Inius Trivia

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

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 !

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.

Because of Google Instant. You’ll see that in Google Instant, the new Google’s interface that was officialy launched few days ago, some key search operators aren’t working.

For example:

• site:domain.com – Google instant points to the traditional search (with “enter”)
• link:domain.com – the same
• inurl:[word, page.php] – sometimes works, sometimes is broken (works, but it collapses)

Thus, it’s obvious that Google’s engineers waited to launch the Google Instant, but as long as  Google Instant isn’t fully working and some searches still need the old way of search, this is a sign that Google’s search infrastructure still has to be fully updated. Including the Page Ranks.