Matt Cutts the Spammer?
While conducting research on the benefits of Google+ I stumbled across Matt Cutts… If you are not familiar who Matt Cutts is a Google software engineer. More importantly Matt currently is the head of Google’s Webspam team. Matt Cutts Seems to have a weighted advantage due to the changes with Google+ and search results. Seems funny to me that the lead webspammer at Google is indeed a spammer.
It appears Mr Cutts needs to look into the effect Google+ plus is having on very specific search results.
Don’t ban me Matt! 
Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) – Example
In this day and age within the SEO community DAO or Digital Asset Optimization is all of the rage. With universal search becoming more apparent on Google and Bing DAO is becoming more and more important within a successful SEO campaign. Recently I have watched two co-workers have a small tiff to rank their sites for “#1 Most Handsome Man“.
The most interesting thing is the DAO that was done to humiliate the other was extremely comical and very effective. Within the Image results in Google the main competitor has been placed with a great photo for #1 Most Handsome Man
This will be interesting to see what shakes out with these two. I am sure they will want to rank the images to compete with one another.
Feel free to comment below or share the image to vote for the #1 Most Handsome Man!
First Imperssion of Google+
First Impression of Google+
With Google+ launching in a closed beta phase, I am fortunate to be a part of it early on and I wanted to give a first impression breakdown of Google+ as it stacks up against the giant Facebook.
At first glance the two have the same look and feel. Very clean lines and content is the main portion of the user experience. But after looking it over a little more Google+ has a slight advantage over Facebook with no pushy banners, over power events and let?s not forget the nonsense horoscope, game requests, or look who answered a question about me bullshit.
Google+ is not initially positioned for the average users, but for the super social users. (aka. Geeks) Rather Google+ is being pushed for business class; mind 20?s ? 40?s demographic. Google+ is not currently a Teen venue like MySpace was and Facebook has become. ?It is more of a civil way of being social online. ? (Imagine me saying that in a tight jawed British accent ? no offense to our London peeps)
Google+ seems to have gotten the community activity right. Google+ has “hangouts” a video group chat application that lets groups communicate via webcams. This will be one of the game changers for Google+. This will allow users to conduct meetings, conferences and plain family events with their selected groups. This has the potential to be a social Juggernaut if Google can incorporate the hangout with mobile.
The other main differentiation for Google+ will be its ability to have full analytics data to go along with it. Google has been rolling in social data and Google +1 data for a few months now. So I think it is safe to say GA will be able to have full analytics for user engagement for Google+ in the near future. That is where Facebook has fallen short in the past.
I do not see my mother jumping on the Google+ bandwagon, but it will be fun to watch these two major corporations who have unlimited funds to play with. Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon due to their sheer number of users and worldwide adoption, but Google will start to make an impact.
Proximity Searches – Between the Search Engine Indifferences
Just recently I have noticed while running several tests on the major search engines and their ability to server and rank site via proximity searches. I first started to see the trend a month or so ago. I was trying to rank a site for “Michigan Green Plumbing” to assist with the certification process for the company to become more green.
First, let’s define what proximity searches are: (via Wikipedia)
a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search.
For example, a search could be used to find “Michigan green plumber”, and match phrases such as “Michigan green plumbing”. By limiting the proximity, these phrases can be matched while avoiding documents where the words are scattered or spread across a page or in unrelated articles in an anthology.
While conducting my testing I have noticed several issues with proximity searches within the three major engines. The target site ranks for the desired search term “Michigan Green Plumbing” and Michigan Green Plumber” in both Google and Yahoo. Bing has the main indifference out of the three.
Tagging – The site is tagged via the title tag and targeted body copy to compensate for the term “Michigan Green Plumbing”
Again while this works to be in close proximity to “Michigan Green Plumbers” both Google and Yahoo rank the site accordingly and Bing only references the site for the exact term.
Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing
Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber
Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing
Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber
Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing
Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber
In conclusion when targeting proximity searches it is an acceptable best practice to include them into your research for both Google and Yahoo, but when it comes to Bing stick to the old fashion techniques for each and every targeted keyword on you list.
Will this trend disappear with the merger of Bing and Yahoo? Or will Yahoo results be close minded to proximity search terms?