Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land posted an article about how Google is violating it’s own rules about sponsored posts, link buying, and content spam to promote Google Chrome.  I find it amazing that Google would sanction these efforts considering the well documented brand bias in their search results.  Google places their products and listings where users “expect” to find them anyway, so why would they need a pay per post campaign?  Apparently they are trying to create more social buzz to get more people to adopt Chrome as their browser.

Google is paying for blog posts which link back to Google Chrome’s download page via a text link and a video link.  The blog posts are generally poor quality and the videos don’t have a lot to do with Google Chrome.  Google is sponsoring posts that link back to their Chrome download page without nofollow tags (clear violations) and the blog posts they are sponsoring have very little to do with the subject.  Both the content and the video are very low quality which should anger the Panda.

How did this happen?  Google is paying a company called Unruly to promote Chrome on social networks and one tactic of Unruly is to run vast pay-per-post link spam campaigns.  Google for Google, they can throw Unruly under the bus and go on their merry way.

What will Matt Cutts do?  We’ll see, but my guess is he’ll do what he’s told.  If it were you or me, we’d be banned for a year.

The full article is definitely worth a read.

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When Panda first launched earlier this year I noticed that some client-pages with good content were getting nailed.  I didn’t notice until I started reading the content that there were lots of typos and misspellings.  I thought “Eureka! I have discovered an elusive Panda ranking signal!”  And I had.   I fixed the problems and the pages popped back up in rankings.  I’ve been spellchecking like crazy ever since.  It makes sense, right?  An algorithm update focused on content quality should have a signal that says content with misspellings is low-quality.  I’ve been quietly plugging away fixing spelling errors and watching the pages increase in ranking.  I haven’t seen much chatter about it anywhere on the SEO forums which is why I didn’t want to say anything.  A Panda ranking signal that nobody is talking about – you can see why I kept quiet.  Well thanks to Mr. Cutts the cat is out of the bag.  Check out the Google Webmaster Help video recently released.  Matt says in the video that spelling on it’s own isn’t one of the signals they use for ranking a site – I doubt it.  Since it does impact pagerank, and pagerank impacts ranking, spelling absolutely does impact rankings… and my clients will agree.

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I noticed a thread today on WebmasterWorld talking about the new(ish) drag-and-drop Google Image search function. You can take an image from your computer, drag it to the search box on Google Image Search, and Google will do it’s best to identify the picture you uploaded. It works by identifying color palates and patterns and then matching those to images it “knows” about. Google has struggled for a long time to identify images on the web – simply because images contain so much content but are so challenging for a robot to make sense of.

Back in 2010 I talked about Google launching Boutiques.com. Boutiques.com (a Google property) is a neat site where you can put together an outfit that match your taste and then Google algorithmically builds a wardrobe for you and even lets you buy the items online. Google does this based on an image content recognition algorithm that they acquired from Like.com. Since I knew about this product and the acquisition of the algorithm last year, I wasn’t too surprised with the launch of the new Google Image Search feature.

When I first started playing around with the new feature it was pretty poor. It did a great job of matching color pallets and a wonderful job of identifying popular artwork, buildings, skylines, celebrities, etc. It had a really hard time identifying flowers – which is what I really wanted it to be good at. Today I was dragging in pictures I had taken of flowers to see how well it’s learned over the last month. It’s learned to identify distinct flowers (like stargazer lilies) but it’s still not any good at identifying and matching specific flowers. It gets the colors right, but doesn’t identify the flower by name.

While messing around today I came up with an amusing result. Google Image Search matched a picture of a rose I took with a Professor from UC Riverside! I chuckled a little but then started looking into why it had done it and I was amazed at how well it’d picked out similar shapes contained in the two pictures. However, had Professor Bazhenov been wearing a different shirt and not standing in front of trees I don’t think he would have showed up at all.

Check out the images below to see what I uploaded, what Google returned, and how I think the datapoints on the two pictures match that made Professor Bazhenov seem like a good choice to the robot.

Wild Rose used in Google Image Experiment Google thought Professor Bazhenov from UC Riverside matched my rose.

Data points I think Google used to match the professor and the rose. (click for a larger view)

Keep in mind that every time I upload the image of the rose I get a different set of related images including other people. I find that in itself interesting because Google is all about consistency.  Maybe the results will become more stable as Google “learns.”

A special thanks to Professor Bazhenov for being a good sport. The Professor studies computational neuroscience and other very difficult to pronounce areas of human biology to help make our lives better. Check out his UC Riverside staff profile.

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Google has added weather and terrain to Google Maps. The option to display these features are available under the options panel which you can see in the image below. (I absolutely love the terrain view!) You can also see that they’ve added some new icons to the map indicating road construction and even accidents! Check out the images below to see the new features.

This shot shows terrain, weather, and some new traffic icons. (click for a larger view)	Google added some new icons to the map showing where there is roadwork. This image shows details about a lane closure. (click for a larger view)
This image shows something else new; detailed information about accidents. (click for a larger view)	Clicking on one of the conditions icons will pop out forecast information. (click for a larger view)

What a great addition! I’m surprised it took so long!

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It’s been a big week for Google.  They made significant changes to the way they list sitelinks and clustered results.

First up; sitelinks.  Sitelinks are the little links you see below a URL that is fairly powerful and ranked at number one.  The easiest way to see them is for searching for a company by it’s name.  Google changed site links to include the URL of the destination page, a description of the destination page, and expanded the list to twelve instead of eight sitelinks.  The changes are nice, but in my opinion a bit messy.  The thing that I think looks messy is the fact that they’ve expanded the information about the links to include a URL and a description, but they have significantly shortened the number of characters that will be displayed.  If Google want this to be “user friendly” they will have to do one of three things; 1. Lengthen the descriptions in sitelinks to accommodate the same number of characters as a “regular” listing, 2. Specify a specific sitelink meta tag, or 3. Allow webmasters to control the sitelink descriptions through webmaster tools.

Another major change in sitelinks is a little bit more subtle.  Google is now including subdomains in the list.  These used to count as separate hostnames to Google and were excluded from sitelinks.  They were even excluded in clustered results, which we’ll discuss later.

Google now includes subdomains in the sitelinks list along with a ridiculously short description and a destination URL (click the image for a larger view)

Google is also presenting different sitelinks for different countries. This set of sitelinks is fro Google.fr and includes French subdomains. (click the image for a larger view)

Now, on to Clustering.  First, an explanation.  Clustered results happen when the same domain has pages that rank on the same page of results.  For example, if a domain has a page ranked at #1 in Google for a certain query, and another page ranked at #6 for that same query, the #6 result is automatically promoted up to #2 to be “clustered” with the highest ranking occurrence from the same domain on the page.  Until now, subdomains were excluded from clustering and you could now only own position 1-4 for a query from clustering, but you could possibley own 5 and 6 with another subdomain as well.  It was a great way to dominate the first page of the listings.

I find the fact that subdomains are included in the list of sitelinks to be a bit annoying.  Mostly because the last few years I’ve been a proponent of putting a company’s blog on a separate subdomain in order to “bust the cluster.”    Now it looks like you have to have a completely different hostname for your blog in order to get it outside the cluster.  Below are some examples:

An example of a blog hosted at /blog/ being clustered in with the main URL's results. (click the image for a larger view)

It used to be that a subdomain was considered a separate hostname and presented outside the cluster. As you can see here - it isn't anymore. (click the image for a larger view)

It seems that we have to go a bit farther to keep a site out of the cluster by giving the blog an entirely new URL.  Something like [company]blog.com would do.  As you can see in the image below, my blog is unaffected by the new clustering method because as you can see in my URL, my blog is hosted outside of my main URL.

As you can see above, my blog is not getting clustered in with the rest of my results because my blog is on an entirely different URL. (click the image for a larger view)

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Google has killed Google Directory.  The site was a copy of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ).  I wondered for a long time why Google – who is king of anti-scraping and duplicate content penalties – was presenting the exact same content of DMOZ.  I was literally looking in the directory yesterday to see if it was still an exact copy of DMOZ.  I guess nobody visited the directory so Google took it down.  One big indicator of the fact that nobody used it was that Google dropped the search box from the page sometime last year which forced people to drill into the directory to see find a site based on a category.  That makes sense since Google already presents results by search query in the main engine.  I think they must have dropped the box to test if anyone would actually use the directory to find a site – and they didn’t.

I wonder if DMOZ will be the next major site from the “old internet” to die.  It seems like the only people who use DMOZ anymore are people trying to get their sites listed for the PR and reputation.

RIP Google Directory

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I’ve been wondering why Google named their social networking service “Google+” since the day I found out about it.  Why would anyone – especially Google – name something with a query modifier??  From what I have read online I think there are two reasons for the name:

1. Branding: Everybody’s heard of Google so when people started talking about a new social network, nobody would have to explain that it’s run by Google.  They knew that if the name included “Google” it would take off like a wild-fire.
2. They couldn’t come up with a more clever way to communicate that they think of Google+ as an augmentation of all their services.

The big problem with the name is the way Google handles the “+” symbol as you can see in the screenshot below.

The results Google presents for a search on Google+ in Google Instant. You can see that it's completely unrelated to their social network. Even Google's search suggest is irrelevant. Once you hit enter it's fixed though.

The set of results completely changes to Google+ results once you hit enter, but not until then.  I find it quite entertaining to see how Google Instant and Google Search Suggest is handling this query.  Instant serves up results for proxies and Search Suggest serves up queries with the + modifier.  Once you hit enter Google sorts it all out and displays actual Google+ results.  However, anyone who has been trained by Google to look at the instant results and choose from them before hitting enter would be completely confused.  This theory can be supported by Google Insights when you examine trends for Google+ and Google Plus.  Check it out here: Google Insights for Search: “Google+” v. “Google Plus” The phrase “Google plus” is almost as popular as “Google+” showing that there is some confusion about how to search for it.

I found an article where Bradly Horowitz explained why the name was chosen. He said:

We’re calling this the Google+ project for a reason. It’s not a monolithic product. We’ve had products before: Blogger is a product, Orkut is a product, Buzz is a product. This is a project and when we say “project” we mean it’s much broader in scope. This is something that will impact Google. That’s why it’s Google+, almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine. (full article)

I find it interesting that he describes the Google+ project as a broad-reaching project that will impact GOOGLE then goes on to say they chose to name it using the smallest modifier that they could imagine.  It that a “the last shall be first” thing?

I don’t think that any confusion about Google+’s name will impact the popularity of the site.  As far as branding goes, it’s a great name.  It’ll be interesting to see if Google changes Search Suggest and Instant so it include results for their service.

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