With a rush of Google’s product updates recently, I keep wondering what’s going on – have they fired and completely replaced their internal staff dealing with interface designs and who are those people working on these things now? Are they clueless newbies, do they even test what they create? Has Google decided to cut down usability testing expenses? Because a lot of what I see looks like a complete disaster.

Take just two products, for example. Those I use quite a lot in my daily work.

First, there is Google Analytics. OK, you sell me on getting access to real time data – but considering the new interface it is just not worth the move for me. I wonder who the typical Google Analytics user is, how many sites/accounts do they have under their login? I of course might be more of an exception with my dozens and dozens, but I’d suspect typically people would have at least 3-4 sites there.

Now, when I check my Analytics I like to have a quick glance first at what’s going on with the traffic and its dynamics and then dig deeper to identify any possible issues, and with the old interface it is easily doable:

But compare that to this sad shit of an interface in the new Analytics:

Takes me 3 clicks just to get to that same data for each single account, nevermind getting the data for all my sites! And they don’t make it easy switching back to the first screen, either – took me quite a while to figure out how to do it (for those still wondering, click on the dropdown in the upper left corner with the list of all accounts and click the button appearing there that says “Accounts list”).

OK with Analytics I am not a typical user but what about Google Docs? I only really use them when I need to share something with other people and have it updated in real time, otherwise I don’t think Google Docs will ever be able to replace the real Office applications for most of my document creation and editing needs – there’s just too much stuff missing. Anyways, I found out that the search shortcut (Command+F or Control+F, depending on the OS) doesn’t work in some browsers. Anotehr issue, again, is a less-than-straightforward way of switching back to the old interface. The only place where the link to do it appears prominently is the Google Docs home page, but when you are viewing a document you just don’t see how to do it. Here’s how: click Help and select “Use the classic look”.

I could go on and dissect the failures of the newly updated Reader but I will stop for now and maybe get back to it some other time. For now, let me just say: I’m sticking to the old GA and Docs for as long as they stay alive.

What surprises me most in this whole discussions, however, is that people somehow fail to see the other side of this whole issue. I was looking if anyone would mention this but nobody did so far – don’t you think what Google is doing is actually an attempt to push more users into (1) creating Google accounts and (2) using Google’s services via those accounts? In other words, encouraging users to stay logged in (of course as a result Google gets to collect more and deeper data, regardless of SSL). Here’s something they say in their official announcement that can act as proof of the above intention (bolded by me):

we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users

In other words, you want security and privacy – you can have it, you just have to log in. Seems like it’s their marketing move to improve the sign in rate which seems to be not so high, to quote Barry Schwartz:

Google says this will likely only impact less than 10% of the searchers. So in a sense, Google is saying that less than 10% of their users are signed in when performing Google searches?

In any case, I wonder if this feature will be as half assed in its implementation as the new Google Analytics and Google Docs interfaces (will post about it separately).

What do we know about this beast tho? Here are a few things I noticed so far:

• To click a +1 button in the SERPs you need to sign up for the Google Labs experiment – to click a button on somebody’s site you only need to have a Google profile and be logged into your Google account
• The button on the site behaves funny – different people may see different number of +1’s at the same time (poor synchronization? data not travelling fast enough between datacenters? anyone remember Google Dance – is this Google PlusOne Dance?)
• No matter how many people +1 a site, in the SERPs you will only see mentions of those you are connected to +1′ing it
• +1’s are like PageRank – they are a page characteristic, not a sitewide characteristic (i.e. if you +1 the home page 20 times but some internal page just 1 time the home page will show 20 +1’s and the internal one will only show one +1)
• So far, there is no Google policy forbidding to place the +1 button on an empty page, or highlighting it by arrows, or encouraging users to click it, like there is with Google AdSense
• Double clicking the +1 button kills your “vote” – so does clicking the button in the SERPs if you already did on the site itself and vice versa
• When putting the +1 button on Wordpress, you need to apply special tweaks for it to work for each specific page – just using the default code will make the button work for the home page only

Questions remaining unanswered for now:

• How will +1’s affect a site’s rankings?
• What will happen to a site that got a bunch of +1’s if the button is removed off it? (hat tip to Paul Madden)
• Will placing the +1 button on a site / clicking it cause Google to index / recrawl the site faster / more often?
• Will withdrawn +1’s affect sites negatively?

Overall, looks like Google rolled out the +1 button for sites in a great hurry, without taking much care of how it will work and what potential bugs and privacy concerns are out there. Site owners have already started placing the +1 buttons on their sites – as more sites adopt the button we will be seeing the effect it has on the web as a whole, the SERPs and our search (and I guess Google hoping, social too) behavior.

Have you noticed any other interesting things about the +1 button? Are you running any experiments with it? What questions it makes you ask? Feel free to share below!

People’s reactions differ, some like it, some do not, others (like Steve Rubel) predict that it will be the end of SEO. Others (like Brett Tabke in that post’s comments) argue that it “opens the door to a whole new type of optimization”. What do I make out of Google Instant?

Google Instant makes me think of “clusters” of related search terms, like those that we see in search suggestions. It’s easy to notice that once you start typing your query, suggestions come up and the results displayed are for the first suggestion. Now, these suggestions may be semantically connected or not related to each other at all – it all depends on the point of your typing during which they are displayed (first letter? first word? half of your query?). The results displayed by the instant search are those for the first suggestion.

I am not going to get into the reasons why Google displays certain suggestions in a certain order for queries – this is irrelevant for now. What’s important is paying attention to these topical clusters when optimizing your site – be it onsite or off-site. Sounds quite like and old and tried technique to me…

“Everything” results are pretty traditional for this query – they are just regular search results. Highlights: #1 is a spammed .edu with a redirect. #2 and 3 are online pharmacies with 37,000 and 48,000 backlinks each, most of which seem to be comment spam. #4 is a bit more interesting – an online pharmacy with top backlinks coming from a network (akin to the one Paul Madden described) built circa 2006. Overall, the prescription for ranking in the top 10 for “buy viagra” seems to be owning an aged (at least a couple years old) domain and spamming a few thousand automated links to it.

“Updates” seem to be all from Twitter. I really like the timeline feature – it lets you discover interesting tendencies in the SERPs. For example, it let me see that the most buy viagra Twitter spam this year occured on March 25 – I wonder why?

In “Images” there is a mixture of actual Viagra images (from online pharmacies and such) and SERP screenshots – watching the “buy viagra” SERPs is getting more and more fashionable it seems (interpreting them correctly is quite another story – but let’s leave discussing the people trying their hand at it for some other time). I wonder if the above screenshot will end up ranking there as well at some point?

“Videos” – surprise surprise – only 1,010 results! Seems like an opportunity, no?

In “Maps” some people are having quite a lot of fun with all kinds of Maps spam – but these SERPs are more saturated than Videos, with over 6,000 results.

“News” – oooo looks like Viagra spammers do not know yet how to plug their stuff into Google News Only 100 results at the moment.

In the “Blogs” SERPs there is more evidence of constantly updated parts of networks used for pushing the main sites up for Viagra queries

In “Discussions” there are a bucnh of spammed forums and question and answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Amazon’s Askville. My all time favorite one is a profile of  German speaking Viagra spammer in one of the forums with the user name of “Dr. Pfizer”.

Conclusion: Because so many alternative versions of the SERPs have become more available to the searchers it makes sense not to discount them any more. So, I predict that it’s only a matter of time until “buy viagra” SERPs in those alternative views becoem as competitive as the regular ones.

<div id="google-ads" class="prepend-2"><!-- need a better name for this div -->
        <ul>
            <li><a class="offsite current" href="">Ads by Google</a></li><!-- remove inline style later -->
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Directory</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Video Blog</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blogger Photos</a></li>

            <li class="last"><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Gratuito</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>

Have they forgotten to place the real Google ads in place of this bit? Have they even intended to? “need a better name for this div”? – who wants a better name for a div that will contain Google’s Adsense code? Are Technorati IT people experimenting on a live site with multi-million visitor audience? Do they intend to pass something else for Google ads in the future? If modifying Google ads code is a crime as per G’s AdSense TOS, then shouldn’t this be even worse? (haven’t been messing with AdSense for ages so can’t be sure but seems like G doesn’t like this much either)

Yea, talk about large online media giants’ screw ups… (Hits “Publish” and pings Technorati)

How did this PR update treat the sites? First of all, my list now includes a PR 9 directory – lii.org. It used to be PR 8 but got to 9 this update. Overall, I see many directories which had PR 0 or even n/a obtain PR 3 or even 4. Surely there are some that drop to 0 or n/a – but you get what you deserve. What I notice, though, is that Google has become much faster these days (the effects of Caffeine, I presume) and I have seen sites and pages created 2-3 weeks ago obtain PR 2 and 3 after the update.

Ok you may say this ebook update is not a voluntary New Year present from me since I promised I would update it every PR update – but here is something else many of you will surely like. I have been approached many times by those who ordered the Directory Marketing ebook and those only considering purchasing it, with the same question: are there directories in your list that would suit my [insert your niche here] site? Also, people have been wondering if there is a reliable service that would do manual directory submissions according to the principles described in the ebook.

Well, now you got it! I have just launched a manual directory submission service of my own for those of you who do not have the time or desire to do it themselves but would still like to benefit from the techniques I teach in the book. Since this is my own service, I can guarantee everything is done just like it should for the most benefit for your site. The directories suitable for your site niche are selected from the 5,000 directory list, then your site is submitted to them at the speed most suitable for you, with up to 5 different titles and descriptions, then you get a detailed report so you know exactly what you paid for and what has been done, and what results have been obtained. Nothing like those pseudo “manual” submission services that promise to submit your site to 20,000 directories the list of which you will never see and the links from which you may only be wondering about (and as I have reported already, there is not even such number of directories out these worth dealing with, let alone live ones)!

But it gets even better: for those of you who have already purchased the Directory Marketing ebook or plan on purchasing it, there is a special member-only discount code available. You get it either with the update (for existing customers) or with the purchased ebook download (for the new customers) and can use it to get $50 off the cost of your chosen manual directory submission plan as many times as you wish, for as many sites of yours you wish to submit through this service. Let me remind you that all the updates and goodies are free for the existing customers – all you have to do is check your email box for the info about the update (in case you did not subscribe to the newsletter when purchasing the ebook you WON’T get this info – so if that’s the case let me know and I’ll try to sort you out).

So buy the directory ebook and enjoy the manual directory submission service, and all the best to you in the New Year!

Lately I’ve been getting spam emails posing as correspondence from Google Adwords. They go like this:

We detected irregular activity on your Google AdWords Account.

Please use the link below to verify your account immediately:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords

But the actual link leads to the phisher’s domain instead of Google. Of course when you enter your account details on the page they offer you, you just hand your Adwords account data (credit card info, all your campaigns data, your personal data, and so on) to the phisher.

There is one more way to see that this email comes from somebody other than they claim to be – if you look at the full headers of the message you will see this:

from copland.udel.edu ([128.175.13.92]:41061) by host02.localhostserver.net with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from )

- which means they are probably using some proxy running on a university server.

How to deal with such emails? First of all, of course, verify that you are on the actual Adwords login page and not somewhere else before entering your login and password. Secondy, I would surely love to see Google’s reaction to these phishing emails. Google has put a lot of effort into getting newbie webmasters involved in AdWords, now I guess it’s their turn to educate people who may not be very savvy about the dangers of phishing.

<h2 class=”hd“>Search Results</h2>

.hd {

height:1px;

overflow:hidden;

position:absolute;

top:-1000em;

width:1px;

}

Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Disallow: /search

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res (click through = results?) is indicating that the click came from organic search rather than a universal search (news or video) result

Upon seeing this post, I rushed to check my own logs and have noticed a couple of similar referrer URLs. However, the ones I have seen in my logs had the traditional /search? element in them, not the new /url? promised by the Google Analytics blog this Tuesday.

What’s surprising about this whole story, however, is that the Google Analytics blog has been the only place so far to ever mention the referrer string changes – and there has been no official comment anywhere as to whether or not Patrick’s guess was correct and Google indeed includes the ranking data into these strings. Matt Cutts has commented vaguely on Patrick’s blog in the key of  “if you experiment some you will confirm your guess ” and tweetted advising “all SEOs” to read Patrick’s post. Well if this is true and all SEOs need to be aware of it why not do an official post or at least a post at Matt Cutt’s blog? Google’s public relations with SEOs amaze me.