Here’s what happens to a large brand that hasn’t taken control of their brand presence.

Contrast that with, erm, someone else…

So there’s apparently unknown and ignored discussion about the brand, visible when the brand’s web site is visited. The potential audience for usage of the Sidewiki is possibly on the same order as the volume that uses FaceBook. Google hasn’t pushed it hard. It could be integrated with Buzz, I think.

See a risk? See some potential? If you aren’t managing Sidewiki, especially as a major brand, go claim control by logging in to your Google Webmaster Console and creating your branding message. Then monitor and contribute, just like any other social medium… but that’s an article for another day!

Any guesses as to why Apple might have missed this trick? I suspect that it may be because the Google Toolbar is available for MSIE and FireFox, and the plugin is available for Chrome… But Safari has no way to surface this content. If a technologically sophisticated brand with good media management skills has missed the opportunity to engage with the audience, care to guess how many other brands have managed to engage?

Here’s Google’s promotional video from last year:

Oh, and time from publication to seeing a Google alert for this article? Five minutes. It took Google five whole minutes to spot the article.

• I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum (that’s a designation given by Google to high frequency posters, who are more often correct and useful, than not) - I resigned, basically because Google doesn’t understand social media
• I used to be a software R&D manager, in a large US Company, in the USA - I do know a little about how large US businesses work and think
• I’ve worked in small businesses, including a company that I co-founded, in the US - I’m entrepreneurial and competitive, perhaps not what a US commentator would expect of a Brit posting about Google and Europe
• My current business is one that I’ve set up in the UK. Self funded through sales to non-governmental clients. I’m not relying on the state to support me, buy from me, or do anything other than the common defence for a citizen - I’m not on a “European Socialist” agenda.
• I’ve developed intellectual property that has been awarded patents - I understand a bit about IP, trade secrets and technical advantages

Google is transparent - within certain limitations. I think you guys have done a great job about communicating the factors that lead to high ranking in your search engine. You’ll see references in the Merjis blog side navigation to Google resources for SEO - because those, and the Bing Webmaster advice, are amongst the best resources that I’ve found, along with Matt Cutt’s superb series on his blog and on YouTube. Applause is due for the clear way that you guys have communicated and the passion you all clearly feel.

However.

You knew that “however” was going to come, didn’t you?

There is a difference between technical excellence, passion, transparency and, on the other side, public relations.

You can have the world’s best product, and if the public perception is that a different product is better, the other product will outsell you. It’s painful for engineers to understand - I’ve personally made that journey, so I know. But having a world’s best product doesn’t automatically confer the advantage of user sympathy that you might expect.

Why not? It is best expressed as a marketing dictum - “Perception is reality”. It doesn’t actually matter, in the public playing field, whether Google is pure when it comes to privacy - it is the perception of privacy that counts. It doesn’t matter whether Google actually is working on a level playing field in Europe - it is a question of whether it is credible. The actuality does make a difference, of course, but perception is not the same as reality - look at the whole climate change issue, for example. There is some real science, with some real data, but perception and reality do not have to converge.

That’s a whole area that Google finds very difficult. Public relations.

Google has a trusted brand. No doubt about that. If the brand wasn’t trusted, it wouldn’t be so badly abused by scammers, who use Google’s name to induce people to buy into their cunning frauds. If the Google brand was untrusted, then Google Money Tree and other scams would be unable to operate.

Perception is a matter of whether the public, especially the public in non-domestic countries (i.e. outside the USA) can trust a business that is owned by Americans, run in the US, under US laws, paying US taxes, and that appears to put US citizens first in their thinking to operate on a level playing field outside the national boundaries of the USA.

It is perception that is the overwhelming part of the game. And transparency is not the same as developing trust and improving perception. I do trust to Google to deliver fair and transparent results - so long as the social context is the USA. That’s the crucial issue.

I trust Google to badly misunderstand social media, and public relations - even in the USA. That’s because you guys are mostly engineering. You think that delivering the worlds best search engine is proof that you are delivering a level playing field to Europe. But what you *are perceived to do* is what counts. And inside and outside the USA you act differently.

Some examples. At the risk of making these too brief to make the point:

Customer Service is not the same as a Public Forum

If I have a unique problem (e.g. my credit card works elsewhere, but doesn’t work on a Google transaction), it is not appropriate to post that problem in a public forum; no-one but Google and the customer should be involved in that discussion of a failed payment - perhaps the bank or credit card company might be involved, but other customers? The decision by Google to throw small AdWords clients into the hands of other users, shows a complete lack of understanding of, and is an abuse of, social media.

Google AdWords apparently conducts the auction in US Dollars.

That means that UK businesses appears to suffer from a competitive disadvantage in auctions - the granularity of our bids is 1.5 times larger than the US, so a USD based competitor can bid slightly less in the auction, giving them a competitive advantage. Where is that documented? Why are British companies selectively chosen to pay more in auctions? It doesn’t *look* like a level playing field. It isn’t discussed in AdWords Help.

Google hides critical elements of fairness from public view. Is that transparent? Or manipulative? Or just so parochial that it beggars belief?

Google AdWords apparently converts British Pounds and Euros to USD for the AdWords auction.

What’s the exchange rate? Where is it published? Which of the exchange rates do you use? What’s the time interval on updates - or is the time interval manipulated so you update faster when it suits you and slower when it doesn’t?

US business may be selectively advantaged, and Google itself can benefit from currency fluctuations, using an entirely undocumented transaction system. Where’s Hal Varian’s posting and paper about currency quantisation and exchange rate fluctuations, and what Google does to level the playing field for non-US businesses? Or did you guys assume that with the auction in USD, that all is fair? Or do you actually run the auction in the .co.uk servers in GBP? You don’t say. Even as an AdWords Help Form Top Contributor, I never got a straight answer about the auction, exchange rates, and the quantisation problem.

Google doesn’t expose stuff that is critical to showing that you play fair. Microsoft doesn’t expose this either. Guess how much I trust them to play fair in Europe?

Yes, I know that some one will say that if I don’t like AdWords I don’t have to use it. But Google penetration in the UK is higher than in the US. I am effectively forced to use Google - it’s not my decision, but my target audiences’ decision. They don’t, directly, bear the costs of that, or need to understand the issues of a business forced to apparently compete on an unequal playing ground with US businesses.

Google makes primary decisions about search in the US HQ.

That means, because you live in an insular nation, that you will unconsciously tend to focus on the US environment in decision making. This shows up. When you (correctly - well done) decided to help with the Chilean Earthquake disaster relief, you chose only to concentrate on US citizens and donations in US Dollars. Even when you translated the pages on national servers to non-US languages, you still told the French in French, and the Germans in German, how US citizens could call US resources.

What? You guys don’t know how to use a search engine to find the appropriate resource in that country for its’ citizens? Or is a US citizen so much more important than a German or French citizen that non-US citizens should be ignored? It is deeply insulting (outside the Googleplex - within, its apparently OK to value a US Citizen more highly?).

Geolocation is confused outside the USA.

Take AdWords again. Google used to claim “94% accuracy with a 20 mile radius” But that’s not true in Europe. See if you can find a statement about the accuracy in Europe. It is important. At certain values of accuracy, you waste money by geotargeting - but Americans have decided that Europeans should use US figures for accuracy. I have discussed this with Google staff, but I’m under NDA, so I can’t say what I know.

What I’ve measured, *BEFORE* talking with Google staffers, in limited trials that my small business can afford to do, is about a 70% inclusion rate. That’s close to the critical value that means it is more effective to disable geotargeting. But you guys think about Americans. Not the Brits, the French, the Germans and the Italians, and how our telephone and ISP services developed. So you make decisions that affect us, without understanding us. Pretty arrogant and insensitive, isn’t it? Or are we just supposed to be grateful that the mighty GOOG noticed anything outside California?

Geolocation is increasingly complex, and as users become more mobile, the location in Europe is likely to become more precise. But the large volume of desktop based (typically, still, 90% or so of the volume on mainstream sites) is subject to the old router/ISP based locations. Which in Europe will be less accurate. Where’s that explained? Clearly? So that someone can make an informed decision? Google has decided that all we need to know in Europe, is carried by the US based experience.

AdWords is completely confused about time zones.

Coded in California, with a default California time zone, the user interface betrays a conflict between events run in PST (California Time), events in the user selected account TimeZone, and the users’ current machine timezone. When you sit down and write this stuff, Google staff think about someone in Mountain View, not in Tokyo or London using a machine set to the time in Frankfurt or Durban.

There’s about ten times as many people *not* sharing US Time Zones, as are in your time zones. Want to convince us, the rest of the world, not accidentally sharing your time zones, that we’re valued? You know what to do - understand time from *our* perspective and reflect that in the UI, properly.

I haven’t checked this (and the related issues of Ad Scheduling that fails when it is near midnight, California time) for a few months. It’s been a problem for ages. But hey, we’re in Europe, so if we complain, it’s probably because we’re funded by Microsoft, eh?

Perception Is Reality

I could offer more examples. If pushed, I will. There is a key point. There’s what Google says, and there’s what Google does. What you *say* is great.

Google is going to organise the worlds information.

What you *do* tells us that this has a qualifying statement.

Google is going to organise the world’s information, in the way that works best for Americans.

In terms of AdWords, I’ve moved to thinking that the Ten Things don’t apply. You don’t put the user first. You put the American user first.

The way you behave to us, causes perceptual problems outside the USA. Until Google learns to play the game of understanding the messages that it emits, as if it didn’t live in the US, we Europeans and Asians and Africans, etc, will feel like second class citizens.

If you want to be the worlds first truly global business, you’ve got to stop thinking first and foremost like a US business. And that will cause you huge difficulties. Your HQ is in the US, surrounded by US media, US investors, US citizens and US lawmakers. You will think of your countrymen first. It’s natural.

You’ll have to work to overcome that institutional bias - or forget about making us feel like partners. Because right now, I don’t trust that Google *could* make a fair and equitable decision about European rankings. You have failed to communicate that a European life is worth as much to your thinking as a US citizen, and that the success or failure of a non-US business is as important to you as a US business competitive advantage.

All because Google hasn’t understood how to encode and decode messages - the key component of social messaging is that you value the people at the other end of the message. Master that, and you’ll help us to love you, instead of fear you. Stop being offended by the criticism, and start thinking about *why* you are criticised. You’ve a long hard haul ahead to master social media. It isn’t an engineering problem - it’s a psychological and marketing communications problem.

These are the slides we used (well, uploaded to “280slides.com“, and slightly edited for that service) for the presentation last Thursday. The slides wouldn’t upload (from Keynote, via a PowerPoint export) to Google Apps - no idea why not. But 280Slides is a nicer UI than Google Apps for presentation, in my opinion!

See “Boosting Web Presence: Review Sites“, as well.

I think the reason is that site owners who “invest” in spammy paid link purchasing rarely deeply understand what they are buying. And link spammers don’t really care whether what they do is effective, so long as there are people prepared to buy, and so long as Google and Bing mistake the links as being valid in the early days. Businesses usually evaluate the impact of an activity fairly early - so if they are told that the search engine impact will be most visible a few weeks or months after starting, then that’s when they’ll measure. A spammy link buyer will keep buying for years, because the impact is positive at the time of the measurement - the value declines with time as Google and Bing detect the patterns of spamming.

The very worst link spammers will submit your site to places that are already known to the search engines as places for low quality links, and already offering no value. So the most value that you get from the service, is a list of places that won’t have any impact… Useful if you need to go back and clean up the spammy links, later.

Take, for example, this piece of spam, submitted to this blog:

It looks appropriate. It’s about H1N1 and it has been submitted as a comment to an article about H1N1. But the URL given is for a product, even though the name offered is not a keyword. Is there any way to tell that it is spam? We could search for a key piece of text that seems unlikely to be in other comments. And here’s the traces that this is a piece of spam:

We can see the same author ID, with the same comment in many blogs - 314 blogs identified as carrying that precise piece of text, presumably with the same link to the “Fish Oil FAQ”. It is definitely spam.

In what way are Google and Bing so stupid that they can’t detect the same piece of writing in comments, when they can tell that a site has two or three paths that lead to the same product, wrapped in a templated page? It doesn’t add up that Google and Bing would penalise a site owner for multiple paths to a product that customers buy, but don’t penalise spammy links. So, do the search engine penalise spam?

Why are pages containing spam reported in search results, if the content is treated as spam?

Search engines are looking at the overall quality of the site and its’ pages. Some spammy comments to a blog or a discussion forum won’t kill the pages’ value. If users are finding the whole page is useful, then the whole page isn’t deranked - unless the web spam teams decide that the only reason for the page is to host, or be target of, spammy links. So you can find spammy postings on pages that have weight. A few spammy links on an otherwise useful page, won’t kill the page. That’s why we can still find spammy comments - they are a part of a page that is valuable.

That doesn’t mean that the reverse is true - spammy comments can be found, but it doesn’t mean that the links in the spam carry any weight. If they did carry weight, then we should find at least 314 sites are offering weight to the Fish Oil FAQ. So… where’s the site in the listings?

Interestingly, you can’t find the site named in the spammy posting. Yup. All that spamming and link dropping has had no useful effect at all - just try the search for links for fishoilfaq.com. Which just goes to show that the technique is pointless - it doesn’t work.

Back To Duplicate Content

Google and Bing are tolerant of genuine duplication within a web site. The large search engines even have a mechanism to help webmasters to signal that they are aware of duplication in their sites, and have a preferred path to that resource - the canonical link ref. A signal agreed to and used by the major search engines. It’s been so successful that search engines are now respecting the canonical link reference tag across domains (with some limitations).

But, identical postings, across a range of blogs and discussion forums, with keyword laden author names? Somehow that pretty obvious technique is supposed to defeat the search engines with wicked cleverness? It does, for a while. Then the web spam teams notice, zero weight the spam, and decreases their trust in your business. And that’s why duplicated postings in user generated content don’t work - blog spamming is an ultimately sterile exercise. If you’re going to comment, comment because you are a part of the discussion. Be interesting enough, and people will write about you and what you’ve written, in their articles - just as I’ve written about Danny Sullivan, below.

This decay in the value of blog spam (and other types of undeclared paid links) is why we hear the repeated refrain from businesses that:

“we hired an SEO agency for link building, it made an impact at first, but since we terminated the contract there’s been no impact on our business”.

Spammy link building has a positive effect on visitor volumes in the first few months or even years. But after a while, the search engines downgrade it, and decrease trust in the sites that gave you links (because those sites host undeclared paid links) and in your site (as a business that buys undeclared paid links). The activities have less and less impact with increasing time, and it is harder for your business to make headway once the search engines suspect that you are focusing on spamming as a link building strategy. You can even find that an entire chunk of your website is not being given any credibility for inbound links.

Blog spam has an unpleasant impact on the blogs it is dumped on, too. Read Danny Sullivan’s article about the way that blog spam affected a nascent site that may been useful to a specific online segment. The site did have some spam defences in place, but doesn’t it seem just a tad nightmareish that a site offering some long lasting value is taken out of action through activities that ultimately have no or little value. The economic equation is imbalanced. When that happens, as Danny implies, there is time and space for ethics and morality to play a part. Law? I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that - all that a US based law would do is to drive the targets offshore, or to use anonymising proxies, etc. (See our ancient article about tracking the steps in a spamming effort, apparently by some Ukranians).

Summary

Spend less time worrying about duplication on your own site - use the canonical link reference to help yourself and the search engines. Read Google’s official description about the canonical link reference, and how they have coordinated with Bing and Yahoo to understand the tag.

Spend more time worrying about what your linking strategy is telling Google and Bing - are you telling the search engines that your business will lie and deceive? Here’s Bings statement about spam and what they do in response to detecting spammy links. You really want those outcomes? You really want to pay people to cause work for other site owners, that has no long term benefit and may have disastrous repercussions on your own site? And when you find that the search engines no longer trust you, then you’re going to face a higher bill to remove links - there’s automated link placement, but the technologies for link removal are largely manual, and hence more expensive.

It’s pretty easy to establish the practices that lead to long lasting, higher ranking web sites. Start engaging with your prospects and clients, or find another way to engage with an online audience - at this point in the search engine optimisation game, they don’t have to be the audience that you sell to!

Follow this on Buzz.

Well done to Google’s socially minded developers for getting this up so quickly. That’s the bouquet.

But here are national language versions, telling Americans to call an American phone number in French and German. That’s not the point. The point is *WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW IN EUROPE*. Can’t you guys look it up, in, like, the worlds premier search engine, for example, and get the RIGHT FRECKING RESOURCE SHOWN!

UK: http://www.google.co.uk/relief/chileearthquake/

FR: http://www.google.fr/relief/chileearthquake/

DE: http://www.google.de/relief/chileearthquake/

And Matt Cutts - see a defence of Google’s transparency on the Google Official Blog. The issue is how you act to us.

Examples? Apart from the Chilean Earthquake relief? The UK moved spend online faster than the US; we have a higher penetration of Google in search than the US. But Beta’s are run from the US. OK, it’s a larger market, and closer to you - but we always feel like the poor relation.

Example? Google does a “Small Business Initiative” - that only plays in the US, as a part of a US domestic play. Fortunately, small businesses elsewhere in the world don’t face any similar problems. Lucky, eh? Or you might be accused of focusing on US domestic issues and ignoring the rest of the world?

Example? High speed connections. Offered in the US. OK, so the US is favoured? Or Europe is a valued partner? Which is it? (And yes, I do know about the European Public Policy Blog and the “Big Gig” article)

You want more? I’ll find you more examples of how, when Google has a choice, it treats the US as a favoured player. And the rest of the world can watch how a first class citizen is treated. It’s now how much you explain openness and transparency, it’s how you behave.

You want us (the rest of the world) to feel that we aren’t second class citizens? Start acting as if we aren’t. When you treat us like valued partners, we’ll feel like valued partners. Basic customer service management and public relations messaging. If you want to include us in your world, you’ll need to make us feel included. Otherwise we’ll feel that you favour US interests.

Update

2010-03-02 (note sure when it was fixed) I’m now seeing US resources in local languages. Thanks, that’s an improvement for a global company. Still feels that you think of the USA first. And that’s still worrying for people outside the US - what does this behaviour say about how you think of us? Smaller brickbat. Bigger bouquet. But the brickbat is still in play. You’re still insulting the rest of the world.

2010-03-01: The page now has a list of non-US charities accepting donations. Better. There’s still an focus on the US, though, with phone numbers for US citizens to call, or example. The information is still not geotargeted. And although there are pages for the domain level servers, such as this page on the UK domain, it still contains information for US Citizens to call US phone numbers.

2010-02-27: Google Buzz, of which I’m becoming an increasing fan, helped me find a Google staffer, who’s passing this suggestion on. Bigger bouquet. Still a brickbat in the air, though…

More - Google Blog’s Post with more resources.

Here’s the brickbat. The referenced page needs resources for non-US people - even in the middle of charitable efforts, Google focuses on the US. Just bloody annoying for a globally dominant player. The internet is not used in the USA alone. I wish Google would stop acting as if the rest of the world were dumb hicks still using smoke signals and drums for long distance communication.

The agencies available for donation are not changed by language settings. I can pick “US English” or “Spanish”. I’d rather make a donation to a UK charity - they can get tax relief on it which increases my donation value. It’s not because I’m chauvinistic about giving only to UK charities. There’s economic value in my donating to a UK charity that isn’t available if I send the money to a US Charity.

This US-centric response is precisely the kind of US-obsessed thinking that leads to my fears about Google impacts in Europe - see the article about Google, Ciao and Foundem.

They’ll lose the brickbat and get a bigger bouquet if they add national pages or use geotargeting to get the right charities and information resources on the page. The UK is not alone in helping local donations give tax benefits to the charitable recipient or to the giver. Please think globally, you globally dominant, parochial player!

Let’s have a look at what Google Product Search is, and does, first… so we’ve got some context.

Google Product Search

It’s free. Anyone can sign up, and feed products. Well, almost anyone. Google has a restriction that there must be one supplier for a given product URL. So you can’t have lots of people all listing the same DVD on Amazon - Google doesn’t like spam, and multiple appearances of the same product from the same vendor at the same price, count as spam.

Within limits, then, Google Product Search is free and a wide range of businesses can use it. You just need to sign up for a Google Merchant Center account, and publish a feed. A feed can be as simple as a properly formatted CSV file (exportable from a spreadsheet, once per month) or as complex as a machine-readable and real-time updated XML file synchronised with your product inventory and pricing.

Product Search results - well, they don’t appear in every search, and they don’t alway appear as number one in the search listings. That last item is especially important and tells us, the rest of the world, something about how Google is treating Google Product Search.

Why is it important that Google Product Search is not always number one for product related searches? Anyone involved with search engines knows that number of clicks to a listing is *very strongly* correlated with the position on the page. A listing in position 1 can easily get ten times, or more, as many clicks as exactly the same listing at the bottom of the page. So for Google to list Google Product Search at positions *other than* position 1, tells us that Google is giving up a lot of influence. And remember, Google isn’t making money (none directly, and only indirectly some revenue) from Product Search listings.

The implication of the varying position of Product Search results is that Google is not giving undue weight to their own product. The reverse implication - that Google is artificially reducing the ranking of competing product listing services - is not addressed by that observation. Just seeing that Google doesn’t inflate it’s own rank in all cases, is not enough to say that a different service has not been penalised.

Are there any other vertical search engines in Google results?

If Foundem has a case, it is that they are being excluded, artificially from results. You don’t just get listed highly in search results because you exist. Well, not unless the search is pretty rare. If you’re talking about the highly competitive spaces in which searches relate to things that people might buy, the competition is intense. To show there, you need a lot of “link love”. You need a lot of people to link to your site, with the right words, and you need the site to be well designed, and you need to have *credible* links. If you don’t have all of that, you don’t stand much chance.

So, let’s assume that Foundem, being fairly new, and not having made much of a media impact before today, doesn’t have a lot of link love. Can we support their argument by showing that Google doesn’t highly rank vertical search engines?

Annoyingly for Foundem, there are vertical search products that show. Businesses like Trovit, with their used car facet-based searches, letting you slip a slider along the price range that interests you, does show up. And they show up for place reviews. And other stuff… It is arguably a better user experience than Google Product Search for used cars. Trovit have page one appearances for some products. I can see their impact on clients’ sites.

Google *does* allow vertical search specialists to appear in search results. That, for me, puts a dent in the argument that Google excludes vertical search specialists. If some do appear, and they collect clicks, in multiple categories of product, then Google is not completely removing them from listings. A dent, but not conclusive evidence.

Do Ciao and Foundem have a case?

I don’t think an appeal based on “we must be shown because we’re a competitor” has any real merit. I’m not a lawyer - so that’s not a commentary on whether the courts would find it to be true. But in terms of search engine results, if you aren’t sufficiently loved by users, to displace the other ten businesses that are shown, that’s not, IMO, a reason for a court to decide that you should be shown. Win the users’ love… and you should be listed.

But, since the algorithms are trade secrets, and the data collected is known only to Google, for an outsider to claim that they have been penalised by Google, is pretty difficult to discern, or prove.

Unless, of course, you have the backing of another search engine that produces broadly similar results, in which your site appears more highly ranked and in which you have no evidence to believe that the results are influenced. In other words, if you were financed by Bing (the only other serious volume search engine left in the game), then you might have strong evidence that you don’t have spammy links, spammy comments and other factors that would cause de-weighting.

Ciao is owned by Bing. Might there be some evidence? Or is this just Bing (Microsoft) playing games with Google. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) have always been strong components of Microsoft marketing techniques. I certainly don’t have any confidence that Microsoft is doing this because they love Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté and the European Way Of Life.

Foundem - it’s a small, relatively new player, in a crowded market. I suspect their only problem is the classic one - not enough users love them to help their site to rank highly. But I haven’t investigated their site or backlinks. That’s just a first pass impression with no evidence. I’ll gleefully admit I could be wrong - though I’d be very surprised to be badly wrong.

But the possibility of Google reducing the rank of a disfavoured competitor, or slightly inflating the rank of a preferred information supplier, is something that gets me twitching. There’s no oversight for Google. We have only their word that they are using what they publicly claim to be fair. If, in the depth of a recession, California based Google were to be weighting US businesses slightly higher in the UK than they should be, it would direct between tens of millions and billions of spend to US companies and away from British companies. Same for France, and Germany. Is Google making sure that the US economy brings in a little more business than it *should* do? I have no idea. I can’t measure it. I can’t tell. It does worry me. I worked in the USA for about a decade, and I know how insular US businesses can be. The rest of the world has fewer investors, fewer buyers and works in funny languages and currencies; it is easy to fall into the model of thinking about what works best in the US economy and rolling that out, worldwide.

So there *may* be some basis for European businesses to wonder if Google is deweighting their business. It may be deweighted because it doesn’t fit a market model that Americans understand. It may be deweighted because an American business is, even unconsciously, working for the end of a recession in their domestic market. It may even be a conscious effort. That really, really worries me - because I don’t think even a national government outside the USA, could get the data to investigate whether Google is deliberately, or unintentionally, diverting economically significant activity, artificially, to the USA.

Do Ciao and Foundem have a case? I don’t know. I’m looking forward to finding out, if it is released, just what evidence might make them think they do. I hope it’s a lot more compelling than “we want our share of the Google billions”, “Microsoft is using me as a sock puppet to attack Google” or “Google’s Buzz is creating a weakness in perception we can exploit”. I fear there may be some interesting biases in Google’s system that do favour US businesses - simply because I can’t see any way to prevent there from being such a bias, or to detect one if it were present. And *that* has implications for national security - the protection of the realm. Interesting times.

Updates

2010-02-27 - SearchEngineLand article about Microsoft’s involvement.

You don’t get search results to be much more personal than including your own social network, preferentially, in results.

The technique of copying already well ranking content is partly a misunderstanding about why search engines rank anything. It’s actually possible to have a page rank highly, that Google hasn’t yet crawled. Examples are difficult, as they’d rely on exposing client details, but if you consider the two following outlines, you’ll understand a little more about why breaching copyright is both dangerous for your business, and a not very effective technique:

• Google bombing, or link bombing, has ranked pages for keywords that aren’t on the page at all
• Uncrawled pages can rank, showing just the anchor text and the link

The big thing to walk away from this story is that copying copyrighted material isn’t a good idea, because it doesn’t entirely give you what you think you’re getting, and may get you in trouble. Better to go write some genuine material, than steal it.

Rewriting Content

An alternative is to use artificial intelligence to rewrite the copy. I stumbled into a rewritten article from the Merjis blog a few days ago:

This example is probably using a simple technique of thesaural replacement, rather than any serious linguistic tools. The technique renders the text of the original article - the title is correctly preserved as “Discussion Forums and Customer Service” - as high entropy gibberish. These site scrapers went another step, though, and had a straight copy of the article, too.

Very much on the black hat side of SEO, I recommend clients to stay away from this sort of activity, not just because of the legal and search engine optimisation risks, but because most companies that have or should have customers, have more useful ways to interact with their customer and prospect audiences. Finding scraped content on a prospective clients’ site is a huge red flag for the account.

If you have a real brand, it is much, much better to focus on what your customer and your prospect needs to know, and engage them properly, than run the risk of tripping search engine filters, bans or public exposure.

History and the Current Era

A long, long time ago, I submitted sites to search engines. I’m talking about 1994-1996. By 1997, the web was becoming decently interlinked. That linking of sites into a formed web, is what allows Google and the modern generation of search engines to work. The old stuff, like AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos, which in their early days relied a lot on submitted sites, has both evolved and disappeared in the face of the modern, link following search engine.

How do the modern search engines decide to rank your site? Strictly, no-one outside the search engines knows all the details. But observation, testing and reading what the search engines themselves claim, shows that search engines like sites with links to them - not just any links, but links that are formed for a good reason, that a user might feel was a good reason for visiting the link. I’m not going to discuss that much more in this article, just this whole idea of search engine submission.

The key points are that modern search engines, like Google and Bing, follow the links around the net, and use those links to find and rank sites. If your site is so poorly linked to, that it hasn’t been found, how high in the ranking will you appear, after submitting your site? The answer is “on competitive keywords, not very far - and on uncompetitive keywords, you may do quite well, but are those valuable enough to try to get?”

By and large, you are better off making sure you’ve joined relevant trade associations with member directories, joined LinkedIn and mentioned your site and formed relationships with business colleagues, or even joined appropriate discussion forums and linked to relevant and useful comment on your web site - these are all more valuable uses of your time and money than submitting your site to Google or Bing.

You do have to watch out for who’s linking to you. Some “neighbourhoods” can reduce the trust that Google extends to you. I can’t tell you what precise directories and link farms might be involved in automated submission, but I’d tend to be very suspicious about the value of those links. By and large, anything formed from automation, will also tend to have a lot of spammy content - and you don’t want that, pointing to your site. Spammy stuff won’t add link weight and trust.

As a small business looking to promote yourself on the web, be very cautious about following up on the offers you get in your email, and instead of spending time on those, go find someone in a discussion forum with a problem of the type that your business solves, and help them - especially if they have a problem that you can answer in a longer article, or a YouTube video, on your blog, explaining the options and how to use what you recommend. Takes about the same amount of time, costs about the same or less, and is likely to result in the search engines both visiting, and better ranking, your site than just “submitting”. And you may have helped someone who becomes a client, or at least thinks more favourably of you.

There’s a guy at Google, called “Matt Cutts”, who’s really helpful, especially to learners. Read a nice interview with Matt Cutts, with a side salad on search engine submission. And another, older message about the official looking requests for money in order to have your site submitted.