Google Gadgets & SEO

I am in the San Jose area for today’s SearchMonkey launch party. It will be at Yahoo! headquarters and it looks like it will be interesting.

What is Search Monkey?

In a way, it is Yahoo’s take on gadgets within search results… sorta. The example they use at their SearchMonkey site is a movie website that has a datafeed, can appear via Search Monkey in Yahoo search results.

Each of the main search engines are using gadgets in one form or the other in their results. Google has Onebox, Microsoft has WebSlices, and Yahoo has SearchMonkey.

Today (actually tonight) at Yahoo HQ we will get some demonstrations and more about the SearchMonkey project.

I like this Yahoo product, and will become very familiar with it. If you want to see what it is about see the SearchMonkey developer tool which helps you find and construct data services that you can use to build apps. Once you’ve built your app, you can use it yourself and share it with others.

I will be leaving the trail to attend a few things in the next three weeks. I hope to see you there, and also this will be the window of opportunity to get some face time with me if I am working on your projects. Contact me asap to arrage meetings, here is where I will be…

 May 12th - Palm Springs (personal stuff)

May 15th - Sunnyvale, CA - Yahoo HQ - I will be at the Yahoo campus for an evening of drinking, er, I mean developer stuff

May 28th 29th - Googleplex - I will be doing some developer stuff and attending some fireside chats. I am looking forward to several goings on there, especially the MySpace/Open Social stuff, and of course the Google gadgets stuff as well.

Jun 3rd 4th - Seattle, WA - SMX Advanced - I will swing by Seattle for the SEOmoz party, and also maybe get a networking pass for the event.

Jun16th - New York, NY - WidgetWebExpo - I will be doing a session there on Widgets and SEO

I also want to mention that Smx Advanced will be having a developer day which programmed by Vanessa Fox, who has over 13 years of experience building websites, documenting APIs, and reading comic books.

Vanessa is starting a new thing Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She also is features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search.

In addition to the above, she is also quite hot

There is a real benefit for companies to send their developers to this event, and I want to add that I personally think that if you are a developer and you are tinkering with the idea of broadening your horizons, this is a good event to go to. If you are thinking of working with me I would say the developer days would be required. (hint-hint)

Although this developer day is naturally orientated towards SEO, there are some very important basics to understand before starting a large project that will be useful to just about any development team out there.

My compliments to Vanessa for starting this.

That about does it, after that I will be back on the trail.

Quick overview of some of the features announced today by Google concerning Google gadgets social aspects including a developer iGoogle sandbox and Open Social support for iGoogle gadgets.

One of the major reasons that Facebook applications spread like wildfire is because they are seen by friends on other friends profile pages, or are listed in updates, or news items.

iGoogle gadgets don’t have this capacity resulting in less viral spread of gadgets. Google gadgets are directory spread rather than virally spread. To become more social, iGoogle will add many things in the upcoming months. Todays announcement opened up some documentation that illuminates a few of the ways Google will compete socially against Facebook and others by providing Open Social functionality to thier own iGoogle container (limited to developers sandbox for now).

One example is the Updates gadget.

This gadget seen above provides essentially a news feed capability to iGoogle and within the documentation is explained as…

Updates Gadget

Using the OpenSocial APIs, you can post updates to the updates gadget. Users will be able to see updates generated from their friends’ gadgets, encouraging content sharing.

* A gadget will be able to read updates that it posted from friends’ iGoogle pages.
* Gadgets have a maximum number of updates it can post each day per user.
* See the FAQ for more details.

Notice the “encourage sharing” point. Sharing is what iGoogle has lacked, and have only recently started adding more functionality to their sharing ability. This update module will likely be a default gadget for new iGoogle users. Expect iGoogle to have a new look with many similarities to a Facebook profile soon…

The other major change will be the canvas page within iGoogle. iGoogle without a canvas page ability meant that iGoogle did not have the ability to support their own Open Social. Here is what the canvas page will now look like…

Note for Google:

The link that states “add developers tools” on the getting starting page is linked incorrectly

Some useful links to Google documentation for this announcement:

Getting Started

Open Social for iGoogle tutorial

Open Social for gadgets example code

To hear more about the iGoogle sandbox…

Hi, this is just an open letter to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask spam teams.

I will be speaking in depth about SEO and widgets at a couple of upcoming conferences and highlighting some of the more “dangerous” behaviors that can lead to spam trouble within widgets.

I have sent an email to Matt Cutts and I hope he sees it and responds. I also hope that anyone from any searchengine that has something they want put out to developers and marketers of widgets, please email me at guidelineguy@gmail.com

Thanks

I am now leaving for my backpacking trip, and I should be online next in approximately a month (beginning of May).

Take care!

Affiliate programs often do not have many of the basic functionalities that I like to see that help me use them in gadgets.

I was surprised when I saw what Superpages was offering for their affiliate system.

SuperPages is a local search company and they have a simple and innovative system to distribute their services. It is interesting to me because it is essentially a gadget based affiliate program.

The program allows a blogger or webmaster to insert a vertical or horizontal banner on their site which allows a visitor to perform local searches.

These “ads” are gadgets!

The program allows you to use a simple interface to customize your gadget and adjust the width, height, color, etc.

There are no real technical skills needed, you just choose characteristics from a menu…

Once you have made a widget to fit your webpage or blog, you are given code to place on your site.

The other interesting thing about this program is that they give you a results code too, very similar to the Google custom search system. This means that you can show results within your own websites design and look within a frame….

The result page is actually useful and ad free.

You can (of course) put the local search in a Google gadget. Here is a gadget live (use it to see what the results look like)…

While just about any affiliate ad can be made into a gadget, Superpages has streamlined the process for anyone.

This is a very good model for affiliate programs. It should do quite well. The affiliate site is here, and is well worth a look whether you are pondering using or building an affiliate program.

Well done, Superpages.

I happened across something that would make Michael Gray of Wolf Howl chuckle…

On the Google analytics features page there is a reference to paid links as if they are just as fine and dandy as can be, in fact you should definitely use Google Analytics because of the keyword and campaign comparison…

I have no real interest in paid links and such, but that is funny. - Check it out (it is the second “feature” down).

Google just released the API for the street view functionality of maps.

I made this example Google gadget that uses the new API that displays a few historic landmarks in Philadelphia to illustrate some of the gadget potential…

The gadget takes advantage of the “simple street view panorama” example provided with the API release. There are several demo examples given and the possibilities are endless.

Can you say real estate? Real estate people can do tons with this.

This is kinda a no brainer I will be there and I am relieved it fits my trail schedule. This event is developer oriented and costs 300-400 dollars depending when you register.

Get all the details at the Google I/O site.

Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts asks some really great specific questions about the internet marketing side of gadgets. It is wonderful to hear people asking Google these marketing questions. This is an impressive interview, and gives a much needed overview of Google gadgets and their marketing value, and includes a thorough, simple explanation of Google gadget ads.

Outstanding interview.
Jacqui (the interviewer) asks all the right questions and is clearly knowledgeable on this, I need to have a beer with her now