Quality Content Helps Your SEO

We are passing through the time where loading a blog with content filled with keywords and little else will help your search result standings.  As this Nolo blog post states, Google has changed its ranking algorithm to focus on quality rather than merely quantity. 

How Does This Impacts Lawyers?

If you have a blog called, “Personal Injury San Jose” and feature posts about recent car crashes with a boiler plate paragraph at the bottom about why you should contact an attorney immediately if you are the victim of such an accident, then this is bad news.  However, if you provide quality articles about how people can work with their car insurance adjusters and ways they can protect themselves through how they purchase their insurance, then you probably are helped by these rules.  Google is looking to promote content which contains professional and technical expertise rather than that which is merely saturated with keywords.

Google’s privacy policy improvements

This post explains how Google has made its privacy policy more readable by trimming out the extraneous bits, creating a privacy tools page and FAQ are all positive moves.  However, it’s disappointing that the Google lawyer doesn’t spell out what Google is attempting to achieve with it’s privacy policy which is hopefully to build trust with Google users about how their information is protected.

Google Settles “Buzz” lawsuit for $8 million

Earlier this year I posted about this lawsuit.  Seems like Google took it pretty seriously, agreeing to donate more than $8 million to various educational and privacy non-profits.

Google search Saturday

Here are a couple cool new Google search features:

• You can use Google updates to follow tweets on a subject in real time.  It feels like watching a telex maching (I’m dating myself!)
• Using localized Google search, the auto-suggest function provides more granular information.  Thus as a Bay Area resident, my search on “Bart” will yield specialized transit information NOT Bart Simpson.

Google “recalling” Buzz privacy settings

Starting today, Google has decided to ask all its users to confirm or change their Buzz privacy settings.  So far, I haven’t seen the great value of Buzz.  I’ve looked it over and the most I can determine is that could help improve my search visibility and give me another channel to disseminate blog content.  But maybe I need to spend more time looking at its features.

Trusted for privacy: Facebook not in top 20

According to Ponemon Institute’s annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Study, American Express is the most trusted company when come to handling privacy issues.  Facebook dropped from the top 20 list this year and Google which had dropped off, returned to the list in 2010.  However, after Google “Buzz” they may not stay there for long.

Google sued for bloggers negative comments

Four unknown bloggers using Google’s Knol and Blogspot, allegedly defamed the owner of a group called the National Association of Professional Women because they called it a scam.

The author of this article believe the suit won’t go anywhere because courts have judged the word, “scam” as an opinion not a fact.  Also the suit doesn’t provide the context for the word usage and courts have been unable to judge a word defamatory without understanding the context.

Google takes on Lexis and Westlaw

Not quite but Google has added free case law to its Google Scholar offering.  Quickly searching this database I was struck by two things:

*In terms of content, this is a limited database which could serve as a quick and cheap alternative when I need to find out something about a legal issue.  It isn’t appropriate for any question when the goal is to be exhaustive. 

*The Google interface is far superior to anything the proprietary legal vendors offer.  It’s very straightforward and easy to use in a way that I hope is keeping Lexis and Westlaw product developers up at night.

Use iGoogle for competitive intelligence

iGoogle allows users to create landing pages for just about anything Google has created an app for and more.  One of the things I use it for is to quickly monitor news about competitors and clients.  And because this is Google, it’s all free.

Basic how-to:

Go to the iGoogle page and if this is your first visit to iGoogle you will see a big button that says, “Look for new stuff to add” which will take you to page full of gadgets you can easily insert into your iGoogle page.  There is also a search button that allows you to find things to add to your page.

Next, search on “alerts” and this will bring up a Google news box that you can customize and add to your page. 

Now you face a question: do you want to load all these news alerts to your one iGoogle tab or create specific tabs for specific activities?  I chose the latter approach and have created a tab called, “Top ten clients.”   To create a tab you open the down arrow to the right of your “Home” label and click on last pull down item, “add a tab.”

A box will come up and you can give this tab any name you want.  It will then save it as a link below your iGoogle home tab.  You can open this tab and start setting up custom Google news searches on your top clients.  The results will display on this page under a label for each client (you create the label) and Google news will stream its most recent news for these clients.  You can display anywhere from 1 to 9 items.  It defaults at three and I chose to see five.  I find it a lot easier to monitor news at a glance rather than have alerts come to my email where I have to open them up individually and scan through them.

Tip:  don’t just follow these instructions.  Play around with iGoogle yourself and I’ll bet you quickly will find uses that work better for you or can improve this approach.  iGoogle is not only very powerful but also lots of fun.

Remember:  I will be speaking about competitive intelligence for law firms in San Francisco tomorrow.

Google announces Social Search

Want to know what your friends think of a new restaurant?  Welcome to Google’s Social Search.  Here is a Google video about how it works.

Already people are understandably wary.