Month: February 2011

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Google Should Look to the Microsoft Model

Remember when Microsoft owned the Web and for that matter computers as well as the Internet? Remember when there was only Internet Explorer and no Firefox? Remember when the only computing platform was Microsoft Office? Not so long ago was it, but now things are very different. Firefox has a distinct growing percentage of the browsing market, Macs are more common place, Open Office and Cloud computing are starting to become mainstream.

Now take a look at Google. Google used to, and for that matter is for right now, the dominant search engine and pay per click platform, but that will change. You have to look no farther than the model of Microsoft’s dominance and what is happening now in the news to know that Google is losing it’s grip on owning the world of search.

Some of Google’s thorns are Facebook, Bing, and the lack of true innovation within its own kingdom. When was the last time you saw one of Google’s new products hit the market make a big splash and be widely embraced? It’s been a while! Remember the flops: Friend Connect, Orkut, Google Wave, Google Buzz? Their last big hit was GMail and they drove traffic there by requiring everyone to set up a GMail account to use any Google products including AdWords when it first came out thereby pushing up initial membership.

Now let’s look at Microsoft. As this giant has aged, it has mellowed. It has grudgingly embraced, but embraced never the less, change. It has adapted and ended up creating better products with greater inclusion and transparency. Google is in a stat of flux, right now it is trying to grasp on to its glory days but may want to look at the Microsoft model to see how it may be able to stay vital yet play more as a partner and not as a desperate bully.

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Google Accuses Bing of Stealing Search Results

The search engine wars just started up again this past week as Google accused Bing of stealing its search results. So let’s dig into this and see if that was really the case.

First, I want to say that I feel that Google is running scared. There was the quick switch of Google CEOs recently and not just to any person but to one of the original Google founders. Then there was the bad news of Facebook overtaking Google in terms of popularity. Right on the coat tails of all of this news Google stated that they had inserted code into their search results and had found their bait in the Bing results.

Bing responded with a resounding “NO” and the conflict ramped up considerably between the two search engines with key engineers appearing on the Web in videos discussing the situation and the blogosphere dissecting both responses.

What happened in a nutshell is that Google inserted in their results a set of characters (that don’t even spell a word) and then found that same set of characters in Bing results. I don’t think this admits Bing is stealing Google’s results, as Bing states that their search results reflect a historical pattern of searchers use and click through rates as well a their own patented algorithm, but Google just does not see it this way.

With Google losing placement and retention of its stranglehold on popularity brace yourself for more paranoid statements and litigation as the two search engines start to reveal exactly what information they are collecting on us and how they integrate this information into their search results.

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Move Over Keyword Density – Readable Content is King

Being in the industry for 10 years this year has allowed me to see SEO strategies come and go. For many of you who have longevity in the industry, you will understand many of my references and have most likely will have used them at some time or another for your clients’ benefits.

Remember when to get organic search placement we did:

  1. Keyword stuffing – loading keywords into image alt tags?
  2. How about when we loaded keywords into HTML comment tags?
  3. Or used the meta keyword tag to drive search traffic?

Keyword density is another tactic that is becoming passé as well. I still believe that good keyword density on a home page is still, at this point in time, a way to get organic traffic, but making the content readable is becoming much more important both for visitors and for search engines.

I don’t believe that search engines drop sites with strong keyword density at this time, but that day is coming. Just look at my list above of the things we used to do that really got good organic placement. 7% keyword density on web pages will soon be added to that list.

What I feel is now more important is that the overall site have Web authority, be content and information-rich, and be updated regularly. The new world of SEO is less about tricks and more about content and inbound marketing strategies.

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Google Focuses on Ridding Their Index of Duplicate Content

In a recent blog post, Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer and high profile personality in my industry stated:

“My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.” Read the full article.

That’s big news for legitimate businesses like mine that are commonly scraped or have content stolen and used on other websites without my approval. Several years ago Google introduced a patent that had identification of duplicate content as its core technology. I wondered at that time how Google was going to determine who the original content owner was. I wondered if a new meta tag would be introduced that allowed us to tag ourselves as owners of original content.

As of today, no new meta tag has surfaced but we do advocate one best practice to our clients, and that is to post the content on your own website first.

What Matt Cutts of Google is addressing here is not duplicate content on article networks, but rather what we in my industry call scrapers. Scrapers are robot tools or disreputable website owners that just steal your content and then place it on their website.

In many cases these scrapers are really stealing content to beef up AdSense advertisement websites. Meaning that they are not really in competition with you and your services, but hope to make money off of someone clicking their ad when they visit their site to read your stolen content.

Thank goodness Google is finally addressing this issue. I for one believe that my site will benefit from this action.