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Friday, May 11th, 2012
Microsoft’s search offering, Bing, has undergone another revamp. And with a huge focus on social, Bing may have found a way to begin to oust Google from search dominance.
After joining a ‘search alliance’ with Yahoo!, the “New Bing” will try to usurp Google by offering things it currently can’t.
Of course, Bing will still return normal organic search results and paid ads, just like it used to.
But now its social annotations, scraped from public information across a variety of social networks, are being lumped into a special sidebar, giving you the chance to interact with social friends.
The sidebar will pull information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and even Google+.
Google has already fallen out with Twitter, and, to a lesser extent, with Facebook. It can’t return Twitter profiles in its search results, because the microblogging site has blocked their spiders.
Not so with Bing.
Whereas Google has faced accusations of throttling social results – leading Facebook and Twitter to publicly demand “Don’t be Evil” (a cheeky nod to Google’s original ethos) whilst falling out with the search giant – Bing isn’t discriminating.
Google isn’t going to be able to pull info from Twitter or public posts from Facebook until relations are mended. In the meantime, Bing has a big open deal which could allow it to steal a march on Google.
The ramifications of this social focus, on both search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns, could be huge. It would see an integrated Internet marketing approach, where search marketing and advertising is combined with social media.
Friend recommendations could become key selling tools, for instance. Group discounts for social groups with similar interests could be offered. It’s still early days, but the potential to create more joined-up marketing campaigns certainly exists.
Bing has been quick to point out that in a blindfolded taste test – much like those undertaken during the 1980s cola wars between Coke and Pepsi – search users preferred Bing’s search results to Google’s.
“We regularly test unbranded results, removing any trace of Google and Bing branding,” they said. “When we did this study in January of last year, 34% preferred Bing, whilst 38% preferred Google.
“The same unbranded study now shows that Bing search results have a much wider lead over Google’s. When shown unbranded search results, 43% prefer Bing, whilst only 28% prefer Google results.”
Of course, internal market research is hard to qualify. And Bing still needs to convince people to leave the relative comfort zone of Google and try something new.
If that works, though, then Google could face a real fight to maintain its position.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: Bing, facebook, Google, LinkedIn, online marketing, optimisation, PPC, results, search, SEO, social, twitter, yahoo
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Thursday, May 10th, 2012
By Ali Harris, content manager, ClickThrough Marketing
I just did a search for “Internet marketing”, out of interest, mainly, and I was bit surprised by Google’s first page of results.
The Internet marketing industry is currently feeling the harsh end of Google’s brickbat – with the Penguin update playing havoc with rankings as the engine looks to end webspam and keyword stuffing.
Examples of bad results have come up on various forums – we wrote yesterday about searching “Paypal France”. That term returns a whole load of spammy results.
That, suffice to say, wasn’t Google’s intention with Penguin.
We wrote earlier about another mistaken side effect of the algorithm update: the potential for successful negative SEO campaigns.
But until there are proven examples of negative SEO bombing an otherwise entirely reputable website, it’s the organic results that matter.
And the organic results remain skewed. I just searched “Internet marketing” on organic Google, without logging in, but with local UK search on (not by region, just country).
Two of the top five organic results are spam. That’s almost 50% spam. A few weeks ago, the top results for Internet marketing were all SEO companies.
So in this case, Penguin has made Google 40% more rubbish than it was.
Try it yourself: you’ll find returns for a telecoms company which offers phone numbers and telephonic systems – but has absolutely no apparent content, services, or information about “internet marketing”, as well as a site pertaining to offer the ‘new rules’ of Internet marketing, but actually only featuring two measly pages of absolutely terribly written content, and a seeming focus on Forex.
I’ve had a look at the sites themselves and can’t really see why Google thinks they should return in the top five results for an “internet marketing” search.
Maybe the search engine is having a laugh at the SEO industry – who are making money off Google’s free product (search) when Google would far rather they used its paid-for products (paid search or pay per click).
Or maybe this is another example of the recent Penguin update getting things very wrong indeed.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: Black hat, Google, internet marketing, irrelevant, Keyword stuffing, optimisation, penguin, ranking, search, SEO, spam, update, white hat
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Friday, April 27th, 2012
Google’s latest webspam algorithm tweak now has a name: the Penguin update.
The search engine has tweaked its system to try to weed out sites using webspam to manipulate the rankings.
But the update has seen many genuine sites downranked, with some less genuine ones suddenly appearing nearer the top of the results pages.
Some SEOs have dubbed the update ‘Titanic’ – in a cheeky nod to the way it has sunk strong sites.
Those Internet marketing firms affected by Penguin (of which, ClickThrough Marketing is not one), are now working on ways to re-establish sites that got hit by Penguin – whilst attempting to understand what factors Google is using to differentiate between quality content, and spam.
Introducing the update, Matt Cutts, from Google, said the idea was to level the search engine optimisation playing field – to penalise sites with huge swathes of keywords on a page (known as ‘keyword stuffing’), and those using link building schemes to fake veracity.
Google’s last big update like this was Panda – an equally cute animal name for an equally harsh update. Panda was designed to look at the quality of web content – meaning sites using ‘spinning software’ to robotically generate content would be found out, and lose ranking as a result.
Panda smashed through a host of previously well-ranked sites: many article repository sites were affected (due to the fact quality control on such huge volumes of copy is nigh-on impossible).
Using automatic means to verify the quality of content can be a difficult thing to rely on – and obviously, some genuine sites would be negatively affected, whilst some less genuine ones would see a boost.
Anyone working in SEO is acutely aware that Google is forever moving the goalposts. The vicious circle will no doubt continue, running along the lines of: Google releases an update, websites lose ranking, webmasters find a new way to increase ranking, Google releases another update, websites lose ranking… and so on and so on.
As time goes on, the indifferences caused by these updates will be rebalanced – especially if quality site owners continue to produce quality content. At least, until the next raft of search engine updates.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: algorithm, Content, Google, Keyword stuffing, linkbuilding schemes, lose ranking, optimisation, page one, Panda, penguin, quality, ranking, ranking loss, SEO, update, webspam
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
Tags: 2012, Analytics, Google, optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, SEO
Posted in Blog, Google, SEO, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Today, Google announced a new service to help speed up the delivery speed of web pages, which as we know is one of the criteria applied in the SEO algorithm for SERPs. The Page Speed Service works by “applying web best practices” to your pages. Other services such as CloudFlare also offer similar solutions to speed up page downloads.
In order to use the Google Page Speed Service, you are required to point your DNS to Google so that they can grab your content, apply the best practice formula to your site, and serve it up more quickly.
This raises an issue, or three, about security, privacy and Google’s access to your company’s data, and that of users who visit your site. The previous mod_pagespeed which was an Apache module which could be applied to your site by you and helped to optimise code for faster speeds. It did not, however, hold on to your data or serve it from a Google server. Whilst Google servers very rarely fall over and are unlikely to, just the issue of having your data under Google’s data centre roof must be a cause for concern for businesses.
Optimising pages so that they load more quickly is important not just for search engine results, but also to avoid upsetting your site visitors whose time is precious. You have at most 7 seconds to capture their attention and if even 50% of that is wasted on page load, you are unnecessarily losing potential customers.
One simple action that can be taken with static sites (i.e. those not dynamically created from databases etc) is to strip out all of the spaces in the code before uploading the page to the server. Many years ago we created a tool to do just this and could make savings in download speed anywhere from 15-80% by doing so. Another method for optimising your pages for download is to limit javascripts, and simplify the CSS so that the code is sleek rather than bloated.
Pictures should be rendered for the web not for print, and third party scripts can slow things down if their server is slow to respond, so use these judiciously. The Google +1 button has just been speeded up for precisely this reason, because Google was having to advise putting it at the bottom of pages rather than the top to speed up page load times.
You should also check that your hosting company has the optimal set-up as far as connectivity to the internet so that their servers can respond as quickly as possible to requests for your content.
So, there are simple ways to optimise your pages for download time. Handing the keys to your website to Google? Hmmm….
Tags: code, css, download, Google, optimisation, page load, page speed service, SEO, serps, speed
Posted in Blog, Google, SEO, Tips & Tricks
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
The influence of the new verb in the English language – “to google” – is clearly showing in the latest statistics from hitwise about Google’s popularity.
Other major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask) are failing to gain ground, with 87% of UK searches being conducted through Google in May ’08.
Additionally, major industries are now seeing Google as an important source of traffic. For instance: travel, entertainment, social networking, business, online video and sports.
Understanding Google’s algorithms, and optimising your website for that particular engine, seems to be ever more important. Whether this ‘monopoly’ is a good thing is a matter of heated discussion in both the business and internet marketing worlds, but however the argument turns out, SEO for Google is a must do.
Tags: Google, optimisation, SEO
Posted in SEM Industry, Stats & Trends
