Here are some of my favorite Google hoaxes from April Fool’s.   Click the picture to be taken to Google’s April Fool’s day hoax page.

Google Blimp Ads

A workout program for your fingers.

A job posting seeking someone to fill in auto-complete data in Google's search box

Voicealyzer stops you from drunk-dialing

Google Docs Motion lets you spell words with your body

Google Gmail Motion lets you control Gmail through gestures

Google Cow lets you see inside the cow

Google Friendship - QUICKLY slapped with an "april fool" stamp

The Chrome Light extension turns Chrome to a text-based browser

Did you know that you are required to notify your users that you are using Google Analytics via your privacy policy?  If not, you do now.  If you haven’t updated your privacy policy to reflect this, you are in violation of the Google Analytics Terms of Service!  According to paragraph seven in the Google Analytics Terms of Service;

“You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data.”

Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it!

Today on Webmasterworld there was a discussion about Google showing fewer than 10 organic results for certain searches.  I did some checking and was able to see that in fact Google is showing fewer than ten results.  It looks like Google is experimenting with displaying other resources they think people may be interested in for certain searches.  At the time I checked, most “commercial” terms were unaffected.  However, if you were the number 10, or in some cases the number 9 result in the organic listings you may see your site dropped to page two which would have a huge impact on your traffic.  Numbers 9 and 10 don’t get a lot of traffic, but page two gets next to none.  If you had enough listings at the bottom of the first page that got dropped, you’d see a significant drop in traffic.  Every time I’ve seen Google experiment with adding things to the results, it eventually sticks.

Page 1 just got more competitive!

A search for the band "The Killers" produces 9 organic results. (click the image for a larger view)

A search for the band called The Shins produces 8 organic results. (click the image for a larger view)

As you are all aware, Google has implemented website previews in the results.  The previews show a screenshot of a site and will call out any text on the page related to your search query.  This makes onpage SEO even more important than before and also presents some unique challenges for websites with flash.

Google’s preview bot doesn’t obey the rules like Google’s normal bot.  The preview bot ignores robots.txt rules and disregards alternate flash displaying big blank chunks instead.   I am running a Google Preview test right now to show that a website can still have something show up in place of their flash piece even though Google won’t display the alternate content you define in SWFObject.  As soon as the page is cached and has a preview I will publish a post with the findings, the code that works, and the reason you cannot afford to ignore this “glitch” in Google’s Preview bot no matter how temporary it might be.

Another facet of Google’s algorithm is being polished.  Google is now taking into account merchant reviews to determine whether or not a website deserves a good ranking.  They are looking at this metric because of an article published in the New York Times about a company that was being intentionally abusive to their customers because the bad reviews the customers were writing were generating links to the company and inflating their ranking.  This appalled Google so they did something about it.

Google considered several options to solve the problem.  One option discussed was using “sentiment analysis” to identify negative remarks in posts and make those posts count as negative votes for a company.  The problem with that, Google said, was that it would be extremely difficult to find political candidates because of all the dissenters.  Another option Google is considering is displaying merchant ratings alongside their results.  You can already see some of this happening in PPC ads, but they are talking about implementing it in the organic results.

What was Google’s solution?  Well, at this point it’s not exactly clear.  They understandably weren’t very forthcoming in their article about this problem.  Google rarely gives much insight in to exactly what is going on with their algorithm.

If you’re wondering how this applies to you, just think of the power this gives to your competitors.  If they are smart enough to launch a negative campaign – and do it in such a way that even the almighty Google can’t trace the source, then you’re in for a big hit in the rankings.  Very scary stuff especially when it’s first implemented and is open to gaming.  I don’t really see how anyone who is smart could be stopped no matter how sophisticated the algorithm gets.

What’s your company’s best bet?  Hire an expert SEO with a deep understanding of online reputation management and pay the RM “insurance.”  It can take three to four YEARS to recover after bad press and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Google announced in it’s blog that they are launching a fashion boutique website aimed at delivering results catered to your tastes.  You curate your own online boutique by adding clothing and items to it that you like, and based on a visual matching algorithm developed by Like.com (acquired by Google) the system will make recommendations to you that match your “style.” As Google says in their blog post, the system “uses computer vision and machine learning technology to visually analyze your taste and match it to items you would like.”

Google started by partnering with a selection of what they call “taste-makers” – people who determine what looks good and what does not.  They chose some designers and some celebrities to help with the project.  The taste-makers told Google what styles, colors, brands and silhouettes they liked, and what they did not like.  The taste-makers also took a visual quiz to teach the site to understand style genres.  One of the features I think people will find helpful is the “complete the look” feature that pairs fashion accessories with outfits.

Google is not selling the items, nor is there an ecommerce interface with the system – yet.  The system simply adds to your boutique based on your interests and lets you go to their third party website to make your purchases.

As an SEO this raises three questions for me.  My first question is how will Google determine the items that will be displayed to you?  I suspect it will be based on the amount the third party fashion site is willing to pay for a lead or product placement.  My second question is will Google’s new website be “competing” in the results for fashion related traffic?  If so I don’t see how that’s fair.  How could any boutique outrank property owned by Google?  So far there’s nothing really to worry about with ranking because everything is noindexed and nofollowed.  Third, isn’t this just a thin affiliate site?  Google hates thin affiliates.

Boutiques.com is a very interesting site and I think it will have a big impact on how the web works.

Boutiques.com Launched by Google

Google has settled with a class action suit against it’s Buzz social networking program that is integrated into Gmail.  If you opted into Buzz, your privacy was at risk.  The suit said that Google violated their user’s privacy by automatically adding Buzz to Gmail without asking for a user if they wanted it or not.  Google has settled the suit by putting $8.5 million into a fund to help raise awareness of privacy issues.  That’s a pretty lame settlement.  Below is the email I got on the subject.

Google has changed the way they display results for locally-related queries.  They now show about seven local results for a query along with a rating of each site before you ever see the organic results at the bottom of the page.  The page now has a total of thirteen listings, but only six of those are organic results.  This will probably tank traffic for webistes that rely on their organic listings to drive most of their local traffic.  Notice in the screenshot below that 60% of the height of the listings is now taken by the local listings.  This is a major shift for Google.  Why are they doing this?  It’s Christmas shopping time and people are going to be looking to Google to help them find things locally.  This just reinforces my previous post about local search optimization and my article on local search in the KC Small Business Magazine.

Google Mixes in Local Results and Reviews (click for a larger view)

I just noticed that Google is testing a new feature where you get a preview of a website by hovering over their result in the listings.  It’s very interesting to see this especially since it’s covering up the PPC ads on the right.  I suspect that they will change the way this displays because their main money maker is PPC ads.

Google's Website Preview - Right from the results! (click for larger view)

This is changing by the minute.  After a couple of minutes of first seeing this in my browser, I started to see snippets of text included with the previews:

Google is pulling summary text to display in the preview (click for larger view)

It’s a sad state of affairs with foundational SEO is ignored, by SEOs!  One of the first things I tell my clients is that you HAVE to have well-written, targeted, unique, and properly optimized meta tags.  Your page’s title and description tags are your first impression on your potential visitors.  The title should be a complete thought accomplished in a specific number of characters. It’s your first chance to attract attention.  The second most important tag is the often ignored meta description tag.  This tag, when properly formatted, controls the text that is displayed below your blue link in the search engines.  If it’s not properly formatted, Google will grab text from your page and display it.  You’d better pay attention to it!!  This is your best chance (aside from ranking) to attract a visitor.

Check out the screenshot below that highlights all the deficiencies of my competitors in the search results for “kansas city internet marketing.”  Come on guys… you’re supposed to be pros!  The worst offending result is emfluence – the description tag they wrote in their HTML is so long that Google ignored it and grabbed some text from their page.  Their title tag is just their company name.  Luckily Google pulled some text that includes “interactive marketing” because otherwise their listing is completely ineffective.  Check out their title tag – it’s ONE word and that word is their name!  The title tag is a super important to the ranking and relevance of a website and they’ve completely ignored it.  I hear good things about emfluence, and they have some serious money, but they’ve really missed the boat here.

Inexcusable oversights in optimization by SEO companies! (click for full size)

If you’re going to contract an SEO for your company, you should check out their site in the results. Do they rank well? Is their result crafted well? If not, how can you be sure they’ll be able to help you?