Catching up…

I’m sitting in Boston’s Logan Airport after WMW, waiting for my flight back. Normally I don’t post a bunch of links, but I want to clear out my browser tabs.

– Looks like the Google Calendar API is already out? I love that they got it out so soon; it seems like the whole calendar launch was really tight, and I can’t wait to see what people do with an API.
Chris Pirillo posts interviews from SES New York.
– I’m really enjoying the resources (including a newsletter) that Google is doing for librarians. There’s a new poster that lists a bunch of search commands.
– Steve Boymel showed me a really smooth iGoogle-like personalized home page with smooth drag and drop, easy RSS adding (including the number of posts to show from a favorite blog), and color customization. Pretty nice.

Doh, they’re boarding. Hope I have no typos.

27 Responses to Catching up… (Leave a comment)

  1. Hi Matt

    Have a nice trip home. And once you are there, just in case you feel like blogging again; a weather report about the new infrastructure shall be highly appreciated 😀

  2. I told my wife to prep the google dog for photos =P incoming maybe tonight/tomorrow lol…

  3. Just wanted to say thanks for coming to boston! what a great conference and hope to see you back on the east coast again soon.

  4. So when you get back can you post about all the upset webmasters with site: command? Are sites being reduced # of pages willy nilly? Is the site: command now reporting erroneous results? Rumors are flying, what happened to good feedback from Google? It’s week two and not a peep from any google reps. How frustrating, feel like back to square #1 with google and I am sure I am not alone in this feeling. Wake up google.

  5. “prep the google dog for photos”?

    damn,,, that shoemoney fellah is a perverted one!

  6. Matt it was nice talking with you as always and enjoyed your presentations. I think the blogging session was the most fun but the site review session was the most informative. I took good notes at the reviews and a few good pix and will try to blog a summary of that session tommorrow unless somebody else has done it (where was Barry?)

  7. Wow SEW, I have to admit that that is the most sense you have made yet and good timing, Matt can’t prune your post while he is on the plane eh? You are baaaaaad! 😉

    This should be obvious, but it a site is getting NO organic traffic to begin with – they have TWO options, to continue being passive and NOT get anything , or to become proactive and aggressive in promoting itself..

    I am exactly in that place today, I have two good sites I believed would succeed on content “merit” alone but they are 100% dead in the water because of lack of incoming links. So what does someone in my position do? You got it, I do what I hate more that anything “link building”! Link building to reach the same level as those before me.

    But to be fair to Google, I notice signs of sites succeeding with fewer backlinks now, but they must have something new and fresh, you know something for real live humans to enjoy? ;-(

  8. Mmmm, I agree Aaron, SEW is a little naughty. I would like to comment on SEW’s statement though…

    “While it was admitted that once a spam site is found to be high on the SERPs – the algos are re-adjusted to prevent this loophole – but that is the problem! …because of these Algo adjustments many innocent sites have been demoted.” (caps removed for neatness :))

    Personally I can’t see that if Google adjusts their algo to combat spam that it follows that “innocent” webmasters will be penalized.

    Unless of course the “innocent” website has some of the same characteristics of a spam website. What would a white hat site have in common with a spam site? Maybe others more knowledgeable than me could provide some examples.

    Matt, I enjoyed your interview with Chris Pirillo, but did I get this straight? Does Google rely on user feedback to uncover Adsense junk sites?

  9. SEW, your argument almost makes sense. And by almost, what I actually mean is that it makes next to none at all, and is right along the lines of your usual incoherent babbling which serves no useful purpose, and I’m just yanking your chain.

    *** Subliminal message to Matt: stop SEWing at once. You must not allow SEWing in your blog anymore. Look into this post, deep into this post, do not look anywhere else. ***

    There are hundreds of thousands of placess to get one-way backlinks with relatively little effort as long as the site has some quality (wow, what a concept, eh?) The problem is that most sites…well, they have serious issues. They’re coded poorly, the copy has spelling and grammatical errors, the copy doesn’t explain what the sites are all about, sites don’t offer something useful or unique, etc.

    This is an offshoot of the “if you build it, they will come” dotbomb logic. They won’t. But that’s not a flaw in search engines…that’s the nature of business in general. There seems to be this archaic notion that a brand-new site should have just as much chance for a generic keyword or phrase as a site that has taken the time to establish itself as a long-term serious site. That doesn’t happen in the offline business world…you don’t see the mom and pop department store trying to take on Wal-Mart. So why do people expect that it should in the online business world?

    These are the sites that get desperate and resort to spammy tricks…the same ones that can’t build something that would get traffic both online and offline otherwise. Show me ONE innocent site that got banned as the result of an algorithm, and I’ll show you a spammy site that had you snowed.

    (Interesting how modding at HEDir gives you a perspective on this stuff.)

    And speaking of spam, Matt…do you also cover AdWords spammers? (As in people who use AdWords to promote scraper sites and things?) Or how do we report that, now that it’s starting to become an issue?

    For those who don’t know what I’m talking about:

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2006-11%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=Canada+auto+parts

    The rustfreeauto.com sponsored link link might provide some light.

    Hope you get back okay, dude. Don’t blog on the plane, either. The pilots don’t like that.

  10. I put this on a forum a few days ago, and no one seemed to get it. Is it too subtle, or too boring?
    ==================
    . I saw the Icon in the header for

    Search Marketing Association North America .. so I searched it Search Marketing Association North America, albeit without “”.

    The results were:

    1. Cremation Association of North America – CANA

    2. AIMS: Main Home Page

    3. Search Marketing Association of North America

    Needless to say, I was a little burned up ..

  11. Psssssssssssssssst

    Quite please. Matt is still in bed. When he wake up, I wouldn’t be surprised if he post a weather report about the progress of the new infrastructure including few words about PR/backlinks update 😀

  12. Well, I think that Google calender will have to do some serious catch up to dent into the userbase of Yahoo calender. Total integration with Gmail can be the first good step for Google in this regards.

  13. re: “These are the sites that get desperate and resort to spammy tricks…the same ones that can’t build something that would get traffic both online and offline otherwise. Show me ONE innocent site that got banned as the result of an algorithm, and I’ll show you a spammy site that had you snowed.”

    I’ll give you an excellent example. Type in this one phrase on google and you get a google search results page that has 4 results from one person on that same page. Guess what? All 4 of those pages redirect to the same page.

    The page they redirect to is a spammy adsense publisher’s page. Here’s a list of all his infractions as far as I see them: Page does not match Google’s description, Deceptive redirects, Duplicate site or pages, Misleading or repeated words, and cloaking I suppose.

    Here’s the kicker. He has also disabled the back button. Not only has he super-spammed his way to ridiculously dominating a google results page (and is doing this for dozens, maybe hundreds, of keyphrases), by disabling the back button he is successfully draining a few adwords advertisers of their budgets though nonproductive clicks.

    Have I reported this guy via the spam report? Yes. No action. Have I notified adsense support? Yes, no action.

    ….You gotta wonder when something is this blatant. It’s like when you tell a cop “Hey, some guys are robbing that old lady down the street” and the cop keeps eating his doughnut and mumbles “Yeah, what do you want me to do about it?”

  14. Hope Matt enjoyed the trip enough to be looking forward to a trip to London for SES at the end of May… 🙂

    Matt, here’s a question for you: What makes all these trips worthwhile for you? Why are you prepared to suffer the red-eye flights, intense questioning, and long long hours just to talk to over-caffeinated (or alcohol-fuelled) webmasters around the globe? Are you like the rest of us, just happy to discuss your working passion with others who properly appreciate it?

  15. Enough with the new infrastructure weather report… If you want to know what the new infrastructure is doing run some tests of your own instead of double hijacking every one of Matt’s posts…

  16. Nice poster about search commands [this is my weak effort at making this post relevant to Matt’s 🙂 ]

    …but do you know that the link: command doesn’t seem to spot internal links coded as absolute references as coming from the same site (e.g. a link from http://www.nutcase.com/fred.htm that is coded as http://www.nutcase.com/wilma.htm shows in the link:www.nutcase.com search)?

    Boy, I wish that the ranking algos had the same bug–I could have some fun with this 🙂

    Cheers, and welcome back Matt…now get to work 🙂

  17. I had a look at the Calendar API – this is an awesome idea! I love the ability to use my own queries.

    I’m still a bit reluctant to write some serious peace of software for the Calendar API though because … look what happened to the AdSense API. Or is Google promising/swearing it will be free to use for the years to come? I admit that I didn’t read the whole terms of use.

  18. BTW, I just made up “www.nutcase.com” for my example. Then I got curious, and clicked on it…and hey, a scraper site! Imagine that 🙂 Should have used my own site instead…*sigh*.

  19. don’t usually post on forums, but Adam Senours’ comments have moved me to this little ditty.

    This kind of drivel has been spouted so often, that many people are actually beginning to believe it to be true. The notion that a “quality” website is something concrete and tangeable, for example, is plainly ridiculous. But the notion that an algorithm will be able to easily discern this intangeable is even more so. I’d be particularly interested to hear Adam’s views on the design of an algorithm that accurately measures the “useful”ness he so flippantly refers to.

    “Show me ONE innocent site that got banned as the result of an algorithm, and I’ll show you a spammy site that had you snowed.”

    Hmmm. So detecting SPAM is easy is it? 100% accurate? No collatoral damage at all? I guess Matt C is out of a job then. Problem solved.

  20. (note to self – never leave a blog unattended while on a business trip…)

  21. Hey Matt, I was so excited to see google calendar out! My biggest issue now though is that for some reason when I sign up for new google services like adsense, adwords, sitemaps, etc… Google won’t let me use my existing account. I’m running out of email addresses to set up new google services. It would be nice to see a Google Accounts Beta!

  22. I do wish that there was Palm Desktop import capability though. I use Palm Desktop for all my calendar needs because I have a Treo, but when I try to import the export from Palm Desktop software, it doesn’t register properly. Do you think there will ever be support for this *.dba format?

  23. Didn’t attend much of the conference, but the social’s were great.

    One of the funniest bits was you getting pounced on by Jay (Str0ud) for the Jay’s Glasses thing – but you were a good sport + joined in!!

  24. Hi,

    Off topic – but you don’t have a forum so…

    I really like the Google Suggest tool.
    Found here: http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1 it is a really useful tool to quickly give yourself ideas for keywords etc.

    S

  25. Hope you had a nice trip home!

  26. How to use Google calender API ?

  27. Really love personalized Google page; It’s much better than Yahoo’s.

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