Uuuh, I smell a new shift in the Force. It seems Google keeps changing stuff…

Or it could just be another bug, like the position six bug that happened earlier this year (where established sites fell to position 6) which was then fixed. Truth of the matter is: some websites are being penalized for stuff they didn’t do, the sandbox effect is being enforced more (sites show up slower in the index if they’re new), Google’s cache doesn’t seem to get updated anymore, and crawl statistics seem to stop fluctuating in the index. And this seems like the system is pausing in order to change. Like the matrix is rebooting

As always senor Matt Cutts, aka Mr. Google to us simpletons (he deals with much of the SEO part of Google, at least from a PR point of view) has denied anything would be changing and said he’d be looking into the deal but I feel something fishy.

Thing is, I’ve experienced this stuff myself. My homepage cache hasn’t been updated since March 30th, which is odd, it usually gets updated every week at most, but otherwise everything’s normal. Cache is doing OK too…

Well, who knows what’s really happening, anyway, just keep watching the thread and see what happens…

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This is about a week old I think, but I’ve just found it on the Google Blog, they have just added analytics to YouTube. How is that important to anything? Well, SEO is all about SEM really, meaning that marketing is a great part of SEO efforts, and knowing what your target audience is is very important. Also, monitoring SMO campaigns is made easier with this tool (and getting to know where your traffic comes from, maybe you made it too US-centered).

Although it only offers a small views graph this is useful to determine user trending, and sync it to whatever you have done in that period. Analytics is very important when it comes to knowing what works and what doesn’t…

The service is called YouTube Insight, and here’s a screenshot from Google:

It needs no activation or anything, just log in to YouTube and go to your videos,and there click on the about this video button on the right, and that will simply display the graphs. Simple and effective. Usage is pretty straightforward, but if anyone needs it, I’ll post a comprehensive article on it.

As always, don’t forget to subscribe because this content gets updated every day and it would be a shame for you to miss stuff.

PS: WordPress 2.5 is out, make sure you upgrade, it’s great

It’s amazing how a partnership between giants sometimes creates wonderful things…

In a breaking news bulletin on both the Google.com and Apple.com websites, the two firms announced a new design for Google’s homepage, more human oriented and with a sleeker, neater look borrowed from Apple’s years of outstanding design work. The new design is powered by simplicity and is amusingly called Googapple. It keeps most of the Google.com functions, adding some extras and giving the whole website a different experience.

But without further ado, here’s the first official screenshot of the new website, click it to get the full high-res screenshot:

It looks great Google announced they would be rolling it out to select customers at the end of this month, with all of us getting it by the end of April 2008. Steve Jobs himself is said to do a keynote on the subject later this week, and the media will probably go beserk on this…

What do you think?

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Well… not exactly. But it’s very similar. Just better. And just intranets… umm, yeah, not really like Squidoo then.

Ok, for those of you who don’t know about what I just said, let me explain. Squidoo is a place where you can make “lenses” (webpages) and fill them up with content about something. And that means you can spam all you want, but what they meant by it was to create a sort of wiki service, just not centralized. Basically you have control over what you put on that page, and it was used by spamming SEOs to get link-juice for their websites, since Squidoo was quite PR-intensive. However, a few months ago, Squidoo was “slapped” by Google, thereby ejecting from its index a large number of those sites.

Fast-forward to present day, and you see Google has acquired JotSpot (yeah, i had no idea who they were either) and basically gone and done the same but for intranets. What this means is they have now bought and integrated a system of wiki-websites, where you can post content for anyone who may be interested. Also, you get full integration with a Google Custom Search system, and in their example, you can search for employees who interest you, etc.

How you use this is through Google Apps. Again, for the uninitiated, Google Apps is a very interesting Google service which allows you to build your own environment filled with Google goodies (gmail for your domain - like I use contact@eydryan.com , calendar, docs, iGoogle, etc.), and the fun thing is that you can brand it with your logos and really make it feel like home. While to the normal user this may not be that much, to a company, small as it may be, this is a great thing, since you always needed a place to keep/ back up documents etc.

The latest addition, Google sites, is an interesting thing since I’ve actually learned about this in Business Quality Management, where we discussed the utility of a company forum, where people can post problems and solutions, search for expertise, etc (and it was a case study about a little company called… Honda). There we talked about how that can help people, without having to go through a lengthy process of contacting the right department etc. Also, there was the mentioning of various websites for each employee, where he would put solutions to problems he had encountered for others to see them and get solutions quickly. The problem with those however, was that they were rarely updated and no one knew how to find them.

Google tries to solve some of those problems, but what it’s basically doing is helping everyone adopt that system. I remember that for that case study however, I was completely against both the forum and the mini-sites and I’ll tell you why. The forum is indeed a centralized and unified space, easily searchable and somewhat easy to navigate through (topic categories and sub-categories can be a hassle and many people don’t know where to post), but it is rarely updated as well (people forget to check it, answers needed quickly get answered slowly and usually too late) and tends to have some topics die out before they get a definitive answer. Also, without a tag system, searching is… difficult. The personal websites are again very slowly updated, no one knows about where they are exactly and how to search through them and odds are they have different navigations, templates, and are a mess to deal with, especially if there are more sites about the same thing. It becomes a nightmare…

The solution? A centralized wiki. It’s simple to use, simple to edit, simple to secure from outside access (logins), data is fresher (since more people add to the same pages), tagging features aid in searching and the centralized domain means that duplicate content is less of an issue. Also, more experts from the same field can verify and correct false information, making it a self-correcting system. And, as wikipedia has shown us, it works…

Now let’s see if Google has done this. Well, not quite… First, everyone has his or her page and not a centralized wiki, BUT you do have a way to see all the sites within the domain. Now let’s see what a page contains and how you make it. There’s a title, then very useful categories and description fields which unfortunately are optional, the option to share the site with all people in the company, some of them only, or the whole world (make it a public website), then you choose a template and voila… Home. And from here on, it’s completely wiki style, which is the best thing possible.

This is a useful thing for any business, and the fact that you can make them public is useful for SEO purposes… Off the top of my head I can see how you can make todo lists and procedures for your company with them, as for SEO, well, there’s a lot of social media stuff that is just waiting to be done…

So, all in all, I consider this to be a very welcome replacement for Squidoo, and I find it very very useful for firms, be they big or small.

To close this off, I give you this introductory video from Google to help you get what Google Sites is:

As for the link, just click the image below, and for an example, here’s a site I’ve made in 2 minutes (it’s obvious)…

And since this has been such a great, this is the point where you should really subscribe… I mean come on, aren’t you even a bit curious about what’s going to be here tomorrow?