google+ Sign-in

Last Tuesday Google launched Google+ Sign-In for third party developers, they can now allow users to sign into applications using their Google+ account. This is Google’s latest attempt to get ‘normal’ people using the social network, it will also give the search giant plenty of user data to slobber over.

Google is claiming that its new sign-in functionality is more secure than the likes of Twitter and, in particular, Facebook. It also gives users sharing options so that their social networks aren’t spammed with app updates and activity. Google+ director Matt Waddell released an image taking an indirect (but quite obvious) shot at Facebook with the tagline ‘Try the red pill.’ Facebook have received criticism in the past for ‘social spam’, however, Danny Sullivan took a closer look at Google’s new feature and decided that it’s not too dissimilar.

Take a look at Google’s launch video:

Google: how search works

A busy week for Google, it also released a stunning interactive infographic called ‘How Search Works.’ If you haven’t seen it yet and are thinking, ‘urgh, another SEO infographic’, take a look it’s pretty cool. The infographic itself gives a pretty basic and general overview of how Google indexes and ranks websites, but it also has some useful stuff for professional SEOs.

The coolest part is probably the live spam screenshots which show examples of ‘pure spam’ that Google has penalised. This is updated in real-time and some of the examples are pretty humorous.

These pages are examples of ‘pure spam.’ They appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites.

This page also goes on to list the types of spam that Google looks for and takes action on such as cloaking, keyword stuffing and unnatural links to/from a site.

Google also published data for the first time on manual actions, webmaster notifications and reconsideration requests. The data in these graphs is really interesting. The graph below shows the number of websites that have had manual action taken against them over the last 8 years and is broken down by the different spam types.

YAHOO CEO BANS WORKING FROM HOME

Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO, sent an email out to thousands of her employees last week in which she announced she was banning them from working ‘remotely.’

As a result, several hundred staff must relocate to their nearest Yahoo office by June or quit. Mayer’s said ‘to become the absolute place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we all need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.’

Those who only work one or two days in the office will have to submit to the new regime. ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,’ she says, ‘speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.’

groupon send andrew mason packing

It came as little surprise last week when Andrew Mason was relieved from his post as CEO of Groupon. The company has been going through a rough patch since going public just over a year ago, and its poor 4th quarter earnings sent its stock reeling.

Rumours of Mason’s exit have been floating around for a while now, and he seemed to be expecting it as on Thursday he released this letter to his employees on Twitter.

For Groupon Employees: jottit.com/v5wux/ (Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but insufficient #leadership)

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 28, 2013

‘After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.’

Mason took full responsibility for his role in Groupon’s recent poor performance and told his former employees; ‘You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that.’

Groupon, now valued at less than £2 billion, is searching for Mason’s replacement. In the meantime, Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis are taking the reins.

That’s our weekly RoundUP of industry news, I’ll leave you with this little treat from Qualcomm:

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The full report is yet to be released, but there have already been some interesting conclusions drawn from the data.
Bearing in mind the origin of the funding for this project, it’s likely to have a certain bias, and highlight the benefits of spending more on a non-Google search engine.The research suggests that you can roughly pigeon-hole people based on their search engine preference.

“Consumer preference for a specific train [search path] demonstrates a unique demographic and psychographic profile … The search experience on different search engines yields different results, with some being more relevant to the consumer than others. [This] contributes to overall customer and brand awareness. If the results of the search satisfy the needs of the consumer, then the search engine has greater appeal to that potential customer and he or she will have a deeper connection to the brand and the search engine. Therefore, the research indicates, search engines provide different degrees of a “brand lift” to the destination site.”

I have to say, this is an ambitious statement to make, because it assumes that you can group people into just 3 different user types based on what could potentially be the search engine that was set as the homepage on their PC. They go on to segment by industry, giving different conversion rates for Google/Yahoo/Bing users for certain brands, products and services.

So far, the data that comes into the main focus regards conversion rates for the various verticals, but the snippets of the results are so specific to brand, that we will have to wait for the full report to be released to come to any actionable conclusions.

For the original press release : Research by Wunderman Finds Link Between Brand Building and Search Engine Use By Consumers

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They claim not to be building a new social network but are focusing on building social into everything they do. I don’t envy them the task because the Yahoo network of sites has grown into a huge unruly beast over the years and the acquisition of Flickr, Del.icio.us and event calendering website Upcoming, further complicates the task. Pulling it all together though could see Yahoo moving toward offering serious competition to Google and Microsoft in the competition to offer a single brand internet experience.

Yahoo have also announced their Search Monkey project which it claims will lead to a more open approach to search by allowing website owners big and small “to build and present the next generation of search results”. Their hope is that buy offering a “free, open platform” and enabling site owners to provide further additional detail of their sites such as photos, ratings and addresses that will all show in the search results.

It’s a very nice idea but as highlighted in the comments accompanying the announcement on the Yahoo blog, there are concerns that this could mean Black Hat SEO techniques could be adopted by many to falsify Yahoo search results.

You can make your own minds up as to what is going on between the two monkeys I’ve used for the photo on this post but I think the surprise on the face of the one says it all.

Related Links:

Yahoo Search Blog

Search Monkey Developer Preview

Flickr

Del.icio.us

Upcoming

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Here’s an example listing that facebook are planning to show in their search results.

In a few weeks Facebook will extend the Public Search listings to include indexing by the major search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. Their hope is that this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.
For those who have concerns about their public search listing being visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can edit your privicy settings to restrict visibility to those in your networks or friends list, as shown below:

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Although both ASK and Live announced they had adopted the sitemap protocol last year neither search engine provided an interface for webmasters to be able to submit sitemaps. All very annoying. It seems though they may have been holding out for sitemap auto-discovery which all 4 search engines this week have announced they will support going forward.

How Does Sitemap Auto-Discovery Work?

Well it’s all nice and simple, simply add,

Sitemap: <Sitemap_location>

to your robots.txt file.

For example:

Sitemap: <http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml>

For anyone still interested in submitting sitemaps manually I have found a method today for submitting to ASK. Enter, http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml into your bowser address bar, where http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml is the path to your sitemap.

For more information checkout the Ask Blog and the Yahoo Search Blog

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So, next came the google Co-op, which is…………….uh………exactly the same as Rollyo. Here’s a custom search engine I made for this blog site with Google Co-op.

POST UPDATE: Had to remove the search engines from the post because they broke the blog. You can see the google custom search engine here though.

Now there’s Yahoo Search build as well which is…………..uh……exactly the same as Rollyo and Google Co-op. Ok so here’s a custom search engine of this blog made with Yahoo Search Build.

POST UPDATE: Had to remove the search engines from the post because they broke the blog.

So which is best? Which should I use? Well I’m not sure because I haven’t tested either to any great extent but for web developers who have either had to implement free search engine scripts that come with horrible adverts littering the results or paying for premium search scripts that cost an arm and a leg your prayers have been answered. I can see these becoming part of the web developers tool kit and what do the search engines get for offering us such a great free service? Well nothings for free is it? so you can bet your last dime that the information they gather from custom searches will be gathered and diagnosed and used in some way.

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Sunday 12th November – Helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon

Like a couple of kids we were all excited about the trip to the Grand Canyon. I think we were more excited about the helicopter ride than the Grand Canyon really.

Monday 13th November – Propel meeting in San Jose

On Monday we flew out to San Jose to meet with Propel. Propel are a software company based in the Silicon Valley part of California. It was all very exciting, as we traveled from the airport to the Propel offices we passed the ebay head quarters which was huge. The people at Propel were lovely and made us feel very welcome. Propel have developed what we feel is the best dial up accelerator product on the market and we’ll be delivering the product in the UK under the NetFury brand. So before long you’ll be able to purchase a great dial up accelerator that will speed up dial up, speed up broadband and speed up email via the NetFury website.

Tuesday 14th November – Opening Day of PubCon

The opening day of PubCon was a little disappointing. Registration was disorganised and a queue stretching a good 100 meters was visible. Apart from the keynote speech from Guy Kawasaki the day didn’t offer much of worth.

Wednesday 15th November – 2nd Day of PubCon and Circus De Soleil

The 2nd day of PubCon was much better. Me and Simon split up for many of the sessions to maximise the knowledge learned. I’ll be writing up my notes in a later Blog. In the evening we went to see Kaa which is a Circus De Soleil production at the MGM Grand. The show was amazing and Simon has been converted to a theater goer by the experience.

Thursday 16th November – 3rd Day of PubCon and some time at the tables

PubCon turned out to be another informative day and the final 2 sessions featured some big names from the Major search Engines. The search engine Smack Down in the final session featured talks from Yahoo Google (Matt Cutts) ASK and Live (Formerly MSN Search). The big announcment was that all of these search engines have agreed to use the sitemaps protocol which will aid webmasters to keep them informed of the structure of their sites.

Thursday evening I managed to get some time on the Casino tables and walked away $350 from the Texas Hold ‘Em World Tornament table which was nice.

Friday 17th November – Pub time for PubCon and shopping for gifts

There were no official sessions for PubCon on the friday just a get together at the Nine Fine Irishman pub and a bar sponsored by Ask. We popped a long for a couple of drinks (well it would have been rude not to) and then spent the afternoon shopping for gifts. I won’t mention the fact that I had pre-purchased tickets for David Copperfield and the MGM Grand for the evening show and managed to miss it because I got the time wrong……..oh I just did, DOH!

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Tags: Manchester Digital MDDA Yahoo PushON

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