Google Activity May Affect 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).

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.

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.

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. 

Source : webpronews.com

Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results

Google would only show up to two results from the same domain on a single search result page. Now, Google has confirmed what many are seeing, where a single brand dominates a single page of Google’s search results.

This is not a bug, this is not an anomaly, it is an intentional change to Google’s ranking algorithm. Google said:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.

What I find interesting is the last statement by Google:

We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

Remember, Google’s Peter Norvig who said, “for the second one [search result], you don’t want something that’s almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there’s where minority views start coming in.” You prefer diversity. Google is clearly saying that a result from the same site can still be diverse and different enough, even if there are ten results, all from the same site.

On the reputation management front, this is a clear winner for those with reputation management issues.


Source : searchengineland.com

Monitoring Backlinks

When you set up a web presence, one of the things you want to do is start getting backlinks. They help your search engine ranking, and the more places that link to you, the more people can find you. However, not all backlinks are good ones. There are plenty of places where people can trade backlinks or buy backlinks, and a lot of those places just offer spam. Link farms are examples of places you don’t want to find your site listed.

Link farms, and similar sites don’t really provide backlinks that are valuable, but inexperienced website owners may think that just having a lot of backlinks will be enough. When they dodo not start  seeing a lot of improvements on their site stats and traffic, they get upset – but they don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves by creating a lot of backlinks that aren’t beneficial to their websites or targeted to their niches. That’s why the ability to monitor your backlinks is so very important.

Anyone who decides to monitor backlinks should know that there are plenty of options for doing that. Some of them are free, and some of them cost money.  Yahoo Site Explorer is free and it works as well as or better than others I have seen This tool allows you to see how many sites are linking to you, who is linking to you and what they are linking to.  One thing that Yahoo Site Explorer does not do is take data points and track the link velocity. Remember that everything is relative as the Search Engines are comparing and ranking for relevance on a keyword-for-keyword basis.  Generally speaking the higher the quantity of naturally occurring targeted backlinks you have along with the higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher you will rank for targeted terms.  We suggest Yahoo Site Explorer because it seems to count many links that Google either doesn’t wish to count or divulge. We also recommend Link Velocity Tool as you can track competitors and take data points. This allows you to go back and see what your backlink count was at a specific point and time in the past.

Monitoring your backlinks is important. If you don’t monitor them, how will you know who’s linking to you and what content they like on your site? When you monitor backlinks, you don’t do it just because it’s the thing to do or you’ve been told by other people that you should. You do it because you want to use that information to make yourself more successful. There are plenty of ways to gain success on the Internet, but ignoring backlinks because you don’t see their value isn’t one of them. It’s much better to learn all you can and get all the data you can get about your website, so you can make good choices for its future.

It’s also important to understand the quality and quantity of your backlinks are a deciding factor when search engines determine where to place your page in search results. If many people who have ‘web cred’ are linking to you, it tells search engines that your site is valuable, and it will be ranked higher.

Not everyone monitors their backlinks with the competitors in mind, but you can certainly do that if you want to. Try our Link Velocity Tool.  You can monitor the relative speed of backlink growth between you and those competitive websites that you are interested in.  It’s a way of monitoring all of your important players while keeping a close eye on your long term online objectives.


Source : website-marketing-pros.com

Raise Of Social Media In B2B Internet Marketing

The term social media marketing generally implies the use of online communities, blogs and social networks and other online media for the purpose of sales, marketing, customer service and public relations. The word social media itself implies those web properties where the content is mainly published by the users themselves and not through those who are the direct and actual employees of that web property. The varied twitter uses and benefits often help in this very purpose.

When it comes to marketing through a social media, the first and foremost thing required is the creation of buzz. This means that some newsworthy event or blog entry or even a tweet has to be made. This is the first step in creation of buzz and dispenses with the requirement of any press releases. The news which is put up does not necessarily need to be in relation to the product or service which the company seeks to promote. An amusing or even a compelling message on twitter, which carries the logo of the company, has been successfully used to create a viral campaign. Many times, the inclusion of an incidental tagline is employed for this purpose. This is a part of twitter uses and benefits, which allow the company to instantly reach hundreds of users instantly and simultaneously.

Others like facebook and myspace are also employed by companies to help in promotion of their services and products. One of the facebook uses and benefits is that corporate public pages can be maintained where anyone may become the company’s fan. Apart from this there can be groups where particular products may be discussed. Fans of the company may help in the promotion of any service through social media venues, or the corporation may promote online conversations regarding its services. Then there is myspace. It makes use of a combination of photos, weblogs, emails, user profiles and forums. Corporations can derive methods of increasing online presence from myspace uses and benefits. The creation of a company profile is helpful in having better media coverage.

Social media marketing is becoming a certain and fixed tool for marketing and promotion of the products and services of the various corporations. The ability of the corporation to reach millions of users around the globe is the most attractive aspect of social media marketing. It is much more effective than the traditional methods of promotion which are usually employed.

Source : website-marketing-pros.com

Caffeine Update : New Web Indexing Method

Google announced completion of Caffeine Update - The New Web Indexing System. Google claims that with the help of this update it will now provide 50% fresher results for web searches than the previous index and is the largest collection of web content.

whatever is published on WEB whether it might be the Video, Story, News Story, Blog, Forum Post and such others will soon be found that are relevant to the user query soon after its published as said by one of the Google's Engineer Carrie Grimes.

"Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be," adds Grimes. "Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

With Caffeine the web is analyzed in small portions and updates its search index on a continuous basis (all around the world). New pages and updates to existing pages are added straight to the index, meaning freshness will be increased.

Caffeine takes upto 100 million GB of storage in a single database, and adds even more and more GB of information every day.

Three Search Types For SEO

Common wisdom, supported by various research projects, has identified three primary types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. All of the major web search engines try to detect which type of search a user is performing by analyzing the query and attempting to determine intent, to better accommodate common searcher behaviors in their search results pages.

For example, in Google, if keyword data indicates that a specific keyword phrase is a navigational query, search engines will put a link to an official company website home page in the first position, often with supplemental Sitelinks.

A navigational query is a keyword search in which the searcher wishes to go to a specific website, or a web page on a specific site. In other words, with a navigational query, searchers are using a web search engine to navigate (go to) a website. Navigational queries are far more common than previously reported. In fact, at the 2009 Stockholm Search Marketing Expo, Peter Maxmin, Director for Online and Bing Search EMEA, reported that approximately 33% of Bing queries are navigational. And some of my sources at Yahoo told me recently that over 30% of Yahoo queries are navigational as well.

What does that mean to us, as search engine optimization (SEO) professionals? Is it enough for us to accommodate navigational, informational, and transactional queries? During my ongoing research on searcher behaviors, I discovered more types of searches that, I believe, we SEOs should know. Here are some of them.

Ad hoc search

An ad hoc search is one that SEOs are probably the most familiar with, even though we might not know the label for it. With an ad hoc search, the searcher’s goal is to find as many relevant documents as possible about a topic, as the need arises. An ad hoc search is informational in nature, since searcher is on a “fishing expedition” for information about a subject. The searcher might or might not have previous knowledge about the topic but wants to read or learn more about it.

For example, suppose a searcher wishes to purchase a new digital camera but does not know what brand or type to purchase. The searcher might want to read reviews about different digital cameras before making a purchase. Some keyword phrases he/she might type into the search box can include:

    * digital cameras
    * types of digital cameras
    * digital camera reviews
    * best digital cameras

The searcher probably does not want to go to a specific website at this time. The searcher is relying on the search engine to deliver many relevant documents (with corresponding links/URLs), and he will browse those documents to learn more about this topic.

Known-item search

A known-item search is similar to an ad hoc search but the target of the search is a particular document, or a small set of documents, that the searcher knows to exist and wants to find again (definition from Ellen M. Voorhees, National Institute of Standards and Technology, available in the paper Overview of TREC 2003). In other words, with a known-item search, the searcher knows a particular web page exists but does not always know or remember where it is.

Or, interestingly enough, the searcher might know where the web page is but finds it easier to type all or part of the URL into the search box rather than the address bar. Why? Because many people find it is easier to type in all or part of a URL into Google (for example) rather than the full URL. In fact, in 2006, 17% of Google mobile queries were URLs, indicating that searchers knew which websites they wished to visit (see A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search for more info).

Here are some keyword phrases that indicate that a person is exhibiting site finding behavior:

    * google adwords login
    * Beyonce website home page
    * official Star Trek site

In other words, labeling a home page (in the title tag, heading and even the meta-tag description) is very important for site finding queries.

Named page search

With a named page search, the web searcher wishes to go to a specific page within a website, a page that the searcher recalls seeing or visiting at a previous time. As an SEO professional, I often test the effectiveness of site optimization by doing named page searches.

For example, many SEOs use Google AdWords’ keyword research tool, but they don’t always bookmark it or remember it when using a different person’s computer. So they might type the following keyword phrase into the search box:

    google adwords keyword research tool

Clearly, this searcher wants to go directly to specific web page on Google’s website. But I also like to do some advanced queries to see how well or poorly clients and competitors are optimizing their own sites. The queries I type use the following formats:

    * [keyword phrase] [company/organization name or abbreviation]
    * [keyword phrase] [part of URL with and without the .com or TLD]
    * [keyword phrase] site:www.example.com

So if I am looking to see how well the National Cancer Institute has optimized its site, using the above example, I might try the following queries:

    * breast cancer treatments nci
    * breast cancer tests cancer.gov
    * “breast cancer screening” site:www.cancer.gov (with and without the quotes)

If inappropriate pages appear in search results, then I know that pages need to be optimized more effectively.

As I continue to research, label, test and verify web searcher behaviors, I continually encounter these types of searches. As you can see, some of these searcher behaviors have overlapping definitions, which can be confusing. Nevertheless, I maintain a list of different types of searcher goals so I can accommodate them in all of my client websites. Which searcher behaviors do you commonly encounter, and how well does your site accommodate those behaviors?

Source

Google Going To Lists Top 1,000 Sites & Lets You To Advertise On Them

The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today.

The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. The list ranks sites based on category, unique visitors, reach and page views. Not only has Google come out with this list, but they are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content ads to show on these top 1,000 sites.

To activate this filter in AdWords, go to your AdWords account and select “non Ad Planner 1000″ within the “category filters” section.

The top list lists facebook.com as the number one ranking site globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. The list will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites. Yes, Google removes some of their own sites.

Where does this data come from? Google explains it comes from “aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms.”

The other Ad Planner features released today include a way to export your Google Content Network Placements from Ad Planner to AdWords and you can now create lists within Ad Planner.

For more details, see the Google AdWords Blog.