Entries Tagged 'Google' ↓

I’m sat here today with 3 browsers open, one using the latest build of Google Chrome, Opera and one using the new Firefox release. Both browsers have the search term Chesterfields inputted into Google.co.uk and im seeing startlingly different results.

As you can see, even seaWhere have the rogue firefox and Opera entries come from? Is it from personalisation as I’m certainly not interested in the riverfront, cylinders or whatever chesterfield.gr is selling etc? Maybe this is a continuation of the internationalisation issues reported in the UK serps of last year?

…or could it be that Google is polluting the SERPS on non Chrome browsers to drive people to use their platform… in which case I’m just adding to the propaganda :/

This also means that when pulling in metrics for SEO clients that you cant rely on the results from one browser and that if personalisation is the cause, that any listings you get on any Google awaye platform will, over time, begin to show non ‘cold hit’ results.

If it is personalisation and you know a way of getting me back to basics then please drop me a line.

At last! A feature ive been waiting for for an eternity (and had originally built into a previous in-house analytics package) has arived for Google Analytics – Annotation.

This is a great little feature that takes the hassle out of monitoring events on the timeline.

With Annotations you can add notes to the timeline which makes it great for:

• Tracking PR activities
• Promotional Sales
• The effect of any high value link (purchases?)
• SERPS changes i.e. Caffeine

The only issue I can forsee is that the notes wont go far enough. I’d like the ability to have different, user defined note types as I can see my Annotations becoming the dominent factor of the visual display.

This feature was originally mentioned in the Google Analytics blog post of December 7th, but has taken until now to be implimented on the UK analytics.

Check the OP here.

I understand the need to show people relevant results. I understand the need for this to reflect relevant new materials, but I just dont get Google Perosnalised search and its for one reason only.

Bookmarks.

If I like a site I Bookmark it, If I want to shop at Amazon, I go to amazon.co.uk or a host of other brand names I already trust. What I dont want is for Google to make surfing the Internet more insular… its a worrying trend.

If you searched in 2001, your results reflected the World.

In 2005 it reflects your country.

In 2010 it will reflect the 10 or so websites you’ve already visit.

I thought the whole purpose of search engines was to help us discover new and exciting things… not coral us into an ever decreasing number of results.

*sigh*

Just reading up on Googles new real time search solution which basically litters the organic results with yet more fluff and nonsense (srsly, does anyone use the Google image search, local, news or Froogle listings on an hourly basis?) and yes you guessed it, it adds more noise to the organic listings with yet another tile inserted with an annoying rotating list of ‘real time’ news.

C’mon, how easy is this going to be to spam? Set-up bots re-tweeting posts or some such spammy black hat system and you’re going to dominate this.

Be warned!

UPDATE

Seems like it only took a day for the spam to flow… c’mon Google, quit with the noise already

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-real-time-spam/

http://www.seo-theory.com/2009/12/07/google-launches-a-new-spam-industry/

Before I start I’d like to clarify a few things. IMHO PageRank is completely dead and useless. For Gods sake, please stop using it as a metric. There’s far better, independent metrics you can use such as MozRank which logarithmically make more sense and if you have to buy links, use common sense and pick a link that’s going to send you traffic, it will probably cost you a lot more than $500 for 30000 links, but with Caffeine around the corner it will be worth it. Secondly this is all speculation based on (a lot of) reading about the ins and outs of whats been leaked on the Interwebs… so just be careful and as with all advice, take it with a pinch of salt.

So you want to ensure your sites longevity as a market leader after the Google Caffeine update? here’s the low-down on the popular beliefs behind maintaining your success. :

1. Page Load Speed

There’s lots of speculation that Google will rank faster serving pages higher (based on comments made by Matt Cutts who said something about users liking sites that load quicker). There’s a lot you can do on your site to improve the page load speed for Google Caffeine:

• Change hosts to one with an impressive ping time – check webcop.co.uk for details.
• Use Google Page Speed to discover images and scripts that are adding weight to your sites download time.
• Host selected images (i.e. product thumbs) on a sub domain. your browser only streams 2 files at a time from each referring domain so  you could split our heavy items such as images and selected scripts to a sub domain.
• Use CSS Sprites. Loading in one large image instead of multiple smaller images will provide a significant improvement to your page load time.
• Compress your code and scripts. Removing all of the white space, indentation and carriage returns in your code will trim your download time. Dint worry, you can always use something like Dreamweavers auto-format before you do your next edit.
• Cache your content. For blogs there’s solutions like WP SuperCache which stores flat file versions of your site and reduced the number of database calls etc to speed up page delivery, for general web servers there’s a host of caching services available.
• Compress output using Gzip – this reduces the amount of data being transmitted and thus, speeds up your page serving.

Personally I don’t believe that this will be a massive factor in Caffeine as it penalises site owners with limited budgets who may not be able to afford a dedicated server on pier1 or rackspace  hosting etc… this doesn’t mean that their content is any less valid.

Ok that wraps it up for part one. Check back soon for the next installment on Social Media.

Bit of a precursor to my big Google Caffeine post but yesterday Google announced a new version of their analytics tracking code that provides Asynchronous tracking and stats.

Now getting stats quicker is great and all that and I’m sure that its work the hassle of changing your footer include but there is a greater benefit to anyone wanting to get an edge with Google’s imminent Caffeine update and that’s one thing… Speed.

I’m waiting for benchmarks but initial reports are that it shaves a nice chunk out of your page load time!

So stop reading this and get your analytics code updated… go, go now!

There’s a lot of speculation about the new Google Chrome OS and I for one do not want it to be yet another Linux clone with ‘cloud’ based access to Google Apps. This is because its been done to death and doesn’t really improve upon or take advantage of Googles strengths that include storage, bandwidth and desire to monitor and manipulate data.

So how do I think the new Google OS should be implimented. Well, for a start I have to say I’m no application developer however, I am a keen follower of technology and somewhat of a futurist so here goes.

To put it simply I think the new Google OS should be in the form of a VPS, a Virtual Private Server with customers using remote desktop style interfaces to access their centrally stored data.

This approch has a number of wide reaching benefits which include:

Limited client side hardware requirements.

As your computing power is handled server side you should be able to do things like play Quake and other intensive games in super high resolution without needing the latest hardware (subject to adequate bandwidth).

In addition the VPS Google OS would take care of hardware upgrades and ensure that your system is always able to use the latest and greatest games and apps. This would also give Google the ability to market Google OS Ready hardware which would simply be a bare bones systems with compatible ethernet and graphics drivers.

Centralised Storage.

Having everything stored on an online drive has numerous advantages including limitless storage (probably for a fee), files being automatically updated from source, collaborative document creation, seamless backups, version control, easy searching and lots more.

Remote Access.

As everything is hosted on the cloud you could access your desktop from any PC by simply downloading a client application. In addition, cloud hosted files would give you web access to your private files from any location.

Subscription Software.

Having software hosted via the cloud would completely remove the ability to pirate applications which would see software developers moving to the new platform on mass. These apps would possibly be available via a subscription service which would not only give you access to the applications but also all future updates.

Issues.

There are obvious issues with this solution including:

Bandwidth – having everything hosted on the cloud would mean that to achieve a high framerate would require a fast connection. Having local mirrors could help speed this up (as with Google Search).

Privacy – Having everything stored centrally could be a privacy nightmare

Local Access – Saving files off the web could be a problem with people wishing to save files to CD and thumb drive. Tho’ with your content being accessible from any web accessible PC it shouldn’t be a problem. Connecting to iTunes or any 3rd party device could also be problematic tho’ as the creators of a new OS, Google should already be tacking this issue.

Fees – Initially the fees would be high tho’ I suspect that as more app developers move to the platform and more users take up their wares that these should go down dramatically

Microsoft – I don’t anticipate that Microsoft applications would initially be available to this service due to the MS / Google rivalry.

All in all, I think a VPS based Google OS would be a smash hit (especially if it’s free to basic users) and would totally revolutionise desktop operating systems.

Today sees a significant change to your Google listings with google announcing its support for rich snippets including vCard and vCalendar. This is important as it gives us an edge to make our listings stand out from the crown, however the down side (yes theres always one isnt there) is that it arms Google withgreater understanding our our content which can be used to marginalise sites and even worse reduce them to a local listing.

hCard

Heres my quick guide to creating a semantic hcard for your site to be used where ever you put your address:

1.  <div class="vcard">
2.    <a class="fn org url" href="http://www.click4beds.co.uk/">Click 4 Beds</a>
3.    <address class="adr">
4.      <span class="type">Work</span>:
4.      <div class="building">Enterprise Works</div>
6.      <div class="street-address">Long Lane</div>
7.      <div class="locality">Honley</div>,
8.      <div class="region">West Yorkshire</div>  
9.      <div class="postal-code">HD9 6EA</div>
10.     <div class="country-name">England</div>
11.   </address>
12.   <div class="tel">
13.     <span class="type">Work</span> +44 (0)1484 666563
14.   </div>
15.   <div>Email:
16.     <a class="email" href="mailto:sales@click4beds.co.uk">sales@click4beds.co.uk</a>
17.   </div>
18. </div>

The Breakdown.

1. Tells Google to start a vCard
2. Sets a link thats a [fn] Full Name, [org] organisation that has a [url] website address
3. Starts the [adr] address content
4. Sets this [type] field to be a work address
5. Sets this [building] field to be the building name
6. Sets this [street-name] field to be the street address
7. Sets this [locality] field to be the town/city or village address
8. Sets this [region] field to be the county address
9. Sets this [postal-code] field to be the postcode
10. Sets this [country-name] field to be the name of your country
11. Closes the address content
12. Identifies content as a telephone number
13. Tells Google this is a work number followed by the telephone number itsself
14. Closes the telephone number content
15. Starts a container
16. Tells google that this is an email address
17. Closes the container
18. Closes the vCard

Adapted from microformats.org/wiki/hcard

hReview

If you read the original Google post above you’ll notice that theyre also displaying a review for this listing. They claim that this is a standard format widely used on the Interwebs so best keep your eyes peeled for something like the following which is used as a sample on microformats.org/wiki/hreview

1.  <div class="hreview">
2.    <span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span>
3.    <h4 class="summary">Crepes on Cole is awesome</h4>
4.    <span class="reviewer vcard">Reviewer: <span class="fn">Tantek</span> -
5.      <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span>
6.    <div class="description item vcard"><p>
7.      <span class="fn org">Crepes on Cole</span> is one of the best little
8.        creperies in <span class="adr"><span class="locality">San Francisco</span></span>.
9.      Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes
10.     for parties large and small.  Window seating makes for excellent
11.     people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside.
12.     I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten
13.     plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood WiFi.
14.  </p></div>
15.  <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
16.  <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
17.  </div>

Based on the break down from the HCard this is pretty easy to understand.

XFN

XFN is already sidely used on blog engines like Wordpress where it encourages you to identify link relations to your site using the REL attribute.

Heres the official list of regognised REL attributes microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values

Rejoyce!

It may only be a temporary thing but after only 2 months working on the Distinctive Chesterfields website I’ve now achieved a #1 position on Google for the term Chesterfield Sofas with a #2 position being helf for the singular term Chesterfield Sofa. We’re also knocking about on pages 1 and 2 for the terms Chesterfield, Chesterfields, Leather Sofa, Leather Sofas, Sofa and Sofas.

I love it when a plan comes together.

One of the most irritating things about Google Analytics is it doesnt give you stats related to the time of day (this is something we use Woopra for)… well that was the case for me until I worked out how to do this using a custom report.

Hits by time of day are important as it helps you identify not only when your getting the most hits, but also when you’re attracting the least amount of traffic which comes in really handy if you’re swapping some key information and/or want to make significant changes to your site.

This simple report has started to make us think. As our most popular time for new hits is 8pm, should we stagger the telesales team to provide phone support up to 9pm?, should we turn off adwords between 12pm and 9am as we only get around 3-4% of visitors during this time (although is this worth it as the saving would be minimal)

Ok heres how to quickly set up this report:

• Open Analytics
• Go to Custom Reporting
• Create a new report
• Give it a name
• Drag Entrances from the vlue Metrics Panel
• Drag Hour of the day from the green Dimensions panel
• Preview/save the report.

Easy as that.now you too will be a little more informed.