Tag: SEO

Google & Bing Are Looking at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking

Search and social go well together, and the search engines are finding more and more ways to use them together. In fact, the right combinations of these two elements could eventually dictate who has the most useful tools for users.

It’s become more and more clear over time that having a strong social presence is helpful in building a strong search presence for a variety of reasons, but it’s not been so clear, just how the search engines have looked at things like Twitter and Facebook profiles when it comes to organic search ranking.

Should social media be considered in search ranking? Tell us what you think.

Search Engine Land Chief Danny Sullivan posted an important article about this very topic, with some rare and surprisingly direct answers from both Google and Bing. While, neither exactly gave away their respective secret sauces, it would appear that they have set some things straight.

Google

Google reportedly uses when an article is retweeted or referenced in Twitter as a signal in organic and news rankings (even though links on Twitter are nofollowed). They also use it to enhance the news universal results (based on how many people share an article).

Google "computes and uses author quality" for when someone tweets. When Sullivan asked if they calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on who tweets it, Google Responded, "Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the ‘Top links’ section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search."

Google says it treats links shared on Facebook Fan pages the same way as tweeted links, but they have no personal Facebook wall data. Authority for Facebook Pages is also treated like Twitter.

So, the more authoritative the crowd sharing links to your content, the better. Not that different than PageRank.

Bing

When it comes to Twitter, Bing tells Sullivan it also looks at social authority of users and more specifically, looks at how many people they follow and how many follow them, adding that this can add "a little weight" to a listing in regular search results (though it carries more in Bing’s separate Social Search). Bing decides when links should carry more weight based on the person who tweets it.

As far as Facebook, Bing currently looks at links shared on Facebook that are marked as being shared to "everyone" and those from Fan Pages. "We can tell if something is of quality on Facbook by leveraging Twitter," as Sullivan paraphrases Bing’s response. "If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate."

Bing does not use its new Facebook data in ordinary web search…yet.

On a related note, Bing is finding other interesting ways to utilize Facebook with search.

So, clearly it pays to tweet and build a credible Twitter presence. This means gaining a significant following in number, but also getting authoritative users to follow you (and hopefully retweet your links). This would appear to be good for plain old fashioned organic rankings as well as other supplemental search results. More importantly, it pays to create good content that will attract authoritative Twitterers to share it with others.

These things of course pay anyway, but it’s nice to know that they actually do have an effect on search rankings as well.

It’s not surprising that Twitter is currently playing a more important role in to search engine ranking than Facebook, simply because Twitter is public by default. Facebook is much more walled, meaning that most of the good Facebook data is private. Though it will be interesting to see what happens when Bing does integrate its newly acquired Facebook into its regular search offerings.

This wall of Facebook’s is also a factor into why Facebook could potentially unleash its own legitimate search engine. It’s got a search feature now of course, but there is a great deal of potential for them to do a whole lot more and really get under Google’s skin. More on that here.

Sullivan provides more background and context around the search engines’ social signals, as well as the full with both Bing and Google, and details about the Twitter Firehose’s lack of nofollow.

With the information Sullivan has gotten out of Google and Bing, will you focus more on social media? Comment here.

December 2, 2010
Google Whips Up On-the-Fly Algorithm Change to Beat “Bad” Businesses

You probably read or heard about a New York Times article that was published over the holiday weekend that talked about a business that was intentionally creating poor customer experiences to boost their search rankings. It was hard to believe that such a thing would work, but it seemed to do so for one particular business, and Google quickly penalized the business once the article exposed the issue.

Google has gone further, however, and with good reason. This kind of thing looks really bad not only for Google, but for algorithmic search in general, which is one reason I think social will continue to play an increasingly important role in consumers’ search habits, and why Blekko thinks it can be the "third search engine."

Google’s solution was still an algorithm, but at least the issue was tackled (supposedly anyway). "We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience," says Google Fellow Amit Singhal of the customer discussed in the article. "Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results."

While this is certainly the way it should be in search, I can’t imagine too many businesses finding a great deal of success in treating their customers poorly regardless of their Google rankings. The smart would be customers are likely to do enough digging to realize that much of what is being said is negative, anyway. Jeff Jarvis has a good idea: before making a decision about doing business with a brand, maybe you should conduct a search for "that brand sucks" and see what comes up. While the results for such a query may not always paint a fair picture of that business, you can at least compare the findings with those of a regular search and get a more balanced view of how consumers feel about that brand.

Will Google’s new algorithmic solution prevent further abuse of this type? Probably not entirely.

"We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future," Singhal acknowledges. "We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search."

While Google does that, users still may find themselves turning more and more to humans over algorithms (or at least in addition to them) before making decisions. That’s precisely while we’ll see more integrations of social media into search like Bing’s new shareable shopping lists.

December 1, 2010
An Inside Look at How Microsoft Handles SEO Across its Massive Site

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November 30, 2010
Is Ranking Number One in Google Losing Its Significance?

As you may have noticed, Google has been putting a great deal more emphasis on local these days than in years past. That includes everything from the introduction of Google Places and Place Pages to automatically showing more local results for certain searches, as well as various other solutions offered to businesses at the local level, such as product inventory or tag advertising. Google caters much more to location-based search and local business search than ever before, and that trend is likely to continue.

Do you think classic organic search is losing importance? Share your thoughts.

Local Rises to the Top

WebProNews spoke with well-known SEO industry analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. at PubCon about search trends and where the search industry is headed. Local is only one facet of this, but it’s a big facet. "Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold," says Clay. "I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees."

"If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now," he says. "So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before."

So SEOs, webmasters and businesses really have to consider how the SEO game has changed in this way. You can’t expect people to go past the first page of results. It happens, but I’m guessing it happens less and less as people adjust their queries to find what they’re looking for when the results don’t provide it. The addition of Google Instant has only fueled this.

Cracking the Local Code

"It [local] has its own algorithm," says Clay. "It’s based on certain kinds of voting systems. We’ve been able to effectively get people into the seven-pack almost all the time. The difference is that the placement within the seven pack hasn’t been deciphered yet. It seems to be random. It is to some degree an accuracy of data factor, and to some degree it’s a review factor. So both of those will play."

"I think that 30% (I think is the number right now) of all results show some sort of local flavor," Clay continues. "What we’re seeing is not so much that 30% have maps, but that the actual body of the search results change to have local sites intermixed. So if you look at a set of results and find positions one through ten, they’re all laid out. If I change my location (in the column, you can change where you’re at)…if I change it from California to New York, I get an entirely different set."

"I noticed just going from my office in California to Las Vegas I got different results, even for terms like ‘search engine optimization’ which is not a shopping term per se, I had a different sequence in the top ten," he explains. "So clearly Google is using geo-location of the searcher to bias the search results. That’s happening in almost everything I see."

The breadth of terms that Google thinks users want local results for seems to be expanding, or at least has expanded from years past. Google has an opportunity to increase its revenue significantly because of this, the way Clay sees it.

"We’re also seeing that local’s showing up more for short terms like one-word phrases like ‘shoes’," Clay points out. "You search for ‘shoes,’ you get a map. That’s just the way it is. And you search for ‘tools’ and you get a map. And things that used to just be ‘what is it?’ are no longer ‘what is it?’. They’re considered to be…if you’re looking for shoes, you’re obviously looking for a shoe store, and they’re sort of assuming that as they go. That kind of a behavior when you see it in search results is really what we’re facing."

Google’s Motivation?

"We’re facing a general shift towards local results, and Google is clearly motivated," he adds. "You would think, using shoes as an example, that there are only so many people that can bid on the word shoes. It’s a national term. If I go local, I have a hundred thousand different opportunities to sell shoes. Every region can have their own bidding on shoes, and people can make money and bid…it’s like local phone books. And it is. And everybody can participate and bid and get on the web."

"And if I do geo-targeted then the return-on-investment’s gonna go up," he continues. "As I make more money, I’m more willing to spend more on my pay-per-click. So on a per-click basis, Google has an opportunity to make 50% more doing nothing more than allowing it to be targeted by location. So Google, perhaps at a greed level or a business level or a democratic level is actually able to make more money the more they promote it."

What’s good for Google is also good for users though. The fact of the matter is that location does matter a lot, when you’re talking about relevancy. It’s one of many factors, much like social (which we’ll no doubt see a great deal of emphasis from Google on as well, going forward) that caters to the individuals searcher, and as location tracking is becoming the norm, these results can get pretty fine-tuned to where the user is at any given time.

Moving Forward

"I think that local is here to stay," says Clay. "I think it’s big, and I think you either play in the local space and either figure out how to get into the seven-pack or you’re not gonna get the clicks, even if you’re number one."

While there is no question that SEOs and marketers are going to have to continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape, it may actually mean great things for people working on the web including SEOs, but also designers, developers, etc.

"It turns out that 92% of all businesses in the United States – serve a 50 mile radius from where they’re physically located, and that hardly any of these…are on the Internet," says Clay. "That means, especially when you couple it with the emphasis of Google to start doing local kinds of results, that means we’re going to see a massive influx of websites. Brand new websites are going to enter…they’re going to star showing up, they’re going to start ranking, they’re going to start competing. These are sites that have never been here before."

"There’s going to be a multitude of web designers now getting involved, a lot of SEOs or wannabe SEOs are going to be getting involved," he adds. "We’re going to see a lot of people wanting a quick hit – ‘Hi, I built my site, how come nobody’s beating my door down?’ There’s going to be a little bit of a two steps back approach to SEOs – a bunch of people ripping us off. There may be some attempts at spam, although I think Google’s going to be fighting that."

There will likely be new kinds of spam, as he suggests.

Read this for more interesting commentary from Clay regarding the search market in general.

Do you think this shift towards local is a good thing for Google? For users? Tell us what you think.

November 17, 2010
Is a Shake-Up Brewing in the Search Market?

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November 15, 2010
Think the Big Brands Got it Great in Search?

There’s no question that big brands often rank very well in search, but you might be surprised at just how difficult it is to scale SEO for large sites and to get the right wheels in motion for big companies.

Challenges of Scale

Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting knows a lot about it. "Scale is the big point, so when we’re talking about that, take somebody like Procter and Gamble – hundreds of thousands of products around the world, so whereas one site might have four brands, two brands, one brand – it might even be a mom and pop talking about a singular product…these large companies, everything is scale – multiple brands, multiple countries, multiple pages," explains Hunt. "It could be a single company – somebody like a TripAdvisor or a Travelocity with millions of pages about a singular topic…so that’s really what we’re talking about is scale that makes the big difference."

"Scale in itself is a challenge," says Hunt. "Interestingly enough, a lot of these big programs are just really starting to get ramped up, and they’ve struggled with ‘how do we do this at scale?’ and the first is indexing. At IBM, we had fifty five million pages, so how do we even make sure we have fifty five million pages indexed? So that has a variety of challenges, and so it’s the same techniques you would use, you just have to think about holistically and scale."

"Things like metrics are a little bit different," he adds. "We often have to have a slightly different business case, because while in a smaller company, I can go to my web developer and say, ‘hey, can you fix this?’ At a big company, I might have to put in a request for an offshore person to do it or an IT request for people that are already over-challenged. So we often have to do a business requirements or business feasibility requests just to get some of the simplest things done, and that in itself is a huge challenge often."

Convincing the C-Level Execs

"I did this thing many years ago that I think a lot of people have picked up on, called a ‘missed opportunity matrix’ and you know, the bigger company, the bigger the ego," says Hunt. "So you’ll get companies that say, ‘hey, we’re a fifty billion dollar company. We should be number one in Google.’ And that’s not necessarily true. So you have to humble them and remind them how you get there, and the quickest way I’ve found to do it is to take ten words that are like the poster-children or the essence of that company…I’ll give you an example from IBM. We used ‘database software’ and IBM’s probably one of the leading companies for database software. We had no rankings. Out of hundreds of thousands of searches a month there was only about sixty visits to the website….it’s almost this ‘holy shit’ moment where it’s like, ‘That can’t be. We’re the essence of database software…"

More WebProNews Videos

You can probably come up with more than ten words you should rank for, but ten is probably enough to drive home the point.

"So even those ten words…creating that, you can see what is the opportunity, then looking at log files – what are we getting? And that’s often the key catalyst to get people fired up to want to do this," says Hunt. "Then it sort of backslides a little bit when they start to understand the complexity – that we need money to do it, that we need to change our operations in many cases to do it, and then the other side of it is paid search. They’re used to spending a lot of money on TV, but now you come in and they look at search as an easy way to do it, and they’ve never really allocated money."

Now that social media has emerged as an attractive marketing channel, it’s probably even harder to convince execs of how much money is really needed.

"Because of search, we’re often able to track it better so we can show an ROI, but that in itself runs into problems now, because you’re now showing in many cases..erroneously, we’ll over-show ROI from search and it really starts to make the other marketers cringe – that ours is so much more efficient, so it’s a nice little political game you have to play," hunt says.

Speaking the Right Language

If you want to convince someone to do something, it helps if you can put it into terms that they understand. This is true in just about every situation.

"The language that the average SEO uses doesn’t fly at the C level, or even at a VP level," warns Hunt. "They don’t care about all the mechanics and sort of geeky stuff. They want to know, ‘look, it’s gotta be changed. What’s the business value of changing it? What’s the outcome? What’s the expense?’ So if you can add some sort of MBA speak to your standard SEO shtick, it helps a lot. You have to speak their language, and just trying to overwhelm them with your brilliance about algorithms and stuff like that doesn’t work."

"I think when you do that, you put it into proper business objectives," he adds. "’Here’s the opportunity. Here’s the yield. Here’s what it’s gonna cost me, and here’s why you should cannibalize somebody else’s budget to give it to me.’…And another one I call the kumbaya moment, when you say, ‘search fits everything.’"

"If somebody sees a TV commercial and loves our product, maybe they don’t remember who we are, but they might go query for it," Hunt elaborates. "Do we show up? Are we in the consideration set? I think that that’s where we need to take it now. We need to start being grown up ourselves and say, ‘we can place nice with everyone.’ We used to come in and say, ‘we’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.’…when you show the business value, it tends to go a very long way."

November 11, 2010
Google Has Internal Debate About Content Farms as Spam, Cracks Down on Link Spam

As usual, Google’s Matt Cutts had some interesting things to say, speaking at Pubcon in Las Vegas.

The biggest thing Google has probably done for its users recently is increase the speed of search results. Cutts referred to things like Caffeine, realtime search, Google Instant, Instant Previews, and Gmail’s priority inbox as examples. Things like Twitter were making people expect things faster, he said. So that appears to be what Google has focused on the most in recent memory.

Some of these features have been somewhat controversial. Google Instant, for example, has been around for a while now, and I still hear people complain about how "annoying" it is. The recent launch of Instant Previews has only added to this. It’s unclear just how popular this kind of opinion is compared to those who like the features, but those complaining seem to still be using the search engine for the most part, so I guess they haven’t been turned off too much.

Cutts says Google Instant is a way to speed up your decisions, but even he acknowledged that power users tend not to like it, but pointed out that it can be turned off.

User behavior will change with Google Instant, Cutts said, but added that it’s not something webmasters should be worried about.

Another thing that turns Google users off, however, is bad content. According to Cutts, there is a debate going on internally at Google over whether they should consider content farms web spam. Rich Skrenta’s Blekko was mentioned, as it has innovated with its slash tags that allow human recommendation. Cutts says they’re wrestling about this at Google, so it will be interesting to keep an eye on that.

Users are pretty angry with content farms, he says, adding that there may be a time for web spam at Google to take action against them. It’s worth noting that when we talked to Cutts at SMX Advanced back in the summer, he mentioned that Google’s infamous "Mayday" update tends to affect auto-generated and content farms the most, but the update was not part of the web spam team’s efforts. It was part of general search quality, with no human intervention involved. It’s strictly algorithmic.

Cutts also pointed out that Google hasn’t stopped working on paid links, and that people get sneaky and pay college students to put links on their pages about debt consolidation. He said Google is doing a big push on link spam, and that they have two or three things coming up in this area (without getting intos specifics of course).

Google has made spam reporting easier with a recently released web spam report Chrome extension. Cutts says Google wants to prioritize spam reports based on user impact, and that if you’re doing a spam report that has a bigger impact, it will look at it manually.

Google is also looking at domain match and whether that should really be ranking you higher, he said.

You should care about conversions, rather than ranking though, according to Cutts, and faster-loading sites usually help conversion, he says. Google rolled out how to crawl Ajax (which Twitter and Facebook have both adopted), and webmasters can add an exclamation after a hash tag in a URL to tell Google you want that remaining part of the URL indexed too.

Site speed is a factor in Google’s rankings, and while it’s not anything to panic about, he says, it can increase your ranking and conversions.

He said if there’s one takeaway he wants people to know, it’s that Google has started contacting people when they see suspected hacking or an increase in crawl errors. He asks that webmasters enable email forwarding, because they have trouble reaching them otherwise. Turn on the ability to get emails in Webmaster Tools.

November 11, 2010
Getting Your Site Ready for TV

If you’re not already, it’s time to start thinking about optimizing your site for televisions. With more connected devices coming out and gaining popularity (not to mention people simply hooking their computers up to their TVs), you’re going to want to have a site that is presentable on large TV screens, as well as small ones.

Now that Google’s own Google TV is here, the company is talking more about TV optimization itself. "Because Google TV has a fully functioning web browser built in, users can easily visit your site from their TV," says Google Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye. "Current sites should already work, but you may want to provide your users with an enhanced TV experience — what’s called the ’10-foot UI’ (user interface). They’ll be several feet away from the screen, not several inches away, and rather than a mouse on their desktop, they’ll have a remote with a keyboard and a pointing device."

Ohye says that text should be large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance, site navigation should be able to be performed through button arrows on the remote, selectable elements should provide a visual queue when selected (it should be obvious what sections are highlighted), etc.

There is an entire Google TV site optimization guide here and a checklist here. I would get familiar with these. Google actually has a gallery of sites that are optimized for TV, though it’s not very big, and very video-based.

Google says you can get a general idea of what your site looks like on TV by using a large monitor, making the window size 1920 X 1080, visiting your site in a browser at full screen, zooming the browser to 1.5X the normal size, moving back, and looking at it.

It’s also worth noting that people using Google TV are required to use a Google account, as Danny Sullivan points out in his review of the new Sony Google TV-ready Blu-Ray Player. Interestingly, it also asks users if they want to send usage stats to Google (this is aggregate data used for detecting bugs, according to the company, which also says it doesn’t collect any viewing history. According to Sullivan, Google still has a lot of work to do with search on Google TV.

Is your site ready for TV?

October 21, 2010
The Future of Search Looks a Lot Like the Present (on Steroids)

Another Search Engine Strategies conference, another conversation about the future of search. It’s a regular topic, but one that never loses relevance, as the search landscape continues to change dramatically, even between conferences. Look at all Google has done this year, for example. Not only did we get the left panel navigation, but Instant search. Those are probably the biggest changes to the interface, but there are plenty of other things going on. This week, they just started adding location information to the left panel, for example.

Google makes changes constantly all year round, and that’s just Google. Yahoo and Bing obviously have a lot going on as well. Bing has a new partnership with Facebook for putting Facebook data in search results. Then there’s the whole Yahoo/Bing search and advertising deal, with Yahoo returning Bing results underneath its own user interface.

Search simply does not stop changing. With mobile and social media heavily in the equation, and TV and tablets about to enter the fray at an increasingly rapid pace, there will continue to be plenty to speculate upon when it comes to where search is headed.

So this year’s SES Chicago "Search: Where to Next?" session featured discussion from iProspect CEO Robert Murray, Bruce Clay President Bruce Clay, and Rosetta Director of SEO Chris Boggs.

Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

1. Keyword research may be narrowed down by all three search engines.

2. Autocomplete needs to branch out.

3. There will be deeper analytics.

4. Building content will continue to be very important

5. There will be increased filtering of search results by users.

6. SEO is going the way of a targeted market.

7. Complexity of keywords is changing because of the algorithms

8. SEO is going to be "a piece of optimization pie."

9. There will be increased focus on local.

10. Even as mobile continues to grow, there will always be search.

11. Social will continue to play an important role. Likes will become as important as links.

Visibility

If you ask me, it’s going to be (and really already is) about being visible in as many places as possible – on as many screens as possible. It’s about being visible in search engines, but it’s also about being visible in communities (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.), sub search engines (like Google Images, Blog Search, Videos, YouTube, etc.), mobile apps, web apps, TV apps, and anywhere else that consumers turn their attention – particularly the kind of attention that comes with problems for which your content has the answer – for which your business has the answer.

The future is going to require a lot of testing.

Testing on different browsers, different phones, different tablets, different connected TV experiences, different apps, and different combinations of each of these. It’s also going to be about speed. Not only is Google placing more and more emphasis on this, but people will just simply leave if they can’t get your site to load in a timely fashion. It may be fine on the desktop, but have you checked it from different mobile devices/browsers? How’s it look from there?

Improving Tech

Then you have voice search, which is quickly becoming a much more common method. Google will continue to perfect visual search (Google Goggles as well). Things are going to get really interesting.

The future of search is much like search’s present – just on steroids. Faster, more powerful, on a lot more interfaces, and a lot more people using them.

What does the future of search look like to you? Comment here.

October 19, 2010
Google Testing a Feature with Major Implications for Clickthroughs

Google is apparently testing a feature in its search results pages that allows users to see full-page previews of sites before they click through to them.

Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm spotted the test, providing the screenshot below and saying, "One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results."

Do you think this feature will make a good site design more critical? Share your thoughts.

Image credit: Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm

It’s worth noting, as Altoft points out, that not all previews display the full page, as some longer pages are cut off at the bottom.

While this may not be a widely released feature yet (and it’s possible that it won’t be), it’s interesting to see just how much Google has changed the search experience this year, just from the desktop. In the Spring, Google rolled out the left panel navigation. More recently, they introduced Google Instant. Those are the major changes, though there have been other smaller ones sprinkled in among them.

That doesn’t include the ways Google is changing the way we search on mobile devices with things like Voice Search and Google Goggles (not to mention Google TV).

If the preview feature goes on to become a full-fledged feature, I’m going to have to consider that a major one. This could dramatically affect clickthroughs, for better or for worse. We’ll really get to see how big a part web design plays in conversions at that point. It’s conceivable that consumers will be drawn even more to well-known brands and familiar layouts.

Late last year, Google released a tool called Browser Size that shows you how others view your site. More specifically, it shows you the percentages of people that will see certain portions of your site without having to scroll. This shouldn’t really have much affect on the full-page previews in SERPs, but it can come in handy for when the user clicks through.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information on the preview feature. We’ll update when we get more info.

Update: Google gave us the classic response: "At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog."

Are you concerned about what the feature will do to your clickthroughs? Comment here.

October 11, 2010
Why Google Won’t Reveal Secret Ranking Factors, But Gives Plenty of SEO Advice

Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide users with the most relevant results for their queries and the best user experience. For this reason, Google keeps its 200+ ranking factors a secret. While some of them are well-known, others are not, and how much weight each is given is perhaps the biggest mystery.

Google doesn’t want people to be able to game its system because this will have a negative impact on search results, and make the user experience poor. This is nothing new. Danny Sullivan recently asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt why they couldn’t at least list the factors, while keeping their weights secret. Schimidt basically said that this would be revealing business secrets. Fair enough.

While one may understand why Google goes out of its way to keep this information under wraps, some may wonder why they go to the trouble of providing webmasters with SEO advice, tools, and resources. After all, Google is going to deliver the results as it sees fit right? This is the topic of a question someone sent into Google’s Matt Cutts who has provided a video with his response.

The question is really coming from the angle that Google should rather not have people optimizing their sites, so they have to buy ads to gain visibility (more money for Google). Of course while Google may want you to buy ads, this is not the company’s approach.

"Whenever the web does well, Google does well," says Cutts.

"I don’t think that it has to be something like, ‘Oh, we help websites rank better and they don’t need to advertise,’" he says. "That’s sort of a short-sighted view. We say, ‘Look, we try to help people make the web a better experience, more people will be on the web, they’ll stay on the web longer, they’ll be happier, and…just the halo effect – the reflected effect of all of that is that people will search more, and then a few of the times they’ll click on the ads’".

One YouTube commenter on the video says, "Or simply Google wants to ‘teach us’ SEO so people who search with Google find what they want. If a user search[es] for something? and Google return[s] non-related results they wont use it. So Google needs US and WE need Google."

Another commenter makes a pretty good point. In the video, Cutts mentions that Google could choose to show pop-up ads, and it could made them some money up front, but that this would annoy users, and they might not want to come back. The commenter says, "I consider YouTube ads embedded? in videos just as annoying as pop up ads."

I don’t think that person is alone. It’s not the greatest thing for user experience.

October 5, 2010
Google’s Really Taking This Speed Thing Seriously

Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on speed for the last year or two, offering numerous tools and resources aimed at speeding things up. In fact, Google has even attempted to speed up the search engine itself with Google Instant.

The speed theme continues as Google has introduced a new image format from the web, aimed at speeding up load times. It’s called WebP.

What do you think of Google’s new image file format? Share your thoughts.

Here’s a sample of the announcement:

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

Those interested in SEO will likely find the status of the format worth paying attention to, as Google recently announced that it now counts page speed as a ranking factor. Just remember, page speed is only one of about 200 ranking factors Google takes into consideration.

Google has a site set up where you can compare the sizes and load times of JPEGs to WebPs. Google also has a conversion tool to convert images to the new format that can be downloaded, and is working with the web browser and web developer community to add support for the format.

Google is also developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Chrome. The company says it also plans to add support for a transparency layer or alpha channel in a future update.

It will be very interesting to see how widely this format gets adopted over time.

If Google can gain enough support for WebP, will you use it for your web images? Will they gain the support? Let us know.

October 2, 2010
Google Uses Rich Snippets for Local Search

Google announced that it is now using Rich Snippets for local search. Webmasters with pages that in some way pertain to real world places, can utilize these to reference those places and optimize for local search results.

"By using structured HTML formats like hCard to markup the business or organization described on your page, you make it easier for search engines like Google to properly classify your site, recognize and understand that its content is about a particular place, and make it discoverable to users on Place pages," says Carter Maslan, Google’s Director of Product Management for Local Search.

Google says to optimize for local search, you should not only use structured markup to help Google identify the places mentioned on your site, but to tell Google about your content through this form.

"Whether you’re creating a website for your own business, an article on a newly opened restaurant, or a guide to the best places in town, your precise markup helps associate your site with the search results for that particular place," says Maslan. "Though this markup does not guarantee that your site will be shown in search results, we’re excited to expand support for making the web better organized around real world places."

Google provides more information about using Rich Snippets for local search here. There is also an FAQ page, which you may find useful.

September 22, 2010
Google Instant And SEO
From the moment Google Instant was announced back on September 8 there have been forum chats, blog posts, articles and podcasts discussing the ramification of this new technology. Some have called it the “Death of SEO” which others (myself included) have proclaimed this a step forward and an opportunity for SEO’s, not a threat. And then of course there’s those who don’t even know there’s been a change at all, let’s call them “the vast majority”. In this article we’re going to discuss the pros and cons of Google Instant as it pertains to SEO’s and to website owners as well as cover some of the reasons that this new technology may not have as large an impact on search behavior as some may fear/predict.

But first, let’s cover the basic question …

What Is Google Instant?

Google instant is a technology that allows Google to predict what you are looking for as you type. They are referring to it as ‘search-before-you-type” technology (catchy). Essentially – as I type a phrase (let’s say “buy shoes online”) as soon as I get to “buy sh” I start seeing results for “buy shoes”. As soon as I’ve entered “buy shoes “ (with a space after shoes indicating I want more than just the 2 word phrase) I start seeing results for “buy shoes online”.

Technologically this is genius. Google is now serving likely billions of additional search results pages per day as each query has multiplied results that apply to it. Well … I suppose we all wondered what the Caffeine infrastructure update was all about didn’t we? But what does this do in the real world?

Why Google Instant Isn’t A Big Deal

Alright, obviously it is a significant technological enhancement in search but the way some react you’d think the whole universe was about to be turned on it’s head. There are two reasons why that’s not the case.
1. I find it unlikely that many will notice right away that the change has occurred and further I find it even less likely that the majority will use the feature. You see – the major hindrance of this enhancement isn’t in the technology – it’s in the users. Only those who touch type and can do so without looking at their keyboard will be affected. If the user looks at their keyboard while typing then they wouldn’t even notice the results coming in ahead of their actual search.
2. This will only affect users who are searching in instances where the shorter or predicted terms match the users end goals. For example, if I am searching for “buy shoes online” and get as far as “buy sh” the top results are sites which clearly suit the needs of a searcher for “buy shoes online” and thus – this may work to the detriment of sites who rank well for “buy shoes online” as they may well lose traffic. In the case of a site targeting, oh – I don’t know – “seo consulting” there will likely be little affect if any. The searcher, looking for an SEO consultant, will find once they’ve entered “seo” that they are presented with Wikipedia and Google – sites that, while informative, don’t offer the services (or results) desired and thus – the searcher would be less affected. Once they proceeded on to enter the “seo c” the searcher would be presented with the results for “seo company” but I’m prone to believe that if the searcher wanted those results – they would have searched for it. For this phrase I’m confident we’ll see little in the way of negative affect from Google Instant.
So we’ve discussed why Google Instant isn’t a big deal, now let’s discuss …

Why Google Instant Is A Big Deal

On the other side of the coin lies the reasons why Google Instant brings forth a revolution in search technology. Followers of the Beanstalk blog or my radio show on WebmasterRadio.fm (Webcology) will know I’m not one to love everything Google does but in this case the immediate affects and long terms affects may well be significant and at the very least – one has to appreciate the brilliance behind the effort. In this section of the article we’re going to cover the three important perspectives involved with the launch off this (or any) Google product. They are:

The Searcher – we’ll look at the pros and cons from a searcher perspective. It’s this aspect that will dictate whether the feature will matter at all.

Google – we’ll look at the positive affect on Google. Of course – this aspect is of paramount importance for this feature to be kept.

SEO’s – I’m of course incredibly interested and have spent much of my analysis time determining the pros and cons to SEO’s (admittedly – there’s more than a bit of self interest here).

So let’s begin …

Google Instant And The Searcher

This is sort of a win-win for Google from a searcher perspective. One of two things will happen for the searcher. Either they won’t notice the change or won’t be affected and thus – Google will be exactly where they are now OR they will notice the change and will select results quicker and find the feature helpful. As I noted – it’s a win-win. There isn’t much of scenario from a searcher perspective where the searcher will be negatively impacted and if they are – they’d simply revert back to past searching patterns. From the perspective of impact on the user – Google has it made with this feature. Their worst-case scenario is that they’re exactly where they are now.

Google Instant From Google’s Perspective

Any feature added to any corporate system must serve a single primary function – it must make it’s developer money. We’ve already seen that the feature itself can’t really negatively impact the searcher but can it make Google money? There are two ways that this can happen:
1. Improved loyalty and marketshare, and
2. Increased revenue directly from the initiative
Fortunately for Google – they’re going to win on both fronts here and when we see the Q3 earnings and moreso in the Q4 earning Google reports we’ll begin to see how significant an impact this change will have for them – mainly in the second of the two monetary reward methods noted above. And here’s why …

We’ve already covered the improved loyalty this can have on the searchers. Anything that makes my life easier and makes my quest for information faster will make me more loyal. At worst – Google will see my behavior stay the same but for many, the search experience will become faster and more effective – especially once the technology is improved by user behavior to a degree that people trust it more. Overall there will be a net gain in the experience – we’ve only to wait to see how large that net gain is and how it translates into marketshare. The big win is in the second point.

For anyone who’s every bid with AdWords you’ll know that for the most part – bids for generic terms are more expensive than bids for very specific terms. If I’m bidding on “shoes” I’m going to pay more than I would for “shoes online”. So let’s view the world where I start showing the results (and paid ads) for “shoes” while someone is searching for “shoes online”. And what if that person sees the ads that was written and bid on for “shoes” but relates to their query and they click on it. Google just made more from the paid ad click. Maybe only pennies but multiply that by billions of searches per day and you’ve got a significant increase in annual revenue.

The move is a huge win for Google but it does come with a theoretical downside and that is annoying the businesses that are paying for the ads. The argument I’ve heard is that if businesses find that the cost of their campaigns is increasing higher than the ROI that they might get annoyed. Fair enough BUT I would argue – what are they going to do about it? As long as Google maintains the first consideration (the searcher) then the advertisers have no choice. They can drop their bids but at worst – they’ll level off to what they were paying for the longtail phrases. Again – worst case scenario, Google will find themselves where they are today.

Google Instant From The SEO’s Perspective

So let’s assume for a moment that Google Instant is here to stay. Based on all the ways Google and the searchers can win and the limited situational permutations by which they could only come out even I’d say that’s a safe assumption. Given this, what’s happens to SEO’s and those optimizing their own websites?

For one thing – we can’t assume that research we did up to and before the 8th will be relevant down the road. I have already scheduled to redo keyword research in a couple months to see what industries and search types have been most (and least) affected by this change. The main reason for this is that I have a strong suspicion that specific industries will be more prone to being affected by the change based mainly on search types (such as the “buy shoes” vs “seo consulting” example above) and demographics. A Linux developer site is more likely to have a demographic off touch typers who can type without looking at the keyboard than say a life insurance site with a more scattered and thus less technically proficient overall demographic.

So in the short term – life is going to be very interesting for the SEO and website owner while we figure out which industries and phrase types are most affected. In a few months when we see the trends and which phrases are being affected and how we’ll likely have to make adjustments to many campaigns. The downside for may business owners will be that for those who’s campaigns focuses on searches for longtail phrases – they may find the search volumes for their phrases decrease and a shift to more generic (and generally more expensive to attain) phrases is necessary. Only time will tell what the best moves are there and we may not know what exactly will shift and how for a few months yet and even then – we’ll then know the trends, not where things will settle (if anything in online marketing can be referred to as “settling” anymore).

If there is a segment that should be concerned about the situation it is small business owners with limited organic or PPC budgets. Google Instant – because it puts preferences to more generic phrases – clearly favors businesses with larger budgets. How much so we’ll know after we’ve had a chance to see how the search volumes shift. For SEO’s this presents two opportunities and for business owners who do their own SEO – it offers one. And here’s the good news for those.

For SEO’s you’ll find two new opportunities, The first is that there will be a shift to more generic terms in search volumes. This means that there will be stiffer competition for more competitive phrases. If this sounds like a bad thing it’s not. If you’re a skilled SEO who knows how to get the job done it means you’ll have more access to larger volumes of traffic without the added efforts required to rank for a wide array or phrases. Rather than needing to rank for 10 or 20 phrases to get traffic you’ll be able to focus in more and reap the same rewards in the way of traffic. On top of that – SEO’s will be able to charge more for the rankings as fewer phrases have a higher value. A win-win for SEOs and a win for business owners who either do their own SEO or have talented SEO’s on staff.

The second opportunity will come in the form of improved clickthrough rates though I’ll admit – at this point that’s just a theory (noted with a hint sent to Gord Hotchkiss to run eyetracking tests on this theory). If I type while looking at my screen and I’m entering in “buy shoes online” and I rank organically or via PPC for both “buy shoes” and “buy shoes online” I would hypothesize that searchers who complete the phrase “buy shoes online” who had the site (or ad) for “buy shoes” appear and then the same site appear for the full query will have a tendency to click on the familiar. This same principle has been witnessed in sites appearing in both paid and organic results who have an increase in their organic clickthrough rates. This will present opportunities for both PPC and organic marketers to improve the traffic to sites by ranking for specific phrases meant to both attain traffic on their own but also to improve traffic for the other. I would suggest that down the road we’ll be hearing of this phenomenon when conducting and discussing keyword research.

Conclusion

There isn’t much to conclude that hasn’t been discussed above. Virtually every party wins or at worst, breaks even with the introduction of this technology. The only victim appears to be small businesses without the budgets to compete for the more generic phrases but even they may win with a shift away from these phrases by the larger companies. It may well occur that while the search volume shift heads in favor of large companies with larger budget – that the lower hanging fruit, while reduced in it’s search volume, may fall too in the competition levels making it more affordable. Larger business may focus like snipers on larger phrases and smaller business may well be presented with the opportunity to go after more, less search phrases that aren’t worth targeting for larger companies – at least organically.

But only time will tell and of course – we have much data to collect and many algorithmic updates to come between here and there.
September 13, 2010
Does Google Instant Mark the End of SEO?

A reporter (I believe she was from AdAge) attending Google’s Q&A about Google Instant pointed out that the new search feature tends to favor big brands. This isn’t really surprising, as it is these brands that are more likely to be searched for most often. After all, they’re big because people know them.

Do you think Google Instant is a threat to SEO? Share your thoughts.

iCrossing has a list of brands that come up when you enter each letter of the alphabet (not all are brands, but many are). A is for Amazon (not Apple), B is for Bank of America, M is for Mapquest (not Microsoft), N is for Netflix, P is for Pandora, V is for Verizon, and Y is for Yahoo.

You must keep in mind, however, that the instant results are personalized. Google takes into account things like your location and your surfing habits when providing you results.

Google Instant doesn’t necessarily make things any easier on small businesses, but it’s showing big brands in cases where Google probably would’ve suggested big brands anyway. If users do a lot of local searches, it’s possible that Google could show more local results (including small businesses) for those users, I’m speculating.

Steve Rubel says that Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant. "Here’s what this means," he says. "No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors."

He’s not wrong about that, but I’m not sure that makes SEO irrelevant. Google has been showing different results to different users for quite a while now. This is really just an extension of that.

Businesses might want to try (and have other people try) doing searches for keywords that they would expect people to use to find their site. See what comes up (keep in mind the personalization) and work from there. Easier said than done no doubt, but it’s something to consider. Think about what kinds of people will be interested in your products and what other kind of searches they might be doing. It’s not a science, but again, perhaps something worth considering. It might mean getting to know your customers better, which can’ t be a bad thing anyway. Maybe it means asking them to take surveys. Maybe it doesn’t.

The whole thing doesn’t help organic SEO’s case in the old SEO vs PPC debate. I’ll give Rubel that.

Speaking of PPC, Google says Google Instant changes the way it counts impressions. "It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels," says Google’s Dan Friedman. "However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need."

Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team says that Analytics users might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and traffic for organic keywords. "For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward," he says.

You should read this post on the Google Webamster Central blog. It says that impressions are measured in three ways: the traditional way, when a user clicks on a link that appears as they begin to type, and when a user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

Sidenote: Google’s Matt Cutts weighed in on the whole will Google Instant kill SEO thing. "Almost every new change at Google generates the question ‘Will X kill SEO?’ Here’s an video I did last year, but it still applies," he says.

He says, however that over time, it could change SEO. "The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time," says Cutts. "For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results."

Google Instant will likely become increasingly important to search marketing, because not only will it roll out to more countries (it’s starting in the U.S. and a select few others), but it will soon come to mobile and browser search boxes. Each of these factors will greatly increase how often Instant results are displayed.

The mobile factor actually has implications for Google retaining a substantial amount of mobile searches in general. The better (and quicker) Google can give results on any kind of query, the less reason users have to go to different apps to acquire certain information.

Google clearly said that ranking stays the same with Google Instant, but it will change the way people search. It will affect their search behavior, and that is what search marketers are going to have to think about more than ever. You should also consider that some people will simply deactivate the feature, leaving them open to Google’s standard results.

Tell us what you think of Google Instant. Do you like it or not?

September 10, 2010
13 Ways to Sabotage Your SEO Opportunities

It’s easy to go awry with Website development – from browser compatibility issues to colors that just don’t work out.

Search engine optimization, an integral part of website – and beyond – is no exception. Often in ignorance, companies cause their own problems or allow issues to endure.

Here are 13 ways you can ruin SEO (but you can avoid these with a little bit of effort):

1. Bring in an SEO specialist after the fact.
It happens all of the time. Someone hears about SEO. And then he decides after a website development project that he could have used SEO all along. If a website takes shape without SEO, the road ahead will be that much tougher – lots of defects to correct (architectural flaws are just the start).

2. Not understanding the difference between keyword research and keyword selection.
I’ve found that too much attention is given to finding potential keywords – relevant phrases that might lead to conversions. Sure, you need to go through those exercises. But keyword selection must be rooted in sound reasoning based on factors like where the website ranks today, how the competition is doing, the website age, nature of inbound links, etc.

3. Picking the wrong domain name.
I shouldn’t be a secret that keywords in a domain help with rankings – a lot. But companies still invent business names – and domains names – with no sense of how that might play out in search engine rankings. Sure, you can get a new domain and go the 301 redirect route, but that’s such a hassle.

4. Having no sense of ranking analysis.
You can’t just do SEO and fail to look at rankings in view of website traffic and conversions. It takes a keen analytical eye to know how to respond to pages (like the home page) that support too many keywords. Keyword relocation can have adverse effects (the new target page may not necessarily perform well).

5. Failure to create compelling content.
Everyone knows that links influence rankings, but it’s tough to attract links if the site lacks content worthy of a link. Make tools that encourage visitor interaction. Write articles worth talking about.

6. Decorating the website with graphic headers.
I like calling them headlines (used to be a journalist). Can you imagine them being graphics? It happens all of the time. Search engines feast on text headers, not graphics.

7. Preoccupation with social media.
Social media should be a part of any online marketing strategy. If you spend too much time in social circles, you can fail to overcome technical and text content challenges.

8. Long-Short Page Syndrome.
Many websites suffer because they lack content or have too much text that lacks a strategic keyword focus. Typically, websites lack text. Or, if they have a page about a keyword phrase, the website may only devote one page to it. Rankings often depend on a series of pages, not three paragraphs (short-sighted).

9. Whacky page titles.
They should emphasize keywords, but often the powerful space is stuffed with long company names and navigational cues.

10. Inbound Link Void.
Link building must be an ongoing endeavor. SEO specialists can do their part, but business executives and marketers should be doing their part too. They should leverage their relationships to get new links from their contacts.

11. Misdiagnosing the competition.
Businesses get the wrong impression of where they stand when they only look at their known competition. Yes, they may have competitors. But it’s a wakeup call for some clients when I explain that their competition is any website that’s ranking above them for any keyword phrase.

12. Unwilling to spend money.
If you have a website with programming and design issues (from an SEO perspective), the fixes may cost some cash. If you update the navigation and dropdown menus to text, that’s bound to help. But companies will literally "save" less than $1,000 and miss out on new leads. It’s such a shame.

13. Terrible Calls to Action.
SEO is supposed to drive quality website traffic. But the effort will fail – or fall way short – if the website doesn’t have clear Calls To Action that draw people in. Burying a white paper deep inside a website just doesn’t make any sense. And then companies invite prospects with humungous forms that basically shout: "Visit another website. We only want to hear from a couple of people who want to fill everything out."

September 10, 2010
Google Activity That May Have an Impact on Rankings

There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking? Tell us about it.

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. "Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming," one person commented on our story about it.

What do you think of this algorithm change? Comment here.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury’s still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we’ll see.

Should Google change search results as you type? Comment here.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, ". their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site… I’ve never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip’s but there was like 10-20 of them running at once."

Acquisition

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it’s unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Have you noticed anything else interesting happening with Google search within the last week or so? Are you seeing things that are impacting your rankings? Let us know.

August 27, 2010
Google Tweaks Algorithm to Show More Results from a Domain

Gooogle announced today that it has made a change to its algorithm that is supposed to make it easier to find multiple pages from a single site.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

"We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year," adds Keshava. "We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page."

This change may prove to be helpful for a lot of searches, but they could still do more in this area if you ask me. For exmaple, they could rank tag pages (commonly used on news sites and blogs) as top results for appropriate searches.

For instance, if I search for "WebProNews SEO articles" or "SEO articles on WebProNews", it couldn’t get any more relvant than the WebProNews SEO tag page. That points to every SEO article we have. Yet, this result is nowhere to be found for either query, and it’s certainly not unique to us (ironically, another article in which I made a similar complaint ranks at the top). These pages aren’t often linked to, so they don’t get the PageRank, but does that make them less relevant for queries like this?

August 27, 2010
Yahoo Completes Bing Transition for Organic Results (in US and Canada)

Last week, Yahoo announced that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results – a product of the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, the companies have announced that the transition of organic results in the U.S. and Canada is complete.

This applies to web, image, and video search on Yahoo for both the desktop and mobile experiences of Yahoo Search.

"With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike," says Yahoo SVP of Search Products, Shashi Seth. "We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come."

"We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall," says Microsoft’s SVP of Online Services, Satya Nadella. "As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season."

Both companies have indicated that the transition has gone smoothly, with Yahoo praising the speed at which the teams were able to get it done.

So, what are your thoughts on Yahoo’s new search results? If you were a Yahoo user before, now you’re choosing between Yahoo’s and Bing’s user interface.

August 24, 2010
Federated Media Acquires Semantic Tagging, SEO Platform from TextDigger

Federated Media announced today that it has acquired a technology suite and platform for semantic and linguistic profiling of web-based content from San Jose startup TextDigger.

FM says TextDigger’s technology complements its own platform with semantic solutions for content tagging, filtering and clustering, that can help the company enhance the user experience, ad targeting, and semantic SEO for a site or network of sites.

"We’re proud to place TextDigger’s semantic profiling technology in FM’s hands," said Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger. "I’ve followed FM’s growth over the last few years and admire the company’s work. They have amassed a great team and a solid technology platform. I’m happy that our IP and our people will be integrated into such a wonderful company. This is a great strategic fit for all sides involved."

"FM’s home-grown technology platform is largely an untold story," said John Battelle, founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media. "Over the past five years, our technology team has built an extraordinary platform that drives our business and keeps us on the edge of innovation in media. TextDigger provides us with a complementary technology that will build upon the work our team began back in 2005. Expect to hear more from FM with regard to media and marketing technology solutions."

Four "key" people from TextDigger including Musgrove, VP Engineering Robin Hiroko Walsh, Sr. Director of Product Management Peter Ridge, and Lead Software Engineer Jim Hull, are also joining the Federated Media team.

TextDigger will continue its own search business. Current Chief Business Development Officer will take over as CEO. TextDigger customers will continue to be supported by either FM or TextDigger, depending on their type of project or service. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.

August 23, 2010
How Much Should You Spend On SEO?

It’s a tough question, especially in a bad economy.

The question really begs another question – what is your goal for your site?

If you are operating it as a real business where you hope to either supplement your current income or rely on it as your sole source of income – then you need to be prepared to invest in search (it’s often the foundation of your marketing and a consistent source of regular traffic).

You can invest time or money and in most cases, you usually need to invest both.

I think there is someone out there spreading some erroneous information about starting a business online. There is a lot of the “build it and they will come” mentality – in other words throw up a site and voila insta-business!

While in many ways, it is easier to do business online because you don’t need to set up physical stores and have a lot of the issues you have with brick and mortars, it is by no means a “sure thing” – you still have to work for your success.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t start an online business – I am just saying if you expect your business to grow and treat you well, then you need to treat it like a serious business.

So, yes, it will be necessary for you to invest both time and money into generating traffic.

So back to the question at hand – how much should you spend on SEO?

You need to crunch some numbers and see how many visitors it takes to get a sale and how much a sale is worth to you to really fine-tune your budget – especially if PPC is part of your plans (so many people waste money on PPC that isn’t converting – spend wisely or it can suck you dry!)

For organic SEO you will find everything from $19.99 mass submission (avoid like the plague, you may as well burn your $19.99) to tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Most small to medium sized businesses spend between $300 – $800 per month, although I’ve also heard people say numbers a little higher, like $500 – $1500 per month is the norm. So somewhere in that range is what you should expect to pay for quality SEO work.

It always amazes me that people are annoyed they have to pay for SEO. People will pay for a doctor or a mechanic, or even a web designer but they seem to resent having to pay for SEO. If you have the time and knowledge, then by all means, don’t pay anyone, do it yourself. However if you don’t have the time or knowledge, it’s a valid, and important expense and not something you should begrudge. Driving traffic to your site is the foundation and not the area you want to go cheap.

I’m jussayin…think about your goals and think about what you are prepared to do to get there.

July 30, 2010