Archive for the 'Google' Category

Dang, it’s after midnight and I’m still at the office again. There’s been 2 cases of Sundaes Best hot fudge sitting on top of my desk that I’m not sure if I should be selfish and give the fudge to the employees (Oh man, I can hear Lisa and Christine and QualityGal saying "Me!", "Me!", "Me!") or if I should try to use this hot fudge for the benefit of my old friend who each year sends me a few cases of hot fudge.

I’ve never taken money from Sundaes Best Hot Fudge. They just send me a few cases of hot fudge each year for "marketing" (fyi, someone else does his site…and I have no say in that area…I’m only "marketing"). So each year he sends a few cases of fudge to me and he doesn’t say what to do with it, or ask about the marketing that we’ve been doing, or have not been doing.

So you know me…I’m always thinking Links…and here’s all these jars of hot fudge in front of me ….and I can’t help but wonder, if I saw a great page about hot fudge, and wrote the the website owner and said, "hey, I was reading your page about hot fudge at http://www.site.com/hot-fudge.html, and thought you’d like to try a jar of this hot fudge. Can I send you a jar?"

Is that breaking any Google guidelines?
Is that evil?
Is that Cheating?
… or is that just "Marketing"?

I don’t know…..
I can tell you that I’d really like to know that answer. I know that Michael Gray is being the trouble maker by pushing some buttons on this very topic via starting Viral conversations which as far as I know, I’ve not seen any G response from yet (correct me if I’m wrong).

I’ve hesitated doing this the past few months….as you know, I’m trying to be Mr. Clean…so I’m not sure if I should try something like this or not….but I’ve got all these jars of hot fudge…what to do….what to do….

This takes me back to the days when I was a Schwan’s Route Saleman. To get new clients, I’d knock on peoples doors and when they’d answer I’d hand them a 1/2 gallon of vanilla ice cream and a product book, I’d tell them it’s Free and that I’ll stop back in 2 weeks and they can tell me then if they ever want me to come back again or not.

It worked then…and it worked good…when they told me I could give away free vanilla ice cream to help get new clients, I ran with that for all that it was worth…and my work at that paid off. Every day I picked up new clients doing this. I was so good at this that I set route sales records that may still stand today, was able to split one of my days into 2 days, sell off one of my days to another driver, and was 4th in the northeastern states territory for new clients. It’s the same thing here….

"Hey Bob,
I saw your page where you talk about how to make hot fudge, and I thought you should try Sundaes Best Hot Fudge. I think is the best in the world, and I’d like to send you a free bottle – no strings, if you’ll let me.
Here’s your page where I saw you talking about hot fudge. If you felt this hot fudge met your approval, feel free to mention it there, we think it would add value to that page, and after trying, we hope you agree."

…I don’t know…. maybe we don’t mention the "feel free to mention it there…"….I’m just thinking… It would make sense to give people hot fudge and say there’s no obligation, and leave them "something" they can do, if they wish….and how they do it, is up to them. I don’t feel I should have to tell them anything about how they link it if they link it….they get the fudge, what they do is up to them, even if the do nothing in return. It’s free fudge. I hope they decide to do something nice in return…but that’s up to them.

I’ve got 2 cases of hot fudge on my desk, can I give them away just like I gave out 1/2 gallon of ice cream back in the day? If so, I might want to milk that for all it’s worth like I did with ice cream…is it evil then? Is that cheating? is that against the guidelines?….or is that White Hat Marketing?

I wonder what the Google spam engineers view is on this?

What’s your view on this?

PS…..relax ladies, I’ve got a few jars stashed away here if you’re needing a fudge fix.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Lisa Barone has moved to Historic Troy New York and has joined We Build Pagesas our Senior Writer.

Stay tuned for a new website and blog on WeBuildPages.com in the near future.

View the Press Release Here.     

I’m Feeling Lucky!

Popularity: unranked [?]

If you’re going to SMX NYC, Be sure the attend This Party which donates to the Ronald McDonald House on Monday Night. 

I’m honored to announce that we’re (We Build Pages) hosting the Internet Marketer’s Charity Party next Monday night, October 6, at SMX East in New York City. It’s our first time hosting a charity party, but shouldn’t be our last.

The Charity Party will be at the Social Bar (795 8^th Avenue). We’re asking for a $50 (in advance, or at the door) donation that will be donated to the Ronald McDonald House. Your entrance also includes free drinks all night.

  The party starts at 8:00 and goes until Midnight. Come and help make the world a better place.

A great big thank you to the Best of the Web Crew, Chris Winfield and the 10e20 Crew, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal, Jon Kelly of Sure Hits, who are sponsors of the night’s events.

Please go the the Charity Party Page to find out more and to get your tickets in advance. 

Drink, Network, and Help the Ronald McDonald House.

Popularity: unranked [?]

In honor of Google’s 10th Anniversary Celebration and inspired by the "Google is turning 10. See what’s happened in the past 10 years." Prominently displayed under the search box all week, I decided to take a little excursion into the outer realm of Google’s returns to find a few fun entries and facts from the 10th page of Google’s results for some of its biggest players.

Google
Interestingly enough when you Google the word Google, the 10th page introduces us to Johnny who says he can help us Hack Google. Nice.
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/

We are also finally given access to http://www.google.com.my/ on page 10. Apparently Malaysia gets nose-bleed seats in Google and in the UN.

And one that actually made me laugh is http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/m/index.cgi

Which despite undergoing a server update, provides us with a link to Amazon.com where we can buy Books on how to use Google as well as on Tantric Sex. Is that some sort of commentary on search engines and delayed gratification? Hmmmm…

Sergey Brin

Where do you want to go if you’re from Portugal and you want to find out more about Sergey Brin?
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

Well this Portuguese Wikipedia page graces page 10 for his moniker, so Desculpa-me meus amigos, you’ll have to dig.

One of the other interesting items you can find out here in the depths of the Serps is what Sergey looks like in Roller blades

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2008/09/sergey-brin-nee.html

and apparently his wheels need rotating?

And of course here we can get our hands on one of many notices about the news of Sergey’s impending plan to temporarily abandon cyberspace for a multi-million dollar trip to Outer space.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/11/1456244

Larry Page

In case you like to take the scenic route, the 10th page takes you to:

http://www.amazon.com/Larry-Page-Sergey-Brin-Innovators/dp/0737738634

Where Amazon conveniently allows you to pick up the Larry and Sergey biography "Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys " and guess what?! It’s on sale and eligible for Super Saver Shipping! Come on guys, news this big ought to at least make page 7.

We also have a Webmasterworld thread where Larry’s genius is debated by guys named Cabbie and Subway. Porn is misspelled and George Bernard Shaw comes up at least once…

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34476.htm

There is also a highly informative notable biography on Google’s founder’s:

http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ow-Sh/Page-Larry-and-Brin-Sergey.html

It covers how they met, a few of the legendary Google pranks and is of course tastefully sprinkled with Adsense.

And last but not least a tribute to Google’s leader of our little SEO tribe, Mr. Matt Cutts.

For anyone who forgot the dark day that Dark SEO came into Matt’s life, then out in page-ten-land there is this little reminder of the fact that Matt does indeed have a sense of humor when it comes to cloaking..

http://www.utheguru.com/matt-cutts-blog-has-been-hacked

And thanks to this enlightening interview with Matt, http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html  I now know that Matt likes spiders, the non-algorithmic kind, and that he called Sowbugs cute.

and lastly I couldn’t help but become enthralled by this tenth page post on SEOscoop.com

http://www.seo-scoop.com/2008/01/24/matt-cutts-why-am-i-still-being-punished/

This one of many "Why haven’t I gotten my PR back even though I no-followed my paid links" blog posts where Matt, rather kindly, engages in a very informative dialogue about the whys and wherefores of the still absent Green bar. He makes it clear that when reviewing a re-inclusion request, Google is much like a new home buyer with the tendency to look under the bed and deep in the closet for junk in placers where the owner hasn’t been in years. The moral of the story? Sweep out ALL of your corners before having an Open House with a Google Engineer. The information is gold, but as for its application? Well the Post ranks in the top 100 for Matt’s name…but it is sporting a spiffy PR 0.

While there is plenty more in the nether-regions, these were a few of my favorites, happy tenth anniversary Google, I have no doubt the next 10 will be even better, at least I hope so, my job depends on it.

Ninja Jen

Popularity: unranked [?]

*** This contest is over. The winner was Risa Borsykowsky, a professional web designer from RB3 Web Design and Search Engine Optimization. Thanks Risa! ***

I’m seeking a logo for a new website and foundation called "Give A Little Bit".

I can pay $200 for the winning logo…

…or…

you can get a link on their "Thank-you.htm" page.
It will say "Logo created by ….." and will link to your site….hum…is that considered selling links??

The winner will be chosen Monday morning, and will be published on Monday Night at http://givealittlebit.com (coming soon).

To submit a logo, email it to my first name at webuildpages.com

Thanks!

Popularity: unranked [?]

Rhea Drysdale Joins We Build Pages! 

I’m excited to announce that Rhea Drysdale has joined We Build Pages. I’m sure Rhea, like Pat, will enjoy all that Upstate New York can offer. I know Rhea and her husband are surfers…..shouldn’t be too hard to learn to snowboard …hehe.

 Check out the Press Release on Rhea Joining We Build Pages.

PS. Stay tuned for more big news like this coming soon

Popularity: unranked [?]

Yesterday QualityGal gave a few thoughts on the recent comments about Michael Gray’s take on Guy Kawasaki accepting a camera for the review…and how they feel Google should treat this (the ole paid link debate stuff).

It’s a debate that I’m personally happy to stay out of….though I know how Yahoo would try to treat this…..hey, the world will never be perfect…ya can’t always get what ya want…but if you try some times, you might just find…you can get what you need…oh yea!…

But since QualityGal talked some on paid links yesterday (and I’ll try to stay out of that), maybe I can talk some of Google’s Quality Raters today (FYI, there may possibly be over 10,000 of them) – QualityGal can’t really comment; she’s a stickler about her NDA.

Today I saw that Barry Schwartz had noted a post by Scott Huffman on the Google Blog on how Human Reviewers are used to help Google with their Algorithms.

Now QualityGal may have a lot of experience rating web pages, but don’t think that she’s ever told me any Google secrets…..I had already given a few presentations at SEOClass on "What a Human Reviewer Might Look At" before ever hiring QualityGal. I know a lot of what the human reviewers might be looking at…I may have come across some documents online…I’ll plead the 5th on that…

Anyways, there’s really no "hidden secrets" in any of these documents that I many or may not have read…there’s no "oh, here’s something one could exploit"….if anything, it shows that the human review is very very hard to "exploit"….you need to provided the searcher what they are seeking.

I can narrow all the documents I may have ever read about the human reviewers down to this basic point.

Serve the User’s Intent for the Phrase Searched.

As Scott said on the Google Blog today,

First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s "intent" — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games, … ? This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.

In the old days at We Build Pages if a client said they wanted to target one specific page to rank great for "Widgets," "Green Widgets," and "Small Widgets," we might have said "sure" if we felt the traffic was good, felt we could achieve it, and felt they’d get their ROI. These days, we’d take our analysis one step further to ask "Does this page serve as a great page for the user intent for each of those phrases?" …and to take that a step further to ask, "How good is that page compared to the other pages in the top 10 for each phrases?"

We’ve also brought QualityGal into several meetings with clients to help explain to them that it’s not the best thing to target a page that doesn’t match the user’s intent. We can change the page or the targeted page (and give ideas for solutions)…but we really want to match the user’s intent…it’s the best thing for everyone (the user, Google, the site…and the SEO).

That may sound simple, but you’d be amazed at how many people only think of keyword popularity, or ROI, rankings, yada yada metrics…yet they leave out "user intent" in their analysis …and ranking #1 for that dream phrase isn’t utilized if it doesn’t match the users intent…and worse case, the human reviewers may collectively vote that you’re type of page isn’t they type that should be on the first page….that’d suck.

Popularity: unranked [?]