Twitter Launches Local Trends for Everyone
For a week or so, some Twitter users have been seeing a new feature called Local Trends. This feature shows users things that are being heavily talked about at the city and state levels. Twitter has now announced that the feature is live for all users.
“Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations. It’s interesting to know that one topic can now spread across the world in real-time, and Trends help us discover which of those topics are paramount on a global scale,” says Twitter’s @jennadawn. “As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them.”
At this point Local Trends are only available for the following areas:
“The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama’s election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?” she continues. “Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you.”
The feature could prove especially helpful for bloggers and journalists covering local news. At the very least, it will show what people are most interested in, in any particular area.
Twitter says it will be improving the feature over time by providing more locations, languages, and data through the Twitter API. There aren’t many locations available yet, but once the feature gets built up it should present an interesting picture of what people are talking about everywhere, which could be quite interesting.
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> Price, Dates Of First Twitter Conference Announced
> Twitter’s Suggested Users Now More Personalized
Has Google Begun Changing How it Indexes the Web?
Last summer Google announced a new project called “Caffeine”, which was described as a re-write of Google’s web search architecture. Around that time, Matt Cutts discussed Caffeine with WebProNews, comparing it to the “Big Daddy Update” of 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites. It appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild.
Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.
Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn’t want a repeat of the Florida update).
The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).
“It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster,” Cutts says of Caffeine.
But enough background. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread where administrator Tedster claimed to have seen Caffeine in action at a number of IP addresses. He wrote:
I’m seeing the Caffeine data-set being served via this set of IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.103, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.99,64.233.169.106
It seems to take 5 IP addresses to build the complete SERP, where in the past it often took only 3.
Schwartz also pointed to another member’s post (Whitenight), who said:
Well, just tripled checked with offices/employees in Texas, Colorado, and Indiana. All 5 “control” keywords/sites showed live Caffeine.
That member’s latest post says that the Caffeine Dataset is also on http://66.102.7.99 and http://66.102.7.104.
We don’t know for sure if this is all really Caffeine in action though. Google hasn’t commented on it, and has not made any announcements regarding Caffeine since what Matt said above. Some people don’t believe this is Caffeine at all. As Schwartz notes, we’ll have to wait for Google to say something.
Still, January is almost over, and Google said it would wait until after the holidays, specifically mentioning the month of January. It’s about time for this to be rolling out to some extent. Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.
Share your thoughts about Google’s Caffeine update.
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Yahoo’s Q4 Financial Results Draw Smiles
Yahoo’s fourth quarter earnings report has been released, and it seems that people who were preparing for some sort of drastic response – whether it would’ve involved either pitchforks or confetti – will have to wait for another day. Although the confetti folks might win out, as Yahoo did all right, more or less in line with estimates.
Yahoo reported $1.26 billion in net revenue and earnings of 11 cents per share, versus predictions of $1.23 billion and 11 cents per share. That’s a pretty solid performance, all in all.
What’s more, the outlook for the next quarter is bright, too, with Carol Bartz stating, “Our business has positive momentum and we feel good as we head into 2010. We’re pleased that the midpoint of our Q1 revenue outlook marks the first quarter of year-over-year growth in six quarters.”
And in case you were wondering, Yahoo still plans on sealing its deal with Microsoft sometime early this year.
Then here’s one final sign that Yahoo satisfied everyone on the financial front today: its stock is up. Yahoo shares have risen 1.88 percent so far in after-hours trading.
Related Articles:
> Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Approval Gets Deadline In Europe
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Google AdWords Tax Calculator
Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system…optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google’s yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don’t yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.
To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.
Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.
Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta 
Mahalo SEO Spam: Case Study
Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are…
- well branded
- well funded
- operating at scale
- good at public relations
- wrapped in AdSense ads
…the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine.*
*based on Mahalo.com
Mahalo SEO Spam Case Study
The Sales Pitch & Launch
Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay.
He had a multi-month sales pitch leading up to the launch of his site where he kept stating that Squidoo is spam and kept calling SEOs scumbags so he could pull in attention and links. This was well received by SEO conference organizers because people would talk about how outrageous Jason’s speech was online, so (seeking marketing for their conferences) the SEO conference organizers acted like lap dogs standing in line waiting for their turn to have Jason call their paying attendees scumbags.
The publicity strategy worked great as it helped land Jason some mainstream press coverage and a lot of ditto head bloggers (who lacked either the experience or the mental faculty needed to see the bigger picture) got behind Jason.
The Wikpedia page about Mahalo reflects the public relations driven misinformed pitch
Search results quality
Mahalo’s goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spam from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware, or engage in phishing scams. Webmasters have a vested interest in seeing their sites listed. Calacanis has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization practitioners. Mahalo’s reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem, producing search results that are more relevant to the user.
When people steal/borrow/syndicate content without any editorial value add or original content, and then wrap it in ads that is generally considered spam. We will come back to that topic later, I promise! 
Early Media Success
Around the above conversation flowed a bunch of links, which helped Mahalo get off to a fast start. At first Jason claimed he wanted to create “the best” content for the most popular search queries. Many members of the media were duped by Jason’s misinformation, as well reflected in the cNet article titled Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo: Screw the long tail:
Instead of a server farm that crawls through the entire known Web so it can automatically match Web pages to the queries you type, Mahalo’s search results are created by humans, in anticipation of the queries its users will type in.
How can this possibly work? Because, Calacanis says, the top 10,000 search terms account for 24 percent of all searches. If you can create great results for the top results, users will learn to appreciate the difference between machine search results–which are often thrown off by spam and poor-quality links–and human-powered search pages, lovingly created by caring search editors. For the obscure “long tail” queries that make up the 76 percent of search terms, Mahalo will serve up Google results.
Their first x articles were typically thin link lists, but hand generated. But since the pages were just link lists they were not remarkable enough to be linkworthy and the service was not sticky enough to keep people coming back. So Mahalo also decided to ramp up link building & awareness using 4 strategies:
- heavy internal cross linking of similar keywords
- create “how to” guides (and other in depth editorial) that were well formatted and fairly in depth
- use nepotism and social media spam to promote those articles
- encourage employees to create spam blogs to promote link lists of articles on Mahalo (example screenshot below, from a person who claims to proudly have never seen a superbowl, but allegedly likes the commercials)
A person who claims to have worked for Mahalo named Matthew Wayne Selznick wrote:
Regarding the Mahalo Blog Network: I don’t know how recent that screenshot is, but it’s amusing to see the blogs of several people who have either left the company or were laid off last October, when half the in-house editorial staff (including myself) was purged.
…
When I was working for Mahalo, staff were strongly encouraged to get blogs if we didn’t have them and blog about Mahalo whenever there was a high-traffic opportunity like an awards show, sports or political event.
…
I unsubscribe from the blogs of my former co-workers when the majority of their posts are Mahalo link parades, just as I unsubscribe from any blog when it becomes a mouthpiece.
Their content was not Pulitzer prize level, but the strategy paid off and they started pulling in search traffic.
Strategy Shift
In spite of claiming that he just wanted to dominate the short head of search volume, that is not how Mahalo started gaining search traffic. Even if they poured hundreds of Dollars into a piece of content the generalist content with little to no topical expertise could not compete for the most competitive and highest traffic search keywords.
You need to have something useful or original to add to the conversation if you want to compete for the most competitive keywords, and penny pinching outsourced content doesn’t get the job done there.
Instead what happened was that they ranked almost instantly for keywords like “best computer speakers” even with low quality scraped content.
Around the time I highlighted the emergence of that strategy, Google’s Matt Cutts was interviewed about it and claimed that it was fine because Jason Calacanas was using MediaWiki to create his site. Jason also did a bit of damage control in a Sphinn comment where he claimed the spam pages were “experimental pages” that “we are no indexing”
In his own words:
That was 671 days ago. What has happened since?
A Prediction
Around the time of the above incident John Andrews (who gets the SEO field as well as anyone does) stated:
Everyone just copy Jason Calcanis and Mahaloo, ok? That sounds like a GREAT idea. Jason dissed SEOs in public, at a keynote, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he wasn’t quite so ignorant of SEO any more, and is now working the SERPs as a black hat SEO. Jason dissed affiliates in public, at a keynore, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he’s not as ignorant of affiliate marketing as he was before, and now Mahaoloo has embedded (inline) affiliate links (take a look.. added since Affiliate Summit). I think every “Learn how to Make Money Fast on the Internets” web site should simply point to Mahaoulo and say “copy them.. they are riding the black edge of gray hat SEO” and be done with it. So simple… just copy them. As they add pages, add splogs on those same topics because those are money terms. Every time they link to some resource, link to it from that blog. Scan technorati for Jason’s comments, and add one of your own right into that thread.. every time. Let Jason pave the way to profits…. each time he justifies his spam, he’s justified YOUR spam as well. Every time he explains how he’s not a spammer, he’s explaining why YOUR not a spammer either. Best of all, he’s being your spokesperson for FREE!
Was John Andrews once again correct? Lets take a look behind the curtains
What Happened?
Well the above computer speakers page that was highlighted still ranks in the top 5 search results in Google.
And the site has been growing quickly, with traffic increasing at least 3-fold over the past couple years.
Jason used the economic downturn as a convenient excuse to fire most of their editorial staff. But a big piece of that traffic growth is that they have got more sophisticated in their content scraping strategy.
To appreciate how reliant their model is on scraping content, I want you to see how a new page starts off.
Once you strip the ads and scraped content from that page there is nothing left but branding & navigation.
Two other noteworthy things about that page are that it was generated by a robot (see below) and that it is already indexed in Google. Once you have enough domain authority you can publish automated scraped garbage and rank well in Google. It is the Mahalo strategy.
That page (which was automatically generated in under a minute by a fake user robot named searchclick) is already ranking well in Google! How do you know searchclick is a fake user? Well look through all the different pages they created in under a minute over the course of the last year…likely 10,000’s of them.
Understanding the Insidious Nature of Mahalo’s Scraping
Search engines like Google scrape content so that they may provide a service of value to end users *and* publishers. When they make your snippets they are used to help promote your website.
What Mahalo does is take snippets, and publish them as content on their site. So they use your page titles and your content snippet to rank their site using your content, without your permission.
If you optimize your page titles on a new blog post you are helping to feed relevant optimized content into the Mahalo machine. They will scrape it, and if you are less authoritative than they are, they will likely outrank you!
To add further insult to injury, they put nofollow on links back to the content source which they are scraping content from, so while they are “borrowing” your content you are not getting any link credit for it.
And It Gets Worse!!!
As abusive and as extreme as the above sounds, it is actually only the first step in the process.
What happens next is that if your content (published on Mahalo without permission) causes the Mahalo page to rank for new valuable keywords then they may feed those keywords into their page generation tool and keep making more auto-generated pages in that area, leveraging their domain authority and YOUR content to compete against you while building an automated spam empire.
Some of the top earning pages might have freelancers thicken them out, but the only reason humans are involved at that stage is to legitimize the mass content scraping farm that is the base of the operation. If a company has 200,000+ automated pages with 0 overhead that make 5 cents/day each that is real cashflow – $10,000+ per day of profit!
Still not convinced of the profit potential? Mahalo.com has ~ 300,000 pages indexed in Google. On auto-generated pages it is far easier to get people to click an AdSense ad than it is to get them to buy something from Amazon.com (and you profit on 100% of the ad clicks vs only 1% of the Amazon.com clicks that convert). While there are 4 AdSense blocks *above* the Amazon.com affiliate links, Jason did $250,000 on Amazon’s affiliate program last year “without trying” (again, his own stats in his own words…see Flickr.com/photos/jasoncalacanis/4234615626/ ).
Putting it All Together
If you build link equity and are good at public relations you can get away with murder in Google. Scale it big enough and the guidelines simply do NOT apply to you.
Most people who try to “pull a Mahalo” and spam up Google will likely fail because they lack
- the public relations & affiliations needed to attempt to legitimize such a strategy
- the willingness to lie just to get a bit of media ink
- the public relations & media savvy to pull such a major bait and switch without getting caught
- the domain authority to make it work algorithmically
Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay. Now that he is scraping your content (and adding nofollow to the links to your content) I think he is right. You are losing out on your search traffic because an authority site is “borrowing” your content and outranking you with your own content.
Are the search results going to start filling up with Twitter recycling start ups? What happens when the media gets in on this “what the bloggers have to say” scraping game? Does it even matter who created the content so long as someone wraps it in ads & ranks it?
I don’t think we can stop people from being greedy or stealing, but I am surprised Google has turned a blind eye to this process. Is this what they want the web to become?