YBO Interactive Blog

I was playing with Google’s Keyword Tool quite a lot lately, and found something really strange.

There are a few keywords that seem to have exactly 1,000,000 searches per month. The thing is, it just doesn’t make sense that both “optimization“, “internet marketing” and also “seo” are searched exactly the same number of times.

Look at the results below:

These are the results for “Internet Marketing”

These are the results for “seo”

And that’s for “optimization”

Does this make any sense at all?

Is Google playing games without telling us about it?

Did you find more million searches keywords like these?

The Official Google Blog has a nice post called Introduction to Google Ranking. Surprisingly (or not…) this post doesn’t tell anything that you didn’t know, nor reviles any secret that can help you do better in anything…

However, there was one thing I did learn from that post: Google’s system is SIMPLE!  It is really is! At least that’s what the guy says.

Being involved in many software projects throughout my career, many of them coded with my own fingers, such a statement makes me smile

KISS! (Keep It Simple Stupid!) has always been a good advice for developers. The thing about developers is that their mind (I was there, I know) doesn’t work like that. They always always always tend to make everything complicated. Simplicity, doesn’t seem to work in this profession…

Maybe the ones that can make it simple work in Google?

A Google Groups thread has a discussion about blocking a whole continent from seeing your website. This guy has a lot of African traffic that he doesn’t want (because he has no customers in Africa?) and he wants to block them based on their location.

The answer he got from the Google guy is that this is against Google’s webmaster Guidelines.

I think this is absurd. The thing about Google Webmaster Guidelines is that you can’t ignore them. If you ignore them, they will ignore you, and we don’t want that to happen, right?

Now , what can we do if we find something really stupid in Google Webmaster Guidelines? Is it safe to ignore it? I don’t have the guts to say yes, although I think that this is the right answer. If the traffic from Iran is wasting my bandwidth and I don’t want to do any business with that country, what is wrong with sending the Iranian visitors to a page that says “Your region is not supported. Good bye and have a nice day (and on a personal level - stop supporting worldwide terrorism…).

I do agree with the Google anti-cloaking policy, I think it makes sense and goes together with their do-no-evil vision.

However, on this one, I think they went too far.

update (july 5th 2008) :
A correction was posted on the google groups thread. The guy from Google was wrong, he didn’t fully understand their policy…

After a bit of double-checking, I have a clarification where I was mistaken. Sorry about the confusion!
The important part is that you do not treat the Googlebots any different than other users from that region. So if your site blocks users in the region where the Googlebot comes from (based on the IP address and your IP/Location lookups), you should be blocking it as well. Blocking users outside of the Googlebot’s region would generally be ok.

At the recent Web 2.0 expo, Matt Cutts presented on “what Google knows about spam…”

I watched the 9 minutes video and it is quite interesting to hear it from an official Google representative. After all, everything we know is based on urban legends…

Adblock

Hitwise Reports that Google has 67% of All US Searches. They also say that Yahoo has 20% and MSN has 7%. Is it a surprise? not to most of the people I know.

I didn’t see the details of the survey made by HitWise, but I guess that if research would be made only with users from Silicon Valley, the Google percentage would be higher, for the simple reason that technology oriented users would rather use Google than any other Search Engine.

So who is using msn and Yahoo?

I think that most of the users using msn are the ones that got their computer with Windows and Internet Explorer, and have no idea how to change the default search engine in their browser. In fact, they don’t even know that it is possible.
Yahoo is a different story. There are still people out there that think that Yahoo is the Internet. They open their browser, go to Yahoo.com and then, they type the address of the domain they want to go to (sometimes IN THE SEARCH BOX). Don’t get me wrong, not all Yahoo users are “computerly challenged”, the thing is that Yahoo was there first (almost), and quite a lot of people know how to use it, like the way it works, they like the content, the channels, the email, and see no reason to go anywhere else.

What can you learn from it? If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign for a company that sells Enterprise Wireless LAN, Google is your place and all the rest are waste of money. The IT managers looking for your products are in Google. On the other hand, if your page is an Acropolis Audio Tour, You should definitely pay attention to msn and Yahoo. Your customers are waiting there as well.

I was asked by one of my customers to explain why removing the company name from all his pages titles is a good idea. It just didn’t make any sense.

As you can see in this list of Top Factors for Google Search Engine Ranking, the most important ranking factor on a web page is the <TITLE>.

Now, take a look at the keyword “aquamarine gemstones“.

For this keyword, a web page with title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Had we used the first title, Google might have understood that our site is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” and maybe also an “Aquamarine shop”. Focus on keywords is very important when optimizing titles.

When working with commercial websites the assumption is that our potential customers are not searching for the brand name, but more likely searching for the product description, therefore a title with a product description is better.
For that reason, on any internal page I would prefer to have a title with the product description without a company name.

And yet, I would still use the company name on a Home Page simply because a Home Page is not like any internal page on site, it has more importance than all the rest especially in terms of branding. The internal pages are there for the content. They can do without it.

The first thing I would do when optimizing a new site is to remove the company name from all titles. It is not always easy to convince your customer that this is the right thing to do, but once they do it, it takes a very little time to show them that it works.

And it works great.

Warning: Search Engines like Google don’t ‘like’ big changes. Changing all titles of a site can cause damage. The advice that appears in this post is very good for new sites, or sites that have very little traffic and want to grow. If your site already has a lot of traffic, it is recommended to change the title of new pages (if it’s a blog, do it above a certain %postid%), and keep the old pages untouched. In any case, the best would be to consult an expert before doing big changes.

I guess you all heard about goolag, the new Vulnerability Scanner that uses Google as their engine. I think it is fantastic. There are very creative people out there, Very. The thing is, I’m not so sure if I would trust them to keep me safe. I think that if you are looking for a commercial service, you should look for a vulnerability scanner that is running by a commercial company that is working for this only. I can’t depend on volunteers that update the open source software, to wake up in the morning, clean the empty cokes and pizza trays off their keyboard and keep me safe. For a personal family site, or for a non commercial site, this is fine, but if you need a real vulnerability assessment I think you should pay for your pleasure and have your network scanned by people that do that for living.

How cool is that! I think it is brilliant.

You have to admit that this is very creative, Very!

Will Google block it?
Do they care more about their gmail user experience or the income from this ad?

I’m not sure…

(found this image here)

Matt Cutts made a nice video explaining the importance of ALT attributes to IMAGE tags.

It’s always nice to hear the official Google opinion about things you already know…

Here is a great article about link value factors with lots of issues regarding link value discussed in depth. As expected, anchor text is the most important factor. Read the article for the complete list.