Amanda Vega's Blah Blah Blog » search engine optimization

Freaking out over Google Caffeine? Relax….

Amanda Vega — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:41:14 +0000

Today I’ll use our blog to post a response to our current clients and the inquiries we’ve received over the last week with regard to Google’s Caffeine release. While VERY elementary in explanation, we wanted to break it down to the terms that make sense to you (heavy geek to human translation here.) None of our clients sites are affected, but we are using the tool to see if there’s any opportunity that may arise. So don’t panick – our nerds have it under control. Here’s what you need to know to seem smart at a party.

Google for the first time release a search index update that was officially named by Google, Caffeine. Google has asked developers and users to give feed back on the search results returned by Caffeine.

Caffeine is not a mainstream search index and purely for research. Google will use data gathered by Caffeine to supplement and improve their current index but we won’t see major changes or updates because of Caffeine. Google has not historically worked this way.

Google seems to also be reacting to Microsoft’s release of Bing and the Microsoft Yahoo deal. Google has in the past released “new” tools and services when Microsoft has made announcements.

Happy searching!

“We meant to do that” and other random quotes

Amanda Vega — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:45:58 +0000

I’m not sure why, but it always amazes me that people cannot simply accept the knowledge of others, or even better, perhaps thank them for sharing that useful intellectual property. Everyday, especially when speaking to small clients, you hear funny little quotes; most of them tied to an odd sort of defense mechanism than anything else. Here are some fun examples I thought I would share:

1. “We meant to do that” – a response when we pointed out that a site a client built (who claims to do web development on the higher end levels) wasn’t visible in Google.

2. “We have too much business” – their continued rebuttal which I found incredibly odd in general, but especially in a down economy. I’ll be sure to check back in with them in 3 months.

3. “We didn’t have any business in January, so we are not going to do any advertising in February” – well, you can see where the flaw is in this one if you know about my rants, but more importantly, the client was on vacation all of January so his phones were not answered. You know how I feel about that.

4. “The internet has only been around for 10 years.” This came from a guy who sells interactive advertising.

5. “There’s not a whole lot of people using the Internet yet.” Self explanatory.

6. “I don’t think we should deal in that social media stuff.” – This from someone who has no ranking in Google for his own name, but there are over 10,000 NEGATIVE posts ABOUT him in Google.

Got anymore? Share them here!

Ohhhh…Everything 2.0

Amanda Vega — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:45:38 +0000

Today I feel like I’m in a time machine, or having flashbacks, or some mixture of both. When monitoring the feeds coming in from writers that are seeking sources for stories, one of the requests for someone to comment on “sales 2.0″ and it led me back to my early days at AOL when we were working hard on this whole new concept of the world wide web and creating ways for people to actually use this new medium.

Shortly after that, you saw a deluge of new sites come up across all industries all with one special moniker…”e” or “i” something or other. For what was really YEARS after the web was already in use, the rest of the world outside us nerds got on board and agencies all over the nation were quick to set up web pages and give them all clever URLs like “eINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” or “iINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” over and over. It was maddening.

Now with the new recognition of what many of us have been doing for years (blogs, community sites, forums, video,) we see the rest of world calling this “Web 2.0″ which is great in so many ways, but also showing the non-creative side of traditional minds getting on board with something us old zealots have been preaching for years.

So now, you see “Web 2.0″ churning out numerous followers to this tagline. ”Sales 2.0″ “Real Estate 2.0″ and the “Economy 2.0.” It makes me wonder though, now that the leaders in our space are forging into “Web 3.0″ to give a name to the NEXT level of integration, will we now see “Dating 3.0″ or “Banking 3.0?”