Farewell Google Affiliate Network

As an example of how little Google cares about a product once they decide to shut it down, we only know about this via a brief mention in a blog post, sneakily titled An update on Google Affiliate Network:

We’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.

To be fair, Google didn’t buy the network deliberately, it was a minor component of their multi-billion dollar purchase of DoubleClick. Known as Performics back then, the affiliate network was worth perhaps $50 million (based on what Double Click paid for it 2 years prior).

But also to be fair, if they didn’t want it they could have sold it to someone else and pocketed $50 million. Perhaps it wasn’t worth their bother for such a piddling amount.

Since Performics became GAN, it hasn’t changed much. Apart from making it look more like a Google product, it seems they put little effort into it. They didn’t even give it its own domain name!

And now, merchants and affiliates who have perhaps had a relationship for a decade through the Performics / GAN platform, will now have to shift to a new platform. Of perhaps just give up, emulating the mega-successful Google?

Google: Product Killer: 70 & Counting

That’s not 70 all time, that’s 70 in the last 18 months. How many businesses have the luxury of ditching products at a rate of one per week??

Woody Leonhard says:

By my count, Google has discontinued more than 70 free-standing apps and major sets of APIs in eight different “spring cleanings” over the past 18 months. Perhaps Larry Page took Steve Jobs’ advice to figure out what Google’s good at, and focus … mercilessly.

It is easy to forget in these fast-moving times, but these are some of the more notable dumps:

  • Aardvark – peer-to-peer Q@A, purchased for $50 million, lasted 19 months
  • Google Desktop Search – best you could get, great brand advocate, but not an earner
  • Fast Flip – interestingly the similar product FlipBoard is all the rage these days…
  • Jaiku – like Twitter but they didn’t want to play second fiddle
  • Google Wave – email 3.0, but too advanced to make waves
  • iGoogle – a landing page that was used by millions. They’ve re-animated it until November, but this is one of the more senseless killings
  • Google Reader – it seems almost certain that the most popular replacement will make a $billion
  • FeedBurner – purchased for $100 million, massive user base, hanging on by a thread. Do they dare kill this as well?

Google Caught Using Paid Links

Google promise to do no evil… but they have been caught manipulating website ranking using the very same technique that has seen other sites punished – paid links.

Basically, Google has paid for “advertorials” in online newspapers, and within the content is direct links to Google products. According to Google the only legit way of doing this is to ensure the links are “no follow”. In the examples uncovered, the links are just regular, meaning Google benefits from the link juice.

Full story at SEO Book

These things can easily happen when a company gets too big, and especially when they assign a publicity campaign to someone who has no knowledge of SEO practises. I doubt it was deliberate!

Meanwhile, in the UK Google has punished flower delivery service Interflora, as well as more than 150 news sites that they had advertorials on, just like Google, without “no follow” links.

Impossible Queries Find Adult Answers

By the time you have read this, Google will have most likely fixed the “bug”. While it certainly isn’t a feature, or an Easter Egg, it is curious:

The Verge highlighted a Quora post about the bug, where doing some searches for “contradictory” or impossible to solve queries brings back porn listings.

For example, queries like the ones below currently do this (and be forewarned, you’re going to get porn results at Google if you click on these links):

 

Found at Search Engine Land

FTC: Google Free To Promote YouTube (etc) in Search Results

…the [FTC] decided on a 5-0 vote that Google’s prominent promotion of its own products and services in search results is not biased towards competitors. [Source: Adage]

The ultimate takeaway from this investigation is that Google can keep buying near-monopoly information services and rank its own properties well in search results. YouTube was already dominating when Google bought it, and it would have been mighty difficult to ever lose than dominance (via some catastrophic error), or for a competitor to ever best their first mover advantage. Sure, if you had a few billion spare you could run a comparable service that was ad-free… for a while.

A better way to describe Google’s future monopoly would be that they have five options when an website starts to dominate search results for a particular niche:

1) Buy it
2) Buy a competitor
3) Ban it
4) Copy it
5) Give in

Additionally:

Google also agreed to no longer scrape content from other properties for inclusion in its own search results. Google was alleged to have grabbed content from other sites such as restaurant reviews site Yelp, leading consumers to believe the scraped content was Google’s, said FTC

So, back to their five choices… It is unlikely that Google can make a case for banning Yelp. Buying Yelp might be tricky, given that it was specifically part of this investigation. Copying is unlikely, because Google hasn’t exactly excelled at social – but they might try to incorporate reviews into Google+.

That leaves buying a competitor – and they already have, Zagat just over a year ago.

Inside Google’s Data Centers

Google has so many servers that they are counted in hundreds of thousands. And to house them they own and operate massive data centers around the world.

Google’s data centers are operating from:

  • Council Bluffs, Iowa
  • Douglas County, Ga.
  • Berkeley County, S.C.
  • Mayes County, Okla.
  • Lenoir, N.C.
  • The Dalles, Ore.
  • Hamina, Finland
  • St. Ghislain, Belgium
  • Quilicura, Chile (coming)
  • Hong Kong (coming)
  • Singapore (coming)
  • Taiwan (coming)

The centers are so large that staff are supplied with bicycles. They are also very secure, sometimes guarded by StormTroopers. For more pics see the Daily Mail.


Webmaster Guidelines Pages Monitor

Like to take a guess how many Webmaster Guidelines pages Google has? More than 50!

And guess what Google’s method for informing people when they get updated is? They don’t. Despite it being critical for online success to be aware of Google’s myriad of guidelines, they update them frequently and don’t tell anyone. The onus on you is to repeatedly check.

Hobo Web have made a nice page that keeps track of when the Top 50 Guidelines pages were last changed.

AdSense and Free Downloads

Google relies on automation for keeping out spammers and improving the user experience. For the most part it works very well, and Google will leave you alone.

The problem is when the automated process gets it wrong.This happens a lot, to both AdWords and AdSense customers.

Google treats this as collateral damage – it’s better value to ignore customer complaints than have a human look into them. Unless of course there’s some bad publicity to fix, as in this example.

Author and Iraq war veteran Cody Jackson has a website with AdSense ads on it. He decided to link to the various places where his book could be downloaded for free. That’s right, a book he had written, and made available for free.

The AdSense system decided that he was linking to copyrighted material (in other words, pirated). His account was closed, and his two emails to Google were met by automated responses. But publicity of his plight meant his account was restored. This does of course highlight that thousands of other innocent customers miss out for good. At least with AdSense there are other alternatives. Unlike AdWords, which in some countries has 90% market share.

Google employees better watch out – one day an automated process will decide that Google Inc no longer needs humans to work for it.

Google News Now Reads Meta Tags

Search engines stopped looking at meta keyword tags many years ago, because they were abused by spammers – combined with better software for determining the topic on the page. But now Google has found a reason for reintroducing their use, by following this logic:

  • All sites that appear in Google News have been manually reviewed for quality – and even if spammers gain entry, they don’t last long
  • When semantic content is wrongly determined by Google’s software, it can look bad on the news page – so genuine & accurate meta keywords will have value

However, there are some sites that appear in Google News that are heavily SEO optimized. They rewrite stories continuously and have elaborate internal linking systems. These sites might take the meta tag reintroduction too far…

Full story at SitePro News.