SEO Friendly Flash?

Apparently Google is now pretty good at crawling flash.

Matt Cutts on Using Search Usage Data to Fight Spam

A couple weeks back we mentioned that Google's Peter Norvig stated that Google does not use search usage data directly in their relevancy algorithms. Yesterday Matt Cutts made a post on the official Google blog stating that Google does look at search logs / usage data to determine how large spam attacks are and how well new anti-spam measures are doing

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it's essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go "back in time" and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

Google Website Trends & The Death of Privacy

Google launched a new version of Google Trends which includes website traffic estimates, and highlights....

  • visitor locations
  • top keywords
  • related sites

You need to be logged into a Google account to get a numerical scale on the traffic graph, but you can still get the general trend graphs and other data without logging in. Google also allows you to compare up to 5 sites at any given time

Search Engine Land reported that Google Trends...

This tool bases its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Those who wondered why using Google Analytics is a bad idea just got a taste of why it is a bad idea! Sure the data is only aggregated anonymously, but with Google owning 70% of the search market and having access to your analytics data you never know how deep they could decide to go through the data for competitive purposes. Is your site a keyword source for AdWords? How much of your data will appear on Google Trends?

You can't export the data yet and it only shows data for high traffic sites, but it is a great free tool for marketers.

  • If sites do not show any data then they are probably either low traffic sites or penalized.
  • The related sites feature lets you know how related your audience is to other sites, which is useful for determining how familiar their audience is or if you are reaching a new audience when buying ads.
  • The top keywords shows you what competing sites are getting traffic from, and if those terms tend to be more brand oriented or more generic in nature...which is useful when thinking about the stability of a website you may want to purchase.

Fred Wilson did a review of Google Trends, comparing Google Analytics to Compete.com and comScore across 3 high traffic websites.

Since we are investors in these three companies and know what their internal numbers are saying, I can safely say that ComScore and Compete are lower but directionally correct. Google is like Alexa in that they don't report absolute numbers but even if they did, they are not directionally correct on this particular set of companies.

The fact that Google is even compared to the analytics firms with years of experience and algorithmic tuning shows how easily they could take a leading position in this market if they wanted it. Google will improve their accuracy, and at any point in time they could chose to expand the top 10 keywords to the top 100 or top 1,000.

The AP threatened to sue a blogger for quoting small passages, and at the same time the mainstream media is trying to redefine copyright for their own benefit. Eventually much of the mainstream media will start looking like eHow and Mahalo. Your content compiled and slightly rewritten by a third party. Your keyword list is their money list. Thousands of people are competing against you while you read this sentence. As your data leaks it is going to be tough to stay competitive unless you are often the topic of conversation. Public Relations is the only PR that matters.

I am probably a bit less pessimistic than Michael is at the moment, but firms are using G.P.S. data to create "reality mining" for offline analytics, predicting everything from traffic patterns, where to buy an ad, and where to place another store. A recent NYT article highlighted some such services:

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”

The idea of staying competitive through obscurity is obsolete. So you may as well be a loud mouth, encourage users to be loud mouths, and build a big brand that helps protect your plot from competitive market forces.

Peter Norvig - Google Does Not Directly Use Search Usage Data in Relevancy Algorithms

Anand Rajaraman recently spoke with Peter Norvig, who revealed that:

  • their best machine learning algorithms is already as good as, and sometimes better than their current hand roled relevancy algorithms
  • but they still prefer to use their hand roled algorithms because of hubris, and they feel that machine learning algorithms may be more inclined to have catastrophic errors on searches that do not look much like those in the training set

I think a third piece (that you will never hear Google employees admit to) is that as the web's structure changes Google feels they have use FUD to police the web and help ensure Google has revenue entry points into important markets. In their 2007 Google search quality rater guidelines they used a typical Commission Junction link as an example of a sneaky redirect. It is doubtful that Google would ever do that with AdSense code or a Performics link (since they own those).

In the follow up post about his chat with Peter Norvig, Anand highlighted how Google measures relevancy. In the post he stated why Google prefers internal review data relative to using direct usage data:

Peter confirmed that Google does collect such [usage] data, and has scads of it stashed away on their clusters. However -- and here's the shocker -- these metrics are not very sensitive to new ranking models! When Google tries new ranking models, these metrics sometimes move, sometimes not, and never by much. In fact Google does not use such real usage data to tune their search ranking algorithm.

Exposure from top rankings already creates a self-reinforcing effect because of the power of defaults. Further tying in search usage data directly into relevancy might not add much benefit to searchers, especially as more people click on the first search result. Anand further explained why direct usage data is not used to refine Google's relevancy algorithms:

The first is that we have all been trained to trust Google and click on the first result no matter what. So ranking models that make slight changes in ranking may not produce significant swings in the measured usage data. The second, more interesting, factor is that users don't know what they're missing.

Google AdWords Price Fixing

In Google's commentary about their ad deal with Yahoo! they wrote:

This does not let Google raise prices for advertisers. Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that.

Aspects of that statement are categorically untrue, perhaps even lies. In many competitive markets with lots of participants the ad market may set ad price minimums, but Google...

  1. publicly talks about how they tweak the number of ads they display to maximize revenues
  2. uses quality scores that allow them to give friendly businesses discounts
  3. Google not only favors its own ads, but also creates custom ad units that only it can buy

Abitrary Pricing Floors

Google has articles in the media talking about how they tweak dials to optimize revenues. While many competitors have increased the number of ads they show, Google has been showing ads across a smaller portion of their search queries, as shown via this comScore data.

If you do not pay Google enough they simply will not show your ads, even if there are no competitors. I have ads where I am the only bidder and I get a 17% clickthrough rate - and yet there is a 17 cent price on those clicks, rather than a true market floor. Bid too low and your ads simply do not show up - even if you are bidding against nobody.

Preferential Pricing

Getting your account Google slapped is a well known phrase amongst many affiliate marketers. One day your ads are going great, and then the next day every keyword has a minimum bid of $5 or $10 per click.

On the flip side of that, many click arbitrage based business models are only profitable *because* a publisher gained access to a high authority trusted Google partner which allowed cheaper ad prices for the same keywords & ad units.

Google has went as far as publishing information about the types of business models that they do not like. Unlike acceptable business models like reverse billing fraud and infidelity, selling ebooks on sites with ads might merit a low landing page quality score.

Google Only Ad Units

Google products are advertised aggressively across Google's content network. Given that internal Google product benefit from brand awareness, bidding with funny money, and cheaper ad prices (since they don't have to give Google a cut) others with similar business models can not compete.

When Google recently entered the mortgage lead market they gave themselves an ad title of 49 characters, and a dropdown that is not available to other advertisers.

Google Does Not Like Flash Welcome Screens, Will the Google Browser?

Philipp Lessen pointed out that Google now offers a link in the search results to skip intro on flash intro pages.

Philipp also mentioned rumors of a Google Browser from February.

Google also launched a major offline advertising campaign in Moscow, hoping to gain market share on Russian search leader Yandex.

Google SERP-rot, Paid Links, & Spam Classification

I talked to a search engineer a few months back and he mentioned that he thought one of my sites and one of the promotions associated with it were both spammy. This month I came across a random blog comment where a person talked about how great that search company was for showing them that same site! The only problem was that since that site was new and we still need more links we had to pay Google for those clicks.

Meanwhile a network of older established poorly designed English third language sites dominate Google's organic search results, and keep getting self-reinforcing links that make it virtually impossible to compete with them without buying links. But our AdWords ads and viral marketing we did lead to some exposure where editors from other companies got to evaluate our site.

  • A number of mainstream media companies (newspapers and radio shows) mentioned us on their site.
  • A leading search company featured a link to our site aggressively in their portal (sorry I can't say more than that or a partner would kill me for doing so).
  • Mahalo listed our site with a cool rating and listed many deep links from our site on their overview page.
  • The Yahoo! Directory listed our site for free.

Had we not paid Google $1,000's, the organic links we got never would have existed, and our site might never rank. Amongst most other search related companies they generally love our site. But because I am associated with the site and I am an aggressive marketer the site is seen in a different light by search engineers at Google, in spite of providing a better user experience than the outdated garbage Google currently ranks (as indicated by searchers and editorial judgement from human reviewers at other search companies).

I am not complaining here, as we are on page 2 and getting close to page 1, but most content producers are not as aggressive at marketing as we have been, and some of the best content might take many years to rank - if ever. The bigger issues at hand are

  • Most English speaking webmasters with trusted sites use Google, thus if something is not in Google it is hard for it to get the quality links needed to rank unless the webmaster buys AdWords or spends a lot on public relations
  • many employees of other search companies are likely using Google search
  • any warp in Google's view of the web (like SERP staleness & bias toward huge media companies) creates opportunity for another search company to be born, and to some extent validate arbitrage plays by companies like Mahalo.

By relying on old websites to clog up the search results Google virtually guarantees that you need to buy links to rank a new site. The only question is who is getting paid!

Google to Police 'The Truth'

Recently a fake story was highlighted in the mainstream media, and the SEO behind it also mentioned it on their site. The SEO space as a whole began debating the legitimacy of such tactics, and Matt Cutts even commented on the issue:

My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this:

“Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”

There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.

The irony of this statement, as Nick Wilsdon pointed out, was that not only did Fox News syndicate the fake story, but they got in trouble in the past for attributing fake quotes to John Kerry. A person coming up with a clever story to get a few inbound links is nowhere near as sleazy as lying to try to sway the public vote for presidency...but it is much easier for Matt to police the small and weak webmasters while turning a blind eye to similar (but worse) offenses from larger players.

Morals of the story:

  • If you talk about exceptionally effective SEO strategies expect them to lose their effectiveness (search engineers are active in public discourse because it is easier to control people through fear than it is to write a better relevancy algorithm).
  • If your technique works so well that it is featured on many SEO blogs and/or draws a specific public comment from Matt Cutts you have went too far (sheep must be slaughtered to control the herd).
  • If you are going to lie do it in a way that builds a fan base. If you have such a large fan base that most of your traffic comes from channels other than Google it is virtually impossible for Google to block you (unless you use hate speech that extends beyond the lies and spin that are typical on networks like Fox News).

If you want to understand how the mainstream media works I highly recommend investing 5 hours and $50 into the following 3 DVDs. As more time passes Google's ad fueled business model will lead to them essentially replicating the flaws and biases of the mainstream media.

  • Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky talks about how the media operates to shape public opinion and policy.
  • Outfoxed - how Fox News spins the news to fuel their desired political agendas.
  • The Fog of War - in this DVD Robert S. McNamara talks about how he used spin and media control to try to minimize blowback from the Vietnam War.

A New Kind of Duplicate Content - GoogleBot Random Form Crawl

Michael VanDeMar highlights how a website lost an important page to duplication across a new not so important page, which was added to the Google index by Google filling out forms.

If you have limited PageRank and a Google accessible form or search box you may want to block them from indexing output URLs via a robots noindex meta tag or your robots.txt file.

Why is Google Buying Links From SEMPO?

Google, which has arbitrarily forced its will to use nofollow on the web (and declared link buyers and sellers who do not use the tag as spammers) is buying a PageRank 7 link from SEMPO.org.

You would think that if Google wants to set new proprietary standards they would follow them as well. And what better spot to start following them than with a trade organization promoting search engine marketing?

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