Googleism

Well, at least not according to Google.

For more than two years now, the CV page for George W Bush has been ranking in the top position when somebody searched for the two words [miserable failure]. No more though. The reason why it ranked up there was that a few hundred thousand web pages had a link with the two words linked to the page. That was enough for it to achieve this not too flattering first position in Google’s result pages. The phenonemon even has a name. The Google Bomb.

According to Google the change is not manual, but totally algoritmic, and this really makes it interesting for SEO specialist who advocate an on-site technique for search engine optimization.

I cannot be 100% sure (nobody can but a small team lead by Matt Cutts), but I’m pretty confident that Google has changed their algoritm in a way that makes everyday life much harder for search engine spammers. I think that the change in the algo consists of these two significant changes:

1. the searched text must actually be written on the page that is to rank for a key phrase, in order for a page to be allegible for ranking for the phrase (the text string [miserable failure] is nowhere to be found on the whitehouse.gov page in question)
2. the site where the page resides should have internal links with the sought text as a linked keyword

If I’m right, then Google has taken a really big step forward in it’s fight with search engine spammers of all kinds. Also, it strengthen the kind of SEO that I, and many white hat SEO’s with me, advocate, i.e. that the most important keywords should be prominant in a page, and that the site should have a good, text based link strukture with the most prominent key phrases as linked text.

Read more about Google’s algo change at Searchengineland.com

See also:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-to-reduce-googlebomb-impact/

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A new pretty cool feature from Google. Now you can pick how many stories are displayed and move the sections around on the Google News homepage.

But the coolest thing is that you can pick a custom section — so if you have any news searches you make on a regular basis (I have a few that I do every day) you can now add those to your custom Google news homepage.

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How’s your mirror reading? The real, original Googleism site reports of All Too Flat’s excellent mirror site of Google. And when they say mirror, they mean it. Go practice your mirror reading skills!

The site is used widely in countries where Google is banned (like China), and I can see how the chineese might find it just as easy to read as the original.

Also, if you try to search, you will have to enter the search phrase backwards. If you would try a search for N!kkes Index your would have to enter xednI sekk!N. That’s one of the great answers in the elgooG faq.

Note about Googleism

I’m sorry, about stealing the term Googleism for this category. But Googleism is such a wonderful word for what I, and many other webmasters spend to much time thinking about. How do our sites rank on Google (and other search engines)? Lately Google has been acting strangely, and since we can’t know for sure what’s going on, we guess and rant att SEO forums like SEOchat.com.

Now, get over to the Google mirror, and don’t forget to donate, they need to cover their bandwidth costs with all those chineese searches going on.

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Every day there are a couple of Google and Yahoo! searches for the phrase “i hate george bush” showing up in my search engine referrals pages. It’s not very surprising that those who perform this search end up here, since both Google and (Google driven) Yahoo! places one of my t-shirt pages, titled “I still hate George Bush“, in the first position, and the same page is listed on top when searching on Yahoo! I’m somewhat flattered by the positioning, but I must admit that I have been wondering why anyone might do such a search. Could it be a possy of right wing christian fundamentalists coming after me, or the CIA?

Today, I think I found out why. The probable cause is an article by Joshua Rey, a British blogger with quite an interesting site. His excellent article is titled “Why we hate George“. His article contains this passage:

It’s no exaggeration to say that George Bush is more widely and deeply hated in Britain and the Western World than Saddam Hussein is. And that’s even though Saddam has home advantage, as it were, in that he’s a fit object for hatred by both sides. If you punch up “I hate George Bush” on your favourite search engine you’ll get a good deal more links than with “I hate Saddam Hussein”. And you’ll also notice that a lot of the Saddam links are to articles about George Bush saying “I hate…”

None of the links from Joshua’s article puts this site in a noticable position. So people must have done the search on their own, and forgetting the surrounding quotes from the article or editing them out deliberately to see what happens they have instead reached my page. At least that is what I hope has happened.

Since Joshua wrote his article Google has spidered his site, and placed it as number 2 and 4 in the two suggested searches above. But why is my I still hate George Bush page on top? There are several reasons, and here follows a few free SEO tips:

1. The page has the words in the search string in the page title (window bar)
2. The headline is tagged as h1, meaning really, really, important to Google
3. On the index page, there was a link tagged as h2, meaning really important to Google. This link has dissapeared with time, but is still present on the t-shirt index page
4. There is another link with the exact same wording in the right menu bar, wich is visible while viewing another of my t-shirt pages
5. At the bottom of every page I have 30 links to “recently added items”. Thus, a link with the exact same wording as the page title was to be found on over 400 pages when Google spidered the site
6. My page probably has a higher page rank than the other pages found

The results will change

Now that I have written and published this article, that in fact, and contrary to the t-shirt page, contains the exact phrase “I hate George Bush”, things will change. It might take a month or so, but eventually this page should pick up a position on those Google searches. Just wait and see. That’s the fun part about writing about Google search results. You know for a fact that the facts will change, and just by writing about a search phrase you are actively driving the change.

And, if you are at all interested in the t-shirt, it still might be for sale at TShirtHell.com. Just click here to find out.

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Wired has chipped in to the accumulating stories about how Google search results are being “clogged by blogs“. They do it with stories like this:

“Scott Gowell, of Lansing, Michigan, had a similar experience after making a brief reference on his blog, Sinekow, to an incident at a local mall. Much later, when he looked up the mall online hoping to find a listing of stores, Gowell’s first search result linked to his own blog.
Another time, Gowell said, he and fellow students in a programming class posted a question online about how to implement a sound feature using Java 3D. The query generated a high enough search-engine ranking that many other novice programmers e-mailed the students with questions.”

I don’t think you can blame the blogs for this. The fault must be with the corporate sites being unable to update their sites. Google seems to be partial to fresh content, daily updates, new info. And should be. So if the mall in question couldn’t bother with updating their own info they only have themselvs to blame. I someone else writes anything about them, so be it. Let them suffer a loss in the struggle for positions on Googles search results. And as for the students, there is no better way to learn than to see other peoples problems and help sorting them out.

Why do corporate sites get bad positions?

Wired goes on explaining what causes the corporate sites to loose rank to blogs and news sites. And there is nothing new. Except for the marketers at these coprorations. Now they suffer for using framed websites, java-generated links, session-ID’s and enormously long URL’s within their sites. Ha! I say. Let them have it.

This is a great incitament for them to go out and hire some competent people who knows how to make good websites that can be indexed by the search engines. That, and the quote from Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect, pretty much sums up the problems with badly kept corporate websites: “The Web is absolutely the great equalizer,” he said. “Good content rises to the top on the Internet. It doesn’t matter if the medium is a blog or a corporate Web page.”

Read the Wired News article. Click here!

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There has been quite a commotion in the SEO world lately. Google’s as much feared as anticipated dance is late, and Google’s test servers aren’t doing what SEO’s have grown used to. There are zillions of discussions going on about this at forums such as SEOchat.com and WebmasterWorld.com.

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By now we all know the verb to google. It’s widely used in a distict meaning. But it turns out the Google legal departement doesn’t like it.

Look here for a note from a Google trademark counsel asking Paul McFedries to remove the verb from his Word Spy site. Now, I thought it was every product managers wet dream to have their trademark become a verb? But not this one…

You just can’t stop new words from evolving, and certanly not via law suits. I wonder if the Google trademark counsel read William Gibsons latest book Pattern Recognition? Me neither, but I know that he has used the verb to google in the concept of “to google someone”.

So there. The word is litterarily established. Case closed?

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Once upon a time there was a monthly event that hypnotized and stole almost all attention from a great number of webmasters. It was called the Google dance. Today it doesn’t exist anymore. Since a couple of months back Google updates it’s index almost every day. Depending on the size and update frequency of your site, it will get spidered by Google daily or at least weekly. Search engin result pages change all the time. At least for the very popular search terms that many sites want to get in top for. The dance is on forever, and thus no longer news. In fact, this might be the only dancing activities Google is involved in right now. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google has been discussed widely lately. Some people even tend to think that Google has a secret agenda of overtaking the world (at least).

But I still can’t think bad of a company that has enough humour to present a preference page with a hacked look. (This might just be a really old link, but that makes it even better.) Just try this link and see it yourself.
www.google.com/preferences?hl=xx-hacker
Beware! If you click the Save Preferences button (54V3 PR3F3R3NZ3Z) the whole site will look like crazy.

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You have probably seen that Google-watch wants us to nominate Google for the Big Brother Awards. Google-watch is one of the most paranoid sites I’ve ever seen. (Others find them odd as well.) They have a true hangup on privacy in a way that makes me feel that these guys never use the same phone twice, never buys their paper in the same shop and never ever travel together in the same viecle. The stuff they worry about is stuff that any webmaster records if he wants to keep track of what is going on.

Here is their list of reasons why Google should be named Big Brother of the year. My comments are in italics. Before you read it (or re-read it because you have probably seen it before) you might want to open the Baloney Detection Kit in a new window.

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Farkers has gone bezerk making the Google logo graphics we will most probably never ever see. They’re hilarious. My favourite is the Dyslexia Awareness Day by E-man (you’ve all seen my spelling on this site).

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