SEO Blog

Massive breach of privacy

A senior US District Court judge, Louis L. Stanton (South District, NY), has ordered Google to hand over approximately 12-terabytes of data to Viacom as part of the long-standing copyright infringement case between the two companies. The data Viacom is interested in contains the log-in name, IP address and a list of videos requested from each and every YouTube user. Google has also been ordered to hand over a list of every YouTube video that was removed from the system for any reason.

Viacom successfully argued it needed this data to study the popularity of copyrighted material vs. non-copyrighted material on Google’s YouTube video search engine. To offer a base comparison, the Library of Congress is thought to contain between 12 and 20-terabytes of information.

(1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte /1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte /1,048,576 (1,024²) megabytes = 1 terabyte, or, think about a really, really big building, the kind that could hold an Olympic sized swimming pool and about 4,000 spectators. Fill it full, floor to ceiling, with paper. That’s about the size of the data Viacom wants to see. - calculations courtesy of wisegeek.com)

Links are the through-ramps of the World Wide Web. Used to move website visitors from point A to point B, links are the sinew that bind all websites together. Because links are virtual recommendations from one page to another, Google based its original page sorting and ranking algorithm, PageRank, on judging the importance of a web-page by the number and caliber of links directed to that page from other web-pages. Ten years later, links remain one of the most important elements weighed by Google when ranking individual web-pages.

Actually, the word important is sort of an understatement. Links are gold at Google. A well optimized website with strong and highly relevant incoming links is going to rank well at Google. In our practice, this is a truism that is very rarely wrong.

Google appreciates SEOs when they work to make websites better, more accessible and usable. It has supported the sector with information and access and even dedicated the time of several of its long-term engineers, most notably Matt Cutts, to communicating with the SEO industry.

Adobe’s Flash has long been a source of frustration for SEOs because, until now, search spiders have not been able to read information contained in .SWF files. This has also been a source of frustration for Adobe, web developers and businesses who require a more artistic image expressed on their websites. Perhaps these problems have been solved.
Google Webmaster Central announced today that Google can now see and index text found in Flash files. That includes Flash based widgets and gadgets like buttons or menus. It also includes sites totally coded in Flash!

This means that Google can now recognize and read all text used in a Flash file that can be seen by a website viewer. Google will even be able to take a snippet of that text to use as the descriptive paragraph found under a reference link on Google search results. Google will now be able to use text on a Flash based site to match that site with search queries.

Search spiders will still not be able to read and reference images contained in a Flash file but the isolation and indexing of text is a major step forward for Adobe and the major search engines. There are a few other limitations though.

Quick trivia question… “Why did Google innovate the AdWords advertising system?”

There are a number of plausible answers to that question but the only true answer is, “To make a lot of money.” The plan worked. Google is making so much money, they can afford to take an enormous risk on a fairly safe bet.

A better and more challenging question might be phrased, “Why did Google invent the AdSense advertising distribution system?”

There is only one true answer to that question. Google invented AdSense in order to erect as many digital billboards as digitally possible. AdSense is the program allowing private webmasters to receive income when web users click on Google Ads which are displayed on that webmaster’s pages. The more webmasters sign up, the more billboard space Google enjoys.

The coolest aspect of AdSense for Google is the extraordinary levels of interest and creativity on the part of private webmasters. Google AdWords are contextually delivered, meaning the ad almost always fits the content found on the page they are displayed on. In general Google search results, a query for Blue Widgets will produce any number of blue widget focused AdWord ads, along with several organic references to websites about blue widgets. Choose one of those organic sites, and you might be served a private page about blue widgets that also displays Google advertising. Click on one of those ads and Google splits revenues with the webmaster.