Google recently acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software which is a display technology that gives you visual representations of trends of various data. It seems like a pretty neat tool. It is very interesting to see the growth in the last 50 years of India and China in many areas. They are definitely headed in the direction of being economic global dominators. I’m not sure where Google will decide to use this technology — most likely it will be used in analytics and possibly another webmaster tool — but I’m sure they’ll find a great place for it.
There was a good post on SearchEngineWatch today called, “Can you Automate Link Development?” that will probably pique some interest in some of you out there. Sadly, reading it may also be a little discouraging to those who were hoping the answer to this question was yes. The jest of the article is that it is very difficult to automate link development. Finding high quality and highly relevant links is a difficult and time consuming process that must be done by hand. However, there are parts of this process that you can automate such as finding the back links of your competitors. There are programs out there that do this for you, but you still have to go through the links and see which ones are relevant to your particular industry and then see if there is any way you can get a link from that site to yours. Oftentimes your competitors will have backlinks from other sites that they own which would eliminate the possibility of getting a link to your site from there. Bottom Line: Be wary of anyone who suggests that they can automate this process for you. There are many companies out there who will claim to be able to do so, but the kind of links they are getting for you are not the kind of links you are looking for or the kind of links that will give you any good long term rankings in the search engines.
Google announced yesterday that they will be anonymizing the data they receive from searches after a period of 18-24 months. Right now, they are able to track all search data right back to the very IP address that it came from. They will still have that data for two years, but after that, they will disassociate the searches with IP addresses etc so that they will no longer be able to track which search came from where.
I’m sure that one of the reasons Google is doing this is because of the terrible AOL slip up that happened not too long ago. For those who didn’t hear about this, an employee in AOL leaked search information that allowed the public to track the information back to the individuals who performed the search. Obviously this was a terrible privacy breech and scared a lot of people out of using search. I’m sure there are other reasons as well, but I believe Google is taking these measures to safeguard themselves against such a disaster.
Search Engine Watch had a recent post about how long it takes a new site to rank in the search engines. Of course, there are hundreds of factors that come into play here that were not mentioned or taken into consideration, but what I did like about the post were the comments on the general ranking trends that the search engines follow. Here’s what Eric Enge had to say:
“…Yahoo and MSN are much faster to accept what their crawler finds (in terms of content and links) at face value. Google is much slower to do so. This is consistent with the general industry belief that Google puts more weight on temporal factors, and needs to build trust in a site before giving it higher rankings.
The speculation about why Google does this is to reduce its susceptibility to SPAM. A side affect of this, however, is that it may not always carry the most authoritative content, particularly when that content is new.”
For the majority (I would say 95%) of our clients, this general trend is true. MSN usually picks up on new sites and site optimization changes first, then Yahoo comes around shortly thereafter with lower rankings and finally Google comes through, but it’s usually a much longer waiting time between Google and Yahoo than it is between the first two.
A great example of this would be my site. I’m showing up in MSN for 9 out of 10 keywords that I searched on (I only checked the first 10 pages). In Yahoo, I’m only showing up for 4 out of those same 10 keywords and in Google I’m only showing up for 3. My rankings will change as time goes on, but it almost always follows this general trend.
I broke into the top 100 search results in MSN today. I’m now showing up number 85 for Nelson James. No, that’s not the greatest accomplishment in my life, but it’s definitely a start of something good to come. Still no sign of search banter showing up for Nelson James in the other search engines.
It sounds like Chris Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search (formerly known as MSN search), is going to leave Microsoft and start up his own business. I don’t know whether his new business will be in the same industry or not. Regardless, this appears to be another huge blow to Microsoft in the search engine industry. They were already on a downward trend in search engine market share and I don’t think this is going to help much. It’s hard to beleive that Microsoft, a corporation which has virtually monopolized the computer industry, is suffering badly in an area you would expect them to dominate in. It will be interesting to see what happens here.
I am performing a new test: Starting today, I am going to attempt to show up for my name: Nelson James. This may actually be quite difficult since there are 52,300,000 sites that show up for that keyword phrase in Google alone, but I’m up to the task. I’ll be competing against an australian rock band “Nelson James” (of which I was not named after), a professional sailor/writer, a Stanford University Lab, an associate professor of psychology (who has his name entirely backwords), an acclaimed nature photographer, some crappy photo.net page, and finally a website that is temporarily down.
I purposely named this post Nelson James because I have created my blog so that the title of the post is in the URL of the page. Also, if you haven’t noticed, I have made sure that my keyword is the most prominent thing on this page. It’s my title, it’s italicized, and it’s mentioned a few other times. I think that should do the trick.
I am hoping that it will only take a month or so to show up for Nelson James, but you never know. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
Business Opportunities created an interesting little applet that looks at the value of each link to your blog and then computes your blog’s worth using a link to dollar ratio such as the one AOL-Weblogs uses. Right now, my site is valued at $5,080.86, but with the way things are going, that will change very quickly so to all of those investors out there, get it while it’s cheap! I’ll sell for nothing less than the price it’s listed for (I even want the 86 cents).
Oh, and I don’t think you can find the dollar amount of anything else but a blog in there, unless Google.com is really valued at $0.00 (of course I tried it).
Have you ever wanted to see how many pages of your site the search engines know about? If so and you haven’t heard about the site: command, read on…
Go to any one of the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and type “site:yoursite.com” and hit enter. Make sure you don’t put any spaces between any of the characters there and that search engine will pull up a list of all of the pages of your site it has indexed…supposedly…
On the official Google Webmaster Blog a few days ago, there was a post saying that this site: command doesn’t always pull up a full list of results from the search engines. It sounds like Google is working on this right now and this should be fixed within a couple of weeks so that it shows all of the pages of your site that Google has indexed.
Why Would I Use the Site: Command?
It’s nice to know how many pages of your site have been indexed by the search engines. If you have created new pages in your site, you can use this command to see if and when they get indexed.
Have you ever been to Google maps and seen street names listed incorrectly or not at all? Have you ever typed in a business name or place and Google Maps pointed you to the wrong place? I definitely have, but I never took the time to find out if there was a way I could tell Google about the error. Well, now I know and for all of you out there who would help Google fix these errors if you only knew how, here you go:
NavTeq Error Reporting
TeleAtlas Error Reporting
These are the map systems that Google uses for their maps. If you report the error here, the next time Google updates their maps, your adjustment will be updated.
If you find other errors, questions, or suggestions for Google maps you can tell them directly here: Google Maps Contact Form.
Everyone needs a quick laugh in their day. Go to the Hello Mom blog for all the mixed-up craziness posted there.
Search US Vital records - birth, marriage, death to find your ancestors.
Nelson James is an avid member of the SEO community in Utah. He is passionate about helping his clients develop and increase the internet marketing facet of their businesses.