Podcast Transcription:
Recent changes in Google. A lot of sites have been decimated off the web, basically off Google, therefore off the web.
A lot of things have happened this year, and we're right now in the middle of the eye of the hurricane. We're right in the eye of the storm. And I'm getting a lot of people just freaking out wondering what are we gonna do?
When you're in the eye of the storm, you don't do anything with SEO. You just, you look at what's happened, you assess the damage, but you got more damage coming.
Because more than likely, Google is going to do what they've done always in the past when they've done such huge damage. They roll back at some point.
So, when they roll back, they will be causing another huge uh, tsunami of waves and we'll have to deal with that. But there are some things that have happened that might give us a clue as to what's happening within Google. Understand first and foremost, Google, is an advertising company.
We've got to understand what is Google? What is their business model? What are they? They're an advertising company.
They are Newsweek uh, of 1970. But in the'70s uh, the traditional media was Newsweek, Time, and, you know, they made their money from advertising. Google is that company. They've taken that away. They give us free Stuff, and we get to, uh, play with that stuff, but it's at a price. And the price is, if you count on them using our content, i.e.
Our website.
They very well may not continue to use that content. When I say use it, I mean we're on page 1. Um, another metaphor that's a little more violent. Is...do you remember as a kid, or even more recently watching some of the shark shows? I remember back as a kid, the movie Jaws was a big deal. So...
Uh, I learned a lot about sharks back then, because there were a lot of shows. And lemon sharks are parasites, right basically, because they eat the scraps of whatever is left over from the sharks. And the lemon sharks just follow along and swim side by side with the sharks. They're little tiny uh, fish, comparatively and uh, as the scraps get available the lemon shark eat them.
Well, don't be shocked when the shark turns around and eats the lemon shark. I.e., you or me. And so we do need another strategy but in order to get to that strategy I think we need to look at the full story.
And we can go back to a post I mentioned, uh, in houseblogger.com, uh, a year ago, that said that it was Super Bowl weekend. And, uh, I said it was a shot across the bow/ Bing teamed Facebook and they also teamed up with Yahoo. Google's 2 biggest competitors jumped in.
It was later on in 2011 when Facebook told Google essentially uh, stay out. You can't see what we're doing here with all of our pages, you can't get in. Twitter, which provided a real time search for Google, also said the same thing. They also created blocks so Google couldn't get in.
And most probably, honestly, disturbingly Uh that happened was Google, who is putting a lot of faith in mobile as, as I agree. But they were not allowed into uh, the iPhone. And in fact they've been busted for trying to get in and get data from the iPhone. So what do I mean by that, get data?
I mean index, I mean crawl, I mean data mine. And if you don't know what that means, that means basically read what they're providing, what their users are providing, what their users are searching. Why do they need to know that?
Well, originally it was to provide data for their search engine. That has morphed into to provide data for their advertising agency, [laugh], their advertising engine. Um, the original....
Algorithm, page rank, was based on, or is to the large degree based on, the total amount of pages on the web.
So...that's always been a problem. And if you remember back to even like I think it was 2005, 2006 as far as that, Google actually advertised on their search results how fast their uh, their search was and I believe um.
How many pages they were able to index. In order for their formula to work, the formula that still online and is Stanford, ah, at Stanford dot EDU. Ah, that Larry page put together page rank algorithms, lots of people think page rank means the ranking of the page. And the search engine world we called that search SERP or search engine ranking position.
Image via CrunchBase
Page rank is named after Larry Page, and that is a relative value, based on the value of a web page, and that page's value is based on, the citations's or the link's that go into that page.
.... And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, down to the last page on the web. So a lot of people think that Google measures, or has measured in the past the value of their pages based on their market, and that's not true. Uh, it was based on the total. The total number of pages and what that value is. I've used the metaphor in the past to say that think of page rank as sort or, or think of page value if you will the value of the page.
Sort of like the US dollar. If you're holding a dollar right now, as I say that over say 2 seconds, it's something like the US government has printed something like $100,000. I'm probably off, I'm sure, but I'm not too far off. So, incrementally that dollar that you're holding has ost value.
And I like to call it link inflation or page inflation because those links that you have going into your site.
That we all know is so important in order to get ranked. Ah, incrementally looses value as time goes on.
So there's a page being created or a share being created which is a page being created all the time. And Google can't see that. Thats a world that Google has no access to. Uh, Twitter the same thing.
And so in fact, it was in January that, or, or I'm sorry, just recently, um, within the last 3 weeks or so. Larry Pages said that the ... it's almost like some insidious plot that, Things on the on the web are being hidden from us.
Well, in January, Larry Page came in to be the CEO of, of Google. And, um, he returned back to Google in power, much like, I guess, Steve Jobs did. And, one of the things he did.
Was almost you can say have a hissy fit cuz he couldn't get into Facebook. He couldn't get into into Twitter. And, it was somewhat of a, causing a bastardization of his own formula that Google was born on.
And so, what did they do?
Google, got social. They have this new thing that they've been working on, and it wasn't the first time. I mean, a lot of people looked at Google Plus. And they looked at wow, okay, well that's the new social engine, that's their answer to Facebook. But Gosh, Gee, they had Google Wave, they've had Google Buzz, they've had Jaiku. They've had, you know social, for a long, long time.
And now this is gonna matter?
So Page decrees, "Guess what, if you have a Gmail account, you're now signed up." So it isn't like Facebook where I went in and you went in and you signed up of your own will. Ah, if you had a Gmail account you are automatically in Google Plus. And a lot of people, still to this day, and I'm talking now on May 2, about a week since Google did a huge change. They call it, uh the penguin uh, update.
Where they decinmated many websites, and um, it was January that Larry Page had a hissy fit and just said screw it, we're making everybody part of Google plus. And not only that, we're gonna make Google Plus or social, part of the regular search results, the default search results. If you don't, if you want the old type of search results, you have to work at it, you have to click the little icon and get out of that.
Search plus your world I believe it's called.
It's such a dumb name, I don't even, I have a hard time remembering it. Um, so if you or somebody Google, you know hits the little Google Plus badge, which is their version of a like. It shows up in the social. And, you know, I've talked to people this is kind of lame. You know, a lot of people think it's lame.
Like, if I'm going skiing I don't want some random dude that is in my social network but I don't even know them, telling me, that, you know, Vail has got great snow and I'm going to make a travel decision on that. You know, and some of it may matter, but anyway, it's-it's questionable but people have their doubts about this whole thing. But, Larry Page...
You know, he went public. And he really.
He said this is it. If you don't like it, and you're an employee, you don't like it, get out. And big hot shots that he had hired and stole from Microsoft, uh, left, and said this isn't the company I came to work for. And they left and went back to Microsoft, or to do whatever they're, they're doing now.
Page seems based on his actions and his words, to be very, uh, clear, and, uh, very focused on getting into the social realm. And, uh, I think it's unfortunate, but it is what it is, and the, you know, there's lots of business books and the wisdom that kind of remind, make me kind of put my, my spider sense up, where I'm like,'Well, gosh, I don't know if this is a good idea. How many different things can you be?'
But that's what they're trying to do. Um, so they're kind of going from a search company to a um, a quasi social search company.
The number of users on Google Plus is, like, the amount of time, they, Google Plus gets per month is literally.
Minutes. [laugh] Minutes. Uh, Facebook time spent by its users are several, several hours per month. Uh, so right now Google Plus doesn't seem its doing so well, but uh, they have high hopes, and they're pushing it, so about, going on a month ago.there was an update. And you have an automatic update, you have a manual update.
Meaning a human being had to look at data and go in and adjust the results in Google deindex sites. So what did they do? Well, in the linking world there are networks of companies that provide links.
Uh, in order to provide links at an affordable price, there's gotta be a some sort of an economies of scale. And a lot of companies create uh, their own little link networks of sites. And some police the quality of the content, you know and some didn't. But, the important thing is to, to note is that Google employees infiltrated some of these networks and figured out links that were being created from the pages or the sites that were on this network.
And penalized it.
If you understand search engines rules, you realize that they just announced and put out a giant sign saying, um, gee, this matters. Linking does matter. Linking is important and it's so important we're willing to walk on the edge of legality to destroy pages.
You could read that however you want. Uh, I'm not a lawyer, don't pretend to be, but, on the edge of, as far as the ethics side, it's a little crappy if you ask me. Uh.
But that's neither here or there. They've announced, if you can read between the bull, uh, they announced by their actions, not what they've said, but by their actions, that linking matters.
What they said was what they always do, it's a publicity campaign. Whenever they do anything manually, it's publicity. We destroyed people manipulating our results.
Okay, so.
Here's the bottom line. If you're doing SEO. The minute you say I need a link, or can you get me ranked. There, there's no such thing as, white hat, gray hat, black hat. That's a marketeer's set of words. Google never called it that ah, or created that, we marketers did, and it's a way to sell services.
By parsing and, and dividing, and what not, into, into, uh, what, what it is that your flavor of, of marketing is. Maybe you're a black hater, you want to live on the edge, you want to beat the system. Maybe you're a white hatter, or as I've heard, ah huh, funny enough as a fickle CO. Like there's any ethics with a machine, a software, a piece of, uh, software data.
So here's what's going on. So, they went in there. They went in and destroyed these networks. They got huge publicity.
Scared the living hell out of a lot of people. Um.
And got a lot of people to stop whatever they're doing, and run, and hide. Then, what they did a week ago uh, a week ago yesterday. They went in and it was pre-announced by Google that they would be presenting an over optimization penalty to websites.
And, what they did, was,um, and they, they, dialed down what the name, they called it. They call it something else later on. Uh, but, that's what it was originally called the over optimization penalty, and they caused quite a bit of sites to drop from the engines.
Curiously, I'm finding a lot of the sites that dropped for, certain words, have not dropped for other words. They're still ranking, it's just like the money word, the big word, that they were focused on died. And, so there's a lot of people [indiscernible] and it, it, it's really [indiscernible] one of the most uh.
Realistic theories that I've heard so far, and right now all that is is theories, cuz there's not been enough time for testing. But.
The biggest, there, the, the, there's 2 theories I have, and I think they both coalesce. Um, the 1 is, is that most people have been linking with, uh, to their site. They're hiring companies to link to their site.
And the way that we've all done it is you link, you know, for instance.
There's an old trick in politics, and it happens every 4 years. Where it's the old miserable failure link, right? A bunch of webmasters that hated George Bush would link to George Bush's miserable failure. And a bunch of webmasters that hated Clinton would link to his.
Page, you know at the whitehouse.gov or whatever it is, would link to his page at uh, waffler or maybe it was gores. And miserable failure also went to um, Michael Moore. They recently did it to Rick Santorum. They uh.
They caused his name to come up as something. I can't, you know, something disparaging, uh, to his character. And the way you do it is you just put into the link the, the words, you know, whatever you want, miserable failure. And.
That's called link, uh, the link anchor text or uh, the marketing word for it is the reputation. You're causing what you're linking to to have a reputation. Well, if it was so specific it's believed that Google is causing that...
That page, that, that rank to go away because you have such a huge number of links with that anchor text with that reputation, miserable failure.
So that it no longer works anymore. Because.
A lot of the other ranks are still there. But the, the, the big, the, the 1 you focused on so much is no longer there. So the belief is, is that if you have over 60% of very specific linking, you're, you probably dropped. Um, and, uh, you know, this is very plausible to me, it's very, uh, very possible. Um, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Um.
Uhh...you know, as far as, uh, a ranking thing, it does somewhat make sense as long as it's not taken to the extreme uh by Google. It does make sense that you wouldn't have, uh, red widgits, it might make sense that the links to your site are some other things, so that makes sense. The other piece I think this is part of...
Is, an, and it's really something we, we don't have a lot of control over. And that is uh, till it all ferrets out is that Google is, remember, at the beginning of the year this social change that Larry Paige did was the biggest change in, in my opinion insurgence in history. Um.
And it's a move towards.
Using what similar citations or, or links. But there's social signals through these little lo-, like sort of buttons called you know, Google Plus buttons. And, it cre-, you know, I call them social noise makers. But they're, they're essentially sort of kinda links. And so there's a, there's a theory out there that you know, if you get a lot of these, these Google Plus likes um.
That it'll help with your rankings. And, and that still remains to be seen in how this ferrets out but, this is something that I'm very interested in because I do think uh, since they made this huge change in January it very well will be part of their future algo. We are in the middle of.
The hurricane. We're in the eye of the storm. We don't know how this is going to fare out. We don't know how it's going to go. If you got beat. If you got beat down with a big word, I would get links that are not specific. If you're going to be linking, do not link super specific. Um, mix them up. 50, at least 50 percent uh specific and 50 percent non-specific, um...
So, that's what I would do. But all of this, if you did get beat, all of this does point towards the need that I've been preaching for over a year. I said it last year at the Super Bowl time that this is um, a change in the search engines uh where we have Bing and Yahoo and Facebook kind of in the same.
Same Arena. Ah, you got Google on their own island, but Google's a huge foe and a huge competitor. Um, and there's going to be a lot of stuff happening. And, and when there is a lot of activity like this, it can hurt us, because we are lemon sharks, we are parasites, we are parasiting on a platform. If you go to Facebook, you're parasiting of their platform. You don't own it, therefore they don't owe you anything. Um, they are letting you talk, and, and, and uh.
[indiscernible] or whatever it is that you do on Facebook, they're letting you do that. Thank you very much. You don't even send them a, a thank you note. And gee whiz, some of us even get business because of it. So.
Um, you gotta understand. You are a parasite if you're on these platforms, uh, including Google or any search engine. And they don't owe us anything, we're not entitled to anything. And so, because of that, we need to be very cognizant of.
Of, of the, of the, how, gosh what's the word? We need to be very respectful of how tenuous our position is, of how, uh.
How fragile it, it can uh, it can happen where our rankings go away overnight and we need some sort of other thing that's more lasting. Some sort of platform that lasts. Well.
Most of us all have websites. You know the big thing, kind of being pushed is, you know we don't need websites. Now we have social media and all that. Well, you know Facebook is going public next year. They're going to become another Google. You know, Google became assholes quite frankly, you know, and gave up their whole mantra of do not be evil, when they went public. And I not, hey I am a Capitalist you know. I am all for people, companies making money. But, that's when it happened. Why? Because the pressure.
To create profits, ah to their shareholders in, ah it, little a fiduciary responsibilities ah, happen that the moment they went public several years ago. Facebook is, is, is, is going to be at that point, and who knows what they're going to do to change, their platform to crank the numbers up. Because that.
That pressure is huge especially when you're getting that kind of money on an IPO. So.
Understand we need to take care of ourselves, and how do we do that? We do that by, by creating our own system of content and information. I talk a lot about it. I, I created a set of, um, videos about 2 or 3 years ago. Uh, it's spiderjuicetechnologies.com/content. Uh.
And I get into a lot of that. Uh, it was before words like curation became a big word in the, uh, in the, in the, in the publishing world. But the bottom line is, is you gotta think of your content as a, as a, as a, um.
That you're a content creator and that your content is, it starts at your website, right, and then it syndicates. As an example, syndication it syndicates to Facebook. I'll give you an example right now. This podcast will be on YouTube. Well, how am I going to do that? I'm just going to stick the audio on top of a bunch of slides.
That's all.
But it's still a podcast. You know? I could also do it the opposite way. I could create uh, a, a, a video and then just rip out the audio.
And then I could go get it transcribed and now I have a nice blog post or a huge blog post. Or, maybe I have a report, right? I got a report I can give away. How to survive the recent, uh Google penguin slap. And that's what I might do. I might take this, uh these words, have them transcribed, put it into a report and, uh and, give it out.
Use it as an opt-in to get some, some uh, some, some email opt-ins. So, you, there's a lot of things you could do. I could also cut this uh, this, this uh, the text up from this. And cut it up and, and, and, place it in, in Facebook every day.
In little tips, right? I know a guy doing that right now. Uh, Kevin Hogan, who's a, a great uh.
Uh, pr uh.
Psychological marker, if you will and 1 of the things he's doing, I could tell he's just taking pieces of his, it's probably not even him, it's probably his assistant, just taking pieces of his works, because he's written umpteen, gillion books and he's got a gillion, you know audios and CDs and whatnot. And I'm sure he's just taking pieces, because he's a, a it's too, it's too organized and that's 1 way to do it.
Instead, like, I watch realtors and they grab, they're putting listings out there. Nobody cares about ch, uh, realtors' listings.
I mean, you're not, you know, you're not there to, uh, on Facebook to look for listings. You're there to, to talk. You're at the corner, uh, if you ever watched Seinfeld, right? And they're, they go to that, that, that little cafe where they talk, and.
That people walk in that they know. That's what Facebook is. We're three to just kind of, Hey, what's up? Discuss the stuff of the day. It could be light, it might be a little heavy but certainly don't try to sell me, you know, your listings. I want to, I'll talk to you. I'll talk to you about whatever and gee whiz,'cuz I like ya.
You know, and you put out nice content and you, you educated me. You gave me a lot of education. Yeah, I wanna do business with you now. Okay, I'll ask you, or, or you can as, you, you have the right to ask me because we, we have a little bit of a relationship. And so.
That's what, that's what social media is. But all of that are, you know, starts, you know, you wonder what do I talk about. You talk about.
A lot of it, if you're creating content, you're talk, you're just placing your content, or you're re-purposing your content, of you're um, you know, you're just, you're just uh, you're putting different forms of your content there and your forms can be audio or video or graphical. They can be info-graphics which is becoming popular. But.
People at the end of the day, they want to have a problem solved. And uh, and I'll leave you with that uh.
Uh, you know uh, to give you the I uh, again, a recap of how to fix this Google thing. Change your anchor text that's linking to your pages. If you uh, that's step 1. Step 2, get into.
And claim you're Google+ page. I think um.
Yeah it will give you, get the Google the, the knowledge you're really who, who you are? Ah yours, so you gonna put up a row author tag, on your page. Um, if you don't what that is, ask your webmaster or call us, we are glad to help you out with that. Ah, [indiscernible], you can claim the page as, as the business page in the Google plus. You gonna put the Google button on your pages and the.
You're gonna [indiscernible], you're gonna ask people to, to, to, to click it. A lot of people want to get likes on Facebook. Um.
Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. Likes help, uh, it, it being, you know, the [indiscernible], ranked in being, you know, um.
Theoretically it's important to get all that Facebook stuff going for Bing. But, Google is the 800 pound gorilla. It rules search and they basically told us, and my belief is that we need to be heavily involved with the Google noise makers that they provide and authorize through Google our various.
Properties so that they know we are who we are. It'll also help within the search engines, cuz if you have the rail off and you've um, attached it to your.
Uh, your profile, your picture show's up in the social rankings, and whenever there's graphics are tied to those rankings, uh, they tend to get a better click through rate. So that's the little gift that Google's given us. So, uh, I'll let you go
I hope this was helpful. At the end of the day, you want to get off of that Google nipple uh, and you want to cre, start creating your own uh, set of content. You want to become your own publisher. We can help you with that, uh, we can consult you with that. We can show you ways to [indiscernible], create and curate, and create content that's meaningful for your marketplace, that is attractive to your marketplace, and that you'll be able to
Uh, re-purpose and use in all of your, uh, your syndication. Social syndication, as well as traditional syndication. So uh, I hope this is helpful. This is the first, huh, first installment of the uh, spider files. And I hope you found it useful. And I thought it was uh, necessary at this point with Google being the way it is. So, I hope it helps, and you have a great day. If you need.
Anything, ask for me at Spider Juice Technologies, (310) 533-9145, (310) 533-9145. Uh, we're at spiderjuicetechnologies.com. We've got all kinds of goodies there that we can help you with. Uh, and we've also got houseblogger.com.
And uh, for the real estate peeps out there we got realestateseo.net. Hey, you have a great day.
Talk to you later.
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