Yahoo Will Essentially Still Be Yahoo

There is an interesting discussion going on in our WebProWorld forum about search engine optimization post Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing’s algorithm in its search results. The discussion is about whether or not this means businesses and webmasters will only have to worry about optimizing for 2 search engines (Google/Bing) rather than 3 (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means

It’s important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don’t know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.

Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing’s results. That’s not to say that showing up in Bing’s results won’t have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.
Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of “applications” that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it’s not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and “related concepts”. This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these “related concepts” either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like “ebusiness news”.

The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing’s control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you’ll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.

All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven’t done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.

Why Stop at Google, Yahoo, and Bing?

These may be the biggest three search engines in terms of market share in the United States, but there are still plenty of people using others. For one thing, YouTube is number 2. Not Yahoo or Bing. If you are concerned about simply being found where people are searching, you should have a YouTube presence. That of course means having a video strategy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a huge video budget.

There are still people using Ask as well. In search industry coverage, it often gets overshadowed by the others, but there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the Ask Network’s market share grew by 6% from December to January. Ask.com’s market share grew by 1%. A lot of people search with AOL. AOL’s search is powered by Google, but it doesn’t always return the same results as Google.

Facebook’s search market share grew by 13% in that same period of time. You may not think about Facebook for search as much, but people are spending more and more time on Facebook, and it stands to reason that they’ll be conducting more and more searches from Facebook. Granted, Facebook’s web search feature is powered by Bing, but that’s only a piece of the Facebook Search puzzle. If you don’t have a Facebook strategy, you may be missing out on a lot more searches. By the way, did you know that Facebook recently passed Yahoo as the 2nd most visited site (just under Google)?

These are just a few examples. People are searching from a lot more places. Rather than just optimizing for Google, Yahoo, and Bing, perhaps you should think about all of the places where your site/business would make sense when a user searches (consider niche sites as well).

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine’s real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google’s real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed, and according to Danny Sullivan, that includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren’t being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren’t only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google’s real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook’s huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn’t dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.
A lot of brands who don’t have Facebook pages in place are likely going to consider this a new reason to create one. Here are some tips for making a good one and promoting it.

This should also lead to Facebook Pages getting more fans, due to the increased exposure. Beware, however, that running a promotion on your Facebook Page may cost you ten thousand dollars, because Facebook’s policy guidelines indicate that you must get written approval from a Facebook account rep. In order to get one of those, you must spend that much in advertising, according to Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook.

Now Google’s real-time search results include (as listed by Sullivan) Facebook, MySpace, Twiter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, TwitArmy, Google News links, Google Blog Search links, new web pages, and freshly updated pages. At this point, Google generally only shows the real-time results for newsy/trending topics.

Note: At the Online Marketing Summit out in San Diego, WebProNews talked about a different kind of real-time search that involves local businesses, with RateItAll president Lawrence Coburn. It’s not local search as you would traditionally think of it, but it involves location, which one might consider a new kind of query.

Update 2: A Google spokesperson says the full-text issue is not a Google-specific problem. “It is possible for Bloggers to prevent their full content from showing in Buzz just like in Reader –it depends on how they set up their feed. If a blog owner wants to not show their whole blog, they have to use whatever tools they are using to create their feed to set it to not syndicate the entire post.”

Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I’ve inquired further. We’ll keep you posted.

Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we’ve mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They’ve also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we’re hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn’t be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N’ Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would “have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week.” That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn’t change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google’s part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers’ content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay’s story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this (we’ll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author’s control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this…again, we’ll post a response when we receive it).

Google Case in Italy Has Serious Implications for the Web

A judge in Milan, Italy has convicted three Google executives over a video uploaded to YouTube in a case, which could have serious implications for social media and ultimately, the web in general, at least in Italy. The video, uploaded back in 2006, featured a group of school kids bullying an autistic child. Google says it worked with Italian authorities to help ID the person responsible for uploading it, and the uploader and other participants from the video were sentenced to community service.

Now, in 2010, Google executives David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (3 out of 4 defendants) have been convicted for “failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.” They were all found not guilty of criminal defamation.

“In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload,” writes Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa on the Google Blog. “We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question.”

This is a case of a business being held accountable for user-generated content. Isn’t the entire web generated by users? What if Google’s search engine (algorithmically) indexed something illegal. Should company execs be penalized, even if they comply with authorities’ requests for removal of such content? Ask yourself these questions:

- What if YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. had to shut down because it couldn’t control the things users post?

- What if every blogging platform had to do the same?

- What if you went to jail for comments posted on your blog?

You’re not likely going to go to jail for comments posted on your blog, but the point is, that by allowing people to post comments on your blog, you are allowing user-generated content, that you can’t necessarily control until after it’s been posted, unless you don’t let them go live until approving them. Google is being held accountable for content that users uploaded, which was not in their control until after the fact. YouTube users upload 20 hours of video every minute, according to Google.

You can see why this case is much bigger than just the specific instance it involves. The case is subject to appeal, but if it is not overturned, what will this mean for the web?
The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police,” says Sucherman.

“To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video,” he says. “They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.”

He goes on to talk about how the case “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built,” also mentioning that European Union law dictates that hosting providers have a safe harbor from liability as long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. “If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear,” Sucherman says.

If rulings such as the one against these Google execs were to become commonplace, how much do you think that would affect the social media industry? Companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc. couldn’t let users upload content, which essentially means social media couldn’t exist. User-generated content couldn’t exist. How could you blog? How could you leave a status update on Facebook, or upload a family photo to Picasa? There is always the possibility that some user could make a death threat or upload a murder video, so if the companies behind the services that were used to commit these crimes were held accountable, how could their businesses continue?

That’s why Google is not only upset about the ruling against its executives, but calls it a “serious threat to the web.”

Time and time again I hear webmasters complaining about their sites getting slapped. In fact, if you take a look at Google’s official webmaster forum, you’ll be shocked at the number of new threads where business owners are pleading with the moderators for a reason why their site has dropped 10 pages down the rankings.

It’s soon brought to their attention that the moderators have no control over the listings and 9 times out of 10 there’s nothing they can do to resurrect their sites’ rankings other than playing the waiting game.

How would you feel if you relied on Google for 80% of your traffic and it suddenly dropped in the rankings overnight? And, if you’re sitting there shaking your head thinking that it won’t happen to you because you’re a ‘good guy’ and you follow all the webmaster rules, then you need to seriously re-evaluate your mindset because time and time again I see innocent sites with great content get the “good news”.

Google reportedly updates its algorithm over 200 times a year

This time next week 50% of the backlinks pointing back to your site could be instantly discounted because the latest updates deems them as being too “spammy”. Where does that leave you? 50 places down the rankings and a dismal outlook for next quarter’s financial results.

So, now that I’ve scared the heck out of you, I’m going to give you five ways in which you can safeguard yourself from Google’s right hook and put you in a position far stronger than your competitors. It’ll also help you sleep at night!

1.Take Advantage of Untapped Traffic Sources

I am serious when I say the traffic generating potential online is incredible. By going one step beyond that of your competition you can really get a foot up and get your brand in front of a TON of laser targeted prospects.

Did you know that there are literally hundreds of high traffic web sites out there that will publish your content and let you include a small pitch and link back to your web site? I’m not talking about article directories here! I’m talking about hugely established and well respected sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits per month. So, do you think it’s worth spending a couple of hours writing an article to get your name in front of that hoard of traffic? Of course it is!

Are you sceptical? Don’t think that it works? Well, you’re reading my article aren’t you?

Not only will you get hugely targeted traffíc, but you’ll also get some incredibly powerful back links (to keep the big G happy until it gets trigger happy again), brand recognition and be able to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Here’s a tip, if you’re a new startup and you’re doing something interesting and something that people will want to read about (a USP that nobody else delivers or an alternative way of thinking for example) then head on over to http://www.mashable.com and write them a nice little article. That’ll kick start your new business for sure!

2.Build A Líst Of Subscribers

Outside of the internet marketing niche and large corporate companies, I rarely see líst building done effectively. Yet building a líst tripled my income within the first couple of months and helped me to build a relationship with prospects that over time I converted into buyers, some of whom became repeat buyers. Without a líst I simply would not have a way of building up a relationship, trust, authority and my bottom line. So, in basic terms a líst makes you more money, but it doesn’t stop there…

It also provides you with a sense of security – you have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that if at any time every single last piece of traffic dried up overnight, you’d still make the payroll and survive until you figured out the underlying problem.

But how do you build a líst of subscribers if you’re not technical? Hosted services such as Aweber have made it so simple to set up your autoresponder service that all you need to know how to do is copy a bit of code into your squeeze page – it’s as simple as that.

3. Start An Affiliate Program

I know some companies that do absolutely nothing to get traffic to their web site. They don’t write articles, they don’t backlink to their site, they literally do nothing and let an army of affiliates do the job for them. And the army produces incredible results!

The great thing about an affiliate program is that there is no rísk as a vendor. You do the sums up front, figure out how much you’re prepared to pay someone for making a sale on your behalf and that’s that. How would you like a no-rísk, pay on results, unlímited sized sales force at your disposal?

You can really attract a bucket load of affiliates if you’re selling digital products with reasonably high profit margins, high valued products so that you can afford to give quite large payouts per sale or, the gold pot of them all, a service that is billable on a monthly basis so that the affiliate can earn a small monthly retainer per sale.

And don’t be afraid to start an affiliate program – you don’t even need to run it yourself if you don’t want to. There are a number of excellent affiliate brokers out there who will manage the tracking, payments and creatives on your behalf – you just need to find one that suits you and get cracking. Should you choose a managed affiliate program then you’ll usually be expected to pay a small fee up front for setup costs and then a small percentage of earnings thereafter.

In Summary

Please, take my advice and don’t get into the position where your business is relying on Google. In the offline world it’s akin to being in the wholesale business with one contract to a huge retailer. What happens when that retailer doesn’t renew the contract? Bad things happen!

You can choose the three methods I’ve mentioned above, or find other ways of generating laser targeted traffíc such as PPC, press releases, e-book creation, video marketing and so on – it doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it!

We recently launched a trial, currently limited to the cities of San Jose and Houston, for a new ads feature in local search that allows business owners to enhance their listings. We’ve seen a lot of curiosity about this feature, so I wanted to take this opportunity to provide further information about it for everyone interested in learning more.

These enhanced listings allow business owners to highlight an aspect of their Local Business Center listing that they think best reflects what they have to offer their customers. The business owner can choose to enhance the way their listing appears in search results by including a link to point customers directly to photos, videos, website, coupons, directions, menu or reservations signup. Let’s say a deli owner thinks the huge selection of imported cheeses really makes her deli stand out – she may want to give potential customers a quick way to see the menu on her website or a photo of her display case. Customers who access this relevant information can make an easier, more informed decision about which business to call or visit.

Here’s an example for optometrist in San Jose, CA. Notice the yellow tag below the North Valley Optometry listing with a link to “View photos” of their business and the photo icon placed on the map:

These enhancements are an easy and straightforward way for businesses to emphasize information that may already be available on their Place Pages or websites, and to connect with interested, locally-based potential customers. When the listing shows up in your Google.com or Google Maps search results, the enhancement also appears alongside it. The enhancements do not affect the ranking of LBC listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

We hope both users and business owners find this feature useful, so we’ll monitor the trial closely and may make changes. Based on the initial results, we may choose to expand it into additional areas. We don’t have a specific timeline to share at the moment but we’ll post again if and when we do. In the meantime, business owners can claim their listing in the Local Business Center, and those located in San Jose and Houston will see an invitation to enhance their listing for a flat fee of $25/month in the dashboard. Interested businesses outside these areas can be notified when enhanced listings come to their area by filling out this form.

You have a beautiful website with great products, great guarantees, many comprehensive pages and great customer service. Unfortunately, Google and other search engines won’t give your website high rankings.

There are several reasons why search engines do not list websites although they look great and offer quality content:

1. Your web pages are meaningless to search engine spiders

Search engines use simple software programs to visit your web pages. In general, search engine spiders won’t see anything that is displayed in images, Flash elements, JavaScript (except for a few exceptions) and other multimedia formats.

If the main content of your website is displayed in images or Flash then your website can be totally meaningless to search engines. If your website navigation is pure JavaScript then chances are that search engines won’t find the pages of your website.

Your website will look like a single page site although it consists of many different pages.

Solution: Check your website with IBP’s search engine spider simulator to find out how search engine spiders see your website.

2. The HTML code of your web page contains major errors

Most web pages have minor errors in their HTML code. While most search engine spiders can handle minor HTML code errors, some errors can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages.

For example, a tag at the top of your web pages could tell search engine spiders that they have reached the end of the page although the main content of the page has not been indexed yet.

Solution: Verify the HTML code of your web pages with an HTML validator tool. You can find an HTML validator in the free IBP demo version (IBP main window > Tools > HTML Validator).

3. The HTML code of your web pages doesn’t contain the right elements

If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords then these keywords must appear in the right places on your web page. For example, it usually helps to use the keyword in the web page title.

There are many other elements that are important if you want to have high rankings. All of them should be in place if you want to get high rankings.

Solution: Analyze your web pages with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. The optimizer will tell you in detail how to edit your web pages so that they will get top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines for the keywords of your choice.

4. Your web server sends the wrong status codes

Some web servers send wrong status codes to search engine spiders and visitors. When a search engine spider requests a web page from your site then your server sends a response code. This should be the “200 OK” code.

Some servers send a “302 moved” or even a “404 not found” response code to the search engine spiders although the web page can be displayed in a normal web browser.

If your web server sends the wrong response code, search engine spiders will think that the web page doesn’t exist and they won’t index the page.

Solution: Use the search engine spider simulator mentioned above to find out which response code your web server returns to search engines. If the response code is not “200 OK”, the spider simulator will return a warning message.

5. Your robots.txt file rejects all search engine spiders

If your robots.txt file does not allow search engine spiders to visit your web pages then your website won’t be included in the search results. Some robots.txt file contain errors and search engine spiders are blocked by mistake.

Solution: Check the contents of your robots.txt file. In general, it is not necessary to use a robots.txt file if you don’t want to block certain areas of your website.

Search engine spiders must be able to understand your web pages if you want to get high rankings on Google, Bing and other search engines. The tips above help you to make sure that search engine spiders see what you want them to see.

Linking is the mechanism that connects all the pages on the Internet. You’ve got links throughout your web site to let people navigate their way around. You may have links going out to other web sites that you think will be useful for your visitors. And hopefully you have links coming into your web site from independent sources.

All types of links can impact your search engine optimization results, helping determine where your web site shows up online. Though the hardest to control, inbound links pointing to your site can make the biggest impact.

At its most basic, the concept is that if several high-quality sites are linking to your web site, then Google and other search engines figure your site must be a popular, valuable resource – and they will be more likely to show it higher in their search results. In effect, your site receives “link juice” from other web pages that link to it.

However, it’s not enough to secure a couple links and then sit still. The Google PageRank algorithm looks at the pattern of links to your site as they build over time.

Building the right kind of links can bring a major payoff, while a wrong turn could get you penalized – and the Google Sandbox is not easy to dig out of.

Armed with a bit of knowledge and some creativity, you can build up valuable incoming links naturally and powerfully, avoiding the traps that plague amateurs.

Spice Up Your Links With Some Variety

There are all kinds of link farming schemes to grow links, and you need to run the other way from these. This is also called reciprocal linking, where you exchange links with other web sites that will then link to you on a mass scale. Warning: Google is onto this.

While it’s perfectly advantageous to link to high-quality sites that also link to you, the key here is to cultivate a natural mix of links over time.

Is it natural to suddenly have 100 links pointing to your site, all with the same text? Of course not. When people link to you naturally, they might use your business name (SEO Advantage) or some variation on a descriptive phrase (search optimization company). If too many similar links exist, it can signal that those links were generated artificially and potentially result in penalties.

Also consider which pages on your site inbound links point to. Your home page is probably going to get the most, but it’s natural to have links pointing to specific pages inside your web site, too. Cultivate links to your services, your blog, your news pages, your articles, etc., to help those pages get indexed and build their own PageRank. Called deep links, these can help bolster your site’s overall performance.

Some links also carry a title tag, which is indicated in the source code. This is a little too technical to go into detail here, but if you can influence this you’ll want both the link text and title to vary a bit among the links pointing to your site. Once again, the key is to grow your links in a natural pattern.

Not Every Link Carries The Same Value

Links from popular, established web sites usually carry the greatest value. That’s because they have high PageRank from plenty of other people already linking to them. A link from CNN.com, for example, will carry much more weight than a link from a free press release distribution site that few people know of. Likewise, a link from www.sbdpro.com will have a greater impact than a link from a directory that uses no-follow tags.

No-follow tags are the bane of naive link builders. It’s tempting to think you can just link to pages on your site from your Twitter tweets, Facebook and other social media applications. However, many of these sites as well as online ads and also some directories employ “no follow” tags that prevent the search engines from following a link to your site. In this case, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist in the eyes of the search engines. (That doesn’t mean the links aren’t valuable to people who find you and follow the link, it’s just not helping your web site show up in Google.)

So, How Can A Business Build Incoming Links Naturally?

The mix of links created out on the web pointing back at your web site should avoid skewing toward any particular type. A good mix that you can influence may include:

• Directories – Professional organizations, online communities and forums, business directories, etc. can all potentially provide good links to your site. There are several premium directories that are staples in an SEO firm’s link building toolkit, like DMOZ.org. Keep in mind that your listing itself should be optimized in order to reap the full link juice benefits.

• Press Releases – Writing and submitting press releases online can help you get your news in front of more people and build links to your site. (Be sure to use best practices for writing and evaluate carefully your outlets for good links).

• Blogs – Link to relevant pages on your site from your blog. Build relationships online with other bloggers, too, and they may want to link back to you! Active blogs with high visibility and large followings are going to be your best bet, but you can mix it up over time targeting lesser known bloggers, too. Keep in mind that as other sites grow in PageRank, the value passed to your site will also grow.

• Create Some Link Bait – Make sure your content is so fascinating or funny that people will want to tell others about it. This is the ultimate for building naturally growing incoming links but of course hard to do.

A sample schedule could mean every month you líst your site in two good dírectories, link to interior site pages from a couple relevant posts in your blog, distribute one press release to news sites, and write one great article that other people may want to link to and then let them know about it.

A word about selecting outlets is in order, too. You’ll need to carefully assess each place you target in order to determine the link value they can pass onto you. For example, different press release submission sites and directories can give you a wide variety in link value. This can be time-consuming to determine but worth it when your site’s PageRank starts to climb. (Find some information on how to evaluate outlets in this article on press release optimization: http://bit.ly/dazx7d)

Google held a press event to announce the most “buzzed” topic of the week – Google Buzz. This is Google’s new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we’ve discussed repatedly.

Editor’s Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after liveblogging the press event.

Google says Buzz has five key elements:

1. Auto Following
2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience…
3. Support for public and private sharing….
4. In-box integration
5. Just the good stuff…

Watch the video below to get a general idea of what Buzz does.

Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them “big and fast”. If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can “like” and “unlike” stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.

Public/Private sharing – The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it’s public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google’s real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.

In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use “@” for replies like with Twitter.

While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:

1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android
2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com
3. Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.

Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world’s most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android’s popularity is growing quickly too.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Reports_December_2009_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.

Search Implications

Buzz posts get indexed by search from the page that its posted to (the Google Profile page), just like anything else on the web. Google says they don’t do anything special to promote it in SERPs.

Google didn’t really talk about social search with regards to Buzz, but it would not be surprising to see Buzz updates integrated these into social search, which recently became part of the web search norm. Your Gmail contacts are the first people listed in your “social circle” that Google draws from for these results.

If Buzz content appears in both real-time search results and social search results, that’s two good-sized chunks of SERP real-estate. Not all SERPs have both or either, but it opens some additional search marketing doors. The feature would also open up more reputation management issues, as simply an additional place to monitor, not to mention other ways businesses are currently using services like Facebook and Twitter for marketing.

How Else Could Google Buzz Be Used for Business?

Buzz may benefit businesses as an orgnizational tool. The first thing that comes to mind is the expansion of communication with existing contacts. When you’re frequently seeing what your Gmail contacts are saying, it will not only keep those people fresh in your mind, but it can cultivate further communication.

The feature could possibly lend to better organization of your communication, which could in turn save time. Again, depending on how many of the possibilities (if any) mentioned in this article actually come to fruition, it could become a central place for that communication. The more services Buzz gets integrated with, the better it could become for organization.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says he wrote an op-ed piece, posted it to Google Buzz, and quickly had 50 comments, and edited based on feedback. He finds it efficient as an editing tool.

Competition

Before it even launched, a lot of people suggested that Google’s product could never compete with Facebook and Twitter, but I was not and am still not so quick to rule out the possibility. No, it’s not likely to come out and kill those two, but that’s not to say that it can’t co-exist, and gain popularity of its own, if Google makes the right moves in integrating it with its other products. It’s already off to a good start on that (especially with the Google mobile home page).

How well the product can compete is directly related to what possibilities Google explores. Even if a lot of options aren’t explored immediately, that’s not to say they won’t be slowly. Google has a way of adding a feature here, and adding a feature there to its different products. Before you know it, things are more connected than you may have realized.

It’s not all bout Gmail. According to comScore, Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, but how many people have actual GOOGLE accounts? You don’t have to be a Gmail user to have one, and Google is increasingly finding more ways to draw people in through various products.

Facebook is supposedly working on its own email product, which could directly compete with Gmail. Between that and Google Buzz, the competition might be heating up between the two companies more than ever, but it still doesn’t mean they can’t co-exist. Will it even matter as more third-party apps begin supporting everything? It’s very possible that these updates will be portable among all of these different services anyway, and they could even support each other in the future. Facebook has had no problem with posting updates to Twitter. Last year, Google actually made a big deal about its initiative to make user data as portable as possible. They formed the Data Liberation Front to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.”

More Possibilities for Google Buzz

Google says it wants Buzz to be as open as possible. That means there is plenty of room to grow and increase integration with different services. The company says it will be wired up to other parts of Google and other parts of the Internet. Facebook Connect integration is “something they’ll think about”, but it’s not happening yet. Google says it will bring Twitter content in, but will not yet let you push it out to Twitter…yett. That could change in time. Think about being able to do all of your social media and email communication from one place. That is something Mozilla is trying to develop with its in-progress Raindrop project. What if Google was able to do it with an established product like Gmail? Google says theyr’e “just getting started” with Buzz.

I think it’s safe to expect Buzz integration with a lot of other Google features. Google has already said that it places Wave as “high on the list of things they can do” as far as integration.

Google could potentially integrate the feature with any product it chooses (and it has a lot to choose from). What if it became available with the click of a button on the Chrome browser (which is gaining popularity)? What if it were integrated with the already social Google Reader? Google Docs? Wave? There could be a Google gadget, for users’ iGoogle home pages. There are a lot of ways tha Google could potentially get people using Buzz. Google says Buzz will be launched as an enterprise product eventually as well.

On a sidenote, it’s pretty interesting that Google and Yahoo both now have products called “Buzz.”

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?
Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.