July 3rd, 2009
Honestly I didn’t notice the difference until I read from Mashable that Google have changed the way it displays search results. As usual, I couldn’t find any announcement about it at the Official Google Blog. So, I take it to mean that Google may still be ironing out some kinks related to this “enhancement.”
So, what are the changes? There are three “unnoticeable” things actually. First, which should have been quite obvious I were closely paying attention was the shrunk Google logo at the top of the page. Then there is also now a big space in between the search box and the first row of the search results page.
As to the search results itself, these are now indented but the most significant change was the removal of the page size indicator. This indicator gives you an idea of how long it will take for the page to load. Google also removed the word “pages” from the previous ”similar pages” link.
Was there any improvement in the loading speed? We have no way of telling now. But ii could be faster or slower. Perhaps if you’re a keen observer whenever you use Google search, maybe you can easily tell whether there was any change in the speed of loading the search results or none at all.
So, any idea on why Google did these changes? Is it for aesthetic purposes? Revenue generation or what? Do you like the new look of Google search results page? Personally, I prefer the old one or maybe perhaps I could learn to like this new look once I get used to it.
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Google Shrunk its Search Results Page
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July 3rd, 2009
So while U.S. Anti-Trust Regulators are planning to investigate Google’s deal with book publishers to settle copyright issues amounting to $125m, Google continues to make Book Search a better and worthwhile service for their users.
If you’ve been following this issue which has been dragging on since perhaps the day Google Book Search’s inception, you’d remember that Google has received so many criticisms because of this project. And so it is not surprising that Google would not bother the investigation that much.
So, anyway it’s something that is yet to happen so we might as well talk about the new feature of Google Book Search that we mentioned.
If you would recall, during the early part of May Google introduced searching inside books wherein the context of search results can be viewed, sorted by relevancy as well as flipped through while users are viewing books.
The new feature adds a cool feature via a scrollbar that appears when users search inside a book. Hints will be displayed if you hover on the scrollbar located at the right side of the search results page. These hints will enable you to preview where in the book the search term is located. You can then click on this annotation go to that part of the book.
And basically that’s it. Just a simple enhancement and yet a useful one. Now it’s time to think about the anti-trust case.
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As Google Book Search Gets Better, Here Comes the Anti-Trust Regulators
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July 2nd, 2009
Nothing innovative here really. Just some functional features which should have been added a long time to Google’s Blog Search. Then again, better late than never. So, Google has just added RSS/ATOM subscription, list of the most popular terms that users are using, and latest blog posts from, I guess “more prominent” blogs indexed by Google Blog Search?The RSS/ATOM subscription is nothing new really. It’s just a way for users to subscribe to any topic or story using any feed reader. For those who don’t use feed readers, Google Blog Search front page can now also be added to iGoogle page as a gadget. This can be customized according to topics.
In addition, the main Google Blog Search site is now featuring to ways to get the latest blog stories - via Hot Queries and Latest posts. Hot Queries list down the most popular searches done on Google Blog Search while Latest Posts displays the latest post from popular blogs. Clicking on the
These two features will appear only on the Google Blog Search main site and will disappear on individual blog search results pages.
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Google Blog Search Adds RSS, Hot Queries, Latest Blog Posts
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July 2nd, 2009
This week we feature the interview with Fraser Kelton, working at new and exciting social media project Glue, developed by AdaptiveBlue.
1. Please share your background. What brought you to the Web 2.0? Also please tell us a few words about your [other] projects you were doing before joining AdaptiveBlue.
I’m originally from Hamilton, a beautiful Canadian city, an hour southwest of Toronto. I’ve been fascinated with computers since my first Commodore 64 and I’ve been addicted to the web since my first taste. Before joining AdaptiveBlue I was at a seed stage investment firm.
2. You’ve been with AdaptiveBlue since September, 2007. Can you describe the company? What have you been responsible for there?
AdaptiveBlue was founded in 2006 by Alex Iskold with the goal of creating a better web browsing experience by using semantic and personalization technologies.
Basically, the web is fairly dumb - it doesn’t know what you’re looking at, or who you are - and because of this a lot of what we take for granted in the physical world is lost on the web. By utilizing semantics it’s possible for your computer to understand what you are looking at online. It’s possible to automate intelligent ‘next steps’ for the user by combining this understanding with some level of personalization.
Our product, Glue, works hard to make life easier for you on the web. When you’re looking at a movie on a popular site Glue automates a lot of the hard work - it shows you which friends like the movie (and what they thought), it allows you to add it to your queue without leaving the page, you can watch clips from the movie, read a summary of the movie, etc.
Glue works across hundreds of popular sites within a number of categories - things like books, movies, music, and other everyday things that we visit online.
3. How was the idea of Glue born? How is it different from all other Web 2.0 platforms?
There are three unique benefits to Glue.
First, the service is contextual. We share a lot of information on the web. But very little of it is presented to us in a useful place at a useful time. When’s the best time for me to know that you like a movie that I may go see in the theater? It’s not when I’m looking at my Facebook newsfeed at 10 am on Tuesday morning. That information is most valuable when I’m looking at the movie on Fandango, deciding if I should go see it or not. Glue introduces context to the information that we share about the books, movies and music that we like. It brings the information to us, where and when it makes sense.
Second, the information in Glue appears automatically. When I browse to the movie’s page on Fandango, Glue appears automatically with the useful information.
Third, Glue is a web-wide network on top of popular sites about books, movies, music, etc. The benefits of Glue are delivered as you browse these sites like we all typically do.
4. I understand the idea behind the project name (plenty of possibilities for word play with "sticking" concept). Do you foresee any problems with online reputation management though? There are plenty completely irrelevant sites found for [Glue] search in Google (compare to "Twitter" for example).
We were slightly concerned with this before we launched. In the short-term, the truth is that initial growth comes from word-of-mouth that’s generated by a great product. If you tell your friend that Glue rocks - and pass them a link via email, twitter or facebook - then we win.
Additionally, because Glue is a browser add-on it’s not mission critical for us to have the best domain name. GetGlue.com works for our need nearly as well as Glue.com would (and was significantly less dollars to purchase).
We had a great moment recently - when users search for Glue on Google we are now the top search result, even above the Wikipedia entry for glue.
We have run into a problem when trying to track the word in real time search. Searching Twitter for Glue produces a lot of noise that we have to dig through to find the relevant signal. It’s not insurmountable and we’ve found that if a message is important it finds us.
5. Launching a new project is exciting. How do you (plan to) promote it?
We’ve recently launched a number of exciting new things - Glue was made available for Internet Explorer, we launched our API, and we released new support for the broad category of Topics.
Because of the unique benefit that Glue delivers we get a decent amount of press from top sites. We’ve also been lucky to capture the attention of influential early adopters. This buzz and coverage continues to drive interest in the product.
We also run an incredibly fun game through a twitter account that is one week-long puzzle. Contestants have to piece together clues to complete the game. Everyone who completes the game is entered into a drawing for free books, movies, and music.
Finally, we’re really working hard to encourage and support word-of-mouth. We have a page set-up where users can easily share the site with their friends or request free stickers and t-shirts.
6. One most thing that amazed me most was Glue interaction with members. You got in contact with me immediately after I Twittered about my joining the site. One of your employees emailed me a day later asking for the feedback. Can you describe in detail this strategy of yours. How do you incorporate social media?
This is a key strategy for us. Our community is invaluable and we really wouldn’t be where we are today without the support, feedback and contribution from our growing community (we call them Glue-rs). We use different types of social media to engage with the individuals who use Glue and help ensure that they are getting the most from the product. It’s a funny thought that customer service can be a competitive advantage but we’re seeing that that really is the case!
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Interview with Fraser Kelton of Glue, New Promising Social Network
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July 2nd, 2009
Creating new landing pages for testing is getting cheaper. And scalable.
So there are fewer and fewer reasons for SMBs not to be testing their landing pages and sites to optimize conversion rates.
Testing landing pages has long been a preoccupation of mine, particularly because of the traditionally prohibitive costs.
Even if you use a design contest at a place like 99Designs.com, you’re still paying $300 - $500 for a good graphic look and feel. Plus you often need to pay about $100 for a competent graphics slicing shop to handle your job.
(Yes, others can do this for less, but you’re taking a few risks:
- Unreliable people vanishing with your money
- Getting crap code and being unable to evaluate that
- Getting an ugly, non-functional design)
And that’s just the first landing page - you need alternatives so you can test! A simple A/B/C split test (eg with three variations) could thus run you $1,200 - $1,800 for graphics and code. (Assuming you start with completely different designs; if you just split test headlines or hero shots or calls to action, you’ll probably be able to do it for “just” $400.)
Oh, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You still need to buy traffic to send to those pages to test! All of a sudden, you’re paying $300 for the graphics, $100 for the code, maybe another $50 for finagling stuff and creating simple variations, plus traffic! This test is starting to sound like it’ll cost $1000, just to do a decent job of it!
Well, not necessarily. Here are some ideas and commentary on recent SMB landing pages I’ve seen.
1) Affiliate Theme - This is a Wordpress theme that comes pre loaded with various layout and graphical options, such that you can mix and match to customize your design.
The idea is excellent. I was partly happy and partly disappointed when I saw this, because my friend Tyler Shears and I came up with roughly the same idea on our trip back from SMX West, and it was a potential business / revenue stream. Now I’d rather not be second to market, but I am glad that this is available, affordably.
A single license goes for $97, says my friend Dev Basu in his Affiliate Theme review (which I wish were a little more review and a little less description :P), while the top line one goes for $197.
The catch with Affiliate Theme, unfortunately, is that it’s Affiliate Theme.
Google hates affiliates (unless they’re Google Money affiliates or Eric Schmidt’s buddies…). Google is quicker to penalize affiliates in the organic results, and is more inclined to slap them in PPC.
Blackhats know that if their networks of sites show a footprint (a common pattern in the code), they’ll get banned more quickly.
If you want to use the same code as hundreds or thousands of other affiliates for serious projects… do yourself a favor and test things first. See how much of a leash Google gives you. I’m speaking theoretically, but this is a risk to be aware of.
2) You can use the following process.
- Buy these three books: (i) Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug; (ii) Web Design For ROI, by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus; (iii) The Elements of User Experience Design, by Jesse James Garrett
- Read the books, and understand how to make usable sites that make money.
- Draw up a detailed wireframe for your site, based on “2)”.
- Get the graphics done cheap ($50 - $100) via a freelance site. With a wireframe, 99Designs is less valuable, because the graphic artists are just painting by numbers. It’s pretty hard to miscommunicate paint-by-numbers, even if your freelancer is a non-native English speaker imho.
- Go to the pros to have the graphics coded.
As a member of the Jewish community, I’m usually critical of my community’s associations for not making more use of testing and advanced landing page ideas and knowledge. Yet I saw an ad on Facebook that lead me to this very impressive page. I’m guessing something similar could be done with the above process.
(Click to enlarge)
- No distracting navigation,
- Clear call to action,
- The form fits entirely above the fold,
- The features are explained in terms of the benefit provided (career, personal development)
- Pictures act as a sample of the experience you can have
- The only obvious issue is that their button is inconsistent with the form headline. I’m willing to bet the text “Get More Info” or some variant on that would beat “Submit Now,” in a split test.
3) If you do have a few hundred bucks for the design and then a few hundred more bucks for the traffic, you can do really impressive stuff.
An ad I recently saw on my favourite salsa site (which has some nice social media elements, especially for an SMB site…) lead me to a landing page for my salsa school, San Tropez.
(Click to enlarge)
- Headline targets needs / desires
- Strong scent with logo, repeated “latin dance school in Montreal” phrasing etc.
- Video parallels offline live demos, which make people want to learn and become great dancers
- Video comes from national TV, and acts as social proof
- Additional social proof in “Why Choose”
- Bullets, headlines and short paragraphs for easy scanning.
- Clear call to action
- Simple form
- Multiple ways to contact them
Even though San Tropez’s agency is a competitor in my city, I have to give props to Amauta Marketing for the sweet ass job they’ve done both with San Tropez’s SEO and PPC (assuming they didn’t only do the landing page). I actually signed up for the school back in January after finding them via Google a few times.
In short, making landing pages is getting a lot cheaper, with numerous options available. And for those with slightly larger budgets, you can do really impressive things. That’s one less excuse not to test!
Gab Goldenberg shares advanced seo tips on his seo blog.
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Landing Pages On A SMB Budget
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July 2nd, 2009
The topic of your link neighbors is well discussed. It goes without saying that:
- a backlink from a resource linking to only reputable sites is good;
- a backlink from a resource that links out very seldom and is very conservative / lazy about out-linking is good.
But is it actually a separate profile for such sites (that are both selective and lazy linkers) in Google’s algorithm.
There is an interesting discussion over at WebmasterWorld.com (also mentioned at Search Engine Roundtable) calling those conservative linkers “stingy linkers” and discussing how Google may be treating them.
“links from authors who are very stingy outlinkers are more informative.”
When the number should matters:
- fewer outlinks can be a sign that they are less likely to be participating in link schemes in general;
- fewer links mean more PageRank is passed to each one;
- fewer outlinks are much easier to analyze; “stingy linker’s” out-linking strategy is in a way straightforward, while regular person’s one can be contradictory (one day he links to a good site, next he just drops a link to some “bad neighborhood”, etc.
Does the number matter actually?
If John Doe links to 20 thin affiliate sites from a page and Jane Buck links to Wikipedia, Nytimes.com, and the Internet Public Library from her page, which sends a more positive message to the search engine: The numbers of links on John and Jane’s pages, or the “TrustRank” of the outbound links’ targets?
If the number still matters…
… Then it contradicts to the statements of the official representatives who encourage webmasters to out-link generously.
So what’s your opinion?
Do you think Google profiles “stingy” linkers?
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What If Google Profiles “Lazy” or “Selective” Outlinkers?
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July 2nd, 2009
Google has disabled a Google News feature that allows personalities featured on the news items to comment on the news stories. When this was announced not so long ago, news media couldn’t quite get the idea behind it. Although it received media coverage for its ingenuity, personalities though didn’t quite like it, well at least based on the low usage of the said feature.
And so, Google probably realized that this is a futile effort at making their Google News service as interactive and social possible, it was then deactivated sometime in May. Unlike the coverage it got when it was launched, Google disabled the feature as quietly as possible.
Quoting official Google statement, Media Decoder reports:
“We’re always experimenting with ways to make Google News more useful, occasionally, this means we have to re-evaluate our efforts to be sure we focus on features that make the most sense for our users.”
What could have gone wrong with this feature? If Google wanted to elicit comments, it should have elicited comments from the users instead of the personalities featured in the news. If you were featured in a news items that runs on Google News, would you even bother commenting on the news item on the site itself?
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Google Disables Commenting in Google News
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July 1st, 2009
On Tuesday, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real were named in a lawsuit filed by some music publishing companies claiming that each of their online music stores - Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody - infringe upon their copyrights. If you’re shaking your head and wondering how that is possible, with all the royalties they pay out, you’re not alone.
This copyright business is a real mess. As consumers we know not to illegally download music or share it online, or we could potentially face crazy fines from the RIAA, such as the $1.92 million one recently handed down to Minnesota mom who downloaded 24 songs. For websites and companies looking to distribute or allow the playing of music on their sites, it’s far more complicated than that and the stakes are incredibly higher. In fact the copyright laws as related to music are so complicated that even places we consider to be legitimate sources are being slapped with lawsuits alledging infringements.
In the case of this latest lawsuit, the publishers claim that all three companies may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but didn’t license the copyright on the compositions. There are a whole lot of details out yet explaining the legalities and issues at hand in the case, but it is assumed these music services struck deals with record labels, but somehow the publishers and labels are separate entities and the rights are separate.
In many cases we assume that the publishing rights were also covered by the major record labels. But in some cases the publishing rights were owned by independent companies, and the claim looks to be that the publishing rights were never cleared with them.
What this means is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all streaming music that they only had partial rights too. And since the publishers consider each instance a song is played to be an infringement… yikes! They could be looking at some pretty hefty fines if the court agrees.
If you’re interested in reading the entire court filing, which I will warn you is a massive 104 pages long, here you go. Have at it. In the meantime, we’ll definitely be following this closely. Any ruling in favor of the music publishers could potentially have major ramifications for all three companies. I imagine that Google right now is pretty darn happy that they’ve stayed out the music game, and that their search engine competitors are being tested.
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Microsoft, Real, & Yahoo All Sued for Music Store Copyright Infringement
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July 1st, 2009
As real-time search and Twitter’s growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people - bloggers or celebrities.
While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this “prominent” people, you will have to construct your search terms like - “Name Twitter” or “Name Tweets” or “@Name”, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these people’s latest Tweets?
It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. That’s more like a “real-time” search, right?
Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:
We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.
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Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of
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July 1st, 2009
Yesterday Twitter sneakily unveiled a new user interface for both the “followers” and “following”. While I personally believe that their efforts could have been better spent on stabilizing their servers and working out those infamous “overcapacity” issues, the change is a good one.
First of all, let’s go over the changes that they made. On your list of “Followers” and those that you are “Following”, Twitter used to display the person’s avatar and username, and the option to follow. Little other identifiable information was presented, so if you wanted to find out more about the person you’d have to click on their name and check out their page.
Now, when you view “Followers” or “Following”, you’re presented with a lot more information, almost eliminating the need to click over to the person’s page to get the full scoop on them. Now you’ll see not only their avatar and username, but also their real name, latest tweet and location. On the righthand side where the “Follow” button used to be, there’s now a new button. Click on it and you’re presented with several action options: @ Mention xxxx, Direct Message xxxx, Follow xxxx, and Unfollow xxxx. So it’s nice in that there’s a lot more information available in one place and there’s less clicking involved.
Here’s a quick peek at my “Followers” page so you can see the changes (click to view full size):
What’s this mean for search engine optimization? Well, we all know by now that SEO is far more than just link building. It’s also a lot of marketing, and if you’re on Twitter it’s an excellent way to market your website. I was a little late in the game getting my site involved with Twitter, but not too late, and it is definitely paying off in terms of gaining new traffic, new loyal readers, new readers, and even some advertisers. It also helps us to connect with our readers in a way that’s just not possible through comment forms on our site alone. This UI update really helps to save time in checking out potential followers, or people you want to follow, especially if you’re constantly bombarded with new followers or manually hunt for new ones to follow yourself.
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Twitter Unveils New UI; What This Means for SEO
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