Even Google Employees Get Delisted

We all know someone or seen someone who’s gotten kicked out of Google SERPs. It seems like a significant proportion of these people (or at least just the vocal ones) feel this exclusion is as personal as it was in seventh grade—Susan G. didn’t like you, so she wouldn’t let you hang out with their group, and it must be the same thing with Google, right?

Tell that to the Google employee who recently realized his site had been delisted. Jason Morrison of Google Australia had his personal site removed from the index. But don’t worry, he’s not spamming or hiding keywords on a background—he just exceeded the bandwidth quota he’d set for his blog, and the server errors made Google think the site had been shut down.

In the spirit of Googly openness, Jason shares not only what was wrong, but how he discovered it through Webmaster Tools, and how he fixed it.

So the next time someone complains to you about Google being out to get them, maybe you can tell them about Jason’s case. Naturally, as TechDirt notes, this case doesn’t mean that Google never targets specific sites, but it is at least one more piece of evidence that most Google penalties are handled algorithmically.

Or maybe you should just confirm their suspicions. With their paranoia, they probably need that abuse.

What do you think?

Five Quick Tips For Success On Google’s Content Network

According to Google’s recent quarterly earnings report, the company earns about 34% of its revenue from AdSense, placing contextual ads on its content network partner websites. This proportion has stayed steady year over year. It certainly reflects overall growth, but some might be surprised at how conservative the pace is.
One of the reasons for this [...]

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The Ultimate Reason Your SEO Is Underperforming

In the first installment of this series I asserted that your seo performance is suffering in proportion to how powerfully you are able to communicate the opportunity to executives. Winning the resources required to grow the channel requires a basic set of metrics. In the subsequent installments, I showed you how to use “Jedi” performance [...]

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Smartphones: Taking Over the World in 2011

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years.

MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase—Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones).

I think that smartphone adoption will be crucial to mobile marketing finally taking off in the US. The fact that most phones today are still incapable of real web browsing has contributed to the slow start to mobile marketing. I’ve been saying for years that a better web browsing experience, like that of a smartphone, is crucial to the success of mobile marketing. And Nielsen agrees:

Nielsen also anticipates more users paying for video and premium content on their phones.

What do you think? Will smartphones reach this much of the market in another 18 months? Will 2011 be the year of the mobile?

Facebook: An Internet unto Itself

Facebook has a lot going for it lately. They’ve got more than 250M users worldwide, they’re the most popular social network in almost every country in the world, they’re hiring in a down economy, and according to a new comScore report, 8.2% of all Internet ads are served on their site.

But, then, maybe this all makes sense. Since Facebook is so popular, it’s not entirely surprising that they serve one out of every twelve online ads. Even better? At least some proportion of their on-site CPC ads lead to another page on the site—so they’re getting money and traffic.

This isn’t a recent development, of course—we’ve all seen ads to “Become a Fan” of something on Facebook. But as smart as it sounds to make your advertisers pay for generating traffic to your site, the underlying logic is pretty much a stroke of genius:

Facebook is an Internet unto itself.

Facebook has long been accused of being a “walled garden”—with its fan pages, apps and other utilities, FB is almost a subset of the offerings of the Internet. If your brand is prominent enough, you’re on Facebook (or you should be!). Driving paid traffic from a personal page (personal) to a branded page only makes sense on that kind of paradigm.

Of course, that kind of advertising is good for advertisers, too, or they wouldn’t do it. JCPenney went from 22,000 fans to 500,000 fans with these advertisements in the run-up to back-to-school shopping (though Bloomberg didn’t say if JCP saw increased revenue from this).

And something seems to be working for FB, too. Last month, Bloomberg said the most popular social network in the world should post at least $500 million in revenue this year.

What do you think? Is Facebook a subset of the Internet, and is internal paid advertising a natural extension of that mentality? Can Facebook sustain this kind of revenue?

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Twittersphere Ain’t What It Used to Be

A study was released today, conducted by inbound marketing company HubSpot, which looked at 4.5 million Twitter users over a nine month period. The data was gathered by their proprietary Twitter Grader tool and provides more confirmation of what we reported last week following a study conducted by a Harvard MBA candidate and assistant professor: As the tool as grown its usage has not in the same proportion.

What in the world does that mean, right? Of course if there are a gazillion people signing up for Twitter accounts and lawsuits being filed over impersonation accounts then it must be that all the world is atwitter with Twitter-itis, correct? HubSpot’s study shows that despite the top line growth in number of accounts the actual usage of Twitter may still rest with the technology crowd that claimed it as their own oh those many years ago (well actually around 3 years ago but in the Internet age that’s like a generation or two).

The most shocking difference year over year was that when HubSpot last conducted this study about 80% of those studied had created a bio in their profile. That number in less than a year has dropped to just 24%. What’s that say? Looks like people are signing up in droves but not using the service to its fullest (or even half fullest for that matter). Other data includes:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

The graph below shows though that those who are tweeting are taking full advantage of that 140 character limit. Lucky for us since they have so much to say.

Other points to ponder include that the vast majority of tweets occur during business hours, many users are located in major metro areas and only 1.44% of tweets are re-tweets.

So speculation as to the real worth of Twitter to business can start now. While you’re at it make sure you spend some time wondering if the $500 million offered by Facebook was high or low or just right.

As for business applications, they are still there and can be very powerful. In some cases it could just be marketing by presence (better to be there than not) while others, like a Dell or Comcast, can do full on engagement of customers and prospects that falls to the bottom line in revenue or goodwill. None of that opportunity has gone away. What may have changed, however, is the speed of the hype freight train that Biz and the crew are engineering.

To put it in search terms it’s a classic case of traffic v. conversions. You can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t turn into business then what have you really accomplished? With Twitter, you can all of the accounts in the world but if the vast majority is not really using the service then what is the real value? That’s why there are no cookie cutter solutions in the Internet space despite what agencies and service providers might say. It is not a “Tweet it and they will come” world, at least not yet.

Report: Companies Spending Less on Web Analytics Technology, More on Staff

My good friend, and web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik once wrote:

Cancel the contract with your favorite expensive analytics vendor and take that $50k or $100k or $200k and: 1) Hire a smart analyst for between $50k to whatever maybe your areas great salary 2) Put the rest of the money in your pocket.

That piece of advice has always stuck with with me, and according to new data from Econsultancy and Lynchpin, it appears it’s resonating with many companies. In the Online Measurement and Strategy Report (aff) we learn that:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licences. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

So, where are they getting the extra money for internal staff?

23% of companies now use Google Analytics exclusively–compared to only 14% a year ago–while 57% of respondents are using Google Analytics in conjunction with another tool.

It certainly appears as if companies are finally realizing that all those pretty charts are useless if there’s no one to interpret them!

PS. Another quick tidbit. The proportion of companies looking at reputation monitoring or social media metrics has doubled from 21% to 40% in the past year. Huzzah for reputation monitoring!