Search Engine Optimization Help

The move continues Google’s pursuit of social search.

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Move is in line with lobbying for National Broadband Plan.

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Only 2 out of 300 events will stream live on the Internet.

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In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in January.
Germany content owners call for investigation of Google. German newspaper publishers association (BDZV), Microsoft owned Ciao and online maps service Euro-Cities AG called the German cartel authorities to investigate Google’s [...]

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According to a variety of sources, Google plans to run a Super Bowl commercial in the third quarter to today’s big game.

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Kids show off their artistic chops.

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This posting is the first in an occasional series that will attempt to quantify the value of links - in this case, by measuring the value of links in terms of other links PageRank (i.e. how many PR4 links is a PR5 link worth). A later posting will cover market pricing of links with statistics from the various paid link markets, and other postings will cover what links are worth in terms of effort and resulting traffic. By the end of this series, a complete model for valuing linking…

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Whether you’re snowed in or enjoying sunny weather this weekend, take some time to read up on these Google updates:

Google Custom Search has made some changes to the hosted home page.

Google Analytics has made annotations available for all accounts.

Google Maps now offers personalized suggestions.

Google Image search for mobile has added Popular Image browsing.

The Google Research team blogged about building cluster applications.

Google Books updated their Home Page and Library.

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – As we draw near to the end of the first month of 2k10, the search world is getting a little more active. Sadly, for this geek at least, we were very light on search patents again this week…. Grumble… mumble…

SEOmoz released a new tool, some people jumped on it (cough * Sebastian * cough), Google was talking semantics and another fella came to light that was trying to trademark SEO. And for the first time in a while, Michael Martinez was relatively quite.

So grab some of your fav beverage and let’s dig into this week’s edition shall we?

Lead Story

SEO being trademarked AGAIN?!?

I try to avoid making one of my own posts/topics the lead story, but this week it couldn’t be helped. You see, for those that missed it, we had a fella’ named Jason Gambert that tried (unsuccessfully) to trademark the term, ‘SEO’. That all blew over… until now.

It seems that he has competition. It came to my attention that one Clinton Cimring has also thrown his hat in the ring. What is almost more interesting is the ORM (rep management) job he did with it. As noted with this Twitter entry;

• “..seriously, we need to talk about actually important stuff, not who trademarked SEO; like pugs in purple monkey costumes!!!”

If he believes that someone trying to TM the acronym (and potential charge for it’s use) isn’t ‘serious’ then maybe he should be the one wearing a purple monkey suit; just sayin’.

You can read more on the trail in this post or Barry’s coverage over on Search Engine Land.

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 01/26/2010

Google is updating its search results to provide fact-based answers directly in the results. The feature is called Answer Highlighting and it bolds facts in the text description area of a result.

For example, if you’re curious as to how tall the Empire State building is and query “empire state building height,” you used to get a direct link to that info in Wikipedia’s text description. Now, the fact is directly included in the Wikipedia listing.

See before and after shots below:

Before:

After:

Answer Highlighting is based on the Google Squared effort, which is designed to organize information into spreadsheets based on information structures that appear to be factual.

Images via Google

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have filed plans with the SEC to sell five million shares of Google stock each over the next five years. The sale will bring the pair’s ownership of Google down to 48%, slightly less than majority control.

Not to worry as CEO Eric Schmidt still owns 10%, keeping the trio well in charge of the goings on at the Mountain View-based company.

Google has a dual-class stock structure. Execs get 10 votes per share of Class B stock, but when they are sold, they become Class A stock with just one vote per share.

Currently, Page and Brin own a combined 57.7 million shares of GOOG.

via New York Times

Rich snippets allow webmasters to include structured data that search engines can include in their search results. Google is introducing a new format for rich snippets: events.

The events markup is based on the hCalendar microformat. Here’s how it would look in the search results:

Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr

comScore has just released a study on growth in the global search market in 2009. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google Sites retains a commanding position in the global search market.

More than 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December 2009, a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute.

The U.S. represented the largest search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion.

Google sites ranked as the top search property worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December, or 66.8 percent of the global search market. Google sites achieved a 58-percent increase in search query volume over the past year. comScore didn’t report what percentage of worldwide searches were conducted on Google and YouTube separately, just Google sites in combination. But according to comScore qSearch, YouTube accounted for close to 28 percent of the expanded search queries conducted in the U.S. on Google sites in November 2009.

Yahoo! sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches (up 13 percent), followed by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8.5 billion searches (up 7 percent). Microsoft sites saw the greatest gains among the top five properties, growing 70 percent to 4.1 billion searches, on the strength of its successful introduction of new search engine Bing.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against Chinese Internet censorship at a speech she gave at The Newseum in Washington, DC. China’s not too happy about it.

China said Clinton’s remarks had no basis. They also said that the accusations of censorship hurt U.S.-China ties.

This week, China put the brakes on their lending practices. The U.S., of course, has relied tons on lending from the Chinese. The new lending limits have rightly been attributed to other economic factors, but for the Chinese government it’s coming at a great time to wage this Internet war.

Google has released its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2009 and the news is positive. Revenue for the Mountain View, CA -based company was up 17% compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, coming in at $6.67 billion.

“Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Our performance in 2009 underscored the strength of our management team, the resilience of our business model and the pace of innovation within our product and engineering teams, which continued unabated throughout the downturn.”

Here’s what contributed to Google’s success in Q4 2009:

• Aggregate paid clicks were up 13% year-over-year and up 9% from the third quarter of 2009.
• Average Cost-Per-Click was up 5% year-over-year and 2% quarter-over-quarter.
• Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC) increased to $1.72 billion in Q4 2009 compared with $1.48 billion last year. TAC as a percentage of revenues held steady at 27%.
• The majority of TAC is paid to AdSense partners. In the fourth quarter, $1.47 billion of the $1.48 billion of TAC was paid to AdSense partners.

Google’s net income profit was $1.97 billion compared to $382 million last year. Adjusted net income was $2.19 billion compared to $1.62 billion last year.

“As we enter 2010, we remain hugely optimistic about the internet and are continuing to invest heavily in technological innovation for the benefit not only of our users and customers, but also the wider web,” said Schmidt.

Let’s hope Google’s numbers reflect a larger trend towards a healthy economic recovery.

As the Internet world continues to wait for Google to fully push online its next generation infrastructure called Caffeine, its best to understand why its doing so and then how best to prepare for it.

Over 5 months ago Google stated its purpose with Caffeine is to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions” and then Matt Cutts made official at PubCon back in November 2009 that with Caffeine a slow page load time will negatively affect your site’s search engine rankings.

Google’s purpose in its declared goal of making the web faster goes well beyond increasing general user retention but in its end goal of dominating the surging growth in mobile searches done principally on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, & Android phones.

There is no declared page load standard but a general rule is no more than a 5 second page load time which can be affirmed via page speed tools or within Google Webmaster Tools.

The main ways to reduce page load times is with server compression and reducing HTTP requests by externalizing your CSS & JavaScript references to optimally a single file with the CSS file(s) referenced in your code BEFORE the JavaScript.

It will be interesting to see the Caffeine Effect on Flash sites which along with it hamstringing SEO efforts its also a page load hog.  Never mind that Flash is not able to render on mobile phones (exception being certain Android phones), although this will be changing soon for smart phones that don’t start with an I, but I will save that for a later post.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Caffeine for Mobile

Every January, journalists, bloggers and other industry folk take to their respective blogs and publications to predict what may happen in the New Year. Search is no exception to such speculation.

We compiled a list of five predictions for search in 2010 and asked experts to weigh in on whether they think those predictions will play out.

1. John Battelle - Google will make a corporate decision to become seen as a software brand rather than as “just a search engine.”

Pat Duncan, Associate Partner in Rosetta’s Consumer Products & Retail vertical

In terms of corporate culture, it makes sense for Google to identify itself as a software company to help ensure focus and a proper product roadmap. However, it diminishes Google’s role as the Internet’s largest advertising network, and I wouldn’t count out Google from continuing to dabble in areas where they see opportunities. Take Nexus One, for example, where Google has gotten into the retail business by selling the phone direct to consumers. It will take some time before we know if this works, but it could end up being a game changer in retail.

Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga

I don’t think it’s necessary for Google to officially rebrand itself as a software company. Many companies that have changed their concept have usually been met with resistance. Ask.com is an example of this, when Ask catered to answering questions, they were very popular amoung women, which is a great demographic to support. As they continued to change their focus away from what made them popular, they started to lose their loyal audience and that, in the end, has only hurt them.

People use Google for certain reseaons, and those reasons are why their popularity is so high…changing that could very well affect their popularity. However, they should continue to grown and offer new products, but should not change their primary focus.

Those that ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.

Richard Sim, VP Product Management & Marketing, Anchor Intelligence

I agree that Google will increasingly identify itself as a software brand, and more specifically, a software-as-a-service brand. Software, as we’ve traditionally come to know it, comes in a shrink-wrapped box with regular software updates. Software as a service is delivered via the cloud and enables unfettered collaboration from virtually anywhere in the world. As Google’s various products continue to penetrate the enterprise (Google Apps), the home office (Google Docs, Gmail, Chrome), and academia (Google Edu), its brand will inevitably become associated with software delivered via the cloud.

Furthermore, aligning its corporate brand with software as opposed to say, indexing data, works towards Google’s advantage in the public eye. Today, Google openly states its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As its products become more ubiquitous and concerns about privacy grow, the company will likely downplay its goal of data organization and instead draw attention to delivering seamless and elegant end user experiences.

2. Ron Shuttleworth at Seeking Alpha, Vertical search will finally take off in 2010: local search enabled by GPS on mobile devices will capture the imagination of consumers during 2010.

Payam Zamani, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Reply.com

There’s no doubt that local search is a major need, both for consumers and for marketers trying to engage customers around offline purchases in local markets. The leading search engine advertising platforms have failed in providing adequate solutions for hyper local businesses, such as car dealers, real estate agents, home and car repair services, physicians, etc. I expect to see continued innovation in this area in 2010.

Ben Saren, Co-Founder and CEO of CitySquares

No question that vertical search is up and coming. As consumers have been trained to search and find just about anything they’re looking for, local search is still a huge opportunity and has a long way to go. As a result, vertical search is where it’s at - it’s a long tail opportunity. Looking for babysitters in Des Moines Iowa? There should be a site for that. Looking for garbage pick up schedules in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there should be a site for that. The problem is that the local newspapers used to provide much of this information to local people, but as local papers have gone under or simply don’t have the reporters anymore, there’s been a void left behind and this is where vertical search comes in. Necessity is the mother of invention, and people need to find this kind of information online. I’m seeing more and more of these vertical and niche sites sprout up every day, and am on the advisory board of two such companies. It’s just awesome to see the innovation and the creativity. 2010 will undoubtedly reveal more of this need and more of these solutions.

Kara Nortman, Senior Vice President, Publishing, Citysearch

Mobile is the future of local search. And, as the local search market continues to innovate and consumers become increasingly more reliant on mobile devices for everything from to work to play, the mobile device will become even more instrumental to our business. As a company, we are heavily investing across all devices and mobile search functionality including GPS, heatmap analysis and the like, to give customers a superior local experience. In addition to building and powering our own Citysearch app, we power some of the most talked about social city guide apps, like Urbanspoon, Loopt and Where, to offer users a customizable experience. The bottom line is that when it comes to any vertical search market, you’ve got to remember that to truly capture consumers you have to play where they play, serve up the content they want - the way they want it, and provide tools that enable people to easily explore, choose and share from the palms of their hands.

Dinesh Moorjani, Vice President, Mobile for IAC

Smartphones will become the defacto access point for urgent content ingestion and search, overtaking stationary computing among higher-discretional spend consumer segments, attracting advertisers. With only 24 hrs in a day and digital media device proliferation cannibalizing idle and leisure time (think e-readers, gaming platforms, Netflix devices, etc.), smartphones are increasingly incorporating functionality that previously existed on multiple, distinct devices. A growing segment of mobile users find their smartphone to be more convenient, personal, and accessible than stationary computing or laptops. The result will be a tectonic shift in companies rapidly investing in consumer behavior analytics, performance tracking, and improvements in the signal to noise ratio among competitive services on small screens. This will be most profound when mobile advertising shifts targeting strategies from one-to-many to one-to-one in a scalable way, based on passive information about the user (location, propensity to engage, etc.). Although share of wallet and retail purchases will continue to be dominated by the full online experience, users will certainly gain comfort consuming in a mobile economy if price points, the user experience, and security continue to improve.

Peter Berger, CEO of Suite101.com

It’s important not to conflate - as I think Shuttleworth does - mobile technology and local search, however much the two overlap. Google’s very recent move to allow business owners to verify and post updates to Place Pages, for example, are as much aimed at dethroning Yelp as providing value to mobile users.

I would argue that vertical search has not only already “taken off,” but has been an integral part of the search engine landscape for years - and indeed has experienced its biggest success through integration into global engines in the form of universal search. But that may simply be a point of nomenclature.

Mobile search is absolutely poised to be a bigger player in search, as evidenced by a number of search initiatives already rolled out by Google in the first weeks of this year. Development and adoption of search products related to GPS-enabled devices will continue to grow rapidly, if not at the furious pace predicted by some analysts. And reports of the imminent death of PC-based based browser queries are greatly exaggerated.

3. Kim-Mai Cutler at Venture Beat - Twitter will launch its own social version of AdWords — And contrary to what chief operating officer Dick Costolo said earlier this year, we’re not sure everyone is going to love it.

Craig Greenfield, Vice President of Search and Performance Media for Performics

Advertising on Twitter will be even more relevant if advertisers are able choose to target ads not merely based on keywords within tweets, but also based on certain criteria. This criteria could include the tweet’s sentiment (positive or negative to a brand), location, a user’s number of followers, overall attitude of the user (generally happy, anxious, etc.), the user’s tweet volume, and eventually the profile of the user based on their past tweets. Balancing relevancy with volume will be key to effective Twitter advertising.

Pat Duncan, Associate Partner in Rosetta’s Consumer Products & Retail vertical

With their own version of AdWords, Twitter could certainly put a different twist on ’social shopping’. Imagine your friend tweeting about an offer they just found while shopping on the Internet, and the tweet showing up with a link directly to the offer. Additionally, sites like GroupOn could benefit with instant access to the group offer. This opens up a whole new avenue for retailers trying to reach interested buyers.

David Berkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation at digital marketing agency 360i

If Twitter launches its own version of AdWords, it could lead to an all out user rebellion depending on how it’s rolled out and communicated to users. If ads are attached to specific tweets, tweeters might demand compensation in exchange for the display of advertising. There would then be two camps - those who accept the cash and those who don’t, and those who don’t would be doing so mostly because of the moral high ground of not wanting to be outright shills. One of Twitter’s many challenges is to find a broad enough advertising model that doesn’t compromise the current organic conversation occurring to the benefit of all its users, including marketers.

4. Chris O’Brien at Mercury News - Google gets hit with an antitrust suit.

Ben Saren, Co-Founder and CEO of CitySquares

I can’t help but think that Google is heading where Microsoft once was - in too many places and making for unfair competition. While they may be cooperating with open standards and the open web, Google has become a massive, unstoppable machine that is making it very difficult for anyone to compete with them on any level. As it seems now, Google is everywhere - online and offline. Be it word processing and spreadsheets, SaaS, email, mobile, desktop platforms, mobile platforms, search (of all types), and on and on, they’re going too far too fast and making it difficult for anyone to compete or innovate. They’re setting the rules in too many places (China, anyone?) and as a result, government(s) are going to step in. In my not-so-humble opinion, they must step in. I’m oversimplifying this quite a bit, but I know I’m not the only one thinking this way. I fear Google now, more than I like and respect Google as I once did.

Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga

Antitrust issues always pop up for large companies, I guess it is just the nature of the beast. It’s a sign that your company has reached an elite level. There are rules that all of us must abide by, so as long as they follow those rules, then it will just be a formality, almost a right of passage.

5. Alex Chitu at Google Operating System blog, Google’s search engine will group related results.

Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations.

Google already groups related results: we see images, news items, real time results and video links bunched together in some SERPs. I think a more important trend to watch is the increase of AdWords “attacking” organic search, as I mentioned in this blog post. Google is starting to diversify its paid ad formats, which includes grouping new kinds of results together, most notably Product Listing Ads. Product queries are frequent and I predict this will be rolled out across all advertisers and appear in more SERPs.

Tom Demers, Director of Marketing, WordStream

I think this is a huge opportunity for search engines. Google and co. are just starting to apply a landing page philosophy to their SERPs. Really the engine’s desired action is as many clicks as they can get, with as much of the distribution going to AdWords (or the other engines’ platform) inventory as they can while maintaining loyalty. The interesting thing for Google has always been that satisfied searchers on organic listings are good for business (more likely to return, more likely to trust the sponsored stuff). But for a long time they weren’t creating “paths” for their visitors: whether you entered in something informational, transactional, or you were after a comparison of multiple products you got effectively the same experience. Keyword segmentation and developing conversion paths are certainly great processes to map to search intent (just ask successful SEMs).

I think clustering results (something like what clusty does) on informational queries could be really powerful. It would allow the engines to create “conversion paths” and would let searchers walk themselves a step closer to the best result set for them.

What do you think of these 5 predictions for search in 2010? Weigh in with your opinion in the comments section below.

Over at MIT’s Technology Review, they have the goods on how Google ranks tweets. Ok, like your regular old organic results, they didn’t learn the secret sauce. But they did get some good info on how you can optimize your Twitter account so your Tweets have a better chance of appearing in real-time search results.

Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, [Google Fellow] Amit Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Singhal also told Technology Review it’s not a popularity contest. They also have to weed out the noise. Hashtags make that task difficult. And sorting through trending topics when so many people are Tweeting is a challenge, too.

Singhal pointed out that Twitter the only source of real-time information for Google. Sources such as blogs and news are also relevant and being weaved into the real-time search experience.

Takeaways:

1. Cultivate your following on Twitter.
2. Don’t overdo the hashtag.
3. Be comprehensive in your real-time efforts. Don’t just focus on Twitter.