@Google: How is this a good search result for business phone system?

UPDATE 01/24/13 - Cisco finally fixed their CMS. The formatting is still broken on the content but at least it is back on the page. For Google, it does not seem to matter either way because they rank #2 as if nothing ever happened.

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UPDATE 01/22/13 - The Google cache has been updated to show the blank page and it still ranks #2. Amazing. Talk about giving Cisco the benefit of the doubt.

Where's the beef?

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UPDATE 01/21/13 - Cisco still in position #2 and they still have an empty page! At least a week with absolutely no real content in the page, which is clearly broken. You'd think that even if Google doesn't notice the problem, Cisco would at least notice by now. Does anyone actually manage this part of their website?

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UPDATE 01/17/13 - Cisco has moved up to position #2 and they still have an empty page!  Both Google and Cisco are asleep at the switch on this one. It's been more than 3 days since their content has been MIA (I doubt I happened to find the page right when their CMS broke).
I wonder which will happen first:

• Google will recrawl the page and update its rankings correctly
• Cisco will realize that their CMS is serving up a bunch of donut pages and they'll fix it

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I am getting familiar with the telecom industry in search as part of my job.  Each industry has its own nuances, players, and idiosyncrasies.  One thing that is common is that from time to time you will find head-scratching results in the SERPs (search engine results pages).  Often it is because someone is having a bad day (site is down, CMS error, hosting provider makes a DNS mistake, etc....).  Other times, it is because Google just has not yet gotten around to updating their index for a particular term.  They may get to it eventually, but sometimes they are a bit slow to update the results even though the underlying content and/or competition has changed for a given topic. It is impossible for Google to stay on top of each result and each page for every term at every second of every day.  But then again, when you listen to Eric Schmidt, he thinks that the whole concept of showing a list of search results is a failure.

Today, I found a good example of someone having a bad day leading to a poor search result.  If you search for "business phone system" you will see Cisco listed with the #3 position in the organic results:

Nice position, there should be good content behind that link, right?

You can' always get what you want....

You would think that after clicking on that highlighted result you would be presented with some sort of wizard/set of questions to help me find the perfect phone system for my small business. You would think that wouldn't you? Well, let's see what we get instead:

This is thin content

Now, that is what I call a generous use of white space on a page layout.

My guess is that the CMS is broken or someone at Cisco has inserted some code (perhaps to trigger the chat window) which prevents the main content from displaying.

After navigating a few different pages, it looks like the problem may be pretty serious because I found multiple "empty" pages today on their site.  I'm curious though at what point does  Google take this into consideration into changing rankings/indexed status of such a page.

The last cached copy from Google is January 3rd, which at least did have real content in the page (not great, but at least something).  So we know that it worked correctly 11 days ago, but not sure when the page stopped working correctly.

Even when working correctly, the page content did not satisfy the promise made by the headline.  It listed off some features/functionality that users should consider but it did nothing to actually educate visitors on what those features mean, not the tradeoffs or factors are to consider with regard to the list of features. It also makes sure to mention that you should talk to a trusted adviser (translation - Cisco reseller).  Why can't Cisco just clearly educate the visitor right on this page?  Furthermore, it lists the next step as a link to learn more about Cisco's solutions, but when you get to that page it is just a list of their products without any guidance to what you should be looking to learn or how it fits together.  Obviously, I am biased, but I think the content we provide is better. You be the judge.

We all have bad days

Sometimes our sites don't behave as they are supposed to. Let's just hope that if these problems persist, Google will get around to taking that into consideration in the rankings, even if the site is famous.  Otherwise, that is an unfair advantage for "big" sites.  Google should not protect the 1% sites any better than the 99% when mistakes are made.

Is this a Reader, Feedburner, or Blogger Error? Webmaster Central really wants to be a photo blog

The search engines just announced Schema.org to standardize the way the webmasters can enrich their content with structured metadata.  I was looking foward to read all about it on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.  So, naturally, I logged into Google Reader to look for a post.

The first thing that seemed weird was that all of a sudden the blog had 20+ new items. 

That never happens.  GWC is a blog that normally posts a 1-2 times per week, not much more than that.  After clicking on the feed, I was presented with a large photo of some woman.  I thought is this a joke?  Anyway, I kept navigating through the posts and they were all large, well taken photos. 

Here is an example: (Notice that I am in the GWC Blog and the url is poinging to the atom feed for GWC.)

Clicking on the feed details, you can see that something is amiss:

As you can see, something went terribly wrong here. It turns out that the feed seems come from a photgrapher named Joe Hewes.  Looking at his blog, you can see that he uses Blogger as his platform.

My guess is that this was not a hack but a bug/error in Blogger.  The actual GWC blog website has only its original (non photog) content.  If it were a hack, GWC would likely have had its content changed as well.

Well, hopefully Joe likes getting a bit more exposure of his work to the tech community.  As for Google, I hope this is not a sign of more problems with quality to come.

Want iGoogle made for laptop / netbook screens? Use PimpMyiGoogle

Download updated PimpMyiGoogle (May 2011):
Install Pimp My iGoogle – Userscripts.org

View Pimp My iGoogle – Userscripts.org
 
Writing userscripts for most sites feels a bit like a game of cat and mouse.  Everytime Yahoo! or Google or anyone else who has a site that I write scripts for changes their page the following occurs:

1. My existing scripts partially or completely break
2. I go to work on writing an update
3. I get most of the way there and hit a roadblock
4. I need to relearn a bit of the differences between script behavior en Firefox and Chrome
5. Updated script is fixed and posted to userscripts
6. Make a new post on spanishgringo.blogspot.com

I am pretty much at step 6 again.  This time it was PimpMyiGoogle.

Google looks to have completely rewritten its content layout and changed its backend JS functions.  I noticed that on 1 computer in Chrome a few weeks back that the script no longer worked.  However, it kept working fine in Firefox and on my computer at work.  I figured that they might be running a new test.  Well, fast forward to last week and all browsers on all of my computers stopped respecting most of the improvements made by the userscript.

So, this weekend, I dove in and made the fixes.  Basically, the script had to be rewritten from scratch.  I decided to clean up a bit and change the old "show sidebar" button to a new CSS3 button.

ToDo for the script:

• Get min/max buttons to work in Chome (odd Object does not have click method error although the JS inspector shows that their is a valid click event listener).
• Check the module status (expanded/minimized ) to determine which button icon to show.

Any other suggestions for the script? Please let me know.  One idea I want to play with is pulling gTalk out of the sidebar and make it a floating menu.

Google Adwords Does not Like Firefox Aurora (5)

It seems to me that every day Google is taking one further step towards going completely hostile towards Mozilla and Firefox.  Either that or they are indifferent to them. 

Logging into AdWords today with the latest Firefox Aurora browser (Firefox equivilant to Google Chrome Canary - near-nightly updates, some risk of instability) this is what I saw.



When did a release from 2 days ago become defined as "old"?

I got the alert message up top, which has become quite common when entering many sites with Internet Explorer 6, thanks to the campaign to kill IE6.  They must be doing some poor UA sniffing and they have not updated their code to reflect the fact that Mozilla copied Google's own release schedule for their browsers.  Being the fans of web standards that they are, Google should be using feature detection anyway. 

I hope this is just an oversite.  Hopefully it is not in conflict with "don't be evil".  You would hope that the AdWords developers would be trying the apps in all types of browsers in advance and only once they have been released.

As recently as 2008, Google was the source of 91-94% of the Mozilla Foundation's (non-profit behind firefox) funding.

When Google decided to launch Chrome instead of further bolstering Firefox, that was the biggest sign that the partnership was going in the wrong direction.  Then, when Eric Schmidt had his privacy gaffe, the Mozilla camp used the dreaded M and B words in suggesting a move away from Google.  I don't know if a partnership with Google can heal, once that has happened.

This is heading towards a sad end for what was a beautiful partnership responsible for forcing the advancement of web browser technology and web standards.  We should leave all of our browsers at half-scroll when the deal finally dies likely later this year.

At least Google does not have a long history of partnerhips turning sour

Google Instant Makes Insights + Suggest Extension even more Valuable

Now that Google has turned on Google Instant (I am not a fan yet, but I could perhaps get used to it), the importance of Google Suggest has increased greatly because now they do not only give you a suggest search, but now give users suggested results.

In making this change, it is even more important that SEOs and other interested users understand and analyze the most popular searches that will be forced on suggested to users of Google Search.

The Google Suggest 4 Google Insights for Search Extension makes it easy to quickly compare and view the popularity (as well as rising/popular related searches, and regional interest) of the searches that Google is most likely to execute in the process of writing a normal query.

See the original post to learn more and download the extension (for Chrome and Firefox)

Google Analytics Evolution - Time Series GA Data using the API & App Engine

This project started with 3 main ideas:

• Need to quickly pull visits, bounces, transactions by month for many sites? Check.
• Want to rapidly chart sites' performance against each other? Check.
• Need a simple interface to allow for getting data into Excel that any marketing person could use? Check.

I am happy to introduce Google Analytics Evolution. A new app hosted on Google's App Engine (for Java) using the Google Analytics API and Flot., a powerful jQuery plug-in for charting.

GA Evolution in Action

Reason for the app
I often have the task of slicing and dicing data for the many sites I oversee. at logismarket we operate our 16 sites in 15 countries. Using Google Analytics, the process of pulling data for reports across all of these sites, was a time-consuming and tedious task. Custom reports, advanced segments, and the great greasemonkey script, cleanerGAProfileSwitching, made things much easier, but I wanted to be able to work even faster. Additionally, any time that I wanted to see data over a longer period of time, my biggest pet peeve with GA, sampling, would rear its ugly head. Given the size of our sites and depending on the dimension or segment used, we can trigger sampling with only a few months of data. That makes using GA for measuring trends quite unreliable, especially for transactions, since the margin of error is much larger on the transactions than it is for visits (the basis of sampling in GA).

So when my boss asked me for a review of the last 18 months for all of our sites and to further segment the data into 3 different slices, I decided to start coding instead of pulling data right away. A little investment now in coding to get a big payback over time for me and anyone else who has the same kind of needs with GA.

Enjoy.


Examples of Usage

• Site comparison: Pull data for the same period for 2 or more sites and click a column header to see the results in the chart
• Segment comparison: Pull data from the same site (or more) and choose various segments for the same period and click to see the difference in the chart without the distortion caused by being forced to include All Visits (as it does in the GA UI). Also less likely to trigger sampling.
• Quick data pull for multiple sites: Select all (or most) of your site profiles, get the data, copy and paste to Excel. Only minimal manipulation needed to get the data ready for Pivot Table usage :-D

Check out the free app today

Ideas for Future Expansion
While this app currently meets my needs I have identified some areas that I want to expand and improve the app. I am also open to suggestions. Please add a comment to this post or report an issue on the Google Code project page for GA Evoluation.

• Add export to CSV feature. I am thinking to do this along similar lines as the charting... where you export the data that is already pulled and you select the tables. That way you know what you are going to get (eg, you can check Confidence Interval to make sure sampling was not triggered).
• Make the metric selection dynamic with a set of default metrics. You can greatly expand the reporting capabilities, but I need to make sure that the reporting stays correct (keep apples to apples in charting of the data).
• Add some calculated metrics not in API. Bounce Rate, eCommerce Conversion Rate are not available via the API because that info can be calculated after pulling the data. No need to burn free Google cycles when we can just calculate it ourselves. However, it would be more user friendly to have the option to get the data as we want it, not just as it is given to us by Google.
• Other enhancements to flot charts. These are not fully defined yet, but I am thinking toward making the charts a bit more dynamic... still need some thought here.

Pimp My iGoogle – Greasemonkey Script

Update May 2011: Complete rewrite to handle new internal structure of iGoogle.



Update: I ported the script to Chrome:

Pimp My iGoogle - Chrome Version  use the main userscript on userscripts.org

Pimp My iGoogle – Userscripts.org
I am not a big fan of many of the changes to the new iGoogle. I tried it back many months ago when it first was launched. I sent them a lot of feedback. Unfortunately, a lot of that feedback seemed to fall on deaf ears at Google (what a surprise - sarcastic emphasis added).

Anyway, there are 3 main things that Pimp My iGoogle does:

1. Simplify and reduce the space needed by the header - I also unbury the link to Google Reader
2. There is a button to hide/show the annoying left-hand nav bar (they really should allow users to customize the order and styling of those links in the nav bar).
3. Brought back the max/min button to load and unload modules. Google decided to move this funtion from its original home to the options drop down layer...forcing users to make 1 more click to move open and close the modules. This script puts the function back where it belongs (on the header of the module)

Sadly, I have not yet fixed my last main gripe with the new iGoogle.
Individual feed items used to have the same max/min functionality as modules. That was great if I wanted to read a post then and there without really changing the screen. Well, that is gone now and you only get a snippet of each post. That makes each feed module take up too much space by default and it forces users into the expanded mode.
UPDATE: Google has since brought back the old functionality

My suspicion is that these moves are mostly aimed at forcing more people into canvas mode where Google will have more ability to show ads targeted to the active module's content. If they try that, I'll just update Pimp My iGoogle to block d'em ads.

Chrome 1st Impressions

I have been testing out Google's new webkit-based browser, Chrome, for about 1 day now and so far I am pretty impressed.  The performance is generally fantastic, although I did have some sluggishness switching between open tabs when some CPU intensive activity (loading a lot of JavaScript and playing Flash video) was going on in my current tab.  Otherwise, it seems to be very very fast and lightweight in the memory department.

I wanted to compare Chrome vs. Firefox 3, especially in the area of JavaScript execution.  My favorite js library is jQuery, so I decided to test how well each of the two browsers can rapidly process all of the appear/disappear effects.  Here are the video results:

Google Captcha Gotcha!

So we are setting up some new buisness processes at work using Google Video and I had the lovely task of creating new Google Accounts for various groups in my business. Actually, the form is quite simple and easy except for the captchas. I think google uses some of the most difficult captchas today (they range from simple to impossible). I guess that is something they need to do.

However, it seems to me that they could make it more difficult for bots without making it so hard for humans to understand.By surprise, I came across what seems to be a bug in their system today. A few years ago, Google added an Audio Captcha to improve its accessibility.I was totally stumped with this captcha:

I really could not tell if that was gnttyled or grityled or what....so I decided to click the wheelchair icon to hear the audio. This however, is what I heard:

It would be easier to decipher a drunk Bob Dylan arguing with Tom Petty, in Japanese, than to figure out this audio captcha.

Now Google does admit that they audio will be challenging:

To keep the audio captcha as challenging as the visual captcha when confronted by automated agents, we add some distortion to the spoken digits, and we're still experimenting with different distortion techniques to ease the burden on the genuine human user while locking out automated agents.

However, that is just ridiculous! Try it for yourself and you can send them feedback.