turktrans blog

It is snowing in Ankara. The season’s first snow. The city is putting its white clothes on slowly, calmly. Children rushing here and there in the snow. Well, it is not enough to build snowman or ride sleds. But it is falling, and snow on the trees and children in the snow is enough to compose a beatiful picture and lead to flashbacks.

This lovely view takes me to my blissful childhood in a deserted (more deserted during winters) village in a northern east region of Turkey that can be properly called a snowland. We used to play from early morning till sunset rolling down the hills, building snowman, or riding sleds, our ears, noses, hands and feet turning to purple.

Now, as a grown up, I have deadlines to keep, and a website to launch.

“I wish I were a child again playing in the snow!” I thought.
“I wish I were a snowflake,” said my 7 yr son. “Then I can fly everywhere I like!” he continued.

“This must be life!” I thought. “Everyone dreams the impossibilities of the moment.”

Jagger has came and gone. Now waiting for the Saga.

After literally thousands of posts, tens of thousands of datacenter checks, and weeks of sleepless nights, the Watchers of Google seem exhausted, bored, disheartened. Many seem lost their excitement and hope. Their initial hope was replaced first by a stressful waiting, then a traumatic disheartening, a resentment against Google, and now by a post-traumatic stress syndrome, as it were. Many are now displaying symptoms what are classically associated with PTSS: feelings of guilt, resentment, grief, emotional numbing, loss of pleasure, impaired concentration, disbelief, confusion, exhaustion, distrust, etc.

In my humble opinion, Google updates, especially prolonged updates such as the current one have became a sociological phenomenon to be analyzed. But leaving its sociological and psychological implications, it has serious marketing implications that should be carefully scrutinized.

Search statistics:

Every month, search statistics are published for major players in the market like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Aol, Askjeeves, etc. Having more searches by surfers means more referrals, more ads, and hence more money. That is why every search engine tries to maximize the number of users of that engine. Each one launches its own toolbar, own email, chat, messenger, etc. programs to drive more users, and produce more results.

But no statistics tell us how much of this traffic is inflated, and how much of it is artificial, empty searches by webmasters or SEO people to check the position of websites they monitor.

For current Google update which is in progress over one month, we can make a rough calculation. From webmaster forums, it is evident that thousands of webmasters are constantly watching and checking tens of Google datacenters. There are pages that checks more than 20 datacenters at once, and there are numerous such websites offering this service free. Now, assuming that a webmaster checks such datacenters 10 times a day for 3 keyword combinations,

10 x 20 x 3 = 600 artificial searches a day by a single webmaster.

When we assume that some 10000 webmasters do the same throughout the month, we get:

10,000 x 600 x 30 = 180,000,000 artificially produced searches.

Impressive, indeed! But this is the picture from the Google’s side.

There is another group positioned before Google: Websites offering various services to webmasters, and SEO people: discussion forums, SERP position check tools, PR check tools, link check tools, etc. I checked the Alexa rankings of a couple of such sites and observed a significant increase in their traffic during the last Google Dance aka Jagger.

All these websites seem doubled their traffics as compared to pre-Jagger period. And assuming that during such updates people are more anxious, more sensitive and susceptible, we can safely guess that these websites doubled their income as well!

This is really a win-win situation for both Google, SEO people, and websites offering services to webmasters and SEO people.

The more such dancing lasts, the more profitable it becomes. Long live Jagger!

Strict confidentiality in translation business is a requirement that some fellow translators do not seem to be fully aware of as evidenced by a recent post somewhere else.

A colleague asking for help in translating some English terms into Turkish posted a whole commercial letter attached to his question without omitting a word:

Dear X

Main body of the letter

Sincerely yours,
Mr Y.

It was a letter from the top manager of a European company to the top manager of a Turkish company discussing some business strategies and areas of possible cooperation in shipping services.

As you would guess, shipping is a highly competitive business, and having a B2B private letter posted at an international support forum means publishing it online and delivering it to an indeterminate number of recipients including competitors and therefore exposing someone else’s business to unforeseeable risks. Confidentiality was indeed compromised!

I warned the colleague to delete his post and post only the terms for which he is seeking help in Turkish translation, or if context is required, edit the letter so as to render it unrecognizable. Before getting a response from the colleague, the forum moderator, a responsive and educated translator herself, squashed the question deleting the post altogether. And she mentioned “confidentiality” as one of the reasons for squashing the question. Thanks to her, the confidentiality of the letter in question was saved within minutes!

For a couple of days (in fact, for the last three week), thousands of anxious webmasters are on watch waiting for Jagger to come while drinking their beers, or perhaps taking some pills to ease their nerves. Even, I read somewhere that wifes of some fellow webmaster are moaning that they are always on their PCs waiting for the jagger. But who is this popular guy called Jagger, and why he is so much desperately waited for?

Each major update in SERPs by Google (aka Google Dance) is given a name: Florida, Bourbon, Austin, etc. And the last one is called Jagger. This update is said to involve three distinct stages of which the first two are already over. And what is waited for is the last stage of update as confirmed by two popular Googlemen to begin this Wednesday.

When Google starts dancing, webmasters sweat to bullet, since it means survival or oblivion for their sites in terms of rankings in SERPs. Too many webmasters wake up in the morning to see that their sites are thrown into oblivion in Google SERPs. So, every such dance turns into a nightmare, a horror story for some, while it becomes others’ victory, since it is a zero-sum game for the webmasters: if one wins, the other looses. A website that ranks #1 after such a dancing means an equal loss for one that previously occupied the #1.

It is a well known fact that if your site is not among top 10 or 20, it is practically non-existent, since surfers rarely goes beyond second or third page while searching the internet. Great majority of surfers stop querying after the second page. Therefore, being among top rankers means more visitors which in turn mean more sales and more money. Conversely, failing to appear among top rankers means loss of visitors, and hence loss of money.

That is why everyone are alarmed, and waits impatiently for the Jagger to come. With every hour passing, this waiting gets harder, nerves get tenser, and everyone ask each other:

Did you see Jaggar?
Has not it came yet?

And the answer:

Yes, saw it in such and such DataCenter already!
- No it is not!
- Yes it is!
- No it is not!
And so on

And all Google datacenters are mentioned as showing the Jagger, or at least a glimpse of it. Everyone seems to select the one datacenter that best fits his/her own wishes. And even though Google staff announced that the Jagger has yet to come, our fellow webmasters do not seem to be tired of posting a new datacenter repeatedly to show that the Jagger has already came.

Meanwhile, I received an email from a webmaster for whom I suggested some minor improvements for a better SERP position that there is sharp decline in the number of visitors for the last two days to which I responded with assurance that it is probably a normal fluctuation and would normalize soon. Next day, I received another email that everything is OK and things seem to be normalizing!

Nowadays, people are becoming increasingly nervous about their positions in the search engines as evidenced by literally thousands of posts at forums run and populated by webmasters. Being oversensitized to even minor changes in SERP positions, people react normal fluctuation (which they called, with an unfortunate term, an everflux) with panic and anxiety, and frantically search for feedback about the cause of such changes.

I read people checking dozens of google datacenters constantly (hundred times a day) to see if their website is still “there.” And refreshing forum pages by repeatedly pressing F5 key to see if a new message is posted.

Yesterday, the third wave of Jagger is confirmed, and first datacenters with updated indexes became visible. Today, the new index is observed to go live at different points of the world. Therefore, it is now time, as they say, for webmasters to bow their heads for a moment of silence in memory of fellow webmasters whose sites dropped or disappeared from the index after the Jagger.

And hail those whose sites bumped up with Jagger, including Turktrans.net.

With the current status of Jagger, it seems that Turktrans will bump up substantially. After normalization and stabilization of initial flux, I would expect it on the first page. Now it is time to work harder to add some content to my site!