Last week’s Google privacy update, reveals that the company will anonymize IP addresses after 9 months, down from 18 months. Check out this NPR: On the Media piece about privacy concerns arising from Chrome and other Google services.

Google VP of Search Products and User Experience and Ninjitsu, Marissa Mayer, asserts that Google is better qualified to choose privacy settings than end users, that data storage involves balancing privacy concerns and the utility of usage data for product development, that Google is very open about what user information they collect and retain, that ISPs really have a whole lot more data than Google does.

My favorite line is Bob Garfield’s stinger, “Does Google believe, institutionally, that all the discussion of privacy concerns is actually stifling innovation of your algorithm and other technological development…or do you kind of get why it’s important to all of us?”

Right on. I work for an Internet marketing company that exists mostly because of Google and the ads and search results it serves. Because Pure Visibility is an AdWords and Analytics partner, we get to communicate our successes and concerns with reps at Google. I know a number of Googlers personally. I’ve had a really nice time at lectures at the Google Office in Ann Arbor. None of this precludes my wariness about Google’s effect on my privacy online.

By Christmas this year, I’ll have been a Gmail user for four years. During that time, I’ve sent and received several thousand emails. Google has used the “concepts” in emails I’ve written and received to show me thousands of ads for products and services that might interest me. I’m pleased that I don’t get too much spam, I love how searchable my mail is, and I feel confident that my data won’t be lost. But even after four years, I remain concerned about the decision I made to exchange access to information about me for the privilege of using Gmail. I look forward to looking deeper into Google’s privacy policy and writing about privacy and advertising on the web in future posts.

Check out Bob Garfield’s blog for Advertising Age
http://adage.com/garfield/

Visit the Google Privacy Center for detailed information about the use of your personal data by various products. The videos are pretty good, explaining what data the company collects and why; not too much technical detail.

http://www.google.com/privacy.html

March 2007 Google Privacy Policy Announcement
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html

September 2008 Google Privacy Policy Announcement

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-protect-user-privacy.html

Chrome is the brand new web browser created by Google, just released today. Looks like it incorporates a number of the best features of Firefox and Safari.   However, in this post, I just want to address one feature, One Box for Everything.

Search and direct navigation have always been done in different places. Used to be, you went to a search engine’s home page to use a search box.

Later, browsers began building in search boxes into their interfaces.

With Chrome, there is a single field that can be used to enter URLs directly, or to enter search terms.   Google suggests results for both types of input.


Collocating search and direct navigation will get more people using search than ever. Dollars to donuts, this is the new standard. Naturally, Google is Chrome’s default search engine. This means more users, more loyalty to the brand, and more ads served.

I’m heading home to install chrome on my home computer, on XP running on VMware Fusion. But I probably won’t use chrome instead of Firefox until Google releases a version for the Apple Operating System. The frustrating decision by Google to start with a Windows only release makes a lot of sense. They’re trying to take market share from Internet Explorer, which is no longer supported for the Apple OS. Plus, Google knows that the fanboy community is working itself into a frenzy in anticipation of their shiny new product. So coy.

It’s nice having bosses who are very awesome. I’m sure that Linda and Catherine know they’re awesome, but like everyone else, they forget stuff. Fortunately people remind them all the time. This week, the Great Lakes IT Report named Catherine to their list of Leaders & Innovators. Makes sense to me. Here at Pure Visibility, we have tons of opportunities to see why our our fearless, Twitter-addicted, 1:30AM-email-writing, constant-enthusiasm-having company co-founder makes our company exceptional. And our clients see that too; Catherine’s constantly thinking about the web marketing strategies that our clients need to succeed now…and 5 years from now. Thanks to GLITR for reminding us all that Catherine Juon is awesome!

Overall, we are very pleased to have acquired Mike Beasley. His experience and training in usability is indispensable; his input can really improve the user experience on websites. But one wonders what it would be like to have Michael Beasley around the office. I decided to do a quick comparison.

Name	Mike Beasley	Michael Beasley
Visual Impact
Height	5’10″	6’8″
Education	B.A. & M.S.I. University of Michigan	1 yr. Kansas State
Organizations	Pure Visibility, Compuware, Thomson Gale, MiUPA, ACM SIGCHI	Kansas State, Chicago Bulls? Miami Heat??!
Income	As of April 2008, Mike was earning more than Michael	It is generally believed that whichever franchise picks Michael in the 2008 NBA Draft will pay him more than Pure Visibility pays Mike
Strengths	User experience, public speaking	Ambidextrous, scores like 26 pts/game
Stuff in common	Likes sneakers, likes hip hop music, has been to Manhattan Kansas	Likes sneakers, likes hip hop music, has been to Manhattan Kansas

Admittedly, the Pure Visibility team often geeks out about tech tools and trends. But one of the really satisfying things that we do is to emerge from the depths of geekdom and share information with clients that shows what’s happening with their online presence, stuff that can help inform decisions about web marketing efforts. Inspired by Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik’s “best web analytics report”, we’d like to share a couple of reports that we like, ones that can make your Google Analytics and AdWords talk to you.

Jessica Hullman:
Google Analytics Site Overlay Report
Jessica picked the site analytics report because it’s beautifully simple. It’s an intuitive visual representation of where visitors navigate on a site. See how many times visitors have clicked each link on a page for a period of time you specify. Look at conversion data for the goals you’ve set for your site.

Steve Loszewski:
Google AdWords Search Query Report
Steve went with a report that helps him save advertisers money. Steve looks through the list of Search Queries that cause his ads to display. Then he picks out terms he definitely doesn’t want to show up for (you know the sort I mean). He adds these keywords to his list of negative keywords and his account is on the way to more relevant placement and visits, higher quality scores and lower bids!

Mark Williams Picks:
Google AdWords Keyword Report

AKA the victory lap report. We <3 AdWords because it is measurable, accountable; we can quantify the performance of our online advertising campaigns. Mark uses this this report to show what’s working in his campaigns, which keywords are generating clicks and leading to conversions. Take a look at the settings in the screenshot below; Mark likes his reports to include only the columns that help explain the information he wants to highlight.

If you want search engines crawlers to find your content, design your site so your text is text, not images. By hiding subject matter from search engines, you’re creating obstacles to good website rankings. It confuses me that anyone would decide to implement their site in a way that gets in the way of people visiting it.

Is this a “cool factor” that I am unaware of? I ask because a lot of sites that eschew text are creative organizations with amazing content; Flash may be preferred to text because of greater control over layout and appearance. Yet, unless done thoughtfully, Flash can completely interfere with search engine findability.

Below are a few examples of sites that are findable, more in spite of their websites than because of them. (The irony of annotating these with image-based text does not elude me.)

It appears the Beatles are popular enough that they don’t need their page content spidered in order to get top rankings. This pricey-looking page has practically no search engine friendly content. But it’s on the Beatles’ official site; John Lennon famously claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Are you more popular than Jesus? No? Then don’t use images for text.

Weiden + Kennedy is my favorite ad agency. But their website not only obscures all of the incredible work they feature, it also looks pretty dated. Making all the text on this site visible to search engines would be pricey. But who can afford to have a website that’s hidden from search engines? W+K clients include Coca Cola, ABC, Starbucks and Nike, so maybe they can. But I still don’t see why they would.

A few of us around the office are really into the spontaneous public concert videos website blogotheque. Nearly all of the text on their home page is invisible to search engines. (See? They’re so cool I just had to link to you so I could tell you about them! Clooney.) Fortunately their detail pages, which contain much more text, make good use of html.

Scenario: (Happened recently to a Pure Visibility client.) Your company has some nice blogging momentum going. You’ve been posting on the regular for about a year now, not quite in Jonathan Schwartz territory yet, but it’s going well. Then one day your Internet marketing company notices that none of your posts are indexed by Google…tried querying Google with the advanced operator site:example.website.com and your blog is nowhere. The Horror!

Here’s what happened behind the scenes.

1. A security flaw in an outdated version of WordPress allows spam to get to the blog, even though comments are moderated.
2. A spider sees the spam and Google removes the blog from its index
3. Spam content deleted, WordPress updated with security flaw corrected.
4. Blog remains de-indexed.
5. Verified site with Google Webmaster Tools & receive notice of Removal from Google’s Indexes
6. Use Webmaster Tools to submit Request Consideration form.



7. Within the week (much sooner than expected) the site is reindexed by Google.
8. Problem! SERP snippet now shows spam that no longer exists on the blog.



Nice that Webmaster Tools allows Google to communicate with site owners and provide them with critical notifications.   This could be pretty frustrating for anyone, particularly someone limited time or intarweb experience.   Takeaways: keep your blogging program up to date; use Akismet or other anti-spam tool; moderate comments vigilantly; sign up for Webmaster Tools.

There are some SEO problems we see all the time. Websites that display text in images instead of html, using language that doesn’t match the way people talk about what the site’s about, vague words used for headings and link text. These are missed opportunities to tell search engine crawlers what a site is about. A lot of the really key parts of SEO aren’t secret; Google Webmaster Central is foremost among many sources for free tools and information that can help make a search engine friendly site.

But still, people code, design and write for websites in ways that really hurt their chances of getting good search engine rankings and the site traffic that those rankings can bring. The other day, I thought of paintings by Mark Rothko as a fine art example of a common SEO problem. Some of Rothko’s famous works include Untitled, No. 18, and of course, Untitled.

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Tomorrow is Super Tuesday; a huge day for the presidential primaries and a good time to look deep in our hearts and consider how we feel about usability. Usability probably ranks pretty low on the list of issues voters are considering this year. It is bound up in the infrastructure of the political process and should go unnoticed, silently contributing to the accurate expression of a voter’s decisions.

Usability issues come to our attention when the process fails, as shown by the notoriety of the hanging chad. Lost or erroneous votes could affect the outcome of an election, especially in a neck and neck race like we’ve seen in recent elections. In early January, Clive Thompson’s story, Can You Count On Voting Machines, ran in The New York Times Magazine. The piece looks at the troubling weak points in the machinery on which our elections rely.
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