In some situations this isn’t a bad thing – searching for an event was always badly handled by Google who have historically favoured older content over new which means last year’s events would commonly turn up at the top of the results.  So this change can be good in that respect, as with a number of other possible searches such as news results – searching for “cricketers fixing scam” results in a load of new pages – most of which were published in the past 24 hours (and not just embedded news results).  Good times!

But the post from the Google blog always mentions product reviews as a potential target for this fresh tweak!  This is a big one.  News and events are easy – very time based pieces of content.  But how does a search engine differentiate between different types of static content such as a product review?  Importantly, how does it tell the difference between a product review and a bog standard static page?  Rich snippet markup perhaps may be a good source here, but not every website has adopted this approach.  This reeks of an update that is going to have a lot of causalities!

How would you react?

SEO has always been quite a mid to long term strategy (well, back in the day you could rank overnight for any term quite easily, but things have slowed down since then) – only small pockets of the industry can have fun with instant rankings – news optimisation, blogsearch, PPC, etc.   But if Google is rolling out a new jazzy instant rank algorithm, how much of a red rag to a bull is that for the SEO community?

Seriously, how much of the industry will shift from creating good content to churning out low quality “fresh” content in whatever form that may entail – rubbish comments, reviews, slight editorial changes, republishing reviews, etc  – all to maintain “temporary” rankings over a longer period of time?  Strangely, I think this change will benefit the more technically minded “black hat” community (I used the term loosely, but you know who I mean) who can autogenerate “fresh” content in much larger scales, compared to the content generation community.

From the Google Blog:

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Well, yes and no.  I want the best, most informative reviews and those aren’t necessarily the most recent ones.  In cases they will be, but is Google good enough to work out which is which?  Or am I going to get the most recent reviews regardless?  This could really hurt review sites that have taken a lot of time to push users to write decent reviews.

The Panda update really riled a lot of SEOs – many of whom spent a lot of time following Google’s guidelines reasonably well (OK a lot pushed the boat out, but not all the way into spam territory).  Are we looking at a scenario where those who are legitimately making an effort to produce a decent web business lose out and those who like to game the system have more tools in their arsenal to do so?

Perhaps not, although it’s fun to wear the conspiracy theory hat for a while!

Perhaps this is a logical progression from the Panda updates which, in one way or another, did force a purge of borderline low quality sites from the index?  Maybe Panda was a prelude to a bigger quality / freshness push in which this is the next stage?  Could Google have even attempted this a year ago pre-Panda or was there too much SEO-heavy content (and you know what I mean by that!) to drown out the reputable content sources?  Caffeine implements the infrastructure, Panda flushes the system and (insert freshilicious name) brings us closer to pure real time search that is has the potential to be fairly spam free?

Maybe Google is certain that they have it right this time – or maybe it’s going to go tits up and really annoy a lot of SEOs (and frankly annoying the one group of people who have the skills and knowledge to poison your core product is kinda stupid)?  What do you think?  Should be interesting all the same – will be keeping an eye on analytics over the next few days!

Related articles

• Google Panda Update Rolls Out Worldwide (fusednation.com)
• Google Rich Snippets Tool (fusednation.com)
• Announcing: The Complete Google Algo History (seomoz.org)

Worth having a play around with and good to test out differnet options.  Remember, Bing likes rich snippets too!

If your website or client’s websites are in any way local, then rich snippet markup is almost as important as getting listed on review sites and Google Places, etc these days.  Local seach is one crowded place – there are loads of different players trying out different things and as usual the search engines are trying to aggregate the data rather than doing their own thing (although Google is doing a little bit of both).

Think about what it means to be able to control how your local business listing appears within search results.  Have a bland title and description, OR;

• Address & Map
• Star rating and reviews
• Contact details
• Deep links to your key content
• Take away prime space from your lesser ranking competitors!

Most standard CMSs should be simple enough to add in rich snippets in and freebie pieces of software like WordPress will have plenty of plugins (although the WP one doesn’t work with the current build…).

On a search query I’ve been working on today, the potential client is 2nd place (normal listing).  1st place is a a competitor with all the stuff I just listed.  Screenshot of the SERPs is all that’s needed to secure the pitch.

No brainer.

You can find the form here: www.google.com/tools/do-our-job-for-us

Let’s see.  Google crushes legitimate business websites in an attempt to remove spam from the index.  Google crushes competition by undercutting them left, right and centre (analytics market is pretty much stagnent and frankly Adense just promotes lazy webmasters who’d rather take some easy bucks than work at their business).  Oh and is quite happy to take vast amounts of our information without mentioning how valuable it actually is too loudly…

And now they want us – that’s the webmaster community (because frankly, no one else cares about paid links – in fact most normal people probably find the idea ridiculous) – to hunt down some evil paid linkers!!

I already give you my search data, browsing history and patterns via Google toolbar, metrics on the quality of my websites via Google Adsense (for a minute fee…), traffic metrics via Google Analytics, an idea of my financials, budgets and target market via Google Adwords.  And now you want ME to improve YOUR product….for FREE?

I think not.

My charge for this service is £500 per reported paid link.  You can afford it and frankly this relationship you and I have has been one sided for many years and I think it’s about time the balance was reset.  C’mon – cough up.  There’s plenty in the war chest since Gates, Jobs & Co nailed the patent bidding war!

I love the way Google has done business over the years.  They don’t compete – they innovate and do it very well for their part.  Actually, they do it as well as a bunch of tech geeks can do it.  Simplicity and ease of use seems to prevail in the Google corporate culture, but this attitude is quickly moving from a fairly reasonable policy to something way more insidious.

What I love is ease in which Google have consumed their chosen markets – not through the aggressive marketing activities that characterise brands such as Coke or Pepsi.  But through developing products and services that people didn’t really know they needed or wanted – that’s genius!

My beef with the big G is that their vision really ends there and the success they see in each market not only scares away some competitors but goes a long way to stifling innovation and growth in other business sectors.

Take Adsense for example.  How much does your blog earn you from Adsense revenue alone?  Probably not that much.  And how much do you earn from direct advertising?  Quite a lot more.  Assuming of course you actually bother to do that – I get the impression that many bloggers don’t.  Which is  a shame really, because you could be earning 10 times what Adsense pays you.  For how many people would that make the difference between being a part time hobby site and being a full time living?

This happening in generic markets is one thing, but moving into verticals is a bold move by Google and is certainly going to upset a few people – but are any of the those people the end user?

I can complain about Google’s search dominance, but I confess, I use Google and don’t look at other search engines (other than for work stuff).  I complain about Adsense and Google Analytics but I still use those and don’t really give more than a passing thought to the amount of data I’m signing away in return for an easy life.  Google Adwords, despite being basic and somewhat dated now is still an effective marketing technique that I can use so I don’t really think about traditional marketing and business expansion.  Will I use Google’s hotel search?  Maybe.  I may not even think about the host of middlemen sites that are losing out because of this.  And perhaps I won’t think about these things until Google comes for my verticals?

I think I’d like to trial a Google-free business plan at some point.  No analytics, Adwords, Adsense, search, local, etc.  Might be fun to see how it pans out.

Update Panda went live in the US a few weeks ago and many sites were hit badly, with some webmasters reporting a loss of up to 80% of their traffic, even for well established websites that have been around for years.

The update was designed to significantly remove low quality websites from the index (or simply score high quality websites differently) and seems to have had a wide impact in the SEO community.

The WebmasterWorld thread has some information that’s worth a read and the Google forums have a dedicated support thread for people who’s sites have been hit.

Happy to report that so far anyway, I haven’t seen any impact from the update, other than a few rankings improving here and there.  Next to no impact on traffic levels.

Has anyone had a site that’s been hit that would care to share the details?   I’m sure any SEO types hanging out here would be happy to offer some feedback on issues you’re having with your business websites.

Scott

An error with GA presumably, but why is toolbar search data being included with the GA data in any shape or form?  I *may* have been logged in to Google when I made the search via the toolbar, I can’t remember (I log in and out all the time).

I’m guessing there’s some mix up with data tracking – because I had also been back and forward to Zero Strategy between searches – so perhaps GA has registered the search query and then noticed I ended up on Zero Strategy?  But it definitely wasn’t a direct SERP click through so why is the referral in my logs?

I only noticed due to ZS being a new site so has fairly low search volume right now – how many other odd results are slipping into GA logs?

Scott

The search engine giant’s latest digital marketing venture has been launched in conjunction with the creator of adult animated comedies, Family Guy and American Dad, Seth MacFarlane.

A new series of two-minute long episodes from the creator will run on AdSense member websites, reports the New York Times.

The cartoons will also be placed alongside other advertisements and will be available, but will also be available on the Google-owned YouTube.com, Google spokesperson Daniel Rubin told Reuters.

As many as 50 episodes of the animated shorts are said to have been planned so far.

In a separate move, Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled plans to release the new action film Hancock for Sony Bravia TV owners before its DVD release.

Google and Sony’s move follow research by ZenithOptimedia, which claimed that online video advertising will grow by 41 per cent this year.

The 3 companies have allowed ad company, Phorm, to access customers browsing records in order to serve relevant ads to any website publisher wishing to join the scheme.  The proceeds would then be shared between Phorm, the 3 Internet providers and the website publisher.

From the article:

A marketer that wants to reach wealthy golfers, for instance, would not have to restrict itself to advertising on golf sites. Because the ad system would track golfers’ Web habits, it could follow them to other sites and show them golf-related ads there, too.

Queue Homer-esque response, “ewwwwww”!

OK, I have mixed feelings about this.  As a website owner, SEO and marketing professional having revenue and advertising alternatives is pretty good, but I really don’t know how comfortable I am being tracked at that level.  Although the article does say that customers of the ISPs involved will be able to opt out of the scheme (and will only be tracked by unique ID and not personal information), it still doesn’t sit very well with me.

Esther Dyson (tech analyst and investor) noted;

Bombarding consumers with more and more ads, even “relevant” ones, risks sending them to social networking services and other places on the Internet where advertisers find it harder to reach them.

That’s a fair point to a certain degree, although I think if Esther had more knowledge of the SEM industry she might consider whether or not social network traffic is that hard to reach for advertisers.

Small guy might be missing out here

Just going through the signup process at Phorm, I see they start their publisher info request form with traffic details – smallest on the list is 500k – 1 million – so it would seem they are targeting higher traffic sites or possibly networks.  I sent in an enquiry and will post back with some info when it arrives.

The demo seems quite interesting from an advertising point of view though.  The example given on the Phorm site explains the process for advertisers.  You can for example, choose to display ads for a Paris hotel only to users who had browsed French travel sites using the keywords “France” and “Paris” (on page), at least 3 times in the past 30 minutes.

That opens up a world of options for advertisers – instead of customising a few campaigns with vague targeting on Adwords, you can customise entire campaigns to target users at different stages of the decision making process.  Frequent browsing could equate to a greater intent to buy – therefore you can target your juicy sales pages to these people.  On the other hand, infrequent browsing could indicate an interest in a new area, allowing you to target more subtle, informational pages at potentially new customers.

It also means we could target different types of customers who are looking for the same service.  A potential new client with no previous SEO services and an existing client of a competitor looking to change supplier could very well browse different types of sites, looking for different types of information – why not tailor campaigns specifically to each customer type?

However, the one constraint with a system like this is scope.  They have the technology to run the system on – they have the user data to sell to advertisers – do they have the content network to justify such a large remit?  That’s where small website publishers could really make or break the campaign.

Last note on this – one cool feature is that publishers can dictate a threshold fee for their ad real estate (i.e. a minimum price advertisers pay to advertise on the site).  I like the sound of that.

Any thoughts on either being able to track and market users at this level, or being tracked and marketed to like this?

Scott

 

Pretty neat huh?  I’m seeing the additional search box added to quite a few SERPs today – seems to be only for site names just now.  I know TheBestOf use the Google Search Appliance for internal searches and I also see the search box on results for Youtube, Amazon and a few other big names.

Searching using the additional search box simply carries out a Google search for the keywords + site:domain.com, rather than producing customised search results from the company using the the search appliance (which would have been cool).

What’s worrying is that it is a slight step onto the toes of webmasters here.

• Say someone searches for your company name and they get this secondary search box that prompts them to “search your site”.
• Say then they decide to search your site.
• How do you feel about them getting these results:

Yup, 10 nice local results in what is essentially a refined site: search.

Explain to me the relevancy of that for users please Google?  They search for a business by name and instead of serving the right information, Google prompts to refine the search and plasters in some more results from other sites.

I guess as a new feature it’s pretty cool, but you have to wonder if everyone will be happy about the potential use for this.  It’s all very well Google setting out on a mission to index the web, but surely there has been a line crossed when Google can potentially show results from your competitors when a Google user is…

1. Specifically searching for YOUR business…
2. Wanting to search YOUR site…

What do you think?  Would Search Engine Watch be happy if a user used their site search and was returned results from Sphinn? Hmmm.

Scott

Page 2, the Wikipedia page for “SEO” which is classed as a “disambiguation” page (lists different meanings of a word / abbreviation).  Fair enough, useful for users of Wikipedia who happen to come across it, but the page itself even states:

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

If Wikipedia has the sense to admit the page is pretty much generic crap, then shouldn’t Google also make this association?  It can’t be that hard for Google to mark down disambiguation pages from Wikipedia.

Scott