OK, here’s a good one. You own the distribution model for paid-for advertising. You allow advertisers to spend money to distribute their ads through your network using your name. You even take their money. Then you sue them for using your name.

That’s what Google is doing. Suing advertisers who use the Google name in pay-per-click ads on Google.

Wait a minute. With all of Google’s fancy schmancy technology, they can’t block ads that use the keyword “Google”? There’s just something about this that doesn’t seem right.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning the work-at-home scams. There are a ton of them. And using another company’s good name to scam people out of their money using trickery, outright lies, deception, and other nefarious deeds is just flat wrong. But if you own the distribution channel for the ads surely you can stop the ads from displaying to begin with. Can’t you? Imagine this scenario: Your local newspaper takes money from an advertiser for running ads promising to make people rich using your local newspaper’s name (fill in the blank). Then the newspaper sues the advertiser for making money off the use of the newspaper’s name. Will it fly?

I don’t think it will. The obvious argument for the defense here is that the company, in this case Google, has the technology, the overall ability, and the motivation for blocking the ads before they run. Therefore, they’re as guilty as the advertiser.

What do you think? Is this a case of trademark infringement or just a bad case of Google With Head Up Butt Syndrome? Or even worst these type of Google scams spend so much money that they don’t mind making some additional money from them until these advertisers get themselves in trouble and then they take action? I don’t know, but this is is an interesting topic for sure!

It seems that Google is always trying to improve. But sometimes the improvement is not really an improvement. The search engine recently changed its home page to “fade in”, which means that all you’ll see upon landing on the page is the search box. Then, after a few seconds you’ll start to see all the navigational links at the top of the page. Is this good?

From the Google blog:

Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

Trust me, I noticed. But I also noticed that if I want to click one of those navigational links then I’ve got to wait. That didn’t make me all that happy.

Something else I noticed is that fade in page is what you get when you are not signed into your personalized Google account. If you are signed in then you go straight to your personalized page, no fade in. So, obviously, Google’s fade-in approach is targeted toward new users or people who do not use the personalized search features.

What do you think? Is it a good change, or a little annoying?

Google Analytics recently announced, on December 1, that there is a new code in beta. It’s the Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code.

If you have a Google Analytics account then you can start using the code right away. But what does it do? According to the Google Analytics blog, it increases your page load time, uses enhanced data collection, and eliminates some tracking errors. The page load time benefit is tremendous both for your visitors and for search engines as well.

For Google to offer this tracking code now indicates to me that page load time is something webmasters, business owners and marketers should pay more attention to. Currently, if you have a slow loading website you won’t be penalized, but your site won’t be given extra points while your competition may at some point. Page load time is extremely important to help improve the user experience of your website. Google has recently hinted that in the future, page load time of your website may become a more important role when determining web page rankings as part of its search algorithm.

It actually makes sense that Google would start by helping load time with their Google Analytics product. I have experienced many situations that the loading of the Google Analytics code on a page sometimes takes longer to load than other aspects of a page. So it makes sense that they start with the Asynchronous Tracking Code especially if in the near future, page load time will become a factor as part of an on site optimization program. We would not want Google to contribute to longer load times, now would we?

We’ve discussed Google’s snippets before. But few people discuss Yahoo! snippets. Maybe the search community has written Yahoo! off as irrelevant?

Regardless of what any of us think about Yahoo!, they are still a part of the search game. And I’d say a major part since they are still the second largest search engine around. Recently, SEO By The Sea wrote a blog post detailing a patent application regarding a method for selecting a snippet for a search page. Bill Slawkski, as usual, has some interesting insight.

The gist of Yahoo! patent application boils down to three things:

* A query-independent relevance for each line of text – a degree to which the line of text of the document summarizes the document.
* A query-dependent relevance of each of the lines of text – a relevance of the line of text to the query.
* The intent behind a query.

It’s interesting to note that keywords and semantic language are not mentioned here at all. Rather, Yahoo! focuses on two types of relevance – query dependent and query independent.

The query dependent relevance is a reference to how many times a query might appear within a line of text on a web page. It might also be a percentage of the query terms that appear in a line of text. In other words, if a line of text has 10 words and a query of 4 words turns up all 4 words in that line of text, that would be pretty high.

But the one I find interesting is this:

Whether the query is a substring of the line of text.

It’s really simple, but if you query a six-word query string and that entire six-word string shows up in a line of text on a web page, that’s pretty significant. I think it’s significant for all the search engines and I’d be surprised if a web page that met that query substring for a particular page didn’t rank that page at No. 1, or close to it, for the query. I mean, the odds of any one web page (out of millions) having the exact six word query string (with all the words in the right order) that a random searcher enters into a search box are phenomenally low.

Sorry to say, that’s not particularly sophisticated when you think about it. But the technology to make it happen is. And I think Yahoo! has some pretty sophisticated technology tools. Still, Google is light years ahead of them. I think it may be because Google started out light years ahead.

Just yesterday, Rupert Murdoch threw another stone at Google. But before Murdoch had cocked back his hand to throw, Google had announced a solution that should make Murdoch happy, though it probably won’t.

There are two aspects of Google’s announcement that are important to both publishers and to searchers:

1. Google has expanded its First Click Free program to allow publishers to allow up to five clicks free per day for any user who accesses its protected pages from Google. More on that here.
2. Google will index preview pages, but list them in its index as “subscription” to warn users that all they will see is a preview of an article, but that they will need to subscribe in order to read the entire article.

Personally, I think Murdoch is just beating the war drums to draw out other disgruntled publishers so that he can persuade them (or coerce them) into joining him in a class action lawsuit against Google in an attempt to wrangle out some payment for Google indexing his content. So I really don’t think he’s interested in Google’s policies.

But here’s how Google’s policy helps Murdoch (and you if you are a publisher):

• No. 1, publishers can blog the Googlebot from crawling their sites and now allow Google to index it, but that would search suicide.
• Since Murdoch is concerned about subscribers, allowing searchers free access to a limited number of articles on his website allows those subscribers to preview his content to see if it is something they want to pay for; if Murdoch is any good at marketing, he’ll see the opportunity and convert some of that free traffic into paid subscriptions.
• Allowing searchers access to article previews while protecting whole articles behind pay walls should increase Murdoch’s subscriptions (again, if he is any good at marketing) while keeping his sites listed in Google where they can gain access to the traffic.

Rupert Murdoch is smart enough (or should be) to know that no business can survive without traffic – online or off line. Therefore, driving traffic to a website is a very important task. Since Google is the biggest referrer of traffic for most websites, it makes sense to be listed there.

For all you publishers out there, Google isn’t the enemy. You need to learn how to use Google to get the traffic you want and learn how to convert that traffic into subscription (or monetize it in some other way).

Rupert Murdoch is reported as saying that he plans to de-index his web properties from Google and go to an all-paid subscription format.

In case you never got a chance to see this interview, here it is:

Now, the talk is that Bing.com has had discussions with News Corp about offering exclusive content through its search engine. According to a Financial Times article, Microsoft, the owner of Bing.com, has approached other publishers with a similar deal.

TechCrunch gives a little bit of insight into how this might play out in the long run and who is ultimately behind the coup that seems to be developing right before our very eyes.

The interesting thing I find about all of this is this: If Microsoft did strike a deal with News Corp – and with the top 5 other media publishers as Jason Calacanis suggests – then that would definitely take a bite size chunk out of Google’s search share. No doubt about it. But it would have to happen on a larger scale than what Rupert Murdoch is suggesting. He doing it alone would not work. He would have to get the other media companies to go in with him at the same time.

In other words, a paid indexing deal between Bing.com and News Corp would be like a rock ding on an old Pontiac. A small dent. Nothing more. But if the top 5 media companies at the same time struck the same deal then that would be more like a boulder smashing the top of the Pontiac and flattening it. Google would still be alive, but searchers looking for news content would have to – they’d have no choice – use Bing.com. Google’s search share would plummet within a year.

Another thing that would happen is a bidding war for content indexing. It’s possible that anyone who wants to be indexed at any search engine would then have to pay to be in the index. Once Google lost share it would have no choice but to approach other large publishers to offer an exclusive deal in order to give consumers a reason to use it instead. They could even offer better deals to News Corp and other publishers who were being bought by Microsoft. This would completely change the way webmasters perform search engine marketing. Instead of discouraging paid links, Google would then almost be forced to encourage paid links. The web as we know it today would disappear and the search engine marketing game would change completely.

Is this even possible? Are all these people dreaming or is there really a coup d’etat in the works involving the wealthy media elite and the third most popular search engine? And where is Yahoo! in this mix? Anyone?

Here’s an incentive for writing good page titles. Google reserves the right to do it for you!

Of course, Google has said all along that it may use different texts for use as snippets to show users in the SERPs. They won’t always use your meta description tag. Google has been known to use descriptions from the Open Directory Project also known as the DMOZ directory. In other cases, the search engine has snagged text from on page and overridden the meta description tag. Now, Google is saying it could use other tactics similar to these for displaying a page title to searchers.

Here is a recent video by Google’s Matt Cutts that examples this Title Tag topic:

If you find that your page titles have been changed in the SERPs, look to see where your titles may be weak and work to improve them. Google shouldn’t change page titles that are descriptive, tell searchers what to expect, and that provide a good idea of what is on your page.