Very well written article by Slightly Shady SEO on Google’s user data empire. Read it in full to understand how pervasive Google’s information about, well, everyone is.

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I wanted to put in a prediction here and now before mind-gaming really takes off (and yes, before I actually have the product) that without knowing the fundamental code behind the devices (caveats) I wanted to make a prediction on the likelihood of mind-gaming tournaments. The prediction I have with mind-gaming tournaments is not in the area of CounterStrike to use your mind to play most of the game, but rather to use your mind against other players.

Think of it as the next-generation gaming that will take off as a more violent Wii game without the remotes. You have objects around the room that you can pick up and throw or use against many other players, with each player respectively trying to do the same to you. Heck, it could be called “Telekinesis Wars” where armies of telekenetic warriors run around and use their mind powers (through the mind-gaming device) to fight other players. So what would make this different than the use of a mouse? It would rely on how “strongly” your mind-gaming abilities are with the device (don’t ask me how, this is just a fun prediction) such that when two players tried to pick up the same object, there would be a battle of the minds for control of the object.

Would be like Peter vs Sylar in Heroes, no? Heck, that would even be the perfect game for the mind-gaming device regardless too.

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A few days ago Google announced a new feature called Google SearchWiki, allowing you the ability to move and comment on search results. Though called a wiki, SearchWiki is really a misnomer considering that you cannot actually fully customize the search results and what each page says. A better name would have been SocialSearch considering that you can see comments made about various pages by other users logged into their own Google Account.

The idea of a social search is nothing new considering the plethora of social media sites around the web that have taken off with many fans of Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, HaoHao, etc (feel free to submit this to any of those of course *winks*), but what is new is a major search engine actually testing and using the concept of social media to affect the results you see. Both Yahoo and Google had actually tested this over a year ago, but required searchers to download an add-on to actually see truly wiki-like results, and as such never caught on.

If you want basic information about the ups and downs of using the new Google Search Wiki, please check SearchEngineLand and check Graywolf for a more… entertaining example of the downsides. I will be covering the SEO and online advertising aspect that could develop from Google’s new SocialSearch (as I will henceforth be referring to it as).

What SocialSearch could do to SEO:

Currently, the new feature rolled out by Google does not play a factor into the search results, but expect that if Google finds the use of it to be beneficial, then it will certainly do so. As a Search Strategist myself, this additional feature would likely force the industry to adopt social media with a stronger embrace as the human equation plays a stronger part beyond the standard on/off-site SEO. As if SEO is not nebulous enough with tracking the value of organic search, the inclusion of having to use social media will only make matters more indirect. Brand reputation will become exponentially cumbersome as comments will continually need to be made to knock out negative commenters.

And that is where things go from useful to spam-ish. Ironically as Google tries to move away from links playing a part in SEO, Google may be choosing the same, if not worse, path in deciding how organic results should rank. I can guarantee that if SocialSearch plays a part into how organic results rank across the board that spam in the comments, spam in emails (”please rank this site” instead of “please link to me”), and spam Google Accounts (with broken Captchas) will inevitably become the norm.

Yet, why do I say it could be worse with social media playing a part? Social media is mob rule at its best and worst. The nice side is you can find unique and strange stuff and share it to large groups of people; the downside is the credit goes to sites that have the largest following. Posted a hilarious picture and Gizmodo found it? Guess which site is going to show up at the top of social media. Minor newspaper outlets that use the AP? Guess which site is going to show up (even though the AP should almost never show up since they do not create their own content). Basically, social search is about those with the largest followings; you have a huge fan base, you win, regardless of what is relevant, correct, or fair.

Heck, I even expect to see a “RankUp” social media button to come about if Google implemented SocialSearch into its algorithm. You could simply post an article, and provide an automatic ability for your fan base to “Rank [it] Up” on their results.

What SocialSearch could do to advertising:

I see the most impact really on the advertising end, along the lines of what Facebook has done. As someone who finds the load times of pages unacceptable when half the load time is of ads that do not interest me, the system that Facebook has set up actually is working rather well. As I mentioned before about Facebook’s feedback advertising, the ability to place feedback on the ads have made them a lot more relevant to me and therefore worthwhile for myself and the advertiser. Theoretically, this could work in the same way for SocialSearch if Google uses the information to help further optimize its search for more relevant sites per keyword (what better way to understand the very general phrases or information only keyword searches) or through Google providing the thumb up/down information to the websites organically ranking.

It is an interesting concept, but the problem really is Google’s foundation of basing sites on popularity algorithms that will always favor those who are popular (whether through links or social media fans).

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Baidu has recently come to terms with media criticisms over whether Baidu allows its paid results to influence what happens in the organic results. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal covers this in a little bit of detail noting about Baidu’s paid results response:

Last night, in a conference call with analysts, Baidu unveiled its response: A new system that more clearly separates its paid links from ordinary search results.

“We are doing this because we care. It is important to us. We want to be a responsible corporate citizen,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li.

They asserted again that the search company doesn’t exclude Web sites from search results because the companies behind them failed to pay for links. But Baidu executives also said they are speeding up development of the new system, called Phoenix Nest, in part to quell confusion. Under Phoenix Nest, paid ads will appear in a clearly marked section on the right side of the search results page.

Baidu has long argued that its paid links are marked, but yesterday CEO Robin Li said, “We do hear from the press from time to time that some of our users were confused by paid and non-paid content.”

This is nothing new for what search engines have had to deal with as even Google has been accussed in the past for possible monetizing their own organic results based off of their paid results as well or not adequately separating their paid/organic results.

Oftentimes those of us in the online advertising industry take for granted that what we understand about search the average Internet user does as well. In fact, most Internet users do not know all of the paid areas of the search results. Let us take an example of someone interested in looking for “gaming computers:”

You would likely get most people able to answer that there are at least one are of the above results being paid search, but that will hinge on whether the browser’s monitor coloring can differentiate the off-color yellow.

Fewer would realize the results on the right are paid, even with the sponsored links showing up. It is not the fault of a user being an idiot, just that the user does not look for the phrase “Sponsored” as a way to tell what is organic or what is paid. This is entirely different from when you use another color to separate the results as Internet users have gotten used to seeing ads in boxes that are of a different color.

Lastly, I would be surprised if many would name the shopping results as a paid search function from Google Base. These results are certainly not a part of organic search (you can argue if it is a part of paid) even though they will vary in positioning (top, bottom, middle, etc).

The point of all this is to note for the Chinese media with knowledge of the online marketing world, that even in the US for Google, most people still do not know the difference between paid and organic results. The search engines are naturally going to muddy the waters in order to get more people to click on the paid results, so without specifically noting what should be done for all engines, there is little point to complain about the current layout.

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Just seems I cannot blog about anything else as I keep finding more mistakes around the web today. I go to search for some examples for a post about people being confused between organic results and paid results, and instead I find the following results when I search for the phrase “analytics” in Google:

Let’s first ignore the fact that Google Analytics ranks number one in its SERPs with sitelinks as a potential conflict of interest there (that is a whole other topic), but instead focus on the aspect that www.google.com has three sites ranking!

For the uninitiated in SEO, for every given keyword, you are allowed up to two pages ranking per sub-domain (exception are the sitelinks above). So, just how and why is Google ranking three?

It looks like Google is still having problems with differentiating secured and non-secured HTTP pages around the web and incidentally ranking secured pages as a whole other sub-domain (or site). I have had clients previously deal with these issues usually in a negative situation where the secured homepage would rank instead of the non-secured in a lower position.

Yet, here in the case for Google, with such a high PageRank on both “sites,” it is only an additional benefit for them to get around the two sub-domain pages per keyword limit. Not bad considering it’s a one-phrase keyword.

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I wanted to ntoe in a separate post to keep in mind that everyone is human and that mistakes are made at some time and place. Even the best at Microsoft can make a simple mistake and accidently indirectly support blackhat SEO tactics in search that are against their own search engine.

At the same time, you will find mistakes happening on the other side with agencies not properly putting in their information properly to run a campaign. Case in point, just a minute or two after I wrote about Microsoft, I noticed the following AdSense image on my website:

The green box highlighted shows that the agency for ABC (or internal team) accidently let this one go out into the public without noticing. Even more hilarious is that Google’s AdSense team did not automatically catch this either! Clicking on the link regardless goes to an error page which apologies to the team who “made” this, but I had to click to see if it went anywhere.

So the moral of the story? Everyone is human and mistakes happen, so be kind, rewind, and apologize when you mess up.

Except for us SEOs, we never make a mistake. *winks*

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Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager of Office Live Small Business wrote a blog post about some of types of link building you can engage in for the purpose of generating additional back links to your site. He starts his post with:

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

Digging the hole deeper by listing a few sites such as LinksMaster.com (an automated link-exchange program) and LinkStrategy.com (paid links site) without actually checking with the Search team on what Microsoft’s guidelines are:

..Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results
The following techniques aren’t appropriate uses of the Live Search index. Use of these techniques might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index….. - Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Now, I titled this post that he was indirectly (and obviously unintentionally) supporting blackhat SEO tactics since he did not specifically endorse the tactics but only talked about the ways you could garner more links. The problem is that his first post did not specifically note the downsides of the tactics, nor read Microsoft’s own guidelines.

His second post is trying to walk back from those statements by noting that it is the abuse of the techniques that are not allowed, noting that it could cause problems with search engines. The hilarity of all this is that Microsoft itself says that even using the techniques he talked about are not appropriate. That and plainly any kind of automated software to acquire back links is quite blackhat SEO tactic and is not within an inch of whitehat SEO.

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My recent trip to Shanghai I was able to briefly get a glimpse of the Bund once again and see Pudong from a distance. This first time I went was in 2003 for study abroad and thought to show a rough (very rough) difference between 2003 and 2008. My apologies on the quality and huge differences in the pictures (click to see a larger image):

Pudong 2003

Pudong 2008

A lot more buildings all around.

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Believe it or not, you can actually read just about any major news website that has an online subscription fee, for free! No, I am not referring to downloading the User-Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox (which does work sometimes) and pretending to be Googlebot. I mean actually acting as yourself and viewing the page you want to read.

Why is this useful? Let us say a friend sends you a link to a good Washington Post article (those are rare, but known to happen), but you unfortunately did not get to read it until about a month later. When you click on the link, instead of actually seeing the news article that used to be there to everyone, it is now behind a subscription wall that you are being asked to pay for. Very annoying, correct?

How can you read the online news article for free? Well, the beauty of today’s world is that if you know the title of the article, you can search for the exact phrase in Google, click on the link, and actually read the article without the annoying subscription wall. Don’t know the article title? Put the URL in the search box and you will be able to access this for free as well.

Why is this possible? Essentially the news websites want to rank in Google in order to get a lot of visitors and make money off of the advertisements been shown to you. Google, unfortunately for the news websites, “mandates” that if you want organic search traffic, you must let the first click be free. Otherwise, Google will consider the whole website to be spam and not relevant to what searchers want thereby hurting Google’s brand.

What does this mean? If you are running a news website, Google believes that anything content-based should free and viewable to anyone, a very anti-publishing “establishment” view. Put another way, anything and everything that can be shown online is and will be considered “must see for free” (with advertisements of course). It is another way of saying “If I can turn something into 0s and 1s, then it should be free.”

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The bootlegged version of Star Trek XI (Star Trek Under Construction) is making rounds on the Internet and Youtube with a rather exciting teaser of a clip below:

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