Posts tagged Itself
Google Forced To Punish Itself For Chrome’s SEO Mistake
Jan 3rd
Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website’s page ranking in search. Hundreds of paid articles, many of them totally incoherent, were used to promote Chrome. At least one of them violated Google’s policy against paid links. As Google’s search guru Matt Cutts wrote in 2009, “paid posts should not affect search engines.”
So that was awkward. Fortunately for Google, the infraction could be blamed on Unruly Media, the third-party company Google hired to promote Chrome. Links from the paid posts were supposed to use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they wouldn’t affect page rank. At least one blogger didn’t, even though Unruly “advised” them to. In order for Google to get out of this mess, it would have to punish itself as it has done to others. Sure enough, Google says it will reduce Chrome’s page rank.
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From the statement Google sent to Search Engine Land:
“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”
At least Google won’t come out of this looking like a hypocrite. It goes to great lengths to punish sites that play games with search ranking, and it already takes heat for favoring its own sites. PR-wise, there was no way out of this for Google but to punish the Chrome site.
But it sure does look sloppy. Google’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand’s hired hands were doing. If the Chrome team knew that paid links were a violation of the search team’s policies, it should have been more careful to avoid this. Google is relentlessly tweaking search, its core product. It’s making its other products, particularly Google+, more important. Getting caught in this old-school SEO trick is not what Google needed to instill trust.
Now that the story has broken, the results look very different, but check out what a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” turned up before:
Image, follow-up, pretty much the whole scoop via Search Engine Land
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Big Question (Answered): “Is Twitter Projecting Itself as Another Social Network?”
Dec 10th
Twitter’s recent redesign had many buzzing about whether or not the micro-blogging platform had aspirations to become a full-fledged social network. Of course, many say Twitter’s been a social network from the beginning, but either way, the redesign, along with their new brand pages, indicates a big shift from simply pushing out a 140 character message to your followers. Hameed Azar, a ReadWriteWeb community member, suggested we pose the question to the rest of the community.
With the #NewTwitter, is Twitter projecting itself as another social network and not a complicated micro blog?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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By Open Sourcing webOS, Hewlett-Packard Distancing Itself From Mobile Platform
Dec 9th
Hewlett-Packard has finally had enough with trying to figure out what to do with its failed acquisition of mobile platform webOS. So, it is doing the easiest thing possible to get out from under the burden of supporting the platform: turning it loose to the open source community.
In its press release announcing the open sourcing of webOS, HP said all the right things. It will continue to invest and be an active participant. It will provide inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation. It will be purely open source. Those almost seems to be conflicting statements. HP may think that it is trying to create a new Android ecosystem, but HP’s and Google approaches to mobile are going in opposite directions.
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HP bought webOS because it thought it could penetrate the consumer market with quality Palm-like devices. It also thought that the capabilities of webOS to connect to the cloud and enable Web-based mobile solutions would be a boon in the enterprise. HP fundamentally failed to create devices or compelling reasons for either consumers or the enterprise to adopt webOS.
So, HP is now distancing itself from webOS under the guise of making it open source. It presumably could not find a company willing to buy the platform so now it is taking the only avenue that is available. HP now has very little way to make money off of webOS. As a licensed open source project, it is not going to be able to sell licenses to the platform, the way Microsoft does with Windows Phone. Nor does it have Google’s clout in the advertising world to monetize webOS the way Android does. HP must pin its hope on the notion that developers, OEMs and carriers will pay HP for its software and cloud services in the development of webOS applications.
Herein lays the problem. As an open source project, developers will be able to choose whatever cloud and development tools they want. The fact that webOS is so closely tied to the Web does not help either because there are a variety of solutions to make HTML5 Web apps outside of HP. From the startup realm with companies like appMobi, Sencha, Appcelerator to enterprise developer companies like IBM and SAP, HP has no way to tie the development process to itself in an open source environment. Google has accepted this fact and lets the Android ecosystem do as it pleases because as long as people have Android devices in their hands, Google stands to make money from when and how they use the Web and native apps on the device.
Android may be open source, but Google ties itself very closely to how and when it can be used by OEMs and carriers. Throughout 2011, Google has moved to bind Android more closely to it, such as the fact that the Honeycomb version 3.0 was never made available to the public. This is where Google differs from HP. Google is tying Android closer to its home base. HP, out of necessity, has to push webOS away.
That may be a bad thing for HP, but it is not necessarily a bad consequence for the mobile ecosystem. By pushing webOS away, HP all of a sudden gives the mobile ecosystem an instantly viable platform to build off. This is not some half-baked project like MeeGo or Tizen. Palm and webOS have the code base to produce high quality smartphones now. Look for Samsung, HTC, LG and other OEMs to all of a sudden become very interested in what they can do with webOS.
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Is RIM Shooting Itself In the Foot With Mobile Fusion?
Nov 29th
Research In Motion has taken a step that many in the industry thought the company would not, could not take. RIM announced today that it will release Mobile Fusion, an enterprise-security grade mobile device management suite akin to its BlackBerry Enterprise Server, for the iPhone and Android platforms.
This was a necessary move for RIM. Yet, it has lost the first mover’s advantage. The BES system was the first of its kinds and became the default system for enterprise mobility. That era is beginning to pass as more employees bring iPhones and Android to work. RIM will look to monetize off that trend, but the company’s edge has been lost.
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Mobile Fusion will provide MDM alongside the BES in enterprise and government IT departments. Fundamentally, it is nothing that the industry has not already seen before. Here is the list of functions for supported devices:
- Asset management
- Configuration management
- Security and policy definition and management
- Secure and protect lost or stolen devices (remote lock, wipe)
- User- and group-based administration
- Multiple device per user capable
- Application and software management
- Connectivity management (Wi-Fi®, VPN, certificate)
- Centralized console
- High scalability
If these product capabilities sound familiar, it is because there is a vibrant ecosystem that has been built around MDM services that do exactly the same thing. Companies like BoxTone & 3 Laws Of Mobility (a Motorola subsidiary), Good Technology, Zenprise, Symantec, McAfee, Sybase (which partners with Samsung), Fixmo (that got a huge Series C round of funding yesterday), Airwatch and others have all come out with BES-style MDM services in the last year or so focused on delivering security to enterprise smartphones.
The problem comes down to the fact that enterprises no longer have to rely on BlackBerry for security. RIM’s data encryption technology on BlackBerry handsets is still at the forefront of the pack and remains attractive to enterprises but there is no shortage of options for companies looking for solutions.
Here is a breakdown of MDM services from Gartner in April. It does not include 3LM, which launched out of public beta in October with a partnership with BoxTone at CTIA Enterprise and Apps.
RIM is in a tricky position here. Mobile Fusion is a product where the company is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. Either way, RIM appears to be damned. In talking with analysts over the course of the year, the general consensus on RIM that it would return from whence it came, a niche enterprise smartphone manufacturer. That was as long as it had the proprietary functions of BES attached to BlackBerry devices. Come Mobile Fusion in March, that is no longer going to be the case.
So, where does RIM go from here? It is losing consumer market share by the fist load and now is making an effort to monetize on that loss in the enterprise market. What it all comes down to for RIM is the wait and see. Wait for BBX to come out next year, hope that it sparkles and gain back consumer (hence, enterprise) market share.
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Barack Obama Joins Google+, White House Itself Still Not There
Nov 23rd
First Britney Spears takes the top Google+ spot away from Google CEO Larry Page today. Now the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has opened an account. Not Yet Verified, But Yes, Real Is it really him? It’s actually a Google+ brand page for the Obama For America campaign, and not…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Four ways the SEO industry could kill itself – Econsultancy (blog)
Nov 10th
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Four ways the SEO industry could kill itself
Econsultancy (blog) Many agencies are bucking the economic climate, budgets for SEO continue to grow and pretty much every decision maker on the client-side understands and appreciates the value of natural search. The SEO industry, however, is not immortal. … |
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Nokia’s Still Has Work to Do to Differentiate Itself With Windows Phone
Oct 28th
The last two days at Nokia World 2011 were spent trying to figure out how Nokia CEO Stepehen Elop could justify his claim that his company’s Windows Phone is, in fact, “the first real Windows Phone.” From a marketing and merchandise perspective, it is not. If we take Nokia’s value added services into account, Elop may have a point but there is still a lot of work to do.
The Nokia Lumia 800 is a beautiful phone. It feels nice to hold and has all the tech specs that gadget geeks would expect from a top of the line smartphone (except for a forward facing camera). The big question has been whether Nokia’s implementation of Windows Phone is any better than LG, Samsung or HTC. The answer remains to be seen.
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Mango Baked Too Soon For Nokia
By the time the ink was dry on the deal between Nokia and Microsoft to use Windows Phone last February, the major portions of Windows 7.5 Mango were already built and done, according to Ilari Nurmi, Nokia’s VP of product marketing for smart devices.
There are still a number of things to like that Nokia has put into the device. Nokia Maps with Nokia Drive is a solid turn-by-turn navigation system that can work without a data connection. Offline maps with turn by turn fully bring an end to the Garmin and TomTom era of dominance of in-car GPS devices.
Nokia also wants to push its imaging and camera functions as superior functionality in this version of Windows Phone. Nokia is known for its hardware so there is little to argue there. Nokia Music is the third prong that the OEM wants to push as a differentiator that seems more like bloatware from the manufacturer than fixing a problem. At the keynote on Wednesday, Nokia SVP of program and product Kevin Shields said that, “I think we have finally solved the mobile music problem. I am really excited about it.”
There is nothing really special about Nokia Music. It is basically like putting a iPod of pre-loaded songs and playlists into a phone. Yes, that makes it so it can work offline (a larger trend for Nokia which is beneficial to consumers), but smartphones these days handle music just fine, from downloading and local storage to streaming from the cloud.
Nokia has built some augmented reality and public transports applications into the Lumia as well. In terms of these types of applications, Nokia is now just catching up with the rest of the industry.
Road To Differentiation
Nokia’s road to differentiation may prove to be a difficult one. Part of the deal between Microsoft and Nokia is that existing Nokia assets, like maps and location-based services, will be put into future versions of Windows Phone that Microsoft licenses to every OEM. So, to get Nokia Maps, all Samsung will need to do is license the next version of Windows Phone since it will already be in there.
We will see how the next round of Nokia’s Windows Phones come out as Nokia and its very large ecosystem of international developers (which is a big plus for the company over iOS and Android) can create unique function into the device. Nokia is excited and it should be. In the time frame that they have created the device and the marketing program that will come with it, Nokia did about as well as it possibly could have. It just may be a while before the company sees any tangible results from the move.
Traction across the globe where Nokia is strong will not be hard for the company. It is in the developed countries with saturated smartphone markets where it will have a difficulty competing. As we have seen with Android and iOS, those are the markets that push popular products down the value chain. Are Nokia Maps and location services, music and a good camera enough? Time will tell.
Disclosure: Nokia paid for ReadWriteWeb’s travel and accommodations to Nokia World 2011.
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Google+ Is Google Itself, Says Google VP
Sep 30th
Google+ is the overriding connection between all Google services. That’s how Google’s Bradley Horowitz described it in an interview, conducted by Wired, that delved into some of the most common and important questions about the Goog…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Former Mobile Search Engine Taptu Reinvents Itself As Tablet Platform Tool
Sep 12th
The search technology behind failed social search engine Worio became the guts of the successful Zite app, which was recently acquired by CNN. Similarly Taptu, which began as a mobile search engine in the pre-iPhone era (2006), did almost the identical thing and is hoping to follow Zite’s…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Google Buys Zagat, Gives Itself Extraordinary Rating
Sep 8th
Google has bought Zagat, an innovator of user-generated restaurant surveys. Google promises that Zagat ratings and reviews, which are currently behind a paywall, will become a “cornerstone” of Google’s local offering. Terms of th…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
