Inius Trivia

I have read today an interesting post from Techcrunch commenting on a recent Google algorithm change. This change was, indeed, announced yesterday on the Google’s official blog: Being bad for your customers is bad for business.

In short,  Google’s engineers have read a story from New York Times that raised some (good) questions: knowing that link popularity is the basis of the Google’s algorithm, is it fair to rank high a website that has a lot of negative reviews?

That’s why they have decided to  perform a sentiment analysis and to position websites according to these results. So, now it’s more difficult to position a website that only enjoys negative reviews.

Unfortunately, in my opinion this approach – sentiment analysis – opens  largely the door to the most unorthodox tactics for search positions manipulation. In fact, to unfair competition.

One of  Google’s most respected principles was that “there’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.” According to the official Google Help Guide,

“Can competitors harm ranking?
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages. [source]”

But now, if Google’s takes into consideration the so-called sentiment analysis, it’s clear that anyone wishing to destroy your website can make it very easily, just by posting some negative reviews on review websites.  Let’s look at this page featuring reviews for DecorMyEyes, the online shop that triggered Google’s reaction: it’s really full of negative reviews! And this page too! And this page! The reviews for DecorMyEyes.com are really awful, but, by commenting on this issue, Google simply showed to everyone the way of harming the competition.

I think that we’ll experience in the next months a growing demand for SEO’ers specialized in reviews writing !

Romania is the EU country with the lowest motorways density on sq. km. This situation dates back from the communist time, when the infrastructure wasn’t a priority for the regime. The communists built only a motorway between Bucharest and Pitesti, the city where the legendary car Dacia was built.

After the fall of the communism the succesive governments weren’t intersted to build more motorways, although it was quite obvious that Romania needs to improve its infrastructure in order to attain sustainable economic growth. The current president, Basescu, minister of transportation during the ’90s, even stated in public that “Romania doesn’t need motorways”. Romania being a country with a surface of 237.000 sq. km.!

However, during the 2000′s, when it was clear that Romania will enter in EU, the governments were forced by international partners to allocate some money towards motorways development.

But the local tradition in Romania is to say “yes, yes” and do nothing. In 10 years, although the plans, as approved and discussed with international partners in the last 10 years, stated that Romania will have in 2011 7-800 km of motorways, the authorities managed to build only 150 km on a motorway between Bucharest and Constanta and 52 km around Cluj, in Transilvania.

However, Google’s engineers seems to take as granted Romania’s government promises and posted on Google maps the motorways’ infrastructure as planned (maybe in USA governmental plans are respected…) So, if one wants to use Google maps in order to plan a trip in Romania, will find that:

• Between Bucharest and Constanta (225 km) it’s a single, continuos motorway. That’s wrong. The real motorway end’s up after 150 km.
• Between Bucharest and Ploiesti (50 km) it’s a motorway. Wrong. There is no such motorway between those cities yet. Some people say that it will be ready in 2012, but who knows? So, this map is wrong.
• One of the most expected motorway is “Transilvania”, that will link the eastern border of Hungary with the centre of Romania. This motorway should have some 350 km. If one looks on Google Maps, the map shows as already built 159 km. That’s wrong In truth there are only 52 km available. This map is simply wrong.

So, instead of using Google Maps, one should turn over the other solutions, such as Bing Maps or Yahoo! Maps. I have test some routes and they look correct.

Google Adsense has a new interface. I like the new design, which resembles more with the other Google products: Adwords, Analytics etc.

The information is organised in 4 big tabs: “Home”, “My Ads”, “Allow and block ads”, “Performance reports”.

Under  the “Home” tabs you can see a short summary of the account. Like in the previous version of the interface one can see the earnings over the day, the last 7 days and so on. There are also some links towards important areas, such as Payment, Messages, Account settings, Resources. This areas were subject to a simple redesign.

The “My Ads” tab is a simple redesign, too, of the area that lets you define and modify ad units in the previous interface.

The user experience is better addressed with the new interface.

But the true innovative factors appear with the other tabs. With “Allow and block ads” tab one can have a fast view over the running ads and can block and allow the ads or the publishers with a single click. It’s much more convenient and easy to use than in the previous version.

A big change can be seen under the ‘Performance’ tab. Now, Google shows us graphics. The graphics are highly relevant, with data about channels, displayed ad types (text, flash, dynamic, image, html) and many more. Thus, you can see very relevant data, such as click through rate (CTR) with every type of ad. Data can be drilled down with CTR of ad types over URL channels. This is a big step further!

In short, the new interface is definitely a nice improvement and it’s worth exploring the new options. I’m sure that the new data can help any publisher to improve his ads performance and earn more from his Adsense account.