Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I got an unusual email from Amazon today:

I’m sure that Domino is a fine magazine, but I told Amazon not to send me anything promotional. So I checked my communication preferences on Amazon. Yup, they’re not supposed to send me any emails like this:

What’s up, Amazon? Ian, tell Amazon folks that they burnt a teeny bit of my goodwill this morning. And that I’m still hoping Amazon implements a couple of these suggestions.

I want to do a constructive post, so I’ll add one more Amazon suggestion: provide a way to see the sales rank of a product over time. For example, if someone recommends a photography book, it would be really neat to see if that changes the sales for that book at all.

Update November 19, 2007:

Someone from Amazon actually contacted me a couple days after this post went live, and I’ve been lax on posting their reply. I’m adding the email that I received (with permission):

Hi Matt --

My colleague Ian McAllister showed me your recent blog posting asking why it was you received an email from Amazon letting you know you were eligible to receive a free 12 month subscription to Domino magazine, even though you had set your Amazon privacy controls to not receive any “promotional” emails.

The email you received was not a promotion. It was a follow up e-mail that we promised we would send to you when you made your purchase. As stated on the site, customers who made qualifying purchases in Amazon’s Home & Garden store would receive an email with instructions letting them know how to opt-in for their free, one-year subscription to Domino.

I hope this answers your question, and thanks very much for your feedback.

--Patty

Patty Smith
Director of Corporate Communications
Amazon.com

On one hand, to a regular user like me, it still felt like a promotional email. On the other hand, I give Amazon props for replying to my blog complaint promptly, and I understand why they didn’t consider the email to be promotional. Now, if I could just convince Amazon to implement some of the tweaks I’d like them to do.

Here’s a short summary of the recent Google blogging brouhaha:

- Google has a new health advertising blog. This weekend Lauren Turner, a Google employee, did a relatively negative post about the movie Sicko. She also mentioned that health care companies that disagreed with Sicko could use advertising to get their viewpoint out.
- Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped called foul.
- When I read the post myself, I thought “Hmm. That was a bit impolitic. I’ll sit out round one of the reaction. Let’s see how this goes.”
- Lots of bloggers piled on negative commentaries.
- Lauren quickly did a second post this weekend to clarify that she was giving a personal opinion of Sicko, not Google’s opinion.

Things will die down from this post eventually, but there are a few evergreen tips to consider if you’re thinking of blogging on your company’s behalf.

The easiest time to make a blogging gaffe is when you’re starting out. When you’re about to start blogging, ramp up slowly:
1) Ask someone experienced to read the first several blog posts you do. They can flag inaccuracies or tell you if you misjudged the tone of a post.
2) Write a few posts that you’re willing to throw away. You still get the practice, but without as much pressure.
3) Do a guest post or two on someone else’s blog first. At Google, we have lots of official blogs. It’s better to try things out as a guest before you step into the spotlight on your own blog.
4) Practice on forums first. For example, Google has a lot of discussion and help forums where Googlers chime in from time to time. For Googlers, that’s a great place to start. For other companies, find the most relevant forum and practice chatting with people (make it clear that you work for your company so that people don’t think you’re astroturfing).

Don’t criticize other companies or people. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. But for a company blog, it’s usually unnecessary and unwise to throw dirt at other companies. For one thing, it lowers the level of discourse. Plus Silicon Valley and the blogosphere is a small place; the person that you publicly rake over the coals now might work with you down the road. I know that the temptation is strong, but resist it as often as you can.

Don’t post when you’re angry. Pretty much every time I’ve posted angry, I’ve regretted it later. The pace of the blogosphere conversation can be torrid, so reacting quickly can be critical to get your side of the story out on Techmeme or other places. But if you can afford the time, take an extra day to get a little perspective. Sometimes other people make the same points that you would have made.

Learn which stories matter and which ones don’t. You don’t have to respond to every criticism that someone makes. If a story is little more than insults, maybe it’s better to work on developing a thicker skin. And sometimes people are just baiting you trying to get attention. Usually there is a core issue that someone is angry about though. Tackle that issue and don’t sweat the insults.

If you make a mistake, don’t clam up. If you work hard enough for long enough, you’ll eventually make a big mistake. Think of it like skiing: if you never fall down, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. The important thing is to keep participating in the conversation. Post again to clarify your stance. Don’t yank the original post. If you have to change the original post, make it clear how you changed it, e.g. adding a postscript or striking out what isn’t right.

Here’s a bonus tip specific to this situation: include a datestamp on all your posts. The posts on Google’s health advertising blog are currently month-stamped and time-stamped, but not date-stamped. I’d recommend changing that template to be like most other Google blogs. That lets people see that a clarifying post went up within a day or so after the original post.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d say this Sicko controversy is only 100 milli-iPhones of blog storm (it looks like Sicko had a strong opening weekend, by the way). I think Michael Arrington identified the most important issue:

What I don’t want to see is Google start to reign in its bloggers. As a public company Google is almost certainly putting blog posts through their legal and PR departments before they go live (how this slipped through is a mystery). If too many situations like the one above occur, they’ll start to add more policies and layers of review. If that happens, we’ll all have less insight into what’s going on there. I’m hoping it doesn’t.

Agreed. I’d rather be communicating a lot and sometimes get scalded than not be blogging. I think Google realizes the importance of communication/blogging and tries hard to get it right. Sometimes Googlers mess up, just like anyone else. But I expect more Google blogging over time, not less.

Wow. Terry Semel is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo!:

Yahoo!, the world’s second-largest search engine firm, announced Monday that Terry Semel would no longer be the company’s chief executive officer. He is being replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

I’ll have to ponder on the implications for a while..

Later: Hmm, Jerry Yang seems to be saying that he plans on being a regular CEO, not an interim CEO. More and more interesting. Jeremy, c’mon, give us your take..

Sigh. Google as a company takes privacy very seriously. I personally feel strongly about protecting our users’ privacy. So I’m frustrated by a recent study that Privacy International did, and I want to know if I’m off-base in my reaction. I got back home from SMX and I’m surfing the web when I see this AP article entitled “Watchdog group slams Google on privacy”:

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”

None of the 22 other surveyed companies — a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL — sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.

So I surf over to Privacy International (PI) to read the actual report, and I have to be honest with you -- it made me mad. But I try not to blog when I’m angry, so I decided to sleep on it. After sleeping on it, I’m still pretty frustrated with Privacy International’s conclusions. Here’s my take.

Google didn’t leak user queries

In this past year, AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users. Within days, a journalist had determined the identity of an AOL user from the queries that AOL released. But AOL got a better grade than Google.

Google didn’t give millions of user queries to the Dept. of Justice

In 2005/2006, the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies requesting users’ queries and other data. In fact, the original subpoena requested all queries done by users for two full months. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all gave some amount of users’ queries to the Department of Justice. Google fought that subpoena (full disclosure: I filed a declaration in that case). The judge sided with Google; no queries from Google users were given to the DOJ. But Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL got better grades in this report than Google.

Google will anonymize query logs

In March, Google announced that it would begin anonymizing its logs after 18-24 months. Google has continued to communicate on the issue, including a post on the Google blog in May discussing the reasoning behind that decision. In fact, we talk a lot about privacy, from blog posts to Op-Ed pieces in the Financial Times. To the best of my knowledge, no other major search engine has followed suit in a plan to anonymize user logs.

Misc bits

Other parts of the study just baffle me. The report claims (I am not making this up) that “Every [Google] corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance.” I know that my years of working at Google may bias me, but does that sound impartial? Let’s test that claim. Here’s a Google corporate announcement we made on our blog in March. Google expanded our support for open-source in our third annual “Summer of Code”:

Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.

That’s over three million dollars in open-source development last year, with even more money set aside for this year. The program introduces students to open-source programming. In return the open-source community and regular users benefit from students’ projects. Does Google’s Summer of Code program have anything to do with surveillance? Nope, not even close.

Conclusions

Sigh. Okay, take deep breaths, Matt. My spleen is vented. Personally, I think Privacy International should feel remorse about walking right past several other companies to single out Google for their lowest rating. But I think that there’s a larger danger here too. I believe this report could corrode earnest efforts to improve privacy at companies around the internet. Why? Because the bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud. Consider: in the last year or so, other companies gave users’ queries to the government, leaked millions of raw user queries, or even sold user queries and still came off better than Google did.

Wait -- someone sold my data?

If I ran a privacy group, I would *find out which ISPs sell their user data*. While Privacy International was conducting its six-month-long study, credit bureau Experian committed to buy Hitwise for $240 million dollars. From the press release:

Hitwise collects and aggregates information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on how over 25 million consumers use and search the Internet in the US, UK, Australia and other countries in Asia Pacific.

If you check Hitwise’s most recent blog post about UK site Gumtree, they discuss collecting user queries: “Hitwise captured 4,201 unique terms sending visits to the website.” Did those queries come from opted-in users, or from ISPs? If I ran a privacy organization, I’d want to know which ISPs sell user data. I’ve pointed out before that ISPs have a superset of data on a user compared to almost any other online company. Some have suggested that ISPs sell user data for as little as 40 cents per month per user. It looks like Privacy International didn’t include any ISPs in its study of online companies. Luckily, some other folks are looking into it. A Wired blog enlisted readers and started to get some answers on the topic.

If Privacy International really wants to focus on Google rather than digging into companies that are, you know, actually buying and selling user data, that’s their choice. Note that I have nothing against Hitwise, Compete, or ISPs at all; I just think it’s unwarranted to call out Google when user data is being bought, sold, given to the government in the millions, or being leaked -- by other companies. And I think Privacy International missed the mark badly by giving those companies a better rating than Google, or by not including the right online companies in their study.

Now it’s your turn. Am I off-base on this issue? Or did this study miss the mark? (I’m going to bed now, so I’ll approve comments in the morning.)

If I said that in my opinion

AdSense : behaviorial targeting :: hydrogen bonds : van der Waals forces

how would you interpret that?

Update, 6/24/2007: In the same way that hydrogen bonds are much stronger than van der Waals forces, I personally consider AdSense targeting stronger than behavioral targeting. Why? Because behavioral targeting might learn that I like TiVo or Terry Pratchett, but I don’t want to see TiVo ads everywhere I surf on the web. But suppose someone sends me a link to a lolcat page and I go there. At the moment I’m on the lolcat page, you know I’m interested in that topic at that moment, because I chose to go there. So AdSense, by targeting to the content of a page, is more likely to show relevant ads based on my interests at that instant. Just my opinion.