Tag Archive for: Google

Google Bookmarking With Stars

Matt Cutts put out his latest update with Google in his blog.  It appears that Google is now allowing bookmarking within the search engine itself.  The way it’s done is to use stars next to each page you want to bookmark (much like Gmail operates with stars and emails).  Then for any related searches, the bookmarks will show up above all the organic listings in a separate starred list.

And for editing on any of your bookmarks, there’s now a Google Bookmarks page that you can use to go and adjust your bookmarks as you see fit.  Any text you add here will be used to match searches you put in, and will display that bookmark if you search for text within these fields.

How many people use this tool we’ll have to see, but it does have some advantages for organizational use within Google.

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Google Could Do Better At SEO

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Google released a report card last week for product pages on search engines.  This report card analyzed the levels of quality for SEO on the pages.

The short of it – Google gave themselves only one “excellent” rating, got three “satisfactory” ratings and eight “needs improvement”.

Google has stated they have taken action on these results or plan to.  It’s somewhat funny to hear that the big search engine doesn’t always tweak their own pages properly for SEO purposes.

If you want more details on this, you can check out this article from the Los Angeles Times.

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Domain Typos Can Be Worth A Lot

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As everyone knows, typing in a domain doesn’t always give you the site you intended to hit.  And typos like this happen all the time.  There are people who have realized this and are making money from it.

There are two ways to make money from domain typos – either by using PPC and bidding on these typos (and then making money from the traffic you get on these usually cheap keywords), or by registering these domains and putting ads on the site for them.

The people that do the latter are called “typosquatters”.  And there’s potentially a lot of money in the ads for higher traffic domain typos.  Keep in mind that if the owners of the real domain notice you doing this, they can ask you to take the site down.

Whether or not typosquatting is ethical is a subjective question, but the fact is that some people make a ton of money from it, and so does Google.  You can find out more about this and the figures involved in this article from Sideways News.

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Google Does SEO?

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The stance Google’s taken on search engine optimization has always been a little hazy.  However, they do acknowledge many elements of SEO as being important for a good web design (as implied by all the information given within the Google Webmaster Tools pages).  But it appears they’re taking it a step further.

Google has begun a small project by showing how to improve SEO for some select pages within countries in northern Europe.  They will then put up a post about each page describing their findings and what they recommend to improve listing positions.

This isn’t exactly offering SEO services for clients (like our own Tulsa SEO services), but it is showing that they acknowledge how important SEO is for improving results, and are even willing to help by giving some tips.

Mark Jackson has a good article detailing more on this in ClickZ.

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So How Is Google Buzz?

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Google Buzz is the latest update from Google.  Went live yesterday, looks to be Google’s effort to break into the social media market.  I personally tried it out a bit, it ties directly to Gmail.

It does do updates regularly, and appears to share the information with anyone who follows you.  A lot of people have commented that it looks to be an imitation of Twitter.  The nice thing is that you can connect to other sites, to reduce all the different social machines that need maintenance.

Google Buzz options

The default for me was to activate sharing with Picasa and Google Reader (I didn’t select either of these).  The other options available are visible in the image above.  The blurred domain is a site I set up on BlogSpot/Blogger through the same account.  With Twitter, it will read your Tweets, but from what I can tell it only reads to Buzz, not vice versa.

Looks like Google’s still ironing out the kinks on this, I’m sure plenty of people will be giving feedback for it.  For now I find it nice since I don’t have the mass of content that is dealt out on Twitter, and so far it appears to still stay within actual social connections (and hasn’t spread into the marketing machine yet).  So every “buzz” I’ve gotten so far has been from a friend, making an actual comment on life instead of a business telling me how good their merchandise is.

I don’t know if it’s automatic for all Gmail users, but from the amount of people I’ve seen pop on with it, I’m guessing it is.  It’s just another option underneath the Inbox, and it will show updates for some “buzz”es (but not all) within the Inbox.  It appears it will post the updates for anything you have contributed to to your Inbox, with the little Buzz logo next to it.

We’ll see if it’s something that gets used a lot or not, should be able to tell within a few weeks how well it’ll work.

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How Much Money Does Google Make? Billions.

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Google just upped their record from the 4th quarter of 2008 by 17%.  So how much is that, exactly?  Revenues in the 2008 4th quarter: $5.70 billion.  And they’re only improving.  Revenues in the 2009 4th quarter: $6.67 billion.

The fact that this is only for one fourth of the year blows my mind.  If that stays consistent, then that’s in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year.  They’re doing okay.

If you want to get more of the details on these numbers, check out this article from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.

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Google Knows What Your Boyfriend/Girlfriend is Thinking

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It’s not always dead on accurate, but by using Google in the right way you can often figure out what your significant other is interested in.  How?  By using what’s known as “predictive text”.  It’s the ability by Google (and Yahoo) to see what you’re typing in and try to predict what you might be looking for.  By only entering a few words in, you can often glean a lot of very interesting information.

For example, you can type in “how can I get my girlfriend to” and then let Google roll, see what it comes up with.  (Warning, even though it’s only text, it’s not all child-friendly content.)  Replace “girlfriend” with “boyfriend”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. and you have a new research tool.

Mind you, in many cases these results may not match at all with your significant other’s thoughts and desires, but it can still be fun to explore.  And for marketers, this is a gold mine.  These are the hot buttons that are looked for to prompt action by many marketers, and Google is just giving it to you.

If you want to see more detail and screenshots of examples of these, check out Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land.

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Google is Not Immune to Error

As posted in article by PC World, even Google can make errors on occasion.  In this case, some statistics for users of Google Business Center were sent to incorrect Business Center users.  This included information such as how often the business had appeared in listings, how many times the business was clicked and follow-through clicks on the business site itself.

This error was found to have been by human mistake, not an error directly with any of Google’s systems.  Google was on top of it and corrected it quickly.  They published a written statement to acknowledge the error and that when they discovered it, said they paused all emails to Business Center users until they could determine the cause of the issue.

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Even Google Can Get Penalized

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Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had).  This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9).  That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed?  They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget.  This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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Real-time Search Example on Google

The news about Google’s real-time search has been out for a little while now, but many people are still wondering how this is affected by real-life situations.  Well – Matt Cutts was gracious enough to show by example.  He displays exactly how Google tracked a recent mild earthquake and how long it took to show results on Google.

It’s good to see that their real-time search update actually functions as intended, and I can see the potential for it to help in a variety of ways.  Being the top search engine and a huge point where people check on things every day, getting your breaking news from Google (for info relevant to what you’re looking for) may get info to some people (who don’t check the news so often) faster.  Whether or not Google should take this role is not something that’s universally agreed upon, but there are visible benefits.

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