Tag: Search

StumbleUpon Explore Box Makes Randomness More Specific

The merits of StumbleUpon are numerous – it’s a wonderful time-occupier and a great place to explore the far corners of the internet. Most of its appeal stems from the fact that it is a “discovery engine,” something related to but entirely different from a standard search engine.

StumbleUpon’s new Explore Box, however, is putting a little more targeted search into the experience. The new feature, which we told you about last month, is still in beta according to a press release.

The official StumbleUpon YouTube channel has released this short video explaining the new box. “Easily explore thousands of interests. When you’re interested in something new, the Explore Box has something for you.”

With the explore box, users can enter specific topics that they want to stumble – for instance, Lady Gaga, Vampires, Bourbon, Guitars. Once they begin stumbling that specific topic, they can easily opt out of it in the top toolbar and go back to stumbling all interests.

StumbleUpon already lets you narrow your stumbling down to categories, but those categories aren’t all that specific (Music, Art, Technology, American Literature, Alternative Rock). This new Explore Box expands the topics that you can stumble from around 500 to hundreds of thousands.

@gmc
GarrettStumbleUpon’s ExploreBox is live 🙂 http://t.co/qAev4hu 59 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

“Millions of people already enjoy stumbling to be entertained and inspired, and the Explore Box now makes content discovery easier for those who want a more precise way to explore their interests,” said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder. “The Explore Box enables discovery for anything you want to learn about, and surfaces the hidden gems you can’t find anywhere else.”

The new feature definitely makes the “discovery engine” a little more like a search engine. But it shouldn’t take away from the randomness that makes StumbleUpon so much fun. For instance, my targeted exploration of “Bourbon” netted me articles about different types of Bourbon, recipes with Bourbon, the Bourbon-making process, the French House of Bourbon, and other tangential topics.

August 17, 2011
Yahoo Traffic Data Comes to Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing announced that it is now integrating Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools. It’s a little surprising that they’ve waited this long to do so, as the Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo has been in place since last fall, but better late than never.

“The changes affect the numbers shown only,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. “No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages.”

Most areas and data within webmaster accounts, will not be affected, he says. In the Traffic Summary and Page Traffic reports, you should see an increase in impressions, clicks, and hopefully clickthrough rate, as a result of the combined data numbers.

“Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines,” says Forrester. “For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine.”

The data will only be combined, and not selectable, at least at first. It will be updated in all markets where Bing is powering Yahoo Search.

The actual data integration starts from August 12, and Bing says it took about four days from then for the data to completely populate across accounts. In other words, you can look forward to September as the first complete month for the combined data.

August 16, 2011
Sitelinks in Google Search Results Get Some Updates

Google announced today that it is launching an update to its sitelinks feature in search results. These are the links that appear under some search results that point users to different parts of that that site.

Now, sitelinks are full-sized blue text links with a URL and a single line of text underneath. There are also more of them. The old maximum number was 8. Now it’s 12.

But that’s not all. How Google actually determines which links to show has also changed.

“In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links,” explains Daniel Rocha, a software engineer on Google’s sitelinks team. “This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page.”

“Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them,” he adds. “The number of sitelinks will also vary based on your query.”

While some users may have seen this feature in tests prior to this point, Google says it is rolling out the updates over the next few days around the globe in all supported languages to modern browser users (Chrome, Firefox, IE7 and above, etc.).

August 16, 2011
Google Points Users to Different Content While They’re on Your Site

Google has launched a new Google Toolbar feature/browser extension called “Google Related,” which basically gives users access to a variety of different Google results that are related (at least in theory) to any site they visit, while they are on said site.

Here’s how Google describes it, followed by a video the company shares:

Google Related is a browsing assistant that offers interesting and useful content while you are browsing the web. For instance, if you’re browsing a page about a restaurant in San Francisco, Google Related will assist you by displaying useful information about this restaurant such as the location of the restaurant on a map, user reviews, related restaurants in the area, and other webpages related to San Francisco restaurants — all in one place.

Whenever you’re navigating to a new page, Google Related will look for interesting related content and, if available, display it in a bar at the bottom of your page. Google Related can display categories such as videos, news articles, maps, reviews, images, web sites and more. To preview a listed item or see additional items, just use your mouse to hover over different categories in the bar. For example, when you hover over a video link, the video pops up in a preview box and you can play the video directly on the page.

Google Related only works for users who have configured Toolbar’s search site to be Google.com. In the future, we may make Google Related available for country-specific alternatives.

In many cases, this is a way for users to see competitors’ offerings without even having to leave your page. For example, if you look at a book product page on Amazon, users can easily see that product’s pages on competitors’ sites. This probably isn’t so great for small businesses. A small book shop might be trying to sell a book, as Google Related points them to Amazon and Walmart as alternatives.

Here’s what an Amazon page looks like:

For a review site like Yelp (they’re going to love this), a user might find a restaurant page, where Google Related will step up and offer your Google’s reviews and/or Place Pages.

Here’s what a Yelp page looks like:

It’s not all comparison shopping and reviews. Google will show a variety of content depending on the page you’re looking at. For some sites, it may expose users to more of your content – particularly for publishers. If you look at WebProNews, for example, the tool will point you to different articles from our site (with the added bonus of +1 buttons. It will also show related web results, such as our Facebook Page, videos, etc.

Here’s what WPN looks like:

On the other hand, that’s just the front page. If you go to an article page, it will show related content from other sites.

For users reading news on a site, it’s not a bad thing to have other related content a click away, to absorb a larger part of the conversation. This is what makes sites like Google News useful.

For users, it’s not a bad little tool at all, and some sites may see benefits. The competition thing may be a cause of concern for some businesses, however, and it’s interesting that Google would launch such a tool as its competitive practices are being scrutinized by the FTC as well as the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust.

For sites fighting to improve bounce rates, this will work against them, because in most cases it’s further encouragement directly from Google to leave the page that you’re on in favor of a page from another site. On the flip side, you could be the one Google is pointing to from someone else’s site.

Google Related is available as a Google Toolbar update and as a Chrome Extension.

August 16, 2011
Report: Each Search is Worth 50 Cents

McKinsey & Company put out a lengthy and interesting report called “The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search,” which explores the value of search.

According to the report, the average Internet user performed about 1,500 searches in 2010, with 1.6 trillion searches a year being conducted globally. I can only assume the number is on the rise, thanks to mobile usage taking off.

While the report is over 50 pages long, one part is particularly interesting. It finds that the gross annual value of search activity at the global level is comparable to the GDP of an entire country like the Netherlands or Turkey, and that this makes each individual search worth about 50 cents.

The report says: “The analysis showed that search activity had measurable impact approaching gross annual value of $780 billion in 2009, similar to the GDP of the Netherlands or Turkey,and making each single search worth around $0.50. It should be remembered that this is only a partial estimate of the gross value of search, limited as our research was in terms of the number of constituencies and sources of value analyzed. In addition, the speed at which the search environment grows makes it likely that this figure has already been surpassed.”

“Not all of this value shows up in GDP—e.g., many consumer benefits, such as lower prices or the time consumers save, are not captured in these numbers,” the report continues. “Some of these are likely to have an indirect impact on GDP. Some sources of value in education and healthcare that we did not quantify also boost GDP indirectly. The estimate of GDP impact should therefore be taken as conservative. It is nevertheless significant. The research showed gross value of $540 billion, or 69 percent of the measurable value, flowing through to GDP. This is roughly the nominal size of the global publishing industry in 20101 or Switzerland’s GDP in 2010.”

I bet you never thought your searching habits were worth so much.

August 15, 2011
New Bing Shopping Features Launched

Bing revealed some new features it’s rolling out today for Bing Shopping. These include the ability to refine your searches faster, product-level deals, product page filters and shopping list improvements.

“As the number of available products increase, we want to make sure you’re able to quickly find the information that is most relevant to you,” Bing says on its search blog. “Today the site includes filters on the left side of the page to help narrow down your search results by category, brand and price point. While these filters are great, you have to click through to the results page before you can start using them. To solve this problem, we removed a step and added the refinements directly to the search box. Now you can select as few or as many of the refinements as you want.”

That would look something like this:

“In addition to ‘refining on the fly’, we have also added product-level deals to the site,” Bing says. “Now when you search for products on the site, if a discounted price is available, you will see it next to the listing. To help you find deals, we added a ‘price reduced’ filter under the price refinement allowing you to quickly filter results to only show the products with price reductions.”

To complement that, Bing has added a filter to product pages sorting products by stores. When the user views a product they can find related items.

Bing is also letting users have more than one shopping list, any of which can be shared via Facebook, a la Bing’s previously announced Facebook integrations. If friends comment on Facebook, you can see the comments from Bing.

Additionally, Bing redesigned its browse pages:

August 15, 2011
Google Authorship Markup – An Easier Way
Google really wants people writing web content to start using authorship markup. Not only are they looking to use it as a ranking signal, but it also pushes the Google Profile, which is essentially the backbone of the Google+ user experience.

Granted, you don’t need to be a Google+ user (at least at this point) to have a Google Profile, and Profiles existed before Google+, but in Google+, the Profile is essentially the equivalent of the Facebook Wall, and authorship markup places them right in search results with nice little clickable graphics.

In a recent article, we looked at a video Google released discussing how to implement authorship markup on your site. They’ve now released another one offering a few quick steps to get it to work when you don’t necessarily control the CMS of the site you’re writing content for. This way, even guest authors can add it.

Google calls it, “a way to make it even easier to annotate your pages and show that there is authorship.”

Here are the basic steps:
“If I can’t control the attributes, I can still add a link to this special URL,” says Cutts, and it’s really as simple as that.
August 12, 2011
Google Panda Update Rolls Out in Most Languages

Google announced early this morning that it is rolling out out the Panda update in different languages around the world.

“Our scientific evaluation data show that this change improves our search quality across the board and the response to Panda from users has been very positive,” Google Fellow Amit Singhal said on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

He linked “scientific evaluation data” to the 15:40 mark of the following video, in which he discusses this:

“For most languages, this change impacts typically 6-9% of queries to a degree that a user might notice,” says Singhal. “This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected almost 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount. We are launching this change for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, where we continue to test improvements.”

The news comes just after Google said that there was no new Panda update a couple days ago, having told Search Engine Land:

“No Panda update is currently occurring… those other sites may just be now seeing changes from the previous Panda update a couple weeks ago, but other than that, there’s no update or anything out of the ordinary happening here.”

This was in reference to some webmasters reporting recoveries on WebmasterWorld, as discussed here.

Here’s a list of Google’s Webmaster Tools Help Forums by language.

August 12, 2011
FTC Google Probe: More Details Emerge

After various reports that the Federal Trade Commission was going to launch a big investigation into Google’s business practices, this was finally confirmed in late June, though little information was revealed as to what specifically the FTC was looking at.

The Wall Street Journal is now reporting, citing “people familiar with the probe,” that Google’s Android and web search businesses will be key areas of focus. This is hardly surprising, but it does shed a little more light on the investigation. The WSJ’s Thomas Catan and Amir Efrati report:

Federal Trade Commission lawyers, in conjunction with several state attorneys general, have been asking whether Google prevents smartphone manufacturers that use its Android operating system from using competitors’ services, these people said.

They also have inquired whether Google grants preferential placement on its website to its own products, such as Google’s “Places” business listings, its “Shopping results” and Google Finance services above most other results.

When Google first officially acknowledged the probe in June, it outlined five principles of its business strategy that it says will stand up to scrutiny, including: doing what’s best for the user, providing the most relevant answers as quickly as possible, labeling ads clearly, being transparent, and “loyalty, not lock-in”. That last one refers to control over data (see Google’s Data Liberation Front efforts).

“It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand,” Google’s Amit Singhal said at the time. He also sprinkled in a bit at the end about Google “ensuring that businesses can grow and create jobs.”

Google is also scheduled to give testimony with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust on September 21. Former CEO and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt will testify.

August 11, 2011
Create and Maximize Videos for Improved SEO
If you’re like many website managers, you’ve been dealt a hefty blow by Google recently, with its various algorithm updates that have taken place over the past few months. The purpose of Google’s updates, known as “Panda” or “Farmer,” was to separate quality content from content farms, scraper sites and other types of low-quality websites. Google estimates that the changes impact nearly 12% of all searches.

While these updates were made to help users find high-quality information, they had unfortunate side effects for many credible websites. A poll by Search Engine Roundtable found that after the first update, 40% of respondents were seeing less Google traffic. Visits continued to fall off as subsequent updates continued.

If you’ve been investing in SEO initiatives, these modifications to Google could be a tremendous setback. Fortunately, there is a fast, powerful way to boost organic search traffic—as quickly as this week. The answer is in video.

Video is the most powerful force on the web today, and continues to occupy more of users’ time and attention. Interestingly, video sites such Metacafe and YouTube were virtually immune to the Google updates, which tells you something. Also, videos continue to rank high in search results. So for anyone needing to improve their SEO rankings, video represents a tremendous opportunity. When video is on your site it can help raise your visibility significantly. But how can you build a video presence online?

If you don’t already have video on your site, below is a short guide for how you can add video to quickly see an SEO boost. If you do already have video but don’t know if it’s being indexed by Google, skip ahead to tip #4 for guidelines on how to get your video indexed – a critical step to seeing SEO benefits.

1. Cover your Entire Product Catalog with Video

First off, as all of us in the online world know, video is engaging. And for e-commerce sites in particular, product videos are an effective way to create trust, demonstrate pretty much any product, and connect with your shoppers. More importantly, they help increase conversion rates. So, if you haven’t already begun to convert your product catalog to video, it’s time to get started. This may sound daunting, but automated video platforms make this so easy, virtually anyone can create and publish compelling product videos fairly quickly.

You can also hire a professional video production firm, but that gets very costly – and if you have hundreds of products to cover, it may also take months to go through your entire catalog. And what happens if pricing or availability changes?

If covering your entire catalog sounds like biting off too much, then simply start with your top sellers. Continue to add video over time, rather than waiting until everything is available on video to launch.

2. Ensure Videos are Relevant

Like your product choices and all the content on your site, your videos need to be relevant to your audience and what they’re seeking. One way to ensure relevance is by including appropriate videos on each product page. If you’ve done your homework and labeled your videos correctly, you can easily serve up video that answers a consumer’s needs.

What’s more, video is undoubtedly the best way to engage shoppers and keep them on your site longer. As an added bonus, time spent viewing is another measurement weighed by Google as it determines how to serve up search results.

3. Test, Test and Test Again

What works better for your product set and your audience? Text or voiceover? Classical music, popular music or none at all? Illustrations or photography? Testing doesn’t have to be expensive, but with the wealth of user information available, it can point you in the right direction for cost-efficient, effective efforts in the future.

4. Ensure Your Video Content Is Indexed

Even if you already have video on your site, you can’t assume it’s being indexed by Google. You need to help them index your videos in order to get the SEO benefits you’re working so hard to achieve.

To find out if your videos are indexed:
1. Go to Google
2. Type “site:domainname” (using your own domain name) in the search box
3. Click “Videos” in the left navigation
The number you see above the search results is the number of videos indexed. If that number is lower than the number of videos on your site, you know you need to take steps to make sure Google finds your content. This example shows you that Heavenly Treasures has roughly 5,000 videos on its online retail site.

5. Submit a Video Sitemap

To get your videos indexed, you need to submit a video sitemap to Google—manually via their webmaster tools page or through a third-party service. Once the sitemap is properly submitted, video content gets indexed almost immediately, unlike other types of content which can take weeks. In order to get the maximum benefit, make sure that you follow Google’s steps and include all the information required, and resubmit your sitemap any time you make a change to your video catalog.

Once indexed, you’ll be pleased to see that your product videos quickly begin to rise in search rankings. Even better, because thumbnail images appear with video listings, your results are likely to enjoy significantly higher click-through rates.

Many online retailers have found that the use of video has dramatically improved their SEO efforts. Online wholesaler DollarDays, for example, created videos and submitted a sitemap shortly after the new algorithm went live. Within 24 hours, all of their product videos were fully indexed and many were appearing on page one of Google search results. Naturally, this also had an instant impact on views and conversions.

Video may seem a bit daunting, but there was a time when doing business online seemed out of reach, too. There’s no better time for you to make the move to video—especially with the holidays on the horizon. From visitor engagement to SEO advantages, there are many good reasons to become a part of the video world.
August 11, 2011
Does Removing Your Website From Google Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

You may be wondering, specifically–why would I ask a question like this? And then try to answer it. Well, it may seem like a no-brainer. Upon first thought, you might think that this is one of the dumbest questions. But let’s delve into this deeper and look at a specific example of a website that removed themselves from Google and then examine the search results a day later, after they have “undone” what they previously did–which was to remove themselves from Google.

As you might be not be aware, RipoffReport.com accidentally removed themselves from the Google search engine by entering that directive in Google Webmaster Tools. Google verified that they removed themselves–but now, less than 24 hours later, the website is now back, with hundreds of thousands of pages back in Google.

If you haven’t heard of Ripoffreport.com, it is a website that prides itself on making companies’ businesses difficult by catering to negative business reviews. Companies do not like the fact web pages from that website rank so well for their company name, and provides an overall online reputation management nightmare for lots of companies. I have heard from colleagues that the company charges as much as $16,000 or more to have their online listings ~~removed from the website~~ changed. That’s just a rumor, as I have no actual proof. But generally speaking, many think the business is no good–and is essentially blackmail.

But let’s get back to the question at hand. Does removing your website from Google hurt your search engine rankings? Yes, obviously if your website is not listed in Google then you aren’t going to get any traffic from Google. However, it appears that once you are re-listed, as in the case of Ripoff Report, your search engine rankings will come back–and the screen capture below show exactly what I mean.

Last night, at about 10:00pm Central Standard Time, a search for site:ripoffreport.com showed absolutely no search results in Google. But this morning, as I post this, the website is back in the Google search results. And it appears that their search engine rankings, such as a search for “Radialabs”, are back.

Does removing your website from Google hurt your search engine rankings? Yes, as long as your site is NOT in Google. But once you are back in the search engine, your rankings appear to come back, rather quickly. Keep in mind that the website was NOT banned in Google. The search engine did not remove the website. That is a big difference here, and being banned from the search engine will hurt your search engine rankings.

Check out BillHartzer.com for more articles by Bill Hartzer

August 10, 2011
The Next Google Ranking Signal: Your Google Profile?

Long story short: if you’re looking to help your search engine rankings, you might need a Google Profile (the backbone of Google+).

Who you are as an individual is becoming more important in search ranking. Is this the right way to go for search? Share your thoughts.

As previously reported, Google has a new series of tutorial videos, and in a new one, Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss “authorship markup”.

Google announced this back in June saying it is “experimenting ” with using the data to help people find content from authors in search results.

In the new video, Cutts asks, “Will people get higher rankings? Is there a rankings boost for rel=’author’?”

Hansson then replies, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

For the time being, what you get, he explains, is your photo showing up next to your results. The idea is to show photos next to results. That’s the goal with this project, he says.

“If people believe it’s a good idea, you know, using HTML5 hopefully might help Google and any other search engine figure out more about content on the web, and what’s trustworthy and what’s less trustworthy over time,” says Cutts.

Given the emphasis Google has been putting on trustworthy content (see Panda update), it’s easy to imagine this not only becoming a ranking signal, but a significant one.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. You have to have a Google Profile to use it. Kind of like Google+. Another interesting strategy to get people using Google’s new social network, no? And while still managing to keep things search-related. Well played, Google.

When the authorship markup is used, it leads to an author photo being displayed in Google search results when applicable. For example, if I write an article and that article appears in search results, it would come with a picture of me (from my Google Profile) next to it, and that would link to my Google profile. So, as an added bonus for Google, this will greatly increase the visibility of the Google Profile, and no doubt contribute to further growth of not only Google profiles, but Google+.

The Google Profile does actually keep the feature from being abused though. “To make sure that I can’t start writing nonsense and attributing it to Matt…you have to link back from your Google Profile to the site,” explains Hansson. “You need to control both endpoints basically.”

To use the markup on a single author site, you basically just need to:

1. On every post, add a link somewhere on the page pointing to your Google Profile (more visibility for Google Profiles)

2. On that link, add an attribute rel=”author”

3. The link can go in the footer or the header or wherever you can make it work.

4. You can wrap it around an image if you want.

If you have multiple authors on the site, like each author’s post to that author’s Google Profile. “That could be as simple as just at the bottom of each post, have the author actually insert a link themselves, with this attribute on it,” says Hansson. “Another thing that a lot of sites have, is…author bios.”

Link the bio to the author’s bio page, add rel=author on the links to the bio, and from the bio page add rel=”me” links to the Google Profile, and link the Google Profile back to that page.

“This obviously requires authors to make Profiles, and it requires webmasters to do the markup,” says Hansson.

Cutts says they’re trying to work with CMS manufacturers so that individual people don’t’ have to do all the work if they don’t want to.

For more detailed instructions on how to implement authorship markup, see Webmaster Tools help.

By the way, Google has been pretty weird with authors lately, though this is unrelated to the authorship markup discussed here, as far as I can tell.

Should authorship markup in this form be a significant ranking factor? Tell us what you think.

August 10, 2011
Yahoo Image Search Gets Redesign

Yahoo has launched a new version of Image Search with a new tiled look on results pages. Images become larger when you hover over one of the image titles.

You can also sort images by three category tabs as they appear: latest, galleries, and Facebook. If you choose “latest,” it will show image search results of trending topics, such as events, celebrities and news. This tab will automatically appear for certain queries.

The galleries tab will appear when results that include photo galleries from Yahoo News, Flickr, and Yahoo’s OMG. The Facebook tab comes in when you connect your Facebook account to Yahoo Image Search, and it will appear when results include matches from your Facebook friends’ name, photo album names or album descriptions.

“One of the most significant changes we’ve made to Yahoo! Image Search is the way images are displayed and navigated,” says Yahoo’s Girish Ananthakrishnan. “By clicking on any image on the search results page, the image will appear on a fresh page allowing users to browse effortlessly through full-size images with a simple click on the desktop browser.”

Images play a very significant role in search engine visibility, and it’s wise to keep abreast of any new features that the major search engines roll out. Last week, we looked at a report from Searchmetrics showing how universal or blended search can help marketers in visibility. The study looked at the top 100 results displayed by Google for a database fo about 28 million search terms over a four-month period. Image results appeared in 30% of all searches where universal search results are included in the top 100 listings. That’s more than any other kind of universal search result other than video (more than maps, news, books, shopping, and blogs.

“We found that video and images are highly visible in Google searches when compared with other types of universal search content,” said Searchmetrics CEO Dr Horst Joepen. “So it makes sense for marketers to increase the volume of video and image content they’re creating and to optimize it both on their own sites and on third party sites such as YouTube and Flickr.”

That’s Google, but Yahoo and Bing also include image results on the first page as well.

On an interesting side note, Barry Schwartz is pointing to a WebmasterWorld thread, where webmasters are claiming that Google Images is doing a better job at determining original sources than Google web search.

August 10, 2011
More Sites Recovering from Panda?

It appears that more sites are recovering from Google’s Panda update thanks to Google’s continued algorithm tweaking. Some are speculating that Google’s Panda update is updating automatically, as opposed to being updated by Google manually, as it has been in the past.

Similar speculation was voiced the last time Google confirmed a Panda tweak (when DaniWeb reported its recovery), though Google stated:

“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.

In a WebmasterWorld thread titled “Panda Updates Now Processed In Real Time“, member SEOPTI says, “I’m quite sure since two sites have completely recovered. One last week on Friday and the second one today which means +400% for each site.”

Member AnkitMaheshwari chimed in, “I am also seeing traffic bouncing back from 4-Aug-2011 on one of my client’s site which was hit by panda2.3. Now the traffic is almost equal to pre-panda 2.3 period.”

It’s important to keep in mind that, like Google said in the above statement, it makes about 500 changes each year. Many of them are not Panda-related, but may still have positive or negative impacts on sites. That’s not to say this wasn’t a Panda tweak, but Panda tweaks aren’t everything. Regardless of Google’s continued iterations on Panda, Google’s philosophy behind Panda will remain the same – ranking high quality content better than low quality content. See Google’s list of questions to ask yourself in assessing quality.

It doesn’t hurt to work to diversify your traffic sources either.

Yesterday, Demand Media released its earnings report for the second quarter. During its earnings call for Q1, CEO Richard Rosenblatt revealed that search referrals were down by 20%. Back then they also announced a clean-up initiative for the eHow site – the site hit hardest by Panda, and most criticized for quality. During the call for this past quarter yesterday, he said they have removed 300,000 eHow articles and continue to edit the rest to improve quality. He said only a small percentage of revenue was impacted by search algorithm changes, and that eHow had over 70 million uniques in June (comScore).

“We feel confident that our auditing and removal of content and improvement of overall quality will continue to attract traffic from all different sources,” he said.

Of course, the company also expanded its ad partnership with Google, including a new presence in Google’s Display Network.

Update: Google has said that no Panda update is currently happening, but that sites may just now be seeing affects from the last Panda update.

August 10, 2011
Google Launches New Series of Matt Cutts Webmaster Tutorials

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has been answering webmaster questions in short videos for quite some time now. The videos have often been quite informative, and have tackled numerous issues that common webmasters face on a day-to-day basis.

Now, Cutts is appearing in some longer more tutorial-driven videos.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve released over 375 videos on our YouTube channel, with the majority of them answering direct questions from webmasters,” says Michael Wyszomierski on Google’s Search Quality Team. “Today, we’re starting to release a freshly baked batch of videos, and you might notice that some of these are a little different.”

“Don’t worry, they still have Matt Cutts in a variety of colored shirts,” he adds. “Instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics.”

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsWoohoo! The next new batch of webmaster videos is ready! The first one is about 301 redirects: http://t.co/WWPUfBr 15 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

Here’s the first one:

In the video itself, he talks about 301 redirect limits. In this particular video, Cutts answers his own question, which is: “Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?”

The short answer is “no.” There is no cap, though it’s best not to redirect one page to too many redirects. 4 or 5 “hops” are dangerous, he says.

Good question though. Hopefully the majority of questions will be as thoughtful as Matt’s. Or maybe we’ll see him answer more of his own questions. I guess we’ll just have to stay tuned.

August 9, 2011
Bing: Here Are the 4 Reasons You Want Links

Bing’s Duane Forrester has followed up his recent post about how Bing evaluates content quality with one about how Bing looks at links. He says you want links for a few reasons, and lists 4 of them:

1 – because they alert us to your website when its new, or to new content
2 – because they are a vote of confidence in your site – quality websites tend to link to other quality websites
3 – because those links can send you direct traffic
4 – because over time, they can help establish a footprint that points to your authority on a topic (think guest blogging)

The main point from the post is pretty much: links are not everything when it comes to ranking in search engines. Nothing new there. Still, it never hurts to listen to the policies as they’re explained by the search engines themselves.

@DuaneForrester
duane forresterYou love links. We love links. Build for the right reasons. – From an early stage people are taught that links are i… http://ow.ly/1e7uc9 2 days ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto

On how many links you need, Forrester says, “Not as many as you may think. Again, as with so many other areas of search optimization, there’s no exact number here. On popular phrases with lots of query volume, to rank well will require more links from trusted, quality websites to boost your rankings. Less popular phrases can often require many less links pointed at your site to see the same lift in rankings. This is where a targeted link building approach can pay off for you.”

The take-aways of the post, Forrester says, are: don’t buy links, great content builds links, prove to users you’re a trusted authority (and links will follow), and social media can help grow links.

Here’s where Bing gives its advice for link building.

August 8, 2011
Does Google Need Twitter?

As previously reported, Google is talking about bringing back its Realtime Search feature. It’s been missing since last month because Google and Twitter couldn’t agree on terms to extend their partnership which gave Google access to the firehose – the source of all tweets in realtime – a crucial factor of what’s going on “right now”.

Do you think realtime search is an important feature for Google to have? Tell us what you think.

When Google’s deal with Twitter expired, Google said the following in a statement, as reported by Search Engine Land:

Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always as helpful (though it certainly can be from time to time) outside of the realtime context.

As Ben Parr reported, Google’s Amit Singhal said they’re working on bringing it back using Google+ and “other sources”.

Now, it’s important to remember that Twitter was not the only thing powering Google’s realtime search in the first place. It also included (and presumably still will include) Google Buzz posts, public Facebook Page updates, MySpace posts, Google News sources, blogs, Quora, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Gowalla, Twitgoo, TwitArmy, Me2Day, Identi.ca, and regular web pages that were simply newly updated (Google can index pretty quickly thanks to Caffeine). Now it will also apparently include Google+ when it comes back.

Given the fact that when it lost Twitter, it shut down the feature entirely, it seems fairly obvious that Twitter was a very critical element. If you ever used the feature much, it was pretty clear that the majority of content was coming from Twitter. So the real question becomes: Can Google+ replace Twitter as a source of realtime updates?

Maybe Google should try to at least go another year using Twitter for realtime search, and give Google+ a chance to match it in content. The incredible growth is there, but you’re not getting the kind of stuff on Google+ that you’re getting on Twitter. Not at this point.

We’ve made the case that Google+ could maim Twitter. A lot of people have already claimed that their Google+ time is eating into their Twitter time (more so than their Facebook time). In many ways, Google+ is much more comparable to Twitter – especially in the area of public updates – what makes realtime search go ’round.

It’s not there yet though. Twitter has the celebrities, all of the brands, the years of establishing its reputation, the revolutions in the Middle East, the news media inserting it into report after report, etc. Many people have only recently started getting into Twitter, and likely don’t want to jump into another network already. They’re just getting used to Twitter.

Google+ does already have a great deal of information. I won’t dispute that. This is especially true for the Internet industry – many players of which, are also early adopters of the service. Sure, it has a few celebrities, and brands are coming. Are you going to get the kind of breaking news from average citizens that you get from Twitter though?

I don’t think so. Not yet anyway. Are you going to get things like the Hudson River emergency plane landing? The live tweeting of the Bin Laden raid? The high profile Tim Tebow wars? Not so much. Again, not yet anyway. Not to anywhere near the same extent, at least.

It has a familiarity to the general public, and it’s open to them. Google+ isn’t even open to the general public without invitation, and they’re already talking about using it to power the realtime search features, which was mainly powered by Twitter?

If you want to see up to the second results from around the world on what people are saying about any given topic, where do you go? Google+ or Twitter?

If Google really wants to organize the world’s information, maybe it needs to fork out enough money to get that firehose back. At least for a while. The early days are promising, but it’s still entirely possible that Google+ could turn into another Google Buzz or worse yet, another Google Wave.

Google did reportedly indicate that they’re working on bringing a search feature to Google+. That would be a start. I still can’t believe Google of all companies launched such an important strategic product without search in the first place.

Do you you think Google+ can replace Twitter for realtime search? Let us know in the comments.

August 7, 2011
If Who You Are Is Important to Google, Google Needs to Get it Right

It seems that Google is messing up a lot lately in terms of attaching the right names to their corresponding content in search results. This is not good, considering that Google seems to be placing a lot more emphasis on who you are.

About two months ago, Google announced authorship markup, which is essentially a way that you can associate specific authors with their content, which is supposed to make it easier for searchers to find content by said author.

This seems to be such a big part of Google’s vision for search that it is the only search feature Google CEO Larry Page mentioned when he was talking about the company’s innovations in search during the conference call for the latest Google earnings report.

“Even in search … which we’ve been working on for 12 years there have never been more important changes to make,” he said. For example this quarter we launched a pilot that shows an author’s name and picture in the search results, making it easier for users to find things from authors they trust.”

That’s all fine and good, but Google seems to be struggling with author names otherwise. Does Google require all publishers on the Internet to make diligent use of this new markup in order to display accurate author names on search results, and otherwise run a high probability of showing false information?

We’ve noticed a couple of Google mistakes with our own articles just within the last few days by accident. There may very well be more, and I’m betting that it’s not just our stuff. For example, here’s Google’s display of a search result for an article by Josh Wolford:

Notice that it lists “Moses Hightower” as the author. This is the name of a fictional character played by actor Bubba Smith, whom Josh mentioned in a different article altogether. Why would this appear as the author’s name for a completely different article (or an article at all for that matter)?

Another example shows Google displaying “Selina Kyle” as the author of an article, which was actually written by Jeremy Muncy. Selina Kyle is also a fictional character (Catwoman’s alter ego), which again was not mentioned in this particular article. It was mentioned, however, in another WebProNews article, written again by Josh. Remember, he did not even write the article that Google is displaying this for.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land pointed to some screwy results in a recent article as well, but these were in a different element of the search results altogether. He looked at Google’ display of social search results, in which Google was displaying weird names for the people who shared content.

For example, one result, Google said, was shared by TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid with “Michael Arringtonon on TechCrunch” in parentheses. Another showed Matt Cutts as “Googlewebmastercentral on blogspot.com”. Another showed David Harry as “dannysullivan on sphinn.com”.

Weird.

I don’t know that any of this is related to Google’s authorship markup, but it’s interesting that with Google looking so heavily at WHO is writing content, that it seems to be having trouble determining who is who altogether.

August 7, 2011
ISPs Hijack Users’ Searches, Apparently to Monetize Them

Internet Service Providers are hijacking their users’ search queries on major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and directing them to third-party proxies.

This news was revealed in an article by Jim Giles at New Scientist, who explains: “The hijacking seems to target searches for certain well-known brand names only. Users entering the term “apple” into their browser’s search bar, for example, would normally get a page of results from their search engine of choice. The ISPs involved in the scheme intercept such requests before they reach a search engine, however. They pass the search to an online marketing company, which directs the user straight to Apple’s online retail website.”

He says patents filed by Paxfire, a company involved in the hijacking, indicate the whole thing might be part of “a larger plan to allow ISPs to generate revenue by tracking the sites their customers visit,” and that “it may also be illegal.”

A class action suit has already been filed by New York law firms Reese Richman and Milberg.

ICSI researchers Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, with Peter Eckersley posted on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site:

In short, the purpose appears to be monetization of users’ searches. ICSI Networking’s investigation has revealed that Paxfire’s HTTP proxies selectively siphon search requests out of the proxied traffic flows and redirect them through one or more affiliate marketing programs, presumably resulting in commission payments to Paxfire and the ISPs involved. The affiliate programs involved include Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, and Ask.com. When looking up brand names such as “apple”, “dell”, “groupon”, and “wsj”, the affiliate programs direct the queries to the corresponding brands’ websites or to search assistance pages instead of providing the intended search engine results page.

The ISPs that are redirecting search queries, according to New Scientist, are: Cavalier, Cincinnati Bell, Cogent, Frontier, Hughes, IBBS, Insight Broadband, Megapath, Paetec, RCN, Wide Open West, and XO Communication. Charter and Iowa Telecom, the publication says, were also doing it, but have stopped.

On Google+, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote, “More than ten U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have apparently been caught hijacking search sessions. Crazy….To protect yourself against this, you can search Google via SSL search at https://encrypted.google.com . It might also help to change your DNS provider. Google has a Public DNS service:http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ and OpenDNS has one too.”

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsWow. 10+ ISPs have been proxying search sessions, and sometimes hijacking them, possibly for profit: http://t.co/cYh6gc4 1 hour ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

SEOs sure have their work cut out for them these days.

August 5, 2011
Bing’s Take on Content Quality
Since the Google Panda Update first launched back in February (and really for some time before that), there has been a lot of discussion about search quality throughout the industry – the quality of the content that search engines are returning in their results.

This is the whole reason the Panda update exists. It’s all about improving the quality of results. Some will dispute the success of that, but it is the reason for better or for worse.

But what about Bing? It doesn’t command nearly the search market share that Google does, but as it powers Yahoo search, it’s really the only major competitor in town.

Bing talked a bit about its own views on content quality this week, and content producers might do well to check take notice of that as well – especially those who may have been hit by the Panda update, but are still doing ok in Bing.

Whereas Google had a list of questions one could ask themselves to asses the quality of their site, Bing has published a list of things to avoid, which reads as follows:
- Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appears in other places. Produce your own unique content.
- Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
- All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
- Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
- Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
- Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
- Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
- Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
- Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.
The rest of Bing’s advice basically boils down to focusing on creating a good user experience and letting Bing know about your content. “Whether you call them rich snippets or by their proper names, the act of marking up your content to tell the engines more details about the content is a wise investment,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. “By following the plan outlined at Schema.org, you can embed meta tags around your content. Visitors won’t see them, but the search engines will, enabling us to understand your content and use it in unique ways to create more engaging search experiences. Take some time and review this idea to see if you can leverage the great content you’re creating in new ways.”

If you’re living up to Google’s definition of quality, you probably won’t be doing too bad in Bing either, and if you’re doing well in Google, you’re probably getting a lot more search referrals from Google than you could ever get from Bing anyway, but it’s still helpful to get a look into Bing’s own thinking on this issue.
August 4, 2011
Bing Adds Mall Maps to Mobile Search

Bing has added mall maps and map search to Bing for Mobile. Microsoft’s search engine currently has over 400 shopping malls available in map form.

“Venue maps are a great way to save time and frustration when planning your next summer vacation or that last minute shopping trip – getting you in and out the door faster. Additionally, we now also provide the capability to search on the map,” says the Bing Maps team. “We’ve made locating mall maps an easy task from your desktop or m.bing.com. Just search for the mall name on Bing or Bing Maps, then click on the Mall Map link in the search results contact card.”

“You can also view different levels of a specific venue by clicking the ‘Level’ button at the top of the screen and then selecting the correct level from the provided list,” the team says.

Bing has also added the ability to search from Bing Maps itself. Search results utilize the split view syncing a list and map view in a single view.

“Pan the map and hit refresh and the results in the list will change based on the position of the map,” the Bing team says. “The map highlights the business locations as you scroll through the list making it easy to see where all the options are located. Clicking on a list item such as a business listing will move the map to focus on that business. Similarly, clicking on a point of interest on the map updates the list.”

The features are supported on iPhone, Android and RIM devices. They can be accessed from m.bing.com.

August 4, 2011