Kingish.com It's a way of life

Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to fund.

Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug

Okay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?

Pile of business cards -> CloudContacts

Here are a few more that come to mind:
Bank statements -> Mint
Photo Albums -> ScanCafe
Bathroom scale -> Withings
Pedometer -> Fitbit
Phone -> Google Voice, Twilio, Ribbit, Rebtel
Camera -> EyeFi
Stack of video games -> Steam, OnLive
DVD player -> Roku, Netflix Instant movies
Treadmill or Elliptical machine -> Nike+ shoe sensor, LoseIt! iPhone app, CardioTrainer app for Android, Fitbit
Pen -> Livescribe

All of these take a hotspot in your home and inject a cloud or web element to make life easier, more efficient or better. So what happens when you look at a pile of manuals, or receipts? Your alarm clock? Those “Learning Japanese” CDs? A stack of take-out menus? A stack of cookbooks? A hard drive full of MP3s that are disorganized? A hard drive that doesn’t have a back-up copy? An out-of-date programming book? A box full of videotapes? All those back issues of magazines? A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration? Stuff in your garage that you’ve been meaning to sell or give away? Your wallet?

Ideas are sitting all around where you live. If you have a small snag, irritation, or hotspot in your life, probably a lot of other people do too. You can make it easier to organize something (can you convert something physical to digital and store it in the cloud?). You can sell niche versions of a product (e.g. Threadless for T-shirts), you can let people make something that they couldn’t make before (CafePress for T-shirts, LuLu for books), you can pool people with similar interests (a blog like Craftzine, or a forum for book lovers or body builders), you can review products in a particular space, you can teach someone to do something. You can become a well-known expert in something and then sell your time or expertise as a consultant. You can make a free version of something useful or fun, then sell more features or consult on more involved cases. You can do meta versions of lots of these, e.g. Etsy is a marketplace for people who like to buy and sell custom crafted objects.

I’ll stop with a story. I have a friend at Google who is really good at noticing things that annoy him. While walking from his car to his desk in the morning, he can easily find six things that irritate him because they should be improved. I’m not recommending that you make yourself more irritable, but I am saying that if you notice all the times you run across something that can be improved, those are opportunities. And I think one of the easy methods of spotting start-up ideas is looking around where you live and how you spend your time. Find the hotspots in your own life and you might identify some great products or services to build.

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!

This month I made my 30 day challenge be “Don’t respond to email after 10 p.m.” I’ve done very well overall on this challenge, and I like the results a lot. I’ll probably try to keep up this behavior.

Now I need to pick my next challenge. I read through the 350+ suggestions and comments that people wrote, and put together a poll. Please vote below for the one thing you think I should try to do for 30 days.

I can’t promise that I’ll do each item, but looking back over the last year, I have had good success at doing the things from the first 30 day challenge poll.

Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz. Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference.

I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting.

Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say.

Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps.

If you haven’t checked out Buzz, or haven’t checked it out recently, you might want to give Buzz another look. You can follow me on Buzz if you’re interested; we’re having a nice discussion about favorite Chrome extensions right now.

A couple weeks or so ago, we did an SEO site review session at Google I/O 2010. The video from that session is now live:

The video is about an hour long, but I hope it’s a pretty good use of your time if you’re interested in search engine optimization. Enjoy!

If your company has a bunch of store locations, please don’t hide that information behind a search form or a POST. If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores. If you have a lot of stores, you could have a web page for each (say) state that links to all stores in that state.

Here’s a concrete example. I’m a big fan of Pinkberry because I love frozen yogurt: both the delicious treat and the new version of Android. But Pinkberry’s store locator page only offers a search form. Pinkberry has a url for each store (for example, here’s their page for a San Jose location). But because Pinkberry doesn’t provide an HTML sitemap on their store locator page, it’s harder for search engines to discover those pages exist. And in fact for the query [pinkberry san jose], Google does find the specific page, but it doesn’t rank as highly as it might; some other search engines don’t return that web page at all.

I was able to find a list of store locations on Pinkberry’s site, but it’s a lot harder to find than it should be. My advice to Pinkberry would be to add a sentence to their store locator page that says “Or see the full list of all Pinkberry store locations.” That would be helpful not only for regular users but also for search engines.

This was one concrete example, but lots of large companies mess this up. If you have a lot of store or franchise locations, consider it a best practice to 1) make a web page for each store that lists the store’s address, phone number, business hours, etc. and 2) make an HTML sitemap to point to those pages with regular HTML links, not a search form or POST requests.

By the way, Google does provide Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) where you can tell Google directly about your business, as do other search engines. But that doesn’t change the fact that you should provide a web page for each store–that lets anyone on the web find your store locations more easily.

P.S. If I were doing a full SEO site review on Pinkberry, I’d mention that they have a slight duplicate content issue, because they have a two different urls for their San Jose location. That’s not a huge deal, but employing the rel=canonical tag would allow Pinkberry to select a single, nicer url instead of search engines trying to pick between two identical pages.

Okay, I’ve finished roughly a year of 30 day challenges, and now I’d like your help picking new ideas. So far, I’ve done:
- 30 days with no TV (May)
- 30 days of 10,000 steps each day (June)
- 30 days biking into work (July)
- reading 15 books in 30 days (I only made it to 12) (August)
I took September off. I had a bunch of work I had to focus on.
- 30 days with no Microsoft software or operating systems (October)
- 30 days without Robert Scoble (November). I like Robert a lot; this was kind of a no-op/easy 30 day challenge to force me to find additional people that I’m interested in online.
- 30 days with no caffeine (December)
- 30 days with no Twitter or FriendFeed (January)
- 30 days with no iPhone (February)
- 30 days with no sugar (March). That was hard. My wife and I did this one together and it was the roughest.
- 30 days without replying to external email (April). This one was hard and I wasn’t perfect, but I got in much better balance on time spent on email.
- 30 days with no Facebook (May). This one was another easy one for me. I never used Facebook that much in the first place.

So what should I do now? So far I’m playing with two ideas:
- no email after 10 p.m. Email remains the biggest part of my life where I lack balance, and I still need to get it more under control.
- read 50 pages a day. This is one that my wife has been doing, and she’s been enjoying it.

Other possibilities include:
- 30 days as a vegetarian.
- read the Bible (or the Qur’an) in 30 days. I’ve never read either all the way through.
- 30 days of trying to learn to play guitar.
- meditate 10-15 minutes a day for 30 days.
- try one new thing a day for 30 days.
- draw something everyday for 30 days.
- try polyphasic sleep for 30 days.
- go 30 days spending as little money as possible.
- learn as much of a new language as possible in 30 days.
- 30 days to get my finances in order (I haven’t really paid attention to financial stuff as much as I should).
- try to write a novel/book in 30 days.
- write down one thing I’m thankful for each day for 30 days.

Okay, those are a few that I’ve come up with. Tell me your suggestions and then I might put up a poll to let people vote.

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot. In both cases, I might want to do a private search that the hotel or local cafe can’t see. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection provides an encrypted tunnel between my browser and Google, so other people can’t sniff what I’m searching for.

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works. I saw one commenter say “If they still pass in the search parameters in the URL (Get), what’s the point? People can still see what you queried, if they made them “post” messages it might actually do something.” It’s important to realize that even though you as a surfer can see the query in the url, the sites between your browser and Google can’t. Google OS demonstrated that by sniffing a regular HTTP query and an HTTPS query in Wireshark to show that the query can’t be seen going over the wire.

Thanks to all the people at Google who did the all the hard work and heavy lifting to deliver this. One of the main engineers behind the effort was Evan Roseman, a member of the webspam team who you might have met at previous search conferences. In fact, Evan was originally scheduled to be on our site review session at Google I/O this past Thursday, but we decided that launching SSL search took priority. I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson, Nathan Dabney, and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.

I hope you enjoy https://www.google.com and find it useful.

Okay, today I’m going to try something different again. I’m going to try live-buzzing the keynote of Day 2 of Google I/O. You can follow the live-buzz right here.

I’m going to update the buzz as news comes out; if you’re following on the web instead of on Buzz, you might need to hit reload to see updates.

Watch the live-stream video at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers by the way.

Check out other live-blogging from:
- Engadget
- Search Engine Land
- A live-wave from Lifehacker
- New York Times
- Wall Street Journal

I believe it should be fine to say that I think you’ll like the speed and polish of Froyo.

Okay, I’m going to try live-blogging the keynote of Google I/O, but I’m doing it with a twist. I’m going to try live-blogging in Google Wave with some other folks.

Watch the live-stream video at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers by the way.

Lots of folks will be live-blogging or waving. Here is a different live wave with Gina Trapani, Kevin Marks, Leo Laporte, and Adam Pash, for example.

Danny Sullivan will be live-blogging the keynote over on Search Engine Land. I believe that Tom Krazit is live-blogging the keynote for CNET too.

Here goes my live-wave:

google.load("wave", "1"); google.setOnLoadCallback(function() { new google.wave.WavePanel({target: document.getElementById("waveframe")}).loadWave("googlewave.com!w+_yNbYytzA");});

It’s that time! On Monday morning I’ll record some new videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular ones plus a few of the more interesting questions. Please submit questions that lots of people would be interested in, not just a question about your specific site.

Just a reminder: please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When you leave a question on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.

If you’re attending Google I/O next week then you might enjoy the SEO site review session that we’ll be doing. If you’ll be attending Google I/O, you can now submit your website for review. I’ll also include the form below:

Added 5/20/2010: The site review is today and we’ve already gotten over 500 sites submitted, so I’m removing the form submission.

By the way, if you’re attending Google I/O you’ll probably want to install the very spiff Android app for it. You can search for [Google I/O] in the Android Market. And if you want to know what to expect in the SEO site review session, here’s the video from the panel we did last year:

If you see me at Google I/O, please say hello and tell me what you wish Google would do that we’re not doing.

Added: Note that sites and comments submitted to this form may be publicly reviewed in our site review session.

I recently returned from a vacation to Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. It was a ton of fun and I hope to blog about it at some point — each country was of course unique and each offered different, wonderful experiences. From the cherry blossoms and the kindness shown to me by my colleagues at the Google Tokyo office in Japan, to the hustle and bustle and skyscrapers of Hong Kong, to the beautiful landscapes, people (and elephants!) of Thailand, I relished every minute. The trip also redoubled my interest in webspam in world-wide languages.

Google has always cared about search quality in dozens of languages, not just English. We’re trying a new experiment in webspam: we decided to identify five languages where we’d really like to drill down into webspam, solicit spam reports in those languages, and pay even more attention to spam reports in those languages over the next couple months. If you know of spam in these languages, we’d especially like to hear about it.

The five languages where we’re asking for spam reports are Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. Of course, we always welcome webspam reports — in any language! — at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport but we’d be especially interested to hear about spam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. If you know of webspam in those languages, please let us know, and thanks!

You know when you do a Google search and get all those extra url parameters that crowd things up? “ie” and “hl” and so on? I hate that, because I often copy and email Google urls, and I try to clean up the url by removing all those extra params each time.

You can fix this annoyance in Chrome. Right-click on the address bar and select “Edit Search Engines…” (You can also edit the search engines via the Options menu.) You can either edit the Google option or add a new entry; I added a new entry. Added: you can’t edit the entry for Google, so you have to make a new entry. I set the URL field to be “{google:baseURL}search?q=%s” (without the quotes).

Now when you search for [flowers] the url is just http://www.google.com/search?q=flowers . Ah, nice clean urls in the browser bar.

Update: Chrome expert and fellow Googler Peter Kasting points out in the comments that “Doing this results in no more NavSuggest or Search Suggest in the omnibox dropdown — a real quality loss. NavSuggest especially is extremely valuable.” Peter has a good point: search suggestions can be very helpful. It’s up to you to decide whether you prefer search suggestions or a clean Google url. For most people who don’t cut-and-paste Google urls all day long, it’s probably better to stick with the default search option that gives you search suggestions.

Here are the Android Apps that I currently love. It’s not a complete list, but it’s a pretty good start.

Music and sound apps

• Subsonic: stream music from your home computer to your phone
• Listen: save and play podcasts like This Week in Google
• Tuner – gStrings: a great guitar tuner
• Pandora Radio: stream customized music based on artists you like
• RingDroid: Make a ringtone or alarm out of any sound you record
• Voice Recorder: Record audio and mail it to yourself
• Shazam: Identify any song you hear

Apps for when you’re traveling

• TripIt: keep track of trips and plane flights for upcoming travel
• Google Translate: translate tons of languages into tons of other languages. You can also do voice-recognition-to-text for English, then translate. This app will even do text-to-speech (voice synthesis) in many languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and German.
• Yelp: Find great restaurants nearby. Pro tip: scan the reviews to discover good dishes to order.
• Compass: also handy when you’re traveling

Social apps

• Twitter: official Twitter app for Android. This app can take empty/missing pictures in your contacts and populate your contacts’ pictures with their Twitter profile pictures, which is nice.
• Seesmic: another fantastic Twitter app for Android
• Google Buzz widget: an easy way to post to Buzz from your phone. By the way, I’ve noticed myself using Buzz more and more recently. When I started on Twitter, it took me several months to warm to the service. I think the same principle applies to Buzz. Buzz fills a nice niche between Twitter (microblogging) and regular blogging. It’s great when you want to throw out one quick idea, but you need more than 140 characters. You can read my Buzzes (or follow me on Buzz) if you want.

Cool demos / showing off

• Google Skymap: move your phone to see where stars are. Like augmented reality for the sky.
• Tricorder: shows all the different sensor readings of your phone. Includes accelerometer and tilt sensors, GPS and lat/lon, wifi, cell phone strength, compass, acoustic data–even solar activity.
• Metal Detector: an app that detects metal. I still don’t know how it works (maybe it uses the magnetometer sensor that allows the compass), but it actually does work on many types of metal
• Google Earth: most of the eye candy of Google Earth, but on your phone
• LED Scroller: enter a message and your phone turns into a faux LED scrolling sign. Kinda low-tech, but impresses people more than I expected.
• Hypnotic Spiral: makes a swirling spiral that you can control
• The Schwartz Unsheathed: a light sword that makes cool sounds as you move your phone.

Signal strength apps

• Wifi Analyzer: walk around and see a dynamic graph of wifi signal strength. Great for picking the right place to sit in an airport or cafe to get the best wifi signal
• Antennas: shows a Google map with nearby antennas on it. Good for monitoring your phone’s signal strength
• RF Signal Tracker (two versions, Donut and Eclair): another app to measure cell phone tower signal strength

QR Code and Barcode apps

• Key Ring: scan your loyalty and other membership cards (e.g. Safeway, or your gym). Then use this app instead of carrying a bunch of membership cards around. I wish my phone could replace everything in my wallet.
• App Referrer: shows all your installed apps. Click on an application and it will generate a large QR barcode on your screen that your friend can scan to install the same app.
• Barcode Scanner: scan barcodes and QR codes. Very handy to install applications and visit urls. Note that the “Barcode Scanner” app (like App Referrer) can also show QR codes for applications — just press the options button. Can also show QR codes for contacts, bookmarks, and the clipboard.

Core apps / misc

• My Tracks: records where you go using GPS and lets you upload a “track” to Google Maps
• Navigation: get turn-by-turn directions as you drive
• Movies: check movie times and see ratings from critics vs. audiences
• Wheres My Droid: If you lose your phone and it’s in silent mode, this app will help you find your phone. I’ve tried Mobile Defense and that’s also very nice.
• WordPress: Upload images and blog from your phone
• Amazon.com: mobile shopping, plus add things to your Amazon wishlist
• Shopper: Google app to scan barcodes and show product search results
• BBC News: see the latest in world news. This is an unofficial widget.
• News and Weather: customizable news, plus this app shows weather in your current location. Wish I could enter 3-4 cities and flick between weather reports though.
• Weather: see the weather in multiple cities
• Google Finance: check stock prices and news
• Google Maps: see where you are

Google also offers a lot of mobile apps, but I just wanted to highlight my favorite applications.

Okay, those are my favorite Android apps, but what did I miss? Which Android Apps do you love?

(I’m traveling, but lots of good stuff from the recent SMX West search conference is now live — plus some new stuff — so I wanted to talk about it.)

At the SMX West search conference I did an Ignite talk about Google’s SEO audit that it did on itself. This was part of a global week of Ignite talks. An Ignite talk has 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of five minutes. Thanks to Aya Zook and Vanessa Fox for organizing, and Brady Forrest (the creator of Ignite) for being the emcee. To help you get the full experience, I’m embedding the video below, then the slides I used (complete with auto-advance every 15 seconds), so you can watch the slides while you listen to the audio:

Don’t miss the other Ignite talks from SMX! There’s some gems in there.

Also at SMX West, I did a live streaming video interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews. I think the interview had 1800 live viewers, and at the end we took questions from Twitter users. (In the beginning I look like a jerk staring at my phone, but that’s because I was trying to tweet about the interview so that people would know they could watch). We covered some new ground in this video.

We also had a fun “Ask the Search Engines” panel with representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can read the Lisa Barone live-blogging write-up if you want.

In the background was the normal amount of webmaster videos and blog posts. Around the same time as the conference, I also did a post on a Google blog about how Google communicates with webmasters and tries to be really transparent about Google works.

The SMX show was also a pretty good week for webmasters. We’re alerting webmasters more often when they get hacked, we released an SEO audit of google.com so that everyone could benefit from the advice, we pushed forward on the ability to crawl AJAX, and we added delegation to the webmaster console.

After the conference, the new stuff hasn’t stopped:
- The webmaster tools team added the ability to verify a site using the domain name system (DNS). If editing a meta tag or uploading a file on your website is hard (maybe because you have an unusual content management system), then DNS verification can be handy.
- We announced that we’re going to start emailing webmasters if we believe their site is serving malware.
- Earlier this week, the webmaster tools team added a bunch more data into our Top Search Queries features.

And of course we’ve had a ton of informational blog posts on the official Google webmaster blog. If you don’t read and subscribe to that blog, you should.

(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.)

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.

In fact, if you read the official blog post, you’ll notice that the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page. So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that “We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.” The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.

There are lots of tools to help you identify ways to improve the speed of your site. The official blog post gives lots of links, and some of the links lead to even more tools. But just to highlight a few, Google’s webmaster console provides information very close to the information that we’re actually using in our ranking. In addition, various free-to-use tools offer things like in-depth analysis of individual pages. Google also provides an entire speed-related mini-site with tons of resources and videos about speeding up websites.

I want to pre-debunk another misconception, which is that this change will somehow help “big sites” who can affect to pay more for hosting. In my experience, small sites can often react and respond faster than large companies to changes on the web. Often even a little bit of work can make big differences for site speed. So I think the average smaller web site can really benefit from this change, because a smaller website can often implement the best practices that speed up a site more easily than a larger organization that might move slower or be hindered by bureaucracy.

Also take a step back for a minute and consider the intent of this change: a faster web is great for everyone, but especially for users. Lots of websites have demonstrated that speeding up the user experience results in more usage. So speeding up your website isn’t just something that can affect your search rankings–it’s a fantastic idea for your users.

I know this change will be popular with some people and unpopular with others. Let me reiterate a point to the search engine optimizers (SEOs) out there: SEO is a field that changes over time, and the most successful SEOs embrace change and turn it into an opportunity. SEOs in 1999 didn’t think about social media, but there’s clearly a lot of interesting things going on in that space in 2010. I would love if SEOs dive into improving website speed, because (unlike a few facets of SEO) decreasing the latency of a website is something that is easily measurable and controllable. A #1 ranking might not always be achievable, but most websites can be made noticeably faster, which can improve ROI and conversion rates. In that sense, this change represents an opportunity for SEOs and developers who can help other websites improve their speediness.

I know that there will be a lot of discussion about this change, and some people won’t like it. But I’m glad that Google is making this step, both for the sake of transparency (letting webmasters know more about how to do better in Google) and because I think this change will make the web better. My takeaway messages would be three-fold: first, this is actually a relatively small-impact change, so you don’t need to panic. Second, speeding up your website is a great thing to do in general. Visitors to your site will be happier (and might convert more or use your site more), and a faster web will be better for all. Third, this change highlights that there are very constructive things that can directly improve your website’s user experience. Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.