Andrew R H Girdwood

Google Analytics not compatible with IE8?

2009-07-02T13:35:00.002+01:00

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

I've not bothered to grab IE8 yet (nor Firefox 3.5, for that matter) but this question on Google's AdWords help forum caught my attention.

RolandV writes,

When I try to access my Analytics account through the Analytics tab under "Reporting" in AdWords, I consistently (on various accounts) get "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". However, this works fine when I do the same in Chrome.

Is this a bug in AdWords, IE8, both? What do I have to do when I want to use IE8, not Chrome?

RolandV, I suspect, will be writing about the AdWords version of Google Analytics rather than trying to access Google Analytics directly (it's the same thing; just a different colour).

Does anyone else suffer from this issue?

Like the Bing logo? Microsoft puts the company that designed it up for sale

2009-06-29T09:53:00.008+01:00

Back when Microsoft bought aQuantive in order to get its hands on Atlas and other technologies the software giant also picked up the ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish.

Image by erokCom™ via Flickr

Yup; Avenue A/Razorfish was created through the merger of the ad agencies Avenue A and Razorfish. Names like that don’t to last long and rather than being called AA/R the agency was rebranded as Razorfish.

Microsoft are hoping for as much as $700m for Razorfish. The aQuantive deal was huge and set Microsoft back a staggering $6b but nevertheless, getting a full $700m back for the advertising agency bit isn’t bad.

That’s if they manage to get that much. The sale of Razorfish has been long rumoured. Back in October 08 we saw headlines like Razorfish buys Wysiwyg – WPP denies it’s buying Razorfish.

In fact, back in 2007 we saw the Tribbble Ad Agency run articles like Avenue A | Razorfish employees get screwed by Microsoft. That article had the brilliant quote from an anonymous employee.

“If they are not going to treat us like Microsoft Employees, then what’s the point of working for Microsoft”

Razorfish has huge clients. People like Kraft, Coca-Cola and Disney. People are talking up either WPP or Publicis as buyers. Heck; people are even discussing Omnicom as a potential buyer but as PepsiCo is an important client for Omnicom I suspect there may be an issue there.

My money is currently on Publicis simply because they recently announced a partnership/joint venture with Microsoft last week (which sparked thoughts of a Razorfish sale in my mind then; as I’m sure it did for other people too).

Razorfish didn’t simply design the Bing logo. It is a healthy part of the impressive advertising campaign for Microsoft’s decision engine.

I doubt the sale of Razorfish will impact Bing at all. If anything it removes conflict of interest concerns. People didn’t like Google owning the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick but I suspect too few people in the Search Industry knew to trace Razorfish back to Microsoft.

Who bought the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick from Google? It was Publicis.

AltaVista search results ranking on page one at Google

2009-06-28T14:00:00.000+01:00

This isn't something you see every day and that's the only reason I took the screen grab - here we see AltaVista results ranking on the first page in Google.

Google's said (via Matt Cutts) that it doesn't want other search results ranking in the index. They took action to remove YouTube search results out. This may be why UK charity search engine Everyclick struggles to rank even on non-search pages. It is also a statement that gives retailers with faceted search CMS sites cause for concern although Google's not likely to treat those canned search/navigation pages the same as 'free hand' search results.

Wolfram Alpha better than Google on Michael Jackson's death

2009-06-27T19:48:00.005+01:00

This is a pretty good result from Wolfram Alpha. Let's not compare Google and Wolfram Alpha in any serious "like for like" way. Let's just look at the differences in speed here. Wolfram Alpha is giving me the right result for the "right" Michael Jackson.

Compare that to the results that Search Engine Journal captured.

The poor state of UK search today

2009-06-25T13:39:00.005+01:00

I hate to say it but the UK search engines are an a truly terrible state today.

Image via Wikipedia

Bing

We don't have Bing. We have a Live Search with Powerset hybrid. It's beta and significantly behind Bing US.

Yahoo

Yahoo's vital Site Explorer has been malfunctioning for the last few days. Key search commands like site: simply don't work any more.

Google

The Google.co.uk results are a mess. They're full of international results; America, Australian and New Zealand pages.

The Google situation is perhaps the most alarming. It's been going on for a long time now - far longer than the trackback flood that predated the Flordia update. The trackback flood was the last time I've seen it this bad.

One concern with the Google.co.uk results today is that perhaps Google doesn't see them as bad results. Could it be that they're using Google.com for American results and Google.co.uk for "international English"?

TradeDoubler gears up to launch behavioural targeting

2009-06-23T12:14:00.003+01:00

The affiliate network TradeDoubler has emailed their affiliates to ask them to help categorise their websites. Affiliates will say what type of site they run so that TradeDoubler's auto-targeting systems can better target users on those sites.

Sounds look a good idea but behavioural targeting is hugely unpopular so this is a PR risk by the network. This may also annoy affiliates a little as it'll increase the chances of people blocking/refusing TradeDoubler cookies.

Their email said;

The categorisation of websites will also enable the future launch of interest based advertising. With interest based advertising a publisher can show ads targeted to each user. The selection is based upon an interest profile built up when a user is browsing sites within TradeDoubler's network. For example, a person visiting more sports websites than average will be shown more ads related to sports.

What are the next steps?
We will be asking you to categorise your current websites when you next log in. This should only take a few minutes. You can select up to four top level categories per site and you should select the most accurate categories to match the content of your website. After you have categorised your website using the popup you can edit these categories from the “Site information” page in your account.

TradeDoubler, like Google, are trying hard not to call this behavioural targeting and are calling this "interest based targeting" instead. You can read more of the network's policy and OPT OUT of the targeting from this legal page here.

Twitterfeed borked

2009-06-22T11:53:00.003+01:00

It's very annoying when Twitterfeed is down. This is an account which is responsible for a whole bunch of auto-tweets into a whole bunch of Twitter profiles.

Twitterfeed recently took cash from Betaworks - investors in both Bit.ly and Twitter. They alo launched a redesigned site just recently.

It's a shame to see them offline. I use verisign (old skool!) to login. Perhaps the snaffu is in that mechanism.

Opera Unite hacked, wormed or maybe just foolish

2009-06-21T23:07:00.004+01:00

What looks like the official Twitter account for Opera's new Opera United has been sprouting crap tweets for GetMeFollowers for the last few days. Are they being dumb or does the tweeting-viral-infection have the password to their account?

Either way; can't say it instills much confidence in Opera Unite.

easyJet forgets "flights to London" in latest business flyer promotion

2009-06-21T21:28:00.006+01:00

In a viral ad for easyJet called "Keep everyone happy" or "Keep the financial director happy" (seems it lost a bit of focus even on the name) there is no flight to London option - not even Luton.

You can probably just make out in this graphic that there's no London option. You're supposed to be able to work out how much money EasyJet will save you (and make your FD dance). Not me. I fly to London at least once a week but there's no dancing FD for me.

Why not? I'm in two minds as why this happened.

1) The ad agency behind this is so London focused that they forgot it is possible to fly to London (rather than just from London).

2) easyJet didn't actually want to focus on the flight to London possibility. A quick check at British Airways tells me I can fly to Heathrow in September for £35 all in. EasyJet will cost £28 for Gatwick and that excludes credit card charges, insurance and bags. BA is actually cheaper and flies to a more convenient airport.

From an SEO point of view its worth looking at the code at http://www.keepthefdhappy.com/. There's a paragraph of text that's shown to users without Flash.

These days if the text represents the Flash then Google's not likely to call it spam. How well do you think easyJet do there?

Perhaps the area of the most concern are the links. There are many links back to the main easyJet site and a link to their sitemap section that's not a link users can find or follow in the Flash.

I'm not calling the SEO one way or another (I help British Airways with their SEO so I've a declared interest) but I am annoyed that the orange airline may have forgotten it is possible for business people to be outside of London!

What do you think?

P.S. The domain is registered by Domain Discreet - just to make things interesting!

Updated!

EasyJet picked this post up via Twitter and looked into the issue. They had intended the site only to target Londoners in the first place.

They've now flicked the switch on the geographic targeting of their banners to try and just promote the site to the audience who cares.

I think this is a pretty swift response by easyJet though I don't understand why London wasn't simply added to the site in the first place. Surely that would make more sense?

I'm also curious to know why easyJet works with Domain Discreet - or does their agency actually own the URL? Ooo.

Twitter accounts to follow for the Edinburgh Festivals and Fringe

2009-06-17T09:18:00.027+01:00

Hopefully this post will be a works in progress up until the end of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If you know of any other Twitter accounts to add then leave a comment below.

Image via Wikipedia

Official Accounts

The main @EdinburghFringe and website
The star attraction @TheFringeThing and website.
The official @EdinburghFest and website.
The official @ComedyAwards account and website (formerly Perrier).
The official @EdintFest for the Edinburgh International Festival and website.
The official @EdFilmFest for the Edinburgh Film Festival and site.
The official @EdComFest for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and site.
The West Port Book Festival tweets from @wpbookfestival and runs a site here.

General

With an emphasis on the International Festival there's Tam Pollard @whereisrunnicles and a blog.
Also for the International Festival there is @UniversalArts and a website.
For those people with more than £4.99 in their pocket there's @fivepoundfringe

Venue Accounts

The Pleasance's account @PleasanceComedy and wesbite.
Bedlam's Theatre Festival account is @BedlamFringe and website.
Venue 150 aka @Venue150 and site.
The Assembly Rooms aka @assembly09 and site.
Underbelly with @underbelly09.
There's even at Twitter account for George Square with @GeorgeSquare.

Stars, Acts, Producers and Shows

Jimmy Car (who will be at Venue 150 @ EICC from Aug 20-23, 27-30) but also @jimmycarr and his website.
Mark Watson the comedian tweets from @WatsonComedian.
The one that doesn't speak from Scott Mills' radio show runs @MillsTheMusical
There's also Show Stopper the Musical with @TheShowstoppers and their website.
There's Tomfoolery at @tomfoolery09, a comedy act from York.
William Morland will be appearing in Quaternary and twittering from festival as @dolphonia.
For their 20th year in a row there will be @theimproverts who have this website.
From the Penny Dreadfuls we have @Dreadfuls and site.
There's the UK sketch act @Pappysfunclub and site.
Defender of the Realm @TiernanDouieb will be at Underbelly. His website is here.
Radio 1 producer Chris Cox is @bigcox and maintains a website here.
There's Heart Production's @TimeOutOfJoint
Comedian, writer and bummer Richard Herring tweets from @Herring1967.
Julia Bolden the writer/director of Venus and Mars and Other Myths of Mr and Ms tweets from @seascribevenus.
Dave Thomas with @DaveThomasMusic and a very popular YouTube video.
Producer James Seabright tweets from @JamesSeabright
From the Amsterdam Underground Comedy Collective there's Rene van Meurs who'll be tweeting from @renevanm and appearing at the Underbelly.
All the way from down under is @BiteTreat, a collection of comedians, and a blog here.

Reviewers

Reviewers are a good way to keep pace with the mushrooming number of shows! Check out:

@FringeReview
@FringeGuru
@AllTheFestivals
@Chortle
@ThreeWeeks
@AndrewGHayes posting at The Edinburgh Guide.
@EyeForFilm posting at Eye for Film.

The Festival Highlights collection

There's also @FestHighlights who are promoting the website Festival Highlights.

I've put these Edinburgh Festivals and Fringe twitter accounts in a sperate section because they've been created by @FestHighlights. On the first edit of this post I was cautious of these accounts as it did seem to me as if they'd all be created by the same person and it looked like that same person was the "author" of them too. However, @FestHighlights left comments on the blog to re-assure us that the plan is to have the cast and crew start to update.

They are:

@PottedPirates for Potted Pirates
@DoctorWhomEdin for Doctor Whom
@RebusMcTaggart for Rebus McTaggart
@ALAVEdin for Almost Like a Virgin
@ShowstopperEdin for Showstoppers
@GittinEdins for Roadside Cafe Owner
@BBMedin for Brtain's Best Mates
@BarbershopOpera2 for Barber Shop Opera II
@Worldswife for The World's Wife
@BensonCoward for Benson Coward
@RexRomanEdin for Rex Roman Pink Floyd
@BlowersEdin for Henry Blofeld
@MGGWEdin for MGGW
@BridgetEdin for My Daily Mail Hell
@nunthewiserEdin for Nun the Wiser
@longtoothedin for Long Tooth
@BodegaBrosEdin for Afternoon Delight

Any more to add? Either recommended follows or perhaps ones to be cautious of?

Facebook's email verification system is in a mess

2009-06-15T13:45:00.002+01:00

There's something screwy with Facebook's email verification system.

When adding a new email address to Facebook (something to consider doing if you want old friends who used to email you at an older email address to find you) you'll get an email response from Facebook.

The first half of the email Facebook sends you sends that someone else has just registered the email address with a Facebook account (you just did) so you'll not be able to log in with it any more nor receive email alerts.

The second half of the very same email says you've just registered the email address (the same one) at Facebook so you can now log in and receive email alerts.

I got the New York Times to link to a zombie story

2009-06-15T09:01:00.002+01:00

The story in question was about Ask.fr mixing up their geo-targeting on Google while playing Zombie (Left 4 Dead) arbitrage.

Ask banking on French zombies and Google traffic

2009-06-15T06:21:00.000+01:00

Some of my weekend was dedicated to battling zombies. I'm sure you understand it's a critical part of my job. This battle required some coordination over Gmail. What caught my eye was the AdWord from Ask France.

This is a geo-targeting error. An oddly bad one at that. It doesn't even reflect well on Google as there's a chance these UK visits to Ask France will click on the French Google ads on Ask.

I did notice the sub-domain for 'Left4Dead'. Ask really is targeting this computer (it has had a very high search frequency due to the sequel) . This is just a displayurl sub-domain, though, the actual ad clicks through to http://fr.ask.com/web?q=left+4+dead&qsrc=999&siteid=2087&l=dis&qenc=ISO-8859-1&ifr=1 as the destinatinon URL.

I'm not sure of the logic here at all. Yes; it's a search term/content term that generates traffic but does Ask really think people will interrupt a Google search to get more information on a game. Ask aren't selling the game.

@ryanbarr doubles his Twitter followers - drives himself insane or bluffs TechCrunch?

2009-06-12T09:50:00.006+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

There's a funny story over at TechCrunch. Twitter user @ryanbarr set up the iPhone AT&T petition to demand cheaper upgrade to the iPhone S. We had the same type of petition for 02 here in the UK.

I'm not sure why iPhone users think they should be able to break contract any more easily than the rest of us - but both petitions have done very well and nearly 10,000 have signed up to Ryan's.

Here's the catch. Whenever someone signs the AT&T petition there's an auto tweet. That tweet includes @ryanbarr in it. Ryan's told TechCrunch that he deeply regrets this now - he's spamming himself silly.

Dear TechCrunch,

My name is Ryan Barr, known on Twitter as @ryanbarr . If you may have noticed, I started a petition (or twitition) found here: http://twitition.com/f96aq .

I want out.

When I first started the petition, it was due to a rant I was having about the price of the phone. It didn’t take long for me to truly not care about the prices as much as I had. And it didn’t take much longer for the petition I started to go out of control.

At the time of this e-mail the petition just passed 9200 signatures. For each signature, a message is tweeted as follows:

“Petition: AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices http://twitition.com/f96aq @ryanbarr”

That’s right, 9200 @ryanbarr’s over the span of two (going on three) days. This does not include the unnecessary retweets people also make. I can no longer stand not being able to see real replies in my timeline. I have AT&T employees following me and saying stuff behind my back when I was just ranting on a site that seemed to have little activity.

I completely, COMPLETELY regret pressing the submit button. As the petition nears the 10000 mark I fear even more. As at that mark, TweetMeme will show me as a TM_10000 (@http://twitter.com/TM_10000) … the first, ever.

TechCrunch — you have the power to make businesses grow. You have the power to make or break the reputation of a new device. Please, help me find a way out of this petition. The attention I am receiving is unwanted — I just want to be able to come clear to all the signers and say, “I don’t want in this anymore. I didn’t mean for it to last this long.”

Thanks for anything and for the great reads over the longhaul.

Best Regards,
Ryan Barr

Do you think that's making the matters better or worse? I hadn't noticed him until TechCrunch posted toady. In fact, TechCrunch kick off their blog post by saying;

A Twitter user who has effectively spammed himself senseless reaches out to us for help. And we’re going to oblige. The only trouble is, he’s making yet another error in judgment, because my guess is this is going to make things worse.

Here's the catch. Ryan must have a really low threshold for pain. The auto-tweets are easy to cope with. It's a snap to set up a Gmail filter to route any emails these replies generate elsewhere (or to move his Twitter account to a Gmail address).

So it's just his Twitter feed that's getting spammed - but that won't last long. It's also fairly easy to cope with - many clients will let you watch tweets of people you're following (even if that means ignoring the @ replies in the next column). He could set up a user list in Seesmic Desktop, for example.

My question is - did Ryan just bluff TechCrunch into posting his "plea for help" or was it just a clever tactic to get even more attention? I'd like to suggest Ryan's been sly here. That was my first thought.

However, a look at his history via Twitter Grader suggests he's not really making the most of the situation he finds himself in. He's not following many extra people. He may have increased his followers by a double digit percentage but he has less than 500 of them!

What do you think?

Whether its Simplyhealth or Simply Health - people may read this first

2009-06-11T17:19:00.000+01:00

“Soon to be SimplyHealth” – some people will read this post first before visiting simplyhealth's actual site.

I’m being a little unfair here as I’m illustrating the challenges brands like HSA face as they gear up for a major rebranding.

HSA was/is a health insurance company. They ran adverts on UK TV which featured bunnies and sock puppets with the catch phrase; “Hey! Just say!”. It was a little quirky but I think it worked well – and really appealed to their target demographic.

By May 2009 and early June HSA’s latest set of ads included the message that they would soon be “Simply Health” (or perhaps that’s SimplyHeath).

This is a tough move for any brand to pull off. They want to let their customers know they’re changing name, they definitely want their potential customers to know they’re about to change name and ideally they’d like to run ads that bring in leads and boost awareness of the new brand.

The challenge, of course, is that until they become SimplyHealth that all sorts of people on the internet have a good stab at becoming an authority on the newly created keyphrase (especially if it’s SimplyHealth without spaces rather than “Simply Health”) then they do.

Simply Health, that is to HSA and partners, at least have a website up on the best possible domain. It’s not thought that much about SEO as its running entirely on a secure server. They are running PPC ads though – good job.

In fact, we can even see the HSA site ranking for the term. The two sites have aligned their visuals. As a consumer checking out the two websites I don’t suffer any doubt. I’m not confused. They’ve done better than FGH.

Nevertheless; this is an extremely vulnerable time for the brand. Health insurance affiliates, in particular, have every reason to move into the weakened brand space and dig down.

What we’ll see in the future – given the rise of social media and always growing importance of search – is that rebranding becomes even harder than it is today.

When Chrome eats Google

2009-06-11T17:13:00.003+01:00

Seconds after I announced on Twitter that I'd changed my default browser on my traveling laptop to Chrome - this happens;

I get a fresh set of random characters with each refresh. I think the internet calls this type of error: typical.

"Hey! Evony fans - tired of saving your queen" wins AdWord of the Week

2009-06-09T11:38:00.006+01:00

What can I say? AQ.com deserve to do very well from this one. If you can't make it out the ad text reads;

Hey. Evony fans.
Tired Of Saving Your Queen?
Us Too. Try out AQWorlds

Civony successfully rebrands as Evony - boobs tactics work

2009-06-09T10:07:00.007+01:00

Controversial online tactical game Civony (Civilization meets Colony) first 'caught' my attention with an intriguing display of flesh. Surely more flesh than Google would allow on its ad network?

Over the last week or two we've stopped seeing the Civony ads and started seeing similar ones for Evony. Ah; a naming change!

I've not looked into why they've changed the name. We might imagine that Evony is legally different enough from their 'inspiration' to be safe. Perhaps the name was changed as a brand reputation management technique - this is never a good idea. There was also the 'suggestion' the original Evony/Civony queen was lifted from a fancy dress catalog and photoshopped ever so slightly.

The eye candy ads are back. I caught one of the more risque ones as I was signing into LiveJournal. Now LJ doesn't make it clear where the ad is coming from but my HTTP-LiveHeaders extension did track me through Google on the click.

The landing page reveals a little more - got to work on those conversions, you know.

So, is it working?

Google Insight shows an almost 45^o success line for the new Evony brand.

However, I'm not able to give this gaming rebrand full marks. There's no redirect on the old www.civony.com site. This results in SERPs which look like:

Does Wolfram Alpha's HTML element hierarchy point to SEO success?

2009-06-08T20:20:00.022+01:00

I've taken the top eleven ranking websites for [search engine optimisation] in Google.co.uk. I've thrown away Wikipedia. This leaves me with ten agency sites.

Let's see how Wolfram Alpha draws their structure. Perhaps therein is a clue to SEO success?

1) bigmouthmedia

2) Just Searching

3) High Position

4) SEO Consult

5) SEOCO

6) Search Engine Optimising

7) Top Click Media

8) Creare Communications

9) Blue Claw

10) XSEO

I did the same thing for [search engine optimization], Google.com but with an UK IP address. This time I had to look a little further than position #11 to collect my top ten ranking agencies. I imagine for some readers this will be the first time they've seen [search engine optimization] results (albeit with spaces) from a UK address.

1) Submit Express

2) Bruce Clay

3) SEO Inc

4) Add Me

5) Patrick Gavin

6) Submit A Website

7) eBrandz

8) Add Pro

9) Keyword Performance

10) eVisibility

There's the evidence. Do you conclude there is any mapping between HTML element hierarchy and Google rankings?

Yorkshire faces Twitter brand backlash after BNP win

2009-06-08T14:05:00.005+01:00

I'm happy to say Yorkshire is a good place to visit and if you fancy a day trip or weekend break in the UK then check it out.

However; Yorkshire is mud today. The extreme right wing BNP managed to win a seat in the EU elections there. Twitter has been raging with the news.

Yorkshire is there in the trend tag cloud with North Korea who locked away the American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling today. That's not an association Yorkshire will be pleased to have.

Twitter is also lashing out against the BNP itself. This retweet from Andrew Thomson shows that the community itself is trying to rid itself of the shame. The original tweet comes from Drew B - the managing director of an agency in Worcestershire.

MySpace, Bebo and LiveJournal the big losers in social network world map update

2009-06-07T20:44:00.005+01:00

Vincenzo Cosenza used Alexa and Google Trends data in June 2009 to produce a map showing the most popular social networks around the world.

Compare this map to the one which Valleywag produced in 2007. It looks very different. As expected Facebook has begun sweeping the board - Myspace, Bebo and LiveJournal (strong in Russia) look like they've lost the most territories.

Google puts UKIP 13 points ahead of the Conservatives in the European elections

2009-06-05T16:45:00.003+01:00

Google successfully predicted that Norway would win the Eurovision Song Contest.

The search engine has now put the same technological forecast to the European elections and there's a dramatic result in the United Kingdom. The far right Europe sceptic party, UKIP, is ahead by a significant distance.

Google gives UKIP 54 points, Conservative 41, Labour secures third place with 38 and just ahead of the Greens who score 32. Sadly, the British Nationalist Party, the extremists, manage to score 11 points.

The post from the new European Public Policy blog from Google is likely to gain attention. No doubt a delieberate move from the search engine and a signal that it will be paying more attention to political developments in Europe.

Bing has /semhtml/ pages and being indexed by Google

2009-06-05T07:55:00.008+01:00

I was very lucky to have a quick little personal tour of Bing from Dr Barney Pell - the very smart guy who founded Powerset. Powerset is the search engine technology Microsoft bought to help 'verb up' their new engine (which became Bing).

In his tour we wandered into the reference section of Bing - the enhanced Wikipedia area. I gasped. I had seen /semhtml/ in the URL of content/scrape pages. "You can't call them that!" I said, "Search engine marketing HTML pages" .

Barney's response was quick, "SEMantic HTML." So these /semhtml/ pages aren't supposed to be search landing pages.

First off; here's how to find them. Search Bing for someone famous - let's go with Alexandre Dumas for now.

Click on the "enhanced view". This appears in lieu of "cached page" when there's the Wikipedia 'enhancement'.

If you want to compare this page to Wikipedia you'll see that they're a match.

As of today Microsoft/ the Bing team haven't done anything to keep search engines away from the /semhtml/ section of the site. There's no noindex in the HTML and Bing.com's robots.txt doesn't block the folder.

In fact it's easy to show that Google's already begun indexing these pages.

I'm happy to believe that these aren't "search engine marketing HTML" pages but "SEMantic HTML" pages instead.

However; Bing is clearly trying to get some of their sexy pages into search. They've a sitemap XML file for them!

Google has made it clear that it doesn't want search results in its search results. We'll just have to see what happens next.

Google about to crack down on paid links in Spain?

2009-06-04T23:53:00.005+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

I've no inside knowledge on this one - expect for the fact that I'm just back from SMX Madrid. One of my take-away observations was that Google sent three engineers from the web quality team in Dublin to the event. Three. This isn't usual for Google. Each of them worked on Spanish web quality.

This observation entered my thoughts during an after event drink with Dr Pell from Microsoft/Powerset and the Googlers. Dr Pell was discussing the order in which Bing had looked at languages (and Bing is in Beta everywhere except the USA) and how Spanish had come late in the process. This wasn’t because Spanish was a low priority or hard – but because the linguist team considered it to be fairly easy and where confident to leave it to later. Googlers nodded.

Link buying is still fairly common in Spain (this contrasts to the United Kingdom where link buying has dramatically decreased). This is just a guess but the telltale signs seem fairly strong.

Evidence that location search might be coming to Google

2009-06-03T21:41:00.002+01:00

This screen shot, I think, suggests Google is planning to add the advanced search command location:

Below the search box Google says

location:madrid was dropped from your search because it is not support for this type of search

You'd think there would be thousands of matches for this search. Think of all the Twitter profiles that contain the bio line "Location:Madrid" or "Location: New York".

Fortunately we can put a space between "Location:" and the target city and get results. Otherwise I'd not be thanking Google for dropping such a significant part of my search query!