Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category

Google Sued for Invasion of Privacy

It seems like not a day goes by when the once clean as a whistle start-up Google is accused of breaching some law or other. The story broke a day or two ago, when it was announced that those bad boys at Google had allegedly written code that by-passed the privacy settings in the Safari browser , allowing the giant to track them physically, and it got worse as it was announced that one disgruntled IPhone user has actually filed a lawsuit against Google claiming

Google’s “willful and knowing actions” violated federal wiretapping laws, among other statutes.

Now THAT is some serious stuff right there, and if I were Google I would be drawing straws to see who will carry the can and do the jail time that this sort of thing can result in.

NOW HANG ON, I hear people saying. This is just lil old safari, like 10% of the market so not that big a deal huh? But THEN  we hear from Microsoft and their Internet Explorer browser, THE most important broswer on the planet, and they had the following to say about  Google breaching Internet Explorer Privacy Settings

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered,

So where does that leave us?

In the European Union, this has HUGE potential consequences for Google as it breaches the 1998 Human Rights Act. you know, that tiny little piece of legislation that forces the UK etc to release paedophiles and convicted terrorists into the community, but prevents us from sending them home?  The LAW states that every EU citizen has the right to privacy in their home and family life. Google have breached what is a fundamental human right. and they have done so deliberately by by-passing a mechanism that was there for this very reason.

People have a legal right to privacy, and if a company can’t or won’t abide by that right, then they should not be allowed to trade within that community (in this case the EU) Google are currently being investigated on multiple fronts within the EU and anti trust case is as we speak being finalised and the outcome will be made sometime in March. This particular case is for illegally promoting Google owned properties, on the Google search results.

The above anti trust law pales into insignificance however compared to the alleged breach of human rights, legislation that is so powerful, it  has recently prevented the deportation of a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist, such is the might of legislation Google have breached.

I would hope that this is not swept under the carpet, like so many other instances of illegal behaviour before them. Google has ENORMOUS power, and there are two saying that are ringing in my ears right now.

1. With power comes responsibility

2. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

As someone who witnessed the birth of Google within search, it pains me to see what they have become, and are becoming, and that is just another power hungry run rough shod over anyone to get what they wat, type corporation.

Announced a few hours ago on the Google inside Search Blog link to PDF was this little beauty of page layout analysis being part of the quality score within the ranking algorithm. What does this mean in reality?

Many years ago back in 2004, Microsoft created an algorithm that scored links based on their location, type and size within a page, this was called Block Level Link Analysis, and as a result, all links were no longer equal (which is a good thing).  It has been believed that Google have used this for sometime, but they have now taken this a step further.

Google claim to be interested in user experience beyond all else (other than making money of course), and this change appears to be a quality control change, but this old bald guy can’t help think that there is huge potential for babies to go out in the bathwater.

So lets grab some snippets of that blogg post by Matt Cutts

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change.

So they are acting on complaints (from their testers) that they want to see content above the fold.

Define Above the Fold?

Two HUGE things there are how do you define ‘content’ and how do you define ‘above the fold’? For those that don’t know, ‘above the fold’ is a term from the newspaper days of broadsheets which were traditionally folded in half. In the news displays, the papers would be placed with the masthead and headline showing out (top half of front page), anything in the printed part is ‘below the fold’ In this case it means the page requires scrolling to read it.  The difficulty here is how do you define ‘above the fold’ in a world where monitor sizes vary dramatically, screen resolutions the same, how on earth do you define ‘above the fold’? Sorry Google but that is pretty much an impossible task.

Define ‘Content’

On a photography site the content may be imagery, the content may be delivered by video, so HOW THEN are Google going to define the term ‘content’ Flash, Ajax, there are so many technologies that can render a page devoid of content, yet still deliver an enriching entertaining, satisfying user experience. But is this ‘content’ under the definition which Google apply?

and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

That right there tells me they are going after excessive advertising, which was a large factor in the panda update(s), it is also clearly saying that going forward, such sites will not rank as highly.

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.

Now read this and think, “or make it hard to find Actual ORIGINAL content” so again this appears to be targeting content scrapers (like Google :p ) sorry I couldn’t resist! Back on topic, it looks like they are trying to get original content with a balance between ads & content. I was involved in traditional publishing and a 60/40 mix (with content being 60%) is about as high as you want to go without ruining the user experience, and getting ad blindness, which results in poor advertising ROI. Which is fine, but that single video could have 1000 words on it, all original, all relevant, all content . How will google handle this?

OK Google define ‘Above The Fold’ Please

If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.

In short, they fail to tell you what THEY are classing as above the fold, admittedly they are recommending you check this using browser simulators and screen resolution simulators, BUT they give absolutely no reference point with which to gauge where your content sits.

I appreciate what Google are trying to achieve here, but I can’t help but thinking there will be a lot of good, honest websites disappearing from page 1, losing pretty much all their traffic, and revenue, PURELY because again Google has introduced an element that is vague, and doesn’t really stop the spammers (who right now are placing layers of content above the fold to combat this) and so protecting themselves from the algorithm change. While the good old boy watches his really popular image based website go down the pan (along with his earnings) killing not only his website, but his dreams of earning a living from the web, and his faith in Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ mantra.

Just noticed this when I did a search for analytics.  Looks liek Google are rolling this out over the next couple of days

Related people and pages in Google+

I can’t help thinking that Google are playing one heck of a high risk game with all these SERP changes. it really is getting more and more congested, and it is like ” I wonder what kinda SERP I am gonna get TODAY?  Elements seem to come and go, site links one day, Blocks opf links the nest, adwords intertwined with places listings, I think I have seen maybe 3 different formats today alone.

It is now getting a little offputting as finding ANYTHING on a Google SERP is becoming a chore.

Just a rocket quick post to say that as of now Google are #1 again in the SERP’s .

YES! They are of course #1 top for the term ‘browser’ via Google Adwords :p

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Too bad google didn’t follow their own advice, as Matt Cutts has just acted swiftly in a complete Public Relations stunt sorry I meant in a wonderful act of fairness   To issue a manual 60 day penalty against Google chrome for the term ‘browser’ , zeroing its page rank (which interestingly enough is an odd statement to make seeing as Google have repeatedly claimed to not allow Google pages to pass page rank (an investigation for another day)

I should really cite a couple of pages here first Aaron Wall (way to go Aaron) who originally posted about this Google buying paid links story, also to Danny Sullivan who then broke it further on Search Engine land and Matt Cutts (who has only paid for one link in this post so doesn’t get a BOGOF offer this time around)  (joke)

Some considerations in the statement made by Matt:-

We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

Indicating that some players CAN and DO pass PageRank

Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines

Crazy that even though they knew the intent, and knew it was an error, a penalty was issued. I am reading this that under normal circumstances of a manual review, a single back-link among so many would not have resulted in such a penalty.

Here is something a little different. On Matts page he states

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days.

But on the correspondence sent to Danny at Searchengineland he states

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.

the key difference here “and lower the site’s PageRank” which kinda kills the claim of many that PageRank doesn’t matter with regard ranking.

I did some rank checking and currently the google.com/chrome page is ranking 46 in the US and 44 in the UK, but the download page is still ranking #1 in US & UK for the terms ‘Chrome’ & ‘Chrome browser’ which again tells me that it is a manual PHRASE BASED penalty (for the term ‘browser’, as well as a PR zero penalty.

As I posted on Matt’s page.. That’ll teach the Chrome Team to Send Matt Socks for Christmas

Finally, in his correspondence with SEL, Matt stated

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

(Bolding added by me) which raises the questions who DID authorise it, and more importantly WHO did authorise the work (if not Google) and WHO actually carried out this spamming?

AFTER ALL  (taken from the google webmaster tools help)

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.

This is really interesting as it shows clearly that Google are moving more and more into social signals for their algorithm.  For some time it was believed, then a short while ago Google announced that they use social as a signal, and this aquisition puts things beyond doubt. Google want their finger on the pulse of social, and what better way (other than buying Twitter of course).

http://socialgrapple.com/ released this statement:-

I am excited to announce that the SocialGrapple team is joining Google.

SocialGrapple started a year ago, and launched only a couple of months later as a social graph analytics service. It was an amazing learning experience and I am incredibly grateful to all the users who supported this venture. Much of what was built over the months came directly from your needs and requests, so I feel like we were all on this journey together.

Since the first launch, we also explored keyword tracking and branched out to other social networks, but this was only scratching the surface. I’m looking forward to taking these ideas to the next level and revealing metrics on an incredibly larger scale.

Thank you again for being a part of my journey. I strive to continue building tools that make the world more transparent and empowered, and I can’t imagine a better partner than Google.

Social more important than ever then.

In a move announced today on the Google Blog , Google announced that it will be blocking referrer data for all referrals from those signed in to a secure SSL. Oh… Apart of course from Google Adwords.

Various reasons have been given for this, but I think this is probably all about Google making it more difficult for marketers and site owners to get data about their own visiters.  Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about this, which is yet another reason to be concerned about the nigh on Monopoly that Google has on search.

I for one have real concerns about the way Google is introducing change, that in no way benefits the site owner, but in many ways pushes them towards paid search via Google adwords system.  Is this good for site owners? Well of course it isn’t.  What google have done is effectively removed the ability to track converting phrases (AGAIN other than through paid search).  NOTHING on this earth will convince me that this isof any benefit whatsoever to site owners.

Anyone want to buy some adwords? going cheap at the moment, but set to rise massively as people turn to them to get conversion data

Google have really started pushing the boat out today. Hot on the heels of their force page re-index , service they have launched the biggest shake up in manual snitching on your mates… oops I mean Spam reporting that we have seen pretty much since Google kicked off.

The new spam reporting page allows and encourages you to specifically report

Paid links

Objectionable content (good luck on that one google)

Malware

pages that abuse Google products (breaching T&C)

Disclosing personal/private info

Phishing

Something else.

MOST IMPORTANTLY In My mind, Copyright and other legal issues.

Seems like Google really have listened and realised that they need to start delivering some sort of customer service thing. which for me is the one MAJOR LEAGUE element that has been missing.

SCREENSHOT OF PAGE

the page is located here

Nice to see some better guidance

Something that has always been a bit of a contradiction was that Google want the freshest content in their index, yet adjust the crawl date of statice pages to an ever growing length of time between crawls.  For instance, my consultancy site currently has a cache date of 3 days ago, but prior to that it was a good few weeks, well over a month. The reason of course is to make best use of resources within the google crawling and indexing structure. My site not changing often doesn’t require crawling often.

But what about when my site is overhauled? There could be a 6 week out of date version in the Google index, and THAt is not good for them nor me, freshness is king in the world of search.

Google have combated this by introducing a new submit a url after fetching as google bot. It is a natural progression isn’t it, and the beauty about this is thatr Google can instantly and algorithmically detect major change on your page, at which point submitting it to the index, will likely as not result in your ‘ linked target pages’ getting a crawl, and if THEY are changed, then probably the entire site.

Some key points are :-

This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.

Now while the service is limited in volume (for obvious reasons), it is a great boon and a major step forward, and in fact reminds me of the old days when we would sit up all night, submitting to Altavista (Alta who I hear anyone under 30 saying), working in a round route of ‘optimise > submit> wait> check ranking change > optimise again> submit> wait for ranking change. In those days and doing that, it was possible to launch a site and have it at #1 within hours.

How trusting were the search engines back then, but then again, is giving them what they want wrong?

Whatever way you look at it, as Jonathan Simon & Susan Moskwa, state in that snippet, it can help make fresh content on irregularly crawled pages fresh, it can correct errors, in short, everyone wins!

It has been reported today by Techcrunch, that Google are offering a new service called the ‘page speed service’.  I am thinking that the article I wrote August 2010 about the Google page rewriting patent application is related to this.

What Google are saying is:-

Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s arsenal to help speed up the web. This service is also their most ambitious yet. When you sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google, they’ll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google’s own servers around the world. Yes, you read all of that correctly.

“Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times,” Google notes. They say that applying web performance best practices across these pages should improve speed by 25 to 60 percent. Google will allow you to test out how much they’ll be able to speed up your site before you commit to it, apparently.

My concern in all of this is that we have seen google push its own properties into the Search results with products, local maps, news, and I have a real gut feeling that we might well see an ‘enhanced’ & ‘non enhanced’ split SERP. with those paying for the enhanced service appearing more prominently.

Once again I see the ‘don’t be evil’ mantra falling by the wayside, as Google chase more money.  For me the anti trust cases currently against Google are now paramount. In the UK Google owns search to well over 90% when you consider their search partners, and if they introduce a two tier enhanced and non enhanced system of search results, then that will slaughter the businesses of those who simply can’t afford to pay whatever it is that google charge.

More interestingly why should they? Google are proposing to re-write code, WHY?

What we have to consider here is that Google pretty much has no customer service beyond AdWords, and even then they operate a two tier system with you having to enter your customer number  whereupon a decision is made to put you to a real person, or to send you to email.

This has the makings of a total an utter catastrophe for those who can’t afford the charge.  It also has the makings of a total and utter junk-fest if Google local places maps thingy (or whatever they are calling it today) is anything to go by.  Google have regularly mismatched the content of multiple businesses that are unrelated. Lets hope this doesn’t spill over.

The other question here is that technically if google does give any preference whatsoever to ‘Google enhanced listings’ then those would become pay for position listings and would by law need to be clearly marked as such.

It is all getting very Skynet isn’t it.