203 karma · joined December 10, 2010
Google deliberately prevents referrer data from passing regardless of the state of SSL. It only allows it to pass if someone's clicking on an ad.
I mean, that's why Google briefed us about the research. Why they let us interview them on it. You know, question them about it, and why we quote them.
The "actual source" is effectively a Google press release, which our SEO blog/spam site did link to. The story that gives context about why they did more research.
I argued that I'm already paying them at least once with cold hard cash for that content, twice if you want to count Hulu Plus, where until last year, they also distributed the content. Three times, if you want to count my Netflix subscription.
Despite all of this, I cannot get last week's episode from them through any device I use where I actually have paid them cash.
But if I want to open my laptop, they'll give me or anyone who has paid nothing the episode for free -- and if I want to hook my laptop up to my TV, then it's on my TV.
That's the argument: despite paying them, I'm getting less than if I paid them nothing at all. That's a broken business model, to me.
They "gain" only two things by doing this. One, it's less convenient to stream from my laptop to my TV, so potentially I will prefer to buy some type of cable or satellite TV subscription. But I already have that.
Two, they potentially prevent me from abandoning cable or satellite TV -- cutting the cord -- and going with all web streaming. But that's a false assumption. If anything, they're encouraging me to cut the cord more. That's because with Netflix and their own web site, I'm getting better service than if I didn't have DirecTV at all.
The fact is, I can have it on demand and for free if I want to watch it through my computer. Or hook my computer up to my TV. Fox provides it this way.
But if I want to watch it through a Roku or Google TV, from the same exact web site, from the same exact data stream, then I can't.
And I can't, because, Fox is afraid that if they do it that way, I won't pay all the money I'm already paying to DirecTV in the first place.
So lesson learned? I shouldn't bother with any of the payment options in the first place.
Two hours is an incredibly long time for Google to respond to something like that, where there's story out in error. It's a long time to respond period. I know, because I'm in contact with them all the time. That's typically a sign they don't quite know what to say.
Clearly, that wasn't the case here. I did look at the OpenSocial site, and a few of the pages within it. There did seem to be a possible connection between the two. Despite my initial language that did qualify things, it was still too strong.
Excuses aside, and as Kevin Marks notes elsewhere in comments here, the OpenSocial idea was initially put out there as some type of way that Google would unite the web to help share social information for developers to use -- to pull in profile info, friend info and activities. And it wasn't positioned as just some type of social gadget building tool.
That's what it seems to have devolved into. Just curious from anyone, is Google feeding Google+ information into OpenSocial?
The connection I was seeing was now that Google has its own social network, and its own set of social signals, it seemed less interested in potentially ensuring there was an ecosystem of sharing everyone's social signals out there.
Google gave me a statement saying they are separate things, which I added, but it still wasn't clear how this may or may not be impacting OpenSocial. So, I asked again.
It's been two hours now, so if it was a crystal clear answer, I'd have expected to heard. My guess is that they are more interrelated, but as I said, hope to get more clarification.
Oh, wait. They didn't. They slapped a ranking penalty on the company, because ultimately it was JC Penney's responsibility.
Google did participate in a blog for payola situation. The fact that it employed third parties that got it involved in that doesn't magically excuse it from potential penalties.
This wasn't some "rogue" contractor that just did whatever it wanted. This was an agency Google hired, which in turn worked with another agency, that ran this campaign. These companies were engaged by Google.
Did Google expect this type of mess? No. Should Google have been watching for it? Absolutely. Either no one at Google bothered to fully examine the final and promised work product or they did and were dumb enough to let this go forward. Neither speaks well about this case.
And to date, I still haven't gotten Google or the agency to provide more specifics about what was expected or promised. That generally isn't a positive sign.
I think someone at Google got a pitch about doing some viral blogging thing to promote Chrome. They probably decided cool, go for it. They probably didn't examine exactly what was going to happen. They almost certainly didn't plan to buy links or have garbage content be produced. There almost certainly wasn't some evil plot to do all this.
But that's not the point. The point is that this did happen, by a company that when others do this, passes out penalties against them, regardless of the excuses. That's why it's an important story, and I'm sorry that's lost on you. It's not lost on many other people.
Including Google, by the way. That's why Google's own spam team has penalized Google Chrome's page.
This very common, very simple mistake was also don by the company which over the past year has tossed hundreds of sites into oblivion from its search engines, because they had content that was deemed too "thin" and warned others not to do the same.
This very common, very simple mistake was also done by the same company that has banned or penalized other companies over purchasing links through sponsored posts, even if those companies protested that they didn't know better and that a middleman was involved.
So how did I wring that much out of this "small" issue. Simple. It's not a small issue.
Perhaps you're dropping like a stone because I explained this in my post.
I don't have a sense of entitlement over Wikipedia. I have a sense of disgust.
1. One person at Wikipedia declares a 7-6 vote to be a "consensus.
2. The same person at Wikipedia, when alerted to a comment with and substantial information that hadn't been cited before does nothing.
3. A second person at Wikipedia, also alerted to the same comment, also does nothing other than leave a message that I should do a Deletion Review
If Wikipedia's goal is to make informed decisions around consensus, it has failed on multiple levels.
I then spend more time trying to figure out exactly where I should submit this information. The instructions were to submit to a talk page, but as I noted, the page no longer had a talk page, since it had been deleted. The review deletions page, as I also noted, has instructions that are unclear.
So I wasn't "really willing to engage seriously" to take a "little time" to understand what was going on and simply wanted to "bitch?"
No. If I wanted to just bitch, I'd have tweeted Wikipedia had its head up its ass about killing the page or maybe done a blog post about the removal and left it at that.
Instead, I did research to help them make an informed decision, using my knowledge of the space to ferret out information they'd been unaware of and clearly missed. I spend time trying to figure out how to submit it despite the insane system there.
Perhaps it would be better for you, since you appear to be connected with Wikipedia, to not dismiss things as people in huffs trying to promote friends pages and instead find a way for Wikipedia to better accept information that it should be using to make for a better resource.
What you have isn't a case study here about someone bitching for a friend. What you have is a case study about how Wikipedia does not make fully informed decisions due to the bureaucracy it believes protects the system.
Wikipedia does not manage to be respectable when ill-informed people debate whether to delete an article that Wikipedia itself started and reach a "consensus" to do so without there being a consensus.
What looks to you as a well-reasoned and thoroughly thought debate looks that way because you're probably not an expert in search marketing. It's like an amateur watching two programmers debate whether some other programmer is "notable" or not. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no idea. And the references that might seem reasonable perhaps aren't, if you're more educated.
The Wikipedia "community" hasn't agreed with my assessment. The Wikipedia "community" that made this decision was one person, who when someone else raised the fact that I posted new, fresh arguments, decided unilaterally that if I thought those should be considered, I should submit a review request.
The way it should work, he should have put that request in himself. At the very least, it sure should be a lot easier for anyone to put in such a request.
As I detailed, I found it actually impossible to do so, because you can't request that a page that's been deleted to be reviewed on the review deletion page -- that page is only for pages in the current process of being reviewed.
I call a confusing system that needs overhaul.
There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons.
Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.
If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus.
When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.
That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.
If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.
I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.
But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.
I understand there is an opt-out. My post on daggle.com goes into great depth about that. However, I don't think that's the way Google should operate.
Google just assumed that it was OK to reprint material through its cached pages; many have felt that was presumptuous. So far, they've been OK with it -- but it remains something that colors them as evil in some quarters.
I get you don't agree with that, but others do view it that way. And it sure jumped out to bite Google when it levied allegations that Bing was copying Google.
The opposite is happening here. Google rolled it out, then just kind of let it sit -- no big huge improvements, and it was hard to find. Now they're putting much more faith into it, making it more visible.
I did indeed debate whether to put the link right in the lead. I did indeed not want people to immediately click out to read and potentially not read what I wrote. There was no "dishonesty" in doing that. The point of writing something is for people to actually read it.
You've got three main people who will read the article.
First, most of my own readers, who probably don't know John and don't particularly worry about what he has to say on the SEO front. The don't need a link to his article right from the opening. They came to read what our authors have to say on a topic.
Second, people who eventually will find this article years from now to learn about HTML title tags. At the time they come, the particular debate on this day won't matter. The advice, however, will. I actually debated whether I should even mention John's article in the opening for that reason, so as not to potentially date a future resource.
Third, people who may have read John's article and then somehow learned of my article. They aren't looking for a link right in the opening -- they read the article.
To make up for it being further down, to emphasize it more, I deliberately chose to link using the title of his article, rather than say from something like "write" or "post."
In terms of being "stingy" with links, Search Engine Land links out all the time. All the time. My article contains seven external links. The internal links to our own articles also contain external links.
If you're being downvoted, it's because you came in with an inaccurate comment and yourself got all angry about it. You missed the link, probably because you didn't bother to actually read the article, rather than it being so invisible as you'd like to make it out to be. Then, in your rush to condemn me, you didn't even bother to viewsource to double check that there was a link there, something that would have taken all of about five seconds to do.
When I pointed out your mistake, rather than apologize, say "oops, I missed it" and maybe suggest it could be more visible, you got even more defensive about it. You were wrong in your comment. You still haven't bothered to apologize for being wrong. Instead, you compound the error with allegations that my site is link "stingy" and that I somehow have "dishonest" link placement (if I were really trying to be "dishonest" from an SEO perspective, I'd have nofollowed the link).
I'm sorry I parroted your tone. That got to me, the attitude you displayed. I should have simply responded that yes, there was a link in the story. Now I've added a further one right in the lead of the story, which perhaps you'll find more reassuring.
Of course, Google seems to give anchor text credit to the first reference of a link, so that means John's article is now likely to be relevant for the word "dishing" rather than "Title Junk," but that's another consideration that I had in mind that was probably lost on you.
Still, I'd agree they probably should shorten the title to be focused around two or three key terms they want to be found more. I think it would be a more attractive headline that would encourage clickthrough.
"In John Gruber’s article today, Title Junk, he gets upset about title tags that produce a bad display or readability situation."
The link is in there in the words "Title Junk." I even specifically called the article out by its name and used anchor text to it. I wanted the link to be next to John's first quote in the story.
Extensions will work if they don't use some API thingee (that's the technical term) that Google doesn't find secure enough. Don't have my notes, but NP/API? Anyway, most of the stuff in the market they tell me should be fine -- but even there, not all of it will be, guaranteed, I was told. In short, Chrome in Chrome OS is not exactly the same as the Chrome browser.
On iTunes, we'll all be using music from the cloud. Seriously -- my second day interview with them will get into this. Maybe so. But if you're into Apple devices, you're still going to need iTunes.
On 3G, I have a 5GB plan that I've used for years. Never gone over my limit. But, I only use it for when I'm traveling, about 5 days or so per month. If this was your main plan, expensive. But Google positions it as something you can use if you're out and away from WiFi.