Web Moves Blog

Just noticed something new in Google webmaster tools called “Google instant preview” it appears to be something they have tied to the fetch as Googlebot. It appears to be somewhat flawed, and does not crawl or display flash (makes our website look bad). Although it is yet another way to keep an eye on your website for errors and crawl-ability. I think this is fairly heavily tied to the “load time” of your website, as it appears to only provide Googlebot with a limited amount of time to grab a snap-shot of your website.

It showed us as having 26 errors on this page, seems like a lot considering our website is fairly tight (not as tight as our clients websites).

One last interesting note, our page actually appears rock solid in the Google Search Preview, yet not in this instant preview….hmmmm…..

It has been brought to my attention that most people in the world do not realize that Google Chrome and Google Android operating systems are not Google Operating systems. They are both simply based upon Linux. I was surprised today speaking a fairly tech savvy person whom has no clue.

Most Linux users know that anything built on top of the Linux Operating system by its rules needs to be open source, therefore Google Chrome and Google Android operating systems are open source.

The good thing about these being open source is the speed of development and community contributions to the advancement of the operating system.  But I do not believe there is a huge user base of top coders seeking to help Google perfect their mobile operating system. Instead what we have is a lot of people quickly developing applications to sell for Google Android mobile devices.

The bad thing about these being open source is the speed of development and community contributions to the advancement of the operating system. As stated above few users are interested in helping Google, they are instead trying to quickly development applications to run on android devices. Now the Android market place, unlike Apple or Blackberry, is now riddled with lots of half baked applications that were not carefully developed and when used or installed with other half baked applications is rendering Android devices useless. I have heard from many an Android user that off the shelf it is quite a good mobile operating system, but once you start adding applications to your device, it slows drastically and often just completely locks up, and can no longer be used unless you revert back to the factory settings.

My rant of the day is that I’m struggling to understand why Google is not either penalizing website sites that do not provide a mobile version of their website, or rewarding websites that do?

This weekend I found myself annoyed yet again with Google’s search results while searching on my phone.  I am really tired of surfing the web from my mobile device only to be presented with 10 of the slowest loading, fat bellied, ad riddled authority websites on earth.  I want to see mobile friendly results when searching on my mobile and find what I need FAST.   Waiting for these bloated outdated sites to load delivers an awful user experience, and that’s what Google is supposed to be making their number one priority.  Even within Google News results, you find these traditional ad heavy websites are the ones that often appear. It’s maddening, sluggish, and I end up giving up before I find what I was searching for.

We know Googlebot can decipher the difference between a mobile website and a traditional website.  I realize that in the beginning, the mobile search results will suffer, as many websites have not been provided the encouragement to create a mobile website.  But I think the time has come.  If you would like to see mobile search results on your desktop, all you need to do is to go to http://www.google.com/m and you can see what the search results look like on a mobile device.

Google, we all appreciate your efforts to take over the world, with your Android OS, Chrome OS, Chrome Browser, Google Radio among the many other market segments your actively jumping into with both feet. I think you need to circle the wagons here and make sure your core business is tidy before you keep going into new markets. You never know someone may be cooking up a mobile browser (like http://www.skyfire.com/) or better yet a mobile search engine in the background.

Why isn’t Google delivering mobile friendly results?

Cindy Krum discussed mobile search results here at SEOMoz, the talk about Google having two separate indexes for mobile and traditional search.  She makes the point about how bad the results are when Google only provides mobile results.  But I am not sure the results are any better when provided with several really big slow websites that take forever to load, and are nearly impossible to navigate or find what you were looking for.

Whether Google needs to maintain a separate index or have a difference in the algorithm is debatable, but I think this should be changed sooner rather than later.  Once mobile websites are rewarded in mobile search, obviously more companies would get their sites mobile friendly.  Google does need not exclude non mobile results, but possibly just tweak their mobile algorithm;  doing something as simple as say for any query, run trhough the top 20-30 results which are traditionally fairy relevant, and if any of these results have a mobile website, show these website higher. No rocket science required, just a little common sense.

It is unusual that Google is not rewarding the online businesses that have embraced mobile search and even providing a great mobile website with the appropriate search engine optimization for mobile search. I really thought by May 2011, Google’s mobile search would have come further than this.

If there is a key to getting good reviews from customers and clients it is the commitment to providing excellent service and quality products. Put this in place and you build a solid foundation that will take care of reviews and testimonials.
But, in this online world, how do you make sure that others will find these reviews and that your business will benefit from them? You have to make sure your users and visitors understand that reviews must be in the correct format and submitted in the proper manner.
That said, you – the business owner – must be responsible for getting the process in place so that reviewing your services and products is as easy as, well, as telling others about the experience. The customer shouldn’t have to be a “techie” and he or she shouldn’t have to wade through half a dozen steps to get that review ready for others to read.
So what does that mean?
In the current online world it means finding out what Google is doing and what Google is not doing. Here’s the answer: Google supports specific microformats. If you want your reviews to get into the Google ocean you will have to get them into the correct format.
How does that happen? Well, it doesn’t just happen.
First of all, determine that you are indeed a viable ecommerce site that could benefit from client/customer reviews. Of course you are! In addition, this particular path is relevant for businesses listed with Google Places. Then you must make sure that the business name, business address and business telephone number are on your pages – in the correct hCard format!!
What is hCard? Here’s the layperson’s definition (if there really is one) from Wikipedia: “hCard is a microformat for publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations and places in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS or arbitrary XML.”
For nearly two years, Google has been using hCard, hReview and hProduct microformats for their search results. More recently, the company is using these microformats for local search results. As we see it, having this code in place will allow businesses to instruct customers to go to the business Web site to give a review, rather than sending them to Google Maps so they can search for the business, find the listing, choose a review link, log in etc. etc. etc.

Going Places
Use the correct format and Google will recognize the review and put it on your Places page. Think of it as user-generated content that goes directly to the place where it will do the most good. Once you set up the instructions – in the correct format – the reviews will be where they should be. Now, it isn’t necessary to rely on so-called authority sites. The information can be drawn from our business Web sites.
We understand that Google presents this in two distinct ways: individual reviews and aggregate reviews. The first is used to format pages that will display a single review. If you plan to use a page for a number of reviews or for summaries of several reviews you should use the aggregate method.
Here’s how Google explains it: “You can mark up either individual reviews (for example, an editor’s review of a product), or aggregate review information—for example, the average rating for a local business or the total number of user reviews submitted.”
If the page will have an editor’s review or an expert review that should stand as individual content but also has a collection of user reviews you should simply choose a format. Again, we understand that Google will work this way: “Use the individual Review format to mark up the editor’s review OR you can use the Review-aggregate format to summarize the set of user reviews. If a page contains both types of markup, Google will use the Review-aggregate markup for display.”
When you start to use this process to enhance your business presence make sure you and your Web site folks understand the concept of properties, as defined by Google for this purpose. The online behemoth explains that reviews “contain a number of different properties which you can label using microdata, microformats or RDFa markup.”

A good example presented at: Google Microformats

Interesting discovery today, a search on www.google.com.au showed some different looking serps. I noticed Google has moved the location of the URL to the upper left hand side just below the title tag of the website before the description tag.

It used to be below the description tag on the lower left hand side.

It is quite interesting how different the SERP look by simply moving the placement of the URL. Not exactly sure why they would be making this move, but it is clear that having sitelinks, becomes more important that ever.

It appears about a year ago people at Webmasterworld had seen this within adwords. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4142468.htm

Baidu, a “local Chinese Google”, who leads the search engine market with over 75% share (Google only has 19 percent), is also one of the biggest and popular websites in the world. Alexa currently ranks it as the 6^th popular in the world, just above Wikipedia and below Live. As do most big players in the SE industry, Baidu offers various services – such as video and image storage, website building platform, online encyclopedia, discussion forums, and more.

However, in today’s dynamic world, standing still and cherishing your achievements will very quickly lead to dethronement, at the very least. That’s why Baidu is looking to expand even further, especially when the number two Chinese website, Tencent, is also gaining ground, entering Alexa’s “world’s top 10” this month, after surpassing Twitter.

Tencent is largest internet company in China, and, with Facebook being unavailable to users, it is trying to utilize the social networking niche to compete with Baidu. The “satellite” services that are being offered by Tencent are very similar to the stated above Baidu products, making the clash between the two a “hot” battle for dominance. Baidu’s response, according to Robin Li, the CEO of the company, lies within expanding its own network of users and making it more “social”. In addition of fighting Tencent, this should also serve as additional income channel for the Chinese market leader.

In addition to bringing you the most relevant results, search engines are many times fighting over presenting the most up-to-date pages to the searcher. That’s why Google has those time-related filters in the left, just below the “type” filters. Although recent content might be well of importance only to news-seekers, Google thinks otherwise. Long before the recent “Panda” update to its indexing algorithm that is being talked about all over the world in during last week, Google has made numerous adjustments to its ranking rationale, with frequently updated websites getting “bonuses” in SE placements.

Yet another step in the same direction was done several days ago, although no official announcement has been made. It seems, Twitter is getting more credit within Google, which has decided to present recent tweets in the search results. In addition, the results also show user’s picture. But more important is the fact that the link is the tweet is included in the SERP’s, making it a valuable inbound link for the featured website.

It has to be noted, that the above only applies to recently posted tweets (the exact amount of time could not be determined, but from my testing it is probably several hours, and after that the results return to the usual “join twitter to follow”. If you want to see those results, by the way, it is very advisable to include the word “Twitter” in your search query.

Google shows a tweet

One of the challenges in the recent Man vs Machine Jeopardy game, which was easily won by the computer, Watson, was coping with contextual questions. I was not only about facts, but understanding what the question is about.

Another fact is that people searches become more and more specific. Once, people would just type “cheese”. Today, as the number of webpages is immense, the search has to be more specific, stating what exactly you would like to know:  “cheese vs cholesterol”, “where to buy cheese”, “how was the cheese invented” etc.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, co-founder of Trueknowledge.com, claims that his website is the future of search – at least for those who want to get answers to specific questions. Instead of typing search terms, you may just enter a question (“what is cheese”) and get a brief paragraph with an answer. Additionally, you will have some useful facts about the product and further at the page you could see related links (“external answers”) . There is also a possibility to add you answer, if you think you know better and want to contribute. To the right, you will see other sections, such as “other ways this question is asked” and related questions that are waiting to be answered (“Can you answer these questions?”).

My personal hope is that since Trueknowledge.com has been founded by scientists, it should present a viable alternative to the popular Wikipedia, which, unfortunately, has numerous incorrect facts in its articles…

While several companies established a Fairsearch.org group in order to try and prevent the Google-ITA deal, claiming that it is a yet another step of monopoly (by Google that is) of the airline ticket market, Bing has decided not to complain, but to fight. In addition to purchasing a predictive engine for flight costs, the Farecast, about a year ago, they now team up with one of the popular travel search engines, the KAYAK. It seems that the deal is beneficial for both sides – after all, KAYAK is probably also worried about Google acquiring ITA, despite their talks about “welcoming Google as a competitor”.

It their announcement, Bing flatters KAYAK, calling its new partner “a leading innovator in travel search”, and talks about “more comprehensive travel search experience”. The deal should benefit those people who want to plan and book via Bing. Although this looks like trying to stop people from leaving Bing, the move is actually a counter-step to Google entering the travel search. Of course, although “Google is not wining every niche it enters” as said KAYAK CTO and co-founder Paul English, it can affect the market heavily.

So, there is nothing left but to wish good luck to both Bing and KAYAK in their struggle.

Growing rapidly, with about 200 million registered users and estimated to surpass the 15 million adult users in the US in 2011, Twitter has proved as a very successful venture in the past 3 years. Based on acquisition offers, the company value has increased from $3.7 billion in 2009 to about $10 billion in the closing months of 2010. Yet, the owners are probably not going to sell it any time soon.

Instead, they want to turn Twitter into more profitable website. And the best way to ear money for an internet website is, of course, advertising. Currently, there are three options for advertising on Twitter – Promoted Tweets (that look like normal tweets, but are said to reach not only your followers but a significantly larger crowd), Promoted Trends (advertising at the Twitter home page) and Promoted Accounts (Twitter recommends certain accounts as “worth to follow”).

The problem, however, is that every potential advertiser has to submit an advertising  request, which is then reviews by the Twitter staff and is either approved or not approved. The approval process is manual and, as a result very slow. Many small- and medium-sized businesses simply give up, unwilling to wait, and turn to other advertising options – such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.

Although Twitter is not going to remodel the advertising scheme completely, it is done the first step, reportedly increasing the “advertising team” to assize of 35 workers (a notable 10% of the company personnel). Their primary task will be to improve response times and also to contact potential advertisers – those who had previously expressed interest in using Twitter in their campaigns.