Alex McArthurGoogle | Alex McArthur

SES San Jose

Alex — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:30:52 +0000

I found my way to San Jose this morning to attend Search Engine Strategies. My flight departed early so I had to get up at 4:30am…so yeah, I’m kind of in a bad mood.

So far I’ve only attended one session. It was regarding Universal/Blended Search.
Moderator:

Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing, Commerce360

Q&A Speakers:

Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
David Bailey, Engineer, Google
Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Mostly, the various search engines discussed how they see the future of blended search evolving. Obviously the engines want to include more and more content (video, images, etc) to keep users in front of their ads.

Google News currently only provides text and images. Video should be available soon.
Google Universal search will begin to shuffle features in the SERPs. For example, (as of 8/20/2007) a search for “Alex McArthur” returns 3 pictures of the actor and 10 standard web results. If a video or blog post about Alex McArthur became popular in the future, then a Google Onebox result may be added to the first SERP page.
Third party videos showing up in blended search results.

Erik Collier, from Ask.com, reported a 30% drop of searchers going to second page as a result of blended search. Also, a 15% drop on searchers performing more than 1 query. According to Erik this means that people are finding what they want quicker.
*2nd page just won’t cut it any more. ;-)

Google reveals it’s pet name on Valentine’s Day

Alex — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:44:07 +0000

Check out Google’s Valentine’s day logo.

If my wife had a pet name for me I definitely wouldn’t tell millions of people. Way to let it slip Big G.

Is this a misspelling or an attempt to be cute with a pet name?
I’m not sure if the strawberry stem is meant to represent the “L” or not.

Google Isn’t Funny

Alex — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:14:42 +0000

Does anyone else remember Google’s April Fool’s joke back in 2002? I remember reading it years back and not finding it funny.

You can view it here:
Google’s Pigeonrank, April Fool’s Day Joke

I just spent some time reviewing some things on G’s site. I periodically do this to look for new tools and came across this joke. After reading it years later I decided it still isn’t funny. Now don’t get me wrong…I use google daily, but this attempt at humor doesn’t get better with age.

Could this be the beginnings of an online office suite?

Alex — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:08:29 +0000

Google now has a sneak peak available for their new web-based spreadsheet solution. The screenshots to dive too far into the feature set, but it does appear to be somewhat comprehensive. Take a look for yourself.

Movin’ On Up

Alex — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:27:07 +0000

Great news for those of you following my attempts to surpass Alex McArthur the actor in SERPs (search engine result pages). About 2 months ago this domain was floating around the 10th page for search results on “Alex McArthur”. At the time AlexMcArthur.com consisted of one static page with very limited content. I’ve since turned this site into a blog with SEO friendly pages and it quickly jumped to number 2 on most search engines. Also, I took some time to submit to numerous directories and acquire a handful of linkbacks. It will be interesting to see what this sites PR (page rank) is after the next update. I expect a small jump to 2, maybe 3 if I’m lucky.

As far as the Alex McArthur (me) vs Alex McArthur (actor) challenge goes it appears a long road lays ahead. I’m sure there will be ups and downs along the way, but hopefully before I die he will feel the pain of being #2. The actor’s fan site has numerous linkbacks that will take me some time to outdo. Why do people have to be so obsessed with movie actors? Quit linking to the schmuk! Desperado wasn’t that good!

This site is optimized fairly well. I’m sure I could do some tweaking and include a few more keywords, but my first priority is to get as many linkbacks as possible. Too bad I have a job and a family or I could spend all day getting links. This site isn’t very high on my to-do list so be patient. However, it will be interesting to see what happens over time.

Online Spreadsheet Tool

Alex — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:43:36 +0000

Have you heard of NumSum yet? It is a simple online spreadsheet tool. To be completely honest it lacks many features, but the project appears to be on the right track. Another hinderance is that from my understanding every spreadsheet built on numsum is publically available. UPDATE – After reviewing the site it appears they are building a more advanced version that will be available for a fee. This version has no published release date.

I’ve heard rumors that the Sun and Google relationship could result in a free online office suite. More on this available here. Here’s to hoping a fully functional online spreadsheet tool will be released soon.

Turkey Day SEO Tips

Alex — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:42:40 +0000

Tip – Make sure to take advantage of header tags by loading them with core keywords.
Ex. – Within my H1, H2, or H3 tags I attempt to always include “Alex McArthur” and other category keywords on this site.

Warning – Don’t use links within header tags. Matt Cutts, a google employee, warns against this practive.

Happy Turkey Day. Have a safe holiday.

Google Analytics

Alex — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 05:25:18 +0000

For those of you who haven’t already heard Google released a new FREE online analytics application this past week. I setup 2 of my domains the day it was released and waited…and waited. Upon login I read “Awaiting Data” for the past two days. Last night I sent a support email to find out if I had done something wrong and received the following:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you aren’t seeing data in your reports, even though your tracking code has been set up for over six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience. We have collected your data since you installed the tracking code on your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout the day.

We are currently in the process of creating reports from your data. You should be able to see your reports populated with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.

For additional questions, please visit the Analytics Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. If you’re unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,

Bo
Analytics Support

As confirmed in this response my data started collecting today. Let me just say Google Analytics is impressive. Yes, I know many people fear google because they collect so much information through your email (gmail), searches, and ads (adsense & adwords). You may as well let them view all of your website analysis. Personally, I’m not afraid of them tracking my data and the new tool is really impressive. Obviously the sophisticated features available from SiteCatalyst aren’t all available, but I’ll choose free over $XX,XXX.