Obviously plenty of commentary knocking about on this one already, the news that Microsoft is going to provide the Yahoo search results for the next ten years with their Bing search engine, essentially closing the book on Yahoo Search forever.
Quite frankly, this is no great surprise given the fact that MS have been aggressively pursuing a tie up with Yahoo for some time, and overall, it is a piece of good news for everyone, searchers, advertisers, and yes, even the search engines, although it is also a bit worrying.
What no-one seems to have mentioned is that one of the main reasons why Google was able to capture so much marketshare early on in their life is that they had immediate access to a huge market when they first launched, because they were at one time (until 2004) the providers of Yahoo’s search results - a similar deal to what Bing have just arranged (see here for the divorce).
This long term marriage of convenience was definitely a major help with the growth of awareness that Google was able to gather, and mirrored similar deals with AOL, and even Microsoft - Google also provided results for MSN at one time.
One thing is for certain, Ballmer and Gates are no fools, they know that the more people they can get searching with Bing, whether they are doing it at Bing.com, Yahoo, or even Facebook, the more advertising they can sell, and the more that they can charge.
SE development is not cheap, Google have thousands of engineers working constantly on their algorithms, and claim to release 300 or so updates each year to improve their technology. While MS are happy to lose money on search for now, they will not be forever, they are experts at turning their businesses into cash generators - apart from Zune maybe…
The Yahoo tie up will give Bing a 25% market share in the US, which is certainly enough to make a big difference to them, and the fact that since the new search engine launched it has grown and continued to grow indicates that users are happy with it.
I can’t see them unseating Google from their position as market leader, at least for the next few years, and tbh, the model that they have chosen to follow is costing them a lot more than it did Google 5 years ago, however it worked then, and it will no doubt work again now.
There are a lot of people saying that Google are the winners here, especially on Matt Cutts Blog, but I suspect that there is also a great deal of concern in Mountain View. Google know that a credible rival means that more spend will be diverted towards Bing now, and that budgets which have already been cut back in the recession are likely to be spread elsewhere. The chances are that average bid prices for PPC ads will drop slightly in Google as advertisers divert spend onto Bing, where prices will no doubt rise (its a zero sum game - there is only a finite amount of advertising cash available, and it has to go somewhere).
Advertisers will want to get as much traffic as they can, and I’ve seen plenty of good evidence that Bing traffic converts better than Google (this is likely to be a demographics thing and probably won’t continue for ever), but it is a good case study for advertisers and PPC companies - especially since MSN still offer pretty good kick backs for growth agencies.
I don’t think that Google will be the winners here, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we could well see the return of best practice funding from the big G in some form as they try to recapture market share in 2010-11, which will eat into Google’s considerable margins.
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Tags: Bing, Google, PPC, Search Engines, seo, Yahoo
Ok, in my last post, I wrote about how I was looking to automate some aspects of SEO, which led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about how I was falling into a black hat trap. Of course I disagreed with him, because he was wrong, however on closer consideration, I think that he might possibly have had a point.
There is a lot of criticism about black hat techniques from many people within the SEO community, and with good reason. The traditional definition of black hat is the use of dodgy techniques such as cloaking and low quality link building, or going against the spirit of the search engine guidelines to achieve high rankings.
Bollocks.
Black hat is doing anything that your competitors haven’t thought of, and doing it well. Some of the things that people like Eli at Blue Hat SEO do simply defy belief when compared to the white hat techniques that are seen day to day on a client campaign. I’m a big fan of the black hat in the same way as I’m a big fan of Derren Brown. I love understanding the techniques, but I don’t necessarily practice them.
Anyway, back to the discussion I had. My colleague maintained that as automation was a big element of many black hat techniques, the automation of an SEO report was also black hat. In a manner of speaking.
I’m still working on the automation, and I certainly don’t accept an accusation that it is unethical - especially with the uses I have in mind. This is 2009, and there is more to SEO than link building and recommending a small change to the meta tags of a page. There is a whole social world that underpins the structure of the modern WWW, and the more time one is able to spend leveraging that, the better the results achieved will ultimately be.
Tags: search engine optimisation, seo
There are a few tools out there such as reaction engine that appear to provide some kind of automated SEO service, however on closer inspection, this isn’t the case, and what they actually do is a simple page scrape that returns some info about the content structure along with some text content about best practices - an example of this might be a suggestion that a page title should be less than 64 characters long.
I’ve recently been tasked with creating a new SEO tool that goes further than this, and actually delivers recommendations about how a page should be changed in order to improve its SEO friendliness. Hard? No, not a bit of it. I’m no web developer, but I do a good sketch of an idea in php that another person can tidy up later on.
I’ve just spent about an hour putting together the basics of a script that checks page title, meta description, h1 and opening paragraph of a web page and returns recommendations based on the existence or otherwise of each element, and whether the keyword is included within them.
Now, if I’ve done that in the space of an hour, why isn’t there a bigger, more complex and better tool on the market that actually goes further and delivers a full page review based on certain parameters.
I guess it’s because if there were, it would undermine the ability of some second tier SEO types to charge a fortune for the kind of on page analysis that says things like:
- You should include your main keyword in your page title
- You should include a set of meta keywords that includes all of the terms that your page is targeting.
Which I have seen.
I acutally think that pushing forward with automated SEO tools to take a lot of the grunt work out of a site review is a good thing, and frees up the time of a better consultant to deliver more insight at a site structure level - the kind of things that are normally missed out.
So, I’ll finish my draft of this tool, pass it on to Dev to have them finish the job, and then deploy it … internally - after all, I wouldn’t want to undermine my own business model, would I?
Tags: seo
Over the past couple of years, a number of companies have launched human edited search engines (Mahalo, Wikia, Google SearchWiki to name but 3), and all of them have pretty much fallen flat on their shiny web 2.0 bottoms. No real surprise there…
There is no denying that Human Edited Search is important. By getting the results of the algorithm reviewed by real people, the quality should improve - and although Google don’t explicitly say that their results are massively influenced by the interaction of users, they collect plenty of information including relative CTR by position, bounce rate, and even engagement mapping / conversion tracking where sites have a Google Analytics implementation.
The problem with these various attempts at user edited search results is trust. How can I trust an editor at Mahalo, or one of the mysterious and anonymous Wikia contributors to provide me with the results I want? The simple asnwer is I can’t. I have no idea what their agenda is, or whether their tastes are in any way in line with mine. I simply don’t know them.
This brings me on to Twitter. I follow people on twitter who I share interests with, whether those interests are work related (#seo), entertainment related (@jimmycarr), as well as family and friends. These are people who I rely on to keep me up to date with things that are important to me in some way. When I asked a question about Family Guy people responded and told me that it would be “this fall”. They even provided me with links to pages about it, and one helpful chap gave me a link to a torrent file so I could download it - I haven’t. This all happened in the space of around two minutes - not quite as quick as Google I’ll admit, but pretty good nonetheless.
This is all pretty cool, my twitter “friends” to give me information relatively quickly, and accurately, but the most important factor is that I can trust the information I get. I wasn’t spammed with irrelevant websites as I would be in some search engines I could mention and I got what I was looking for.
Of course, the key word here is relatively quickly. In a world where instant access to information is essential, relatively quick simply isn’t good enough. Sure for now, I’m using Twitter to search because it works for me, but this won’t do for most people.
What I really need is some kind of better search.twitter.com that brings in the best of Wolfram Alpha - the ability to slice information from millions of users up into useful categorised chunks so that instead of just asking my limited number of followers for recommendations, I can instead outsource my questions to the 19 million or so Twitterers and take advantage of all the information that they have provided.
Tags: crowdsourcing, search, twitter
So Microsoft are finally ready to unleash the new generation search engine, Bing, which they have done without actually letting anyone use it. Genius.
BTW guys, your revolutionary new interface looks exactly like Hakia, which is also a next generation of search and a Google Killer.
What’s interesting about the Bing launch, is that just minutes after MS formally announced Bing, Google responded with some nebulous stuff about a revolutionary new productivity/communications tool called Wave.
This seems a bit petty to me, as through Google are putting a stake in the ground, and telling MS that if they start intruding on their core product, then Google will respond with a similar invasion.
One of my colleagues, Luke Regan said recently that the only way Bing (or Kumo as we knew it then) would get traction in the market place is if Microsoft created an advertising message that followed the pattern of iPhone, concentrating on how the UI was so good that it made everything easier. Luke put that in a much more elegant way.
I wonder what the $100 million that they’re going to spend marketing Bing will buy them.
If Google have been scared by Bing, and to be honest, their recent spate of new mini launches like Wonder Wheel and the larger number of search refinement tools they offer that look a lot like a Googlized version of Bing indicate that MS may have touched a nerve in Mountain View, the next couple of months could be very interesting.
If there is one thing that you’ve got to admire about Google, its their ability to find ways of making money out of literally everything. They are literally experts in taking any possible tool or service and plastering it wiath adverts. Blogs, Search Results, Email, Every spam site on the planet, and now they’ve found a way of monetising their Google Suggest tool.
Which means that at last, the only place in the Google empire that isn’t an advertising hoarding - the Google Home Page - is now just that. They no longer even need to push a user through to the results of their search before offering them the unique opportunity to click on a subtle advert and make them a couple of quid.
Now, I’ve no problem with google making money, and to be honest, I could see this being a bit of a winner even though I can’t see many people using it. Google Suggest is intended to make it easier to refine your query in line with what other people are looking for, and its a pretty cool little add on that can give you a good idea of what you might want to look for, but it is also a bit flaky.
The engine that powers Suggest appears to use advanced stemming coupled with search volume metrics to generate a list of options that you might be looking for that is refined on the fly as you type more into the box. This is all fine and dandy, but what is painfully obvious is that the initial targeting of any advert served will be pretty poor - imagine you are looking for “Cheap trousers” - presumably you are a man of very little taste.
The first thing you type is “Cheap”, for which Google has the following suggestions:
- cheap flights
- cheap tickets
- cheap hotels
- cheap airfares
- cheap cruises
- cheap textbooks
- cheap prom dresses
- cheap car rental
- cheap books
- cheap furniture
And you can pretty much guarantee that the advert will be for “cheap flights”. When you add the t of trousers to the search box, the list changes to
- cheap tickets
- cheap textbooks
- cheap tyres
- cheap trick
- cheap tvs
- cheap tickets to India
- cheap t shirts
- cheap train tickets
- cheap tyres for sale
- cheap treadmills
When presumably the advert served will be for “tickets”
The problem is that you’ve got to get a long way into typing “cheap trousers” before you get a listing that includes “cheap trousers”, which means that you are fairly unlikely to give up and suddenly click on the advert.
Gut feeling about this is that the CTR on these adverts is going to be shockingly low, but I guess that doesn’t really matter, beccause with 80% of the search market, which equates to billions of searches each day, even a fraction of a percent of people clicking on the ads will probably result in a significant jump in revenue for the big G - after all, they will have done extensive monitoring of how people interact with the Suggest function.
The only losers here are likely to be the people who rank top of the natural search results through their SEO campaign, and even they will only be likely to drop a couple of clicks a month even for the highest volume terms that they target.
Overall impact on marketers: Negligible
Overall impact on search traffic: Negligible
Overall impact on Google Revenue: Negligible
However, I would still expect a disproportionate rise in the GOOG share price off the back of this, because with Google, even a small percentage increase in their revenue is vast in terms of the actual cash sums it represents.
Tags: Google, seo
Well done to the guys at VCCP for putting together the Compare the Meerkat viral campaign. Its good to see a big brand who are willing to take the plunge into a fairly daring campaign with no guaranteed return on investment in the middle of a recession. So, full marks for implementation, and full marks for content, however the integration of the Meerkat activity into the main search campaigns has been pretty woeful - and it provides a fairly intersting case study into being a victim of your own success.
Patrick Altoft at Blog Storm has already picked up on part of the story here, the fact that Compare the Market haven’t been clever enough to bid on their own story via PPC, which means that their competitors were nicking a shed load of traffic from CTM on the term “Compare the Meerkat” - they’ve started to bid on this today however, so at least they’re making a start at putting things right, however GoCompare have been there for weeks as the only advertiser:
as I said above though, this campaign has not just been a bit of a fail due to the lack of PPC activity to protect traffic, its also been a victim of its own success, and that is partly due to Google adding Suggest to the .co.uk search page on April 1st.
Essentially, Google Suggest appears to add results to its list based on a freshness algorithm combined with the popularity of terms in the number of searches that they attract. I’ve done a bit of research into this, and the volume of searches that the ten terms Google offers follows the following profile:
Here, the number one and number 4 results get the most searches - this may be due to the number 4 result being a popular alternative subject. The upshot is though that Google are providing insight into the ongoing popularity of a particular term and promoting it to users. When you start typing compare into the search box on the Google home page, you get the following:
I added the Smug Meerkat
So successful has the campaign been that the Meerkat is now the top suggestion offered by Google, which indicates that it is getting more search volume and therefore interest than the brand that spawned it. Of course, CTM will have got a shed load of natural links from the campaign, and it has undoubtedly pushed them up the Google Rankings for their key term “car insurance”, but it is also hurting them in a way because the main Compare the Market website does not rank in the top 10 results for the “compare the Meerkat” term.
To my mind, this is a hideous missed opportunity, and one that CTM should sort out immediately. I’d recommend them at least putting some Meerkat related content on their website so that they can get a page into the top 10 for the term, because the way I see it, at the moment they aren’t taking fulll advantage of what is available to them.
Overall, its a lesson in integration - integration of social media into a holistic search strategy, and integration of a particular campaign into the overall brand activity that is being carried out. There is no point in pushing out the most daring viral campaign in the world and getting huge success from it if you don’t fully exploit the results that you have achieved…
Simples
Tags: compare the Meerkat, Link Bait, seo, Social Media
You could never accuse Google of being innovators. but what you can applaud them for is the ability of their engineers to develop existing ideas and bring them to the masses. Like Apple, they seem to have a great way of taking something that is already there and making it more user friendly and appealing. From the time when the original Google.com search engine launched and did away with every trick that existing search companies utilised to keep you on the page, they have been dedicated to bringing users and content closer together.
The latest shiny toy that Google have “invented” is the fantastically named Wonder Wheel for those who haven’t seen it yet, you access it via the new “show options” link at the top of the search results, and it looks like this:
Google Wonder Wheel
Essentially, its a nice Ajax implementation that fits in with the standard Google design aesthetic of less is more, and allows users to explore concepts related to their original search. It is almost the same as the interface that Quintura uses - although rather than producing a tag cloud, Google produces a nice little spider chart. FYI, since about 3 people have ever visited Quintura, it looks like this:
Quintura Tag Cloud
What I like about this is that while it keeps people on the search engine for longer, it makes it much more straightforward to refine the search. and even encourages people to look into different areas - after all, how many times have you been to Wikipedia to check a quick “fact” before finding yourself diverted into a vortex of articles about everything related to the main subject before emerging blinking a week later, none the wiser about what you were originally looking for.
The impact that I see coming from Wonderwall wonder wheel is a better quality of user coming through to the website. My theory behind this is that if a user has refined their search, they are more likely to be satisfied with the results that they get, and less likely to bounce out. So, the question is, how do you check if a user has visited from search results refined via Wonder Wheel?
Like this:
The all important Referrer string...
Any visitor to the website who has used wonder wheel to refine their search will come complete with a referrer string that includes tbs=ww:[somenumber]&, which means that you can compare the bounce rates that they have.
The only problem with testing this at the moment is that very few people outside the hallowed halls of SEO & Online Marketing are aware of the function, and since it is very new, it is pretty hard to get a decent sample. Having said that, I’ll be keeping an eye on the traffic to a couple of websites with high numbers of natural search visitors so that I can copmpare the bounce rate for visitors who used Wonder Wheel, and those who did not.
I’ll post back with the results in a couple of weeks
Tags: Google, search engine optimisation, seo
Aside from a few experimental posts on this blog over the past 12 months that were written with the intention of testing some theories about what does well in Digg and what doesn’t, I’ve not been doing a great deal of “proper” blogging - I tend to do my updates and rants via Twitter these days.
Thing is though, 140 characters might be enough to make a snarky comment or share a link or two, but it isn’t really enough to say anything profound about a subject. It also means that I’ve missed out on making comments on the SEO industry, which is what I’m more interested in.
Just look at what I haven’t* blogged about recently…
Google Vince Update
Increased focus on promoting bigger brands in the Google SERPS to “protect” customers
April 1st Updates
Increased number of universal search inclusions, mini links, introduction of Google Suggest in the UK, and of course the localised IP based search results.
Launch of Wolfram Alpha
and of course the subsequent back in the bunkers move
Google Squared
Which is much the same as Wolfram Alpha
Kumo Search from Microsoft
Don’t need to say much about this at the moment
Reintroduction of Jeeves
to perennial drain circler Ask (face it guys, its time to give up)
Yahoo closing GeoCities
That’s a huge chunk of naturally given editorially safe links to established websites deleted
and more…
That was all I could think of in the space of five minutes.
*not strictly true, as I’ve commented on most of these things via the company blog, and also via Twitter
So, in an industry that is changing so quickly, there is always plenty to talk about, so from now on, I will.
Tags: seo
