Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Google Give Us Our Rank, Our Daily Bread(Crumbs)

Sorry I haven’t made any posts in a while…as we recently took on a big project AND moved hosts on SEO Book (currently on a speedy quad core), and I wanted to have minimal activity around the time of the move.

Google recently announced adding breadcrumbs to the search results for some sites which offer hierarchical breadcrumbs in their navigation. The display looks likeso:

Each breadcrumb is a clickable link to the associated page (which could increase traffic to the target site in some cases), but the initial implementation is a bit sloppy for a couple reasons

• Google initial implementation shows the hierarchy (and places more emphasis on hierarchy) rather than listing the current page…this has a net effect of making the result look less relevant UNLESS the breadcrumbs are really tightly associated with each other and/or the site covers a small tight niche
• when people look at the search results they scan them and match patterns. the lack of showing the current page hurts perceived relevancy, and even when a search keyword is in the breadcrumb it is not highlighted

As an example of how far astray the above 2 points can go, check out the following listing for Joost’s great Wordpress SEO guide.

While seeing the site structure might be nice…the exact reason people are using search is because they don’t want to have to drill down through someone’s site structure…they want the most relevant thing shown in the search results.

So did Google do this for relevancy? It is hard to believe they did given that they don’t list the current page and employ no bolding.

Perhaps they want to make the results harder to scrape? Or they wanted to give advertisers even more options with the ads (many new ad formats hit the organic search results first)? Or maybe, as John Andrews mentioned, “Google would LOVE to eliminate the URL altogether. Just another try…”

Do I recommend using breadcrumbs? Historically I have, but if Google does not fix the above issues it will likely end up costing publishers some perceived relevancy, and in some cases I might not recommend using them except for on small sites or those with tight and descriptive breadcrumb structures. And on larger sites they might make more sense on category listing pages rather than on item detail pages.

Click Economics: The Last Click

Sorta an old post that I forgot to publish until today! Having the site closed to new members has given me time to start working through a few of my almost done posts that were never published yet. It’s hard to have time to do everything while growing a few businesses…and thus the blog needs a little TLC

Media has traditionally been afforded a wall between editorial and advertising due to limited marketplace competition. But, as Jim Spanfeller stated, the perception of value in “last click marketing” where search gets most of the credit for the entire demand creation and fulfillment cycle, is killing the value of online content:

A publisher can and should price their inventory at levels that will meet the market expectations and drive their business model. What they should not do is allow some sort of invisible hand (or should I say hands) to price their inventory against a backdrop of objectives that can and often does change at a moment’s notice. This practice has fundamentally driven pricing down across the web and, perhaps more importantly, changed the success metrics from ones based on “demand creation” to ones driven by “demand fulfillment.”

Worse yet, the leading metrics most closely track how the poorest members of society interact with media, creating a media ecosystem designed to exploit the poor. The above linked article states “we now know that 16% of web users generate 80% of clicks and that this 16% represents the lower income and education segments of the total user base.”

It may have cost Google 1 day of revenues to create the default analytics tool, which by default has a last click wins behavior that few people know how to edit. They can even add more features like tracking SEO rankings without risk because they know few people will use them.

Google’s web domination is so impressive that experienced and well trained journalists writing for publications like Wired mistake Google’s mission statement as the goal of the web. Literally…

The Internet’s great promise is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams?

Gary Wolf should know that was actually Google’s mission statement, not the goal of the web.

Sure data mining and sentiment analysis can be parts of the web, but the best bits are often scattered messes and weird stuff we accidentally bump into.

Report: Microsoft, News Corp. Plotting Against Google

The companies behind search engines sometimes try to attract more traffic by advertising.  Establishing a partnership is another strategy, as is improving the actual search results.  Microsoft might be ready to try something a little different, however, as a new report’s indicated that the company is interested in making Google’s results worse.

Remember the days when arguments about search engines centered on the size of their indices?  Well, according to Matthew Garrahan and Richard Waters, Microsoft does.  “Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google,” the pair reported.

They then continued, “Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.”

This idea seems plausible enough, given that Microsoft has a history of paying for users (think of its popular and long-running cashback program).  There’s also the simple fact that Microsoft, with its market cap of $263 billion, could possibly outspend Google (which has a market cap of $181 billion) if a bidding war erupted.

What’s more difficult to say is whether the idea is any good.  There’s no word on how much money News Corp. and other publishers would receive, and it’s anybody’s guess how many searchers would switch engines to retain easy access to their content.

Related Articles:

> 80% Of Consumers Would Not Pay For Content

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: ”I Think We Will”

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

Google Doesn’t Know if Your Site is in the Cloud

Google’s Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are “in the cloud” with regards to how listings are affected. Matt’s explanation was a response to the following user-submitted question:

Can moving my website to “the cloud” harm my listings? Say my server’s in Germany and I move the website to Google’s App Engine or Amazon S3. Does this harm my listings for German results – or is it enough to set the “geographic target” in GWT to Germany?

Matt broke the question down into separate parts to answer them. First, he took on the part about moving a site to “the cloud” harming the users’ listings. His answer for this is basically that Google doesn’t even know if your site is in the cloud, so it can’t use that information to affect listings.

“We don’t know what is happening on the side of your web server. Your web server could be running Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails,” said Cutts. “All we know is what the web server returns. So your web server could be running code that would go talk to Amazon’s cloud or Appspot or anywhere else in the cloud, but we wouldn’t even know that. We don’t even know whether a page is dynamically created or statically created. All we know is what the web server sends back.”

He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that. Watch the video above to hear Matt’s explanation for the second part of the user’s question.

Related Articles:

> Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

> Google May Change Your Page Titles

> Where Google Stands on the “Keywords” Meta Tag

Excuse Me, But Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go?

In the past many SEOs have called organic search results the results on the left side of the page and the pay-per-click / AdWords results as the results on the right side of the page. As Google has grown more aggressive with promoting vertical/universal search I think a better way of defining the portions of the search result page are ABOVE THE FOLD and BELOW THE FOLD.

As recently as yesterday Google stripped the phone numbers off of non-sponsored map listings, even if you were doing a navigational search! And that shows that the primary goal of the maps is as filler content (rather than utility).

Update: it looks like Google claimed the phone number removal was a bug, but weird timing that the bug appeared at the same time they started selling premium local ads that appear on the regular search results.

So lets redefine these search result pieces as they are…

• AdWords Ads: the ads at the top of the search results and those which run down the right rail of the search results.
• Universal Search Results: filler stuff to put in the search results to a.) drive the organic search results lower down the page, while b.) driving additional incremental click volume to other Google properties which display ads.
• Organic Search Results: the results on the search result page that are determined algorithmically and appear below the fold. On some larger monitors a listing or 2 from this category may appear above the fold, at least for the time being.

In the future A LOT of verticals (movies, music, books, news, ecommerce, travel, etc.) are going to look more and more like local, where Google in some cases has at least 15 ads above the fold AND filler pushing down the organic search results…quietly building a backdoor portal that sends Google the second click if they were not able to monetize the first one.

To me this screams the importance of working the tail of search, because the more obscure a search query is the greater the risk to Google if they pollute it with junk from vertical search databases.

As Google gets stingier with their traffic that will increase the importance of relationship development and lead capture, as well as developing distribution channels outside of Google.

This new search result layout also highlights the importance of being #1 for your most important keywords…if only 1 result is going to show above the fold then there is little point being #2. So that will really help/force you to decide which words are practical to target and which words are not. If you have some valuable #3 or #4 listings you better start marketing them today before they end up below the fold tomorrow.

The last important thing this search result signals is the importance of increasing conversion rates and lifetime customer value…if/when search becomes pay-to-play in your market, will you still be able to compete? If not, what can be done to help bridge that gap?

Google Wants Your Location for Live Traffic Reports

Google is expanding its traffic layers in Google Maps. They’re now showing traffic conditions on arterial roads in selected cities, but is working on doing this to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available.

Google is capturing this information based on the commutes of people using phones with GPS. They are also encouraging more people with such phones to enable Google Maps with My Location so that their phones send anonymous data back to Google indicating the speed at which you’re moving.

Keep in mind that some phones like the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed. The iPhone Maps application doesn’t support it though.

Google presents the concept as an initiative to call upon users to help create live traffic reports that everybody can use, but there is no question that many won’t be entirely enthusiastic about the idea. Google Maps Product Manager Dave Barth talks about privacy concerns:

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don’t want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you’d like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

More information about Google’s plan for traffic reporting via Google Maps can be found here and here. It’s an interesting concept, but Google Latitude creeped a lot of people out, despite Google’s privacy defense, so this probably won’t be much different. I have a hard time believing that enough people are going to be on board with this for it to really deliver accurate traffic information.

In a world that was inhabited entirely by users of the necessary phones and the will to help, it could be possible, but I think we have a ways to go before we get to that point. What are your thoughts on the concept? By the way, I hope checking Google Maps info on your phone while driving isn’t considered as dangerous as texting while driving.

Google on Online Ads Boosting Offline Sales

Google is talking about how online ads can boost in-store sales at a couple of its different blogs today. The first one looks at the relationship between POS (point of sale) and O2S (online to store).

“Online To Store research is transforming retail today based on the ability to test digital marketing during a specified period of time and measure exactly what happens to sales not only online through eCommerce, but possibly more importantly- in-store in the test markets,” says Jay Bowden of the Google Retail Team. “Test and control has never led to greater clarity of online efficacy.”

“This is the Holy Grail of advertising and marketing funding if you think about it,” he adds. “You have read on this blog before about Google partnering with Retailers to learn exactly what a dollar spent online can do for in-store sales, well now a number of the tests have been completed and the results are in! Online advertising drives in-store sales!”

The other post from Google looks at a recent study from comScore, which shows that online advertising is on par with television advertising in growing retail sales of consumer packaged goods brands. Over 12 weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40% of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9%. It was only 8% for tv ad campaigns over 12 months.

“In 2008, Google commissioned a study with Harris Interactive among three CPG brands to compare the brand building effectiveness between traditional TV and online platforms,” says Google on the CPG Blog. “Effectiveness was equated to impact and engagement.”

“Identical traditional TV ads were shown on three distinct platforms: 1) on TV, 2) on a computer screen replicating a YouTube video environment, and on a computer screen replicating a click-to-play video embedded in content,” Google explains. “The Harris Interactive results showed that :30 commercials on YouTube and embedded video ads performed at parity with TV. All three were on par with the ability to communicate key messages about the brand, strengthen likeability, and drive purchase intent.”

The research discussed above is positive news for online advertising in general. In fact, it makes helps make the case for unification of offline and online advertising efforts.

Google Testing Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

Google appears to be testing breadcrumbs in some search results, at least in some areas. If you are unfamiliar with the term breadcrumbs, it refers to the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page.

Do you utilize breadcrumbs on your site? Comment here.

Several bloggers have noticed Google displaying these types of breadcrumbs in various places in seemingly random results to some queries. For example, Rob Hammond provides the following screen shot:

Leo Fogarty provides another, which shows the breadcrumbs displayed in a different position within the search result:

Google’s use of breadcrumbs appears to only be a test, and a limited one at that. Google has talked repeatedly about sites having good site architecture in the past. This allows Google to more easily and quickly crawl sites.

Bing acknowledges this too. Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently said, “You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines.”

Here are some tips from both Google and Bing regarding site architecture issues. In addition, Google recently provided this related information on getting your site crawled faster.

If Google begins incorporating the breadcrumbs display as in the above tests, on a mainstream level, that will be all the more reason to clean your site architecture up, at least in the navigation area. Site architecture certainly goes beyond this, but it is a key part of usability anyway.

Have you seen breadcrumbs show up in Google results? What do you think about the idea? Share your thoughts.

Google Adds Option to Email Task List in Gmail

Today Google introduced a feature to Gmail, which allows users to email their task lists. This can be done by simply choosing the new “email task list” option found in the actions menu.

When a user clicks on this option, Gmail will open a new compose window with the contents of your current task list. It works in each task list view – My Order, Sort by Date, and Completed.

“So to email your mom to explain why you’ve been so busy and haven’t been able to return her calls, just choose ‘View completed tasks’ from the Actions menu, then ‘Email task list,’ and send away (Note: this may not be very convincing if you haven’t actually checked anything off your list recently),” says Google Software Engineer Michael Bolin.

Gmail’s tasks feature graduated from Gmail Labs earlier this summer. At that point, a print option was also added.

Google Adds Keyword Predictions to Search Insights Keyword Tool

Google recently upgraded their Insights for Search tool to include predicted keyword search volumes as well as interactive maps of how keyword search volume changes over time.

There are lots of business implications of the forecast data:

Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations. One could identify deviation from such forecasting and identify new factors that are influencing the search volume as demonstrated in Flu Trends.

Some business categories are more predictable than other categories

• Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
• Nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable (with respect to the model we have used).
• Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).
• Some categories have particularly low fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Entertainment (35%) and Social Networks & Online Communities (27%).
• The trends of aggregated queries per categories are much more predictable: 88% of the aggregated category search trends of over 600 categories in Insights for Search are predictable, with a mean absolute prediction error of of less than 6%.

If you were to launch a brand new business from scratch it might make sense to target a less predictable category since it would be more open to new market entrants & they would not appear on the radar of competitors as quickly.

And Google now make their Insights for Search charts embeddable in third party websites via iframes. Given that, I just added those data points to our keyword tool below the keyword data our tool returns, which is like having an instant second opinion on the keywords.

This allows you to instantly estimate the seasonality of a particular keyword. And if our search volume seems somewhat inflated and/or you are uncertain if it is accurate then you can look at the search volume graph for more data. If the keywords graph is quite spiky for a non-seasonal keyword (or if it has no data returned) then there is a good chance that there is a bit of noise in the data.