Google released version 6.0.1 of AdWords Editor. In response to user feedback, it's now possible to download performance statistics for selected campaigns and ad groups, instead of always downloading statistics for the whole account. Once you've installed version 6.0.1, you'll be able to download selected statistics by following these instructions.
Unlike last release, this update won't affect your comments or unposted changes.
As a result:
- You don't need to export an archive of your account. In the auto-update prompt, choose the 'Update without Backup' option.
- After you upgrade, your account will already be in the new version. You won't need to download your account again.
If you're already using AdWords Editor, you'll be prompted to upgrade automatically. You can also visit this website and click 'Download AdWords Editor.'
For more information about AdWords Editor, visit the Help Center.
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
July 18, 2008
December 25, 2007
Google Secret Site
This is one of the best kept secrets of Google. It's a mystery on Webmasterworld. Also in Europe (France) they don't know what to expect from that odd URL http://eval.google.com. Click it and you get ...nothing. The site reveals itself only if you have the proper login and if you use a network known by Google. Residues of Eval.google are found on the web, but the full content of the mystery site has never been published before. Here it is: the real story about Eval.Google. They use... humans! Welcome to the first entry in Search Bistro.
It's a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet.
I call it Google's Secret Evaluation Lab, but the real title is less adventurous; 'Rater Hub Google'. The coming days I will reveal all I know about this lab - must find the time first to do so. To keep you busy, here's a Flash-movie from a part of the site. Stay tuned, next posting will be tomorrow.
Here's one way how Google recruits testers:
QUALITY RATER - (SPANISH, DUTCH, ITALIAN, FRENCH) This is a temporary role offered through Kelly Services. Google Inc. is recruiting part-time, temporary, home-based workers to help with work on a search quality evaluation on a project basis. You would work at your own pace, and the time and length of any particular work session would be up to you. Candidates will evaluate search results and rate their relevance. Thus, all candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests. Specific areas of expertise are highly desirable. We are looking for smart people who read voraciously and have a wide variety of interests. Raters should have all the following qualifications: Native-level fluency in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or French In-depth, up-to-date familiarity with the web culture of at least one predominantly Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or French-speaking country. Excellent web research skills and analytical abilities. A high-speed internet connection. Legal eligibility to work in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain or France. Moderate ability to read and write in English. Perfect English is not necessary; however, you must be able to read and write English well enough to use software with an English interface, understand fairly complicated instructions written in English, and make yourself understood in informal written communication. The job involves frequent written communication with fellow Quality Raters. For immediate consideration, please send an ENGLISH text (ASCII) or HTML version of your resume to monsterjobs@google.com Important: The subject field of your email must include Quality Rater - TEMPORARY.
See Monsterboard
October 25, 2007
GMail shakes IMAP
Google has slipped IMAP support into its GMail service, allowing users to manage their mail on the server and access it using different clients, with the status of their messages maintained.
IMAP is a vast improvement over POP3 - the more popular protocol for collecting email - though it seems GMail will continue to support both. The feature was reported by DownloadSquad, which says not all users have access to the functionality yet, though it is spreading.Users can try logging off and reconnecting, or use the newly available help pages.
The POP3 user connects to the server, downloads their mail, and disconnects. Once they've downloaded their mail they can sort it into directories and see which messages they've read, or not. IMAP provides that same functionality, but on the server, so the user can create folders for their mail, read messages, and see the messages they've sent from any IMAP client.
Readers with long memories might recall using IMAP 10 years ago, when Netscape started supporting the protocol, and being delighted to see all their mail from anywhere without mucking about with synchronisation protocols or carrying a laptop around. But IMAP suffers from two drawbacks which have, until now, limited its deployment.
With IMAP all email is stored on the server, including sent mail, which can easily add up to several GB of data that ISPs (who used to run mail servers in the days before Hotmail) didn't want clogging up their servers. The other problem is that IMAP requires the user to remain connected, which back in the days of dial-up internet wasn't easy to arrange, but now is much less of a challenge.So the clients and servers have supported IMAP for decades, and the space and connectivity have finally caught up with the protocol.
IMAP is a vast improvement over POP3 - the more popular protocol for collecting email - though it seems GMail will continue to support both. The feature was reported by DownloadSquad, which says not all users have access to the functionality yet, though it is spreading.Users can try logging off and reconnecting, or use the newly available help pages.
The POP3 user connects to the server, downloads their mail, and disconnects. Once they've downloaded their mail they can sort it into directories and see which messages they've read, or not. IMAP provides that same functionality, but on the server, so the user can create folders for their mail, read messages, and see the messages they've sent from any IMAP client.
Readers with long memories might recall using IMAP 10 years ago, when Netscape started supporting the protocol, and being delighted to see all their mail from anywhere without mucking about with synchronisation protocols or carrying a laptop around. But IMAP suffers from two drawbacks which have, until now, limited its deployment.
With IMAP all email is stored on the server, including sent mail, which can easily add up to several GB of data that ISPs (who used to run mail servers in the days before Hotmail) didn't want clogging up their servers. The other problem is that IMAP requires the user to remain connected, which back in the days of dial-up internet wasn't easy to arrange, but now is much less of a challenge.So the clients and servers have supported IMAP for decades, and the space and connectivity have finally caught up with the protocol.
iGoogle Now in 42 Languages
Earlier this week, iGoogle launched in 13 new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 42 and the total number of country domains supported to over 70. For those of you who don't know, iGoogle is a personalized version of the Google homepage that lets you select the content that matters to you most from across the web and arrange it in a way that you find useful and fun. People rely on iGoogle to save time by putting all the information and services they need in one place. They also use it to discover new content through the iGoogle gadget directory.
With this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language, which is really exciting for us. We're particularly curious to see what iGoogle ends up looking like in these new languages.
If you're a developer who speaks one of the languages below, now is a great opportunity to get your cool gadget idea out to a fresh audience. For more information, visit our Gadget APIs page. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next 'Tu Nombre en Japonés.'
With this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language, which is really exciting for us. We're particularly curious to see what iGoogle ends up looking like in these new languages.
If you're a developer who speaks one of the languages below, now is a great opportunity to get your cool gadget idea out to a fresh audience. For more information, visit our Gadget APIs page. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next 'Tu Nombre en Japonés.'
October 16, 2007
Google Released Video Filtering System
Google released a long-promised video filtering system Monday that is designed to give owners of copyrighted videos more control over whether their material appears on YouTube.As YouTube's popularity has soared, large media companies have grown increasingly frustrated by the prevalence of pirated content on the video-sharing site. Last March, Viacom, which owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, sued Google, which owns YouTube, for massive copyright infringement and demanded $1 billion in damages.
For months, Google has responded to complaints by media companies that it is working to create state-of-the-art technology to filter copyrighted videos.
Media companies have argued that existing technologies were already working to filter out pirated content on other video-sharing sites.
Google had been using technology provided by Audible Magic of Los Gatos to identify copyrighted music.
Dubbed "YouTube Video ID," the system creates an abstract image of copyrighted videos and compares that to similar images that are extracted from videos uploaded to YouTube.
While the filtering system began operating in test mode on Monday, the average YouTube user is unlikely to notice anything different - at least in the near future.
That is because Google needs copyright owners to submit copies of their material to the Google database.
Copyright owners who give Google copies their content will have the choice of blocking content if it is uploaded without their consent or choosing to leave it on YouTube for promotional purposes. In that case, they will have the opportunity to make money from advertising provided by Gogole.Google Wins In Blind Search Test
In a blind "taste test" searchers chose Google, then Microsoft and Yahoo.That's according to the results of a poll created last week by the Google Operating System blog. Participants could try out three unidentified search engines and vote which had the best results. The results are in and 51 percent of the more than 2,000 people who voted said Google had the best results. That was followed by 35 percent for Live Search and 30 percent for Yahoo. In comments to the blog post people said they were surprised Microsoft was ahead of Yahoo, but also surprised Google's percentage wasn't higher.Interestingly, some of the most frequent queries included "Google," "Microsoft," "sex," "cow" and "Liverpool."
September 11, 2007
Google News Now With Comments
Google News now have a new feature that, while promising, is sure to be controversial. Google plans to roll it out globally once they iron out the kinks.Any person mentioned in a news story that Google News indexes can email in their comments to news-comments@google.com. Those who do so will be asked to verify their identity and organizational affiliation. There's more in the Google FAQ here and here.
Once Google approves the comments, they are posted and are attached to the story as an addendum, as you can see from the image above or live on the web here. It's unclear if these comments will also roll up into Google Universal Search results.
This is certainly a boon for PR professionals who have longed for a way to respond to what is largely an automated system. Wikipedia needs a similar mechanism. Google is also fairly liberal in the sources it aggregates. It includes lots of homegrown sites and blogs. This approach, while managed manually, certainly gives companies and subjects a voice on a critical site that is increasingly a big gateway for lots of news/blog content.
July 1, 2007
Google Translate Now With Dictionary
If you ever wanted to translate a single word into or from another language now you can use Google Translate to get their definition/translation and several examples of it used in a sentence. For individual word translations, this method is better than typing in a single word into the translate box, you get a better answer, and some useful usage samples.The new feature currently only works for French, German, Italian and Korean to and from English.Several weeks ago, Google also gave us the ability to search the “foreign web” in a three staged approach. First Google translates our search terms into the target language, then it queries Google for results with that translation, and finally it displays the results translated back into a language understood by the user.
Google Expands PayPer Action for Google AdWords
Google announced the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Since the initial launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta in March 2007, many advertisers who have used the new pricing model are pleased with the opportunity to have more ways to promote their products and services online.
From now,advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis.
Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense for content sites. Publishers in the Google content network who want greater control over the ads shown on their sites may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site's content. These publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against CPC or CPM-based ads, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units.
From now,advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis.
Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense for content sites. Publishers in the Google content network who want greater control over the ads shown on their sites may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site's content. These publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against CPC or CPM-based ads, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units.
June 13, 2007
EU welcomes Google offer on privacy
Internet search leader Google Inc. had offered to cut the time it retains data on user searches from the current 24 months to 18 months amid growing concerns it could be violating EU privacy rules.The EU justice and home affairs commissioner welcomed a letter sent by Google officials to an independent EU data protection panel earlier this week in which the company said it would raise its data privacy standards for all users.Google said the company "is committed to raising the bar on our own privacy practices for the benefit of Google users."Google relies on its cookies and user logs to compile information of the search terms entered into specific Web browsers as well as other potentially sensitive online information. The company says the data help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.The 28-member data protection panel, which advises the European Commission and EU governments on data protection issues, had demanded Google answer concerns about the company's practice of storing and retaining user information for up to two years.
London-based Privacy International last week rated Google the worst among the Internet's top destinations on privacy.The watchdog said it was particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.
London-based Privacy International last week rated Google the worst among the Internet's top destinations on privacy.The watchdog said it was particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.
June 8, 2007
Google Gears
Google has launched an open source browser extension for IE and Firefox called Google Gears that enables web applications to be available offline.After you install the extension, every Gears-enabled web application will ask your permission before storing data offline.Depending on the functionality implemented in the application, Google Gears caches resource files so they're available offline, stores data in a SQLite database that has powerful search features and synchronizes data in the background.
Google Gears will enable you to read the most recent messages from Gmail while offline or to edit your documents in Google Docs even without a network connection.
Google Reader is the first Google application powered by Gears. To enter the offline mode, just click on the small arrow and all the recent feed items are downloaded to your computer. You can disconnect from the Internet or click on "work offline" in your browser and you will still be able to read your favorite feeds in Google Reader. Like in any feed reader installed on your computer. Well, almost, because Google Reader doesn't download images or other multimedia files embedded in the posts.
Google Gears will enable you to read the most recent messages from Gmail while offline or to edit your documents in Google Docs even without a network connection.
Google Reader is the first Google application powered by Gears. To enter the offline mode, just click on the small arrow and all the recent feed items are downloaded to your computer. You can disconnect from the Internet or click on "work offline" in your browser and you will still be able to read your favorite feeds in Google Reader. Like in any feed reader installed on your computer. Well, almost, because Google Reader doesn't download images or other multimedia files embedded in the posts.
May 24, 2007
Make Money With Google Earth
Google Earth team introduced a new survey for the downloadable application that will require the users' answers to improve the program.The "User Experience Research" is quite a short form because it asks only a few questions, most of them being related to the Google Earth features.The most interesting aspect of the survey is that you can get paid as the search giant is offering a certain amount of money for certain feedback formsThe will pay $75 for each time you spend with Google researcher!
The survey asks participants questions related to the frequency of using Google Earth as well as the most used features of the downloadable application.For example, you're required to mention if you're currently using the directions feature, the layers, the placemarks or the polygons.A few days ago, the Mountain View company introduced a Blogger research that was paying also $75 per user.
For more information read the FAQ.
The survey asks participants questions related to the frequency of using Google Earth as well as the most used features of the downloadable application.For example, you're required to mention if you're currently using the directions feature, the layers, the placemarks or the polygons.A few days ago, the Mountain View company introduced a Blogger research that was paying also $75 per user.
For more information read the FAQ.
May 20, 2007
Google Universal Search
I was reading today that Google announced a new search called universal.This model will offer users a more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online. The company also introduced an updated homepage design and several new navigation features that make it faster and easier for users to find the information they are looking for.The new navigation elements include contextual navigation links above the search results that help users "drill down" to specific types of information. For instance, developers who search for [python] will see links for "web," "blogs," "books," "groups," and "code," whereas [downtown los angeles] will show a different set of links. Also, in terms of integration and navigation,they introduced a new universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to provide easier navigation to Google products, such as Gmail.
April 25, 2007
Google Knows Everything About You
Wow!I found this article and I was shocked reading it,although I knew all these!You will see that Google knows almost everything about you,including your name and address!And here is what would happen if Google was evil!Oh man,I think I'm going to uninstall all toolbars,accelerators etc!
It's so scary,don't you think?We give them the right to them to have all that information about us and we don't even care or ask questions!
It's so scary,don't you think?We give them the right to them to have all that information about us and we don't even care or ask questions!
April 19, 2007
Google Testing Content Filter
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt told attendees at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas Monday that the new filtering system will be ready to go to work within weeks, Variety reported Tuesday. Schmidt said that with the new technology, which he called "claim your content," any legitimate copyright holder can register videos they made. Then any copies uploaded onto YouTube, which Google owns, will be filtered out. Schmidt also used the forum to criticize Viacom's litigious ways. California-based search engine giant Google and several partners are testing a content filtering system to help keep copyrighted videos off YouTube.
Presentations To Web Based Tools By Google
Speaking at Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, announced a new addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Presentations, a Web based alternative to MS PowerPoint. According to Google’s blog the new service will be based on the technology developed by Tonic System, a company Google acquired.
The launch date of Presentations is set for the summer and at Web 2.0, Eric Schmidt used a beta version of this new app to present his slides.
Even Google Presentations may be considered a direct competitor of MS Powerpoint, Eric Schmidt said the two products are not competing.Erich Schmidt didn’t provide any details about Presentations or its capabilities, but product manager Rajen Sheth said for AP that users would be able to store documents online and let anyone with a free Google account view the slides.
In February, Google Apps has taken the step forward from a non-commercial application, geared towards individual users, to a business software package: Google Apps Premier Edition, which is being offered primarily to small and medium businesses for an annual fee of $50. Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006. It includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail (where you can store not only emails, but chat history and even files from your desktop, with the help of a Mozilla plug-in), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk, which is an instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.
Google Apps Premier Edition offers over its free precursor 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues, advertising is optional, and the cost is $50 per user account per year.
The launch date of Presentations is set for the summer and at Web 2.0, Eric Schmidt used a beta version of this new app to present his slides.
Even Google Presentations may be considered a direct competitor of MS Powerpoint, Eric Schmidt said the two products are not competing.Erich Schmidt didn’t provide any details about Presentations or its capabilities, but product manager Rajen Sheth said for AP that users would be able to store documents online and let anyone with a free Google account view the slides.
In February, Google Apps has taken the step forward from a non-commercial application, geared towards individual users, to a business software package: Google Apps Premier Edition, which is being offered primarily to small and medium businesses for an annual fee of $50. Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006. It includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail (where you can store not only emails, but chat history and even files from your desktop, with the help of a Mozilla plug-in), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk, which is an instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.
Google Apps Premier Edition offers over its free precursor 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues, advertising is optional, and the cost is $50 per user account per year.
November 22, 2006
About Google
Google “…is big. Really Big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” (excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Google is the most powerful information resource humans have ever constructed. The power of any major search tool boggles the mind but considering the vastness of Google’s complex simplicity can truly hurt one’s brain. With over 8-billion references in its rapidly growing, organically generated index, Google sets the standards other search engines follow. Benefiting from a three year reign as the undisputed leader of search, Google has had a very good year and looks poised to make 2005 an even better year.
In 2004, Google introduced more new and improved applications for its users than any other tech company, posted one of the most successful IPO’s in business history in a most unorthodox Dutch-Auction format, and met or exceeded any challenges its rivals threw at.
Google is no longer just a search engine, it is an advertising machine. Drawing about 90% of its revenues from paid advertising and contextual ad-delivery, Google has had two major focuses this quarter. The first is increasing the number of places paid-advertising might show up. The second is to develop new products and features that will retain current user loyalty and win new users from the other search firms. Both initiatives rely heavily on Google’s reputation for delivering fast, free and relevant search results. Google has the world’s largest database of indexed websites and it acquires site information through its spider GoogleBot.
GoogleBot is probably the most well-known spider working the web today. It is also likely among the most analyzed applications ever written. On one level, GoogleBot is quite simple and can be depended on to act in a very specific manner. GoogleBot lives to follow links. GoogleBot will often chase down a link-path until it can no longer work its way deeper into a site. It will also work its way through any site linked to from any other site. Google finds the majority of new sites in its index by following links from established sites. If a link exists, Google will (A) find it, (B) follow it, (C ), record every bit of information it can possibly record, and (D) weigh that information against a fairly rigid algorithm to determine the perceived topic or theme of a site for future reference. If a site in Google’s index is modified or changes, Google will re-spider the site as quickly as it possibly can.
GoogleBot’s mission is to create a snap-shot of the World Wide Web and store it across Google’s network of data centers around the world. When you reference information from Google, the results you see reflect Google’s most recent snap-shot of the web. Parts of that snap-shot might be hours or even weeks old but overall the index is updating itself every minute of every day, 24/7. The fastest way to see exactly what Google views as the most recent version of your site is to click on the “Cached” link generally below the main link-reference Google displays for your site.
How GoogleBot behaves as it acquires sites is one thing. What Google does with the information its bot gathers is another thing. Google’s method of ranking websites is extremely (and increasingly) complex. To understand how Google works today, a brief (and over simplified) explanation of the principle of PageRank is in order.
Google was originally developed as a means of finding information in research documents at Stanford University where its inventors Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as grad students. PageRank was developed as the basic sorting algorithm for their search tool (then known as Backrub) and was based on a very simple concept, trust.
Page and Brin understood that documents on the Internet could be linked together. They speculated that if someone took the time to code a link (by hand in those days) to another document there was likely a relevance between the two documents. Why else would one researcher link to another researcher’s work? Simply put, the more incoming links a particular document has, the better it would rank when sorted by PageRank. Given the environment in which it was developed, Google’s genesis proved to be the perfect tool for intelligent users. Tranfering that simplicity from a dorm room at Stanford to practically every living room and office space on Earth has been a great challenge for Google’s engineers. While it is still somewhat based on the original, “democratic” nature of PageRank, Google’s sorting algorithm has become infinitely more complicated.
Google continues to weigh the number of links directed towards a site as positive indicators that there is relevant information to be found there. Since links are the veins and arteries of the web, links continue to be the most important factor influencing Google’s perception of the relevance of a website. As the Google index has grown so rapidly over the past six years, and search engine marketers have learned how to use Google’s behaviours to influence rankings, Google weighs several other factors when considering the relevance of a site but the core of the algorithm remains rooted in PageRank.
Not all Links are Created Equal
Back in the good old days, seven or eight years ago at Stanford, one link could represent one positive vote. As marketers learned to manipulate links, Google learned to apply different standards and measures when looking at those links and the content of sites in its index. Today, Google considers different links in different ways. As a matter of interest, our recent studies show that Google displays less back-links for sites than any other search engine, leading us to conclude that Google has become much stricter about how it views and values incoming links.
Google looks at a number of factors when determining the value of a link. Where the link originates from is as important as where the link is directed in Google’s eyes. Google, like its rivals, is trying to find relationships between documents aside from obvious keywords. Google has the ability to fundamentally understand documents in its index and determine the topic, theme or context of those documents. This is an important measure as Google is becoming increasingly strict about link-relevance. To receive a highly positive response from Google, the pages or sites linked together must somehow relate to each other in topic as well as by sharing similar keywords. An excellent example would be in regional tourism.
A local tourism bureau will almost certainly have a website. That site will link to the sites of member-clients in its region. Each of those sites represent businesses dependent on regional tourism, thus establishing relevance between the sites. The tourism bureau becomes the “hub” from which Google follows links to other, topically related websites. In this way, the Hub site becomes a highly positive link-reference in Google’s eyes.
The very best links, in Google’s eyes, come from “authority sites”. An authority site is one that is very well established and respected such as mainstream news sites (CNN, TIME, NYTimes, etc…) other search directories, industrial leaders (Macromedia, HP, Pitney Bowes, Nike, etc…), and other highly credible sources such as the regional tourism bureau mentioned above. While a website doesn’t necessarily have to represent a large corporation to be considered an authority site, the sheer number of pages and references, combined with high visitor numbers generally associated with large corporate sites helps. Some personal Blogs, smaller companies and alternative news sources/blogs have also enjoyed “authority” status. This status is, in some ways, flexible and situational. A link from the tourism bureau mentioned above will not tend to help a business outside of its region unless a tangible relevancy factor is somehow introduced.
In practical terms, the “authority” status of a website is irrelevant for SEOs as the vast majority of sites in Google’s index are just regular, run of the mill websites run by regular, run of the mill folks like us. Small businesses, researchers, governments, NGOs, musicians, artists, families, hobbyists and others write websites to offer the world access to their information. 99.999999% of these sites contain links of some sort or another and the vast majority of those links lead to topically relevant documents. While not “authority” sites, Google still considers these links extremely important when sorting and ranking sites. Again, the stress is on topical relevancy as Google places enormous value in good, solid links.
Google does not live on links alone
Much as been written in this article and thousands of others about Google and links. If links were the only factor Google looks at, the SEO business would not exist and Google’s index would be as off-kilter as a Batman set. As stated in previous paragraphs, Google has the ability to read sites and understand what it is reading. Google is able to reference a world of information when figuring out the context of text used in Titles, Meta Tags, Body Text and Anchor Links. Since we know that Google is actually reading and comprehending content, we need to place specific content in places we know GoogleBot likes to look for it. Writing and placing this information is where SEO becomes an artful science that stems from simple common sense. Think about what Google knows about your website before it even visits.
It finds your site by following links. Therefore it “assumes” your site is topically relevant to the site it acquired the link to your site from. Google knows the address of the site, the URL. It also knows what anchor text the original linking site used when phrasing the link to your website. Keyword enrichment of both elements is beneficial with Google. In other words, if you can, use a target keyword phrase in the URL of your site, and request that others linking to your site use your target keyword phrases as the anchor text of links directed to your site.
Once Google hits your site, it learns a lot more very quickly. It sees the title, tags, text and links, and records these elements as it moves through the site. These are the basic elements SEOs examine and modify when working on your site.
The first thing GoogleBot sees is the title of the site. Keyword enriched titles are very useful but webmasters are cautioned to be very conservative in the number of keywords or phrases they place in the title of a page. We generally use two or three keyword phrases when writing titles. Page titles should be page specific with keywords focused on the topic of the page. The second (or third) keyword set in the title is used to provide an overall context to the site. For example, Overloading the title with keywords is useless and may be considered spam in extreme cases.
Next, Google looks at the meta tags. Unless you wish to exclude Google from sections of your site, there are only two really important meta tags, the description and the keywords tags. Of these two, the description is the most important. Google uses the description tag as a topical reference and may draw from the description tag when generating the two to three sentence site description shown under links in the SERPs. As with titles, each page should have a page specific description tag that outlines the topic of that page and the theme of the overall site. The keywords tag is of much lesser importance but is still considered to carry minor weight. Mentioning keywords that might be associated with your website, including common misspellings doesn’t hurt. Packing the keywords tag with dozens of mentions of the same word, or using keywords that do not relate to your website might. We still use the keyword tag on client sites and still use page-specific keyword tags.
After the meta tags, Google looks at page content or body text. Again, relevance is extremely important. The Internet is a very big place and Google’s index is pretty big itself. Finding documents in an 8-billion page universe requires precision. Webmasters can help themselves by simply addressing one topic or issue per page. Google is extremely intelligent and intuitive, but even the smartest robots get confused. Keeping it simple for GoogeBot makes good ranking much simpler to achieve for your site. As Google reads information from left to right in columns, like we read a newspaper, placing your keyword phrases early in the body text of pages in your site is very beneficial. Well written sentences that are topically focused are the best spider food for Google as it has become wary of words that “float” on a page without supporting words to provide context.
Lastly, GoogleBot comes back to links. GoogleBot moves through your website following links you place there. It reads the text that phrases the links to determine what it might find when it gets to the next page. For example, the second page in most websites is the “About Us” page. Billions of websites use “About Us” as the anchor text linking the index page to the about us page. A better link would read About “Blue Widgets Inc.” as the keyword phrase Blue Widgets is used as the anchor text from one page to the next. Keyword enrichment of anchor text also effects Google’s perception of external links . Going back to our tourism bureau example, a link to a local bed and breakfast might read “Humboldt House” Bed and Breakfast or it might read Humboldt House “Victoria – Bed and Breakfast”. The anchor text used in the second example would be far more beneficial than the first.
Remember, links provide the pathway for GoogleBot and other spiders. A final element that should be included on all pages is a text-based sitemap that links to all pages in the site and is linked to from the Home or INDEX page.
In a nutshell, that’s how GoogleBot examines a site. Here is a quick rundown of which elements GoogleBot is looking for:
*Relevant Incoming Links
*Good URLs that are not too spammy
*Easy to follow link paths including a sitemap
*Keyword enriched titles
*Well written Description Meta Tag
*Well written Keywords Meta Tag (less important than Description)
*Topically focused Body Text
*Keyword Enriched Anchor Text
*NO SPAM
Google is the most powerful information resource humans have ever constructed. The power of any major search tool boggles the mind but considering the vastness of Google’s complex simplicity can truly hurt one’s brain. With over 8-billion references in its rapidly growing, organically generated index, Google sets the standards other search engines follow. Benefiting from a three year reign as the undisputed leader of search, Google has had a very good year and looks poised to make 2005 an even better year.
In 2004, Google introduced more new and improved applications for its users than any other tech company, posted one of the most successful IPO’s in business history in a most unorthodox Dutch-Auction format, and met or exceeded any challenges its rivals threw at.
Google is no longer just a search engine, it is an advertising machine. Drawing about 90% of its revenues from paid advertising and contextual ad-delivery, Google has had two major focuses this quarter. The first is increasing the number of places paid-advertising might show up. The second is to develop new products and features that will retain current user loyalty and win new users from the other search firms. Both initiatives rely heavily on Google’s reputation for delivering fast, free and relevant search results. Google has the world’s largest database of indexed websites and it acquires site information through its spider GoogleBot.
GoogleBot is probably the most well-known spider working the web today. It is also likely among the most analyzed applications ever written. On one level, GoogleBot is quite simple and can be depended on to act in a very specific manner. GoogleBot lives to follow links. GoogleBot will often chase down a link-path until it can no longer work its way deeper into a site. It will also work its way through any site linked to from any other site. Google finds the majority of new sites in its index by following links from established sites. If a link exists, Google will (A) find it, (B) follow it, (C ), record every bit of information it can possibly record, and (D) weigh that information against a fairly rigid algorithm to determine the perceived topic or theme of a site for future reference. If a site in Google’s index is modified or changes, Google will re-spider the site as quickly as it possibly can.
GoogleBot’s mission is to create a snap-shot of the World Wide Web and store it across Google’s network of data centers around the world. When you reference information from Google, the results you see reflect Google’s most recent snap-shot of the web. Parts of that snap-shot might be hours or even weeks old but overall the index is updating itself every minute of every day, 24/7. The fastest way to see exactly what Google views as the most recent version of your site is to click on the “Cached” link generally below the main link-reference Google displays for your site.
How GoogleBot behaves as it acquires sites is one thing. What Google does with the information its bot gathers is another thing. Google’s method of ranking websites is extremely (and increasingly) complex. To understand how Google works today, a brief (and over simplified) explanation of the principle of PageRank is in order.
Google was originally developed as a means of finding information in research documents at Stanford University where its inventors Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as grad students. PageRank was developed as the basic sorting algorithm for their search tool (then known as Backrub) and was based on a very simple concept, trust.
Page and Brin understood that documents on the Internet could be linked together. They speculated that if someone took the time to code a link (by hand in those days) to another document there was likely a relevance between the two documents. Why else would one researcher link to another researcher’s work? Simply put, the more incoming links a particular document has, the better it would rank when sorted by PageRank. Given the environment in which it was developed, Google’s genesis proved to be the perfect tool for intelligent users. Tranfering that simplicity from a dorm room at Stanford to practically every living room and office space on Earth has been a great challenge for Google’s engineers. While it is still somewhat based on the original, “democratic” nature of PageRank, Google’s sorting algorithm has become infinitely more complicated.
Google continues to weigh the number of links directed towards a site as positive indicators that there is relevant information to be found there. Since links are the veins and arteries of the web, links continue to be the most important factor influencing Google’s perception of the relevance of a website. As the Google index has grown so rapidly over the past six years, and search engine marketers have learned how to use Google’s behaviours to influence rankings, Google weighs several other factors when considering the relevance of a site but the core of the algorithm remains rooted in PageRank.
Not all Links are Created Equal
Back in the good old days, seven or eight years ago at Stanford, one link could represent one positive vote. As marketers learned to manipulate links, Google learned to apply different standards and measures when looking at those links and the content of sites in its index. Today, Google considers different links in different ways. As a matter of interest, our recent studies show that Google displays less back-links for sites than any other search engine, leading us to conclude that Google has become much stricter about how it views and values incoming links.
Google looks at a number of factors when determining the value of a link. Where the link originates from is as important as where the link is directed in Google’s eyes. Google, like its rivals, is trying to find relationships between documents aside from obvious keywords. Google has the ability to fundamentally understand documents in its index and determine the topic, theme or context of those documents. This is an important measure as Google is becoming increasingly strict about link-relevance. To receive a highly positive response from Google, the pages or sites linked together must somehow relate to each other in topic as well as by sharing similar keywords. An excellent example would be in regional tourism.
A local tourism bureau will almost certainly have a website. That site will link to the sites of member-clients in its region. Each of those sites represent businesses dependent on regional tourism, thus establishing relevance between the sites. The tourism bureau becomes the “hub” from which Google follows links to other, topically related websites. In this way, the Hub site becomes a highly positive link-reference in Google’s eyes.
The very best links, in Google’s eyes, come from “authority sites”. An authority site is one that is very well established and respected such as mainstream news sites (CNN, TIME, NYTimes, etc…) other search directories, industrial leaders (Macromedia, HP, Pitney Bowes, Nike, etc…), and other highly credible sources such as the regional tourism bureau mentioned above. While a website doesn’t necessarily have to represent a large corporation to be considered an authority site, the sheer number of pages and references, combined with high visitor numbers generally associated with large corporate sites helps. Some personal Blogs, smaller companies and alternative news sources/blogs have also enjoyed “authority” status. This status is, in some ways, flexible and situational. A link from the tourism bureau mentioned above will not tend to help a business outside of its region unless a tangible relevancy factor is somehow introduced.
In practical terms, the “authority” status of a website is irrelevant for SEOs as the vast majority of sites in Google’s index are just regular, run of the mill websites run by regular, run of the mill folks like us. Small businesses, researchers, governments, NGOs, musicians, artists, families, hobbyists and others write websites to offer the world access to their information. 99.999999% of these sites contain links of some sort or another and the vast majority of those links lead to topically relevant documents. While not “authority” sites, Google still considers these links extremely important when sorting and ranking sites. Again, the stress is on topical relevancy as Google places enormous value in good, solid links.
Google does not live on links alone
Much as been written in this article and thousands of others about Google and links. If links were the only factor Google looks at, the SEO business would not exist and Google’s index would be as off-kilter as a Batman set. As stated in previous paragraphs, Google has the ability to read sites and understand what it is reading. Google is able to reference a world of information when figuring out the context of text used in Titles, Meta Tags, Body Text and Anchor Links. Since we know that Google is actually reading and comprehending content, we need to place specific content in places we know GoogleBot likes to look for it. Writing and placing this information is where SEO becomes an artful science that stems from simple common sense. Think about what Google knows about your website before it even visits.
It finds your site by following links. Therefore it “assumes” your site is topically relevant to the site it acquired the link to your site from. Google knows the address of the site, the URL. It also knows what anchor text the original linking site used when phrasing the link to your website. Keyword enrichment of both elements is beneficial with Google. In other words, if you can, use a target keyword phrase in the URL of your site, and request that others linking to your site use your target keyword phrases as the anchor text of links directed to your site.
Once Google hits your site, it learns a lot more very quickly. It sees the title, tags, text and links, and records these elements as it moves through the site. These are the basic elements SEOs examine and modify when working on your site.
The first thing GoogleBot sees is the title of the site. Keyword enriched titles are very useful but webmasters are cautioned to be very conservative in the number of keywords or phrases they place in the title of a page. We generally use two or three keyword phrases when writing titles. Page titles should be page specific with keywords focused on the topic of the page. The second (or third) keyword set in the title is used to provide an overall context to the site. For example, Overloading the title with keywords is useless and may be considered spam in extreme cases.
Next, Google looks at the meta tags. Unless you wish to exclude Google from sections of your site, there are only two really important meta tags, the description and the keywords tags. Of these two, the description is the most important. Google uses the description tag as a topical reference and may draw from the description tag when generating the two to three sentence site description shown under links in the SERPs. As with titles, each page should have a page specific description tag that outlines the topic of that page and the theme of the overall site. The keywords tag is of much lesser importance but is still considered to carry minor weight. Mentioning keywords that might be associated with your website, including common misspellings doesn’t hurt. Packing the keywords tag with dozens of mentions of the same word, or using keywords that do not relate to your website might. We still use the keyword tag on client sites and still use page-specific keyword tags.
After the meta tags, Google looks at page content or body text. Again, relevance is extremely important. The Internet is a very big place and Google’s index is pretty big itself. Finding documents in an 8-billion page universe requires precision. Webmasters can help themselves by simply addressing one topic or issue per page. Google is extremely intelligent and intuitive, but even the smartest robots get confused. Keeping it simple for GoogeBot makes good ranking much simpler to achieve for your site. As Google reads information from left to right in columns, like we read a newspaper, placing your keyword phrases early in the body text of pages in your site is very beneficial. Well written sentences that are topically focused are the best spider food for Google as it has become wary of words that “float” on a page without supporting words to provide context.
Lastly, GoogleBot comes back to links. GoogleBot moves through your website following links you place there. It reads the text that phrases the links to determine what it might find when it gets to the next page. For example, the second page in most websites is the “About Us” page. Billions of websites use “About Us” as the anchor text linking the index page to the about us page. A better link would read About “Blue Widgets Inc.” as the keyword phrase Blue Widgets is used as the anchor text from one page to the next. Keyword enrichment of anchor text also effects Google’s perception of external links . Going back to our tourism bureau example, a link to a local bed and breakfast might read “Humboldt House” Bed and Breakfast or it might read Humboldt House “Victoria – Bed and Breakfast”. The anchor text used in the second example would be far more beneficial than the first.
Remember, links provide the pathway for GoogleBot and other spiders. A final element that should be included on all pages is a text-based sitemap that links to all pages in the site and is linked to from the Home or INDEX page.
In a nutshell, that’s how GoogleBot examines a site. Here is a quick rundown of which elements GoogleBot is looking for:
*Relevant Incoming Links
*Good URLs that are not too spammy
*Easy to follow link paths including a sitemap
*Keyword enriched titles
*Well written Description Meta Tag
*Well written Keywords Meta Tag (less important than Description)
*Topically focused Body Text
*Keyword Enriched Anchor Text
*NO SPAM
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