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Latest Interview: Google’s Maile Ohye

8/24/2008 by 3 Comments

As is my normal policy, no interview was published last week, as many in the industry have way too much to deal with when there is a major search industry trade show taking place, such as SES San Jose. However, this week I have the pleasure of publishing my recent interview with Maile Ohye, a Senior Support Engineer at Google.

Our conversation including quite a bit of semi-advanced stuff on Google Webmaster Tools, and also a discussion of the recent indexing improvements that Google has made with regard to Flash. Once you have read it, do use the space below to ask any questions or make any comments.

Filed Under: Google, SEO, Webmaster Tools

Vanessa Fox’s Last Google Interview?

6/30/2007 by 4 Comments

Shortly before she left Google, I spoke to Vanessa Fox about what’s going on with Google Webmaster Tools, and, we also spoke for a while about duplicate content problems. While I was working on polishing up the interview transcript Vanessa left Google. So I may have had the last real interview she did while at Google. After another week of vacation, she will officially make the leap over to work at Zillow. Best of luck Vanessa!

We talk at length about key parts of Webmaster Tools, and we also talk about the newest features, and planned features for the product. Vanessa talks quite a bit about they types of features that users have been requesting, and while nothing was committed, it should provide some insight into the types of things you can expect to see in the product in the future.

We also talk quite a bit about duplicate content, what types are easy for Google to detect, and some more advanced duplicate content situations, such as those were actual penalties are put in place.

Filed Under: Duplicate Content, SEO, Webmaster Tools

The 4 Best Things in the new Link Capabilities from Google

2/7/2007 by 1 Comment

The SEO world has been abuzz with the announcement of “accurate” link information from Google. This is, in fact, really good news for webmasters. If you care about building traffic to your site, you care about links. And having the tools to find out when you have new links is very good news indeed. It just makes our job easier.

There are a few things worth commenting on, with regard to this new tool:

  1. The link counts are less than those shown on Yahoo’s Site Explorer. A quick check today shows about 13,100 links to the Stone Temple site. The results I got from Webmaster Tools was around 8800 (67%).
  2. So Yahoo shows some links that Google doesn’t. However, the converse is also true. Google shows some links that Yahoo doesn’t. So for those of you who are into the gory details, looking at both will make sense for you.
  3. Webmaster Tools provides you the ability to download the data in a spreadsheet. This is just a fabulous feature. It allows you to quickly and easily manipulate the data to see what pages are linking to to each of the pages on your site. This is pure gold.
  4. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported earlier today that you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to download other people’s backlinks. Of course, Yahoo let’s you see any site’s links with Site Explorer, but the ability to download these into a spreadsheet on the fly is really, really precious.

So lots of good stuff in this release. Kudos to Google for making this available.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO, Webmaster Tools

Google Image Search Labeller

12/15/2006 by Leave a Comment

Vanessa Fox posted yesterday about using images on your site. The post includes a variety of basic tips for getting the best impact on your search results.

The really good stuff though, is a pointer to a cool new feature in Google Webmaster Central. You can read a basic description of the service here. Basically, if you enable enhanced image search in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you will be permitting your images to be labelled using the Google Image Labeler.

This is true social search in action. Once you turn this feature on, anyone can begin to associate labels with your images. So the community at large will begin to label your images, and here’s the kicker, these labels will be used in indexing your images in Google Image Search.

What this means is that your images can begin to show in the image search results for many different types of terms, based on the labels people associate with them. This presents an opportunity for sites with high quality image content to get considerably more traffic than previously possible when the only available tool was the “alt” text for the image.

Filed Under: SEO, Webmaster Tools