Discussion with Sep Kamvar About Gadgets
Last week I traveled out to California for a series of meetings at Google, and also so I could be at the Searchification event. One of the people I sat down with at Google was Sepandar Kamvar (aka Sep Kamvar). While Sep is well known for his work on personalization at Google, our conversation focused on another area, that of Google gadgets.
I learned a few important things about the Google Gadget world. One of these is that getting a large number of gadgets you have developed installed by other users is not something that will help with your web search rankings. This is consistent with a conversation I had later with Matt Cutts, where Matt told me that this signal was simply too noisy.
On another note, promotion of gadgets is something that requires some effort as well. It’s easier to get something to go viral if you nudge it along by getting the word out. Sep suggested that one way to do this is to buy Google Adwords ads to promote the gadget.
Another thing I learned is that placement in the Google Gadget Directory is based on popularity. You can get a lot of visibility here, but only if you achieve a high ranking. Note that user deletions of gadget installations also count as a negative signal for purposes of ranking in the Google directory.
We also talked about what makes a really good gadget. Here are the 3 main points I took out of the conversation: