YBO Interactive Blog

SearchEngineJournal has a story about this guy that gave the keys to his business to Google. Well, not exactly the keys, but he used a Gmail account for all his business emails, and had used the same account for his customers Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and his own Google Adsense.
And then one day he woke up and found out that Google disabled his Gmail account.

From that moment on, not only his Adsense income stopped and he couldn’t access any email he kept in his Gmail Inbox, but all the emails sent to him by his customers were routed to a voided account.
I can’t even think how to start handling such a crisis. What do you do first? Well, I have a few ideas but that’s for a different post.
The question I’m asking is what the hell where you thinking about when you gave Google the keys to your business? (Are you out of your mind?)

If you still want to use a Google account for your business there are a few things you should do:
1. Make sure you backup your account on a regular basis.

2. Get your own domain and use Google Apps. This way in case of emergency you can change your MX Records back you to your original hosting whiting a few hours.

3. Never use your personal account for your Google Adwords.

4. Never use your personal account for your Google Analytics.

5. Never Ever use your personal account for your Google Adsense.

Don’t let them catch you unprepared.

Google had recently launch a few extremely innovative features, some of them put a big smile on my face. I love creativity, and I love innovation. Google seem to be really good at both.One of those features is the Are you sure it is a good idea to send emails when you’re drunk gmail option, which asks you some math questions in case you are sending emails very late at night.

Another one is the forgotten attachment detector, that checks if there is really an attachment attached to your email in case your message includes any text regarding an attached file.

For the last example for today, check my latest securiteam post, where I wrote about the way Google Chrome handles https certificates that expired. 

These kind of developments remind me every day that the people that make Google are simply brilliant. It is not just another interenet company. This one is something else. 

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…

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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.

It may be interesting to see where exactly they collected their info. There is no question that information collected from Nebraska will be significantly different that the information collected from California. There are so many tech-oriented users in the Silicon Valley area, and these guys would never use Yahoo! or MSN as their search engine for technical purposes. (Of course, this does not include the employees of Yahoo! and MSN…)

So who are those people that use MSN and Yahoo!?

Most of the users that use MSN are the ones that got their computer with Windows and Internet Explorer and have no idea how to change the default search engine and their browser. In fact, they don’t even know that it is possible. They search, it works, and they are happy. I call this audience ‘the houswifes’.

Yahoo! is a different story. Yahoo! was there first, and 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 url they want to browse 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, the news and see no reason to go anywhere else.

What can you learn from it? If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign or thinking about SEO for a company that sells a Firewall Analyzer, Google is your place and all the rest is a waste of money. IT Managers, Software Engineers, Security Experts are not looking for you in Yahoo!. On the other hand, if your web page is about the Acropolis Audio Tour, You should definitely pay attention to MSN and Yahoo!. Your customers might be 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>.

A web page with the title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower for the keyword aquamarine gemstones, then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Google might get the impression that this page is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” or an “Aquamarine shop”. Keyword Focus is very important when optimizing titles. The less words you have around your keyword, the better. In most cases, your potential customers won’t search for your brand name, but more likely search for your product description. The ones that search for your brand name already know you, and know how to find you. Adding your brand name to the product description will be a total waste energy that won’t bring any good.

On any internal page it would be the best to have a title with the product description without a company name. Having said that, Home Pages are different.

I would put a company name on a Home Page <title> 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. In terms of look&feel, your company name simply belongs there. SEO is very important, but it is just another part in the marketing puzzle.

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)