I’ll gladly drive out of my way to avoid the soul-crushing agony of bumper to bumper traffic, and that’s just what a new beta for the Google Maps Navigation Android app will show me how to do. From now on, the first set of directions it spits out will be the fastest in current conditions, so if everyone’s gawking at some accident on the highway you’d normally be taking, Google will direct you zip away on an alternate route. [Google Mobile]More »
Tommy Swanson is the Social Media Specialist at KMA (A Pursuant Company), a full-service fundraising company. Swanson is in charge of SEO and social media for numerous nationally recognized non-profit organizations. He is also a serial online entrepreneur who has built and sold several large businesses since his early teens.
Type a query into Google and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a result that does not seem right. It’s not a bug or a website getting a lucky break from the Google gods — it’s the result of savvy manipulation by a group of Internet hustlers known as search engine optimizers (SEOs).
I know because I am one. For the last few years, I’ve been pushing websites to the top of search engine results — websites that don’t necessarily belong there in the eyes of Google. SEOs like to call their tactics making a site “search engine friendly,” but what we’re really doing is gaming the system and getting inside the algorithm that powers Google. It’s what we are paid to do.
As of recently, Google’s algorithms are on the move. While there’s no doubt that some of the current manipulation tactics will still play a role in shaping search results, the newest component of search comes from a new (but important) source: You.
A Brief History
Over the last decade, search engines have evolved at a rapid pace for two reasons: To provide higher quality results to a given search query, and to keep SEO spammers from manipulating search results. But despite all attempts, the basic concepts behind search have remained consistent, and good SEOs have always come out on top regardless of minor algorithmic tweaks.
In the early days, Google would scrape a webpage looking for keywords on the actual site to determine its ranking. Search marketers came up with the clever idea of stuffing their page full of the keywords they wanted to rank for. After some time, Google caught up with the clever tactics and brought out the ban hammer.
Not all marketers are able to keep up with the rapidly changing algorithm. They continue to suggest that clients adopt mundane optimization techniques such as meta tags, keyword density, and directory submissions that, at the end of the day, won’t get you anywhere near the top of a search engine ranking page.
A New Model
More recently, the search engine’s algorithm has put most of its weight towards links around the web. To the search engines, a link is a vote of confidence. But not all links are created equal. A vote of confidence from someone influential in society is much more powerful than that of an Average Joe. A link from NYTimes.com is much more powerful than one from “JoesHardwareShopInNYC.com.”
SEOs figured this out too. It’s called “link building.” We either create high quality content (which is what Google likes) and hand it off to websites in return for a link (white hat SEO) or pay for a link without providing any content (black hat SEO).
With the proper techniques, good SEOs can take a website and, with good link building techniques, put them in the top 10 to 20 results for a term that gets millions of searches a month. And as of right now, it still works.
But as SEOs look around the field, it’s obvious that the engines are changing. Their most recent update, focused on killing content farms, saw had a nearly 12% change in their algorithm.
There is no doubt that the keywords on your pages and the inbound links to your site will still play a major role in rankings, but the next big change is the”you” factor.
The “You” Factor
In 2009, Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post titled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines.” I think if he wrote the post today, he might reconsider that first adjective.
As recent changes to Google have illustrated, search engines are moving towards a more user-focused algorithm. Most Internet marketers would agree that humans are much harder to manipulate than a computer-based algorithm. While there are certain aspects of life that are consistent for all people — eating, sleeping, and so on — everyone has their own unique set of preferences that define them as an individual.
So why hasn’t Google been taking these unique preferences into account in its search rankings? Well, it has, but not to the same extent that it has been changing its algorithm. In the past, links (which were often created by humans) were the most natural way to determine relevancy and popularity. As the Internet has evolved over the last decade, links aren’t controlled by human placement to the extent they were years ago. But, as the Internet has evolved, so has the way humans can express themselves. Online behavior isn’t limited to e-mail and stand-alone blogs anymore.
Social Media
According to a 2011 Marketing SherpaReport, 64% of marketers have begun integrating social media into their search marketing efforts. And there is reason to do so.
In December of 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that links shared through Facebook or Twitter have a direct effect on search engine rankings. But one word that was continually brought up through the entire interview with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land was “Author/Social Authority,” suggesting that it’s not the quantity, but rather the quality of a tweet or share that has an impact on SEO rankings.
In another recent post by Jen Lopez at SEOmoz, she presents an accidental case study that proves the correlation between a powerful Twitter account and search rankings. After being tweeted out by @smashingmag, SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” ranked number four for “Beginner’s Guide” on Google.
But if you’re one of “those” Twitter users — one who follows all of the other marketers who follow you, who also follow your other account, which follows them — don’t expect to get anywhere. Initial results indicate that the engines can easily weed out the Internet marketers and see true influencers in social media.
Despite the fact that Google can filter out Internet marketers and spammers, there are still problems. What prevents me from buying a tweet from an influential person in the social space?
Google’s New “Personal Blocklist” Chrome Extension
If there was ever an incredible opportunity for Google to really crack down on spam without having to manually intervene, their new Chrome extension for search is the answer.
The extension allows users to block websites within results — which is a good indication of content that doesn’t deserve to be there.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, explained the extension in greater detail on the Google Blog, saying it aimed to weed out shallow or low-quality content from suspected content farms. To do so, it allowed users to report or block sites from their web results. Those choices were then sent back to Google for analysis.
Links are easy to manipulate. Social media will most likely be easy to manipulate, unless quantity becomes a larger factor. But if tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people using the extension? That won’t be so easy to game.
Khronos Group today released the final specification for WebGL, a specification that brings OpenGL hardware-accelerated graphics to the web browser.
The organization has been working with Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera to implement the specification in popular browsers, with the technology now available in developer builds.
With native support for WebGL in HTML5-compatible browsers, consumer-end plugins that achieve the same goal will become obsolete. While the technology marks a big step forward for those developing media for the web at large, it’s particularly significant for companies whose business is creating games for the browser.
The use of plugin support for 3D graphics in the browser has allowed developers to bring games to the web without WebGL. Convincing users to install third-party plugins and ensuring that the plugin performs well on all major platforms, however, has made it more difficult for companies to grow their user bases. Native support circumvents these issues entirely.Khronos Group
LawPivot is legal matchmaking made in heaven for startups. CEO Jay Mandal, the former lead mergers and acquisitions attorney at Apple, started LawPivot in 2009 with Nitin Gupta, the site’s Co-Founder, who was working as an intellectual property litigation lawyer in California. Gupta saw needs on both the startup and legal sides of business. First, bootstrapped startups are fundamentally adverse to high legal costs and it is often very difficult to find the right lawyer whether it be a corporate, IT or tax lawyer, likely impossible to find one that can handle all three. Second, he saw the effects of the recession putting a lot of corporate lawyers out of work and looking to build their book of business.
Enter LawPivot, a confidential, crowdsourced Quora style platform for legal issues. At LawPivot, a startup can draft a question in a confidential manner, attach a tag to that question and using a service called LP Recommendation, LawPivot will recommend the top 10 lawyers to answer. Startups can read up on the recommended lawyers, and will receive approximately 3 different responses within 24-48 hours. These services are free on LawPivot, but only until the end of the month. It’s likely that beginning in April, LawPivot will start charging startups either per question or a monthly fee. So get busy asking your questions now.
Lawyers use the site to connect with companies that they can impress. And when lawyers respond back to companies in a timely fashion, they get points. The points act like a reputation measurement that lawyers can use to build their credit online. Points are measured using LawPivot’s search algorithm, which tracks their behaviors on the site such as how fast and how many times they’ve answered questions compared to the number of questions received.
“In addition to personally vetting each and every lawyer that comes onto LawPivot, this data allows us to determine and keep track of the quality of lawyers on our network,” says Gupta. He also suggests that Quora will soon be implementing user rankings in a similar fashion.
The site is currently open to California lawyers, California companies and companies that have Californian based legal issues. Both companies and lawyers have to request have to request invitations to the site at this time. While LawPivot plans on expanding in the next couple months based on demand, Gupta says they currently have hundreds and hundreds of lawyers, many from the biggest firms in Silicon Valley.
A startup in its own right, the company was founded in November 2009 and officially launched in August in 2010. Since then, operations have been flowing. Just two months ago, they received $600,000 in funding from Google Ventures and a handful of angels. Working with Google Ventures has been an incredibly positive experience for the team as they work around the clock on Google’s campus in its startups labs with support from everything from public relations to user interface and product development.
So don’t get screwed two years after launch because you forgot to fill out some nitty-gritty legal form. Seeking legal advice is good advice for any company. A friend of mine always jokes, “If Mark Zuckerberg had the right legal advice, Eduardo Saverin wouldn’t be an accidental billionaire.”
Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter.
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.
Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.
The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.
Phase I: The Search Dominated Web
This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them.
Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking
In the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services gained significant traction, surfacing popular content. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon are hugely popular even today, driving millions of page views.
Phase III: Personalized Recommendations
Services like Hunch, GetGlue, etc. have focused on building an Interest Graph for users, to deliver personalized recommendations using a ‘taste engine’.
Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity
The latest crop of startups is focusing on personalization using a combination of Interest and Social Graphs. Personalized Serendipity is what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘Unexpected Relevance’. Examples include Gravity, my6sense, Genieo, and TrapIt.
What Exactly Is Relevance?
The battle against information overload is sometimes presented as a choice between Relevance and Popularity, where ‘relevant’ is equated to ‘personalized’ as against popular.
However, Relevance does not always mean Personalized. Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.
There are multiple approaches to filtering information for Relevant Content. Google, Paper.li, and PostRank are examples of algorithmic filtering, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach. Klout can be used to filter Twitter streams by influence, while Facebook uses social affinity as a filter for its newsfeed and social signals for its new Comments Plugin. Location is another high-impact signal for delivering relevant content, gaining importance in a mobile world.
In other words, Relevance spans across all the quadrants of the Discovery Matrix above, and none of the above approaches to filtering for relevance is the ‘best approach’. There is no killer approach to Relevance. Henry Nothhaft, Jr., CMO of TrapIt, described it as “the myth of the sweet spot”. The competitive edge will be with services that support multiple discovery methods, multiple filtering approaches, have flexibility, and support multiple mobile platforms.
Quora: A Showcase Of The Interest Graph
Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.
Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.
This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.
The war over the Interest Graph began between Twitter and Facebook last year, as Erick described so eloquently. So how did Quora beat them to this game?
For starters, Quora is built from the ground-up with the Interest Graph being a backbone of the framework. Twitter’s ‘Browse Interests’ is too broad and primitive to be of use, even at present. And while Facebook has a mechanism for allowing publishers to push new items to your feed, most publishers have been unaware of this functionality.
The implications of a Relevance-driven web are wide-ranging and broad in scope. Better utilization of the Interest Graph by services will lead to better ad targeting, and a potential decrease in reliance on CPM/CPC-based advertising. Monetization focus will be on higher yields through transactions and subscriptions as Dave McClure once described. Online media publishers will focus on Relevance Metrics revealing engagement and time-spent on site, than primitive metrics like page views and traffic.
Social media may lose its obsession with follower numbers and traffic, evolving to context-driven reputation systems and algorithms.
Interest Graphs will be used to build Better Social Graphs. Today’s monolithic Interest Graph will get further specialized into Taste Graphs, Financial Graphs, Local Network Graphs, etc., yielding higher relevance for different needs.
