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You know that look your pets give you when you are vacuuming?
No not this look:
More like the ‘I will eat you if you get any closer’ look.. ?
That was the look on my face as I read reports today that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has formally requested that the FTC investigate Google’s new social search features for anti-competitive nature and privacy violations.
So what this did is prove? In my personal opinion it proves that someone at EPIC is either a complete fool or funded by Facebook. Here’s why it’s so amazing:
If I want to ‘violate privacy’ in the eyes of EPIC I’d do an image search (on any search engine) for ‘teen mirror facebook’ and I’d get a slew of images teens have taken of themselves in front of a mirror and posted to Facebook. That’s all I’d have to do, and by EPIC’s standards I’ve ‘violated privacy rights’ by getting access to these pictures which are marked ‘public’ on Facebook. This would be no different from me choosing to see search results from my Google+ interests.
If I wanted to make my browser anti-competitive in the eyes of EPIC I’d go into my search settings and I’d add a modifier for my search engine URLs that would add ‘facebook’ as a verbatim keyword that must be in every search result. By clicking those options I’ve now set my browser up for a big fall and stern letters should be written to the FTC immediately to urge them to spend millions of dollars investigating these horrible anti-competitive atrocities. Again, this is no different from me deciding to specifically look at Google+ results when searching.
Heck now that I’ve pointed out that browser software has pre-meditated options to allow anti-competitive behaviour, I guess EPIC will be writing letters to the FTC demanding to have the browser manufacturers investigated to put a stop to people having access to features which allow them to choose a particular service over another.
If my hair wasn’t so short I think I’d be pulling it all out right now in dismay over such examples of non-thought. Perhaps I’ll go trim Chia Bart instead, he’s almost getting ‘shaggy’ now.
If I took even more pictures we could animate Bart!
Yesterday we covered the hot topic of Google’s social search from a very ‘news’ perspective. If you haven’t watched the tour video take a minute and hit play on the video below.
The truth is that Google is rolling this new search functionality piecemeal just in the same way as most of the recent features. So if I try to explore the option from my work account I get no offers and I’d have to cheat to go play with it right now.
However, on my personal account the option comes right up and my personal account has a smaller social circle than my work account so it seems to me that it’s just a work-in-progress at the moment.
A visit to the Google Inside Search site gives us a bit more confirmation:
If you aren’t seeing the features of Search plus Your World, don’t worry, we’re rolling them out over the next few days.
.. so if you’re not getting the option to try it out, it should come along soon!
Here’s a ‘hands on’ example of ‘Search plus Your World’ for a phrase I personally talk about a lot, ‘minecraft’:
The first thing that occurs to me is that Danny talks about Minecraft WAY more than anyone else, but the second thing that gets my interest is that there’s nothing in the results that I wouldn’t have read or couldn’t get from poking my head into Google+.
Going back to that video from Google that we linked earlier, I have to admit this looks like a very over-hyped feature where 90% of the interesting parts of the video aren’t things we can do with the new search feature. This almost feels like a Microsoft product that was invented by marketers as something to market with zero user interest?
Well that’s my opinion dealt with, but what about SEO factors of this new feature?
A ton of questions come to mind that need to be answered, here’s a few :
Who stands to gain from these types of searches?
What sites will be negatively impacted?
What should websites be doing to take advantage of this new feature?
The first one’s easy, Google, and particularly, Google+ will gain the most from this new search behaviour. Google has always wanted you to find what you want within their domain/services, and limiting your search to a Google owned property, selling it as a great feature, works so well for Google’s overall goals. If you don’t believe that Google wants to keep you inside their services, as you use Google products challenge yourself to consider ‘What more could Google do to keep me inside their networks?’ and I think you’ll start seeing all the efforts they are making to give you what you want instantly vs. leaving Google to visit an external site.
Social media sites that were getting a lot of commercial traffic/advertising will be the hardest hit by this move. If a client came to me and said “We’re on all the big sites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Squidoo, etc.. but we haven’t bothered with Google+.” I would be forced to assume they were Australian with such an opposite approach. The same thing would follow with campaign strategies where a company looking at time spent vs. returns would be silly to start a social media campaign anywhere but on Google+ first.
If you have a website that isn’t already following the guidelines for linking between Google+ and your site, you need to start there and then work on building up followers. Ideally you want people talking about your products/services more than your competition so I’d strongly urge someone within your company to engage in Google+ social media efforts on a weekly basis if not more. While it’s pointless to have infinite reach and zero relevance, you also want to be very ‘friendly’ doing whatever it takes to get people to take enough interest in your company pages to follow, +1, add to circles, etc..
In fact the last bit of advice will be a recurring theme for early 2012 where we will be looking at super organic ways to get your product/services out to relevant sections of the internet.
A good example would be a product that is easy to find on-line, but very technical/tricky to work with. Selling the product puts you in the same group as everyone else selling that product, but offering expertise on that product will raise your profile quickly while generating interest/informing potential clients. If you can get links from grateful recipients the effort will pay for itself, and the people you come in contact with are very likely to draw in more clients due to the way that social media is sharing business leads via friend connections.
Typical of Spring, the sooner you plant this ‘social seed’ the sooner it will grow into something that can support your on-line efforts.
Speaking of growing, Chia Bart is getting a little leafy already!
In the last installment we learned of my husband’s satellite television hobby and my 15 year long hatred of the dishes affixed to the side of my house. Through the observation of a passing dogwalker, my perspective was changed and my husband’s dishes were validated. The whole experience brought to light just how important it is to know the genuine perception of anyone outside your narrow field of vision, i.e. the consumer. One might even call it a key to survival in business.
We know consumer perception is how the public sees your business, but reputation management is how you want the consumer to see your business. Two very different, but related things. In the simplest of terms and in the context of SEO/SEM etc, reputation management occurs through the creation of a feedback loop and constant monitoring of search results. Data components are determined, tracked, reported and analyzed. Toss in the algo-antics of the almighty Google and, well, let’s just say thank goodness for pale-faced techies whose idea of fun is watching other people’s breadcrumbs at ten o’clock at night.
What if my husband were the client and the dishes were his website? I would have spent 15 years quietly ranting about the ugliness of his site. I would still have taken his money of course, but as just an SEO it would not have been part of my repertoire to change the site. I would have relied upon spam. Then the dogwalker came by and forced every SEO to become a marketer. In this post-Panda period let’s call it what it is: online reputation management. Those days of quietly spamming every blog and forum in existence are as dead as disco (and thank goodness).
We know consumer perception and reputation management are related through one factor: control. And we now know online reputation management is really about manipulating search results and public opinion, in essence controlling what information users will be given when they do a search (beit on Google, Facebook, Yelp or otherwise). Now those factors we control have to be attractive to search engines. We have to decorate the dishes. We have to make them more authoritative and unique. In some cases it only takes a bit of paint and a modern day Rembrandt. In other more challenging situations, a completely new house is needed before the dishes can even be seen. Once again, and for the good of organic search results, we are left with no other choice than to listen to the dogwalker.
My husband came with dishes, and I learned a long time ago to accept them. These aren’t your Grandmother’s Norman Rockwell dishes depicting sugary impressions of the so-called ‘American dream’. They aren’t even the kind of dishes I can serve a lovely red Thai curry on. They are satellite dishes. Large grey, ugly satellite dishes affixed to the side of my otherwise attractive home. Right now there are only two, but there have been times when I had to painfully admit all five dishes were in fact not a cruel joke.
Being someone who was born and bred in middle-class Canada, my first concern with the dishes was not their lack of aesthetic appeal. It was “People will think we are couch potatoes! TV is not THAT important to me!”. But I love my European husband. He comes from a place where satellite dishes are like toilets, if you don’t have one then you are very, very poor. And besides, he needs his soccer. So I put aside my egocentric concerns and pouted the other way while the dishes went up. I even helped. For what seemed like hours, I stood watching the television screen, shouting signal readings out the window while he adjusted his LNB’s (they could be miniature rocket launchers for all I know). I am good wife, yes I am.
Then one day I was taught a lesson. My husband was up on the roof doing some sort of mysterious repair to the chimney, when along came a gentleman walking his dog. Upon seeing my husband on the roof, the dogwalker began asking all sorts of questions about satellite television. And at that moment my husband was uplifted both in elevation and ego. After 15 years of his wife quietly hating those fugly dishes, here was a complete stranger mistakenly assuming he was a professional satellite installer – because of the fugly dishes! The gentleman didn’t think we were TV addicts. He didn’t care if we were lazy or liked to watch Jersey Shore (we don’t). This man simply saw a potential source of information on a fairly obscure subject. Finally, my high strung, forgiving, intelligent, patient husband was validated for his dishes.
The lesson I learned was in perspective. Call it what you want, but clearly my experiences put a great deal of importance on the aesthetics of our home, particularly when it came to how we were perceived by the public. So much that I lost sight of the existence of differing perspectives. In business, understanding how consumers perceive the face of the business is a lot like using Facebook. Once you get to know the new arrangement, it changes again. The internal influences of consumer behavior will always be comprised of the usual elements; lifestyle, personality, personal finance, knowledge, attitudes, feelings etc. And those characteristics shuffle around as they are affected by external factors such as, culture, sub-culture, ethnicity, class, experiences, family and the ever-ambiguous market mix. Shifting and shuffling on both sides means the perception of the consumer ebbs and flows.
When you have an online business, your website is your face to the consumer. People spend thousands and thousands of dollars on making their website just right for their consumers. But assessment of your customer base cannot end there. With the evolving state of consumer perception, needs and desires change. Now here comes the important bit: every business owner needs a dogwalker. You cannot always be the one quietly freaking out because ugly grey dishes are all over your home page. Step back and trust the word of an outside perspective. The key word there is TRUST. Get someone fresh to assess your business, website or just the homepage. Their external and internal influences will differ from your own, allowing them to see things you cannot. Listen to the dogwalker.
As online advertising continues to be a more prominent source of revenue for both big and small businesses the importance of Google’s Adwords advertising program has also increased, emerging as the premiere method of advertising on the internet. Despite this rise in useage, many businesses still lack a thorough understanding of exactly how the Adwords process works, which is to say, they are likely spending a significant amount of advertising money on something they do not completely understand. No wonder then that many campaigns are not nearly as successful as they could and should be.
Yesterday, Wordstream released a Google Adwords specific infographic in which the Adwords auction process is explained for potential clients in an easy to follow presentation. The infographic illustrates precisely how Google determines which ads will be shown and how much money the ads will cost (click image for full printable version).
While the infographic is relatively easy to follow and understand, a simple explanation of Adwords can be defined as follows: The Adwords auction process is structured so that all bidders can win; an Adwords bidder need only pay the minimum amount required to beat out the person below them.
When you use Adwords, your ad will appear along the very top or along the right hand side of the organic Google search engine results. The rank of your ad is directly related to your traffic and your traffic is related to a number of relevant factors:
Quality Score – Rating that search engines assign to each keyword chosen by an advertiser Click Through Rate (or CTR) – Percentage which expresses how many people are seeing your ad and then clicking it Bid Price – the price per keyword an advertiser is willing to spend to gain a click Ad Relevance – Relevance of the text in an ad in relation to keyword
Also in direct relation to the factors shown above is the landing page. It makes very little sense to go through the time necessary to set up an Adwords account and attain and drive traffic that ultimately takes a user through to a page that is not relevant to the ad they’ve just clicked on – you’ve wasted their time, and worse, you’ve wasted a part of your budget. The landing page is often the ‘Achilles Heel’ of many Adwords campaigns – a sensible course of action would be to have these pages built around the following criteria:
- Easy to navigate
- Load quickly
- Keyword enriched content relevant to the searched word
Landing page relevance factors heavily into Quality Score; quality score affects cost per click (CPC) as well as eligibility in the keyword auction process.
Each step of the Google Adwords auction process informs the the next step required to build and maintain a successful Adwords campaign. If you are an advertiser considering using Adwords to expand revenue, get up to speed and ensure you have a thorough understanding of how the entire process works before you spend any time or money on a campaign. Understanding the auction process is the first step towards success.
Pleasing plus is presently proving to be a problem with the plethora of possibilities. Confused by all the Plus linking options suddenly available? Here’s a round-up of what it looks like right now.
Create a Google+ page for the company.
Create employee G+ pages.
Add your employee G+ pages to the company.
Add a link or badge from your website to the G+ page for the company.
Add rel=author links between content on your site and your employee pages.
Add +1 options to the homepage and content/product pages.
I’d put your content/blog posts on your website first, and then follow up with a share to the G+ profile page of the employee/author responsible for the content.
That’s the whole process for G+ interaction between a website, staff pages, and the company page. Doing this properly will tell Google your content is legitimate and maximize the potential ranking signals for your site as it pertains to Google Plus.
Last step is getting folks to follow your Google+ page, hit the +1 buttons, and interact with your Google Plus postings/profile. We’ll have some ideas for this and followers other social networks as the excitement over recent Panda updates quells and we have more time to get back to addressing followers/traffic. Don’t forget that past articles (of which we’ve had a few) may still apply or at least offer some ideas.
Anyone who has used Google for any length of time is probably familiar with using the "+" operator in search queries in order to refine their results. This "+" older operator has been around for many years and is widely used by many searchers. It seems that overnight, Google has decided to remove this functionality from search queries.
In a recent response to a post in the Google Webmasters Forum, Google employee Kelly F. stated the following in regards to the removal of the "+" operator:
Hi everyone,
We’ve made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"].
We’re constantly making changes to Google Search – adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments, -all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible. This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want. Cheers, Kelly.
The new process she outlined will work for most in most cases, but it does seem to make for more cumbersome searches. I personally can understand that Google needs to remove this in the wake of their Google + Social Media platform for obvious reasons, but as a frequent user of this operator that has been in place for the past 15 years I will be difficult to get used to a less intuitive process; regardless if it has the same functionality as the old way of performing the search.
There was an interesting postscript from Danny Sullivan:
I can’t believe Google has done this. I use the + command all the time, especially in an age when more and more, Google constantly reshapes a search based on what it guesses a searcher wants, rather than what they entered.
The functionality is still there, which is a relief. But having to do a search like this:
mars +landings +failures
now like this:
mars "landings" "failures"
is more complicated. It also goes against 15 years of how search engines have operated, where quotes are used to find exact phrases. Now all those references across the web have become outdated, for no apparent reason other than maybe Google picked a name for its social network that wasn’t searchable.
I think Danny Sullivan "sums" it up the change very well by saying:
Imagine people learned how to symbolize addition by using the + symbol, then 150 years later, one of the big calculator makers declared that the + symbol would now be replaced by using the " symbol. That’s what Google has effectively done, no big blog post, no notice, just yanked the command search engines have used for over a decade. And probably because it named its social network Google+ — making it hard to find.
I think this is an instance where the Google marketers and staff should have realized how the implementation of Google + was going affect search results. It also shows a lack of far-sightedness on their part to not speculate how the coining of the Google + brandname was going to cause problems for searchers. Removing this operator that has been around much longer than Google with no press release shows a profound lack of respect for the subscribers of the Google service.
I know that as a stubborn old nerd I can be pretty hard to win over, and as much as this Google Engineer claims to have accidentally leaked his rant, I read this as intentionally made public from the get-go just by the way it was written to ‘everyone’ in a few spots. I could be wrong, but I’m not reading this as a leak, just as a rant.
The full post is, amazingly enough over on Google+ as a public post (although the original author has pointlessly deleted it). I shouldn’t say it’s really amazing that the post is still public, people duped it instantly so there’s no point in trying to remove it now.
Make no mistake, there’s a few good points from Steve Yegge; I find some of the observations to be true but mostly from an outsider standpoint which is shocking because it was written by a fellow with almost 6 years of experience in the company. Google does have platforms, they do use them, and they do share them. True there’s always been an obvious panic towards security that’s effected accessibility, but then Google’s track record probably wouldn’t be as amazing with a more casual approach to giving outsiders access to core tech.
Amazingly of all the points made, the one that echos most with my opinion is that Google is becoming arrogant and almost needs two versions of projects like Google’s Chrome browser. One version that runs super secure, fast, compatible, and sleek, with no frills or compromises. The other needs to be as bloated as FireFox/Opera, and it’d run like a buggy mess of poorly considered features that are starkly incompatible with themselves. To quote Steve on arrogance and Chrome development:
“You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I’m a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We’re not arrogant, by and large. We’re, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post — if you’ll reach back into distant memory — by describing Google as “doing everything right”. We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we’re arrogant it’s because we didn’t hire them, or they’re unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They’re inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.
But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn’t let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I’m actually going blind. For real. I’ve been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they’re quite brazen about it, and F*** You if you’re blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.”
As Steve deleted the original post he put up a good bit on why it’s bad to have such things in public:
“Please realize, though, that even now, after six years, I know astoundingly little about Google. It’s a huge company and they do tons of stuff, and I work off in a little corner of the company (both technically and geographically) that gives me very little insight into anything else going on there. So my opinions, even though they may seem well-formed and accurate, really are just a bunch of opinions from someone who’s nowhere near the center of the action — so I wouldn’t read too much into anything I said.”
I really couldn’t agree more. If this had come from someone working with Google’s engineers on something such as the GO language it would have been a different story, but Steve’s admittance of the scope of his role is very honest and worth considering as you read his rant.
TL;DR – Google guy rants about Google’s strategies from an outsider’s perspective and calls out some of the lingering issues with Google’s dev teams/arrogance. Everyone would like to see Google bend more and give more, though nobody can seem to qualify themselves to say if it’s really the wisest strategy.
As most were involved actively with SEO are aware, an update to the Google Panda Algorithm was implemented on September 28th and again on October 5th. This appears to be part of ongoing revisions to the Panda algorithm that continue to cause wild fluctuations in many websites rankings. Confirmed on September 30th, Google’s new Panda 2.5 arrived. It is still unclear if Panda 2.5 had been reversed or updated.
DaniWeb, who has taken extreme measures to recover from the previous Panda updates, states that the site was hit hard again by this latest iteration of Panda. DaniWeb stated that traffic to the site dropped by as much as 50% on October 5th, which was the release of a previous update to the algorithm.
Search Metrics has stated that 10 of 30 sites being hit saw an 80-90% recovery in visibility, but also stated that many others saw little to no improvement at all.
In a post from Search Engine Watch, Simon Heseltine wrote a post asking "Was the Google Panda 2.5 Panic Warranted?" I have to respond with an emphatic, “yes.” Google continues to erode confidence in property by continually pulling the rug out from under its multitude of users. Many sites have still not recovered from the original Panda update at the beginning of the year, despite following all the best SEO and content practices and completing site overhauls.
As is usual with major updates to the Google Algorithm, there is much speculation over the full scope or impact of the update. This time is no different. With conflicting reports from Search Metrics and sites like DaniWeb it is difficult to know who is correct. The more likely reality is that they are both right. Even though there appears to be an abundance of information discussing tactics for recovering from Panda and despite the valiant efforts of site owners to recover, many continue to be hit hard, while others seem to weather the updates quite well.
More transparency from Google could help to quell the debates and to restore a measure of confidence in the search-engine giant. Releasing timely information regarding algorithm updates would save an enormous amount of frustration for their users. It is exceedingly difficult to apply a bandage if you cannot see where you are hemorrhaging from. Google is even getting pressure from Danny Sullivan to be more transparent with the Panda updates. This may or may not have prompted Matt Cutts to release a "weather report" regarding Panda:
As a well connected SEO I digest a lot of publications from the web and I try to limit my opinion to factual results either from real world feedback or by controlled tests. Google is constantly evolving and improving itself to render the best search results possible, or at least better search results than the competition.
Considering where Google was with regards to just hardware in 1999, things certainly keep changing:
On Monday SEO Moz published a small test they did to gauge the importance of keywords in the anchor text of links. The test is discussed in detail over on SEO Moz but the result was rather straight forward.
In a nutshell they took 3 new sites, randomly equivalent, and tried to build some controlled links to the sites using three different approaches:
Build links with just ‘click here’ text
Build links with the same main keyword phrase
Build links with random components of the main keyword phrase
Obviously the test is a bit broken, because if you don’t have existing keyword relevance for a phrase, you should build relevance with keywords in the anchors. When Google is sorting out who will be ranked #1 for a site dealing with candies, the site linked to with relevant keywords should always rank higher than a site with links like “click here” or “this site” which aren’t relevant. The only exception would be in a situation where the links seem excessive or ‘spammy’ and may result in Google not considering any of the similar links for relevance.
Outside of a clean test environment we know the best results would be a blend of all three types, with a bit of brand linking mixed in to avoid losing focus on brand keywords. A well established site with a healthy user base will constantly be establishing brand due to all the time on site and click-through traffic for that brand.
ie. If I search for “Sears” and click on the first link only to find it’s a competitor, I’d hit back and find the right link to click. In most cases Google’s watching/learning from the process, so brand links aren’t going to be a necessity after a site is quite popular, and the % of brand links wouldn’t need to be much at all.
Kudos to SEOMoz for publishing some of their SEO test info regardless of how experimental it was. We’re constantly putting Google’s updates to the test and it’s often very hard to publish the results in such a clinical fashion for all to see. We will always make an attempt to blog on the topics we’re testing but it’s still on the to-do list to publish more of the data.
If I took even more pictures we could animate Bart!
Bart’s beans are sprouting!
