This over-reaching legislation to prevent pirated software, music, and IP has too many unintended repercussions. SOPA would likely affect the websites of the IP owners represented by the very media companies that support the proposed legislation.
The Digital Millennial Copyright Act of 1998 requires websites to remove links
to fraudulently obtained material when the copyright holder requests it, and this provision has already been successfully invoked millions of times. This is documented in testimony of Katherine Oyama, Copyright Counsel, Google, Inc., before the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, hearing on HR 3261, November 16, 2011.
SOPA Case: Throws Baby Out with the Bathwater
Carrie Underwood is a very well-known American singer and songwriter on the Arista Nashville music label – a label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, an RIAA member. Ms. Underwood’s website includes user-generated content on its forum: http://www.carrieunderwoodofficial.com/us/forum. If a fan posted a link on that forum to a Carrie Underwood song hosted without permission, under SOPA the entire site could be shut down – and Google.com and Bing.com could be punished if they allowed fans to find the site via their search services.
On the other hand, the song pirate – and people who download stolen material – would have no more
incentive to stop than under existing law.
Several weeks ago, Google published changes to their algorithm. This will affect search results worldwide and it’s important to review how these changes can affect your site’s rankings. By sharing the methodology and process behind Google’s search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes, they are giving us deeper insight into the over 500 changes they’ve made to search so far this year.
Thank you Matt Cutts/Google for providing some of the transparency that our search engine marketing agency seeks to help us improve our client’s web page/ website visibility from search engine query results. Below are 10 of the important google algorithm changes from the last quarter of 2011.
10 Google Algorithm Changes 2011 Q4
1) Cross-Language Information Retrieval
This now means translated English pages are provided by Google where limited web content is available in that native language search query.
Specifically for these languages:
Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
2) Snippets with MORE Page Content & LESS Header/Menu Content
This change helps Google choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As they improve their understanding of web page structure, Google is now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
3) Better Page Titles in Search Results by De-duplicating Boilerplate Anchors
Google looks at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. They found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so they are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
4) Length-based Autocomplete Predictions in Russian
This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. They will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already Google’s practice in English.
5) Extending Application Rich Snippets
The “Big G” recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
6) Retiring a Signal in Image Search
As the web evolves, Google often revisits signals that were launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, they decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
7) Fresher, More Recent Results
As they announced several weeks ago, Google made a significant improvement to how they rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query. This reinforces the importance for website owners to maintain the freshness of their site with new, updated content.
Refining Official Page Detection
They try hard to give users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, they adjusted how Google attempts to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in the rankings.
9) Improvements to Date-Restricted Queries
New change on how they handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
10) Prediction Fix for IME Queries
This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes made to the search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine.
Google published these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.
For those of us at CarbonFoot Interactive that work in digital marketing / search engine marketing every day, this stuff is incredibly exciting. If you’d like to see more posts like this, please comment and let us know.
People’s Daily is China’s state-run newspaper. And now China has it’s own state-run search engine to challenge BAIDU (and to a much lesser degree Google Hong Kong). The new search engine was launched in beta as Gosa, but has been rebranded as JIKE. (Jike sounds like ‘geek’ in English – apparently to make it more appealing to to China’s youth.)
Somehow the major internet companies in China have thrown their support behind it, according to the Wall Street Journal. The big guns that were on hand at the launch as visibile supporters were: Charles Chao, Sina’s CEO; Sohu’s Sogou CEO Wang Xiochuan and Baidu’s chief scientist William Zhang.
Their logo which has blue and yellow geometric blocks that make up a Tang Dynasty puzzle.
I was amazed at the noticeable improvement in the return of my search results when Google Instant launched. That’s what happens when you do a Google search using Google’s Chrome browser and it finishes your search query for you with the most likely result. Over time – it saves you lot’s of it (time that is).
Now – it’s time to “type less, speak more”. Google introduced Voice Search from your computer (vs. phone) on their Chrome browser. Try it. Click on the small speaker icon placed on the right side of the search box. Fast, easy, simple:
Think of all the searches on Google, Baidu or Bing. Some are infotainment, others time and business critical – all very important.
Or are they?
Here is another search to which everyone on this blue little marble we call Earth is inextricably tied. NASA assembles a Carl Sagan inspired video that envisions when the “mother of all searches” pays off.
Refusing Google’s $5 billion bid, Groupon shows us that if you can nail social media monetization – you’re a winner. As promised, CarbonFoot Interactive reports on search engines’ B2B & B2C marketing opportunities and how to leverage them for your business. So, while Groupon may not mesh into a “Goopon” entity, you can be sure see more Groupon search engine results in your web browsers.
For those unfamiliar with Groupon, they offer consumers deep discounts online for local businesses such as restaurants and salons, with the deal working for everyone if a minimum number of its subscribers sign up for the offer. Groupon takes a cut, typically 50% of revenue from each deal.
Groupon’s Chief Executive Andrew Mason created a site called The Point in 2007 that organized collective action around social or charitable causes. It failed to turn a profit, so Mason retooled it to focus on daily deals for local services. And so Groupon was born. It’s now two years old (or should we say two years young)….
Earlier in 2010, Groupon rolled out personalized deals that target offers to users based on gender, ZIP code and purchasing history. So, Groupon can now serve multiple deals in each market, preventing a business from being overwhelmed by thousands of new customers. This opens up the queue for local merchants eager to participate in a Groupon promotion. The company accepts one promotion for every seven submitted.
Recently, Comscore reported on Groupon’s traffic growth and the question was – “Will Traffic Drop Off”? Guess we know the answer to that question.
There’s more – - Groupon agreed to have its deals featured on eBay and joined a service Yahoo rolled out that aggregates daily deals from multiple providers, including many of Groupon’s rivals. Acquisitions followed, with three Asian daily deal sites and a California-based technology firm. “Attention Silicon Valley! – We’re HERE!”.
So Groupon remains (for now) independent, but look for an IPO soon. Their originally reported revenues were $400 million, now recalibrated closer to $500 million.
If you’d like to learn more about how better leveraging social media for your business, please contact a CarbonFoot Interactive Digital Marketing Specialist.
Google Campus at the Google HQ in NYC yesterday was sponsored by SEMPO and showcased new search insight tools, advanced Google Analytics capabilities, Google Adwords intelligence & recommendation engine enhancements and some great YouTube and Google TV opportunities. While much is in beta and under NDA, suffice it to say the G-Team is on their ‘search game’. More to come…
Google Product Showcase
Google TV offers national Dish Network media buys
search engine marketing agencies invited to Google HQ
We knew this was coming. The opportunity for Yahoo to expand it’s search marketing reach – and the same for Microsoft – has arrived. But what does it really gain for those using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on both already? For those of us managing the campaigns, it’s a time-saver for one. Microsoft AdCenter will be the primary login and management interface. That right there cuts down time. I’m feeling more efficient already.
Here is Yahoo! Search Marketing’s official statement:
What’s Ahead
There will be no immediate changes to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Both companies are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial to you as possible. Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the U.S. prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective. Approximately three months in advance, we’ll begin providing you with detailed information about what to expect and how we will assist you.
How the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance Will Benefit You
Once implemented, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will enable you to:
Reach more customers.
Reach up to 150 million searchers1 and get approximately 62% more search volume2 than on Yahoo! alone through a new, unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks.
To help drive future growth in search volume, Yahoo! will continue to significantly enhance the search experience on our leading web properties.
Save valuable time and effort.
You’ll log into one place–Microsoft’s adCenter–to manage campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better ROI.
With just one buy, you’ll reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, as well as other premium partner sites.
Benefit from rapid innovation.
Yahoo! will deliver new features and innovations to the world’s favorite online destinations, content, and web products used by hundreds of millions of consumers to connect to the people and things that matter to them most.
Microsoft will innovate the underlying technologies that drive high quality algorithmic and paid search results.
Ok – this was announced back in May, and I took a quick look at the demo back then, but I just revisited the demo and was inspired to write a little story.
The CLOUD
The air was still. Silent.
All but the constant drum of “MS..MS..MS..”
Beyond the horizon, however, a small CLOUD appears.
An APParition
Thin and solitary.
A lonesome spirit in the BIG BLUE.
Suddenly, the winds of change blow gently across my keyboard.
A tingle travels down my spine, disrupting my MEMORY.
Where was I? Time warps.
Something stirs in the air.
An approaching CLOUD
Massive and thunderous in APPearance.
In the streets, DRIVERS stop and stare.
Others gather from near and far, sensing something wonderful in the air.
A gentle rain begins to fall.
The HARD WARE and tear of our grounded existence begins to wash away.
We feel lighter, untethered, carefree, ethereal.
The rain falls harder but the CLOUD defies Mother nature’S laws.
It grows in size. APPearing to become more substantial.
We connect with it somehow – this strange CLOUD gathering substance and sustenance from those it has FREEd from their earth-bound tethers.
We have been changed.
Our CONNECTions to each other have grown stronger.
I pause to take a breath of fresh air and look around me to see a better world.
And so I WAVE goodbye to all those with whom I am now CONNECTed. And they WAVE back.
Wave is Google’s new collaborative, universal messaging platform. It is an open source system allowing developers to build collaborative ‘WAVE” communication objects. So, that means you can connect with communication and collaboration systems like email systems, VoIP, IM, photo-sharing, use WAVE as a platform for building blogging sites, discussion groups, build wiki-like sites, and use WAVEs to collaboratively edit documents. It includes a set of extension APIs allowing you to build games collaboratively inside ‘a wave’ , connect with Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s about integration into workflows and appears to that ‘ubiquitous‘ collaboration platform talked about often. The list goes on, but it’s beauty lies in the ability of each of these apps to interact cross-platform seamlessly. And, it’s all done in the browser. It’s quite remarkable. wave.google.com (sign-up to become one of the first 100,000 to beta test it) code.google.com/apis/wave – API documentation www.waveprotocol.org – whitepapers and protocol
BING – Microsoft’s re-invention of their former search engine www.live.com may have some legs to it – at least the first couple of weeks are showing their number of clicks have increased 13% (as reported by Efficient Frontier Inc.) ! Not bad. Of course, throw a $100 million dollar campaign at anything and you’re going to see some movement, right?
Keep up the momentum Microsoft – and we may starting seeing the creep of Google domination (share of searches) start to diminish or perhaps even reverse? Yahoo! Search – with a battering from both sides now, it’s time to beef-up your battleship stations!
One nice feature I like about Bing is how it helps you decide whether you want to click on the link by providing additional information beyond the standard listing (Take NOTE Google and Yahoo!). By scrolling over a vertical line to the right of each listing, AJAX pops up an expanded summary of the page PLUS the major navigation links associated with that destination page. Nice job Bing.
However, from Microsoft paid search advertising perspective, this new feature may actually reduce their revenue by minimizing the number of clicks searchers need to find what they’re looking for. In the end though, that presents an advantage over Google and Yahoo! and may start converting folks over….
CarbonFoot will be watching Bing‘s progress and report back to you.
Refining Official Page Detection
Somehow the major internet companies in China have thrown their support behind it, according to the Wall Street Journal. The big guns that were on hand at the launch as visibile supporters were: Charles Chao, Sina’s CEO; Sohu’s Sogou CEO Wang Xiochuan and Baidu’s chief scientist William Zhang.
