SEM CLUBHOUSE » Ramblings

Google Now Imitates AOL With New Page Speed Service!

Chris Silver Smith — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:00:59 +0000

Google’s announcement of their new Page Speed Service was so very expected by me that it nearly didn’t form a blip on my radar screen when it flew by in my streams today! It’s a sort of combination of Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) and automatic page code optimizer which will allow them to make your webpages more efficient at delivering and resolving in browser windows, and it will allow them to cache your site content on servers deployed around the world so that your content won’t have to travel as far through the network to reach anyone at the moment that it’s requested. It’d be super-cool, except this kind of technology was first invented by AOL! Let me explain.

Quite a number of years ago, AOL got sued by some of their subscribers for not upholding service representations, and as a result, AOL began to automatically cache images and webpages from across the internet, keeping them in their servers in Reston, Virginia. This helped them to cut one leg off of the circuit for delivering content for their subscribers. As part of their caching process, they’d recompress images, knocking percentages of the images’ filesize off, reducing how much data needed to be transferred. This actually used to cause problems for some types of images, since their compression algorithm had one or two errors in it, causing big honkin’ artifacts to be left unattractively in the image.

(It’s very geeky of me, but I actually remember some of the image processes which would cause the compression errors, because I had to deal with cases at Superpages.com where our artists made ads for clients, and then the client might call us up and scream because the ad looked bad to them. Such calls could be confounding — imagine an irate attorney who pays many tens of thousands of dollars per year calling you up because he sees crap in the ad your team made for him, and when you pull it up on screen, you can’t see any problem! Then imagine trying to explain to him how he’s seeing the error because he’s on AOL, while the people in your company who create the ads are not on AOL… and you and up with an interesting conversation. Don’t EVER do tech support! But, I digress.)

Anyway, Google’s Page Speed service is taking AOL’s idea just a little further, because they’ve married a few of their services together in order to improve the HTML of the pages they’re caching. Some of that automated improvement will be stuff like rewriting the code to specify heights and widths of images, and minifying CSS or JS code. They might even be doing some of that image compression which was so troublesome with AOL’s rehosting of the entire internet.

But, I’m being snarky with the AOL comparisons! I actually think Google’s idea is a very cool one, and it’s one that I had previously predicted. It made sense once Google rolled out the Page Speed diagnostic (which helped webmasters find areas for improving their pages speed) to then roll out something that would cut down on the network travel time between web site servers and the endusers who request webpages.

This service also immitates other CDNs which came previously, such as Akamai and Amazon’s EC2. I’m a big believer in the power of CDNs, since they have long helped sites move content out closer to “the edge” of the network, reducing the time it takes to deliver webpages, images, Flash, videos, etc. I recommended a CDN for Superpages back when I was there, and it helped improve the user-experience for the millions of visitors we had.

Google’s deployment of this service is a great fit for them, since they already have an array of servers located around the globe, which had enabled them to essentially be their own content delivery network. Also, I wonder if Google couldn’t leverage some of their dark fiber to further reinforce their delivery network’s effectiveness.

The open question at the moment is whether integrating with Google’s Page Speed Service will positively influence search rankings. Since Google started using Page Speed measures as a ranking factor (another development we at KeyRelevance had anticipated), and since using their service would speed up a site’s delivery speeds, it’s easy to connect the dots to see that using such a service could provide a website with an immediate advantage for this ranking factor.

So, Google’s retread of a very old AOL idea may not be all that original, but it is cool since it’s a tool that could help optimize your site a little and improve your user experience very quickly.

12 Tips To Optimize For Google Instant Previews

Chris Silver Smith — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:27:54 +0000

Earlier today, I outlined how Google’s Instant Preview doesn’t display Maps, Flash, YouTube, AJAX, and lots of other rich media commonly found on webpages. If your site pages or homepage have this stuff on it, chances are your Instant Preview image is less-than-stellar and may actually reduce your CTR.

There are a lot of professional websites which have “borked” Instant Previews. For example, check out this Los Angeles dentist’s homepage, which appears with this jaunty giant jigsaw puzzle piece taking up most of its space:

Google has said that the Instant Previews were found to improve their users’ satisfaction with search results significantly during internal testing prior to rolling out the feature. Users can rapidly glance at the preview images to see if the webpages might hold what they’re looking-for, increasing their confidence and helping them select webpages to click upon which are more likely to hold what they want, avoiding clicking on stuff they don’t want.

If that’s true, then the opposite is likely also to play into users’ behavior: if a preview image looks bad and doesn’t look like what they’d expect or want, they might avoid clicking on it.

For anyone who has a site which doesn’t look right in Google Instant Preview mode, this is alarming, since their introduction of this feature could wrongly reduce your clickthrough rates. Even if you’re not worried about the collective effect over time, you still are likely not thrilled that the image representing you may not reflect a true picture nor show you up in the best light.

I’ve been asked before on how to optimize for Google Instant Previews, so here are a few tips I’ve put together:

Although it was an unpleasant surprise when Google opted to ignore sites’ noarchive tags when launching Instant Previews, they did provide a protocol whereby you could completely opt out of it. To opt out, you may add a robots meta tag to your webpage, and in the content include “nosnippet”. You can also use “nosnippet” in the x-robots-tag HTTP header response sent by your server. (Note, this will also block the regular text snippets which usually appear beneath webpage links in the Google SERPs, according to their FAQ.)
Similarly, you could instruct Googlebot from spidering the page by specifying in your robots.txt file that the site, section, or page is to be disallowed. Note, this may also have other undesirable effects, since if Googlebot doesn’t crawl through the page they won’t see all the keyword content on the page nor all the SEO-goodness you’ve already put into it. However, there are sites which have done this, such as Condé Nast, and as a result you will not find the Instant Preview magnifying-glass icon next to their homepage in the search results (an effect which I can understand them wanting, since the main content of their page is Flash, which Instant Preview won’t display):
Of course, opting out of having Instant Previews entirely may be something of a Pyrrhic victory, since all the webpages around you may have it. If you don’t have it, users might be more skeptical of clicking through to your site. Alternatively, they might click through more, out of curiosity. Read on for options on how to improve your preview portrait instead of deleting:
It’s important to diagnose why your page appears with chunks missing or with the gray puzzle icon in place of your core content. For example, I’ve run across a number of sites which have disallowed Google from spidering their images, perhaps under the mistaken belief that image search doesn’t help them. Image search can actually enhance your overall rankings, and your referrals from image search can be substantial over time. So, to get your images to appear in Instant Preview, go back to your robots.txt file and remove disallow rules which may have banned Googlebot from visiting directories on your server where you store your site images.
For Flash content, you really should enhance your site’s overall user-experience by incorporating code which detects whether a visitor’s browser can use the content, and display some default content such as state images or image maps when the browser doesn’t support Flash. For example, you could put the static image content on the page and use Javascript and CSS to overlay the Flash on page load for browsers which support it. In this way, Google Instant Preview may display the image content, allowing the page to look right when previewed. I’ve actually used screen-grabs of the Flash interface itself in order to create these default images for purposes of graceful degradation.
For YouTube videos, you might be able to do something similar. You can probably set up a static preview image of the video interface and then use Javascript and CSS layers to overlay the actual YouTube video embed code for browsers which support it.
For Google Maps, instead of using their embed code which relies upon iframes to deliver the dynamic map interface, you could take a screengrab of the map and set it up as a regular static image, possibly linking that image back to the URL for the map.
For site-wide applications using Google Maps, I believe their API also provides a static image option which could be used instead of the iframe delivery. Obviously, if you’re going for the dynamic functionality, these two options are not going to be preferable.
Another Google Maps option would be to attempt to use NOFRAMES tags around a screengrab image of the map. You’ll need to test this to see if Instant Previews is correctly interpreting and displaying noframed stuff.
Finally, for Google Maps you could also use the Javascript/CSS method I suggested for handling Flash and YouTube videos. Place the map iframe on a layer which will be made to overlay a static image of the map.
Optimizing the call-out text in Preview Images is even more tricky. You may have noticed that Google magnifies portions of text, displaying these snippets larger in boxes on the preview image of your webpages, depending upon the search keywords used. To optimize for this, if it’s displaying badly for some reason, you would need to experiment with placing the page’s most-popular keywords in advantageous places on the page, and then waiting to see how Google highlights it later on in the Instant Previews. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
I’ve also seen Instant Previews highlight certain images on a page, by drawing outlines around them. I believe this may occur when the search keyword matches the image’s ALT text. If this looks unattractive, you could experiment with adjusting the ALT text and see how it looks, just as with the callout snippets. However, I caution that removing ALT text from images could hurt your page’s overall keyword relevancy determination, and impair your image SEO work.
It might be a daunting prospect, but another possibility for optimizing for Instant Previews is to redesign. Instant Previews is a very small wakeup call that website appearance matters, and will impact your effectiveness. Considering how Google likes to quantify userexperience and incorporates usability into rankings, website appearance may impact your rankings in search more and more — you could choose to get ahead of the curve now by making your site appear optimally in the little previews as well as when visitors come to the site.

I expect that Google will likely (hopefully) work upon closing the many gaps in how Instant Previews represent pages. Until then, these tips may be useful to you in optimizing how your site appears in Instant Previews.

Google Sneakily Ignored Noarchive With Instant Previews

Chris Silver Smith — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:01:36 +0000

Google rolled out Instant Previews three months ago in November. After I looked over the new utility, it struck me as very odd that I found pages in Google search results that had no cached view of the indexed content, while they did have this new viewing option of a screengrab of the page.

For instance, quite a number of newspaper websites choose to disable the cached views of their pages. Just search for “newspaper”, and you can immediately see an example such as the New York Times:

As you can see, the listing in the Google search results for The New York Times has no link under it for “Cached”. However, it does have a magnifying glass — the Instant Previews button — which, when clicked, reveals a screengrab of the NYT homepage from Google’s copy of the page when they last spidered it.

The reason the New York Times doesn’t have a “Cached” link is that they purposefully set up a robots meta-tag that specified that they didn’t want Google and other search engines to make a cached copy available for users to see or access:

The NYT “robots” meta has “noarchive” as one of its parameters. This parameter tells Google not to store a cached copy of the page. Or, more accurately, as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines state, “noarchive” instructs Google to not provide the link to the cached copy (Google has to cache some encoded version of the page if they spider it to offer up in the SERPs).

Newspapers with paywalls have done this in many cases where they desire to be spidered and indexed by Google, but they may allow each user “one click free” where the user is allowed to freely access and read one article from their site, but any subsequent articles may require the user to register, or pay. So, those news publishers do not want users to be able to read the article for free via a cached copy.

Various other types of sites use the “noarchive” when they have changing copy on the page that might get out of sync between Google and the page, or when there’s some sensitive content that shouldn’t be visible upon other sites.

So, when Google launched the Instant Preview, it would be common sense for those publishers who’ve chosen to suppress their cached view to think that it would also be suppressed via the Instant Preview. Frankly, the Instant Preview images are a representation of the webpages. They are a snapshot. They are a type of cached view of the page.

Oh, sure, the Instant Preview is often too small to reasonably read print upon the page. However, that’s not the point. And, the print isn’t the only reason why some have opted to disable cached views — for some, the images are also sensitive. And, the print’s not always too small to be read.

Now, Google has provided a way to suppress the Instant Previews. According to the FAQ, using the “nosnippet” parameter in robots meta tag suppresses Instant Previews.

But, the point is that “noarchive” should’ve been expected to have applied to the Instant Previews. Despite the preview images being chopped in some cases or being difficult to read, they are a type of cached copy of the page. And, there are people who don’t mind the text snippets showing up in the search listings, who do mind having the preview page screen-grabs appearing.

Publishers who were using robots noarchive protocol shouldn’t now have to go back and add nosnippet parameters.

Google’s deployment of the Instant Previews, while ignoring the noarchive specification in favor of a lesser-used control parameter is something of a betrayal of trust for webmasters.

A Few Interpretations of Google’s Response to DecorMyEyes.com

Chris Silver Smith — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:55:01 +0000

All the recent hubbub over DecorMyEyes.com, and their claim that treating customers poorly in order to obtain more negative reviews resulted in better Google rankings, has left a small cloud of confusion. The ruckus was sufficient to get Google’s interest, and motivated them to react to it, but what they may have done is worth considering, not least because their statement around it has caused part of the confusion, perhaps purposefully.

First, it seems likely that Vitaly Borker, the offensive proprietor of Decor My Eyes, is likely not some stealth marketing genius. Rather, he sounds more like he rationalizes bad behavior in a variety of ways, according to the NYT article about him, and one of his prime beliefs is that negative ratings have helped his Google rankings. His supposed reasons for this were likely wrong by some degree, but he may’ve accidentally derived some benefits from the practice without knowing actual causality.

What makes him more important is that he got Google’s attention, and caused them to react — or claim they’ve reacted — by making some changes to their algorithms. It’s possible that Google responded mainly out of concern over negative press. It’s also possible that they may’ve said they’ve made a change but did not, but it seems equally possible that they could have indeed tweaked their algorithm. The incident really seems to call for us to consider that “where there’s smoke, there may be fire.”

First of all, I think it’s worthy to note that a few different free/public analytics services appear to indicate little or no major changes to DecorMyEyes.com traffic in the past year, and they indicate the site has relatively little overall traffic anyway.

Compete.com shows fairly consistent, unremarkable traffic:

Alexa shows a sharp spike around when the New York Times article hit, and a subsequent decline, perhaps as traffic went back to normal. Previous to that, it also appears there was pretty consistent, unremarkable traffic:

So, if increasing/ongoing negative reviews helped the site in some way, it’s not clear that it was sudden, dramatic, or providing ongoing increases.

A number of people have tried to reverse-engineer what may have been happening with DecorMyEyes.com, and to also analyze what Google may have done in response. Google states that the negative ratings didn’t help the site, pointing out that a number of those sites nofollow their links. Other analysts have found that the main sources of the site’s PageRank came from links on many low-quality sites, and were likely paid links of some sort. From the Compete/Alexa evidence, it appears very likely that the main traffic to DecorMyEyes may have been primarily longer-tail traffic where they had pages that better matched phrase combinations that fewer popular sites have.

For the analysts believing Google’s statement that the nofollowed links provided no value, and instead ascribing the site’s ranking ability primarily to paid links, their seems to be a small conflict that has gone unrecognized: Google states that they are adept at recognizing paid links, and that they don’t count them. So, it seems dichotomous to simultaneously believe that the nofollowed links that a few review sites may’ve included were worthless to Decor My Eyes, while believing paid links may’ve helped.

As I pointed out in my article on the Decor My Eyes fiasco and local reviews tactics, it is possible that they could have ranked due to citations provided in the text of reviews. As you may be aware, in local search algorithm patents, Google engineers have written that it could be possible to use mere mentions of a business’s name and address information as a signal for popularity. While this may never have been used by Google in local search or otherwise, it’s possible that they have been using it and may have even extended some of the algorithmic behavior into regular web search rankings where it could affect sites like Decor My Eyes. If such a ranking factor were at play, it could also explain why major brand names seem to have better ranking ability, as many SEOs have observed.

Google’s post about their action towards Decor My Eyes is the most obscure when describing changes they made to demerit the site due to customer complaints. The rhetoric surrounding that aspect is particularly worthy of politicians. They point out that merely basing rankings or penalizations around sentiment analysis would have negative consequences — such as making it difficult to find politicians’ websites, which would be a poor consumer experience. However, they state that they’ve come up with some solution that may negatively impact sites which offer such poor customer experience.

As I noted, Google personnel have explicitly stated that they may choose to still use some nofollowed links from sites with data that they deem to be valuable. So, it’s possible that they were counting links to Decor My Eyes from any consumer review site which had nofollowed links. After all, before the NYT article aired, consumer complaint sites probably were not a widely-exploited target for links, since most people would’ve assumed they would harm websites’ reputations unacceptably, counteracting any possible value obtained from their links. If this was the case, Google’s action may have been as simple as halting link flow from complaint sites.

However, another explanation could be related to both sentiment analysis and citations. If Decor My Eyes was deriving citational benefit from consumer complaint sites, Google could have applied algorithmic rules to the effect that citation rank benefit would not be passed if sentiment analysis of surrounding text/context indicated it was a complaint rather than a compliment/recommendation.

Conclusions?

Google’s actions and rhetoric would appear to strongly indicate that there was something about what Borker was doing that may’ve benefited him. From external traffic reporting services, and from analyses of what terms the site seemed to be ranking for, it appears he was mostly getting long-tail phrase matches. However, even his ability to get longtail matches indicated he had a small amount of ranking weight from something. So, theories expressed by some people that he was doing nothing that helped him at all appear to me to be off-base. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
The analysts who say that DecorMyEyes.com ranked only because of paid links, at best are painting an incomplete picture. If it was the case, Google could’ve then simply demerited the site’s external links’ voting ability and done nothing else to penalize them. However, if you’re going to believe Google any, then they are strongly suggesting they altered something else in penalizing Decor My Eyes, and you have to also suspect that many of the paid links and nofollowed links were not passing any PR anyway. If that’s so, there was some other, hidden phenomenon going on.
Citations might be the hidden phenomenon — the “black matter” missing from our unified field theory of the ranking algorithm universe. If so, Google’s actions may’ve involved tweaking some aspect of assessment or transferring of citation ranking weight.

Facebook SEO Tip: Add Your URL To Your Wall

Chris Silver Smith — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:41:28 +0000

Here at KeyRelevance we’re researching a number of different avenues for online marketing for our clients, so, along with our bread-and-butter work on Paid Search (PPC) management, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we’ve done quite a bit of exploration of ideas on how to leverage the massive audiences found in various Social Media such as in Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday, I published an article on a somewhat subtle technique which can be used when posting status updates on Facebook in order to increase the numbers of people who might see each updates. However, there are a number of very straight-forward things which businesses and organizations can do to extract marketing advantage from Facebook without getting all tricky. Sometimes the most basic steps can give you the greatest advantage, but it’s not always obvious how to go about it.

So, here’s a ridiculously basic tip which I’ve found many businesses have utterly failed to accomplish in setting up their Facebook presence: add your website link to your Facebook wall page!

There are a great many companies, organizations, and small businesses which haven’t figured out how to do this, and so you can encounter pages all the time which do not sport that most basic element of their online marketing. For instance, the official Facebook page for the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest universities in the country, has completely missed the boat by leaving their URL off their Facebook page:

By contrast, their rivals at Texas A&M University have implemented their website URL on their Facebook page:



(Disclosure: Texas A&M was my alma mater, so I did get a grin when I noticed that the TAMU University Relations Department did this most basic element correctly while the "Tea-Sips", as we like to call them, did not.)
Oh, to be certain, I should point out that URLs on Facebook pages are nofollowed (not to mention that they're apparently dynamically written to the pages onload, via Javascript), so they're not precisely as optimal as many search engine marketing experts might like. However, there's much to indicate that Google, if not the other search engines, can pick and choose whether they'll use the links from a particular site as ranking signals, even if the links there are Nofollowed. Wikipedia is a strong case-in-point, where it appears that links from the behemoth site are somewhat influential. Google might well desire to use Facebook page links as well as the number of likes associated with a page as yet another ranking signal -- despite the presence of the nofollow parameter.
Part of the reason so many companies (or universities) may have neglected to add their links to pages is Facebook's fault. Depending on the type of page one is adding, there may or may not be a field provided to add a link -- which is downright odd. Most people have set up personal pages in Facebook, which allow one a specific field to enter the URLs into -- so, people are at a loss when configuring the page for their business and no link field is provided overtly.
So, one way around this limitation is to update the small text box located below the profile picture that says "Write something about [organization name]." If you write out your URL here, it will automatically get hyperlinked by Facebook. Here's the field from our KeyRelevance Facebook page:



Using either the full, HTTP://... URL, or just "WWW.EXAMPLE.COM" version of a URL will result in it getting automatically hyperlinked once you save.
Ideally, I think one should enter the business/organization URL, and then post a brief descriptive statement directly afterward, similar to how Texas A&M University did theirs.
Anyway, enjoy this most basic of tips -- the link is the most fundamental element of search engine optimization, so you should never neglect including it with your online promotional work. Unless you're the University of Texas -- in which case I'm okay with it.


Using Bing’s New Webmaster Tools For SEO
Chris Silver Smith — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:05:41 +0000
You may be aware that Bing recently released a new version of their Webmaster Tools which are intended to help webmasters in improving their sites’ performance in Bing search. One of Microsoft’s Senior Program Managers and SEOs, Duane Forrester, asked a number of us to give feedback to their team on what could be improved about the interface. So, I thought it might be good to provide that feedback via blog post, openly — not to beat up on Bing, but to further bounce ideas among the community.



Giving feedback to any of the search engines about their tools for webmasters seems a bit fraught with the near-futile dichotomy between the desires of Search Engine Optimization experts and the desire of search engineers to neutrally provide positive/fair rankings of search results. However, the exercise of me providing a little feedback is worthwhile, because if the tools are useless or pointless to us, then there’s little point in the search engines going to the effort of providing them in the first place.
Having worked in a major corporation before, I almost feel repressed about throwing out suggestions that I know could be deemed no-gos from the point of view of Bing engineers. I tend to self-censor to a degree because I don’t want to be interpreted as naive of the issues the search engines must take into account in trying to limit undue influence of those attempting to subvert the SERPs.
Even so, I’m aware of the potentially conflicting considerations, and as I described earlier, it’s an exercise in futility if the tools don’t provide worthwhile functionality to the intended users.
One of the primary problems I see with Bing’s Webmaster Tools is the sense of “keeping up with the Joneses” one gets when reviewing their interfaces. Bing’s development team is in a near no-win situation with whatever they do in this area. On one hand, if they copy the same functionality found in Google’s Webmaster Tools, they’d be accused of being mere immitators. However, there are some good elements in Google’s toolset which really ought to be provided, perhaps. On the other hand, if they went even further in providing usefulness to webmasters, it could make them more prone to unethical marketing exploits. So, there likely were not a lot of easy solutions nor perhaps obvious things which they should have done.
Further, their focusing upon their tool-vs-Google’s tends to be a bit incestuous, and there’s the usual engineer myopia in providing what they think people would need/want versus trying to really look at the problem directly from the point of view of a webmaster. (Now, this bias in perception can’t be accused of Duane, because he was an external SEO prior to working for Microsoft — but there’s a definite sense of this basic utility design problem inherent in both Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Webmaster Tools.)
Likewise, Google Webmaster tools suffers a bit from the conflicting goals of the engineers and the needs of the tools’ target audience. So, I’d prefer that none of the search engines look at one another’s offerings when designing such things, but instead try to focus solely upon providing as much functionality as webmasters might need. As things currently stand, there’s a sensation that all of the search engines are providing something of “placebo utilities” to webmasters — the interfaces have some confusing melange of features which are ultimately not all that useful, but are instead intended to throw up some smoke and mirrors to make it appear that they’re trying to help webmasters with the optimization of their sites.

Moving past my perhaps-unfair assertions, let’s look at what the new Bing tools provide, and what could be done better.

First, a head-nod to Vanessa Fox for her comparison between Bing's and Google's Webmaster Tools -- as the creator of Google's Webmaster Tools, she is likely one of the best people around to examine such utilities with a critical eye, and in the best position to know how much info a search engine might realistically be able to provide, and in what format. Likewise, a nod to Barry Schwartz's post about Bing's tools.

Both Vanessa and Barry berate Microsoft for building the tools while requiring Silverlight technology to view/use them. I don't consider that as much of a big deal, because I consider that a sort of "religious difference" in how the tools were constructed (most of us who are jaded about how Microsoft has strong-armed proprietary technology in the past might react negatively against Silverlight, as well as those who avoid it out of conservative privacy practices).

However, if I'm looking at Bing Webmaster Tools purely from the perspective of how well it does or doesn't function, I'm not concerned about this tech dependency built into it, since I think the majority of webmasters out there will be unaffected by this. I'm not a fan of MS programming protocols AT ALL, and it may be a bit of my former bias as a technologist within a megacorporation creeping in, but the Silverlight criticism just appears slightly out of sync with the primary issues of whether the tools provide vital functionality or not -- and, it may not be unfair of Microsoft to decide that if you wish to play in their Bing sandbox, they have the right to promote their proprietary technology to do so. In comparison, I have a friend who is a privacy freak, and he surfs with Flash disabled -- Google's Webmaster Tools requires Flash for one or two graphs, and would be equally irritating to him as Silverlight.

Both Barry and Vanessa mention how Bing's new interface revoked the backlink reports, and I agree with them both on this point. This was one area where I'd hoped Bing would take the opportunity to be more open than Google. If the engineers looked at competitors' tools while building Bing's, they should have tried to recreate the backlink reports that Yahoo! provided in Site Explorer -- which seems to give a more comprehensive picture of backlinks. Since webmasters are told that inbound links are one major criterion for rankings, avoiding providing this info is a major void.

Bing obscures the numbers of pages indexed when one performs a "site:" search by domain, too, so revoking this functionality, such as it was, from the old interface eroded some of the usefulness. Perhaps their pre-development surveying of webmasters resulted in feedback that their earlier backlink report "wasn't useful", but that would've mainly been because it was less-robust than one like Yahoo's.

Vanessa mentions that they don't provide data export features, and I agree completely that this is a major oversight. In fact, as a programmer I happen to know just how relatively easy it is to code data to export in XML or CSV, and considering how long it took to launch the product it's sort of shocking they didn't include this upon launch. (You'd think Microsoft would not miss an opportunity to provide a "click to export to Excel" button!)

Vanessa stated that they also ditched the Domain Score, and remarked that this was a good thing. I disagree on this point because I think any insight into a ranking score that any of the engines give us is helpful in assessing how effective/important a site or domain is. Was this the same as the small bar-scales Microsoft had been providing for a handful of the more important site pages via the interface? Although these graphical page ranking scores were entirely derivative of Google Toolbar PageRank, I would've prefered they provide even more in that area. Bing's in a position where they ought to be able to experiment with providing more info than Google does, and see just how dangerous it really is to be more open with marketers!

Vanessa did a great comparison between the analytics Bing provides versus Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. While analytics from Bing's perspective are interesting to us all, she notes one aspect that also strikes me as an issue with the graphs: as a webmaster/SEO, when I see indexation decreasing, I'd really like to know why. This is particularly irritating where Bing is concerned, because among the industry I think it's widely felt that Bing simply indexes a lot less than Google.

Many of my clients want to know what they can do in order to increase their indexation with Bing. I see the same thing with my test websites. I may have 30,000 discrete pages and Bing appears to index a sharply lower number than Yahoo or Google. The feature allowing one to manually submit URLs seems to acknowledge this sad fact -- but, in context, it's nearly sending the wrong message! "Oh, our spider's legs get tired out there, so bring your pages directly to us." Vanessa's got a point on this score -- why should I feel I need to do this if you accept Sitemaps? And, if I or my clients have tens of thousands of site pages, fifty pages to be manually submitted at a time is simply not a sustainable solution. I can understand having the interface to rapidly submit brand new content pages, but what's missing may be some clear communication as to what issue is restricting my indexation.

The Features showing whether there are robots restrictions, malware, or crawl errors which could impact a site are all great. However, if one already has everything functioning just fine, the tools need to answer futher questions: Why isn't my site crawled more deeply? And: Why don't my pages rank higher? Ultimately, webmasters ask: What can I do to improve my site's performance? Understandably, Bing and other search engines are reticent to provide too much info in this area. However, there are things which they could provide:

Possibly a tool where a webmaster could select one of their pages or submit a URL to find out what primary keyword phrase Bing considers the page to be about?
Tools which report upon quality issues detected with specific pages. For instance, is the page missing a Meta Description or Title? Are there pages where the Title or Meta Description appears to not be relevant to the page's content, or out of sync with anchor text used in inbound links? Are there images which could be improved with ALT text?
Why not merely inform webmasters that you consider their links and other references to be too few or of too low in importance?
Bring back the scales showing page scores, and actually go further in providing some sort of numeric values!
Actually show us that you spider all pages, even if you opt not to keep all in your active index! This would at least give the impression that you are able to index as deeply as Google, but choose not to display everything for other reasons.
How about informing us of pages or types of pages (based upon querystring parameters, perhaps) which appear to have large degrees of duplication going on?
Tie-in our Webmaster Tools with local listing account management for local businesses, so everything could be done via one interface.
Provide means for us to customize the appearance of our SERP listings a little bit, similar to Yahoo SearchMonkey and Google's Rich Snippets.
Provide us with tools that help us improve overall site quality, such as if you see pages on our site with incorrect copyright, misspellings, or orphaned pages.
Consider providing us with an A/B testing type of tool so that you might inform us about which of two page layouts performs better for Bing search!
Inform us if you detect that a site has some sort of inferior link hierarchy -- this could indicate usability problems affecting humans as well as spiders.
Provide more granular details on how well we perform in Bing Image Search, Mobile Search, Video Search, etc. Currently, I cannot tell how many of my images are indexed in Bing.
For that matter, it would be nice to enable an Image Sitemap file, like what Google offers.
Finally, for a really pie-in-the-sky request: You operate web search for Facebook -- would your contract allow you to tell us how often our webpages appear in Facebook search results and how many clickthroughs we might get from those?

Anyway, there's my feedback, criticism, and some ideas for additional features. I'm not trying to beat anyone up and I'm actually grateful for any feedback we receive from all of the search engines on our performance within them. I mainly ask that the search engineers will keep in mind that we mainly want to know "What can we do to improve performance?" and to provide us with tools to accomplish that in as much as they're able to do without compromising the integrity of the engine.

Where Bing is concerned, I believe it could be possible to be even more open than Google is in order to further differentiate yourselves and experiment to see what's really possible in terms of openness!

Without Usability, You’re Not Doing Advanced SEO

Chris Silver Smith — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:06:14 +0000

My article covering how Google’s fixation with Usability reveals local search ranking factors published yesterday on Search Engine Land. In it, I described a number of common website elements which few-to-no marketers have ever cited as ranking signals. Some of these elements, such as whether or not a site may have employee profile pages, or whether a site displays prices for products and services offered, might be controversial in search engine marketing circles.

CNN's homepage checked with Google Page Speed - Google introduced Site Speed as a new ranking factor in 2010, and provided tools like this Page Speed extension in FireFox to assist webmasters with Usability improvements.

Other elements I described have been cited by other experts as beneficial for search marketing, even though they may’ve recommended them for reasons other than those I outlined. Inclusion of images, maps and locations pages make sense for multiple reasons in local business websites.

The thought and methodology behind coming up with these factors is sound, and has allowed me to successfully predict present and future search engine optimization factors where others have not. It makes logical sense that while Google is interested in Usability, they will seek ways to quantify and measure it on websites, just as they have done with Site Speed. And some very easy usability elements to quantify include common website elements such as the About Us, Contact Us, and Locations pages.

Back in 2006, I began predicting that the practice of Search Engine Optimization might become replaced by Usability. Unquestionably, this change is occuring to some degree right now.

I’ve known a lot of top corporations which are involved in very sophisticated paid search marketing and search engine optimization, but few of them are also including usability testing and user-centered design considerations when performing a site redesign. Google has tried to make the importance of user-experience abundantly clear by actually going public with their adoption of page load times in determining search result rankings, but many companies are still not connecting the dots.

Here at KeyRelevance, we have long prioritized usability in our assessments of web sites’ design. When companies contract with us to audit their websites, we offer both a Technical Website Review as well as a Usability Review. However, many companies eschew our Usability Reviews or dismiss them as less-important.

For some reason, people often react to usability recommendations from experts in an emotional way, rather like how a portion of the population avoids going to their doctors for a yearly physical. For some companies, there are already so many dependencies and requirements going into web design projects that they can’t include more without losing impetus. For others, individuals with authority over projects have egos which do not want to lose discretionary control over project decisions which could be altered if usability research ran counter to what they desire to do.

Usability testing can be the difference between a design that becomes highly popular versus one which is rapidly forgotten. Google itself is an example of how user-centered design will translate into success. More design options can be scientifically decided, honing down to interfaces which will maximize ease-of-use and enjoyment-of-use. Instead of being avoided, usability testing should be embraced — after all, in the business world we’re looking to increase the potential for success in our company projects, right?

Knowing Google’s heavy focus upon usability factors, consider that if you’re not doing iterative Usability testing and adjustment for User-Experience, you really may not be doing “Advanced SEO”.

If you’d like a thorough Usability Audit of your site, contact Key Relevance today to schedule our review and get a report of items to consider before your next sitewide redesign is completed.

Also, check out some of the free tools that Google has been providing to help you with portions of usability analysis. Try out Google Browser Size, Google Page Speed, and look at the Site Speed reports in Google Webmaster Tools for your website.

Town & City Name Sponsorships

Chris Silver Smith — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:24:39 +0000

I just wrote an article which published at Search Engine Land yesterday on the subject of some innovative and occasionally guerrilla marketing tactics that might be used to display advertising promotion via Google Maps. (See: Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps)

One aspect the article touches upon is how some smaller towns and cities might find it attractive to sell the rights to their names in return for sponsor dollars. I find this concept interesting, particularly as many municipalities have begun considering flogging the rights to name all sorts of things from auditoriums to subway stations to city service departments.

In the article I mentioned “DISH, Texas” which sold its name a few years ago to a satellite dish company in return for free satellite TV service for all of its residents. While this is one of the more recent examples of “City Name Sponsorships”, it’s not the first. My coworker, Mike Churchill alerted me to the fact that the small town of “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico” actually changed its name from “Hot Springs” back in 1950 in order to win a radio contest.

The NBC radio program, “Truth or Consequences” offered to broadcast their show from the first town that renamed itself for the show.

In American history, quite a number of towns and cities went through various name transitions over time, but most of these monikers were inspired by people’s names or were descriptive in some way. These days, I suspect that most larger cities would find a lot of resistance to selling off their names — and for well-known cities they’d be losing a lot of “brand equity” if they dropped a well-known name. But, for small towns, there could potentially be a lot of places which might find large corporate investment attractive enough that they could overcome constituents’ resistance to name-change.

Selling a placename is bound to create controversy whenever it happens. Winnipeg’s plans to sell off naming rights on everything from parking meters to bus tickets and even city services has apparently gotten significant criticism.

Kalle Lasn, founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, says selling off naming rights to city services is an example of backward and unimaginative thinking.

“It’s really depressing … They should learn how to be a little bit more innovative. There are ways of cutting back and ways of generating revenue that don’t include selling your soul to corporations.”

(Adbusters is famous for helping promote “Buy Nothing Day” and other anti-commercialism and anti-advertising philosophies.)

Regardless of the controversy, the prospect of abruptly having some saleable assets available is likely to prove too attractive to resist for many city managers during these cash-strapped times. I expect we’ll see some more instances of corporate-sponsored city names appearing in online mapping systems like Google Maps.

I think my computer must be tired – it’s not thinking too clearly

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:01:14 +0000

I was checking the weather this morning (raining again – Ugh!) and when I went to look at the detailed hourly predictions, I got a suprise.

It was interesting find that the Google Toolbar thinks that the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website is written in Sovenian !

The Associated Press’s News Microformat

Chris Silver Smith — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:28:27 +0000

The Associated Press (AP) recently announced a semantic markup standard they’d like to see adopted online for news articles – the “hNews Microformat“. The proposed microformat was announced simultaneously with their declaration of a news registry system to facilitate protection and paid licensing arrangements for quoting and using news article material. While the overall announcement and news registry system was widely ridiculed in the blogosphere (in part because of a confusingly inaccurate description which stated that the microformat would serve as a “wrapper” for news articles, and the overall business model and protection scheme seems both naively optimistic and out-of-touch with copyright “fair use” standards and actual technological constraints), but the hNews microformat part itself could potentially gain some traction.

So, if you’re an online marketer of a site which publishes large amounts of articles and news stories, is the hNews microformat worth adopting to improve your online optimizations?


(AP's Diagram Illustrating "Protect, Point & Pay" System & hNews Microformat)

I’ve long been a proponent of incorporating microformats within webpages as a component of overall good usability and potentially valuable formatting for search engine optimization purposes. Microformats can provide some additional, enhanced usability for advanced users who are using devices which can read the information and store it for future use, and they can potentially improve search engines’ ability to understand the content within webpages which could lend a marginal increment more SEO value.

Both Yahoo! and Google have been sending signals for the past few years that they consider some of the microformats to be potentially useful as well. They’ve both marked up their own local search results with hCard microformatting for end users’ benefit, and they’re both starting to make use of microformatting to give certain types of data special treatment. In the case of Google, they announced that they’d begin displaying some microformat data with slightly different listing layouts in the search results, a treatment that they’ve dubbed “Rich Snippets”. And, they say they’ll be rolling out more treatments based on microformats in the future.

With this background in mind, it’s not surprising that the AP has jumped on the microformats bandwagon, but it also appears that they’re trying to influence the development of them where news articles are concerned, with a major agenda in mind. They wish to include some sort of webbug in each news story’s markup, so that publishers of the content can be tracked more easily by them – it will be clearer when sites are reprinting news stories, and how frequently those stories are visited and viewed by consumers online.

Other portions of the hNews microformat appear to be more useful from both a search engine viewpoint and publisher site aspect. Labelling of items including keyword tags, headlines, main content, geographic locations and including author’s vcard info all appear to be valuable standards.

(I could really criticize their “geo” tagging of the articles as quite inadequate, though. Merely adding a longitude and latitude to an article seems quite short-sighted, because there needs to be further definition of what is being geotagged. If an article is about multiple locations, it would be ideal to label each geotag to tell what item is being located. Further, it would be ideal to label the article with an assumption of the geographic region that the article should be expected to appeal to. Is it mainly of interest to people within a particular city, state/province, region, nation, or is it of international interest? Still, having some geotag is better than nothing.)

For any marketers out there considering adopting the hNews Microformat standard, I’d advise waiting until the dust settles on this one. Other microformats developed perhaps more objectively, and there’s a lot of distrust and disaffection with the heavy news industry influence that is involved in this proposed standard. Currently, I’m not convinced that it will be widely enough accepted to become valuable for use. While having AP partners all adopting the standard may be sufficient enough to reach a tipping point where many other sites and companies will make use of hNews, Google’s public response to it was unusually cold-sounding.

Blogger/reporter Matthew Goldstein quotes Google’s response on the matter: “Google welcomes all ideas for how publishers and search engines can better communicate about their content. We have had discussions with the Associated Press, as well as other publishers and organizations, about various formats for news. We look forward to continuing the conversation.” While sounding expectably neutral and noncommittal, Google is also stating that this has not been widely-accepted by everyone, even within the news industry itself. This in combination with widespread skepticism within the developer/microformat community and blogosphere signal that hNews may have a very long way to go before it becomes something worthwhile for optimizing articles on publisher sites.

So, for now I advise avoiding this proposed standard, sit back and see how the dust settles. If you’re already syndicating content via RSS and Atom feeds, then you’re already distributing your content in a manner that’s easily absorbable and readable by search engines.