Google

Why I Sued Google (and Won) - Aaron Greenspan

“But it’s not fair!” Google’s paralegal protested. “What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?”

It’s a valid question. Yet until Google changes its policies to become more transparent, which might also reassure skeptics that AdWords and AdSense, which have oddly limited reporting capabilities, aren’t just two sides of the same ponzi scheme (for why else would one want to terminate legitimate accounts with high monthly liabilities when they’re supposed to be making money for Google on each click?)–I will give this answer:

Maybe everyone whose account was canceled, should.

 

Solid article and worth a read.

Tagged none | 7 Comments »

Via blogscope, we see that Google Japan was buying paid posts:

[Google] are now using a tainted and controversial social media optimization method called pay-per-post, provided by CyberBuzz.

 

(confirmed by Google’s apology)

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

 

I’ve filed a spam report about Google Japan and encourage you to do the same.

The query is “Google Japan”

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+japan

and the result is that first one:

http://www.google.co.jp/ - NOFOLLOWED YOU SHADY BITCH!

Remember that Public Apology

If Google Japan is not penalized (and right now, they still have a page rank 9), then shouldn’t the same option be available to all the rest of us? If we’re caught spamming, we just publish something that says:

It turns out that [insert search engine spamming technique] on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

then any penalty should be immediately lifted. Wouldn’t that be the fair way to do it?

Google should even add a section to webmaster central where we can link to our apology. This way, we can avoid that pesky penalty all together.

The above post was paid for by Google and does not necessarily represent the opinions of SEO Blackhat, it’s Black Hat Forums, or QuadsZilla. Normally I wouldn’t whore myself out like this, but hey - a man’s gotta eat!

Tagged none | 6 Comments »

I have no idea why, but my user friendly sitemap (that links all posts by title) and my about page on this blog have lost all page rank even though they are linked from every page on the blog.

Some of the category pages suffered the same fate
Google
Doorway Pages

While most others did not:
Myspace Friends
Black Hat Site Reviews
Poker

I know, I know - who cares about page rank? But still - this does mean something - I just have no idea what.

Any thoughts?

Tagged none | 11 Comments »

Can I target my adwords buy to include only one type of OS or Browser type? I see where I can target mobile devices, but beyond that . . . am I just missing the option and it’s right there in front of me?

Let’s say I’m selling an application and only want to target Safari users or those on the OSX platform - can I do that with Adwords? Can I do it with Yahoo’s Advertising platform?

Has anyone done this with adwords?

Can one of my loyal Google-Employee readers help me with this?

Tagged none | 7 Comments »

After my last 2 posts on bounce rate, Many more questions have been popping up about the bounce effect.

First, let’s clarify what we’re talking about here. Google doesn’t need to use analytics data bounce rates. It’s much more likely that Google would use a metric such as:

SCASI

I don’t think there’s a word for this yet, so I’ll invent the term SCASI (SERP Click After Site Inspection).

If a surfer Clicks SERP A from a list of SERPs and then (10 secs to 4 mins later) clicks any other SERP on that same list of search results it is a negative quality indicator. If the user found what they are looking for, they wouldn’t need to keep clicking on SERPs. If they continue to click, they’re initial find was not satisfying.

The links in search results are not direct links to the sites, but rather a google redirect such as:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=14&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.holidays.net%2Fthanksgiving%2F&ei=UQIvSfPRHaGievXK5OMK&usg=AFQjCNFNzOBQgfUn_14d33MdAMUPBgYz2Q&sig2=SJhrGbVZlvPXlOT9zYBHgQ

This would allow Google to easily track SCASI . . . and to a great extent “bounce”.

This isn’t technically the “bounce rate” but would be a good corollary in most instances. However, in the event that the landing page actually answers the users questions, the corollary would start to break down.

For example, many people who go to the wikipedia through a Google search will not continue to click in wikipedia. Many of them will “bounce” after reading the article. But if the wiki article answered the user’s question, the bounce might be high but the SCASI would be very low.

As webmasters, we don’t have access to SCASI data . . . unless of course we own all the top 10 SERPs

What we DO have is bounce rate. In a majority of cases, a higher bounce rate will mean a higher SCASI rate.

It’s clear to me that Google already uses this type of data for ranking sites. If not, they should start sending me a consultancy paycheck for designing their damn search engine . . . after all, I did answer their interview questions. Better yet, let me take over the search department at Microsoft; we desperately need more competition in the search space.

I’ve got more to cover on this - but is it getting any clearer to you?

PS: Happy Thanksgiving!

Tagged none | 19 Comments »

Pay Per View on Youtube.

It’s Coming. My prediction is that it’s coming in the next 12 months.

That’s my read on the recent change to widescreen support. They are getting users ready for the most popular formats for movies. Why? Because they are going to sell movies on a pay per view basis through deals with the studios. Then they can catalog every TV show ever released and sell them for 50 cents to $1 per episode. That sounds like a very Google thing to do - I wouldn’t be surprised if they are already cataloging everything in anticipation for such a release.

They could even add a way to make Pay per subscription channels on youtube; splitting the profits with the premium content providers or striking deals where certain shows are available only on GooTube.

Finally, Google will have a reason to police copyrighted videos; when they have their fingers in the pie.

Google properties, primarily via YouTube, accounted for 44 percent of the 11.4 billion videos viewed in May. (the other 56 percent must have been from Porn Tube Sites NSFW )

They have the audience, now their going to monitize it. Think itunes . . . only bigger.

12 months. Pay Per View on Youtube. You heard it here first. Just like you read about the Google Voting here a month before anywhere else.

Tagged none | 3 Comments »

SEO continues to evolve. Need more evidence that Google uses bounce rate to test their SERPs?

Here’s are screenshots from one of my sites (it’s a “white hat” site or I wouldn’t be posting the footprint here). The first shows overall traffic:

the 2nd shows Google traffic:

and the 3rd shows Bounce rates:

This is exactly the pattern you would expect from a program designed to flush out terms with higher bounce rates and test them across other sties. Moreover, this isn’t the first time I’ve recognized this pattern, it happens every 2-3 months on average.

Unsurprisingly, the word “bounce” does not even appear once in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Too bad I didn’t print it our first, because then I could at least use it to wipe my ass.

However, Google does give some clues in their analytics support page, Google notes:

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

In this instance, you can substitute “ad copy” with “SERP preview” for organic results. So for the site in the above example, I just have to taylor each result for the 193,018 keywords and phrases that were used in the past month, hope that some of them repeat themselves, and anticipate every permutation that Google’s gonna throw at me next month.

Easy enough.

This week I’ll cover how to lower your bounce rate in more detail . . . that is if anyone is actually interested. Are you?

Tagged design | 32 Comments »

This morning, I wanted to look at the Frank Schilling video I posted a while back. I’d love to get him to come to SEO de Janerio as an expert, but haven’t met him yet (anyone care to make an introduction?)

Anyway, I wanted to watch that video again, so I Googled “frank seoblackhat”.

Check out these awesome results:

As you can see, you have to wade through 6 scraper SERPs to get to the post you’re looking for on seoblackhat.

Microsoft still has their head up their ass and didn’t even find the result that I was looking for, but at least they got the DOMAIN right for the top result:

and the winner is . . . Yahoo!

Looks like it’s time to change that default search engine to Yahoo.

I Guess Google has been too preoccupied lately maintaining their paid link monopoly to pay attention to the actual quality of their SERPs.

In the meantime, while Google (and in fact all the Search engines) continues to serve up scraper after scraper - Scrape away! It’s the blackhat technique that just won’t die and continues to drive traffic and make money.

Tagged none | 5 Comments »

The Yahoo - Google advertising deal would have been horrendous for consumers, advertisers, Yahoo, partners . . . pretty much for everyone but Google.

Yesterday, that deal was pronounced dead.

<sings> “Ding, Dong the witch is dead.”</sing>

w00t! and all that jazz.

As much of a free market guy as I am, the one place where the free market needs government intervention is in the area of Anti-Trust and Monopoly oversight. The DoJ did right on this one.

Google is becoming increasingly arrogant with their partners and advertisers. On their syndication deals, from what I hear they want to “renegotiate” every deal down to a 50% or lower payout (when in many cases these partners have 85%+). While Yahoo isn’t the best answer for “competition” in the marketplace, at least they’re something.

Google knows they are in effect the only game in town and are behaving more and more like it. Aaron Wall discussed this further in “How Long Until People View Google Like Microsoft?”

I know at least one person who already does.

Speaking of Microsoft, Yahoo shares are up significantly after the death of the Google deal on speculation that this puts Yahoo back in play for a Microsoft bid. Jerry Yang all but begged Microsoft to buy them following the collapse of the Google deal.

The mid $40 numbers that Jerry et al were dreaming of earlier this year are more of a pipe dream than ever. Even the odds of Microsoft bidding $31 per share again are slim to none.

But a $23 price tag would probably work for everyone. Whether or not that’s gonna happen is why the stock is still trading a shade under $15 today. Microsoft said they’ve “moved on” and they may well have meant it.

The question is: If MSFT has moved on, what the hell have they moved on to?

Tagged none | 1 Comment »

It seemed to me that Google never intended to buy Digg. They just used the tested Microsoft trick of starting a takeover bid to get their hands on all relevant information via the due diligence process. Then once they had that info, they were just like “nah, that’s OK. We’ve got what we wanted without paying $100 Million. Have a good life!”

We may never know whether or not that research has anything to do what I’m dubbing the new “Google Hot or Not Buttons.”

As you can see from this screenshot, now two buttons appear to either promote or remove a result:

It’s probably too early to start trying to abuse this feature. That’s because it’s unlikely they will use this initial data to rank results.

I say, don’t break it til we’re sure it’s being used and worth breaking.

Then, of course, you’re gonna want to get to exploiting on a major scale. Malware is the most obvious attack vector, but that’s likely to be on the illegal side. Other exploit methods will include creating fake profiles - although that may prove difficult if Google is using email usage as a metrics for verifying user authenticity.

I don’t think it will benefit you to search for every term your sites rank for and promote every result; I have faith that Google isn’t that stupid in 2008. That method will probably not work, may be detrimental to your “user rep”, and will probably be a dead end that will have you wasting days on something that is unlikely to bear any fruit.

My advice is to take some time to think of how to best attack this new feature. No need to jump in, as your experiments may not show results even if those same experiments might work 8 months from now.

You want to abuse the Google Hot or Not Buttons?

Yea, me too. But be patience young Jedi.

A father Bull and his Boy are at the top of a hill. They See a heard of Cows grazing in a pasture down below. The Son says to to the Father Bull “Hey Dad, Let’s run down there and fuck one of those cows!”

“No son. Let’s walk down there and fuck ‘em all” - Tony Soprano

Tagged Digg | 14 Comments »