For the last few days, there have been rumours that Bing has been running tests of paid PPC ads within the search results. Not placed off to the right or clearly highlighted at the top or bottom, but ‘camouflaged’ within the organic search results.
Now, this may prove to be an advertisers’ dream, but is likely to meet a backlash from consumers and some search agencies who have previously reacted badly to this type of ‘hidden advertising’ within the index. For search marketing agencies who work hard on organic results through SEO and search marketing, this testing of placement of paid ads in the middle of the SERPs will undoubtedly cause the SEO blogosphere to respond.
This is already a time of shifting sands for search marketing agencies, especially those who have been slow to realise the importance of social for both search engines and searchers, and with a growing focus on personalisation, dominating the SERPs is becoming ever harder. Losing one or two positions within the index to paid advertisers is more likely to cause bad feeling from those who believe the search engines need to operate a level playing field rather than favour those with large advertising budgets.
Those organic results are proving important to get return on investment and results for clients, and are where a good agency with experienced SEO staff can still outshine a mediocre one every time a search is returned.
Will Microsoft continue testing? And how will Google respond if its major competitor puts paid ads in the middle of the search results? Bing has been making advances on Google’s market share over the last year but still has less than half of that of Google. There is a fine line to tread in the search engine market between satisfying advertisers and investors, and
upsetting consumers, and only time will tell whether this is a canny move by Bing or a very bad idea.
In case you have been under a rock, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Tony Bates, CEO of Skype have just made a live announcement about new chat and video chat features within Facebook.
The first announcement was about the Open Computer Project, which has been underpinned by a need for better infrastructure to deliver service to Facebook users – servers and data centres. As this is not the core interest of the readers here, we’ll gloss over it!
The next announcement was the one everyone has been expecting following Google+ opening its field trial doors last week – video chat within Facebook. G+ has Hangouts and some of us are addicted, and very excited about the potential for our business clients, as well as on a wider social level for consumers. What was Facebook going to announce to compete with this?
I have to admit to being disappointed. My initial feeling is that this announcement has been rushed out because of the Google+ launch.
It (or someone) has missed the fact that G+ is a field trial and certainly does not seem to have taken any account of the fact that hundreds of thousands of users are clamouring for, and not getting, G+ invites. Google is not relenting in a hurry and just letting people in in droves; the product development forums make it crystal clear that Google is trying extremely hard in this, its third attempt, to get social right this time. New users are being let into the trial in trickles, not floods. Ergo, IMHO, there is no immediate threat to Facebook’s userbase right now, and this early announcement may prove an undoing over time.
G+ has launched with a slick mobile app for Android, and also a mobile browser interface which is intuitive and easy to use. Facebook has launched video chat and chat enhancements without any mobile solution. I think implying that this has not been done yet because FB wants to get the desktop/browser version working first was the first real indication of the hurry to get this announcement out. particularly when later on in the presentation, Zuckerberg clearly states that the three biggest trends that drive FB activity are 1) apps 2) mobile and 3) groups.
If that is the case, and FB needs user activity to grow its business, then surely you would focus on providing a mobile app from the word go for this new partnership with Skype? After all, Skype have had a mobile app for years and 50% of Skype’s own traffic each month – a staggering 300million minutes – is video chat. Adding over half a billion potential users of this video chat facility would imply to me that a mobile app would be essential in light of the massive growth of mobile internet access. (And might help pay for those new data centres Facebook are building!)
Seeing how the clunky chat has been improved (um, not much at first glance!) makes G+ Hangouts look even more impressive. And Zuckerberg’s comments when asked what he thought about Google + Hangouts by Ben Parr of Mashable gave an even greater impression that this has been rushed out. Focus on the fact that 1 on 1 video chat is going to be the biggest use. Hmm, no, I don’t believe so. The killer app is group video chat, and the facility to do precisely that has been included in Google+ from the outset, whereas FB are planning to work on it over the coming months.
Part 2 of our impressions about this and its effect on businesses using Facebook to follow shortly.
The big announcement this week has of course been Google+ and the limited field trial. Not so limited that people still aren’t managing to sneak in through various back doors! The general consensus from those within the field trial is positive, although obviously the entire reason for the trial is to find bugs and gather feedback so there are plenty of critiques, complaints and suggestions doing the rounds. And Google are responding in double quick time and making changes faster than users can find things to be critical of!
However, overwhelmingly it seems that the vast majority of the (lucky) early adopters want to see Google succeed; if only, to stop the behemoth that is Facebook, which 6 years in, does seem to be suffering a middle-age crisis for many.
There does seem to be a need for an integrator i.e. a one stop shop for everyone’s multiple so-me activities to be easily found, and perhaps Google + is attempting to be this. Add-ons, plug ins and apps will obviously need to be developed, and probably outside Google, just as Tweetdeck was developed for Twitter. It seems that few twitter addicts are likely to give up Twitter for G+, any more than many of us will stop using email, the phone or a letter when these are clearly the right tool for the job.
It would seem that Facebook are going to make an exciting announcement on July 6th, and the money at present is on a video chat with Skype built into FB profiles. There are other possibilities, but this is about the only announcement that will right now derail the buzz about Google’s Hangouts, which seem to be catching on at a rate of knots.
Facebook has made a few other changes this week too, such as adding the possibility of Klout for brands on Facebook. The vast majority of the non-so-me world have probably never have heard of Klout unless their Twitterstream mentions it, so this measure of influence has just taken a big step from the business world to the land of consumers. Klout’s announcement about Facebook integration means that brands can customise the user experience to any brand page according to their Klout score. One has to admit this is a clever move for Klout, extending their reach to consumers, whilst giving brands even more reason to take note of Klout.
This is a nice win-win for the social media world and pushes Klout, which many have been derogoratory about recently, back towards the forefront of activity in the so-me world. Not just for businesses, who should be at least monitoring their Klout score for an idea of how effective their social media activities are, but also for consumers who may well begin to see brands differently once Klout is introduced into the social networking experience.
Whilst many have to date seen Facebook as a purely social experience, the fact that most TV ads now have “Follow us on Facebook” shows that businesses, whilst relatively slow on the uptake, have finally realised that FB is a route to wallets, sales and “brand love”. What businesses need to do far more quickly than they did with Facebook is get into Google+ as soon as possible. Because Google + is not about social networking per se, and this is only one of the many changes coming from Google over the coming hours, days, week and months.
If your company has been relying on SEO, then you need to know that even Google is no longer relying on that. Read the next post!
Just over a month ago, Google Chrome UK showed off how the +1 button will look in the Chrome browser in a TV ad.
The +1 button acts exactly as the Like button on Facebook, permitting users to share and recommend content that they have enjoyed.
Slowly but surely we are seeing more websites add the +1 to their site, but it doesn’t appear yet that any particularly notable and positive results are being seen if the US search engine fora and blogosphere are anything to go by.
By now many people are beginning to ‘settle’ into their social networks and have found the network(s) of choice for the way they work, socialise and share. So they are already faced with tweet, Like on Facebook, Digg and so on when they find content they wish to share and they know which place they wish to share it to and who with. An additional choice may simply be plus one too many, and it is apparent from visiting pages where the +1 button is deployed that far fewer people click that than the FB Like button, Tweet or even, depending on audience, the Share on Linkedin Button.
It may also be that people are unsure how it all works, and are somewhat bewildered with the complex choices that a 2011 browser now offers. From watching a variety of users recently, it would seem that the vast majority do not use much of the functionality built into browsers, beyond the basics.
There is also an issue that for anyone who has not already enabled +1 in their public profile, the rest of the +1 world is still invisible in the search results; although it is visible just as the counts for “Likes” and “Tweet This” buttons are on content.
This lack of profile within the search results is not going to make it a simple task to educate users into its usage as many will remain ignorant of it. Until it is on as many pieces of content as possible, as the Facebook Like button is, for all to see, it is unlikely to see mass uptake.
It would also seem that there is a minor issue with load time if the +1 code is placed at the top of an article or near the top of the page. Undoubtedly, Google are working on this, but we all know that users have become ever more impatient over the years with pages that do not load immediately.
So, one could ask if the +1 button has arrived late at the party with so much other competition around ….or is it just that it is still only available on google.com searches that is slowing down its adoption?
It is likely that, as ever, Google has far more tricks up its sleeve to do with social networking than just the +1 button, and perhaps in future, the +1 will become a more commonly used tool for searchers than it would seem to be today.
Our advice: add a +1 button to your content and let’s see what happens when it hits google.co.uk. Watch this space.
Running a PPC campaign in order to support spam and scams seems rife. After all, even on highly competitive terms, the costs are little if the ad brings the results you require. Before you are banned. The Farmer / Panda update may have targeted organic results, but there are still issues within PPC. Especially for the following type of scam.
This weekend, I endeavoured to do a simple task – quickly create a Follow Us on Twitter button. Obviously Twitter offers Follow Me Buttons but Twitter’s solution didn’t figure for any of the obvious searches in the first two pages. So, I thought I’d explore some of the other options. There were two PPC choices and several first page organic results that fit the search.
The first PPC choice is twitterflash.net. (No link, don’t go there, read on and see why). Obviously, in the top PPC position, with 60,500 monthly searches on the term, this ad is getting some eyeballs.
You choose your button and are then asked to enter your Twitter username to generate the correct code for your Twitter button.
However, it does not matter what code you insert into that box asking for your Twitter username, this is what you are asked to copy and paste into your page.
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
data=”http://www.buzzbuttons.com/BUTTON0/twitbutton.swf” width=”100″
height=”80″><param name=”movie”
value=”http://www.buzzbuttons.com/BUTTON0/twitbutton.swf”></param><param
name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><param name=”menu”
value=”false”></param><param name=”wmode”
value=”transparent”></param><param name=”flashvars”
value=”username=your_id_here”></param><a
href=”http://www.gamblinginsider.ca” title=”gambling insider”>gambling
insider</a><embed src=”http://www.buzzbuttons.com/BUTTON0/twitbutton.swf”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”100″
height=”80″ menu=”false” wmode=”transparent”
flashvars=”username=your_id_here”></embed></object>
Spot the problem? I didn’t immediately on entering that page, but I did fairly quickly when I pasted that code into the page I was adding it to and the word Gambling appeared instead of a nice neat button.
[I also believe that AllowScriptAccess is a problem - can anyone clarify this please?]
The real problem is that you have just potentially exposed a Twitter username to spambots; Twitter is rife with them. However, it also comprehensively breaks Google’s T&Cs which forbids PPC ads for gambling.
Which raises the question: what is Google doing to prevent such ads being placed in top spots?
(Interestingly, the second PPC result threw up this:
so a small company of web professionals are, sadly, wasting their own money on PPC ads that lead to a 404 page – have YOU checked your PPC campaign recently??).
Google is making money from these types of ads that feature spam and scams; yet, reporting such an ad is, as I discovered, quite difficult, although I eventually tracked down the Complaint Report form for Google AdWords. It seems that others, such as Ben Edelman, have looked into this and the implications for Google far more deeply than I. In a post from 2006 entitled “PPC Scams”, many of the problems were exposed.
Little appears to have changed, although I hope a reply from Google may prove otherwise.
Whilst on this particular term there is little competition, it is likely that on other keywords and phrases, genuine advertisers are being forced to pay a higher price for their PPC ads than would be required if there were not scammers sitting in top spots. Who wins? Google. It is high time Google resolved this issue of relevancy and quality in the SERPs – organic and paid.
The Guardian is reporting that Apple have toppled Google as the biggest brand in the world.
Just before this puts the world into a spin on Monday morning, I’d like to look at how real this thinking is. OK, it’s only one list, but this is going to be big headlines, as no doubt the researchers, Millward Brown, knew when writing their press release.
Obviously, the world revolves round money, stock markets and brands, (or the world that makes news does) but in reality much of this is very nebulous. Millions of dollars can be wiped off a company’s value (and hence brand) over night often for seemingly spurious reasons.
Is Apple a better brand? There are, of course, the Apple fanboyz, just as there are for Open Source, or Marmite, or thousands of other brands. But is the estimated market price of a company a true reflection of its value? After all, surely the consumer is the best judge of value? And should brands seek purely to increase perceived market value rather than customer satisfaction?
Consumers, as we know, are often forced/persuaded into purchase through sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques. That is what many in our industry do for a living. But, to date, the largest brands have seemingly failed to be penalised in such assessments or valuations for poor ‘after sales’ service, and are judged purely on sales figures ie money in.
What would be most interesting, is to see how many people have forked out for an expensive Apple item, and then never bought from Apple again…. for instance. Where is the satisfaction index?
Here’s mine. Our Apple satisfaction index is very low.
Our Mini Mac (now quite unloved) stopped working properly within less than 2 years of purchase, and despite a long trip away to an Apple repair shop, it now does only the barest minimum. And that whilst making the most horrendous noises.
Then, thinking those who espouse Apple, and whom I respect, must be right and that the MacMini experience was a mere blip, I recently acquired, against my better judgement, an iPhone. I was travelling, my 3 year old handset gave up the ghost overnight, and I needed a phone to get hold of the people who I was supposed to be meeting that day. This iPhone has, to date, driven me up the wall (even more so than the Nokia N97 it replaced) and really, if I lived nearer to an Apple Store, this latest handset would also go the way of the previous one – for replacement or refund. (THAT is a whole other post over the fact that handsets now last less time than your mobile phone contract).
The last iPhone had zero battery life and was replaced after 3 weeks (would have been much sooner but I couldn’t get to a store).
This one refuses to connect to a network, of any flavour – GSM, wifi etc – most of the time. It is bordering on useless for every reason I got it – phone, online, wifi. It is right now as much a smart phone as my cat is. The only thing that does work well is the camera but I can only share my photos if I go through a mind-bendingly tedious process to remove and share them. Whilst plugged into my attached-to-a-landline computer, which means the word ‘mobile’ is bordering on anathema to my iPhone.
From what I can see, the vast majority of apps in the AppStore (ditto the Android store apps according to the BBC) are not really worth the time their developers’ have spent on them, although there are some glorious gems such as Photosynth which has solved a problem I have had for years – stitching a panorama together. But that comes from Microsoft! (And of course, I can’t view my final attempts on the Net as that requires Silverlight, which Apple does about as well as Flash).
Let’s be balanced though, considering the headline – there are days I dislike and distrust Google too, as part of my general distrust towards big business vs small business, consumer and community interest, but looking at what has been achieved by Google for the customer – gmail, maps, search, and so on – I feel more comfortable in assigning a value to Google for services, than I do to Apple for products.
I am though quite concerned that the two biggest companies in the world, as of this morning and a single assessment (let’s make that clear!), suffer such a major #fail when it comes to those that matter most – the people who buy their products. Google will not answer questions in their forums; yet, there seem to be hundreds of thousands of people with problems that affect their daily lives, businesses etc. Apple suffers similar issues – the AppStore is full of them. My iPhone problems were only solved after I drove 200+ miles to a store – which now makes this device the most expensive I will own in a hurry.
But I cannot afford to be without a phone for the x days/weeks it takes to replace this one, which hasn’t worked properly since the day I got it. And as to my MiniMac problems – it’s now a very expensive box on the desk I should probably tidy away, into the bin.
So, in conclusion, whilst the money markets may make the headlines, and encourage other brands to aspire after those wielding the highest stock prices, is that what you should be doing with your brand?
I don’t believe so.
It comes down, I believe to a slightly different approach to assessing brand value. Social capital sells, as well as Quality Goods. Which. Work. Rushing to market to get the headlines and hence these type of valuations are all well and good, but personally, I may buy a PlayBook which is late to market but probably does what it says on the tin rather than an iPad. How will that decision be reflected in the news?
Traditional business values often bring you longer term value than any shiny quick wins. Many of the most successful businesses are not hitting the headlines of WSJ, NYT, or any of the British broadsheets this morning. They just keep on delivering, day after day, to a happy customer base who will support them through generations.
THAT is value. But it ain’t news. And sadly, those hard-working valuable companies will be written off by the meeja and thrown to the wolves by newcomers’ shiny claims. Leaving us with an ever-decreasing QUALITY for consumers in the rush for the headlines and the stock valuations.
Have a great week! Your comments are as ever welcomed.
The founders of Youtube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, have acquired delicious.com from Yahoo!
All existing users are being asked to sign in to the service to give permission for bookmarks to be transferred to the new AVOS set-up.
Social bookmarking continues to be an important feature for many, and can also influence your rankings on the search engines. Recent additions to Delicous have included being able to tweet or email your bookmarks directly from the bookmarklet on your toolbar, as well as sending all URLs referenced on Twitter directly to Delicious through apps such as packrati.us.
Undoubtedly, the new owners will add yet more functionality to ensure that Delicious continues to play a role in both social media and social media marketing. However, the leaked Yahoo! announcement at the tail end of last year that the service was to enter a “sunset” phase saw many users jump ship to services such as SpringPad, YourVersion, historio.us, Pinboard.in and Zootool.
Delicious may need to work hard to attract users back by differentiating from the new social bookmarking and online notepad start-ups, which now offer a multitude of different solutions to the task of saving all your content into the cloud.
Which social bookmarking tool do you use, why, and will you be using the AVOS version of Delicious?
You have probably heard about the impact of the Google Panda update hitting UK shores (well Google.co.uk) last week. If you missed it, we covered the US launch back in March.
The update was designed to reduce the rankings of lower quality sites with a lack of original content and an abundance of ads. Article sites like Ezinearticles and FindArticles.com were the main category of sites affected, but other sites were affected also. A useful analysis of different UK sites by Searchmetrics reported in the Guardian showed how different sites were impacted.
Here are some examples:
You can see that review sites like Ciao.co.uk and Review Centre were also affected as were some tech review sites like TechRadar.com. This suggests the update may have wider implications for your digital marketing than search engine optimisation alone. If these sites are generating direct or affiliate traffic then visits from these sources may be reduced also.
How to review the impact of Google updates on your site
The recent update certainly begs the question of how you review the impact of Google updates on your sites. This is now easier than it used to be since there are now a wide variety of tools available. I’ll give a quick run-down of the main ones as I see it since there may be some you’re unaware of:
1. Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Tools. This will show you changes from day-to-day for the main keyphrases you target.
2. Rank checkers. Rank checkers for which you supply a set of target keyphrases such as AdvancedWebRanking provide a similar toolset. Google built its Search Queries tool in response to these.
3. Natural search visibility tools. Similar to rank checkers, but showing performance across a wide-range of keyphrases so better for showing the big picture to marketers. Searchmetrics is one example of these. Another is Sistrix which has been used by its provider to show changes in the US Search rankings:
4. Panel data and sampled search queries. Hitwise has data on visits referred to different sites within a category. Its cost means it only tends to be used by large companies.
5. Analytics systems. Of course these show what really matter, i.e. visits to your site and conversion to commercial goals. Thinking of Google Analytics, there are several options in here to help you identify changes to performance:
A. Non-paid search Advanced Segment
B. A custom-advanced segment setup to show non-brand search traffic which is most likely to be affected by an algorithm update.
C. Google Analytics Intelligence which can be setup to alert you when there is a week-on-week change in natural search performance of natural search overall or a phrase containing the keywords you are targeting.
These are the main methods we use, but do let us know of other tools or techniques that are used by others.
The first edition of Think Quarterly is all about data, and it is telling that the introduction mentions the aspect of speed – to connect, to market, to share, to shout etc.
The Executive Insight actually reinforces something that will be in our next book about social media – stop focussing on numbers. Whilst you need to know them, you do not always need to rely on or share them. You need to understand them, and react to the information behind the stats.
CEO of Vodafone, Guy Laurence cannily states:
You have to take the action you think will work and the numbers follow.
Google adds:
Data is something that informs his hunches – but never rules them.
Are you, as a company, spending so much time analysing marketing data that you are not taking timely decisions? You won’t be alone if you answer “Yes”.
UK companies need to start to act, rather than react to expensive consultancy projects that say what worked last year. Is something working today? Great, then keep doing it. Did it work yesterday but has dropped off today? Then change.
In a connected world, that change can be as simple as changing the hashtags you include on your tweets. Linking to new companies or trends. In the olde worlde, the oil tanker mentality meant that it could take literally months to change track. Now you can do it in 140 characters.
The ThinkQuarterly ‘magazine’ has thousands of similar insights that your business can read and apply over the coming months. Take an hour out over lunch, and then change the course of your business this afternoon.
I recently took part at the Econsultancy Digital Cream event where client-side marketers discuss approaches to improve their digital marketing.
I was moderating the SEO roundtable where we discussed the main challenges and opportunities marketers were seeing with their SEO.
These were the main topics which were of interest to the 30 or so marketers at the roundtables:
1. The impact of social signals on rankings
The announcement that social signals now influence SEO rankings is well known, so this has to be a big issue to consider, particularly since many companies don’t have a blog and/or it’s not so well integrated into their site products and services pages.
At each of the roundtables we discussed how to integrate the type of content that will be shareable and linkable into commercial, non-publisher sites. Methods to gain backlinks are unsurprisingly still a major concern.
Even before this announcement I noticed many companies making efforts to integrate their SEO with online PR and social media. There seem to be more joint responsibilities for SEO and social in the larger companies that get it, a good move I think.
Many of the challenges for larger organisations involve getting SEO specialists to work more closely with other parts of a company or agencies working on online PR and social media initiatives.
2. Mobile search
Google revealed recently that over the past two years, its mobile searches have grown by more than five times.
As I showed in my last ClickThrough post, you can see how much this matters for your sector using Googles own tools.
3. Local search
Closely related, following an algorithm and interface update towards the end of last year, Google Places has become a lot more important for local searches involving the name of a location plus a service.
If you see the tell-tale red balloons dominating the search results for searches related to your services in an area, that’s a sure sign you need to take action.
4. Video search
Did you see the stats showing that YouTube has become the second-most important search engine in many countries? That suggests the opportunities for video SEO should be explored alongside other forms of blended search, if they’re not already.
5. Opportunities to engage on other sites
There’s a tendency within SEO to think inwardly about driving traffic to your sites and gaining links on other sites. But as the social web has evolved there may be new options for reaching an audience on other sites which perform well in the SERPs.
I see these types of sites as increasing in importance – often within the SERPS:
Few of the companies attending had been directly affected suggesting that if a site is a recognised brand producing unique, quality content, this update will have a limited impact.
6. Site migration
I chaired 3 roundtables and was surprised to see, in each one that, at least one person mentioned their concern of how a site redesign or relaunch affecting their URLs might impact in SEO. This was based on their experience of previous refreshes. All of this just goes to show that as well as reviewing new approaches, it’s important to know how to get the basics right too.
