Google’s Third Quarter Revenue Up 33% Year Over Year

Google gets to have all the fun especially when it comes to quarterly earnings reports. Rarely is there any bad news and the third quarter of 2011 was no exception. As Larry Page reports from the Google investor relations announcement:

    “We had a great quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “Revenue was up 33% year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion. Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark. People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!”

Maybe it’s consistent quarterly results like these that draw the ire of those looking to bring Google down through government intervention. The biggest worry Google usually has around these calls is how negatively people will react to the size of their quarterly increase. When people complain that you didn’t grow enough rather than jumping on a quarterly loss it can make these calls kinda fun I would guess. Nice problem to have huh? Business Insider summed up the report with this:

    Here’s what Google reported vs. expectations:

    Gross revenue: $9.72 billion vs $9.60 billion expected (by Citi’s Mark Maheny)

    EPS: $8.33

    Non-GAAP EPS: $9.72 vs. $8.74 (consensus)

    Net revenue (- TAC costs): $7.51 billion vs. $7.21 billion (consensus)

    Net income: $2.73 billion

    Google Sites gross revenue: $6.74 billion vs $6.67 billion (Citi).

    Google Network gross revenue: $2.60 billion vs. $2.61 (Citi).

    Operating expenses: $3.28 billion, or 34% of revenues. That’s versus $2.19 billion, or 30% of revenue, last year. So it looks like the hiring spree is still ongoing. In fact, Google added 2,585 people during the quarter, bringing headcount above 30,000 for the first time.

For a historical perspective here is a chart showing revenue growth over the past two years. Pretty amazing.

Once again, this is the stuff of envy but, let’s face it, we need Google to be performing both as an industry and as an economy as a whole. Imagine if Google reported a real problem what the shockwave ripple effect would be throughout the economy? That’s one thing we can ill afford at this time so three cheers to Google’s success.

Google's News-Bot Got It's Retirement

Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag.

Blocking Content From Google News:

Seem confusing? On the one hand, it’s not at all.

If you want Google to index your content in both web search and News (if you are a Google News publisher), then you don’t need to do anything. Google will keep crawling as it always has, but if you look at your server logs, you’ll only see entries for Googlebot rather than entries for both Googlebot and Googlebot-News.
If you want to keep your content out of Google News, you can keeping using the Disallow directive in robots.txt (or meta robots tag) to block Googlebot-News. Even though Google will now crawl as Googlebot rather than Googlebot-News, they’ll still respect the Googleb0t-News robots.txt directive.

Presumably, you can also allow your content in Google News and block it from web search by using a combination of a Disallow directive for Googlebot and an Allow directive for Googlebot-News (although I’m still trying to get verification of that from Google).
 
Gathering Data About How Your Site Is Crawled:

On the other hand, this change makes things a lot more confusing if you’re using data to understand how your site is crawled and make improvements.

For instance, if you notice that your news articles aren’t being indexed in Google News and you check the news-specific crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools and don’t see any problems, you can no longer check your server logs to see if those articles are being crawled for the news index. You can see if the pages are being crawled generally, but this less granular insight makes it tougher to troubleshoot problems.

In this example, you may be generating a news-specific Sitemap and that generation process may be missing specific URLs. You used to be able to review your server logs, see that Googlebot-News was crawling particular URLs but not others, and then check to see if the URLs that hadn’t been crawled were in the Sitemap. Now, all the server logs will tell you is whether Google is crawling the URLs at all. If they are being crawled for web search but not News, that detail is now lost.

You lose granular insight for web search as well. If you are tracking down why particular pages on your site aren’t indexed, you could previously review your server logs to see if they were being crawled, but now it will appear as though they are, even if they are only being crawled for Google News.

You can still get News-specific and web-specific crawl errors from Google webmaster tools, so some insight is still available. In terms of granularity, Google tells me that the Google webmaster tools URLs restricted by robots.txt report includes only the pages blocked from web search and not URLs blocked from Google News.

However, It doesn’t sound like you can currently see a list of URLs Google tried to crawl but didn’t due to Googlebot-News being blocked, and unfortunately the robots.txt analysis tool in Google webmaster tools doesn’t let you test URLs blocked in Google News separately from web search. So it would be tough to determine if you were accidentally blocking URLs from indexing in Google News.

This change seems like a bit of a step backward to me. When Google News was first launched, Googlebot crawled for both web search and News and news publishers asked for a news-specific bot. Certainly, the most important reason for this is the ability to block and allow content from Google News separately from web search, and that functionality remains. However, the granular insight available was useful as well, and it’s unfortunate that will now be lost.

Apple announces Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO

In a stunning and unexpected event, Steve Jobs resigned as Apple's chief executive today. The board has named Jobs Chairman and Tim Cook new CEO.

Apple released this letter from Steve:

"To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.


I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Jobs"

Here is the press release Apple issued this afternoon, after the stock market closed:

Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple

Tim Cook Named CEO and Jobs Elected Chairman of the Board

CUPERTINO, California—August 24, 2011—Apple’s Board of Directors today announced that Steve Jobs has resigned as Chief Executive Officer, and the Board has named Tim Cook, previously Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, as the company’s new CEO. Jobs has been elected Chairman of the Board and Cook will join the Board, effective immediately.

“Steve’s extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world’s most innovative and valuable technology company,” said Art Levinson, Chairman of Genentech, on behalf of Apple's Board. “Steve has made countless contributions to Apple’s success, and he has attracted and inspired Apple’s immensely creative employees and world class executive team. In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Steve will continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration.”

“The Board has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO,” added Levinson. “Tim’s 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does.”

Jobs submitted his resignation to the Board today and strongly recommended that the Board implement its succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO.

As COO, Cook was previously responsible for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple’s supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries. He also headed Apple’s Macintosh division and played a key role in the continued development of strategic reseller and supplier relationships, ensuring flexibility in response to an increasingly demanding marketplace.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

SEO Experts Should also Be Great Social Media Professionals !

The SEO skill set has evolved (and continues to). While being a great link builder, knowing how to write content for SEO and understanding best practices for optimizing a website are still incredibly important, they are not the only things we as SEO professionals need to understand in order to do our jobs well and produce real results for our clients. In today’s online world, having a solid understanding of how social media works and how it can be leveraged for SEO is critical to developing long lasting and quality SEO campaigns.

These are just some of things we as SEO professionals have to know about social media:

Understanding the Differences Between Social Networks:

Not all social networks were created alike. While there is some overlap, each network has a unique audience that uses that site for specific reasons. And there are certain rules of etiquette that companies are expected to abide by when joining a site. For instance, since Tweets are so short, it’s not uncommon to see multiple postings by the same account every day. It’s fully expected, as Twitter is meant to be a “real time” source of information. However, flooding Facebook with hourly updates is often seen as spamming. Even though you are promoting the same content, the rules have changed.

How to Automate Tasks:

We know that you could spend hours a day (if not all day) posting, submitting, uploading, Tweeting, sharing, linking, bookmarking and so forth. Now spread those actions across several accounts and there is no way you could get everything done between 9-5. Never mind the fact that most of your social connections might not even be active 9-5.
Knowing what tools are available to help automate your social media tasks is critical. Do you know how to schedule future Tweets and Facebook updates? Are your accounts linked so it’s one-and-done? Do new blog posts automatically go live on your social profiles? If you can automate these tasks, you can save yourself countless hours.

Leveraging Social Media as a Promotional Tool:

Matts Cutts has said“A lot of times people think SEO versus social media marketing, and a lot of the times it makes sense to keep a holistic view. First you have to have great content … then you need to tell people about it, and social media marketing can be a great way to do that.” Having great content is only the first step. It doesn’t matter how educational/informative/amazing a piece of content is if nobody sees it.

For example, look at LinkedIn groups. You couldn’t more finely define your target audiences if you wanted to. LinkedIn users have willingly identified and categorized themselves by their industry, job title, level of experience, skill sets and so forth. You can choose exactly what kind of person would be most interested in/receptive to your content. That kind of laser focus means you aren’t wasting your time on the wrong audience.

Understanding Social Signals:

The Facebook-Bing integration, indexing Tweets, Google+1. The search engines admit that social signals are an influencing factor on their algorithms. Social media is directly affecting SEO! If you don’t understand why author authority is important for link building (trusted social personalities have more search engine “appeal” than generic spam accounts), then you aren’t getting the most value out of your social media marketing and your SEO will suffer.

Social media and SEO have a lot more to do with each other than you might think. Neither can exist in separate silos if you really want to get the most value from your time and efforts. A great SEO professional has to understand the ins and outs of social media, as well as how to leverage social SEO to help their clients succeed.