All the features, all the tools, it’s just brilliant. One of my favorite is the transcribing of voicemail. Google will transcribe the message and provide you the text version as well as the ability to listen of course. This is great and I use it all the time, if I can’t get to the call I can have the voicemail text sent to my cell as a text message.

And while it is very impressive and for the most part mostly accurate there are the occasional mis-translations. My wife in particular seems to not just confuse me but Google as well. Here is a screenshot of the message she left…

I was wearing a smile the whole time until I got to ’so poker’ and ‘i’m gonna give me a call’ and then I couldn’t contain the laughter.

The bad…well, having been spoiled by the Mozilla community I have Firefox running exactly as I’d like. I have addons that prompt me about the validity of certian sites, little gadgets that alert me when my mail has come in, a plugin to drag and drop photos into my flickr account, and it’s all within Firefox. Chrome is…well, it’s just an out of the box browser which I’d take over most other options but it has a way to go.

Number 2: 1 Trillion URLs indexed
Now that is an impressive milestone. 1 Trillion URLs. No that’s great copy, and looks brilliant splattered all over the web, but don’t confuse legitimate web pages for URLs. 1 trillian urls does not equal 1 trillian legitimate web pages. Think about it, most blogs have the same page reachable via a number of urls, canonicalization means essentially every domain is reachable via 2 URLs unless the owner is hip to .htaccess, and don’t even get me started on search queries each with a unique URL or session ids each with a unique URL.

But alas, it still is a tremendous step forward and Google should be congratulated.

Number 3: SearchWiki (which I’ve blogged about before)
Allowing us to essentially customize and influence the search rankings was the next logical step in personalization. How far Google will take this and how much influence this will have in terms of optimization only time will tell.

Number 4: FIGHTA!
Yes, having your own multi-billion dollar company pays off.

Apparently 2 Gulfstream Vs, a 757 and 767 Boeing jets simply wasn’t enough so the gents got themselves a Dornier Alpha Jet. Impressive no?

Combine this with the landing priveledges Google has at the NASA facility that sits adjacent to the Google campus and you’ve got yourself a number 4 spot on my list.

Number 5: Flash no longer a death sentence
Rounding out the list is Google’s ability to index Adobe Flash content. Historically this has not been the case, they were unable to read text, extract links, really it treated flash as the ugly step-sister of the web.

But all that has changed, or so we are being told. Adobe has created and released to Google what they are calling ‘Flash Reader Technology’ which allows Google to read text, extract links, in short all the things Google could not do before.

Sounds brilliant right? The kind of thing that shoud top ANY list of 2008 Google accomplishments but alas there are huge issues with the technology. First off, being treated like the ugly step-sisters they were Flash developers never bothered with SEO techniques. Things like unique URLs and an easily indexed structure for the Flash application have never been utilized so while they may now be able to rank it will be nearly impossible to do that highly with such terrible on-page optimization. But it doesn’t stop there, the reader has a number of flaws – even something as simple as mistaking coding as content.

No the Flash reader has a long way to go but it has the potential to be the big ticket item for Google in 2009.

The mystique surrounding Google as being this untouchable super-company is crumbling. It’s just another tech company, a tech giant, but a company nonetheless.

Well Google’s personal promotion service is back and this time we have a name for it: SearchWiki.

When you do a search you should see two new icons presented in the results next to the title. These icons allow you to personalize your search results by promoting or demoting results.

Notice the new promote and demote icons next to the search results

As you can see above, you have the ability to promote sites you deem the most relavant for your needs. The SEO implications are huge just as they were when Google originally tested this feature. We can’t confirm that these promotions will influence global search results but it’s the next logical step.

Think digg.com! Social content is the future, it’s hard to manipulate the masses. One or two or a thousand bad eggs for that matter can’t harm the marketplace when millions and millions are casting votes.

From Google:

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.,,,Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.

..The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

John Battelle has a Video on SearchWiki – check it out!

Many folks are speculating on Google’s apparent shift of importance giving greater weight to H2 tags and even the meta description – both of which many folks ignore.

But this is all of course speculation, interesting and the H2 tag getting more importance makes sense, but it wont be for two to three months before it can be tested accurately.

Check out the November Search Update discussion at HighRankings.

You see, GAudio takes the audio track from YouTube videos and makes it searchable. Essentially transcribing the audio into text and then allowing you to search for that information.

The interface has Google written all over it: simple, boring, and screaming to be visited by a real UI designer. However this blog isn’t about interface, it’s about SEO and the implications for GAudio is huge especially with the push towards Universal Search Results.

You can’t tell me life isn’t cyclical – everything seems to come full circle! When we first started optimizing we paid too much attention to meta data. Keywords were key and we spammed the meta data. Then Google began to devalue the meta data and found that relevance is better served by pulling those keywords within the content of the page.

So why should a video be any different? We can all make a video and plaster it with 50+ ‘tags’ or ‘keywords’ and that has worked fairly well especially in regards to social media driven link building. However, wouldn’t the perfect evolution for video be to devalue those keywords or tags and pull weight or relevance from the actual words being said within the video?

Google’s focus for this technology is very specific right now: it’s only YouTube and it’s only been their political channel. How long to you think that will last?

Check out GAudio for yourself.

One of my sites lost its pagerank (most likely because I was selling text links on the site).

I have redone many things on the website and don’t sell text links anymore. should I submit for Google reconsideration?

I know Pagerank doesn’t matter in ranking but advertisers still like it and that is my major income from the site

So is it smart to submit a request for Google to reconsider the pagerank penalty (if any)? My answer has to be an emphatic NO! The reinclusion option is very specific, if you have been removed from the SERPs or are sufferring poor rankings in the SERPs you may request for a reconsideration.

Doesn’t seem all bad right? WRONG! If you were once buying links to pass link juice chances are you were or are doing some other activity that violates Google’s webmaster guidelines. Do you really want a quality control staff member manually review your website and it’s incoming links? Talk about a potential pandora’s box.

I say chalk it up to a learning experience, realize that while PageRank is still an important factor it isn’t nearly as important as on-page optimization and trustrank.

So I decided to poke around and examined my own analytics for a handful of my clients. One client in particular sees around 1500+ unique visitors a day which is a fair amount of traffic. Here is what I saw:

A couple of notables…

1. Yahoo! only accounts for less than 5% of the organic traffic sent.
2. MSN and Live.com combined accounted for less then .25%!
3. Google with 71% (slightly lower than I expected) and ask.com with 19% combine for 90% of the organic traffic!

First let me start out by drawing a line here and define duplicate content in the context of this post: Duplicate content is content which other websites have utilized scapers or other means to take information found elsewhere and place it on other websites. It is also (more importantly in my opinion) content on your own domain that is available via more than one url.

For example, you can reach the content on this very blog via a number of avenues…through the homepage (temporarily), through the category specific page (which house the articles within that category), through the actual post page itself, and so on.

Having duplicate content (cross-domain) is of course frowned upon by Google due to the possibility to monetize someone else’s work or simply for blatant spamming and increasing your SERPs. On domain duplicate content is also frowned upon due to a number of potential exploitations.

So is duplicate content a major issue? Well as Sven of the Search Quality Team states:

I’d like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.

So that should tell us definitively it’s not a major issue right? Well, no. As we all know, SEO is a numbers game. We deal with small bits of optimization techniques that once pulled together gives you the advantage over your competition. Having duplicate content is not only not going to help you with that fight but if deemed done for ’shady’ reasons it can get you penalized and the penalties may be severe.

Here is the referenced blog posting about duplicate content from scrapers.

With only 72 individuals actually putting their input it, it’s not the most accurate poll but we can draw something out of it (other than the obvious don’t get removed!). The largest group (25%) is the over 3 months category which is worrying. But think about it, why should Google just to reinclude your site after being deemed to have broken the guidelines.

As the RustyBrick folks were quick to point out, the results are really all over the place. But with over a quarter of the results coming in at over 2 months it’s a bit worrisome.

So what do we draw from this? It’s not that white hat is the way to go or that black hat is evil, it’s knowing where the line is drawn. Be careful and clever with your optimization efforts people! If you’re not, you’re looking at possibly 3 months of being banned by Google and that is IF you have a case for reinclusion.