Using Google’s Android? That’ll Be $10 a Year, Thanks!
July 29th, 2010 by Andy Beal
How are you enjoying that free Android software that powers your iPhone-competing smart phone?
I hope you like it enough to reimburse Google $10 a year, because that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt is hoping to get out of each Android user:
“If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that?” Schmidt asked rhetorically. All it would take, he said, is $10 per user per year.
Did you just feel a small pain in your wallet?
OK, relax.
Google doesn’t want you to actually hand over ten bucks a year to use Android, but that’s the nominal amount it says it needs to earn from each user, in order to add a nice supplement to its search engine revenue. That could come from any kind of distribution deal or premium apps that you might pay for.
And any amount it can earn from Android would certainly help it to finally cast off that “one trick pony” tag that appears to be relentlessly applied to the search giant. And, based on the number of people that tweet to me about their love of their Android phone, I suspect that Google has a good shot at getting the income from Android it so dearly craves.
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Google Wi-Fi slurp cleared by UK privacy watchdog
July 29th, 2010 by DaveN
Below is the ICO announcement that clears Google of spying on us … what I just don’t get is Google said it was a mistake in June, they even blamed a software engineer for scooping up the Wi-Fi data.. if it was truly a mistake why not just delete the data ??? and if it [...]Google Wi-Fi slurp cleared by UK privacy watchdog is a post from: Dave Naylor's SEO Blog.
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Deja Vu: First Time Matt Cutts of Google Saw Web Spam
July 29th, 2010 by barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
Aaron Wall posted an example of a large brand manipulating Google through an old spam technique. In short, they were buying expired domains to piggy back off of the link popularity and anchor text of those old domains. Aaron wall...
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Yahoo Search Marketing Reporting Goes Down For Many
July 29th, 2010 by barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
There are several complaints at both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that the Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns are missing all their data. One person received a response from Yahoo, where Yahoo presumingly said: Upon researching your account we found there is...
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Searcher Concerned After Wired’s Google / CIA Article
July 29th, 2010 by barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
Wired published an article last night named Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring. Here is a snippet of that article: The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web...
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More On Google Alerts Quality Control
July 29th, 2010 by barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
A couple months ago, we wrote on how Google Alerts tweaked their algorithm to be more more quality focused and send out less alerts. A recent Google Web Search Help thread has more on how Google Alerts works from Google...
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How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging
July 29th, 2010 by Yoav Ezer
One of the things we do to help our SEO efforts is to write professional articles about our niche. We believe this is a great way to get links, and anyone can do this in their own niche.
Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.
The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.
First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.
At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?
Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.
You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.
An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.
This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.
If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!
So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.
While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.
For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.
So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?
We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.
Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:
- Read the alert feed
- Iterate over all items
- Remove items from sites we don’t want
- Keep all others
- Output the kept items as a feed
This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.
So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.
Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.
So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.
The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!
The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.
Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.
From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.
We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.
A word about how it works
We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.
If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:
- Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
- Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
- Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
- Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.
Summary
Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.
A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.
We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging
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Google, US Gov’t Back Same Data Mining Startup
July 29th, 2010 by Greg Sterling
Their objectives may be different but both Google and the “investment arm of the CIA” are funding the same startup: Recorded Future. According to a piece in Wired both In-Q-Tel (the CIA investment firm) and Google will have a seat on the company’s board. This is reportedly the first time the government and Google have invested [...]*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
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See An Offensive Image On Google? Stay Tuned.
July 29th, 2010 by Barry Schwartz
Before the revamped Google Image Search design went live 9 days ago, there was a clear and quick way to report offensive images to Google. In fact, Google released the report offensive image feature just about a year ago, due to complaints. Now, that feature is no longer found in the new design. Here [...]*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
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Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search
July 29th, 2010 by barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search. The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content....
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