Google Is Much More Than A Search Engine---
We all know that Google is the dominant search engine, and controls a large percentage of online advertising. But many of us -- even regular Google users -- are not aware of some of Google's other services. Most of them are presented as new ways of listing and categorizing the universe.
However, consistent with Google's new status as a profit-first public corporation, what lies at the root of most of Google's expanding ventures is the need to become less dependent on context-based advertising revenue. In other words, the people at Google are desparately looking for new ways of making money.
**Froogle still looking for a mission in life
Google's product search and comparison tool called Froogle, was launched in December 2002. It was developed in an attempt to cash in on the obvious market for online shopping that major sites like eBay and Amazon had so successfully exploited.
Unlike alternatives like eBay, Froogle lists products for free, and it has no integrated purchase capability. You just look for products by product name or description and are presented with a list of products with links to sites where they are available.
Product information gets into Froogle in one of two ways, according to the Froogle instructions. It can be submitted electronically by merchants, and will then be included in the database. Second, in the course of spidering the web Google's spidering software "automatically identifies webpages that offer products for sale". These are then included in the Froogle database as well.
What Google wants is to make Froogle a product search tool of choice, and open up various monetization opportunities. The obvious ones are embedded advertising and paid listings, but others include direct sales possibilities on the eBay model.
After more than three years Froogle is still called a "beta" suggesting that Google still has no definite plans for it. The latest development was to add "local shopping" information to the listings giving Froogle potential to become an online yellow pages.
**Google Local integrates maps, local product search
Everybody agrees that local search is going to be very big in the next couple of years. Say you're looking for a place to buy an digital camera in a particular city. Just do a search for "digital camera in MyTown", and Google Local will give you a detailed street map of the area along with stores that carry the product, and locations indicated on the map.
Since products are indexed by keyword, you can search for virtually anything, rather than being restricted to the categories pre-defined by a service like the yellow pages.
Also unlike the yellow pages, Google Local includes all stores they have a listing for, not just paying advertisers. Local gives you a map with locations, plus listings with links direct to the stores. The potential for this resource seems awesome.
Plus Google Local has integrated a very slick map utility that arguably looks better (simpler) and in some ways, works faster than other services such as MapQuest. For instance, you can search for a relatively obscure place like Carlyle, Saskatchewan or Brora, Scotland and you are taken to a detailed street map for the entire region. If you are looking for a broader overview of the area, you can just grab the map and scroll along a highway or the coast without having to click on navigation arrows as you do with MapQuest.
Google has also integrated its satellite imaging service into Local. If you are looking at a specific map and would rather see a satellite image of the area, just click on "satellite". Or if you would like to see the satellite image with a map overlay, you can see that too, by clicking on "hybrid".
**Google Video lets you put your videos online
Google Video was introduced in beta back in the spring of 2005, ostensibly to give video producers an outlet for their work. As Google says, "Whether you produce hundreds of titles a year or just a few, you can give your videos the recognition and visibility they deserve by promoting them on Google - for free. Signing up for the Google Video Upload Program will connect your work with users who are most likely to want to view them."
No doubt Google has something else in mind here too -- providing video-related services to generate revenue. The logical move is for Google to eventually build a large library of amateur and then commercially produced videos and moves that it can "rent" on a pay-per-view basis. The company has already taken a step in this direction with its recent AOL alliance in which it committed to promoting AOL's video library.
As John Battelle said in a (http://battellemedia.com/archives/001658.php) June 2004 blog post, "this will help the spread of an alternative universe for video distribution and playback, one independent of the walled garden business model in which video is currently locked... the sooner independent voices have an outlet for their work, and a business model to pay for it, the sooner we'll see content creators revolt from the hegemony of cable and studio models."
But there are other possibilities as well. As Jon Udell says in a (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/12/06.html) blog post, "the larger goal is to bring the social effects we see at work in the textual blogosophere into the realm of audio. Linking and quotation drive discovery and shared discourse, but media formats, players, and hosting environments are notoriously hostile to linking and quotation, and I'd really like to see that change."
Google made a move in this direction by switching its player technology to Flash in the fall of 2005. While encoding options for flash (FLV) are still relatively limited, the capabilities to make flash movies more "link-friendly" are much better than the other mainstream alternatives (Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real).
In other words, it is much easier to build hot links and other types of scripting into video and audio using Flash, making it a much better fit with the traditional "interactive" features we expect from the web.
This also gives it more potential for the integration of advertising into pre-existing videos.
Google Keywords Tool Guide----
If you have thought about starting your own website or already have one, and have done any research at all, you have read about the importance of keywords. Everything on the web is driven by keywords. It’s the fuel the Internet runs on.
One of the ways to get great traffic to your website is through the Google Adwords program. You select the keywords you want to bid on and set up the budget you want to use to get traffic based on those keywords from websites that utilize the Google Adsense program and other sources.
There is a tool to help you choose the best keywords to bid on that you definitely need to know about. I just learned about it from a friend, so we are going to learn how to use it together. Open a new browser window and copy and paste this address into your address bar.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
If you are not sure about all of the terms used in association with keywords and Google’s Adwords program, click that very first link that says, “keywords for your ad campaigns”. You can use that as a guide if we get into unfamiliar territory.
In that first paragraph is a link titled, “Learn More”, that gives a more detailed explanation about using the Google Keywords Tool. In this article, I am going to try to give you the information in layman’s terms to make it easier to understand.
As with anything, you should also at some point read the terms of service. It is always a good idea to read the terms of service for any program you are about to use. But we will skip that step for now.
We all think we know which keywords we want to and are targeting with our website. I just had a humbling experience. I have been at this for a long time and have a lot of experience in optimizing websites for keyword content. However, I just clicked the tab at the Google Keyword Tool that says, “Site-Related Keywords “, to extract keywords from one of my own websites and can see that it is not optimized for the keyword I would have chosen.
You may want to do this first. Put in your URL and let it pull out the keywords it finds to be most relevant to your website. You might be as surprised as I was. Now I am going to be re-writing some of the text content at my website before I bid on any Google Adwords. Without the Google Keyword Tool, I would have likely just wasted money.
Make sure your website is optimized for the keywords that you wish to target by analyzing it with the Google Keyword Tool before bidding on your Google Adwords.
Now, using the other tab, “Keyword Variations”, you can type in one keyword phrase or keyword per line and it will give you suggestions as to other keywords and phrases you can bid on that are related to your topic. (I like to type in one keyword or phrase at a time)
The suggestions the Google keyword Tool creates for you are based on statistical data Google compiles from the numerous searches that occur daily through their search engine, so those keywords and phrases are more likely to produce targeted traffic to your website.
As you type in each keyword or phrase and check the results the Google Keyword Tool gives you, look over to the right. You can add the keywords and phrases you might like to bid on. Create your list as you go. You can always edit it down to a few later on.
Once you have your list of keywords and phrases you might want to bid on, you can login to your Google Adwords account and check to see how much it will cost you for each of them. Then you can decide how to spend your budget wisely. Nothing replaces good research. The Google Keyword Tool takes a lot of the guesswork out of buying Google Adwords and I applaud them for creating this great tool.
Now, what they do not say anywhere at the Google Keyword Tool website, is that you can use this tool to analyze your competitor’s websites as well. Go to Google and type in your targeted keyword or phrase. Copy the URL of the top 10 results. Analyze each of them using the “Site Related Keywords” tab at the Google Keywords Tool.
By doing this, you will see what keywords and phrases their websites are optimized for. If you want to compete with them, you need to optimize your website in a similar way and you may want to start bidding on keywords and phrases that match those that were pulled from competing websites.
Follow success and it will follow you. Do what successful people are doing and you are likely to also achieve success. The Google Keyword Tool can help you do that.
Google Page Rank Update----
Many people are suggesting that google is currently updating the page rank of each site, this is what can be seen on the google toolbar and is basically a rating out of ten for each website. From reading some of the messages on the search engine forums, different people are reporting changes where as other people as of yet have seen no changes. It is reported that by the middle of July in 2006 this update should be visible on all data-centers, however with google you never can tell as they seem to like to keep people guessing.
In reality many people think that this will have little effect on the over all search engine ranking position of each site as they believe that google has already factored these changes on a daily or weekly basis in its search results, but that it only shows the new page rank of each site on its toolbar around every three months.
So what is all of the fuss about you may be thinking. Why are so many people always so eager for the next google page rank update to take place? In my opinion it could be for two reasons:
Fear of seeing a lower overall page rank
Not all webmasters are able to spend as much time as they would like to, in promoting their own website. Having a good page rank is like having their site recognised as a good and worthy site and they fear that if they were to be lowered that this could have a negative affect on their sales etc. They may think that people may be tempted to buy their products if their site is classed as a page rank six, however that they may think twice if it was only a page rank four.
Expectation of a higher page rank
Other webmasters who put in a lot of work promoting their site are hoping and even expecting to see an increase in page rank for their site. If they achieve this, all of their hard work will have been worthwhile and it will act as an inspiration for them to continue promoting their sites in the same way. If they see no changes or even worse a lowering of page rank, it will show them that they may need to change the way that they are promoting their site.
Is page rank important?
I have read many articles and read many messages on different search engine forums which suggest that their is too much emphasis placed on the importance of page rank. In a way I agree but I do however think that having a high page rank is of benefit. Page rank is not the be all and end all, and people should not become too angry if they are not able to for example obtain a page rank five straight away. I believe hard work pays off and that a website should be seen as a long term project. If you stick by the rules, there is no reason why within a few years your site should not be rewarded with a respectable page rank value. I think that too many people who bring out new sites are trying to get rich quick, obtain far too many backward links too quickly and see the whole thing as a sprint rather than a marathon.
Like most people, I am hoping to see some positive results from this page rank update, however I aim to stick around to see another one hundred updates, therefore I will not be shedding any tears if a couple of my sites go down a grade or two.
Google Pagerank Update - First In 2006-----
With much enthusiasm and equally much concern, there are clear signs that a new Google PageRank update is happening right now as we speak.
Most of you, web site owners, publishers and SEO consultants, are probably dreading these updates just as much as I do: after a period of working hard into acquiring new valuable links, the inevitable question is "Will I be rewarded? And if so, just how much?"
Let's take a glimpse into what the new PageRank update is bringing:
First, let's see what will your page's new PageRank be?
If you haven't done this yet, check the page(s) that interest you using a Future PageRank tool (available from http://www.teawithedge.com/google_pr_update.html ).
This simple tool sends queries to known Google data centers in order to retrieve the PageRank of the given URL. It should normally show the same PageRank for all centers, however, if you run the tool during an actual PageRank update, you can see variations from one data center to another thus previewing what your page's future PageRank will be.
Caught any changes?
Whatever the answer, there are some logical explanations for it.
After studying the performance of several web sites, these are the conclusions I have come upon:
1. The trend to reward links from content-related web sites continues.
Web sites that have focused on gathering quality links, both reciprocal and non-reciprocal, from web sites with related content, shall expect to see their efforts to be successful: a relatively small amount of related links, even if reciprocal, proves to be much more beneficial than thousands of totally unrelated links.
However, one must not forget that climbing on the PageRank ladder becomes increasingly difficult as you ascend. If your web site already had a good PageRank before this update (i.e. 4 and above) it is possible not to see an improvement on the 0 to 10 scale. The true PageRank scale is exponential: the distance from 3 to 4 is much smaller than the distance from 4 to 5, and the distance from 4 to 5 is tiny compared to the distance from 5 to 6!
If you know you have planned and executed your SEO plan correctly in terms of building link popularity (and that means focusing on gathering links from related sites, work towards getting non-reciprocal links, and paid attention to various way PageRank can leak out of your pages), keep on the good works and if possible intensify them: you'll be rewarded by the next update, depending on how high is your current PageRank.
2. Newly created web sites are able to achieve a nice PageRank from their first PageRank update, providing they played fair in the link building game: little but quality links, and care for not leaking PageRank when not necessary can easily get a PR of 3 to a new site!
The issue of PageRank leaking has been probably overly-discussed within the SEO media, yet it might still be useful to mention that there is "good" leaking and "bad" leaking and it's only up to the site's publisher to make a choice:
- "good leaking" is when a site links to external resources that are of benefit for its readers, thus giving a vote of trust and approval to the linked site;
- similarly, "bad leaking" is when a site associates itself with a resource search engines (Google, in this case) dislike, such as link farms, sites employing gray or black SEO techniques, or sites with totally unrelated content (this usually happens when, in an attempt to monetize a site, ads and links to unrelated resources are published).
3. Sites that acquired no new linkbacks since the previous update seem not to be penalized (unlike a while ago!), and stay constant with their older PageRank.
The current PageRank scale seems to be stabile and it might take a while until it is brought down a level, in order to keep some proportions to it.
If this is the case for your sites, it might be a good idea that you start a link building campaign in order to make sure your site is not in danger of being brought down at a further update. Depending on the intensity and quality of your campaign, you can even go up the ladder - with all the benefits this can bring.
To sum up, Google's new PageRank update shows clear signs of continuing the existing trend of rewarding those who employ clean, honest techniques against the less innocent ones. This is nothing but good news for the SEO community and serious publishers, however, there's no guarantee we will live to see the end of the war between the "good" guys and the "bad" guys of the SEO world.
Google Proof Your Business From Updates-----
With the relative chaos that surrounded Google’s last major search engine algorithm update (Big Daddy) now on the ebb, there is now time to reflect –but not a lot of time. Google will continue to update its search engine algorithms, and sometimes in essential, infrastructural ways, as they seek to improve the quality of searches. Indeed, in all the fuss over Big Daddy the fact that the Jagger update (which temporarily gave msn.com a page rank of 2) preceded it by only two months. While this development is, of course, good in the sense that all who use the machine will have a better machine with which to search, it is a turbulent environment that can materially impact our online businesses –your business.
Operations that depend on Page Rank and that have spent the time and resources to cultivate a high one need some assurance that their work won’t be wiped out in a blink. What it requires are a few tactics to improve your chances for surviving Google updates. Here are a couple of tips farmed from several blogs and bulletin boards throughout the web. Essentially what the discussion boils down to is a concern over function.
“Google wants to present high quality web sites that are interesting to web surfers in its search results”, says free-seo-news.com. I think everybody can agree that this is true. However, what does it mean? What qualities does Google command its crawlers to analyze for when listing and ranking websites? Furthermore, are there things to be done outside of what we generally think of as SEO activity to improve our chances? Some suggestions for answers to these questions are as follows:
First, I can’t tell you exactly what it means, but there are definite qualities Google’s crawlers are programmed to analyze when listing or ranking a page, and while their optimization is never a guarantee in the face of beasts like Big Daddy, it certainly improves your chances.
Time and consistency are of the essence. Make sure the website gets regular updates. Keep things fresh. Let the Google-bots know there is stuff going on. As for time, well that kind of runs on its own. Keyword optimization is also growing necessity. The trick is to be strategic. As John Hill, an SEO Professional says in his article for seo-news.com, ‘If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking for the major keywords will be close to impossible.’ He suggests using tools to see which keywords relevant to your organization are already heavily contested, and to find alternate keywords to claim.
There are other ‘white-hat’ SEO trade tricks, and they are well summarized in a number of places. If you are not familiar with them definitely become acquainted with the basics. Even if you hire someone to do it for you, know the essence of SEO, Google, and their functions. However, as stated above these tricks and techniques are not always a match for the algorithm updates. While staying on top of your website’s SEO is crucial, it is also a good idea to cultivate a customer base in a sphere outside of the Google search –that timeless discussion over eggs and baskets. Do not neglect a mailing list. Do not depend entirely on the search engines for customers. If people like what your website has to offer they may or may not bookmark it, email the link to friends or even link to it from their website. In other words, even with Google’s awesome capabilities, word-of-mouth is still the best of all marketing tools. Stay in the radar. Grow a mailing list and send out newsletters to those who have subscribed; not just any newsletter, a newsletter people can use. Think about it. How do you feel about subscribing and receiving fluff when what you want is information?
If you’ve done your job providing good content and staying ‘present’ to a growing number people, your website should be able to better weather the slowed search engine traffic from a Google algorithm storm. Based on bulletin board discussions surrounding Big Daddy it appears some websites spent as long as five or six weeks either listed ‘supplemental’ or with radically diminished Page Rank. While that was an extreme situation, you’re aim should be to try and cultivate a customer or readership base large enough to compensate for such ‘lost’ time so as to make those accidental Google pains less painful.
Google’s “Big Daddy” Purportedly Causing Havoc With Page Rankings-----
Bigdaddy, Google’s new data centre, isn’t news to most webmasters; both Search Engine Watch and Webmaster World’s forums have discussed the technology since late 2005, and even Google’s own Chief Search Engineer Matt Cutts has blogged the topic extensively. Even the reason behind the naming convention (one of the Google staff’s kids call him Big Daddy at home) is out in the open.
How Bigdaddy will affect page rankings within Google however, still remains to be seen, although there is a lot of speculation floating around the Net. Mr. Cutt’s blog states that the new foundation will improve cannonicalization, which is the computer code that tells a search engine that
www.domain.com
domain.com
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com/index.html
are all the same web site. It is also reported that the data center will positively impact 302 redirects, which have been a known issue for some time.
What wasn’t anticipated with the update though were the chaotic and oftentimes strange behaviors the search engine has displayed, most notably over the past several months. Although some of Google’s previously-indexed sites dropping off the face of the engine may be associated with their reported lack of server space and others due to Google’s “different datacenters get different data at different times” statement, many of the problems seem surreal, without explanation.
For instance, Webmaster World’s forums have reported large SERPS drops, changes in supplemental result handling, “home page only” results and pages dropping right out of the Bigdaddy index, while the Digital Point forums are asking if Google has cleaned their index and why the supplemental problem is reoccurring.
What little information is available on the subject is only the information that webmasters are providing each other; little explanation is coming from Google themselves right now. Some experts have shown that the supplemental deletions across the data centers have been gradual over the past several months, with the idea that perhaps the supplemental results are being deleted to free up server space. Others have noticed the inclusion of longer URLs with multiple variables, such as database-driven pages (which were not previously indexed), and the product-based sites like BizRate and Amazon generating higher search results than previously found.
Right now, the only “fixes” seem to be either contacting a member of the Google team (most notably posting in Mr. Cutts’ blog), ensuring your website doesn’t fit within the “too similar” Google guideline (as it seems that sites with slightly different page text are doing better than most) or hitting up Google’s site for a re-inclusion request. Without more guidance from Google though, there isn’t much webmasters can actively do at the moment, other than sit back and watch Bigdaddy work out the search engine-retrieval bugs, talk over the situation with other webmasters, and stay as informed on the subject as possible.
Google’s Forecast For A Speedier Internet-----
Google is currently the top search engine company in the industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their biggest weapon – their clusters of datacenters). Although they’re at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is definitely what they’re continually using to bring the company forward. Google’s engineers are continually working on ways to improve their search engine’s performance and to give additional features that will enhance user experience.
Although it could be very easy to miss because of its sheer simplicity, speed is one of the key reasons why Google is number one. They understood early on that in order to provide a top-notch user experience, search results must be delivered to the user in the shortest time possible. Even when on a dial up connection, Google has designed its search engine in such a way that the web search results appear in a snap. One might say that Google has perfected the speed aspect of search engine results delivery, but displaying the list of results is just half of the story. What happens when a user clicks on the result is also an important component in the overall experience of the search engine user. Google therefore wants to improve on the Internet for the user searching for information. Improving the speed of the Internet for the users is also important to Google’s other mission: to bring software applications that a user uses from the desktop to the web. The idea of network computing is something that is not entirely new, but it is only lately that we are seeing a start (albeit still slow and not without its own share of challenges) towards the right direction. Products like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, Google Calendar and Writely are testament to this Company mission.
So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how Google intends to improve the speed at which information is retrieved and delivered to the user.
We’ll start with what Google is doing now to address the problem of speed, moving on later on the company’s future plans, clues of which can be found in the company’s patent applications.
Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means that the browser will download a web page to the user’s computer even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded quickly from user’s computer memory.
The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the user is using.
The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user, but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user. Search being the second most popular activity done by users on the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of many Internet users.
"Predictive information retrieval" and "anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine" -two patent applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing: anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search results faster and more personalized for the user.
The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends partial queries to the Google servers that are actually predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what you are looking for based both on what other people are looking for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what it knows about the user. This can include the user’s search history or other factors. Google can then display the list of suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will make searching experience speedier for the user, and will smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.
Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that’s why it’s also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and customers. In the same way that we don’t know how we managed to live in a world of dial up connection now that we’re on broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the Internet.
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