Users can either search for trends across Google and YouTube, or restrict searches just to YouTube. Here’s how “Harlem Shake” compared to “Gangnam” on YouTube over the last 12 months:

Trends has always been a fun tool to get a sense of what people are searching for, but it has also been helpful to optimize your own websites for Google search results. And with YouTube now being part of Trends, one can expect that many video publishers will frequent the tool to figure how to name their videos. In other words: Don’t be too surprised if your YouTube experience looks a bit more zeitgeisty and SEO-optimized from now on.

That being said, it makes a lot of sense for Google to include YouTube data in Trends, even for the purpose of tracking search trends across Google properties: YouTube has long been the second-biggest search engine on the internet, following Google proper, but ahead of Bing and Yahoo.

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According to a study by Portent, an internet marketing firm, Google is steadily decreasing the number of manipulative links it will tolerate before it downgrades a site. When Google first introduced Penguin, the algorithm would permit 80 percent of a site’s incoming links to be spammy before it took action; that number then dropped to 65 percent and then 50 percent by the end of 2012 (which is end range of the study).

To come up with the findings, Portent examined thousands of incoming links for 50 major websites, and the effect those links had on sites’ prominence in search listings.

If the findings are correct, the upshot is that companies will have to be even more cautious about search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that rely on external links. These links are one signal that Google uses to decide if a site is popular, which has led some companies to acquire non-organic links through trade, purchase or other means. In one famous example, JC Penney used SEO tricks to appear as the top search listing for a wide range of terms, including “bedding” and “area rugs” before Google took action.

In some cases, it may be unfair for a site to be punished for outside links — particularly, if they have control over the sites that are linking to them. To prevent this, Google offers a “disavow” tool that sites can use to indicate that they don’t want particular links to considered as part of their search score.

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SEO is still a major traffic driver for publishers, but search is slowly losing its grip — constituting less than 50 percent of traffic sent to publishers — to an exploding number of social referrers. But, as publishers turn to social insights to optimize content and fuel site revenue, they run into a big problem. The data that they’re looking at to make these high and low-level decisions about social is inaccurate.

As the CEO of Parse.ly, a data and analytics platform provider for large-scale content sites, I’ve worked with teams from some of the biggest online publishers to resolve their data challenges. Social shares comprise a new data source that presents technical complexity specific to this market, and I have watched my company’s customers struggle with poor data leading to the wrong decisions.

Historically, publishers lamented over “fly-bys,” readers who discovered a site through a search engine, read the article, and then left without recognizing the brand or ever coming back. Though the explosion of social won’t directly convert these users, it does give publishers a whole new way to build engaged audiences that can translate to a decrease in fly-bys in the long run. With social, the strategy changes from passive (SEO) to active engagement, and that can have a dramatic affect on a user’s ability to recognize a publisher’s brand.

How does this happen? Well, it is certainly not just about tweeting all the new articles that you post on your site. Instead, it’s about understanding how your social audience is engaging with your content on and off your property. Publishers should be able to answer such questions as: What type of content resonates best with my audience from Facebook? Who are the top influencers of traffic to my site from Twitter? And if I focus on Pinterest as a social strategy, what type of traffic can I expect out of it?

The best publishers are getting even more savvy and looking at the virality of individual stories to judge success. And then extracting the viral characteristics of successful stories to make editorial decisions that hopefully continue to tickle reader curiosity and keep them coming back. For example, Buzzfeed wisely engineered a way to backfill Facebook timelines with “nostalgia-drenched” content through posts on their site, catering to readers’ desires to digitally re-live memories from an era before Facebook.

More and more successful publishers are dedicating resources to crack the nut on social the same way they did with SEO. The potential upside locked in social is huge.

Let me say it again: Unfortunately, your shares data is wrong

Simply put, the margin of error for shares data is unacceptable, and publishers are putting themselves at risk by making important decisions based on shot-in-the-dark conclusions.

On most publisher sites you see share buttons with the number of shares associated with each of the large social networks. Most publishers assume that these numbers correctly represent the number of shares associated with a particular post. However, there’s much more than what meets the eye.

The underlying problem with share buttons is that they only represent the number of shares associated with a single URL. For small sites that’s not a problem. But when you’re dealing with mid- to large-sized publishers, one URL does not equal one post. To explain why this is the case we have to go into a bit of history.

History of the publisher URL structure

Due to the way content and the Web has evolved, online publishers have been toying with the URL structure of their article pages for years. This has led to a slew of important “link alias” patterns for a variety of content types, including traditional news stories, articles, and slideshows. Here’s a list of the different subsets of URLs that publishers tend to deploy:

• Mobile versions, which tend to use m.domain.com
• Multi-page stories, which tend to have mulitple URLs all referring to the same story
• “Single-page” and “print-friendly” versions of a long-form article
• Comment threads
• Article updates (such as SBNation’s “story stream”)
• Alternative slugs for SEO testing
• Shortened URL redirects (such as bitly) for the purpose of squeezing into Twitter character limits and tracking click-throughs

Even worse, social networks do not agree on how to normalize a URL. For example, consider a link to this article at Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5909215. Should a link to http://www.gizmodo.com/5909215

be treated separately (notice the www.)?  How about a link to http://gizmodo.com/5909215/ (notice the new trailing forward slash)? How about a link to http://gizmo.do/KpJhhN (Gizmodo’s bitly redirect to the same story)?

Many publishers have as many as 50 different URLs that all point to the same “piece of content” on their site. But the only number they look at is the point-in-time share count for a single URL provided by the official share buttons, which often drastically undercounts the real number. In some cases, a publisher could be missing a majority of their shares data because not all URLs are fired against the social networks. Any shares data, no matter how trivial it appears, is still important, because a single share can translate to multiple page views. If you don’t have the right data, you can’t make the right decisions.

The editorial importance of accurate shares data

Many publishers find themselves crossing their fingers and hoping for a story to “go viral.” If a publisher is waiting for a story to go viral, they haven’t pulled out a microscope to examine their social strategy.

With accurate shares data in-hand, informed publishers can start to answer really interesting questions (such as the ones referenced at the beginning of this piece) about their content and the behavior of their readership.

Further, if publishers start to keep historical data about shares, then they can start doing trend-based analysis across the data to gain even deeper insight. Real-time shares data is important, but it doesn’t tell you, for example, which stories are increasing in their velocity of shares (10 shares in the past ten minutes versus 20 shares in the following 10 minutes). Even more, with a historical look you start to understand the cause-and-effect of why stories did well and what led to their success (in-house efforts, other referrals, organic, partnerships). Since most of the current social network APIs don’t support this type of data, publishers would have to either build the infrastructure to capture this information or leverage a third-party service.

Diving into social data is incredibly important. It can dramatically influence the voice and content strategies of a publication. This is why it’s absolutely critical for publishers to take social-as-a-strategy seriously. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss solutions to the shares problem as well as larger initiatives the industry can take to reconcile the issue.

Sachin Kamdar is an NYC entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Parse.ly. Parse.ly provides insights to online publishers through its flagship product, Dash. Dash captures publisher specific data to present the best opportunities for engagement and to improve key metrics for publishers.

Image courtesy of Flickr user KungPaoCajun.

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Santorum’s search engine ordeal began in 2003 after he made a series of anti-gay comments in the media. In response, columnist and gay-rights activist Dan Savage led a successful campaign to push a new definition of “santorum” to the top of search listings. The results of that campaign can be seen in the following screenshot taken this morning:

As the image shows, the leading result for “Santorum” is the website “spreading santorum.” The Google (NSDQ: GOOG) search results page also displays a definition that wouldn’t be printable in a family newspaper and a click on the top link brings up an obscene graphic.

When the former Senator was a relative obscurity, Savage’s search engine campaign was (depending on your point of view) either mean or a funny and effective political tactic. But with Santorum’s newfound prominence there is a real possibility that six-graders across the land will encounter “spreading santorum” in the course of a civics class assignment. And it is not just a “Google problem,” as Politico described it in September, but a full blown search phenomenon. A search of his name brings up the same results in Bing and Yahoo!.

What can Santorum do? For now, not much. The First Amendment and America’s defamation laws for public figures mean that a lawsuit is out of the question (and would probably spur even more interest in the site).

Santorum tried approaching Google in September but was reportedly rebuffed. According to “In the Plex” author Stephen Levy, founder Sergey Brin once wrestled with the same issue over the fact the word “Jew” once brought up offensive sites, but ultimately decided that the company’s search results should not be tampered with.

In the long run, the social conservative may eventually be able to dislodge the “spreading santorum” site if he can gain more fame as a mainstream politician than as a gay-rights opponent. As SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan explained in a definitive article on the Santorum phenomenon, McDonald’s was slowly able to push down unwanted search results like “McCruelty.” But given the vigor of his opponents, there is no chance Santorum will be able do this anytime soon.

The most sensible course of action for Santorum may be to agree to Savage’s proposed truce in which he will take the website down in exchange for Santorum recognizing gay people as equal citizens. In doing so, he would be accepting a position that is receiving support from courts, the federal government and most Americans. I can also attest that my own aunts are enjoying a happy life together after getting married in Canada five years ago and that, strangely, Canada hasn’t turned into a giant gay bath house.

In the meantime, parents worried about their children learning too much from their civics lessons can change their Google search filter from “moderate” to “strict.”

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Each and every video on the Khan Academy’s website now comes with a subtitle menu that allows viewers to pick the language of their choosing. Some of the videos, like the first lesson of Khan’s Arithmetic course, already feature plenty of translations, ranging from Spanish to Chinese to Tamil. Check out the clip below, complete with all of the available subtitles:

Other clips come with fewer languages, and some don’t have any captions at all yet. Community members can transcribe these videos through an easy-to-use online captions editor, and existing transcriptions can be peer-edited to work out any kinks.

Khan Academy’s translation project director Bilal Musharraf told us via email that Universal Subtitles was the ideal partner to pull of this kind of internationalization of the site’s video assets. “It was a good match for what we were looking for because its basic service of enabling an existing volunteer community to gather subtitles was available at no cost,” he said. Eventually, the subtitles will also be used as scripts for translators to voice over the videos, Musharraf explained.

Khan is only one of a growing number of sites that relies on Universal Subtitles for translation and accessibility. The initiative was launched less than a year ago by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, but it already helped site owners and volunteers to transcribe around 100,000 videos. Some of its other users include Mozilla and Al-Jazeera, which recently began to use the platform to crowdsource the translation of citizen media footage from Syria, Tunisia and other Arab spring hot spots.

Crowdsourcing captions not only makes content from Khan and others more accessible both to people with hearing disabilities and speakers of languages other than English, it can also help with SEO efforts. Full-text transcripts of videos can be indexed by search engines, making video assets easier to discover. “It’s a huge part of where online video is headed,” said Participatory Culture Foundation cofounder Nicholas Reville via email.

It’s also something online video makers increasingly are forced to do: Congress passed a law last year that will eventually force broadcasters to provide closed captions for any web video that also aired on TV. Last week, disability advocates sued CNN and Netflix to force the companies to caption all video on their sites. The plaintiffs in both cases argued that CNN and Netflix discriminate against deaf viewers by not providing captions.

The outcome of the cases is unclear at this point, but a legal precedent in favor of disability rights advocates could potentially force a wide range of online video publishers to provide subtitles for their video catalog. Quite a few publishers might decide to follow the Khan Academy’s example and appeal to their audiences to help with captioning.

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Facebook is closing in on 700 million users, but according to a new study by the Pew Research center, the Drudge Report sends more than twice as much traffic to the nation’s top news sites. According to the report:

• Overall, Drudge accounts for 7 percent of all traffic sent to news sites. That’s more than Facebook (3 percent) and Twitter (1 percent) combined.
• “Drudge Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to which it drove traffic” (emphasis added). In other words, for every single news site Drudge was ranked as a traffic source, it maintained its lead over the social networking sites.
• Drudge drives traffic to sites across the ideological spectrum. Fox News (11 percent), Washington Post (15 percent), ABC News (11 percent), USA Today (8 percent), and Boston Globe (11 percent) all receive significant portions of their traffic from Drudge.
• Only Google tops the Drudge Report as a traffic source.

PBS created an infographic contrasting Drudge with Facebook and Twitter. A caption on the graphic puts it all into perspective: “Five of the top 21 news sites receive more than 10 percent of their audience from the Drudge Report.”

It’s time to give Drudge his due

Forget the wisdom of the crowd. When it comes to online news, Matt Drudge is the one friend that news outlets really need to have.

Given how news outlets have struggled to adapt to the rise of the web, this should make Matt Drudge a hero. He’s sending outrageous amounts of traffic to traditional news outlets, giving them a chance to monetize their professionally generated content. But if you mention Matt Drudge in the tech world, the best you can hope for is a smirk.

Drudge is seldom lauded in Silicon Valley as a web innovator — much less an amazing entrepreneur — which is a shame. Maybe it’s because the design of his website has changed little in 14 years. He’s not on the cusp of the latest web technology to deliver content. Plus, he is politically conservative, which is at odds with the Silicon Valley area’s liberal ethos.

It’s time to give Matt Drudge his due as an Internet pioneer. Before blogging and the rise of the citizen journalist, there was the Drudge Report. In 1998, he was the first to break news linking Bill Clinton to Monica Lewinsky, a scandal that would later lead to impeachment charges being approved in the House of Representatives for only the second time in our republic’s history. That might have been the rocket that took Drudge to the top, but it’s been his own hard work and journalistic instincts that have kept him there for well over a decade.

Drudge’s game-changing design, data-driven approach

Matt Drudge used the web to change the way media works. He showed us that the Walter Cronkites of the news world — curators working at massive conglomerates — shouldn’t have a stranglehold on information. In that sense, he paved the way for subsequent online content entrepreneurs like Arianna Huffington, Mike Arrington, and Om Malik.

He also set a paradigm for web design that still stands to this day. Critics who call his site ugly miss the point. It’s easy to navigate, doesn’t hide important information under sub-sections, and has a minimalist approach to layout. It’s also data-driven. Visit the Drudge Report several times in a day and you’ll see how he tweaks headlines and moves articles around to get the optimal configuration.

Will the Drudge Report’s importance to online news compared to Facebook and other social networks diminish over time? Of course. Social networking is becoming too big a part of our lives to think otherwise. But that’s missing the point. Matt Drudge is an Internet pioneer who’s been at the top of his game since the early days of the web, and he’s disrupted an entire industry in the process.

Eric M. Jackson is the CEO/co-founder of CapLinked, an online platform for private companies, investors, and their advisors to network, manage a capital raise or asset sale, and exchange updates. He previously ran the marketing team at PayPal and is the author of The PayPal Wars.

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YouTube has been providing automatic captioning of its vast library of content since early last year, using the same type of voice recognition technology that’s also at work on any Android phone. However, automatic captioning isn’t always accurate, and there’s no way for a publisher to correct automatically-generated captions in real time. That’s why the new YouTube Live captions feature relies on professional real-time captioning professionals instead of algorithms.

Google has hired a team of San Francisco-based Computer Assisted Realtime Transcription professionals to make sense of the spoken word during the Google I/O keynotes. “Working in teams on-site at I/O, they type at several hundred words a minute on specialized stenography equipment,” explained Black via email. She added: “We project the text on screens at I/O for the audience, and the text is also streamed live to an AppEngine gadget that delivers it to our website and YouTube channel.” Visitors to the site will then be able to translate the text in real time using machine translations.

YouTube officially unveiled its live streaming offering a month ago and has since given a limited number of partners a chance to broadcast their live video on its site. These partners will also be able to use the same AppEngine gadget, but they’ll have to work with and pay for their own live transcription service. Videos with captions will be searchable in full, which should give live streaming partners a considerable SEO bump.

Black and some of her coworkers are going to show attendees of Google I/O on Wednesday how they used Google’s AppEngine and YouTube’s API to implement live captions. The AppEngine gadget itself will be published as open-source code on Google Code, and Black told me it could theoretically also be used by YouTube’s competition. “We designed the gadget primarily to meet the needs of YouTube Live partners, but the code can easily be repurposed to work with other streamed text providers, and even other sites,” she said, adding: “You could use it on any website to provide live captions, regardless of where the video is hosted, or even without video at all.”

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