For years I’ve pointed out that Google consistently acts to disintermediate web publishers. For years I’ve noted how Google, while saying that we are all friends, reliably “improves” Google’s services in ways which force webmasters to eliminate their own interest in the dissemination of what they publish. The “nickels from Google” may add up to tens of thousands of dollars for some publishers, when you aggregate all those hard-earned page views and ad clicks, but the profits are not sufficient to support publishing. They support Google, and they support aggressive innovators (right now). Google has us all in the cross hairs. We are the future profit sources for Google.

One tactic of any PR machine is to engage the enemy in conversation. Debate even. It keeps everyone busy. There is so much to talk about… microformats being one huge current trend supported by Google, which serves to quite effectively disintermediate publishers. “Please wrap your content into neat little tags, so we can easily parse it” asks Google. The nickels will come soon enough.. rewards for compliance. And the scammers innovators will go “all in” on the new opportunities, and we’ll see pictures on DailyBooth of big fat smiles with big fat Google checks, and pictures of Yachts named “Google Me” and Maserati’s and Bentley’s and bling bling bling buy my program and learn how you, too can profit from Google!

If I start debating these things, I’ll be distracted. I won’t be able to also see the forest… to see the impending damage on the horizon. Everyone is amazed at Google’s progress. Meanwhile, the real issues of economic stability and industry infrastructure are secondary to the awe with which technology (led by Google) decimates our work environments. Google’s amazing. Our modern civilization is only hundreds of years old, but in that past if any “company” had ever worked to wipe out industries and destroy people’s livelihoods, they would have faced mobs with pitchforks. People would have been scared, politicians motivated, and war machines activated. Of course they probably would have been overrun and decimated by a beast as powerful as Google, but they would not have been blind to their fate as we seem to be today.

It’s easy to write an article about how amazing or how ominous Google is. It’s hard to figure out just how bad this will get for all of us non-Googlers (i.e. people who don’t work for Google). Of course Google (the machine) would love us to keep busy like that.

Everytime someone from Google speaks, we need to listen carefully. Eric Schmidt’s latest comments reported by TechCrunch include this little gem. He was asked to look 10 years out, and what the future Google looks like. He answers that Google will determine the best, most authoritative site for a given question, read it, and summarize it back to the Google user as “the answer”:

“So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time…what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site [the definitive authority on a particular searched query] and then summarize what it says, and answer the question”

I cut out some because the answers were reported almost verbatum, with roundabout thoughts and an example in the middle. Read it for yourself if you like.

Eric Schmidt, the guy who thinks Wikipedia is the greatest gift to mankind ever created by man, has web publishers (and domain owners) in his cross hairs. If Google succeeds, no one needs a domain name and no one needs to create a brand. They just need to submit to Google, and then, perhaps if Google has not completely satisfied the users with “the answer”, provide a way to be contacted or a server IP for a web site for further reading (perhaps through the Google Profile conduit).

Eric Schmidt is a technologist, and geeks (relatively speaking) are poorly schooled in political and social aspects of reality. But is he really clueless? He’s CEO of one of the world’s most powerful companies. . I can’t believe he’s dumb enough to not think through the eventual outcome of his aggressive behavior… that he hasn’t considered that this is not a technological world, but a world of people. That people need to get along and compromise, and that we have been lucky enough to evolve a fragile economy based on our human interactions (not computer transactions) with less than the possible amount of war waging. Some call that “civilization”.

Civilization requires a ton of work, and most of that work is “talking”. History shows us that failure of communications, refusal to talk,  failure of educataion with respect to tolerance and cultural differences, and strong arm approaches that devalue human interaction and force a will upon others, lead to unreasonable behavior (terrorism, war, disobedience, etc). Does Eric Schmidt think the world is ready for one global economy and culture? Does he think the masses are so educated and appreciative of knowledge that they will choose one great website for answers at a cost of say food for their families or stable employment?

Ten years out is 2019. Many of you will be “mid career” by then. Between now and then, are you prepared for a Google that collects, analyzes, and summarizes what you publish, using your work to serve 80% of the world’s Internet users without your involvement? Think about it. Just how much are you giving away by allowing Google to own the Internet?

It seems Palm has decided that they are OK with being slimy about undisclosed privacy and user tracking. Give a chance to comment on the recent expose about detailed user tracking buried inside the Palm Pre, they tell us (paraphrasing) “everybody does it” and “we’re happy our users trust us”.

MobileCrunch re-highlighted this news from a CNET article, but goes easy on Palm, while exposing how they track users location, what applications they have been using, what applications they have installed on the Pre (including those not authorized by Palm), and other personal data unique to the user’s Palm Pre. If you read the article literally, it is almost as if they had been threatened by Palm and were treading lightly.. exposing but being careful to not openly suggest the Palm Pre was a privacy-invading abuse of consumers.

The Economist wrote about cell phone tracking, and location-based services do indeed need to report back location in order to deliver maps, directions, etc. But they don’t need to report back all that other personal data that Palm is collecting from Palm Pre users.  According to the MobileCrunch article:

When it comes to location tracking and device activity, you must alert the user and specifically request permission. If you don’t, you are spying, plain and simple. Regardless of what Palm is doing with this data, the user needs to be completely aware that it is being sent.

Palm seems to disagree. See this excerpt from Palm response (emphasis added):

…Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust.

They have no intention to violate your trust! How re-assuring, no? How about if a vendor asked you for your social security number and mother’s maiden name, and assured you they had no intention of violating your trust?

I have a follow up question for Palm. One day, when a Junior Marketing Executive at Palm gets a brilliant idea to exploit some of that juicy data, will Palm notify me of their new intent to violate my trust? I know they don’t have to, that’s the whole point.

Believe it or not, they’ve got that covered in the Privacy Policy as well. The default is that they can do whatever they want under that elastic justification “to enhance your device experience“. The lawyers make it sound less abusive by adding “For changes that are materially less restrictive or protective of your personal information than the privacy policy in place at the time of collection, we will seek your consent before implementing any such change.” Hard to imagine a case where they make an open, elastic data use agreement more restrictive, if that is even possible.

Scrutinize the Palm Pre Privacy Policy here, but be careful because Palm lawyers are just as clever as the rest of the lawyers in this industry: “We reserve the right to change our privacy policy. Please check our website periodically for changes…“

SEO is Dead: Long Live Competitive Webmastering

My friends at OutspokenMedia just published an outline of their SEO audit process. It looks exactly like what should be in a webmastering 101 course. From my perspective, it has nothing to do with search engine optimization, except that search engines control the flow of almost all of the Internet’s traffic these days. That these SEO audit points are actually just good webmastering is an important distinction to make, because every time we treat SEO as a unique entity, we grant Google more authority over the Internet. Why do we do keep doing that?

Every time we consider something “improper” because it doesn’t help or perhaps hinders search, we support the search engines in their manipulation of the Internet. This blog of mine is for experienced SEO people, so I don’t explain everything in great detail for the lay person, but it is very clear that Google stifles innovation on the Internet so that it can control traffic flows and the profits associated with that traffic. It is very clear that Google acts as a censor for public dissemination of freely-published materials, and it is becoming more clear that the popularity of SEO is helping Google (and the other search engines) further their control and censorship at all of our expense.

Honestly, did you ever really believe that a commercial entity claiming to want to “organize all of the world’s information” would be unbiased, altruistic and benevolent?

If you feel like throwing up after reading that Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs is now giving out $20 billion in bonuses (averaging $700,000 per employee this year — Google it), you should really enjoy a look at Google’s profits and the economic impact Google’s manipulation of the web has had on our economy. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a few more years for the economists to put all those numbers together. If you ask me, the smartest thing other countries have done and can do going forward, is block Google entry into their markets until those analyses are available.

In the mean time, let’s try and understand how SEO is adding to the problem. Here is the Outspoken Media list, with my annotations showing why these issues should be discretionary for web publishers, were they not being manipulated by Google:

Duplicate content: I am free to publish the same paragraph twice, or the same article twice. I might do that to reach my audience, who may be reading my web site via different paths. But Google uses an algorithm to penalize duplicate content. They say it’s not a “penalty” but from a publisher/media perspective, it is a penalty.

If I publish my editorial on the home page of my site, and again on the Editorial Page, Google will decide which one to index and offer in the search results, based not on my publishing objectives, but Google’s own algorithm.

The solution recommended by SEO experts? A complicated re-review of my publishing model, looking not only at my visitors and their attention/reading habits, but whether factors like incoming links from other sights will cause Google to remove my home page from the search index. This is abhorrent business behavior by Google, and one of many examples of how Google is an aggressive, profit-driven abuser of the free and open Internet, and unworthy of our support. Yet, we support them and even go so far as to say that the proper way to publish is to defer to Google’s desires.

Redirect issues: A redirect is a technical solution to a common problem: the desired information has been moved to another URL. Done properly, the user looking for Article X gets forwarded to where Article X can be found. The SEO audit looks for “redirect issues”, including technically incorrect implementations. That’s good webmastering, not SEO. But the SEO also looks to see that 301 or 302 redirects are used, according to Google’s guidelines on the use of redirects. Google claims some redirects that are proper by webmastering standards are “wrong” and the Google guidelines state that not following those guidelines can get you penalized (even if you follow proper HTML standards). Once again, we see Google setting a new standard in its favor, without compromising through participation in the democratic standards setting processes. Good web citizen? Hardly. Yet, we seem to support it.

Indexing/crawl issues: Good webmastering should not prevent spidering or crawling of web content by search engines. Any “indexing issues” are entirely based in the search engine and its approach to the web. If you are not indexed and want to be, then yes, you need to deal with the search engines doing the indexing. In the long run, this pure search engine issue is really a government and societal issue, having to do with civil rights (equal access to information) and responsible government (upholding the public trust). Sadly, we are a ways off from addressing those broader concerns.

Improper categorization: The publisher decides how to categorize the published content. Good webmastering achieves the goals of the publisher. Only when we start to look at the specific ways that search engines index the content, do we start to consider some forms of categorization “improper” (or sub-optimal). Again, until society works through its dependencies on private for-profit companies like Google for universal information access, we suffer the whims of Google abuse and have to turn to specialists for help navigating those treacherous waters.

Crappy title tags: I’m not sure what “title tags” are, but the title element is a very important part of SEO and a very minor part of publishing. Each page has one title element, which is displayed in the blue bar at the top of most rendered screens (in browsers). Title elements offer little value to the publisher, because users ignore them. Google actually thinks title elements have no value at all to the reader, and dropped them completely from display in the Google browser rendering. However, Google has co-opted the HTML standard once again, and made title elements critically important for SEO.

Crappy meta descriptions: meta description tags are another part of HTML standard, and are invisible to the reader. Once again publishers need only pay attention to these if they are following Google or other search engine guidelines, for some specific reason (such as getting traffic from Google). Since they are part of the HTML specification, good webmastering should ensure these meta tags are present and proper, by publishing standards.

Usability problems: Usability is an art and science dedicated to users, not search engines. Not sure why this is in an SEO audit, but of course good competitive webmastering is concerned with usability. I know Google sometimes falls back on a general “good for users” usability argument when pushing involuntary standards onto webmasters, but they also violate that logic frequently. Publishers should make good websites for their readers…. and if they don’t their readers will let them know via the free market. With Google, that free market goes away because Google might decide not to send you any of that market traffic in the first place.

Conversion problems: just like usability… not an SEO issue, but of concern to publishers and competitive webmasters.

Keyword research/Keyword density: the entire field of keyword research developed around search engines and their private, unilaterally imposed policies. If you are catering to search engines, you need an SEO and keyword researcher. But there is no reason why publishers (masters of language and communication, at least if they survive in a free marketplace) need a third party to tell them what words to use in their documents.

Internal linking strategies, anchor text, and Sitemaps: This is another example where Google corrupts the publishing process for commercial gain, and is empowered to do so by the marketplace’s adoption of SEO and other Google-imposed bastardizations of content publishing. A publisher naturally adds navigation to its content to serve the users. Newspapers and books have had page numbers for that purpose for as long as I can remember.

Poor navigation technology or internal linking is a webmastering quality issue. Improper linking with respect to publishing goals is a business issue.

When Google starts to manipulate that process, in ways that hinder, stifle, or corrupt the free press, Google is not only interfering with market dynamics which are known to improve the marketplace over time, but artificially supporting market practices which can hurt a market over time. This is just one example of this very serious issue that few are acknowledging… those economic analyses we will receive in a few years will prove this.

When a publisher starts to play with XML sitemaps at the request of search engines, that extra work is injected into the system at a cost to the publisher but generates profit for the search engine. That, by very definition, decreases productivity, and can be considered one of many cost externalizations the search engines have achieved over the years while the SEO industry has supported their market manipulations.

External linking strategies and anchor text: External linking strategies only exist because of search engine’s corruption of the publishing process. Otherwise, external linking (and anchor text) is a free market innovation, outside of the purview of the content publisher (it is others, external, who make those links to your content). If you want to start to understand how Google stifles innovation, and recognize how Google is one of the worst web citizens the web has ever encountered, start with linking.

Site architecture and URLs: Again, this is a good webmastering issue and success should align with the achievement of publishing goals. To the extent that SEO intervention is needed beyond good webmastering or alignment of publishing with business goals, that intervention is necessary only because of search engine imposed restrictions. More stifling of innovation. Society needs to address the value of that, just as they need to re-evaluate the value of the current Federal Trade Commission (FTC) here in the states.

Nofollow, disallow, noindex: these are directives for use with robots.txt and certain meta tags, and are part of Google webmastering, again serving business goals. To the extent that intervention is needed by an SEO, it is solely because search engines have corrupted the normal standards process. If doing it properly doesn’t achieve results in the marketplace because of specific search engine imposed restrictions, then what other choice is available but stepping in line and changing to accommodate the search engines? Stifling it is… as established.

Social media indicators: Another thing that belongs on the publishing side and not an SEO audit list, Social Media involves webmastering when the business goals are supported by a publishing strategy. This has nothing to do with SEO, until search engines corrupt the free market dynamics and establish guidelines for how society should behave. Which they have.

You might recognize this as Google’s clearest intrusion into society and behavior to date, but my perspective suggests the destruction of linking was more damaging. Also the sharing of aggregate user data with other entities is disgusting. Social Media on an SEO audit list? What has this world come to… and perhaps more importantly, why are we lining up and supporting it?

The answer, I’m afraid involves politics, something technical people have never really liked and often choose to ignore. As a result of our (in)actions, we get the web we have and the web that’s coming, instead of the web we all imaging could be when it all started, and probably still dream might be as each new, cool, innovation comes onto our radar screens. Radar screens which, by the way, are controlled by Google.

What can you do?

Don’t use Chrome. Wait for Firefox to catch up, or use Opera (it’s wicked fast).

Don’t use Google Analytics. It’s priceless as a business tool for Google, so if you don’t use it for some reason, Google will be forced to pay attention to the reasons.

Don’t use Google. Use bing.com or Yahoo.com or rely on friend’s recommendations. If you gave Bing every other search you currently do on Google, Bing would have 50% market share. Yes, that’s the power you have.

Chat with your local political representative. Just because you approach him, he’ll have to pay more attention to you. That’s how it works. Let him know you are afraid of Google having too much power, and are thinking it’s time to start paying attention before it’s too late.

Block Google analytics spying on your system. You can do it easily via a few means. When you do this, every site you visit that uses GA will not report your visit back to Google. It’s a simple step that can go a very long way towards improving things on the web.

I recommend you ask your Social Media circles for advice on “how can I block Google analytics? Thanks“. And once you do it, pass it along with a tweet “here’s how you block Google analytics spying on you -link“. Go ahead. Help yourself, and help others.