SEO Werkt!

Apple should get down on its knees and thank God for whatever corporate traitor gave it Samsung’s internal iPhone vs Galaxy S1 comparison document.

I’m sure that you have seen some of the stories floating around about Samsung’s internal document detailing basically how the iPhone rocks and the Galaxy Samsung S1 sucks. I’ve read the entire document, and I’m almost literally speechless.

(I said almost.)

Let me offer a blinding flash of the obvious and mention I’m not a lawyer.

But I think it spells hellish legal agony for Samsung if the jury takes even a cursory glance at just a few pages. And an expert did tell VentureBeat just a few days ago that juries in “look and feel” patent cases will sometimes just simply eyeball the competing products to make a call.

Here’s your chance to play jury, without the hassles of showing up in court for $20 a day. I’ve included some screenshots below — okay, a lot of screenshots below — but they are all basically variations on one unchanging and massively damning theme:

GALAXY SUCKS, MAKE IT LIKE THE IPHONE.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m overreacting? Take a look for yourself:

I’ve managed products selling tens of millions in annual sales, and I have been in product development meetings where we’ve been late to market on an innovation and needed to catch up. And we did exactly what Samsung did: Study the market leaders, identify their strengths, and remedy our weaknesses.

But two things were different.

First, no product is perfect. And that includes the iPhone (anyone who wants a quick way to turn battery-sucking Bluetooth on or off on a non-jailbroken iPhone knows this). So in any product comparison, teams I participated in always found a few places even in the best products that were suspect or weak where we could take advantage.

Second, even very good is not the best. The iPhone is very, very good … but it could use some improvement. Apple does so with every iOS release. And the job of a competitor is to stand on the shoulders of whatever giants it can find … and move the sticks forward. To make progress.

In this document at least, Samsung makes zero attempt to do either. Page after page says: Do it the way iPhone does it.

And that kinda plays right into Apple’s point about “slavish” copying.

Image credit: Complot/ShutterStock

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Apple was able to get a Samsung internal document admitted in full in its case against the South Korean company on Tuesday, with the report offering a potentially crucial comprehensive side-by-side comparison of the Galaxy S and the iPhone.

Ben Chiang, is an editor at TechNode, a bilingual blog based in China.

Are Amazon’s Kindle tablets and e-readers ready to break into the world’s biggest market? We’ve spotted some Chinese Help documentation for Amazon Kindle devices on the company’s China-facing site in a sign that they may be coming for real this time.

Even though the online documentation was yanked, we have a screenshot of Google’s cached version of the site (see below). Amazon’s China office declined to comment.

This isn’t the first time that Chinese Kindle fans have been disappointed. It was widely reported in 2010 that the popular e-reader was going to enter China after an internal document from Amazon China was leaked to the local press. It showed a Kindle e-reader with the Chinese name Jing Du, which literally translated to ‘Golden Reading.’ But after nearly two years, Kindle devices still haven’t entered the country.

As yesterday’s blowout Apple earnings show, it’s a missed opportunity for Amazon. Apple said China alone brought in $7.9 billion in revenue last quarter and has become the second largest market for the company. So it’s time for Amazon to step up and bring Kindle products into China, especially as tablet sales start to eat the market share of e-readers, according to a Digitimes Research report.

There are already many dirt cheap local e-readers like Shanda’s Bambook and Hanvon’s WISEreader. Both accounted for 19.6 and 59.6 percent of China’s e-reader market in the third quarter of last year, according to a report by Beijing-based technology consultancy AnalysysInternational. Both companies lowered the price of their devices in last year. Now the cheapest models are available at RMB 499 (or about $79).

Wang Hanhua, the president of Amazon China said late last year that Kindle products are definitely coming to China. But he didn’t have an exact timetable.

Posted by Dr. Pete

Last week, when the SEO world was distracted by revelations that Google was blocking keyword referral data and nostalgic mania over MC Hammer’s search engine, Search Engine Land released a leaked Google document outlining Google’s official guidelines for quality raters. I read the 125-page document out of curiosity, and I decided to share some valuable insights it contains into the mind of Google.

Sorry, No Secrets Here

If you’re looking for SEO “secrets,” you’ll be disappointed by this post. Although this is an internal document, and Google may not be happy about it being leaked, you won’t find a smoking gun here. What you will find is a training manual on Google’s philosophy of quality. The key to proactive SEO is to understand how Google thinks. If you only chase the algorithm, you’ll always be reacting to changes after they happen. Since the document in question is proprietary, I’m not going to link directly to copies of the document or quote large chunks of it. I’m writing this post because I sincerely believe that understanding Google’s philosophy of quality is a fundamentally “white hat” proposition.

What Is A Quality Rater?

Quality raters are Google’s fact checkers – the people who work to make sure the algorithm is doing what it’s supposed to do. Data from quality raters not only serves as quality control on existing SERPs, but it helps validate potential algorithm changes. When you consider that Google tested over 13,000 algorithm changes last year, it’s a pretty important job.

This particular document focuses on rating SERP quality based on specific queries. Essentially, a rater reviews the sites returned by a given query and evaluates each result based on relevance. Raters also flag sites that they consider to be spam. One last note: Google’s philosophy is not always reflected in the algorithm. The algorithm is an attempt to code quality into rules, and that attempt will always be imperfect. The document, for example, says almost nothing about back-link count, unique linking domains, linking C-blocks, etc. Those are all metrics that attempt to quantify relevance.

Here are 16 insights into the human side of Google’s quality equation, in no particular order…

(1) Relevance Is A Continuum

I think the biggest revelation of the document, in a broad sense, is that Google’s view of relevance is fairly sophisticated and nuanced. Raters are instructed to rate relevance along a continuum with 5 options: “Vital”, “Useful”, “Relevant”, “Slightly Relevant”, and “Off-topic”. Of course, there is always a certain amount of subjectivity to ratings, but Google provides many examples and detailed guidelines.

(2) Relevance & Spam Are Independent

Relevance is a rating, but spam is a flag. So, in Google’s view, a site can be useful but spammy, or it can be irrelevant but still spam-free. I think we see some of that philosophy in the algorithm. Content is relevant or irrelevant, but spam is about tactics and intent.

(3) The Most Likely Intent Rules

Some queries are ambiguous – “apple”, for example, can mean a lot of things without any context. Google instructs raters to, in most cases, use the dominant interpretation. What’s interesting is that their dominant interpretations often seem to favor big brands. In specific examples, the dominant interpretation of “apple” is Apple Computers and the dominant interpretation of “kayak” is the travel site Kayak.com.

Other interpretations (like “apple” the fruit or “kayak” the mode of transportation) automatically get lower relevance ratings if there’s a dominant interpretation. I think the notion of a dominant interpretation makes some sense, and it may be necessary for a rater to do their job, but it’s also highly subjective. In some cases, I just didn’t agree with Google’s examples, and I felt that the dominant interpretation unfairly penalized legitimate sites. Most people may want to buy an iPad when they type “apple”, but a site that specializes in online organic apple sales is still highly relevant to the ambiguous query, in my opinion.

(4) Some Results Are “Vital”

The “Vital” relevance rating is a special case. Any official entity – a company, an actor/actress, a politician, etc., can have a vital result. In most cases, this is their official home-page. Only a dominant interpretation can be vital – Apple Vacations will never be the vital result for “apple” (sorry, Apple Vacations; I don’t make the rules). I suspect this is a safety valve for checking the algorithm – if “vital” results don’t appear for entity searches, many people would question Google’s results, even if the SEO efforts of those entities don’t measure up.

Social profiles can also be vital, if those profiles are for individuals or small groups. So, a politician, actress or rock band could have multiple “vital” pages (their home-page, their Facebook page, and their Twitter profile, for example). Interestingly, Google specifically instructs that social media profiles for companies cannot be considered vital.

(5) Generic Queries Are Never Vital

Obviously, Walmart.com is a vital result for the query “walmart”, but Couches.com is not a vital result for the query “couches”. An exact-match domain doesn’t automatically make something vital, and some queries are inherently generic.

(6) Queries Come in 3 Flavors

Query intent can be classified, according to Google, as Action (“Do”), Information (“Know”) or Navigation (“Go”). Like ice cream, queries can come in more than one flavor (although Neapolitan ice cream should never substitute banana for vanilla). This Do/Know/Go model comes up a lot in the document and is a pretty useful structure for understanding search in general. Relevance is determined by intent – if a query is clearly action-oriented (e.g. “buy computer”), then only an Action (”Do”) result can be highly relevant.

(7) Useful Goes Beyond Relevance

This is wildly open to interpretation, but Google says that “useful” pages (the top rating below “vital”) should be more than just relevant – they should also be highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent. This is left to the rater’s discretion, and no site has to meet all of these criteria, but it’s worth nothing that relevance alone isn’t always enough to get the top ratings.

(8) Relevance Implies Language Match

If a search result clearly doesn’t match the target language of the query, then in most cases that result is low-relevance. Likewise, if a query includes or implies a specific country, and the result doesn’t match that country, the result isn’t relevant.

(9) Local Intent Can Be Automatic

Even if a query is generic, it can imply local intent. Google gives the example of “ice rink” – a query for “ice rink” should return local results, and clearly non-local results should be rated as off-topic or useless. This applies whether or not the location is in the query. Again, expect Google to infer intent more and more, and local intent is becoming increasingly important to them.

(10) Landing Page Specificity Matters

A good landing page will fit the specificity of the query. A detailed product page, for example, is a better match to a long-tail query for a specific item. On the other hand, if the query is broad, then a broader resource may be more relevant. For example, if the query is “chicken recipes”, then a page with only one recipe isn’t as relevant as a list of recipes.

(11) Misspellings Are Rated By Intent

If a query is clearly misspelled, the relevance of the results should be based on the user’s most likely intent. In the old days, targeting misspellings was a common SEO practice, but I think we’re seeing more and more that Google will automatically push searchers toward the proper spelling. It’s likely Google is only going to get more aggressive about trying to determine intent and even pushing users toward the dominant intent.

(12) Copied Content Can Be Relevant

This may come as a surprise in a Post-Panda world, but Google officially recognizes that copied content isn’t automatically low quality, as long as it’s well-organized, useful, and isn’t just designed to drive ad views. Again, this is a bit subjective, and it’s clear that you have to add value somehow. A site with nothing but copied content (whether legitimately syndicated or scraped) isn’t going to gain high marks, and a site that’s only using copied content to wrap ads around it is going to be flagged as spam.

(13) Some Queries Don’t Need Defining

Dictionary or encyclopedia pages are only useful if a query generally merits definition or more information. If most users understand the meaning of the query word(s) – Google gives the example of “bank” – then a dictionary or encyclopedia page is not considered useful. Of course, tell that to Wikipedia.

(14) Ads Without Value Are Spam

One quote stood out in the document – “If a page exists only to make money, the page is spam.” Now, some business owners will object, saying that most sites exist to make money, in some form. When Google says “only to make money”, they seem to be saying money-making without content value. It’s ok to make money and have ads on your page, as long as you have content value to back it up. If you’ve just built a portal to collect cash, then you’re a spammer.

(15) Google.com Is Low Relevance

By Google’s standards, an empty search box with no results displayed is off-topic or useless. Ironic, isn’t it? Joking aside, the document does suggest that internal search results pages can be relevant and useful in some cases.

(16) Google Raters Use Firefox

I said no secrets, but I guess this is a little bit of inside information. Google raters are instructed to use Firefox, along with the web developer add-on. Do with that as you will.

Knowing Is 53.9% of The Battle*

So, there you go – 16 insights into the mind of Google. Advanced SEO, in my opinion, really comes down to understanding how Google thinks, and how they translate their values and objectives into code. You can lose a lot of time and money only making changes when you’ve lost ranking – really understanding the mind of Google is the best way to future-proof your SEO efforts.

*I always wondered what the other half was – blowing stuff up, apparently.

Do you like this post? Yes No

An executive from the country’s fourth largest wireless carrier, T-Mobile, said the company won’t be getting the iPhone 5 this year, according to a leaked internal document obtained by Tmo News.

Right now, T-Mobile is the only carrier that has not confirmed Apple’s iPhone will launch on its network.

According to the document (a transcript from a recent Town Hall meeting at a T-Mobile field service center), T-Mobile’s chief marketing officer, Cole Broadman, claims that the carrier will not “get the iPhone 5 this year”.

The news doesn’t necessarily mean that another model of the iPhone won’t debut on the network soon. Both the current iPhone 4 and the rumored iPhone 4S upgraded model do have a chance to appear on the network in time for the lucrative holiday shopping season.

It’s highly likely that an iPhone will land on T-Mobile. Back in April, it was revealed that Apple was testing out the iPhone on T-Mobile’s network with prototype devices. Also, T-Mobile admitted that it was hosting over a million unlocked iPhone devices on its network in June, which was made much easier after Apple began selling unlocked versions of the phone.

Update:

T-Mobile responded to us with the following statement, which includes a curious mention of news the company plans to announce next Monday:

“We don’t comment on rumors.  We remain focused on expanding our portfolio of 4G smartphones.  We look forward to sharing on Monday, news about our latest and greatest product lineup.”

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat