What seems like many years ago American business methods shifted. Money became more important than potential. Cash associated more closely to power, where “might” had previously been associated with power. What I mean by that is companies with real might in their industries, real potential stored in their established positions, had power and were respected more than upstarts, even if the upstarts had cash. You might draw parallels to stocks and dividends… Wall Streets demand for short term gains over long term profitability changed everything.

Things shifted slowly, but in the beginning I often heard “if we only had the resources to do this right…” even from divisional managers at large Fortune 500 companies. Apparently, even though they were powerful companies leading their industries, they didn’t have the resources to continue to be great companies. In the last 6 years middle managers have grown accustomed to being told to do more with less. I’ve grown accustomed to meeting middle and even upper tier managers at big companies who are barely prepared to do their jobs let alone excel at them. We consumers have grown accustomed to poor quality products, and even poorer quality customer service. Our economy reflects that conundrum.

I notice Google has resources.  What is Google doing with them?

Today Google offered to send, on your behalf, a greeting card/post card to anyone you choose, for free. It is not email.. it’s a physical, decorative paper holiday greeting card. You can send yours here. Why is Google doing this?

A great company in Google’s shoes might say wow.. this is a great PR stunt. Latch onto the communication of good wishes between people, and get some branding credit inserted into that transaction! Associate Google with smiles and good wishes! Lessen the overall fear of privacy-invading, all-powerful Google by placing the brand into everyone’s soft spot during the holidays. But it will cost money… perhaps up to twice the cost of post card postage, per sender/recipient pair, when you include the overhead (my estimate, which goes down with volume).

But Google’s crafty strategists could chime in and cover part of that cost. If we’re sending postcards, we’re validating real, physical addresses of real people who are either Google users or potential Google users! That is valuable stuff…  it helps the Google maps team, and it helps the local business center team, for example. What an opportunity to add more valuable data to the Google sausage grinder that has already been set up in a modular fashion to manage data about people and their associations.

And speaking of people and their associations, don’t friends and relative send greeting cards to each other? Another piece of value that will enter the sausage grinder… just as friend networks give Google insights into relationships and connections, this greeting card program would similarly add value, even at the very least.

There are so many ways this is a good idea. I’m sure you can think of a few angles yourself, which you can post below in the comments. If the people within Google work together or, if the data processing systems in place at Google  already accommodate management of this sort of universally-valuable data, it’s a winner program for Google… the company with the resources to do things well. And I bet they do.

If you are a manager or director at a company and want to learn more about how your company thinks, why not propose that your company offer a similar program for all of its customers? Outline all of the reasons this is good for the brand,  good for customer relations, good for helping to clean up and strengthen the customer and vendor databases, and even good for adding value to your companies side of its company-vendor relationships (vendors always appreciate your knowing more about your customers).

Roughly outline for your decision-maker how easy this is to execute… a simple web form, mentions in the companies seasonal mailings, a button on the “thank you” page at the online checkout, and perhaps a link in the “here is your order/invoice” email sent to customers. Highlight the availability and willingness of your existing direct mail provider to do the fulfillment for you (I bet you don’t even need to call to verify). If it’s too late to do for the winter holiday season, there’s time to test  it at Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.

And when you hear back “if only we had the resources…” you know the truth.

Since it’s Thanksgiving Day and in my culture that means watching The Wizard of Oz, I thought I’d reference the wizard (the little man behind the curtain) while making a note of Google’s latest “innovation” — the breadcrumb URL replacement. Aaron over at SEOBook (a great source of free SEO tools by the way) notes that Google has strayed from its focus on relevance, and replaced user-friendly URLs with not-so-meaningful site breadcrumbs.

See some examples of Google breadcrumbs in the SERPs here.

I like that Mat Cutts responded by saying he’d pass along the word… suggesting that this innovation was not a quality factor, and perhaps had not received much internal debate at Google w/respect to the relevance argument. I think that makes sense, because I think this sort of Google innovation is anti-competitive, and part of a long term internal strategy. I told Aaron it was just another step towards eliminating the URL. I have long believed Google wants to eliminate domains and URLs for lots of reasons.

But right now on the eve of Thanksgiving, I want to remind everyone of the Great and Powerful Wizard that was actually a little man behind a curtain.

The breadcrumbs are the Wizardry..what Google wants everyone to watch. Something new! Another Google innovation! Look, helpful breadcrumbs! Naturally it is the professional SEO that remarks first how this innovation does not enhance the SERP, because properly optimized sites have helpful URLs. In the example Aaron provided, Google has replaced a very helpful, meaningful and rich URL with an much less relevant breadcrumb. But Google wants everyone to watch how those breadcrumbs help  average web sites, because Google doesn’t want you to look behind the curtain.

What’s behind the curtain? Google hates those who make a market around Google. They hate the companies that make tools that mine Google’s data. They hate the optimizers who scrape Google and they hate the rank checking tools that charge money to report on Google status and ranking. They hate domains that garner direct navigation traffic, because users can find shoes at shoes.com without asking Google where to buy shoes (and revealing that they are a consumer, tracked by numerous Google-owned marketing cookies, now poised to execute a commercial transaction).

This URL removal is an anti-competitive practice that seeks to hinder the efforts of companies that re-sell Google’s data, whether they be SEO research services or re-purposers (scrapers). It is the unique URL (and unique domain name) that enables everyone else to make money on the web. As long as every consumer has to go through Google to find a web page, Google has a chance to take a piece of the profits.

The urgency however comes from the competition.  As long as Google spends its efforts creating relevant collections of URLs and publishing them to the web for free, others will mine that resource and re-sell it into niche marketplaces for profits. And that harms Google in the long run (or so the thinking goes… you do need to think it through though).

Think about the businesses that have storeed Google results sets for years, and now offer research services. The businesses that offer SEO services, to help web sites rank higher than Google naturally ranks them. The reporting services… even the “let us manage your Local Business Center account” agencies are parasitic to Google’s business model of one website, once business owner, one Google customer.

This year Google renovated its SERPs to use 302 redirects through a Google redirector, instantly breaking many third party tools and disrupting all sorts of user-centric research tools. AJAX results sets also debuted, redefining the Google SERP as dynamic in a whole new way. And now, in this test, the URL is replaced in many of the results, swapped for breadcrumbs. It could have been anything, not just breadcrumbs. Anything but a direct URL, or a URL which could be parsed out.

Personally I like to see big successful companies that exert monopoloy-like power over public markets start putting their energy into defensive tactics. It’s energy not put into real innovation. It takes a wee bit of pressure off the upstarts that hope to some day challenge the monopoly. Like my lacrosse coach used to scream at me every day, whenever you’re relaxing (not  working out), your competitor is getting bigger.

“Think! Think! Think!”, said Pooh.

Today Google announced Google “Closure”, a set of tools for efficiently working with javascript. With Google Closure Google has theoretically “closed the loop” on a number of javascript problems. Not problems developers have with javascript, but problems Google has with javascript. The problems haven’t been solved, mind you,because we don’t all use Google Closure for everything yet, but conceptually, if we did, Google would have a much easier time as web overlord.

I think it’s important to change perspective for  a moment, from the Google PR and developer world perspective, to the competitive SEO perspective. I’m not saying any of this is true fact; I’m merely implying intent the same way Googlers often imply intent when looking at webmaster activity. I’ve seen Google employees look at a web site that appeared to be clean, and mark it untrustworthy simply because the webmaster appeared to associated with other sites that were not as clean. That’s the world Google forces us to live in, so Google should live in the same world. If Google expects us to be slimy, it’s a pretty safe bet that Google behaves that way as well.

So what’s this Closure stuff? Google released Closure as four related tools for working with javascript. First, a js compiler, which “compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code“. There is a Firefox tool, which helps you see into compiled code for debugging, since without that no developer would compile anything that wasn’t considered 100% finished. There is a “well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library” called Closure Library,  and finally closure templates, which make working with the Closure Library easier if you are totally committed to The Google Way and comfortable building js apps on someone else’s framework.

So what’s the SEO perspective? Well, you should go back and re-consider why Google may have started hosting the most popular javascript libraries on the Google content distribution network last summer. I raised the issue then but didn’t highlight specific reasons why I was giving it so much attention. Google has long distrusted javascript. Since Google can’t actually crawl and interpret all of the javascript that may be modifying published web content on the Internet, js provides clever webmasters with a means of resisting the Borg. But if we all pulled our standard jQuery and MooTools and prototype js libraries off of Google’s CDN, Google could “trust” our sites more than sites which hosted their own js libraries.There wouldn’t be any “funny business” if the libraries were known to be clean.

With Closure, Google is able to go a step further *if* we all adopt it. Javascript submitted to Closure for compilation could be “indexed” and assigned an id code on the web, so that from that point onward Google would be able to recognize (and trust?) that compiled code. Any change would necessitate a recompile (or, in other words, re-registering your javascript code with Google). Given Google’s development of the Chrome browser, Google could also offer additional incentives for code registration — it could run faster in Chrome. Or it could be pulled from the CDN like jQuery, and your project might benefit from a kick-start if you use the Closure Library and Closure Templates.

Again… I’m not saying this is Google’s intent with Google Closure. I am saying that if I were Google, I would certainly explore this as an opportunity to advance my control the web without stifling innovation as much as I would otherwise have to… such as Google has been doing lately.

With Closure, Google closes the javascript loop, with what is basically registration of js code with the Borg. Like it or not, whether Google does it today or not, it is a viable option for Google, and certainly easier than trying to license white hat SEOs.

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Related questions that Google should probably answer if it wants support from developers:

• is this intended to compete with jQuery? Compliment? Or are devs expcted to pack jQuery through Closure, too?
• why built another js minifier? Dean Edward’s Packer works very well… even better than Closure according to early reports.
• what about Google Web Toolkit js library? What’s the roadmap here.. or is there a js roadmap at all?

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