Pedro Sttau

Massive infrastructure near the The Dalles. Pictures are a courtesy of Information Week.

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Google is watching your every move, don’t you think you can fool the eyes of the Bot! So buying your way to the top, are we? It’s just a matter of time before you get caught. Riiiiiiiiiiight.

A little word of advice to the big G, Begin by sorting out your first page results, and then worry about what Webmasters are up to.

Search for Web Marketing at Google.pt: (The Red arrow is pointing to my companies website whilst the blue arrow is pointing to the site that is “clustering” the results page).

http://www.google.pt/search?hl=pt-PT&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enPT232PT232&q=web+marketing&meta=

Is a simple condition statement too complex for the algorithm to handle?

IF RESULTS page 1 already contains Page A should I display Page A twice? What about three times? Heck, why not go all the way and cluster my own search results page with a single website?? that should be fun!

I don’t have a lot to complain about since my company is leading the SERPS with a single results. But for the love of God, this is becoming ridiculous, to the point where I’m having trouble explaining to my clients that Google is a good reliable system to invest in.

Maybe the Adwords Learning Center could add a new Sales pitch tutorial on how to lead with questions like: “why is that site occupying three slots in the first page? Why should I invest in PPC when I can get 30% of the top page slots with my website?

Please note that I have nothing against the website’s webmaster, I personally know the owner of the company in question and kudos for him for the fantastic results, but it’s impossible to stay quiet when you see one of your top business search queries being handled by Goolgle the way it is. Sort it out!

Now here is a creative way of kicking the crap out of your competition.

So Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick published some notes about how Google is going to develop a system that will aggregate the data from all of the most prominent Social Network sites. Note that we are not talking about an end-user product, meaning that the purpose of this system is to provide a tool that will generate graph data from all of the network sites without having to login seperatly to each account. Sounds a bit confusing right?

That’s the idea! Of course that there is a hidden agenda here, and doesn’t take a rocket scientist to uncover it.

Imagine not having to re-invite your friends every time you register on a new Social Networking platform since this centralized system will aggregate all of this data for you! and what about only needing to login to your Google account to have all of this data at your mercy? Ah the joy of Google contr…I mean simplicty.

Supposedly, Google is negotiating with Facebook and they have shown a lot of enthusiasm.

The goal is not to replace Facebook. In fact, most people I’ve talked to love Facebook, just want a bit more of their already-public data to be more easily accessible, and want to mitigate site owners’ fears about any single data/platform lock-in. Early talks with Facebook about participating in this project have been incredibly promising.

If you have a centralized system that aggregates all of the data in one platform, the natural progression will be that the traffic will divert from the independent data feeders to the centralized system.

For the life of me I cannot understand how any of the Social Networks can find this exciting or promising in any way, unless of course there is plenty going on that we don’t know about.

Very cool presentation my Googler Mark Lesser. He talks about how one should take a step back and try and enjoy the “art of doing nothing” at least once a year.

Something I should deffinately consider doing in the near future.

Seems that Google is taking down the paid video rentals and downloads in a couple of days. This of course means that all of the rented videos will no longer be playable.

An email was sent to the Google Video purchasers informing them that they would be credited a fantastic sum of $2 in their Google Checkout accounts, that’s right bonus and gals, not $0.50, not $1, but a total sum of $2 for your troubles!

For god’s sake, why doesn’t this multi million dollar company just reimburse the money people spent with the videos they rented and were expecting to have access too?

I believe that today was the first day I ever had a real feel of insecurity towards Google as a company and as a brand.

About 7 days ago I took and passed the AdWords Professional Exam, and patiently waited for the exam results to reflect in my Client Center AdWords Pro tab. Three days had gone by and the system still didn’t recognize that I had passed the exam.

Decided to send the AdWords Professional team an email expressing my concern. The next day I got an email from them asking me to send them the Prometric email that attested that I had passed the exam. I promptly sent the required information and finally got a reply almost two days later telling me that regrettably I would have to take the exam again since the ID that I used to take the exam didn’t belong to me but to one of my clients.

Now, please bare with me…I registered to take the exam through the link “Register for the Exam” I believe in the “Client Center Pro Tab”, that redirected me to the Prometrics website.
When I clicked on the registration form the ID field was already filled in, so I assumed the information was correct and took the exam.

What happened was that for some reason it placed one of my clients AdWords ID in the field and allowed me to carry on the registration.

Even if in theory it was my mistake, because I should rechecked the information before submitting the form, why would I have to pay another 50$ to take an exam that I had already passed just because there was mistake with the account ID in the exam form? Take into account that I have full control over my client’s account, including the email address associated with that account, so I would easily be able to proof that I was the one who took the exam.

This however didn’t help me much, and Google Support promptly congratulated me in passing the exam and told me that regrettably I would have to take it again. Wasn’t that nice?

Decided to give them a call and sort out this nonsense. Surprisingly, or not, there was no Support line to be found. Now, I spend a lot of my own money as well as my client’s on AdWords, and this company isn’t open to helping out when I need them? What if it was a matter that required a fast and urgent intervention, would I have to wait 24 hours for an automated reply from Mr. Googler bot?

I eventually found the Google support line (1.866.246.6453) on the Google SEO Forum and called them.

The employee that attended me was called Ann, and what a difference! I must say I had never experience such a good level os support. She was polite, listen to what I had to say, but best of all, she was Human! Didn’t interact with me in “Bot mode”, and make me feel like I was actually a client.

All I can say is that 8 hours later my problem has been resolved.

One of the things I love about this industry is that every day you discover people who are willing to test things out, that don’t simply take things as they are. Kuddos to them!

Shaun Anderson tried to figure out how Google would treat and index a title with 50 terms inside the tag. The results were very surprising to say the least.

Hobo SEO UK : “You can put 50 words in your title tag, we’ll read it”

For all of you that are wondering why Google needs our Search History data, the obvious is now slowly becoming reality.

Adwords is begging to serve ads that are influenced by he user’s history search data.

I first read this on a post by Barry Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land
Personalized AdWords Google Ads You See Influenced By Previous Searches that explains how this is being implemented.

The idea is pretty simple, you do a search on Holidays, and then do a search for Portugal, the next time you search for Holidays you will be served ads of holidays in Portugal.

Very slick, and this is wonderful news for advertisers since it will increase the contextuality of the ads, and consequently the conversion rates.

Google has integrated a way for webmasters to be notified of eventual problems with the websites they own. I’m guessing the concept is similar to the one implemented in adsense.

This might be very useful if Google actually uses the system to notify website owners of problems before they act on them.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61504&hl=en

My friend Nikesh talks about the Internet as a Global Economical revolution at the Institute of Directors 2007 annual convention.

One of the things he said that I really found curious is that all of the new successful Internet start ups always come about with two founders, Google, Youtube, Myspace, Skype, Facebook, etc…

Being in an Internet start-up myself with a partner with whom I identify myself a great deal, I can totally related to that and understand how this collaboration could be beneficial to a business concept and growth.

Maybe most of you use something similar or even better, but I have found a little tool that generates Google Maps (with the embed HTML) from inputing the desired adress.

Very handy when you want to generate Maps for your clients in a flash.

Google Map Generator

Very interesting interview where Eric Schmit is confrotned with current law Suite Viacom against Google regarding Copyright.

I was a bit surprised to see Eric Schmit persistently dodge from answering direct questions regarding Intellectual Property.

Another thing that I found hilarious was Walt Mossberg asking why Google didn’t recruit Human editors to take care of specific search queries? Oh dear!

Okay, so I find Wiki to be useful in many ways, but for gods sake Google, stop making it compete for business terms.

If Wiki is a non commercial electronic knowledge base, why is it ranking for commercial terms?

Why is it that when I search for Web Design Wiki is beating the crap out of my companies website, that IS in fact dedicated to ..Guess what.? Web Design.

Isn’t the quality of the results in search dictated by relevancy?

So how relevant is Wiki for a user that is looking searching for Web Design?
What is the probability of this user looking for the meaning of the term rather then companies that offer the service?

Most of the times, if I want to look for the meaning of something and want a Wiki results I’ll just add WIKI in front of the term that I am searching for.

To understand this fixation of Google with wiki, take a look at Search Mash ( Google’s Search testing platform) and you will see Wiki as a default result on the right column of all your searches.
It’s still annoying, but at least it isn’t competing for the regular organic search results.

Most of you might have already seen this, but due to an email request I decided to post the requested videos. Enjoy.

An old friend of mine down at WebMasterWorld just sent me this fantastic presentation featuring Sergey Brin and Larry Page.