Archive for the 'Google News' Category
Does the text color of your link matter? According to a Google patent granted a little while back it just might! You can view the document yourself here.
But let’s spend a little time with claim 18,
The one or more server devices of claim 16, where the data associated with the features of the one of the links includes at least two of: the font size of anchor text associated with the link, the position of the link within a source document, the position of the link in a list, the font color associated with the link, the attributes of the link, the number of words in the anchor text associated with the link, the actual words in the anchor text associated with the link, the determination of commerciality of the anchor text associated with the link, the type of the link, the context of words before or after the link, the topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated, whether the link leads to a target document on a same host or domain, or whether an address associated with the link embeds another address.
This claim gives us a lot of good information on how text links might be valued but by color? It might have something to do with detecting hidden text (for instance if the color of text matches the background color a flag is raised or the link is discounted), but I would bet some serious money it is just a matter of time till we see some quack SEO’s offering Bill and Jimmy’s Rainbow Color Link Building Service, claiming that they will garner you hundreds of blue, green and yellow links for $xxx a month. Guaranteed to get you to the number one spot or your choice of a full refund or a case of multi-colored lollipops!
I have the strangest Adsense bug happening and I am finding it very hard to contact Google customer support. When I look at the three month view of my Adsense balance I get one number and when I look at the twelve month view I get a much different balance.
I am all for putting your best foot forward, after all that is what SEO is all about but it seems Google has used some very creative accounting in making claims about how much it contributes to the US economy.
They (Google) claim that in the US they “generated $54 billion of economic value in 2009.” How did they arrive at that figure?
How, then, do we then correctly calculate Google’s contribution to the economy?
The same way we determine the economic impact of other companies: the value of the goods and services produced, minus the value of all of resources consumed. Google generated revenue of $23.65 Billion in 2009 and by their own reckoning, their expenditures were about $17.13 Billion, which means that Google’s worldwide value addition was about $6.5 Billion. Google does just under half of its business in the US, so their US economic impact in the US was about $3.2 Billion, far less than the $54 Billion they claim.
Chitika advertising network published some analysis it did of click through percentages based on 8,253,240 impressions.
“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.
The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”
A friend of mine just emailed me some social circle results that came up when he was doing a search for Toronto SEO - while I think these are interesting I am worried that Google is going to make it very hard for new companies in any industry to breakthrough in the search results.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
Just announced today over at Google Webmaster Central Blog - this is something you should already have been tweaking for user experience but knowing it will effect rankings in a small way (as one of over 200 factors) this should wake up some sleeping webmasters, SEO’s and designers.
Now that Google is coming to terms (publicly) with the fact that SEO is real and important it seems they released their own SEO Report Card internally.
Very interesting report and you can download the entire thing here.
The onion takes on a Google request in American Voices:
You know search engine optimization has gone mainstream when it shows up in a Dilbert comic strip!
When it comes to engaging your grassroots demographic, forums are the best bang for your buck. I recently started at thread for a client that garnered 1,300 views and 4 pages of replies within the first week. I was able to have 3 live signature links and two additional text only links pointing to my clients site.
Now it is important to remember you won’t retire on this type of advertising but it is a great, low-key way of getting your brand out to those that matter. Long-term this type of promotion is invaluable to your online marketing mix.
Update January 21, 2010
Let’s fast-forward a couple of weeks and take a deeper look at this method of promotion. I am also able to compare it to forum posts started the same day in the commercial advertising area of the forum - the number of views is completely lopsided and this just proves that forum promotion is valuable but only if done correctly!
