FIFA World Cup 2010 Match Times - Google Calendar (also available for ICAL (.ics))

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After the May Day update many websites reported a significant loss of traffic, while others have seen improved traffic from search engines. After all, Google’s Search index resembles an ecosystem where one site’s loss is another one’s gain.

If you are using Google Analytics there is an easy way to check if and how this update has affected your performance in Google. In order to segment and analyze your long tail traffic you need to set up Advanced Segments using Regular Expressions. The nifty thing with Advanced Segments is that they allow you to analyze historical data, something which is not possible with filters, and to easily share them with others. Below I  have created 4 different segments which will hopefully help you get started with analyzing your long tail traffic. Simply click on any of the links to add them to your own Google Analytics profiles.

>> segment single-keyword queries

>> segment multi-keyword queries (>1)

>> segment two-keyword queries

>> segment three-keyword queries

For those of you interested, here is the basic regular expression used in the examples above. When applied with the Keyword dimension it filters in visits where exactly two keywords were used.

^(\S+)\s(\S+)$

With one of these Advanced Segments activated, you can for instance search for any patterns in your traffic from Google. You can find this report under [Traffic Sources > Search Engines > google].

I would love to hear your feedback, as well as any findings related to this Google update. Happy analyzing! :)

Photo credit: jean-fabien on Flickr

In short, Google pays out 68% for AdSense for Content (AFC) ads, and 51% for AdSense for Search (AFS) ads. Quote from the post:

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. […] Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. […] The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

This announcement is a welcomed news by websites monetizing their content with Google AdSense; this will in addition end many speculations around the subject.

Read the entire post here: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

You can see examples of this everywhere: why do so many people work for little money at NGOs while they could easily make more elsewhere? Some organizations, even startups, have people queuing at their door to work for them, others can’t hire no matter how hard they try, and when they succeed you will always find a high employee turnover in those organizations.

My favourite quote from the speech:

“The goal is not to hire people who need a job, it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. […] If you hire people just because they can do a job they will work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe they will work for you with blood, sweat, and tears.”

Annotations now seem to be rolled out to all users and here are 8 suggestions on how you can use it in your SEO projects.

In general you should make a habit of creating a note in Google Analytics for the following reasons:

- Technical adjustments including server updates and migrations, change of hosting provider, changes in the code (scripts, CSS, etc), database updates and modifications, etc.

- Structural modifications such as changes to your H-tags, URL structure, meta-robot tags, robots.txt, sitemaps submissions, etc.

- Editorial updates including copywriting, experiments with call to action, page titles, link anchor texts, etc.

- Campaign launches, both paid and organic, as well as offline campaigns. Changes in for instance AdWords budget should also be logged.

- PR work including articles written about you, your company or product, or related stories which could indirectly stimulate interest in your content.

- SEO related announcements including changes in search algorithms or introduction of new features, for instance launch of Google Caffeine, Personalized Search, and Real-Time Search.

- New inbound links to track any positive effect on your rankings and traffic.

- Seasonal trends, for instance start of the summer holiday season, related seasonal keyword trends such as ‘winter tires’ and ‘soccer world cup’, related behavioural trends resulting in higher search volumes in specific keyword clusters, e.g. health and fitness queries after the Christmas holiday season, etc

Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments section. Here is a video explaining how you can create an annotation in Google Analytics:

The principles of the Social Search feature are very simple. As a user I can create a Google Profile and link it with my various public accounts on for instance Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. Google then uses this information, plus other clues such as my Gmail contacts or blogs in my Google Reader, to generate a social graph of my direct connections, friends of friends and so on. Next time I perform a search, the search algorithms look through the public content published in my social graph to see if there is something relevant available.

Here is an example of how it can look like: when I for instance search for [301 redirect], I get two very relevant results from my social circle blended with other results. One is an excellent blogpost from my friend Jesper Åström about how to implement a .htaccess 301 redirect, and a second blogpost from my former colleague at Google John Muller about 301 redirection issues on Twitter.

So how did Google found these two results? That’s simply because I have linked my Twitter profile from my public Google Profile. Google’s algorithms can then see that I’m following both of these guys on Twitter, and that both have a link to their blogs in their Twitter profiles. The type of content which might pop up in Social Search are for instance blogposts, tweets and status updates on other microblogging platforms, reviews, public Picasa or Flickr images,  and other activity from your friends on places which are linked to via their profiles.

To start using Google Social Search, you need to first create your own Google Profile and add links to your public profile on Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. Google’s algorithms will then use these links to outline your relationship graph and to identify relevant content from your online neighbourhood next time you make a search.

If you are already using this feature, head over to this page to get an overview of your current social circle as Google sees it. More details about Social Search here.

(Photo credit: laurelpapworth.com, personalizemedia.com)

Update February 4: Following this post and my email conversations with the folks at Digg, they corrected their robots.txt file on January 29.

I was recently looking through some of the major tech news sites around the web and studying their usage of the robots.txt protocol. I came across Digg.com and found a potential error in their robots file which is costing them a lot of lost search engine traffic, as well as revenue from advertising. Since it looks like an honest mistake, I thought I write about it so that you won’t make the same mistake. For those of you not familiar with robots.txt, it is a way for webmasters to give instructions to search engine crawlers (also called robots and spiders) about what they are allowed to crawl, and which areas of the website should not be accessed. You can read more about the robots.txt protocol here.

To come back to Digg.com, I found a mistake among the instructions which causes a large part of the website (the Gadgets directory) to become inaccessible to search engines. If you take a look at their robots.txt file, you can find the following instruction:

Disallow: /gadget

If you are a SEO geek (like me) you have probably noticed the open ending to this line, and hence the wild card effect it causes in practice. What this line basically says is to block access to all content which have ‘digg.com/gadget’ as part of their URL. Note that this is not the same as exclusively blocking the “gadget” directory, but is far more inclusive. In practice, this instruction also covers Digg’s Gadgets directory, ‘digg.com/gadgets’ (note the ending ‘s’), and hence the problem! The correct implementation includes a forward slash ending the line in order to avoid the wild card effect:

Disallow: /gadget/

Digg has a large amount of pages in its index, for instance a Google site search shows close to 290 thousands pages in the ‘digg.com/apple’ directory alone.  We can therefore only speculate exactly how much search engine traffic Digg.com is shutting out by accidentally blocking the /gadgets/ directory (Yahoo Site Explorer shows 108 thousands pages in /gadgets/). This could be done intentionally, but it seems more likely to be an honest mistake (it’s one sinlge “/” missing after all). According to Compete.com, Digg has around 40mil monthly unique visitors, so I can only speculate around how much money such a small mistake has cost them in advertising revenues during this period.

Finally, the lessons we learn from this are to:

1) generate easy to read robots.txt files so it’s easier to spot such mistakes. There are online tools which help constructing and deciphering robots.txt files.

2) always use web analytics tools and segment your traffic so it’s clear to you what is going on across the various parts of your site.

3) be afraid of the wildcard effect, in fact just completely avoid anything with the word “wild” in it :)

What are other important things to think about when creating a robots.txt file?

1- Google and a number of other organizations have lately been a target for a sophisticated cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure originating in China
2- Evidence that the attackers’ main object have been to gain access to Gmail accounts of human rights activists inside China
3- Evidence that Gmail accounts of a large number of human rights activists in U.S., Europe and China has been regularly accessed by third parties. This has been achieved through using illegitimate methods such as phishing attacks and malware installed on user’s computer.

Google declares:

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Now, stop for a second and think about which other public company would pull out of the most lucrative market in the world, for a good cause? To me, it looks like Google continues to live up to its “Do No Evil” mantra. I really hope more companies will follow suit.

The entire post can be found here.

Anyways, if you don’t know The Swell Season then you really should check them out! The duo consists of Glen Hansard, singer of the Irish rock band The Frames, and Markéta Irglová who is an actress and musician. The couple became internationally famous for their roles in the fantastic movie Once and subsequently won an Oscar for best original song.

Their new album Strict Joy was released back in October, and except for having a wicked album cover, it sounds really good. Here is a mix with two tracks from the new album, plus a collection of previous stuff they have done. I hope you will enjoy it.

Watch a trailer for the new album here.

Listen to Strict Joy on

The latest assault comes from Germany’s minister of justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (FDP) who in the Spiegel magazine (poor translation here) threatens with legislative actions unless Google is rethinking its what she calls “gigantomania”. She criticizes Google for its general arrogance against user privacy, lack of transparency, and megalomania. Just as in any Google bashing article, she also mentions Google Book Search which has recently been harshly criticized by Angela Merkel’s government. In a speech before the opening of the last Frankfurt Book Fair Merkel said her government opposes Google’s endeavour to create an online library due to the “considerable dangers” for copyright protection online.

Germany has a dark history of breeches in citizens’ privacy and still to this day there are new revelations about the GDR’s repulsive treatment of its own citizens. Thus, this suspicious view of Google the Giant might not come as a surprise. One can only hope though that there are enough politicians and advisors in the current government who understand and can explain new technology to their older peers. The way I see it, Google with its huge worldwide reach and innovative products has undeservedly become a convenient target for people’s legitimate fears to lose their privacy in the vast world wide web.

To answer the question if the German government dislikes Google, my answer is clearly No! Instead, I believe the lawmakers’ attacks are caused by pressure from understandably concerned citizens, but even worse, from slow moving industries, mainly in publishing and news, who have held on to their old ways and refused to adapt to the digital era. They are now failing to deliver on their outdated business models and governments are sadly once again intervening to save failing industries to the detriment of the users.