The University of California, Harvard University, University of Michigan, The New York Public Library, Oxford University and Stanford University have teamed up with Google to offer users the ability to download books whose copyright protection has expired at no cost.
Google is being very careful about this, where they have set special terms of use for this digitalization of classic books. In their disclaimer they state, "Make noncommercial use of the file. Refrain from automated querying. Maintain attribution. Keep it legal." In addition, and to prevent others from profiting Google has added a watermark to the bottom-right corner of every PDF page which states "Digitized by Google".
This project will surely effect the way users can now search for historical and famous quotes, where instead of just pulling up a site that has a bunch of quotes, they can now actually search for the full text serounding the quote. If a publisher does not want their out of copyright book to be scanned and converted to a PDF for the world to download, they can opt out of the program. However, the legal community has been rather critical of Google for this practice, where a favorite legal target, Microsoft and their search engine, MSN are now offering a similar service, except they offer an opt in, where a publisher must take a proactive step, rather than a reactive step.
While optimizing your web site for the various on page factors is a great start to increasing your search engine ranking, the off page factors may in fact bring more traffic to your web site, in addition to assisting in your SEO campaign by increasing your inbound links to your web site from highly trusted sources. Moreover, as I stated in my past blog entry on the new Google patent, having links and references to your site form trusted sources, and editorial opinions from those sources can greatly effect your rankings in Google.
Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported, 50 million Americans get news online each day. Alternatively, only 27 million Americans watch network TV news on a typical evening. This demonstrates a dramatic shift in the way we as Americans obtain our local, national and world news. The web is quickly becoming the preferred news source over radio, television, magazines, and trade publications.
To cite several examples, it has been reported by SiteProNews & SEO-News that Yahoo News ranks ahead of MSNBC.com and even CNN.com, while Google News ranks ahead of USAToday.com and Boston.com and NYTimes.com.
This information though interesting to know is of little value if you do not know how to get your news or press releases into the hands of these online news sources. There are many techniques that can be used to accomplish this task; if your products or services are targeted to a particular geographic area, you might want to include these locations in your keyword phrases; try not to optimize a press release for more than 3 keywords phrases, but 2 phrases are optimal. This is just a sample of some of the techniques we at Rock Coast Media use to get news stories into the online news sources. This blog entry was written by Michael Goldstein, the SEO manager at Rock Coast Media.
In the past, Google has used a computer algorithm that used factors such as link popularity, keyword density, title tag, Meta tags, placement of content, spiderability of sites, use of text vs. multi-media and other such criteria. The new patent does not claim any of those tried and true factors are not still a big part of the equation, but it does tweak the results based on whether a web object is related to a favored or non-favored web object, or at least one topic discussed on a favored web site.
The patent explains how Google will decide a “score” of a web object, such as a web site, flash movie, MP3 etc. which are not linked to on favored or non-favored sites using the current algorithm. The patent also says scores for web objects that have links on Google’s list of favored or non-favored sites, using that same set of criteria and then tempers the result with editorial options, to come up with the final score. A web site that is listed on a favored site, and has a positive editorial opinion, will rank higher than a site which is not referenced by the favored or non-favored sites, even if it is still keyword dense, has great titles and all other factors that has been used in the past to rank a site in the past. The inverse seems to be true, a site linked from a non-favored sites or with negative editorial opinions will be decreased. The statements about favored, non-favored sites and editorial opinions make me think that Google is referring to the classic “good and bad neighborhoods”. Google is reading these editorial opinions and seeking specific positive or negative context.
What is the reasoning behind this new patent of Google? There must be a way to fine tune the results of general searches. For example, a search for printers will come up with thousands if not millions of results. Why not utilize the experience of web users, and enhance the ranking of search results by integration editorial opinions into the scoring of web sites, then applying the score of an overall web site to each individual page, which will be relevant to a keyword search. This new patent, makes me rethink my previous blogs, which said that Yahoo and MSN are bypassing Google when it comes to social networking. While Yahoo has already integrated their local search, Yahoo Answers, Flickr, Trip Planner and other social programs with their main SERPs, Google is the one who has come out and actually documented what they are doing and provided SEOs a manual of sorts to better optimize their client’s web sites for the most popular search engine on the planet.
The above entry was written by Michael Goldstein, Esq. the SEO manager of Rock Coast Media. Disclaimer: Attorney Goldstein is not a member of the United States Patent Bar, and his opinions should not be taken as legal advice in any shape, mean or manor, nor should his opinion be legally relied upon.
On August 22, 2006, Google’s latest patent was approved. This patent is extremely interesting in light of the recent excitement surrounding social search. The patent if broken down into its most simplistic form states, Google is going to take their existing algorithm and temper it with shared book marking sites and other trust networks.
The Patent itself is called, “System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results”. What does this all mean? If your web site has gained and lost significant ranking over the past month, it is very likely due to your inclusion or not in trust networks, such as links from http://www.myspace.com/, http://del.icio.us/, Google Co-op and others. Though the patent does not go into detail on which sites are trusted sites and which are not, it is likely that the trusted sites are the ones that are being talked about heavily with in the social networking arena.
In the coming days, I will decipher this complicated legal document into plain everyday English that we can all read and understand, so stay tuned.
The above entry was written by Michael Goldstein, Esq. the SEO manager of Rock Coast Media. Disclaimer: Attorney Goldstein is not a member of the United States Patent Bar, and his opinions should not be taken as legal advice in any shape, mean or manor, nor should his opinion be legally relied upon.
I wanted to let a few weeks pass and digest all of the great information I picked up at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, August 7 – 10. To help others who were not there, or even to benefit those who were there but did not get a chance to really take in the SEO track, I have created a power point file which can be downloaded here.
According to Chris Sherman V.P. and editor of Searchenginewatch.com, “algorithmic search has plateaued and that humans are still better at creating a more relevant search system.” He stated at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose a few weeks back, The popularity of social search, is based on the desire to listen to and give credence to our piers, as social search is powered by the wisdom of crowds. Chris Sherman of went on to intimate, the best solution will be a combination of both algorithms and social search. “This will lend to the creation of ‘trust networks’ and an increased level of personalization”.
If you limit yourself to the traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with the big three, Google, MSN and Yahoo, and even through in a little Ask.com, you are only hitting one segment of the potential search market, though it currently is a major segment. Social search is the future. Search engines are going to be the portal to find the smaller niche web portals that users will need.
Yahoo currently has several of the best examples. If you are photo buff, and want to post your photos of interesting shots, or you just want to search for photos of an area, service, product or just about anything else, Flickr may be just right for you. This is a site where users can post, search and discuss photos. There is a rating system and if the photo is rated highly enough you may even find it on the Yahoo main search page.
Another prime example is all the question and answer sites. Again, Yahoo leads the pack here, with their Yahoo answers program. Registered users can post a question and usually with in minutes they will be provided with several answers from the community. If you have a specific question this is the place to go and find out the answer. Moreover, if you have the question, odds are someone else already asked it and the answers are waiting for you. This is what I envisioned Ask Jeeves was originally going to be.
Then there are the all encompassing networks which include shared book marking, photo uploads, friend networks and more on sites such as Myspace.com and facebook.com. The messages to take from this, SEO & SEM are but two aspects of a solid online marketing campaign, and if you ignore social search, you are going to miss the boat.
There is a new service on the Internet horizon, which at first glance looks like a SEO gem, and a small businesses dream in keeping their web site fresh with new content. However upon a closer and more cynical look through legal eyes, this service needs to be used very carefully to extract the benefit without infringing on an other’s web site copyright. It should be pointed out that the United States Copy Right Act as amended in 1998, and the web site equivalent the Digital Millennium Act of 2000, provides for severe monetary penalties for intentional copyright infringement, which could exceed $150,000 in statutory fines without even needing to prove any damages.
This new service is a form of content scrapping, without the need for the original content developer to provide for an RSS feed. Dapper, created this new service which makes it easy to extract content from any website. According to Dapper’s marketing shpeal, the service allows you to create a "black box" for any data source on the Internet. This data is then converted into an XML feed which you can use programmatically in whatever way you like. Moreover, Dapper allows you to change this XML into other formats both textually and through images and Google maps.
The idea is great, where a web site owner can keep their site fresh by adding new content every time another web site updates theirs. This is very much like an RSS feed, which is not only legal, but encouraged by many content providers, as a way to generate backlinks and as a way to establish those content providers as the authority on a particular subject. However, you do need to know some very basic programming in order to bring an RSS feed into your site. If you are the content provider and are not using a blog or automatic RSS syndication service, you may need to know quite a bit more about programming in XML, to create those helpful RSS feeds. The Dapper service will eliminate the need to create RSS, so that a site owner can more easily allow their content to be syndicated without the need to put it in a blog format.
What is the problem? Not all web site owners want their content syndicated, or even copied on another web site. In addition, the search engines do a great job in not accessing a duplicate content penalty to those who use RSS feeds, but how will the engines see this technology. One might suspect that the engines will not see this technology as friendly as an RSS feed, where the content owner has made their content available to copy. It certainly leaves the door open for anyone to grasp photos, videos, and original creative works and display it on their own site without even asking permission of the content owner. This by its very essence is intentional copyright infringement. With that said, a simple email or phone call might be all that you need to protect yourself, though as they say, “if it isn’t in writing, it didn’t happen”. It will be interesting to see how the Dapper technology moves forward.
The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.
Day two brought some great insight to the more technical aspects of SEO, such as a session on dynamic web sites and even ways to use cloaking in an ethical manner, where you server spiders and humans the same content, but show spiders different URLs. There was a great session on duplicate content, and some very good point brought out by the Google Master himself, Matt Cutts. There were many pointers on how to make your dynamic sites better for the search engines. As well as things to look out for, such as long URLs, duplicate content, requiring the engines to use cookies, geo targeting on the SEO side, password protection and form based navigation.
Google, Yahoo and Ask were all represented on the panel regarding duplicate content, and all seemed to be saying the same thing, have one URL for each page. There was a lot of talk about 301 redirects vs. 302 redirects, the use of cookies to store user information and how and why blogs and RSS feeds are not going to create duplicate content penalties.
The evening was topped off with a part that reminded me of my college days. It was like being back at one of the frat houses on the Umass campus. Good food, but bad for you, all the beer you can drink loud music and everyone dancing to it in their own way, even a few games. My favorite was a Sony game where you and two of your friends would sit behind a green sheet and wear green shirts to block out your body and then bop your head to a music video which superimposed your head to the video. You had to try and stay with the dancers. I will upload the DVD from my performance later this week.
Day 3: Small budgets but big ideas
Day three brought some humor and some great information on optimizing smaller companies’ web sites, or those sights with small budgets. I also explored the exhibitor hall and found some real gems. In one session a panelist suggested that search engines are like Pinocchio. How? Pinocchio wanted more than anything else to not be a wooden puppet, but rather to be a boy. Search engines just like Pinocchio want to be “real boys and girls”, or more specifically, they want to think like real people and not computer generated algorithms. In response to this statement a humorous panelist responded, well then if Google is like Pinocchio, then is Matt Cutts, Jiminy Cricket? The first panelist would not go down that road, but it did provide for a moment of great fun.
On the more serious side of day three, there were some very poignant tips made for optimizing small business’ sites. One such suggestion was to stop trying to chase the algorithms and concentrate on running your business, while using time tested techniques that are here to stay. The theme of the day seemed to be a reinforcement of what we already know, good content drives traffic, though the spin on it today was search engines are watching user behavior, and as such good traffic will give you good rankings. The other aspect of good content, is to write in English, and by that I mean, if there are industry terms that you and your competitors through around a lot, chances are your customers are not using those terms, but rather more simple everyday terms, so why not go after those simple terms for your product. The final point I want to bring up from
Day one at SES proved to be very enlightening. Rather than spending time reviewing the traditional SEO practices, which we at Rock Coast Media, Inc apply to most projects, I took the opportunity to attend sessions on social networking, which has been theorized to be the next big thing.
As of this writing, this is no official definition yet for social networking, but it basically means humans finding sites and telling others about those sites. Humans are making judgments about which sties are good and which are not, which is very different than a computer algorithm looking at code, content density, title tags, inbound links etc. Social networking likely is going to pick up where search engines can not; making subjective judgments based on esthetics, pose, and other such intangibles. What does this mean? Humans can judge an image, sound clip, video or other multi-media source, which the web is producing in mass quantifies now, much better, as often there is no metadata or contextual reference to determine if the web file is important, relevant or even popular.
Yahoo and MSN are on the cutting edge and may outpace Google with the use of human interaction in the near future. In one session at SES a Yahoo and MSN representative demonstrated how social networking can influence page #1 ranking for many queries, both tail and significant ones. Both of these search engines are using the trust factor of humans in their applications to better judge what a good site is and what is not.
On the other hand, Google, through its Google Co-op, has attempted to get into the social networking field, but its two main applications, Google topics and Google subscriptions, will only work to the web users benefit if the person searching on Google has already visited the web site once before and subscribed to an RSS feed. While this may prove to be a great source of new content for users, it will not help new users find the web site. Yahoo and Microsoft especially have created new applications allowing users to create their own vertical search engines, which will display in the rankings if a query is structured just right. This of course can then be optimized on the developers end by conducting proper keyword research.
It looks like we have come full circle. Just like when the Internet first came out and humans had to judge web sites, we are back to allowing actual people to rate and categorize web sites which others will follow.
The excitement is building; the forums are a buzz; the SEO world is getting ready; San Jose California, here we come. I am anxiously awaiting my flight on Sunday evening, where I along with several other members of the Rock Coast Media team will head out to sunny San Jose, California to participate in the Mac Daddy of all search conventions Search Engine Strategies 2006 - San Jose. There will be a panel discussion on Wednesday, about SEM for non profits & charities, where RCM co-founder, Stephen Anderson will be a member of the panel. Mary French, RCM's senior campaign manager will be touring the exhibit hall and attending sessions for pay per click marketing. While I, RCM's SEO manager, will be doing the same on the organic side of SEO. I am particularly excited, as this will be my first time attending SES, and also my first time visiting the west coast.
During the course of the convention, I will be writing a daily blog entry of my experiences at SES for all of you who will not be there in person. I hope to provide pictures as well. I will be paying special attention to the social networking seminars, which will be discussinging how "search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widely through tagging, click through tracking, search history features and other methods". I am particularly interested in how the search engines are gathering information and potentially using it from sites such as Myspace, Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo My Web, Yahoo Answers and others.
Come Sunday, my bags will be packed, my lap top will be charged and I will be ready to experience the grand daddy of 'em all - SES 06 - San Jose.
The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.
The impossible has finally happened, the three major search giants have teamed up to recognize, gauge and combat their common enemy, click fraud. The big three will be joined in their efforts to fight off the evil forces of click fraud with Ask.com and Looksmart.com.
The problem of click fraud has obviously escalated to such a point that these three search companies, who vigorously complete against one and other, and often have very little positive to say about each other are willing to collaborate on eliminating the threat. The search engines are very well aware that sponsored advertising is in great jeopardy. The more publicity click fraud gets, the more difficult it will be for any of these companies to reach out and renew their current subscribers. The numbers are staggering, Google, by it self, earned $1.3 billion on paid advertising revenue through the first two quarters of this year alone.
As has been well documented on this blog, click fraud has accounted for several class action law suites against Google and Yahoo. Google recently settled their suit, while Yahoo has made a settlement offer and is awaiting a trial date to make its case.
According to a report August 2, 2006 in the Washington Post, “John Slade, senior director of Yahoo's defense against click fraud, predicted the alliance's guidelines ‘will be a game-changing step in measuring and fighting click fraud.’"
Perhaps the biggest problem is there is no single definition for the term, “click fraud”. However, in all cases, the final outcome is inevitably the same: Advertisers are paying for traffic by those who have absolutely no intention of ever purchasing anything from their site, but whose only goal is to consume large amounts of their competitor’s online marketing budget. If the big three can just put a label on “click fraud” they will then be able to start to detect exactly what the financial damages are and put their engineers to work on resolving the issue.
The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.
In the distant Internet past, circa 2000, a very solid SEO strategy was to purchase a domain name with your keywords in the URL. This was said to greatly assist a web site in their rankings. While this strategy has met with limited success as of late, it is still a good marketing ploy to buy names which have your core competence terms as part of the URL. This has been made increasingly difficult as a result of cyber squatters, who buy and horde domain names for ransom, or just because they think they may someday want to use the name, but have no immediate plans to do so.
It is estimated that about 70 million domains are currently under registration from ICANN. It is further estimated that there are virtually no one and very few two-word phrases left in the English dictionary. This means that web site owners are going to either need to come up with some very creative words, which are not real words, or they are going to need to come up with very long domain names, which may be difficult to spell or have a high risk of mistyping by a user.
What does all this mean to the web site owner who is concerned with getting traffic to their new site? It may require more SEO work and less traditional advertising to get users to come to your web site. Why is this? In the past you could create a brand around one word, such as Yahoo, or Boston, and with a good marketing effort, have users simply remember your web site, type in your domain name and go to the site. This is not going to be the case with newer sites, as the domains names are going to get longer, and the extensions are not going to be limited to .com, .net and .org, but rather a plethora of domain name extensions will be needed.
So what is a web site owner to do? The marketing of sites will now fall to developing great content, getting others to link to you, making sure the web sites are defined properly and not allowing for sloppy programming. There is also the avenue of paid search, where no single keyword or keyword phrase is owned by a single person in perpetuity, but rather many companies can bid for the same term and based on a variety of bid management techniques and better copyrighting, you can purchase web site clicks.
The world is changing, and we are quickly becoming more and more a wireless web-based society. As such, TV, radio and print commercials have less of an impact on how we find the web sites we want to visit, but it seems as though the large consumption of domain names over the past decade may move us into that new medium far quicker than some of us might like. On the other hand, if you are skilled at SEO and SEM, you may be positioned to be a leader in an industry that you simply could not have bought your way into just six years ago.
The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.
Do you know for what terms you want your web site to rank? You may think so, but upon further investigation, you may find that your words won’t truly achieve your conversion objectives. Mike Goldstein, our SEO manager has drafted an article on the topic of why your key words being relevant to your web site topic is not enough. The key words must more importantly, relate to your search campaign goals. You need to concentrate on what is the central objective the search campaign will eventually lead to. If you have a specific goal, selecting your key words becomes much simpler and more profitable. Read the article…
