social links. But, how many people at StumbleUpon are just waiting to link to Poughkeepsie dentist? None.

So, now you are back to creating a sock puppet account, or asking all of your clients to go click. You are giving them something that says reviewme and rateadoc, and also telling them to create a StumbleUpon account and bookmark me.

Pretty soon you are going to have to start paying your customer. So, I am not meaning to make fun of it; it's just part of the frustration that people face. People think that there is some sort of a secret. People think that they are doing something wrong, or that a competitor knows something that they don't.

In reality, the problem for so many is that the overwhelming majority of businesses that have a web presence have no true discernable content quality signals that will engender the kind of links to give Google any sort of confidence that one is any better than the other. I don't know that you can ever move the needle once you get to that point without deciding you want to be something that you might not want to be with your website.

Eric Enge: Let's get back to the scenario where we are dealing with the site that has a lot of content. What are your thoughts on packaging up the content in some form and syndicating articles in order to get links?

Eric Ward: I would not say that I am against it. I think the question you always have to ask yourself about this particular tactic is if there is anything about it that will preclude your competitor from being able to employ the exact same tactic. If so it's simply a matter of who is going to do it first, and who can stay ahead of the game. You have to ask yourself, what is it about this tactic that in anyway differentiates you from anybody else?

I am not saying article marketing itself is bad. I just think that it's one of those things that it's the same exact problem looked at a little differently, which is creating content. I am more tempted to say don't create articles for other sites if you are creating content. So, if you are going to go to that extent, create your own article database and make them sharable. And, if you want to submit them someplace that's fine, but have them show date of birth and first existence on your site first.

If you want to try to do something with them that's fine. But, don't let the tail wag the dog here, just because you are not passionate about creating that content to begin with. I don't think it's going to ever end up mattering, but ask yourself the same question about the Poughkeepsie dentist, and what long term edge is gained if you have 10 dentists all doing article marketing. I hate to say it, but it's such a fruitless pursuit in some ways in the online world, because anything you do also leaves trails that a savvy competitor can identify.

If your content ultimately doesn't have anything about it that can't be replicated by a competitor, then all you can really hope for is enough of a lead that you can move on to the next thing. Your competitors can figure out what you did with that last thing, and they are going to be right on your doorstep again. There is no time for resting on your laurels with generic link building.

Link building of this type isn't driven by truly meritorious content. If you hire some kid that's going to get his masters degree in journalism to write 25 articles about the care and feeding about dental health, just so you can try to push these articles to somewhere else, you've done nothing that can't be replicated by some other dentists hiring some other journalist or journalism student to write some other articles that you haven't yet written about.

here really isn't anything different. You have to make that hard decision to either accept that you can't differentiate and decide not to play, or to take all that budget and just do pay per click. Or you have to ask yourself, what can I do that nobody else could do? And, for any different given website, or subject, or business, it's going to be different. Perhaps you are the only dentist in town that deals with little kids. Sometimes it's a hard question to ask as the person may say well nothing. But it really is the question you need to answer.

Eric Enge: Thanks Eric!

Eric Ward: Thank you!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Eric Ward interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• Yahoo's Larry Cornett, December 15, 2008
• Google's Brett Crosby, December 1, 2008
• SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin, November 24, 2008
• Hitwise's Bill Tancer, November 17, 2008
• Dennis Mortensen - October 27, 2008
• Guy Kawasaki - October 14, 2008
• Bruce Clay - September 22, 2008
• Microsoft's Nathan Buggia - Sept. 15, 2008
• Yahoo's Frazier Miller - Sept. 8, 2008
• Microsoft's Ziya Genceren - September 3, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com
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Google Earth: Three trends for 2010

It's not that I've stopped paying attention to the social implications of neogeography in general and Google Earth in particular: It's simply been a quiet few months in the niche topic Ogle Earth covers. Maybe this is because the new geospatial technologies introduced these past few years are now being embraced by the mainstream, so there are fewer opportunities for disruptions to long-held assumptions, both among users and politicians. Just as with the plain-vanilla web before it, people are now getting the geoweb.

But this lull gives us the space to focus on three unheralded yet significant trends in Google's mapping service, which are going to make it an even more useful product than it is now.

1. Imagery freshness:
With every monthly imagery update since August 2009, Google has made available a KML file outlining where all the new imagery is to be found (on Google Lat-Long Blog). This makes it very easy to check up on new imagery in areas of interest.

It used to be that newly added imagery would be at least 6 months old, but usually a year or more. Perhaps this was by agreement with Digital Globe or because of an internal process. Since a few months ago, however, a good chunk of the imagery has been just weeks old. It's basically being added to the dataset as quickly as it is gathered.

The traditional complaint of Google Earth users has been that the imagery was outdated, often by several years. In fast-developing places like China, that kind of delay is especially frustrating. This new bias towards near-realtime updates is a huge improvement to the usefulness of the satellite imagery as a tool, but one that is not immediately obvious if you're not paying close attention to the metadata.

2. Map and imagery correlation:
European and American cartographical institutions have long synced their products with the geodetic system used by standard GPS devices, WGS84. As a result, map data and imagery across Europe and the US correlate well, often to within a few meters. On Google Maps, you can switch between the map and the imagery without confusion. Place a feature on one dataset and it is accurately positioned on the other.

Not so in other parts of the world. When I lived in Egypt during 2007-2009, the road layer and other map data for Egypt was positioned some 125 meters NW of the imagery, because it was prepared using some other geodetic system datum. Even imagery tiles were sometimes badly stitched together, with errors of up to 20 meters at the seams (as blogged here).

Now that I have moved to China and am looking closely at the local data around me, I've noticed the situation here is even worse. The map and imagery layers are off by 250 to 500 meters across all of China. This is causing all sorts of problems that will have repercussions in the future, even after these discrepancies have been reconciled, because a lot of user-generated data is being created on top of the map layer, and this content then bleeds into Google Earth and Google Maps's imagery layer, where the locations are plain wrong. The opposite happens also, (though without repercussions for the future): Wikipedia placemarks that are accurate in Google Earth are misplaced in Google Maps's maps layer:

But Google is working to make things better. Egypt recently received a revamped map layer, and now the discrepancy is only 10-20 meters from the GPS reading. The content generated on top of the old map data is still in evidence, however, so for a while yet we will have to deal with inaccurate POIs, such as hotels situated in the middle of the Nile:

In fact, both Egypt and China are exceptions, because neither country is currently included in Google Mapmaker, a community effort focused on the developing world that lets users generate objects on the map layer aligned with the underlying satellite imagery. Vietnam, for example, enjoys a high degree of alignment between the two datasets; this is how mapping is now being done for most places in Google Earth outside Europe and the US, and the results are replacing existing substandard or incomplete datasets.

For extra credit: Hong Kong also has a good fit between the two datasets, which led me to wonder if there might be a visible edge between HK's accurate map data and China's off-kilter data. Sure enough, the two datasets clash quite dramatically, with lots of roads to nowhere:

The Chinese version of Google Maps, ditu.google.cn, introduces an interesting hack to fix this discrepancy around Hong Kong. If you turn on hybrid mode and scroll across the border from Hong Kong to mainland China, the background imagery tiles will suddenly shift to the Chinese geodetic system, so as to correlate with the foreground map data. In the image below, the imagery tiles have shifted to accommodate the Chinese map datum.

3. Cloud-power:
For a while now, Google Maps's My Maps has allowed Google account holders to create and share simple maps via a web browser, storing the content on Google's servers. Google Earth, even though it has far more sophisticated tools for creating content, has never been connected to Google's account management cloud. Yes, there is a sidebar in Google Earth containing all your user-generated and downloaded content, but it isn't synced with Google, nor can you easily share it via Google's servers. Instead, you have to manually upload it to your own server or to Google Earth Community, after which the public content is no longer synced with the version on your desktop (obviously).

It's long been mooted that this stuff could and should be synced with the cloud, just as with Google Maps. For example, you might be able to choose which datasets you want to share; subscribers to your content would then see the changes live as you update it, just as your subscriptions to the content of others would be automatically updated.

We're not there yet, but two weeks ago Google took a step in that direction by linking My Maps to Google Earth for the iPhone. As a result, all the maps I've made over the past few years with My Maps are suddenly available on my iPhone via Google Earth. For example, these georeferenced photos of a trip to Ethiopia:

In effect, the Google Earth iPhone app now better connected to the cloud than the standalone Google Earth, but somehow I suspect that this is not how things will remain.

My Maps doesn't currently support imagery overlays, so it doesn't parse all the KML Google Earth's content would throw at it, but there is no technical reason for it not to. It's just a hunch, but I think that Google Earth's next big revamp is going to involve a more intense integration of user data with the cloud. (Especially as such user data is something you can sell ads against :-)

PS:
A bit off-topic, but I can't let this be: Sometime in the past few months, between the last time I checked and this week, Google Earth gained a high-resolution image of our planet's remotest island, Norway's Bouvetøya. The imagery is from 2008, even, and it is just gorgeous:

Considering it is one of the places I am least likely to end up at, I will settle for this high-resolution view.

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How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
Information Outlook

Summary

This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook.

Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians.

Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians.

Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products.

Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers.

Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues.

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SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES

Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity).

If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence.

Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.

Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link to any page in your domain, including internal pages); pages of your site that are indexed; and pages that contain your URL in the Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN, Teoma, Lycos, AOL, and Alexa search databases. (See Figure 1.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Once you register (it's free), you can also see overall Google page rank, the number of pages you have at each Google page rank, and whether your site is listed in the DMOZ Open Directory, one of the major search directories. Page rank is one indicator of a page's popularity and authority. Registration lets you do mass reviews of up to 16 domains and have the results e-mailed to you. (See Figure 2.)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

This has become one of my favorite tools, because it provides one of the most comprehensive snapshots of Web presence as far as the number of search engines it covers and the type of information it shows. The one area it doesn't cover is competitor comparisons. When I need to do a competitor comparison, I use the Top 10 Google Analysis and Marketleap tools.

Top 10 Google Analysis (www.Webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm) provides the top 10 search results for a keyword on Google, along with the ranking of the base URL. This makes it a great competitive intelligence tool. (See Figure 3.)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The results also show the number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo; the number of backlinks for the reference URL and for the domain as a whole from Yahoo, Google PageRank, Yahoo Web Rank, and AllInAnchor (query words in anchor text of links pointing to the site); body keyword density (ratio of keywords to total words); and link keyword density (ratio of keywords in links to all links).

This tool is a good indicator of the overall standings of your competition on the two major search engines and provides information about what gives them their rankings (keyword density, number of links to the site, number of links with keywords to the site, number of pages indexed, and page ranks). By analyzing the key characteristics of the top 10 sites for a keyword, you can get a good idea of what it takes for the term to rank well. (See Figure 4.)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

To use this tool, you need to have a Google API code, available free from Google (www.google.com/apis). The API code lets you run a limited number of specialized searches on Google.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Marketleap offers a suite of free SEM tools, including the Search Engine Saturation Validator, the Link Popularity Analysis, and the Keyword Verification Tool. (See Figure 5.)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

The Search Engine Saturation Validator (www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm) shows the number of pages that several top search engines have in their databases for your Web site and the sites of up to five competitors. The search engines covered are AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo. I use this tool primarily to see how the site I'm optimizing compares with specific competitors on the number of pages indexed by the search engines. In general, the more pages a site has indexed, the greater the opportunity to be found by searchers. (See Figure 6.)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

What I like most about the Link Popularity Analysis (www.marketleap.com/publinkpop) is its ability to choose competitors with whom to compare link popularity, along with the ability to see the link popularity for 25 other Web sites in a company's industry category. If your company's industry isn't included, you can choose General, which shows the link popularity for 25 companies across a number of industries. What you get back is how your site compares with others in your industry on link popularity on the AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. (See Figure 7.)

The tool shows your presence on the Web in terms of number of pages in each search engine's index that contain a link to your site, including your own Web site. Another valuable component of this tool is that it gives you an idea of whether your link numbers make your company a major player on the Web:

* Limited presence: 0-1,000 references.

* Average presence: 1,001-5,000 references.

* Above-average presence: 5,001-20,000 references.

* Contender: 20,001-100,000 references.

* Player: 100,001-500,000 references.

* 900-pound gorilla: 500,000+ references. (See Figure 8.)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Needless to say, there are very few 900-pound gorillas. In some niche industries, there may not be any sites that come close to having this many total "references" across all the major search engines. (Note: "Total" data are inflated, because they include the total of all links for the six search engines, which means many duplicates. Nevertheless, the total is a good relative indicator of what it takes to be a top site.) The General Industry category lists 14 gorilla sites; the top five are listed in Figure 9.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

By looking at the sites linking to your site, you can get an idea of the volume and quality of pages linking to you and who may be referring traffic to you. Once you know who is linking to you and the part of your site they are linking to, you can examine the areas of your site that are performing well and those that aren't. By checking out competitors who are outperforming your site, you can see who is linking to them and figure out what you need to do to improve your visibility. (See Figure 10.)

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Marketleap's Keyword Verification Tool (www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm) provides a quick way to see if your site ranks in the top 30 keywords through keyword verification. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people don't look beyond the first 30 search results. You may have numerous pages indexed with plenty of links pointing to your site, but if you're not ranked in the top 30 on keywords that people use to search for your products and services, you're not visible. The Keyword Verification Tool covers AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Google/AOL, Lycos Pro, Hotbot, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo. (See Figure 11.)

Thumbshots (http://ranking.thumbshots.com) lets you compare the top 100 results for a term on two different search engines or compare two different terms on the same search engine. You can highlight a particular site to see where the site ranks on both search engines. (See Figure 12.)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The output is visual, with lines connecting pages that rank in the top 100 on both search engines or keywords. Pages from your site are in red, and those of other sites that have pages on both sides are in blue. Hover your mouse over any of the hundred circles and see the URL, rank, and, if available, a thumbnail image of the page. The text output includes the number of overlapping links and number of unique links. (See Figure 13.)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The comparisons also show how little duplication there is on the Web--there are usually very few connecting lines between search engines. In a search on "retail displays," only 15 pages ranked in the top 100 on both Google and Yahoo.

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

I like this tool because it shows you where your site is ranked along a 100-dot line for a phrase on two search engines or how it ranks for two different phrases on one search engine. I use it more for seeing how two different terms rank on the same search engine than for search engine comparison, as there are other tools to do that. I've used it most often for demonstrating to clients the success of using one phrase over another in their site's content. (See Figure 14.)

Link Desirability

The next two tools are designed to help you determine the "desirability" of having another site link to yours. Not all links are created equal--some can even hurt your search engine rankings. Generally, a popular site that contains a few relevant links will be a better site to seek a link from than a "link farm" site that is nothing more than a collection of links. Although Google's PageRank is considered to be an important indicator of the link popularity of a site, I don't give it much weight when I'm looking for a site from which to request a link. Instead, I look at whether the site is a good fit for the one I'm marketing, and whether a link on that site would benefit both sites. (See Figure 15.)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

One tool, Link Appeal by Webmaster Toolkit (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml), calculates the desirability rating of a link on the URL you specify. The calculation includes factors such as page rank, number of outbound links, and overall percentage of links to HTML. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not. (See Figure 16.)

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The Class C Checker (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml) allows you to check whether two domains are hosted on the same Class C IP range. Links from sites that are not on the same range as your site are thought to give more weight. (See Figure 17.)

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

Search engines don't like duplication in search results, so having a different IP address can help separate sites that are located on the same servers and may share databases or programming elements. Because EBSCO hosts many sites, I use Class C Checker more for the latter purpose than for link popularity. (See Figure 18.)

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Other Ranking Tools

While the following tools aren't strictly SEM tools, I find them very valuable in my work.

The main Google search engine doesn't number results, which can make it difficult to figure out where you rank on a particular term. But Google Results (www.google.com/ie?q=&num=100&hl=en) gives numbered results. A disadvantage is that it only shows title and URL information, so identifying your site among the results can be difficult (unless your site name is in the title). I generally do a search on the main Google search engine and use the browser's Find option to see if my site's URL is in the top 30 or 100 results. If it is, I make a note of the title, then go to Google Results and redo the search. I check to see my site's numbered ranking. This is a lot easier than trying to physically count search results on a screen. (See Figures 19 and 20.)

Google Dance (www.google-dance-tool.com) has two uses. The first shows how you rank on the various Google servers; the second presents numbered results. I use this tool primarily for numbered results, unless I've discovered that I'm getting vastly different rankings when I search on a term within a short period of time. (See Figure 21.)

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Froogle (www.froogle.com) is Google's shopping search engine. It allows companies to add their products to the site free of charge. I use Froogle in two ways: to expand a site's listings on the Internet and to illustrate price comparisons. Because Froogle is free, it is the simplest way for an e-commerce company to get all its products listed online. And because Froogle results sometimes appear at the top of Google results, it's a good way to get a site to show high in rankings if it doesn't do so organically. Currently, Google is generally not allowing new sites into top-ranked positions for at least six months after launch. (See Figure 22.)

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Froogle is valuable in price comparisons because it helps me understand where my clients' pricing is compared with that of their competitors. You can do price comparisons on the other shopping search engines, but the only Web sites you find on those are companies that pay to be on them. All our e-commerce clients who meet the requirements for Froogle are added to it when ESWS redesigns a Web site. (See Figure 23.)

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Figure 9

Marketleap Top 5 Most-Linked-To Web Sites

Most-Linked-To Web Sites Number of Links

Yahoo.com 51,624,212
Mp3.com 26,652,540
Amazon.com 24,213,964
Microsoft.com 18,340,881
CNN.com 10,777,438
RELATED ARTICLE: How to use keyword saturation and popularity tools

1. Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity can help you identify some of your online competitors and determine how you compare in the terms you use to describe your products and services.

2. If you get a question about why your company Web site isn't performing as well as a competitor's site in search engine rankings, the Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Search Engine Saturation tools can illustrate why--or show why your site is doing well.

3. Librarians often spend a lot of time explaining to people why it is important to use more than one search engine in doing research. Thumbshot is a good tool to graphically show the lack of duplication in search results.

4. The Google Dance tool is good to know about if two searches for the same phrase return different results. Use it to see if Google is in the midst of updating its index.

5. Use Google Results or Google Dance for a concise list of numbered search results.

6. Froogle and the other shopping search engines are an easy and effective way to find out what your competitors are charging for your type of product and how your pricing compares. Because Froogle is a free service, it has a broader range of companies to compare with. However, Froogle also has a smaller percentage of visitors, so it may not be representative of all shopping visitors.
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How to Optimize for Google Search Engine
This post is very important for Search engine optimizer. So follow this post very carefully and realize these tips and tricks for web marketing and web promotion.I find this article from sitepro news.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more, please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords, it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still provide a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word "hotel" would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to "Victoria BC hotel" you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.

It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.

Strengthen Your Positions in Google!

To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term "hotel" and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.

If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.

Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.

The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and not repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on your site should have its own unique description tag.

Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won't influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.

Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.

This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.
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Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.

Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.

To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as "~hotels". Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the "~hotels" example Google brings up phrases such as 'travel', 'tourism', 'accommodation', as well as various hotel chain names such as 'Hilton Hotels'.

Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.

If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.

While having a keyword located within your domain can provide some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.

Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL's can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:

MyTourismSite.com/Victoria/Accommodations/Hotels/Hilton.html

Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don't flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.

Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you clíck on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.

While a link that simply states "clíck here" or "www.domainname.com" does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use "discount hotels" as its anchor.

Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.

Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.

Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can provide more relevance to the linked page.

Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google's ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.

- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.

- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google's Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.

- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google's cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn't mean Google won't follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.

URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL's with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.

About The Author
Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc., based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Scott's articles and those of the StepForth team at news.stepforth.com or contact us at StepForth.com, Tel - 250-385-1190, TollFree - 877-385-5526, Fax - 250-385-1198
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Josh Cohen Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: November 15, 2009

Josh Cohen is the Senior Business Product Manager for Google News. He is responsible for global product strategy, marketing and publisher outreach for Google News, which is currently available in 26 languages and more than 50 countries. Prior to joining Google, Josh was Vice President of Business Development for Reuters Media, the world's largest news agency. While there, he led business development for Reuters' Consumer Media team, including all activities with major strategic partners. He was responsible for agreements with AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and numerous media companies around the world for content distribution, revenue generation and strategic investments.

Before joining Reuters, Josh was Director of Business Development for SmartMoney.com where he led business development and licensing activities for the site, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst. Cohen holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia Business School, where he graduated Beta Gamma Sigma.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell me what your responsibility is within Google?

Josh Cohen: I am the business product manager for Google News. I work with other folks on the news team, on figuring out what is our roadmap, what are the features that we are working on, what we want to do with the product in the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and so on.

A big focus of my job is really working with people outside of Google; so talking to publishers, talking to people in the media and at conferences; just putting a face on Google News and trying to demystify it as much as possible. I also work with a lot of the different cross-functional teams who interact with publishers on a day-to-day basis and try to tie those efforts together a little bit better.

Eric Enge: Tell us what Google News is and what it does, and who uses it.

Josh Cohen: Google News was launched in beta back in 2002. The idea behind Google News is really similar to what we are trying to do in search. Not to throw the company mantra at you, but, it really is about organizing all the news information out there and making it even more accessible and useful for users.

We are trying to do this in every single country, and in every different language. We want as many different sources as possible, so that when people are looking for that information, they can find it. The interest in news overall is probably higher than it has ever been. More and more people are getting this online, and so the challenge is trying to find that information and to provide some context and organization. So, we really are operating as a search engine specifically for news.

Eric Enge: How do you define news versus other types of content?

Josh Cohen: We really try and keep as much as possible as black or white, and we don't get into qualitative discussions about the nature of the news site. We don't include any hate speech and pornography. What we look for is whether or not the site is covering current events, is it specifically covering the topics of the day, is there some evidence of an editorial organization, is there at least some editorial review process before something actually gets published. But, our bias is really toward inclusion.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you try to be as broad as possible and include as many different sources as you can. Are you looking for the content that would be unique, rather than somebody just republishing stuff off of a news wire?

Josh Cohen: Absolutely. We don't have people who are just pure aggregators; there needs to be some original content on that site.

Eric Enge: That makes a lot of sense. What is the process that people go through when they want to have their site or some portion of their site considered for Google News?

Josh Cohen: It is actually pretty straightforward. There is a whole help center on Google News that is specifically for users and explains to them how it works. A whole portion of that is dedicated specifically to publishers, which explains to them how it works, and how to submit their content. Ultimately, they simply submit their sites or the portion of their sites that they'd like to be reviewed for inclusion, and then we take a look at it.

Eric Enge: There is a form people can use?

Josh Cohen: Yes. It is located here.

Eric Enge: What type of questions are covered in the form?

Josh Cohen: There are a few basic questions about the organization itself. We do not make editorial judgments about the nature of the site. It is really up to the user at the end of the day to make those decisions about whether or not they think it is a site that adds value to them. So in the form, we are looking for objective information about their site, and we are not looking for them to make a pitch about their site.

Eric Enge: Evaluating whether it is unique news content is something that your reviewers just do.

Josh Cohen: Yes, there is a support team that will review those sites as they come in. There is not a single editor or journalists who are working on Google News. Once the site is included in Google News, and included in our index, there is no manual intervention around the rankings. It is all done algorithmically.

Eric Enge: Right. Yes, but the people who review the site check to make sure that it is unique content as opposed to duplicated.

Josh Cohen: Yes, they ensure that it meets that criteria. A lot of that can be done algorithmically. We understand duplicate content, and we can do a full-text analysis. But yes, there needs to be original content.

Eric Enge: Right. And you know, for some reason, something goes wrong in the process, and the site does get turned down, but the publisher thinks that there is a fit, and they really believe that they should be reconsidered. Is there a process you would suggest for that?

Josh Cohen: Our bias is towards inclusion, so if there are things that we miss, we certainly want to be able to understand the site better.

Eric Enge: I know one example of a site that got turned down, and it turned out what happened is that, the person who had reviewed it had not looked at the news portion of the site.

Josh Cohen: That is really why we try and ask for as much information about their site as possible, because obviously the webmaster, the owner of the site, the publisher is going to know a lot more about it, understands the details of it. We are looking at thousands of different sites, and so that is the one real manual part of Google News; so the more information we can get about this site, during that submission process, the better.

Eric Enge: We have heard things about other kinds of requirements, like there needs to be a certain volume of news for example.

Josh Cohen: No. There is not any a volume requirement in terms of number of articles published a day or something like that. It can certainly have an impact in the rankings, but not in terms of inclusion or not. We have sites that are publishing hundreds of articles on a daily basis, and we have others that are longer analytical pieces or investigative pieces that are publishing just a handful a week. So, there is really a pretty wide range.

Eric Enge: There is also the notion that the URL needs to have a 3-digit code on it.

Josh Cohen: That is correct, there are certain technical requirements, which have nothing to do with the nature of the site, but the ways in which we can pickup that content. The 3-digit identifier is one of the ways we pick up the news content on a site. As you mentioned, there are sites that have a section that is devoted to news, but maybe the rest of their content is inappropriate for Google News. Oftentimes, in those sites we will see that that 3-digit identifier is a way for us to pick up the specific news content, so that is a requirement for crawling that content.

However, when sites are included in Google News, they are able to submit a News Sitemap, and if you are submitting the News Sitemap to us, then we don't need the 3-digit URL requirement anymore, and you can ignore that if you are submitting the content via sitemaps, as we can pick it up that way.

Editors Note: Since this interview took place, Google News Sitemaps went through an update into a new format.

Eric Enge: Do the sitemaps bring any other kind of specific advantages?

Josh Cohen: Yes. It doesn't change the ranking; there is no bias towards a site that submits a site map versus one that doesn't. The real benefits of submitting a sitemap are, it provides a greater level of control over which of the articles appear on Google News, and it allows for specific metadata to be communicated about each of those individual articles.

Right now it is fairly limited, but we are certainly looking to expand what we do within sitemaps, because the more information we have about a publisher's site, the better. For individual articles there can be basic stuff like attribution, and bylines, and location, and so forth. Ultimately, sitemaps are a really good way to clearly identify the information that you want to get crawled.

Most questions that a publisher will have around ranking of their content on Google News boils down to some a technical issue; where we didn't take up an article or when we try to crawl it, it failed the extraction process. So, sitemaps is a real good way to insure that we are crawling that content, and it also allows you to proactively address any of those issues, because you can go right in, you can see when we are having problems crawling your site, whether it is a technical issue on our side or your site. I won't say sitemaps eliminate all the technical issues, but it can certainly it can limit the impact of some of those, and allows you to have a better way of monitoring them.

Eric Enge: It will reduce errors, and will not affect ranking of included stories. It can affect whether or not the story is included at all.

Josh Cohen: Yes, exactly. And, that is a pretty big difference.

Eric Enge: Yes, it is. Are there other technical issues that people need to be concerned with to make sure that their news articles are friendly to the Google News crawler?

Josh Cohen: There are definitely challenges with images; so there are certain best practices that we try to encourage publishers to do. Larger-sized images with good aspect ratios are always easier for us to pick up; having more description within the captions is always helpful, having them near the title, having them inline and non-clickable. And, for the most part we prefer JPEGs.

Another thing is to have relevant and useful titles that are going to help the readers and to help our crawler know what your page is about.

Try not to break up the body of the article, such as having dates between the title and the body. These are tips that are not just specific to Google News, but certainly help for Google News.

Eric Enge: These things can also influence click-through.

Josh Cohen: Absolutely.

Eric Enge: Who are the people who consume Google News?

Josh Cohen: The focus of Google News, and I think one of the real appeals of it, is trying to offer as many different perspectives as possible on a given story. So, it can be a different political perspective, different geographical perspective, and you have different people who want to understand a story and all the different angles around it, and they really want to delve into a story. And that is why we cluster these stories not by sources, but any request of the articles by story. People click on a bunch of these different links and those are the people who by and large get a lot of value from Google News, because they get that diversity from Google News.

Eric Enge: From our experience, that certainly includes reporters and editors from a variety of sites.

Josh Cohen: They are certainly heavy users of Google News. There are those who will come to the front page and like the fact that we will aggregate the top stories out there on the web, and allow them to browse the top stories, see what is there, click on them, and go read them on the publisher's site. Looking at those top stories is not dramatically different from somebody who may go to the publisher themselves directly to look for those top stories.

They may be just looking to see what is out there from across the web, from both their favorite sources and sources they don't know. Then, there are the other half of the users who are using us pretty specifically as a search engine, who are using us just to type in the keywords or news stories that they have heard; whether they have heard it in the office, or on the web, or somebody emailed to them want to learn more about it, and they will just type in a name or few keywords, and use it much more as a search.

Eric Enge: People also set up news alerts, right?

Josh Cohen: Absolutely. They can set up alerts, use our RSS feeds, so there are a number of different ways where they can try and keep on top of stories. We see our role not as a destination site, just as a starting point. Our goal, very similar to what we are trying to do with web search, is to help people find what they are looking for and then send them on their way.

Eric Enge: One of the subtleties of this is that it is obvious to have a title that entices a click-through. But then, you also want that title to whatever it is that the editors you want to reach use as search terms.

Josh Cohen: To be clear, having a clean title matters, and the placement of that title in your page matters; but there are a few different elements that we are going to look for in trying to pickup the correct story. Certainly, the title matters, but URL and most importantly the text in the article itself matter too. If you have got a URL that is somewhat unclear, or the information is not that clear in the body of the article itself, then the title takes on more weight.

These are all different components that we are looking for; so if you have got a URL that has information, the text is very clear for us; then the title I would say is no more important than the other ones.

Eric Enge: Are there other things that go into ranking news stories?

Josh Cohen: Yes. There are two separate ranking processes that take place. One is just the story ranking, such as what is the top sports story of the day, what is the top entertainment story of the day, science and technology, and so on. There are a number of different factors that go into that, but the easiest way to think about it is we are really relying on what editors think the most important stories are. What is the aggregate editorial interest in a given story: that is to say, how many people are covering it, and where are they putting it on their page? These factors do not impact an individual source's results, but do influence what story lines we think are most important. So, that is the story ranking.

For article ranking there are a number of signals that we are trying to use: is it original content, is it timely, is it relevant, is this a local story, and there is a local source reporting original content on it? That is again, not always relevant to every single story, but it is something else we will look for. Other questions we ask are, is it novel, or is it just a rehash of an article that was out there before, a story that somebody else broke, you just happen to publish it later. These are things that we look for, hard to do, but increasingly something that we are trying to include in our rankings.

Then, there are also source-specific signals that we try to use. This is where volume comes in: what is the volume of publication of original content in a given category? The example that I would like to use is, looking at the business category, you have got the Wall Street Journal, or Bloomberg, or Reuters, all of whom, any given day, are publishing probably hundreds of original stories in business. By itself, that is a decent signal that this is a quality source in that category.

You can compare that then with their volume of publication of original content in the sports category, you are probably not going to see a whole lot, if any, of original publication there.

I would say another really important signal for us in recent quarters has been the user behavior. Their behavior has become a really helpful signal for us in trying to determine that same trusted quality of a given source. So in a given cluster, the first link will get the most clicks, the second gets less clicks, and the third, the fourth, and so on, keep getting fewer and fewer clicks. But, if you look at a user who comes in, and instead of clicking on that first link which is what they were "supposed to do," and instead let's say they click on the fourth link; that is a very strong signal about both the source that they clicked on and also the three sources above it that they didn't click on, even though they were "supposed to" click on that.

Over time, as you aggregate that information, normalize it for different click positions, you can look at this section-by-section to get a sense of what users feel are the best sources in given categories. Again, sticking with the business example, if I have got some random source as the #1 link in Google News, and Reuters in the #3 link, somebody may come to that and say "Wait a second, this is a business story, I want to see what Reuters has to say, I am clicking on that link in the third spot."

That type of behavior takes place again and again, and it has become another important signal. Now, that doesn't trump everything else; all these other scores and factors still matter, but all things being equal, we certainly want to take a look at some of the qualitative aspects of a source. We try to algorithmically determine the qualitative nature of a source in addition to the story-variable signals.

Eric Enge: Are inbound links a factor?

Josh Cohen: Not really. It is obviously a signal on the search side of things. With PageRank links certainly, as you know, are an important factor. On the news side of it, just because the nature of news and how quickly that information comes out, to be able to build up links over time is just something that isn't really all that applicable on the news side of things.

Eric Enge: What about social media signals, such as Twitter?

Josh Cohen: There is nothing specific I can say on those, but I think it is safe to say that we are always looking at new signals. We will always keep working on this, because it continues to remain imperfect. We will test certain ones, and we will do evaluations against them as we did with the user click behavior.

Eric Enge: Anything you can say about plans for Google News?

Josh Cohen: We are trying to experiment in a number of different ways. For example we launched Fast Flip two months ago.

With Fast Flip we tried to introduce that element of serendipity that you get in the offline world. When you pick up a paper and you see the top stories, you may spot the article at the bottom of the page. It is something you would never think to read, you would never really look for, but you do because you spot it.

How do you introduce some of that quality into the online experience? Fast Flip is an attempt to do that. Another key component to that is the speed with which you can browse those pages. If a page takes five to ten seconds to load, you are not going to want to explore different types of content. Fast Flip is an attempt, both in terms of how it is presented visually, and also the speed with which it loads, to allow you to introduce some of the best of the offline experience online. That is a good example of one of the things that we are experimenting with; and I think we like to keep trying to innovate and figure out ways in which we can help our users and work with our partners.

Eric Enge: From my perspective, for a publisher looking to get exposure for what they are doing, implementing a quality-relevant news feed and working with Google News is an outstanding opportunity. I mean, you get visibility that a lot of people would die for. Of course there is an expense in implementing such a news feed. You have to do a quality job, because you don't want to get in front of people and then have them say this is crap.

Josh Cohen: I think that is well-said. The way that we look at it is that it is a real partnership with the publishers that we have. We are a search index, we are focused on news; but we don't have any content, we don't have editors, we don't have any journalists, and we don't create any information. We get that from the publishers. For publishers, we think that we bring value in helping them get found and driving the traffic to them. In a given month, Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide.

Eric Enge: Better still, a significant percentage of that is from news editors and bloggers. So, not only you are getting the traffic from Google News, but you are getting the possibility of being written about in other news environments.

Josh Cohen: Sure, getting written about by others within the market is interesting, but we also help publishers obtain loyal users, who may like the aggregation qualities of Google News, but will discover their content and like it.

Eric Enge: Thanks so much for taking the time Josh, to speak with me today.

Josh Cohen: Thank you!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Josh Cohen interview here.

Other Google Interviews

• Google's Peter Linsley, July 12, 2009
• Google's John Mueller, May 14, 2009
• Google's Rajat Mukherjee, March 31, 2009
• Google's Sandra Cheng, February 16, 2009
• Google's Cedric Dupont, February 4, 2009
• Google's Brett Crosby, December 1, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008
• Google's Carter Maslan - July 14, 2008
• Matt Cutts - June 16, 2008
• Google's Dick Costolo - April 28, 2008
• Google's Adam Lasnik - Feb. 4, 2008
• Google's Sep Kamvar - Dec. 17, 2007
• Google's Matt Cutts - Oct. 8, 2007
• Google VP Udi Manber - July 9, 2007
• Google's Vanessa Fox - July 2, 2007
• Google's Mark Lucovsky - June 10, 2007
• Google's Adam Lasnik - Apr. 30, 2007
• Google's Rajat Mukherjee, Apr. 16, 2007

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com
Full Article

(Gespalder/34701) I don't normally frequent this forum but thought I'd share this

I don't normally frequent this forum but thought I'd share this


http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-337891.html

GPS device maps typically two years old
By Victoria Ho ZDNet Asia
Posted on ZDNet News: Sep 02, 2009 5:45:08 AM

User-generated data may be the answer to the GPS navigation industry's problem
of outdated maps on user devices, say industry voices.
According to Ed Parsons, Google's geospatial technologist, the reason users
encounter inaccurate road layouts and landmark placements on their GPS devices
is that it takes a long time getting updated maps to users.
From the mapping of roads to getting the maps updated and onto distribution
channels such as garages, people can expect their maps to be over two years
old, even on new devices, Parsons said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.
Even buying maps online will only shorten the process by about a year, leaving
users with maps that are about a year old, which is still not good enough for
some users, he added.
The most time-consuming portion of the process is map collection, Parsons said.
"Traditionally, people captured [road data] by driving around. To update the
data, they drove over the same routes again. This manual [process] has been
time-consuming and costly, but it's been the only way to do it up till now."
The industry is moving toward making information available in real-time, to
push out updates faster, he said.
Incidentally, the Automobile Association of Singapore on Tuesday announced a
GPS-based device it calls TrafficGEM, aimed at providing more up-to-date
information for motorists.
Although its map does not reflect changes in roads, the real-time traffic
alerts are hoped to alert users to temporarily-valid information such as
traffic jams.
The power of user-generated data
Parsons said the industry has warmed up to the trend of harnessing user
responses to supplement map data, by offering users tools with which they can
feed back information.
Google has a site, Map Maker, which works with its Google Maps service.
Maps provider, Tele Atlas, too said it integrates user contributions as an
"additional source", which has been helpful in geographically dispersed and
rural areas which are less frequently covered by its surveyors.
Tele Atlas Asia-Pacific director of operations Arnout Desmet, said in an
e-mail, road information changes between 10 to 15 percent each year, and more
so in busy urban areas.
He said updates are pushed out four times a year, with the help of "tens of
thousands of global sources, ranging from mapping vehicles and digital
cartographers to zoning boards and public safety officials to construction
companies and truck drivers, satellite and aerial imagery and government
documents".
Geraldine Kor, director of customer marketing, Asia-Pacific, at Navteq, said
keeping maps updated involves some 80,000 sources, which include professional
cartographers and "the input from more than 100 million users every day".
Navteq offers an online tool it calls Map Reporter, which lets users suggest
changes in maps. Once users identify such a change, the information is verified
before it is added to Navteq's database, she said.
She did suggest, however, that some inaccuracies users faced result from them
having outdated maps. "We find that many Map Reporter submissions prove to be
about locations we already have in our map, but are not in the version of the
map the consumer is using."
There are some map players who do not agree with the notion of harnessing
user-generated data. Singapore-based maps site Streetirectory.com, said in an
earlier interview the site's strength was its professionally-collected data.
Its managing director Firdhaus Akber, said competitors like Google Maps, which
allow users to tag locations have introduced inaccuracies into their maps, as a
result.
Google's Parsons said: "There is always value in high quality cartography. What
has changed is it's much easier to enter the mapping market. [Map makers] have
to work harder to win users."
This article was originally posted on ZDNet Asia.

Full Article

Google's John Mueller Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: May 11, 2009

John Mueller is currently a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zurich. Prior to working at Google he became well known for his active participation in Google Groups and a variety of SEO forums.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you provide me with your definition of cloaking?

John Mueller: The standard definition of cloaking is to show Googlebot something different than you would show your users. So, in a worst case situation, you would show Googlebot a nice family-friendly homepage, and when a user comes to visit that page, they would see something completely different.

Eric Enge: Like porn or casino ads or something of that nature?

John Mueller: Exactly. So if the user was searching for something and finds what he thinks is a good result, he clicks on it, and then there is nothing even related to what he was searching for on that page.

Eric Enge: Right. So that's clearly an extreme form of cloaking. There are many different levels of cloaking, and I'd like to explore some of those.

Some people, for example, may have a content management system that just insists on appending session IDs or superfluous parameters on the URLs. They may not be superfluous from the CMS' point of view because they are using the parameters to pull information from a database or something like that. And given the content management systems that they have, it's actually very difficult and very expensive to fix this problem at its core. So one solution would be to serve the same content to users and to Googlebot, but to modify the URL seen by Googlebot to remove the superfluous parameters and the session IDs.

John Mueller: That's something that we've seen a lot of in the past. We currently have a great new tool that can really help fix that problem without doing any redirects or without really changing much at all, and that's the rel="canonical link element. You can place it in the header of your pages and specify the canonical URL that you would like to have indexed. So you could take away all the session ID parameters or anything else that you don't need, and just specify the one URL that you want to have indexed.

Eric Enge: Right. And that's something that you announced with the other search engines just a few weeks ago, correct?

John Mueller: Yes, it's fairly new. It's something that not a lot of people have already implemented, and there are a lot of people who are already using it to clean up this problem. Crawling a website and finding many duplicate versions of the same content with different URL parameters such as session IDs can confuse search engines. Using this link-element helps to make it a bit clearer and can help to resolve this problem.

Eric Enge: So you basically implement the canonical tag on various pages and you tell people what the canonical URL is. If, for example, somebody has different sort orders for their products in the e-commerce catalogue (e.g. by price, brand, size, color, ...), you can basically point Googlebot back to the canonical version of the URL, it's supposed to behave much the same way the 301 redirect would, except for it does not actually take the user to the different URL specified? Is that a fair summary?

John Mueller: Yes. It's not a command that you would give a Googlebot, it's more like a hint that you would give us. One thing we've also seen is that people try to use it, but they use it incorrectly. For instance, they specify their homepage as a canonical for the whole site. And if we were to follow that as a 301 redirect, we might completely remove their website. So we have to take that information and determine if it is really a canonical for the other URL, or if the user may be doing something incorrect.

Eric Enge: And of course one way you could do that is by making sure the content on the two pages is identical.

John Mueller: Yes.

Eric Enge: So if you make a mistake and use canonical tag to send everyone to the home page of your site, presumably the content will differ from the other pages. And, as I understand it, the gold standard solution is to fix the problem at its core and not have to rely on the canonical tag.

John Mueller: If you can move to the cookie-based session tracking, then that would really help. But we know it's not always easy to change to a system like that. There might be a lot of money involved. So at least with this system there is fairly simple way to fix that problem.

Eric Enge: Right. So it's the backup plan that should be used if you can't fix it at its core or if it's just too expensive to fix it at its core?

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Yes, that makes sense. Now I imagine there are also people out there who served a different URL to Googlebot and its users before the canonical tag existed. Is that problematic?

John Mueller: I would suggest doing that for all new users who come to the site without cookies, instead of just for Googlebot. This way, if a user accesses an old URL that has a session ID, you can just redirect him to the proper canonical. That would treat users and search engines in the same way, and it would still help solve this problem.

Sites that are currently showing prettier URLs to Googlebot should not panic, as long as their intent is genuine and it is properly implemented. But I'd advise against this for sites that are in the process of a redesign or sites that are being newly created. Using rel="canonical" is the current best practice for tackling this problem.

Eric Enge: But if the system is relying on the session IDs, then it's there for a reason, right?

John Mueller: Yes, but usually most CMSs resort to session IDs if they can't access a cookie. So if you see that a user doesn't have a cookie, you can redirect them away from the session ID. And I think the important thing here is that you find a way that you can treat users and search engines the same.

Eric Enge: Right. You could use JavaScript to append your various tracking parameters to the URL upon the click. So that, in principle, is treating users and Googlebot the same.

John Mueller: Yes, but that really doesn't solve the problem, because there would be something that would happen within the site. But when the search engine crawls a site, they don't execute the JavaScript, so it would have to work with and without the JavaScript enabled.

Eric Enge: Right. So users that don't have JavaScript would of course be handled in an identical fashion to the search engine robots, and users who do have JavaScript would be able to benefit from whatever the tracking parameters are meant to give them.

John Mueller: Exactly. That's similar to using AJAX on a website. If you have a normal HTML website and you start adding AJAX components to that website, a user with a limited browser, maybe from a mobile phone or even search engine crawler, would still be able to navigate your site using standard HTML.But someone who has JavaScript enabled would be able to use all those fancy AJAX elements, and that would also usually generate slightly different URLs, so I think that's completely normal.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's talk a bit about A/B or multivariate testing, which is something supported by Google's Website Optimizer product. It creates a scenario where users come to a page and some piece of code runs and decides what version of the page to show users, usually implemented in JavaScript. And of course the Googlebot will only see the one version, it won't see the alternate versions.

John Mueller: Exactly. So, the clue here is that the intent matters, as is generally the case with Google. If the intent is really that the webmaster wants to test the various versions of the same content, then that's no problem. And if the intent is there to show the user something completely different, then that would be on the border. You would have to look at that.

Eric Enge: I mean, you can always take any technique that was created with good intentions and find ways to abuse it. So let's say somebody is testing out four different versions of a key landing page on their site to see which performs the best for them. Maybe they are changing the logos and moving elements around, they might be changing the messaging a bit to see if one tagline is more effective than another, or they may be changing the call to action.John Mueller: If you are doing that with good intent to find the best solution for your users, and you are showing more or less the same content, then I wouldn't really worry about that.

Eric Enge: Say you have a graphic of some sort, an image file on your site that might be a menu link or a logo. And there are various techniques for showing the search engine's robot or any specific user agent's text instead of the graphic. What are your general thoughts in that area?

John Mueller: Generally speaking, if you do that with good intent and you more or less match the content up, then it's fine. So, for example, you could have a menu where you use JavaScript and graphics to create a really nice user experience with an alternate version that's in static HTML that might be behind the graphic menu then. If it matches up, that's fine. And if the home link has an alternate text tag, then that's fine too. But if you have a home link and alternate text that says, "click here to see our great cleaning products available in these 22 cities," then that's kind of sneaky, and not something that we would like to see.

Eric Enge: So, there are various grades of this, correct? One level is where the text matches up a hundred percent with what is in the image. And there is a notion of substantially similar, and then you could actually several more grades and have somewhat similar, and then completely different. And, I think you just highlighted an example that's completely different. So, an identical is an easy case, I think you already addressed that. What if something is substantially similar, but is not word-for-word identical?

John Mueller: I would say it depends on the case, but if you are not trying to deceive the search engine crawler or the user, then it's generally okay, but in general I would be cautious as soon as the content is not identical.. So if you have a link that goes to your homepage and it has a graphic of a house, then you wouldn't have to use house as an all-text. You could just say "go to homepage," or something like that, and it's fine.

Eric Enge: So again it gets back to the notion of intent that you've already raised?

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: And, of course, one flavor of this is sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. sIFR uses text input to render what is shown in Flash so it is guaranteed to be identical.

John Mueller: Exactly. Where we start to see problems is when a website has a completely Flash-based interface and a lot of different pages all on the same URL hidden behind it. Then it would be hard to include ten pages of HTML on a single page that match exactly what is written in the Flash file. So you have to find a solution for yourself there; how much really makes sense and how much you might have to cut back and just leave the basics in HTML and keep the bulk of your content in Flash.

Eric Enge: Right. And of course when you get to that scale, you are past what you do with sIFR, which is really intended for putting anti-aliased fonts on your page, which is a more limited technology. But I think once you get into the more complex situations, you can use SWFObject, correct?

John Mueller: Yes, it would be something like that.

Eric Enge: That technology doesn't guarantee that the alternate version shown in text is identical to what is in Flash.

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: So it is open for potential abuse, but I would imagine that the policy again gets back to what you actually do and what your intent is in doing it.

John Mueller: Yes. And there are two other things that also play a role in that. The first factor is that we have started crawling and indexing Flash files. If you have a lot of content in your Flash file, we will try to at least get to that and include it in our search results.

The second is that there are still a lot of devices out there that can't use Flash. So if you have a website that relies on Flash and you suddenly notice that there are a bunch of mobile users who are trying to use their iPod, iPhone or Android Phone to access your website, then you would start seeing problems because they wouldn't see the Flash content at all. , And if the HTML content doesn't match up with what you are trying to bring across to the user, they will simply leave the site.

Eric Enge: One grade of this problem occurs when you try to implement something in Flash, but you are not going to be doing it with the intent of rendering the same thing that you can easily render in HTML. You are probably using it because you want to create a highly graphical type experience. It is not always the case of course, but certainly one of the things that's appealing about Flash is that you can create a really attractive visual experience. Say you have a man driving a fast car on the German autobahn, the Flash isn't going to narrate the course of the drive.

But in your text rendering of what is in the Flash, you would want to describe what is happening. For example, "it's a nice day and a man gets into his expensive car and heads out onto the Autobahn". So you are actually implementing text that isn't in Flash, but the content essentially is.

John Mueller: Yes, that's generally fine. If the intent is okay and it matches up so you can see that there is a car and a man driving on the autobahn, then that would be fine.

Eric Enge: So again, it is about making sure that you are pretty much rendering the same information so that there isn't anything confusing in the user experience? Like if you flip from one mode to another, Flash, JavaScript or AJAX enabled or disabled, so to speak.

John Mueller: Yes. If you can think about it from a user-experience point of view; if the user sees the HTML content in the search results and clicks on that page, does that match up what he would be expecting?

Eric Enge: So what about serving different content based on an IP address to address things like language and national or even regional issues? Just to think of a regional issue, the products that your customer base in Florida buys could be quite different than the products your customer base in Minnesota buys. So you want to serve up the Florida user one set of offerings and the Minnesota user a different set of offerings. John Mueller: That is something that I see a lot as a European user, because in Switzerland we have four different official languages, and as soon as you start using a web site, it automatically tries to pick a language that they think is right. They are wrong most of the time, and it is something that really bothers me a lot. So I guess I might be a little bit emotional about that.

One thing that I have noticed that you have differentiate between whether or not your content is really limited to a specific language or geographic location. For example, you have a casino website that you can show to users in Germany and in France, but you can't show it to users in the US. That's kind of an extreme situation, but in a situation like that you would still have to treat Googlebot like any other user that would come from that same location.

So if we crawl your website from the US, and your website recognizes us as an American visitor, then you should show us exactly the content that an American visitor would see. And it would be a little bit problematic if the website started blocking all American users because of legal reasons. So what you would do then is make a public website that everyone can access and then just link to your private website that has been limited to users in a specific region.

So, for example, you would have a general homepage that tells what your website does, gives some information and provides something that search engines can crawl and index. Then when users get to the right location they can click through to your actual content.

Eric Enge: So are you suggesting that if a user accesses that website from Germany, they come to some initial page and then they have to click further to get through to page they are actually looking for?

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: So it is not acceptable to just simply serve them?

John Mueller: Yes, that might cause problems when Googlebot visits. The other problem there is that IP location and language detection is often incorrect. Even at Google, we run into situations where we think, an IP address is from Germany so we would show German content. But in reality, the user maybe based in France, and it is really hard to get that right. So if you try to do that automatically for the user, you are almost guaranteed to do something wrong at some point.

That leads to leads to the other version of this problem, where users in the wrong location can still access your website. And in a case like that, we would be able to crawl and index the website normally, but I recommend that you include elements on your website that help the user find the version of the website that they really want to use.

The important thing there is that you use different URLs for the different locations or different languages so that we would be able to crawl all of the specific content. So when I go to Amazon.com from Germany, for example, I have a little banner on top that says "Hey, don't you want to go Amazon Germany? We are much closer; we have free shipping". And that way, the search engine would still be able to see all the content, but users would still find their way to the right website.

Eric Enge: So this of course is a little bit different than the scenario where you implement a website at casino.co.de, or .co.uk, or .com, or .co.us, where you really are creating versions that are meant to be indexed in the local version of the search engines?

John Mueller: Exactly, yes.

Eric Enge: So that's a different scenario that someone could use if they wanted to.

John Mueller: I think the key point is whether or not users are allowed to access the wrong version of the website, or if there is a legal reason why it is blocked completely.

Eric Enge: So if the legal reason isn't there and it is just that you want the default language that a German user sees, and you are willing to accept the fact that you are right about 90% of the time and you are wrong about 10% of the time, they can click the French link if they are really from France?

John Mueller: Yes. I think that the important part, especially with languages, is that you really provide separate URLs so that Google can crawl all language versions. And this way you also don't have to do language detection on your site. The user will search for something using a German or French-speaking Google, and we will show the French or German-speaking pages appropriately.

Eric Enge: So they end up in the right place through that mechanism? John Mueller: Yes. And you don't even have to do anything on your side. Maybe if you have a homepage you could show a little drop-down and let the user choose. Or you could have it pre-populated with the determined location by default, but you are still giving the user a choice between the different language versions. You give the search engine a choice and we will try to send the users directly to the right version.

Eric Enge: What are your thoughts on serving up different content based on cookies, such as explicit or inferred user preferences.

John Mueller: I think the general idea is also to make sure that you are not trying to do anything deceptive with that. Say, for example, you have a website where you just have general information. If a normal unregistered user comes there and you show that same general information to Googlebot, that is fine, because even a logged in user finds more information when he accesses the same URL. So if you make sure that it matches up with what a user would see, then that's generally not a problem.

Eric Enge: And since we are talking about cookies, presumably we are talking about a user who has been at the site before. So if they come back, their expectations may be for somewhat of an enhanced experience based on their interactions.

John Mueller: Exactly. So if you have it setup in a way that logged in users or users who have preferences get to see more detailed content, then that's fine in general. But if you have it in a way that users who were logged in see less content or see completely different content, then that would be problematic.

Eric Enge: Right. Can you give us an overview of First Click Free and what its purpose is?

John Mueller: We started First Click Free for Google News so that publishers could provide a way to bring premium content to their users. For example, if you have a subscription based model for your website, you could still include those articles in the Google News search results and a user who goes to those articles would still be able to see them and read that article normally. But as soon as they are trying to access more on your website, they would see a registration banner, for example.

Now, we have extended that to all websites, because we know not everyone can be accepted into Google News; it is kind of a special community. So if you have some kind of subscription or premium content, you can show that to Googlebot and to users who come in through search results. But as soon as something else is accessed on that site, you are free to show a registration banner so that users who are really interested in this content have a way to signup and actually see it.

Eric Enge: So the idea here is you have subscription-based content and Google wants to make its users aware that that content is there and it exists.

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: So the user goes to Google, they see the article, they decide to go read it, the site implementing First Click Free checks the referrer and makes sure it is from Google, in which case they show the full article including all pages of a multi-page article, not just the first page?

John Mueller: Yes.

Eric Enge: And then the user potentially gets the registration banner when they go on to or a subscription box on a different article?

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Now, can a user just go back to Google and search on something and try to find that same article somewhere else in the search results?

John Mueller: Theoretically, yes. That would be possible, but we found that most users don't do that. It is more work that way, and if it is content they are really interested in, they will figure out a way to access it normally. When you like the content, you might say a subscription and say "Okay, this is a good website. I want to come back and read more of this content. It is fine if I just pay a small amount for it".

Eric Enge: I would imagine that for most subscription-based sites that it is an effective program to expose their content and increase their subscriptions.

John Mueller: Yes, absolutely.

Eric Enge: Exposure is really good. To do this, you basically bypass the login screen and give it access to all the content that you do want to index when Googlebot comes to the site.

John Mueller: Exactly, yes. I would expect that you could probably do the same for other search engines. You might want to check with them, but I think that is generally acceptable if the user sees the same content as the search engine crawler would see.

One thing that I have noticed when I talk to people about this is that they are kind of unsure how they would actually implement it and if it would really make a difference in their subscription numbers. It is generally fine to run a test and take a thousand articles and make them available for First Click Free, make them available for Googlebot to crawl and make them available for users to click on.

You can leave the rest of your articles blocked completely from Googlebot and from users. Feel free to just run a test and see if it is going to make a difference or not. If you notice it is helping your subscriptions after a month or so, then you can consider adding more and more content to your First Click Free content.

Eric Enge: Right. You can take it in stages. Are there other questions on these topics that you hear from people at conferences or out on the boards?

John Mueller: Another thing about cloaking is that we sometimes run into situations where a website is accidentally cloaking to Googlebot. That happens, for example, with some websites that throw an error when they see a Googlebot user agent. It is something that can happen to Microsoft IIS websites, for example, and that would technically also be cloaking. But in a case like that, you are really shooting yourself on the foot because Googlebot keeps seeing all these errors and it can't index your content.

One thing that you can do to see if that is happening, is to access your website without JavaScript, with the Googlebot user agent, and see what happens there. If you can still access your website, then that's generally okay. Another problem that sometimes comes up with language detection is that a website will use the same URLs for all languages and just change the content based on user or browser preferences.

The problem here is that Googlebot will only find one language, and we will just crawl the whole website in that one language. So, for example, we have seen cases where Googlebot was accidentally recognized as a German-based user, and we re-crawl the whole website in German and suddenly all the search results were only showing up to German users.

Eric Enge: So people in the UK couldn't see the UK-English version of the site, because, the Googlebot wasn't aware the content was there?

John Mueller: Users in the UK would be able to see that content, but since the Googlebot was recognized as a German user, it was seeing the content in German only. In this case, the old pages would be re-indexed in German, so if someone was searching for an English term, they wouldn't even find that site anymore.

The lesson here is to really make sure you have separate URLs for your content in different languages and locations.

Eric Enge: Right, for purposes of this example, we are assuming that the content is identical but translated.

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: And, you want to have separate pages for the different language versions of the content.

John Mueller: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Excellent, thanks John!!

John Mueller: Excellent, thank you!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the John Mueller interview here.

Other Google Interviews

• Google's Rajat Mukherjee, March 31, 2009
• Google's Sandra Cheng, February 16, 2009
• Google's Cedric Dupont, February 4, 2009
• Google's Brett Crosby, December 1, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008
• Google's Carter Maslan - July 14, 2008
• Matt Cutts - June 16, 2008
• Google's Dick Costolo - April 28, 2008
• Google's Adam Lasnik - Feb. 4, 2008
• Google's Sep Kamvar - Dec. 17, 2007
• Google's Matt Cutts - Oct. 8, 2007
• Google VP Udi Manber - July 9, 2007
• Google's Vanessa Fox - July 2, 2007
• Google's Mark Lucovsky - June 10, 2007
• Google's Adam Lasnik - Apr. 30, 2007
• Google's Rajat Mukherjee, Apr. 16, 2007

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com
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Perception Is Everything - See How Google Is Slapping People about Pagerank

This article was written in a simple language so you can learn on how google is manipulating the pagerank. Pay attention.

Recently Google did a major PageRank update where a lot of sites were downgraded. Many experts believe this PageRank update was Google's response to link selling - sites which sell links lost points in their PageRank.

Google measures all web pages on a scale of importance from 0 to 10, which is shown in a small green pixel bar on browsers carrying the Google Toolbar. PageRank is "supposedly" measured by the number of backlinks to your site.

Online democracy in action, a link is a vote for your site. The more votes you have the higher your site is ranked. At least that's how it was supposed to work until a lot of high PR sites started selling links and put a monkey wrench into the whole system.

The latest update may be a smart move on Google's part to curtail this practice; who's going to buy a link from a PR2 or even a PR4 site? Besides this could be more than a warning that your site will go down even further if you continue to sell links.

Now this is more of a cosmetic change in PageRank than a real change in your true rankings in Google. Just because your PR goes down doesn't mean your keyword rankings or traffic from Google also goes down.

I saw some of my sites go up, some stayed the same, but my major site took a big hit - falling from PR6 to PR4. This was more of a devastating blow than I expected mainly for psychological reasons than actual consequences. After years of building the best content you can muster and constantly getting quality one-way links, to see that PageRank drop was very disappointing and hits to the core of your online work.

Google sometimes just slap you at the face without any apparent reason. but lets keep it up.

I have been around for a while so I have experienced many Google Updates - anyone remember the Florida Update? I also keep my ears peeled to discussions of the latest updates in Webmasterworld and Stompernet, and I even read Matt Cutts when I get real nervous... so I knew not to panic just because of the sudden drop in PageRank.

I also knew what most of the SEO experts were saying was true because my major keywords stayed the same and my Google traffic actually went up. But that's little comfort when you're talking about Google; you immediately go into overdrive and try to figure out where you went wrong. What caused the drop - because whether PageRank is meaningless or not, you're still going in the wrong direction.

I saw many of my competitors drop too, but many stayed the same and even a few increased in PageRank. What are they doing right; what am I doing wrong? I don't sell links but does Google think I am selling links was my main concern? I even moved one external link from my main page to another part of my site, just in case Google is mistaking that as a paid link.

Welcome to webmaster's paranoid hell! Well, i believe that every webmaster has becamed paranoid about google one day.

For SEO reasons I have very few external links on my main page. Can't see why Google downgraded my main site. I have been at PR6 for years.

Herein lies my main beef, with Google you never really know where you stand; you are constantly walking on eggshells. No matter how good your content or your site is - one misstep and you could be in the doghouse. All your hard work can be taken away in a heartbeat.

It wouldn't matter so much if it was one of the other two major search engines downgrading your site but this is Google.

Free organic traffic from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffic from Google over any other source of traffic on the web, except for traffic coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffic probably originated from a search in Google.

Google and Google PageRank have always been important to me - that's one of the reasons a sudden large drop causes so much concern. There's another important reason Google PageRank is important to me.

Most SEO experts mistakenly believe PageRank is meaningless because Google is not giving us the true ranking of any site or revealing all the backlinks, which is supposedly one of the major factors in how Google ranks sites. While this fact is obviously true, it has caused many to jump to another conclusion.

Because Google is not giving us the real ranking, many webmasters have dismissed PageRank as a vital element in their sites. Don't make the same mistake.

Google PageRank is extremely important if you're doing business on the web. The higher PR you have, the better. But it has nothing to do with keyword rankings or first page SERPs.

What many SEO experts fail to realize (not really their business) is the whole "perceived" value of PageRank.

Google, hate it or love it, has become the most respected company on the web in the eyes of the majority of the web's users. It carries enormous weight and prestige. The "perceived" value of a high PR7 or PR8 is extremely valuable.

We are not talking about link selling; we are talking about how a perspective business partner or customer will treat your site or business.

Say you have two identical sites you want to do business with online and you discover one is a Google PR2 site and the other is a Google PR8 site - which one would you choose to do business with? Honestly?

From first-hand experience, I know any online company or marketer will get more business offers and be offered more partnerships/joint ventures if you have a high Google PR site than a low one. It will make a difference to your bottom line.

PageRank is important. PageRank has meaning. Even if it has little bearing on your SERPs rankings or Google traffic, PageRank can greatly influence the success of your online site or venture. Don't ignore or dismiss PageRank as a meaningless relic that didn't quite work out as Google had planned for it in the first place.

High PageRank will always be valuable.

The day Google gives its own site a PageRank of PR1 or PR2 instead of the current PR10 - that's the day you can dismiss PageRank as truly meaningless.

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Alex Chudnovsky Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: December 29, 2008

Alex Chudnovsky is the founder and managing director of Majestic-12 - a UK based firm that specializes in cross-platform .NET/C# development of scalable high-performance data analysis applications with primary focus on creation of the World Wide Web search engine. Majestic also uses the trade name Majestic SEO which publishes a backlinking tool that is a competitor to SEOmoz's Linkscape.

Alex previously worked for a number of well-known retail businesses with primary focus on maximizing sales from their respective retail web sites. Utilizing extensive business and technical skills for Jungle.com (part of the Argos Retail Group), formerly top 10 UK e-tail website that handled over a billion hits annually, Alex led many significant projects with a proven overall economic effect of over £15 m in additional online sales.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Tell me a little bit about Majestic-SEO at a company level.

Alex Chudnovsky: We have a registered company in the UK, which is called Majestic-12 Limited, and we started a distributed search engine project four years ago. The goal is to build a viable alternative to Google. And because we were small and they were big, we had to find some ways of catching up. The way that we chose was to develop distributed computing on the internet.

Projects such as SETI@Home, distributed.net were the basis of the approach we took. We created software and we started crawling the web using volunteers all around the world. This is our main project, and it has been going on for four years now. About two years ago, when we used the data to create a full-text search index, we had one billion pages indexed. As we were building it bigger and bigger, we realized that relevance was becoming a problem.

You can't beat Google unless you are as relevant as Google. The solution for this was to look more closely at the web graph, look at the backlinks and analyze link text in order to be just as smart about it as Google is. You really have to do that, because when you rank in competitive categories, you have so many matches that you have to discriminate against many of them to decide which ones are the best and most relevant.

This is where backlinks come into play big time, because that's really one of the key objective ways to differentiate between more popular and less popular sites. When we realized this two years ago, it became clear that we needed a separate index that would help us understand backlinks and link text better. So, we started working on the so-called “anchor index” and we've been doing it for two years with many index builds.

It was very, very difficult to build a large index that was close to that of Yahoo and Google. But, we built it, and early this year we launched a commercial offshoot to help us fund further R&D activities. This is what Majestic-SEO was designed for. It is the same company, but it's our trading name that we use to position ourselves in the SEO industry.

So, what we have in Majestic-SEO is the biggest publicly available backlinks index. It allows webmasters to verify their sites and obtain extensive backlinking data for free. If you want information for your competitor websites, then you can pay to obtain reports and compare the websites. It's essentially like Google Webmaster Tools, but you can get information on competitive sites and we show complete data.

Unlike Google, we show all data that we have, and we actually have quite a lot of sites with many millions of backlinks. We will show you the whole lot if you want it. And, we include a number of analytical options that allow you to focus on the areas you are most interested in. So, in a nutshell, this is what Majestic-SEO is about.

Eric Enge: How many web pages have you crawled?

Alex Chudnovsky: So far we have crawled about 114 billion in total (this figure includes urls that failed to get crawled due to various reasons – 404 Not Found, server was down etc). The total crawled data size is over 2.5 peta bytes. If you look at the number of unique pages that we include within our index in Majestic-SEO, we have over 52 billion unique crawled pages in our current index that will grow again in January 2009. We show all these stats on our website. We consider a url being a page if the URL was successfully crawled. We analyze those urls and pick up links from those pages as well as other metrics.

If you look at our database in terms of unique URLs, then we have lots more of those than crawled pages. Google recently claimed to have one trillion unique URLs that they knew of, but they have not crawled them all yet. It's the same with us. For us, the number of unique URLs is 346 billion, 52 billion of which are pages, meaning that these are the URLs that we crawled successfully at least once. Our aim is to catch up with Google by the end of next year.

Eric Enge: You've organized this in a product that people can explore and pull down link profiles for different domains? I presume you do things like pull the anchor text and that sort of stuff?

Alex Chudnovsky: Yes, we supply the link text, if it was present, date when backlink was found, and a number of flags, such as whether it was an image link, or it was a redirect, or whether it was in a frame. The latter can be very useful because you can actually check backlinks for your own site. You can actually find the people who have embedded your site in a frameset, and you may not necessarily see this information from your log files, because if it's in a frameset, the referrer may not be set in log files and it may not be obvious to you that your site was quite literally framed.

We also have a measure of how important the page is, called ACRank. ACRank stands for “A Citation Rank.” What it basically is, is a number from 0 to 15, with higher being better. A higher number shows that there were more referring external domains linking into that page. For example, if both Google and our site's homepages linked to your site, we will rank the Google link higher than ours because Google itself would have a lot more referring domains that point into them.

This allows our customers to focus on the most important links first, because they would know that those links are coming from pages that are themselves very heavily linked to.

Eric Enge: Right. You are doing that based on a proprietary calculation method?

Alex Chudnovsky: Yes, it is very simple at the moment. It's basically an indication of how many unique referring domains will link into the page which links to you.

Eric Enge: When did you release this product?

Alex Chudnovsky: We launched Majestic-SEO in February of this year. We were not selling data at the time we launched it because it was effectively soft-launched as a test to allow webmasters to come to our site and verify their domains to get information for free. So, we were getting all this feedback. In July we launched new option, which allowed our customers to actually buy reports on domains that they do not own. From the commercial point of view we launched in July 2008.

Eric Enge: How many people have signed up so far?

Alex Chudnovsky: We have a lot. It's exceeded our expectations definitely. We are gaining acceptance right now, and we are converting traffic really well. We get a lot of people who come to our site just to verify their own domain and to check out whether the service is good or not.

Then we convert them to actual paying customers because they see that they can look at their own domains and the information we have on their own sites. This is where they become believers in our information, because it's the best way to check.

Eric Enge: What is the commercial model?

Alex Chudnovsky: We have different pricing for different domains. The fundamental issue for us is that some domains are a lot bigger than others. For example, if we take Google as a domain then our database tells me that we have 3.7 billion external backinks to google.com.

When we name this number, it means that we actually have that many backlinks that we can retrieve. This is quite a critical difference from some of our competition. They will often show you a limited number of backlinks, such as what you can get in Yahoo Site Explorer. But in our case, when you buy access to the domain, you get the whole lot, all the information you can retrieve at no extra charge.

So, we have very large domains like google.com and we have small domains like our own site www.MajesticSEO.com. We have one thousand external backlinks in our database at the moment, and that is a number that is growing quite quickly. So, we have different domain pricing which depends on how heavily linked the domain is.

We also offer some time based options. You can subscribe to domains data for seven days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months. So for domains that you might just be curious about, it makes sense to buy them for seven days, just to check out the information. Those that you want to keep an eye on for longer, it makes sense to buy for 12 months, as the monthly price gets reduced as you subscribe for longer periods of time.

Eric Enge: What's the cost for a domain that has 10,000 links to it?

Alex Chudnovsky: Let's take your site for example. On your site, we have 78,000 external backlinks coming from 2,500 referring domains as of now. If you look at the price, you can get it for 10 credits for 7 days. Now, we sell credits and we have different packages for credits. If you buy a bigger package, you get a bigger discount. For example, if you are our client and you want to use our service a lot, it makes sense to buy a thousand credits, because you would get a 30% discount on that.

So, if you are a big buyer, the actual price of domains that you buy will be lower for you. In your case, it will be 10 credits for 7 days. In monetary terms, if you buy one thousands credits, it should cost about a dollar a credit. So that means that data on your site could be had for $10. That would include almost 79,000 external backlinks coming from 2,500 referring domains. So, you've got quite a popular website. We are also considering introducing a fixed fee subscription model in Q1 2009.

Eric Enge: That's interesting. Yahoo reports 94,800 by the way. Of course, is has its own accuracy issues as we all know. When did you go live?

Alex Chudnovsky: Basically we do a lot of research at Majestic. We first launched our index in February of this year, but we only started selling payable information in July. The reason for that is that as we were building different indexes. We were providing quantitative assessment to understand how close we were to Yahoo and Google.

To do this, we picked 20 URLs, some of which were from well-known websites such as Google, Wikipedia, CNN.com, etc. And, we took backlinks from last year that were reported by Google and Yahoo for these URLs.

Every time we made an index, we actually found the backlinks reported by Yahoo and Google in our index. So as we were growing our index, we could see whether we were improving our quality or not. And we found out that we were matching more and more . What it was showing was that our index is actually getting closer to that of Yahoo's and less so to Google's. And I think this is interesting because I don't think our competition is doing something like this, at least not publicly.

Eric Enge: You are continuing to run your own crawlers?

Alex Chudnovsky: Absolutely, yes.

Eric Enge: Does your client base currently skew towards Europe or other geographies?

Alex Chudnovsky: I would say we get clients from the United States, Canada and a lot from Europe. I would say maybe it's 60% from Europe and 40% from America.

If you look at market size in real terms, it probably should be the other way around really. We are not as strong in the United States as we are in the Europe, but we are gaining more and more customers and definitely growing in North America,

Note that in your interview of Rand Fishkin about Linkscape, you asked Rand a question about the bots that they are making use of, whether they are leveraged and if they do custom crawling for themselves. Rand said, in some cases but not all. At Majestic-12, we have our own crawler and we publish information about our own crawler and we are very open about these things.

We are not asking others to crawl for us. We actually crawl the data ourselves, we have the URLs and we decide what we crawl. It's a hundred percent our effort.

Eric Enge: So you must have a fairly substantial data center in order to be able to do that level of crawling?

Alex Chudnovsky: Because we have a distributed computer network it allows us to offload this complicated task to a lot of computers. So, we do not actually need the data centers you would imagine required to sustain this sort of crawling. That's our commercial advantage that gives us hope that we can reach Google scale in respect of webgraph (backlinks) analysis.

Eric Enge: How do you acquire the access to the computers that are within your network?

Alex Chudnovsky: This is done by people who join our project, the Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine project. They join it and they will use our software on the computers that they own. We are not actually installing it ourselves. It's one hundred percent volunteer and we have built quite a name in the distributed computing area. There are a number of projects out there, but we are fairly unique in that distributed computing projects would usually are CPU intensive.

Eric Enge: How do you recruit your participants?

Alex Chudnovsky: Well, we have a website, www.majestic12.co.uk, which is our main project site and they sign up there. We have more than 100 regular users who return results to us. In a full day they usually crawl more than 5 terabytes of data and around 200 million URLs. The first people who found us were the people who saw our bot in their log files.

After they saw our bot, they searched and found our web page, read about our project and liked the idea, then they joined it. This is how we started, and after some time we become known among the distributed computing community. We have active people who are also doing other distributed computing projects.

They talk about us and this helps increase the interest in our project, so we have grown to a point where we sustained high number of volunteers who can come to us.

Eric Enge: What's in it for them?

Alex Chudnovsky: Remember, our main objective as a company is to build a search engine which can rival Google in terms of relevance, speed and scale. As a part of this, we also need to understand the web better, this is where backlinks come into play. It's strictly volunteer, we have not paid them anything at the moment. What we do is that we will have a separate company for our partners, which will own 20% of shares in the main commercial company, which also owns Majestic-SEO trading name. I have to stress here that money was not the main motivation for the people who took part in our project.

We don't really want people to come to us specifically for a short-term financial incentive in mind, as this can cause problems. In our case, many people who came naturally were interested in distributed computing in general and our project in particular. They like the project, they like the idea of trying to to create a competitor to Google, and they don't like monopolies.

They found that the administration of the project, the way we work, the direction in which we are trying to move, and the feedback that we give to them is good; so it's worth sticking around. This is really how we retain the people who are taking part in this project.

Eric Enge: How many participants do you have?

Alex Chudnovsky: Today we have more than 100 active participants. However, if you look in terms of computers, we have about 150 machines crawling the Internet and analyzing data from different locations in the world.

Eric Enge: How do you get the service to perform acceptably well?

Alex Chudnovsky: That was very difficult. Let me just tell you what you can do in our index. First, you can search for the exact URL and they give you a quick answer. Or you can search for a domain by typing the domain name. Say you typed google.com, in this case we would have search results showing top URLs from that site with some basic statistics, such as how many referring backlinks are internal or external.

How many referring domains it has is also something we show, but something Yahoo does not. I think our competition wants money to show this information, but we show it for free. A lot of effort was put into design of the index to make sure that it can scale to the number of URLs that Google and Yahoo have.

Eric Enge: You must need some powerful hardware.

Alex Chudnovsky: It does use fairly powerful hardware.

Eric Enge: How many servers do you have that are involved in this process?

Alex Chudnovsky: One part is the crawling and analysis stuff, which is done by distributed crawler. That is around 150 machines. Now not all of these computers run 24/7, but many do and they do big chunk of work. We have a lot of hardware involved; but because of the way we did it, we don't need to have this hardware on the premises.

These computers will do the analyses, the crawl and they will send the data back to the central servers. The servers also do quite a lot of work, but we don't need that many. We have less than 10 servers that do the final processing and searching at the moment.

Eric Enge: Thanks a lot, Alex!

Alex Chudnovsky: Thank you very much, Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Alex Chudnovsky interview here. Other Recent Interviews

• Eric Ward, December 22, 2008
• Yahoo's Larry Cornett, December 15, 2008
• Google's Brett Crosby, December 1, 2008
• SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin, November 24, 2008
• Hitwise's Bill Tancer, November 17, 2008
• Dennis Mortensen - October 27, 2008
• Guy Kawasaki - October 14, 2008
• Bruce Clay - September 22, 2008
• Microsoft's Nathan Buggia - Sept. 15, 2008
• Yahoo's Frazier Miller - Sept. 8, 2008
• Microsoft's Ziya Genceren - September 3, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com
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