Category Archives: Web 2.0

Knol Knows Ranking

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Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert.   The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.

Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.

Aaron on knol

The SMX search folks – I think it was Danny Sullivan – have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well.     Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites.    If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.

In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank.      I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference  – SES San Jose.

Later:  Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself.    Here are listings I created for:

Beijing, China |     Blogs and Blogging

Extremism in the defense of the algorithm is no vice?

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WordPress surfing led me to another interesting sob story from a penalized webmaster and my reply got so long it deserved to become a post:

Marshall Sponder wrote:

Take Know More Media’s case – you have 100+ blogs and 2+ years of content – that’s easy, 30,000 to 50,000 blog posts and Google, with just one or two paid links that pass PageRank, is going to throw the entire blog network out of it’s index over that?

Yep, it appears that’s it – that’s the reason.  But is it fair?  No.
Strictly from a users point of view I think it is very hard to justify technical penalties on good content.    Few users know or care what “hidden text” is, so if a mom and pop webmaster uses this tactic and Google deletes the otherwise informative, relevant website it is hard to argue that users are served well.    Even if a black hat SEO created a site filled with illegal tricks but also full of highly relevant quality content I think Google’s case against including that site is weak.  As a user I want  *quality content* and I don’t care about the site’s technical construction.    Where Google is simply banning sites for using spammy tactics I’d agree with Marshall that to be faithful to user centricism they really have to take it a step further and look at the content they are excluding.   Even if the content contains paid linking and other violations if it unique, quality content Google cannot exclude it without violating their stated “prime directive” of providing the best for the users.

However, Google has to manage about one trillion URLs, so obviously they need shortcuts in ranking and one of them is a page from AZ Senator Barry Goldwater’s playbook when – many years ago – he tried to justify an escalation of the Vietnam war, perhaps to nuclear level.   Google’s coin of the famous Goldwater phrase would be: “Extremism in the defense of the algorithm is no vice”.

I don’t think penalties are generally *fair* or *user friendly*, but I’m willing to concede they may be necessary for Google to function as profitably as they do since it would take a lot of human intervention to help every mom and pop determine what’s wrong with their sites.

However, I feel Google continues to fail in their obligation to communicate more effectively with penalized sites although I think they are s-l-o-w-l-y  catching on to the fact that most webmasters of penalized sites remain unclear as to why the site has been penalized or downranked.    Removal offers you a shot at “reinclusion” and (very rarely) possible webmaster tools staff feedback.   Downranking is algorithmic and Google will not generally offer any advice to help downranked sites.     In this case you generally want to re-read the webmaster guidelines and experiment with different approaches in an effort to boost rankings.

My view is that as many thin content database sites have flowed online Google is holding online material to a higher standard of quality, especially if it’s at a new website.    This helps explain why you can find well ranked pages that are inferior to pages at a new website.

There is a solution to all of this in my opinion, which is for Google to include a lot more community input and feedback into the process than they currently appear to do.    I’d guess the recent discussions to aquire DIGG may have been in part to gain more community feedback tools and data.     Historically Google has been brilliant at using algorithms to determine ranking and advertising, but has fallen short of brilliance in their ruthlessness in dealing with website practices they don’t like, leaving a lot of collateral damage – especially related to sites involved in “paid linking” and variations on that complex theme.

At SES San Jose 2009 I’ll hope to get to ask Matt Cutts more about this in person.   Matt is Google’s top spam cop and always very open to conversations about ranking and search.    In fact the best event of the conference is the Google Party where engineers are on hand to discuss search related issues – including complex ranking technicalities that are sometimes brought to Google’s attention as part of the search conference circuit.

Microsoft BrowseRank to compete with Google PageRank

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CNET profiles a new paper showcasing a Microsoft effort to enhance search by looking at *user behavior* as well as the old standby standards that all the major search engines use such as links in to the page, the content of the page, titles of the page, and several others.

Google’s initial brilliance was recognizing that the link relationships on the web gave you great insight into the best websites. Google correctly noted that sites with many links to them, especially for a particular keyword, were more likely to match a users interest for that keyword. Although many factors have been included in Google ranking for years, pagerank was arguably the most important breakthrough. Initially the system tried to be an online analogy to academic citation. Google’s Larry Page reasoned that websites with more incoming links would tend to be better, and that those incoming links themselves should also be weighted according to the importance of the site from which they came.

The system started to show severe signs of wear as search marketeers as well as mom and pop businesses began to “game” the pagerank system, creating spurious incoming links from bogus sites and buying links from high rank websites.

Enter Microsoft “BrowseRank”, which will arguably be harder to game because it will monitor the behavior of millions of users, looking for relationships between sites, pages, length of time on page, and more. It’s a good idea of course but arguably it is Google that has *by far* the best data set to manage this type of approach. So even if Microsoft’s system starts to deliver results superior to Google’s one can expect Google to kick their own efforts into gear.

As with all search innovation the users shoud be the big winners. Search remains good but not great, and competition in this space will only serve to make everybody better….right?

Google: A Trillion URLs and counting

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The Google blog notes how huge the web is now, with Google indexing over a trillion unique URLs.  As they note in the article the actual number of indexable URLs is, in one sense, infinite.    For example calendar pages will automatically appear as you scroll through many applications, continuing through the years until..the singularity and beyond.     Of course Google does not index many of these “empty” URLs or even a lot of junk or redundant content, so the true number of real, unique URLs is actually well above a Trillion.

I think a fun question is this:   What will the information landscape look like in, say, 20 years when we should have the ability to pour *everything* from the past and the present online?     Questions might take a different form if we had access to every reference on a topic that has ever been produced.    Algorithms will be used to sort through the oceans of content much as Google does now, but with far more precision and better comprehension of the whole mess.

Ballmer: Yahoo a tactic, not a strategy

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Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer spoke to the Microsofties today about the companies plans.   For Yahoo merger followers there was nothign much new as he simply reiterated this point:

Related to Google and our search strategy are the discussions we had with Yahoo. I want to emphasize the point I’ve been making all along—Yahoo was a tactic, not a strategy. We want to accelerate our share of search queries and create a bigger pool of advertisers, and Yahoo would have helped us get there faster. But we will get there with or without Yahoo. We have the right people, we’ve made incredible progress in our technology, and we’ll continue to make smart investments that will enable us to build an industry-leading business.

Some would argue that the reason Microsoft needs Yahoo is that their online strategy has so far failed to do very much.   My take is that they have not moved the online market as they’d hoped, but that they also have not worked nearly as hard in this area as they could have because Microsoft (correctly) sees that their huge presence in the software market is where the big money remains, at least for the next few years.    They have chosen in large part to protect their huge revenue ship rather than act more aggressively and nimbly (and expensively) to find online revenues or pull market share from Google.    I think many analysts – especially those in blogging – fail to recognize that Google’s revenues simply pale in comparison to Microsoft’s.   Google has the lion’s share of online money but Microsoft still has the lion’s share of the lion’s share money, which is in software, gaming, and entertainment.      I agree that the power curve is shifting from MS to Google, but MS remains the 800 pound revenue Gorilla.    Money beats buzz to the bank every time, and this point is not lost on Microsoft or Google.

Disclosure:  Long on YHOO

Malik: Facebook Connect is better than Colin Farrell?

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I can’t help but think Om Malik is under some kind of Facebook conference spell when he first criticizes their presentation as too stylish (comparing Mark Zuckerberg to that bastion of style and wit Colin Farrell = OUCH!) but then gushes that Facebook Connect is going to be the big winner in terms of bringing web-wide social functionality.

Malik notes:
In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions.

I suppose it depends on what he means by “quite feasible”, but I’d still predict that Google Friend Connect (still in Beta) is the system to watch in this space for two very simple reasons:

1) It’s Simple
2)  It’s Google

A great example of the first challenge is to read the Malik excerpt above.   How many mom and pop websites will read that and say “wow, gotta have it!”.   The answer is very few.  Instead, I think in a few months they will be working their PPC account at Google and be prompted to “click here for the code to make your site a social masterpiece”.

Even assuming Facebook’s social application will allow very simply integration with any website, it’s going to be very hard to compete with the web’s top brand as web empires as well as mom and pop websites seek to integrate social functions into their sites.

I’m not suggesting Facebook will fail however.   I just think that once the game begins in earnest both Myspace and Facebook will struggle to keep up with Google.   I think we’ll see social functionality spread quickly across the web, probably starting from the three key places working this angle right now:  Google, Facebook, and Myspace.  A key question will be how these three will choose to allow their applications to interact, but luckily for users there is a lot of pressure for cross compatibility of social networking.

So, in the end everybody is going to win, and we should soon see a great new layer of social functionality spread across the entire web.  And  that….is a good thing.

Twitter Gets Search

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Twitter has aquired Summize, a search utility that will make Twitter a lot more friendly than it has been if you want to drill down in Twitter results and find more relevant information and people.

Twitter is practically gushing about the aquisition of Summize, so it’s likely that Summize is solving a major problem they have been struggling with for some time.

Here’s the scoop

I’ve been somewhat skeptical in the past that Twitter will ever be much more than a sort of social post it note service, but if they add enough functionality to the existing design Twitter’s huge and influential social network could turn this into the major application that some suggest Twitter could become.    It already seems to me that key folks often prefer microblogging to Facebook or email, though I’m still not convinced that Twitter will catch on with regular folks as it must to compete with Facebook and Myspace.

Blog Revolution Needed?

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I think I’m too lazy to start the blog revolution some of us were carping about last year, but I hope somebody else does it.

Update: Jim Kukral says the Revolution is over!    I think he’s way too optimistic.

Marshall has a thoughful post about some of the issues surrounding tech blogging and the challenges of surfacing new voices within a system that increasingly seems to center on a handful of good blogs again and again rather than helping bring more attention to the *best* writing on a given topic.

Here’s his take on this.

I replied over there:

Marshall thanks for a thoughtful post. Although I think “A list” blogs are generally very good, I think ranking and commercial issues are keeping a *lot* of quality writing from surfacing. Huge search engine advantages are enjoyed by blogs with extensive incoming links.

Links can be a pretty good and democratic measure of what users want, but with so many A list blogs using very strategic linking, combined with so many “wannabe” blogs linking to existing A lists, combined with A listers rarely linking to even the best writing of others for competitive and commercial reasons, the system is probably no longer working well to bring new voices into the mix.

Solutions? Aggregators like FriendFeed should surface more new writers and content proactively rather than defaulting as they have. A listers should commit to featuring new voices much more regularly, and new voices should find a way to band together so the best writing – rather than the best linking and strategy and commercial cleverness – tends to prevail.