AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
The San Francicso leg of the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing this past Friday was really great! The crowd was intimate, which allowed all of us speakers to mingle and have some quality discussions with folx, and the seminar/conference/workshop was excellently organized.
Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/25/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Google, HTML Optimization, Keyword Research, Link Building, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Seminars, SEO, Social Media Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Search Engine Optimization
New Research Could Improve Google Image Search
New research recently published out of University of California – San Diego could allow Google’s Image Search to easily begin using elements from “true image search” — that is, the ability for software to detect and identify elements appearing within the image itself rather than just relying upon external text metadata to associate keywords with the images. Read on for more details.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/05/2007
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Filed under: Google, Image Optimization, Research and Development, Searching Google, Google-Image-Labeler, Google-Image-Search, image-search, Supervised-Multiclass-Labeling
Coming Soon to NYC: The Googleheim Museum
[Source: SEO-AP] Due to budget cuts of the NEA and gross mismanagement by the Guggenheim Foundation board of directors, one of America’s top museums has been in danger of closing down in bankruptcy and selling off priceless artworks in order to repay debtors. However, Google [NYSE: GOOG] company has apparently made a unique sponsorship offer to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the deal is apparently set to initiate on June 1.
Source: Google internal documents outed earlier today on Natural Search Blog.
Information related to the deal was discovered by this reporter while browsing through 3D images of buildings created with Google Sketchup (while researching an article on Sketchup’s University Contest). Apparently, Google personnel had generated a new façade of the building in the application in order to use the images in a proposal to bail out the museum. Due to a temporary glitch, links to the confidential building diagrams showing a new exterior could be found for a short while in the application’s online data warehouse. These images showed a new logo reading “Googleheim�, apparently a cross between the well-known Google brand name and the Guggenheim name.
The proposed exterior showed the newly Google-ized logo broadly splashed across the museum, replacing the much smaller signature letters of the current museum name. Other information regarding the deal was leaked by a few unnamed sources within the company, and the deal was subsequently confirmed to by Google spokesperson, Erin Fors.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/01/2007
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Filed under: brand names, Google Art-News, Google, Google-Sketchup, Googleheim, Guggenheim, Margaret-Withers, Museums
Podcasts of Neil Patel, Eric Ward, and Vanessa Fox
I’ve been interviewing speakers of the AMA’s Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing events taking place April 20th in San Francisco, May 25th in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago (all three of which I will be chairing). I had fascinating and insightful conversations with link builder extraordinaire Eric Ward, Googler Vanessa Fox, and social media marketing guru Neil Patel. There’s some real gold in those interviews.
Download/Listen:
- Neil Patel interview (15 minute MP3, 3 megs) – getting to the front page of Digg and other social media sites
- Eric Ward interview (36 minute MP3, 8 megs) – tips and secrets on how to garner links
- Vanessa Fox interview (40 minute MP3, 9 megs) – Google’s webmaster tools, SEO impacts of AJAX, Flash, duplicate content, redirects, etc.
More podcasts to come from other speakers, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss them. Also be sure to register for the conference at one of the three cities, it’ll be great!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/28/2007
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Filed under: Google, Link Building, SEO, Site Structure, Social Media Optimization digg, Google, Link Building, link-baiting, podcasts, Social Media Optimization, social-media-marketing, Webmaster-Central
Google Logo with Autographs
While I was vacationing in St. Louis last week, I stumbled across this curiosity — the Google logo with Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s signatures.
This is the Google logo from 2004, commemorating SpaceShipOne winning the Ansari X-Prize.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/20/2007
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Filed under: Google Ansari-X-Prize, Burt-Rutan, Google, Google-Logo, larry-page, Sergey-Brin, SpaceShipOne
Google Cubed: Our Cubes are Bigger than Google’s!
This past month we noticed that a company started moving into the empty office space adjacent to ours. We’re located in Texas, inside the great Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The office space in the strip of buildings next to us has been vacant a long time. Some of our customer-care folx stopped and asked the electricians who was going to be moving in: it’s Google.
A few of us in management were a bit concerned, because it was entirely odd that Google would choose, out of the entire, huge, gigantic, sprawling metro area, to park themselves *smack* next to us! We couldn’t help but wonder if they were planning to lure away some of our advertising specialists! After all, we knew that they apparently had a small office in nearby Irving where they had AdSense optimizers, so it was conceivable that they might think that poaching our employees might give them skilled people quickly. There’s so much office space in the entire metro area, that it virtually defied reason to consider that they only coincidentally located offices next to us.
However, one of our marketing staff finally came back with the intel that this was to be offices for Google Radio (aka “Google Audio Ads”)Â — not something all that related to what we do. So, maybe it is coincidence, and not a snarky attempt to leach away our talent.
The workmen appear to’ve mostly finished setup, and it seems like people are starting to work in the building. So, I strolled over there after work and took some pics through the windows. I was stunned to see that Google’s cubes are actually smaller than ours!
(click on the pic to enlarge)
Read on for more description and more pics.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/09/2007
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Filed under: General, Google cube-bling, cube-decor, cubes, cubicles, Google-Audio-Ads, Google-Radio, office-cubes, superpages, work-environments
Google Employees Can’t Find PageRank – Must Search For It
Last night, I was comparing relative popularity of a few keywords in Google Trends, and I noticed that the term, “PageRank”, apparently has the highest number of searches in the US from people in the city of Mountain View, California:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=pagerank&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all
As you may be aware, Google headquarters is located in Mountain View (see map).
So the most likely reason that most USÂ “PageRank” searches happen in that little town is that Google employees are frequently submitting searches for info about PageRank. They may be searching for what people are saying about PageRank, or they may be searching for new research papers concerning the algorithm. But, they’re definitely searching for it…
For the one place in the world that has the most PageRank of all, you’d think they wouldn’t have to search for it. 😉
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/23/2007
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Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, Google-Trends, PageRank
Google Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Brave New World
Google’s Larry Page addressed the recent conference for the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences, and in his presentation he revealed what many of us had suspected or already knew from some of our friends who are employees within the company: researchers in Google are working upon developing Artificial Intelligence (aka “AI”).
During the address, Page stated he thought that human brain algorithms actually weren’t all that complicated and could likely be approximated with sufficient computational power. He said, “We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. It’s not as far off as people think.” Well, one of the top scientists in the world disagrees, if he’s talking about approximating a human-like consciousness.
I’ve written previously about how stuff predicted in cyberpunk fiction is becoming reality, and how Google might be planning to develop intelligent ‘search pets’ which would directly integrate with the human brain in some fashion. What might Google use this for and how soon might they show it to the world? Read on…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/20/2007
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Filed under: Futurism, Google A-Scanner-Darkly, ai, artificial-intelligence, craig-silverstein, Futurism, Google, larry-page, science-fiction, Turing-tests
Local Search Mentions in the News
It was cool that Greg Sterling mentioned one of my projects during the last week — IdearcLocal.com (the site was previously known as “VZlocal.com”, prior to our recent divestment from Verizon Corporation):
It’s always gratifying to have one’s work get noticed!
In a less-than-glowing mention of me, David Naffziger, VP of Strategy and BizDev at Judy’s Book, was critical of my recent article on Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics. He apparently feels that some of these tips could result in “spamming” online directory listings. I beg to differ, of course. (Not to be too pedantic, but his use of the word, “spam”, is inaccurate because spam is the mass-mailing of unsolicited email notes of a commercial nature. My posting had nothing to do with email. Heh!)
Read on for my rebuttal on this and some more local search news.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/01/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization black-hat-seo, idearc, Local Search
Hey Google: Nofollow is for when I don’t vouch for the link’s quality
I’ve said before that I don’t agree with Google’s tough stance on link buying and use of “nofollow” to mark it as a financially influenced link (here and here). One of my favorite white-hat SEO bloggers, Rand Fishkin, is also on Google’s case for it. A key argument that Rand makes:
Nofollow means “I do not editorially vouch for the quality of this link.” It does NOT mean “financial interest may have influenced my decision to link.” If that were the case, fully a quarter of all links on the web would require nofollow (that’s a rough guess, but probably close to the mark). Certainly any website that earns money via its operation, directly or indirectly is guilty of linking to their own material and that of others in the hopes that it will benefit them financially. It is not only unreasonable but illogical to ask that webmasters around the world change their code to ensure that once the chance of financial benefit reaches a certain level (say, you’re about 90% sure a link will make you some money), you add a “nofollow” onto the link.
You go, Rand! Tell those Googlers a thing or two! 😉
Despite all this, Google is the one who holds the keys to the kingdom. So we have to abide by their rules, no matter how “unreasonable” and “illogical.” That’s why my January column for Practical Ecommerce goes into some detail explaining Google’s stance on link buying and the risks. I’ll post a link once the article comes out in a few days.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 12/28/2006
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Filed under: Google, Link Building Google, link-buying, nofollow
