Just a quick note to say that I’ll be live-blogging the BlueglassFL conference next week from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino outside of Ft. Lauderdale. Thanks to a generous prize from Ann Donnelly I was able to attend at the last minute. The agenda looks exciting.
If you’re going to the conference, make sure you familiarize yourself with some of the local Florida Laws before you go. You don’t want to end up being arrested for singing while wearing your bathing suit at the Hard Rock’s pool.
If you’re lucky enough to “hook up” remember that in Florida, only the missionary style is legal. Also, sex with porcupines is strictly forbidden – so you’ll have to find another animal. Be careful though – while it is legal to have relations with an elephant, you will be fined if you leave it tied to a parking meter.
And Ladies, don’t even think about parachuting on Sunday.
Once you get to Blueglass, look for me by the blackjack table and let’s talk SEO over a beer. If you’re not, you can find my live blog coverage of Blueglass Florida below, and you can find even more coverage on my Twitter Feed
It’s not often I get political like I used to, so I’ll try to keep these types of posts rare. I’ve been writing about SEO way too much lately though, and I never intended that for this blog – so it’s time to go in a slightly different direction today.
Listening to talk radio last night, they were discussing a new Detroit schools proposal. Basically, in an attempt to get parents more involved in their child’s schooling, they’ve proposed criminally charging parents who don’t attend teacher conferences.
It’s clear that the city is desperate, but this isn’t the answer. Statistics clearly show that children with a parent in jail do worse in school. Locking up mom isn’t going to help (besides that, there’s already a shockingly high number of Detroit school children who already have one parent in prison to start with.)
Detroit has several problems, but three of the biggest ones are clearly related. We have the worst schools, the highest unemployment rate, and the highest percentage of people on government assistance. It doesn’t take much to connect those lines. Not finishing high school makes it very tough to find work, and not having work makes you very likely to apply for welfare. It’s a vicious cycle, so how do you stop it?
To stop the cycle, you get tough. Very tough. You definitely don’t start by throwing people in jail, and you can’t just cut off welfare either. Like the cartoon above you have to throw a drowning man a life preserver – but when he gets out of the water he takes it off and learns to swim. Currently, we have a bunch of people still walking around wearing water wings and counting on somebody else to pull them out if they fall overboard. We’ve got to teach these people to swim – one way or another.
Doing that requires tough love, which I’ll explain after this little anecdote.
Years ago when I was in college I worked full time as a Wendys manager. It was a great job for a 19 year old. $30k/year, tuition reimbursement, free food, and flexible schedule. Eventually I was given a nice raise in exchange for working at what we call the “section 8” Wendys. The store was completely surrounded by government housing projects – which also seemed to be the only source of employees we could find willing to work there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the following conversation:
me: “Hey, XXXX, I know you’re only part time working 10 hours per week, but I’ve got a full time spot open for 40 hours every week and overtime if you want it. It would mean $1 more an hour too. Do you want it?”
employee: “(grabbing calculator and doing some quick math) No thanks, if I did that it would only be about $200 more per month than my welfare check – which I’d lose, so I’d rather just work the 10 hours.”
That’s the problem I’m talking about. Currently, most people on welfare make more than full time employees at fast food places, Walmart, etc. There’s no reason for them to care about school or work.
That’s where the tough love comes in. The first step is to make a high school diploma or GED required in order to receive welfare or food stamps. If you don’t have one, you can still get assistance but only as long as you verify that you’re attending classes. If you miss class, your check stops coming. The same applies for recipients with kids. If your child isn’t attending school, your check gets severely reduced.
The second step is work. If you’re on welfare or food stamps, and able to work (obviously this wouldn’t apply to disabled, mentally ill, etc) then you must be actively looking for work. Something like 3 job applications per week – and it will be verified. If you refuse a reasonable job offer (equal to or more than what you’re getting from the government) then your benefits get taken away. You can re-apply in 6 months. Also, until you do find work, you’ll be spending 10 hours per week picking up trash on the side of the freeways. We have no shortage of trash to pick up in Detroit.
So how can we do this? That’s where part 3 (and the jobs part) comes in. Establish a larger welfare office – just like a probation office. Welfare recipients will meet with their welfare agent on a monthly basis. The WA will check up on their job applications, schooling, child’s schooling, etc. Hiring these agents should create plenty of jobs. Not to mention the people we’d have to hire to drive and supervise the road cleanup crews.
Similar programs exist in Europe, and countries that employ them (like Germany) have pretty low unemployment rates. Of course, the countries with the lowest unemployment rates are those that don’t offer any type of government assistance, but I don’t think that’s an option.
The current situation in Detroit is one that sees no value in education or hard work. That’s the attitude that needs to change before the city can even start to turn itself around. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is with tough love. It may take a generation or two before it happens, but it will eventually happen.
As I was reading through the comments on Lisa Barone’s latest blog post one thing kept jumping out at me: There’s big differences in SEO thought processes based on the size of the client.
The post itself was about whether SEOs should focus on ranking and traffic or on conversion – and the commenters on the post were strongly divided. What I noticed about the divide though is that many of those who have fortune 500 clients were on the traffic side of the debate while SEOs with smaller “mom and pop” style clients took the conversion side.
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And that doesn’t surprise me one bit.
I’ll get to my thoughts (if you haven’t already read them in the comments yet) but before I do I want to talk more about the divide.
While the basic components and strategy of SEO (good content, clean code, lots of links, etc) remain the same no matter the size of the client, much of the thought processes and focus points differ vastly when it comes to larger SEO clients.
Link building, for example, makes a much bigger difference for smaller sites than larger sites. In my work with Ford, link building rarely comes up at all. That’s not to say link building isn’t important, I just don’t have to worry about it as much. There’s enough fan base, interest, and news coverage already in place to ensure that good quality links keep coming in regardless of what we do. We still have to ensure that pages are discoverable and able to be linked to, but we don’t spend any time submitting the site to directories or emailing people asking for links. It’s one of the benefits of being a large site.
Content is another one of those areas. Look at the websites for the top brands in the world: Coke, Nike, McDonalds, etc and you’ll notice a shocking trend: There really isn’t any content. It’s all pretty images and flash.
At the corporate level, SEO isn’t as important as branding, image, recognition, etc. It doesn’t need to be. SEO is still important, but sometimes it has to take a back seat to other considerations – considerations that smaller sites don’t have to worry about.
Rishil says that small business SEO is about education – and he’s right. I’ve worked in small shops, startups, and fortune 100 environments. Small shops are all about education; not just about what SEO is but why it’s needed as well.
With several larger clients I’ve worked with, SEO isn’t so much about education as it is about balance. Most clients already know they need SEO, they want somebody to deliver the strategy, recommendations, insights, and analysis. On top of that, they want somebody to balance the creative requirements with making the site findable. If you’re planning to apply for freelance SEO jobs, SEO certification programs could help you step up your game and land more clients.
So what about Lisa’s post? Do you measure SEO with rankings, traffic, or revenue?
The answer is all of it.
According to this SEO agency named King Kong, SEO is measured by traffic AND ROI, no matter what level – it’s the focus and importance that differs.
When I did SEO at a smaller shop it was easy for me to change content on pages, add or remove links, or run tests to optimize content. It’s often the case where the small shop SEO can simply open up their FTP editor and make the changes themselves. I’ve worked in that type of environment before.
At an agency though, content changes are a little more complicated. While the recommendation may start with an SEO, the content goes through a copywriter, information architect, project manager, and legal review – all before it even shows up in comp or wireframe. Does it fit with the brand image? Can we legally say it? Is it confusing to customers? Does it fit in the allotted space? Does it use terms people are searching for? Brands have to answer all of these questions (and more.)
And that’s where the difference in metrics comes in. An enterprise SEO not only needs to recommend changes, but he’s got to sell them to the PM, IA, creative team, optimization team, and client – and the change has to make sense for all departments too, not just for SEO.
With many big brand clients it’s not always appropriate to measure the success of an SEO campaign by revenue or KPIs – not because they aren’t important (they are) but because there are too many teams involved in determining what happens once the visitor finds the site.
What does success look like in SEO? I generally start by measuring things like traffic from search engines, unique keywords, & visibility (not just rank.) From there, the next step is to look at revenue and KPIs. Then you can see the whole picture and make decisions. Low conversion could be due to several things: poorly targeted SEO, bad navigation, high pricing, confusing funnel or shopping cart, etc. Those things are outside the realm of a typical SEO, and it may be difficult for the SEO to influence change in those arenas.
The important takeaway though (as Danny Sullivan notes in one of his comments) is that even if the SEO isn’t doing the optimization or on page analysis – somebody has to.
I measure SEO by traffic and visibility, but I measure the overall website by conversion. I think we can all agree that conversion is the right metric for most websites to be measured on, the only difference seems to be whose job it is to take the site from traffic to conversion.
Last night after seeing the reviews on Flixster I decided I wanted to go see The Social Network movie. I quickly found a date on OkCupid and we headed to the theater. Upon arriving I quickly pulled out my iPhone and twittered that I was planning on seeing the movie. Then I opened up Facebook places and checked in my new friend and I before updating my status to let everybody know I was about to see the movie of the year. I also checked in on foursquare, where I was made aware of a coupon for free popcorn.
I logged into Groupon to take advantage of a ticketing deal, and paid with my debit card so that the purchase details were instantly available on Blippy (and also tracked on Mint.com) Then I took a photo of my date and I and uploaded it to DailyBooth and Flickr.
Unfortunately, by the time I did all of this the movie was over. I set my MySpace mood to disappointed and headed home.
Of course, you probably caught all of that on my friendfeed right?
Several months ago at SMX advanced in Seattle, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ did a presentation on Google Vs Bing Correlation of Ranking Factors. Since then, I’ve seen these charts and data surface on several SEO blogs, forums, and chat rooms – and every time I see them being used to backup some crackpot theory I cringe.
While I applaud Rand and SEOMOZ for attempting to bring science to the SEO community, sometimes I think they try to stretch that science too far – and this article is one of those cases.
The bit about explaining the difference between correlation and causation is spot on, but unfortunately the rest of the article is completely irrelevant bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with the data or how they collected it, it’s just that none of the data is significant enough to warrant publishing. None of it tells us anything.
The problem here is that most people using this data to support their claims have no idea what correlation coefficients are, let alone how to interpret them. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1. If two factors have a coefficient of 0, that means they are in no way related whatsoever. If the coefficient is 1, it means they’re positively correlated. That is to say, as one increases so does the other. For example. The amount of weight I gain is positively correlated to the amount of food I eat. A person’s income is positively correlated to their level of education.
Negative correlation is the opposite. It implies that two things are oppositely related. For example a student’s sick days and grades are negatively correlated – meaning that the more school a child misses the worse his grades are.
If you were to graph points on an X,Y coordinate system, the graph would look more and more like a straight line as the correlation numbers approach 1 or -1. Here’s a quick graph of some correlation coefficients:
The problem is that the SEOMOZ article (and several SEOs) doesn’t properly interpret the correlation coefficients and what they signify. Let’s take a look:
By SEOMOZ’s own admission, most of their data has a correlation coefficient of about 0.2 – but what does that mean? In scientific terms a 0.2 correlation means that these things aren’t really related at all. That means most of the SEOMOZ data is pretty meaningless.
To further illustrate, here’s what a graph of a .28 correlation coefficient looks like. (note, this is a higher correlation that most of the SEOMOZ data)
These numbers are all over the place – there’s no pattern and there’s certainly no trend. I could draw several different trend lines on this data that all tell different stories. In other words, the data isn’t related and can’t be used to prove anything. There’s no real correlation here at all. .28 is too close to zero to be signficiant.
When factors have a correlation coefficient this small it usually means there’s some sort of anecdotal relationship, but nothing worth publishing or reporting. And this is just the random example I picked. When they start talking about ALT attributes having a correlation of 0.04 it just gets crazier. There’s nothing statistically valid to be learned about data with coefficients between 0 and .1.
To be honest, I wouldn’t base any decisions on the data unless it had a correlation coefficient of around .45 or higher.
There’s a few other issues too.
One of the charts mentions that .org domains have better ranking than .com domains. That’s great for sites (like seomoz.org) that have a .org in their name, but is it really true? When you look at the data two things stick out here. First, Wikipedia is a .org and ranks well for many terms. In fact, it ranks so well that it probably should have been considered an outlier and discarded. Second, the data doesn’t include what they call “branded terms” – but a vast majority of .com domains are in fact brands. Having done SEO for several fortune 500 clients I can tell you that big brands mostly target branded terms. That has to make an impact on the data.
And that’s part of the problem in SEO. In addition to collecting the data, we have to sell stuff. Often it’s way too easy to present the data in a way that helps us sell the narrative we want. I’m not out to get SEOMOZ, and I don’t have any problems with them. I actually admire them, because at least they’re collecting data. That’s way more than many others are doing. Collecting data is just the first step though. The real magic happens when you properly apply the data.
Let’s face it. The SEO community isn’t very scientific. We tend to believe anything Matt Cutts, SEOMOZ, or Danny Sullivan say as gospel truth. But should we? Sure they have great reputations but sometimes they make mistakes too. (Remember when several SEOs sold pagerank sculpting services even though now we know it never worked?) I’m not a very religious man so I tend to take everything with a degree of skepticism – and I think that’s the approach more people in the community should use. We need more posts like the SEOMOZ one I linked above, but we also need more people willing to question the data and run tests of their own too. I know we get enough scrutiny from those outside of SEO, but that’s because we don’t get enough scrutiny from those inside the community. Only then will people start taking SEO more seriously.
Disclaimer: The views in this post are mine, and mine alone. I’ve said that a million times before but I just wanted to repeat that here.
I shared an (edited) version of the following on the ZAAZ intranet today, and I wanted to repost some of the information here as well.
Ok, so by now (hopefully) you’ve heard of the Google Instant announcement yesterday and may have even played with it a little. If you haven’t, check it out: google.com/instant. I’m not going to go in depth talking about what exactly Google Instant is, as several tech blogs have already done a great job of doing that.
Instead, I want to give some quick bullets on how Google Instant affects those working in SEO or Analytics, what insights we can learn from it, and what our clients can expect.
So how does Google Instant change SEO Strategy?
Well, for starters most savvy internet users don’t pull up Google, they search from a toolbar – so it doesn’t affect them. It does affect less savvy users though (and mostly the general populace), and these people could be worth more (more likely to buy / click an ad / whatever).
Instant suggestions seem to be based off of the Google suggest feature. Google suggest works off of search frequency and volume. So it will show what the majority are searching for. I haven’t figured out if this is spamable yet but expect several people to try.
Instant should have the effect of funneling people toward higher searched terms, so I would expect to see a slight decrease in long tail terms and “unique keywords†sent to websites. Conversely, I expect to see an increase in traffic for the “funneled” terms that I do rank for.
There seems to be a lot of localization built in. When I search for “city” I get “city of Detroit.” When I search the letter S my default is “Sears” but the default for our Seattle office is “Seattle.” This should make optimizing for local search even more important.
The big part I don’t like is the “auto complete,†for example I can’t see results for “car†without hitting enter and actually searching. Instead it shows me “careerbuilder.†I expect this to improve over time.
SEOs who optimized for commonly searched terms (those who did good keyword research) will see the biggest reward. At the very least, one should look at Google suggest and see what’s being suggested– as the goal could be to try and show up for those suggestions to maximize visibility.
It doesn’t work for terms that would otherwise be filtered by “safesearch†and it doesn’t work for “sucks†style terms. In fact, we noticed last month that Google removed “sucks†and other negative sentiment terms from Google suggest.
What about AdWords?
You’ve probably noticed the AdWords ads change by the query. According to Google, an AdWords impression is not counted until the user stops typing for 3 seconds. Type in a query and you’ll notice the URL in your browser will change. When the URL changes you’ve “fired†an AdWords impression even if you resume typing after the pause. I expect to see impressions increase across the board – and CTR to fall as a result.
Technical Stuff
If you’re looking at referrers in your site logs, you should see several new parameters coming from Google searches. The biggest new one is the oq= parameter. When a user searches on Google Instant, the q= parameter passes the search term that Google showed results for (the auto suggest one) while the oq= parameter passes what was actually typed into the box. I would love to see webmaster tools incorporate this data so i can see the differences. There are several insights to be had from that data.
Also of note, many rank tracker programs have broken today due to Google changing the underlying HTML structure of the results. I’d wait a few days before running any ranking reports.
What About Clients?
Google instant could be a challenge to explain to clients – especially if they haven’t used it yet. If you use unique keywords as a performance metric though, you may want to spend the time explaining the change to clients. This change isn’t a bad thing, and it should yield great results for SEOs who put the time into doing good keyword research.
So who will it hurt
Hopefully nobody – but if you’ve got a poorly optimized site you could expect to see larger sites take some of your long tail traffic. If your site is positioned to capitalize on mis-spellings or common typing errors then I would expect to see a large decrease in traffic. The same goes for spammy sites who optimize solely for long tail keywords.
What’s your 140 character summary?
Google Instant doesn’t kill SEO. It rewards SEOs who did proper keyword research. It’ll be interesting to keep up with and see what happens.
(and yes, that was exactly 140 characters)
What exactly are microformats and how can they help my SEO? If you’re like many SEOs or developers I know, you’ve probably heard some talk about microformats, but you’ve probably got some questions.
You may remember an old blog post of mine where I lamented that nobody really supports hCard. Thankfully the day has finally come where sites are supporting hCard, but it’s not because of my previous bitching. It’s because of SEO and search engines.
Sometime last year, Google announced what they call “rich snippets”. Rich snippets are Google’s way of presenting more useful information from your site right in the search results snippet. They look something like this:
Shortly after we started seeing them in search results for sites like Yelp and Linkedin. Then, at SMX advanced in Seattle, Google let it be known that they’d soon be rolling out rich snippets across all websites whenever the algorithm decided that they would be useful. This is very similar to how they treated site links.
This is great news! Since preliminary studies have shown that things like rich snippets increase click throughs, the obvious question becomes “how the heck can I get them on my site?”
Microformats are the answer. Now, before you go thinking “oh great, I’ve got to learn another programming language, I’m still struggling with jQuery” you can relax. Implementing microformats is simple – and it’s all done with HTML that you already know.
While there are several types of microformats, Google currently only supports 6 major ones. Those are:
hcard – for marking up business card or profile information
hReview – for dealing with individual user reviews
hReview-aggregate – basically a summary of hReviews (think, overall or average rating)
hProduct – for marking up products, prices, and all things e-commerce
hCalendar – pretty self explanatory, dates and appointments
hRecipe – also pretty explanatory. Recipes and ingredients
If your site deals with any of those categories, you should explore the possibilities of using microformats. There’s a great guide over a Microformats.org (which I won’t copy here, so go take a look when you’re done reading) but when it comes down to it, implementation is as simple as tagging your content with classes. And you should also check out these brilliant and very cheap SEO services as I know that they work very well.
Here’s an example. Instead of just typing Name: Ryan Jones the hCard way to do this would be: So what are the SEO benefits? Let’s look at an example.
With Rich Snippet (has microformats)
The 2nd snippet here not only looks better, but it’s way less ambiguous than the first one – especially since there’s at least 25 Ryan Jones’s on LinkedIn. It goes beyond the generic LinkedIn META description and pulls in basic information. In this case, it tells you I’m from the Detroit area and that I work at ZAAZ.
The difference is even more astounding when you look at something with reviews. Let’s look at a rich snippet that uses both hReviews AND hRecipe.
Which of the following results would you be more tempted to click on?
Here, ThaiTable out ranks FoodNetwork for the query “pad thai” – but I’d be willing to bet that FoodNetwork.com is getting more traffic from Google for this query.
Microformats may not directly increase your search engine rankings, but they can still be a vital part of your SEO strategy. Ranking on page 1 of Google isn’t all there is to SEO – you’ve still got to entice the searcher to click. Rich snippets may be just thing to do that. This is a critical time to at least consult with an ecommerce SEO agency because you need to know exactly what the competition looks like and what kind of investment it will take to carve out a niche in an established industry.
Go ahead, give ’em a try. I’d love to hear your success stories here in the comments.
Several years ago a colleague of mine interviewed a candidate for an SEO position who recommended paying people in other cities to search for your term and then click on your site. He said a good policy would be to make employees do this whenever they’re out of town as well. He attempted to back up his claims by referencing the fact that Google tracks historical click data, but was eventually thanked for his time.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it IS true that Google may use SERP click data. They even filed a patent on doing it (If you’re too lazy to read the patent, SEOmoz has a nice write up of it.) Invent Help can help you invent idea and patent it.
Before we freak out and start creating Mechanical Turk jobs to click on our results, let’s apply some computer science logic to this.
IF Google used what results you clicked on as a major factor in their SEO algorithm, what would happen? It would start a completely self serving cycle. The results already on the front page would get more clicks, and rank higher – getting them even more clicks! It’d be a vicious cycle. Sure, you could introduce some randomness to it, but where would you pull those random results from?
You couldn’t just throw completely random results at the front page and let the click history sort it out. The top 5 results would get clicks regardless of what was there, and the overall search quality would be terrible. So IF you wanted to do the randomness to prevent the above cycle, you’d have to pull from somewhere. The most likely place would be the results on page 2. Check out the seo services in NZ and how it can help your site.
But what factors determine the results on page 2? You can’t use click data here, as results after page 1 get very few clicks – so you’re back to links and on page elements.
And that’s the point I’m trying to make: Even if Google uses historical click data in ranking, links and content are still way more important. In fact, if your links and content aren’t up to snuff, click-rate won’t make one bit of difference.
My advice: Don’t worry about click rate, site speed, or other minor factors. They won’t matter unless your site already ranks well – and that’s the goal you should be focused on.
Raise your hand if you believe that using Google Analytics can affect your site’s SEO rankings. Now raise your other hand if you believe Google Adwords also affects your SEO.
If you’ve got both hands in the air keep them that way, as having your hands off of the keyboard is probably the best SEO strategy for your website right now, just visit websites like Victorious and start learning all about SEO.
I had been under the impression that Matt Cutts put this myth to rest several times (see video below) however some recent forum threads make it hard to maintain faith about the general public’s SEO opinion. It’s not just SEOs either. I’ve seen this level of thinking with fortune 500 clients as well. In fact, I’ve even seen some analytics platforms use the “don’t share your data with google” angle in their sales pitches. By the way, if you clicked that link I know what you’re thinking and yes, I read black hat forums. Is there something wrong with that?
Sadly, (and chime in if you can think of one) there’s no proper controlled way to test this. Since we can’t scientifically prove that Analytics has no effect on SEO, there’s only a couple of ways we can look at this.
1. We can take Google’s word for it
That’s well and good, but I know exactly what people like Graywolf are going to say here. “Why would Google tell you the truth if they did use it? Wouldn’t that just get you to stop using their products?” And I agree. If you already believe it’s a conspiracy, taking the conspirator’s word for it doesn’t help much. It’s like trying to use the bible to prove God exists. Let’s move on.
2. We can look at anecdotal evidence
People have been claiming ill effects after installing GA for years on webmaster world. But does that make it so, or is it simply a timing or correlation/causation mistake? We’ll never know because webmaster world doesn’t let you list sites for examples, but I’d be willing to bet I can look at any site claiming this and come up with other non GA reasons why the rankings are down.
I’ve been debating this whole post whether or not I want to out some spammy sites, and I’ve decided against it – however for every claim that GA is affecting rank I can name several examples of sites that rank #1 for competitive terms, are pretty spammy in quality, have been ranking #1 for years, and use Google analytics. I could even name a couple of my own sites that fall into this category (I mean come on, who doesn’t test and experiment right?)
So anecdotal evidence didn’t provide much help. I can find some for and some against, but that’s exactly what I expected to find – since if all the anecdotal evidence said the same thing we probably wouldn’t even be asking the question to begin with.
3. We could look at things from Google’s point of view.
When all else fails, this is usually the best bet. WWGD? (site note: maybe I should start selling WWGD wristbands) Whenever I’m in doubt about something in SEO I do do two things, one I look up to companies like therankway and then I put on my software engineer hat and think of things from Google’s point of view. To me, it wouldn’t make sense to use Google Analytics data in rankings. There’s several reasons for this.
Google doesn’t need to use your analytics data, their index contains most of it anyway. Think about it. What can google get from your Analytics account that a good index of the web wouldn’t already tell you? They know about all of your pages, they know what sites link to your pages, they know how many clicks you get from search, and they know what keywords you rank for. They also know all of this about all of the sites linking to you. Sure there’s other data they can get from analtyics like paths, funnels, conversion rates, etc – but none of those things really make sense to use in rankings. Think about it, how would what the visitor does once they’re on your site affect whether or not your site is relevant for a term? It wouldn’t! You can take a look at this page if you want to subscribe to receiving automatic notifications, rather than repeatedly searching for data sets across on-premise and cloud services.
So just looking at their search index, with a little recursion Google can get all the ranking relevant information without needing analytics – so why use it? From an engineering perspective it would be both slower AND more complex to do so. Plus, what would happen if they ever discontinued analytics? The search engine wouldn’t work without it – and that type of dependency doesn’t fit the Google model of scalable thinking.
It would also be a PR nightmare.
Think about what would happen if word got out that they DID in fact use analytics data? Danny Sullivan would be all over it, Privacy groups would be up in arms, the EFF and ACLU would file lawsuits, the Times would run a front page article, Jesse Jackson would hold a prayer vigil, Graywolf and Pageoneresults would be screaming “I told you so”, and that would bring about the twitter fail whale. They’d never live down the bad PR.
If you don’t think Google takes these things into consideration, perhaps it’s best you raise your hands up in the air too.
You can safely ignore this post. I’m testing something on my server and also playing with word press for iPad. Typing is a pain without a keyboard but I’m getting pretty fast at using my thumbs. Auto spell check is actually helping here (unlike sending a text message where it always screws up my words).
Sadly it looks like I can only attach photos at the bottom so in true blogger fashion, here’s a cat picture.
I’m also wondering if links work. So here’s a link: my softball stats
Interesting after you type “Http:” it brings up a link builder. Wish it just gave that option.
Overall this seems pretty weak. Id like some formatting shortcuts. HTML editing stuff and ability to include images anywhere in a post. I don’t think I’ll be live blogging from my iPad any time soon.
This also concludes my test. This post will be removed in a few days.
and headed home.
