Google Caffeine is a major overhaul to Google’s search infrastructure that was announced in August of last year, which aims to deliver faster and more comprehensive crawling and indexing for the Google index.

About the Caffeine Roll-Out
After a developer preview period, Google rolled Caffeine out to just one of its data centers sometime around November 2009, giving a small percentage of users access to search results powered by Google’s fancy new infrastructure.   So when do the rest of us get to play!? In a recent Search Engine Land article, a Google spokesperson is quoted as expecting Caffeine “to roll out to all data centers over the coming months.”   This is a lot later than the estimate given by Google’s Matt Cutts, who blogged about Caffeine being rolled out after the 2009 holiday season. Bummer.

So Why’s Caffeine a Big Deal, Anyway?
Just to be clear, Caffeine is not a change to Google’s search algorithm, but a new approach to crawling and indexing web pages and content.   That said, it’ll almost certainly result in differences on search engine results pages (SERPs), because the new technology will allow Google to index more content (including more kinds of content) faster (think: realtime results).   What can we expect to see on Google SERPs powered by Caffeine?   Here’s a quick summary of speculations from around the web:

• The speed of search results will increase;
• The temporal relevance (i.e. real time) of results will increase;
• Social media will be more prominent/prevalent in search results;
• The variety of content offered on SERPs will continue to increase;
• The relevance/importance of long-tail keyphrase searches will increase (because of an even larger index).

We use several tools hourly at work – Basecamp for project communications, time tracking, and file sharing, our Socialtext wiki for cross project searchable information storage (procedures, lessons learned), our email, IM and shared calendars through Google Apps for Domains.  We’ve recently been adding a few other tools to our constellation. They’ve been sneaking in to solve particular problems. We’ve begun collaborating with each other in Google Docs and piloting Google Sites for some project specific collaboration (both available within Apps for Domains).

One of the questions that resurfaces from time to time is how to share status. We have a daily standup meeting and regular project standups (monthly). We schedule quick check-ins with each other throughout the month, and most of us work in a big open room (“war room”) where status is a nerf dart toss, spoken question, or IM away.

However, from time to time we get into a fit of wanting more formal status sharing in the form of a microblogging application. We have messed around a little with Yammer (think of it as a closed Twitter within your corporate network), Google Wave, Campfire (chat integrated with 37signals’ Basecamp product), and updating status in our GChat IM available through Google Apps for Domains.

Here are some thoughts as I consider these microblogging/status sharing tools.This is a quick comparison of the most obvious tools given our existing infrastructure. I added my own interpretation with bolding for my critical decision feature. There are lots more categories I could have evaluated, including smartphone accessibility, but I’m considering the main use case for our team being folks on computers, not on trains nor in cars….

I imagine most of the criticism of this post will be on applications or features I didn’t consider. I’m going to exclude Google Buzz right off the bat because it is not available in Google Apps for Domains and therefore not integrated with our other corporate infrastructure and because I don’t want to be drawn into my personal email interface at work if I can avoid it!  Other tools I haven’t tried are Socialtext Signals. Since our wiki is one step removed from our client interactions, it seems the wrong venue even if the tools are interesting. I also couldn’t get it to work in our wiki easily, so I ruled it out.  Please don’t confuse this with a comprehensive summary of all available tools. That has been done nicely by others (including  Laura Fitton on Mashable and  Dion Hinchcliff at ZDNet).

No one will be surprised by this conclusion: which application is better  comes down to what features you need. For me, my internal recommendation is for us to start using the “status” line in our GChat better before we jump to a whole new application. I’d like to see us adopt the habit before we adopt a particular tool. And, I don’t want another inbox or screen to check.

The keyword density ratio, that is, the total times a targeted keyword appears in the overall text of a page, is still something we hear mentioned as an important consideration in SEO from many firms and agencies.

It’s not. The strategy has been firmly and consistently debunked by the leading thinkers in the industry. This is not to say, by the way, that adding your targeted keyphrases to a page’s content isn’t good for SEO. Of course it is. There just isn’t any secret formula for determining how often you should add them.

So why do people keep talking about keyword density? It is one of the most persistent myths in online marketing for four important reasons:

- It was true once. Before search engines really started to grow in sophistication, a lot of spammy strategies would get traction, the most famous of which was “keyword stuffing”, or the inclusion, in meta tags and on-page copy of huge blocks of repeated terms or repeated synonyms. In a bizarre nod to “usability” often   these blocks were made invisible to the user through formatting tricks like making the text the same color as the background.

Algorithmic changes started to make this strategy increasingly ineffective as early as 2001, but the approach had been so successful, and so low-effort, that it persisted as a strategy for years. These days few people think “stuffing” is a good idea, but the attraction of a low-effort “magic bullet” remains so appealing that the sanitized “keyword density” approach has replaced it in the SEO mythology.

- It makes a lot of logical sense if you think about SEO as a way to fool web crawlers. If the use of a keyword once helps with ranking, wouldn’t adding it a second time double the effectiveness? The problem is that the web crawlers — and, more importantly, their underlying algorithms — are extremely sophisticated, and grow more so every year. Even if keyword density were a real input into search engines, it would be one of 200 or more signals considered by Google alone.

- It is easier than writing copy properly. Who wouldn’t want to get a nice list of keywords, drop them in appropriate ratios on a page, and watch the traffic roll in? Modern crawlers, however, are much more focused on the actual content of the page and the relationship between that content and other related pages. A good way to think about keywords now is as a guidepost to the crawlers who are trying to contextualize the content.

In that regard, one keyword is most likely enough, and in fact it is more appropriate to mention context-appropriate synonyms rather than repeating the same phrase.

- It is untestable. You’d think this would be a detriment. However, those who persist in talking about keyword density argue that it cannot be seen as a single input, so the variation is hard to lock down. This is less than useless, and creates ranges of appropriate “density” as low as 1% and as high as 8%.

We would argue that this attraction to untestable strategies is a huge red flag. What is the point of a theory if you can’t test it, especially when your marketing budget is on the line as the bet?

These four reasons are not just a problem with keyword density; we think they are indicative of the biggest problems in the SEO field today, in that they allow people to get away with doing SEO badly. In reality, these four reasons can apply as the motivations behind many shady SEO recommendations.

The cynical side of me believes that SEO often attracts people who are excited about the complexity of a system but don’t like the intensive work in the trenches necessary to make it work. In that way, the myth of keyword density captures the essence of how this problem can be part of many SEO worker’s attitudes about their efforts, the results, and, most importantly, your money.

As an aside, if you are interested in doing SEO right, just dive into the SEO section of our blog. There are many great articles there about how to improve and optimize your site’s organic visibility.

The online interface offered by Google Analytics offers a wealth of easily-accessible, business-oriented data and reporting about the usage of your website. But it has it’s limitations. Recently, when attempting to segment branded and non-branded keyword traffic for one of our larger clients (which, by the way, is a good idea for anyone who wants to understand whether their SEO efforts are gaining traction), we ran into one such limitation.   Here’s the scenario: in order to capture all of the possible brand-related terms associated with our client, we created regular expressions matching variations of each (20 in all), and plugged them into two Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (one segment to exclude those terms, and one to match only those terms).   After quite a bit of work (identifying the branded terms, writing the RegExes, creating the Advanced Segments, etc.), we clicked the Advanced Segments “on” with eager anticipation.   And voila! Here’s the spiffy chart that appeared:

Hooray! Just what we wanted – visitor trends by branded and non-branded keyword traffic!   But wait, what about that little yellow box of fine print? It reads: “This report is based on sampled data. Learn more.”   So what exactly does that mean to us?   Check out the data table that Analytics presented us with:

The numbers for branded and non-branded traffic *should* add-up to 100% of the visits… but they don’t.   See those little yellow boxes next to the segmented data? Those depict the margin of error that Google’s data sampling resulted in. Basically, the statement “This report is based on sampled data” means that the numbers aren’t as precise as we might like them to be. In fact, the margin of error on some of our results was over 70%!   Kind of a big deal…

After a little experimentation, it became clear that neither the size, nor the complexity, of my Advanced Segments were triggering the use of sampling.   Instead, it turns out that the number of visits contained in the selected date range was the determining factor – specifically those instances where the total visits exceeded 500,000.   In order to return reports for large data sets quickly, Google employs sampling whenever it generates a report through the online interface that isn’t automatically compiled.

The take home message?   If you’ve got large volumes of Analytics data that you want to slice-and-dice, you might be better served to pull the raw data from Google using the Analytics API and perform the calculations on your own!

Ann Arbor is abuzz with talk of A2 Fiber. I first heard about A2 Fiber when Facebook suggested I become a fan of the A2 Fiber Facebook page. I wondered what this was and why all my friends were “fanning” it. Google Fiber is a plan to create an ultra-high speed broadband network in a number of carefully selected communities across the United States. This broadband network promises to deliver data at 1 gigabit per second; almost 100 times faster than the average American’s current cable or DSL provider connection. While at work I am extremely connected through Pure Visibility but away from the office I rely on coffee shops, the library and other hotspots for my internet because I find the monthly rates to be too high – Google Fiber might be able to change all this . . .

Ann Arbor is extremely enthusiastic about being included in this Google Fiber experiment. The University of Michigan and the City of Ann Arbor have partnered to fill out Google’s request for information. Ann Arbor would be the perfect place for Google to run one of their Fiber networks. Google plans to “offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people” which will make a huge impact to these individuals but the greater long-term impacts are huge.

By offering “affordable” internet they’ll break up the current monopoly large providers have over certain geographic areas. It’s not a good thing if there is only one broadband provider. The network of fiber could be opened to other providers giving small local companies the option of offering their own services at affordable rates. Google’s “competitive” pricing for their Fiber network would be significantly lower than what most Ann Arborites are paying and the quality of the connection would be far faster.

It is getting more difficult to control ad display in Google AdWords because they’re giving the system more liberties. There are a few variations of this – I’m calling them “Ultra Broad Match” because it’s funny:

Automatic geo-targeting parsing of queries.

If a visitor searches a general term and Google pinpoints him/her to a location that is in the target-area of one of your campaigns, the query is sometimes treated just as if it had geographic modifiers attached to it. Likewise, if you are bidding on a term that has geographic modifiers, Google might decide to broad match it to a more general query that does not have modifiers attached. For example, if someone is searching for “plumbers” from an IP address that is located in Detroit by Google’s system, then it might be treated just as if he/she searched “plumbers in detroit.” Likewise, if a person searches for “plumbers in detroit,” he/she might be treated just as if he/she searched for “plumbers” from an IP address located in Detroit. In your account, you can be explicitly bidding on the term “plumbers in detroit” in a nationally targeted campaign, but Google may decide instead to show an ad for the term “plumbers” that is in a campaign targeted to the Detroit area. For an advertiser, this means it is very difficult (if not practically impossible) to keep terms that have geographic modifiers separate from terms that do not have geographic modifiers when setting bids.   This is a problem because you might expect a broad matched keyword phrase like “plumbers in detroit” to have better conversion rates than a broad matched keyword like “plumbers” – even if the more general term is in a locally targeted campaign. I can think of at least four reasons why the geo-modified term should deserve a higher bid for a local business:

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The   growing popularity of smart phones is leading to a very fundamental change in the way advertisers reach out to users. It’s generally safe to assume by now that in a small group of people, someone has a smart phone with them. The better question would be is it already in their hands, or still in their pocket or purse.   The evolution of this mobile marketing landscape presents some new and interesting ways that advertising touches us on a daily basis, but it is also boosting the use of a much older technology; the QR (quick response) Code, AKA, the barcode.  Apps on new cell phones are now able to read these codes, allowing virtually any traditional form of marketing to easily become a launch pad for a multimedia experience.

My personal favorite use of QR codes is by the Detroit Red Wings. I’m bias, yes, but you find me a better use. I bet you the Colorado Avalanche aren’t doing anything nearly as cool yet. On the big screen, the Wings gave instructions on which free apps to have downloaded, and which page in the program to turn to. What the fans got is a hilarious YouTube video named ‘Kronwalled”, linked below. The best Kronwalling happens 22 seconds in. Anyone that makes that face is really asking for a good Kronwalling. According to the Red Wings, people watching the video through a mobile device watched the video from beginning to end 22% of the time, far exceeding their expectations. They also plan to experiment with and integrate more multimedia placements with their traditional ad mediums.

Another experimental use of QR codes came from the Weather Channel, who surprisingly always seems to be at the forefront of new technology (widgets, phone apps, desktop alerts, and now QR codes). They took this a step further than the Red Wings, putting a large QR code on screen during a broadcast. Scan it with your phone, and it takes you to the Android marketplace, where you can download the weather channel app for your mobile phone. Genius!

Other interesting uses I’ve seen or heard of lately include several restaurants with these codes in their windows. You scan the code, and it takes you to a Google Reviews page where you can read what other people thought, see the menu and hours of operation, and get the link to their website if you want more information. There’s been a few instances of entire billboard displays being a QR code. This approach will work while the idea is new and still clever, but will probably fade as they become more common place.

Also, Campbell-Ewald, the winning agency of the Time Magazine ‘Selling Detroit’ contest, used a QR code in their ad, which will now appear for free in Time Magazine. Their forward thinking likely played a huge role in their winning of the contest and $1,000,000 in free advertising space.

Where else would I like to see this done? How about in news papers? AnnArbor.com is changing the way we see and react to the news, so where could they go next? How could a newspaper use QR codes?

Google is doing some cool things with how we view news. One of my favorite things they’re currently working on is called Living Stories (livingstories.googlelabs.com ). If AnnArbor.com had the QR code on the hard copy of all stories that are still in progress (Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, Local Elections,Healthcare Reform, Haiti Earthquake, Flu Season Information, Frequent Bloggers, etc..), it would allow you to read the article, and if you wanted, you could catch up on the entire backstory.

More than this, lets say you’re reading a hard copy of the newspaper and find an interesting article a friend of yours might enjoy.   Scanning the article code could take you directly to the online copy of the article, which you could then forward to a friend. This would also make it much easier to share via Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. These are the kinds of things that will change the way people interact with newspapers, and what may actually save these dinosaurs from extinction.

Where else could these be used? How about in lines at amusement parks? Building a christmas list or wedding registry? Viewing movie previews after seeing a poster or article about it. There seems to be an endless list of how and where these can be used.

Have you seen a clever use of these lately? How do you think they will be leveraged in the near future?

UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.

The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.

The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.

The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.

Ever wonder if your Facebook Fan Page could appear in a search result on Google? Your dreams have come true…if you use Google’s Real Time Search you will now also see Facebook Fan Page posts included.

According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Real Time Search also includes:
* Twitter tweets
* Google News links
* Google Blog Search links
* Newly created web pages
* Freshly updated web pages
* FriendFeed updates
* Jaiku updates
* Identi.ca updates
* TwitArmy updates
* Google Buzz posts
* MySpace updates
* Facebook fan page updates

So what does this mean for your company? Because you have to know about selecting the “show options” link on your Google search results page. I would like to see the statistics on how many people are selecting it, and actually using the Real Time Search Results. I have a feeling it is under utilized because it is so new, however time will tell!