Search Engine Optimization

Yesterday, the editors over at TechCrunch were some of the first to discover the latest addition to the Google pantheon of gadgets, tool and all-around fun stuff. With little to no fanfare from Google itself, WDYL.com (What Do You Love?) made its quiet online debut.

As TechCrunch reported,
…the idea is to return users a single page of relevant results across many of Google’s products for whatever query is typed into the wdyl search box. The “search” button is even a heart. Cute.

TechCrunch also reported that the best queries for WDYL are for vague, broad terms.

Being intrigued I strolled over to the new search engine (note, you have to include the www. in the address, otherwise you get an error message) and searched for something very near and dear to my heart, the Boston Red Sox.

Here are a couple screenshots of what I saw:

Talk about Red Sox overload!

On the WDYL results page, it looks like you’ll find every Google tool as it pertains to your search query. For instance, I can purchase Boston Red Sox merchandise with Product Search, call someone about the Boston Red Sox with Voice, find patents about the Boston Red Sox (really?) with Patent Search and translate Boston Red Sox into 57 languages with the help of Translate, plus just about everything else Google does.

While I can’t see WDYL turning into an actual search engine spinoff, it is a very clever way for Google to introduce their services to users that may not be aware of all that Google has to offer. Other blog and news sources seem to agree that WDYL is going to be a marketing push for Google more than anything.

If you’ve got a few minute to spare, head over to WDYL and mess around with some of your favorite search terms.

What do you think Google’s plans for WDYL are?

Attention all SEO experts, marketers web masters and business owners! Panda 2.2 is coming up and soon. Is your site ready for the next algorithm update?

At the SMX Advanced Marketing Conference held two weeks ago, Matt Cutts confirmed that the Panda 2.2 update has been approved, but not yet rolled out.

The next update will reportedly target sites that re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content. This was a common complaint among many web site owners about the first Panda update. Since Google couldn’t accurately identify the original source, the real author was sometimes penalized as a content farm along with the spammers. “A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” said Cutts during his Q&A with Danny Sullivan, producer of the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series and Search Engine Land leader.

The first Panda update was designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” said Google in a blog post back in February. About 12% percent of search queries were affected. In April, Panda was rolled out globally and incorporated Google “blocking” data. About 2% of US searches were affected from that update. To learn more about the original Panda update, check out this Search Engine Optimization Journal post from early March.

Many site owners who were negatively affected by the first Panda update claim they have yet to fully recover. Google released a set of guidelines for sites to help them make their site more Panda-appropriate, but they insist that no manual exceptions have been made to help penalized sites.

During the Q&A, Cutts noted that the Panda is update isn’t run on a regular basis. Google manually runs the algorithm (presumably when the algorithm is improved), which means that site owners who updated their site might not see immediate recovery. This has been a great source of frustration for many site owners who A) aren’t necessarily sure why their site was affected with the first update, B) aren’t sure if they are making the appropriate changes to be more Panda friendly and C) want to know when their site will recover.

It will be interesting to see what happens to sites when the Panda 2.2 rolls out. Will sites that unfairly escaped the first attack on content farms finally get penalized? Will sites that were unfairly affected be redeemed as the original author’s of widely plagiarized content? Time will tell.

What do you think Panda 2.2 will do?

There has been a lot of buzz this past week about Google’s “Farmer Update,” which was designed to take on content farms; spammy, low-quality content sites that have been crowding their search results. Google had this to say about their updated algorithm in a post on the official Google Blog on February 24th.

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible…This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on…”

The Google crackdown affected 11.8% of search queries.

While the “Farmer Update” did successfully knock a lot of splogs (spam blogs) out of the search results, several major content distribution sites took a major hit—EzineArticles.com , Business.com and Yahoo! Associated Content to name a few. Check out this graph from Sistrix to see how hard these and other sites were hit. EzineArticles CEO Chris Knight wrote a blog post about the consequences of EzineArticles getting labeled a content farm and what they intend to do about it:

“…we adamantly disagree with anyone who places the “Content Farm” label on EzineArticles.com… We’ll be evaluating ways to reduce the number of ads per page to improve the perceived user experience… Expect to see our current article rejection rate (40.6%) climb by another ~20%…”

The Google attack on content farms is a prime example of why sites need to take a diversified SEO approach. Sites that were relying on links solely from content marketing efforts suddenly found that a lot of links are now attached to sites that Google views as spam. Link credit (aka link juice) can have a substantial impact on a site’s trust factor. If a site’s inbound links are now associated with content farms, they lose part of their trust factor.

Content marketing got a lot of attention as a critical component of SEO. And once something is considered an important factor, that’s when the spammers and black hat SEO types swoop in and try to game the system. Since content marketing has taken a hit with the “Farmer Update”, websites should take some time away from content marketing and focus on other components of their link building plan. That is not to say that you should give up on producing a company blog or developing quality content. It just means that major content sites that were adversely affected by the update will have some sorting out to do before they can begin to publish new content. Hopefully the sites that were wrongly labeled as content farms will re-earn their spots in the search results.

Other sites were affected by the update because, while they may have had decent content, they may have had too many Adsense Ads or ads in general that are cluttering the page. The number of ads feeds into the overall user-experience, and a lot of ads comes across as spammy. Too many ads can kill the quality and usability of the content. However, Google hasn’t laid down a clear line of what constitutes “too many” ads. This has many site owners frustrated, as the feel like they’ve been unfairly penalized for trying to monetize their site.

Some are grateful for the update, glad to see Google finally taking on content farms that have been burying quality content in the search results. Others feel like Google went too far and attacked sites that typically produce quality content. What do you think about the new Google about and hot it impacts content farms?

Google’s new innovation was just matched this week by a developer at Microsoft who was rumored to have written the application in just over a day.

Even more amazing is perhaps the short run that Google had with being the only kid on the block with the instant search toy.

It appears that Microsoft has built its own instant search using Bing APIs and some low-key timing settings. This accounts for a slight lag but it is predicting results as soon as you start typing keywords. It then works by analyzing 100 milliseconds between each key stroke, and as soon as you pause, bing references the api to get the suggestions.

I personally tried the application, and for all intents and purposes, it feels like the Google instant search. I didn’t really notice much of a relevance difference nor quicker results; pretty much it is the same application in my experience.

You can try the new application for yourself, currently at www.binginstant.com.

However, progress is rarely without cost, and it appears that in the wake of the Yahoo and Microsoft partnership, Search Advertisers could be the ones paying for all this innovation.

The effect of this new partnership is perhaps a possible rate hike of about of 64% for unbranded keywords and 78% for branded keywords. Keep in mind that while this seems outrageous, you can minus 50% if you had formerly advertised on both Yahoo and Bing; now they are one and the same from an advertiser standpoint, so you are only able to place ads with Microsoft now. The high cost is mostly a result of supply and demand, no matter how you shake it; cut the supply in half, the price must go up.

In fact, even after this pricing rollercoaster all shakes out, Bing’s paid-search advertising could stay up to 23% higher than before the partnership. This is because CPC is expected to increase at the same time as the shift from using both Yahoo and Bing, goes to just using Microsoft alone.

So while advertisers will pay a premium, the end users will collect benefits. Microsoft recently stated that it is going to essentially “pay for you to play” with regard to Bing.

They are rolling out a points / reward program that will encourage you to stay on Bing, try out its applications, and use its searching.

To start, you can receive 250 credits just for signing up and then you get more credits by jumping through a few Microsoft hoops or even just doing some Bing searches; all on their terms.

How will this work and what terms are required to get to the good stuff?

Well, if you set your browser search to default to Bing, or if you try some of the new Bing features, then for every five of these new Bing searches you get a credit which tops out at eight credits per day.

But you cant just start earning points, there are a few rules and step that need to be followed.

First, to get started, you must install the new “Bing Bar” on your computer. This is how they are going to keep track of the new points system.

Keep in mind however, this can only be accomplished by both having and running your Windows Live ID.

If you do not have this, it is fairly easy to get and its free. Given that this is all Microsoft’s idea, it makes sense and is really not too much to ask.

So after you secure your Window’s live ID, you may not necessarily be done.

One obvious requirement is that you must be using a Windows-based computer; Google’s Chrome, Firefox, or Apple’s Safari wont get you through the door this time.

They may have started as open source, but there is one truism when they give things away at Microsoft;
nothing is ever free.

A mayday situation is one in which a vessel, aircraft, vehicle, or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. To many online entities, Google has put their long tail search referrals in imminent danger.

Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times and if you are too narrow in your optimizations you will be at the mercy of each revision, and may find your rankings drop.

Specifically, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may find that there was a drop in the number of referrals, pages getting traffic, etc,  due to the “Mayday” change, but any drops in traffic to your big terms are most likely unrelated. Search referrals (long tail traffic) is where you should look for change.

If you monitor your rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms, you may notice that your rankings suddenly dropped and indexation or crawl statistics suddenly changed.

There is much speculation about what elements of the algorithm were tweaked; to many that Google may have reduced the size and depth of the primary index and possibly broad link devaluation, and/or a shift in how phrase match is performed, increased bias may now be given to authority/brand sites, and many other unsubstantiated theories.

In reality, Google has been looking to achieve a few fundamental things with their search engine: Improve speed of results, improve relevance, and increase the amount of time users spend on Google.

Google has also been trying to ensure that brands are being found first for their own goods and products; if you have your keywords and searches better engineered to sell products than the actual manufacturer, you may have seen a drop in results after Google’s tweaking.

Regardless of what elements that Google changed, if you create unique, relevant and comprehensive product descriptions and search terms instead of simply using generic terms, you could save yourself current and future traffic loss.  This is a strategy that we advise and implement for our clients at Metamend. Hopefully, your service provider has prepared you accordingly.

Amazingly, a heavy keyword count is not the fix you are looking for; review your link structure and content, make site-wide changes for the benefit of the Googlebot, and give attention to who overtook you in ranking.

Avoid spam and purchased links as a quick fix, and instead focus on what the competition is doing different from you and work on building your page strength.

Does this mean you should forget about Search Engine Optimization? Absolutely not!

In fact, the opposite is true; Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever. Industry professionals can guide you in making quicker and more relevant changes to your site and rebuild or maintain your ranking in a more timely manner.