dimanche 27 mars 2011

Code For America

If you don?t already know about Code For America, I highly recommend you read about the initiative. As a web geek myself, I find it to be an incredible program and see it as an essential part of advancing this technology that literally has changed the world.�Below is an article�originally published by Jolie O?Dell on Mashable. It?s a great description of the CFA Fellowship Program.


Code For America Calls For Hackers With Hearts of Gold for 2012 Fellowships


Code For America seeking devs for its 2012 Fellowship Program, a year of public service that puts coders to work for communities.

The fellowship gives developers, researchers, entrepreneurs and designers a chance to build customized web and mobile apps for communities and governments. Their work is used to solve pervasive public problems and connect citizens to governments. Each app built will be open sourced, as well.

The 2012 fellowship will be the second annual program of its kind. This year, recent graduates are encouraged to file early decision applications, which would allow for better planning of internships, employment or continued education. Those applicants would be notified of CfA?s decision by May 1, 2011.

Early decision applications are due April 15, 2011, and all other applications are due August 1, 2011. Would-be fellows can�apply now on Code for America?s website.

Last year, the fellowship program had room for�20 fellows, and more than 350 applications were received. Given the�stature of government applicants for the second cycle, competition is expected to be even more fierce this year.

Fellows in the year-long program will receive a living-wage stipend, travel expenses and healthcare. They?ll also get leadership training, networking opportunities and future career support in the form of guaranteed interviews at top web companies.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Web Development

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Source: http://www.sq1agency.com/blog/?p=2563

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Police Guilty of Server Arrest

February 2nd, 2011 by John

The Home Office launched a new initiative through www.police.co.uk on February 1, whereby visitors could log onto the site and search for crime statistics in their neighbourhood by entering their postcode. Unsurprisingly, the site crashed within minutes as over four million people tried visiting at once.

Approximately 75,000 people a minute tried accessing the service as soon as it was launched, leading to bugs, glitches and crashes. The Home Office recognised the problems and urged people to ?keep trying?.

Sorry Home Office, but that simply doesn?t wash with us. The interest in this project was huge, as underlined by a statement from site developers Rock Kitchen Harris, based in Leicester: ?The site is down at the moment but it is being resolved. It has had a lot of interest, more than we expected due to the high media coverage.?

The Home Office have launched a new online crime statistics service

There have also been varying levels of satisfaction in regard to the figures being shown on the website, with some people saying that the figures are a wild, inaccurate view of their street, and that their communities are being misrepresented. That?s a problem for the Home Office to sort out, though. What we want to read the riot act over is the Home Office?s poor planning before the site?s launch.

Who doesn?t want to know if their street is safe or not? An official crime statistics service from the Home Office was always going to draw massive traffic to the site, and they should have made sure their servers could cope with such volumes. Our advice is always to have good, speedy servers in an SEO campaign to improve the overall user experience. Site speed has also become an important factor for search engine optimization services, but we?re more concerned with the usability aspects of having a good server.

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Source: http://www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk/seo-blog/about-seo/police-guilty-of-server-arrest.html

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So you think SEO is expensive?

Chatting with a search-marketing expert

Using a search engine like Google or Yahoo is the most common way customers look for products online. Without effective search engine optimization, your business may get left behind.

In a chat with SEO expert Dustin Williams, the recently promoted senior SEO analyst offered some tips for those hoping to market their smaller companies to the next level.

He said that cutting through the cyber-clutter requires your website be near the top of the search results when people search for your product or service online.

?You can build a company, but if nobody knows where it is or how to find it, it?s not going to get business,? Williams said.

Whether you do it yourself or hire an SEO firm, Williams said businesses today cannot afford to not rank highly on the world?s most popular search engines.

The owners of some businesses probably believe that beefing up their company?s presence online will bust their budgets. If they have any money for marketing, it?s probably a very small amount.

But over the telephone, an SEO expert can assess which methods might work best for you.

?If they contact us, we can really assess their needs,? Williams said. ?We can evaluate their website and we can evaluate the competition.?

A small startup company might not have the money to pay a major SEO firm, he explained.

?There are different companies that provide different services at varying costs,? Williams said.

But closely scrutinize any SEO firm before hiring them, he stressed.

?There are a lot of companies out there that promise results but don?t always get it,? he said. ?You need to do some research.?

Hiring a professional is the quickest way to provide your business a noticeable presence on the Internet. One sign of a credible SEO firm is that their website ranks highly on Google.

?If their website ranks high, that?s a great indicator,? Williams said. ?If you?re searching in Google and you can?t find the SEO company, then they can?t do it for themselves.?

Also examine a list of the firm?s clients.

Meanwhile, businesses with time on their hands may try themselves to improve their presence online.

?SEO takes a while to learn to the point where you do it effectively,? Williams said. ?Time is money.?

Generating leads among people who are genuinely interested in your product takes patience and persistence. And staying up to speed on the most current SEO trends is critical.

More important, however, is having strong content on your website. The material should be unique and rich in keywords.

?Google and the other search engines rely on the content on your page,? Williams said.

Using keyword phrases in your copy tells ?the search engine crawlers what the website is all about,? he explained.

Williams made a comparison to a book without any words.

?A book isn?t a book without content,? he said. ?It?s the same idea with the crawler. It has to know what the website is about. If there is no content on the website, there is nothing to tell the crawler what the website is about.?


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Source: http://www.seo.com/blog/seo-expensive/

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vendredi 25 mars 2011

A Marketing Optimization Fitness Plan

According to ClickZ; A Marketing Optimization Fitness Plan

Is your corporate metabolism a bit sluggish? Are you dragged down by the weight of meeting-itis? Do you need more energy and resources to respond to the ever-increasing demands of your customers?

Well I wish I could tell you about the next magical black box, with the persuasive infomercial that promises you miraculous gains without any of the hard work required. If you bought any of these gimmicks before and are tired of their sugar-coated promises and lackluster results, then maybe you are ready to get on the marketing optimization fitness plan.

Here are four exercises that should help you on your way. Don?t worry if you don?t execute perfectly on the first try; the key to this plan is to continuously improve day after day.

Exercise 1: Tweet VP

In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your unique value proposition or unique campaign proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you do a good job of this, you could lower your bounce rates by putting this on every landing page.

You should revisit this regularly and try to improve the power behind each word.

Exercise 2: Reflexive Response Time

Choose one of the following:

A.) If you are an e-commerce retailer, take 10 mystery shoppers and time how long it takes from customer order to fulfillment. Then have each of them contact customer service via e-mail, phone, and Twitter and time how long it takes for them to get a resolution. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve?

B.) If you are a lead generation business, take 10 mystery shoppers and have them complete your lead generation forms. How long until they got their first real response ? not an automated one from an e-mail auto-responder? Keep in mind that a lead loses its effectiveness by six times in the first hour. Now have these ?leads? well-prepared to respond to a sales person?s questions. How long does it take for them to get a real price for your product or service? Then have these leads break into groups and ask tough questions by phone, e-mail, and Twitter or Facebook. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve?

C.) If you are a publisher ? pick a unique story line. How long does it take for your article to be researched and published? How long does it take until they get promoted and socialized on each of the social sites that you participate on? Have some pretty specific new information or corrected information to the article ready and ask your team to revise their article. How long does it take for it to be revised? Have ?subscribers? ask a question each by phone, e-mail, and Twitter. How long did it take to respond? How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve?

Exercise 3: 25 Interesting Things About You/Your Customers

You may have seen this pass-along on Facebook a while back as people started to list 25 interesting things about themselves. Do the same thing for your business and have several people involved in your business do the same. Then find the most interesting ones and use them on your about us page. This will enhance your credibility by adding transparency into your company.

Exercise 4: Metrics Madness

Have each of your team leads in a meeting room with you as you open up your marketing dashboard with your KPIs (key performance indicators). Go through each one and ask them what the team?s plan and role is as each one of those metrics changes by 20 percent up and by 20 percent down. Do they have clear action items? How long would it take for them to respond? Do you have too many KPIs or are your KPIs not clear enough? Can they prioritize these changes effectively?

There are plenty of other exercises you could perform on your way to becoming a marketing optimization fitness fan. Living the lifestyle that performs under pressure, responds to changes rapidly, and serves your customers and business in real-time fashion is just one way to improve your corporate metabolism fitness levels. What else are you doing to stay fit?

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Source: http://www.sq1agency.com/blog/?p=2600

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When to Quit Your Day Job

Our CEO, Mike Mann, is hosting a webinar tomorrow morning on how to become a successful entrepreneur. Join us, and find out if now is the right time to start your own company.

Space is limited, click here to register now.

Mike is going to share his secrets on how he started SEO.com, Phone.com, DomainMarket, BuyDomains, and many other highly-successful, profitable companies.

Are you tired of the mundane 9-5? Have you always wanted to start a business? Now is the time to take control of your own future.

Join Mike Mann, serial entrepreneur and author of ?Make Millions and Make Change, Secrets to Business and Personal Success,? in a candid webinar about how quitting your job might be the best move you could ever make. Mike will discuss:

  • Why quitting your job is necessary to build a profitable business
  • How to know when to quit your job
  • What to know before you quit
  • The real risks of quitting
  • How jobs prevent personal success
  • The power of faith and belief in your ideas

Click here to register today, and begin your path to growing your business.

Date: Thursday, March 10th
Time: 9:00 AM PST (10:00 AM MST)
Length: 30 minutes



Source: http://www.seo.com/blog/quit-day-job/

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OpenTable for Restaurants

Watch Grovo?s lesson on OpenTable for restaurants to get your restaurant on OpenTable.com and use the site?s restaurant management software.

Check out the rest of Grovo?s lessons to learn how restaurant goers utilize OpenTable.

Source: http://www.grovo.com/blog/2011/03/opentable-for-restaurants/

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mercredi 23 mars 2011

Director of Bing Discusses Holistic Search and Clickstream Data - Whiteboard Friday

Rand:�� �Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we have a very special guest with us, Stefan Weitz, director of Bing.

Stefan:�� �How are you doing?

Rand:�� �Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.

Stefan:�� �Sure.

Rand:�� �Really appreciate it.

Stefan:�� �It's on the way home. It's actually better for me this way.

Rand:�� �So, Stefan has two great distinctions. Number one, you were recently honored best hair at Bing. Is that right?

Stefan:�� �That was actually true and it was by mistake. One day I woke up and I had long hair and then I was afraid of getting scissors near my head and so I won't cut it now.

Rand:�� �That's phenomenal. And second, you are tasked with dealing with messy cleanup from incorrect PR that happens on the Internet and in major media sources.

Stefan:�� �Sometimes PR that I actually create. It's like job security over and over again.

Rand:�� �That's great. Well, let's see if we can't create some job security for you here today on Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:�� �I'm sure we can.

Rand:�� �So we are going to get into some of the clickstream topics, but the first thing I actually wanted to chat about is something that you and I were talking about before this session. I think it will be of big interest to a lot of webmasters. So Bing obviously is gaining some nice market share, having a significant impact. Clearly Google is thinking you guys are more and more of a threat, which has got to feel a little flattering. It's got to be a nice feeling.

Stefan:�� �Well, I mean certainly it's good to know that. I mean, no one's really gained share against Google since Google launched. And look, they do a phenomenal job and they have for years and they've served us well for over a decade. So, yeah, it's nice to see us actually, between us and our Yahoo-powered search or the search that we power for Yahoo as well, I mean, you're talking between 26 and 30 percent of queries are now served by a Bing engine, which is great. The engineers love to see their work being used. There's nothing worse as engineers, as we all know, than writing something that never gets used.

Rand:�� �Oh boy. I can tell you some frustrations we've had on that front. Now, in terms of Bing and Google, one of the things that is really interesting is this New York Times story that came out this past weekend around JCPenney. So a search consultant was using Open Site Explorer, digging through the backlinks . . .

Stefan:�� �Nice plug.

Rand:�� �Yeah, it was a nice plug. Oh yeah, I have to plug SEOmoz on Whiteboard Friday. That's very important.

Stefan:�� �Okay. Make sure we're clear on that.

Rand:�� �So they're digging through these backlinks and they're finding a lot of what look like manipulative and paid links that apparently an agency that JCPenney had hired to do some search marketing work for them had purchased to help inflate their ranks. And for a year plus, or nine months plus, they'd been ranking number one, number two, number three at Google and fairly well, reasonably well on Bing, for most of this time for a lot of big searches. So one of the big ones we talked about was "dresses" and "bedding" and these kinds of generic terms. So the New York Times writes this article. That afternoon, Google sort of responds and says, "Hey, we're taking some punitive action against them." In the article they talked about this.

Stefan:�� �A penalty basically, yeah.

Rand:�� �Now, we did a search right before this Whiteboard started, and we searched for "JCPenney dresses."

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �And JCPenney is not in the top three results.

Stefan:�� �That's where it got weird for me, actually. I mean, look, I get . . . there are certainly, it's well within Google's rights to say, hey, we want to manually penalize a domain for any number of reasons. That happens. We generally don't like to use a lot of manual re-ranking. We like to try it algorithmically if we can because that just seems like it's actually a more scalable fashion. But you're right. What's happening here, I think, is they've kind of gone a little too far down the path of penalization. Because literally as we looked at, "JCPenney dresses," probably the best P1 result would be JCPenney's dress site, I would think. Right?

Rand:�� �Right.

Stefan:�� �And now it doesn't appear anywhere on that P1, page 1.

Rand:�� �And in fact, I think the fourth result is like their mobile page, which is sort of a weird result to have in the web search.

Stefan:�� �Yeah.

Rand:�� �And this is happening because of this penalization system. One of the things that is really curious, I think, for a lot of webmasters, how are Bing and Google ever going to beat this problem on a macro scale?

Stefan:�� �That's an excellent question. So, there's a couple ways. There is the kind of short-term thing we're looking at from the ranker itself. Like, are there particular classes of link farms that we know are of low quality? Can we kind of apply some kind of discount to links that are coming in from what appear to be low-quality link farms? There's stuff we can do there, which we'll do too. We'll all look at these methods to figure out . . .

Rand:�� �There's a lot of machine learning that goes into that process, to say like here's a big set of what we think are spam links.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �So as a webmaster, you better not look like spam, either the spam that exists today or the spam that's going to exist tomorrow because a classifier is going to catch that.

Stefan:�� �That's right. And this is a machine, right? And so you could get ostensibly swept up into one of these categories, right? We actually had someone mail us, a couple weeks ago, who had a site that actually looked like it may have been a spam site. It actually wasn't, but it had a lot of characteristics of what we consider them to be and so she was getting a penalty it looked like on her site. And so we said, "Okay, we can't tell you exactly what to fix, obviously, but here's some things you ought to look at." So there are some things that are happening there.

But, I think, if we go a little bit further, there are two things. We, Google, everyone, Yahoo, Bing, we all use human judges to kind of measure relevancy.

Rand:�� �Right. Google has this big worldwide distributed team of search quality raters, and you guys have a team as well.

Stefan:�� �Same thing. HRS, yeah, same thing, and so human raters actually look at this. The challenge we have, we were looking over the weekend, all the engineers, we were all in threads over the weekend looking at this problem and we said, gosh, you know the problem is for bedding, the JCPenney result wasn't bad to a human. Maybe it shouldn't have been P1, but P4? I don't know. Actually if you ask a human to say, "Is this a good result?" They go, "Yeah, it's actually pretty good."

Rand:�� �So this is why you're not going to get spam quality raters who are saying, oh, JCPenney ranks first for bedding, complain and spam report.

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �No. JCPenney seems perfectly reasonable.

Stefan:�� �That's right. And so if we took it all the way out, we actually realize that you likely would decrease any CG or the kind of cumulative gain that we get as we measure relevance. So if you yank it out, you actually then, people go, "Wait, where did JCPenney go? They sell bedding." And so it's one of those weird things actually to try to correct for when you have a situation like this.

But in the longer term, this really points to the bigger challenge with search, which is stopping thinking of search as just a way to navigate the collection of links across the Web. Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and page rank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term.

Rand:�� �And you think that this model of anchor text, page rank, or in Bing's case static rank and diversity of incoming domains, that's going to fade out to something else? Or it's going to be bolstered by other things?

Stefan:�� �Yeah. I think that'll be around for a long time. So don't worry. You don't have to like go and sell off. Don't call up Rand and say, "I want out." That's all fine. I don't know. I always think of you as . . .

Rand:�� �That I sell links? Really?

Stefan:�� �No. You know orange is Bing's color. That's why I took the color.

But there are signals beyond this. That'll be for a long time. But what we're looking at, and the example I was using today with some engineers was, you do a query ? not to pimp Bing here ? but if you do a query for, say, shoes on Bing, we actually . . . the first answer now, we actually fire off what's called a visual search gallery, which basically is a way to navigate 3,000 pairs of shoes using a more familiar visual metaphor. So you can say, "Okay, I actually want high heels. I want patent leather. I want black."

It's kind of like applying metadata to your query, and it actually rejiggers the results in real time based on what it is you're trying to do. Because in many cases, people do come to engines and they put in one word, they put in two words, very ambiguous. "Shoes" is a horrible query, right? But we get a lot of that. So the question really is do we just take "shoes" and just try to throw back everything we can against that word, which of course is going to be fraught with problems.

Rand:�� �Right. Shoes.com. Online shoes. Shoe store.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, exactly. Is that the right thing? Really, is something that ambiguous actually calling out for a more reasonable approach where we say, "What do you mean?" Kind of like if you and I were talking and I would say, "Shoes." And you go, "What? What, like dress shoes? What are you asking? Do you want to buy shoes?" So we have conversations. And today, engines, they kind of fail. They're very autonomic. They're kind of an in and out type transaction. And we think, with things like Visual Search, we're able to actually start to say, "Okay, great. What do you really mean with that query," and try to pivot and help people refine.

Rand:�� �So Google's got kind of on the left side those related searches or search suggestions. You guys have search suggestions.

Stefan:�� �I think the left and the top. On the top. We actually do an answer bar at the top. Those are interesting ways of conversation modes, but we're even looking at ways to go a little further than that without getting into Clippy, which I love Clippy, but not everyone loves Clippy. So something like that without being annoying.

Rand:�� �I always worry that people are going to think Roger, our mozBot, is Clippy-like.

Stefan:�� �Oh, you know what? Can we borrow him for our . . .

Rand:�� �You totally can. We have a current asking price. I'll let you know after this Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:�� �So there's that. Longer term, we're looking at how we think of the Web really as a representation of the physical world itself. So we understand that, the weird example I was giving you earlier, "Inception" is a movie. You and I understand that "Inception" is a movie. We understand "Inception" as a movie has a certain number of characteristics. Movies have reviews. They have show times. They have previews. They have trailers. They have pictures. They have conversations on Twitter.

Rand:�� �So are you saying, from a marketer's standpoint, let me imagine that this is the knowledge that I've got about "Inception." It's a movie. Do I then want to say, "Oh, I should make sure that a page about 'Inception' of mine has things like information about who is acting in it and maybe a video of the preview or the trailer and reviews and data like that and that it's in the movie realm rather than just being the page on the Internet with the most inbound links that say 'Inception.'"

Stefan:�� �Yeah, because honestly, what's going to happen is . . . we just did this, actually, with our last release. We have become much smarter about these objects on the Web. So we do actually know "Inception," and that's a weird example. Think of like, "Casablanca," which actually has multiple editions that have been re-released over the years and there are different release dates.

Rand:�� �And there's an actual city.

Stefan:�� �Exactly, right that too. But now we can begin to say, okay, this "Casablanca" on Netflix is the same "Casablanca" you can buy on Amazon or you can rent on iTunes. That's actually a lot harder than you think because the movie domain is not as clear.

Rand:�� �So this is like an entity association type of algorithm.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, exactly. And so that's what we're going to see more and more search heading towards, we believe, is that us understanding the Web again literally as a representation of the world and not just a bunch of links and pages and static text. That offers up an entirely new way to think about ranking.

Rand:�� �I guess that would be my last question on this before we move on to the clickstream stuff is, as a marketer, what should I be thinking about to be a step ahead as this is coming forward? It sounds like there's naturally going to be some brands who are doing these types of things already. I'm a small website. I'm starting out. I review movies. I want to make sure that Bing and Google know that my stuff is good. What should I be thinking about?

Stefan:�� �Today, all the classification is done in a very machine learned process. Ideally, there are defined microformats you have for a lot of these things. I can see a lot of that coming down the road. Even like Facebook's Open Graph system has a limited amount of RDF.

Rand:�� �Right. I can say, "This is me. Rel=me."

Stefan:�� �Or you can say something like, I forget the actual phrasing, but basically you can say, "This page is about a movie," for example. I would be watching very carefully what standards or even what proposed standards begin to evolve to help describe things that you're working on in a more concrete manner. So if you are selling, let's say your business is selling sheet music of 1930s swing songs, as an example. There will be a time in the not too distant future, in most people's opinion actually, not just mine anymore, where you're able to actually mark up this piece of sheet music that I'm selling. There will be kind of an ontology or some kind of taxonomy which lets the marketers say, this is from, I can't think of composers from the 30s, but some composer ? composer=foo, decade=foo, year=foo ? and actually begin to describe this thing, this object as an object and not as simply a web page, hoping that we crawl and parse it correctly. Because, frankly, crawling and parsing is a very messy, expensive, and inaccurate science.

That's the brave new world. But again, for now, just keep doing great SEO work, but don't buy links.

Rand:�� �Don't buy links. Let's move into another really interesting story around this clickstream stuff. So a couple weeks ago . . . no, I'm sorry. I guess it was about a month and a half ago. So Google built a little honeypot, right? Essentially they say, we think that . . . well, because Google and Bing are both using these signals of clickstream data, Google says we think we can engineer this clever system to catch Bing by using a nonsense word.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �And essentially what they caught you guys doing is not building a system that was robust enough to recognize, oh, when we have very few signals about some random nonsense word, maybe we should be tossing those out because otherwise we could be manipulated in a way that would make us look bad.

Stefan:�� �Right. Yeah, let's do it.

Rand:�� �So let's go with an analogy here. This is a terrible representation of the island of Manhattan, right?

Stefan:�� �Wow.

Rand:�� �So here's maybe here's Central Park. Does that sound . . .

Stefan:�� �That's better. Now I . . .

Rand:�� �Now you're there. Washington Heights right here.

Stefan:�� �My mom grew up in Harlem right over there.

Rand:�� �My sister lived right here for a while. This is kind of fun.

Stefan:�� �Yeah.

Rand:�� �So, navigating the island of Manhattan are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �Maybe even a million vehicles. I'm not exactly sure. There's like 11 million people in the city. So if I get a Bing navigation system, Bing is going to tell me based on traffic patterns and the weather and the time of day which way I should go in New York City. Hang with me, this analogy works.

Stefan:�� �It does work, I think.

Rand:�� �So Bing has this nice satellite that's orbiting up here.

Stefan:�� �This is hypothetical, by the way. There is no Bing satellite watching traffic.

Rand:�� �Right. This is a pure analogy.

Stefan:�� �Everyone is going to be freaking out.

Rand:�� �So there's a satellite that's sort of watching and saying, "Oh here, look at traffic patterns." And Google's got their nice satellite.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. They actually do have one though, watching everything you do.

Rand:�� �That's good to know.

Stefan:�� �I'm sorry. Was that out loud?

Rand:�� �Oh boy, you're going to get into big trouble.

Stefan:�� �There goes that sponsorship.

Rand:�� �So they're both watching all the traffic patterns and what they see is, oh, you know what? The best traffic pattern at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday for a midsize car is to go down the West Side. The East Side is just a mess. Park Avenue, nobody wants to be there, but the West Side, that looks quite good. So they're directing cars this way.

Now, what Google did in this instance, taking this analogy to search is essentially say, "Oh, you know what? It's 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. There's virtually nobody on the road and we're actually going to grab . . . you know what? We're going to make this weird, new three-wheeled blue vehicle that no one has ever seen before and we're going to send them this weird circuitous route. In fact, they're going to have to cross over Central Park and around there." Oh my gosh, just to get down to Wall Street.

And so Bing is monitoring this and they see, all right, well there's one blue car traveling on Christmas Eve at 2:00 a.m. This is the route it takes. And then next Christmas Eve, when a blue car shows up, some Google engineer goes home and gets into his blue car and checks, "Oh look, that's the route that Bing is sending me. They must be . . ." What do they call it?

Stefan:�� �Copying.

Rand:�� �Right, cheating off my test.

Stefan:�� �Yes, copying, cheating.

Rand:�� �It doesn't seem like an entirely accurate analogy, but it's pretty good. Well, the cheating off the test results seems . . . it seems like the kind of way that things are going. So Google and Bing are both looking at where people are going on the Web, what they're clicking on, when they search for something, what do they get to next, what do they seem to be happy with, did they refine those search queries and do other types of searches, can we learn based on that behavior? Seems like a very smart way to go. And you saw, there was an ex-Google engineer who went on Quora and said, "Oh yeah, when I worked at Google, we did exactly the same thing."

Stefan:�� �Oh, yeah. That's kind of what I was so perplexed about is that it's not . . . (a) we've said we've been doing this for years. We've actually, since '07, been doing clickstream analysis. It's an opt-in thing. Again, it's anonymous. People opt-in to it.

Rand:�� �And the Google engineers who checked this, they went home and they installed Internet Explorer with the toolbar and opted in.

Stefan:�� �And opted in, correct.

Rand:�� �So that they would show you guys this data.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. And so what? We made no secret of this at all. This is actually, we think, a very valuable signal to have. Now, that being said, I can tell you, without getting into all the details, it's not a huge signal. It's one of thousands of signals we use to actually calculate PR.

Rand:�� �I bought thousands of Mechanical Turkers and had them all click your results for SEO, and I didn't move one position. So I'm really upset about that.

Stefan:�� �Aw, dammit.

Rand:�� �Because based on what I saw here I thought . . .

Stefan:�� �You thought you could nail them, right?

Rand:�� �I thought I could just get it.

Stefan:�� �So that's the first thing is that we, and Google even themselves uses this data. They are kind of going back and forth if they do or not. But look, we know for deep links, likely they use toolbar plus . . .

Rand:�� �Right, sure. Yeah. If I click that JCPenney search result, there's these other links that pop up there, and they're usually the same ones that people search for most often and click on most often.

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �That's a good customer experience. You actually want to encourage that.

Stefan:�� �Oh, totally.

Rand:�� �They have, I think, they've got a site speed ranking factor as well. How fast is the site? And they'll show you that data in Webmaster Tools and that comes from the toolbar.

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �I think they say it comes from the toolbar inside Webmaster.

Stefan:�� �Oh, well, there you go. I'm not throwing mud at all. I think it's actually a very valuable thing. What was frustrating to me, I think, is just the fact that it was . . . they successfully proved something we've said we've done now for three years, which is great. They've given me a proof.

Rand:�� �Well, to be fair, you guys probably should have written something that said, hey, if someone builds a honeypot and uses these small signals . . . so they've got a little gotcha.

Stefan:�� �Absolutely.

Rand:�� �But I think maybe it was the press who blew it into a pretty big gotcha.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. At the end, it's really, you're right. And we actually were talking to Harry, who kind of runs all engineering for Bing and he's like, "If anything, they helped us kind of find a bug. Maybe we should be throwing out if we only have one signal." Because really, the reason that 7 of the 100 that actually tried the beta with . . . so we actually didn't fire. They gave 100 terms and 93 we didn't actually do anything.

Rand:�� �So they had 100 blue cars.

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �You only tracked a few of them.

Stefan:�� �We tracked all of them because they have clickstream, of course, but we just didn't use the clickstream in our ranker. I would have to look at the probe. Something triggered something somewhere and said, "Even though we have this signal from toolbar, something doesn't feel right. We're not going to fire anything at all." So seven of the hundred actually did, and that was, probably where we had . . . maybe the engineers got a little happy at home and they had a couple gin and tonics and started clicking like crazy on the link and that gave us more data than the other terms. Who knows. But the point is that we think it's a valuable thing to use. We think the behaviors of customers on the Web who have said they want to help improve the product through their usage, we think it's the customer's behavior that they're giving to us to use and refine.

Rand:�� �Well, this would be like in the SEOmoz web app, for example, us saying, "Oh, you know what? When people go from their on page to their ranking report, lots of people are doing that, let's put those tabs right next to each other."

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �Let's do it. It seem pretty natural.

Stefan:�� �One of the arguments that I had heard from people on the Web was, "You just shouldn't be using it. It's just not your data." And I think that the Web was built on this notion of collective intelligence. And frankly, Google has a lot of search data. We know this, right? So to ignore it just because it comes from a competitor, it seems . . .

Rand:�� �Well, you're not just doing this on Google, right? You do it on Yahoo.

Stefan:�� �Oh, yeah. The clickstream, right.

Rand:�� �If somebody searches SEOmoz's website, you'll see that if I use Internet Explorer.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �So it doesn't matter the specific source. Right?

Stefan:�� �That was the big brouhaha.

Rand:�� �So let me ask, from a marketer's perspective. I think a lot of people in search observed this behavior and then said to themselves, "Wait a minute. I can drive blue cars. Can I influence things through the clickstream?" Is that something where you've already seen an uptick in manipulation?

Stefan:�� �There have been attempts, I'm sure. But the reason this was so successful, if you call 7 out 100 successful, was because they were nonsense words, words that no one would ever use.

Rand:�� �Literally zero search volume ever.

Stefan:�� �Precisely. They were made up words. And then Google did a manual re-rank of those in their index. So when you searched for them on Google, this one site would pop up. It was a completely . . . and even that, even with that explicit signal, only 7 out of 100 actually worked. So I would tell you that it probably isn't a good use of your time to be doing a lot of clicking on clickstreams to try to rank higher.

Rand:�� �Gotcha. All right. Well, good to know. We'll try something else.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. But what it does say is that if you rank organically high generally . . . do what you generally do to rank high organically, because that is a factor. In other words, if you do rank at P2 on Google or P2 on Bing and people are clicking through, they search for SEOmoz and click on that link. It's just good practice.

Rand:�� �So you're saying one of the things that SEOs maybe need to be thinking a little bit more about is not just getting that position, but making sure that once you have that position, people want to click on it.

Stefan:�� �Are you maximizing? That's right. Your caption, your title, all this stuff.

Rand:�� �Right, that title and that meta description.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. Make sure . . . you want that click after they search for you if it is the right site for that particular term. So yeah, that was "Copygate" a couple weeks ago.

Rand:�� �Well, I'm glad we're done with that.

Stefan:�� �It was fun.

Rand:�� �Yeah, I'm sure you want to do that all the time.

Stefan:�� �One hair is grey now because of that.

Rand:�� �I have more than that. So, third question, and last question, but I think a lot of people are interested. What's some new stuff that's coming out at Bing? Either for searchers or for webmasters, because I know Webmaster Tools has sort of been in a little bit of a stagnant state for a little while.

Stefan:�� �It's catch-up, I'd say. We just actually brought in Duane Forrester who you guys might know out in the community.

Rand:�� �Yes, absolutely.

Stefan:�� �Duane now works on the Bing team, and he is in charge of a lot of stuff. He'll be out there in the forums with you guys a lot more and across the entire ecosystem for Bing. Duane will be our guy out there in the space. We updated the Webmaster Tools, I think it was a couple months ago now. It's all Silverlight-based. There's still some areas I know we need to catch up in.

Rand:�� �I won't give you too hard a time, but the Silverlight . . .

Stefan:�� �I know.

Rand:�� �When you install Silverlight functionality, there are a few things you lose that you have on the HTML side.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, that's frustrating. But the good news is that we've staffed a team of actually more than we had before. So those guys are cranking on the new functionalities. We know that we have to do a better job there. We know it. No one's hiding like, "No, we're hot. Let's just keep going." We think we do a good job. We can do a lot better.

And then as far as new stuff for consumers is concerned, I think one of the most interesting things that we'll have rolled out this week ? since this is Friday, I can talk about it now ? is this new thing called tiles. You'll see them on the page. Think of it now as really a user experience enhancement. In essence, what we found was that people are able, when they see basically a page, if you look at the page and you do a query for something like, I don't know, let's just do one. What's that new Natalie Portman film?

Rand:�� �Oh, that looks terrible. Not "Black Swan."

Stefan:�� �Not "Black Swan," the other one.

Rand:�� �Oh, with Ashton Kutcher.

Stefan:�� �So we'll let's call it "new Natalie Portman film." I don't what it's called, but whatever it's called.

Rand:�� �That's probably a good search. Since we can't remember, lots of people are querying that.

Stefan:�� �That's probably true. I can see the billboard in my head, but I can't . . .6

Rand:�� �I can see the preview. Clearly bad branding.

Stefan:�� �God, no kidding. What the hell? Anyway, so you do a search for this on Bing and you get all the results here, all of the organic results. And what you're seeing now with the introduction of tiles is a little visual indicator here on the side for a couple of these results that come from what we call authoritative sites. So you might have one from IMDB here, one from Rotten Tomatoes, one from, I don't know, Flixster, etc. We're actually going to be pulling in metadata from those sites. So you have the average 77% fresh rating here. Flixster might have their rating, IMDB can have their rating. But what we're doing now is we 're actually . . . because we know people actually are able to figure out the results they're looking for if you append some kind of visual cue onto the page. So by adding on these visual cues for these kind of authoritative sites or high-quality sites. . .

Rand:�� �Are they sending data specifically to you, or are you guys pulling that from their page without them even having to do anything?

Stefan:�� �No. In this case, there's been some agreement with these guys.

Rand:�� �So it's like when Google was testing some of their rich snippets, what they call recipes and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stefan:�� �So that I think . . . we'll see. It's just a test now, but we'll see how it works. Internal flighting have been pretty successful with it, and it really provides a way for people to actually find what they're looking for much faster, because you know the logo for IMDB, you know the logo for Flixster, maybe.

Rand:�� �And if I think I'm a trusted website, hopefully in a few months I'll be able to submit something to you, give you some data, and you could potentially give me this kind of result.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. Nothing to announce yet, but you're getting the idea. Exactly. This notion of how do you kind of ingest third party content more successfully and make it more discoverable to people. So that's kind of fun.

And then, of course, a lot of mobile stuff has come out in the past couple months. You'll see more of this going forward. But really focusing on the scenarios as you're on the go. You know, unfortunately, it's not out yet, so I can't talk about it. Just let me think for a second. It's so awesome. You're going to love it. Just wait.

Rand:�� �Is it on all Nokia devices now?

Stefan:�� �It should be. We'll do a follow up. Next time, I'll actually bring a machine and we can actually demo stuff.

Rand:�� �Oh, that sounds awesome. I love it. Well, Stefan, this has been phenomenal stuff. I think people really appreciate you and Duane particularly being out in the community talking to webmasters about this type of stuff. I hope you'll join us maybe in the comments if folks have a couple questions.

Stefan:�� �Absolutely. Just don't make fun of my hair. That's all I ask.

Rand:�� �It was windy outside before he got up here.

Stefan:�� �Sure.

Rand:�� �Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/AOByolLCm-I/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

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