How far we’ve come in Search over the last 6 or 7 years – there was a time where using certain url parameters (back in 2002-2004) got your site in the Google doghouse because Google’s crawlers would think, then, each url was part of a session, and since crawlers don’t login to sites, it would ignore those urls.

Today, people don’t have to worry as much about that happening, as Google just announced an enhancement to Google Webmaster Tools that Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore according to Search Engine Journal:

A new feature has appeared in the Site Configuration Settings Sections of Google Webmaster Tools. The setting, called Parameter Handling, enables site owners to specify up to 15 parameters that Google should ignore when crawling and indexing the site.

Google lists the parameters they’ve found in the URLs on your site, and indicates whether or not they think they those parameters are extraneous (with a suggested “Ignore” or “Don’t ignore”. You can confirm or reject those suggestions and can add parameters that aren’t listed.

So what does this mean for site owners?

The primary value of the feature is to improve the canonicalization of a site in Google’s index due to duplicate content. Canonicalization issues occur when multiple URLs load the same content. This scenario can be problematic for a number of reasons (for instance, it can skew analytics data) but from a search perspective, canonicalization issues can cause:

In a way, duplicate content, is often created by the same pages that are tagged for different purposes.  For example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18regulate.html?hp

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18regulate.html?ref=business

are the same url, the hp parameter refers to traffic that discovers this page on the homepage while the latter link indicates the page was opened from the business section – the search engines might pick up both urls, as separate pages – but they’re really not – so Google’s new utility, in this case, would allow the site owner (NY Times, in this case) to tell Google to ignore “hp” and “ref” parameters which eliminates the duplication.

Another thought was about Adobe purchasing Omniture yesterday for 1.8 Billion Dollars – according to Read/WriteWeb:

“…Th he acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe’s quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

Omniture is a top dog in analytics. But even though it competes with just about everyone, including Google, in the measurement market, some industry analysts have pointed out that it’s really run out of new ideas. In trying to explain the acquisition during an earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen asserted that buying Omniture was meeting customer needs.”

A number of people, including Eric T. Peterson, thinks making Flash trackable is not that big a deal-not enough of an excuse for this merger -

“…Similarly, I don’t see this acquisition as creating anything new regarding measurement being embedded into rich media applications. Thanks, perhaps ironically, to Macromedia (owned by Adobe) we have been embedding tracking codes into Flash, Flex, Silverlight, AJAX, etc. for years … and while the integration is botched as often as not, I don’t see how adding a “Click here to Omniture-ize” button into Dreamweaver and Adobe’s RIA development suite will solve that problem.”

Actually, that’s one way I can see a lot of money coming out of this deal – Adobe-Omniture could create that button – and develop Omniture Site Catalyst as the premier solution to gather information on Flash, etc – and then create a toolkit for everyone else (all the other analytics vendors) but charge then for access and use – that could create a lot of revenue.

Let’s face it – if it were that easy track Flash with a “button” – most analytics platforms would have had it already, but it’s not.   Maybe Adobe didn’t make it easy to develop solutions – now it will, but, maybe, you’ll have to pay to get access – and …. who in their right mind, would not pay?   After all, these days half of the pages on many sites are running Flash – or some similar type of Rich Media – that isn’t easy to track – and easily botched up in tracking, when it’s attempted – … why not just “charge” people to turn Flash Tracking on ……. End of Story -  who, in their right might would refuse?  All the headaches this will solve, or attempt to solve.

So, from that perspective, the Adobe acquisition of Omniture makes sense – even if it has something very disquieting about it – the nature of Web Analytics is changing – and vendors are rapidly vanishing, being bought up, one by one – what’s next for Coremetrics and WebTrends?      Hey, maybe Sears will buy WebTrends and maybe Coremetrics will be bought by IBM – just a guess – might be totally off (since Coremetrics bought IBM Surfaid a few years back – in a way, things would have come back full circle).

With the analytics vendors being “absorbed” into other businesses (for example, Omniture bought by Adobe – Document preparation, Flash players, etc – essentially – presentation software) – what’s next?

Also, on the Social Media front, I noted that Jive Software and Radian6 entered into a partnership, announced this week, to power part of Jive, with Radian6′s listening platform.   I never worked with Jive -and was largely unaware of them – Jive seems to be a platform for a large enterprise company to work with Intranets:

…. Broadly Share Those Learns – Relevant tweets, blog posts, comments on a traditional news outlet website, or trend reports can be pulled directly into a team community with designated places for specific topics and focus areas (such as competitors, industries, or product lines). This information can either be pulled in from pre-set dashboards, directly from the web, or from the company’s own community—and published to an Observation Wall specific to that market or topic. That wall effectively becomes the central point of collaboration where others in the organization can add their comments, thoughts, and opinions.

One thing I have noticed – and Radian6 has attempted to address  it, is how it’s neccessary to have “Listening Systems” in place to understand spikes in traffic coming to your site.  In many cases, Referral logs are unable to capture, by their nature, the richness in conversations that go on, around a brand or website, on the web.

Radian6′s solution (see my post on Radian6’s Web Analytics and Salesforce.com Intergration) goes halfway towards a solution by allowing the export of a site referral log into Radian6 – which will match up pages of your site, and buzz that results in a visit to your site – but not all the buzz about your site – stuff being said about your business – leads to a visit – therefore, won’t be co-related – so while this solution by Radian6 is excellent – it could go further.

Another story that caught my eye about Social Media is the300  Jewish bloggers who are  geting advice on combating the Iranian threat at a Jerusalem convention

Aimed at tackling challenges faced by Jewish bloggers both here and in the Diaspora, over 300 bloggers attended the Second International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem at Beit Avi Chai on Sunday evening.

Jewish bloggers who off their offerings at Sunday’s gathering at Beit Avi Chai n Jerusalem.
Photo: Sasson Tiram

Although the convention attempted to help bloggers discover how to best make use of the Internet for promoting their cause, Tova Serkin of JGooders warned that “social media are not the ‘magic bullet,” and explained that while the Internet is indeed “the future,” it remains merely a tool that needs to be harnessed.

The conference, titled “Uniting the Jewish Community through Social Media,” included eight workshops followed by two panel discussions aimed at advancing Jewish, Zionist and charitable causes.

Can 300 bloggers who agree on the same thing change perceptions of a nation?  Perhaps – if you get get 300 people to fully agree, and they all blog …..  well, I’ll let you complete the sentence.    I don’t agree with the sentiment – don’t want to see any more wars – but I do think if you can get a small group of people to totally be on the same page – and really focus – you can amplify that energy.

A lot went on during the last couple days and I have some time to reflect it. I’m writing from my iPhone, which makes writing a post take longer, and sometimes alters the way I write.

First, I was intimidated, initially, in moving my blog to a new hosting env as WordPress does not accept an import file over a few megabytes and my blog, when it’s content was exported, created a 25 megabyte file to import.

Thought I’d have to hire a programmer to handle the file import, since I did not know how to do it, but then, I searched Google with the right phrase and found a blog post written by a programmer, who had a similar issue a few years ago, about a visual basic program the programmer wrote that solved my problem, as well.

I can’t tell you how many times I faced a problem I solved by using a program or utility someone else wrote; by leveraging the work of another I was able to accomplish much more than I could alone. This idea, leveraging the work of others, gives me confidence to take on new challanges, because I know, somewhere, someone has dealt with the same issue, and offen there is a solution, if you know how to find it.

But, the ability to leverage the work of others, and build upon it, has only been possible in the last 10 years, and has accelerated even more, in the last 2-3 years, with the acceptance of Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed). While Web 2.0 didn’t invent Social Networking, it made possible, the leveraging of social connections, virtually, and, as a by product, made information a commodity.

As a result, many industries are being recreated on the fly, including Newspapers, Job Search, Politics, Banking, Healthcare, The Military, Film and Cinema, Art, Public Relations and Education, just to name a few in the top of my mind.

In almost every industry or career, what your father or mother did, a generation ago, or even, what you did, 5 to 10 years ago, no longer works as something you can do now, without major modifications, and in some cases, what you did 10 years ago is obsolete, today, or in the near future.

In fact, the ability to leverage thoughts and ideas the already exist, and build something new and useful to a community of followers, may be the skill set most needed, today.

Till about 10 years ago, things were much different. In the mid 1990′s the Internet, and Search Engines in particular, made sharing ideas, inventions, programs and thoughts easier.

Thinking about the pace of innovation in ancient times, grandfathers and great grandsons might be practicing the same trade, with little that changed, in say, a hundred years, with ship building, metel works, writing, the arts, both painting and music, politics, mores, etc.

But, With the arrival of the industral revolution, things have been speeding up, faster and faster; now, industries and careers are shifting every couple years, and the average person changes careers several times in their working life.

I’ve often thought about religious, cultural institutions, wondered if the conflicts we’re seeing, particularly in the United States (ie, between the Religious Right and Liberal Left) are really about ways of reacting to dramatic change in our lives.

Part of human nature, often termed, the reptilian brain, likes to hold on to the familar, even when it makes no sense, anymore. The other extreme, Liberal Left, embrases new concepts that aren’t yet proven. Somehow, the challange now, is harnessing the reptilian brain to maintain some level of stability and balance, while embrasing new thoughts and ideas, through the Internet, which can then be absorbed, leveraged, and built upon, much as I used Visual Basic program to split up and import a large WordPress file last week.

Just another series of thoughts on a hot, muggy August Sunday.

I’m happy to learn about and try out Microsoft adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel for Excel 2003, which I wasn’t aware existed, till tonight.  I thought in order to run adCenter Add-in you needed to have Excel 2007, but that’s not the case.

I can’t prove it, but I believe the genesis for adCenter Add-in came from, partly, from me, back in 2006, when I spoke to Jed Nahum of Microsoft who I briefly met at Webmasterworld Pubcon Boston in April 2006,  and shared a Competitive Analysis I did, manually, using Microsoft AdCenter, for a client of mine at the time, Bullseyetattoo.com.  It was a lot of work and I wished for a way to extract data from AdCenter directly into Excel.

The adCenter plugin focuses on Keywords, and does most of what I did manually, but doesn’t include any Lifestyle segmentation or Competitive Analysis of Websites, just of the keywords a list of sites may have or share.  I guess that makes sense as the Lifestyle segmentation is now absent from the platform; my guess is it was too complicated and inaccurate to support (but it was nice to play with, when it was available, and let me do charts like this):

And this chart, I thought, was my most original but it was a lot of work to produce, and at the end of the day, keywords being used by a geo-demographic cluster segment group is pretty tenuous, given how the data is collected and how people use language; no doubt, there was probably so much “dirty” inaccurate data, my guess, Microsoft moved away from psycho graphics and stuck to demographics and stuff they could support.

But I was able to generate stuff like this (see examples, below) using the Plugin

I was able to use this information above to create this chart, below, that gave me the overall catagorization of all the keywords I pulled for a bunch of Exotic Car Rental sites, with a little extra work from me

The AdCenter Plugin even comes up with suggested keywords it thinks you should have on a campaign for a specific term.

While I’ll never be able to prove that all of this was my idea, I belive, I was the first to formally ask for it – and I’ll be using it a lot more for now on.

It’s not perfect, the AdCenter plugin wasn’t everyting that I asked Jed Nahum for, at the time, but it’s a lot of what I wanted.