Website Marketing Strategies

On September 18th, Google announced that they will start crawling any published Google Docs that are linked to from a public website.  Those docs will not only be crawled but also indexed which means they could appear in search results.

I’m not a Google Docs user, in fact, anything that can give Google more access then they already have with the data on my computer, is in my estimation “Not Good”.

One thing we know is that whenever Google gets its hands on data, it loves to share it with the world, despite copyright laws or trademark laws.  Just look at their Google Books program – rather than obeying copyright laws, it indexed tens of thousands of books and published them online.

Rather than getting permission from the various authors guilds and writers associations, they just posted the material which lead to a 3 year court battle where the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers eventually settled with Google and agreed to let them post those books online.  Copyright Laws Be Damned!

I can promise you that at some point in the future, any content you post to Google Docs will show up online, despite the fact that you never published it or linked to it from a publicly crawled website.

Just be careful, don’t use Google Docs for sensitive data – remember, once something is posted online, it is there forever.

Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

On Monday, August 10th, Google officially announced a new search technology they will be releasing in the near future.  The new technology is called “Caffeine” – that gives me the jitters just thinking about how this could effect ranking results.

According to Google, “For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

So, once again we come to the question, “How Does This Affect Me?”.  Well, that’s a great question!  No one knows for sure what changes this will cause to current keyword positions or what optimization changes will need to be implemented, if any.

Google does give us access to test the new search and from what I can tell, 99.9% of the keywords I tested came up in the same positions as the standard Google search.  That’s a good thing because Google is not known for rolling out improvements to its search engine.

I want to caution everyone – just because the results seem to be similar, doesn’t mean they will stay similar.  There are people reporting huge differences between Caffeine and standard search but there could be any number of reasons for that, the least of which is the change in search technology.

We will be watching and testing the new search engine as long as we have access to it.  Once it is launched, which will be at Google.com and won’t appear any different in looks than the current search, we will be testing heavily to see if the launch itself caused any changes to keyword positions.

If there are any changes that need to be made to your search engine optimization campaigns, we will send out a newsletter explaining what those changes will be and the time frames for making them happen.

Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

Everyday new search engines rise through the ranks just enough to get a mention on a blog or two; and most of them turn out to offer nothing except regurgitated or outdated results scraped from some other useless engine, but sometimes they offer something unique.

Stumpedia, a new human powered search engine, came on the scene in early 2008 but didn’t make a big splash, in fact, they got by me which is rare – I’m always looking to get behind someone that can give Google a run for their money.  Thanks to our ever-evolving love of social networking, people of the web may be ready to accept a new engine with some pretty groovy capabilities.

According to a press release from Stumpedia,

“Stumpedia.com will enable users around the world to share their knowledge and interests with one another and provide an alternative to traditional search. Users are encouraged to create custom content pages for any possible search term in the world and links that will help people find relevant results and answers to their search requests. Links to social bookmarks, social profiles, blogs, news stories, authoritative articles, videos, images, and web pages are welcomed.”

The simple fact that Stumpedia is just now being recognized may be a blessing in disguise.  Last year, social networking was big, but not this big.  These last few months, people have fallen in love with Twitter like never before, StumbleUpon has been brought back to its original family of developers and Facebook is getting a new facelift.  This wouldn’t be possible without people-power.

If, like me,  you’re ready for search to breakout of the ordinary and into the extraordinary, I encourage you to drop in at Stumpedia, give their engine a whirl, setup an account and post a link to your site or blog – play around with it a bit.  Then tell all of your friends because honestly, we need something different – it has been too many years with Google and Yahoo. We need a change and what a better way than incorporate search engine technology with social networking.