Is Google going to be the next MSN? I would like to apologize for my lack of a witty title here…when Microsoft is involved, my brain kind of shuts down.

If you’re one of the rare, rare people who actually thinks MSN is a thing as fine as a newly-discovered Fawlty Towers episode, let me explain to you that most people, or should I say most NORMAL people whose knuckles don’t bleed when they walk, really hate MSN. Not only is the engine a right piece of crap, but the company itself seems to be so seriously annoying that it’s in danger of being sued constantly over something ridiculous. Honestly, I have trouble listening to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp now that it’s been made abundantly and painfully public that they had something to do with the startup sounds…I can’t keep talking about that or I’ll sob again though.

Microsoft was investigated for antitrust violations as you all know, settling in 2002 with promises to stop being so damned overbearing with all of their products and to help their competitors write software that would run properly on the Windows systems. This period of altruism is supposed to expire this November, but there are already talks of it being extended due to Vista’s possible issues.

Consumer groups are already requesting that the Federal Trade Commission review Google’s proposed purchase of the internet advertising company DoubleClick. Just as was the case with Microsoft, European regulators plan to follow up the American probes with their own. That sounds stangely dirty. Lauren Weinstein, the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, is quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying “Just as concerns about Microsoft gradually increased until they reached critical mass, I think that is starting to happen with Google…We are starting to approach a tipping point in all this, where the risks to Google are becoming greater and greater.”

The antitrust bit is just one problematic angle with Google, however. They are simply everywhere, and they’re expanding faster than a redneck at a Golden Corral buffet. Lots of people don’t really feel all warm and toasty about Google any more. Just the other day as my husband and I were walking up the street, he was harrassed due to his Google t-shirt. I didn’t mean to be so rude to him but I couldn’t help myself. Ok that’s a joke–one of our neighbors simply lacks class and began yelling “yahoo!” at us. We ran like hell as groups of dirty schoolkids threw rotten eggs at us. OK that didn’t happen but you get the point I hope. Anti-Google sentiment is growing.

From what I’ve gathered, the San Jose conference was rife with Google complaints. This says to me that it’s not simply my own dislike of anything popular that causes me to become somewhat enraged at the fact that, to do well online, Google is usually what matters. When they change their algorithm, even if it’s going to cause the loss of rankings in another engine, most of us still adhere to what Google wants and we make the changes. We use their analytics software because it’s free. We pay tons of money for paid ads in AdWords, and we use Google as our default engine to the extent that some of us (not me of course) get so into PageRank that, when it goes up 1 point, we throw a celebratory riverside hootenanny. We love it and we hate it. I don’t know of anyone who ever really loved Microsoft, but just like Google, they were on top and they had to pay for it. It looks like Google could be heading down the same path.

Google has always been renowned for their “free” services, from analytics to email. They also tend to have really good products, to their credit. Their stock has performed at an insanely high level, and they are now a legitimate verb. That is pretty impressive. I understand how they invade my privacy and the privacy of everyone else, though. While I am concerned about it, it’s well-known that I have a thing for Adam Ant and kneehigh leather boots so I’m not too embarrassed that they have that information. I would just really love to see an alternative pop up soon, not only to give Google the competition that they need to continue to better themselves, but to give us something different that’s worth our time. Yahoo and MSN really aren’t doing that, unfortunately.

I am a firm believer in leaving people alone unless they’re doing something detrimental to children and/or animals, trashing Joe Strummer’s good name, or harassing my favorite Viking. That being said, it should come as no surprise that I am firmly against turning in your competitors for violating webmaster guidelines. First of all, it’s an extension of tattling as a child. Secondly, it’s just bad karma. You’re going to do something bad at some point and you’re going to really wish the person who turned you in for it was nice like you should have been when you turned someone else in for something asinine like using doorway pages to rank one spot ahead of you.

I’ve worked with SEOs who choose the path of least resistance in getting ahead in the SERPs, which usually means digging around on a higher ranking site and reporting on findings when turning them in to Google. That technique might clear the path for you a bit, but it’s a sign that you obviously don’t know how to get ahead without hurting someone else, which, to me, says you’re not a great SEO. You might, however, think about going into American politics.

We all know that Google frowns upon cloaking. Still, if your competitor IS cloaking, figure out how to beat him at his game without resorting to tattling on him. You may have skeletons in your own closet, after all, and in many cases it’s going to be apparent to someone who’s been doing the tattling. I have dealt with clients who would give me the names of competitors and ask me to dig around to find out if I could turn them into Google for anything. In most cases, I have indeed found something, but I’ve never turned anyone in. I also have never transported Dracula at night or eaten a candy apple. There are lines I will not cross.

Analyzing how your competitors do things is a key part of SEO, and it’s helpful to figure out WHY they’re ranking higher than you are. However, once you ascertain that they’re doing something that violates Google’s guidelines, for example, just keep it to yourself please, as full of yourself as you are. When you use this information to harm someone else you’re the equivalent of the office arse-kisser, tattling on coworkers in order to get in good with the big boss. It’s horribly ill-mannered behavior, and it’s not something that a good Southerner does.

It’s been my experience that the black hats of SEO are the ones who inspire my utter awe. I am completely fascinated by black hat techniques, especially the really hardcore ones that involve writing code that I couldn’t possibly begin to imagine how to do. These people have serious talent, and I don’t really care how they use it. If they’re ahead of me in the rankings, kudos to them. If these black hats were working on coding the search engine algorithms, maybe we wouldn’t need all the spam reporting tools, because the engines would be smart enough to catch spam without relying on humans to do it for them.

Turning in your competitors is not an act of improving the internet for the rest of us either. That’s an argument that’s making less sense the more I hear it. Honestly, the ideal of doing SEO with the goal of simply making the web a better place where kittens can frolic is lovely, but I really do not believe that it’s anyone’s true desire. We do SEO because we want to make our sites do better than everyone else’s.

Is how a search engine handles your private data going to soon determine whether or not you use it?

In a recent decision, Ask.com has told users that it will no longer store data on their queries. This sounds very nice of course, until you get down into the nitty gritty of it and learn that it’s almost meaningless. So basically, for those of you who like to conduct searches on items such as men’s girdles, rare Adam and the Ants singles, and BASIC programming guides, you should still be a little worried that your user data could haunt you at some point (this is excluding how it simply affects you to know what Adam looks like these days.)

Here’s the main problem with this: their partners could potentially still be privvy to this so-called private data. Considering all of the blasting I’ve heard over the years about everyone wanting to get their claws on all of our data, this does actually concern me a bit. Keywords used in an Ask search can still be seen in the web address bar, and your ISP can still get this information. Apparently Ask plans on reviewing this issue with their partners and wants to come to an agreement on how this data can be used. Still, why say you’re not going to keep private data if, in fact, you really are keeping it, even if it’s by passing it onto another party?

Obviously this information can’t really hurt you if it’s not being kept. However, the promises of purging it and no longer retaining it seem way too good to be true. Obviously I am not too embarrassed to be searching for Adam and the Ants singles, although I will acknowledge that I SHOULD be, but I certainly do not want Google knowing that I am also a big fan of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in light of their second album’s being crap. This is extremely humiliating and could potentially wreck me if it came out in court.

Google and MSN will supposedly purge user data after 18 months. Google’s cookies are now going to expire in 2 years, not in 2038 (which is about when the last batch of chocolate chip cookies my mom made will expire…I almost needed dental work.) MSN “apparently” stores its search information so that it can’t be attached to personal information. Yahoo is going to “anonymize” data after 13 months. My head is spinning around like Linda Blair’s did in the Exorcist, and I am not even wearing a nightgown right now so it’s not nearly as funny.

I have never been a private person. Just ask the tons of horrified people who have been witness to me after one glass of red wine. People who constantly complain about their lack of privacy usually have something nasty to hide, like an affection for Celine Dion, but I’m beginning to see their side of things. I’m not beginning to see their affection for Celine, of course, because that is incomprehensible, but I am beginning to understand that, where privacy is concerned, there are some simple principles that we should think about.

We should all be aware that most of what we do online can be recorded in some way. That still won’t stop most of us from calling our boss a horrible troll on Yahoo IM (although I don’t do this), sending Photoshopped photos of our friends done up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to everyone we know, or looking for thigh-high latex boots. However, we need to realize that just because we’re sitting behind a screen, we’re not anonymous in the eyes of the search companies or our ISPs.

The real questions: How will you react to this? Will you continue to use Google if it keeps all your information, or will you switch to something like MSN if it turns out that their privacy policy makes you the happiest? Is privacy THAT much of an issue? If it’s not going to haunt you in a legal manner, do you really care? Are you going to search for “Celine Dion in thigh-high latex boots” and hope you get caught so you can get help?

So, some feedback please, if you would…nothing about this issue is black or white. What are your thoughts on this?

Nothing in this field ever stays the same. What’s considered white-hat becomes black-hat, the engines like a hyphenated URL one day and then it starts to look spammy, Coldfusion is no longer cool (was it ever?), and stupid is the new clever.

Google’s latest major algorithm change is apparently responsible for the loss of massive amounts of traffic to some really large sites. The 28% drop that Answers.com reported has been all over the news, both in the industry and outside of it. I think my mother even asked me to express my opinion on it. OK she didn’t, but I wouldn’t have fallen over in shock if she had. Well yes I would have but you get my drift…everyone has heard about it. It reminds me of the horrid Florida update a few years back, which personally crushed several of my best sites and reduced their traffic to almost nothing since they got the bulk of it from Google. Did that teach me a lesson? NO.

This utter reliance upon Google is going to kill us in the end. I know that I concentrate my efforts on doing well in Google first, then I consider the other engines next. It’s very difficult to focus my efforts on performing well in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and everywhere else, so I see the stats and concentrate on Google since it brings the bulk of traffic to the sites. That is going to be a fatal flaw though, and even though I know it, it’s a hard habit to break. I hope you’re all singing that Chicago song now…

The online gambling industry was hit quite hard last year when the US legislation made online transactions for gambling sites illegal. For companies who relied heavily on the US for their traffic and real money players, this was a fairly crippling blow. The gambling industry has spent the past few months struggling to make up the US losses by strengthening their efforts in non-US territories, and I’m sure things are looking up for them but the whole point of this is that, like all of us, they put most of their eggs in one basket, and the basket eventually breaks. Google Adwords recently refused to publish ads for sites that are even remotely related to any form of gambling, therefore causing panic amongst some who think that THEIR industry could be next in line. This in part caused cost per click prices to shoot up across the board.

I could go on at length (as you may know if you’ve read any other posts that I’ve written) and describe tons more cases in which there was a reliance upon one institution, and it screwed someone big time in the end. That sounds very dirty. I swear it has nothing to do with my affection for Richard E. Grant. Anyway, what I hope for you to take away from this is the fact that whatever you’re doing may work well now, but it won’t forever. I’m sure you know that…I know that, but it’s easy to become complacent when you’re on top. Again, not a Richard E. Grant thing. Or IS it?

I have never seen a site’s statistics that showed an equal distribution amongst the major engines. Obviously in their competition to be the best, they’re going to favor certain factors over other ones that may be in favor with their competitors’ algorithms. Google might like a flowery keyword tag where the keyword is listed at the beginning and no permutation of it appears anywhere else, but Yahoo might like it when you have 10 variations of that keyword in its tag. Each wants your business as you know. Figuring out what each of them like is tough and even when you do, you usually can’t make everyone like YOU. Unless you’re my little nutbrown hare (who needs a website I can LINK TO) or my evilgreenmonkey or Richard E. Grant.

Just don’t get complacent. Don’t accept that Google giving you 75% of your traffic is always going to be as good as a large cognac after dinner when someone else (like Jon Roy) is paying. Take a look at your statistics (and if you don’t read them please read Rebecca’s post about getting anal…with your analytics, I mean. Her other post on getting anal with your…well it’s not on THIS blog let me assure you. We’re good girls here! And yes, I left out the “retentive” on purpose because otherwise it would not have been half as funny and today IS Rebecca’s birthday.) If you’re all cockeyed and skewed then do something about it before another algorithm change targets you and wrecks your life.

OK, this one ain’t that relevant to much on our site, but it’s Friday, and when I read this story, I couldn’t stop laughing - so that’s as appropriate as it will get for the start of the week end…

Brad Waller from Revenews.com went in search for quirky stories the other day, and I’m thinking he got plenty. That’s the wonderful thing about the online world… So he found this story:

Now, I know as well as the next person, that money talks, but I have always wondered how eBay manages to be the first to get its trademark protection from Google (who claims it can’t really impose one), and how do they get to bid on everything under the sun - including “cat sick”.

This is not a naff question BTW, I’m capable of figuring out they pay a lot so they’ve twisted a rubber arm or two… so please respond with specifics :o)

Cat sick anyone? Head over to eBay…

Disclaimer: Not looking for controvercy here - just really interested in tactics ;o)

What exactly does the PageRank measure?
PageRank is an algorithm (mathematical equation) developed by Google to determine the “importance” of a website based on the incoming linking structure. Every incoming link works as a “vote” for the website. Google doesn’t only measure the volume of incoming links but also analyses the page that casts the “vote/link”. A link from a page that has itself been deemed by Google to be “important” will give the page it’s linking to some of its goodness, or like one of my client likes to call it, some Google Juice.

So where does the PageRank toolbar fit in?
Now the PageRank equation itself is an important factor of Google’s overall algorithm to determine which website should be ranked before another. BUT, what confuses SEOs and webmasters all over the world is the Google PageRank toolbar. Now this is NOT the same thing, the toolbar was created to give an indication of the importance given to a page by Google, but the problem is that people take it WAY too seriously. The toolbar is not updated often enough to actually give you an accurate representation of the givens page “importance” according to the actual PageRank equation. Matt Cutts himself admits that the toolbar is only updated roughly every 3-4 months.

So why do some people obsess about the PageRank toolbar?
Now this could be a number of reasons. For people that are in the area of actually selling outgoing links the actual toolbar PageRank will very much determine what they can charge for that link (although as a pure white hat wearing angel SEO we would never do this, seriously Matt we wouldn’t!). But also, there is a lot of SEOs out there that uses the toolbar PageRank to “prove” success to the clients. As the toolbar is something they can see, so if the PageRank was 5 one month and 6 the next month, obviously that would be an indication you are doing something right.

Now my overall view of this is YES PageRank itself is important as it IS a part of the Google algo, BUT beware of the toolbar, don’t take it so seriously.

But don’t worry, it’s totally normal to get excited when your PageRank does go up, we all do it =)

I don’t know quite when it happened. I do remember the early days – the days of AltaVista and the instant movement when you changed your website code. I remember the trouble getting in to Yahoo!, the importance of being on DMOZ (I might still have a few editor IDs hanging out on there), WebFerret and Dogpile and I remember the revolution that was Google.

After that it is a bit of a fog of searches, search engines and a splash of colour. Somewhere between 2002 and now I seem to have become addicted to Google. It’s my searching buddy and gets opened along with HBX, Yahoo! and AdWords every morning after I turn on my computer.

It’s not just that I use Google for my searches – oh no. I have collected a plethora of that freebie Google gear you get at Google University. I also managed to score a Google mirror, nail file and water bottle from Girl Geek dinners (where I regrettably did not score as well on the lip balm… damnit!). Recently, my ad gal in Dublin sent me a Google t-shirt all the guys love (due to the tight, white nature of it) and a Google hat.

Looking at my Google-festooned workspace and home, I realised I had become addicted and realised I had to kick the habit – and hard. Danny’s article on Google-free Fridays seemed like the perfect opportunity to start quitting – much as the smokers here in the UK will on July 1^st. I already had Yahoo! open all day, I thought to myself, so it was just one more click to use it for search instead.

Forget Friday – I thought – I’m a girl geek! I’ll just do it now! So, intrepidly I stepped out in to the vast howling wilderness beyond the Google dominant market and typed my first query in to Yahoo. I’ll do something easy, I thought. The Chocolate Society – I want some good chocolate. WOOHOO! Score! But what is this – what kind of title… ooooohhhh… directory description. Still… I got news and email with my weather just before searching and I also seemed to have chat and… wow… kinda like a personalised home page and… must… not… go… to… Google… NYARGH!

Shuddering a little with the withdrawal and still needing to do more searching, I soldiered on. More and more searches whizzed past my fingers. ‘Go little search page, go!’ I thought to myself as I stepped boldly out of my comfort zone in to a brave new world of search. Gone was my underdog Ask whose t-shirt also graces me with less curviness at the gym. Gone was my Google page – my constant companion… my pet search engine. Here I was striding out in to Yahoo and I wasn’t getting hopelessly lost. WAHEY!

While as a SEM/SEO/SMO I cannot ever abandon Google completely, I think it is a great idea to give up our pets for a day – Google, Facebook, Neopet or otherwise (but not our cats… cats aren’t pets, they’re furry people). Like a good detox, getting away from Google for a bit is good for you but ultimately I’ll never give Google up.

Why not try it for a day yourself? Close that browser tab/window and leave Google behind for a day. Check out Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN/Live and see if another search engine won’t help you just as much. Yahoo is a fantastic portal and I do use it daily. Ask has a brand new interface all swishy and funky. MSN/Live may seem like it is struggling but it does power Miss Dewey – the perfect Friday afternoon companion.

Yahoo!
Ask
MSN/Live
Miss Dewey