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.
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Sorry for the old story, but WTF, I can’t believe this one at all, Google are now going to allow other people to bid on my trademark protected brand.
icture the scene in boardrooms up and down the country where the owners of some of the most respected businesses have spent years of hard work and millions of pounds to build up a world class brand they have investing in quality throughout their operations to boost conversion rates, and develop a prestigious brand that has core values, and ensures a high conversion rate from potential customers.
Then Google shift the goal posts, and after years of recognising the value of brands and protecting them, they stop all this, and allow anyone including lazy affiliate marketers to perform the lowest value campaign possible and piggy back on a brand, while forcing the original brand owner to pay more for every click through to their website.
While Google claim that this change will not affect businesses to a great extent - after all, if I want Nike, I’ll buy Nike, even if there is an Adidas advert appearing in Google - it will.
Take British Airways as an example, they have spent years developing their brand, and people searching for it will more than likely be looking to book a flight. This means that all the travel companies in the world can bid on the term BA, which is a trademark, and get a customer that is statistically likely to convert. All the investment in the brand that encourages a customer to choose a product from that brand is subverted by the affiliates and agents who simply pay 3p or whatever to get a customer.
Now to a certain extent, I can understand where Google is coming from, after all, this is the age of the Internet, the age where everyone is a publisher and there are a million shops with a market of one, and to these small businesses, brand is not important. The temporary nature of the web means that there is no need for some companies to build long term relationships with their clients, and no value to them in having a brand.
Google could so easily have been one of these companies, and to a certain extent they are, I use them for email and to search for things, they are also the basis of my career, but if Live Search started offering better results, or HotMail was opened up so I could integrate it into more things, then I would switch. I have no loyalty to Google, like they have no loyalty to the advertisers like BA who spend literally millions with them each year. Its a sad state of affairs, but for me, the thing that takes the p!ss most about this somewhat casual attitude to the value of other brands is that Google have recently been super protective of their own brand - claiming that no-one should use the Brand name Google as a verb, as in to Google for something.
There is always a danger in double standards.
I’ve been reading a lot of people bleating about how they’ve been banned from Google AdSense lately. They all seem to have exactly the same story about how their account was closed for no reason just after they had reached that magic $100 dollar mark, and all of them are complaining.
The fact is, no-one gets banned without a reason. Google have very strict guidelines about what you can and can’t do when using the system, and most of the people who have been banned have breached these guidelines in some way.
There is one main reason why people are getting banned by Google, and that is Fraud. Clicking on your own ads - even if you only do it once - is stealing. You are stealing from the people who pay to advertise, and you are stealing from other publishers, because money that they should have earned is being paid out to a thief. No-one “Accidentally” clicks on the adverts, they do it on purpose, and they do it for personal gain. This is theft, and quite qimply, anyone who engages in it should be prosecuted. The only reason that Google aren’t chasing the fraudsters through the courts in addition to banning their accounts is because this would cost them more in the long run, and undermine trust in the system.
Another reason why people are getting banned is because they don’t bother to read the terms and conditions of serving the ads. FFS. I have a job, I read the contract before I started, anyone who enters into a programme that involves the exchange of services for cash should read the contract before they start. But they don’t.
There are a whole list of terms that Google impose on publishers, and they do it for a reason. The advertisers who are using their services are doing so for a reason, to promote a product, and contrary to what you, with your blogspot blog and stolen content might think, they do not want their adverts associated with you. They do not want their advert to appear next to profane content or badly written and designed layouts that trick users into clicking on an advert that doesn’t really interest them.
This brings me onto the fact that there is about to be an explosion of bans at the end of May.
You remember those additional terms that you agreed to recently, the ones you didn’t bother to read because you were so desperate to click through to find out how much money you’d earned from your network of 5000 one page websites that are published using RSS and promoted through traffic share programmes?
When you agreed to those terms, you agreed that you would put a disclosure paragraph on your website about how any users visiting the site would have cookies added to their browser by the adverts that you were publishing. But of course, you didn’t bother to read that did you, because that would be too much effort, to actually think about what your responsibilities to your users were.
The fact is that Google cares jack about micro publishers, and when they get the opportunity in 6 weeks to clear out a vast amount of dross from their inventory, they’re going to do it.
To my mind, its fairly brave of Google to actually take a stand to protect users from shady people who build hundreds of crappy content free websites that serve one purpose - to get in the way of finding information. With their source of income gone, a lot of these sites will pack up and move on.
Of course there will be the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth about how evil Google has become, but what the people doing the complaining will have forgotten is that Google’s responsibility is to their users, shareholders and employees, and by enriching the user experience by eradicating the poor quality sites from the Adsense programme, they will be benefiting all of these groups.
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One of the central tenets of the Google Webmaster Guidelines was that “there is almost nothing that your competitors can do to harm your rankings”. Well not any more it seems. I was searching for that very phrase in the webmaster tools as part of an induction for a new junior, and it is conspicuous in its absence.
Google have been a bit ban happy lately, with a number of high profile companies falling victim to a penalty for paid linking, and the fact is that your competitors are able to do something to harm your rankings.
They can report you for paid linking via the web master tools console.
My suspicion is that Google have had to remove the clause for legal reasons to cover themselves in the event that a site gets banned because of malicious activity from a competitor. (ie their competitor buys a shedload of crappy links from PPP or Review Me, and then reports them for it).
If this happened, it would be an unfair restriction of trade against a company due to activities they had no control over, and with that phrase left in the webmaster tools, Google may well have ended up being liable for a substantial compensation package.
In light of the recent penalties that have been handed out, I wonder how long it is before the old “my competitor did it to me” excuse gets trotted out, and by the same token, I wonder how long it is before someone actually gets a payout to cover loss of earnings due to a ban.
Holistic search is not a new concept in internet marketing, however as the SERPS get more competitive and other agencies get more intelligent in their marketing, it is going to become even more important to leverage the full benefit of all the different areas of data that you can get. In a year or two the web is going to be so competitive that any edge you can get will be essential.
Intelligent targeting of keywords through SEO will be able to give you a competitive advantage because you can concentrate fully on targeting the PPC campaign at the search terms with the lowest cost per sale or cost per acquisition, and your SEO efforts, which will deliver the “free traffic” can be dedicated entirely to these sales. There are also many other ways in which the data from analytics can be shared to develop the best possible campaign for clients (or your own business). This is the first in a series of posts about ways in which a holistic approach to SEM can be used to boost business.
There is a lot more than your ranking to consider when compiling and completing your SEO campaign.
I’ve always focused my optimisation efforts on an ROI model. By this I mean that the campaign is built around the value that it is able to deliver to the client. With this in mind, it is essential to be able to squeeze the maximum value from every appearance.
While a lot of my work is still built around the idea of getting the rankings:
- link building
- content analysis
- site structure work
I am also now very focused on the idea of traditional marketing and its impact on click through rates. Digging right into the data provided by my analytics solution gives me a great deal of vital information that can help to improve the site. I’m lucky in many respects because I also have access to paid search data for many clients, and I can build the various testing information that this gives in order to improve the natural search.
Using Multivariant testing of different creatives through the PPC campaign lets me get an indication of what will encourage users to click through to the website, and I can then build these learnings into the descriptions that I write for each page.
I read recently that Google do not place much weight on the description in terms of its value to their ranking algorithm, so I can use this more creatively. Things that work well in this include using the brand of the company I’m working with, building in a particular special offer to encourage users to click through, and adding an explicit call to action.
For me, the most successful format for a title and Meta Description in terms of boosting click through rates is as follows:
Buy [PRODUCT] online | [WEBSITE NAME]
Buy [PRODUCT] online from [WEBSITE NAME] from just £[PRICE]. Visit the website now for the best deals on cheap [PRODUCT].
In circumstances where the brand is really recognisable - such as with a major retailer, I will use the website name before the product name. My research has shown that a well known brand appearing at the front of the title and close to the beginning of the description can boost the click through by as much as 5%.
When you are competing for every click and need to be able to demonstrate high quality traffic and better conversions as part of your SEO Campaign, it is vitally important to get the most out of every potential users.
It appears as though Yahoo are integrating even more of their web properties into their natural search results. as the image below shows, Yahoo are now highlighting results in their natural search results that have been picked up and tagged in del.icio.us:
What does this mean for SEO?
Well, to my mind, the main effect of this implementation by Yahoo will be to boost the number of click throughs to highlighted pages. The votes in del.icio.us not only highlight the result in the SERPS, they also serve to legitimise certain results in the eye of users:
“If 200 other people found this site useful, then it must be a good resource”
While I can only applaud the use of social bookmarking data in terms of enhancing the relevance of the overall search results, I can’t help worrying that it will just lead to greater levels of abuse, and undermine the confidence of users in the long run.
