Google privacy concerns go mainstream

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You know that worries about internet security and privacy are becoming widespread when they start appearing in the Metro. For any overseas readers this is a UK free newspaper which is given away at rail stations and on buses, and while awaiting my cancelled train this morning I read a full page article in which they included statements by Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in the USA and by Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both highlighted the large amount of personal information held by Google and that this information gives a substantial picture of your character and beliefs as well as private data. According to the article there are EU suggestions to add privacy warnings to search sites in the style of cigarette health warnings – not one I’d come across. As well as highlighting Google’s purchase of Doubleclick it also mentions another purchase of a genetic profiling company, though whether this is slipped in for dramatic effect is hard to say as no further details are given.

The Google view is presented in such a way that it sounds a bit wooley and unconvincing, and there are numerous mentions of Orwell’s 1984 and Big Brother as well as the KGB and Stasi. (wonder if they were reading my previous post!) They also mention the recently announced plans to extend search into areas where you can ask very personalised questions such as “what shall I do tomorrow” and the Eric Schmidt comments about being at the very early stages of compiling information.

So is this just a bit of journalistic bandwagon jumping or a sign of the big Google backlash? Regular readers will know that I have reservations on the subject of keeping personal data online and the tracking of online activity. I don’t use Gmail or other online data storage mail systems, and I don’t use online bookmarking. Whether it’s politicians or big business there are too many people I don’t trust to have access to our private lives. Maybe I’m not in such a minority after all.

Boogie on up

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Google rankings changed fairly radically again for me on one site this weekend (previously discussed on this post), and this time most of the results went up; with the exception of one for the most generic keyword phrase which decided to stay the same for once (fingers crossed for next week). The Edinburgh-based terms all came back too.

Many of the terms are now at or near their highest level so the trends are still upwards, as would be hoped for a site that’s only been around for about a year and a half, it’s just that they are kinda variable in getting there recently. Is anyone else seeing this sort of major oscillation? Working out whether it’s site specific, datacentre related, or a sign of a more fundamental algorithm tweak is proving difficult on this occasion.

Checking Supplemental pages

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In an earlier post I spoke about Google’s planned removal of the supplementals tag from their results. They went ahead with it and it caused quite a stir amongst webmasters and SEOs. Various people have looked for alternative ways to discover which of their pages are still in the supplemental index. US SEO firm Bruce Clay have come up with the following query –

-site:www.mysite.com/* site:www.mysite.com/

which so far seems to do the job. Thanks guys, let’s hope Google don’t pull it.

I noticed that the same, or at least very similar results can be deduced in Webmaster Tools by looking at the Internal Links report. Not all your pages are shown, and if a page isn’t listed in there then it’s a fair bet that it’s a supplemental. On my sites it seems to be the case that pages with very few internal links are still ok if they have a link from the home page but if they only have links from subsidiary pages and no external inbound links then they won’t have enough PageRank and will fall into the “Dungeons of Doom” (cue maniacal laughter), where their chances of ranking for anything will be poor. That seems to match what we know so far of the reasons for supplementals.

Now why can’t it all just depend on quality?

The Search for Spock

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If you’re of a paranoid disposition, or maybe even just mildly suspicious of Big Brother tactics, then the news that Spock intends to build a profile of 6 billion earthlings will have set your antennas twitching. No, not the supremely logical Vulcan first officer / ambassador from the 23rd century but a new search engine of the 21st.

Spock is intended to do for people-searching what Google does for general search. Their intention is to trawl the social sites such as Myspace, Facebook, etc. to build up detailed information on people all over the world. CIA eat your heart out! For those of us old enough to remember when privacy and the ability to walk down the street without being photographed by a battery of CCTV cameras was something we took for granted and made us different from the eastern block with their KGB and Stasi, this has worrying overtones. Even if you don’t keep your email online with the likes of Gmail, or your photos on Flickr, or your bookmarks on Del.icio.us you’ve probably still joined enough discussion groups, or posted on usenet, or commented on blogs for a pretty big dossier to be put together by anyone, be they press reporter or politician, looking for an easy story or scapegoat.

Made a left-wing political comment in your teens? A non-pc comment during drunken online banter? Joined a swingers group? It’s all potentially retrievable, and free to be twisted by anyone with an axe to grind. Of course it could be argued that much of this is retrievable already, but such a dedicated search system is bound to take on new and potentially more invasive methods in order to differentiate it from the competition. Will the social media sites be able to opt out of this process if their members demand it? Will the Spock spider pay attention to robots.txt?

So how happy would you be with total availability of all your online activities. Expect a rise in popularity of anonymous proxy surfing facilities and a renewed use of PGP to encrypt emails. Me, I’ll be polishing up my firewalls and being very careful with the trails I leave.

Get down and Boogie – Google rankings vary dramatically

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In the last few weeks I’ve been seeing some extremely variable results in the Google UK rankings. Some competitive search terms have been alternately ranking high and then dropping back by up to 150 places, back up high, back down again. Then at one point, just to confuse us further, any term that included my home town of Edinburgh simply dropped out of the indexes altogether. Weird.

It’s all a bit reminicent of the old days (all of two years ago!) of the infamous Google Dance, when excited and feaful webmasters would tremble at the first mention of it on the forums, knowing that their rankings would go crazy for the next few days. In these days of what Matt Cutts calls Everflux it’s not supposed to happen any more but something seems to be afoot. If anything this is more of a regular oscillation from one set of rankings to another – so my esteemed colleague at Oyster Web, John Hughes,  has christened it the Google Boogie. Just be careful you don’t pull a muscle trying to follow the gyrations 😉

Check your hosting

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If you can’t understand why your site isn’t getting Google rankings try checking your web hosting!

There are various reasons why it might be causing you to lose search positions. A few years ago there were reports that one large hosting company had been blocking Googlebot from spidering any of its clients’ sites, apparently in order to save bandwidth. That would certainly be a major breach of faith, but as ever the onus is on you as the buyer to beware. There’s some very cheap hosting deals out there, but you have to ask why they are cheap. Maybe they don’t have essential facilities or support, access to log files, database capability, scripting languages, or as in that case, maybe you’ll never get any rankings from them and therefore never be able to attract traffic. Free lunches generally have a catch somewhere.

Geographical considerations for search engines

How about checking where your host’s servers are. Search engines have various ways of establishing where your site is based and generally assume that where it’s based in where it’s aimed at. No problem if you have a .co.uk address – you’re obviously UK. Likewise, if your address finishes .fr .es or .it then you’re assumed to be French, Spanish or Italian. But what if you have a .com address? .com is something of a historical anomaly from the days when the net was in its infancy and everyone (well, everyone in America) thought you could just split sites into commercial (.com), non-profit (.org), educational (.edu), and government (.gov).

For a long time everyone jumping on the internet bandwagon assumed you had to have a .com address (the press even called it the .com bubble) but in fact the main problem with it is that it has no geographical significance. Without that major clue the search engines resort to secondary information, and one of those is where the servers are based. If you are a UK company with a .com address and your host’s servers are in another European country then you have a problem – Google and MSN/Live won’t include your site in their UK-only search results.

I was once phoned by a company who hosted their servers in Ireland (Eire) and complained they could never get rankings in the UK. Sure enough I checked their hosting and then checked Google and Yahoo in Ireland – they had top ten results all over the place. Unfortunately they didn’t have any potential customers there. In the UK where their market was they were nowhere to be seen!

The same problem has long caused difficulties for Australian webmasters who tend to go for hosting in the USA where it is apparently much cheaper. If they’re using a .com address then they won’t get results in their own country.

So watch where you host your site – it could make the difference between the success or failure of your business.