Tag: Search

Should Microsoft Buy Yahoo?
What if Microsoft bought Yahoo? According to a report from Reuters, Microsoft is eyeing a bid on the company which is currently down a CEO.

Would such an acquisition be good for Microsoft? Good for Yahoo? Tell us what you think.

Yahoo’s board fired CEO Carol Bartz last month, and has yet to find a replacement beyond interim CEO Timothy Morse. According to at least one report, former CEO Jerry Yang had even assumed control at the company (though this is unconfirmed). The company source cited in that report from Business Insider said it was “f-ing crazy”.

The Reuters report cites “sources close to the situation,” and says, “Microsoft joins a host of other companies looking at Yahoo, which has a market value of about $20 billion and is readying financial pitch books for potential buyers, they said.”

The other companies reportedly include Providence Equity Partners, Hellman & Friedman and Silver Lake Partners, Alibaba, and DST Global.

“Microsoft could easily afford Yahoo. After a 10% stock price bump on a report that Microsoft was weighing a bid, Yahoo’s market capitalization was about $21 billion,” says the Wall Street Journal. “If Microsoft offered $20 a share, 25% above Wednesday’s close, the price would be about $26 billion. But the net cost could be less than half that, assuming Microsoft sold Yahoo’s Asian assets and factoring in its $2.6 billion of cash.”

If you’ll recall, Microsoft made a failed attempt to take over Yahoo a few years ago, but ultimately ended up forming a “search alliance,” where the two companies would partner on search and advertising. Bing has been powering Yahoo’s search results since that went into effect. Microsoft’s bid for the company in 2008 was a reported $44.6 billion.

Given the amount of attention we (and our readers) place on search, it’s easy to get caught up in Yahoo the search engine, but Yahoo has a lot of properties, and some of them are quite powerful. A few months ago, the company shared this infographic as a reminder:

In its last earnings report, Yahoo said it is home to nine #1 properties globally, and is in the top three in 23 categories. It also said it has nine out of the top ten original video programs on the web.

Yahoo considers itself a media company, and that certainly is an area where Microsoft could grow. It would be interesting to see how the regulatory process plays out if this goes forward.

Regarding Yahoo and search, the company recently put up a blog post talking about how it’s ready for a “search fight,” including these three bullet points on “what search looks like” to Yahoo over the next 18 months:
- From destination to companion: Access and convenience are two key components in the search game. In the next 18 months, Search will be a companion experience that gives you answers immediately and instantly without leaving the page you are on – effortlessly.
- From fragmented to seamless: Consistency and simplicity are two key components in the search game. Users are increasingly searching on multiple devices. In the next 18 months, your devices and platforms will be seamlessly connected, allowing you to start an experience on one device and continue effortlessly onto another, with simple access to any information on any other devices. Search will be evolving into a beautiful and consistent multi-modal experience that simply integrates into your everyday life.
- From more information to better information: Relevancy and depth are two key components in the search game. When you search for something — say, Adirondack chairs — do you really care that we returned 9,150,000 results? Probably not. In the next 18 months, Search will focus on a deep experience that gives you only what you want to know, taking into account your search history, click behavior, demographics, social graph, and browsing history to provide you with a 1:1 experience. It will tell you why it served you the results it did and allow you to pivot on a number of aspects to further tune the page. It will no longer be a search engine designed for the masses, it will be a search engine tailored just for you. Some call it a results page; I call it an intent satisfaction experience.
Last month, Yahoo redesigned its search results pages.

Bing and Yahoo were both up in the U.S. search market reports last month, with Bing-powered search accounting for 28.99% of the market, according to Experian Hitwise.

Do you think Microsoft should buy Yahoo? Let us know in the comments.
October 8, 2011
Google Panda Update: A Delicious Set of Resources

A lot of Delicious users aren’t digging the new version of Delicious, but I kind of like it. Sue me.

I’ve started a new “stack” for resources related to Google’s Panda Update, which webmasters can use to stay informed about it, and hopefully get some useful knowledge to help them survive future updates or help them get back in Google’s good graces if they’ve already fallen victim.

I wouldn’t say that the list is complete, so I’d like to encourage you to share other resources in the comments section. We’ll evaluate whether or not to include them from there. Hopefully we can make this a really useful resource.

Bookmark the stack, because there are links in it that will be updated continuously as more info comes out. Click the image below to go to the stack, and feel free to share it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. so more can see it and help add to it.

October 6, 2011
Google ITA Software Deal Reportedly Just Approved by Federal Judge

Google has had a long regulatory battle trying to get its acquisition of ITA Software approved. In April, it got DoJ approval. Just last month, Google finally launched Flight Search, as it was able to use the technology it acquired from the $700 million purchase.

Bloomberg is reporting today, however, that the purchase has only just been approved by a federal judge. Tom Schoenberg reports:

U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins in Washington today approved a consent decree between Google and the Justice Department that allows the acquisition as long as Google makes travel data available to search-engine rivals and lets the government review any complaints it’s acting unfairly. Wilkins said he found the agreement to be in “the public interest.”

With Google’s Flight Search feature, Google adds a “Flights” link on the left panel when the user searches for flight info. The feature can also be accessed from google.com/flights.

Google said upon launch that it would be working hard to improve the number of cities and types of flights it shows, though for now, users can only see a limited number of cities and results for round-trip economy-class flights.

October 5, 2011
Google Panda Update: Latest Confirmed as Global, Tweaked with Fresh Data

If you’ve been following the Google Panda saga, you know that an update was launched last week. At least one site, which was negatively impacted by the update (DaniWeb) suddenly regained its search visibility after Google apparently made some kind of adjustment.

We asked Google if they made any tweaks to the Panda update since last week’s iteration was launched, to which a spokesperson replied, “We pushed a fresh version of data that incorporated more of the signals that we’ve incorporated after the initial launch of Panda.”

She also pointed us to the Matt Cutts tweet we wrote about earlier:

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsWeather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%). 8 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

So expect more fine-tuning of the latest update.

The spokesperson also told us that the latest update was global, in case there was any question about that.

From what we’re hearing, it sounds like we would be correct in assuming that Panda updates from here on out will be global.

In August, Google rolled out the update across most languages.

October 5, 2011
Google Panda Update: Expect More Over Next Few Weeks

Last week, Google rolled out its first Panda update in quite a while, but many sites have felt its effects for better or worse. SearchMetrics put out an interesting list of top winners and losers (more on that here), and DaniWeb, which has gone up and down in search visibility throughout the evolution of Panda was hit again and then quickly recovered.

We asked Google to confirm any tweaks to the latest update. We didn’t receive response to that, though the company did previously confirm with us that the update was indeed Panda.

The last time a site that quickly recovered after getting pounded by the Panda was highly publicized (Cult of Mac earlier this year), Google talked about tweaks to the update. In a Wired interview earlier this year, Google’s Amit Singhal said, “Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

Now, Google’s Matt Cutts has flat out tweeted that we should expect some tweaks to the Panda update over the next few weeks, even if they aren’t as major as the main update:

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsWeather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%). 6 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

So, if you feel you were wrongfully hit by Panda (and you truly believe that), perhaps an adjustment will work in your favor. Others that escaped the update may be on their toes for a bit.

Image credit: Rick Bucich.

October 5, 2011
Google+ APIs Get Search

Google announced some updates to the Google+ APIs, including search. The API will let developers include the ability to search public Google+ posts and people on Google+ in their applications.

These are achieved using two methods: activities.search and people.search. The documentation can be found here and here respectively.

The former lets users search across the body and comments of public posts. The latter searches across public profile info including fields such as name, bio, location, tag line, and description.

“Our first API release let you retrieve public posts,” says Google+ API software engineer Jordanna Chord. “We’ve now added ways for you to see how people are publicly engaging with those posts — you can find out who reshared a post or who +1’d a post, and you can read the comments on a post.”

For that, developers can use the method people.listByActivity. Documentation on that here.

Developer use of the Google+ APIs will be key in making Google’s social network more useful across a variety of applications. APIs certainly worked wonders for making Twitter relevant to more people.

Of course Google+ is really just part of the greater Google network.

October 4, 2011
Google Panda Update: DaniWeb Recovers AGAIN

It’s funny how things can change with Google and the Panda update. DaniWeb has been a prime example of this. At first, the IT discussion forum was hit by the update, but was able to make a 110% recovery. Then last week, DaniWeb was hit once again, which founder Dani Horowitz let us know about in an email. DaniWeb lost over half of its traffic overnight.

Today, we received another email from Dani with much better news. “The Google saga continues. We have just recovered. Google Analytics is very delayed, but it is already reporting that we have received as much traffic today as we received all day yesterday, and it is not even 2 pm yet,” she tells us. “Clearly Google admitted they screwed up with us.”

The timing of this is quite interesting. We posted an article this morning about how Dani’s team discovered that DaniWeb’s “time on site” stats decreased by 75% at 1PM on August 11, and held steady at the reduced number, as what she said is the result of “Google Analytics rolling out their new session management feature.”

“There have been MANY reports across the web of the bounce rate and time on site being inaccurate every since August 11th, especially when multiple 301 redirects are involved (which we use heavily),” she said at the time. “As a result, we have been hit by Panda. Or so I gather.”

In the latest email, Horowitz points us to a recent Q&A with Google’s Matt Cutts.

With that (before the recovery), Dani wrote:

For those who don’t want to watch the full 45 minutes, fast forward directly to 18:30 in the video. It’s essentially Matt Cutts answering a question of when the next versions of Panda are going to run. His response was that, “We’ve made many, many changes over the last few months, even within Panda, trying to iterate, find new signals. You see a site like DaniWeb complain and then we find signals and say, okay, here’s a way we can differentiate between this site and the sites that might be a little bit lower quality.”

…

This video was recorded on September 22nd, after our recovery and before we were hit again. So I don’t know what to take from that. It can be one of two things:

(1) Matt and the rest of the Google webspam team not only know about my situation, but realize we were penalized unintentionally. They have been working towards making Panda not hurt us, and it was a mistake that we were hit again, and that will be soon fixed.

(2) Matt and the rest of the Google webspam team are aware of our situation, and think we should have been penalized. I misunderstood Matt’s quote and he meant that DaniWeb is a complainer and IS one of the low quality sites they will continue to work on filtering out of the SERPs.

Then came the recovery, so it seems like number one is more likely. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation that a tweak has been made on Panda. We’ll see what kind of response we get on that. This is fairly reminiscent of when CultofMac was hit by Panda and recovered shortly thereafter.

Let’s refer back to a quote from a Wired interview with Google’s Amit Singhal, who said, “Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

As you know, Google makes “roughly 500” yearly algorithm adjustments.

October 4, 2011
Google Panda Update: Could Inaccurate Google Data Be Costing Sites Traffic?

Late last week, it was discovered that Google had rolled out another version of the Panda update earlier in the week. Industry voices have dubbed the update “2.5”. Google dubbed it “one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

Did you notice a drop or increase in traffic in the past week or so? Let us know.

SearchMetrics put out lists of the top winners and losers from the update. Some sites were surprising, some weren’t. Interestingly enough, eHow and EzineArticles, which were previously “pandalized” were not on the loser list this time. EzineArticles would not offer comment, and eHow (Demand Media) told us that they’ve been pleased with the results of a massive content clean-up initiative they’ve implemented this year.

Another previous victim, HubPages, was even able to make the winners list this time around. Some of the more surprising “losers” were press release distribution services Business Wire (which actually just patented its SEO strategy) and PR Newswire, and tech blog TheNextWeb. There have been some questions raised over the accuracy of the SearchMetrics data, however.

“I’m glad to say we had a good summer as far as traffic is concerned,” Rod Nicolson, VP User Experience Design & Workflow for PR Newswire tells us. “We’ll continue to monitor closely, but so far we’re not seeing any unusual changes to our traffic due to Panda 2.5.”

TheNextWeb Editor in Chief Zee Kane tells us, “We haven’t noticed any effect right now but we’re still digging in. Will hopefully know more over the course of the next week.”

We’ve reached out to SearchMetrics for comment, but are still awaiting a response. We’ll update when we receive one.

Update: Here’s what SearchMetrics tells us about its data:

We monitor a selected and representative set of keywords for Google (in several countries) once a week and analyze the search results pages for these keywords. One of the main indices we calculate from this is the Organic Search Engine Visibility. This is a culmination of figures collated from search volume (ie how often people are searching for a keyword or phrase) and how often and on which position (ie what position on a Google results page) a domain/web site appears. Add them all up (plus some more math applied) and you get the performance index – an estimate for how visible a site is on Google in a specific country.

The basis for our analysis is a local keyword set for every country we analyze. Our values are local, that’s why we can give you an overview over the SEO and SEM visibility per country. The keyword sets are representative and varied between some hundred thousand and 10 million. The keyword sets are extended every month with new keywords added and irrelevant / outdated keywords deleted.

While we track millions of keywords, we obviously don’t track every single keyword that is searched. We can be viewed as providing a very good indication of underlying trends. However, results can be off when, for example, a web site has only a very small visibility and is ranking for a small number of keywords or a higher percentage of the keywords a domain is ranking for is not included in our keyword set.

Please note: Visibility is not the same as traffic. Further, sites that are listed among a ‘losers’ list may still generate traffic from other sources and can still potentially continue to prosper. Our data can only be used as a trend for search engine visibility on Google. But Google isn’t the only traffic source websites can have. So, if a site experiences a reduction in Google visibility, it may still continue to generate good traffic to and continue to prosper. Other sources of traffic include real ‘type-in’ traffic (when visitors type in a URL); social media traffic (ie from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other); and affiliate traffic etc.

DaniWeb, which has been an ongoing sub-plot of the Panda storyline throughout the year, due to its victimization and full recovery, was hit again by the most recent update. In fact, Dani Horowitz, who runs the IT discussion community, is the one that tipped us that this was even going on.

Horowitz and her team have of course been doing some investigating themselves, and documenting this a bit in a Google support forum. In it, she writes:

So, everyone, thanks to DaniWeb’s handy dandy systems administrator, we have come to a conclusion. Our ‘time on site’ statistic decreased by 75% at 1 pm on August 11th, and has been holding steady at the reduced number, as a result of Google Analytics rolling out their new session management feature.

There have been MANY reports across the web of the bounce rate and time on site being inaccurate every since August 11th, especially when multiple 301 redirects are involved (which we use heavily).

As a result, we have been hit by Panda. Or so I gather.

Now, this is not confirmed, but could a Google Analytics change, and inaccurate data on Google’s part be responsible for sites losing over half of their traffic? If so, that’s not cool.

Google, who famously won’t reveal its secret recipe for search rankings or even list each of the factors without revealing the weight of each, has been historically vague about its use of Google Analytics metrics in search. Michael Gray recently wrote a post suggesting that you can almost guarantee that Google is using your Analytics data, but he mentions how Google always manages to sidestep questions about its use (or non-use) of data for bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, etc.

Another interesting side-story to the Panda saga is that Google-owned sites have done well (according to the Searchmetrics data). The timing of the most recent Panda update, which Searchmetrics counts YouTube and Android.com as major winners for, is interesting given recent Senate discussions about Google favoring its own content in search results. A Google spokesperson gave us the following statement on the matter:

“Our intent is to rank web search results in order to deliver the most relevant answers to users. Each change we make goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing, and if we don’t believe that a change will help users, we won’t launch the change. In particular, last week’s Panda change was a result of bringing more data into our algorithms.”

The Panda update has appeared to favor video content throughout its various iterations (and not just YouTube). I can tell you that video has some major SEO benefits regardless of Panda, and that it is also great for increasing time on site. If a user is watching a video on your page, they’re on the page for the duration of the video or at least until they lose interest (so use good video content).

Even Demand Media told us after they announced the eHow clean-up, that it wouldn’t much affect its YouTube strategy.

Update: Dani Horowitz tells us that DaniWeb has already recovered. More here.

Do you think Google is improving its search results with the Panda update? Let us know what you think in the comments.

October 4, 2011
Google Panda Update: Google on Why Google Sites Did Well

In case you haven’t been keeping up, Google confirmed late last week that it launched a new Panda update earlier last week. You can follow our previous coverage here.

Recent data from SearchMetrics indicates that a couple of Google sites – YouTube and Android.com – were among the top winners of search visibility from the update. The timing of this is interesting, considering recent Senate discussions regarding whether or not Google favors its own content. We asked Google for comment on this, and a spokesperson for the company gave us the following statement:

“Our intent is to rank web search results in order to deliver the most relevant answers to users. Each change we make goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing, and if we don’t believe that a change will help users, we won’t launch the change. In particular, last week’s Panda change was a result of bringing more data into our algorithms.”

The Panda update hasn’t even been much of a focus in the Senate discussion. It’s been more about Google’s placement of content from properties like Google Places, Maps, etc.

Aaron Wall at SEOBook uploaded a cartoon, having a little fun with Google on the subject:

This is not the first time Google sites have gained search visibility from Panda. In April, YouTube, Google.com, Google.co.uk, Blogspot.com and Android.com were all named among the top winners (also from SearchMetrics data), though to be fair, a handful of Google’s competitors also saw gains.

Paul Edmondson, CEO of HubPages, which was actually able to count itself among the winners this time around after being previously victimized, has talked extensively in the past about how YouTube has seemed to get a pass in areas where others (like HubPages) have been penalized.

In May, he wrote a guest post for TechCrunch, where he said, “One presumes Google isn’t treating its own affiliated sites differently than any other site, but YouTube’s open publishing environment makes low-quality content as prevalent as on any other moderated open publishing platform. Google shows over 13 million indexed videos on YouTube for lose weight (known spammy area) and over 10 million for forex (another spammy area). Apparently, Google’s Panda update has been punitive only to platforms other than Google’s.”

Google seemed to inadvertently back up Edmondson’s comments when YouTube shared the stat: 30% of all videos account for 99% of views. That doesn’t mean that 30% are spammy, but it does say something about what people actually watch on YouTube.

October 3, 2011
Google Panda Update, Trust & Monty Python LEGOs

We’ve been talking about the Google Panda update a lot here at WebProNews since the company rolled out another version of it last week. Aaron Wall at SEOBook has put together a video dedicated to the occasion, and of course Google has been talking about plenty of other things with video clips. In addition to all of that, there is some other fun stuff below for you to check out in today’s edition of top videos.

View other daily video round-ups here.

Here’s a Google Panda-related cartoon uploaded by SEOBook:

Google announced the Trusted Stores pilot program:

Monty Python LEGO display from Brickcon:

WebProNews interviews Rand Fishkin:

A typewriter that makes drinks:

A “Google Apps Adventure”:

If other planets were as close as the Moon (CollegeHumor):

Becoming a noun to live forever (from NPR):

Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun from NPR on Vimeo.

Twilio’s “brogramming” primer:

YouTube’s “Tales from the Tube”:

A plane hits a ferris wheel in Australia and nobody is injured:

October 3, 2011
Google Panda Update: eHow Untouched, Says Pleased with Progress on Content Quality

While escaping the wrath of the Panda update again, Demand Media tells WebProNews that it’s pleased with the results of its eHow clean-up initiative.

Demand Media and its eHow property in particular were always part of the Google Panda update conversation. In fact, it was a major part of the discussion even before the update came to be known as Panda, and even before it was rolled out. eHow was often characterized as the poster child of content farms, despite Demand Media’s continued efforts to clean up its reputation and denials that it actually is a “content farm”.

Waves of astonishment rippled throughout the industry when Google finally launched its Panda update, supposedly targeting content farms, and eHow didn’t take a hit, but actually gained in search visibility. The update was even referred to as the “farmer” update throughout the industry before Google mentioned the “Panda” name in an interview.

Demand Media no doubt breathed a gigantic sigh of relief, as the initial update and the company’s IPO were interestingly close together on the timeline. But eHow (not to mention some other DM sites) would not escape the Panda for long. A later iteration struck a blow to eHow, and Demand Media inevitably announced a big clean-up initiative to help weed out the lower-quality content and get the site’s search visibility back up.

When asked for comment last week’s update, Kristen Moore VP, Corporate Communications at Demand Media gave us the following statement:

We don’t comment on whether or what kind of impact our sites see with each individual Panda update. As you know Google continually adjusts their algorithms, so the updates are pretty frequent.

I can tell you that we’ve been really pleased with the pace and the results of the new initiatives we announced and implemented in the spring to ensure tighter controls around quality on eHow and across our studio model. We’ll be providing a more specific update on those initiatives and what our sites have seen relative to the Panda updates when we announce Q3 earnings in just a few weeks.

Looking at SearchMetrics’ data it seems pretty clear that eHow was not “pandalized” this time around.

During the last earnings call in August, Demand Media indicated that Panda turned out to not be too big a blow to the company’s revenue. At the time, the company had said that 300,000 eHow articles had already been removed.

October 3, 2011
Google Panda Update: HubPages Goes From Victim To Victor

As you may know, Google launched its latest iteration of the Panda update early last week. The company confirmed this for us on Friday. Shortly after that, SearchMetrics compiled lists of the top winners and losers. Some were surprising (as usual), and some weren’t.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises was the placement of Hubpages on those lists. Panda enthusiasts probably recall HubPages getting hit pretty hard by the Panda update, as the company hardly let us forget. CEO Paul Edmondson was very vocal about the whole thing in the aftermath of the Panda massacre. Now, HubPages has made the top winners list.

When asked about his feelings on this, Edmondson told WebProNews, “HubPages has always cared about quality. We’ve done a tremendous number of things to highlight the best of HubPages. Our internal metrics now show significant redistribution of traffic to higher quality pages.”

While being vocal about Panda, as mentioned, Edmondson had called out Google in the past for treating its own YouTube property differently, despite YouTube and HubPages having similar models in acceptance of user-generated content – each with its fair share of lesser-quality content. YouTube was actually the top winner this time around too, per SearchMetrics’ data.

You may also recall Edmondson’s idea to implement subdomains across the site, as to separate content from other content on an author-by-author basis.

When asked about the main factors he thinks turned things around with this latest update, Edmondson said, “HubPages has a tremendous amount of high quality content. Stuff that is so good that they’re labors of love. We concentrated on giving the best content the best opportunity.”

He didn’t mention the subdomaining, but the site implemented this back in July, after some testing appeared to indicate that it helped the better stuff rise in search visibility.

It’s really quite interesting that the Panda update was always tied to discussion about content farms, yet with this latest round, sites like eHow, EzineArticles, Suite101, etc. are off the grid, as far as the losers list, and HubPages was even able to become one of the top winners.

Either way, the fact that HubPages was able to do a complete 180 on the Panda scale should give webmasters who have been victimized, a bit of hope. On the other hand, DaniWeb was able to make a 110% recovery before getting slammed again with this update.

October 3, 2011
Google Touts New Ad Formats as Answer to Print Circulars

“Maybe the best ads are just answers.” That’s Google’s motto for search ads, as described in the above video.

It is Advertising Week, and Google’s talking about their efforts in this department at the event in New York City. According to VP of Product Management Nick Fox, about a third of searches with ads show a new enhanced ad format. New formats include a mix of the visual, the local and the social.

“Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad,” explains Fox. “Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.”

“More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location,” says Fox. “On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Fox equated Google’s efforts in search ads to trying to find the online equivalent of the offline print circular. You know, those big ads you find in your Sunday newspaper (if you still get that, or at least remember it).

Google offers quick glimpses to its various search ad formats here, though Bloomberg reports that the “circular” style ads will also be available for display ads.

October 3, 2011
Google Panda Update: New Winners and Losers

This past week, Google rolled out its latest iteration of the Panda update, which the company (as usual) downplays as only one of roughly 500 yearly algorithm changes.

It doesn’t sound like such a big deal when they put it that way, but for those who have lost major traffic because of it, it was a bigger deal than most of those other roughly 499 changes. Ask Dani Horowitz from Daniweb, who noticed the big traffic drop and tipped us about it before we confirmed the update with Google.

Daniweb was hit by Panda earlier this year, and was able to get all the way back to a 110% recovery – something few have been able to achieve. Then along came Panda “2.5” (as the industry is calling it) early in the week and took away more than half of Daniweb’s traffic overnight. All of the hard work that Daniweb put into that recovery might as well have been erased.

But Daniweb is far from being the only victim here. SearchMetrics, which has regularly released data about Panda winners and losers throughout the year, has compiled another list of the top winners and losers as a result of 2.5.

Here are the biggest losers:

A few things worth noticing:

A. Press release distribution sites were hit again. We talked about PRNewsire getting victimized by Panda in the past. Now it, along with BusinessWire – arguably the two top services in this area on the web, have been hit again.

B. EzineArticles and Demand Media’s eHow – two big past Panda victims are not present on the list.

C. Some pretty high profile sites are on the list. Today.com. TheNextWeb (which if anything has increased in quality if you ask me).

It’s a pretty interesing list, as is the winner list:

A few things of note with regards to this list:

1. Google sites won again (YouTube and Android.com). I’m not saying they shouldn’t be on the winners list, but given the regulatory scrutiny Google has found itself in over how it treats its own content in search results, one has to wonder if this will draw the attention of regulators.

2. HubPages is on the winners list. The site, which we have written about several times, used to make the loser list. They must be doing something right. But who knows? They could get hit on the next one. One would have thought at that Daniweb was doing something right too.

3. The list is dominated by pretty big brands.

I’m sure we’ll be digging into all of this more soon, but this is a quick look at what Google’s algorithm is considering to be of quality, for better or worse. It will be interesting to watch how these sites perform moving forward.

I can tell you one thing, Google is all about some identity these days. I’d encourage you to take advantage of the authorship markup Google uses to highlight who is responsible for various content. They’re even starting to include Google+ Circles numbers with it. It’s looking more and more like you ought to be taking full advantage of Google+ if you want to do better in search.

October 2, 2011
Google Launches Important New Tools for Webmasters

Google made a couple relatively quiet announcements this week that have pretty big ramifications for webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites.

If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

Do you like the new design? Share your opinion in the comments.

The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about ‘important pages: ‘as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on ‘important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

“Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website ‘unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

What do you think? What else should Google show you as part of its site health feature? Let us know in the comments.

Now on the Analytics side of things…

In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

“One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

“For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

Do you think real-time analytics data will help you improve the your site’s traffic? Tell us what you think.

October 1, 2011
Google Panda Update: Google Confirms New One

Google has confirmed to WebProNews that an iteration of the controversial Panda update was launched this week. When asked directly if this occurred, a Google spokesperson told us, “yes,” then offered the following canned statement:

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

While Google did not say a specific day, one webmaster reported that her site was hit on Wednesday, September 28th. That was Dani Horowtiz, who runs Daniweb, a Panda victim we’ve discussed several times before, as the site had managed a 110% Panda recovery before getting hit this week.

Search Engine Land is reporting that while Google “declined to share any specifics” about what kinds of pages were being targeted, unnamed sources said the update rolled out on Tuesday. The blog is calling this version 2.3.

Some webmasters thought maybe a Panda update had rolled out earlier this month. Search Engine Land editor Barry Schwartz asked if Panda 2.5 had hit (personally, I’m not bothering much trying to keep track of the numbers). The answer turned out to be no, as Google told him there was no update taking place. According to Search Engine Land now, this latest update is actually the first true Panda update in about 10 weeks.

Since then, Google announced that it is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (blog scrapers in particular). The company also released a video giving an inside look at how Google handles search algorithm tweaks:

We’re only at the end of September, so go ahead and expect plenty more algo changes before the New Year. Hopefully Panda won’t screw over too many e-commerce sites for the holidays. Google has been pretty good about taking it easy around the holidays since the infamous Florida update, though.

September 30, 2011
Google Shows Circle Counts for People In Search Results

Lately, Google has been placing a lot of emphasis on the importance of who you are on the web. That’s why they want you to use your real name on Google+ (or more broadly, your Google Profile).

This thinking certainly applies to search. This year, Google introduced authorship markup, which helps Google associate various content from a person with that person in search results, and ultimately gets that person’s profile prominence in Google search results. If you ever see a little image of a person off to the side of a search result, which is clickable (leading to that person’s profile), this is likely what you’re seeing.

It’s good for authors to gain exposure, and it helps readers establish some level of trust by simply knowing where a result is coming from (regardless of whether or not they actually trust any specific author). In fact, Google is so concerned about this, it doesn’t even want authors to have profile pictures that are the least bit unprofessional. For example, I know a guy who was using a picture of himself in his Halloween costume for his profile picture, and a Googler actually contacted him and asked him to change it. There was nothing bad about the picture, they just wanted a regular picture of him for his profile pic, presumably so people wouldn’t see anything goofy in the search results, and hurt the perception of Google’s rankings, even if the content it showed up next to was perfectly legitimate.

Google recently posted a pair of videos explaining how to implement authorship markup, if you need a bit of guidance:

It would appear that Google considers how many people have you in Circle on Google+ to be some indication of who you are now.

The Next Web says an unnamed source confirmed that the next step of Authorship Markup is to show the number of Circles you’re in on the search results pages. You can already see it in action for some people.

This actually makes the whole Circle limit thing a little more interesting. If you can only have so many people in your Circles on Google+, you’re not going to want to add just anybody right? In an article this week, we called for Google to get rid of Circle limits because it limits our access to information through Google+, but is this the mindset Google has here?

The bigger names on the web are going to have more connections, so if they can’t put every one of them into a Circle, they’re only going to want to put their top connections in there. I don’t know if this is the way Google is looking at things, but it raises an interesting point, especially with the attention that Klout has been getting (and now its new competitor Kred).

While we don’t know that the number of Circles you are in is a search ranking signal, it seems very likely. Remember, when Google was talking about authorship markup, they said they want to “get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking.” It seems pretty logical that circle count could play a role.

If I’m wanting to get more Google search respect, I’m trying to get in more Circles.

September 30, 2011
DaniWeb Loses Over Half of Traffic: The Panda is Back.

Update: When asked if an iteration of Panda was implemented this week, a Google spokesperson told us, “yes.” She also provided the following statement:

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

If you’ve followed the Google Panda update saga throughout the year, you may recall Dani Horowitz’s story. She runs an IT discussion community called Daniweb, and it was hit hard by the Panda update, but she made a lot of changes, and gradually started to build back some Google cred.

We interviewed in May, and she talked about the kinds of things that she was doing that was helping her get back some of her lost traffic:

In July, she claimed that her site had achieved 110% recovery from Panda, as all the while Google had released various iterations of the Panda update.

Unfortunately for Dani, in what may or may not be the latest iteration, DaniWeb has been hit again, and even harder than the first time.

We got an email from her today in which she told us, “After being hit in February, and fully documenting every change we’ve made, we eventually made a more than complete recovery. We went from averaging 280-290K pageviews (every so often hitting 300K) pre-Panda, to consistently being at 370K post-Panda.”

“However, we were hit again on Wednesday, September 28th, once again losing more than half of our traffic,” she added. “I think this might even be a bigger hit than last time. I am still investigating whether or not this was another iteration of Panda that just went out or something different.”

Apparently, Dani just can’t catch a break, despite all of the work she’s been putting into it (as discussed in the above video).

We’ve asked Google if it has released another iteration of the Panda update. We’ll update if we receive a response. About 10 days ago, we reported on some suspicion that was going around that another Panda update had been released, but Google shot down that theory. We’ll see if that happens this time.

Dani says there is “definite confirmation that we lost all our Google traffic overnight.”

September 30, 2011
Blekko Gets New Funding ($30 Million)

Blekko has secured a new $30 million investment from a mix of investors (some old, some new), including Russian search engine Yandex. CEO Rich Skrenta tells WebProNews, “Money will be used to expand and grow the service – hiring, infrastructure, marketing, etc.”

When asked if Blekko intends to expand into areas beyond search, he simply said, “We are focused on delivering great, spam-free search results.”

Earlier this month, Blekko did launch an analytics tool called Web Grepper.

Skrenta said that he wanted Blekko to be the “third” search engine (along with Google and Bing) back when it launched. I don’t know that it’s very widely considered that yet, but the investment can’t hurt the company’s quest to get there, especially if they will indeed remained focused on search.

Of course, Yahoo might have something to say about that “third search engine” thing. While it does use Bing to power its back-end, the company has been very vocal about how seriously it still takes search. Last week, they said they’re ready for a “search fight”. I don’t think Blekko was their main concern though.

September 29, 2011
Business Wire Patents SEO Strategy

Press release distribution service Business Wire announced that it has been awarded a U.S. patent for the technological process of optimizing and distributing press releases to maximize their ability to be found and tracked in the search engines.

So, basically they’ve patented an SEO strategy. Strange, but interesting. Will this lead to other SEO strategies being patented?

Business Wire says its strategy is the result of “years of research and development and considerable investment.”

I wonder how many SEO firms would make similar claims.

“Our new SEO patent provides complimentary enhancements to Business Wire’s already powerful press release distribution and measurement services,” said Laura Sturaitis, Executive Vice President of Media Services and Product Strategy.

“Through Business Wire, customers have the power to effectively analyze and optimize their press release content for search, then simultaneously deliver their news to media and market participants via our patented NX delivery network, then measure audience engagement via our NewsTrak reports,” she added.

“With the awarding of this patent, in addition to Business Wire’s NX distribution technology patents, our company continues to develop unique, proprietary and more effective communications innovations that have been a hallmark at Business Wire for 50 years,” said Cathy Baron-Tamraz, Business Wire CEO.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this patent leads to any legal battles in the SEO world.

Business Wire is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

September 28, 2011
Jerry Yang Back in Control at Yahoo?

As you may recall, Yahoo recently fired CEO Carol Bartz. It was kind of an ugly parting of ways. Upon the announcement, Yahoo said it had appointed Timothy Morse Interim CEO, and that the company formed an Executive Leadership Council designed to support Morse and manage Yahoo’s day-to-day operations until a permanent CEO is found.

“The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities,” said Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo’s Board, at the time. “We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders.”

Today, Business Insider, whose own CEO Henry Blodget proposed that Yahoo buy his company and appoint it CEO, is reporting that former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is currently in control at Yahoo. A snippet from the report from Nicholas Carlson says:

Jerry Yang – who is at once a beloved cofounder and a hated former CEO – has reinserted himself at the top.

One source close to Yahoo says Yang has “essentially” taken control of the company.

“Jerry who is essentially running the company again. He is in there running the company day to day,” this source says.

“It’s f—ing crazy!”

“How that’s even possible is bizarre after what he did to this company. How the board didn’t show him out is shocking.”

Carlson’s sources are also telling him that Yahoo board member and Akamai President David Kenny is campaigning for the Yahoo CEO job.

Despite all of the turbulence on the leadership side of things, Yahoo’s brand in general hasn’t seemed to have taken much of a hit. I’m not sure that’s the case in terms of the search industry, but Yahoo does keep talking about how seriously it’s taking search. They recently introduced some redesigned SERPs and put up a blog post about how they’re ready for a search fight.

September 28, 2011