SEO:Search

Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo!..

Yahoo! Search Lag Google & Microsoft in Ranking Newer Websites

…still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank?

Here are some examples of what I am talking about (with URLs expunged to protect the guilty)…

A couple year old site that was lingering about with a few inbound links and was promoted last November. Notice how quickly both Google and Microsoft took to the marketing, whereas Yahoo is still nowhere to be found

Here is a site that was promoted from brand new. Notice how Google and Microsoft are trending toward trusting it more and more, while Yahoo! Search occasionally picks it up and then spits it back out again

Here is yet another newish site that Microsoft loves and Google is starting to like more and more. Yahoo! is still nowhere to be found

If you had to pick the 1,000 most competitive keywords on the web I think all 3 of the above would fall in that group. I could list numerous other example sites as well. All the above sites have been in the Yahoo! Directory for at least 4 months. Even with new sites and a moderate amount of targeted promotion it is not that hard to work your way up into Google and Microsoft’s rankings, but Yahoo usually ignores it.

I have highlighted that Yahoo! Search has their domain authority score overemphasized in their relevancy algorithms, which causes a lot of parasitic SEO to dominate their search results, but do they even care?

Can you rank a new site in Yahoo! for terms like insurance without getting it nuked in Google? What makes Yahoo! so much slower at ranking new sites than the other major search engines?

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Google released Google Sites, allowing you or a whole team to build websites with documents, photos, presentations and more. This new service, which was spawned from the Google-acquired JotSpot suite, just works with a Google Apps account, though. If you dont have a Google Apps account, try signing up for one.

Google Sites Launched

If you have one, log-in to your domain management dashboard and click the Add more services link, where you can then add Sites.

Creating a site

When you create a site, youll first configure site title, topics, theme and more. Im creating a dummy site for Samplonia Incs software downloads. Once saved, the page is (optionally) public on an address like
sites.google.com/a/outer-court.com/samplonia….

Editing pages on the site

If youre logged in to Google as administrator, then you will see an Edit button above pages (among other buttons, none of which appear for normal visitors). Hitting the wiki-style Edit button transforms the page youre looking at into a what-you-see-is-sort-of-what-you-get editor. Nothing so far is revolutionary as similar content management systems have been around for many years (the press release, in true press release style, makes you think Google just invented the wheel), but the implementation is quite usable.

Admin view

Admin view while editing

What the visitor sees

When you create a new page, you can select from different page types (web page, dashboard, announcements, file cabinet, and list), and each type may have more sub-types (e.g. a list can consist of action items, issues, a unit status, or a custom list). Using a list -> issues page, Ive created a todo list for the sample site.

Creating a todo list using the list page type

Many more options are available from Google Sites. Theres:

• the ability for editors in the team to add comments to a page
• the ability to add attachments to a page
• an automated site map, showing the hierarchy of your sites pages
• an alert feature you can subscribe to, sending you an email when the page changed
• a revision history for pages so you can see what was changed on a page in the past
• the ability to customize the sidebar, e.g. by adding a countdown widget
• a built-in site search which doesnt include the usual lags of having Googlebot index the site first
• sharing options for the site, with an interface similar to the sharing tab of Google Docs
• customization options for fonts and colors, as well as the ability to change the theme later on
• and more…

Google also presents a couple of use-cases so you can see what can be done with Google Sites.

The feedback so far

Some of the early comments Google Sites received in the forum were mixed. Ben says, Im so disappointed that its just for creating intranets, and is not after all a replacement for the very basic Google Pages. He adds: I also wish it was a public wiki rather than a private wiki ” i.e. I wish people could sign-up themselves, without having to be invited, and could view edit history without having to login.

Beussery notes that Google still seems to be fixing bugs right now. Pau Toms comments that Google Sites needs more integration with the other Google Apps. For example offering a list of the available Docs when inserting into the document instead of having to paste the URL of the doc. David Mulder wonders why people call Google Sites a wiki, as he considers it more of an advanced intranet tool.

Elsewhere at the Google Operating System blog, Simon comments (line breaks removed): Ive given Sites a try and it looks as easy as using Blogger. As usual, Google is starting simple but therell be more to come Im sure. Weve used Blogger for a community organisation which doesnt have a lot of web expertise but Sites may be the way to go for collaborative content generation. Meanwhile, Im wondering if theres potential for a family intranet. And Ephilei wonders: So will this be a total replacement for the Google Page Creator which hasnt seen an update in about a year?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch argues Google Sites is a relaunch of JotSpot which took 16 month. He says it may not be a SharePoint killer yet, but that Google Apps constitutes 2-3% of Googles total revenues. Some point soon, its going to start hurting Microsoft.

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Henry Blodget, editor of the fast-growing blog, Silicon Alley Insider (SAI), has an exclusive interview today with an unnamed “influential Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) shareholder.” He offers exclusive “access to the (shareholder’s) thinking on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.”

That would be me, says the former Wall St. analyst. Henry Blog-It!

Apparently not enough people have asked Henry Blodget for Henry Blodget’s opinion of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. So he this morning he did it himself.

Slate tried their best. Daniel Gross quoted Internet analyst and Slate contributor Henry Blodget in Slate (MONEYBOX: The Unspeakable R Word): “Search may be the best advertising medium in the history of the world,” says Internet analyst and Slate contributor Henry Blodget. “But that doesn’t help much when searchers are broke.”

That’s his Brokeback Mountain View: no country for old analysts.

All is forgiven: Blodget grew up in the “Me Decade” coined by Tom Wolfe. Henry made coin on Wall St. just after the “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Now as an aspiring A-List blogger he writes “Advertisements For Myself,” a 1960s strategy pioneered by Norman Mailer.

Blodget has become the defacto DIY go-to guy: DIY plumbers (leaks), DIY pink slippers (layoffs), DIY Page Six-ers (celebs, rumors) and DIY fruit stand (sour grapes). SAI loves engaging in what Mike Arrington of TechCrunch lovingly calls “rumormongering” to describe his own pioneering style of the New New Web 2.0 Journalism.

Henry has sense of humor calling his ploy a self-styled example of “Net-era absurdity.” We prefer to term it Kafkaesque.

Henry - no private wealth financial advisor - has hung on to his Yahoo and Microsoft shares for “the better part of a decade.” (So that’s what’s behind his bearish views on the Google Disaster.)

The better part of a decade!

I’d summarize and disagree with Henry but I don’t want to interrupt his conversation with himself. But you’ve really gotta read it to believe it.

You’ll find out the most important reason Henry warns “Jerry to get his butt up to Redmond.”

Why? Well for one reason, Henry thinks “Steve Ballmer has a decent chance of getting Jerry and the board fired.”

There you have it. What self-respecting billionaire wants to file for unemployment insurance these days?

Jerry Yang, are you listening?

Search engine Baidu has launched instant messaging (IM) in beta, the first formal foray into the Chinese IM market. The “Baidu Hi” service won’t be expected to generate revenue in the short term. But the Chinese search titan must find a way to diversify its revenue base.

The Chinese language search engine recently launched a Japanese portal.

Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, has more than 60 percent of the search engine industry revenues, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based research firm.

Google China holds second place with about 26 percent share.

Yahoo China site remains in third with a little less than 10 percent share.

Baidu considers the service a strategic product, according to the Chinese search engine’s press release issued tonight.

As with Google, search drives revenue for the fast-growing Baidu. For the past three years Baidu has doubled in size every year. The growth rate may drop to 30 percent in the next five years as Baidu’s revenue base grows.

The beta is restricted to Baidu employees only. No word on how long the beta will last or when the product will officially launch.

One company, Tencent, based in Shenzhen has about 80 percent of the IM market share in China with its QQ service. How large is Tencent’s customer base? QQ has 580 million users. The company earned 1 billion yuan in the Q3 last year through Internet services.

In second place, Microsoft’s MSN Instant Messaging runs far behind Tencent’s QQ platform.

The Santa Clara Convention Center has come to life as the Search Marketing Expo was declared open. All the attendees have their eyes set on covering fundamental and basic issues, the latest happenings and forward-looking keynotes from leading authorities in search marketing and technologies.

SMX West, February 2008, Day 1

Session: Opening Keynote by Danny Sullivan: Search 3.0, Search 4.0 & Beyond

Danny begins by emphasizing how the times have changed since the first generation of search or the Search 1.0. The period was a cakewalk as it was dependent on the location and frequency of search terms. As of now the age of Search 2.0, in which the links do enhance the democratic nature of search, though the system is still fraught with manipulation. Google leads in Search 4.0 aka personalized search. While attempts to include the social search haven’t been a hit, but social media simply can’t be ignored and assures everyone that there’s no need to be scared of it. Social media helps in building links, increases visibility and influences reputation. SEO is on a growth path and there’s a need for PR efforts, SEO case studies and to resolve complaints.

Session: The Blended Search Revolution

The Blended Search track at SMX West, has on the panel David Bailey from Google, Cris Pierry from Yahoo! and Raju Malhotra from MSN Live Search.

Hosting the panel is Vanessa fox, the ask.com representative has not arrived as yet so she begins by showing off the Ask User Interface. David Bailey speaks of Google fulfilling its primary mission of Universal search. Says that it was simply web results earlier but now we have the blogs, images, news, code and the best part is that all of it is available from one search box, rather than using many vertical engines.

She now shows the latest releases on the Universal search from Google

• There are now the local business review snippets within search results
• There’s a list of ten local businesses for if you run a broad query in the serps
• A increased number of videos from external sites are displayed in the serps
• There are more number of pictures with triggering on the long tail
• Books too are grouped for the topical queries, mostly at the bottom
• There’s a comprehensive blending of which is more than just being at the bottom of serps
• There are also universal blends for the international audience, other than Google USA
• A growing diversity on the page is the overall theme

How does it all work?

There’s an increase in the diversity amongst the search results, gives the example of Ella Fitzgerald, users are searching for a whole array of results. The universal search works by searching all Google indexes and only then collect the data, use it for better ranking. The query is sent to several vertical engines and the results returned are then compiled with the help of a ranking algorithm to show the results and in which places.

There are a couple of challenges like the capacity to expand, optimize the big infrastructure. Rank compares to apples and oranges. Like in the (Green Bay Packers ) & (Kentucky Fried Chicken), where should it go to the local results or the web results. Apparently, looks like the web results, but need to notice the whole text as ‘green bay’ and ‘Packers.’ So Google has the task of handling the situation to make the results relevant.

Google makes use of the PageRank, phrase matches, anchors etc, other indicators as the freshness, users’ ratings, TOC matches etc, the universal search is all about technology.

So whats next with universal search

• Enhancing the relevance
• Ramping up the new categories blogs, Images
• Enabling users exploration the the universal search

Where would search engine optimization land up?

• The web results are indeed the main results at Google, but the universal search is to complement this listing, but the normal webmaster guidelines still apply.
• SEO for Images requires publishing high quality images on the high rank tagged images.
• Videos search engine optimization, use sitemaps at the Webmaster Console and tell Google about the contents of the video.
• Product search requires you to submit your feeds to Google Base/Product.
• For blogs, the quality needs to be high

Sean Suchter from Yahoo’s search

He explains that Yahoo! focuses more at the placements of shortcuts at the same time finding out what information the users need to answer their search query. At Yahoo! there’s a great deal of content in music, movie, pictures from Flickr etc, videos, local business results, maps. There’s also the capacity to fine tune the restaurant search by location city visitor guides, hotels by chains location. Lots of info about one of a kind hotels. A category for consumer electronics, health etc.

A quick presentation by Cris about Yahoos SearchMonkey (yahoos open search platform ) is shown.

Next up is Raju Malhotra the director, product management for Live Search, Microsoft

He feels that the blended search this the first step to the internet and information that being hunted for. At Microsoft, the favorite means of researching is to simply camp out with the users and monitor their search behavior, and the info being hunted for. They’ve found that users search in three primary ways.

• They want an answer to a specific question, eg. weather, directions, traffic, etc.
• The users searching in the discovery mode, eg. research and shopping
• Users exploring, surfing through the search, eg. entertainment, music, hobbies, videos, etc.

He moves ahead with an example snow reports and searching for info on ski shops. He figures out ‘one click’ directions in examples of blended searches at Microsoft.

What are the implications for the SEO perspective. the local searches have a big share of 33%. If a person searches for a ski shop in San Jose, you’d want to be #1. one way to better your rank is to feature in the business listing in built in the Microsoft webmaster dashboard. A huge proportion (80%) of online shoppers start off with product search queries. Microsoft allows users to upload the whole of the product catalog so as to help users find the whole range of products available.

Session: Search Marketing & Persona Models

Gord Hotchkiss begins by asking how many people are using personas at present? Only a handful do. Why do people use personas at all? Before 1992 the emotions were removed from neurology and psychology, there’s a whole lot of emotions that affect decisions, and personas help you to cash in on those factors lying beneath. The factors which offer something more than the rationally considered ones. People manage reward, risk, emotion, knowledge in decision making. But way humans interact with search engines in very similar ways. The decisions move through from being broad and narrow down to specifics. So the intent of wording coupled with size, placement of images determines how the actions are taken.

Persona is akin to a character of the brand that’s constructed to target the audience that could use a site or a product. If you have a marketing persona it will create empathy and integrate the emotional part of people, which is so much used in decision-making.

To create a marketing persona you’d need to research the demographics followed by brainstorming and documenting it. Things that would prevent you from doing well in creating the persona are the stereotypes, perfectionist attitude and uncommon words. Once you’re through with building the persona you need to measure, review and alter it accordingly. The personas act a stand-ins for your users, you’d need to draft your message to communicate with users and make a write a text for their needs and wants. There’s a caveat that you shouldn’t trust the data gathered from research too much, because you need to act on what actually people do rather than what they tell you they’d do.

Session: Defending Your Paid Search Budget Against New Ad Fads

First up is Brian Combs, he begins by emphasizing that while defending things, budget isn’t the only thing, and more of it is about time. Time for price comparison among second-tier search engines as also for testing new keywords, ad copy variants, new landing pages, etc. Understanding of your numbers is important, this includes some precise metrics and analytics, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, cost of different kinds of paid search and ROI.

This helps to showcase a clearly spelled out definition of success, you need to educate the site’s stakeholders. The focus should be on the biggest ROI drivers so as to maximize ROI across different. When you evaluate the programs you need to present stats. The advancement in paid search such as the geotargetted ads, mobile ads, video ads, local ads, etc simply can’t be ignored. Stats reveal that the global paid search revenue would be hitting a $30.5 billion mark. And it had gone up by 48 percent last year. The paid search advertisers have experienced an ROI in the range of 15 to 20 times of the investments made.

Session: The Economics of Search

Chris Sherman begins by briefing about why the session is taking place at all. He asserts while, many SEMs know about marketing side but aren’t aware of the other part and that is what the engines think about, and make money?

First to surface is Michael Schwarz, he talks about the future of sponsored search. And that the primary competitors of Google and Yahoo! in the sponsored search are the organic listings. In short people click on the sponsored search listings because organic search isn’t good. The interests of both the advertisers and search engines are for the most part same. All are important, maximizing the value delivered to users and advertisers and maximizing the search engine’s profits. Sponsored search is faced with some major challenges, such as that of making it more relevant, including better measures of the user experience, better targeting and lacking tools for advertisers.

When you bid on AdWords, it you need to bid on real search behavior, should use long-tail keywords, consider the cost per conversion compared to the value per acquisition. Also the bid should continue until the value per click is equals the incremental cost per click.

Moreover, you would want to consider cross subsidization as well. Try making deals with low profits or margins now, to be able to grow in the future ahead. Google will not be left untouched by recession, this is so because as people would purchase less they’d also search less.

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Seems Yahoo has really been falling behind in updating their databases, according to Aaron Wall’s article today.

This is something all people who work in the SEO area should be taking notice of since Yahoo has had good conversion numbers for many of us and if the efforts to add more content are not being recognized by Yahoo then efforts may be better spent improving existing pages - though even this may not be possible.

Yahoo has gone through a number of changes both to its system and its personnel lately so hopefully this will soon be remedied.

If Ask dismantled its Teoma engine, would Ask still be Ask? The simple answer to this existential question is no.

The Ask search is based on the concept of expert opinion, and there are many refinement options shown in the interface based on clustered or categorized results.

So if Teoma were shut down, we think the ability to narrow or expand searches would likely disappear — as shown in the chocolate options here.

On the other hand, it’s possible to port these algorithms elsewhere if there’s enough time for Ask engineers to prepare transitions. That means these search refinements could be layered on top of a different engine, albeit slowing down the response time.

According to PaidContent, the ad deal between Google and Ask includes “a clause allowing Google to engage more deeply with Ask’s algorithmic search.” If the algorithms from Joisey were connected inside of Google, then these functionalities live on.

Not sure what’s planned here, but we can’t take the user-interface for granted with a simple plug-in.

Having successfully completed an in-house search marketers’ salary survey in the fall (with results in January), SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, is conducting an online salary survey of agency-based search marketers.

The survey presents less than 30 questions and can be completed in an estimated 12 minutes. It’s open now and will run through mid March. Results of the survey will be published in connection with ad:tech San Francisco in April.

Yahoo announced the launch of Yahoo! Search Experience, a 3rd party development platform to enable websites to include more information in Yahoo! search results.This new scheme looks pretty cool and seems to be somewhat of a competing service to Googles Universal Search / Local Search / etc.

Yahoo! Search to offer an open search platform

Check out the screenshot on the Y! blog - basically it means your Yahoo! search results could include more features and deep links to your site, including reviews, photos, contact details and price information.

From the Yahoo! blog:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners ” big or small ” an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites ” ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data ” directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Not only is this an interesting (and pretty clever) move from Yahoo!, it also indicates a shift for the future of search and search engine optimisation.  I love the revised look for the Y! search results - I think this rolled out to the live SERPs would be a great change for Yahoo! and will most likely force the hand of MSN and Google who will need to keep up (although in fairness, Google has led the way in the past with new features like this).

It will take a bold step from any search engine to make the move from old school SERPs to new SERPs - Google have gone some of the way over the past year or two, but having been playing it relatively safe by keeping everything under the beta banner.

More doors opened though, means more ways for people to spam!  I know Google Local do keep a tight control of data that powers local results in listings - but thats just a few big sites providing most of the information, with loads of small sites providing a small proportion of the listings.  By allowing webmasters to dictate so much data that will be reflected in live SERPs, Yahoo! could be setting themselves up for a lot of work to keep a solid level of quality control over the process. 

A lot of work?  Yes, but I do think it is entirely within the realms of any of the big search engines to manage this well - and I also really do think they should do it.  

For SEOs it could make for an interesting future.  More data to play with + more control over SERPs = great for us.  But think about it:  more data on page 1 = less people browsing to page 2 (or even to below the fold on page 1).  Where title tags influence click through rates now, user reviews, contact details and other supplementary information might influence CTR in the future.

Not a bad thing, but certainly may offer a larger challenge for the Internet marketing community.  What do you reckon?

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An informal poll by Enid Burns at ClickZ News finds that many agencies that advertise on Google’s content network have seen improved results over the past six months.

Some credit the changes Google has made to improve the network, such as placement targeting, performance reports, and new ad units on Google’s search, content, and mobile networks. Google also shrank the clickable area of AdSense ads to to limit accidental clicks.

Incidentally, that shrinkage is attributed by some as the cause for ComScore’s report of flat click growth for Google, among other declining click volume theories.

This fits with the trend of decreasing AdSense income being reported by publishers.