Does Googlebot crawl videos:

Recently I have noticed surge in videos from YouTube ranking for competitive phrases. If you see YouTube page all you see is a video without proper text, few comments shown and all other are just junk data. So here are my questions?

1. How a video ranks on top of Google results when it doesn’t have any proper optimization done or it just has keywords in title.

2. How does Google determine the content of a video? Does it have a program that somehow analyzes the video and evaluates its content, even when there are no spoken or written words, as in this case. Or does a Google employee actually watch the video and personally evaluate its content?,

Doing a bit of more searches I feel Google will be seeing the popularity of the video, real backlinks coming to the video, no of instances the video has been embedded etc.

Google can also see the comments and valuate the quality of the video some videos attract 1000s of comments so I feel Google will have ability to crawl all the comments though many contents are hidden.

Also the quality of the domain itself matters youtube.com is PR 9 domain which signals very high level importance and popularity in Google’s eyes. You can expect pages under youtube.com to rank because of the quality of YouTube domain.

Video views can also signal Google that the video is important.

In fact only Google knows the algorithm behind ranking YouTube videos. I will leave it to them.

Google introduces broader keyword suggestions and longer snippets:

Google on 24th march released a new technology that can better understand concepts and associations related to the search done by end users, this advancement will help provide more related keyword suggestions on top and bottom of the search result pages.
Example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Longer snippets in Google results page:

Now Google in offering longer snippets for longer queries. A snippet is the dark blue title and is followed by few lines of text which was previously indexed from your website. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word “sun” in context, suggesting that the page doesn’t talk about Earth’s distance from the sun:

Unable to get rid of potential penalty?

You know your site is penalized. You cleaned up what you thought was the trigger. Filed re-inclusion request. After that you are in the dark. The chances are you never get reincluded-

– Your site might never have had a problem to begin with. It might have been one of those Google’s freak collateral damage issues that landed you in the soup.

– You correctly identified the issue, cleaned it up, filed a request, but you are in the mandatory penalty period, which you don’t know is how long and when will it end.

– You haven’t identified the problem or have partly addressed it and Google wants you to do more, a fact you are not aware of and are waiting endlessly for the penalty to end.

– It might never have been a penalty by Google’s definition, but an algorithmic tweak that has affected a select set of keywords. If the overall traffic hasn’t been affected drastically, perhaps a perceived penalty might belong to this category.

– Your site is affected (penalized or algorithmically tweaked), you undertake damage control efforts, file a request to Google citing what might have been the problem that you addressed, which might be a news to Google! So, they use the stick you gave to beat you.

It might just be best to clean up issues that you are aware of and leave the rest to destiny.
Google penalties are vague and sometimes affect high quality sites I feel best is to go for re-inclusion requests.

Is Google devaluing forums:

Several people have reported that Google is devaluing forums and not indexing them well these days. I did notice something similar in couple of forums we monitor. Google stopped indexing our PHPBB forums. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn’t index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.
My rankings of what is already indexed didn’t drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. And yes, we checked: our board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn’t display any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-February than in November-December. It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has “better things to crawl”. Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.
We did some research on few of the other PHPBB sites we monitor, and even those boards faces the same situation. I suspect this could just be a temporary glitch with Google. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Google and Brand Authority

A webmaster world member has started a discussion whether Google is giving brand authority to certain results. When you say Brand Authority it means if you are the top brand for that particular search you will be ranking for that term.

For example:

Keyword: Laptop
#1 – Apple
#2 – Dell

Keyword: High Speed Internet
#1 – ATT
#2 – Comcast

Keyword: Quit Smoking
#1 – SmokeFree.gov
#2 – CDC.gov

I have seen this in many cases there are some keywords where a top brand for that keyword ranks even if their website is all flash or just a splash page. Google’s Eric Schmidt has already said there needs to be some sort of Authority / Social Buzz for a top brand to rank. Its not just about onpage factors or offpage factors for top brands if a particular brand is top on a particular search I am sure they will be ranking atleast for Google. I wonder how Google does this they always say their results don’t have manual intervention but it seems to make a top brand rank without proper web popularity should come from some extra ordinary human based algorithm. Most top brands have good offline popularity but not web popularity but still they rank well for their phrases.

Google says its not just about factors influencing the site alone but the social media factor also boosts top brands. Especially this year many users begin to notice brand authority. Probably google has figured out a way to make the top brands rank for their corresponding keywords. The real question are Google users happy to see their top brands on top of Google results for major keywords if yes I don’t think Google need to worry how they get them out there. Users come first and I feel most users are happy to see top brands on top of results for brand related keywords.

Does meta descriptions still helping in Google?

Meta descriptions were never ignored by any search engines. It’s the meta keywords tag that got booted for over spamming. Meta description tag is still very important for major search engines especially Google. Google had long stated that they don’t use meta description for ranking purpose but are using it only for snippet purposes. But this snippet is what your users see so its important to make sure it has the right combination of keywords as well as marketing strength. Most people prefer to use their phone numbers directly on title or meta description tag this is an effective way but you might loose the chance of adding some important phrases if you are adding too much marketing words so make sure you also include good keywords you are targeting. Google will try to relate the keywords on your page with meta description tag to valuate the effectiveness and accuracy before it shows up in search engines. So better have good keywords on the description tag.

Google does take lot of effort and show in your webmaster tools whether you have duplicate descriptions if Google is taking so much care I am sure it considers meta description tag important. For one client who came to us recently his site never had any meta descriptions written Google was able to figure out something from his page but it looked really bad. Google took the menu of his site as the description and it looked spammy so better write good descriptions so Google will use it.

Remember Google’s algorithm and search is very complicated and they need to return results from billions of pages within a fraction of a second. So when they get a query first they try to find relevancy from meta description and then they go to the actual page. Better the meta description faster the results will be. Also Meta description helps in increasing click through rates if they are written well. To conclude write what is best for your users search engines will endorse that for sure.

An experimental search tools launched by Google

Google started as a search engine company and from that time it is working as same. But on January 12th, 2009 Company released a new quick search box for Macs that aims “to make it jus as easy to search outside your browser.”

The quick search box included in Google desktop is similar to command button that comes up anytime you double-click. But according to Google result it says it is similar to the Google Mobile App for the iphone. This search box is more experimental.

Google says it works fairly well but a bit faster than the Apple’s own spotlight search feature. Google search box includes more web result, which people no doubt spend more time for it than something else on their computers.

This new tools allows you with the option to make search in the specific area.

You can see the new Google search box on Google Code Page.

Few things which Google should do with this New Year

I want Google to introduce few more services and product this year and I wish new services and product to be like

• To connect all services and apps together. I mean when you Gmail your photo to your friend, I want Google to upload the same to Picasa Web also. And allow more integration and more space on Picasa Web.

• Google presentation should be compatible with PowerPoint. It should allow saving and editing of pdf attach from Gmail to Gdocs.

• Google should allow users to get OpenId like blogger for Google accounts and Google Apps.

• Profiles of Google should be expanded and integrated like face book.

• Google sites should be more or less similar to blogger and allow html, scripts and iframes. It should allow posting no. of comment like blogger comment function.

• Google should chrome for Mac.

• It should digitize more of old newspaper around the world.

• It should also digitize microfilm and books from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, UT.

• There should be sitemaps for images so that it helps to get more images into image search with keywords site owners provide.

• Google should update Google Music search to include videos and song samples. Google should allow graphical AdSense ads but excluding animations.

• Google should introduce separate drive call GDrive. More and more coverage in Google Earth is required.

• Google should allow the user to send even Exe files from Gmail.

• Synchronization of Itunes/iPhone to google calendar.

• Other thing that I always wanted to see from them is a tool to locate and integrate datasets with similar axes, and then build reports and graph based on them and grand central coverage in UK and Europe.

• I want see a much better bookmark manager.

• A Google should have a central console which would contain all the Google web applications a user uses, so he logs on to the console, one button pressed would open whichever application he chooses within a shell so it easy to swop in between.

• It should gears support for Gmail and calendar.

• There should be integration between Grand Central and Gmail contacts.

• They should improve Android in order to support more than one Google Apps accounts.

• Google to take over Microsoft so that we can make a even better operating system. SMS support in Gmail for India.

• There should be Community chat room in Orkut.

• They should now introduce movies in you tube. There should be transparency in how they rank, search results is the only long term way to prove that they are not tampering with search engine to make more money.

These are the few wish which I want the Google to fulfill it as soon as possible this will help more and more users to use G-products.

Google webmaster holiday ideas

Google compiled a list of quick and simple tips for websites preparing for the holiday rush. For online and offline retailers, we understand that your website is a big part of your business, especially this time of year. Whether it’s to make the sale online or to increase foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location, your web presence is a critical part of your business plan. The tips below are fast, free, and can make a big difference.Verify that your site is indexed by Google (and is returned in search results)Check your snippet content and page titles with the site: command [site:example.com] — do they look accurate and descriptive for users? Ideally, each title and snippet should be unique in order to reflect that each URL contains unique content. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools. There you can see which URLs on your site show duplicate titles or meta descriptions.
Label your images accurately

Don’t miss out on potential customers! Because good ‘alt’ text and descriptive filenames help us better understand images, make sure you change non-descriptive file names [001.jpg] to something more accurate [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of our largest search properties, so you should take advantage of it.Know what Google knows (about your site)Check for crawl errors and learn the top queries that bring traffic to your site through Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.Have a plan for expiring and temporary pagesMake sure to serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you no longer sell a product, serve a 404. If you have changed a product page to a new URL, serve a 301 to redirect the old page to the new one. Keeping your site up-to-date can help bring more targeted traffic your way.Increase foot traffic tooIf your website directs customers to a brick-and-mortar location, make sure you claim and double check your business listing in Google Local.
Usability 101Test the usability of your checkout process with various browsers. Ask yourself if a user can get from product page to checkout without assistance. Is your checkout button easy to find?

Message center info through Google API

The webmaster tool has just launched the Message Center GData API as a part of webmaster tools API. For those of you that are not familiar with GData, it’s a protocol for reading and writing Data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like webmaster tools. The webmaster tool GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of webmaster tools, such as setting graphic location or your preferred domain. If your site targets user in a particular geographic location, you can actually use our geographic tool to provide us with information that will help us determine your site appears in our country-specific search results and also improve our search result for geographic queries. This feature can be used only with the top-level domain, such as .com or .org. and if no information is entered in webmaster tools, we will continue to make geographic association largely based on top level domain and the IP address of the web server from which the context was served.
The webmaster tool GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit sitemaps programmatically. With the help of these webmaster tool GData API you can also access and update site-specific information. This is useful when you have large number of sites. With the webmaster tool API you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.
This message center is nothing but just to get personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Initially the message will refer to search quality issues, but over time we’ll use the message center as a communication channel for more types of information. For our webmaster outside US we are also pleased to tell you that message center is capable of providing in all supported webmaster tools languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Korean, Japanese, etc.), across all countries.
Until now you were only able to access through the Message Center section of webmaster tools but now you can access even through GData. This way you don’t need to continually check your messages in webmaster tools, you can retrieve the messages feed automatically and be informed as soon as possible of any critical issues regarding your sites.

Source: Google Webmaster central blog