Its Snowing in Chicago & All your base are belong to google…

December 4th, 2007, 8:00 pm Michael google pwns, SEO

So I made it to the SES - after a 45 minute cab ride through the rush hour traffic of Chicago I arrived upon the Hilton Hotel. Checked in, threw my bags in my room and just was able to make Seth Godin’s opening seminar. Which I personally was able to get some good idea’s and pointers from.

After that it was a rush into and out of seminars. The highlight of my day was “SEO & Development - Get It Together!” mainly because I was able to have a question answered or at least commented on by the panel members. So what was the question that I asked, that was basically only half answered anyway, “With universal search showing the ability to knock out a top ranking by displaying Video, GoogleBase, News or Image results for a phrase or keyword - what are some ways that we can harvest this power and be able to have a picture of ours or a google base product show up on the top of the organic listings?”

Well no one heard the google base part and instead jumped right into the images. The panel basically said that the image search is again a similar algorithm to the regular search. So inbound links to the image, good tagging and also description and content relevance will all play parts in whether or not your image appears first above the organic listings - this also goes the same for google video results on youtube.

Is that right?

So lets do some research…

I typed in the word “Jump” into google…

The top 2 listings are Wikipedia (which will soon be the top listing for everything, IMO)

Jump - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump, South Yorkshire, a village in the metropolitan borough of Barnsley in … Jump! (computer game), a 1987 computer game for Commodore 64 by Loadstar … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump - 20k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Jump In! - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Izzy finds he likes Mary, a member of the jump team The Joy Jumpers, who place fourth in the tournament. They make the city finals, but when Yolanda, …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_In! - 51k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
[ More results from en.wikipedia.org ]

The next listing is a video listing… For Van Halen’s 80’s hair band / mullet mega video “Jump”

YouTube - van halen - jump 

1583 clicks from http://www.clipstijl.nl/clip.php/Van+Halen …
Watch video - 3 min 58 sec
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-vgQSqNtASo

I check the Youtube video, which says it only has “5″ inlinks, its been favored 17,431 times with over 2 million views.

The video does have a pagerank of 4.

The next listing is for the Jump project.

The JUMP Project

The foundation of The JUMP-Project is a suite of free, open-source applications that provide an extensible API and graphic user interface (GUI) for viewing … www.jump-project.org/ - 12k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

The JUMP Project

The JUMP Unified Mapping Platform (JUMP) is a GUI-based application for viewing and processing spatial data. It includes many functions common to other …
www.jump-project.org/project.php?PID=JUMP&SID=OVER - 19k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

This site has a page rank of 6!

So why a cheesey Van Halen video beat out a higher page ranked website? When the video claims to only have 5 inlinks? Would google be counting the on site users who have added the video to their favorites?

I think as the google universe grows its going to favor its own parts more and more. So what can we do as marketers? Make sure that we are using every avenue possible.

You like to use flickr? You better like to also use Picasa.
You have an online store and list your products on yahoo? Better get a base feed.
Your website or company have a video? Put it on youtube!
Are you using social bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or sphinn? Better use the google “note this” option when you see something you like.

Google more and more are coming into every avenue possible on the internet - i could even go as far to say as google is becoming the internet. I watched a movie last weekend and here 2 distinct references in the movie by the characters to “google it” when asked to look something up on the net.

Welcome to the age of digital monopoly. All your base are belong to google.