My Lunch With Retired Google VP Wayne Rosing

My Lunch With Retired Google VP Wayne Rosing
Retired VP of Google Wayne Rosing and Taylor Reaume

I felt very fortunate to be able to be involved!

I got an email last month from Catalyst who let me know the details about an upcoming lunch opportunity with retired Google Vice President of Engineering, Wayne Rosing. I simply could not pass this up, being so heavily into Search Engine Optimization.

We met about Noon, April 15 in downtown Santa Barbara at the University Club. I first became aware of Mr. Rosing after I attending an interview conducted by a fellow SEO colleague of mine Jaques Habra at SBCC. I was fascinated by the gems of wisdom Wayne shared about managing employees, and the Google Way.

I left very fortunate to be involved in the lunch meeting with Wayne, and I actually got to sit right next to Wayne at the table. I learned some interesting new facts about Waynes history with the “G”, and also was fortunate to ask a couple questions as well. A few key takeaways I had from Mr. Rosing with regards to the Google hiring process:

1. The candidate must be highly technical

2. The candidate must be high sociable

3. The candidate must be able to work long hours and be passionate about success.

Wayne says Google was successful in hiring many people right of college. The ability to learn and adapt, and the work ethic he says was generally stronger with that demographic.

There were many other tid bits of wisdom Wayne shared with the group, such as making sure your employees are motivated, and incentivizing them in some way. He spoke about hiring the right people and how to manage them successfully, the Google way, and how to sharpen the hiring focus.

The more I listend to Wayne speak, the more I realized how much Google is really one of the foremost “epicenters of innovation” in so many ways. All in all it was quite a fascinating experience to be at the same table with Wayne – a very friendly and personable guy.

Wayne Rosings’ training has been in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Gaining experience as an engineering manager at DEC and Data General in the 1970s, he became a director of engineering at Apple Computer in the early 1980s. There he led the Apple Lisa project, the forerunner to the Macintosh. He then went on to work at Sun Microsystems and headed the spin-off First Person. At Sun Labs, his team developed Java. Rosing served as Vice President of Engineering at Google from January 2001 to May 2005.
He is a computer engineer by vocation, and has been programming, doing computer, electronics and optical design and telescope engineering since high-school.
Most recently, Wayne founded Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc. (LCOGT) now located in Goleta, CA.

At LCOGT, he and his staff of engineers and scientists are currently developing scores of 1 & 0.4 meter aperture telescopes to be placed in various locations around the world. These telescopes will be used  for scientific research as well as be available for educational use by “learners of all ages.”
You can check their work out at: http://lcogt.net/
Mr. Rosing currently resides in Santa Barbara, CA.

MINDS
“tapping global resources, locally”

Learn SEO: 301 Redirects And How They Impact Ranks

Learn SEO: 301 Redirects And How They Impact Ranks

301 Redirects can be a powerful tool for search engine optimization if they’re utilized correctly. For the webmaster hoping to learn SEO, 301 redirects are a critical service to be understood. This article will explain what exactly 301 redirects are and what a webmaster, whose goal is to learn SEO, should be doing to make the most of them.

One segment of web-based tools that seems to be expanding by the minute is the URL shortener. These are sites like tinyurl.com that allow users to redirect their long, cryptic URL to a much easier to remember web address. It’s obvious that these tools have the potential to make a lot of money: controlling a link is the same as controlling web traffic. And there are a number of ways in which a URL shortener can use the links it creates.

There are several advantages to the end-user of a URL shortener:

  • The most obvious is that the web address is, well, shorter. A long web address is not only hard to remember, it’s difficult to use in many other web-based services such as a Facebook Status Update or a Twitter tweet. Short web addresses conserve valuable character space in these services.
  • Many URL shortener services keep detailed traffic statistics about the web address, which means the owner of the shortened web address can see not only how much traffic visited the web address but also where the traffic came from.
  • A shortened web address hides the “real URL” or the destination page. This is great when your original web address is long and hard on the eyes. But it can also help some unscrupulous page owners by hiding the identity of the page behind the shortened web address, which sometimes might be a page that many users wouldn’t want to visit.
  • Some URL shorteners allow users to choose a custom web address. The advantage of having a memorable web address is that a web surfer doesn’t have to search for it; it’s also re-usable, meaning the web address can be re-directed to new content. One example is http://tinyurl.com/mypictures, which might point to an online album with an almost indecipherable web address.
  • The best URL shortening service will use a 301 redirect to pass along their Google page rank to the destination web address. This helps the redirected web address advance in search rankings.
  • Many web services utilize their own forwarding scripts that allow the link to be loaded into a frame, leaving the original page from which the link was clicked intact – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all do this. This allows a user on this site to link to relevant information without the reader leaving their profile page.
  • Some URL shorteners give their users access to their link database through an API. These links can provide users with limitless analytics potential to mine data and traffic information. Imagine if TinyURL could be merged with a Reddit or Digg.

But as with anything else, a URL shortener comes with its own set of disadvantages:

  • As noted above, unscrupulous users can hide potentially offensive or malicious destination pages with a shortened web address. Some URL shortener providers have begun to display the destination address alongside the shortened web address, and this practice will likely become more prevalent.
  • Creating a web address shortening service is relatively easy, but many attract so much traffic that their web hosting bills skyrocket and their services go out of business. When a URL shortening service shuts down, so do all of the links that anyone ever created with the service.
  • Shortened web addresses generally don’t convey any information about the content on the destination page and therefore offer no incentives to click on the link. A shortened web address in Twitter won’t contain any link text, and the reader is forced to gather context about the link from the text of the update. Optimizing social media SEO requires an entire skillset in its own right.
  • Many URL shorteners don’t have robust user account features – they simply allow anonymous users to redirect web addresses. While this might save time, it also prevents frequent users from being able to use a dashboard to organize their shortened web addresses and to keep track of which ones they’ve shortened.
  • Shortened web addresses generally have no link text and therefore do not associate themselves organically with a keyword. Readers have to either gather context from the surrounding content or take a chance with the link.

Learn SEO: How to Increase Page Rank

Learn SEO: How to Increase Page Rank

Learn SEO! This Week’s Discussion Points:

“Increase Page Rank And How It Affects Your Rankings”

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We will be discussing a variety of topics related to page rank (seo juice) and how it affects your rankings in Google and other major search engines. You will learn SEO and how to increase page rank to attract more visitors to your site.

Tune in tonight at 7pm, we look forward to seeing you on the call.

Happening Tonight @ 7pm On Your Phone

Visit Our Blog for details on tonights discussion points.

If you are free on Wednesday evenings, we hold a complementary Search Engine Optimization Webinar from 7pm-8pm. It’s informative. It’s educational.  And it gives you the opportunity to learn SEO from a seasoned internet marketing professional. Our weekly search engine marketing conference call can help you increase page rank to drive traffic to your website.

Call this number,484-589-1011 ( access code 223-974-217) and you will hear us talking about “Smart Things To Know About Search Engine Optimization”. You are encouraged to use the webinar Voiceover IP. The right way to join is to follow this link and register at gotomeeting.com.

To join this webinar the lazy way:

Step 1: goto www.joinwebinar.com
Step 2: enter this Webinar ID: 676368720
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• Increase page rank
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