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Wouldn’t you like to know how Google works?

If you use Google (like most of us) you might wonder how it works.

Screenshot 2014-12-04 10.23.25
Google’s how search works page

Recently Rachid Guerraoui, professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, France wrote on a blog for the French newspaper Le Monde:

(base translation from the original French by Google Translate)

“What will happen if we search for Michael Jackson on Google? One sees links to pages about the singer: his life, his photos, videos, family, fan clubs, death, etc. All this seems very logical a priori. But if you dig a little, it should intrigue us. After all, there are millions of pages with the string “Michael Jackson” on the Web. Why does Google offer us nothing about Michael Jackson the carpenter in Dallas? Or Michael Jackson the singing teacher in San Francisco? If you were the carpenter, you might even be shocked to see no link to a page that talks about you, so that you have published dozens by including your name each time. Why such injustice?”

Professor Guerraoui goes on to discuss the “… PageRank algorithm, invented by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of Google, inspired by the work of Jon Kleinberg of IBM.  It’s the algorithm that creates what Guerraoui calls “injustice”, but does such a good job of finding the right information about the right Michael Jackson.

Google’s “…PageRank was originally the ranking of the results of the search engine Google. Today, more than two hundred other criteria are used to classify these results. The recipe is secret, which opens the door to all sorts of speculation on this ranking.”

You should know that while the formula is secret Google’s ultimate goal is very clear. According to Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management on Google’s search in an interview with Slate Magazine: “Our vision is the Star Trek computer,” she shot back with a smile. “You can talk to it—it understands you, and it can have a conversation with you.” Amit Singhal head of Google’s search rankings team confirmed this: “The destiny of [Google’s search engine] is to become that Star Trek computer, and that’s what we are building.”

Back to the present, there are a few things that are known about parts of Google’s original secret formula:

  • indexes pages by keywords
  • calculates a numeric score for each page relative to its content
  • the score is calculated in part by the scores of the links to the page
  • as of March 2013 Google had indexed 30 trillion web pages

The name “Google” is a homonym for “googol” the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes. You can see that the current number of pages indexed fit comfortably inside the “Star Trek computer” that Google is building.

An article at venturebeat.com lists some likely other ingrediants in the secret formula:

  • the freshness of the results
  • quality of the website
  • age of the domain
  • safety and appropriateness of the content
  • user context like
    • location
    • prior searches
    • Google+ history and connections

Professor Guerraoui continues:

“Intuitively, it is as if each page has a number of votes represented by its score, and could share their votes between all the pages that reference.”

He concludes:

“Lots of details are hidden from you. It’s scary to think that (in order to reproduce Google’s results) you (would need to) calculate the ‘fixed-point of a matrix equation with a matrix with billions of rows and columns.’ … Is this a big calculation? No! It’s really a very, very … very enormous calculation. And it takes a lot of computers to achieve it. And this is only one of the functions of a search engine …

It’s difficult to visualize the magnitude of just one component of the more than two hundred parts of Google’s algorithm. You don’t need to. Just call, email or search for us on Google. Knowing how to work with Google and other search engines is part of what we do.

 

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Online security? – if you are using WordPress maybe not so much…

Online security is a relative thing.

With more and more news of huge hacks of companies’ financials you really should wonder about your own website.  Especially if it is based on WordPress.

From time to time we are brought in to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO provided by others. Recently we were asked to audit a site that had enjoyed excellent search engine return placement (SERP) for a number of relevant search terms but had dropped well off the front page for all of them.  We found a lot of problems that likely contributed to the decline. We did not, however, see any evidence that they had installed security plug-ins in WordPress.

Could compromised security have contributed to their problem?  Absolutely! No way to know for sure without installing the appropriate software. That software was not present in this case.

spam from hack
This text block appeared in the header of all pages on the site. Something to be proud of isn’t it?

In another case, hackers attempted to break into one of our client’s WordPress sites. If they had prevailed, the site would have forever displayed spam ads for a changing carousel of usual suspects: payday loans, cheap Viagra…

If we hadn’t quickly identified and corrected the problem, the site would have been a strong candidate for de-listing by Google and other search engines. This is the area where online security and SEO intersect.

The interesting news showed up post-hack.  There are a number of new security upgrades that track and dissuade hack attempts. We installed the most highly rated. These plug-ins guide you past the basics of never using the default administrator name and easy passwords. The tracking was the real surprise. One of our client’s sites had over 60 attempted fake logins per day.

60 failed attempts in one day
The aftermath of robotic attempts to login to a WordPress site.

Others were experiencing fast flurries of attempts several times a day. By arming ourselves with the best security software, we had the earliest possible indication of the scope of attacks on all of our individual client’s WordPress sites.

How can you protect your website? If your webmaster hasn’t protected you or if you don’t even know maybe it’s time to bring in someone to help.

Contact sem[c] – we make your website a more effective business tool.

 

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SEO snake oil

SEO-snake-oilRarely does a day go by without my receiving at least one email pitching the benefits of getting my site to the front page of Google.

For example:

“My name is David. I am a SEO and Internet Marketing expert. I am in this profession from since last 4 years.

I will be happy to promote your website and bring this on the top page of Google. My plan of action is to promote your website through local Google and your website to be promoted in the combination of Geo location with your selected keywords.”

How many things has David got wrong in just four sentences? Let’s begin at the end of his statement and work our way to the beginning.

      1. 1. The idea of “your selected keywords” being the basis of his promotion is an ineffective approach to SEO. When sem[c] begins a promotion we discover which keywords are being most frequently used by a business’ best prospects. These keywords are frequently not obvious. Figuring this out is our job NOT our clients.
      2. 2. The importance of “Geo location” is determined by the nature of the business and is not appropriate for businesses that might be limited by that kind of perception. Recently an sem[c] client in Iowa was approached by two prospects in Ireland and several in China. Their physical location was not important in the least. What would have been the benefit to them of localizing to Iowa?
      3. 3. Does it matter to you that he would “be happy to promote your website”? Of course he would be happy to take your money. How happy will you be?
      4. 4. Does his being “in this profession from since last 4 years” impress you? This sounds like it was written in fractured grammar by someone who is not a native American English speaker. The importance of understanding how people use language to find what they are looking for is of the absolutely highest importance not only in finding the right keywords but also in eliciting buying action from them.
      5. 5. He writes that “I am a SEO and Internet Marketing expert”. I am skipping yet another grammatical error here only to ask the question this begs: In whose opinion? He is writing to me hoping to promote http://SearchEngineMarketingChicago.com on my behalf. It should be obvious to him that my site is about Internet marketing. He completely missed that point.

His targeting is so wildly inappropriate that he brings to mind the old joke: “The word ‘expert’ consists of two parts, ‘X’ which is ‘the unknown’ and ‘spurt’ meaning ‘a short burst’.”

In the spirit of that joke is this guy’s name even ‘David’? The the reply-to email address belongs to ‘Bob’ at Gmail.com.

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Who’s managing your online reputation?

Your digital reputation consists of everything about you that is visible online.

SEO by sem[c] is all about getting you found more effectively online. Branded SEO is concerned with how you are found for your name.  Non-branded SEO involves getting you found for what you do. The process of discovering and implementing this is a process of enhancing your reputation online so that it becomes an effective marketing tool.

Online reputation - GradientWhat do you do if a search for your name prominently displays negative comments?  What do you do if the statements are true?  What is they’re false? How do you hide stuff on the Internet?

There are a number of terms for this being bandied about like “negative SEO” but we prefer “digital reputation repair” because we really believe that SEO should enhance your brand by clearly and ubiquitously linking it online with the most relevant non-brand terms in every possible way. These terms are the words that most people use when looking for your goods or services.

One of tricky parts of my writing about clients with these type of needs is that I can’t reveal anything about them other than their circumstances and those only in general terms. One of our clients wanted to erase all trace of themselves; their children, references linking them to specific businesses… everything. Another client found themselves attacked on Yelp! This was a bit unusual since their business wasn’t a restaurant, salon or any kind of retail operation.  They found out the hard way that you can’t ignore it when a very likely prospect was unsatisfied over the initial dismissive approach.

Dealing with issues like these requires a custom strategy in each case that will ease the problems with your online reputation by emphasizing the positive using the target terms from the non-branded identity and exploring all the possibilities for correction.

Anger is not an option.

Contact us to find out more.

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Ecommerce – nothing is simple

Ecommerce

E-commerce has many components. Since the main purpose is to make money you need to process credit cards. This isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do.  It also can spring some interesting surprises.

sem[c] ‘s client The Samurai Business Group presents a number of events every year. It order to improve the process both for the business and its clients we introduced Brown Paper Tickets, an online events aggregator. Samurai had maintained their own shopping cart on their website but decided it was wise to begin phasing it out for a variety of reasons. The new approach offered a better user interface, better calendaring and good attendee tracking capabilities. The only hitch was that Brown Papers Tickets required one of a set number of merchant account providers for credit card processing. Samurai’s provider was affiliated with Authorize.net.

Mary Ahart at Matrix Payment Systems got the ball rolling quickly and in less than a day we got things setup, tested and into production. So far, so good… right?

The next day we heard from Mary that their risk management TriSource Solutions LLC had discovered a problem with the Brown Paper Tickets website.

???

Incredulity was our first response.  How could a well establish company like this have missed such a problem?  Admittedly it was a bit obscure: they had included Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned companies in their list of countries in which they claimed to deliver tickets. Trisource accurately assess this as a risk and Brown Paper Tickets, when notified, quickly agreed to correct their problem. Trisource proved why Mary could cite their great track record in preventing online fraud. Your e-commerce success can all go away if you are defrauded. You are warned.

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Do you know where your passwords are?

So much has been written about online security that it’s hard to believe how many people have important passwords they don’t know about. Part of the problem is that there really aren’t any viable options.

So we are still stuck with using passwords.  This mean keeping track of them. Yet rarely does one of our new clients have all of the basics:

  1. Domain name registrar password – this gives you important control over your website address and, possibly, your email setup. You or your company should always be the owner of the registration NOT a third party.

  2. Hosting provider password – this give you access to how your website is put together and allows you to figure out the FTP password which gives you control of your website.

  3. All email accounts usernames and passwords – your company email belongs to the company NOT to individual users. In this era of cloud computing these usernames and passwords may also give access to online storage of company documents.

One of our clients found it necessary to part company with an employee.  This employee anticipated her own departure by changing all company passwords in her possession. After she left our client had us change the passwords that she had provided. One of them was incorrect as she had just changed it two days previously. We were able to access the account using password recovery linked one of the other accounts for which we did have working access. Luckily thoroughness was not one of the departed employee’s strong points in this case. A more thorough person could have made it a great deal more difficult to secure a company’s critical information.

How your business looks online is a critical part of your marketing. You can choose to let it take care of itself or make it work for you.  We can help.

Our name starts with “Search” but we go on from there to help with all aspects of your online presence. Contact us to get us onto your team.