2008

Google News Interview

by Brian Ussery on September 13, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

As mentioned on Blogoscoped.com, I did a radio interview this week with Jeff Horwich about Google. It was a lot of fun and thanks again to Georgia Public Broadcasting as well as Minnesota Public Radio for making me sound so good!

“The Week” September 12, 2008 from In The Loop. (My interview starts about 14 minutes into the show and is available at npr.org/…)


“* Congress back in session: Will they actually get anything done? We talk with Kathryn Pearson of the University of Minnesota.

* Trouble naming your baby? Sarah Palin’s here to help.

* Brian Ussery of Blogoscoped.com joins us for The Week in Google (it was a big week)

* The Wall Street Journal’s Vanessa O’Connell on new employee management software

* "Too Big to Fail"…sounds like a John Prine song to me”

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Categories: Google, Innovation, News • Comments Off

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Google Chrome Browser

by Brian Ussery on September 1, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

Google has done it again, who says you can’t launch a new product via a commic book? As first reported by Philipp Lenssen Google, recently sent out comic books by Scott McCloud announcing their latest offering. Not so incognito perhaps but, very cool!

According to Google’s “Google Chrome (BETA)” for Windows FAQ (which wont be available until launch), “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.” A few of Chrome’s features include thumbnails of favorite pages, shortcuts for applications and “universal” one box functionality. Google Chrome offers webmasters built in “desktop” style features designed to deliver a better experience to end users. In addition to Google tools and APIs built-in, Google’s use of JavaScript engine 8.0 in Chrome should speed up “AJAXy” web applications. Also worth pointing out, Chrome is built on WebKit and uses the WebKit rendering engine. Thanks to WebKit, pages should look the same in Google Chrome as the appear in other WebKit based browsers like Safari. Also worth noting, Google’s new Chrome browser already supports CSS3 features even though the standard hasn’t officially been released. According to Google Chrome’s EULA “If you’ve tested your website with Safari 3.1 then your site should already work well on Google Chrome.”

Google Chrome offers several tools for webmasters including “Web Inspector”, “Task Manager” and “JavaScript Debugger”. When it comes to meta data, Chrome offers shortcuts similar to those found in Google Gears Desktop API meta data (meta tags), application-name, description and application-url for example. When it comes to search results, “By providing an OpenSearch description document (OSDD), you enable Google Chrome to include your site in the list of search engines in the browser.”

In addition to Google Chrome’s tools for webmasters, Google introduces “incognito mode” for users. While in “Incognito mode” Chrome “will not store basic browsing history information such as URLs, cached page text, or IP addresses of pages linked from the websites you visit.”

OTHER NOTES:

- Not including encoding information could prevent CSS parsing.

- User agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13

- Google Chrome will percent-encode query parameters within a URL.

THOUGHTS:

While Google Chrome is a great new product, I feel like privacy advocates may not like Google Chrome recording “snapshots of most pages you visit (except for secure pages with “https” web addresses, such as some bank pages)”. Even in incognito mode snapshots “…could still be stored elsewhere on your computer…”.

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Categories: Beta, Chrome, Google, Innovation, News, Search, seo • Comments Off

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Google’s Cost Per Query

by Brian Ussery on August 27, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

Google recently modified how they show results and in doing so virtually crippled at least one popular “rank checking software” package. As “JohnMu” pointed out, Google has always been clear about using these kinds of tools. In fact for as long as I can remember, Google Webmaster Guidelines has clearly stated:

“Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service.”

Bottom line, automated queries require resources without any potential for generating revenue. It has been said that Google’s “ultimate selection criterion is cost per query, expressed as the sum of capital expense (with depreciation) and operating costs (host-ing, system administration, and repairs) divided by performance.“

During Q4 2007, Google reported capital expenses of $678 million with operating costs of $1.43 billion. According to ComScore 17.6 billion “core searches” were conducted by Google during the same period. Using Google’s formula and financial data along with ComScore’s estimates, it appears as though Google’s average cost per “core search query” was nearly $.12 during Q4 2007. Again, this is a rough estimate and a rounded total but, personally I was a little surprised by the number.

If 1 million sites run ranking reports on 100 keywords 12 times per year at $.12 per “core search query”, it costs Google $144,000,000. Over a ten year period, that’s more than a billion dollars. Given this data, it’s easy to see why Google uses “algorithms and different techniques to block excessive automated queries and scraping, especially when someone is hitting Google quite hard.” Matt Cutts suggests, contacting Google’s Business Development Team about permission on sending automated queries to Google.

Now, I fully understand the importance of ranking reports when it comes to SEO clients. That said, there are folks out there abusing the system, running ranking reports on thousands of keywords daily.

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Categories: Google, online marketing, Search, search engine optimization, seo • 2 Comments »

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Has Google Changed Postion on Static Copies of Dynamic Pages?

by Brian Ussery on August 15, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

Does Google’s removal of the following paragraph mean that creating static copies of dynamic pages is no longer necessary?

“Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don’t forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.”

http://www.google.com/support…..py?answer=40349&ctx=sibling

Until today, Google suggested creating static versions of dynamic pages. Reason being, Googlebot had difficulty in crawling dynamic URLs especially URLs containing question marks and/or symbols. To prevent duplicate content issues caused by sites with both static and dynamic versions, Google suggested “disallowing” the dynamic version via robots.txt. While this tactic helped engines, some would say using both thinned PageRank as well as the relevancy of anchor text in inbound links. Either way, it will be interesting to see how this move impacts Flash sites with a “static” version. Safe to say, Google is quickly advancing in the ability to crawl content!

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Categories: design, Flash, Googlebot, seo • Comments Off

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TinyURL SEO

by Brian Ussery on July 26, 2008   | Google+ LinkedIn Facebook email author Twitter

A friend of mine recently emailed to ask, how TinyURL impacts SEO? It’s a good question and one many folks can’t answer so, I thought I’d blog my answer to his question!

For anyone not familiar with TinyURL, in layman terms it’s a tool where users can enter long displaying URLs to get a shortened version. TinyURLs are often used where long URLs might wrap and therefore break, such as in email or social media web applications like Twitter. In more technical terms, TinyURLs are short, dynamically created URLs that redirect users to another intended URL via 301 redirect. Because TinyURLs “301″ or permanently redirect, search engines should not index the TinyURL but instead should index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.

It is important to note, TinyURLs to paid links passing PageRank is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines and that sites like Twitter use nofollow techniques to prevent spam.

On their own, TinyURLs can be search engine friendly from a technical perspective. At the same time, I wouldn’t suggest replacing your site’s navigation with TinyURLs and would point out that tracking TinyURLs via analytics might be difficult.

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Categories: analytics, Googlebot, online marketing, PageRank, Search, search engine optimization, SEM, seo, Spam • Comments Off

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