Google is on the domination warpath to snuff out any major information competitor.

Introducing Knol

I haven’t had the time to really play with it, but word is that it’s very nice and easy to use. Here is the information from the site.

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How will this affect the search landscape with marketers?

New Google Interface

There are so many blogs now, it amazes me. I would guess that 65% of the blogs online are legitimate and 35% are spam(splogs), link farms or abandoned wastes.  I would bet that you could search for the most obscure subject and their would be someone writing about it. Cat Potty Training, Couch Coushion Change etc.

Anyways, there is no real point to this post other than just ranting to dead air. Sometimes a certain days will do that to people.

Changes are in store for newly merged Google and DoubleClick, following the March 11 approval of the merger.

Google has announced that it will lay off 25% of DoubleClick’s 1,200 US-based employees. In addition, the online giant has announced that it will split DoubleClick Performics into two separately run business units, one covering affiliate marketing, and the other search marketing. Google plans to integrate the affiliate marketing into its existing business and sell off the search marketing group.

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business,” said Tom Phillips, director of DoubleClick Integration in a blog post. “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.”

This comes as a response to concerns that owning both a search engine and a search marketing firm would create a conflict of interest for search results. “We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers,” Phillips added in the blog.

In recent weeks, Google executives have been spending time with privacy group Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) in Washington to help develop an online privacy bill.

“We are happy to work with Google on a consumer privacy bill,” said Ari Schwartz, VP at CDT. “Our main concern about their acquisition of DoubleClick is the potential integration of search marketing with their search engine information, because it could be tracking too much of a consumer’s behavior without his or her knowledge.”

What is Section 508?
The legislation referred to as “Section 508″ is actually an amendment to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The amendment was signed into law by President Clinton on August 7, 1998. Section 508 requires that electronic and information technology that is developed by or purchased by the Federal Agencies be accessible by people with disabilities.
Now, the above has also been adopted by Financial, Retail and Automotive websites that I’ve seen.

Here is the situation: A company makes a website that is made of one Flash movie.  There is content that is valuable within the  movie, not only for users but also search engines.  So the question comes up, ’should I just make static pages and link from a sitemap or make a “low bandwidth version”?. There are some other factors involved with this situation, but this is the jist of it.

My solution was to make static pages, place a link in the footer called “508 Compliant Version”. This then links out to the static pages with the good content on it. Then, on the Flash detect page, if someone doesn’t have Flash, give them the opportunity to either download or view the 508 pages. Wah La!

To me, there is a fine line that is a form of cloaking. Why? well, unless you look for the link, you can’t find the static pages. And unless the users don’t have Flash installed, you won’t see the option the download or view the 508 pages.

Now you ask, why call it 508 pages and not just a Low Bandwidth version? I look at it this way, if the pages are specifically for being compliant, then you have now taken into consideration the disabled people, hence built for the users and not specifically for the search engines.

What are your thoughts on this?

Famous Quote: Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly. - Dalai Lama

Removing negative press is huge and Rip Off Report is always ranking negatively for company names. You’ve seen it before but might not have paid attention to it. You do a search for a specific company name and on the first page are results for the actual company, but as you scroll down, there is multiple site bashing that particular company.

So here is what happens, Company ABC is losing business because of the negative rankings. So they start to freak out and talk about this “damn website ranking for our name”. 9 times out of 10, it’s going to be Rip Off Report.

How do you get rid of negative press?
There are multiple ways of removing these negative parasites. One is to rank other properties the company owns for the business name. By this, I mean, other domain names. Depending on the complexity of who is ranking, alot of times you can use social media for ranking a business name as well.

Being from Arizona, Ive read stories in the past and remember reading this article along time ago in the New Times . It’s a very good story giving you alot of history.

So today, I’m reading SEOmoz, and Rand has posted a good write up about the Rip Off Report . Going deeper, he’s referencing this post by Chris Bennet posted today. Very good stuff.

Looks like someone needs to form a witch hunt, I’ll bring the torches and pitch forks!

1. SEO Digger - You search by URL, which returns a list of keywords your site ranks for along with Word Tracker searches and Overture searches and the position your site is in.
2. SERP Checker - Enter a list of keywords and this tool checks rankings across 3 engines.
3. Domain Stats - This is cool for looking for alot of information at once about a domain.
4. Site Analysis - Gives you a good clean overview of how your web site is doing. Nothing groundbreaking, but is cool.
5. McDar - I have to add McDar. Been using this for ever. This is very good for viewing multiple Google datacenters at the same time for rankings.

I’m sure there are a million other tools that could be listed, but I just wanted to list 5. I’ll list out more later.

Google reads Flash text, so optimize it

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems’ Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

“It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers,” Cutts said. “So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text.”

This has long been the suspicion of Flash developers and SEO professionals concerned with .swf files, but to my knowledge, this is the most direct and clear confirmation to date. The implication is simple but important: if Web developers–and specifically Flash developers–have the ability to test .swf files during development for textual SEO parameters, then Flash files can be designed to offer specific text to search engines.

While the concept is simple, the practice may not be. Flash is a complicated multimedia program with tremendous flexibility and many layers of content. Also, parent Flash .swf files can load secondary, child .swf files ad nuaseum, and this is a very popular, load time-friendly technique. The path between viable textual content and the “front” of a given Flash presentation can be very intricate.

There have been tests measuring what sort of text can be discovered by the Search Engine SDK program, much of it dealing with where in a Flash movie it resides, when the text crosses the stage, and what sort of text is most likely to be read. While there may never be absolute rules for optimizing text within a Flash file, now that it is known with fair certainty how Google reads Flash text, more testing is in order.

Well-designed Flash content can be a fantastic user experience. Google may not be pursuing this content, but it certainly has opened the door to the possibility. The ball is in Adobe’s court to continue to develop and improve the SDK tool, but this is a great opportunity for Flash designers interested in SEO or for search engine optimizers interested in Flash.

Despite the shortcomings of the current Search Engine SDK software, (it would be nice to see an update, Adobe!), it is quite likely that SEO standards can be developed for dealing with Flash text so that Flash files can “tell” search engines about their content with more clarity.

1. Duplicate, non-descriptive and overly long title tags. The title tag is widely regarded as the most important aspect of a page to ranking, but it seems most campaigns view it as a throwaway job. Rudy Giuliani, despite keeping issue sections to simple and search-friendly terms, made every single Issues page’s header the generic “Rudy Giuliani : Issues.”

   Likewise, “Hillary Clinton.com : Issues : Strengthening Our Democracy” gives readers and engines alike no idea what content will actually be discovered on the page and is therefore a fairly worthless title tag.

2. Lack of, or poor use of, header tags. This is the most egregious and widespread issue. Frequently, H1 and H2 tags aren’t used and, when they are, it’s often on the same terms on every page. John Edwards’ campaign takes this a step further by placing an H1 tag around its logo, a practice that is helpful (according to some circles) to the visually impaired by making the alt text more prominent in site readers as the page’s main topic. However, the fact that this H1 tag is the same on every page renders even this extra step meaningless in practice.
3. Splash pages, JavaScript navigation and other search stoppers. All campaigns have gone with java script navigation, often with no straight HTML links to the pages underneath. Fred Thompson’s campaign has gone as far as to place his issues content completely behind JavaScript expanders. Splash pages asking for donations when one first arrives can destroy a site by diffusing its front page’s influence, especially when the site vacillates between using them and not using them.
4. And, of course, nary a sitemap to be found. While this could be mitigated with XML sitemaps, what’s the likelihood that these sites blew off so many other aspects of site ownership and management – except for this particularly tedious exercise?

I know that everyone from large search agencies to small mom and pop shops always put huge emphasis and money on Google rankings without stopping to think about the other search engines such as Yahoo!, Ask, Live. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard from fortune 500 companies that they don’t care about rankings in the other engines, just Google. To me that sounds absurd.

I know you’ve heard this saying, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. You wouldn’t believe the crazy things people do to only optimize a website for Google alone.

With that being said, I had ran a test of 2 very similar websites. One blocking Google from indexing and another allowing them to index. After about a month of building links and watching traffic, the site that did NOT allow Google received more qualified traffic.

What does this mean? It shows me that Google should not be the only search engine that people should optimize for. There are other engines that can send qualified traffic to your site that is targeted to your needs. If you build it they will come, right?

So my word of advice is to not put all of your eggs in one basket, don’t limit yourself to one search engine and build your site to draw qualified traffic.