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Posts Tagged ‘Algorithm’

Google Search Plus Your World – Reactions & Business Strategy

January 23rd, 2012

Web marketers and those with online businesses everywhere just got a huge boost from Google. A kind of back door has just been opened into Google search results; although, it’s safe to say that Google didn’t intend to do such a thing, and those without plans to run an active Google+ account may not see any direct benefit.

Here’s what happened: On the 10th of January, Google made a change that has altered the type of search results that many of us are already seeing. If you’re a Google+ user, the change concerns “your world” – so to speak – and you may have noticed a slight difference in the kinds of results you’re receiving on a number of different types of searches. What’s happening is that Google is elevating information that has been shared in Google+ (or +1′d) into the upper-end of the search results pages. Google calls this new development “Search, plus Your World” (which we’ll call Search Plus).

Search Plus is the latest search results treatment by the folks from Mountain View, California. Some may ask “why are they doing this?” A fair question. A few experts in the industry have stated that Google is seeding Google+ data into search results because they want searchers with Google+ accounts to contribute to Google+ more often. Others claim that Google is acting on the idea that “personalized” search results are more relevant results.

Google, to no one’s total surprise, is putting a positive spin on the new development.

From Google Inside Search: “Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.”

What this boils down to is that when you’re logged in to Google+ and perform a Google search for a product or service – those results that have been shared by a member of one of your circles or +1’d by a friend are likely to rise to the top of the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for a new messenger bag and one of your Google+ friends has +1’d products from Timbuk2 – bang – there it is at the top of your search results. That’s a significant development.

Consumer Reaction

The market is having mixed reactions. Some search users say that it’s a radical departure from traditional search: Why would Google think that I want to see search results from my circles of friends? Facebook has already told me all about what they like or don’t like.

Others have labeled it a puzzling transformation: There’s no reason to strip out all of the relevant search engine results in favor of results driven by social media.

And while it’s interesting to hear some grumble over how search is being altered, search marketers and savvy business owners are watching how Google+ is already populating search results. As businesses benefit from social proof, there is good reason to be excited.

Already, businesses are touting their products, service, brand and corporate identity through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. Google+ pages are the next logical add-on for any web marketing strategy. But the difference here is that the results of their marketing efforts can be seen immediately in Google search.

What happened to Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”?

Now, some would say that Google (and search as a whole) has forced the hands of many marketers and business owners alike. Let’s face it, if you’re in business today, you have a web marketing strategy (at the very least) in the planning – so that you can be in business tomorrow. That said, yes, the changes in search (including Google pulling keyword data out of Analytics) will change your web marketing plan from quarter to quarter. And this quarter is all about leveraging the power of Google+ to get your foot in the back door to the top of the search results pages at Google.

The other part to consider is the wrath of larger companies like Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps the most interesting item to stem from all this is a new website created over the weekend: http://www.focusontheuser.org/. The YouTube video (below) from the site anonymously outlines how Facebook and Twitter provide more relevant results but Google chooses their own social network first to rank.

The video is so simple to follow even a US Congressman should be able to follow it:
Focus on The User

Tags: Algorithm, Facebook, Google, Social Networking, Twitter
Posted in Facebook, Google, Google+, SEO, Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments

Too Many Ads “Above the Fold” May Result in Google Penalty

January 23rd, 2012

What is the first rule of real estate? Location, location, location. As true and unchanging as that statement may be in real estate, it’s about to change for website advertising placement. This is a good thing. Read on.

When it comes to web ads, the prime real estate, so to speak, is at the top of the web page – an area referred to as “above the fold” or “above the scroll” in some vernacular. But regardless of what it’s called, the area at the top of the website is an advertiser’s greatest attraction.

Why is this? Because we humans sometimes have a short attention span and the human brain is, therefore, programmed to skim. Any advertisement or call-to-action piece that exists above the fold – in that top-most area of the site that is visible without scrolling – is almost 7x more likely to be acted upon by page viewers. Any die-hard advertiser will tell you the area below the fold might as well be on another page altogether. In the advertising game, the value of ad positions above the fold cannot be overstated.

Great For Revenues Not User Experiance

According to the recent news item at the Google Webmaster Central blog, it’s all about to change.

Google has done a little research and made an algorithm improvement (one of about 500 expected in 2012) that examines how much of the “above the fold” area of the website is dedicated to content – and how much is covered in ads. Google has heard some complaints from searchers about how “it’s difficult to find the actual content” on some pages they’ve clicked to. And although Google claims that this algorithmic change will alter less than 1% of all searches globally, the search team has said in no uncertain terms that those sites that clutter up the top portion of their webpages with advertising may be penalized. Google has all but promised that sites with top-heavy advertising will not rank as high in the very near future.

From Google Webmaster Central: This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.

Although searchers are no-doubt benefited from landing pages that “get to the point” and deliver the content they expect to see, some site owners are not happy.

But it’s only 1% of all searches, Google said. Seems like a small number, but when you consider that Google handles 2 million searches every minute of every day, that’s 20,000 occurrences every minute where a typical searcher might see a reordering of search results on the page. It’s quite a bit, really. Makes you wonder who’s doing all that advertising.

But, as stated earlier, this is a good thing. Here’s why: Google’s oft-stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google talks incessantly about relevance in all things related to search. Google is continuously making changes to its algorithm to favor original, quality content. Therefore, it’s no huge effort to see that Google knows that searchers want to see the content they expected to see with every search. If they give the people what they want, they’ll continue to be successful.

As web marketers, site owners, and content developers, it is our continued mission to create honest and compelling content that gains the immediate interest of site visitors and builds their trust in your brand.

Content is King. We’ve said it before and it’s not likely to change. Let’s be honest with each other, if someone walks into an ice cream parlor for a triple cone (chocolate, cherry and pistachio) and is offered a taco salad instead, they’re going to waste no time in exiting. In the end, you lose their business, your advertising dollars were wasted, and negative word of mouth begins to seep into the market. There is a place for advertising on nearly all websites. It is, however, not above your message. When adding a new ad to your page, it’s of paramount importance to consider the ad size and placement relative to your content. The focus of every content marketing campaign is to deliver the message and a positive user experience.

Tags: Algorithm, Content Development, PageRank, search rankings, Web Ads
Posted in Content Development, Google, SEO | No Comments

Google Goes Live with Fresh Algorithm Change

November 7th, 2011

Once again, the developers at Google have opened their toolboxes and made a few fixes to the world’s most reliable search engine.

The changes to the Google ranking algorithm were made live yesterday morning. Did you hear it? When the news broke, there was an almost-perceptible hush as silence descended on cubicles in offices across the globe – followed by a calamitous rattle as millions of cans of RedBull clattered to the desktops. Propelled to action by the notion of a change in the almighty algorithm, SEOs and Web Marketers across the planet dropped whatever they were doing and began furiously typing in search strings to see the search results.

The results were fast and fresh. So, why the alarm? Well, outside of the notion that Google had tweaked their algorithm to index, crawl and return results faster, developers from HQ in Mountain View, California also stated that the improvements to the ranking algorithm impacted roughly 35% of all searches. Again, that’s 35%, people – a larger percentage than the Panda update which only impacted 12% of conducted searches. The concern, as you may imagine, was that a whole bunch of search results just lost their expected placement. This is a good thing.

The present change to the ranking algorithm supplements and supports the Caffeine web indexing update that was completed by Google in June of last year. The Caffeine indexing system was built in response to the changes in available content on the web. The developers at Google (and just about everyone else who spends a little time on the web each day) know that content on the web is both thriving and growing at an alarming rate. More content means more complexity. More content also means greater expectations from content producers and searchers alike. Google built Caffeine to index pages on an enormous scale, adding new information to the database at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes each day. Then they added in the freshness factor.

The primary term that Google has created over this new algorithm change is freshness. By this term, Google developers are expecting the algorithm to determine when to give searchers more up-to-date, relevant results for varying degrees of information freshness. Simply put: given the absurd rate at which information moves and changes, different search types must have different freshness requirements – if the search results intend to give the searcher up-to-the-minute information.

Examples:

Under the new update, a search for information about a recent news event, such as the “Occupy Wall Street” protest, may return pages with information only a few minutes old.
A search for a regularly-occurring event, such as the World Series, would prompt search results for the most-recent World Series (Cardinals over the Rangers in Game 7) and not some historical game.
Those searches for information that receives frequent updates, such as consumer product reviews on laptop computers, assume that the searcher probably wants the most up-to-date information on the brand and not something written three years ago for a product that is no longer manufactured.
On the other hand, we did find a 2006 Matt Cutts blog post ranking #1 for “URL canonicalization“. This content ranks above 2009 content from SEOmoz, and 2010 content from Vertical Measures.

I think we can conclude that Google has favored freshness for sometime, but not discounted all old content completely. Links, comments, social signals, and general URL trust/freshness are other indicators that your content should still rank. This will keep some old content rankings strongly, as we found in example four above.
Was it a good update to the algorithm? Did the world as we know it change dramatically?

Somewhat, yes.

The freshness factor has already been shown to impact one out of every three searches (hence the 35%). Some experts have suggested that the freshness factor may open search results to new problems with relevancy, search engine poisoning and junk content. In order for the changes to work as the developers wish, Google may have to leverage a few other search ranking factors as future tweaks to the freshness update.

Tags: Algorithm
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments