The Cynic’s Guide to Interpreting Google
Okay, we like to find the hidden meaning behind what google says poke fun at google, right?
Yesterday, Google’s Non-Profits Team Google Grants published a post on their official blog, about a training session they held recently in Washington D.C. Their blog entry details the material that was taught to campaign managers on how to move sites up in natural search results.
We’ve taken this opportunity to test the beta version of our soon to be patented Google PR Cynic translation application (GCTA), AKA Goognic™, on the Google Grants Team’s recent post.
| Google Grants Team wrote: | Goognic™ Translation |
|---|---|
At a recent non-profit training held in our D.C. office, I got the chance to teach a group of issue campaign managers the basics of “search engine optimization” (SEO), or how to earn a spot for your content that is closer to the top of Google’s natural (left-hand side) search results |
At a not-immediately-profitable training session, our Google Propaganda Team got the chance to explain how to organize website content in order to help the successful targeting of Adwords campaigns. |
It was a rewarding experience because we were able to take what’s often a technical conversation and make it feel like something everyone could (and should) do. |
Our strategy here was two-pronged. From those of whom that will achieve results by following the guidelines, Google shall reap the rewards of better organized sites added to the index (we’ll profit when they switch to Adwords, once their site gets buried on page 6 a couple of “updates” down the line). Those that are overwhelmed by the whole “SEO thing” will realize there is really only one way to go. Did I mention Adwords? |
Indeed, when most people hear the words “search engine optimization,” they figure it’s too technical for them or that it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re running a long-term education or awareness campaign, you need to know how to improve the chances that interested users will find your information through natural search results. It’s just as important as learning how to use your Google Grant effectively. |
See previous section. Oh and by the way. The Adwords store called. They want your rankings back. |
Fortunately, much of what you can accomplish with SEO doesn’t require any programming or technical skills, but it does require a big-picture awareness of your issue. Because ultimately, you’re not trying to rise to the top of any one search results page, but rather to make your site more relevant to the whole search picture, which means designing your site, sections, and sub-pages with the most high-demand search terms related to your issue in mind |
Don’t be intimidated by all this SEO stuff, because if after all your hard work your site still doesn’t rank, well hey, that’s ok, because an Adwords campaign will probably work REAL sweet now! |
Doing well in high-demand search results pages requires that you first know what search terms or keywords are most popular. Take concepts and terms you discuss on your site and test them against related terms using tools like Google’s Keyword Tool and Insights for Search. Make sure you’re developing individual pages centered around what people are looking for, using the language they use |
Lets get to know some of the tools you’ll be needing to run your first PPC campaign! Sktool, Analytics, Google’s Keyword Tool. Mmmmm, do you smell what the Goog is cooking? |
Use these high-demand keywords where they accurately describe your content, especially in page titles, section headings, and in URLs. If you have lots of images or interactive graphics, make sure your most important content appears in text too, because the Googlebot doesn’t read images. |
Googlebot has been able to “read” images for over a year. Nobody’s seemed to notice so far, so we’ll hold out a little longer from telling you, we don’t want to have to deal with curtailing a landslide of image sculpting. Well not until we endorse it first. (Ok, that was cheap, sorry, I couldn’t resist) |
Finally, understand that the number and quality of other sites that link to your content determines much of your ranking in search results. Make sure you know the other online players on your issue, and encourage them to link to you. Starting a blog or Twitter feed is a great way to keep users abreast of the latest updates to your site and encourages them to link to you too |
We’ll be acquiring Twitter soon. Get ready to transfer all your Twitter profiles to your Google accounts, suckahhhhs! |
Ok ok, maybe I went a little far this time. But how could I resist? Google has a working++ business model, and I respect that. They’ve done many great things for the search industry, and will continue to do so, while making a profit (Go figure). But who says we can’t entertain the troops in the meantime.
In case you passed on clicking through to the Google Grants site, here are the slides from the recent training session. Enjoy!
Bing’s White Paper Category in Need of a 301 Bandaid
By now, those of us even remotely up to date with what’s happening in the search industry know that Bing released its Webmaster Whitepaper almost 2 weeks ago.
I find it refreshing that the Bing Webmaster Center Team has referred to SEO as an opportunity to help your website stand out from the crowd
in the last couple of pages of the document. Not to infer that SEO will change so much on account of Bing, but it’s nice to see the Bing team demonstrate some examples of how the search engine’s categorized results lists will affects SEO efforts in general.
I’m pretty surprised however that in the 12 days since the whitepaper’s release, there hasn’t been more community response to the post, with a mere 32 comments, and very few questions.
In all honesty, I’m not too keen on the stripping of capital letters from comments on Bing Community, but I can live with that.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like what I see so far with this search engine. But what I am having a hard time understanding however, is that in the 6 posts of Bing’s ‘announcement’ ‘annoucement’ category made since May 28 2009, nobody has bothered to correct the typo and 301 redirect to the proper spelling of ‘announcement’.
Is it just me or does $80 million to $100 million (on marketing and advertising for Bing), not go as far as it used to?
Nofollow no longer an effective tool for PageRank sculpting
In what is arguably the biggest SEO news so far this year, Matt Cutts announced yesterday that using nofollows is no longer a solution to preventing loss of a site’s or page’s link juice, and hasn’t been for over a year!
When the rel=nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005, it was meant as an annotation for not “vouching” for a link. Virtually all forum and blog pages have nofollow attributes associated with visitor generated content, as a means of instructing search engines not to follow (crawl) these untrusted user comments or guestbook entries. Not long after the introduction of rel=”nofollow”, we learned to minimize leakage of our sites’ total allocated PageRank by ’sculpting’ PR with the attribute as well as to push it to more important pages of our sites. We can now cross this technique off the list.
In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchor text. However, we find out now through Matt Cutts (who else) that nofollow links no longer conserve the linkjuice from an outgoing nofollow link in order to be be divided among other links on the page in question.
Old PageRank Algorithm
2 separate cases of a page with “x” amount of available link juice.
As a somewhat simplified example: In the original PageRank algorithm, a page of PR10 would have passed PR2 each to 5 regular links (fig.1). The same page would have passed PR2.5 each to 4 regular links and PR 0 to the nofollow link in fig. 2.
New PageRank Algorithm
Page with “x” amount of available link juice
As you can see in fig 3, nofollowing a link no longer passes extra juice through to the remaining live links. Many SEOs are now considering cutting down substantially on outgoing links, or going back to previous PR Sculpting methods such as:
- Embedding robots.txt-blocked iframes containing certain links
- Embedding Java, Flash or other non-parseable applications to contain certain links
- JavaScript redirect scripts with access blocked for search engine bots
Many SEOs are disillusioned by the fact that using internal nofollows were advocated as best practice by the powers that be at the Big G, and now feel they’re being told the opposite. There will be a lot of speculating, calculating and theorizing in the SEO community on this one in the upcoming weeks. I’ll be back with news on this one soon enough, because I know there’ll be some.
Forbes Survey Gives SEO Big Thumbs Up
Forbes Media has released the results of its “Ad Effectiveness Survey“, revealing the digital marketing preferences among senior marketing executives polled.
The survey, published yesterday was conducted between February 19, 2009 and March 19, 2009 in order to better understand behaviors and beliefs regarding digital marketing, and to predict areas of growth and weakness in the industry over the next six months.
Some of the highlights of the study
- Search Engine Optimization, Email and e-newsletter marketing are by far the 3 leading methods of digital marketing among respondents.
- Ad networks were the most unpopular, with 50% of respondents stating that the results did not meet their expectations.
- The tools considered most effective for generating conversions were SEO (48%), email and e-newsletter marketing (46%), and PPC/search marketing (32%)
- In the coming six months, half of the respondents expect that viral marketing (54%) and SEO (50%) will likely see the biggest increases. Ad networks see the highest percentage of expected decreases (52%).
Forbes Media includes Forbes and Forbes.com, the #1 business site on the Web that reaches 18.6 million people monthly. The results of the “Ad Effectiveness Survey” are available at www.forbes.com/adinfo/research.html
Microsoft launches Bing Search Engine 2 Days Early
Bing was originally scheduled for launch June 3, 2009, however, Microsoft’s “Decision Engine” went live today, and aims to compete with Google and divert its share with $80 Million in marketing.
In announcing the search engine May 28, 2009 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Bing (AKA Kumo) hopes to help users receive the information they’re searching for faster and that the decision engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload. When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.
Bing Search Engine will replace Live search, and focuses on 4 key areas:
The main feature that I notice from the start is that aside from regular search results, certain queries offer categorized search results in the sidebar as well as related search, as seen below.
Also of interest, each thumbnail in the results of video searches will play the first 30 seconds of the video on mouse over, giving you a sneak preview before clicking the link. The world of Search Engine optimization just got another toy to play with – or rip apart, depending who’s sitting in front of the toy box.
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