During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C. Penney beat millions of websites to the top of the search results rankings on many competitive keywords such as "dresses", "furniture" or "home decor". J. C. even beat Samsonite on searches for "Samsonite carry on luggage". Not an easy thing to do, taking into consideration that Google's goal is to find the most relevant websites. Is it J. C. Penney a more relevant search result for Samsonite searches than Samsonite.com? So how this could have possible happened?
It turns out that J. C. Penney's Search Engine Optimization consulting firm used a "link scheme" a trick banned and highly penalized by Google, thousands of random websites with enormous amounts of keyword links to J. C. Penney's website landing pages which automatically made it the most relevant website for those keywords.
But the intriguing part of this story is that it took evidence collected by The New York Times for Google to take some action. Within hours Penney's rankings for many keywords went from number 1 to 70 and lower. Still why it took Google so long to detect such a blatant and widespread deception? it could be that the $2.46 million a month J. C. Penney spends on paid search ads made Google look the other way?
The European Union is already investigating possible antitrust abuses by Google. Money talks even for godly Google. Read the full story.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C.
The Huffington Post got $315 million from AOL and Demand Media raised $151 million in its January public offering. One thing that have helped these two companies with such high valuations is their search engine optimization skills. However one serious drawback particularly for web publishers is their dependency on writing stories based on trending Google searches. After a while to maintain a high level of incoming traffic (and money), web publishers are finding it hard to beat the habit of writing articles for S.E.O. instead of for quality.
Google is refining its search algorithm to prevent low-quality content to be top ranked in its search results as publishers are moving from S.E.O. to S.M.O. (Social Media Optimization) the next battleground in the never ending search ranking and clicks war. Read the full "Web words that lure the readers" article.
With high customer ratings Google Translate is a handy (and fun) iPhone app for translations on the go. Simply speak what you want translated and the app will speak back the translation, available in 15 languages, or a written translation in more than 50 languages. This technology has the potential to make a serious dent on the translations industry.
With high customer ratings Google Translate is a handy (and fun) iPhone app for translations
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visible to the human eye" there weren't kidding. After reading this article in the New York Times about Google's Art Project, a website that gives you access to a selection of high-resolution images of art treasures I was skeptical. After taking a close look at some of these paintings I almost fell off my chair. I can't explain the feeling of looking at, for instance, Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting so close and with such a detail that an inch of the painting becomes its own little masterpiece. Thanks Google!
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visibl
As I reported last week in my "When e-commerce turns ugly and Google makes it even worse" post, a New York Times article exposed a loophole in Google search that allowed unscrupulous online merchants to grow their businesses by improving their rankings in Google searches as a results of customers complains. The more complains the higher the rankings they got. Kudos to Google for their quick reaction to fix this problem. Read the full story.
As I reported last week in my "When e-commerce turns ugly and Google makes it even wo
We are all more or less aware of the risks of online shopping and we might even have had a bad experience or two but I have never heard of a level of aggression and blatant intimidation from an online store like this before. To make things worse, the more damage and ensuing complains this online store would generate the higher was ranked by Google so even more people got hit by this crafty online crook. Kudos to The New York Times for exposing this seemingly unstoppable thug. Read this hard to believe e-commerce horror story.
So far Google bread and butter has been the lucrative search ads this is most likely to change with the introduction of the Product Ads. This ads show pictures of products along with a short description and price. Instead of paying for a click advertisers will pay only if the ad produces a sale and finally Google will choose what are the searches for which your ad will appear. No more keyword guessing and bidding.
This ads are particularly effective for e-commerce. Online stores normally bid on thousands of keywords to cover their product lines, but now Google will take their product feed and automatically matches ads with searches.
Google has been testing these ads for a year and now this ad format is opened to all US advertisers.
