Category Archives: SEO

Naked Conversations with Robert, Jeremy and Matt

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book Naked Conversations probably should have kept it's working title "Blog or Die", but it's an excellent read nonetheless.   The point they hammer home with many good examples is that corporations better jump on the blogging bandwagon or suffer the consequences of missing what many would say may become the biggest communication bandwagon of all time.

As if to emphasize the power of blogs and the freewheeling nature of the new corporation two of my favorite online guys – Matt Cutts of Google and Jeremy Zawodny or Yahoo have traded blogs as what has got to be the top April Fools online event so far today.

Given that these two represent two of the top public faces of their respective companies, it's obvious that the NEW corporate landscape – blogging and otherwise – ain't nothing like the old one.  

I like that.

The Google Story

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I read two books up at the lake. David Vises "The Google Story" was an entertaining and informative history of Google from humble beginnings as Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Stanford PhD project to the earth shaking internet giant Google.com. I didn't feel I was getting any really "deep" information however. I kept feeling as I often do when talking to people at Google that they are simply too loyal and too enamored with Google to share insights that might reflect poorly on the company. I'm actually in the picture of Matt Cutts taken at SES San Jose last year. The very favorable tone seemed odd because Vise is a distinguished reporter. I'm wildly guessing that he (perhaps even subconsciously) sacrificed some critical observations in exchange for better access and candor about the basic story.

This "guarded" nature of comments about Google dovetails with points made in Scoble and Israel's "Naked Conversations", the second book I read up at Odell Lake which I'll review next.

Overall though I remain convinced that Google is

1) Special, especially with regard to the incredible intelligence, innovation, and involvement of the founders. The rapid ascent of Google may allow more of this "founders energy" to have a positive impact than where a company grew more slowly.

2) Sincere. This is a slippery slope but I think they remain fairly steady and non-compromising about doing great stuff for the right reasons.

3) Overpriced. I simply don't understand the stock price, which seems to assume Yahoo and MSN have no interests or abilities relating to grabbing a bigger share of the online advertising pie.

NMohwy.com experiment continues…

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Interestingly, Google stopped the rapid re-indexing of NMohwy.com even though they have recently downloaded the sitemap. What's odd is that the immediate effect of breaking off this domain and setting it up separately with non duplicate (but similar) information was that the NEW pages were indexed with NEW cache dates. No effect on traffic.

NOW the pages at NMohwy.com show OLD cache dates (often Feb 5, 2005) and have been relegated to supplemental index except for Home page. The key event in this experiment will be the reindexing of the "new" pages which look very much like they did years ago before Google started hating these pages.

Were the problems getting properly indexed and ranked from GOOGLE changing it's opinion about our site or from SITE errors WE made as we improved things?

Even after a year of conferences, emails from Google and others, hundreds of questions, site reviews (even one by Google at Las Vegas PubCon!), and many changes made we don't know the answer to this simple question, though I think duplicate content filtering is be the most likely category for our problem.

Taking Stock of Yahoo

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What do you get when you mashup Yahoo’s uber blogmeister with EX uber stockmeister Henry Blodget? A very interesting dialog about what’s up — or what’s NOT up — at Yahoo. The only thing for sure is that in stock terms YHOO is no GOOG, and this is THE key issue for many.

This follow up summarizes that mini-debate. I’m more interested in whether I should be buying YHOO or buying more puts on Google.

Jeremy’s bold stab was probably taken too far out of the intended context, though I think it will generate a good debate about a broader topic — that Yahoo and Google are similar in many broad respects but not even in the same ballpark in total company valuation. 109 billion vs 45 billion. Why is this?

* Search quality roughly equivalent according to objective measures.

* Traffic similar (though not search traffic in which Y lags significantly). I think search will begin to move vertically soon and people will use a different engine for different tasks. A9 recognizes this already. This could shake out in many destabilizing ways.

* Yahoo considered clear leader in Web 2.0 awareness

* MOST IMPORTANTLY, YPN is still in beta and will likely soon take a chunk of Google’s online publisher revenue stream (about 40% of G total revenues) as will MSN’s new publisher programs.

* I do think corporate leadership is VERY different at Google, and probably helps facilitate and motivate people in ways that are well tuned to the fast and flexible needs of the online biz world. I’ve heard that Googlers will be working in the wee hours on a project only to have Sergey Brin walk up behind them to ask them to explain the code they are working on. This level of interaction has got to be a VERY powerful incentive and motivating force.

At MIX06 I spoked with two ex-Microsoft people who noted slow change there frustrated them and inhibited the flexibility needed to compete in the new web environments.

But Yahoo is no Microsoft, and to my knowledge Yahoo was the company that brought the new informal but intense corporate culture to Silicon Valley in the first place. If this style has caused problems for Yahoo it’ll likely cause similar problems for Google in a few years. If not, then why is Yahoo stock languishing despite good fundamentals and huge revenue potential from online ads?

Wait … No free lunches at Yahoo Cafeteria? THAT must be the problem!

MIX06 “Live” Gadgets = Cool

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Earlier I said MS was doing web 1.9 rather than 2.0 but that was before I heard the two presentations about the coming “LIVE” web environment, complete with what looks like the most robust set of customizable gadgets from a major player.  This is 2.0 stuff and it’s … really good stuff.

I actually heard Microsoft rather than Yahoo and Google folks talking enthusiastically about mashups and open environments and how important it is to create platforms to spread info wildly as well as customize the user experience with things that are NOT Microsoft.   I confess I’m not familiar enough with MY YAHOO to compare it to the LIVE environment which will be growing fast in the coming months.  My Yahoo is certainly really good stuff too,  but I think MS has the edge in being able to customize their LIVE stuff to their own OS and browser.   I see a lot hinging on how LIVE plays out over the coming months.  

Also I’m starting to see why their were rumors recently about MS aquiring Yahoo.    I’m not betting on it even though I’m right here in Las Vegas, but it’s interesting to see several Yahoo examples with nary a mention of Google.  

Mix06 = Web 1.9

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OK I’m starting to grok the conference and the MS role in 2.0 …. maybe….. I got a chance to ask Tim O’Reilly to help me interpret Bill Gates’ answers to Tim’s excellent questions to Bill at this morning’s keynote. Most important to me was this simple question:
“Does Microsoft ‘get’ Web 2.0?”.

“parts of it…” was Tim’s excellent summary of the situation I see unfolding before me here at MIX.

I’m seeing good stuff – maybe some great stuff once I have a chance to play with some of the new applications like ATLAS and Windows Presentation Foundation – and I’m seeing enthusiastic MS folks who know they must come up with great aps and must overcome the Google “coolness” challenge in the developer community, but I’m not feeling anything like the energy at Mashup Camp where developers were simply on fire with new ideas that embraced the new Web with the excitement of the early years when the internet wasn’t about money, it was about … profound innovation and change.

So this is Web 1.9, and if I were an MS shareholder I think I’d be OK with that. The path to Web 2.0 riches is VERY unclear.

Mixed feelings about MIX06

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OK, it’s still WAY too early to tell, but I can’t help but feel a bit like this conference is Microsoft *pretending* to care/respect the changes swirling about and typically called “Web 2.0” rather than *really* caring.

In response to O’Reilly’s request for an appearance at his November conference, Chairman Bill said “maybe it’ll be Web 3.0 by then”. I think this remark was telling in that Bill sees all this as “more of the same” rather than what many would describe as a significant shift in direction – the beginning of a world of ubiquitous connectivity, community, and voice.

Are blogs and mashups just clever little devices or are they a window into human info evolution? I’m kind of thinking if you belive the former you should tie your rowboat to the USS Microsoft ship of change but if the latter you should be cautious and just … keep … rowing and fishing for the exploding number of competing technologies that seem to be adapted more specifically for and with respect for the implications of Web 2.0.

But jeez, I haven’t even been to the party yet at TAO, the Venetian’s monstrous nightclub. That’ll change my perspective….?….

Atlas and AJAX

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… talking up Atlas now with the geeky demo.  If this makes AJAX more accessible rather than creating just another MS overlay to learn it could be great.
My favorite conference quote so far by the Atlas guy:
“it’s hard to type when you have 5 cups of coffee in you – fast but not accurate”

Off to MIX06

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No Mom it’s NOT about the glitz, glamour, and free huge nightclub tabs picked up by Microsoft!  It’s WORK and SOMEBODY darn well better get down to Las Vegas and do what has to be done!

MIX06 starts tomorrow morning with keynote by Bill Gates and leads into a large number of concurrent sessions which appear to be focused almost exclusively on how MS applications and future developments can be used in online applications.   That’s OK because this is put on by MS, but somewhat ironically I think the concept here was to have a very “open” environment that tried to get feedback from the community about what they need, want, and where they are going.   I’m anxious to see if MS is sincerely interested in ….. us.

Yahoo and Google certainly are interested as evidenced by the way they interact at other conferences.   I think part of their corporate culture is to say “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!” even when that approach could threaten some aspect of the company’s revenue.  I’m not expecting this from MS but I’m hoping for greater responsiveness than they’ve shown the web community in the past.  

Sitemap submission for NMohwy.com

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Using the excellent free online sitemap generator HERE I created and have uploaded and verified a sitemap for the approx 3000 pages at NMOHWY.com.   I’ve noticed that using site:nmohwy.com currently yields almost all supplemental pages with VERY old Cache dates – usually Feb 2005.

Now and I’m trying to get Google to revisit the site.

Interestingly about 3 weeks ago when I uploaded pages that had the old names and data in a simpler database format Google pulled in the new pages and indexed them very quickly and did NOT seem to put them in Supplemental Index.   Now they are using OLD page with OLD cache dates.
The overall idea is to take the OLD pages from the time Google liked us, strip out links that are no longer relevant and other extraneous stuff, reformat some of the text in the hopes of avoiding duplicate content problems, and see if we can regain traffic for this domain and figure out why Google seems to hate the site after loving it for so many years.