What’s in it and what you can do

Everyone who uses Gmail or Google+ or any of Google’s products and services recently received an email notification of the upcoming changes to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

At first, I didn’t want to bother to take the time to read through it, but after receiving the same email 12 times – I decided to go ahead and take a look.

Google provides a wide variety of valuable services for free. They are also the top search engine and all of their services are an integral part of my job and my personal life. Part of what it takes to make their services free is the collection and distribution of user information, and I understand that.

However, that being said, there are things about Google that make me squirm a little. After all, nothing is really “free”.

The privacy policy language is a bit vague and hard to fully understand, but here are a few notes I made on the policy that you may find interesting…

Google may collect the following information from you:

• Any personal information you give in any Google platform – including, name, address, photo, etc.
• Information about the Google services that you use – including websites that you visit who advertise through Google
• Mobile device information – including your phone number, type of device, etc.
• Mobile log information – your telephone log, SMS routing & IP address
• Your location
• Information gathered from cookies and pixel tags – on the web and in your email

Google uses the information it collects in the following ways:

• To “provide, maintain, protect & improve” services and products
• To present more targeted ads
• To keep forever for “legitimate business or legal purposes”
• To share with publishers, advertisers & connected sites (with the exception of “sensitive personal information” which you must opt-in in order to share)

This is not a comprehensive break-down of the privacy policy, just the major points I took away from it. You should read the entire thing for yourself and decide for yourself what you think about the new privacy policy.

If you decide you can’t live without Google products and services, but you want to limit the amount of information Google collects from you, here are a few steps you can take to control a portion of your privacy:

• Google and other sites use special cookies for “behavioral advertising”. The Network Advertising Initiative has a site where you can learn more and opt-out of receiving these cookies.
• Remove information you want to keep private from your Google Account dashboard.
• You can opt out of some advertising by editing your ads preferences.

Image credit: opensourceway via Flickr.

Think back to your first cell phone. Mine was a black and white Nokia with detachable faceplates and a wonderful version of the game snake. Those days are long gone and I now have an iPhone that makes my first computer growing up look like a sad joke.

Not only is this little device in my pocket faster than the computers of yore, it also has the power to view just about every bit of content on the web. But have you tried looking at a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices?

It’s confusing. Images break, forms don’t work. A bad mobile experience means I’m almost certain to search for another site that offers a better user experience on my phone.

According to Google, I am not alone. Around 60% of people are unlikely to return to a site that’s not mobile friendly. User engagement increases by 85% with a mobile-friendly design. That is steadily increasing and for the most part businesses have been slower about catching up with technology than their customers.

In response to these numbers, Google has launched a information site called GoMo to educate owners of websites. The site provides data that makes it pretty clear: mobile browsing is here to stay.

Google’s findings are very much in line with the trends we see in our client sites. In fact, in reviewing a sample of the scores of websites SmallBox monitors, mobile traffic increased a whopping 230% in 2011 compared to 2010.

If you’re ready to get serious about mobile, SmallBox can help! Don’t be caught with a website that cannot be viewed by a huge percentage of your customer base. Contact us today for questions or quotes.

Watson–IBM’s ‘intelligent’ computer–won at Jeopardy against trivia super-geniuses Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last Thursday. I thought I’d lead off by repeating that information just in case you’ve been living under a rock.  Our question is: will Watson-like technologies end up impacting our industry by changing the way that search engines analyze data?  SPOILER ALERT: The answer is, ‘Yes, almost certainly these technologies will have an impact at some point, but probably not right away, and probably not for some time to come.’  But before we toy around with that idea, let’s do some review.  Who is Watson?

IBM built Watson as a follow-up to Deep Blue–the computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997. By all accounts, it is tremendously more difficult to design a computer that can win at Jeopardy than it is to design a computer that can beat the the all-time world-champion chess-player Garry Kasparov.  For humans facing-off against a master-chess player may seem more intimidating than playing Jeopardy–something that most humans can do with varying degrees of success.  But the crucial difference between chess and Jeopardy is that the former requires the computer to understand graphic relationships & sequences in a clear, rule-bound formula (something that computers are very good at doing), while the latter requires the computer to understand language–which is a far more elusive, fluid, and altogether human ‘game.’ 

So: are computers now able to understand language the way that human beings do?  The short answer is: no, not yet. The tone of this answer has changed, though.  The answer used to be: no, and they never will.  Now even skeptics will say: ‘not yet.’

Let’s look at the ruminations of Jeopardy superstar Ken Jennings for some insight into Watson’s grasp of language.

“Watson is indisputably a huge leap forward in computer ‘thinking.’ When I studied artificial intelligence in college just a decade ago, a question-answering computer as flexible and sophisticated as Watson would have been snorted at as science fiction – the kind of technology that only Captain Kirk, not Alex Trebek, would have access to….But is it really head and shoulders above the best human ‘Jeopardy!’ players, the way it looked on TV? Not by a long shot.”

In an interesting blog post, Ken Jennings says that he’d wanted to be like John Connor (re: the soldier who defeats the Terminators in an apocalyptic future) but he ended up performing more like John Henry (re: the steelworker who died tried to outpace the steam engine).  “BUT…” Jennings qualifies Watson’s victory.  He says that the machine’s primary advantage was its reflexes–it pushes the buzzer at a super-human speed if it knows the answer.

Here is how Ken Jennings explains Watson’s win:

“The key to Watson’s dominance lies in the famously tricky “Jeopardy!” buzzer, the signaling device that allows players to respond to the show’s clues. Like any human player, Watson does buzz with a “thumb” of sorts (actually a magnetic coil mounted over a buzzer), but it can also rely on the millisecond-precision timing of a computer. The reflexes of even a very good human player will vary slightly, but not Watson’s. If it knows the answer, it makes the perfect buzz. Every single time. And it’s hard to win if you can’t buzz. Imagine if John Henry had to beat the steam engine at a feat of brute strength just to be allowed to swing his hammer, or if chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov had to solve a long-division problem faster than supercomputer Deep Blue every time he moved a piece in their epic match.”

With that said: for all that we haven’t arrived at self-evolving artificial intelligence quite yet, even Ken Jennings will concede that Watson does represent a huge leap forward in terms of how data-processors are able to understand language.

As a copy-writer and SEO consultant this piques my interest because that is what our industry is all about: we have to write so that algorithms will understand us as well as human audiences. To some extent, the whole concept of SEO is that search-engines and human beings looking for websites need a middle-man to help them fully understand one another in order to derive optimum efficiency and maximum benefits.  After the epic Jeopardy death-match between man and machine that went down last week, I am left to wonder how long it will take Google to integrate some of these various new capacities into the way that they do search and I am very interested in how that will ultimately change our field.

As Google continues to improve its algorithm–adding reader-levels & n-grams and other tricky mechanisms to the massive amounts of user-data that inform their search results–the ‘intelligence’ of search results can often seem almost eerie. As a sidenote: for me, the addition of millions of OCR-ed texts in Amazon and Google Books has added a new level of functionality to Google’s search engine.  If a stray thought runs through my head from a book that I read years ago, I can type in a paraphrase of that quote and find the source.

But, of course, Google’s search engine is not actually ‘intelligent,’ its just incredibly well-informed. You can enter the terms ‘web-design’ into Google search-engine and it will pull out reams of information on that subject for you in a cleverly arranged hierarchy.  But Google’s search engine does not actually know what ‘web design’ is.  It may know that ‘web-design’ and ‘web-designer’ are related terms–the second term contains the first, but it does not understand that the term ‘web-designer’ designates a human-subject, whereas ‘web-design’ can refer to a discipline or an industry.  The people at IBM, however, are beginning to design machines that do understand these distinctions, however.  It will be interesting to watch as new applications are developed to exploit the advances that Watson’s victory represents.

There was an article in this Saturday’s edition of the New York Times about black-hat linkbuilding that we found interesting. This article might be very informative to the average reader but there’s nothing particularly novel about this ‘news’ to anyone at SmallBox.  Provocatively titled, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,” this article is just further confirmation of something that we’ve known for a long time: Google is getting more and more discerning about filtering good quality links and high-quality content out of the online jungle.

For anyone who doesn’t have time to read the ten page article, here’s a quick summary:

The NY Times noted that JC Penney’s was showing an abnormal level of dominance in an unusual diversity of keyword constellations in Google Search this holiday season. They showed up in a No. 1 ranking spot for keywords as competitive as “dresses” and “bedding” and as diffuse as “area rugs” and “grommet top curtains.” Other keywords where they were showing up in the number one spot included: “furniture,” table clothes,” “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” and “comforter sets.”  They beat out huge operations like Lowes, Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond and any number of other Big Box retailers in keywords where these other industry leaders should have naturally dominated.

About 34% of Google’s traffic goes to the No. 1 website on the SERP.  The website ranked No. 2 pulls in about half of that, or 17% of all traffic. As you can readily imagine, with number one rankings in practically every product category for sale in their store, JC Penney’s must have been getting great traffic over Christmas.

So: how did they do it?

Well, unfortunately for them, they did it by using black-hat SEO techniques. Company executives claim that they had no knowledge that black-hat techniques were being used and it’s quite likely that they’re telling the truth.  They contracted a link-building service that used shady practices to get them results and now they’re paying the price. Across the board, after Google’s corrective measures, JC Penney’s has been buried back in pages 6 or 7 on Google, even for terms where they would, perhaps, naturally appear on page one or two.  That’s because when Google gets wind of the fact that you’ve been using black-hat methods they dock you.  Getting docked liked this is a known-quantity in the industry, that’s why reputable firms stay away from black-hat techniques.  This can really hurt revenue.

There’s no doubt that JC Penney’s reaped a huge benefit by dominating such a wide array of search terms over this Christmas season, but over the long run the campaign that brought them so much traffic between black Friday and Dec 24th 2010 is going to damage their bottom line.

Back in the Wild West days of Search Engine Optimization–say during the early days of the past decade–there were all kinds of ways to manipulate search results. You could type in your keywords over and over in white type-face against a white background and draw visitors like moths to a flame.  Trashy link-farms were a legitimate way to leverage the marketing potential of a website.  But that was a long time ago.

These days Google’s algorithm has gotten so smart that, believe it or not, honesty actually is the best policy in terms of how we drive online business. Thoughtful, well written content trumps keyword stuffed content.  Links from sites that are germane to your industry will usually help you a great deal more than links from random sites, and links from link-farms will end up hurting you in the end.  Google can tell.  They’re not omniscient yet, but they’re getting close.

That’s why SmallBox has focused on staying at the cutting edge of totally straightforward, strait-laced SEO techniques over the past few years. We always recommend to our customers that they make sure the code and content on their site is in good shape before investing in link-building.  The industry is always changing, and new opportunities appear practically on a weekly basis, but there is a consistent theme to our approach: we’re interested in long-term solutions because, in the end, long-shots don’t pay off.

To learn more about SmallBox’s SEO service click here.

Google Boost: it should be available in most major cities by this summer.  Is it going to be a big hit or not? Is it going to change the landscape of our profession or is it just going to be another little bump on the road?  Our guess is: it will make the pie bigger, but it won’t be replacing PPC management any time soon.

Pros of Google Boost include: ease of use, and an eye-catching factor.  Boost’s ads will stand out from other sponsored links, because they’ll be including star-ratings, reviews, and you’ll get a blue pin to distinguish you on the map from all the other red pins.  Also, it’s minimum price-tag is $50 dollars, which is lower than most PPC campaigns if you want to outsource the heavy-lifting to a professional. The cons include: limited control, diminished effectiveness, and a loss of equilibrium in terms of how sponsored links will be ranked.

Scanning the articles that have been written about Boost, and consulting our in-house specialists (re: Ben), the consensus seems to be that Google Boost will most likely act like a gateway drug–introducing small businesses to the power and potential of Search Engine Marketing, but ultimately leaving them wanting more.

Here’s the theory: Businesses who have yet to be sold on the concept that AdWords campaigns will produce a solid, measurable return on investment for them (especially if they hire a professional to run their campaign), will buy into Google Boost because its entry-level pricetag is relatively cheap. When they start to see the response, they will become intrigued–they will want to know more.  When they know more, they will want more control–so that they can make more money.  But they won’t be able to refine their campaign because Google Boost is opaque and one-sided.  Boost is not designed to integrate business-owners’ knowledge and input to make campaigns more profitable. At this point small business owners may try to mount their own AdWords campaigns, which, oftentimes, they will probably end up turning over to a professional.  Other business-owners will go straight to professional PPC managers when they see the results of their Boost campaigns.

So: our working hypothesis is that Google Boost will make the pie bigger.  What do you think?

If you need some advice about Search Engine Marketing check out SmallBox’s services here.  Or just get in touch with us here.

Google’s N-Gram cache brings their level of near-omniscience–and in particular their knowledge about how the use of language informs human interaction with Search Engines–to a new level. Human language and human behavior (re: consumer behavior) intersect in interesting ways on the Internet, and Google has long been established as the industry leader in mapping and manipulating the site of this interaction.  Cultural theorists have, for a long time, been writing ‘prophetic’ essays about how the Internet is a kind of incarnation of collective memory or a representation of collective consciousness.  Google’s new N-Gram cache & viewer consummates that kind of pipe-dream in some interesting new ways.   At present Google’s N-Gram cache is mostly interesting on a scholarly level–it will not immediately influence the way that businesses compete for Search Engine Rankings. But it gives us some insight into the scope of Google’s long-term ambitions, and for that reason, I think its worth a blog-post.

The N-Gram viewer allows users to search the rising and falling frequency of words as they appear in print over the last five hundred years. Search can be narrowed to any period of years in the past five hundred years, so you can search levels of word-usage from 1500 to present or you can search within a shorter period.  For example, how often did the word Reagan appear in print between 1980 to 1988?

Well, certainly more frequently than it had appeared in the preceding 500 years. No great surprise there.  The use of the word ‘Reagan’ begins to pick up in the mid-60’s and it spikes steeply in the 1980’s.  (In fact, the word Reagan appeared in print more frequently than the words ‘Jesus Christ’ from 1980 until mid-year 2000.  Go ahead, take a look.)  The word Bush fared better than Reagan in the early centuries of Early Modern era, experiencing occasional spikes in usage.  However that probably has more to do with the word for shrubbery appearing at the beginning of sentences than it has to do with certain members of the oil-dynasty from Texas, some of whom have been promoted or elected to various high positions in the United States government in the past 30 years.

Below I’ve called up a comparative n-gram (or ‘bi-gram’) of the words ‘God’ and ‘money,’ spanning the past five hundred years.

As we can see usage of the pronoun ‘God’ in print peaked during the late 1600’s through the early 1700’s, and at the end of the 18th century it began a precipitous decline, the frequency of its usage gradually approaching an almost perfect statistical convergence with the word ‘money’ not too long after the Industrial Revolution.  The usage of the word ‘God’ in print remains at a frequency slightly higher than the word ‘money’ in our present decade.

The appearance of the words ‘Angelina Jolie’ in print, surpassed the prevalence of the words ‘War in Afghanistan’ in early 2002, by a margin that has been growing consistently since that time.

To assemble their N-Gram cache, Google scanned 10% of all books ever published. That’s one out of every ten books, dating back to the invention of the printing press.  That’s an impressive sample and it will allow Google to map the evolution of language in print-form in amazing ways.  This, presumably, will ultimately inform the ‘discernment’ of their algorithm in ways and by means that I am not qualified even to hypothesize about.

It’s interesting that the N-Gram and Google’s Reading-Level filter came out in the same week. At this point, the reading-level filter is not informed by data from the n-gram cache (the reading level filter is informed by a group of teachers who graded sites along specific criteria), but we can imagine that as that tool becomes more nuanced, some bandwidths of data from the N-Gram may begin to come into play, framing the way that Google reads websites, and how we, in turn, encounter the written word.

Fun fact: Did you know that in order to harvest the parchment (sheep-skin) to produce one copy of the first print run of the Gutenberg Bible (the 1st book ever printed) 300 sheep had to be slaughtered?!  In intervening years, with the invention of blogs and so forth, the dissemination of text to an audience has become much less costly!

Google just introduced Boost, its newest advertising tool through Google Places. Currently in beta, Boost is available in only a handful of cities and not yet available in Indianapolis. However, in a recent conversation with a Google employee, I learned that Boost will be expanded to include Indianapolis in the not-so-distant future.

So small business owners, perk up your ears.

Designed for local small business owners, the core idea of Boost is simplicity itself. First, the business owner writes a simple business description, chooses business industry categories and sets a budget. Boost then automatically creates an ad campaign for your business, finding relevant keywords and managing your budget to achieve maximum potential. Essentially, Boost is a layman’s Adwords, without all the fuss of keyword research, geo-targeting or spending analysis.

Boost ads appear above the search results in the ‘sponsored ads’ section, or to the right of the search results.

On a local search that generates a map insert, Boost ads receive a blue pin on the map instead of the usual red pin.

Boost ads do not change organic search ranking and all analytics data is collected and viewed through the Places dashboard. Each Boost ad budget must be at least $50 monthly, but can be increased at any time. Ads can also be deleted at any point and the business owner will only be charged for the number of clicks that actually occurred during that time period.

More information about Boost billing and the advertising process can also be found in Google Places Help and on the Google Lat Long Blog.

Last week, Google revamped the way that they “organize the world’s information,” giving ‘place’ a new centrality in how they rank websites.  What that means, in SEO speak, is that they’ve merged place results with organic search results. This has a number of important implications, but the long-story-short is that this is good news for small local businesses.

Most searches used to look like this:

At the top of the page, the website with the highest organic ranking would appear.  Then, further down the first page, ‘Places’ would appear.  Appearing at the top of the place list could be important, but without a tagline describing your business in your place-listing, your business had no chance to win traffic by distinguishing itself.  The website with the No. 1 ranking at the top of the page usually wound up winning the highest search-traffic.  Now that Google has merged ‘place’ and organic search results, for local searches Google’s page 1 often ends up looking like this:

As you can see, the red place-balloons with the business’s address and phone-number, now appear beneath the organic listing.  What this means is that maps optimization and organic SEO are no longer compartmentalized in terms of how businesses appear in search.

This weeds national competition that does not have a local presence out of the top slots in many cases. For example, say that your customers enter the search terms:  ‘flowers Indianapolis.’  If the national flower-delivery service that does not have a local flower shop formerly appeared in the top-slot, they are likely to fall in the rankings to the best optimized local flower shop.

On the other hand: whereas, formerly, businesses that were well-optimized on Google Place without any organic SEO (or without a website), might have had an advantage over other businesses that were not well-optimized on Place, now they’ve lost that advantaged.  This makes having a well-optimized website ever more important for local businesses.

By now we’ve all had a chance to work with Google Instant a little. If you aren’t familiar with it here’s a quick summary-

Google is now trying to guess, based on their massive backlog of user data, to “guess” what you are looking for.
So if you start typing “indianapolis” you will see that Google assumes you are looking for the Zoo and start serving up results immediately before you hit submit.
In fact you never actually have to hit submit to use Google now.

Having used Google Instant for a week or so I have to ask- Do we really need to be even more distracted when online?

I may have come to Google to find Indianapolis Restaurants but now I’m thinking about the Zoo.
It doesn’t take a PHD in Psychology to know that some people are going to forget why they came there in the first place.
Maybe people looking for dinner will now be planning a trip to the Zoo.

So it could really benefit listings that are showing up for the first word in a 3-4 word search query, like the Zoo. There may be serious implications, good and bad, for some Websites. If they owned a 2 or 3 word search that brought a good deal of traffic they could see that eroded by a competitor who is winning a 1 or 2 word search, essentially hijacking that visitor. It could also mean some sites getting a lot of the “wrong” traffic which could create a higher bounce rate, bandwidth issues, etc.

We are watching our clients’ analytics to see any changes. Already we have noted an increase in shorter searches for one client with a good deal of traffic.
My guess is that users are now typing in the first part of their search and since the company’s website is showing up immediately below they aren’t finishing the query.
I have to wonder how much shorter search queries will get. They have been rising in length pretty steadily for the last 10 years or so. Here’s some stats from 2009.

As technology gets faster and faster we need to question when will it max out the fixed capacity of the human mind. Faster is not always better. The mind only works so fast, Google Instant could soon be faster and that might not be the best thing for the user who is, after all, only human.

If your business has a physical location where customers can walk in and conduct transactions, you probably already know about the power of Google Local. But April 20th brought the switch from Google Local to Google Places. What does it mean for your business?

If you are doing everything correctly, probably everything will continue to work as normal. But what if you have never really completely implemented your local search optimization? How do you know if you require professional Local SEO Services?

Here is a checklist to make sure your local customers can find you:

step 1 – Search for your service. Most services will show local results complete with map and other important information. If you are not there you might need professional local search services.

step 2 – Search for your competitors. If they appear ahead of you, then you are losing business. Small Box SEO can definitely help with that.

step 3 – Assess your PPC. If you are spending money each month for clicks, and not converting those clicks to paying customers, then Small Box can improve your results, or help you replace that traffic with better converting organic results.

step 4 – Search for your company on a mobile device. Mobile technology is driving business. If mobile devices are sending people to the wrong location, then you have lost a customer. Small Box executes your local strategy completely, with zero problems for you.

step 5 – Understand your audience by viewing your statistics. Your audience is telling you important things about your site. Are you listening?

It makes a lot of sense for any business to try and manage as much as possible in house. But when it comes to connecting locally in your community, why leave loose ends? The businesses that have 100 % of their profile complete are going to win the battle for Local SEO.

Don’t take chances, Contact Small Box in Austin at 512-850-4819 or Indianapolis at 317-254-0932.