SEOMike Search Marketing Blog

Firefox 10 Makes Add-ons Compatible by Default

SEOMike — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:55:04 +0000

Firefox has beaten Internet Explorer to the coveted version 10. Is anyone really paying attention? Not really. Firefox switched their update numbering scheme which is why their version numbers keep climbing so rapidly. They adopted a more Chrome-like system of dropping support for older versions which is why you get fewer 8.1.4.5 type versions.

Mozilla say that Firefox 10 makes add-ons compatible by default	Installing Firefox 10 shows that not all add-ons have been made compatible by default
Firefox 10 scores a 2,977 in Pacekeeper's benchmarks	Chrome still trounces Firefox in speed with a score of 4,893 in Pacekeeper's benchmarks

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Google Posting Emergency Alerts on Maps

SEOMike — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:03:26 +0000

Google has a new layer of information to add to their maps feature that shows areas with public alerts. The notifications are for floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, wind advisories, winter weather advisories, heat advisories, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It’s a pretty neat feature available at http://www.google.org/publicalerts

Google Public Alerts - Click for a larger view

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Google Indexing My Blog in 30 seconds!

SEOMike — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:15:39 +0000

This morning I made a post about Google’s upcoming privacy policy changes. Google found it and cached it within 30 seconds of posting. That’s incredible when you think of how many websites and pages they have to keep up with! Check out the screenshots below that show WordPress’ timestamp on my entry, a screenshot of when I chatted the link to someone so they could read it, and a screenshot of Google’s cache time.

Wordpress Post Time

I usually chat my new blog posts to my friends and employees. This image shows when I chatted the link to someone using Google chat.

This shows that there was about 30 seconds from the time my post was published to the time it was indexed

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Google Privacy Policy Update

SEOMike — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:21:38 +0000

Google announced yesterday that they are going to change their privacy policies and consolidate more than 60 of them into one document. Cool, right? Well, the change comes with a new “benefit” for Google users – that they will track you across multiple services. Google will follow you across search, Google+, YouTube, gmail, and any other property they own including Android phones. That’s right, if you have an Android phone you’re required to sign in with a Google account. Oh, the best part, you cannot opt out. If you use any of their services, you have to be spied on. Don’t get me wrong, Google was always collecting data about you and your online behavior, but now they have more ability to stitch that information into a comprehensive profile. For example, they plan on sending you a notification that you might be late for a scheduled meeting based on your current location, your calendar appointment, and the current traffic conditions on the route from your location to your meeting. Neat, but very creepy if unsolicited. Don’t even get me started on what this means for their ability to advertise to you. Scary.

Not only will Google become more intrusive into their users lives, it also means big things to SEOs because of an an even bigger loss of referrer data in analytics. Google Analytics used to report on all the keywords that people used to find your site in Google’s search engine. This is very important to measure the importance and ROI of your organic campaign. They recently changed analytics to “protect” Google users data by removing referrer information for any logged in user. (Protect, or hoard the data?) That means that anytime a Google user is logged in they do not send keyword data to analytics and people like me have no idea what they searched to find our sites. When Google requires more people to be logged in, more organic keyword information will be lost and being an SEO will become even more difficult.

Guess what data isn’t impacted… Adwords. That’s right. If you pay for advertisements on Google, you get your referrer data. Free = no data. Paid = data. I think I see a trend here and I don’t like it. They are trying to choke us out in favor of making a few more bucks. I wonder how long until there are no “free” organic results on the first page at all. I can see it now – a list of paid advertisements on the first page which are disguised so well that people don’t notice and all organic results pushed to page two. Google has already pushed the number four organic listing “below the fold” for many users (depending on screen size) by expanding the blank space at the top of the page. Basically they added 40px worth of blank space that pushed off an organic result so paid ads were more prominent. This is even worse for queries that have local relevance and Google Maps results push organic all the way off the page.

I also wonder what this change means to websites that currently embed things from Google products like YouTube, Google Custom Search, Analytics, Adsense, etc. If a user has to be logged in to access any Google service, won’t that mean that these embedded services won’t work for people who aren’t logged in?

I don’t like Larry Page’s Google. It’s getting evil.

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Google Search Results for Punctuation

SEOMike — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:14:05 +0000

You now have no excuse for not knowing the names of the punctuation marks on your keyboard because Google will now deliver results for them! Until now Google just ignored the queries, but not anymore! I played around with queries for all the punctuation on my keyboard, and it seems that the only thing Google wouldn’t respond to was the asterisk (because it’s a wildcard). In my tests most of the number one results are Wikipedia definitions for the symbol. I found the first result for the : symbol to be particularly amusing which you can see below. Go to Google and work through the symbols on your keyboard and see what happens.

Google results for a query for the ":" symbol

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Google to Penalize Ads Above Fold

SEOMike — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:35:54 +0000

I’ve long been aware that Google looks at the layout of web pages to identify sections that might be advertising, ROS links, static content, dynamic content, etc. They’ve used the information they found in those sections to either give “extra” credit to the content in the sections, or ignore the content all together. Google announced, via Matt Cutts, on the 19th that they are going to start “demoting” pages that don’t “have a lot of content above the fold.” According to Google, this change won’t affect sites that have a normal amount of ads above the fold, just sites that stuff the top part of their site with advertisements. I always cringe a little when an algorithm is used to interpret website designs.

Google say that if you decide to update your page layout, the layout algorithm will automatically reflect your changes the next time they index your website. Unfortunately, it can take weeks for Google in index large websites.

Google used this opportunity to promote their Browser Size Tool which allows you to check your site in several different resolutions. When you enter your URL your site is brought up with an overlay that shows what percentage of people can see the content. For example, in the screenshot below, 90% of the people that visit my site can see about 50% of the page. Not bad. It will be interesting to see where Google decides the cutoff is for websites that have “too many” ads.

SEOMike site in Google's browser size tool

A very interesting little nugget at the bottom of Matt’s blog post said that Google plans on rolling out over 500 improvements for search this year. 500 is a lot. It’s going to be an interesting year

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SOPA Protest Impact

SEOMike — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:24:34 +0000

Yesterday’s anti SOPA / PIPA protests were quite effective. Thousands of sites went “dark” and thousands more issued statements or offered some kind of graphic in protest to SOPA / PIPA. As a result many major supporters, including some of the authors, have withdrawn their support. Though the bills were not killed, they were significantly damaged. Below are some interesting statistics about the impact of yesterday’s protests.

7 million people signed Google’s petition to stop the legislation
Google’s petition was +1′d 130,000 times
Google’s Facebook post about SOPA / PIPA received over 4,600 likes, and 1,100+ shares
3.9 million tweets went out about SOPA / PIPA
162 million users saw Wikipedia’s blackout page
8 million people used Wiki’s blackout page to look up their representative’s contact info
12,000 people commented on the Wikipedia Foundation page
323,000 Flickr pictures were darkened during the protest
Reddit blacked out their site meaning their users didn’t spend 18 million minutes viewing their content
WordPress’ protest was seen by about 35 million bloggers
Craigslist went dark and as a result probably lost about $825,000 in revenue

As a result of all of this activity, the bill now has 35 opposing senators, which is up from only 5 opponents last week.

Awesome.

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Notable SOPA Protests

SEOMike — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:41:56 +0000

A nice chunk of the internet has gone dark today in protest of the SOPA legislation which is up for a vote and is fervently backed by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). It’s nice to see so many sites up in arms about this legislation and I hope it has an effect. I’m afraid that it’ll be like the healthcare bill that was jammed down our throats; keep trying until you get it. I’m sure someday something like SOPA will be passed into law. They’ve been trying for MANY years to get the ability to censor the web. It’ll be a sad day when the government is given carte blanche to take down sites without due process.

SEOMike is fully opposed to SOPA, ProtectIP and any other attempt to censor the wonderful, wild internet.

Thousands of websites are protesting today by “going black.” Below are some screenshots from a few notable sites.

Google logo crossed out in protest of SOPA	Craigslist goes dark in protest of SOPA
Greenpeace goes dark in protest of SOPA	Archive.org goes dark in protest of SOPA
Mozilla goes dark in protest of SOPA	Reddit goes dark in protest of SOPA
Wikipedia goes dark in protest of SOPA	Wired gets censored in protest of SOPA
Wordpress goes dark in progest of SOPA / ProtectIP	The Cheezburger network protests SOPA

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Hands off my Internet!

SEOMike — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:18:34 +0000

Visit SOPABlackout.org to learn more

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PPC Newsletter Extension

SEOMike — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:23:25 +0000

Today I spotted an adwords extension that allows a user to sign up for a newsletter straight from an adwords ad in the search results. If you’re logged in to your Google account your email address is pre-populated into the email address box. I did some digging and found that Google has been experimenting with this feature since the 29th of December. I have quite a few clients that could benefit from this feature and I’ll be signing them up as soon as the option becomes available in their adwords accounts.

A new Adwords Extension lets you try to get people to sign up for your newsletter from your PPC ad.

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