Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Google Goes Black for the Day

I must say I thought my computer was playing up this morning - I went to my Google search page and it went completely black. On closer inspection I found the line:

We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn - Earth Hour

Apparently,

Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.

It will all culminate in Earth Hour, where people around the world are invited to turn their lights off for one hour (8-9 pm on Saturday night in the UK).

It doesn't look though like Google.com, based in the country that wastes more energy that any other country on earth, is following suit!

24% Of Internet Users Can't Find Google!

An interesting (should it read alarming) stat comes out this week from Jakob Nielsen who says that 24% of people were unable to get to Google in order to perform a search.

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task. It's not even a true task — that is, it's not something users want to accomplish for its own sake or something we'd pose as an assignment in user testing. Getting a Google search box is the first step in searching the Web, which is only the first step in doing something real (such as, in one of our test tasks, to find "a strong vacuum cleaner that is easy to use, can pick up pet hair, and costs under $300").

All too often we, who work in the Internet industry, take it for granted that what for us are very simple tasks, will also be simple for other people. I am often guilty of assuming that everything is simple myself. I will ask people on my eMarketing Award courses to type in a URL in the “address bar” or the Google box and am occasionally (not too often!) met by blank stares!

Tiger Woods Putt and the Long Tail

In April of 2005 I wrote an article entitled Tiger Woods Putt Goes Open Source. I write about a putt he did in the Masters of that year but mainly focus on a video that appears on Jaffe Juice: Tiger did it a.k.a. the next Nike Commercial. The article is only one paragraph long but appears in position number one of Google for the keywords:  "Tiger Woods Putt".

Why? I think there are a few reasons why this is so.

1. Page Title: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source

2. H3 Tag: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source

3. Keywords in article: golf, tiger woods, putt, masters, nike

4. Outbound links:

Tiger Woods Official Website
Woods Captures Fourth Masters
PGA Tour
Callaway Golf
Nike Golf

Why mention this now?
Well, yesterday I had a huge spike in my traffic and it was caused by people searching for "Tiger Woods Putt" - and trying to find the 25-foot birdie putt that he did in the Arnold Palmer Invitational on March 16th, 2008. If it is this putt that you're looking for, here it is:

Google Launches "Search Within a Site" Function

Google is always adding more functionality to its Google Search facility and a couple of days back it announced on its Google Blog that it had been:

testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site.

This provides searchers with potentially better results and is a step further than the "Sitelinks" which often appears for more trafficked sites. The examples that I have seen on the web have primarily been for large US, business, military and government sites. The example below shows that even "local sites" already have this search within a site element:

This now means that with many websites you no longer need to use the command

Happy St David's Day!

It's St David's Day today - the patron saint of Wales. And it looks like the good people of Google and their Google Doodler have certainly not forgotten the Welsh this year. Hat tip to Google.

Footnote
He is the only native born patron saint of Britain and Ireland. What most people don't realise either is that St Patrick was actually Welsh! If you want more information on St David, visit the religious pages on the BBC, the St Davids' page on Wikipedia or the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Google's Marissa Mayer On..... Google!

This is a fascinating podast that Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, did for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. It gives real insight into how Google actually comes by its ideas and sheds light on the firm's well-documented principle of giving engineers 1 day a week to spend on projects that interest them.

powered by ODEO

Google on Google Reader

Google have come up with a very simple, yet very effective, way of teaching people about the benefits of RSS - obviously with reference to Google Reader. It just goes to show that with some A4 printouts, a "flat" white board and a digital camera you can create great video.

Of Web Developers and Men

Over the past month I have been working on a couple of interesting client projects with a subtle mix of Site Design Architecture, SEO and PPC built into most. These projects have meant that I have had to deal with web developers and clearly state to them what elements of SEO should be included in the overall development. Here are some of the elements which should be givens:

• Individual Page Titles for each page
• Customisable Meta Tags
• H1 Tags
• SEO-friendly URLs
• Sitemap

Up until last week I was asking for URLs to be created in not just a search friendly way but also asking for them to be created with hyphens. Well, recently Google changed this policy and was now treating underscores as  word separators - the same applies to MSN and Yahoo! Another given should be Google Analytics - this is a free tool and integrates easily with static and dynamic web pages and offers great reporting results.

The latest web developer I have dealt with, in all fairness to them, has been very much aware of the need to include the key elements of SEO. In fact the web development proposal actually highlights the work they will do with regards SEO - and I don't mean registration with all the major search engines, as some muppets who I come regularly across often talk about!

I must admit that it is quite amazing that a high number of web developers are selling solutions to clients, with no consideration of how people will find the site (e.g. search engines) and what they will do when they are there. It would appear that their business model is built on making a quick buck from a client with no consideration of future relationships. And the staggering thing is that they keep churning clients out using the same business model. On a slightly different tack, and as a good rule of thumb, I would recommend that companies try and identify what type of web developer they are dealing with:

1. Graphic designer turned web developer
2. Web developer come web designer
3. Web designer come web developer
4. Muppets

I would always try to make sure that you deal with a web design firm that has a good blend of web design and development skills and which has a dedicated SEO specialist. Always be wary of graphic designers turned developers, invariably they come up with 'pretty' designs which are almost always search and visitor unfriendly.

I would also recommend that you do not believe web design firms when they tell you that client sites have been successful - always telephone the client yourself, explain you're thinking of going with this web design firm and ask how much money they have generated or enquiries received.

Google Acquires Slide Presentation Company Zenter

It looks like the Google spending spree continues with no signs of slowing up. This time Google has purchased Zenter, a company which provides software for making online presentations. This will obviously strengthen its "Docs and Spreadsheets" arm and help in its objective to become the web's primary deliverer of online office tools. As someone who uses Google Doc's & Spreadsheets, Calendar and Mail for business productivity, I can certainly see the attraction of using a presentation package, too.

On a side issue I would certainly recommend that you try using GooSync and Gmail Mobile to synchronise your mobile devices.

Google Checkout Hits the UK

After some months of waiting, Google Checkout has finally arrived in the UK. And until 2008 Google has some special goodies for both buyers and sellers: buyers get £10 off each order over £30 and sellers benefit from credit and debit card payment processing on all transactions. I think it is quite clear what Google's objective is here!

With the growth of online credit card fraud, Google Checkout is trying to pitch itself as a safe haven for online shoppers. Google has also integrated Google Checkout into their AdWords programme, so that a little icon appears in your search listings.

Here are some of the companies that have already integrated Google Checkout into their online payment systems:

ebuyer
empiredirect.co.uk
3M

State of the Internet: Mary Meeker

For the past couple of weeks I have been downloading Web 2.0 podcasts onto my iRiver MP3 player. Most of them came from the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where there were some great 'conversations': Eric Schmidt (of Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Bob Parsons (GoDaddy), to name but a few but the podcast which I remember most is the Mary Meeker: State of the Internet, Part 3 one. The main reason is that she delivered 37 PowerPoint slides in around 10 minutes - I have used a number of them on the eMarketing courses that I deliver.

Here are the downloads:
PowerPoint Presentation Slides
Download Audio
Download Video

Does Google Have Problems With YouTube?

An interesting article on Red Herring asks whether YouTube is turning into too much of a distraction for Google.

But so far, YouTube has been nothing but a source of headaches for Google executives. Their efforts to negotiate content deals with mainstream media groups have resulted in a rash of negative publicity, forcing CEO Eric Schmidt to spend an inordinate amount of time defending a subsidiary that accounts for a sliver of Google's revenues.

Clicky - View your site visitors using Google Maps

Steve Rubel appears to be taken by a new Web 2.0 analytics application called Clicky. Aside from giving you information on where your visitors to see where they came from, what pages they looked at, and how long they stuck around and RSS feeds, the site also hooks up to Google Maps and lets you view where people have come from and also gives you referrer stats, too. The Spy function lets you see who's one your site at any given moment - that's really cool. Why not give it a test drive over at Clicky?

Those Extra Links on Google

I have just been doing some background research for a Google Workshop that I''l be running in December - aptly called Google Day! - and stumbled across an interesting thread on Search Engine Watch. If you've ever wondered why some websites return the following sort of results:

well, these guys may have the answer. And it doesn't look like there's much you can do to tweak the results - apart from the usual - building logical, well-structured website with good content. But that's what you're doing anyway, isn't it!

In order to get to this article I used the following search words:

"google results added"
"additional page results google"
"extra results google"
"extra links google"

Within the post they mention that the name to call these links are: "Google Sitelinks". Danny Sullivan seems to nail it here: Google Sitelinks: New Name For Those Links Under The Top Listings

Here's another thread from Search Engine Watch and from Matt Cutts on the same subject.

Google Set to Overtake Channel 4 (UK) in Ad Revenue

I heard about this story last week but simply forgot to blog about.So here goes. According to Andy Duncan Chief Executive of Channel 4 Television, in an interview that he gave with the Financial Times, Google UK's:

advertising revenue in the UK is expected this year to surpass Channel 4’s anticipated 2006 take of £800m. Within 18 months, it is forecast to overtake ITV1, Britain’s leading commercial TV channel and the country’s biggest single recipient of advertising revenue, according to Mindshare and Initiative, two top media buying groups.

He reckoned that Google, which doesn't comment on revenue, would:

would earn about £900m in UK revenues this year, compared with £800m at the C4 group.

To put into context the impact this would have - ITV1 generates around  90% of the ITV Group's £1.63 billion advertising revenues!

Speed Matters At Google

At the Web 2.0 Summit Marissa Mayer, one of Google's top executives, told attendees that speed was the critical driver of Web 2.0. According to Zdnet:

In testing out the user interface for Google search, Mayer said that with more results for a query, users were spending less time on the site. It turned out that the cause wasn't just the paradox of choice–paralyzed by too many choices–but the fact that a page with 10 results was half a second faster that the page with 30 results. So, Google set about making the page with more results faster, and the rest is history.

And here's an amazing fact:

Part of Google's secret sauce is that a round trip for a search query that returns a result in .05 seconds touches 300 to 700 Google machines across the country, Mayer said. "Users really respond to speed," she said.

And on Google Maps:

When the Google Maps home page was put on a diet, shrunk from 100K to about 70K to 80K, traffic was up 10 percent the first week and in the following three weeks, 25 percent more, she said.

Google Buys Jotspot

Just came across an article on Techcrunch that said that Google had just acquired Jotspot. They are clearly building quite a suite of online collaboration tools: Google Groups, Calendar, Spreadsheets and Documents, Video Sharing, Wikis.

Google's New Web Optimiser Tool

Just read over at John Battelle's Search Blog that Google's Website Optimiser Team has just launched a new tool called, wait for it!, Website Optimiser. It is in Beta mode at present but they are looking for Beta testers to give it a test drive. Here's what Inside AdWords has to say about the product:

Over the coming weeks we'll be testing a new tool called the Website Optimizer that can help you find out which content will convert best on your site. Whether you define a conversion as a purchase or a newsletter sign-up, Website Optimizer allows you to experiment with different headlines, copy, and images on your site in order to find out which combination results in the most conversions. You can use this tool on your landing page or any page that represents a conversion.

It sounds like it could be quite useful and they have even done a quick tutorial on why landing pages are so important for your website.

Google Set To Buy YouTube

Here is a story that is just breaking on what will be Google's biggest acquisition to date: YouTube.

Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock

And here are some blogs that are posting articles on it:

And It's Done - Google YouTube (John Battelle)
Google Acquires YouTube for $1.65 (Scobleizer)

More on Google Supplemental

Andrew Goodman has a further take on Google's Supplemental Pages. I agree with him on everything in the article, hell he even references this blog, so why shouldn't I agree with him? Here's a taster:

Honestly, two-year-old posts from this blog should *never* go into supplemental. Why would they? Did something change? They were good enough to index before, so what's wrong with 'em now?

Andrew even uses Blogger, which is a Google product, and finds his pages shoved into supplemental - so what hope is there for people lek myself who use Typepad! He mentions duplicate content:

One reason content can find its way into supplemental can be "duplicate content". Sometimes we allow others to republish our stuff (though rarely). But that's not the only issue. I wish I knew what the real issue was.

Just to test how safe even Andrew's content was, I thought I would just do a quick check to see how many sites were actually duplicating the same content on Google's index. Here are the results:

www.searchnewz.com/
www.searchnewz.com/topstory/top_story.html www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/top_story_news.html www.terrakon.com/search-engine-marketing-tips/
www.webpronews.com/?SHT=WPN-SW findory.com/source?source=Traffick&ib=1 www.susannahutcheson.com/search-engine-news.html
www.kinja.com/user/artlung
www.interwebmarketing.net/current-topics/google-supplemental/ www.lisfeeds.com/feed.php?id=128
www.voipaction.com/index.php?ch=voip&fn=google&rstr=288
google-hacking.pl/
www.seodata.com/SEO-Penalties-Sandbox/reg-1-23_default.aspx
planet-google.com/
www.ilogger.cn/myread/

In total there are 34 indexed pages on Google - and the article was only written last week!!

More on Google Page Rank

I wrote an article a couple of days back on Google's Page Rank. Well, here's an interesting site that gives you the actual Page Rank from the Google index and not the snapshot that you'll find in the toolbar. According to Live PageRank:

Google updates its internal PageRank value continuously as the web changes and their index is updated. Only once every third month or so this value is exported to be displayed in the Google Toolbar.

Live PR reckons that:

what this tool does different though is that it makes sure it gets the current PageRank value for the exact URL entered. Where other future PageRank tools get it right most of the time, we make sure we get it right everytime.

Neat, if you believe in the value of Google's PR!

Webcameron and the Google Generation

Last week, at the Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair talked about the Google Generation and how:

two thirds of the country has access to the internet. Millions of people are ordering flights or books or other goods on-line, they are talking to their friends on-line, downloading music, all of it when they want to, not when the shop or office is open.

This week David Cameron, at the Conservative Party Conference, took a pop at Tony Blair saying:

It's no good just talking about the 'Google generation', you've got to understand what it is that this generation not just wants but also how they want to communicate.

In a bid to tap into the soul of the Google Generation, Mr Cameron has decided to start Webcameron - his own personal blogging/video blogging site. Judging by the first instalment on 'David's Blog', it looks like someone from the Google Generation should offer him some tips on how to write a blog:

After the speech, discussing Webcameron

Posted by David on 01 October 2006

David Cameron talks about his first conference speech as leader of the Conservative Party, and discusses Webcameron with Sam Roake, head of Web Campaigning for the Conservative Party.

I suppose that someone from the Google Generation should let him know that blog articles should be written in the first person!

Google Supplemental Results and Marketing Tom

Over the past month I have noticed that a high number of the 400-500+ pages on this site which were previously indexed on this site have now been moved into supplemental results - in fact only 100 pages now exist on the Google index. Here is what Google has to say about supplemental results:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears.

According to Jim Boykin this is what it generally means to you and me if our site ends up in "Supplemental":

Pages from the "regular" index will almost always show up first for any searches. The only time you’ll usually see "supplimental results" is if there’s not many, or any, results in the regular index. What this means, is that if you’re page about "blue widgets" is in the "Supplemental Results" then you’re screwed as far as having your page rank at all (will not show up at all since there’s pleanty of results for "blue widgets" in a google search. Your only chance of rankings a page that’s in the supplimental results is if someone searched for something super specific like "blue widgets in southbend kansas on market street").

Supplemental Results also tend to have old Google Caches…..in other words, once google has sent them to "Google Hell", they tend not to come back….thus you’ll find pages in the Supplemental Results are dated long ago.

Shit!

Jim identifies 3 main reasons:

1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

And 3 solutions:

1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

There is a slight flaw in the above though, as many of these pages have links from other sites which have not only been cached but have a decent PR rating! Hang on! - a decent PR rating and cache for discussing something on my page.

Here are some of the supplementals which I will start linking to:

Keyword Links - Try not to 'Click here'!
How to Use Case Studies Properly
Podcasting From the Heart of the Catholic Church
Tracking a DMOZ Editor
Pushing the Boundaries of Podcasting
How to Get People to Complete Online Surveys
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's Blogging Book - A Case of Open Source Book Writing?

How to get rid of the ODP Description

If you're fed up of seeing the DMOZ description for your website being brought up on Google Search  results, take a look at a neat work around on Matt Cutts' blog. He points visitors to Vanessa Fox's Sitemaps blog and an article she wrote entitled: Google now supports the META NODP tag.

25 Things Danny Sullivan Hates About Google

Danny Sullivan is one of the leading lights of the Search Engine Industry and is the catalyst behind Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Over on Clickz he has written an interesting article about the 25 Things I Hate About Google - I didn't know there could be so many issues with Google! It looks like Google's purchase of Writely pushed Danny to write this article - his gripe would appear to be that they are focusing on a new toy without having fixed the other ones. Some of the 25 include:

Web search counts make no sense
You confuse people by changing UIs [User Interfaces]
Where are the related searches?
You aren't responsive enough to click fraud complaints
Give us paid Web search support
Blogger is free
I don't have a list of all my referring pages in Google Analytics

Seth Godin at Google

Why not take time out (48 minutes) and listen to Seth Godin impart more pearls of wisdom to the good folks of Google?

Google Buys Writely

Both the Google blog and Writely Blog announce that Google has indeed bought Writely. Writely is a Free, at the moment!, online collaborative tool which allows users to share, upload/download documents through their website. I have been using this tool for the past few months on a number of projects and am mightily impressed. I just hope now that Google will ensure that it remains an exciting Web 2.0 tool.

Technorati Tags: writely

Google's New Tool - Click to Call

Seth Godin has come across an example of Google's new enhancement to Google Adwords, Click to Call. According to the Google site:

We're testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here's how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click 'Connect For Free,' Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.

It's interesting to see that Google will actually foot the bill for phone calls. This is a great innovation as it brings customers much nearer to the marketers. Instead of deliberating whether they should email or phone once they get to the destination page, Google is now offering the best call to action: voice communication. I feel a bit left out though as, being based in the UK, I couldn't actuallly see his example in action!

BMW Germany Booted Off Google

Look like BMW's German site has been booted off Google for breaking Google guidelines. Matt Cutts has a very good write-up on the subject and explains how they fell foul of the Big G! Try doing a search for www.bmw.de on Google to see what I mean.

Google Programme on BBC

Last night the BBC's Money Programme broadcast a very interesting half-hour special on Google. It featured a brief history of the company, including old interviews with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, a glimpse of the Googleplex, how the company went public and made many of its employees millionaires. It showed the Google employees having fun at work and the estate agent who sells them $5 milllion houses in Silicon Valley.

It was quite a balanced report and also looked at the issues of privacy, click fraud within the company, how the company is moving into video and its implications on the media and even the private detective who uses Google to do his "research". The programme also featured Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search products and John Battelle, "Google Watcher".

The whole programme can be viewed from the BBC's Money Programme site. You can also see additional interviews with John Battelle, Campaigner Adam Price MP and Google Europe's Nikesh Arora.

Video: The World According to Google

Matt Cutts on Google Bombing

If you think you've had problems with Google ditching you, or even if you're about to engage in some 'black hat' SEO tricks, then you better read Matt Cutts' post - SEO Mistakes: Not checking your site. He writes about how one site owner felt particularly aggrieved that Google had dropped her site from it's index because of link bombing. However, as Matt explains in the post the real reason for being dropped lay in her use of hidden text, duplicate content (on different site pages) and keyword stuffing.

One thing he points out which is quite interesting is Google's "life cycle of a spam penalty", which has 5 phases:

1. Spam
2. Get caught
3. Fix the spam.
4. File a reinclusion request.
5. Possibly get reincluded in our index. You need to convince us that we won’t see any spam in the future.

And Matt Cutts' moral of the story:

"The SEO mistake I want to communicate here is to check your own site before assuming that someone else is hurting your site or that Google is making a mistake."

Will Google Light Up for Christmas?

Have you noticed the Google logo over the past few days? Well, keep an eye on it to over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to see if it will actually light:

Post Christmas
They did light it up!

Interview with Matt Cutts of Google

Aaron Weil, of SEO Book fame, posts an interview that he conducted with Mark Cutts, software engineer at Google, on his Search Marketing website. Here are some excerpts from it:

Is all SEO spam?
Absolutely not--I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines--things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

And on unsolicited email from "SEO Experts"

Some SEO firms cold call saying they can rank people in first place. Can they guarantee this?
Not on Google. No one can guarantee this, not even Google, since our ranking algorithms are often updated. I've seen scams where the "#1 placement" is really buying ads. I've seen scams where the "keywords" that they sell are really for people who have scumware hidden in their browser. I've seen stuff where the guaranteed keywords are 5-6 word phrases that only have nine results, and no one would ever really type that really long, specific phrase.

Here's an interesting insight for bloggers:

I originally started a service-selling site and then later sort of stopped selling services and started blogging. An interview with you will likely go on that static site and is likely to be a well linked page, but my blog is by far the more popular of the two sites. Am I effectively hurting my end rankings by splitting up the content? I don't think that's ultimately hurting your end rankings much.
There's always going to be people who do some attribution by linking to your main seobook.com page, and some people that link directly to a post or to your blog--and some people that do both, because they're different urls. So having a primary service that's off the main page can sometimes even help a little bit. I think you'll get the same total number of links (or even a little more if they link to the root and the blog or specific post). After that, it's up to you how to handle that with internal linkage.

And this:

What would be the best ways to integrate the link popularity?
I think having a main site with a large feature like a blog somewhere near the main page is actually a pretty good structure. If you run a blog, it's good to spend some effort to have one main url for each post so that there's a single well-known permalink. I haven't been as nitpicky about that on my own site, but if you do SEO for a living I'd pay a little more attention to that.

On what to do if your site is out of favour (banned) with Google:

If I got a site banned what is the procedure to get it re indexed?
This is boilerplate that we're sending out to some site owners as a pilot program if we detect spam, but it's the most current info: "If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py
You can select "I'm a webmaster inquiring about my website" and then "Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking," click Continue, and then make sure to type "Reinclusion Request" in the Subject: line of the resulting form." If that procedure changes, I'll blog it.

Google's Beta Version of New RSS Tool

Google has just unveiled the beta version of its new RSS Reader, aptly named Google Reader! Google Reader is similar to other online RSS Readers and offers a smart user interface in Google's cool blue colours and user friendly design. In essence, it allows you to search for feeds, subscribe to them, label (categorise) feeds and view feeds within its interface. In order to use Google Reader you will first need to set up an account.

Here are some screenshots:

Display of your feeds

Display of articles from feed

If you would like a more comprehensive analysis of Google Reader, Take a look at  Gary Price's First Fast Impressions of Google Reader.

Matt Cutts of Google Starts his own Blog

Matt Cutts, Google's highly respected software engineer and creator of Google's "safe search", has just set up his own blog. A lot of folk say that Cutts is "googleguy" over at Webmasterworld and if you want to get the lowdown on the workings of Google from this Google guy, you  better head off to Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. Though Google own Blogger, Cutts has decided to opt for Word Press to develop his own blog. So far the site has thrown up some interesting and thought-provoking articles.

Technorati Tags: google | blogging

Where Does Google Go From Here?

Fast Company magazine has an excellent article, entitled Can Google Stay Google?, which looks at how Google will develop in the future to avoid becoming a Silicon Valley Casualty. Advanced Language Translation Programs, Advanced Search facilities and Google Scholar (which partners with academic institutions) are some of the projects they're looking at. Marissa Mayer, who heads up consumer products, has this to say: "We're not anywhere near done with search technology. 2010 or 2020 will make today look really sad."

The article also goes on to discuss Google's way of sharing its wealth, from giving 2 awards worth $12 million to employees for great work on a project to the founders - Sergey Brin and Larry Page - paying themselves $1 per year! Fast Company believe that the next few years should be good for the big players - Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo! - but says that "maybe some other grad students at Stanford -- will do to Google what Google did to Microsoft and the other powers".

It concludes with an interesting thought on Google's major cash generator - paid search advertising:

"according to a recent Pew Trust survey, only 38% of people realize the difference between paid and unpaid search results. That might seem surprising, but it fits the pattern of other innovative forms of advertising that have emerged in the past generation: Studies show that it has taken many years for most people to grasp that "infomercials" are different from regular TV programs and that brands shown in movies are paid product placements. Once consumers wise up, the gimmicks lose much of their impact."

Technorati Tags: google| paid search

Google UK Adwords Voucher

If you haven't started a pay-per-click campaign, you may well be interested in an offer on Google's UK site which offers visitors a free £20 Voucher. The offer is restricted to new Google Adwords customers and includes a £5 registration fee.

Google Factory Tour

I came across an interesting item yesterday on John Batelle's Searchblog site about the Google Factory Tour. It looks like Google had a press day on the 19th May and invited the good people from the media along to listen to Google engineers and product managers discuss their technology - looking at what they are currently doing and will be doing in the future. Here's what was on the programme:
Progress in Research and Ads
         Marissa Mayer - (Director, Consumer Web Products)
         Peter Norvig - (Director, Engineering Search Quality)
Opportunities Today
         Jonathan Rosenberg - (Product Management)
         Jeff Huber - (VP Engineering)
         Dave Girouard - (General Manager, Enterprise)
Future Directions
         Alan Eustace - (VP Engineering & Research)
         Marissa Mayer - (Director, Consumer Web Products)
         Sergey Brin - (Co-Founder & President, Technology)
Product Demos

The Google Factory webcasts are available on the Google website and make for interesting viewing.

Google Announces Web Accelerator

Google Labs has just released a new tool called the Google Web Accelerator, which is designed to speed up your online experience. Designed to work with ADSL and Cable Connections, GWA has already been tested by "Googlers" who have noticed big differences in the time it takes information to download. According to an article in Search Engine Watch, Google Web Accelerator can speed up the surfing process by:

+ Prefetching material
In part, determined by an algorithm developed at Google that looks at mouse movements and aggregate traffic to sites to try to determine what to prefetch
+ Caching of pages on Google's own servers
They will also try to determine how frequently material is updated and continuously have the latest copy available on their servers. Mayer said that GWA and Google's new search history product are completely independent of one another.
+ Parallel downloading
Download multiple parts of the page (images for example) at the same time.
+ Differential fetching
Instead of downloading the entire page, GWA will try send only what might have changed on the page
+ Compression
Mayer added however that GWA tries not to change the quality of images and other material.

Once you have downloaded the toolbar, you will find a new toolbar on the browser which will indicate whether the tool is switched and the amount of time you have saved.

Has Silicon Valley Watcher Scooped the First Sighting of a Google Browser?

Silicon Valley Watcher reckons that inspection of their website stats has revealed a scoop - a sighting of a Google Browser. Recent months has seen speculation from the BBC and hiring of key engineers from Microsoft and Firefox (Google Hires Firefox Programmer). Let me know if you have any similar sightings.

Is Yahoo! Testing Rival to Google Adwords?

In the blogosphere this is actually quite old news (it appeared a couple of days back) but I just didn't have time to write about it. It looks like Yahoo! is testing a product to rival Google's Adsense. Silicon Valley Watcher reckons that this information came from an "informed source at Yahoo!". Furthermore, Andy Baio on his blog points visitors to the blog of Yahoo! product manager, Ken Rudman, which features contextual ads.

"His homepage shows the vertical two-ad format, monthly archives show a three-ad horizontal format, and individual entries show another variation of the horizontal format.  The ads have decent relevancy, especially considering its early state."

Andy has identified that the ads are served from a Overture server - further proof that Yahoo! are tesing the market?

How People Read Google Search Results

There's an interesting story on Search Engine Watch about how people view the search results on Google. The actual research itself was carried out by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it and eye tracking firm Eyetools. The result shoudl certainly make marketers sit up and take notice.

It would appear that most searchers see information in the shape of an "F", with people's eye movements starting from the top-left of the search results and moving down, then jumping across to the right (where the first Google Adwords appear). Here are some of the results:

Organic Search Results Viewed:
Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%    
Rank 3 - 100%    
Rank 4 - 85%    
Rank 5 - 60%    
Rank 6 - 50%    
Rank 7 - 50%    
Rank 8 - 30%    
Rank 9 - 30%    
Rank 10 - 20%

Chris Sherman points out that though Organic Search Engine Marketing is far more popular with web searchers, many firms are ignoring its potential in favour of Paid Google Adword listings.

Original Source
Eyesite (Seth Godin)

Partial Indexing on Google

Every so often you will find that some of your web pages have not been listed fully by Google, this is called 'partial indexing'. And it happened to me this week. The Marketing Tom blog has around 253 pages listed on Google and yesterday it reported to me that around 60 of these pages were partially indexed. Let me explain the difference. This is a 'fully' indexed page:

Whilst this is a partially indexed page:

I don't want to go into great detail about the issues that relate to partially indexed pages but suffice to say that searches on Google will find the first example, but not the second. For me, this could mean that around 25% of my pages are redundant on Google.

What's the solution? Well, I could wait until Google indexes these pages again (don't forget it does have the URL but not the content) or I could try and help Google find the page again. In order to do this I need to create keyword links to these pages. Given the very nature of blogs I know that Google will firstly index my home page (www.marketingtom.com) within a day or 2 and it will later index the articles as their own individual pages with their own page titles. So, let's put some keyword links down:

Launch of Google Toolbar 3 (beta)

Looks like Google is launching a new beta version of its popular toolbar - this one is called Google Toolbar 3, obviously! On John Battelle's Searchblog he says that Google Product Chief, Marissa Mayer, told him that the new release had three main features:

1. SpellChecker. This feature moves Google's "Did you mean" concept from search results to the toolbar. For any web form (ie Hotmail, or any web-based input) you can now get spell checking courtesy Google's algorithms. Cool.

2. AutoLink.The Toolbar will not automatically make US addresses appearing on web pages into URLs which are linked to Google Maps. Again, cool.

3. WordTranslator. This nifty feature translates any English word on a page into any of 8 other languages. Mayer said this would be a sought after feature for international users who use English as a second language.

Real-time Keyword Suggestions from Google Select

According to 4WebResults Google is testing a new tool called "Google Suggest". The tool sounds really  cool as it will throw up keyword suggestions as you type in the words. As Tom says in New Internet Tool Offers Suggestions in Real Time - "Google Suggest": "this is the perfect tool to do exploratory keyword research, especially if you're not sure what people are really typing in to find your business. Or if you're writing an online article (like a blog article) and you want to use keywords that are popular to increase your traffic, then use Google Suggest."

Blogs that feature "Google Suggest"
Google Suggest (Anil Dash)
Top 5 Web Applications of 2004 (Andy Budd, Blogography)

Pictures from Google's Googleplex

As I mention Google rather a lot on this website, I thought it would be nice to let people view some photos of the Google complex, taken by an Internet Marketing company on a recent visit there. Chris Breikss, Director and Co-Founder of 6S Marketing Inc, was invited to the Google Campus to meet up with the Google Adwords team and whilst there took these interesting shots. My favourite is the picture of the Beach Volleyball Court where Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, often hangs out.

Animated GIF's to appear on Google

Looks like Google are testing out animated GIF ads for use on Google Adwords. The Clickz website reports in their article Google Testing Animated GIF Ads that the company will only use these ads on websites of Adsense Publishers who accept GIF images to be displayed.

Ex-Spanish President uses Google to find work (or not!)

I just came across an interesting article from Spain, entitled Aznar Using Google AdSense to get a job which says that a Google ad had appeared offering the services of ex-Spanish President José María Aznar. However, it does look like the Google-approved ad had nothing to do with the Spanish ex-president and the campaign has been stopped.

See Also
Aznar, un falso señuelo publicitario en la red
Aznar, un falso señuelo publicitario en la red

Visit the Google University at Internet World North

On the 3rd and 4th November, Manchester (UK) will host Internet World North, which bills itself as "the only event in the North of England and Scotland for the internet professional". The event features Google University which offers attendees the chance to learn more about using Google Adwords and is delivered by Google experts. Other seminars include:
Effective Email Marketing - How to optimise email marketing to get maximum results
Michelle Hocking, Retail Director, Cheetahmail
Achieving ROI with a Content Management system
Nigel Jackson, CEO, Immediacy
CASE STUDY - How to Effectively Run A Search Campaign - Building Your Business With Search Advertising
Ian Carrington, Head of B2C Vertical Market Group, Google
In order to get in to Internet World North, you must register and the same applies for Google University and other seminars.

Google Adwords Tips from the Google team

If you're looking for advice on how to maximise the effectiveness of your Google Adwords campaign, then you will find this PDF from the Google team - The Maximum Effect - very useful. Google has compiled a 41-page document offering the best tips on Google Adwords after having studied thousands of Adwords campaigns. Here's a taste of what can be found within it:

Chapter 1 – Setting Goals
Chapter 2 – Selecting Keywords (A four-step process)
Chapter 3 – Developing Ads
Chapter 5 – Tracking Results
Chapter 6 – Optimizing Again

An essential guide for those new to Adwords and an interesting read for those who already have experience with Adwords.

Related Article
Google Adwords - useful tutorials<