Google Privacy Policy – A breach of privacy?

The search giant Google is taking steps to ensure that they are on song with the law enforcement and have stated new privacy laws for their products.The popular Google products like YouTube, Gmail also have not been spared by the privacy policy. In the Google privacy policy page one can find the details of the data they are going to collect from the users.

It says they are going to collect personal information such as name, email address, telephone no or credit card. Google will also be tracking your device data such as operating system, unique device identifiers and associate these information with your Google account.Google will also be collecting search queries of logged on users, your telephone log information, your Internet protocol address. They will also be collecting cookies to identify your browser or your Google account.

Also there will be location data collected when using location enabled Google services. They will be collecting GPS signals from mobile devices and sensor data to give information about nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.The other details mentioned they will be collecting are Local storage data like browser web storage and application data caches. Finally they mention they will be tracking cookie data from other sites using Google features.

Google further explains that the information they collect is to help them to provide better services to their users.

Any amount of explanation by them doesn’t seem to satisfy most of the countries. Most of them have requested Google to delay their privacy update. Even though Google claims that this act is for making the services better, the common man can see it as a breach of privacy.

How can someone be comfortable with their personal data like search queries involving their personal issues, sexual orientation and other confidential details being tracked. There have been a great number of countries opposing this act and recently in New York Times one could see the headline “France Says Google Privacy Plan Likely Violates European Law”. In the news article a line was quoted by the French privacy agency known as CNIL “Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals.”

The French privacy agency have the power to fine companies up to 400,000 $ for privacy breach.

The users of Android powered smart phones may have no other option but to ditch their phones to get away from the Google Privacy act as the policy involves mobile, OS tracking data to.

Privacy advocates have slammed Google that they are forcing users to share data which when given a choice they wouldn’t have. Also this move is being seen by many as an evil trick by Google to promote their ads to specific users based on their data tracking. While promoting their business is commendable, the promotion coming at the cost of user privacy really needs to be reconsidered again.

While the web is flowing with a range of updates requesting Google to get their privacy act delayed and Governments asking time to review them in detail. There seems to be no response from the other side.

One must also take into account the French are acting based upon the European commission instruction and they were assigned to do the initial check. So this law could go against the whole of Europe and many other countries around the world.

In addition to this based on a survey taken it was found that most Google users were not aware of the privacy policy, despite being promoted by Google in the past weeks. The survey also gives us the shocking census that only 1 in 8 users have gone and read the privacy policy of Google. The remaining 7 users are still ignorant of the change and are continuing using Google services.

Big Brother watch, a British civil liberties and privacy pressure group have called for an enquiry on the Google privacy law and how it complies with the British data protection law.

At this time we would like to Guide users on how to delete their web history before Google starts tracking it

Step 1: Login to your Gmail account

Step 2: At the top right corner of your screen you can view your email id, click on it

Step 3: Once you click on it, you will be displayed a dropdown and you can click on privacy if you would like to know the details of Google privacy or click on account settings

Step 4: In account settings you will have a section called services and you will have the text “View, enable, or disable web history” parallel to it you can find the linked text Go to web history

Step 5: On clicking that link you will have the option to remove all web history

There is also another face of this privacy act with Google having data that many countries have requested user data to be handed over and also had asked Google to block services or remove data that they found to be affecting their country.

January – June 2011

China
Three requests to remove 121 items from services. Google removed ads in response to two of those requests.

Cook Islands
Google received content removal requests

France
User data requests recorded an increase of 29% compared with the previous reporting period of Google

Germany
User data requests recorded an increase of 39% compared with the previous reporting period of Google

Russia
User data requests reached the reporting threshold at Google

South Korea
User data requests recorded an increase of 36% compared with the previous reporting
Period of Google

Spain
User data requests recorded an increase of 28% compared with the previous reporting period of Google

USA
User data requests recorded an increase of 29% compared with the previous reporting period of Google

You can find detailed reports for previous years to in the Google transparency report page.

This data seems to be arousing a lot of interesting debates as if countries oppose user data collection by Google and later on request Google for user data then the whole process would need to be talked over by individual Governments.

Even as many feel that this may hurt their online privacy, the Google official blog states that Google still remains committed to data liberation and also that they don’t sell your information, or share it externally without the user’s permission unless in dire consequences like a court order.

Given all these facts and details how Google are going to cope with privacy laws of nation and how users are going to react to it will be one of the modern day dramas to unfold online soon.

Tags: Google cookies, Google Privacy Policy, Google privacy policy issues

Google’s miserable failure on Paid links

Google recently penalized lot of websites that were buying links. In this process some sites were penalized even though they don’t buy links. Google’s new algorithm that detects paid links is a miserable failure according to me. So many sites got affected and even 2 or 3 our sites got affected. We never bought links for our client sites but 2 sites were affected because it looks like the backlinks were bought. The pattern of our links are no-where the same as the paid links that others get for their sites but still we lost 5 or 10 places for some important keywords. I can understand an automated algorithm cannot be 100% accurate in detecting paid links but they should also be careful before pulling the plug. I feel more manual review should happen so that the sites affected are really buying links and not just because their backlink pattern might look similar to a site that buys links for top ranking. The worse thing here is so many sites that are buying links got away with it and the sites that never bought links got caught. I hope Google is more careful with their buying links algorithm in future.

Are embedded links in widgets ethical?

Google and other search engines have always stressed for people to get only natural links. The whole link based algorithm depends a lot on natural links. Scientists wrote link based algorithm because links are natural and more reliable. Talking about widget embedded links this has been in debate for a long time. Search engines always have mixed opinion on this.

Embedding links in widgets has been in existing from the day widgets were introduced. Statcounter.com a world famous tracking company which provides free tracking were PR 10 because of the links embedded in their counter. Seeing this people started this natural usage of links in a commercial way. People started approaching commercial counter companies to embed their links when free counters are distributed in exchange for a payment. Lots of companies got temporary benefit from it but the search engines immediately woke up to the occasion. An SEO company which did this as part of their link building strategy was completed banned from Google’s search engine. Also Google started implementing link based penalties like the -60 penalty for sites that use widgets to embed links. Even we were affected a bit but later recovered. So is this ethical? . In my opinion I feel the user should know that the link is embedded into the widget code as long as they know it its fine. But if the links are embedded without the user’s knowledge then it’s wrong. I feel search engines too have similar view. People should have the ability to embed the link or remove it or make it no-follow. If they can do it I am confident the search engines will accept it whole heartedly.

Tags: Link Building, SEO

Google’s blind eye towards paid links:

Recently we are seeing more and more websites buying links casually to get their rankings boosted. Google who is opposing paid links openly are nowadays showing a blind eye towards mass link buying. We are a SEO company but we always stay away from buying links or recommend clients not to buy links. Its because we know that buying links are the biggest plague to hurt the search engines but the search engines seem to not realize it.

Yahoo is the only search engine which is serious about link buyers. Google seem to be never interested. They keep saying they want to fight it algorithmically and in this process they ban some innocent sites. Almost a year back our ranking got devalued because Google thought our widget links are paid links and devalued our rankings (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php ) .

More and more people resort to link buying these days. Almost all clients who come to us for SEO and have done SEO before have paid links to their site placed by previous SEO companies. So is automated detection working? I see it a big failure people just find innovative ways to hide links from Google’s algorithmic detection and the result it hurts Google.

I expect Google to take more action on buying links since it hurts people like us who don’t buy links. Our clients push us hard to buy links but still we stay away to stay within Google guidelines. If Google continues to show blind eye towards paid links companies like us too with resort to buying links since we don’t have an ethical option to tackle aggressive competition.

Is Caffeine search results live?

Google caffeine update datacenter was under test mode for months. Now Google has taken down the datacenter and many people feel caffeine results are now live in Google.com. I have to disagree on this I don’t see any significant movement in our sites or our client sites. We did see lot of changes in caffeine datacenter and none of them are visible in Google.com results.

We are expecting Caffeine results to be live because we had some cool ranking boost in that test datacenter

Gmail down and the internet is buzzing already

I thought i will be one of the first few people to blog about gmail being down as of now for about 45 minutes. But its all over internet now almost 75,000 webpages are covering it already.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&ie=UTF-8&q=gmail+down&btnG=Search+Blogs

And now we have an update from Google’s official Gmail blog

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/todays-gmail-problems.html

Gmail down – Cannot access Gmail now

This is the 2nd time Gmail is down in the past 15 days. I cannot access gmail now and even my friends in India and USA cannot access gmail. I am surprised because gmail is the No.1 email provider now and i wonder why Google is not taking this serious.

It has been down now for more than 10 minutes which is a big surprise. Seeing the millions of users around the world i am surprised how much work and email time they loose. I hope Google fixes this soon. Is this some sort of ddos attack on Google?

Google

Error

Server ErrorThe server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.

Google gets all the bashing but why?

From what I have seen in forums and blogs Google gets so much bashing for something they do to defend their algorithm. Why do people do that? Don’t they ever know they wouldn’t have been doing SEO for their sites to rank in Google if Google never exist?

I have been watching Google ever since I started my online Business. I have seen major Google updates for a period of over 7 years almost all the updates were aimed at protecting their algorithm and getting rid of Spam and sites that entertain aggressive search engine ranking tactics. Today Google has changed into a highly quality search engine with good results. If they were not targeting the aggressive search engine optimization people they will not be what they are today.

Hottest topic in today’s SEO world is the Google’s ability to detect and penalize paid links. Whether you buy it or sell it if you get caught by Google police you are gone. Once in a SEOmoz post Matt cuts replied to Rebecca’s post where he talks about natural links being like very strong tires and paid or other artificial links as week tubes / tires than can burst any time. It’s actually true and from what I have seen every site that got affected for links had some sort of problem with artificial links.

Personal experience

Our own site had some problem with Google rankings when we created the search engine promotion widget and got lots of backlinks without knowing we were abusing it. Then we were hit with ranking filter which prevented our site from being in top 10. Did we whine? Well know personally we were not aware that widget links can hurt a site. We were not abusing the system in any way with widgets we spent money on our widgets and the only way we get back our investment is by links. We do that for all our tools but Google never complained on it but when we redirected the links from widgets to our Homepage Google algorithm got angry with our site and reduced our rankings.

What did we do?

We never whined we made all the widget links optional no-follow, cleaned up some links to homepage, removed link to homepage and added it to the widget page directory, checked for any other potential problem with our website and submitted a re-consideration review and in 1 month we were back in rankings.

So was Google wrong with our website?

Ofcourse no even though we thought widget links when not abused will not affect rankings still we shouldn’t have linked to the homepage with keywords. It’s our mistake and Google has every right to make us regret for this mistake their own way. But Google were nice, in fact very nice after rectifying our mistake and explaining them we got back to rankings. So Google definitely want us back in their rankings. Over 4000 people use our SEO tools (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm ) and out of that almost 2000 come from search engines. Google knows that and they know our tools get lot of traffic from them and they are happy to send people because people like it.

We don’t come under link buying / selling category

We never bought a single link to our site almost all of them are links to our tools, widgets and some custom built links through articles, directories, blogging etc. We don’t buy links but still hit with a link buying / selling detection algorithm. Was Google wrong in doing this? Ofcourse no why because abusing a widget Is same like buying links. Those links are not editorially given links, people linked to us in exchange for our widget. They didn’t link to our homepage because they liked our site. We understand / I understand and when everyone in our company understands Google’s position we are all good with anything Google decides. But not everyone take it that way I see so much Google bashing out there when something Google does to protect itself and its algorithm.

Being SEO is nothing to be proud of.

Some people think SEO is something great and they are the best in the world. I’ll tell you in Google point of view most of the SEOs are very close to spammers. Not everyone but most I said, including places like SEOmoz which is popular among SEOs discuss so much link buying / selling. Even Rand fishkin is an active support of Text-link-ads and he also supports buying / selling links for ranking. If this industry supports so much text link buying / link selling for ranking purposes and Google tries to defend itself is it wrong? For most SEOs yes Google is wrong. I would call that **** ****. Without Google you would have never existed, who are you to give commands to Google? The massive improvement by Google in transparency with webmasters and Google has helped webmasters a lot. But still webmasters and SEOs want more and more. They don’t want Google to penalize link buying, selling and other sort of aggressive and abusive link building tactics. I would say better leave the SEOs to run the search engine they know how difficult it is. Even the so called Google supporters abuse the search engines when they loose rankings. If you lost your ranking see the mistake you did. Rectify your mistakes, fix them and ask Google to reconsider rather than whining that Google is useless.

Confession from a SEO.

I am in this industry for more than 7 years. Am I proud to be a SEO? No never this industry is hated by so many people including the search quality engineers themselves. I am passionate about search engines I like them, I like the miracle algorithm that works behind it, I like all the PHDs. I personally wanted to become a scientist which never happened. I want to be friends of search engineers not for SEO benefit but to admire and gain knowledge from the wonderful work they do. I sometimes wonder why I came into this SEO industry. Truth I came into SEO from my programming background only for the money involved. This industry has so much money involved than programming and web design. People will pour money if they get good business from search engines. I have seen that practically in some PPC campaigns our company handles. Some big clients spend around 100,000$ a month for PPC. Though ‘not the same case in SEO still the rewards are high. But I am always looking alternate ways because I am not the bad guy type who goes after money. I like to earn money in a way everyone appreciates. Not in a way everyone glares at you. To all the SEOs out there realize the type of work you are doing and please give respect to my loveable search engine. If Google never existed I wouldn’t be here running a Business in SEO. Love Google and appreciate everything they do whether its right or wrong. Everyone appreciates if Google does something right and everyone bashes if they do something harsh to protect their algorithm. Love Google and all its efforts.

My suggestion to all the SEOs and newbie’s (so called SEOs out there) . Google is a search engine for people it’s not for you to play with.

Is Google penetrating our secret lives?

Many of us are not aware how much we get addicted to Google and its products. I personally use Google search, Gmail, Google reader for reading my favorite blogs, Google images, Product search, Google Maps and much more Google products. Virtually you can say most of my internet experience in around Google search engine. It’s not just because I am Google addict. It’s also because SEO is my lively hood. I spend most of my time in internet and Google.
But doing all these most of us forget, Google is tracking every activity of us using cookies and other technologies. So more we use Google and its products more our privacy is invaded. I suspect a big YES. We all know Google needs to collect information from its visitors to keep its search engine going efficiently, if any of our sites use Google analytics it’s important they track down every detail possible for their Analytics users. Similarly every product has a catch for itself. Google has a reason always to spy on us for each of its products. So is this something to worry about? If someone is spying on you will be happy to let it go? Don’t you think you will get disturbed it’s true that more you use Google products more they spy at you? But it’s their duty you cannot blame them but you need to be aware that Google knows what you are doing.
The most penetrating and efficient Google spy tool is the Google Pagerank display on the Google toolbar. If you enable PageRank display on Google toolbar for each and every web page or website you visit the toolbar needs to query the Google datacenter to get its PageRank. So Google knows each and every page you are visiting. Most of us who are aware of this either turn of the PageRank display or turn off the Toolbar itself when we are surfing for personal or sensitive information. Its not just me who is concerned on Google’s penetration there are lots of discussion on blogs and forums about this issue. Most of the people conclude by saying if you are worried about privacy don’t use products that invade your privacy. That is the reason many corporate don’t allow emails like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc. Only corporate emails are allowed to be used. Some companies even ban search engine usage to protect privacy. I recently came across an interesting theory in a forum on Google’s privacy invasion. A user posts
“Google’s Algorithm has changed to the point where it now tracks every user by IP address, so for example if you are searching for a specific search term or browsing a website running AdSense ads, then it will log the sites you visit or terms you search for and display matching ads to you regardless of what website you visit. I think this is one of the reasons why people often see irrelevant ads on their websites. Google is refining their technique and logging all of our activity individually. I also believe Google has a way of rating the relevance of each users visit, for example Google might pay AdSense account holders for clicks based on criteria around the kinds of sites a person visits prior to arriving at their site.

I will provide a better example; A person that visits Gamespot.com and then clicks on a link to Netflix from Gamespot might result in a publisher earning .10-.20 cents for that click, however a person that has visited moviereviews.com and then went to Gamespot and then clicked the Netflix link might result in a publisher earning .20-.30 cents for the click since the chance of an actual sale is increased. “
Even he agrees it’s just a theory but it looks dangerous and little bit possible. Also you should look at the most interesting Google flu trends search.
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Here Google will show the spread of flu in certain parts of the world monitoring the searches arising from those places for flu related keywords. This is one example what Google can do with the data it collects I am sure we can see something similar to this a lot in future.
What I am telling Google users is that be aware that you are being monitored for everything you do in Google. Even if you don’t have cookie enabled still there are lots of ways Google will collect your data. What is important is the awareness that’s required when using internet and Google.
Good Luck.

Does Google’s crawler active on one day compared to another day?

There are few people who report Google is indexing pages more on weekdays than weekends, also it seems Google’s traffic in much more in first 3 weekdays than towards weekends or Fridays.
I do agree with the traffic point its obvious that weekdays are much more popular than weekends. People tend to use computers more on weekdays especially from work places. We monitor a lot of websites and the pattern remains the same.

But for pages indexed I don’t buy the argument. If you see more pages indexed on some weekdays it could just be a coincidence. What I have seen when Google indexes pages it keeps them in its index for a long time. So when a page is indexed on say Monday it will still remain on Saturday. So the numbers should virtually remain same as of Monday. But from what I have seen, sometimes lot of crawling happens on weekends and sometimes it happens on weekdays. I don’t see much difference; I think it has to be mostly with the person who operates the crawlers.