It looks like the user-agent recently changed from:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.1; en-us; dream) AppleWebKit/525.10+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Mobile Safari/523.12.2
To:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; en-us; T-Mobile G1 Build/CRB43) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1
Manta.com distributes a very successful newsletter with topics ranging from Sales, Marketing, HR, Business and Technology. As we continue to grow our audience to over 12 million visitors per month, we’re also looking to continue populating the newsletters with quality content.
We’re looking for technology related content for the newsletter in the areas of: IT, networking, smart phones, wireless, etc. If you’re a company involved in one of these, or related, industries and are looking for additional exposure, please contact either myself or editor [at] manta.com for more details.
So Google released a new version of their webmaster tools, which has some nice features, but also some frustrations.
After logging in you’re presented with a dash board, showing highlights of certain report segments, unfortunately this can’t be customized, which really sucks, although at least they did a pretty good guess at the stats I like to monitor. There are four report segments shown:
If I could customize this view it would be fantastic.
The left nav has 3 main menu options:
The functionality beneath those is pretty much the same as before, just with some cosmetic treatments. Under each of these there are in total 12 reports. With that number of subnav items, I really would have liked to see them all available without having to expand the three top items. Come one Google, it’s just 12 lines, 15 with menu headings.
I’ve been using webmaster tools from the very beginning and I consider myself an advanced user, so I would also like to be able to turn off the dynamic help items.
One big enhancement is that the message indicator follows you around in the top right corner of each page, which is really helpful. Previously it was only available on the screen after you’d just logged in, so if you leave your browser open and on a specific site profile, it could be days before you knew you had a message.
As well as the internal links and links to your site reports, I’d also like to see a report showing sites that you link to. This would be really helpful in determining if your site has been hacked or and help monitor outgoing to links if you have a site with multiple contributors or authors.
Taking this one step further, the outgoing links report could also show you if the page you’re linking to turns into a 404. That may get webmasters to proactively change their links. No self respecting webmaster wants to send their users to a 404. So rather than have the site owner try to chase the inbound 404 links, sending emails, which often get confused with other link requests, or just never make it past the spam filters, webmasters could see the errors and make corrections. How cool would that be?
I did notice that some oddball sitemap files had showed up, although they had big red X symbols next to them, meaning that they have errors. It would be helpful to see a mouseover popup describing the error, rather than making me click through each one to see the error.
There are some nice things in there, but overall, it’s pretty much the same as it was before, except for more plusboxes. I’m imagining a design meeting at Google, someone stands up and exclaims: “We need more plusboxes!”
After reading Joe Hall’s tips on hacking bookmarks, I decided to set one up for Manta.com, so I can quickly search for any of the 17 million US companies in its database.
I created a bookmark (I did it in Firefox 3, my default browser), then edited the details so they looked this:
Make sure you add the %s after the search parameter in the Location field. The description was automagically pulled from the site, you don’t actually need that info for this to work.
For my keyword I choose simply “manta”.
Now all I need to do to manta a company is to click in the address bar in my Firefox window and type “manta XYZ” where XYZ is the name of the company I’m looking for.
e.g. “manta google”
Also note that with our recently improved internal search functionality, you can also add other words into your search criteria, e.g. “manta google mountain view, ca”
Note: This only works in Firefox. If you want to add Manta.com as a search engine, let me know and I can hack something together.
So I was using Chrome to check my gmail account and noticed a message at the bottom of the page by the stats that I could download the latest Google toolbar. I was pretty excited to see this and give it a go, so I clicked the link, which took me to this page:
Ok it only mentions ie and firefox, but I kinda skimmed over that and just saw the first blue link to download the toolbar, so I clicked it:
Ok it mentions firefox, but I thought, Chrome is still fairly new and there’s still a lot of sites out there that are not recognizing it and classifying it as something else. Anyway, I thought I’d continue just in case, so now, 3 clicks later I get presented with this:
Ok, now it detects my browser, but it took 3 clicks for me to discover this. If this was an ecommerce site trying to sell a product, it would have been a really disappointing experience for a user. And as we’re aware, once you give a user a disappointing experience, it’s really hard to win them back.
Now I’m assuming that the rotating message that appears at the bottom of the screen is served by some type of ad serving application, so why could it not have detected my Chrome user-agent and bypassed that ad?
It makes you wonder how many companies are buying ad inventory which is being served to users who cannot convert.
If you’re buying ad inventory, make sure you have an exclusion list, so you can work with whoever serves your ads to maximize exposure to your specific audience, however you define it.
Over the past 2 years I’ve read countless articles and posts about how SEO is dead. Let me tell you, it’s very much alive and kicking. If you want to think that it’s dead, go right ahead and move on to do something else. Because that’s a defeatist attitude and you’re obviously on the verge of giving up.
I’ve been with my current employer for about 18 months now and since then I’ve done a lot of work to improve things in various areas. On one of our sites I’ve grown traffic approx 6 times. I’m not talking from 10 to 60 visitors a month, I’m talking in the scale of millions of visitors a month.
This is with whitehat, search engine friendly, long term, futureproof SEO techniques.
I can’t spell out everything I did, but I can tell you that what I did was pay attention to the direction of where the search engines strive to be. I went to conferences and heard first hand about the goals of the search engines and tried to look at the site through their eyes.
I worked closely with my development team, as well as managers and content people to ensure that they understood the big picture. Through educating my team members and showing results, I gained their trust and respect and because of that, the SEO function has now become an integral and top of mind consideration for almost everything we want to publish.
Next I worked with the development team to obtain some key reporting tools and custom reports from Omniture which let me analyze certain trends and statistics. By paying close attention to detail, I often uncovered problems which were most oftentimes quick and easy fixes. More importantly I also was able to discover areas of opportunity and put plans in place to exploit them.
Traffic is no where near peak, we still have a long way to go and are forging ahead with some great new site features and plans for content. The budget for 2009 is showing that organic search engine traffic is set to continue to grow to new record levels.
The other thing that’s surprising about this issue is that most often the issue of knowledge and analytical skills that most SEOs possess are completely overlooked. How many times on various forums do you see site owners panicking about lost rankings/traffic/pagerank, etc. When something goes wrong with a site, who do they turn to? SEOs, yeah, we’re also detectives.
But we’re also consultants. The other type of questions that are commonly overlooked are the ones about site redesigns. The site owner is on to a good thing but needs to freshen up their site. SEO consultants (external or internal) are the people who can guide a site redesign to ensure minimal loss in rankings/traffic. I just completed this process for one for one of our big sites. We radically redesigned our main product page, adding a lot of extra functionality and changing the page layout. It was a process which was quite involved and required 3 or 4 iterations before I gave it the green light for launch, but had I not worked on that project, site traffic would have tanked almost immediately, then the typical mad panic would have set in and then all kinds of rash decisions would have been made.
So when I sit back and think about the people that are blogging and writing about how “SEO is dead”, I can’t help but wonder if these people are actually doing any serious SEO, working hard at it and paying attention to detail.
As one of my college professors once told me: “Work hard, play hard”
For some reason it really grates me when I read people’s definition of PageRank being “the quantity and quality of inbound links”. To me, “quality” is fairly subjective and doesn’t really accurately describe it. I prefer to use “value” instead of “quality” since PR is just a numerical value. See, there’s that word again, value.
The PageRank value assigned to a URL is just the result of a numerical calculation. A higher value does not necessarily signify importance or quality. It just means that it has a large amount of PageRank being passed to it. This could be from one high value link, or multiple low value links. Google uses other means to determine relevance, quality, importance, spam, trust, etc.
What do you think?
I used the Google for Search app on my iphone tonight for the first time. I wanted to look up the names of the three tenors, so I tapped the voice icon and said “the three tenors”. Unfortunately it did not fully understand my accent and instead thought I was wanting to find “history tennis”. My family found it quite amusing when I had to repeat the search with a heavy American accent.
It would be really nice to have a settings option where I can read a passage of text so that it can better understand me. Then at least I wouldn’t have to have to break out the British fake southern American twang in public again.
Anyone else have problems? If so, do you have an accent?
Edit 6/15/2009:
Well it looks like they implemented some updates to their speech recognition so that it also understands British and Australian accents. Well done fellas!
For those of you who are into military humor, I had to repost these set of pictures, which came to me via email. I’m glad they still have a sense of humor with all the stuff they have to deal with. Thanks to all the service men and women keeping America safe.
If you search Google for TrustRank you will find many blogs and forums talking about it and giving advice and theories about what you can do to alter it, but the fact of the matter is that it just simply does not exist.
At pubcon 2007 Suresh Babu interviewed Matt Cutts and asked him specifically to define TrustRank. Below is the video of that interview.
For those of you not able to watch the video, here’s a transcript where Matt Cutts talks about its origins and confusion between a Yahoo intern’s project and an antiphishing filter Google was developing.
What is trustrank? everybody’s curious about that. It’s kinda nice you asked because it’s good to have a chance to debunk this a little bit. So it turns out there was a summer intern who was at Yahoo and Jan Pedersen and some other people at Yahoo, and they wrote a paper about something called TrustRank; and what it does is it tries to treat reputation like it’s physical mass and see how it flows around on the web and what physical properties does trust have; and it’s really interesting stuff. But it’s completely separate from Google. So a couple of years ago at like the exact same time, Google was working on an antiphishing filter, and as part of that we needed to come up with a name for it and so they filed for a trademark, and I think they used the name TrustRank, so it was a really weird coincidence. Yahoo had a TrustRank project and we had this TrustRank trademark, and so everybody talks about TrustRank, TrustRank, TrustRank and yet if you go and ask five different SEOs you’ll have five different opinions and definitions about exactly what TrustRank is.
If you go to the US Patent and Trademark website and do a trademark search you’ll find this result:
If you go to the advanced published applications search page on US Patent and Trademark website and search for Trustrank you will find these results. Notice that none of them are filed by or Assigned to Google, although there are references to Yahoo’s link-based spam detection patent application.
IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF MEDIA CONTENT HAVING A HIGH LIKELIHOOD OF PRODUCING ON-TOPIC CONTENT
Inventors: Wolters; Timothy J.; (Superior, CO) ; Setayesh; Mehrshad; (Lafayette, CO)
Assignee Name and Adress: COLLECTIVE INTELLECT, INC. Boulder CO
Serial No.: 938691
Series Code: 11
Filed: November 12, 2007
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SECURE, ANONYMOUS, AND PERTINENT REPOSTING OF PRIVATE BLOG POSTING, ETC.
Inventors: Drayer; Jay A.; (Houston, TX) ; Howe; Grant M.; (Cypress, TX)
Serial No.: 923366
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 24, 2007
Enhanced Detection of Search Engine Spam
Inventors: Caldwell; Larry Thomas; (Annandale, VA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Idalis Software, Inc. Annandale VA
Serial No.: 871539
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 12, 2007
System and method for characterizing a web page using multiple anchor sets of web pages
Inventors: Joshi; Amruta Sadanand; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Ravikumar; Shanmugasundaram; (Cupertino, CA) ; Reed; Benjamin Clay; (Morgan Hill, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 542079
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 3, 2006
Dynamic updating of display and ranking for search results
Inventors: Ferrenq; Isabelle; (Saint Lattier, FR) ; Chevalier; Pierre-Yves; (Biviers, FR)
Assignee Name and Adress: EMC Corporation
Serial No.: 522498
Series Code: 11
Filed: September 15, 2006
User-sensitive pagerank
Inventors: Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Fayyad; Usama M.; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Raghavan; Prabhakar; (Saratoga, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: YAHOO! INC.
Serial No.: 474195
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 22, 2006
Providing a rating for a web site based on weighted user feedback
Inventors: Repasi; Rolf; (Sunrise Beach, AU) ; Clausen; Simon; (New South Wales, AU)
Serial No.: 803922
Series Code: 11
Filed: May 16, 2007
Search engine with augmented relevance ranking by community participation
Inventors: Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 478291
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 28, 2006
Trust propagation through both explicit and implicit social networks
Inventors: Berkhim; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Taha; Abe; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Maghoul; Farzin; (Hayward, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 498637
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006
Realtime indexing and search in large, rapidly changing document collections
Inventors: Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Walters; Chad; (San Francisco, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 498706
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006
Using community annotations as anchortext
Inventors: Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 498682
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006
Link-based spam detection
Inventors: Barkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Gyongyi; Zoltan Istvan; (Stanford, CA) ; Pedersen; Jan; (Los Altos Hills, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 198471
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 4, 2005
So since Google has dropped the trademark, does not have any patent applications for it and Matt Cutts explained the confusion, I think I’d call this myth busted!
