There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here.
In short, Beard discovered that TechMeme’s Google PageRank had mysteriously dropped from a 6 or 7 to a 4 in a short period of time. Mysterious is the word, by the way, as TechMeme has always been and continues to be a high quality aggregator of tech news conversations and there is seemingly no reason for Google to hammer it in its search listings in such a significant and terrifying way.
I say significant because if any person on the planet started a new blog on Blogger right now, you’d get assigned a PR 4 in all likelihood. And I say terrifying because when Google hammers your relative search rank, it has the potential to cripple your business and there’s normally very little you can do about it aside from praying, hoping, and tweaking your page content and then praying/hoping that a month or two or three in the future your ranking will be magically restored.
If any of this interests you in the slightest – and it should if you’re a web publisher, interested in search, or wonder how people on the Internet end up driving traffic and making money – head over and check out Andy’s post and its comments.
Can you imagine living in a society where one day the government decides it’s not so into that whole “Google thing” and decides to up and block it for the whole country? Well, that’s what happened in Iran.
It’s commonplace and even fun in the United States to complain about Google. They’re too big, have too much power over user information, make silly acquisitions with the billions of dollars that they find in the couch cushions of their luxuriant Mountain View, California offices, and so forth.
Personally, as a web publisher, I have had frustrating experiences dealing with Google. Finding a human being who will listen to a legitimate query with regard to Google’s famously mysterious search algorithm and Page Rank system can be an exercise in masochism (though to their credit they have improved at this over the last year or two).
But really Google is an extraordinary search engine, a ubiquitous term that means being able to sort through millions upon millions of web pages and find information nearly instantly – from the entertaining to educational to profane – that only a few short years back would require tedious hours of research.
Clearly, Iran’s government is afraid of what its people would do with such a powerful window upon the world. While it claims to be concerned about moral corruption and foreign influence, it’s not hard to believe that the real concern is to maintain its grip on power.
To quote the great Tenacious D: the government totally sucks.
The Internet may still very nearly spin around the axis (matrix?) of Google search, but people like Yahoo’s content and services at least a little bit better, according to a new study from the University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index.
The relaunch of Yahoo’s portal is cited as a reason why Yahoo’s customer satisfaction is on the rise, as well as its e-mail, “social networks and other features.” Meanwhile, Google’s applications and services are not as visible to the average user.
In my view, GMail is superior to Yahoo e-mail, though I’ve heard that people like improvements that have been made to the latter. In terms of social networks, I can’t believe that either Yahoo 360 or Orkut could have made much of a difference in peoples’ responses. I can definitely see the difference if Yahoo’s “web 2.0″ acquisitions such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and MyBlogLog were cited. That’s a pretty great trio of efficient, elegant, and popular web services right there.
I wonder if Google cares very much about this study. As long as it continues to own search and make zillions through its Adsense and Adwords services, they will continue to laugh all the way to the e-bank. Internet Marketing Monitor rightly notes that, “The article suggests that Google’s relatively unchanged interface and dismal marketing of its non-search services give users the impression that little has changed at the site. Those of us who look beyond the interface realize that this is not the case. But most users don’t go much deeper than the outside.”
That said, Yahoo has smartly improved in areas that it needed to – recognizing Google’s dominance in search – and it’s paying off. Another four-year study, produced by Nielsen/NetRatings, proves the old Internet axiom that content is still king.
According to the study, people are consuming online content like never before, watching videos and reading news and entertainment content, “surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information.”
While at first glance, these seem to be fairly obvious “revelations,” they are pretty stunning when looking at the short history of the web. E-mail, for instance, is one of the first “killer apps” of the online world. It’s something that grandparents do everyday as part of their lives. People who can barely turn on a computer know how to “Google” search terms to find relevant information.
But the increase in broadband penetration, coupled with the serious and massive effort to increase the quality and quantity of online media and entertainment offerings, has fundamentally shifted the way in which people consume content overall.
People spend more time online today than they do watching television. As recently as four or five years ago, this would have seemed like a farfetched notion.
In other words, the Internet is not just a place to write to friends and family and find relevant information. It’s a place where people can immerse themselves in deep social networks, create and share media, and watch (and interact with!) videos and other forms of entertainment.
So, both surveys show that Yahoo is looking at the long run and improving in areas that reflect where people are spending increasing amounts of time.
Wikipedia defines PageRank as: “a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”
Google’s mysterious and fiercely guarded PageRank system is the stuff of web publisher dreams and nightmares. A PageRank jump from 6 to 7 can bring in untold thousands of daily search engine traffic visitors, for instance. All based upon Google’s cyclical and algorithmic assessment of web page influence, based upon factors such as incoming links, outbound links (and the influence or relative importance of both), web page design, whether or not you seem to produce high quality content or are an unrepentant spammer, and on and on.
But is it so important? Of late Google luminaries such as Matt Cutts have been downplaying the importance of PageRank in how it ranks webpages.
If you’re up for a pretty intense breakdown and analysis, check out this beauty.
Blog search engine Technorati has rolled out a new front page design in an attempt to further align itself as a multi-functional blog and media portal. The new design has cleaned up what was a somewhat chaotic-looking homepage, creating a more eyeball-pleasing experience. It includes a news ticker that runs across the top of the site that runs popular tags.
And as Dave Sifry explains, Technorati wants to leverage its blog search engine to become the premiere place to find “user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we’re using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.”
Steve Rubel brings up some great broader points about the need to easily be able to find web “influencers” across a broad spectrum of the Internet. Who is influencing the conversation on Facebook, he asks, and what videos are buzzing up buzz on YouTube? It seems that Technorati is attempting to move in the direction of answering those questions, and if it can it may be able to move up the ranks into Google territory.
Speaking of Google, they recently unveiled (what I believe is a revamped) Google Trends, brought to us by Google Labs. Search for American Idol for example and you’ll see a fascinating trend line that shows huge spikes in Google search volume surrounding climactic episodes of the show.
That quote - you could’ve given us help, but you’ve given us so much more - actually comes from the mouth of Bill Murray’s character in Quick Change (one of the all-time underrated comedies) to a magnificently and contentedly unhelpful New York City taxi driver.
It could easily however have come from Topix CEO Rich Skrenta to the monolith that is Google. A Wall Street Journal piece details Skrenta’s and Topix’ frustration with Google over the company’s change from a .net domain to the more popular .com. That change, on top of costing Topix $1 million in acquisition fees, may end up costing a lot more due to lost search engine traffic, the lion’s share of which stems from Google.
It’s painfully hilarious that the CEO of Topix, a pretty large and well known web company that reportedly receives 10 million visitors a month, received the following advice at a time when it could potentially lose millions of search-based visits: “…an email recommending that, if the switchover were to go badly, the company should post a message on an online user-support forum; a Google engineer might come along to help out.”
Skrenta very rightly responded with, “‘This can’t be the process…You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.’”
A host of web publishers shares Skrenta’s pain. Breaking through the layer of automated responses when attempting to contact Google is a Tolkien-esque quest that many have attempted and few have succeeded at. Because Google so tightly guards the nature of its search algorithm and system of “page ranking” web pages, it very rarely will dole out specific information about why a particular website moves up or down its search rankings.
Small variations in page rank can have an enormous effect on placement in Google’s search rankings and effectively cause thousands or even millions of visitors to show up at a website. Or, in the case of the new Topix.com, potentially not.
I just realized that Blogger allows you to add tags to blog posts.
Actually, I must give credit where it’s due and that belongs to my online pal and fellow member of Blogcritics Magazine and The Mondo Project, Mat Brewster. I’ve seen tags appear on blogspot blogs countless times, I’m sure, but absolutely assumed that they were part of some fancy plug-in that was not for the likes of me.
Part of my reintroduction to blogging from my own site on Blogger (as opposed to writing exclusively for BC, which I did for about a year) is that I’ve been able to better tune in to how bloggers are organizing themselves and their information, promoting themselves, and building audience.
This post is a bit of an experiment. Since I started posting here regularly since the first of the year, I’ve noticed that the majority of my traffic comes from the following sources:
* MyBlogLog: A great networking site for bloggers, it also helps to bring in some traffic.
* Techmeme: Great great source for following current tech and online media stories and the conversations springing up around them. I’ve been able to hit this page a nice number of times, and have brought back some visitors because of it.
* Blogcritics Magazine: Cross-publishing at the old battleship BC absolutely has a positive effect on one’s “home site” bottom line.
* Search traffic: mostly Google.com, but drips and drabs from Yahoo!, Ice Rocket (I think mentioning Mark Cuban’s name helps, which is indeed worthy of another experiment!), and Google Blog Search.
Search traffic is that great randomizer. If you can pull lots of it, you can sail off to Tahiti for six months and still have rip roaring traffic stats when you get back. If you don’t, it’s a grind-it-out battle to itch and scratch each reader home for supper.
This is somewhat the topic of a raging debate of the online moment, with entrepreneur and provocateur Jason Calacanis setting off fireworks with talk of SEO (search engine optimization, or rigging one’s code to harness more search engine traffic) being “bullshit” and a swift and immediate blowback from the likes of Neil Patel following, who challenges Jason to allow him to increase his own traffic “by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect” with promises of no shady dealings on route. And it seems Jason has accepted – the great SEO throwdown is on!
In any event, without being shady (I know so little about code that this would be very difficult anyway!) and as openly as I can, I’ve placed a nice number of wide ranging links and references here that hopefully add up to nearly a coherent whole.
I’ve listed the following blog tags as part of this post: blogger, blog, blogs, google, search, SEO, ice rocket, mark cuban, google blog search, techmeme, mybloglog, blogcritics, jason calacanis, neil patel, page rank
So the questions are: did I “optimize” this post by writing a decent piece and linking out to fellow bloggers and engagers in the online conversation? Or will dropping a deluge of tags at the bottom help auto-magically bring home some visitors? Or, perhaps, did none of this pile up to a hill of e-beans in the vast vacuum of the blogospheric realm?
I’ll report back the results, and look forward to your thoughts.
We all know that the power of Google is omnipresent, right? That’s a given. Zillions of people search Google.com googillions of times a day, creating search engine-driven traffic to sites and blogs the world over. That many millions of dollars exchange hands due to these actions, via Google Adwords and Adsense and advertising on referral websites, is a mysterious thing and a fountain of wealth for those who get it right.
People find websites in many other ways, of course. The best ways for publishers include being popular and well thought of enough that large numbers of regular visitors know a URL by heart, have a site bookmarked and visit it often, or are subscribed to one or more site RSS feeds.
TechCrunch, through its CrunchNotes site, has provided an unusual level of detail as to how people wound up at the popular site during December, 20006.
Traffic from the Google universe dominates, which is normally something of a given but striking in that we see that even for a well known site with thousands of devoted regular readers looking for news, reviews, and analysis of the tech and Internet industries, Google search and related products still sit in the number one and four positions. (There is an interesting discussion in the comments area about what the difference is between “Google – Organic” and “Google.com – Referral,” with ideas floated about Google.com search traffic, Google Reader, and paid AdWords placement.)
In a way it’s a little disheartening to know that even a broadly popular site like TechCrunch receives a significant percentage of its traffic through search engine referrals. It’s enough to make you think that it’s possible to hang up your blogging hat to craft perfect search engine friendly titles (Google’s Sex Scandal Causes Paris Hilton to Leave Iraq), write some gobblygook, and reap the search engine-derived rewards. In fact, this is pretty much what sploggers attempt to do, causing Google and other search engines to crush the page rank (or relative position within its search rankings, some call this Google Juice) of any site that smells of non-legitimacy.
For real websites trying to get real traffic – and not tempted to join the dark forces of cyber crime as I am – getting hammered by Google is a very real and frightening concern. In essence it’s like being a supplier of goods that is wholly dependent on Wal Mart for business survival. No matter how good or bad the quality of goods being produced, Wal Mart can always move onto another supplier, and then you’re shut out of the largest marketplace with no recourse.
Of course, many will argue that if you create great and consistent content, if you network and market your site effectively, then readers will come and stay. And this may be true to a certain extent. But the truth is that the true and truly consistent traffic numbers flow from Google (and other search engines but a far lesser extent). High quality links and regular readers can help to increase your visibility and page rank within Google’s search algorithm, but in the end the equation is the same.
So what are ambitious bloggers to do, those who want to write about things they’re passionate about and attract lots of repeat visitors at the same time? The simple answer is stick to the basics: find an area of expertise, write about it consistently, market and network the best you can, and then hope that the Google Love in the end outweighs the Google Evil.
One growing area for consistent traffic may come in the form of social news referrals. Digg and Reddit sit at number three and number nine on TechCrunch’s list, respectively. Social news referrals are essentially a result of an algorithm driven – in theory – by site visitors themselves. Get enough votes or diggs and you hit the jackpot of getting your story placed on the front page, where a story will reap the benefits of potential thousands of site visits.
Social news sites have their own issues, but it will be interesting to see if, as they continue to grow, they may begin to rival search engines in driving traffic to particular kinds of sites.
