Adam Whippy» New Google Design Explained – SEO { Adam Whippy }

New Google Design Explained

thewhipster — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:22:08 +0000

I spent some time with the new Google design of its search interface last week which made it on to the company blog at 360i.

Velociroflcoptersaurus – Revisited

thewhipster — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:04:11 +0000

This is should really be more aptly called: “How I won the Velociroflcoptersaurus competition”…

Back in December 2008, a rather simplistic competition was begun at Razorfish’s Client Summit by the ever prolific minds of their Australian agency, Amnesia. It was one of those – let’s coin up a bloody word never uttered before and try to prove a point that Google search is ridiculously valuable – ideas.

The concept was already getting old by then, but whatever. The Social folks at Razorfish wanted to prove how much social integrates into search. Fair point, and it certainly did have an effect for a short while as blog posts, linked-in and twitters got first page rankings.

Simply put, ShiftedPixels in Australia killed the competition through a very well timed effort in pure spammy link building. They certainly got the timing right and rightfully won the competition with a #1 ranking for “velociroflcoptersaurus”.

But wait…

Who’s on top a year and a bit later? And who has been #1 consistently for over 8 months?… yours truly…

I wanted to demonstrate that content was king, regardless of the social media driven interrupts that occur. well structured optimized content was always going to win the day. (see my strategy explanation here: http://www.velociroflcoptersaur.com/disclaimer/)

So the point of all this is to provide some closure on the long-term standings, where my site velociroflcoptersaur.com holds rankings #1 & 2 in Google US. That also includes a result for my side experiment in using only webmaster tools to geo-locate a section of the site to Australia (and succeeded in doing so!)

You’ll note that shifted pixels is noticeably absent in Google US at least. (not so in Australia) And further, the amnesiablog did well in retaining the post and holds good standing with its unique content. Finally, there is still some clear evidence on how some social sites have staying power and can contribute to your share of shelf space in search. (Facebook, Linkedin and Flickr all hold well a year later…)

Look at the search result:

And quite funny is the long tail that my blog has attracted. (how someone who searched “jurassic claw”, spent 2 min 30 sec, and went through 7 pages of content is beyond me! LOL)

Skittles

thewhipster — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:25:52 +0000

Skittles is back, having pulled the plug on its ballsy social media experiment of yielding its brand homepage to the tweeple. No doubt they enjoyed a good amount of press coverage through this bold act to promote the undercurrent of social media conversations to such a position. But it was a little simple to think that there aren’t factions out there that marvel at the challenge to override it with spam. Regardless, it was a well worthy attempt and I was pleasantly surprised by the more guarded but fun-loving re-design – but not because they found a great way to integrate Social into their brand… that they didn’t…

If you are like myself, you probably landed on skittles.com and had a “taste” of the rainbow. To realize that the page is effectively endless… that is cool, even though it made me feel daft for a second.

No, what really caught my was in the HTML source code. Now I look a this stuff day in day out and always in delighted of beautiful semantic HTML markup. Skittles did a good job, but low and behold… ASCII ART. Love it.

While SEO best practices calls for the discipline to code sparingly to achieve results, in this instance who cares! I think its brilliant that while Skittles made quite a u-turn in embracing social media without borders, it had enough fun-loving within its DNA to give us source-code inspecting geeks a reason to enjoy this tedious task…

ASCII art is seriously treasured skill, I’ve spent quite a while in the past both testing how ASCII art could be incorporated into natural search meta data (tip: it mostly fails) and looking for such practitioners for some viral marketing.

Wikipedia is your brand!

Adam Whippy — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:25:52 +0000

According to GoogleCache 96.6% of Wikipedia pages Rank in Google’s Top 10:

Although I don’t believe their methodology is particularly sound, it got my brain juices flowing. Wikipedia is a growing authority on brands…so how do brands fare, what’s the coverage?

I’ve answers, I picked Business Week’s list of Top 100 brand names and subjected them to the Wiki test, the results are pretty conclusive.
Google is in bed with Wikipedia, Yahoo! is a WikiFlirt^TM and Live is confused as always:

I could not observe any particular instances whereby Wikipedia was out-ranking the brand sites, asides from Live whose ranking algorithm is proving rather brittle.
Google and Yahoo are amongst the only Top 100 brands without a WikiPedia listing in their Top 10 results (the irony).

MSN/Live ranked Wikipedia over these brands (in the event it could actually rank the brand site altogether, you guys NEED SEO!)

Duracell
Hennessy
Hermes
LG
Marlboro
Porsche
Prada

This really goes to show that brand marketers need to get hands on with Wikipedia!

Ownership of the Search Landscape

Adam Whippy — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:30:53 +0000

Over a decade of dot com M&A from the big guns of search have produced some insightful collections of web properties. Google’s latest 10-K filings is a good time to do a quick summary of who owns what in the world of search.

Google – See Google’s full portfolio of subsidiaries
GGLs list of acquisitions exhibit an impressive grass roots approach, their buy-outs have often contributed to eventual product releases in one form or another.

JotSpot and Writely have contributed to the launch of Google Apps for Domains and the Google Docs and Spreadsheets products.
SketchUp, now re-branded as Google SketchUp – a 3D authoring environment.
ZipDash – provides traffic maps, recently incorporated into Google Maps.
Urchin which is now Google Analytics.
Keyhole Corp – now Google Earth.
Applied Semantics which no doubt contributed to the Adwords/Adsense platforms.
The list continues with heavy weights like YouTube, Orkut, and host of Payment transaction holdings to support Google Checkout.

Clearly Google are masters in acquiring enlightened technology companies at their early stages, fostering them and later bringing them to market as rich, comprehensive products.
Yahoo – See Yahoo’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

Yahoo’s story is quite different, their holdings feature a great deal of search engines which Y! had to acquire to build up the search engine technology intellect base to compete with Google and move away from their original strong editorial model. More recent acquisitions are highly successful and promising enterprises such as Hotjobs, Kelkoo and Delicious.
You might remember Compuserve, once the only ISP available in Belgium which soon became a bottom-less pit for my pocket-money!

Microsoft – See Microsoft’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

The folks at Redmond have apparently favored an in-house approach with few M&A deals in the search sector.

Ask (IAC) – See IAC’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

IAC holds a truly diversified and exciting set of subsidiaries:

TicketMaster
A multitude of online dating sites like Match.com
Parts of Excite
CollegeHumor.com
and countless more…

In summary, the strategies at play here are very different. IAC is excelling at diversifying into disparate fields, Google is holding and capitalising on smart investment moves, Yahoo is striving to get back into the game and, alas Microsoft is caught sleeping as usual!