Let me also say: this is in no way dictated by UBL, and they’ve never put limits on my expressions of opinion (and, anyone who knows my history with Verizon knows that I’m not a corporate patsy nor afraid of speaking my opinions about companies far more influential and powerful than UBL — in fact, it’s not widely known but I actually started the process to resign once when Verizon’s public affairs department tried to keep me from speaking at a Search Engine Strategies Conference, but they ultimately backed down). I can’t blame people for being skeptical about business communications, but I do try to be forthright in stuff that I say, and I believe one of the reasons UBL asked me to be an advisor in the first place is because I express my opinions. So. This is not a disingenuous attempt to spin-doctor the truth on my part.

I’m speaking out about the Local Paid Inclusion dealie because UBL has apparently been dragged into this, and aspersions and suspicion have been cast their way — unfairly, from my point of view. I saw Barry Schwarz’s opinion piece this morning, “Bruce Clay Hurts His SEO Legacy & The Industry“, and I was left disatisfied with how the opinion of many has been negatively impacted regarding Universal Business Listing. I’m not saying Barry did anything unfair or illogical — I think I would’ve come to a similar conclusion that he and others have arrived at, based upon the limited communications that have been published about the matter. But, the fact that the series of events has left people with some degree of skepticism and suspicion of Universal Business Listing is why I decided to go ahead and post this.

For any of us involved in online reputation management, you sometimes have to weigh whether talking further about something is just going to throw fuel on the fire or actually help resolve it. But, it is clear that Bruce Clay’s statement on Local Paid Inclusion left many thinking that UBL caused this whole thing in some way, and that Bruce was a victim of their actions.

Here’s what I know about the matter, and my conjecture/opinion on what may have happened:

• UBL has been discussing and experimenting a number of different business information distribution products and ideas for products, including some variations referred to internally sometimes as “paid insertion”. None of those have had anything to do with “paid inclusion” nor paying to get top rankings in organic search results in local search engines such as Google, Bing, nor Yahoo!. Some of the experiments in listing distribution to search engines and online local directories are being prepared for testing and are in “Alpha” stage.
• Bruce Clay has been predicting that local search would involve paid inclusion for a while now. In fact, I sat in the audience at SMX West this past year when he spoke on the Local Search Tactics session panel, and I was fairly stunned and not impressed when he suggested that Google would start producing paid placement listings throughout local search results in a massive way and stated that the local search results were “not organic”. I thought it was a highly unusual thing to say, and anyone familiar with the trends in Google’s local search development (not to mention their overall philosophies of search development) would never have said such a thing. At the time, I considered publishing a blog post critiquing the statements made in that presentation, but I opted not to do so out of respect (not to mention it’s not good form to publicly critique someone you work with on an advisory board). I now regret not speaking about it then — if I had, it might have kept this all from happening.
• Bruce seems to have possibly convinced himself of his own predictions around paid local inclusion. He published a blog post of internet marketing predictions in late January which also invested a considerable importance in the concept with these statements:

  “Local results become a massive revenue source for the search engines. A local paid inclusion program develops where brick and mortar sites can get local result preferential listings for a reasonable monthly fee.”
  
  and:

  “Local Paid Inclusion will replace traditional SEO and PPC as the first traffic tactic. Premium listings in local results will immediately gain popularity as early adopters happily get traffic for a low fee in a matter of days. This will be the most significant traffic tactic in 2012. Everyone that has a local address will participate.”

  That latter statement is essentially the same sorts of things he’d said earlier last year at SMX West.

• I believe Bruce may have so convinced himself that paid local inclusion would be happening that he heard what he wanted to hear when UBL personnel discussed some of their “paid insertion” types of products.
• Bruce has been a reseller of UBL’s local listing distribution service, and based upon that relationship and his misunderstanding of UBL product plans, he published the LocalPaidInclusion.com website — that site, its description of products and its content were done without any knowledge nor involvement on the part of UBL.
• I think it highly likely that when the reporter, Miranda Miller, at Search Engine Watch was pitched the story by Bruce Clay (“Google, Bing & Yahoo in Partnership to Sell Top Organic Local Listings?“), he must’ve hinted that UBL was his backend partner. Or, perhaps someone else with a passing familiarity of Bruce’s business told them that UBL was a partner, based upon the preexisting relationship for normal local listing distribution services.
• When Miranda called UBL and spoke with CEO, Doyal Bryant, I think he misunderstood what he was being asked — if a reporter called out of the blue and asked if he was planning some sort of distribution project with major search engines, he’d truthfully answer “yes”, unwittingly confirming a story about a completely different thing than what he realized. When he said a project was on hold with search engines pending some testing, it was something involving normal listing information distribution services — not a guaranteed top listing placement product — because there isn’t one. I understand there was a very brief call involving him speaking to her on a mobile phone while stepping out of a meeting — so, perhaps the call quality wasn’t all that great as well.
• While Miranda was only one of the players in this comedy of errors, I think it behooves a reporter to doublecheck that they’ve heard rightly when the story appears to be extraordinarily unbelievable. I wasn’t witness to the convo betwixt her and Doyal, but I also think that some level of misunderstanding was going on, that some degree of it was also her responsibility, and that perhaps she should’ve blinked and paused to doublecheck that particular story. At the same time, it’s understandable if a well-established person has given you a story and others reportedly involved appear to be confirming it.
• UBL was dismayed by their abrupt association with a controversial project they knew nothing of. It was also difficult to figure out how to explain their CEO’s apparent confirmation to Search Engine Watch without further muddying the waters with references to their “paid insertion” types of products, and they also didn’t wish to reveal details of other local technology products that they have in the works.
• There’s also the fact that they have respect of Bruce Clay and didn’t wish to cause him embarrassment, and, just as with any corporation, there are issues around what it’s safe to say about people who’ve worked with you in terms of liability. (I’m also on the record as saying that I respect Bruce Clay, and consider him to be one of the pioneers in SEO. I still respect him — I’m just wishing he’d gone further to clarify that UBL wasn’t involved in this, and that UBL’s not forcing him to shut up about the fact that nothing’s going on.)
• The negative publicity was a bit confounding to deal with as well – how do you disprove a negative?  As it was, UBL executives showed restraint with their statements. Unfortunately, this restraint and vagueness about proprietary product plans lead people to conclude they were more deeply involved than the reality.
• Bruce’s blog post around the matter was disappointing from UBL’s perspective. It was a sort of politician’s apology, like when someone says “I’m sorry you feel bad about what I did to you.” The blog post did take some responsibility and apologized some, but it also continues to muddy the waters by hinting that there’s a nondisclosure in place keeping them from revealing the full truth of the matter. This mystery partner, we’re lead to believe, is being mean to Bruce Clay by keeping him from telling on them. He’s trying to have it both ways in that blog post, which just isn’t cool.
• There was no agreement betwee UBL & Bruce Clay to have a paid inclusion service that would give preferential treatment in local search engines with Google/Bing/Yahoo, as far as I’m aware. I’m on the Board of Advisors there, and chat with Doyal Bryant about the major company plans on a somewhat frequent basis, and this sort of product concept has never existed there. Never. Not even speculatively.

Perhaps there is some mystery partner lurking in the background somewhere that really did have such an idea, and convinced Bruce that they could deliver it. I don’t believe that partner was UBL. There’s no agreement with UBL over such a product, so there’s no nondisclosure keeping Bruce from talking about the complete nonexistence of the exclusive Local Paid Inclusion product with UBL. This is less than vaporware, I believe. UBL is mystified by it, and mystified as to how to disprove a negative.

Their fault, if there is any, is by way of the busy, workaholic CEO of UBL, Doyal Bryant, who is guilty of not slowing down and taking the time to carefully understand the context of questions that were asked of him when a reporter called him up and asked about projects which sounded vaguely like things the company really does, involving someone with whom the company really has had a partnership.

The truth of what actually happened is pretty straightforward. There’s no big conspiracy going on. It’s a bit of a comedy of errors.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post At Bruce Clay’s Blog: 10 Image SEO Tips For Local

As you can see above, one email note for “magicJack Plus” included a little telephone symbol, while another one for printer ink included a little fountain pen nib symbol at the begining of its subject line.

It appears that spammers have woken up to the same concept that I wrote about in “Special Characters Are Lucky Charms for Twitter“. In a list of text titles or status updates, adding a little icon-like picture to just a few lines is very eye-catching.

Of course, if this becomes too common, the notes won’t stand out at all, and they’ll risk getting visually filtered by consumers who’ll start associating it with spam, since most of these notes are sent to people based on poor or nonexistent demographic targeting.

This sort of thing should be considered by marketers to be the spice in their stew as opposed to being the main ingredient. Consumers are very fast at relegating types of ad objects into being thought of as undesirable, extraneous stuff to be ignored.

There’s also a higher risk, I would imagine, that these types of special characters might not display properly across platforms and email systems. I’d bet $ that quite a few mobile phones and webmail systems would either display an unknown character symbol or nothing at all in many cases.

However, I must grudgingly admit that there’s a level of cleverness and sophistication for the email marketers who are using this concept — it can work at increasing clickthrough by some degree for the very same reasons that I had suggested it could increase attention for Tweets.

No related posts.

The 3-D letters which are made to communicate the concept of cut-away views of earth sections to show layers of rock and sediment were effortless-seeming in their execution. This is a really great example of typography and graphic art — it’s very nearly an infographic — and, it does all this without losing the recognizability of the Google name (which some of their special logos have done).

Very cool!

Related posts:

1. Have Google Logos Jumped The Shark? Father’s Day Logo Illegible
2. Google’s Happy Birthday Logo
3. Google’s Jack-O’-Lantern Logo Celebrating Halloween

Let me say right here: I’ve long been a fan of Wendy’s food, not only because of the cheap menu items which still are of excellent quality, but because they have a handful of really healthy options. I am also never, ever rude to fast food workers, and I’m sympathetic to how difficult it is to work inside of huge corporations and how there’s always some friction with customers when familiar products are changed.

Even so, I have to take Wendy’s corporation to task for how they chose to change their product, and the marketing decisions involved which resulted in my negative interaction at my local Wendy’s. It was quite clear to me that my negative experience was NOT the fault of the local fast food workers, but due to the decisions which came down from their headquarters in Dublin, Ohio. I’m writing this because I have been a longterm, very pleased customer of Wendy’s, and I have expertise in marketing — I’m hoping they understand very clearly how their direction of product change has negatively affected me, and how it’s likely to cause them increasing problems down the road.

So, back to my first interaction with the new versions of their “Old Fashioned Hamburgers” — I very occasionally eat a hamburger, and when I do, I prefer Wendy’s because of the taste, quality, and the fact that I can easily choose a side item that’s healthier for me than french fries (by contrast, I believe McDonald’s only began offering a few alternatives like apple slices a few years ago, whereas I could get either a side salad or baked potato at Wendy’s for nearly a decade at this point). I’ve been ordering Wendy’s hamburgers for years at this point — always the same, basic product: a Quarter-Pound Single Burger, never with cheese (I rarely ever eat any cheese, since it’s bad on my blood pressure), with all the standard toppings (I later add a bit more ketchup!).

So, I rolled up to the drive-through menu and microphone, and didn’t immediately see my standard order, but they were already asking me what I wanted so I just said “I’ll have a 1/4 pound single burger and a side salad with Italian dressing.” They told me the amount, I drove to the next window and paid, then drove to the pickup window where they promptly handed me my order.

I have a habit of always checking fast food orders, because I’m aware that with them moving so much through and so many customers and orders there’s often a chance for mistakes — so, I was not overly surprised to see that they gave me a cheeseburger instead of a burger without cheese. I told the attendant that I didn’t want it with cheese and handed it back. At this point, things went off the rails slightly as they peered at me suspiciously/unhappily and asked if I’d specified I didn’t want it with cheese. I said — “I only ordered a quarter-pounder single, and I didn’t say I wanted cheese.” At this point, they told me their menu had changed — and they only had burgers with cheese, and you have to ask specifically if you want it without. I thought this was an extraordinary thing to say! I told them I was unaware that they had made such a change, and if they’d just tell me how to order them properly, I would do so. I looked at the new burger they made me sans-cheese, and it looked different — I asked if it was smaller, too, and they stated it wasn’t. I wasn’t animated or rude or going overboard — I was just surprised at the change. However, they made a slightly bigger deal out of my neglecting to state I didn’t want cheese, taking great pains to convey that I had been the cause of the mistake, and even going to the point of calling the young worker who took my order over to the window to further clarify for me how I’d made the error. This treatment slightly pissed me off.

When I got home, I felt irritated. It seemed to me that a major menu change for something that had been a longterm standard item probably should’ve been conveyed better. Sure, maybe I should read the menu in-depth prior to ordering every time, but I go to fast food places when I want a familiar food item and quickly. For something that really hasn’t seemed to change in years and years, the change should’ve been highlighted and perhaps mentioned by the store employees for a number of months — instead of chastising customers about getting it wrong. I did feel strongly enough to write a complaint via the Wendys.com website and I explained what happened. I did get contacted back by a corporate-level customer service rep, as well as the local store manager who offered me some sort of free food coupons (these were messages left on my voicemail).

I didn’t ever take them up on the free food offer — it was never about that, although it does please me that they did acknowledge the issue and attempted to address it with me in a personal way.

But, I find that I’m still irritated every time I go back to one of the Wendy’s locations in my area of Dallas, because I have to specify in an abundantly clear fashion that I DO NOT WANT CHEESE. It’s hard to understand that on the fast food lane intercoms, even, so I find myself having to park and go inside frequently, just to make the interactions go more smoothly.

But, I also find it terribly unimpressive that they launched their new burger products, specifically geared to have more fat and calories as a standard configuration on the sandwiches, and they’ve made it more inconvenient on consumers to have to get it customized to undo the added unhealthiness!

Bumping up any unhealthy aspects of a food item and making it harder to order to reduce those back out probably has an overall negative effect upon their customers as a whole. Or — am I in a minority — perhaps they removed cheeseless burgers off their menus because they just didn’t sell well, and maybe their client base doesn’t care about healthy eating habits at all? I don’t think so.

For instance, the Krispy Kreme doughnut company stock fell pretty roughly back in 2004 (right around when reduced-carb diets became popular) — they same year they introduced a milkshake with blended-up donuts in it. And, they closed some of the many locations they’d rapidly expanded into, and the stock hasn’t ever come back up.

Krispy Kreme Company Stock Performance

A loose connection, I admit. But, it’s definite that companies only known for unhealthy food have taken a hit from the health consciousness movement in America, which is why fast food restaurants added things like salads, fruit, wraps, and other alternatives to all deep-fried, calorie-heavy stuff. This is why McDonald’s added such food, and it’s why Wendy’s did as well — and, it’s why I shop at Wendy’s at all.

Wendy’s project to update their burgers and their removal of the cheese-free option from their menus made me wonder: are the new burgers more unhealthy than the old ones, even if you have them made without cheese?

Unhappily, the answer is no.

I pulled the nutritional info from Wendy’s website via the Wayback Machine from back in January of 2010, prior to when their new line of cheeseburgers was launched (the PDF is dated December 2009). When we compare it with their current nutritional information chart, you can see that even without cheese the burger has inched-up higher on some scores that are generally considered not ideal for health reasons:

Wendy's 1/4 Pound Single Hamburger Nutritional Info, 2009

Wendy's Single Cheeseburger without Cheese Nutritional Info, 2011

As you can see, their statistics show that the new burgers, even when the cheese is withheld, have 30 calories more. That is a small difference in of itself, but the cumulative effect over time for anyone who eats this Wendy’s food frequently will add up. More concerningly, the extra calories come from 5 grams more fat! The cholesterol increased as well. The figures are worse if you include the cheese — which Wendy’s apparently feels is equivalent to the prior version of the burger.

With the cheese included, the sandwich jumps up to 580 calories, 33 grams total fat, 14 grams of which is saturated fat, and the sodium content jumps to 1240 mgs!

For those of us concerned with the slow build-up of plaque on our arteries (as everyone really should be) and the related negative effects on blood pressure, as well as those concerned with obesity, Wendy’s recent menu changes are not good news. If you were trying to maintain a consistent intake of fat and calories while still having one of Wendy’s burgers, the company hasn’t given you that option.

If we compare the Cheeseburger (with the cheese) with McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder with Cheese, McDonald’s comes out ahead:

Wendy's Cheeseburger Nutrition Data

McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese Nutritional Info 2011

As you can see, McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese has 70 less calories, 7 grams less total fat, 2 grams less saturated fat, and 50 miligrams less sodium.

Now, if we use McDonald’s meal builder, we find that if we hold the cheese on their Quarter Pounder burger, they beat Wendy’s Hot N’ Juice Quarter Pound single burger:

So, McDonald’s Quarter pounder has less calories, less total fat, less saturated fat, and less sodium than Wendy’s equivalent!

Considering all this, I have to give Wendy’s a failing grade on their burger retooling on the following points:

• The product “updating” removed a well-established, standard menu item that would be more attractive to health-conscious people.
• The new menu change was not well-highlighted for returning customers nor mentioned by staff when orders were taken, leading to confusion, and a negative experience.
• The change made it hard for returning customers to order a burger without cheese. Really – how hard would it be to include a product name or combo number that was just for a cheeseless burger?
• The change incrementally pushed the basic, single hamburger in the wrong direction on the health scales. Calories and fat were increased, even when customers asked to leave off the cheese.
• Seriously, nearly two years in the making and you couldn’t retool the product to be healthier or at least equivalent?!?

So, here’s the effect on this consumer: I may incrementally improve my health slightly by choosing to go to McDonald’s when I want a burger in the future. The hassle I may face at having to request a Quarter-Pounder without cheese may be equal or less to what I encounter at Wendy’s, but I’ll feel good that I’m improving my diet slightly by reducing calories/fat/sodium in return. The company’s past moves in the direction of having healthy diet options attracted some consumer demographics, and now they’re moving in the opposite direction.

It’s a mystery to me why Wendy’s, in this day and age, chose to redo their core product and in so doing reduced its health score.

No related posts.

It’s not hard to find instances of ads which arguably should not be allowed to be displayed smack along with a business’s listings. Here’s one I just grabbed showing an ad below a local doctor’s listing — the ad urges consumers and potential patients to “Check for disciplinary action”, and has parsed the doctor’s name into the ad itself — casting an implicit aspersion upon the doctor, and potentially damaging the doctor’s conversion rate if the advertiser’s site has some sort of negative information about the doctor:

As Mike points out in his post, there are many cases of inappropriate ads showing up with these — and, it’s hard for me to find a whole lot of cases where an ad might be considered “appropriate” from the perspective of businesses “graced” with oddball ads. I can see where such ads would make sense for some landmarks and other non-business places, but for business listings themselves, such ads are at best distracting and at worst they are actually damaging to businesses’ referral rates.

From the perspective of small businesses, the new ads are far worse than having nearby competitors appearing on their profile Place Pages — these ads are visible at a higher level in the consumer research cycle, and interfere with the potential for users to move any deeper in clicking through to read more details about the business’s information. The related listings showing and ads which have been displayed on Place Pages are shown lower on the page and are not as prominent in the cycle as consumers seek provider information.

One has to wonder how Google can keep a straight face in claiming that the advertising side of the house is separated by a “firewall” from the search engineering side at this point!

One also wonders how Google intends to spin this to local businesses — it feels very extortionary — “you’d better advertise on your own listing, or we’ll let someone else take it hostage!”

This appears to be yet another of many instances where Google does a poor job in designing the online user-experience due to an obstinate refusal to do any sort of user experience testing or focus group testing for local business owners — which are one of the major constituent audiences which makes use of Google Maps. Not only does this new ad presentation *not* improve or avoid detracting from the user experience, it damages how Google is perceived in the eyes of millions of small businesses.

How is it helpful to Google Places to make local businesses feel downright hostile to your company?

Related posts:

1. Google Maps Hates Small Businesses By Launching Local Folksonomy Descriptive Terms
2. Sea Change: Google’s New Place Search Introduces New Disruption
3. The Occupy Protesters Google-Bombed Maps

After media began noticing the unofficial name appearing in Google Maps, Google apparently corrected the error. I just did the search, and the plaza is showing the official name within the map, although you can see from the tooltip that some user had been encouraging people to post ratings under the protesters’ nickname for the place:

A Google spokesperson admitted that the name came from user-submitted edits, and that it shouldn’t have been approved, but should have been allowed as a “search reference”. I’ll translate: Google should not have pasted the name on the map as an official place-name, but should have allowed it to be added to their synonym database so that people searching on the name could easily find the location it refers to. As you can see from my screen-grab, it is now functioning as a search reference.

Concerningly, this incident supports what I have been saying, along with others, that Google Maps is particularly prone to Google-bombing from user-submitted content (“UGC”) edits. As I illustrated recently from Mike Blumenthal’s experiment to flag Google HQ as closed, some types of edits can result in businesses getting their listings defaced with false claims that they’re no longer open, and in even worse cases business Place Pages could get forced to rank for obnoxious terms, and labeled with descriptive terms that sabotage business referrals.

I could argue that it’s actually improper for the plaza to be made to rank for the unofficial name in this place, under the condition of a purposeful Google-bombing exploit. I can also argue that it’s useful and helpful for users to be able to search for places under their common nicknames and alternative spellings. But, I bend more towards this being an inappropriate association in this case. The edits were a type of vandalism intended to hijack place-names in maps in order to convey a political message represented by what was probably a relative minority (assuming the Occupy Oakland protest was a part of the nationwide protest movements sparked by Occupy Wall Street, it’s hard to fathom what a police killing in 2009 has to do with the outrage against corporate corruption and economic problems, other than perhaps some desire to kick up the drama a notch or to appeal to a subset of protesters who desire to associate themselves with a sort of iconic martyrdom).

Considering how there are relatively few checks and balances in place, it’s really not surprising that a mob of people can hijack a place name in Google Maps and change it to communicate their political message. This sort of thing is happening on a much smaller scale to hundreds and thousands of businesses which are unfairly harmed by similarly applied user edits.

While it’s great that consumers have a greater voice in this Business 2.0 age, I think some more balance needs to be brought back to “The Force” by way of limiting the easy manipulation of Google Places and it’s vulnerability to such exploits.

No related posts.

Here’s the key part:

“Express Update will also create public online profile pages for every business in the Infogroup Business Database. This new feature essentially gives all businesses — whether they have a website or not – a visible online presence.”

For IYP companies, this cannot be a good thing. Quite a number of Yellow Pages sites receive business listings data from Infogroup, as well as many other types of online directories such as reviews sites, local social media services, mobile directory apps, etc.

While it’s true that people launch business directories on the internet nearly every day (barrier of entry is low, requiring little more than a database with a web interface slapped-on), it is not every day that a major data aggregator and supplier of YP information does this, nor one which can likely develop necessary search engine ranking clout rapidly.

IYPs already have suffered in terms of natural search traffic due to increasingly aggressive changes by Google in recent years, such as introduction of Google Place Search pushing IYP listings down in visibility and rankings for many top local searches.

But, if Infogroup does its SEO right, it could edge IYP sites out of even more traffic. While Infogroup will have to go to some considerable lengths to develop its PageRank (the site is new, so it’s showing zero toolbar PR), the company has the resources necessary to do so at a time when some YP companies have scaled back technological resources due to budgetary stress. For Infogroup, any additional organic traffic likely will convert to upside overall, and one can imagine that they could parlay this traffic into additional customers as SMBs discover their listings and seek to claim them. If Infogroup develops enough traffic in this directory they might eventually sell ad inventory through it, becoming an ad network partner.

Search marketing managers at YP companies should be concerned that introduction of these new pages could impair their rankings, particularly for those companies that are receiving data from Infogroup — Google has worked hard at reducing instances of duplication from the SERPs, and as the original, authoritative source for much of this business information, Infogroup’s directory pages might be able to trump pages for the same businesses at IYP sites.

From a business strategy viewpoint, Infogroup’s move is also brilliant and simultaneously troubling for YP companies. As consumers appear to be going straight to search engines — Google in particular — and less to directory sites, YP companies have been put in the position of appearing to be less necessary middlemen positioned between consumers and businesses. As one of the larger and more authoritative local business data sources, Infogroup’s move to market themselves even more directly to SMBs circumvents YPs, leaving them out in the cold.

I can see that Infogroup has published the profiles under their listings.expressupdateusa.com subdomain, but Google is only showing 16,900 pages indexed so far — that’s only a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses in their database. They have a long way to go to get all of those pages indexed, but this will still be worth watching for the IYP SEOs.

No related posts.

It combines two-dimensional logo design, sculpting, and performance art, since it is a video showing the Google team sketching their designs on the jumbo-sized pumpkins, carving them, hanging out with each other, and then the jackolanterns are lit as dusk is falling, until you ultimately see only the carved letters glowing with flickering candlelight in the dark of night.

Not only is the logo fun, but it perfectly encapsulates the experiential nature of the traditional pumpkin-carving experience, and a bit of the feel of Halloween festivals here in America. The extra-large pumpkins are set on bales of hay in the central courtyard of what appers to be the Googleplex (Google’s headquarters cluster of buildings) in Mountain View, California.

I like that they designed this variation of their logo while still including the basic nature of the letters, so it’s still readable as the word while also capturing the spirit of Halloween.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Geology Logo
2. Have Google Logos Jumped The Shark? Father’s Day Logo Illegible
3. Google’s Happy Birthday Logo

In it, Matt answers the question of whether spelling/grammer matter to them when they evaluate a site’s quality for ranking purposes.

I wrote about this exact thing in “Google Penalty For Low-Quality Writing?” over a year ago, and some commenters thought the concept of Google analyzing text to detect bad grammar and misspelling was too farfetched to believe possible. However, I’ve read some of the books on corpus linguistics, and it has seemed to me that it’s well within the realm of possibility.

Fast-forward to now, and Matt has essentially stated that some within Google have done some work on detecting bad writing and others have done work in rating the reading levels of text copy. He further states that while it’s not currently one of their ranking signals, the quality of written text correlates so closely to actual rankings that it could make sense to use.

He does acknowledge that there are significant situations where it is difficult to consistently assess the quality of writing. One example he gave was in how it’s challenging to detect what language a page may be written in, and another example was how some pages have portions of text in different languages.

However, it’s very clear that some Googlers have seriously considered using elements of writing quality as potential ranking factors, and if they improve some of the areas where it’s currently challenging for them to properly assess text quality, they might very well add these into the “secret sauce” that PageRank has evolved into.

Just on the language-detection issue alone, I’ve noticed while using Google Translate that it auto-detects the language of text on pages extremely well, and it is good at translating just the foreign language text on pages when I submit webpages that have English and foreign language text mixed on the same page. So, some of these challenges that Matt referred-to are probably moderately trivial where Google is concerned and may be very short-term impediments.

I feel pretty vindicated in the prediction and advice I gave over a year ago, however. The endsum is that Google may not be using spelling and grammar in quality assessments or rankings at the moment, but they very well may add it in the future. And, even if they are not direct ranking factors now, they are likely indirectly having an effect upon rankings because of how these elements affect user interactions with the page in terms of bookmarking, bounce rates, time on the page, linking, and social media endorsements.

(Miriam Ellis, I think you may have to bake me a cake fairly soon! )

Related posts:

1. Thoughts On Local Search Ranking Factors
2. Google Maps Labs “What’s Around Here?” Feature May Reveal Ranking Factors
3. Trust Seals May Be Super Local Ranking Factors

The Whole Foods corn field maze advertisement

It’s not the first time “crop art” or corn field maze designs have been used to promote a company.

Whole Foods’ does have a coolness factor and logic to it, since the grocery store chain desires to associate itself with the concepts of organic farming and freshness. Farm operator Loren Liebscher is quoted as saying:

We feel people are too far removed from where their food comes from.

So, the farm and Whole Foods are said to have thought the maze promotion was the “perfect way to emphasize the farm-to-plate connection.”

What’s not mentioned is the commercial side of the deal — the money which almost certainly had to change hands for this to happen. These sponsorships are good business for the farms which offer them, helping to further augment the diversification of revenue streams. Good corn field mazes help bring in significant amounts of money for farms in terms of admission fees and concession sales.

It will be interesting to see if the maze becomes temporarily immortalized in satellite pics appearing in Google Maps, Bing Maps and other online mapping interfaces. Since the images for those services only get updated every year or every other year, it can be hard to predict if any sort of crop art will get photographed before the season ends and it all gets mowed-down again.

Related posts:

1. Corn Maze Memorializes Deadliest Catch Captain Harris
2. Google’s Earth Art Logo
3. NY Artist Molly Dilworth Seeks Fame Through Painting In Google Earth/Maps