Google has announced that its Data Search tool is out of beta and ready for prime time.
Data Search is a tool designed to provide an easy way to search the countless datasets that exist on the web. As Google explains in their post, “across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject that interests you. If you’re looking to buy a puppy, you could find datasets compiling complaints of puppy buyers or studies on puppy cognition. Or if you like skiing, you could find data on revenue of ski resorts or injury rates and participation numbers. Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is.”
Based on feedback the company has received from the beta period, Google has added a number of new features, including the ability to filter datasets, see maps of a region associated with a dataset, whether a dataset is available for free, better dataset descriptions and mobile support.
Organizations who have a dataset they want included in Data Search can ensure it’s added via an open standard.
“The number of datasets that you can find in Dataset Search continues to grow. If you have a dataset on your site and you describe it using schema.org, an open standard, others can find it in Dataset Search. If you know that a dataset exists, but you can’t find it in Dataset Search, ask the provider to add the schema.org descriptions and others will be able to learn about their dataset as well.”
Now that the tool is publicly available, Google is committed to continuing to improve it. The tool should be a valuable addition to a wide range of companies, researchers and consumers.
Last March Google was fined a record $5 billion by the EU over antitrust charges related to the company tying its browser and search engine to the Android OS. It appears the company has found a way to abide by the law while charging its competitors at the same time, according to The Verge.
Starting March 1, EU citizens will be given a choice of four search engines—including Google—to use as the default search for Chrome, as well as the Android search box. To select the search engines that will appear, Google opted for an auction system.
“The search engines shown to new users will vary for each EU country, with the selection decided based on a ‘fourth-price’ auction system. Each provider tells Google how much it’s willing to pay the company every time a user selects their product as the default. The three highest bidders are then shown to users, with the chosen provider paying Google the amount offered by the fourth-highest bid. This process is repeated every four months.”
Under this system, Microsoft’s Bing is now only shown as an option in the UK and not in any other EU country. In all likelihood, this is because the UK has higher search ad revenue than other countries, and Microsoft was likely unwilling to pay a higher price for less profitable markets.
As The Verge goes on to highlight, many of Google’s competitors are not happy with what is being perceived as a “pay-to-play auction” they feel goes against the spirit of the EU’s ruling. Given the close eye the EU has kept on Google, it will be interesting to see if they step in as a result of Google’s “solution.”
First reported by MSPoweruser, Microsoft has unveiled Bing Pages, a new way “for brands to manage their public personas on Microsoft products like Bing and Outlook.”
When searching for a well-known or popular person, company or brand, Bing will often display enhanced search results that provide far more—and usually more visually appealing—information than a standard search. With Bing Pages, Microsoft aims to bring those results to everyone. The program is currently in beta.
According to the official site, “Bing Pages is a beta program that lets users manage their presence on Microsoft products such as Bing and Outlook.com….Participants who sign up for this program get their own page on Bing to highlight their contact information and social media channels. They can also promote social media posts in relevant search results–at no cost.Businesses can use Bing Pages to customize their Outlook profile with updated contact info, images, and content. These changes also appear in Bing search results.”
The signup page is available to everyone and only requires an email address and Twitter account to get started.
TechCrunch is reporting that France has levied a $166 million fine against Google over abusing its online advertising dominance.
France’s competition watchdog, Autorité de la concurrence, announced the fine last week following an investigation dating back several years. The fine is based on advertising rules that were “opaque and difficult to understand” and that Google was applying in “an unfair and random manner.”
The case was brought to the competition authority’s attention over four years ago when Google closed the Google Ads account of a company called Gibmedia without any notice. Google told TechCrunch GibMedia’s account had been closed to protect consumers, as it was “running ads for websites that deceived people into paying for services on unclear billing terms.”
Autorité de la concurrence pointed out, however, that Google is not applying that rationale uniformly and currently has other sites selling similar services.
Google has vowed to fight the decision. In the meantime, in order to comply with the Autorité de la concurrence’s ruling, Google must clarify its rules and procedures, set up a warning system to alert advertisers and help them avoid account suspensions and “organize mandatory annual training for Google Ads support staff.”
Today Google announced the immediate availability of a new Speed report in Search Console.
Originally previewed at Google I/O 2019, the new Speed report has been modified and improved based on feedback from beta testers. The report is designed to help webmasters and site owners identify and improve user experience issues, especially those related to how fast a site loads.
The report classifies URLs by speed and the issue that causes any slowdowns. Drill down on a specific issue to see examples of slow URLs to help you prioritize performance improvements for them. To get a better sense of what type of optimization can be performed for a specific URL, the report links to the Page Speed Insight tool, which provides information on specific optimization opportunities.
“You should use this report both for monitoring your performance over time and for tracking fixes you made to your website. If you fix an issue, use the report to track whether users experienced a performance improvement when browsing the fixed version of your website.
“To help you understand how your site is performing, you can also see what types of URLs are doing better by checking the moderate and fast buckets.”
The new report should be a welcome tool to help webmasters keep their sites responsive and competitive.
Whenever Google updates, tweaks, replaces or improves its search algorithms, webmasters the world over anxiously wait to see how it will impact their rankings.
Google’s latest update, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is one of the company’s most interesting to date. Last year Google “introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training,” or BERT.
The company is using BERT to better understand complex, natural language queries and return more relevant results.
“By applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information,” wrote Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search in a company blog post. “In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.
“Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.
“To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.
“Here’s a search for ‘2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.’ The word ‘to’ and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn’t understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.”
Google received a welcome victory in the European Union’s highest court in relation to the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rules.
For the past five years, EU citizens have enjoyed the right to have search engines remove embarrassing or outdated information from their indexes. At the heart of the case was whether the right to be forgotten extended beyond EU borders.
The CNIL, a French privacy regulatory body, had ordered Google to expand the right to be forgotten globally. Google resisted, citing concerns that authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world would abuse the feature to cover up crimes and human rights violations. The CNIL eventually tried to levy a $109,901 fine.
Ultimately, however, the EU ruled that the right to protect personal data was not an absolute right, and that there was no obligation for Google—or any other search engine—to delist search results outside of the EU.
While Google praised the decision, it is not without complications. Google has relied on geoblocking to ensure EU citizens do not see delisted search results. Geoblocking does not, however, mean that the search results are not there—it simply means they are not accessible to someone within the EU. A person based in the U.S., or anywhere else outside of Europe, would still be able to find the very things someone in Europe may have filed to have delisted and will never see themselves.
Despite the complications, the ruling was welcomed within the tech community. The case was being watched closely to see how much authority the EU had to impose regulations on a U.S. company. Had Google lost, the long-term implications for Google and every other tech firm would have been profound—and gone far beyond mere search results.
“To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity,” says HubSpot SEO expert Braden Becker. “The View Velocity metric measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.”
Braden Becker, Senior SEO Strategist at HubSpot, reveals the secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm in his latest video:
The Secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm
Since marketers are at the mercy of algorithms on nearly every publishing channel, knowing how each of these unique algorithms work is crucial to attracting and maintaining an audience. Luckily, while some channels are rather reserved about the secrets of their algorithms, YouTube has been remarkably transparent. To figure out which videos and channels that users are most likely to enjoy watching, YouTube follows their audience. This means they pay attention to which videos each user watches, what they don’t watch, how much time they spend watching each video, their likes, their dislikes, and “they’re not interested in” feedback.
What YouTube Pays The Most Attention To
Ranking High In YouTube Search Results
YouTube’s algorithm also uses different signals and metrics to rank and recommend videos on each section of their platform. With this in mind, let’s go over how the algorithm decides to serve content to its users on their search results, homepage, suggested videos, trending, and subscription sections. First, are the search results. The two biggest factors that affect your video search rankings are its keywords and relevance. When ranking videos in search, YouTube will consider how well your titles, descriptions, and content, match each user’s queries. They’ll also consider how many videos users have watched from your channel and the last time they watched other videos surrounding the same topic as your video.
Positive Engagement With Your Videos Is Key
Next is the home page and suggested videos. No two users will have the same experience on YouTube. They want to serve the most relevant personalized recommendations to each of their viewers. To do this they first analyze user’s activity history and find hundreds of videos that could be relevant to them. Then they rank these videos by how well each video has engaged and satisfied similar users, how often each viewer watches videos from a particular channel or topic, and how many times YouTube has already shown each video to its users.
Ranking On The Trending Page
Next is trending. The trending page is a feast of new and popular videos in a user’s specific country. YouTube wants to balance popularity with novelty when they rank videos in this section, so they heavily consider view count and rate of view growth for each video they rank.
High “View Velocity” = High Ranking
Last is subscriptions. YouTube has a subscriptions page where users can view all the recently uploaded videos from the channels they subscribe to. But this page isn’t the only benefit that channels get when they acquire a ton of subscribers. To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity, which measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.
The Secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm with HubSpot SEO expert Braden Becker
Bing has a real opportunity to gain market share on Google for the first time in years. Half the country believes that Google is slanting its algorithm and search results to favor its own politics and ideology. There certainlyisalotofevidenceforthat. What if Microsoft’s Bing started marketing itself as the free speech search engine? Their TV ads could literally show competing search results between Google and Bing to prove that Google has a point of view. It would be the Pepsi vs. Coke of the digital age.
The public would eat this up. They are tired of mega tech companies trying to control information and manipulate us. Bing could take advantage of this by proving that they are the neutral search engine. They are the search engine that is merely showing the results based on a pure algorithm, not their political point of view. No one really wants their information filtered or sanitized by big brother. If Bing made this their marketing message they could gain significant market share.
After all, search shouldn’t be about ideology or political correctness or only the mainstream media. Search results should be based on non-political factors only. Tech behemoths shouldn’t determine what fake news is and then proceed to delete that news from top search results. That is subjective and leans toward groupthink, which is often wrong. Let the people decide what is real news. Many would say that Google has gone too far in “protecting” us by promoting certain viewpoints and not showing politically incorrect speech. Why would they do that? It certainly doesn’t make business sense.
This is why Bing has an opportunity to rapidly grow market share by becoming the search engine for all people of all stripes. Bing should announce that it is the free speech search engine that will display search results without inserting its political bias. It should say that it isn’t going to attempt to combat fake news because that is far too often a subjective exercise and is anti-free speech. Bing should say that it welcomes news sources from both the right and left, not just the mainstream media. If Bing became the Free Speach Search Engine, it could force Google to change.
“Search has changed,” says Howard Lerman, CEO of Yext. “It used to all be about websites where you’d type in a keyword and you get ten blue links back on a page. Today, when you search you just get an answer. The companies that put answers out there from them are the ones that are going to win in this massive paradigm shift.”
Howard Lerman, CEO of Yext, discusses how Yext helps businesses adapt to the new paradigm in search by inserting brand verified answers into all the major search platforms in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Yext Delivers a New Paradigm in Search
Taco Bell with they’re 7,000 stores is a partner of Yext. But we don’t just partner with food companies. We added 350 new enterprise logos last year with 128 and Q4 alone. That’s nearly one logo per day. We live in an era of too much information and much of it is wrong. In this era of too much information, Yext delivers a new paradigm in search that enables consumers to get brand verified answers on all the major search platforms like Siri and Google and Alexa even the Chinese search engine Baidu.
So the overseas tourists from China that come and go to luxury brands or need to eat can find information or they can find facts in Mandarin. They don’t use Google when they come to the United States.
The Ultimate Authority on a Business is the Business Itself
Morgan Stanley has over 14,000 Wealth Advisors. They all use the Yext platform to manage all the facts about every one of their advisers. They can log in, update their photo, they can say whether their a CFP and what languages they speak. They put it into Yext and boom it’s updated everywhere. We stand for the truth. The ultimate authority on Old Navy, the ultimate authority on Taco Bell, the ultimate authority on Morgan Stanley or New York Presbyterian Health is the business itself.
So when you look up a doctor and you’re looking up a doctor that treats certain conditions and accepts certain insurances you need to make sure that you get the right answer. The ultimate authority on the doctor is from the hospital and the doctor itself. That’s what Yext stands for. We put customers, the brand itself, with brand verified answers in all these different services. Every customer journey starts with a question and when you use Yext your customers can get a brand verified answer.
Companies That Put Answers Out There Are Going to Win
Yext Brain is an extension of Yext that lets customers create any type of entity they want with custom objects in their platform. They can publish events. They can publish menus. They can publish products. If you’re in the financial services industry you can publish a credit card. These are all new types of entities that companies can put into Yext to deliver answers to their customer at that exact moment of intent. Search has changed. It used to all be about websites where you’d type in a keyword and you get ten blue links back on a page. Today, when you search you just get an answer. The companies that put answers out there from them are the ones that are going to win in this massive paradigm shift.
Does Wendy’s have gluten-free menu items? Do they have vegetarian items? How many calories are in a Whopper? How many calories are in a Big Mac? What about the new Burger King Impossible Burger. These are the types of questions people ask. The number one question someone asks when they visit New York Presbyterian health, that’s one of our customers, is they want to find a doctor that can treat their condition, that accepts their insurance, and is near them. If New York Presbyterian Health can’t answer that question the consumer is going to go ask the question to a different provider.
“Do you want to know what’s better than being on page one of Google?” asked digital marketing expert Neil Patel. “Not just ranking number one, but owning the first page.”
In Patel’s latest video (below) he reveals six tips designed to help anybody with unique and useful content result on the first page of a Google search. Incredibly, Patel says that these techniques will actually help you achieve not just the number one result, but will rank your content in multiple listings on the first page.
The first tip I have for you is to interlink your content. Let’s say you’re trying to rank for a term like ‘SEO’ or ‘online marketing.’ If you have an article that’s super in-depth about that topic you can create other offshoots. For example, I have a lot of topics about online marketing. One of them is ‘Online Marketing Made Simple – A Step-by-Step Guide.’
I also have other articles that break down online marketing tools. What I can do is cross-link those articles together. By doing that It’ll increase my chance that both of those pages can rank on page one for the term ‘online marketing.’
Tip 2 – Create Multiple Pages That Cover the Same Topic
In addition to that, you want to have multiple pages that cover the same topic. I just gave you an example. One could be on ‘Online Marketing Beginners Guide.’ Another one could be ‘Online Marketing Tools.’ Another one could be ‘How To Get Started with Online Marketing.’ Another one could be the ‘Advanced Guide to Online Marketing.’
You get the point. By having multiple pages, and not just two, by having five or six or seven it’s going to increase your chances that you can rank on page one with more than just one listing.
Tip 3 – Do Not Duplicate Your Content
The third tip I have for you is to not duplicate your content. A lot of people when they’re trying to rank for a term like ‘online marketing’ they’ll take the same content and regurgitate it throughout their whole site. If you do that Google is not going to want to rank duplicate content from your own site multiple times. That will create a terrible user experience. If you do that you’re not going to do well, so don’t duplicate your own content. Write fresh unique content that you already haven’t written about before.
Tip 4 – Build Links
The fourth tip I have for you is to build links. If you build links to your site you’re going to rank higher. You know that, but you also want to build links to every version of your posts that you’re trying to dominate page one for. Using Ahrefs they have a feature called Link Intersect. You can put in your URL as well as other competitive URLs and it will show you who links to your competitors but are not linking to you.
The beautiful part about this feature is if someone links to three or four or five of your competitors but not you, there’s a good chance you could potentially convince them to also link to you. This is because you know they’re open to linking to other sites within your space. By using the Link Intersect tool you can see who links to other online marketing articles or other online marketing sites.
Then from there what you’ll want to do is hit up those sites and ask them, ‘hey you got a detailed post that you cover A, B, and C’ that your competition may not. Ask them to link to you as well. Don’t just do that for your main post on that subject but also do it in regards to your secondary and third pages that are also around that same topic.
Tip 5 – Promote Your Articles on the Social Web
The fifth tip I have for you is to promote your articles on the social web. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, you’ve heard this before. You want to promote your main articles as well as your sub-articles that are also around that topic. But what most people don’t tell you when it comes to social promotions is that when you share an article on Twitter or Facebook, most of your fans or friends aren’t going to see it. You don’t want to just share it once. You want to share it four or five times over the next six months.
By doing this you’re going to continue to get more eyeballs and more shares indirectly. Some of those people may link to the article or leave a comment. This will help with the engagement and better user metrics and that should help with overall rankings in the long run.
Tip 6 – No One Likes Outdated Content
The last tip I have for you is no one likes outdated content. When you publish content it gets outdated over time. It’s natural even if you write about tools and tips. For example, if I wrote about Vine, which is a company that Twitter bought, it’s outdated. It doesn’t exist anymore. Twitter shut it down. I’d have to update that content and talk about a different tool out there, maybe Instagram.
The point I’m trying to make is whatever you write on is going to get outdated. That’s okay and that’s natural. However, once a year consider updating your main pieces of content because that’ll help them all rank higher.
SEO expert Barry Schwartz has reported that in his tracking there appears to be some unstableness with the Google search results recently. This would explain why a lot of sites are complaining a bit louder lately about search traffic declines.
“Over the past few days, I’ve been tracking this and it seems like there’s really some unstable search results going on in the Google search results,” Schwartz said. “I’m not sure if it’s an algorithm update or if it’s more of like a penalty affecting a very specific niche or two, or maybe a specific type of tactic, maybe around links, I’m not sure. It seems a little bit more blackhat oriented where the blackhat communities are complaining a little bit more, but I’m not really sure.”
“The algorithm tools that are tracking this stuff really aren’t showing many fluctuations at all, which is interesting,” noted Schwartz. “But there is definitely, within certain types of communities in the SEO industry, a lot of communication going on over the past 3-4 days or so around a bunch of ranking changes for their websites. We’ll keep investigating that but I just wanted to bring that to your attention because it does seem to be somewhat significant for a limited number of segments within our industry.”
Self-made marketing phenomena Neil Patel says that there is an alternative to buying Google Ads to grow your company. The answer he says is creating a free leader product or service that drive customers to your site for you to later upsell. Patel sees this alternative solution as a less expensive and more sustainable “growth hacking” strategy.
Neil Patel discussed this growth hacking strategy in a recent video:
You Don’t Have to Buy Google Ads to Create a Big Company
Google Ads are continually rising in cost. What if I told you I have a really cool solution that’ll give you a much better ROI in the long run than Google Ads. Today, I’m going to share with you the best alternative to Google Ads. What most people don’t realize is, you don’t have to spend money on Google Ads to create a multibillion-dollar company.
Have you heard of Dropbox? Of course, you have and the chances are it’s on your computer. Did you know that when Dropbox first came out they tried to grow by doing Google advertising? And what they found is, even though they had a product that costs around $5 a month, which is around $60 a year per customer, they were spending roughly $200 to $300 to acquire a customer from Google Ads.
Can you see how those numbers don’t work out? Not only are they spending more to acquire a customer than what they’re paying in the first year, but just because someone’s paying you $5 a month, doesn’t mean that $5 is pure profit either.
How to Leverage a Growth Hacking Strategy
So, what did Dropbox do? They leveraged growth hacking. They figured out a way to get users to come to their site and generate more customers. They did this by creating a free product or a service, and that’s a better alternative to Google Ads. If you look at Dropbox, you look at Slack, even look at Amazon, although Amazon’s not really doing free with Prime buy you get free two-day shipping.
By creating something that’s free or such an amazing offer, think of it as your carrot that you’re dangling, you’re going to get so many people over to your website that then when you upsell them into your paid products or services, it’s so much easier because they’re already using your product or service, you’ve already built that brand loyalty, that connection, that rapport with them. It’s much easier to get that upsell.
It Does Cost a Lot to Offer a Free Product or Service
And here’s what most people don’t understand; they’re like, “Whoa Nellie, if I spent all this money getting people over to my website by having a ‘free’ product or service, it’s going to cost me a lot of money,” and it does. I recently released a tool called Ubersuggest. If you look at Uber suggest, I’m spending $150,000 a month releasing a lot of the features you see in tools like BuzzSumo or SEMrush, for free; 150 grand a month, that’s my cost. My cost isn’t going down, it’s continually rising too.
But you know what, if I had to do paid advertising on Google to get those visitors, my estimation shows that I would be spending a bit more than $600,000. Do you see how giving something away for free that costs me $150,000 a month is much better than spending $600,000 a month on paid ads?
Get Creative with Your Marketing
You do not have to spend money on Google Ads to create a big business, just look at Dropbox. Leverage growth hacking, and then as you have these free tools, these free products, these free services, and it may not be the best ones out there but something that people are used to paying for, what you can do is do things like creating invite flows. Dropbox has it: you want more free space, invite more users. I can do the same thing with Ubersuggest; I don’t, but I can say “Want more free usage? Invite more members.”
You can get creative with your marketing, leverage growth hacking. Just don’t put all your money into Google Ads, and the reason I say that is not because I don’t like Google Ads. Ideally, you should be doing both. But the reason I say this is, the moment you stop Google Ads you don’t have any more traffic.
By creating something that’s free, and it doesn’t have to continually cost a ton of money, like HubSpot, they have this free email signature generator. It doesn’t cost them much money; they only spent a few thousand dollars creating it. They don’t even spend any money maintaining it each and every single month. But they found that it can drive over seven figures worth of revenue to their business per year; not too bad from one free tool.
Google is now relying on behavioral data that it gets from searchers, Chrome users, Android, etc. as the primary way that it ranks pages, according to Moz founder Rand Fishkin, who spoke at the recent MozCon event.
Google used to have to predict what searchers are going to do and used a reasonable surfer model as the premise for its search algorithm. No more says Rand Fishkin. Google knows everything so it doesn’t have to predict because it already knows. Interesting but very scary stuff.
Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz and current founder of Sparktoro, discussed Google’s current approach to ranking websites at MozCon:
What is Google Going To Do About Judging Links?
I want to from my mind of all the things that I knew about link building up until this point and instead, take a look at companies and brands and websites and just ask what did they do right and what did we do wrong in the past and what is Google going to do about judging links?
You might remember that last year when Google announced RankBrain they said it is the third most important ranking factor. You might also recall Danny Sullivan asking them what are the first two? A few of us were on a phone call with one of Google’s engineers and brought this up and he was like, what are you talking about, everyone knows the first two are content and links. Still true.
In the past, link evaluation algorithms have been in these places we’re all familiar with such as PageRank, source diversity, anchor text, trust distance, domain authority, location on the page, spam out link analysis, yadda yadda yadda. All these little individual factors around how Google judges a particular link and all the links that point to a website.
Google is Going Away From the Reasonable Surfer Model
But this is not where they’re going. Google’s is going away from the reasonable surfer model. Remember what PageRank was supposed to do, even in 1998, it was supposed to predict which links on a page were important and then it was supposed to assign values to them and it was supposed to assign those based on the probability, the chance of someone clicking on those links.
Of course, Google was very naive in 1998 and so all they could do was assign the same weight to all the links on a page and they assigned the weight of a page based on all the links that pointed to it.
Google Search Relying on Behavioral Data Because Google Knows Everything
But that is not today. Today, thanks to Chrome and Android and Google WiFi and Google Fiber, Google knows everything. Google’s sample of everything that happens on the web is probably in the 80 or 90 percentile range. It’s insane and it’s crazy. Because of that, they can see. Google knows where people were, where they go and where they go next. You don’t need a reasonable surfer model anymore. You don’t need to predict because you know.
Google’s goal is pretty clear, it’s searcher satisfaction. Google knows that if they satisfy searchers well, those searchers will return again and again. The number of searches will go up and the number of searches per searcher will keep going up and that’s what we’ve been seeing. Even as desktop has leveled off in its growth, mobile keeps growing and searches and searches per searcher keep growing.
Google’s core search team asks the same question every time, are searchers satisfied with the results? The way they know that is finding out if searchers are getting the answers that they’re seeking. Google asks how do we get to that? It’s behavioral data.
One of the most powerful ways for a business to drive sales is via video reviews on YouTube. Earlier this year, Google made that even more effective by combining the power of video on YouTube with Google Search. Nicky Rettke, YouTube Group Product Manager for Video Ads spoke to an audience at Search Marketing Expo 2018 (SMX) and explained exactly how easy it now is for businesses to make use of this marketing one-two punch summarized below:
As you know we’ve been we’ve been working on direct response video formats for ad promotion for quite a while now, but we haven’t had a comprehensive solution for driving web conversions until now. I’m going to share some of our newest innovations that help you harness the combined power of search and YouTube together.
I want to start off by just having everybody take a minute to think about the things that you bought last week and how you decided what to buy. If you’re like most people, 86% to be exact, then you know you turned to Google for help where we have the world’s information at our fingertips when we’re shopping. We can read reviews, we can search product details, and we can even watch videos to help us make the best decision possible.
What that means is that even small everyday purchases like a toothbrush can kick off a big research project. Did you know that mobile searches for toothbrush reviews have more than doubled in the last two years? Whether it’s a car or toothbrush, we want to literally see things in action before we buy them. This is why people are increasingly turning to YouTube in addition to Search for help with their purchase decisions, and we can see this trend in YouTube search data.
Over the last two years, review videos on YouTube have had over 50,000 years worth of watch time on mobile alone. That’s over 438 million hours!
It’s not a hard jump to go from review to purchase. We’ve seen 100 percent increase in online conversions coming from YouTube ads globally over the last 12 months. That’s showing that consumers are coming to YouTube not only to research but to take action.
3 Features Helping Brands Harness Commercial Intent on YouTube
1. Custom Intent Audiences – Find People Who Recent Searched
Remarketing lists on search used to be the only way that you could re-engage users who did not immediately convert with custom intent audiences. You now have a second chance at winning them over using the most persuasive tool in the world… video.
Custom Intent Audiences allow brands to reach people who searched for relevant keywords on Google. All you have to do is create a keyword list, or you could just repurpose the keyword lists that you’re already using on your search campaigns.
Purple, the online mattress retailer, used Custom Intent Audiences to sell mattress protectors. Targeting YouTube viewers who had recently searched for queen bed sheets, they were able to lower the cost per visit by over 30 percent and they saw a 3x increase in the number of people searching for Purple on Google.
2. TrueView for Action – Make it Easy to Take Action!
Once you have found the people with the strongest intent, the next step is to make it really easy for them to take action. TrueView for Action is YouTube’s new format optimized to do exactly that. You can use it to drive whatever action is most important to your business, like clicks to your website or new signups.
It’s most powerful if you combine it with Custom Intent Audiences, that way you can reach people who are just on the brink of making that purchase decision.
3. Target CPA Bidding – Auto-Optimize for Results
TrueView for Action campaigns use target CPA bidding to automatically optimize bids using Google’s advanced machine learning technology. Simply put, you can now bid and buy for your video campaigns just like you do on search today.
Combining Video with Search Improves KPIs
This suite of features makes YouTube more actionable and early adopter brands are seeing it in the KPIs that matter most to them. Whether it’s the investment startup, Betterment, who increased their return on ad spend by 6x or the online education platform Masterclass, who grew class signups by over 140 percent, or travel giant Kayak, who reduced their CPA by 80 percent, brands around the world are using YouTube to drive meaningful and efficient business results.
Google Site Search is being discontinued according to multiplereports. Google emailed its Site Search customers saying that starting April 1, 2017, new purchased and renewals of GSS will not be available. The product will completely shut down on April 1, 2018.
They noted that this move will not have any impact on a customers current use of Google Site Search or until your license expires. Customers will continue to receive customer and technical support for the duration of their license.
The rest of the email from Google’s Enterprise Search Team provides some additional insights:
“Search has always been core to Google and we know its essential to the way your customers find content and interact with your website,” wrote the Google’s Enterprise Search Team. “While Google Cloud will no longer support GSS, we’re continuing to invest in other technologies that make enterprise search a great experience for our customers. Recently, we introduced the general availability of Google Cloud Search, which searches across G Suite content, providing useful and actionable information and recommendations.”
“When your GSS subscription expires or your quota is exhausted, your subscription will automatically convert to Custom Search Engine (CSE),” noted Google. “Custom Search Engine is an ad-supported product that provides similar capabilities to GSS, including the ability to build custom search engines for sites or pages, image search for your website, and customize the look and feel of search results.”
By simply adding the words “fun facts” to a search involving a living creature Google will try to provide an interesting tidbit. For example, if you search for “Cat fun facts” a new Google box will appear at the top of the results providing a new fun fact for each time you search that phrase. We tried it and got some interesting results obtained from a variety of websites:
“Cats lack a true collarbone.”
“Outdoor cats shed more in fall and spring.”
“Most cats prefer their food at room temperature, and will boldly REFUSE any food that is too cold or too hot.”
“A cat spends around two thirds of its day asleep.”
“Studies have shown that cats can distinguish between red and green; red and blue; red and gray; green and blue; green and gray; blue and gray; yellow and blue, and yellow and gray.”
“Starting today on Google Search, you can find fun facts about living creatures from around the world, making you the most interesting person at the dinner party or the reigning champ at trivia,” noted Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager at Google (Search, Assistant, YouTube, Media, Gaming, Payments etc.) “Head to Google, ask for a fun fact about something (think plants, animals, fruits and veggies), and ta-da! A trivia tidbit is delivered right at the top of your search results.”
“These are just a few of the fun facts out there for you to find on Google,” added Salgar. “And here’s a pro-tip for the trivia lovers out there: Some queries have multiple facts, one of which we randomly display when searched. So if you’re interested in learning more, just hit refresh and another fact may surface. Enjoy your fact finding!”
If you’ve never heard of a “crawl budget” you’re not alone. It’s actually something that most publishers don’t have to worry about, as long as your pages tend to be crawled by Googlebot the same day that they’re published. Also, if you have a small site with fewer than a few thousand URLs, it is probably already being crawled in a timely fashion.
However, Google felt it necessary to explain in a blog post exactly what a crawl budget is and what factors can impact a quick crawl by Google.
First there is the Crawl Rate Limit which limits the maximum fetching rate for a given site in order to not degrade the user experience. “Simply put, this represents the number of simultaneous parallel connections Googlebot may use to crawl the site, as well as the time it has to wait between the fetches,” says Gary Illyes who is part of the webmaster team at Google.
The crawl rate will go up and down based on site speed and server errors. Fast responsive sites with no errors will get crawled more. Also, in the Search Console webmasters can manually add limits to crawling.
“Even if the crawl rate limit isn’t reached, if there’s no demand from indexing, there will be low activity from Googlebot,” said Illyes. He says that popular sites get priority crawling and that in general Google wants to crawl new content. “Taking crawl rate and crawl demand together we define crawl budget as the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl.”
Low-Value-Add URLs
Having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing. In order of significance, low-value-add URLs fall into these categories:
“Wasting server resources on pages like these will drain crawl activity from pages that do actually have value, which may cause a significant delay in discovering great content on a site,” says Illyes.
Google has begun sharing certain public records requests, many from the FBI related to national security, in order to illustrate to its users a high level of transparency. Google and all major search and social internet platforms are deluged with record request from law enforcement and court actions. One of the reasons Google may want to show samples of the requests to the public is to bring attention to the fact that they are overwhelmed with requests and also to defend themselves from accusations that they are not giving adequate privacy to those using their service.
The fact is, no one has privacy when using Google or any online platform.
“In our continued effort to increase transparency around government demands for user data, today we begin to make available to the public the National Security Letters (NSLs) we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations,” said Richard Salgado, Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security for Google.”
“As we have described in the past, we have fought for the right to be transparent about our receipt of NSLs,” he said. “This includes working with the government to publish statistics about NSLs we’ve received, successfully fighting NSL gag provisions in court, and leading the effort to ensure that Internet companies can be more transparent with users about the volume and scope of national security demands that we receive.”
Google has provided links to 8 NSR’s here with the goal of creating a portal for all of them to be viewed in the future. Here is a sample from one of them:
In a response to many requests by search managers and webmasters, Google has expanded the functionality of the wildly popular property sets feature to more sections of the Search Console. Google launched property sets back in May allowing you to combine multiple properties (both apps and sites) into a single group to monitor the overall clicks and impressions in search within a single report.
John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google based in Switzerland explains:
“For example, if you have multiple international or brand-specific websites, and perhaps even an Android app, it can be useful to see changes of the whole set over time: are things headed in the expected direction? are there any outliers that you’d want to drill down into? Similarly, you could monitor your site’s hreflang setup across different versions of the same website during a planned transition, such as when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, or change domains.”
“Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date,” said Brandon Gaille in a guest post on Google’s Inside AdSense blog. “With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic.”
Gaille has been on a tear over the past 3 years, founding business advice site BrandonGaille.com which now has over 2 million monthly visitors. Galille has since parlayed that success into offering a course called The Blog Millionaire for others to learn how to make millions too. “The overwhelming success of his blog system led Brandon to create an online course to guide bloggers and businesses down the same proven path of success that his clients pay him up to $100,000/year for,” said Galille on LinkedIn. There is currently a waiting list to join the course!
5 Reasons Adding a Number to Your Article Titles Increase Traffic
1. Placing a Number Gives Users What They Are Used To!
Call it the BuzzFeed effect, but lists drive traffic and a number in the title signifies a list. It’s really that simple.
“Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic,” says Gaille. “This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically.”
2. List Posts Are Shared the Most on Social
People love to share List Posts on social media like Facebook and sharing can supercharge your traffic. Why not play into the social media game and give them what they want, short, easy to digest sharable content.
3. Odd Numbers in Titles Are 20% More Effective
“Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles,” said Gaille.
I think it’s probably because it sounds more legit, not made up. For instance, if somebody posts the 10 best ways to drive traffic, people will inherently think that the writer thought of 10 points and stopped thinking. However, if it was the 7 best, it sounds as if these are actually what the author thinks are truly best.
4. People Love to Link to Lists Which Makes for Great SEO
Search engine optimization is driven by links and what better way to get links than to get your content shared on social. So part of your SEO strategy should be to write content that people want to link to and then not only will they link in their own blogs but they will also get the word out by sharing your posts on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and many other places.
5. Gaining a List Site Reputation Will Cause Repeat Traffic
Just like Brandon Gaille has discovered, writing lots of list style posts and including a number in the title gives you traction as a place people want to go. People like simple straight forward easy to read advice and that’s what Gaille delivers. Those who are looking for something to share on social or for inspiration on an article (like this one) find list sites a great destination source.
