Street View Privacy

Besides the issue with the WIFI networks, people have been requesting that their should have a way to “opt-out” of this service. Currently Google blurs out faces & number plates of cars, but in Germany people have the right to request that the image of their house can be removed. Right now this is a storm in a tea cup for the German regional Information Commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar. Some{DE} newspapers {DE} are reporting that there are over 10,000 requests already to remove information, and it’s expected that this number will continue to grow.

I must admit, I think that these people are forgetting how the internet works. This type of information is not just available from Google. Here are a series of videos from a Düsseldorf letting agency, which show houses and other details of locations through the city. People fail to realise there isn’t much you can do from stopping someone taking a picture of your house, and putting it on a service like Panoramio, here is an example of a house close to my office. And the bigger question, is this something you should be able to request ? Is this an invasion of privacy (either morally or legally) to have a picture of your house on the internet without your permission ? All that Google is doing is making this information easy to use, and filling in the many holes in what other services offer. While I realise that Germany’s privacy laws on photography of people are stringent, I really don’t understand why this could extend to an image of your house.

There are other issues that I wonder about, like if you live in an apartment building, and one person requests your building removed, but the other 11 tenants are perfectly happy with the image being included. In the end, my fear is that it will just render this service unusable in Germany.

Google Video on Street View Privacy

Here is a video from Google’s Street View page in German that talks about data privacy {DE}, from their microsite about this topic.

Street View German Cities

The cities list of cities that google plans to roll out streetview in, via google blog {DE} :
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.

Business Card Backgrounds

Using Business Cards

As the backgrounds are all different, you do get a few interesting looks handing out business cards. Some people think you are giving their colleague a different / special / secret card, compared with the one they are getting. To be honest I am not a big fan of handing out business cards (and these ones will probably last a year), but in certain circles it looks bad if someone gives you their card and you can’t offer one in return. At the very least the business cards are good for entering competitions in trade shows and at hotels For anyone settings themselves up in business and starting out, a few euros and an hour invested in some cards should help.

Right now they have an offer, which only runs until tonight, where you can get 200 cards for about €50, see here. Or to test is about €15 for 50. They have an email list too which regularly sends out offers.

One final moo tip : unless your company is a really focused on the environment, avoid the eco paper cards. The finish isn’t as polished on they as it is for the matt (no recycled card) business cards.

btw. I will be the first to admit that my cards aren’t as cool as these cards, being an ex-electronic engineer I find them really intriguing.

Delivery !

And five days after I’ve ordered they’ve popped up on my door.

Presentation

The packaging

The Moo Cards

This morning I was looking for a T-shirt printer in Munich, and I typed in the following search query [tshirt druck] on google.de , and after position 3, I see the google places map.

Casually checking out C & D, I didn’t notice that they had the same phone number. But both results brought me to the same same website. On closer inspection we see that munich-t-shirt.com 301 redirects to stadtkopierer.de, but none the less google places lists them both.

btw. stadtkopierer I am also surprised you have 20 reviews, when your competitors have 0, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Steps to create a multiple listing

Things that will probably need to be unique :

• website URL
• email address
• business title

Things that probably don’t need to be unique :

• phone number
• location

I did notice that the two websites have different WHOIS & DNS settings, but I’m guessing that this also isn’t so necessary.

Adding your business on Google Places

To add your business to google places, simply log in to your google account and visit http://www.google.com/local/add/, here you will be guided through the process. My only tip here would be to include as much information as possible.

I’m not going to go too in-depth as to why being listed on Google places is absolutely important. But if you are selling a product and have a physical presence in a town or city, then having a listing will deliver you a great leads of customers who want your product in a specific area. (examples : wedding planner {city name}, dentist near {postcode} , gardner {town} , etc, etc.) You know that people searching for these types of things are more prepared to buy, than someone looking for general information. Test it yourself, google [tv shop] & [tv shop dublin], and see how Google treats the different visitors.

Now I’m off to do a little further testing

The FrontEndUser Module is a great addition, where it allows you to have a login for your site, and display certain parts of templates whether a user is logged in or not. Sadly their email validation is slightly flawed, as it didn’t like email addresses with dashes in the username part.

I came across a great post titled “Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions” , which show various examples of what regular expressions will match and check for valid email addresses.

FrontEndUser Fix

To fix the FrontEndUser module to allow dashes (some of you call them hyphens) you can take the following steps

• go to /modules/FrontEndUsers/FrontEndUsers.api.php
• find the function IsValidEmailAddress around line 965
• comment out :

if( !eregi("^[_a-z0-9-\.-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-\.-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$", $email ) )

• and replace it with

$reg ='/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i';
if( preg_match($reg, $email ) )

The next thing from Google

I’m thinking out loud here, while looking at my credit card bill earlier today I am really quite surprised that Google hasn’t launched their own version of a credit card. They already have a payment gateway, google checkout, which can provide data on consumer spending processes. But it is limited to online transactions. I’m sure that offline transactions, and the data set of

• what people buy with the cards
• where they are when they purchase
• what time of the day they purchase
• what their average purchase amount is
• frequency of purchasing at a location
• etc.

could nicely be tied in with the data on into

• how they search (google search)
• use a phone (google voice)
• use broadband
• use email (Gmail)
• use health care (health.google.com)
• etc.

to allow them to create a comprehensive profile of a person, and ultimately target ads to people with products that  now that they like to buy.

Again this would align with their strategy to organise the worlds data. hen I see Google touching into these markets with their recent  credit card comparison tool for the UK, I really start to think that it could be a possibility.

We’ve seen how they will soon destroy the GPS industry with their Google Maps Navigation (which I wish would be launched in Europe, so please hurry up) to provide free turn by turn directions to users instead of having to buy rather expensive GPS devices. Google entered the market under the radar so to say, by licencing the content until they were in a position to use their own. Maybe with the comparison tool google will be able to see what offers interest consumers most, is it a low APR , balance transfer or rewards ?

Ways to make the Google Credit Card attractive

I’m sure they will want to avoid another backlash like they got from the launch of Buzz earlier this year, so it will have to be something people are willing to trade their data for. Most cards in the United States don’t have an annual fee, unlike European cards, so I don’t think that a no-fee card would be a such an attractive proposition. And offers of points, air miles and cash back are also quite standard. To catch the attention of the public it would probably need to be something significantl that people wouldn’t mind their purchasing data being analysed. My thoughts that it would be something with an extended credit limit, lower balance, and then tied in with another google product like say a free phone for example. Again these are just some random thoughts on what they could do.

One other possible entry into the market would be to purchase one of the smaller credit card companies, like say Discover.

After Google Credit Card

And what will Google do after that. Could Google start to be an cheap energy provider or even a  bank ? Sure why not ! At the end of the day it’s all data.

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• SEO consultant
• etc.

Note: I’m not slamming anyone company in these examples, well maybe one, but this is not the point of the post. I want to give some tips on picking a SEO company so that you know the right questions to ask and know when someone is pulling the wool (a little) over your eyes.

Reality Time

A sad fact in this matter is that people searching for [SEO] are more likely to be other SEO companies, rather than potential clients looking for some SEO help. So the fact that they rank for SEO probably doesn’t even help their bottom line. Here is a little comparison between the number of searches for [SEO] and the number of searches for [cake recipe] using a popular enough keyword [house prices] as a scale. This graph relates to the worldwide view rather than just Ireland.

It just can’t be that there are similar enough numbers of people looking to bake cakes, as there are people looking for information on SEO. My tip would be if a company says they rank for a keyword, give it a check on google trends or on google keyword tool for adwords to find out exactly how popular it is.

Looking at the amount of enquiries I got last year, and the % of them which came from the keyword [SEO] I would have to say it was close to zero. I would hazard a guess that the a lot of my manual comment SPAM for SEO tools and link building etc, is from dubious firms putting these keywords into their browser and going through the first few pages of Google results to find some links. So the fact that a company ranks for [SEO] doesn’t really help them, rather it probably wastes a bit of their resources, unless they are using it for bragging rights.

Final Thoughtson hiring a SEO company

If you are going to hire a SEO company, ask more about what they do and how they do things. What is their approach to site structure ? And how to they go about procuring back links ? Don’t be fooled when a company says that they are are #1 or #2 for a particular {keyword}, and therefore they must be good and they will be able to get you to rank at a high position too. Rather, ask for real life cases they have worked on, and what the resulting traffic increase has been because of their SEO efforts. Request Google Analytics data (or some other statistical report) of before and after the SEO campaign, and if necessary verify with their client that the SEO company has actually done this.

An aside : And oh, here are our SERPs for SEO so we do rank somewhere, but just not that high, but then again we are not looking for new clients, so that’s okay.

The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash  amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :

1. open up notepad
2. enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
3. for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
4. save as ASCII .TXT file.
5. login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
6. click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
7. fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
8. click review, do a review and see the fees.
9. Click send and save some fees !

Paypal Fee Savings

For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com  1000 EUR

So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge,  rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.

It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !

Merry Christmas !

And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.

Google UI Testing Video

Use full screen to see more details.

Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?

1. The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend.  I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some  motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
   
2. The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about  special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords.  A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips

Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

And last year they also had a special edition :

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

Some issues with jobberbase

Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or  perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)

Jobberbase custom homepage footer

• copy the file /_templates/default/footer.tpl to /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl to add in more navigational links or text.
• edit the file /_templates/default/index.tpl and change the last line from

{include file="footer.tpl"}
to
{include file="footer-home.tpl"}

Jobberbase proper error page handling

• copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file

{php}
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
{/php}

• edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from

{include file="header.tpl"}

to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}

Advertise your open jobs

And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org

Some quick points noted about Google Caffeine :

• Image results seem to have lower priority.
• Search results appears to be about 50% faster.
• Larger index size.
• A different sensitivity to keywords in domain names.

Caffeine Comparison Tool

As always we like comparisons to be easy, like the Google / Bing Comparison, so I chopped the tool around to do a comparison between Google and the new Google Caffeine version and it’s located at www.comparecaffeine.com .Give the tool a run and see for yourself the differences.

Right now we have a US .com and Irish .IE targeted versions, more can be added upon request. Just say the word !

Updates

Given the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to implement some changes:

• Added .CO.UK version , the tool is now available in .COM / .CO.UK / .DE & .IE versions
• Ability to see more than 10 results, now has the option to show 10/20/50/100 SERPs
• Personalised search is turned off. Result changes on the current version of Google SERPs won’t be effected by what you have clicked / searched previously.

Bing From Microsoft

Today Microsoft has relaunched Windows Live search and it is now called Bing (www.bing.com). Right now Bing looks very promising, at least for the US market, their image search and some localisation seems to be better compared with google.com. For some searches like [thai restaurant 33308] the results are very similar indeed. Bing’s image search has a nice slight zoom in featyre , and “similar images to this” option which is rather nice. They present the results rather clearer than google, and have an easier navigation system on the left hand side to drill down on queries.

For Bing.IE the results we looked at seem on a par with google.ie, i.e. as good or even better, when it comes to general queries of facts ([horse racing] for example). But when we start to ask more localised and to ask for [doctors in Cork] or [cooking courses], bing starts to show it’s weakness. I would generally expect more local search results to be returned, even without specifying “only pages from Ireland”. I’m sure that this will be improved over time, and Bing.IE’s deficiencies are not always a bad thing. Right now there are very little ads on bing.ie, so you can be sure that the results you are getting are not confusing you with paid ads. This alone would move me to check bing before google.

Compare Google & Bings Search Results

For SEOs we have thrown together a quick tool that basically compares the two search engines side by side in one frame. Check out our Google compared with Bing Tool . Here you have the option to compare the .com or the .ie version of the search engines . The query will check and display the results for both search engines so you can see the difference in their ordering of the SERPs.

Google vs. Bing

Search Results compared

Submit your site to Bing

Hat tip to Michele for the link toBing’s URL submission. If you were previously in MSN Live Search results, then your site should also be listed in Bing, but if not you should take the time to add your URL.

Is Bing the Google Killer ?

Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real Google killer, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money. I’ve read that Microsoft are planning an ad campaign in around the $100m mark, so after that I’m sure everyone will know what it is ‘to bing‘ just like they know what it is ‘to google‘.

Business Listing

So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.

Hotels in Dublin

List your business on Google Local Business Listing

Here is a quick run down on how to  get your business listed on the google local business listings:

1. Go to the Local Business Center
2. Login with your google account
3. Select Add New Listing
4. Enter your business details and link to your website
5. Select your business categories  and add opening hours
6. Verify by phone/SMS/post

When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.

For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.

The Bad of Google Business Listing

Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]

Spam in the Business Listings

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.

Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.

The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.

above the fold view

But let’s have a look at the full page view:

full page view (click to view)

There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.

These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.

Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
 

200+ links in the footer

Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.

A further SEO look

As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.

There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.

And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.

I hope Hans enjoys his prize !

Auction ends in 1 week, April 30th.

So fi you want to win some great memoribilia then please chewck out the ebay auction.

Paul

One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.

example of a Google penalty

The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic.   Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:

Jan 1st to Mar 10

We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.

Our actions against the penalty

The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.

Google on Reconsidering Request

Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”

Further reading

Here are two good posts about the google penalties from SEOmoz.ORG and SearchEngineLand.com and are well worth a read.