Google

Google is a huge growing company, currently it has 20+ thousand employees in more than 30 countries. Out of the 20,000+ employees, less than 200 employees are really important. Like all companies, there are core departments and there is the rest. It's the quality control department that decides what to do with all the websites, what to display and how to rank the results when it comes to search.

Every year, Google's quality control team does one or two “clinics.” A clinic is a public session where Google's quality control analyse and explain what's good or bad in various websites. Many people, like consultants, try to do the equivalent to Google clinics, but… they don't know! The consultants guess. Sometimes they are correct, but more often than not they are often wrong! The only people that “know” are the quality control people at Google.

Last year, Google did a clinic in London, UK. Here are some of the “important” points:

In February 2011, Google got shamed by JC Penny who cheated to be ranked in the top 5 websites for common words like dress, jeans…. I wrote about in SEO: How To Cheat JC Penney Style

Fast forward May 2011, and last week, I was talking with a Google engineer.

If you want to sell any photo on the web, you have only 2 choices:

1. Microstock like iStockPhoto and the others
2. Your own website

The problem with using your own website is that people have to find you. Google, here we come. You are indexed by Google and nothing! No inquiry, no sale, nothing, nada… What's happening?

What's the problem?

Google has the standard Googlebot. That's the standard index spider. That's the one that everybody looks for.

Everybody wants to be the number 1 when it comes to Google and search. Being the number 1 does bring millions of dollars, especially when you are the number 1 on very common words like “dress”, “skinny jeans”, or “Samsonite carry on luggage”…

JC. Penney was the number 1 on all these common words . JC Penney was even above Samsonite when asking about Samsonite! JC Penney web sales for fiscal 2009 were $1.9 billion.

Ask anybody and 120% of the people asked will want to know the Google secrets. Knowing the Google Secrets will make you:

1. Rank high up on their index
2. Rich beyond belief
3. Famous beyond belief
4. ...

Turns out that Google doesn't really have SEO secrets, that's the search engine optimization secrets. If Google had those secrets why do Bing, Microsoft search engine, returns very similar results to search requests? The only real difference between Bing and Google is the frequency and the breadth of the indexing spiders.

Yesterday, I wrote a post called: SEO Misunderstandings explaining where was the SEO in the grand scheme of things. I also said:

I was at one of Matt Cutts talk and he explained it fairly well, I hope I can make it also clear.

Looking back at it, I don't think that I did such a good job. I need to further expand and explain. There are a few things that you should do, not for Google or the SEO but for the user. Please note that it's Google's interest in having your website do well.

There are 2 type of people that search on Google:

1. The people using full sentences.
2. The people using keywords.

The biggest misconception is that Google indexes websites. Google does NOT index websites. Repeat after me, Google does NOT index websites. Again, repeat, again and again. That's to make sure that you don't forget it.

What? Yes that's right, Google does not index websites. Google only index web pages. There's a huge difference between a website and many web pages.

• Website → All the web pages and how they relate to each others.
• Web page → One single web page, independently of any other web page on your website

Everybody knows how to search on Google, and what it means. Right? Are you sure? And what about the consequences for your own website? If you are doing your job right your website will go right up there, but only after Google has indexed and added your website to its database.

How To Read Google Search Results

Take a photo's always easy, it's there in front, but how to create new photos and new ideas? The way I do it, is to look at what others did. Am I stealing, no, but I use it for:

• Inspiration: Their photos give me ideas either on what to do or how to do my photos.
• What will I encounter?
• What have I missed?

I already wrote about a few places on: Photo Ideas

Here are a few more:

A good web administrator will keep a tab on the Google Webmaster Tools. If I did it more regularly, I would have noticed that many of my web pages were not indexed. Before I can be in prominent place in the search results, I must be indexed by Google or any other search engine. I had problem with my website:

  Submitted: 714 pages
  Indexed: 200 pages

It never went above the 200 pages. Why? It turns out that I didn't read carefully Google's notes. I read too much on the web. Here are the requirements:

1. Tell Google and other search engines where's your sitemap that will contain all the web pages to be indexed. This doesn't mean that Google will actually index them, but that's what you'd like to be indexed
2. Tell Google which directories to follow.
3. Tell Google and other search engines which directories to NOT go in.

This done with the robots.txt file.

Last night, I was zapping and they had on a US news:

• Number of Internet users: 1.6 billion
• Number of blogs: 22 billions

That's 13 blogs per users. I can't find a confirmation, even from Google, it's the middle of the night and I can't phone the TV station to find out where did they get these numbers, but these numbers “feel right.”

• How many of these 22 billion blogs will be updated at least on a weekly basis? My experience tells me it's far less than 1%. We are down to 220 million blogs.
• How many of these blogs are in English? In 2009, less than 30% of the Internet was in English, with Chinese and Indian now accounting for 30% of the Internet. That's 220 millions divided by 3 and we are down to 73 millions blogs.
• How many of these blogs are about the topic that interests you? 0.1% or 0.2%? There are not that many blogs about photography related topics. That's at the most 73,000 blogs.

Most people do not understand that there is nothing private on the Internet. And the Internet has an infinite memory, even what you don't want to remember. So how do make a web page disappear from Google? Matt Cutts the head of the quality control at Google, aka the anti-spam department, explains it in the this short 4½mn YouTube video.

The YouTube video also explains why is Google displaying the web page URL, even though you have asked Google not to read that web page with the robots.txt file, a file that directs the “nice” spiders on what to crawl on your website.

How good and successful is your website? Many website owners will gloat and claim:

I have 300,000 hits per month

to make sure that their numbers are high. There is big confusion between:

1. Hits
2. Pages
3. People

Hits

A hit happens whenever a web browser, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera... issues a "GET". The web browser may issue dozens of GETs per page, including one for each graphic, for each photo, for each "container"... So hits will always be the highest number. When somebody gloats, including the media, about the huge number of hits, do NOT trust them. It's snow job. If they are misrepresenting their website this way, what about the rest?

Pages

A page is what you think, a web page. So it must be true and reliable. Yes? No! When is a web page a web page and is not a web page? It depends on who asks for the web page. "Served 250,000 web pages this month". Yes it's true but was it done by humans or by robots whose job is to steal your content, harvest emails, names and photos. Robots will go through every page every time. Or even worth through hot linking[^1].

People

People must be real, with eyes, brains... Shouldn't that be the correct number? Almost, it's the better one. You can get this information from Google Analytics or from some software such as AwStats. Google Analytics does not include anybody behind a "proxy server[^2]".

You have a website, I have a website, everybody has a website, even my dog has his own website. Each website is made of web pages. Each web page has at least one address, the URL: the Uniformed Resource Locator such as http://www.foto-biz.com.

In today's world, very few people write website by hand, crafting the web pages with raw HTML. Almost all websites are generated by some software. From Wordpress for blogs, to Mediawiki for wikis like Wikipedia to specialize scripts and software like Adobe's Dreamweaver.