I think I’ve figured out a way to solve this issue. I’ve created a new Gmail account, siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com. Let’s say it belongs to John Q Public, a power user living in Silicon Valley. Feel free to send John non-Google-related emails about fictional events: “Hey John, want to come to the party on Saturday?” or “John, here are those pictures from the fireworks this past weekend.” or “Hey John, I saw in the newpaper that you won the California lottery--congratulations!” Then when I want to do a screencast or demo some power feature of a Google account, I’ll have some realistic email to show.

Just one note: please don’t email anything to John about Google. I get way too much email about Google already, and the purpose of this account is to show different features of Gmail or Calendar. To keep this email address completely separate, I created a filter that deletes any emails that mention Google or me:

Again, please don’t email about Google-related stuff, but feel free to email John about interesting fictional things at siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com! I’m hoping that I can do some blog posts or videos with good tips.

So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out

Make your links appear Natural

Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant…

is starting off on the wrong foot. The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural. Another rule of thumb for me personally is to be wary of people that email or cold-call you out of the blue repeatedly. Checking my email, these “link building experts” email-spammed me back in April, too.

This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

Is the translation going to be perfect? No. But I saw multiple people around the web asking for this, so I’m glad that Google is offering this translation tool so quickly.

Here’s one final tip: Google provides a set of translation bookmarklets for many languages. The “English” bookmarklet (drag this bookmarklet up to your bookmarks bar) will auto-detect any language (including Persian) and translate it into English. If you select some text first, the bookmarklet will translate just that text. If you click the button with no text selected, the whole page will be translated.

So for some Persian (Farsi) text like this:

You can select just the text you care about and click the “English” bookmarklet and you’ll see something like this:

This can be pretty helpful, so I’m glad that the Google translation team added this feature. Likewise, if you want to translate from other languages into Persian, here’s a bookmarklet that should work.

About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the Q&A might be interesting to you. Video aren’t perfect (for example, it’s much harder for someone watching a video to skim quickly). But I love that I can do a two-minute video by just talking for two minutes. Compare that to any blog post which seems to take me at least an hour.

P.S. If you like this session, you might be interested to know that most Google I/O sessions were recorded and are available on video. For example, one of my favorite sessions was watching Aaron Boodman (author of Greasemonkey) talk about how to write extensions for Chrome. The amount of information available from the full session list is pretty amazing. That’s not even counting the Google Wave announcement, which has been viewed about 2.5 million times.

Disclaimer: Even when I joined the company in 2000, Google was doing more sophisticated link computation than you would observe from the classic PageRank papers. If you believe that Google stopped innovating in link analysis, that’s a flawed assumption. Although we still refer to it as PageRank, Google’s ability to compute reputation based on links has advanced considerably over the years. I’ll do the rest of my blog post in the framework of “classic PageRank” but bear in mind that it’s not a perfect analogy.

Probably the most popular way to envision PageRank is as a flow that happens between documents across outlinks. In a recent talk at WordCamp I showed an image from one of the original PageRank papers:

In the image above, the lower-left document has “nine points of PageRank” and three outgoing links. The resulting PageRank flow along each outgoing link is consequently nine divided by three = three points of PageRank.

That simplistic model doesn’t work perfectly, however. Imagine if there were a loop:

No PageRank would ever escape from the loop, and as incoming PageRank continued to flow into the loop, eventually the PageRank in that loop would reach infinity. Infinite PageRank isn’t that helpful so Larry and Sergey introduced a decay factor--you could think of it as 10-15% of the PageRank on any given page disappearing before the PageRank flows along the outlinks. In the random surfer model, that decay factor is as if the random surfer got bored and decided to head for a completely different page. You can do some neat things with that reset vector, such as personalization, but that’s outside the scope of our discussion.

Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext [*].

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Q: Why did Google change how it counts these links?
A: For one thing, some crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).

Q: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.

Q: Why tell us now?
A: For a couple reasons. At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time. When we added a help page to our documentation about nofollow, we said “a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.” In a recent webmaster video, I said “a better, more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing (for example) which things to link to from your home page.” At Google I/O, during a site review session I said it even more explicitly: “My short answer is no. In general, whenever you’re linking around within your site: don’t use nofollow. Just go ahead and link to whatever stuff.” But at SMX Advanced 2009, someone asked the question directly and it seemed like a good opportunity to clarify this point. Again, it’s not something that most site owners need to know or worry about, but I wanted to let the power-SEOs know.

Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?
A: If you think about it, that’s the way that PageRank worked even before the nofollow attribute.

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Q: If Google changed its algorithms for counting outlinks from a page once, could it change again? I really like the idea of sculpting my internal PageRank.
A: While we can’t ever say that things will never change in our algorithms, we do not expect this to change again. If it does, I’ll try to let you know.

Q: How do you use nofollow on your own internal links on your personal website?
A: I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that’s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.

[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.

From the Custom Search Element web page, I copied the code. Then in the WordPress control panel under Appearance->Widgets, I clicked to add a new “Text” widget, changed the title to “Search (CSE)” and pasted the code into the box:

Click “Done” and then “Save Changes” and that’s it! No need to register, sign up for anything, get a user ID, or anything like that. You can see the result on the right-hand sidebar of my blog.

You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.

- Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if you have a student ID the price is only $50. Need an extra incentive? I’ll be doing a site review session so you can tell your website and get a review and advice about your site. I plan to bring along several smart folks from my team to help on the panel. I really think this conference will be worth your while.

- Is $400 (or even the $50 student rate) too much to pay? Then come to WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco on Saturday, May 30, 2009. It costs $25 that includes a T-shirt and lunch. I’ll be speaking at WordCamp as well.

- Maker Faire is next weekend (May 30 & 31st). I love Maker Faire, so I’ll be there to soak up the fun. If you’re a geek in the Bay Area, you don’t want to miss Maker Faire--again, trust me on this.

Bonus recommendation: If you’re willing to look two weeks out instead of one week, SMX Advanced will be in Seattle on June 2-3, 2009. I think there’s only ~50 tickets left, so I’d sign up soon. I’ll be there and I’m really looking forward to it. Danny Sullivan will repeat our You & A session where both Danny and the audience ask me questions.

I think each of these events should kick butt in slightly different ways, so I hope you can make it to some of them. If you can make it and you see me, walk up to say hello and chat a little bit!

- Pat Riley mentioned a couple internal code names for spell-check features. There’s the normal “Did you mean:” spellcheck link in red at the top of the search results. Then there’s a more aggressive feature (internal Google codename: “Chameleon”) that does mid-page suggestions:

Finally, there’s an even more aggressive feature (internal Google code name: “Spellmeleon”) for when we really think the user messed up. In that case, we’ll include a couple results for the corrected query first, then results for the user’s original query. Take the query [ipodd] for example. Our algorithms strongly suggest that the user meant to type “ipod” so we’ll include those search results first.

By the way, if you’re a power searcher and you really did want “ipodd” then you can do the query [+ipodd] with a ‘+’ character in front of the word that you want to match exactly. Let me just say that Spellmeleon makes life *so* much better for my webspam team. Tons of spammers target typos and misspelled queries all the time. If users see a couple of valid results before they see results for a misspelled/typo query, well, lets just say that users are exposed to a lot less webspam in Google. I’m a big fan of Spellmeleon.

- Pat Riley also mentioned that if you do some of these search improvements in a naive way, the additional server load is equivalent to if Germany and France just appeared out of nowhere and started sending all their daily searches to Google. So you have to do some smart things to make this search improvement viable.

- Scott Huffman revealed that mobile search results are blended between results from the mobile web and results from the regular/normal web. Makes sense, but not everyone knows that.

- Marissa Mayer mentioned that about 1 in 4 searches triggers a universal/blended search result.

- Marissa also mentioned that 40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user (I’m not sure if that means repeated that day, or just repeated compared to past searches). She mentioned that to explain why SearchWiki can be useful, because if you’re repeating a search, you may want to customize the results to your taste. Marissa also said SearchWiki receives hundreds of thousands of annotations each day.

- Someone asked what Google is doing to crawl the deep web. My advice is to check out Jayant Madhavan’s paper to read more. Here’s a direct link to a copy (PDF) of the deep web crawling paper.

- Someone asked how important is it to search video with a text search query? Google did this for political videos during the election and I’d really like to see more in this area. Together with fellow Googler Wysz, I’ve made about 50 videos to answer common webmaster questions. Right now it’s a pain to create caption files for those videos. If Google could give me a rough speech-to-text transcript (with timecodes) and let me edit the transcript to correct errors, that would be fantastic. Then someone in Turkey could read my videos even if they didn’t understand English. I would love that.

- In answer to a question from Vanessa Fox, Kavi Goel mentioned that Rich Snippets will roll out slowly at first (probably beginning as a whitelist of trusted sites) but that over time, more and more sites could show up with rich snippets. You can read more about rich snippets on the Google webmaster blog or see example code. And if you’re really into RDFa or microformats or rich snippets, the folks at O’Reilly did a nice interview with two Googlers (Othar and Guha) involved with the project.

- TechCrunch got some video of Google Squared. The whole video is interesting, but the part that I thought was funny was 4 minutes, 12 seconds into the video where the Google demo person signs into Google Squared and Michael Arrington does the polite “password lookaway” and looks at Steve Gillmor, who is also doing the polite password lookaway.

- Finally, Tara Calashain asks for a custom date range form (hear hear!) and then points out something I missed. Once you move into searching with date ranges, you can sort Google results by date. This opens up lots of options for power searchers. Here’s a search for [hubble telescope] with sort-by-date selected:

That’s pretty useful.

- If you want to see the slides from Searchology, it looks like Yvo Schaap took the time to snapshot each slide as it appeared. Until/unless Google releases the slide deck, that’s where you can see the slides unofficially. My favorite is slide #8.

Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such as [cfl light bulb] and look above the search results for a “Show options…” link. Click on that to get a ton of useful ways to power search. You can see web results with images, like this:

My personal favorite is to sort by time (e.g. only show me results from the last week). That’s super-handy, and the option previously required clicking around in our Advanced Search. You can also search by genre, including forums and reviews. If you sort by reviews, Google will perform sentiment analysis and highlight interesting comments. You can also request longer snippets, see search results on a timeline, or explore more related search queries.

You can use a tool called “Wonder Wheel” to explore searches and see the results update as you click. For example, if you search for [matt cutts] then the Wonder Wheel will suggest that you might also be interested in search engine optimization. Click on that and the Wonder Wheel and the search results will change in real-time:

Google Squared. You can type in any search and this Google Lab (scheduled to launch later this month) will try to build a useful “Square” that you can save. In the demo, if you typed in “small dogs” then Google would try to return types of small dogs, along with facts like how much they weigh. It’s easy to add a row to the Square, so you could add a row for Lhasa Apso and Google will try to infer the relevant facts from the web. You can also add new columns, e.g. if you type “energy level” then Google will look for corroborating facts across the web and try to guess the energy level of each type of dog. I can personally attest that Google Squared can be as fun as Google Maps--you can easily burn an hour just typing in random things to see what Google can do for that search.

Rich Snippets. See the official webmaster blog for more info, but this one is destined to be a favorite for webmasters. Essentially, you use some open standards (RDFa and microformats in the initial launch) to add some additional markup to your web pages. The markup is pretty simple and you don’t need to register with Google. Then when Google thinks it will help users, we show a “rich snippet” that has more information than a typical search snippet. Here’s a result on Yelp for a yogurt place, for example:

Note a couple quick points. The markup annotates existing text that’s already on the page, and this richer markup exists out on the web. That means that any search engine can make their own rich snippets (there’s no proprietary data that only goes to Google). I like that Rich Snippets relies on open standards, that the markup is simple, and that the data is out on the web; it’s not locked up by Google in any way. I would expect Google to roll this out cautiously at first (much as we did with Sitelinks), but that more sites will see rich snippets over time.

Google SkyMap. Google also announced SkyMap, an Android app that lets you star gaze. With GPS, an accelerometer, and a compass, SkyMap can tell you what stars you’re pointing your phone at. You can also search for stars and the application will guide you until your phone points in the right direction.

If you’d like to read more, Techmeme has coverage and Danny Sullivan live-blogged the Searchology event.