Google Articles by SEO Speedwagon

July 02, 2008

Google Maps Abroad

The inclusion of Google Maps in natural search engine results is nothing new for queries such as Ohio, Indiana, United States, etc. but I just noticed something new today. Google is now showing maps of foreign countries.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the tension between the West & Iran. Me being a news nut, I went to Google and typed in Iran. Here is what pops up in natural search. What you'll notice is there is an obvious immersion of Universal Search Results on page one, but to stay on point with the post, you'll see a map of Iran at the very top of the SERP. This is the first time I've personally seen foreign maps propagating natural search results like this and I find myself curious if this has been around for some time?

Anyway, after further digging with searches for other countries such as Russia, Iraq, UAE, India, Austria, etc., I noticed something VERY interesting in a search for China in that it's the only country out of about 30 or so searches that didn't have a map in search results and required an additional click on the Maps link to actually get maps of the country. To me it doesn't make any sense why Google would change its map inclusion protocol in search results for just one country out of over the 30 country searches I conducted.

I'm sure there are other orphaned country map examples out there, but why doesn't Google just have a standard for country-specific searches pulling into search results in a similar fashion?

Google Maps Abroad
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July 01, 2008

Google to Index Flash Content ... Again

In a post last night entitled "Improved Flash Indexing," the Google Webmaster Tools blog reports that

We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. ... In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

This brings up several satellite issues:

• Since it's been so difficult to index Flash content, a virtual cottage industry sprang up with ways to circumvent that disability, including methods like SWFObject, sIFR, user-agent-based delivery of plain text vs. Flash content, and so on. With these techniques becoming more sophisticated and easy to implement, is it likely that sites will abandon them soon?
  
• It appears that for now, Flash files spawned when users fail a JavaScript test will still be uncrawlable, since engines too typically fail a JS sniffer.
  
• If you have a SWF file embedded as only a part of a larger HTML page, trust me that you do NOT want only that SWF file being returned in search results. It typically looks awful, lacking both the size requirements you implemented, as well as the critical navigation that resides in your HTML. The Webmaster Central post didn't say that SWF files would be returned in SERPs, so I'm not saying that's what will happen. But I've tested client sites by searching for strings of text that only appear in Flash files, and I've seen it happen. So test with your own site and cross your fingers.

I chose a somewhat sarcastic post title because ever since search engines and Flash have butted heads, the ability for engines to index text embedded in Flash files has been "just around the corner." In 2002, for example, hearts were briefly aflutter about the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK, which was going to be the end of engines' inability to index Flash content. Hear that? The end. 2002.

So I enter into this new era with guarded optimism. Optimistic because Google never releases anything "new" until it's been tested in the wild for months or years. Guarded because the "right" recommendation for clients is never quite as black and white as people think it will be.

Google to Index Flash Content ... Again
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June 13, 2008

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?

Sean saw it coming yesterday, and little more than a Month ago I thought it a Yang Threat to balance the Microsoft yin of bluster.

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:

If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?
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May 21, 2008

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update

This is from much earlier in this fleeting year, admittedly, but with most focusing on the average words per search query increase angle of the story, I wanted to make sure and dig out a fine morsel from the very mouth of Google that may have been lost had I not:

14% of Google clicks come from paid search and 86% of clicks are organic.

True in court it may only qualify as hearsay, having come from the Google mouth of Avinash Kaushik to the ear of beu blog before finally being transcribed into print; yet, as you may remember from my earlier quest for a documented source behind that most mythical of numbers in all of SEM, the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, hearsay here surely now trumps unattributed there.

And the alleged statement is said to have come from Google's Analytics Evangelist, folks, so I think we are getting closer...

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update
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May 03, 2008

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer

Just when it seemed the twain might soon be making their way down the aisle, arm-in-arm, the mere spectre of Google is enough to call off the nuptials: Mashable has the goods, including Balmer's e-mail that is really more about Google than Yahoo:

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

He goes on to devote almost half of his e-mail to explaining how bad an idea Yang's Google threat is. I caught this on my Mashable feed as I began watching the original Frankenstein movie with my kids. No kidding.

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer
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April 30, 2008

Real and Imagined Errors in Google Sitemap Feeds

When you upload your XML sitemap feed to your server -- especially if it's GZipped -- don't expect it to look pretty. I got a nervous call from a client because when he called the XML feed URL in his browser, he saw this:

While it looks like an error, it's really not. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The error here is that your browser (in this case, Firefox) isn't able to view the file without a little help -- specifically, a stylesheet that tells it how it should look to human viewers.

The bottom line is that this message doesn't mean that engines can't read your XML feed -- only that you can't see it. To see whether Google can process it, for example, check the Sitemap Summary report. For some reason, this report isn't in the main GWT left nav. To find it, you need to click the "Details" link at the far right of the Sitemap Overview report. When you click that link, here's what you see:

Real sitemap errors do exist, even in the example I used above. In this case, I've inadvertently included in the sitemap a URL that I also excluded via robots.txt. So I'm sending Google a mixed message there. Fortunately, the robots.txt file overrides the URL's inclusion in the sitemap, so it ends up being more of a gentle nudge than a true, crippling error. If the error doesn't specifically say that the sitemap is invalid and unreadable, then it's probably not.

Real and Imagined Errors in Google Sitemap Feeds
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March 13, 2008

Google Showing Robots-Excluded Links in Sitelinks

You might have noticed that Google rolled out sitelinks for a new batch of sites a couple weeks ago. This blog was included in that batch, as you can see if you do a query for [seo speedwagon].

The goal here isn't to beat up on Google, but I think it's significant enough that site owners should be aware of it. In a couple cases, the sitelinks that Google shows (or showed) for our site have been links specifically excluded from robots, either via robots.txt or by the "noindex" attribute in the robots Meta tag. Following is a screen shot of the [seo speedwagon] query taken on February 26, which is roughly when the new batch of sites started noticing their sitelinks:

Note the two red-outlined links. The one in the left column, ip login, is our staff login page. It's been excluded by our robots.txt file for almost three years. Coincidentally, Google couldn't index that page if it wanted to, as it's password-protected. I know that robots.txt exclusion isn't a totally reliable way to keep a URL from showing up in SERPs, as it often causes what's known as a "partially-indexed" URL (example). But come on -- a Sitelink?

The outlined link in the right column (November 2007) is a typical (if capriciously chosen) monthly archive page -- exactly the kind you see in the third column of this blog. They're ugly, more or less useless (both for SEO and for people), and I'll probably eventually do away with them, but for now, there they are. But the important thing here is that I added the robots "noindex" tag to them well over a year ago.

Just this week, Google changed the format slightly. Here's a current shot:

The November 2007 link (excluded via Meta tag) is now off the list (automatically -- I didn't do it), but the ip login link remains.

Yes, I know I could block specific sitelinks from within Webmaster Tools. And I might, but I wanted to show it to you first.

It seems like excluding specific URLs via robots.txt or via the robots meta tag should be a sufficient method of opting URLs out of sitelinks.

This topic is especially timely as Matt Cutts just recently asked users how they'd prefer that a meta-tag-excluded URL appear -- if at all -- in the Google index. As of this writing, 83% say "Don't show a link at all." I don't want to speak for his readership, let alone all site owners, but I can confidently predict that most people don't want a robots-excluded URL (regardless of whether the exclusion mechanism was robots.txt or a robots "noindex" Meta tag) showing up in a Sitelink.

Google Showing Robots-Excluded Links in Sitelinks
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March 04, 2008

NYT Traffic Doubles, Revenue Grows Since Killing Subscriptions

John wrote a few times last fall about the NY Times tearing down its paid subscription wall and allowing spiders in.

Now, in an interview at The Deal, Google's David Eun (on p. 5) confirms that it was a good idea:

We have some partners that have made very bold steps, such as The New York Times, which went from a pay model to a free model. After they went free, the traffic they got from us alone doubled. Their math says they make more money by offering content free to consumers, but stimulating demand and making it work with advertising. The Financial Times did the same thing, and at least early on in the process they experienced at least a 100% growth in traffic.

Don't hold your breath waiting for further breakdown of the math, especially for the NYT example. Note that while Eun says traffic doubled, he was less specific about the money, saying only that "they make more" under the current scenario.

It should be no surprise that it's Google -- not the Times -- telling us the good news about expanded indexation. After all, Google has more to gain from all of us knowing about it, because it now gets a slice of the pie:

Thanks to BeetTV via SearchCap.

NYT Traffic Doubles, Revenue Grows Since Killing Subscriptions
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SEO Success Factors

I was recently asked about the success factors of an SEO campaign. There are many, but let's take a look at three of what we consider the most important success factors:

1) Knowledge Is Power

It's very important for us to know what prior SEO activities have been conducted on a site. This can make or break the campaign. On a few occasions, our team of site analyzers have uncovered controversial techniques that even our client didn't know had been performed!

It's also very important for us to have access and learn from your web site analytics data. SEO is about getting the right people to your site from search engines. Your analytics data prior to SEO and after SEO is a constant gauge to see if your SEO company is traffic-focused, not just placement-focused.

Finally, the knowledge of understanding how your target audience is searching for your offerings allows an SEO best practices firm to shoot for the bullseye where visitors convert, not the outer rings of the target where visitors are "just browsing". Since the early days of SEO, this has not changed.

2) Link Popularity

With the significant weighting of link popularity in Google's algorithm, there are very few sites that can ignore link building. Now crucial to your site's success at major search engines is the continual effort of adding quality, relevant third party links to your site. Trust me, most of your competitors are doing just that.

3) Flexibility To Site Changes

We always make sure to take the temperature of potential clients as to their flexibility to make changes to their site that will make the site more search-engine-friendly. If you are considering SEO, I would suggest you rate your flexibility to site changes on a scale of 1-10. Bottom line, if you are below a 5, you may want to consider Paid Search along with Natural SEO.

SEO Success Factors
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February 15, 2008

Where oh Where Is Thy User-Friendly 404, Google?

As I kick off my day this morning enjoying the beautiful weather down here in Florida and sippin' on my starbucks, I noticed something I found to be quite interesting with Google. They have no user-friendly custom 404 page!

Now I know Google is probably not a company that needs to be too concerned about having user-friendly custom 404 pages, but feel it would make sense for them to at least have a link on 404's going back to their home page. If I were tasked to create a 404 page for Google, I'd want to have links to a bunch of services such as GMail, Google AdWords, Webmaster Central, Blogger, Google News, Picasa, Google Analytics, Etc.

By having a user-friendly customized 404 page with links to a plethora of services, Google can potentially attract new customers who may not be aware services such as the aforementioned are even available.

Just my .05.

Have a great weekend everyone!!!

Where oh Where Is Thy User-Friendly 404, Google?
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February 13, 2008

Nip/Tuck Drops Google, and Leaves It on the Ground

I found myself in the midst of a double-take last night while watching Nip/Tuck. A patient revealed that she found McNamara Troy when she googled [free plastic surgery]. Now Nip/Tuck has a history of sprinkling web talk into episodes (YouTube episode from Season 4), and a Google drop today is as common as a professional athlete wandering onto the Brady Bunch Astroturf. However, in almost all cases, characters google to learn about a person or a thing without a direct action. What led me to double take was that an actual conversion had just taken place. The character made an appointment based on the results of her search.

So how far did Nip/Tuck take it? Is the media in place to draw in curious fans who might perform the search? Think Seduce and Destroy Hotline from Magnolia, which was actually in operation when the movie was released. Well, McNamara Troy has a site with plenty of interaction available for curious fans, but no easy route to get them there. Certainly, curious fans would not get there from a results page.

So, tell me what you don't like about your site.

Almost no content accessible to search engines. The only actual content on the page is the "HOME" link and the footer.

No other pages available for indexation. All links on the page point to FXNetworks.com or are behind JavaScript.

Site is buried. McNamaraTroyLA.com permanently redirects to FXNetworks.com/shows/originals/niptuck_s5/ , which links to an incredibly long intro that eventually displays an unspiderable link to McNamaraTroyLA.com/LosAngeles/.

As a result, the site is nowhere to be found for [nip tuck] and barely hits the front page for [mcnamara troy]. No chance for [free plastic surgery] or any other term.

Then again, maybe the character was referring to the McNamara Troy PPC landing page? Nope, nothing there either.

Kudos to Nip/Tuck for upping the ante on Google dropping. I loved seeing a greater level of understanding applied to casual dialogue, yet it only leaves me wanting more. I felt the same way last year when the characters all watched the sexy YouTube video. Could you imagine the views if they actually had uploaded the video in question?

Nip/Tuck Drops Google, and Leaves It on the Ground
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February 08, 2008

Tracking Local Press Release Syndication Performance

If you are a PR professional and looking for a way to track your newly syndicated press releases across a local platform then you've got to check out "Google's News" new local search feature. Now you have the ability to look up your news via zip code, city, or state and see what's showing up in your local market. You can use this information to see how well your local PR campaigns are doing online and get a better feel for other places to possibly syndicate your news.

To check out the new Google News local search feature go to news.google.com and scroll down the page, look for the "Local News Category", and enter your pertinent information into the search box. You will then be presented with the latest local news that reflects whatever region you are searching for online.

Your news results will look like:

Then to monitor your local news with ease on a daily or weekly basis create a Google Alert with your local news preferences are you are good to go!

Tracking Local Press Release Syndication Performance
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January 28, 2008

Barack VS. Hillary Above the Fold

What does first glance show the thousands of searchers looking for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each day?

The first thing a results obsessed searcher might note is the number of results. Hillary has more than twice as many relevant pages to her credit. Perhaps understandable, she has been around much longer than Barack.

The quick clicker might first note Barack's sponsored ad. That searcher would receive a warm welcome video and a call to action from Barack. No such sponsorship from Hillary.

Searchers with a blind eye to ads might first note News Results, which leave both Barack and Hillary at the mercy of Google (and/or their campaign's ability to constantly generate news). Actually, Barack receives some Google Book Search links above the News Results, a bonus opportunity to speak to potential voters In His Own Words.

The searcher only interested in natural results might first note the candiates' sites. If that searcher were a Link Builder, however, he or she might note an internal linking issue manifested in those first results. Hillary must be doing a good job of showing the search engines her most important internal links, as she receives 8 site links within her first result. Barack receives just one.

After that Link Builder regained composure, he or she might note an internal linking/duplicate content issue manifested in the second results. Hillary's second result should be her second most relevant page, not a duplicate version of her first page. As for Barack, he doesn't have a second result.

Wiki-obsessed searchers might first note Wikipedia, which lands just above the fold for both candidates. As for what they would see there, well, that's for another day . . .

I wonder what the chances are that either campaign has completed this exercise.

Barack VS. Hillary Above the Fold
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January 16, 2008

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?

One of my favorite clients of all time, with us now going on 8 years and powered mightily by the rare, dual client-side SEO strengths of search understanding and inter-departmental implementation influence, recently noticed the same thing Mark Jackson saw in Google's most recent round of Universal Search peekaboo:

Notice the incredibly disappearing PPC Ads? My immediate explication was that surely this must be to prove, in a small test sample, that someone's bad idea from above would be a disaster, indeed.

Mark, though, has made me think again:

Google may succeed in encouraging companies to bid more ferociously for the top two positions. If universal search leads to more searches because it's fun, this could be a win for Google (higher revenues) and users (better experience).

Sometimes it's hard for us to imagine that there is a finite set of clicks on any given day. The business model in a closed set like this, then, must discover what to do to increase the value of the average click within the set on a given day. Mark's point about less ads likelier driving up value per is on target, I believe, but thanks to him getting me to think again I think the test layout in question has less to do about increasing searches "because it's fun" and much ado about that map, an image mind you, kissing the PPC ads at the right corner of the screen and making your eye immediately jump there to focus.

Take a look yourself and see where your eye is drawn, and then check out what eye tracking heat maps are telling us about how pictures affect focus on a search page.

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?
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January 02, 2008

What was that about Google Host Crowding?

Matt Cutts talked a while back about algorithmic changes to heighten Google's host crowding capabilities. Now he said they would not apply this across the board, but the below serp for [google adsense] shows some kinks.

And further down on the first page, a couple more results from the secure connection and a subdomain.

What was that about Google Host Crowding?
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December 05, 2007

Google Poisoning

I remember back in the late 90's when I was first cutting my teeth in SEO, Google was in its infancy and merely a project for Brin & Page. Back then, the major players in search were AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, Yahoo! (when it was a crappy arduous directory) and DirectHit. In the mid-to-late 90's, SEO was not en vogue and black hat SEO techniques such as doorway pages, sneaky server side redirects, spider spoofing and a slew of other controversial techniques ran amuck. Of course, search engine guidelines for SEO didn’t exist nor “Best Practices SEO” for that matter in those days. Come 2000-2001, that all changed when sites were getting banned left and right for using those sort of "black hat SEO" techniques.

Here we are in December 2007 and black hat techniques are still running strong. Just the other day, I read an article about some crazy folks deploying thousands of sites with incestuous linking between them for instantaneously increasing link popularity at Google primarily, but certainly would affect any search engine with link popularity as a part of it’s algorithmic flavor.

Hell, even as I write this post I can smell a 302 hijack taking place somewhere in Google SERP’s!!!

Read about one of the latest Google poisoning articles here.

This sort of thing makes me sick and really doesn’t help the image of SEO for SEO’s who only follow best-practices SEO guidelines as set forth by the search engines. But come to think of it, it does help those of us who do the right thing; the white hat thing. It helps in that companies such as Intrapromote or other reputable SEO’s out there who follow SE guidelines will NEVER have bad press like this nor have to explain to clients why their site's PR went from a 6 to a 0 and why their site was completely dropped out of Google Index simultaneously. We will never have to explain this to clients as white hat SEO's because we do what we are told by the search engines themselves and therefore have nothing to worry about.

So, for those black hatters out there, we’ll be seeing you in a damning article again sometime in the near future and for you white hatters, keep on keepin’ on, baby!!!

Google Poisoning
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November 30, 2007

Will Google's New Linking Stance Create Innocent Victims?

Color me at least somewhat concerned about the latest revision to Google's stance on buying and selling of links. Here's the phrase that worries me:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Conventional wisdom, until now, has stated that "you can't be penalized due to who links to you; you can be penalized only because of whom you link to." Because otherwise, if you could be penalized based in inbound links, all a competitor would have to do is purchase a ton of "noteworthy" links on your behalf, right?

Isn't this reason for concern?

Will Google's New Linking Stance Create Innocent Victims?
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November 28, 2007

Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!

We are sticklers with our clients when it comes to issues of content duplication, sometimes to the point, I think, of being viewed as Canonical Fascists. This can be annoying, much like fascism mostly can be annoying, so it is gratifying to see Mr. Google himself lay out just why such annoyance is worthwhile advocacy, even approaching the subject of PageRank Splitting in the process:

When I did a wget from the Googleplex, I eventually got a 301 from the seomoz.com url to the seomoz.org url. But look at the timestamps: " --09:28:33-- " was the initial fetch and "--09:32:41--" was when the 301 came over the wire. Assuming that I'm reading right, that means almost a four minute delay on getting the 301 from seomoz.com to seomoz.org. Googlebot will wait around for several seconds for a page, but it won't wait four minutes. Instead, the connection will time out and we'll treat those urls as separate (and think that we couldn't fetch the seomoz.com url). So if a bunch of people are linking to your article, and some link to seomoz.org and some link to seomoz.com, that PageRank is getting split between two urls, and the long delay on the 301 response can cause Google to believe that the urls are separate and therefore cause dupe issues.

Hat tip to Randfish for calling forth such manna in his heavily commented comments area.

Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!
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November 06, 2007

Google Sitelinks Expansion: Early Results in Traffic Funneling

As you probably recall, Google rolled out an enhanced version of Sitelinks in mid-October. I thought it would be interesting to monitor the early results and see how effective the new links are.

Following is a typical example of Sitelinks. Google now shows up to eight links instead of the maximum of four that it showed only a month ago. When I refer to traffic later in the post, these Sitelink numbers are the links/URLs I'll be talking about:

The point of this post is to show you what happened (if anything) to the traffic that had traditionally funneled to either the main link or to the four Sitelinks. I plotted traffic to each of the nine links through October to see what would happen. the following charts reflect these filtered criteria:

• The query term was a single word
• The referrer was Google (organic)
• The entry page was the exact URL of the link being discussed

In addition, here are some important caveats:

• These charts are NOT all the same scale; I can't give actual visit numbers, but I will give the percent of all clicks received. The "main" link, as well as Sitelinks 1-3, pull in some serious numbers. While the traffic spikes in Sitelinks 5-8 will look pretty large, they shouldn't be construed as having the same traffic numbers. More on that as I discuss each link.
• Don't necessarily infer any proposed correlation between drop in traffic to one link and rise in traffic to another. These things are controlled by many, many more factors than the mere existence of new Sitelinks.
• The Sitelinks change was announced around 10/18, but it took a while to roll it out to all DCs. I didn't see it for any searches until at least the 25th. Keep a gradual rollout in mind when you look at the charts for links 5-8.

Okay, here we go. Following are descriptions of each link followed by a graph of the traffic to that link for October.

URL/Sitelink 0: The "main" link -- represented by "Company Name and Stuff" in the shot above. A slight drop overall, but it appeared to happen across the month, not necessarily at the same time as the Sitelinks rollout. Total traffic: 67.6% :

URL/Sitelink 1: The first true "Sitelink" link. A slight decline throughout the month, but again, not necessarily correlating to the Sitelinks rollout. Total traffic: 25.2% :

URL/Sitelink 2: Like the previous two links, it declined slightly. It looks a little more aligned with the rollout, but not completely. Total traffic: 5.1% :

URL/Sitelink 3:This link actually showed modest gains, starting about the time of the rollout. Total traffic: 1.6% :

URL/Sitelink 4:In early October, this link was already coming down from an offline push that peaked in late September. But the Sitelinks rollout didn't seem to help it, as it shows additional decline after the rollout period. One additional thing about this link: It's not what you'd traditionally think of when you type "keyword," so I attribute a lot of its clicks to curious onlookers who didn't expect to see it there. The other side of that sword is that now, the query shows four new, shiny links in the other column that will continue to drain clicks away from this guy. Total traffic: .22% :

URL/Sitelink 5:Okay, the first of the new links. From out of nowhere, it starts getting traffic on 10/17. But not that much. Total traffic: .12% :

URL/Sitelink 6:Like Sitelink 5, this one really jumped when the rollout started. It had just a few clicks before the rollout for this query, because this URL also ranks for "keyword" on its own somewhere beyond Page 2. Total traffic: .07% :

URL/Sitelink 7:In addition to its new location as Sitelink 7, this URL also lives above the fold on Page 2 for the same query. Since the Sitelinks rollout, it's on a pace to roughly triple its former traffic (for this keyword only, of course). Total traffic: .06% :

URL/Sitelink 8:This link came from nowhere, but it didn't do much. Part of it might have to do with being in the eighth spot, but more likely it's because I believe this particular link doesn't interest people who are searching for "keyword." Total traffic: .02% :

Required disclaimers. This click distribution across the nine links (main link plus eight Sitelinks) is highly variable and will change depending on what Google picks for your Sitelinks, how well the links match the query itself (and the intent of the searcher), etc.

The interesting thing for me here is not that Sitelinks 5-8 are getting clicks. That's not newsworthy. But from a behavioral perspective, it's interesting to watch how users react to links they might not have expected to see associated with their query.

One final note: These eight links are the ones that Google auto-generated. We'll be doing more posts about the ability to subtly affect the Sitelinks choices in the future.

Google Sitelinks Expansion: Early Results in Traffic Funneling
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October 24, 2007

PageRank Punches Perennials

[Cue Bob Eucker]

In case you haven't noticed, and judging by the attendance you haven't, the Indians have managed to win a few ball games . . .

. . . and . . .

[Cue 1982]

The Google PageRank for major sites is plummeting like the careers of Soft Cell, Dexys Midnight Runners, and Toni Basil.

Below are some articles discussing Google PageRank drop for the biggies:

Major Sites Taking PageRank Hits
Google Reduces PageRank of Many Sites
Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm?

The drop in PageRank is most likely a result of Google devaluing links pointing to major sites from very large networks. Because of the removal of the value of those links, the sites experience a drop in PageRank. You can call it a penalty, but that does not get at Google's intention or tell you anything about the process. These sites still have PageRank and they still show in results. We are seeing the cumulative result of one piece of the puzzle being altered.

Why is this distinction important? It tells you that you need to vary your links. Google is getting much better at categorizing links and devaluing certain types that exist solely to impact rankings. A huge, old site will survive because so many other links and/or so many other pieces of the puzzle are very strong. However, you will not survive if you are a smaller, younger site that relies on rankings based on an overwhelming number of one type of link pointing to your site.

[Cue Lloyd Bridges]
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

PageRank Punches Perennials
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October 01, 2007

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles

Frank and Maureen and Thomas, oh my!

The chipped cement still has yet to be cleaned up fully from the wall being torn down at that historical error known as TimesSelect, and already we are seeing NY Times columnists able to commune with readers freely at point of search, at least at the Frank and Maureen level:


As internet titan Alan Meckler noted in his posting of the Times e-mail to subscribers, search results like these were the driving force:

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

Sharing it, linking to it, and commenting on it are the currency of being able to find it in search, and that might be important to a newspaper if, as the latest surveys indicate, 91% of adults use a search engine to find information and 72% get news therefrom.

Ya think?

LATE UPDATE: We just noticed that similar to 1989, another Eastern Block Web Site is about to topple...

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles
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September 28, 2007

The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization

In May of this year, Google announced its new Universal Search System which blended traditional search results with news, video, music, images, local and book search engine portals, as well as Blogs on a single page to help users find information with greater ease. Universal Search, a new platform which represents a major shift in information display and retrieval, is causing search engine optimization companies to rethink how they conduct service offerings. So what does this mean for SEO professionals?

For those who conduct Search Engine Optimization services for clients, “Universal Search” is yet another marketing opportunity worth considering. Our industry is already known for dealing with extreme change on a monthly basis, and as a result of being able to adapt to this ever-changing market, this has enabled us to thrive in the industry. With these changes, we must re-invent or enhance our offering to meet the growing changes presented by Google in order to stay ahead of the curve. The emergence of Google’s Universal Search now forces SEO professionals to look outside the box for providing their customers with bleeding edge Internet marketing solutions.

To be able to help our clients rank in the top Google search results, we now have to look towards creating effective SEO strategies that involve RSS, news, videos, audio files, images, local and book search engine portals, and Blogs. With so many new things being displayed in Google’s search results it will be much harder to attain a top ten search engine listings for clients. However, this doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end for SEO’ers. Nevertheless, it means that we must look towards existing Google search platforms and integrate them into a new strategy called “Universal Search Engine Optimization.”

Universal Search Engine Optimization encompasses traditional SEO (on-site & off-site) methodologies as well as combines Web 2.0 marketing tactics, i.e., RSS, Online Optimized Press Releases, Podcasts, Vodcasts, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Social News sites, Image and Book listing optimization, as well as Local Search, that aids clients in gaining a greater market share within Google’s Universal Search results.

The following Internet marketing activities make up a large part of Universal SEO:

"Definitions in parenthesis taken from Wikipedia"

RSS -- “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.”

Online Optimized Press Releases -- Tailoring a company’s news in such a manner to gain greater visibility online through optimizing elements within the press release.

Podcasts -- “A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.”

Vodcasts -- "Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand or video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.”

Blogs -- “Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.”

Social Bookmarking -- “A way for Internet users to store, organize, share, and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.”

Social News Sites -- News aggregation (social network) sites that gain stories from community members online.

Image Optimization -- Effectively optimizing image file names, alternate text, and the utilization of photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, etc.

Book Listing Optimization -- Optimize Book company Web site pages to enhance placement in search engines for the titles of books for sale.

Local Search Listings -- Create local business listings and optimize Web sites to better perform amongst local search engine (Google Local, Yahoo Local, etc) listings.

To stay competitive in the ever-changing SEO industry, we need to create strategies for our clients that focus on all aspects of Universal Search. I believe this new form of search results presented by Google will open many doors for companies seeking to embrace the evolution of search.

The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization
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September 18, 2007

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989

We knew it was coming and we tried to bake a cake for Maureen Dowd more than a Month ago, yet we are still surprised at how search-friendly they are being in their explanation today:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

If you have any doubt that this is the SEO equivalent of 1989 scroll a bit further down the page for this money quote:

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989
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September 10, 2007

Google Book Search Results Defy Clustering, Quantity Precedents

Sean pointed this out to me early this morning. While we've known that Google has rolled out Book Search results in its main results column, some of the things Sean is seeing seem a bit out of whack with G's traditional clustering and placement precedents.

For example, here's the first page of results for [monopoles]. When I run the query, I don't see these results, but Sean does, along with a few other people that Sean has (mono)polled around the country:

Note how the results are unclustered. In other words, results from a specific subdomain typically get grouped together on the SERP for the sake of convenience, user experience, or ... well, for some reason, anyway. The results pulled from the books.google.com subdomain seem immune from the clustering behavior. And when results appear in the "regular 10" (as opposed to one-box) results, any given group of 10 results typically shows only two results from a given subdomain. This SERP shows three.

This is hardly the clustered behavior that some bloggers like Seth Godin have noticed. The examples he gives in that post are neatly organized at the top of the SERP in a one-box-style format.

If you move to the second page of SERPs (results 11-20) you'll see even more instances. In the case of [monopoles], Google Book Search holds six positions in the 11-20 group:

So for at least this query (and several others he's shown me today), Google Book Search has nearly half the top organic positions. That's hard to beat.

Google Book Search Results Defy Clustering, Quantity Precedents
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August 21, 2007

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II

Article or Press Release?:

It's always seemed strange to look for information on a brand, and to see it appear both in the organic search results and at or near the top of the paid listings. Why spend money on a brand term that's going to deliver a top five organic result for the same query anyway?

If this sounds eerily similar to what many Wagon Riders thought yesterday was a lede of questionable intelligence, then your parotid attention may have kept you from swallowing full gulp. For those caught in the act of mastication, though, it's good to know that the above meme is being pushed by Atlas, owned by Microsoft, neither of which are owned or own or like Google, beneficiary of the great majority of the branded ad spend currently under PR assault.

Here at The Wagon we get the same strange feeling the Talking Point pushes in the quote above when we fix our eyes on a graph like the below:

With search behavior like that, why in the world would you want your brand to appear more than once, let alone a single time, in the same screen space above the fold? Good advice from the originator of democracy of screen space.

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II
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August 16, 2007

Link Building in the Google Supplemental Aftermath

Having gone to play basketball with Chuck Cunningham, Google Supplemental enjoyed a stint just long enough to present questions that shouldn’t go away. Although we no longer see the GSI tag identifying the doghouse inhabitant, does it not behoove us to believe that, like Tiger, that dog still exists? We must continue to ask ourselves what places a page in the doghouse, and more importantly, what pulls that page out of the doghouse.

From a Link Building perspective, we know a deep page with no links is likely to be tagged. Search engines will consider a page important (read as not supplemental) if it is linked well throughout the site. All pages cannot be linked from every page, obviously, but a site’s structure must both allow and encourage spiders to get deep into a site to deem those pages as important.

Also, an external link building campaign must add links into a site, not just to a site. We have found that applying this slightly adjusted preposition to a site generates a huge impact on that site. Links pointing to deep pages indicate to the search engines that those pages are important, push the spiders farther into the site, and indicate to the search engines that the pages linked from that entry are also important. Deep links are necessary for better indexation as a whole, and they are necessary for greater importance at the page level.

Thankfully, Google took the high road with the disappearing character. I’m not sure there would have been anything to gain from the replacement of Google Supplemental Index with an adorable child or a farm boy from back in Hanover . . . although there still is time for Google to wake up and realize it was all a dream . . .

Link Building in the Google Supplemental Aftermath
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August 15, 2007

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade

As you probably know, the NY Times has been the most prominent experiment in the paid content-behind-a-firewall-yet-at-least-partially-indexable model, and they are indeed now, finally, announcing via trial ballooning they are no longer going to put their most popular columnists behind that magic curtain one has to pay to sweep aside. After the magic show ends and the same fingers which initially drew the curtain are finished being pointed this way and that, this failed experiment will have had much to do with the principles of Link Building.

A party-goer cloaks her content as Maureen Dowd. Found on Flickr. Copyright 485i

First a great quote that helps explain the decision's relevance to our industry:

But the truth of the matter is that you get far more eyeballs when you're not locking away your content from the general public. The reality of Web 2.0 news is that people a rising tide raises all the ships. If you've got good content, and the Times does, people will link to it. When people read a technology blog like Engadget or a political blog like Daily Kos and find links to articles at the New York Times, everybody wins. Keeping your archives, op-eds, and other content locked up means that blogs and news sites won't link to you, won't give you credit for finding a story first, and won't drive up your traffic.

This lack of inbound links to the content-behind-the-firewall damaged traffic to the site not only through a paucity of visitors being able to click on these links to the columns themselves...:

...the share of traffic that the NY Times sends to NY Times Select has been decreasing over the past year – down by 16% year-on-year in July. With NY Times Select receiving more than two thirds (67%) of its US traffic from NYTimes.com, the decline had an impact with US visits to NY Select down 22% in the past year.

...in having to rely far too heavily on the parent site rather than third party links for traffic, but also in the residual effect such had in these columns' search engine visibility. With few third party inbound links accumulating with each new column, in fact from a deliberate online community decision not to link to content-behind-a-firewall, it is also very difficult for each new column to be judged more relevant than similarly themed columns emerging on the same topic that immediately acquire inbound links in the form of the same online community recommending them. It's no wonder the Times Select had to rely so heavily on clicks from the parent site for visits, as a great many of those visits were likely already subscribers. In that situation it is difficult to grow at the rate of the internet. Try these two simple searches for Frank and Maureen alone: nary a column to be found. Haven't they written quite a few?

I think everyone likely to read this blog knew this would happen. But to say we knew it would happen ultimately is not to say we are not happy to see even giants felled by an algorthm rejected, not select(ed).

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade
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August 08, 2007

Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)

I get the feeling that most people, even in our industry, using Google Webmaster Tools for themselves or a client aren't scrolling far enough on the Query Stats page to reach this link:

What you get if you click is rather unwieldy, sure, especially if you are dealing with a very large site, but the payoff is simply as large by the same degree. We are beginning to view it more and more here as a kind of matrix for how Google views your site architecturally, especially in light of GSI now having been moved to an undisclosed location. Actually, now