Treasury investors are frequently described as being smarter than equity investors because treasuries and generally good leading indicators i.e. the price or yield on treasuries can sometimes be used to predict future economic activity, or at least the trend thereof.
When the economic outlook appears to be bleak or risky, some investors "flee" to treasuries, which are essentially guaranteed loans to the government. This is called a "flight to safety", because the risk of losing money (in nominal terms, at least) is lower in treasuries than in equities or other investments.
However, one must be reminded of the "chicken and the egg" problem. As there is a flight of capital to "safe" treasuries, less investment and venture capital is then available to functioning business and those wanting to start new business. More businesses will therefore fail, and many new businesses will never get started.
So, at least some of the weakened economy must due to this flight to capital.
If you ask me, the US government should not be allowed to issue treasuries... With over $14.5 Trillion current outstanding debt, the government have borrowed enough (on our behalf) and has absolutely no business borrowing any more!
Eliminate treasuries and free up some capital for those that will use it more wisely!
Ah... reciprocal links. This is definitely one of the more polarized topics in the SEO world. Some SEOs will tell you that they are mega black-hat, punishable by instant death in search engines. Others will tell you that they are absolutely fine and encourage them. As with most things, reality lies somewhere between these to points of view.
In the most simple form, a reciprocal link is a link that points to a Website which in turn has a link back. So, if Site A links to Site B and then Site B links back to Site A, the links are called "reciprocal links".
In contrast, if Site A links to Site B and Site B does not link back, then the link is called a "one-way link".
Here's the truth: Only do reciprocal links when the two sites are of high quality and when the link is of value to the Website visitors. If you follow this principle, you shouldn't have any problems.
For example, if you own a Website that sells bicycle equipment, it might make sense for you to link to a bicycle tire manufacturer's Website. Conversely, it might make sense for them to link back to you, if you sell their tires for example. Something like this is absolutely fine and passes the smell test.
However, if your bicycle Website links to a casino or prescription drug Website and they link back, something about this smells fishy and Google would probably look at that very closely. If you have multiple links like this, you are almost certainly in trouble.
Site-to-Site reciprocal links may be fine if the site quality is high and they are in some way related, however one thing you definitely should try to avoid is getting involved in link farms or complex linking schemes. For example, if you own 10 sites and you try to link them altogether in a daisy-chain type of way, or if you have all of them reciprocating links with each other (even if they are related), then Google may think that you are trying to manipulate ranking, and again you could find yourself in deep trouble.
Remember: Only link to high quality sites that are related to yours, especially if the link is going to be reciprocated. And don't get involved with daisy-chain linking or cross-linking sites.
In recent years, Google have diversified their portfolio of products and services in many ways. Just think of all of the different labels that fall under the Google brand:
That's a LOT of stuff. And there's a lot of other stuff they have going on also. So it's no surprise to learn that Google is closing two of their services: Google Health and the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace .
The question is... Are Google going through a strategic realignment of the business. They have strayed very far from their core competencies with all of these add-on products and services. Some are very noble and interesting, but many are complete failures in market-uptake terms. Focusing on too many things makes it very easy to become scatter-brained and very difficult to achieve success in any one area.
Now that Larry Page is the CEO after taking the helm from Eric Schmidt, it will be interesting to see if and how Google's direction changes. Of course, Google have phenomenal brain-trust. I can't want to see how they use it.
Yesterday I posted a video showing a "prefetch" hit coming from the Google SERPs. The bad news is that this turns out to be nothing new; I thought it may have been related to the recent page previews feature - It wasn't.
The good news is that there's an opportunity here, which I don't think has been discussed before.
To summarize: When you use the integrated search box in Firefox (top right) to search Google, Google will sometimes use a rel=prefetch attribute on the first result link. This causes Firefox to automatically download the HTML source code of the first result page. Along with the request to download the page, the referrer string is sent. This is great, because we have a hit to our server without the visitor ever clicking on our result.
So, what is the opportunity and how can we take advantage of it?
Simple. Because we have a hit directly from a Google SERP (along with the referrer string), we can identify searches where our site is ranking. If we don't get the click, then we know we have a problem.
So, let's go through this quickly so we can all get back to work.
In the Apache HTTP server, tell the server that you want to track only prefetch hits to a separate log file:
SetEnvIf X-moz prefetch Prefetch_Request #Set a variable when prefetch CustomLog /path/to/prefetch_log combined env=Prefetch_Request #Log the request if prefetch
Then restart the server. This will log any requests that come to the server with an X-mox: prefetch header to the /path/to/prefetch_log log file.
You can look through the data in this log file to determine where you're showing up in SERPs. If you compare this data to your normal log file, you will be able to identify where you don't get the clicks from the Google SERP.
What you do with this information is up you. I know what I would do - optimize the title and meta description/snippet to maximize the click-through rate.
I found an odd issue with Google and Firefox today. I noticed that on some occasions, the first result on the SERP was GET'd by Firefox, despite the fact that I didn't visit the site. Cache was cleared, and it only happens when I use the firefox search bar.
Video:
(In listening to it myself again, I see that I messed up my lefts/rights when talking bout the windows... will be sure to pay more attention to that in the future :) )
Postscript: After some more digging and it appears that it is actually Google that is causing the prefetch. They do it by using the rel=prefetch attribute on links they want prefetched, and Firefox then goes and gets them.
That means that hits from Google could be inflated. For those with much higher traffic, the margin of error could be magnified.)
As I was looking at the Google cache of a page, I noticed that the layout was a bit weird. The issue was that the cache date was Nov. 1 and the site had undergone updates on the 3rd or so. The updated external CSS files weren't playing well with the old cache page.
So I hit refresh and noticed that the cache date was now Nov. 4th, and the page looked fine, as the page from Nov. 4th was designed for the updated external CSS files. So I hit refresh a few more times and noticed I was able to randomly toggle between two different versions; The cached page from Nov. 1st and the page from Nov 4th. So, Google obviously stores cache in various different places. This gave me an idea.
It has been said before that Google has kept copies of all of the different indices it has ever created. If this means what I think it means, then they should have all of the different cached copies for every URL that Google has every crawled. OK, so maybe you know where I'm going with this, but keep reading anyway...
I'd like to introduce you to... Google "Versions" (or possibly Google "Timeport"). I'm going to use Google as the example search engine in this case. I'm sorry Bing - This could equally apply to you, but I spend most of my day worrying about Google.
Imagine this:
BUT... each result has an extra link called "Versions" beside the standard "Cached" and "Similar" links.
When you click on this "Versions" link, you are presented with a list of the dates for which Google has a cached version of the page. You click on a date and get the cached version of the page on that date.
Yes, this is basically the concept of archive.org aka the "Wayback Machine", except that archive.org does a relatively bad job of crawling pages often enough for it to be useful. I say "relatively" because they obviously don't have the resources of a company such as Google or Microsoft. So perhaps archive.org does a fantastic job given their resources, but they're terrible when compared to either of the aforementioned companies.
There's a couple of problems with the idea of Google Versions. First, Google right now caches only the HTML. All of the inline/embedded elements in the cached code, such as CSS, JavaScript, Images, etc., are relative to the original URI of the page. So, if you were to view an old cache version of a page and some object that is referenced from within that page has since been removed from the server - or even just modified on the server - then the page will likely be broken to some degree or another.
To workaround this problem, Google would have to synchronously cache the page itself and all of the objects referenced therein. To my knowledge, the Google cache system simply does not work this way at this time and it would probably require a rewrite. We know that Google crawl images and also CSS and JavaScript files, but I don't know the extent to which any of these are cached, or whether they are cached synchronously with their parent pages.
But, archive.org has synchronously cached pages and their associated objects for years, so presumably Google could do it also if they were so inclined.
Another problem is the potential copyright issues, but I don't see this really being a hurdle - especially in the US. The robots.txt is the defacto standard for exclusion from search engines. A separate User Agent string could be used for Google Versions e.g. "VersionsBot". Also, the meta robots noarchive tag should also prevent a page from being indexed in the Versions archive.
It's an interesting idea that I would like to see Google or Bing introduce. It's certainly in line with Google's mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
What are your thoughts?
By Darrin J. Ward
I'll preface this refresher on 301 and 302 HTTP redirects by saying that we always strive to plan the layout of Websites so that we will never need to move or rename pages. You should try to do the same!
However, sometimes it's unavoidable and pages need to be moved or removed entirely. When that happens, it's very important that the right strategy be used to "redirect" the page from the old URL to the new URL. There are two viable options for doing page redirects: a 301 redirect or a 302 redirect. The 301/302 number refers to the "status code", which is sent by the Web server to robots/crawlers/browsers, informing them of what action is being taken.
A 301 redirect code indicates that the move is PERMANENT. This type of redirect should be used when you know that the page WILL NOT move back to its original location.
A 302 redirect code indicates that the move is TEMPORARY. This type of redirect should be used when you know that the page WILL eventually move back to its original location, or somewhere else.
In the vast majority of cases, it's the 301 redirect that you will want to use. The 301 redirect passes most of the PageRank and "link juice" from the old page address to the new page address, which is exactly what you want to help maintain rankings and PageRank. I will point out that there is going to be some loss due to the 301 redirect (our internal research suggests anywhere from 10-25% is lost), which is why it's best to avoid redirects altogether, where possible.
302 redirects do not maintain the PageRank and link juice in the same way.
The implementation of these redirects is usually done at either the server level or in the programming code. Here are some samples.
I wrote the following simple function to allow me to perform 301 redirects:
function Redirect301($GoTo)
{
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $GoTo");
}
This function can be called in your php code like this:
Redirect301("http://www.example.com/new-url/");
PHP has a built-in function called redirect() which does a 302 redirect. You can call redirect() like this:
redirect("http://www.example.com/new-url/");
Using the HTTP server itself is a popular way to perform redirects. Because I use Apache most of the time, I'll limit the discussion to the .htaccess and httpd.conf methods for Apache, and leave IIS and other servers alone for now. The easiest way to perform a 301 redirect is to use the Redirect directive, which can be used like this in .htaccess or httpd.conf:
Redirect Permanent /old-page.htm /new-page.htm
302 redirects also use the Redirect directive, but without the Permanent flag. i.e:
Redirect /old-page.htm /new-page.htm
You should always check that the server is sending the correct redirect response code. Don't just assume that your redirects are working correctly. Here are a couple of tools that I recommend for testing HTTP redirects (and server headers in general):
By Darrin J. Ward
Hi, my name is Darrin Ward and I'm addicted to speed. Speedy Websites, that is.
I've always been addicted to making the Internet go as fast as possible. I distinctly remember playing around with the physical positioning of my first 28.8k modem to see if moving it away from the electrical / magnetic interference of the computer and monitor would speed up the Internet, or if tinkering with all kinds of other software and hardware settings sped it up any.
In fact, I love speed so much that sometimes it could actually be considered for a flaw. If you've ever seen a Website that I personally have designed, then you'll know exactly what I mean. Although the Darrin Ward design team does fantastic designs, all of my personal designs tend to be stripped down to almost text-only sites, because I want things to load as fast as possible, and graphics and rich-media only slow it down.
It turns out that we've found a great balance in the team; My team comes up with visually stunning designs, and then I go to work on making the site load stunningly fast, with minimal sacrifice to the original design. It's a win-win.
Anyway. I also happen to practically live inside of Apache httpd.conf and .htaccess files (the configuration files for the Apache Web Server). So when I recently heard that Google released an apache module called mod_pagespeed, I was ecstatic.
The apache httpd module is for version 2.2 and higher, and it takes care of some of the items that Google's Page Speed Firefox plug-in addresses.
I haven't had time to experiment with mod_pagespeed yet, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up under high load. Because of our success with SEO and Internet Marketing, some of the sites we manage get a LOT of traffic (top site peaks at about 2,000 hits per second!). The other issue is that it's not yet listed as compatible with FreeBSD, which is my server OS of choice (I love the HTTP accept filter), but I'm sure it can be made to work.
The long and the short of it is this... Here at this SEO company, we are 100% committed to making Websites fast because we know it's important for visitors, and because it helps Google rankings now that page loading speed is part of the Google algorithm. We're happy to see that Google is providing Webmasters with tools to help make the Web faster (and save bandwidth).
Every now and then we are reminded how much we rely on Google.
Over the past couple of years, Google has done some experimentation with using AJAX search engine results pages. In doing so, such experiments have broken the keyword-tracking functionality of analytics tools because a full set of referrer data was not being sent (anything after the # in a URL is not part of the referrer string). Once Google were made aware of the issue, they rolled back and things went back to normal, where analytics packages could continue tracking referring keywords.
The visual change of the AJAX implementation was unnoticeable to an end-user, but the impact for Webmasters was immense. Earlier this week, it was noticed that Google was again not passing referrer strings. Matt Cutts of Google commented to let us know that the changes were an error on Google's part due to repurposing of old code. However, ever since the first implementation of the AJAX results pages, my Firefox installation on my Mac continues to show me AJAX results pages, not the regular ones. So, I have no doubt that there is still some Google traffic out there that is not sending referrers/keywords correctly.
It's just another reminder that if Google did want to make this change and not listen to us, they could really cause a big nightmare for all of us SEOs out there!
Barry Schwartz over at the Search Engine Roundtable reminds us today that you should use rel=nofollow on your affiliate links, or else you may receive a Google penalty.
The inherent illogic of stuff like this makes my blood boil sometimes... Why would/does Google penalize content from ranking just because links to affiliates or other sites do not use rel=nofollow? Either the content on the page is useful and it deserves to rank, or it doesn't. I don't see why having links lacking rel=nofollow alone should be a determining factor in that decision. Using rel=nofollow is a technicality.
If Google determines that the links on a page are against their paid-linking policy, then they should just discount any "link juice" that might get passed on from them. That's something they could do transparently in the background, without having to force Webmasters to consider this ridiculous rel=nofollow tag, and without having to deprive searches of valuable content (assuming Google otherwise determined it to be valuable except for the non-rel=nofollow affiliate links.)
Alas, the Google insidiousness continues, and we continue to begrudgingly comply forthwith so that we may get some rankings love! Although the whole thing does remind me of the pied piper sometimes :)
I sometimes use Google as a dictionary replacement, as I suspect a lot of people do. I search for the word on Google and then click on the "definition" link beside the word in the horizontal blue information bar. Google links to answers.com, which gives the definition:
What I don't understand is why Google hasn't licensed the content from the Oxford dictionary or some other dictionary and made their own dictionary function. Probably a better idea would be to license the content from multiple dictionaries to make sure they have all of the right definition variants, including those that are regionally specific.
Granted, Google does have the "define:keyword" operator that attempts to define words by scraping content from pages across the Web. But, anyone that has experimented with this function to any degree will tell you that it can be horridly inaccurate. I've often seen it pull definitions from adjacent words on pages, yielding a completely irrelevant definition.
It should be noted that, according to compete.com, Google is responsible for 61.19% of answers.com's traffic:
It's not clear how much of this comes from the definition links and how much comes from regular organic listings. Either way, that's a pretty significant share of the traffic.
Hey, Google... If I set up a dictionary site, will you link to me instead?!
First, sorry for the lapses between blog posts. The unfortunate reality is that the blog does take something of a backseat versus servicing clients, business development and doing all of the interesting things that are going on with the De Ward Group right now.
Is it just me, or has Google really stepped up their efforts over the last few weeks and months? They've made many changes to their services, from minor UI tweaks, experimenting with different ad formats and organic listing formats, right up to introducing entirely new products such as FastFlip in the Google Labs.
Granted that Google has always been experimental, but one has to wonder if perhaps they are pushing things a bit harder now to counter the fact that Microsoft's search solution - now known as Bing - has crossed 10% market share for the first time in as far back as anyone cares to remember. These Nielsen ratings only came out the other day, but it was obvious that Bing had been gaining some traction. And knowing that Microsoft may very well soon accrue a on of traffic from Yahoo - assuming the deal gets regulatory approval - can only be increasing the pressure on Google.
These are very interesting times for us here in the world of search engines. I very nearly fully exited the SEM industry back in 2003 when sold the SEOChat.com company. Even though I did make a conscious decision to become a less public figure, I'm very glad that I chose to stay within the industry. We've got one hell of a roller coaster ride ahead of us in the coming 2 years, and I would hate to miss it.
Bing still have a long way to go. But as much as I love Google, I have to hope that Bing can step up to the challenge and give Google a run for their money, because competition is good for you, me and everybody.
I use a BlackBerry 8820. I've got an iPhone, used to have a Sony Experia X1 (Windows Mobile) and I have tried a plethora of other phones (including other BlackBerry's), but the BlackBerry 8820 is the one for me.
However, one thing that used to irritate me about the phone was that it wasn't very easy to sync my iTunes music podcasts and some business documents from my Mac to the SD card in my BlackBerry. So I wrote a simple shell script that takes care of those things for me. The script I show here should also work with other BlackBerry's.
The script uses rsync to overwrite folders on my BlackBerry with folders on my Mac (like my iTunes folder). I saved the following code into a file named bb-sync.sh in my ~/ folder:
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Podcasts/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Desktop/WalkMusic/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Music/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Documents/Passwords.kdb" "/Volumes/BB/Documents/Passwords.kdb"
The formatting of the above code may look weird owing to linebreaks, so you can also Download bb-sync.sh.
This is 3 separate rsync commands because I am syncing 3 folders. On each line, the first reference to a file or folder is local on my mac and overwrites the second stated file/folder, which is on my BlackBerry SD card (they all start with "/Volumes/BB/").
My blackberry SD card mounts as a volume named "BB". Yours will probably mount as something else, but you can check by using "cd /Volumes/" in Terminal when your device is connected to see what name it uses when it mounts. You may need to plug it in and out to see the differences between mounted/unmounted states. The Volume name will probably also show up on the OS X Desktop as a drive when your BlackBerry SD card mounts. Substitute BB for the name of your BlackBerry SD card volume and change the directories that you want to sync.
When my BlackBerry SD card mounts, I sync by opening up terminal and typing "sh bb-sync.sh" and it prints out a report of the files it's deleting and new files it's uploading.
There are two last things that I will say: 1) That this technique will work for any mounted volume; it's not specific to BlackBerry, and; 2) You can fiddle with the rsync flags and options to get a two way sync, or some other functionality. But I'm not going to bother with that. See the man page for rsync if you want to do something other than what I have described here.
Now if you'll excuse me... I am going to listen to some recently synced podcasts on my BlackBerry while I go for my evening walk. :)
I change the number of results-per-page setting quite a lot, and I just noticed that the "Preferences" link on the Google homepage that I normally use to change my results-per-page setting is missing. Instead, it is now located in a "Settings" drop-down menu up at the top, named "Search Settings".
Before, the "Preferences" link was to the right of the search box, I believe under "Language Tools". In the words of Stewie Griffin... "I don't like change".
Take a peek:
Edit: The "Settings" link at the top will be a drop-down to include both "Search Settings" and "Account Settings", if one if logged into an account. If one is not logged into an account, the "Settings" link will change to read "Search Settings", and it will go directly to the settings/preferences page.
I'm not sure if this is a new thing or not, but I just searched on Google for "staples.com" and I noticed that the Staples paid listing at the top was sporting sitelinks... something that I don't recall seeing before. Upon refresh, they were gone.
Take a look:
BBC has a cool article piece and video today on the potential future of barcodes, called Bokodes. Bokodes are basically very small but versatile version 2.0 barcodes that can hold lots more information than traditional barcodes.
What's very interesting however is the mention of integration with Google street-view, where the small bokodes posted on the storefronts could be read by the Google street-view camera as they go by. The bokodes could contain information such as menus, hours of operation, etc... This is pretty amazing stuff and it really is a glimpse into the future. This is really taking digitization to the next level and I wholly encourage you to check it out!
BBC Article: Barcode replacement shown off.
I absolutely loathe flying. I'm not scared of flying (in fact I find takeoff and landing to be quite exciting), but rather I just find the whole experience of public air travel to be utterly deplorable, and frankly, disgusting! Airports are congested, people on planes have zero personal hygiene, getting the shakedown at airport security, etc. is just an invasion of my personal space that I rather not endure, which is why I only fly when it's absolutely essential.
However, there are a couple of upcoming projects for which I may have to travel, so I was recently looking at some airfares, which is why I was very interested to see that the bing travel blog has an interesting recent post about airfares rising faster on the west coast vs. east coast. Cross-country fares have also risen by a whopping 23% over a 4 week period.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting enough to share. Personally, I think I'm just going to line up as many conference calls as I can over a 2 day period and drive where I need to go rather than fly. That way I can still get work done and I don't have to fly. Unfortunately, I was hoping to make an international trip and I may just have to concede and fly, because I can't drive and I can't afford to charter a large yacht (though I would if I could before flying).
Rick DeJarnette posted on the Bing blog on Friday that we should expect to see an increasing number of visits from msnbot/2.0b, a second (or third?) generation of the crawler used to power Bing.
This really isn't all that helpful to us Webmasters. In all reality, if they didn't tell us that they were testing a new crawler and didn't change the UA string (1.1. to 2.0b), we probably wouldn't have ever noticed.
Why do they still call is msnbot though? Shouldn't it be BingBot? I wonder if Microsoft has an identity crisis.
PC world underscores Nielsen's report this week that American's spend more of their time on Facebook than any other Website. Quite an achievement for Facebook, but the really interesting part of the Facebook phenomenon is that they are penetrating the age 55+ market more successfully than social media sites.
Facebook is a great site and I used to be an avid status updater, but for me it became boring pretty quickly. There has been a lot of recent talk about Facebook's direction, whether or not they can successfully become profitable (including a recent comment by Facebok board member Mark Andreessen stating that the site would be posting billions of dollars in revenue in the coming years.).
It will be really interesting to see how things pan out, but I can help but think that all of this is just hype. Rather few social sites have generated anything near where lofty expectations were.
If you've been in the Internet Marketing industry for any length of time, then you will have heard of the "ODP" or "DMOZ", the Open Directory Project that resides at www.dmoz.org. The ODP is a large general Web directory edited by volunteers. And for years it was considered almost the holy grail for inbound link developers. Some still consider it to be so.
A member at WebmasterWorld asks "Is DMOZ still relevant in 2009?". The responses are interesting.
As part of our SEO campaigns, we do perform directory submissions to a select number of top-tier general directories and a small number of niche directories (the number depends on the niche). The ODP is still in the top 3 of our most desirous general directory link acquisition targets. But it's certainly not a holy grail of any sort.
The ODP certainly has is problems. It's very slow to get anything listed in the ODP due to the lack of editors/volunteers as compared to the volume of submissions they receive. Internet users seem to be tending away from directory type Websites and converging on social/search type sites. And, ODP hasn't done anything even remotely innovative in years (in fact, I don't know if they've done anything innovative, ever.)
But the ODP still gets used in countless places across the Web. So a listing/link in the ODP inherently means links from many other places. The value of the ODP link itself probably carries more weight than all of the subsequent links combined, but it's still a positive.
Yep - for me submitting to the ODP is still relevant in 2009. Not as much as it used to be, certainly. But it's still relevant. I do however recommend that you read my insights on submitting to directories for SEO.
Latitude Longitude Coordinates / Points Mapping Tool.
I was having a tough time finding a tool to map lat / long coordinates for a project. I needed to just copy and paste a bunch of coordinates and have points show up on a map, but I couldn't find a tool to do that, so I put a simple lat/long point mapping tool together.
Simply paste your geo-coded coordinates into the text box and hit submit. The page will reload and your points will be mapped. However, you must be sure to provide the latitude and longitude coordinates in the right format (this was just for internal use so I didn't bother with formatting or error checking). The right format is to use ONE combination lat,long per line. Separate the lat/long with a comma and there should be no spaces.
Here's a very small but interesting change. Google has changed the text label beside the checkbox on the Google account login form that keeps the user signed into their Google account. It's changed from "Remember me on this computer" to "Stay signed in".
I wonder if the previous label was confusing people. Good to see their experimenting with little usability things.
Here's how the login form looks now:
And here's what it used to look like:
Start your persistent cookies, get set. GO!
A thread over at WebmasterWorld has some reports of a PageRank (PR) update going on with many people seeing new PR values, just one month after Google did their last PR update.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out during the course of the day... is this an incremental update or a full PR update? Are Google returning to their monthly PR update cycle from many years ago? It's not impossible... as more new content is generated, people want to see the PR values for those pages. Leaving PR updates on cycles of just 6 months leaves huge gaps in the number of pages for which Google has missing PR values. That can reflect poorly on Google.
SEOmoz has published some updated SEO best practices guidelines. The guidelines are apparently based on "correlation data", which means that they looked at rankings and analyzed the different components on the ranking pages.
The list of SEO best practice items gives recommendations for:
This is great stuff, but as with everything in the "SEO" world, it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Each element that gets analyzed essentially introduces another unknown variable into a simultaneous equation.
One of the most interesting items is that H1 tags have been reduced to having nearly no importance in search engines. What I'm wondering is whether or not SEOmoz also looked at the CSS styling for the H1s to determine if H1s styled to a smaller font carry less weight, or if the reduced importance of the H1 is blanketed. We know that Google look CSS and JavaScript.
Google Blogoscoped has some screenshots of Google showing product results on the right side of the SERP underneath the Sponsored Links. This is almost certainly related to Google experimenting with commission-based advertising. I had seen screenshots of the product links up top, but not at the side.
I should note that Google has experimented with CPA (Cost Per Action/Acquisition) advertising before with AdSense Publishers back in 2006, but they stopped that program. My thinking at the time was that it turned out to be ineffective because the ads weren't targeted enough, so CPC probably yielded a larger income for Google and their publishers. But with direct products integrated into search pages, I'm thinking that they should actually work quite well. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
There has been a lot of talk this past week about how Google Voice is set to open up to the public soon. At the moment it's only available to Grand Central users - Grand Central being the name they have been using for the last few years. Fortunately, I've had a Grand Central account since the very beginning, so I'm now testing out the new Google Voice system. Here's a screenshot of the homepage / inbox: when you first join:
As you can see, this layout is very similar to GMail. You've got an Inbox, Starred, Spam, Trash and some other items specific to Google Voice like Voicemail, SMS, Recorded, Placed, Received and Missed.
The first thing I wanted to do was check out the transcript feature for voicemails, so I called my Google Voice number to leave a voicemail. This is what I said:
And here is what Google delivered to my Inbox:
Google also delivered a transcript of the message to my email Inbox:
Obviously, this is not a perfect transcript, but I have to say that it is still pretty accurate. I was disappointed however that Google didn't deliver a .wav file of the message like Vonage does.
Clicking on the "SMS" button in the top left will allow you to quickly send an SMS text message:
This message came through on my phone (BlackBerry) very quickly, but what I liked most was that it appeared to have come directly from my Google Voice number and the message did not have any labels or advertising indicating that the message was from Google Voice. It looks just like it came from another mobile phone:
When I replied to the text message from my mobile phone Google alerted me that I had 1 new message. This was a link which I had to click to see the reply in my Inbox:
I never use SMS messages, but I do use the BlackBerry PIN service. So I'm a little disappointed to find that this is not an option on Google Voice. I frankly don't understand why people use SMS messages. There's a character limitation (or you break up into multiple messages and get charged multiple times). BlackBerry PIN is free with an internet connection and there is no limitation, or at least none that I have ever run into.
Google Voice is painfully slow for me right now. Pageloads are taking upwards of 15 seconds. However this problem may be on my end; We have a new fiber connection in the building that doesn't have a reverse DNS yet, and this seems to cause huge delays with sites that require reverse DNS lookup.
Google recently acquired 1 million new phone numbers from Level 3, so they are obviously expected a surge in numbers soon. I think Google Voice is a cool service, but it doesn't add anything that I don't already have. You will still need another phone to make outgoing calls and the SMS functionality for me is useless (though I might use SMS more if I can proxy it through email or BlackBerry PIN so I don't have to pay.)
Please share your thoughts on Google Voice!
Barry Schwartz at the Search Engine Roundtable has some screenshots of Google SERP listings where some of the long URLs are truncated to be only one line.
It doesn't seem to be happening for all URLs on all SERPS, but it's definitely happening for some of them. A quick look seems to indicate that Google are more likely to truncate part of a URL path (the folder names) instead of the filenames. They always seem to keep the beginning of the filename (whether it's located in the root or in a folder/directory), but they sometimes truncate the end of the filename.
Gotta love Google with incremental changes!
China is at it again. They have disabled part of the Google search engine that they claim displays "pornographic and vulgar content", according to the New York Times:
I'm not clear on whether Google disabled it themselves voluntarily or if China disabled it by force in some way.
Amid the ongoing Iranian election madness, Google has added Persian (Farsi) as an available language to their Google Translate tool, according to the Google Blog. The language is currently in "Alpha" status, meaning in the very early stages of testing (pre-beta).
Bob Heyman today on Search Engine Land notes that the Google freshness factor may mean big implications for retailers. He notes that the EVP of ice.com, a large Internet retailer, is making proactive changes to their site because of the recent search "options" functionality introduced by Google that allow searchers to select "recency" as a criteria.
They are indeed correct. When you search on Google you will see a "Show Options" link at the top of the SERPs. When you click this link, you will see the "recency modifiers" options of "Any time", "Recent results", "Past 24 hours", "Past week" and "Past year". These allow searchers to refine the search results based on how recently the pages were updated.
If you sell products online then you probably don't need to update your product pages all too often. This will have a negative impact on your traffic levels if many people adopt the usage of Google's recency modifiers, because your pages that haven't been updated in a long time won't get listed in SERPs that require recently modified pages.
The first few things that come into my mind are: "daily changes", "Last-Modified", "checksum" and "page size". If you can keep all of these in mind and know how they relate to each other, then you should be able to engineer yourself into always having fresh content.
Google are looking for pages that are recently modified, so the best way to fit into that criteria is to actually add new content to pages daily. Keep in mind though that they are probably look for pages that exceed some threshold of new content before the page is actually considered changed or updated. So just adding or changing 1 sentence on a page with 100 sentences probably isn't going to cut it. I don't know what the threshold is, but I would be comfortable recommending a guideline minimum of 10-20%. This means 1 or 2 new stories every day for a page that normally features 10 stories.
I know what you're thinking... I'll add some random content and every time a search engine sees the page it will be different. I generally advise against this because if Google find that your content is completely random, then they will be a lot less confident sending traffic to you for a specific keyword, given that the relevant content that was on the page at the time they spidered it will likely be gone when a user goes to see the page. Frequent change = good. Random = bad.
So. Commit to making a few changes throughout the day and you should always be there for a "Past 24 Hours" search.
"Last-Modified" is an HTTP header which a web server sends with the response to a request. The Last-Modified header tells the client (the search engine spider in this case) when the page was last modified. It's very likely that Google and other search engines wanting to determine freshness will look for this header. However they won't completely rely on it because it can be "faked" to whatever date the Webmaster wants. So, search engines will still look for content changes. Always sending the current time is bad.
It's important to note that the Last-Modified header is not always sent by default. It is sent most of the time with static content/pages, but sites that are dynamic generally don't send this header by default due to the complexities in calculating the true last time of modification. If you're selecting a CMS, this may be a worthy consideration. Incidentally, there is also something called the "If-Modified-Since" header, which you should look into.
Finally, a quick and dirty way to check for changes to a page would be to compare the checksum values and the file sizes to previous versions of the document. I won't go into much detail here because I'm not sure that Google are using these methods, but if 2 versions of the same file pulled on different times have exactly the same size, then there is at least a small probability that they are identical.
The checksum method is more accurate, but still not perfect. A checksum comparison will compare the checksum of 2 versions of the same document, and if the checksums are identical then there is a good chance that the documents themselves are identical. This method gives a pretty accurate yes or no answer as to whether the 2 documents will be identical. It does not measure the degree to which the documents' contents differ (the percentage of content that is different).
I hope this helps to at least get you thinking about this important issue. I know that I'm using the recency modifiers quite a bit, but I don't know what the adoption numbers are; hopefully Google tells us at some point. Submit a comment or get in touch if you have something to say!