Google has entered the arena of social media outreach and is engaged in directly contacting publishers about Google products and offerings, asking people to write about them.

In a nut shell, they are link building now. It is through a third party, but they are doing it.

I received an email a couple of days ago that asked me if I was interested in doing a story about the new Google search stories tool.

Upon initially reading this email I was very suspicious to be completely truthful. Suspicious enough that I did some investigating. Here is what I learned…

This appears to actually be someone acting on the behalf of  Google.

After speaking with several people (all of whom were notably professional and nice) I wanted to share what occurred because it is a great example of communication. Social media is people, and these are some professionals who know how to interact with people.

Even though I have some critiques about the initial email I received, they impressed me very much with their open communication as I was investigating this.

I am going to describe this in three parts.

1. I will share the email I received and note the things I liked and didn’t like about it.
2. I will explain why I was suspicious of the email
3. I will describe how the communication went when I contacted them, and why I was left with such a great overall impression.

The Email

I have highlighted what I think was good about it and what I thought was bad about it. Here is the entire email with my critiques in red and my compliments in green…

Hey Patrick (<–They got my name right, good way to start),
How’s everything? My name is [name], I’m a digital Marketing consultant that works with Horizon Media. (they identified themselves)(but they did not identify that they were working with Google)
I love the site. (compliments will get you everywhere)
I really liked your articles “Facebook fan requests make me want to projectile vomit” and “Google translate for animals”. I thought the Google translate for Animals video was pretty hilarious. (they mentioned by name my posts and commented specifically about them)(they probably shouldn’t just reference the last two posts I did, would be more real if they mentioned a new post and an older post)

I’m reaching out to you today about Google’s new Search Story campaign. (they explain why they are contacting me)
You may remember Google¹s Parisian Love ad that aired during the 2010 Super Bowl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU .This was Google’s first Super Bowl ad, and the response was so positive, that Google decided to share this opportunity with all of its users. (they used a great reference that most people would know about)

Google’s brand new Search Stories tool has gone live yesterday. You can check the below blog posting to read more about it
(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/make-your-own-search-story-video-in.html). This tool allows you to create and publish your own personalized Search Story that you can share with your readers, fans and friends. To view the Search Stories Creator template, and build your own story, please visit the YouTube channel @ http://www.youtube.com/searchstories I have also attached a PDF on how to create your own search story.You can also reference the below link on youtube if you would prefer. (a good solid but brief description of product)

If you could check out the tool, create your own story and post on your site that would be greatly appreciated. (very specific and real request, no confusion here) If you could encourage your readers to do the same and share with their friends and family that would also be a huge help. Lastly, if you could let me know when you do create your own search story that would be great because I would love to see and read all about it. (these are very specific requests as well, which I think is good, they are contacting me, might as well not beat around the bush about what you want. The request for further communication is a good thing. It also is a pretty good idea for a blog post.)

One last thing I wanted to mention was that many videos that stand out as creative and fun will be posted on the official YouTube Search Stories Channel. In order to meet those requirements, you must publish a story that meets Google’s terms and conditions, which you can find on the Terms and Conditions page of the You Tube Search Stories Channel (http://www.gstatic.com/sst0/static/terms.html). Thanks a lot and I look forward to seeing what you create and publish on your site.

Thank you! (politeness rocks.)

~[name]

(the following FTC rule warning was a big red flag because it says to disclose I was directly contacted by Google, but I was not informed in the email that it was Google making the request. This did not add up to me.)
IMPORTANT NOTE

In keeping with recent FTC rule changes, we request that you provide full disclosure to your audience in regards to your relationship with our brand.
Please make clear that you were contacted directly by Google, who asked for your participation in the ways outlined above. In addition, please disclose fully any materials and/or products we have shared with you as part of this initiative. Your honest and transparent participation is truly valued by Google. We look forward to working with you again on future initiatives.”

That was the email I received and now I want to describe what made me suspicious of it.

Smells Fishy

As I noted I was a bit suspicious of this email when I first looked at it. I am a pretty big fan of Google and I am somewhat familiar with how important their brand is to them. When I first read the email I was never told that it was from Google (or someone directly acting on the behalf of Google) so when I got to the end of it and read that FTC warning stating “I was directly contacted by Google” it didn’t add up for me.

Worse still, I went to the domain name that the email was sent from and…

There was nothing there.

This convinced me at that moment that this could not be a Google contact as I felt that they would not send emails from a domain that didn’t have anything on it.

The Communication

Since I am a bit protective of Google because I am sorta a fanboy, I replied to the email with this…

“explain more of who you are to me please and what your relationship with Google is. If you do not, the only story I am writing is about your misrepresentation.”

Nice aren’t I?

I received a prompt reply. It was professional, it explained what was up, and it offered me solutions. (wow)
Here it the reply I got….

“Patrick,

Google is one of the advertising accounts that Horizon Media represents. The current campaign we are working on in generating awareness and encouraging people to try out this new Search Story software Google has created.

If you would like I could send you my supervisors email so you can discuss further with him.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
name of person”

I was impressed by the prompt reply, but I wanted to put on my reporter hat and dig deeper, so I replied that I wanted the email. I also said in part…

“The email seems sneaky to me, it is not sent from horizon media, and the domain the email is from is non existent.
Thank you”

I was again given a prompt reply within minutes..

“Patrick,

Not a problem at all. My supervisors information is below. I apologize if the email came off as sneaky, that was not my intentions.

[name of supervisor, email of supervisor, and phone number of supervisor was provided here]

I hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks,
Name of person”

Wow. A nice, apologetic reply with actual contact info. I was again impressed, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this so I called the contact.

I had a conversation with the supervisor on the phone, and he explained to that there was a relationship between Horizon Media and Google.

I then spoke to the director of social media & relationship marketing of Horizon Media and we had quite a friendly chat. I have had my share of overseeing outreach efforts, and he was a very nice open person who actually wanted to hear my critiques.

The bottom line of this is that Google has hired someone to do social media outreach and are actively engaging in reaching out to publishers.

I appreciated the transparency of the conversation I had, and my impression went from suspicion to support. Nice job.

They found me, and I am one of the right guys to find if you are Google and are wanting to reach out to publishers.

I think there are two main things a social media outreach plan needs to do in order to be successful.

1. Find the right people
2. Communicate with them well

They seem to have done that. If your communications were published by a rogue blogger, would your outreach fare as well?
(notes: I am not a rogue blogger, and do not normally publish email communications on my blog without discussing it first with those I have communicated with. I told them I would do this story, and that it would include critiques on their initial email.)

I have made quite a few websites and they tend to do well. It isn’t because I am particularly gifted, it is because of the decisions I make before creating a website.

I do not try (and fail) to make a million zillion dollars on the web.

I do try (and succeed) to make a few hundred dollars a month on websites that are really good and really small (if you make a few of these websites, they add up pretty quick).

The work to money ratio on these types of websites is amazing.

I have sites that make from 1000 to 30,000 dollars a year that only took me a couple of days to create. I never did any link building campaigns for those sites, I never looked at any charts and SEO graphs for those sites, and I never kissed up to anyone or begged for social mentions for those sites. I just made really good websites that were really small. Since I have several such sites, I have a good solid income, I don’t need to have a job and I don’t need to deal with clients.

If that sounds good to you, read on.

I consider 3 key elements while creating a new website because when I consider these elements, I know I can likely make a website in a weekend, have it do well, and get recurring revenue from it. These types of websites also make the web better. I am going to describe at length the process and considerations I use to make web sites. This post will provide actual examples using a website I specifically made for this post which uses the concepts I discuss.

How to Make a Website That Ranks Well Without a Bunch of Links

The first step is to decide what your website is about, here is what I do when I am thinking of creating a new site. I always start with a very important question…

1. Does the web need this website?

The surest path to disappointment on the web is creating a web site that isn’t really needed.

There are millions of things you can make a website about, you need to ask yourself if there is a need for the website you are creating. The websites that tend to do well fill an existing need that is not currently being filled. As you dream up your website, make sure it does not already exist.
The first step in making a great website is to determine if the web site is needed on the web. To make that determination is basically asking yourself if the subject of the proposed website is covered well already in the search engine results.
Probably the best way to find a subject for a successful website is to use your search experience. If you are searching for “odd hats” on Google and all you find is sites that have normal hats, then you know you can make a website about odd hats and have it work and have a good chance of ranking even without a million links.

In contrast, if you search for something on Google and all the results are websites that fufill your search needs, then you probably shouldn’t make a site about that subject.

2. Decide how your website will be better than other websites

If you have decided that the subject of your website is needed, now you have to decide how it will be better than the websites that already exist. This is crucial. Prior to getting a domain name, decide how your website will be superior. To use the “odd hats” example again, if you made a website about odd hats, one of the main ways you could be better is by only highlighting odd, unique hats.

Even if there are a million websites out there on a subject, they may not be filling a need well.

Example: I always search for CSS code to move an image to the left or right, I always forget it and always end up searching for it again. I noticed something very strange when I did.

The top results for image related CSS information often did not have an image in it. There are no visual cues on the pages. I often found myself reading through very verbose explanations when all I really need was a tiny bit of code.

This to most would seem a minor frustration, but to me it was a web site in the making, particularly because there isn’t a website out there that only discusses image related CSS.

I knew if I made a website that was only about image CSS, was very visual, to the point, and simple, it would probably rank well even in an area as crowded as CSS sites. It probably wouldn’t need to get alot of links to start getting traffic.

If you search for “float images left” on Google, nine of the top 10 results do not even have an image on them to display the concept of what it is they are explaining. Articles about image CSS techniques should have images. This could be done better.

3. Only Make Websites That You Can Finish Quickly

One common mistake is to make a website with a subject so broad that it gets bigger and bigger and takes forever to finish and maintain.

Being more comprehensive is a wonderful way to have a better website than someone else. However, you must realize that in the spirit of “making really good websites that are really small” you should not choose a subject that takes more then 10 or 20 pages to be comprehensive. If you can not be a comprehensive resource about a subject in a few amount of pages, you have not found the right subject yet.

There is real wisdom in creating concise laser focused websites that solve a certain problem. This is what “niche” is all about. Niche web sites are talked about all the time, but not many people talk about what a niche site really is.

How do you know if a subject is niche? I do not know how other people decide but here is what I think…

If you can not make a comprehensive website in a weekend about a subject, that subject is not niche.

Understand that well. It is very important.

With my CSS frustration I outlined above, I knew that I could make a website that took care of all of my frustrations and it could likely be less than ten pages.

So I made decided to make a website that would take care of all the gripes I had about the subject and use it as a real example for this post.

Here is the website that I made for this post. It is about… image CSS.

Here are the things I did to make that site and why I did them…

What I did step by step

1. I determined a website was indeed needed about image CSS
The 3 biggest deciding factors I used to make this decision were:

• I had a problem finding what I wanted in Google when searching for image CSS subjects.
• There was no website specifically about image CSS
• Image CSS is a no brainer when it came to traffic. Virtually everyone creating web content, no matter their skill level, will at some point wonder about CSS and images. I did not use tools or charts to determine this, I used my common sense.

2. I decided how my website would be better than other websites… Specifically, I looked at the problems I noticed:

• There was no website that was only about image CSS
• There were no (or very few) web results that quickly and concisely gave me the information I needed.
• There were no images in posts about image CSS techniques, which I found incredibly weird.
• There were not visually simple and pleasant websites about this subject.
• Many of the results I found were overly verbose, and spoke with complicated terms rather than simple terms.

Having seen these problems, I knew that I could be better than those results because…

• My website will only be about image CSS
• My website will have pages that quickly gave the user the information they want
• My website will have visual examples of the techniques using images.
• My website will scream simplicity
• My website will focus only on providing solutions, not history of problems.

3. Get a domain name.

Now that I know how my website will be better, I can look for a domain name.

Amazingly, I found a rather good one…

imagecss.com

That is a good domain name for a website about Image CSS huh? I lucked out on that one. Ten bucks well spent.

4.  I need to think about how it will look visually.

I want it to scream simple. I want it to be clear within an instant what the site is about. I want to use images that are friendly. I want it to be visual , visual, visual. This would mean I need to spend some money on images, but whenever I spend money, I want to do it effectively. I decided I would spend about 100/200 dollars on images so the site would look good.

Since this would be a visual website I decided I need to find and use images that were friendly, cute, simple. I used istockphoto.com to find images. Here are some tips when looking for images to use on your new sites…

• Understand that your images need to tie together in a theme. You are not looking for one perfect image, you are looking for a suite of images that work together. This is important so that you site “fits together” well.
• Drawings are less used on the web because they cost more than photos do. Consider this when making your visual decisions. Your website can often look more original if you use stock drawings instead of stock photos.

Knowing these two things, I went to istockphoto.com and searched around…

When I did a search I searched for “cute friendly”…

I then unchecked all of the choices except for “illustrations”…

I browsed through the results and came across an image I liked. Once you find something you like, it is well worth the time to make sure that the artist has other things you like so that you can used the same “look” throughout your site. To do this choose “view portfolio”…

Okay when I did that there were lots of similiar drawings. I had found an image I liked, with a look I liked, and made sure that there were many options available from the same artist.

5. I need to make a good header.

I found an image from the artist I liked that was simple and friendly and that I thought would be a good logo of sorts…

I then got a pen and some paper (cause I’m fancy like that).

I sketched out a design that I thought would be kinda cool using that image as part of the header.

Once I decided it would look nice, I bought the image.

You can also download a copy of the image and use that in your experiments.

I am cheap. I do not want to pay for an image I do not want. Testing is good.

Here is the header I eventually made…

With this header I accomplished a few of my goals (remember one of my gripes was that “there was not a website only about image CSS”).

It is simple and friendly (one of my gripes was that “There were not visually simple and pleasant websites about this subject”).

It is clear what the site is about without even seeing any content, nobody who ends up on this website will be confused if they have found the right place or not. A good website header will let the user know instantly what the site is about.

The tag line is concise and a little bit humorous (non technical and simple).

6. I need to make a good homepage.

I have a domain, I have a header, now I need to figure out what the site should include and how it will be presented. The home page is important, and should illustrate quickly to someone what the site is about.

The information I want to provide is image CSS related stuff. The most common issues I had were how to move an image left, right, center, etc. I decided all this type of info should be quickly and plainly addressed.

I wanted a visual homepage that clearly showed what information you could find at this site. Under the friendly header, I decided to make this for the home content…

The home page has six boxes that cover the main ways an image can be placed in a web page or blog: left, right, center (horizontal), center (vertical), top, and bottom. This solved my gripe that “There were no (or very few) web results that quickly and concisely gave me the information I needed.”

Each box has a visual example of what technique I am describing (remember that my biggest gripe was that there were no visual examples of techniques on other sites. I am better!).

The friendly theme of the header is continued. In the side bar it says a blurb about how the site covers simple and easy ways to do things with images using CSS. It is friendly, simple and provides visual indications of the techniques that are described.

7. I need to decide the hierarchy of  the site.

The great thing about small websites is that they have simple hierarchies. You know that advice about “every page should be able to found in two clicks”?. When you have a small site that is easy to accomplish. In fact, every page of my website is linked to from the homepage.

That being said, it is still good to have a list of your pages, and a general idea of how they will fit together. I decided that the home page would be the main navigation of the site (sorta like a “sitemap”) because each page of my site is linked to from it.

My site has a grand total of 11 pages and describes the subject pretty well, pretty throughly, and pretty simple like.

I did not choose to look at keyword research for what my subjects would be, but many people do. I instead just covered what I felt were useful. Because the total of pages is so small, all the pages can be linked to about evenly.

8. Create the information pages

I have a great domain, a great header and a great homepage, now I need to have great content. The content must to fulfill the needs of people searching for image CSS terms.

Each page should describe quickly and visually the concept. It should have a clear title and describe off the bat what the page is about.

I also decided to have a short concise description of each technique at the top, and then a more thougrough and in depth explanation below. This way if people knew what they wanted, but just couldn’t remeber the code (like me) they could grab it quick. If a person need more info, they could just scroll down and get it…

Below the fold there is a much more in depth explanation of the technique and how to accomplish it.

I made the articles as good and simple as I could. I made one for each technique (left, right, center, etc.). I also decided to create content that helped people understand things like background images, image opacity, and the image tag. I did not go crazy. The only thing the website discusses is image CSS.

Things like “padding”, “margin”, and “border” can be hard to explain or understand, but it can be visually explained in an image quite quickly with the CSS box…

I made the best content I could, I chose my subjects and stuck to them.

I now have a good website. Now what?

SEO stuff:
I do not do much as far a as SEO goes, here is what I do…

• Choose “www” or “non www”. Make a choice, and the do the 301 redirect to the version you decide.
• Make sure that a search engine spider can see the site using a spider simulator.
• Add it to Google webmaster tools

Okay, that is the SEO I do. Pretty involved, huh? In the beginning, this is really all I do as far as SEO goes.

Link Building
I do not do much on the link building front either.
I tweeted about the site yesterday. Today I am linking to it in this post. I also put it on Stumbleupon.
That is all I will do for the first few weeks. Three links is good for now
If that surprises you or you feel that is too little effort, you might just be surprised. We will revisit this site in a couple weeks and I will do another post about tweaking, monetizing, and more link stuff if necessary.

Monetize it:

For the first month or so, I do not put any money stuff on my sites. I sometimes end up getting emails from people wanting to advertise. If I do not, I will probably put Adsense on there, again we will revisit this in a few weeks.

The important part

This post is like 3000 or more words long. I spent around 2800 of those words describing the things to do before you make a website. The thing to spend time on is the decisions you make before making a website and knowing how it will be better than others and how it will fill the needs of searchers.

The Google webmaster guidelines recommend that you support the “If Modified Since” HTTP header.

It wasn’t easy for most people to figure out if they supported it or not.

I wanted a tool for my webmaster tools page that simply answered the question…

“Does my website support If Modified Since?”

Here it is… If Modified Since HTTP header tool

A screen shot of the tool:

Does your web page support if modified since as recommended by the Google webmaster guidelines? Find out here.

This new tool checks images and alt text on a web page to see how well it can be “seen” by search engines.

One Google guidelines states…

Make sure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

My new free image SEO tool lets a user enter a url and check how well images are following the image ALT part of this guideline.

Image SEO Tool

Once you enter a webpage and click “go” this tool will…

• Show the images of that page.
• Display the ALT text associated with each image.
• Notes for each image about how well it is following Google guidelines.

Here is what the tool results looks like…

To check your web page images go to the Image SEO Tool.

How are scores assigned? / How does it know how well the guideline is being followed?
I have seen some tools that tell you if an image has ALT text or not, but I have never encountered a tool that examined the ALT text itself.

So I built this tool which does.

This tools not only sees if ALT text is present, it also examines the ALT text and counts the amount of words contained in that ALT text.

I thought about it, and the amount of words does tell us alot.

Scores are based on the amount of words contained in the ALT text. Here are some examples:

• If an image has no ALT text (o words) then the image is not following the guideline.
• If an image has 100 words in the ALT text it is likely spamming or keyword stuffing
• If an image has only one word it is likely not “descriptive”. The Google guideline states it should be descriptive.

I am creating free SEO tools which help a webmaster determine if they are following the Google webmaster guidelines. This and other new (and old) SEO tools having to do with Google will be on my webmaster tools page on feedthebot.com, so you might want to check that page every once in awhile.

Update: Some people reported bugs, they have been fixed. Specifically:
-some cases where images were being reported as having alt text when they did not was fixed (this was happening when people used alt=”" )
-dashes and characters are no longer counted as a word (in fact one letter words are not being counted either)
- I changed some of the conditions so that it is more acceptable to show more words (I went up to 15 words before giving a red “x” and saying “could be seen as spam”)

Many Google videos and much Google documentation refers webmasters to the page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

This webpage used to contain a wealth of information that was useful to new and/or struggling webmasters. It explained and linked to several resources that helped the webmaster community.

Rather unbelievably, the page now is almost worthless to new webmasters, and I would argue downright confusing.

To show you what I am talking about here…

Google Webmaster Central History

Let’s look at the Google webmaster central page year by year shall we?

2004

See this page? It answers common webmaster questions prominently like “Why isn’t my page listed?” and “How do I get my site listed on Google?”
Nice page Google – Kudos. I wonder if you can make it better…

2005

Wow, you made it better! More concise, and answering more common questions. Where you can’t answer the question fully you link to resources that do. Boy oh wow you guys are swell to new webmasters! Thanks! Wonder if you could make it better…

2006

Holy helpful Batman!
This page is even better now and has a nice simple layout with oh so friendly icons, awwww. You really do like us webmasters. Shucks.
Could it get better?

2008

Wow oh Wow!!!!
Look at all that stuff you have that helps ‘lil ole me the webmaster! Such a great array of things, and it is all laid out in friendly terms, and I know what to do because you have it all broken down in chunks like “Improve traffic with Webmaster tools” and “find answers to webmaster questions” and “learn more about your site” and “submit your content to Google”.
So informative! So useful!
I can’t wait to see what you do next…

2009 (current)

What the f**k?
This page is useless. Crappy crap it is.

A wealth of vastly improved tools and resources are now provided by the Google webmaster team, and they have made such great progress in the last couple of years, but most of their improvements are now invisible to the new webmaster because of the limited nature of the new “Google webmaster central” page.

Google has mentioned and referenced the Google webmaster central page as a “one-stop shop for webmaster resources” and a place for new webmasters to go.

That advice is not sound anymore.

Why would a new webmaster need a rich snippet testing tool? (note: The rich snippet tool is ultra cool and a great resource, but is it really of any use whatsoever to webmasters in general?)

Google Base? Google base is promoted heavily as well. Again, a great product but not so great to the general webmaster having problems.

The most prominent chunk of real estate goes to signing in to “Webmaster Tools”. If I were a new webmaster and saw this, I would probably think…

Hmmm, “Webmaster Tools”, sounds like a page where there are a whole bunch of tools for webmasters. Sounds great, I guess I will create an account or log in”

The problem here is that when they do sign in they are redirected to the Webmaster Tools page – which is utterly and completely worthless to someone until they take a whole bunch of additional steps and time goes by.

The page does not even say what Webmaster Tools is.

This simply does not pass my bullshit detector. If I see a link that says “cat” I expect to go to a “cat” page.
For Google not to define what “Webmaster Tools” is, and to redirect users to a page that has no tools available to be used at that moment, and in addition require people to login or create a new account simply to not get what they are expecting is pretty much plain and simple wrong.

I think new webmasters deserve a page on Google where they can go to get general information about what to do next or how to solve and identify their problems.

Google webmaster central utterly fails to do this now.

My specific complaints…

This page does not answer any questions.

This page does not explain or even attempt to define any tools, resources, or processes for the new or struggling webmaster. (except for Google Base? WTF?)

This page does not offer any advice for a webmaster with questions.

This page does not follow the guidelines and recommendations of Google itself .

Food for thought Google… Your “guide to making a Google friendly site” states right at the beginning “Give visitors the information they’re looking for” – it also states “In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic.” (pssst – your topic is helping webmasters and you have literally NO TEXT on this subject whatsoever.)

Arrgh.

Hey, but just like anything else I see on the web, if something isn’t up to par, it just means an opportunity for anyone with the gumption to make a better resource.
I have the gumption… Here is my version of Google webmaster tools.

With mentions in Mashable and SearchEngineLand this Digg like gadget is off to a very good start. The What’s Popular gadget shows stories, videos and images that are popular. You can submit your own stuff to the gadget and these things can be voted on.

What’s Popular? How about What’s Probable?

There are some notable things about how this gadget is made. First off, this gadget is a URL gadget, meaning it is using type=”url”. This is very interesting to me since Google has not really used this type of gadget for any of it’s official gadgets. This type of Google gadget simply displays content from a url, which means the content behind this gadget is at a live web page…

http://www.google.com/labs/popgadget/world

This means that the about url is searchable, indexable, etc. Here it is in the Google results:

This is a full swing, functioning website and will likely serve as the home page of this service at a later date. In other words, expect this service to be a web based feature of Google. This is not a gadget only project by any means.

This service will become popular itself among iGoogle users. In fact, if history serves as a guide, I can almost assure you that this gadget will become a default gadget on new iGoogle pages.

Virtually all competitors to Digg lack one common thing, distribution.

Guess what? By making this a default Google gadget on iGoogle this gadget (and therefore this service) will have around 8 million users almost overnight. iGoogle is a distribution monster.

I am willing to bet three things about Google What’s Popular

• It will be a web based service soon
• It will be a default Google gadget on iGoogle
• It will definiately be a contender to other voting sites, even Digg.

This is how Google distributed the Gmail gadget and the YouTube gadget, I see no reason why the same won’t be true of the “What’s Popular” service as well.

Getlisted.org has a new tool that examines web pages for street addresses. It is like a spider simulator that checks street addresses to determine if they can be seen by spiders and if there are any potential problems. It is based on address formats in the USA only at the moment.

Addresses are very important for small businesses when it comes to search engines and local SEO. We all know that, but there are many businesses who still do not put an address on their website. Many more still do display addresses, but use an image to do so which search engines can’t read.

This tool is a small piece of functionality that GetListed.org will use for some of our upcoming projects (GetListed has alot of things in the pipeline). I felt that this functionality could be a useful stand alone tool.

The algorithm it uses is quite robust and this tool also breaks down the addresses it finds into their natural or expected pieces (“city”, “street number”, etc.) and the lists warnings or potential problems with the address found. We will be offering an API in the future to use this functionality (and other Getlisted functionality) in your mashups and local SEO projects.

See the tool in action here

Please note that this tool currently examines single web pages, not websites. This is a beta project.

Here is a gadget that displays the latest videos from Matt Cutts and the Google Webmaster Help team. Whenever they put new videos up they will be displayed automatically in gadget.

This pulls the latest videos from The Google webmaster help YouTube channel which can be found here. (if you can’t see gadget in feed then see it here.)

I was reading Janes blogpost over at SEOMOz about the advice given by Google on dynamic urls. There was some drama about this throughout the web as we all know. As I read Janes post I thought I could provide the explanation of why the advice given by Google could seem confusing.

My take on this issue is that Google is providing contradicting advice in their official documentation and that hopefully it can be clarified so that people who are trying to learn from and follow the advice given by Google can do so.

The Contradictions…

(I have put in bold the things that contradict each other.)

1) First contradiction

Official Google webmaster central blog….

“We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers.”

vs..

Official Google webmaster guidelines…

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

The above two items seem to disagree with each other.

2) Second contradiction

Official Google webmaster central blog…

“While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.”

vs…

Official Google webmaster guidelines…

“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”

These two statements directly contradict each other. I am not saying this for drama, I am saying this because the advice given on the Google webmaster central post is stating clearly that one should ignore the value given to the user by static, trustable URLs. It is advising that “Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static” even though they have highlighted the value to users that static looking URLs provide.
This is the first time I have seen Google give such advice.

3) Third contradiction

Official Google webmaster central:

“Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.”

Official Google webmaster guidelines:

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

The above two statements seem to contradict each other.

These are the main contradictions I see. I believe they are valid and are worth consideration by the the Google teams involved.

The above video of Taniya Nayak is just one of several and is from the Tv page of her website. Or see her video from a local news site.

On HGTV there are multible episodes with her but they can’t be found via a video search.

I feel bad to pick on HGTV, but I had to choose someone. Virtually every TV station that has joined the online content movement all share a very simple problem. Some call it the “hidden” web, but what it really should be called is the “poorly indexed” web. Long story short the “hidden” web is content not listed in search engines. To be real specific, it took about 15 minutes for this article to be the number one result in Google for the search term “Taniya Nayak video“.

I chose HGTV for this example because they have a rabid fan base, a great website, and they are saavy enough to share their content online with full episodes of their popular shows. Great stuff, but searches for their talent exposes some problems…

There are no video results, more specifically, there are no HGTV video results. The entertainment business pays talent. If you are paying an actor, you should also be getting some internet bang for your buck.

The reason I am highlighting Taniya is because a search for her name in Google results in no video results.

This problem could be resolved easily and would result in traffic for HGTV.

Using Taniya as an example, let’s highlight a basic problem. She is a part of the HGTV show “Designed to Sell“  but so are several other designers. HGTV offers full episodes of Designed to Sell on their website, but because of the way their online episode player is configured, there is no traditional way to distinguish which episode have Taniya, and which do not. Specifically there are like 10 episodes of “Designed to Sell” available online, but only about five have Tanyia in them.

There is no way for a search engine robot to understand which ones are which.

This means that HGTV is missing out. Now this doesn’t mean that HGTV doesn’t have a state of the art video system (they do) but what it does mean is that an extra step is necessary to allow Google and other search engines to understand which videos are which. This is a common problem, and HGTV shouldn’t feel bad. Most online episode players have this very same problem.

HGTV could create a page for her that linked to her specific episodes. They already have a page for her so why not have a see her videos link? Through a simple step like this they could have video result listings.

The Google guidelines are really simple. Google has to be able to see something to index it.