Google’s Take on Search Plus Your World
A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows…
You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:
Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large…
Google announced they rolled out their anti-overly-aggressive-ads algorithm. They didn’t give a specific % on how much of the above the fold content can be ads, but suggest using their browser preview tool. Using that tool on Google.com’s search results would of course score it as a spam site, but for some small AdSense webmasters that avoided Panda, Google may have drew first blood.
Much Quicker Updates
With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda, the first bite might seem like a big concern, however the “too many ads” algorithm updates far more frequently than Panda does:
If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes…
This is an interesting play:
BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients.
The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the “BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator”…
Wow…this is pretty…um…transparent.
According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google “Get Your Business Online”, disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google…
“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone Except Me Should be Open
Being labeled as open or transparent is a great public relations strategy. Executed effectively it gets ditto heads to feel like they are part of a movement and spread your propaganda.
However actually being transparent is often a poor business strategy…
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…
That is what they say, typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business.
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Thanks to John Andrews for highlighting the above industry trend.
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For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals.
Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from Google.com, pushed below the fold from larger AdWords ads and/or heavily skewed by things like brand bias there is much less value in link building in numerous big money markets…
Some of Google’s new search results look quite alarming in terms of every single link above the fold is either a paid ad, or links to yet another Google page wrapped in ads.
I have a huge monitor & it is impossible for me to click *anywhere* above the fold on some search results without going through Google’s toll booth or clicking off to yet another Google ad wrapped page.
(click on the image for the full sized view)
Some people have given Google the benefit of the doubt “well this is just vertical search” and “this is just for the consumer” but we see that in many cases it harms consumers by limiting choice:
Charlie Leocha, the director of the Consumer Travel Alliance, says Google Flight Search is “limiting consumers’ knowledge…
Since Panda has happened I (and others) have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages, ranked scraped 3rd party content, padded out crap “content farm” content to suck in search traffic, took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences, bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank, engaged in off-topic affiliate extension (Barnes & Noble, Overstock, Overstock AND Barnes & Noble), etc etc etc
At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged “quality” algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers)…
Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy:
With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart’s world is about as large as the state of Maine. That’s massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it’s not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth’s largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people — and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way…
Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy:
With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart’s world is about as large as the state of Maine. That’s massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it’s not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth’s largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people — and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way…
Only a few hours left in the discount, but its a great deal.
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A directory listing in Best of the Web is a vote of confidence for your business website…
Over 5 years ago I had a quick chat with the folks from Interspire about their websites, including their shopping cart at the time & offered a few tips to fix some of the obvious issues I saw. This was over a half-decade ago & under a different product name & entirely informal.
Anyhow…as they later ramped up on marketing, they at some point claimed that I somehow “certified” their software, even as the version changed, their product name changed, their mode of sales changed (from primarily pushing a downloadable software product to an SAAS model), many SEO fundamentals changed over the years, and so on…
In the below video Matt Cutts states that “there is no such thing as white hat cloaking” …
… yet Google is testing a new ad unit where users have to fill out a survey before they can view the content.
How long until the surveys include something like:
Then after the survey: “Thanks for your feedback…
Google collects a lot of information on individuals & can have some level of confidence if the person is a real person or not based on things like their history of email usage, if they have a credit card on file, how they interact with other high confidence real accounts, how many people are friends with them on Google+, usage of an Android cell phone, their search history, etc.
Google doesn’t need all those signals on any individual, just some blend of them…
Google Hates Affiliates
Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem.
How was I aware of that?
2 ways:
SEM Rush has long been one of my favorite SEO tools. We wrote a review of SEM Rush years ago. They were best of breed back then & they have only added more features since, including competitive research data for many local versions of Google outside of the core US results: UK, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil.
Recently they let me know that they started offering a free 2-week trial to new users…
Even if you are in a seedy vertical that you think Google wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, Google may still be gunning for you!
Recall that when Google bought DoubleClick, Larry Page wanted to keep running the Performics SEO & SEM shop:
Google would spin Performics out of DoubleClick, and sell it to holding firm Publicis. Only one major force inside of Google hated the plan…
Google has recently began mutating search queries far more aggressively. In the past they would change search queries if they thought there was a misspelling, but now they have taken to changing keywords that are spelled correctly to align them with more common search results.
As one example, [weight loss estimator] is now highly influenced by [weight loss calculator]. The below chart compares the old weight loss estimator SERP, the current weight loss estimator SERP & the current weight loss calculator SERP…
On September 28th, Google rolled out Panda 2.5. Yet again Youtube is the #1 site on the leader board, while even some branded sites like MotorTrend were clipped, and sites that had past recovered from Panda (like Daniweb) were hit once more. In the zero sum game of search, Google’s Android.com joins YouTube on the leader board.
It doesn’t matter what “signals” Google chooses to use when Google also gets to score themselves however they like…
“To thine own self be true”
In a word?
Prescient!
10 links in a single AdWords ad unit!
Then more ads below it. Then a single organic listing with huge sublinks too. And unless you have a huge monitor at that point you are “below the fold.”
Negative advertising in AdWords is not allowed. So long as you build enough brand signals & pay the Google toll booth, public relations issues & reputation issues won’t be accessible to searchers unless they learn to skip over the first screen of search results…
Another friend sent me a message today: “just got a whole swathe of non-interlinked microsites torched today. Bastard! Just watching the rank reports coming in…”
I haven’t seen his sites, but based on how he described them “whole swathe” I wouldn’t guess the quality to be super high. One thing you could say for them was that they were unique.
Where putting in the effort to create original content falls flat on its face is when search engines chose to outrank aggregators (or later copies) over the original source…
I recently got put in a test bucket for Google’s new layout with a “search results” bar near the top of the page. Generally this impacts the search results in a couple ways:
In the past doorway pages could be loosely defined as “low-quality pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.”
The reason they are disliked is a click circus impact they have on web users as they keep clicking in an infinite loop of ads.
This would be a perfect example of that type of website:
However, ever since Google started to eat their “organic” search results, the definition of doorway pages has changed significantly…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
