Online Marketing Reviews, Tricks, and Shortcuts
Matt Cutts at Google posted a new video that will help you understand how Google is changing and making things easier for consumers and for webmasters. This is a summary of Pubcon 2009 speech filling us in on the future of Google and of the web. He covered how to make your searches more functional, your site faster, and how to crawl your site like Google does. Take a look and take notes.
You don’t have to worry about not finding RSS feeds anymore it sounds like as Google’s Reader will update you when a page is crawled and the reader sees changes.
Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes in the executivespage at another search engine.
Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.
See the original blog post here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/detect-page-changes/
It looks like Google is making billions again. Although they didn’t hit their goals in revenue, Google post a 6.67 billion fourth-quarter profit in 2009. With take a look at some of the highlights of Google’s earnings release.
Google network revenues – Not only did Google generates a lot of revenues, its network partners as well. Most of this was done through adsense programs which netted just over $2 billion in revenue. This is a large jump from the fourth quarter of 2008 which showed Google adsense revenues at 1.69 billion.
Google sites revenue – Google owns a lot of sites across the Internet. Those sites that Google owns generated revenues of $4.42 billion which is 66% of total revenues. This is up 16% from the fourth quarter of 2008.
Total revenues – Google’s total revenues of 6.67 billion in the fourth quarter is a 17% increase from the same time in 2008.
Here is some of the conversation between Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a question and answer session.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Touts search quality improvements and product improvements (e.g., Real Time search) and discusses future investments in personnel and technology in general. He says of acquisitions: “there will be at least one a month.”
CFO Patrick Pichette: Google saw some “impressive growth in YouTube revenues.” UK revenue up 13 percent, while US up 11 percent.
Product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg: Discusses “more wood behind fewer arrows approach.” This refers to shutting down non core products: Lively, Audio Ads and putting more emphasis on fewer core services and products. He says Android started 2009 with one device and now there are more than 20. He echoes Pichette: “YouTube is monetizing nicely.” We’re going to work hard on making ads richer, more diverse and more useful. We’re trying to make it easier for local businesses to manage their online presence and help them connect with people “around the corner.”
He alludes to Google’s efforts to bring local product inventory online. There’s potential to make the “mobile web better than the PC web.”
President Global Sales Operations Nikesh Arora: Discussed how larger businesses turned a larger part of their media spend to online. He also mentioned that retailers (both etailers and traditional offline merchants) were spending more online.
Arora also mentioned that “all parts of our display ad strategy” were performing well: DoubleClick ad exchange, YouTube, Google Content Network.
Schmidt: Offers a very general, high-level response. Wants to stay in China but “under somewhat different terms.”
Rosenberg: Re mobile . . . new formats (e.g., click to call) and targeting tools are making a “big difference.” We’re starting to see much improved monetization across mobile.
Pichette: YouTube . . . now running ads in 20 countries. Home page was nearly sold out in Q4.
Schmidt: A story that hasn’t been told is how successful Google is in display; you’ll hear a lot more about that in 2010. He also says that 2010 will be a very strong year for mobile revenue growth. Re Apple, he expresses respect, acknowledges that they compete but says their relationship is “stable.”
Also cites local as a growth area (not clear if he’s talking consumer behavior or small biz advertisers).
Rosenberg: Our CPCs not impacted by what our competitors do (re Bing question).
Pichette: Says that TV advertiser budgets will be shifting in some part to online display; this is a big area of focus for us this year because “it’s got a lot of runway.”
Schmidt: Re Apple (again) . . . not going to speculate on any deals or rumors of any kind (re implied Bing replacement of Google on iPhone).
In social media, the number of people that follow you on your accounts like Twitter, Facebook, squarefour, and Linked In is in similar relation to the number of links pointing to a page in traditional SEO. We all know that Google ranks your website based on the number and also on the quality of backlinks coming into your site. Google recently hinted that they will rank social media sites similarly in the fact that if you have reputable followers and a lot of them, your tweets could get ranked higher than someone else’s based on that scenario.
In search engine optimization, high quality pages link to another website or another webpage and pass “link juice” to the page they are linking to. With social media is looking like it’s going to be the same type of scenario based on a popularity contest or voting system.
Google is really trying to get into the real-time search market. People are starting to use twitter search or Google blog search to get more relevant real-time information has recently been created on the Internet. Nobody likes searching for something on Google and finding non-relevant content from four years ago. So, it is good for consumers and it is good for marketers because those marketers that continue to market and continue to update their websites and social media accounts should reap the rewards.
Another question that people are asking about the ranking of their tweets is how hash tags are ranked. It is predicted that Google will rank has tax is a lower quality tweaked as they serve as a red flag for spam like content. Google, as we know, is all about being natural. We will see where this takes us over the upcoming months.
Google’s Gdrive online storage has really begun to launch. Ok, they are still saying that the the Gdrive does not exist and refused to confirm the name of Gdrive.
It is announced that over the next few weeks, Google docs will start rolling out the ability to store some of your media in your Google Docs account. Before this point, it was just for documents like text and presentations. Now you will be able to upload images and video to your account. This isn’t really the launch of anything according to Google, but could be their slow and methodical roll out of the “Gdrive” service which is expected to allow you to store all of your files on the Google servers and not have to store them on your own personal harddrive.
To start out, you can upload up to a max 250mb size files to the server and up to 1gb of storage is free. If you want or need more space, you can purchase more at $.25 / gb per year. Sounds pretty cheap to me.
We will see how it goes. I do like the idea of using any computer and having access to all my files at anytime, but don’t really like the idea of Google having all my files. Maybe its just the conspiracy theorist in me.
Google caffeine is due to start rolling out here soon. It looks like it is going to be a significant change to Google search. Website responsiveness and more an emphasis on real time search information is rumored to be a part of the changes with Google Caffeine.
Here is an interview with Matt Cutts about some of the changes.
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