How To solve canonical URL problem in Google,Yahoo and Msn

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 5:02 AM

Here is the solutions for the Canonical URL problem..

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Let's take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish


However, users (and Googlebot) can access Swedish fish through multiple (not as simple) URLs. Even if the key information on these URLs is the same as your preferred version, they may show slight content variations due to things like sort parameters or category navigation:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

Or they have completely identical content, but with different URLs due to things such as a tracking parameters or a session ID:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

Now, you can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version:

Put the below tag immediately after head or title Tag: 
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.Domainname.com" />

inside the section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

This standard can be adopted by any search engine when crawling and indexing your site.

Of course you may have more questions. Joachim Kupke, an engineer from our Indexing Team, is here to provide us with the answers:

Is rel="canonical" a hint or a directive?
It's a hint that we honor strongly. We'll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as ?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the tag. Also, if you include a link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.

What if the rel="canonical" returns a 404?
We'll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.

What if the rel="canonical" hasn't yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we'll immediately reconsider the rel="canonical" hint.

Can rel="canonical" be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.

What if I have contradictory rel="canonical" designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

Sounds great—can I see a live example?
Yes, wikia.com helped us as a trusted tester. For example, you'll notice that the source code on the URL http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana_Limited specifies its rel="canonical" as: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana.

The two URLs are nearly identical to each other, except that Nelvana_Limited, the first URL, contains a brief message near its heading. It's a good example of using this feature. With rel="canonical", properties of the two URLs are consolidated in our index and search results display wikia.com's intended version.

Feel free to ask additional questions in our comments below. And if you're unable to implement a canonical designation link, no worries; we'll still do our best to select a preferred version of your duplicate content URLs, and transfer linking properties, just as we did before.

Eyetools Research and Reports Google Search's Golden Triangle

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 3:31 AM

Google Search's Golden Triangle

New EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through.

A joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a "golden triangle."

The first phase of the study was conducted with 50 people in Eyetools' eye tracking lab in San Francisco, California and presented panel participants with 5 distinct scenarios that would require the use of a search engine. Google was used as the search engine in all of the instances.

Key Preliminary Findings of the Study

The key location on Google for visibility as determined by the eye activity in the study is a triangle that extends from the top of the results over to the top of the first result, then down to a point on the left side at the bottom of the "above the fold" visible results. This key area was looked at by 100 percent of the participants. In the study, this was referred to as the "Golden Triangle". Generally, this area appears to include top sponsored, top organic results and Google's alternative results, including shopping, news or local suggestions.

Visibility dropped quickly with organic rankings, starting at a high of 100% for the top listing, dropping to 85% at the bottom of the "above the fold" listings, and then dropping dramatically below the fold from 50% at the top to 20% at the bottom.

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Eye scan and click through behavior changes dramatically as users moved "below the fold" to the section of results that required scrolling down. At the top of the page, the amount of eye movement declined rapidly through the top 4 or 5 results, and then at the bottom of the screen, tends to become more consistent through to the end of the page.

In searches where top sponsored results are returned in addition to right sponsored ads, the top ads received much higher visibility, being seen by 80 to 100% of participants, as opposed to 10 to 50% of participants who looked at the side sponsored ads.

On side sponsored ads, the top ranked results received much more in the way of both eye activity and click through. About 50% of participants looked at the top ad, compared to only 10% who looked at ads in the 6, 7 or 8th location on the page.

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%

There seems to be a "F" shaped scan pattern, where the eye tends to travel vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right if something caught the participant's attention.

These results come from an initial analysis of the results and were presented during sessions at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. While interesting, the study's main findings are still to come and will required detailed analysis of individual behavior patterns.

Did It's Kevin Lee said, "At this point, we weren't too surprised at what we've seen in the study. We suspected much of this to be true prior to conducting it. However, there is tremendous value in confirming these suspicions, especially in a way that's so visually compelling. It also proves that our methodology will hold up for phase 2 of the research. On the sponsored search side, data indicates that it is the clear branding and visibility advantage offered by gaining top positions, especially Google's top sponsored links. Unfortunately, these aren't always presented with a search. Google is a little fickle in this regard."

Enquiro's Gord Hotchkiss added, "We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link. The past few studies we've done, this one included, shows that there's a huge importance placed on where the eyeballs end up on the page. Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It's all about location, location, location."

Eyetools' CTO Greg Edwards also commented, "Eyetracking is the enabling tool that fills in the gaps to understand why people click or don't click — by quantifying what people consider before the decision to click or leave is made, companies can start to better anticipate and design to satisfy people's needs. Applying this in the search results arena enables companies to better plan their marketing communication and increase conversions."

This research is ongoing and the phase 1 results are highly encouraging. After further analysis is done, the results will be made available to the public through white papers. Further findings will be announced as they become available.

Off Page Optimization Tips and Types

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:58 PM

Off Page Optimization:

Off Page Optimization Tips

Off page Optimization is one of the method and technique in search engine optimization which work off the Page, like getting relevant links from other sites, link exchange with quality relevant sites, choosing etc.,

Off Page Optimization Techniques:

Link popularity building:

Links play key role to driving traffic from all Search Engines. A quality back link is helps to develop a unique traffic and ranking for all keywords in Search Engine Ranking for which you do link exchange.

The importance of link popularity varies with each search engine, but every link to your web site is an endorsement of your site's quality, and increasing the visibility of your site. We vary your link text and replace it with related keywords to ensure maximum results for your site. Link building technique is not only to increases your rankings with the entire major search engines but also brings targeted traffic to your site.

Types of Link Building:

  • One Way Link Building
  • Reciprocal Link Building
  • Buying a Links

One way linking:

Exchange a link with other website.

Most Search Engines like Google, yahoo and Msn give more value and weight on a site’s link popularity. If your website is visited by the users then its count as quality website, then you will automatically receive random linking to your site with little work on your part.

Two ways to increase your chances of one way linking is to provide quality content for your site and the other one is to get your site listed in the major human edited directories. Currently the two most important human edited directories are Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org).

Reciprocal Link building:

Reciprocal linking or two way linking is where you provide a return link to the other Web site in return for a link to yours, which is less valuable than one way direct links.


This type of linking is done when it is difficult to get one way links. Many search engines use a search algorithm which analyzes the quality of the site linking to you.

Buying text link advertisements:

This is one of the more expensive options in a link building campaign and black list by search engines. Text link advertisements are bought from relevant sites to increase link popularity of the site. Buying a link is also the quickest method to give a quick boost to your site’s rankings. While buying the links, the main criterion is Page Rank. Linking with pages having a high Page Rank is the only way to give a quick boost to your site’s rankings and drastically improve targeted traffic.

Buying a link from high page rank is bad seo technique and it should be adopted for only six to eight months (short term strategy) and help to boost PageRank of your website will get from such a link, you will find it much easier to find other high quality free reciprocal link partners.

SEO Techniques, White Hat preferable to Black Hat

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:52 PM


SEO Techniques

SEO techniques: White Hat preferable to Black Hat

Seo Techniques is uses to index in major search engines and to get unique traffic to your website.

SEO Techniques into two different types:

White Hat :

  • White hats produce is long lasting results and fallows the search engine guidelines. White hat primarily in creating a unique content for user, not for search engines.
  • Whereas black hats bring a short term result and your sites may be banned once the search engines detect what they are up to.
  • White Hat is increases the values and rely more on the quality of content and marketing skills to achieve top ranking. White Hats techniques times to ranking in search engines and avoid shortcut methods.
  • White Hats have their rewards as they are able to get more inbound links from other websites, because their content is widely appreciated as valuable.

Black Hat:

  • Black hat is not seo friendly, means not authorized by search engines to improve rankings.
  • Black Hat method is also known as SEO spamming.
  • Black Hat SEO brings you small results in search engines compare to white hat.
  • Black Hat provides you the instant results but when the search engines detects then the website will banned.

My suggestion is that instead of spending a lot of time and money on black hat strategies, it is much easier to work on white hat technique to makes the website and content more rank-worthy.

White Hat tactics is free risk and need to fear of being banned by the search engines and losses of visitors who come to your website will be impressed by the quality of content and patronize you.

It's true to say that both black hat techniques and white hat techniques can generate both short term and long term results for clients, whether results are measured in terms of rankings, traffic, conversion or profit.

Google Webmaster Tools

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:49 PM

Webmaster Tools Google Webmaster Tool

Webmaster Tools Google Webmaster Tool

Webmaster Tool is free provided by Google with an easy way to make your site more Google SEO friendly. Webmaster tool help you to show you, when Google last visited your website, help you diagnose problems, and give more info to us to help improve website's visibility in our search results.
Advantages of Webmaster Tool:

In these articles, we will discuss about the benefits and features of webmaster tool given below:
Google better crawl your site
Google give details info on, how we crawl Info and index your site.
Overview:
Crawl Info: when Googlebot last visited. Googlebot has successfully accessed your home page.
Indexing Stats: Pages from your site are included in Google's index.
Web Crawl Errors: At the time of crawling your website Google found few errors in the urls and provides you the info following given below:

  • Errors for URLs in Sitemaps
  • HTTP errors
  • Not found
  • URLs not followed
  • URLs restricted by robots.txt
  • URLs timed out
  • Unreachable URLs

Setting:

Use the Settings page to provide Google with information about your site and preferences. This will help us improve how we crawl and index your site.

  • Geographic target: If your website targets visitors in a particular location then this is useful to determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results and also improve our search results for geographic queries.
  • Preferred domain: The preferred domain is useful for you, how Google would like used to index your site's pages.
  • Image search: This option is useful to include your website in Google Image Labeler .
  • Crawl rate: We can set the crawl rate and Google recommend that you set a custom crawl rate only if you're experiencing traffic problems with your server.

Diagnostics:
In this we have three options and get info about web crawl, mobile crawl and content analysis.

  • Web crawl: In this we will get the information on errors and problems encountered by Google's crawlers while accessing pages on your site.
  • Mobile crawl: In this we will get the detailed information on errors and problems encountered by Google's crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones.
  • Content analysis: In this we will get the detailed information related to content of the WebPages like Meta description, Title Tag and non indexed content issues. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site.

Statistics:
In this we have four options and get info about Top search query, Googlebot see, crawl stats and index stats.

  • Top search queries: Impressions lists the top 20 searches in which your site appears, while Traffic shows which queries generated the most clicks.
  • What Googlebot see: The listed word or phrase is the anchor text of a link to your site. This information provides good insight into how your site is seen by others.
  • Crawl stats: These statistics provide information for those pages for Google has indexed and crawled. The PageRank distribution reflects all crawled pages in your site, not just the home page.
  • Index stats: You can use our Advanced Search page to find out how your site is indexed. Below, we've done some of these searches for you.
  • Subscriber stats: If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.

Links:
In this we have 3 options and get info about internal links, external links and Sitelinks.

  • Pages with external links: provides a list of pages that have links pointing to them from other sites and we can download the links.
  • Pages with internal links: provides a list of pages that have links pointing to them from other internal pages.
  • Sitelinks: Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these Sitelinks periodically from your site's contents.

Sitemaps:
After creating a sitemap then, we have to submit. Sitemap helps us to make sure that Google knows about all the WebPages, including URLs that may not be still indexed by Google's when they normal crawling process. After you submit a Sitemap, you'll be able to see if there are problems with it or its URLs.
Tools:
In this we have six options and get info about Analyze robots.txt, Manage site verification, Generate robots.txt, Remove URLs, Gadgets and Enhance 404 pages.

  • Analyze robots.txt: Use this tool to test your robots.txt file to see if you're blocking Googlebot from files or directories.
  • Manage site verification: Use this page to reverify all currently verified owners of this site.
  • Generate robots.txt: The Webmaster Tools robots.txt generator lets you easily create a robots.txt file in which you can specify any bots you don't want to crawl your site, as well as allowing or blocking access to specific files and directories on your server.
  • Remove URLs: Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal. Before you begin, you must make sure that Google and other search engines will not crawl the content you want to remove from our search results.
  • Gadgets: Use Google Webmaster Tools from your own homepage. Get errors, statistics, details about your site, and more on iGoogle.
  • Enhance 404 pages: Help users who receive a Page Not Found error find the information they need and so they can modify the error.

Meta Description Tag Length, Examples

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:47 PM

Meta Description Tag, Meta Description length, Meta Description Html and Meta Description Example

Meta Description Tag

Meta Description Tag: SEO description is the Meta tag of description, it place between the and tag. Meta description tag is most important for getting unique visitors and clicks, but not getting to rank high for particular keywords.
The Meta description tag provides short information on webpage as a summary. Meta description will not appear in web page but it display in SERP (Search Result Pages). Google search engine give much important to Meta Description Tag to display in search result pages , but yahoo and other related search engines give somewhat different important to meta description tag, so you should not neglect it altogether.
Meta Description Tag Length: It’s not the number of words that count. It’s actually the number of characters length. Because, Google will cut off anything more than 155(roughly) characters. Optimizing for in the description and try to limit its length to 25-30 words. Also try to use no more than two sentences.
Meta Description Html: Describe metadata within an HTML document.



Meta Description Example and Syntax:

Meta Description Strategies:

  • Differentiate the descriptions for different pages.
  • Include clearly tagged facts in the description.
  • Programmatically generate descriptions and not spammy.
  • Use quality descriptions with keyword rich.

Anchor Text Optimization

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:35 PM

Anchor Text Optimization, Important of Anchor Text, Anchor Text SEO

Anchor Text Optimization

Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the hyperlinked text found on a Web page which link site users to detailed page that contains full information about the linking page. For example, consider link search engine optimization, when you put the cursor on the link and click on it, it will show the hidden
What is Anchor Text Optimization?

Anchor text optimization is the process of optimizing anchor texts using target keywords to get higher rankings for those keywords in SERPs. Using keywords in Anchor text to link to pages having related content.
All major search engines give a importance to anchor texts in comparison to mere links. By placing keyword in hyperlinks and use them to link with related pages then search engine considers this as additional value to the page.

How to optimize for anchor text?

Anchor text can be optimizing in two ways.

  • Internally Anchor Text
  • Externally Anchor Text

Internal anchor text optimization means internal linking within a website using related keywords as anchor texts.
External anchor text optimization means, inbound links from websites, directories, forums and blogs using necessary keywords as anchor texts.
Importance of Anchor Text Optimization:

  • Optimize the Anchor text for content related keywords link to different pages.
  • Anchor text optimization is mainly done in order to secure higher search engine ranking.
    Anchor text optimization can be done externally and internally.
  • External anchor text involves getting inbound links form other websites, directories, forums and blogs using necessary keywords as anchor text.
  • Internal optimization of anchor text can be done by using specific keywords on the links that link the various pages within the website.
  • With the help of Anchor text we can rank high in search engine.
  • We can increases the relevancy of a webpage in search engine ranking by linking with related inner pages of the website.
  • Google give more important to Anchor text for calculating the relevancy and page rank of the webpage.
  • Anchor text optimization is an important off-page optimization factor as it tells search engine what the linking page is all about.

Anchor Text Html:

Free SEO Articles

On Page Optimization

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:24 PM

On Page Optimization, On Page Optimization Basics

On Page Optimization


On page optimization is a method that makes a webpage additional search engine friendly. With the help of On Page Optimization, search engines will be able to send targeted or relevant traffic to a webpage.

Guide to On Page Optimization:

  • Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines.
  • Make sure that you have unique content in the WebPages.
  • Write unique title for individual pages with keyword rich.
  • Use the meta-tags like description tag and keyword tag.
  • Use Header Tags like H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6.
  • Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly and keyword rich.
  • Bolded the keywords in content at least four times in the webpage.
  • Make sure that you use descriptive URLs for your images.
  • Make sure that you label all of your images with descriptive alt attributes.
  • Use keyword rich anchor text links within your content.
  • Give proper inter links (Navigation Structure) between the relevant pages and relevant category.
  • Use the rel="nofollow" tag in the links to these pages.
  • Use the W3C validator to check your markup.

SEO Tool - Link Analyzing Tool

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:21 PM

Link Analyzing Tool

This SEO tool site link analyzer tool avaliable at Site Link Analyzer provide you the information on what is the number of links of your site. This SEO tool has few options to choose from when showing the links: external, internal, both types and if show nofollow links. This SEO Tool can be added for example to your site if you want so that it can be used from there.

Tips from Google to Boost Your Website

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:18 PM

Boost Your Website

Great video from google team and a serious study of these tools can surely help imrove site performance.

List of SEO Tools and SEM Tools

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:01 PM

List of SEO Tools and SEM Tools

SEO Tools

SEO Tools:
Search Engine Analytics
Simply just enter any Url into the search query and voila you get a trend report from link popularity, PageRank™, Alexa Rank, keywords.
Head Checker
This tool will check any web page's header tags.
Search Combination Tool
This tool will generate all possible combinations of two separate lists of search phrases.
Keyword Density Analysis Tool
Enter a page URL and this tool will tell you the keyword density of all the phrases on the page.
Spider Viewer
Wonder how your page is viewed by a search engine spider / bot ?
Index Rank
Check and benchmark your website indexation against your competition
SeoDigger
Find out for which keywords your site ranks high enough to be in Google Top 20. Registering for a free account at SeoDigger gives you information per entire domain as well as per separate pages.
Site Comparison Analysis
A useful tool in benchmarking your website against a competitor via a radar diagram.
Stomper Ranker
A firefox plugin in finding out how well your site fare against the competition in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live.
SEO Site Audit Tool
A quick audit on your website or competitor on how well your website is faring on search engines, social bookmarking, etc
SEO Audit Report
Free SEO audit which provides score that incorporates things like website traffic, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social popularity and other technical factors on how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Backlink Analysis
Find out all the important information about your competitor's links. This free tool reporting includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information , etc.
Website Analysis
Another tool in digging out everything regarding a website
SEM Tools:
Keyword Tool
The free keyword tool from Google
Find out how competitive your particular keyword is / are; Crawl your own website to determine which keyword / s are getting higher traffic
Traffic Estimator
The free Traffic Estimator tool from Google
Get quick traffic estimates for keywords for your sem campaigns
Keyword Competition Tool
Find out how competitive the particular keyword /s is for your sem campaigns.
Search Radar
Search for topics relevant to your search query
Landing Page Optimization Tools:
Loading Speed of your website
How long does your website load in various web browsers ?
Website Speed Test
Another tool in testing your web site loading speed
Page Size Calculator
Useful in calculating the size of your web page and the estimated time it would take to download on a 56k Modem.
Heatmap Analysis
Identify how people view your website, photo or ad and which areas are getting most of the attention.

SEO Tool - URL Rewriting Tool

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:00 PM

SEO Tool - URL Rewriting Tool:


URL rewriting tool

Difficult url's can be rewritten with the tool at URL Rewriting Tool. This program can show you how to convert a (difficult) dynamic url to static looking html one which is typically better for SEO. Example:

Typing some site into the Enter Dynamic URL form:
site.com/products.php?prod_id=22

Then you will be shown 2 options:

Type 1 - Single Page URL

site.com/products-prod_id-(Any Value).htm

eg: site.com/products-prod_id-22.htm

and Type 2 - Directory Type URL

site.com/products/prod_id/(Any Value)
eg: http://scibody.com/products/prod_id/22/

And below еach of the options there will be an example code for .htaccess file (not tested).

What is Search Engine Optimization?

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 8:50 PM

What is Search Engine Optimization? (SEO), Define SEO, SEO Means

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process and a technique to modify the website in better way to rank better in the search engine results page (SERP).

The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:24 PM

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.


This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).

We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.

In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:08 PM

We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:


Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your Google AdSense account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.

It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube.

Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:07 PM

My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.

So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.



You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.

Google Translate now speaks 51 languages

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:06 PM

We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.

The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate emails within Gmail, webpages using Google Toolbar, RSS feeds in Google Reader and most recently, documents within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the Research Blog.

Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 9:05 PM

, we're really pleased to launch Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance.

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.

For example, the Google Luxuries Index tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.


The Auto-Buyers Index is also interesting, especially the dramatic 40% increase correlated with the launch of the Cash for Clunkers program in the U.S.:


These charts let you easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to Google Trends. And the data for these indexes are available for download — so you can use it with your own models.

Read more about this on the Google Finance Blog, and be sure to check out the Google Research Blog for info on Hal's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic activities.

Five million students going back to school are "going Google"

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Posted by Pradeep | Posted in | Posted on 8:58 PM

It's always tough to bid farewell to summer and hit the books again, but for a few million students this back-to-school season, things are looking up. As of this fall, over five million students at thousands of schools in more than 145 countries have "gone Google" and are actively using Google Apps Education Edition on campus. Since this time last year the number of students using Google Apps on campus has increased by 400%. Because more schools sign up for Apps everyday, we wanted to celebrate the start of the 2009 school year by launching a new site that shows off some of these schools, provides product tips and tricks, introduces a community discussion forum and more.

A snapshot of some of the thousands of schools "going Google" this fall. Every location in green indicates Apps users.

When you visit the site, you'll also find an interactive map packed with interesting trivia. For example, in addition to the 70,000 students using Apps at Temple University, their 5,000 staff and faculty were given a choice between Gmail and alternative vendor, and over 90% chose to go Google. Or when Kent State first deployed, they saw more than 700 students migrating each hour. And a single admin at Montana State successfully deployed over 30,000 accounts in less than 90 days. Or as we learned in the recent webinar from another school on the map — Notre Dame — they saved $1.5 million by switching to Apps. You can hear their full story in this video:

We hope more schools will continue to go Google and bring Apps to their campuses in an effort to improve communication and collaboration while cutting costs and resources. In the meantime, check out our site and find out what Apps has done for other schools and what Apps can do for your school — and if you're already a part of the movement, add yourself to the map!
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