This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Recently we introduced powerful, time-saving features in Gmail: Priority Inbox and the ability to call phones right from Gmail. Google spreadsheets added new features, and many more businesses and schools moved to the cloud with Google Apps. Cut through the clutter with Gmail Priority Inbox Since its beginning, Gmail has been helping people cope with large amounts of email, whether it’s with more than seven gigabytes of storage, really fast search, great spam filtering or automatically organized conversations. This Monday we launched Priority Inbox , which helps you get through your inbox even faster by automatically putting important messages front and center. The more that you use Gmail, the better Priority Inbox will become at categorizing the email you receive. Our research suggests that the typical information worker can save a whole week of work time each year with this feature! Call phones from Gmail People in the U.S. can now call any phone right within Gmail. If you have a Google Voice account ( it’s free! and open to everyone in the U.S. ), you can also receive calls to your Google Voice number right within Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free at least until the end of the year, and international rates start at just $0.02 per minute. Google Apps customers won’t see this feature quite yet, but Google Voice and call phones in Gmail are coming soon with the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts. Improved scheduler in Google Calendar Last Thursday we made it easier to set up new events in Google Calendar. The interface for repeating events is now more intuitive, and we’ve improved how we help you find a good time for your event, even if you’re coordinating a large group of people with busy schedules. In-cell drop-down with validation and more in Google spreadsheets We added two helpful features in spreadsheets last week as well. In-cell drop-down with validation allows you to configure cells to display a drop-down menu of accepted values. For example, you can require a cell’s value to be selected from a list of specific cities. We also introduced the ability to easily see which cells have formulas , which can come in handy when you’re working on a complicated mode. You can turn this feature on from the formula bar by selecting the “Show All Formulas” button, selecting “Show All Formulas” in the View menu or hitting Ctrl `. Who’s gone Google? The pace of organizations saying goodbye to legacy on-premises technology and moving into the cloud continues to accelerate. Read more about why The Richmond Group , Box.net , Bowerly Lane Bicycles and EPS Communications selected Google Apps for their messaging and collaboration needs. I hope these updates help you or your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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Google Apps highlights – 9/3/2010

Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to. In some past interviews (like this one ) you have highlighted how Google’s key strength is perhaps brand rather than relevancy. After seeing Yahoo! bow out of the search game do you still hold that same opinion? What do you think of the Bing brand? Brand is still Google’s strongest competitive asset in search. It means that to get someone to switch you have to be significantly better than they are, which is a tall order. Bing is the first search offering from MSFT that is in the same league with Google, so it’s more about branding and positioning than objective quality at this point. If Bing was a standalone brand they wouldn’t have a chance, but it has the advantage of default positioning in IE, so for now it just has to be close enough that people won’t swap it out. Over time Bing may evolve some interesting differentiation from Google, but that’s not really the case right now (at least it seems to be pressuring Google to experiment/innovate a bit more). It’s been quite a while since using a MSFT product was “cool” and Bing has that drag on its brand. Some of the new upstarts entering the search game believe that perhaps the thinning of the herd is creating an entry opportunity? Have you checked out Blekko yet? Any other new general search projects interest you? Google rose to prominence during the dot-com bust when the existing players were quite disinterested in search, since at the time (pre-PPC) it was money loser. Search is so ridiculously lucrative right now that any promising technology that starts to get traction or buzz is likely to be quickly acquired by one of the major players as a blocking measure. Google’s rumored attempt to acquire Cuil for $80MM pre-launch is an example. There is an opportunity, but it’s more about getting bought out for a sweet price than taking down the SEs. There is also so much manual tuning in search these days that even a great system will take a lot of effort to return great results. “Plumber OR Pipefitter” is a Boolean query, “Portland OR Plumber” is not, and someone’s got to build code to recognize that. This is where the existing players have a huge legacy advantage. Looking at new search technologies I’m very cautious about those that ask users to do more work in return for better results. Search is a low-intensity activity that people don’t really want to learn or spend time on. This is where an approach like WA (that Bing is also aiming towards) looks interesting. We’d all like search to be like the computer from Star Trek that gives you back exactly the answer/data you ask for. The complication with this, beyond the technical issues, is what benefit it has for the webmasters (i.e. why should I let you crawl/index my site). Current SEs take your data for their use, but provide traffic in return, which an answering system would not. You are one of the few guys who literally wrote the relevancy algorithms & then later worked in the SEO space. Do you consider the roles to be primarily complimentary or adversarial? So is SEO good or bad for SEs? On the whole I think it’s a benefit for them. From an algo perspective it’s a lot easier to determine the intent of a well SEO’d page. The SEs give webmasters a lot of tools and encourage them to use them because it makes search better. 301 your pages so we know where the content went, let us know what parameters don’t impact page content so we don’t get caught in robot traps, tell us what language your page is in using the metatags so we don’t have to guess, etc. If one of these tools ends up being a net negative, SEs can always change how they treat it (NoFollow), or just start ignoring it all together (Keywords MetaTag). This is not to say that a lot of work doesn’t have to be put into removing spam and factoring out overly aggressive optimization, but it’s a lot less than what they’d need to do if no one SEO’d. Given your experience on both sides of the table, do you feel that ranking great in other search engines is like stealing candy from a baby, or is it still hard? What aspects of the SEO process do you find most challenging? For SEO-ing established businesses it’s not a slam dunk, but it is still possible to generate very strong returns. At Become.com we have dozens of people working on SEO in a very organized manner and paybacks on investing effort are better than almost any other aspect of our business. The challenging part is the innate volatility of SEO and the fact that ultimately the SEs control our destiny. You can put together a great growth plan, and then watch an algo update like MayDay shred it. For the spammers, it’s like stealing candy from a sleeping Doberman. It’s easy until the Doberman wakes up. Does your experience allow you to just look at a search result and almost instantly know why something is ranked? If so, what are the key things SEOs should study / work on to help gain that level of understanding? I wish. There is always some pattern recognition that comes from experience (i.e. this is a collage site), but there are so many nuances in the code and off-page stuff that it’s not always instant, you just get better at knowing what to look for. The real learning comes from looking at pages that are ranking well for no obvious reason and seeing what they are doing. It’s no secret why apple is #1 for “ipod nano,” but what is that site I haven’t heard of doing right to get the #5 position? Also if we see a competitor suddenly see a step-function traffic lift we look to see what they changed/added that the SEs seem to be liking. Back in 2006 you highlighted the rise of some of the MFA collage websites. In 2010 content mills are featured in the press almost every week. Are you surprised how far it has went & how long it has lasted? I think Google actually likes folks like Demand Media. What they are doing is seeing where GG’s users are looking for something and not finding it, then plugging that hole. It may not be the Pulitzer Prize-winning content, but it allows users to find something and thus makes Google more useful and universal. When better content comes along those pages will slip down, but they serve a purpose in Google’s ecosystem. Collage websites (stitch sites in Yahoo! parlance) are another story entirely. They add virtually no value and are pretty much spam IMO. The difficulty is in detecting and eradicating them as fast as they can be robo-created. You mentioned looking at the aboutness of a site for Become.com when judging links. Do you think broad general search engines care about link relevancy? Personally, I have not seen it have much of an impact, which is a shame. I think the main reason is that it is quite difficult for general SEs to judge which site relationships are meaningful, and which are not. For example, a golf course might get links from a real estate site; golf and real estate might be classified as very different verticals, but the links are quite relevant because the real estate agent is pointing out one of the benefits of the community. As a result link relevancy has become more about avoiding bad neighborhoods (3Ps, link farms, etc.) than finding good ones. How important do you think temporal analysis is in judging the quality and authenticity of a link profile? It’s certainly a red flag if a site gains too many links too quickly. The same is true if the profile of the links looks unnatural. If all your new links are coming from PR3-PR4 blog sites, something’s off. If bloggers are suddenly that interested in you wouldn’t a lot of PR0 comments exist, FB mentions, tweets, and a few higher PR press mentions? At Yahoo! sites that got a sudden upsurge in inlinks were classed as “spike” sites. Legit spike sites (ex. the website of some unknown who wins an Olympic medal) have typical hallmarks like temporally-linked mentions in media sites that you can’t buy access to (AP, NYT, Time, etc.). The spikes that are blackhatted look totally different. In an interview a couple years ago Priyank Garg mentioned Yahoo! looked at the link’s location on a page. Do you feel other search engines take this into account? All of the major SEs have been doing boilerplate stripping for a while. They recognize footers, rail nav., etc. and look at those links differently. Also, SEs will only follow a limited number of links per page. They typically collect all the links, remove the checksum dups (note: if your links vary by even one parameter they will not be deduped at this phase), and follow the first N links from the code. None of the SEs will say exactly what N is, but it’s probably somewhere between 75 and 300 links (Google recommends you have

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Jon Glick Interview

Today, Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon, will announce a joint proposal for an open Internet. We’ve been working with Verizon to find common ground on the issue of net neutrality for nearly a year—last October we released a shared statement of principles , and in January, we made a joint filing to the FCC . We hope today’s proposal, a suggested legislative framework for consideration by lawmakers, helps to advance the debate over open Internet rules in Washington. We also believe that it is best for users and for the web. For more information, read the full post on our Public Policy blog . Posted by Karen Wickre, Editor, Google Blog team

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A joint policy proposal for an open Internet

Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold, but some “insider secret” shortcut that unearths millions automatically while you sleep - perpetually. One of the problems with false scarcity hype launches is that it attracts the type of customers who can’t succeed . The people who are receptive to that sort of marketing want to be sold a dream, they are not the type of people who want to put the time and effort in to become successful. They are at stage 2 in this video : “my life sucks” … so sell me a story that will instantly make everything better without requiring any change from me at all. Another one of the problems with the hype launch business model is that it requires you to keep repeating the sales process like a traveling salesman . Each day you need to think up a new scheme or angle to sell a new set of crap from, and you have to hope that the web has a short enough memory that the scammy angles used to pitch past hyped up product launches don’t come to bite you in the ass. I don’t mind when the get rich quick market work their core market, as there is a group of weak minded individuals who are addicted to buying that stuff . But I always get pissed off when someone claims that your field is trash or a scam (as an angle to sell something else), and then they later start trying to paint themselves as an expert in your field. Here is a video snippet of Ryan Deiss exclaiming his ignorance of the SEO field & how he got ripped off thrice because he knew so little he couldn’t tell a bad service provider from a good one. “If you want to get free traffic you have to get good at the cut-throat game of SEO (which I for one am not). … SEO for most of us isn’t the right answer.” - Ryan Deiss And his latest info-product (in perhaps a series of dozens of them?) is called Perpetual Traffic Formula. In the squeeze page he highlights that it offers you the opportunity to… “Discovering a crack in Google algorithm so big it simply can’t be patched. Being able repeat the process for similar results in UNLIMITED niches.” You don’t have to be an expert to create an info-product ! The Droid has a pretty good review of how awful his sites are doing in terms of ” perpetual traffic .” If you want to buy from a person who *always* has another new product with a secret short cut to sell, Ryan is THE guy. If you want to learn how to evaluate the quality of products being sold, here are some good tips on that front . And if you want to get a good overview of the internet marketing world for free you will love this .

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Ryan Deiss Perpetual Traffic Formula Review

When was the last time you checked the bounce rate for visits from Hong Kong? You may never have needed to, until an “alert” in your Intelligence reports tells you that the bounce rate from Hong Kong has suddenly doubled. An automatic alert in Intelligence is triggered when the expected performance of a metric, historically, differs from what is happening now. Intelligence monitors the past and current activity of all your metrics and lets you know when something out of the ordinary happens. One reason why these automatic alerts can provide so much insight is that they often bring your attention to traffic segments you might never have thought to examine before. Now that the alert has caught your attention, you’re ready to dive in and learn more. In this 3 1/2 minute video on automatic alerts , also below, you’ll learn how. Did you know that you can graph the bounce rate from Hong Kong with a single click? Or that you can quickly create an advanced segment from the alert and start using it throughout your reports? You’ll learn these tips and others, including how to use annotations with automatic alerts, and when to use daily, weekly, or monthly alerts. Enjoy the video and feel free to share your own automatic alerts tips in the comments. Next week, we’ll look at custom alerts. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Analytics Intelligence Tips: Automatic Alerts

Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. But for many people, finding the right flight at the best price is a frustrating experience; pricing and availability change constantly, and even a simple two city itinerary involves literally thousands of different options. We’d like to make that search much easier, which is why I’m pleased to announce that today we have signed an agreement to acquire ITA , a Boston-based software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices. While online flight search is rapidly evolving, we think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data. Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket. We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise as the leading developer of flight information software with Google’s technology we’ll be able to create great user innovations in flight search. ITA has built a very successful QPX business, and we’re looking forward to working with their current and future customers. Google will honor all existing agreements, and we’re also enthusiastic about adding new partners. You can read more about this deal here , and we’ll keep everybody up to date as we work to close this exciting acquisition. Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience

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Taking off with ITA

About a year and a half ago, I asked for suggestions for webspam projects for 2009 . The feedback that we got was extremely helpful. It’s almost exactly the middle of 2010, so it seemed like a good time to ask again: what projects do you think webspam should work on in 2010 and beyond? Here’s the instructions from an earlier post: Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year. Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment. I don’t want individual sites called out or much discussion; just chime in once with what you’d like to see Google work on in webspam. Add your suggestion below, and thanks!

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Webspam projects in 2010?

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed. My dad’s family grew up in Vietnam. Even as they faced an uncertain future, they attended school, believing strongly in the value of education. So when my aunts and uncles immigrated to the U.S., they went to great lengths to make sure their sons and daughters had the best opportunities. It wasn’t always easy—learning a new language and finding a new job was a struggle at first. But through their selfless efforts, my cousins and I were able to excel in our studies and pursue college degrees. So for this reason, and on behalf of the Search Stories team, I’m delighted to introduce our latest video, Graduation . It’s both poignant and relevant to my family’s own experiences, and I think it speaks to devoted caregivers the world over. Visit www.youtube.com/searchstories to check out the whole collection, or to create your own story. Posted by Dana Nguyen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps Education

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Graduation: our latest Search Story

Anyone who has been an SEO consultant knows that SEO is often bolted-on as an after-thought. Which is, of course, the worst way of doing SEO. Part of the problem is that SEO is often thought of, by clients, as a fix. It is a fix applied to solve the unforeseen problem of not showing up in search engine result pages. Whilst some businesses get it, we know most never will. But this fact is to your considerable advantage if you build and run your own sites Relevant Traffic Is Everything We know that a site without traffic is like a billboard in the desert. If no one sees it, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it is useless. A site without relevant traffic is a cost, not a benefit. Traffic that “just passes through” presents a major opportunity cost. What did that traffic really want to see, and why aren’t I providing it? Someone else will be. We know that search is the ultimate internet marketing research tool. Search is marketing nirvana. Visitors tell us what they want, using a keyword query, and all we need to do is match that query up with our site. Most people, outside search, still do not get this. But we do. Integrating SEO At Every Step One thing some SEOs may not get is that SEO needs is an integral part of business strategy. SEO is not just about positioning a site in the search rankings, it’s about positioning a site in the market. For example, it is pointless getting a #1 ranking for “cheap t-shirts” if a site sells designer t-shirts. Whilst this may result in a few rouge purchases, the site will constantly lose out to sites that offer cheap t-shirts. Because the visitors will reformulate their search queries until they find the service that is most relevant to them. From a business point of view, it may be better to run two sites - one offering cheap t-shirts, and one offering designer shirts. That’s what being relevant really means. Being relevant to a target market. An SEO strategy should look like this: Identify the target market Conduct a competitive analysis Create a business plan that shows how you will compete in that market Research keywords Create a brand identity related to those keyword terms Create a search-friendly site Get links SEO flows naturally out of the demands of the target market. The visitors tell us what they want. We look to see if anyone else is providing it. If they are, could we do better ? We create a basic plan showing how we will supply the need, and how much money we’ll make, after costs, if we succeed. We develop a strategy, as opposed to tactics . We investigate the many ways people phrase queries . We create a “language” for our site copy, and brand, that includes those queries, and addresses the intent behind them. We build a crawlable, well-ordered site and then we tell the world about it. We hope the world will talk about it, the send some attention our way . SEO Is Ongoing Just as business strategy is something we must do each day, so too is SEO. Integrate SEO into all you do. Even sending out a bill is an opportunity to ask someone to engage with your site. And hopefully link to it. Ask your friends, associates, suppliers and customers to link to you. Do the same for them. Create a personal link network of like-minded people and grow that network wider and wider. Think of it as a circle of trust. Your keyword referral stats are pure gold. Find the keyword terms people have used to find you. Use them as ideas for new page topics. Integrate their language into your copy. Repeat. Grow organically based on the demands of visitors. It’s just a case of “listening” to them. And responding with new pages. Join related clubs, forums and organisations. Find out the top sites in your niche that accept advertising, and advertise on them. Write articles for them. Contribute to discussions. Go to wherever your potential visitors are. Every page should link to another page on your site in a strategic, meaningful way. Think of any page you write as the start of a funnel that leads to other areas of your site. You want to subtly direct people to the page or action where they’ll engage with you. For this to work, you need to have a clear business directive in mind. What is it you want people to do? Every page is a step leading to that point. Be newsworthy. And remarkable. What do you do that’s really interesting? Social media thrives on, and rewards, the different - the thing that is new. Same-ness - not so much. Position for both business and rankings

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SEO Flows Through Everything

We created the Google Apps Marketplace to make it easier for businesses and universities to benefit from the rapidly growing ecosystem of apps in the cloud. Apps in the Marketplace come in many sizes, from bite-sized apps that focus on providing a single feature to larger standalone apps that run major business systems and processes—and they’re all conveniently integrated with Google apps. We believe it should be as easy to discover and purchase cloud apps for your organization as it is to get mobile apps for your smartphone. And, once you install and evaluate an app, it’s easy for your administrator to deploy them to users with just a few clicks. (Check out this video to see how it works). We’ve added some great new apps since we launched in March and today we’re bringing you 16 new apps to the Marketplace. They represent a cross-section of the innovation happening on the web around integrated applications, where information is shared between applications allowing people to get their work done, faster: Jive : Jive Social Business Software combines collaboration, community and social networking software, allowing you to engage employees, customers and the social web. Harvest : Harvest is a simple time tracking application that makes it fast and easy for businesses to track billable hours and create invoices. Floorplanner Pro : Floorplanner Pro provides a quick and easy way for real estate agents and facilities professionals to create and share interactive floor plans in both 2D as 3D. Check out our post on the Enterprise Blog for more information on all 16 apps, or go right to the Marketplace . Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise

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Bringing sixteen more apps to the Google Apps Marketplace