Search with Design

June, 2007 marks the date I officially switched tribes and joined the Ubuntu crowd.

As far as I can tell, Ubuntu is an African word with no direct translation, but which embodies the concept of “being completely inscrutable, yet self-congratulating and better than Windows”.  The truth is that it is a distribution of Linux, favored by many due to its easy install, and similarities to the Windows environment.
But why go all the way to Linux from my previously favored WinXP?  Glad you asked…

To be honest, I saw the release of Windows Vista approaching and realized that I was getting sick of playing a (small) part in the empire-building of Microsoft.  As much as I had hated the switch from my trust Win98 to WinXP, I had learned to live with it after a lot of slipstreaming CDs, backups and tweaks.  But Vista’s DRM-pushing, close-to-spyware using, sanitized like a mental hospital hanging from a cliff feeling just wasn’t going to cut it for me.  So what if it’s pretty?  Nothing runs on it and it will mark every file I create as illegal.

So why not go with a Mac?  After all, they’re powerful, chic, nerdy and they look like a hip young rock star.  Here’s where things get complicated.

I have a serious dislike for laptops.  I’ve never been able to find a laptop which fit the bill for a computer I could actually work on.  I need lightweight, power, small screen, excellent keyboard, durability, battery-life…the list goes on and on.  I’m a laptop snob.  There is only one line of laptops on earth that I will buy and use, and that is the IBM Thinkpad.

I love my little Thinkpad.  The keyboard is great, the battery and weight are good.  Also high on the list is the thumbstick, which is tough to master at first, but once mastered, makes a touchpad feel like drawing in the sand with a stick.

I need my desktop and laptop to sync fairly effortlessly, and because IBM doesn’t make a LeopardPad, I had to shoot the middle.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have my trusty copy of XP dual-booted (although I haven’t seen the familiar green ‘Start’ button in weeks).  I keep it around for one reason, and one reason only: Battlefield 2.

The switch to Ubuntu wasn’t bad, the three biggest sticking points being syncing my iPod (done with Amarok and patience), enabling the ‘Back’ button on my MS Intellimouse (done with some extra drivers), and disabling my on-board sound in favor of the SoundBlaster 5.1 card (accomplished through some text file editing and a reboot).

All in all, the switch has gone great, and it’s only getting better as I play with Compiz/XGL effects and customizing my computer through clever use of Launchers and Terminal.
I think Windows Vista could be greatest thing that ever happened to the Linux community.  More users = more options.

Why not come over for a stay with the tribe?

This question has resurfaced in the SEO-world, and in my world recently, and so I’d like to weigh-in. Here’s the latest situation presented to me:

My friend sent an email to 100,000 subscribers, of which 1,000 of them were GMail addresses, advertising “college widgets”. The link back to his site contained the anchor text “college widgets”. He went from ranking #10 in a Google search for [college widgets] to #1 in just a few days, then later he dropped back down to #4. I looked at my GMail account and the email page has a PageRank of the 7!

The first thing to understand is that the way the PageRank in your toolbar works, is that when it doesn’t find any data for your current page, it extrapolates an approximate value from the previous page you visited as well as the domain. Because the Google domain is a PR10, your toolbar extrapolates a PR7 for your mailbox.

So where did the resultant change in rankings come from?

Well, the page in question has a title tag whose first two words are “College Widgets”. The page also has 59,000 links pointing at it (according to Yahoo!) most of which are from the same domain, with the anchor text “college widgets”.

In a sample of 100,000 emails, I have to think that at least 1-3% would have the Google Toolbar installed. Add in the GMail subscriber base, and Google has 3-4 thousand pieces of user data to use about the page in question. I would estimate that amount of user data spread over just a couple days would be more than enough for Google to trigger a deeper crawl of the page, and potentially index or count more of the backlinks.

As RC mentioned, you can’t triangulate with only 2 points. Google uses user-data, it’s time to face facts and build your websites for users too.

The Article Distribution Service iSnare.com has been billed as one of the best tools around to increase a website’s presence. And I’ve been a big proponent of it since I first came across the service.

The idea is simple enough: submit an article to this service, it is reviewed by humans for quality and then gets auto-distributed to 1000s of article-aggregation websites, many on general topics, and a few on whatever topic you choose for your article.

After using it a few times, I began to notice that pages I promoted with the service would tend to rise in Google’s SERPs for my targeted terms, and then slowly fall back down. They would usually settle at higher positions than where they started, but I wondered why the Rome effect was so strong (that was a subtle reference to a rise/fall timeline).

So, I decided to study the Google results on fresh articles, and their mentions in search engines. I used the old trick of searching a unique phrase. On August 4th I used a unique phrase from each article on Google’s engine: 0 results. I then submitted both articles to iSnare for distribution. On August 8th I got an email that both articles had been approved and syndicated; a second Google search revealed 0 results for both.

0 results again on Aug. 9th. Then on Aug. 10th I saw the first signs of life: 7 results for Article 1 and 8 results for Article 2. By Aug. 15th, Article 1 had 437 results, and Article 2 had 458 results. There are two points of note here:

Point 1: I submitted both articles under the same category. They were approximately the same length (around 450 words). I submitted them on the same within minutes of each other, and yet Article 1 lagged behind Article 2 for some reason.

Point 2: At this point (Aug. 15th) there were no supplemental results for either article. All 400+ results were fully viewable in the main index.

On the 16th of August the dupe filter must have kicked in on Article 1, because supplementals appeared and total results dropped to 361. Article 2 continued to thrive with 556 results on the 16th, with still no supplementals showing.

Eventually the dupe filter must’ve kicked in on Article 2 as well, and by August 30th, both result counts were below 50 (39 and 34 for 1 & 2, respectively).

As of today, Big G shows 11 results, of a total of 16 for Article 1 (so, approx. 4 supplementals). Article 2 fared better in the end, today displaying 16 results of 22 total (so, approx. 6 supplementals).

The [recently exported] PageRank for the top 10 results on each article range from 0-2, with the majority being 0 (and 2 N/As!).

So now some theories:

1. Article 1’s target phrase was more competitive than Article 2’s. My theory is that the more competitive an area, the greater number of filters (or in some cases, reviews) a page must pass to become part of the index. This is explained best in the theory of long-tail keywords, where phrases that don’t mean much in a marketing sense have a lot of impact on John Q. Searcher.

2. To compete with social bookmarking, Google needs to be buzz-aware. When a site creates a certain amount of buzz (linking, textual-references, etc.) Google needs to get in there and evaluate it for ranking. It will weight these sites with additional trustrank to get on top of the coming wave. A second (and potentially third) filter will later decide if the page is worth keeping in the index. Possibly by analyzing search volume for a phrase vs. the amount of “buzz”.

What might a takeaway be from this experiment? In my case, the combination of the “buzz” created with the article distro, plus the already-established authority (or Trustrank) of the site was enough to put the [brand new] pages I was targeting into the top 10 for their intended keyphrase.

As with most SEO activities, it is recommended to use this tool appropriately, and in combination with other tools.
Any thoughts?

Update: Looks like Aaron Wall and I may have been thinking along some similar lines. He just posted about new domains getting ranked in Google over old sites, and mentioned the following:

“Also think of the search business model as though you are a search engine. To them, being the first person to do something is a sign of quality because to be the first person in a market requires some market timing / knowledge / investment / luck.”

“Catch a wave” theory, explained in financial terminology.