Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Philipp has a good interview with Niniane Wang. You can check out Niniane’s blog or her web site to read more about her; I didn’t know she had a SIGGRAPH paper about rendering clouds, for example. I love graphics stuff.

I’ve also really been enjoying Mihai Parparita’s blog. I first encountered his site when I was looking for a way to color-code Gmail labels. I had just switched from Mutt and I was homesick for the ability to color-code. It looks like this:

Some readers noticed his recent Greasemonkey script to fold Google Reader into Gmail. He’s also recently done a script to import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Google bookmarks.

One of my favorite “Mihai scripts” is to save persistent searches in Gmail. It looks like this:

For example, I have a label “outside” for non-Googler email based on the “from” field of an email. So I often do the searc [to:me label:inbox -label:outside]. Let’s break that down:

to:me This means that the email has to mention me in the “To: line” somewhere. That excludes emails to mailing lists that I’m on, for example.
label:inbox I use my inbox as my todo list, so this restricts the search to things that I haven’t dealt with yet.
-label:outside This excludes emails from outside Google.

The net result is that I’m left with things sent directly to me from Googlers that I haven’t dealt with yet. Mihai’s script lets me save that search right on my Gmail screen.

The Google blog also lists a lot of Googler blogs you may be interested in (search for “Blogs by Googlers”).

Update: I forgot to include a hat tip to Google Operating System for noticing Mihai’s delicious import script. GOS also wrote a cool post about firefox extensions to manage Google bookmarks that I keep meaning to explore more. I wonder if these tools play well with Google’s extension to sync bookmarks across different computers?

A while ago, I was a little sick for a couple weeks with bronchitis, so I didn’t answer as much email for a couple weeks. I didn’t stop replying to email, I just didn’t answer as much. And in a couple weeks, I was 100 emails behind. So I took one day with no meetings and just tried to power through all my email. At the end of the day, I’d caught up with all my emails except for that day--but I was still down by 80 emails. Another 4-5 more hours later, I’d finally caught up with all my email.

Sure, I’d managed to help some people and report some bugs, but sheesh, it sucks to blow a day with no meetings scheduled.

How do you keep email under control?

Eric Enge got a funny link exchange email. Check it out to find out the new trend in linking. Recently I got one that started:

Dear,

I have visited your site and I think that the Culture content could be of interest to our web site visitors.
...

Best regards,
Ivan

He didn’t even bother to fill in any name at all. C’mon Ivan, at least put a little work into those emails.

I don’t play with AdWords or MSN advertising, but I think it’s good to try to stay aware of that side of things. So when Shoemoney posted about a $100 coupon for Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) this morning, I figured it was time to try out YSM. I showed up and they had a six-page signup. It reminded of the line from the Rodney Dangerfield movie Old School Back to School: “I have only one question for Mr. Melon, in 43 parts.” But I waded through it all, down to the sixth page, which was a required survey. I hit submit and it took me back to page five, with this screen:

So my first YSM experience was “There was an internal error. Please try again later.” I guess I won’t let Yahoo give me $100 of free advertising after all. My favorite was a commenter on Shoemoney’s original post though:

Comment by kari
2006-10-13 10:33:11

This is so hot. I have never seen yahoo have a 100$ coupon. Just made 2 accounts. Free 200$!

Still working as of 15 minutes ago

Multiple accounts? Not cool, kari. You probably took the $100 Yahoo was going to give me, and that’s why I got an internal error! Then again, it is Friday the 13th, so maybe it’s just bad luck on my part.

Philipp notes (hat tip to Googlified) that you can upload unlisted videos to Google video now. The webmaster help page for the feature points out that it’s like an unlisted telephone number: the odds of someone guessing an unlisted url are miniscule, but you can send the video’s url to anyone you choose and they can access the video.

This was something that I would have loved when I did my spate of videos a while ago. It’s nice to make a video and upload it in advance. Then making the video visible is as easy as (according to the help page):

- Find the video you want to re-list and click the link that says “Edit Video Info”
- Find the “Access” option and select the “Public” radio button

and maybe waiting a few hours for the change to go into effect. By the way, here’s a simple link to see all the videos I’ve done so far.