Web Development & Design | Online Marketing
Unsolicited notes, links and advice from an online development firm in Kansas City.
Something we all knew is now official policy:
You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests…
…If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.
The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.
Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.
Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages…
…BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said the concession was relatively minor but Mr Murdoch might see it as vindication of his decision to take on Google.
Now seems like a good time to revise and extend my remarks… Not really, I stand by what I said not 12 hours ago: Rupurt Murdoch and Newscorp are underestimating a lot of lean content producers. The less old media that’s available online the more new media there will be to fill in the blanks. (And I suspect this more about Bing than newspapers for Google.)
Rupert Murdoch/Newscorp are threatening to block Google from indexing their content, and it’s looking like they have a real incentive to do so, since Microsoft might pay them for it. (It’ll be interesting to see the zeros on that check since Google currently provides ~25% of traffic to Newscorp’s sites such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.)
To anyone that works in the search, and most of us in the even broader web development industry, this sounds absolutely ludicrous. There must be some fundamental misunderstandings of the mechanism (search) at play for this to even be considered:
Murdoch thinks that people are using search to look for Newscorp sites, but they aren’t. People use search to look for information. When we type in the topic of a late breaking news story we don’t try different engines and key phrases until a source we recognize pops up in the results. That’s optimizing our information intake and it’s hard, we went to Google in the first place so we wouldn’t have to do this. Instead of optimizing our information intake, the majority of us will satisfice. We click through on one of the results that’s provided; the one that looked like it might solve our problem in the three to five seconds we cared to spend scanning the page. We do this because the penalty is low and we know it usually works.
Taking Newscorp’s content out of Google will only strengthen Newscorp’s rivals. As a content provider myself, I would love for Newscorp to remove themselves from Google’s index. And I’m not alone. There’s an army of new media publishers that have been doing a good job of slaying the print media dragon over the last few years and they would be overjoyed if a monster like Newscorp just took itself out of the online content provider gene pool.
Thousands of people will fill that void left by all the Newscorp results disappearing. Yes, a few loyal followers will follow the Wall Street Journal and New York Post content to Bing. (Or will they-if a user is specifically searching for a New York Post result, why not just search directly on the site itself? Why keep querying various third parties until you receive a result from the site you want?) People will keep using Google because it’s what they know, they deliver high quality results and they’ll keep clicking on the relevant search results that Google has always delivered, but non of them will be Newscorp results, and that’s a lot of clicks – people that are knowledge-hungry and primed to discover new information sources, ones that will replace Newscorp sources. It’s an opportunity that many online content creators will jump at.
People trust Google. People trust Google so much that when a competitor’s search results are compared with Google’s and the brand names are switched, people pick the Google-branded results. No one thinks that Google is bad at search. When something is not included in Google’s search index, users don’t go looking for it or wonder, “gee why isn’t that Wall Street Journal article in Google, Google must be broken.” They think that the article in question is what’s broken, or that the website is down, or that it’s not included because it’s poor quality. This could be partially remedied by a traditional media marketing blitz, but that kind of marketing doesn’t work so well with the search savvy crowd that makes a conscious decisions about the engine they use; which makes that an incomplete solution at best, and at worst, an expensive waste of time. Either way, there will be serious damage to Newscorp’s various brands. (Damage to the tune of 25% of their current audience.)
*Yes, this brand bias will go away eventually, but that’s a long road; combined with the other factors above, Newscorp may never see the end of it.
This is a raw deal for Newscorp, but what about Bing? It would be great publicity for them and help keep the momentum they’ve generated, but it’s definitely not the high road. Paying 3rd parties to remove themselves from competitors’ search results isn’t a sustainable strategy and smacks of desperation.
It’s also a credibility issue with web developers and tech industry insiders: some prominent people are complaining that this is the start of a sky-is-falling scenario for the state of the current web. Microsoft is already much maligned in these circles because of the havoc that their deliberately non-standards compliant browsers continue to wreak on the web. This will just be one more notch on Microsofts let’s-piss-off the-community-we-operate-in-and-hire-from. Not that Microsoft cares, or at least they haven’t in the past.
You can take all of the above as biased rambling (I do work in search), but the real reason that Newscorp should be extremely concerned about the success of a search pullout is that Google’s response has essentially been, “we don’t care.”
“Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute… Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”
And there isn’t anyone who knows more about the internet, or making money from the internet, than Google. Yes, they could be* are bluffing, but my money says they’re just looking at the future instead of the past, along with most of their users.
Google just announced it’s First Click Free program, allowing publishers to limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.
When you paste the following into the address bar of your browser when on google.com and hit return, you should find yourself as new participant of Google’s latest and more all-encompassing prototype test – the one with a new logo, buttons, and always-visible left-hand pane in results. Please note I needed to sign out first for this to work.
javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com");
Looks like Google is taking a page out of Microsoft’s (as in Bing’s) book. It’s a surprising move, but one that I think will improve their service. The time framing options presented in the all new left sidebar are something I’ve been wanting for years. (Time framing had been available in the advanced search area for a while, but now it’s a few less clicks away.)
Google is testing this in a few markets right now, and it will be rolling out soon if it gets a positive response. My gut says it will, but I’m sure it’s just an A/B split test for them-the test users will determine if it gets implemented or not.
- The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results.
- These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results.
- They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data.
Google just announced that social search features are coming to Google Labs in the next few weeks. It works like this: you link a social media account to your Google Profile; they start crawling/indexing that content and sticking some of the results at the bottom of your SERPs, if you’re logged in.
This seems like a sloppy approach. I’d much rather see an option to search only your social media accounts (see pic below) and have all returned results be from that index, rather than have those results mixed in with the regular stuff.
Google social search mock up - click to enlarge.
Having some social stuff pop up in my daily searches seems like feature bloat to me. Although, it would be nice to have a robust search function for that part of my online life when I need it.
Google pioneered the model of judging a pages worth by primarily letting other people do it for them. (All the big search engines have long since followed.) Search engines, at their most basic level, rank pages by looking at how many incoming links they have. Yes, the web is a popularity contest.
Of course it’s more complicated than that. Search engines also assign all those incoming links or votes for your content a quality score by looking at how many incoming links the pages doing the linking have, they also look at link structures, link content, reciprocal links and on… and on… and then on some more. Links are the most important aspect of search engine marketing. With enough quality incoming links, nothing else matters. In fact, the Incoming Links portion of the Voltmeter makes up more than half of the total score.
This all makes sense of course. The easiest way to automate a process that’s impossible to automate (like objectively determining the quality of human-generated information output) is getting a real person to do it for you. Preferably someone else; or in Google’s case, everyone else.
Why does Voltmeter check the link sources it does? Not all links are created equal. Like I said earlier, the engines check your links’ links, they check domain histories, hypertext composition and so much more…
We have to apologize up front because this number will never be consistent or correct. No searche engine has ever indexed the entire web, so no one actually cn tell us the total number of incoming links. We can provide you with the closest approximation available and that’s from Yahoo! Site Explorer. Their index is massive and their resources are many, so this is the best place to check for an overall idea of how many total incoming links a site has.
Wikipedia links are a good measure of if you’re providing any sort of authoritative information on your website. Is what you have to say some combination of unique and valuable? If so you probably have a lasting Wikipedia link or two. Wikipedia links are fairly controversial in search marketing circles because I can go ad some Wikipedia links to any site I want right now. But even if I do, they won’t be there for long unless they actually add something to the what’s arguably the largest, most current knowledge pool online. So we check them when running the Voltmeter test.
Remember how we said the best way to automate something was to have someone else do it? Well some search engines don’t give two licks about automation. DMOZ is one of them, if not the one of them. DMOZ hand-selects every single website that it admits to its search index. If you want your site in the DMOZ directory, first you or someone else has to go and suggest your URL be included in the DMOZ index. Then it goes into a long queue until a real life human looks it over and decides whether it’s up to snuff or not. This can take weeks or it can take months, but we highly recommend it and we have Voltmeter check for DMOZ links, because they are likely the most trusted links available.
Google News tracks all kinds of news sources from TV stations to newspapers to online wire services. Checking for links to your site here is sort of a shotgun approach to checking for mention of your URL in traditional media. These links are usually pretty high quality just because we know for a fact that no link farms or other shady links sources are tracked by Google News.
Google Blog Search is just like Google News, but for blogs only. So if you can get the fickle, echo-chamber, rumor-mongering blogosphere talking, you’ll get some link-love from this area of the net. These links are usually pretty easy to come by with a minimal investment in some good link-bait. (Despite the negative connotations of the word baiit, we’re big into link bait around here. This is something we define as content compelling enough to spread on its own. Link-bait and viral content are pretty much the same thing. The Voltmeter itself is link bait. It’s useful, easy to use and looks good.)
This is sort of the catchall for anything we may have missed. This searches Google for your domain. So if we were looking for domain mentions of this site, we’d go to Google and search the term, “360voltage.com” (quotes and all) and see how many hits we got. This important because even if someone isn’t directly linking to you, this is the second best thing, it’s more than text, but not quite a hyperlink.
Links are the thing. They are the currency of the net. You want as many links as you ca get from as many different reputable sources as you can get. (No link buying or link-farms.) If you only invest in one area of search marketing, make it link-beggingbuilding. I’ll say it again: with enough high quality links, nothing else matters.
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.
In the last 30 days…
…No wonder Google is doing some tweaking under the hood of their cash cow: search.
The new/revamped search engine looks and feels just like normal Google. All the changes were on the back end. For now, it’s a touch faster to load and it returns more results for the few test queries I’ve run. More will come out about the differences in how Google’s new back end is indexing and crawling the web as we experiment with the new search.
More viable search options means more work for online marketers, but that’s OK with me. When competition starts heating up, consumers win. With the rate of information output these days, we need as many wins in search as we can get.
Welcome! 360 Voltage is a collection of online tools that Voltage Creative, LLC, a Kansas City Integrated Marketing firm, makes available to the public on both a free and paid basis. The tools on 360voltage.com and the material published on this (very official) blog, are meant to educate and enlighten our clients, business owners and web developers about online marketing.
The information age has exploded and is still accelerating. Marketing is no longer about coming up with a clever phrase and pushing it to a massive audience. Right now, so much is pushed from so many different directions that a lot of the old playbook doesn’t work anymore.
It would take a week to absorb the marketing blitz a person is exposed to in 30 minutes of life in the developed world. We have to stop throwing away our dollars! We must go to our audience on their terms. This means offering mutual benefit marketing and communicating with speed and integrity. There’s no better tool for this than the internet. This is due in no small part to search. Search is becoming more important every 3 seconds. (That’s how often new web page is born.) This site’s focus is on helping information and messages get found online through search.
Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) have received a bad rap and that’s a shame. For a long time these terms were synonymous with hacks and tricks for gaming a system and yielding short term results. That’s thankfully going away now as the snake oil salesmen are exposed by search engines with an increasingly sophisticated and refined product. The whole search industry is maturing fast as bigger brands and (more impressively) scrappy upstarts see massive strides toward their goals with search marketing & optimization.
We’re very excited about this, because as anyone who’s seen a professional search engine marketing campaign or who’s watched a properly optimized site hit its target can tell you: search is the most powerful type of marketing there is when it comes to return on investment. It allows you to place your message in front of your audience at their precise moment of need. It’s pull marketing at its best; a lighthouse in a blinding storm of information. It’s also a good long-term investment: as information output accelerates, search will only become more important.
We can’t take on all the clients that come to our door, but we can share out knowledge about how to get a message to an audience and provide a nice toolkit to help you on your way. If you’re looking for access to a cutting edge marketing professional’s secret sauce, you’ve finally found it.
This site is a labor of love, so contact us if you can think of a way to make it better. We’re always going to be interested in that.