Search Engines

August 19, 2008

Keynote Roundtable: Technical and Information Giants

How awesome is this going to be? Check it out: Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan are moderating the most fantastic panel on the planet. Matt Cutts (Google), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Tim Westergreen (Pandora), Robert Scoble (FastCompany.TV), Kirsten Mangers (WebVisible) and Rich LeFurgy (Archer Advisors). It's still dark in here but the glow off the superstars on stage is more than enough to blog by. Lisa and I have super good seats because we got here 45 minutes early to stake out the front row. We're committed. Or should be committed. Debate that in the comments.

Kevin gets us started with some house keeping and more award winners. Yay! Check out the winners on the site. Matt Cutts gets the Editor's Choice award for having cute cats. Or possibly contributions to search marketing.

It is PACKED in here but no less cold. Am going to become a bloggersicle.

Right to left: Mike, Tim, Robert, Kirsten, Matt (Kevin says he's worshipped as a god in some countries), Danny (also a god in some countries), Rich and Kevin. We start with a video. I like those. They're easier to blog. Essentially it's this [Clips from lots and lots of popular media with characters talking about Google, MySpace, YouTube, etc. It's funny, if very, very geeky. Perfect for this audience basically.]

Robert's on his phone through the whole thing.

We start the actual session with a couple quotes from Vint Cerf.

Looking back at the next ten years, now and what's next.

Robert: We're seeing Twitter going down, and it's that these sites get so big, so fast. I was the first to talk about ICQ back in the day. iLike got to 6 million users in the first 6 days. How do you keep up with that demand? You're not going to be able to do that unless you're Google.

Kevin: How did we get here? We started out as just a bunch of geeks. What did this look like when it first started.

Robert: I started out at a camera store and it was all word of mouth. But it was all very inefficient. Now it's become (over time) hyper efficient. He was twittering through the video about being on stage with Matt. [I knew it!]

Matt: I haven't really talked much about the early days of Google on my blog. I stopped working on my Ph.D. to join Google. They didn't even have a lobby. It's wild to look back and say wow, how did this happen how tid this occur. I came to the conclusion that Google should be an advocate for our users. Offline there's Consumer Reports but online it didn't work as well. So that was our role, we tried to make it reputable.

Kevin: Is there a Google killer?

Danny: I think Google's going to be fairly dominant for years to come. Whenever I hear that there's a Google killer is turns me off. They underestimate how hard it is and even if they did have the relevancy and the information they probably wouldn't have. If there's going to be a Google killer, it's going to be Microsoft. At best what you're going to see is incremental stages. YouTube is a classic success story of succeeding where Google could not. Google came along with a great product at the right time and they stuck with it. They succeeded in part because it was user first.

Kevin: So when you go to the VCs, you say 'I'm going to be purchased by Google?"

Mike: Why does there have to be a Google killer? Competition is good. It's brand switching at this point. The average guy sits at the search engine and just does his search. He doesn't care about privacy. He just cares about results.

Robert: I got shown a stealth project and the first thing they said was 'we're not a google killer and we're not Cuil either." More than half of the sites I visit use Google analytics. Microsoft is going to need the same kind of foothold. They're not going to compete on the brand. Even if they get the relevance. How many people search for Yahoo on Google. They don't understand the address bar, they only understand the search box.

Kevin: To the lay person, they just want it to work. It took hours to set up my Slingbox. I just wanted to plug it in. The less thinking the better off we're all going to be. [Reads several quotes from a 2003 article] Do you think it's possible to acquire Yahoo.

Matt: We have a culture of trying to build things ourself. We've had to scale things up. The ability to scale is really tough. People assume that Google is simplicity itself but we do a lot of experiment. We've got more people working on search than ever before. I think Yahoo partners better than we do but I think it's a strength if you can do things in house.

Kevin: Is the first man on the platform the winner?

Tim: Pandora's thought about acquiring Google but we're not there yet. We started Pandora because as a musician, your challenge is reaching an audience. We wanted to do that in a democratic horizontal way. The thing with search is that it's building one big huge popularity contest. I think the next generation is an engine that addresses the sites that never had a chance to be in the Top 10, the Top 100.

Mike: Even if Google brings up 30 million pages a day, 90 million go live and you're never going to see that. In terms of the way that Google led the way by emphasizing linking. The voice of the end user is important. They can't link to you so there's got to be more than than.

Kevin: To most of the world, local is mission critical. How is that process evolving? Are small businesses engaging?

Kirsten: No. I asked Matt what the killer local app is and it's Urban Spoon. (Hee, she says she's both the token female and the redheaded stepchild.) [Robert explains what Urban Spoon is] The problem with online is that you only get what's cool not what's convenient. It needs to do a better job of bringing buyer and seller together. The content needs to get online. They don't understand it on a local level how to do that yet. No one just comes to a site. You have to go out and buy eyeballs. We have a long way to go before we can make Urban Spoon relevant, before we get every restaurant on Yelp. We need a hell of a lot of servers and more content and better efficiency. We need to be able to make it simple enough for the local people to understand.

Robert: I think we're going to see a lot of back filling, lots of education.

Kirsten: It would take your average carpet cleaner 31 hours to do what we can do in minutes. They need education.

Kevin: You're not the token female. I invited a lot of women. I prefer women. [Ariana, the other female, was busy]

Rich: I think some of the open local formats for content, like Google KML and Yahoo FireEagle, it's not so much about where the businesses are, it's about where users are. It's about GPS and fixed IP. I think that level of relevance is going to be layered over it and I think it's important. How do you do relevance at scale, that's the point.

Matt: What's made your life easier? Broadband, wireless... I went to Waffle house in Tennessee. They didn't have tablet PCs but they, every single one of them, had cellphone. He was down in LA last week and could look up traffic and restaurants [but not apparently the directions to the BC office, eh Matt?]

Rich: One company to focus on is Nokia. They sell a million phones a day. They have a lot of smart phone capabilities.

Matt: Nokia open sourced Symbian and that was good. Now there's all sorts of open platforms. If you make a great app where someone can run it and install it, you'll see a lot more innovation.

Robert: The right question is who is going to get earlier into the buying behavior. Can I get earlier in the buying behavior and lock up the user before they get to already deciding what to get and where to get it?

Kirsten: Imagine the relevance if Facebook picked up local search. If they took cues from updates.

Tim: From pandora's perspective, local is the motherlode. Our growth rate doubled when we launched the iPhone app. When you look at radio, they have double the revenue of the retail business. We on the Web, we're looking at putting out business on every person the street. [Robert takes over the interviewer role and asks Tim to explain royalties. Kevin thanks him a bit dryly. Tim explains.]

Robert: Search is where you get the transaction. There's lots of things that come before search.

Danny: No, there's search through all parts of the process. You don't know anything about wine, you go to Google and ask it about Google. Then you go back and refine and ask it something else. There's not any time when search isn't part of it. [I heart Danny.]

Kevin: Are consumers doing it backwards? Should people be marketing the way Danny describes? Is there going to be a social rejection of the process?

Matt: We don't want to lock in the users data. All the of the users data can be pulled out. What if you could link it all in and have Google suggest things for you to do. What if, like Robert says, you could get in earlier and find out 'here's this thing you might want to do'

Kevin: Most important things to avoid? Top Trends? Biggest challenges? Today's decisions, tomorrow's consequences?

Tim: The next wave is accommodating big money now. Launching a new car isn't about buying a keyword. How and when will those companies find a way to really make the most of online.

Robert: I agree with that. People are looking for ways to put money online but they're not there yet in understanding how to do that. They're still trying to understand how to spend money online. It's not what they know. Mobile and social are the trends I'm watching right now. Evernote is getting better. The search engines are getting better at finding photos and recognizing the fingerprint of a photo. [Brief discussion of Robert's phones.]

Kirsten: Agrees with both, and expands it from big marketers to all marketers. No plan survives its collision with reality. The future is about becoming Costco. High quality at low cost. It's all about mobile and hyperlocal and "find" instead of search.

Matt: Cloud based storage. If I dropped my laptop, I still wouldn't lose my data because it's stored elsewhere. It's cheaper than ever to do a startup. It costs virtually no money. You can code on weekends and so many opportunities. We haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible.

Danny: Search marketers. As you're watching stuff rolling out and people getting exicted on things that you don't know are going to convert. Don't forget what made you unique as a search marketer. You know how people are looking for information. They seek it in different ways and you understand what those venues are and what it takes to get there. That's what I get concerned about when people get all excited about social or video ads but that's not search. Don't get distracted by the shiny new things. Don't get distracted from your expertise.

Rich: I think the big thing is that agencies realize they have a problem. 4-5 years ago, they were waiting for it to go away but now they know they have a problem. Media exhanges--Google and Doubleclick creating a place for display advertising. I think that's going to squeeze ad networks. You'll see media futures. That's going to take some time to get going. Exchanges are really granular and really scalable.

Q&A

How do I afford anything after I have to pay so much to get all these shiny things?

Kevin: [doesn't quite call Verizon Wireless Nazis.]

Danny: Arguably, the bulk of the people still aren't going to be using smart phones. In the Sex and the City movie, Carrie needs a phone and Sam gives her the iPhone. She doesn't know how to use it. This is not the year of mobile. Next year isn't the year of mobile. It's gradual growth. It's not simple enough yet and not cheap enough yet.

As businesses start to use Twitter and Web Analytics, how do you make those a competitive advantage?

Kevin: I can't believe we just used Twitter and analytics in the same sentence. [Lisa and I said the same thing!]

Robert: You need to create extraordinary experiences. Get people to talk.

Kevin: Use it, don't abuse it.

Kirsten: Keep it simple.

Mike: What's the point of twitter?

Robert: There is no point to Twitter!

[general chatter]

Matt: You find that guy who wants to learn about that stuff anyway and you let them come up with something viral. People move to the things that are interesting to them.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/19/08 at 2:49 PM | Comments (2)

August 5, 2008

That's Just Not Cuil

Editor's Note: (Super)mom Jordan McCollum just had a new baby girl and still managed to get us an entry for our Guest Blogging week. All I managed to do this morning was get coffee. Thanks, Jordan!--Susan

For all the press it generated, it's not too surprising that Cuil didn't live up to expectations. While Cuil boasted it was bigger, more relevant and more private than Google, most people quickly panned the limited index, the three-column search results layout and the technical glitches. But amid the mistakes of the launch, there were a few things they did right, too.

Working against Cuil:

Hype—When the Wall Street Journal trumpets your launch, it's probably going to be difficult to keep up with not only the expectations you're setting, but also the traffic you get. Remember, nothing kills an inferior product faster than superior PR.

Selling points—You're certainly not going to impress people in the industry touting your index size and relevance (especially not if you don't live up to the claims). While both of these metrics sound good to the average user, they're usually not enough to make them consider a permanent switch of their default search engine (again, especially not if you don't live up to the claims).

Brand recognition—This is a big one. If nobody can spell or pronounce your name, it will be exceedingly difficult for them to get to your site. My husband works for a company with an unusually-spelled name like Cuil—it's pronounced like a "real" word, but it's not spelled like its homophone. I can only imagine how much type-in traffic (not to mention email) is lost because people can't spell the name. Yes, all the good domains are taken, but . . . come on. That word is "quill."

Brand recognition again—This is such a big one that it deserves mentioning again. Remember that study last year, the one that said that people don't really "see" relevance? What made them say results were relevant was the brand on the top of the page—the exact same results were magically more relevant with a Google or Yahoo logo.

Actual traffic—Despite the fact that traffic overloaded Cuil's servers, during its first day of life, the search engine only barely cracked the top 10 search engines as measured by Hitwise. Tuesday, it slipped to #12. Worse yet, more than a third of its first-day traffic was from other search engines (and more than a quarter came from news and media sites). Breaking the top 20 during your first week is good, of course, but you might expect coverage by the WSJ would generate more than 0.6% of search engine traffic.

Working for Cuil:

Attention—If you can get the WSJ to cover the launch, your PR department (or is that just PR person?) should get a pizza party. Or at least a pizza.

Focus on Google's weak point—privacy—While a lot of search engines do have excellent privacy features, privacy was probably the strongest of the three features that Cuil touted the most. It was possibly the best selling point they were going to have. With fervor over Google's perceived invasions of privacy renewed every few weeks, for the most part the only thing that has kept many of the privacy-emphasizing search engines back is lack of publicity—something Cuil had in spades.

The moral of the story: never, ever describe yourself (or allow yourself to be described, if you can help it) as a "Google killer." We've been disappointed too many times by that hype. It's a kiss of death.

Instead (and this lesson isn't just for search engine startups), focus on things that are truly unique and worthwhile to your users—and deliver.

Jordan McCollum is the assistant editor of Marketing Pilgrim, an Internet marketing news site. She has worked in search engine optimization, content creation, web analytics, and, of course, blogging.

Posted by Guest Author on 08/ 5/08 at 11:57 AM | Comments (1)

June 12, 2008

SEO Headlines

Should Your Employees Be Your BFFs?

Barry Schwartz pointed me to an article from Ad Age this morning that asks Do Bossfriends Create Great Employees. It's funny, because if you asked me that a year ago my answer would have been completely different than what it is now. When I was still wet behind the ears I would have said that a boss can absolutely be buddies with their employees. I may have even rattled on about how it creates team unity and that hitting a beer bong in a social setting with those whose paychecks you sign was totally okay. Now, however, that kind of behavior would make me cringe.

As a boss you should be friendly with your staff. You should create an environment of trust and openness and free expression, but that doesn't mean you should be best friend. There's absolutely a line you have to draw. You don't want to get into a situation where employees' feelings are hurt because their bossfriend suddenly has to care about getting work done or the bottom line. You don't want to open up an environment where employees get too comfortable or too casual and their professionalism suffers. You want there to be chemistry and for your employees to feel supported. That doesn't mean that you have to help them close down the bar.

I think we manage to have a good balance around here. We have a pretty casual environment and open door policy when it comes to getting time with Bruce. We have company BBQs, bowling days, movie nights, spontaneous lunches, etc. But I'm not hanging out at Bruce's house tonight to watch the Celtics beat the Lakers. I'll be doing that at home, with people who are actually my friends.

Sorry, Bruce, but I just want to be friendly. I don't want to be your BFF. :)

Yahoo, Microsoft, Google & The Internetz

Yahoo says that their talks with Microsoft really are over and that no deal has or will be made. Take a moment to compose yourself. It'll be okay. Here's a tissue.

Better?

Yes, TechCrunch reports that though Microsoft and Yahoo had both gone back to the table for negotiations, in the end Microsoft couldn't justify the price Yahoo was after, and Yahoo realized it'd just be neutering its search engine anyway. The two will just have to go it alone.

Don't worry, Yahoo's not about to fall out of the headlines. Just this afternoon they announced a non exclusive search agreement with Google like we all thought they were going to. The deal will allow Yahoo to run Google ads alongside its search results and some of its Web properties in the United States and Canada.

From the press release:

"Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which - and the pages on which - Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo! will define its users' experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search. The agreement also applies to current partners in Yahoo's publisher network."

Companies With An Identity Crisis Fail

Dave Goldenberg had a great article over at Digital Web Magazine entitled Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha. Dave says the biggest reason new companies fail isn't because they don't have the talent or the drive to back up what they're trying to do, it's because they never really identify what it is they want to do. They don't know who they are, where they're going, what makes them different, etc, and as a result they fall on their face.

I mentioned this in Tuesday's Avoiding Product Fail post, but you really have to know what you're creating and what niche your product is going to fill before you launch it. Otherwise you those vital first moments of your existence solving your own identity crisis when you should be out presenting a strong brand image and getting your message out to your audience. As was hailed in the Cre8asite Forums, you don't want to be that nerd in the singles bar. You want to assured, nimble, and ready to woo the masses.

It's hard enough to launch a new company. If you don't have a clear plan for how you're going to do it and become the next TechCrunch, you may as well not even try.

Fun Finds

Christopher Hart, the new Director of Regional Operations for Bruce Clay East, sat down with Jim Hedger during last week's SMX and talked about his plans for the new office, bringing SEO training to the East Coast and how BC East will fight through the noise of New York.

Chris Brogan tells us all how to be sexier in person. C'mon, you know you were googling it last night.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/12/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (2)

June 4, 2008

Search Friendly Development

Good morning, Friends. It's time for Day 2 and I'm coming to you live from the brand new Developer Track. The Developer Track is awesome because it comes complete with a fancy waterfront view. I'd also mention the yummy bagel I'm eating but I think Michael VanDeMar is going to come and kick me if I do. He's over my bagel stories.

Vanessa Fox will moderate as speakers Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Maile Ohye (Google) and Sharad Verma (Yahoo) get us started.

Up first is Nathan Buggia. He says he rewrote his entire presentation last night based on what people were talking about on Day 1.

Microsoft is working on lots of big, hard problems. Stuff like:

• Affiliate tracking
• Session management
• Rich Internet application
• Duplicate content
• Geo-location
• Understanding analytics
• Redirection
• Error Management

Advanced search engine optimization is analytics. That's what differentiates it from regular search engine optimization. It means you're at a larger company with more resources (um, not necessarily). Implement things in a logical order. See what the impact is on your customers and the engines and decide if that's the right thing to go forward with. Do not implement something because you heard someone on a panel say it was a good idea. PageRank sculpting is a good example of that. Everything on the Web is an opportunity cost.

Nathan says to watch out for complexity. If you build cloaking or situational redirects into your Web site, you can add a lot of complexity to your site. It becomes hard to notice if you have problems on your site because stuff is hidden from even you. You want the simplest architecture you can have. Microsoft says cloaking isn't all bad, but it's never the first, second or third solution they recommend.

All Web sites have the same first problems. The first problem is accessibility. That's where people should start. Can a crawler get to your Web site? Are they hitting 404s? Do you use Flash or Silverlight and are they monopolizing the user experience? Take a look at canonicalization. Are you dividing all your PageRank and reputation?

Search engines are always changing. Someone can come up on the stage and claim they have the big new tactic for search engine optimization and then that may change in a year. What is consistent are the Webmaster Guidelines. Those are things that in spirit all the search engines agree with. If you go to Google's Webmaster Guidelines and adhere to the spirit of them, then you're working with the search engines instead of against them.

Nathan gives us an example and uses Nike.com. Nike is a brilliant company. There are few companies that can do the type of branding that they did with Just Do It.

When you go to Nike.com you see the Flash loading. Then you select language, region, etc. Then you get another loading screen because they're going to play a full minute video. It takes eight seconds to get to that video. Maybe people don't have eight seconds. Maybe they only have one second. The second run experience is 3 seconds because of the cookie Nike puts on your computer. The cookie resets every day. If you are blind or ADHD, you have a really bad experience on that site.

The site also isn't great for search. He shows us the HTML behind the page. There's no Title tag. There's nothing. It's just a Flash application. Basically they're cloaking. The site is also really complicated. Nike has over 2 million pages on their Web site and they're cloaking for a lot of them. He shows what the Nike SERP description was for a few days after their cloaking broke. It was a user error.

Every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing all in cloaking, there are other people out there NOT investing in those things. If you type in [Lebron James shoes], Nike doesn't come up.

Alternate Implementation

Throw your rich object at the top of the page and then use JavaScript at the bottom to detect what the div does. (If I mangled that, please feel free to correct me in the comments. As awesome as Nathan is, I don't speak tech geek.)

Advanced search engine optimization is not spam.
Search engine optimization does equal good Web design.
Design for your customers, be smart about robots and you'll enjoy long-lasting success.

Sharad Verma is up.

Sharad says he loves his job. This is an opportunity to serve his customers. When he's not working he loves to travel. Last week he was in Machu Picchu, Peru. He's giving us a bit of a history lesson and telling us how he took trains and buses on his journey. I'm not sure where this I going but it will tie together soon. Oh, I get it. The moral of the story is that Machu Picchu is accessible and easily discovered. I see what he did there.

As a site owner you're serving both your users and robots. You need to design your site so you're not alienating either of them. There are three cranks behind the box - crawling, indexing and ranking. You have control over all three, but more control over crawling.

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

They start with the URL, download the Web page, extract links from the Web page and then follow more links. Sometimes they find invisible links or sometimes they see links but decide not to crawl the content. That could be because the links are excluded in your robots.txt or because they're duplicate links.

Search engines find your contact via the organic inclusion from crawling. All you have to do as a site owner is put up your site, get links, and let the crawlers in. They'll do the magic. If you're not satisfied with what they're crawling, then you can supplement that with feeds.

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

Search engines do not understand JavaScript. They're starting to understand it but they're far away from being able to full crawl it. He recommends turning off your JavaScript and seeing if you can navigate your Web site. Is all the content reachable?

Flash: Make sure your site can be read by a robot. If you're using Flash, make sure you're offering up alternative navigation.

Dynamic URLs: Difficult to read, lead to duplicate content, waste crawl bandwidth, split the link juice and are less likely to be crawled and indexed.

Best Practices:

• Create user friendly, human readable URLs
• 301 redirect dynamic URLs to static versions
• Limit the number of parameters
• Rewrite dynamic URLs through Yahoo! Site Explorer

He asks how many people use Site Explorer and their Dynamic URL Feature. Log in and authenticate your Web site. It allows you to remove parameters from URLs.

Duplicate Content

Consequences of duplicate content: Less effective crawl, less likely to attract links from duplicate pages.
Solutions to duplicate content: 301 duplicate content to the canonical version, disallow duplicate content in Robots.txt

Other Best Practices:

• Flatten your folder structure
• Redirect old pages to the corresponding new pages with 301/302
• Use keywords in URLs
• Use sub-domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove the file extension from the URL if you can
• Consistently use canonical URLS for internal linking
• Promote your critical content close to the home page

You can also get your content included through feed based crawling. You can provide feeds through their Sitemaps Protocol to tell the crawler were to find all the pages on your site, especially your deep content. Sharad recommends using all the Meta data supported by Sitemaps Protocol.

Do not exclude your CSS content in the Robots Exclusion Protocol because the engines want to see the layout of your page.

Search engines want your content. Break down those accessibility barriers and let them do their job.

Maile Ohye is up last.

Google wants to help users create better sites. If you have better sites, we all have a better Internet. Aw. She's going to tell us how to enhance your site at every stage of the pipeline. Maile talks like an infomercial.

Crawlable Architecture

Consider progressive enhancement. This means you don't just begin with Flash. You start with static HTML and then add the "fancy bonuses" like Flash and AJAX later. Then the fancy stuff becomes a complement to your Web site instead of your entire site.

She looks at a page/site that's rich in media with HTML content and navigation - the Dramatic Chipmunk video on YouTube. The video is in Flash, but there's descriptive content on the page (title, description, user generated content in the comments) and HTML navigation.

Consider sIFR for Flash

JavaScript detects if Flash is in installed.
With No Flash, it displays the regular text. With Flash on, you get the Flash.

If you do that the text must match the content viewed by enabled users. It must be accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Consider Hijax for AjAX

Format JavaScript with a static URL as well as a JavaScript function. She gives us a long URL and says that the search engines often ignore fragment (#f00=32) but respect parameter (?foo=32). I'm hoping that makes sense without you having to see the long URL.

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster Tools: They give crawl errors if you verify your site. In crawl errors, be sure that what you see is what you expect. They'll show URLs blocked by robots.txt, make sure that's what you want. They'll also tell you about time out errors and unreachable links. Use it to verify your link structure and that all your links are findable.

Promote your quality content. Set preferred domain to www or non-www. You don't want to run two versions of your Web site. [As a note, this doesn't always fix the problem. Be consistent in your linking and don't rely on Google to do your work for you.--Susan]

To reduce duplicate content, keep URLs as clean as possible, internally link to your preferred version and store visitor information in cookies then 301 to canonical version.

Use a cookie to set the affiliate ID and trackingID values.

Proper Use of Response Codes

Use 301s for permanent redirects.
Signals search engines to transfer the properties like link popularity to the target URL. This applies to situations like moving a site to a new domain and modifying the URL structure.

Anatomy of a Search Result

Create a unique, informative title. It acts as informative signal of the URLs contents to a search engine and user. You don't want your title to say "Untitled". She talks about how Webmaster Tool can help you locate Title tag issues.

Snippets: Provide the user more content about each search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your click-through.

Influence snippets with Meta Description. Meta Descriptions can be utilized by Google in search results. Meta keywords are of low priority.

Final thoughts from Maile:

• Verify Crawl errors as expected
• Creative descriptive titles, consider adding useful meta descriptions
• Submit site maps for your canonical URL
• View Webmaster Central blog posts

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

June 3, 2008

Organic Track: Bot Herding

Back from lunch and Rand Fishkin is moderating a star studded panel. We have Adam Audette (AudettaMedia), Hamlet Batista (Nemedia S.A.), Nathan Buggia (Live Search Webmaster Center), Priyank Garg (Yahoo Search), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Evan Roseman (Google) and Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts).

[Ooo, we're rocking the Tears for Fears. It's pretty sweet. SMX always pulls out the good stuff. I'm really loving the Organic room this time around. The first row is literally two feet from the stage. I could totally throw my mini bottle of water and hit Adam Audette square in the face. Not that I would. I really like Adam. Maybe I'll take out Rand instead?

Holy Jesus. I almost just kicked over the big projector that the speakers watch. Blogger Fail.]

Rand gets this whole show going. He says he's moderating. He's wearing a tie. I don't think I've ever seen Rand wear a tie. Up first is Michael Gray.

Michael says that when you first buy a house you're poor. Over time you make more money and can afford to air condition your house. But no matter how much money you have you'll never air condition your mail box because you have a better use for your money.

Similarly, you have a Web site. You don't have a lot of links. You don't have a lot of Page Rank. You're not going to send that PR to your Contact page because it's not a good use of your resources. You want to send your PR to the pages that make the most sense for you. You want to send it to the places that will give you the most sales and the most leads.

PageRank and link equity, how much do you have: Many Web sites, especially smaller or new Web sites, don't have a lot of PR. They have to use and maximize what little they have and direct it to the right places that make the most difference.

Deciding What to Sculpt Out

Who wants to rank for privacy policy, terms of use or contact us?

Locations: Unless you are multi-location business, put your address in the footer and sculpt out the Locations page.

Company Bios: Unless you are involved in reputation management scandal, sculpt them out.

Site-wide footer links, advertising stats, rates and legal pages.

How to Sculpt:

• Nofollow: Quick and easy, but may be a signal to search engines that an SEO or advanced webmaster is involved.
• JavaScript: Old school, relies on client side technology, currently bots don't crawl it but this may change in the future.
• Form pages, jump pages, redirect pages - More complex to implement and maintain. Search engines currently don't follow them but that may change

Be Consistent. If you're going to nofollow something, do it with all of your links and then do it in your robots.txt. Don't block them one way and then allow them in another. This will account for outside links and any spider or search engine quirks. He says that he's seen most benefits on mid-level sites where they sculpted out blocks of 20-50 non-conversion based pages.

Do it now or wait for a rainy day? He says do it now. If you have any critical or serious issues this can take a backseat. Otherwise, unless you have a large or very complex site, PageRank sculpting is a 1-2 day project at the most for any CMS or template based site. It's easier to get it right now than to get back and fix after you launch.

Adam Audette is up to give us 8 arguments against sculpting PageRank with nofollow. He used to do it but he's now starting to slow it down. They use it far, far less.

More Control: Have a mechanism at the link level to control spider behavior is good. However, we don't know enough. We don't know how much PR we have on a domain. We don't know how much we have on a page or how much a link takes off a page. We're attempting to control the flow of internal PR but we don't know how much we have. We don't know how much it fluctuates. It's imprecise. It's like using a precise surgical tool while blindfolded.

It's a Distraction: There are a lot of things we can do to make our sites better. Matt Cutts has said that sculpting with nofollow is a second order effect. It can also mask other issues - focus of a page, keyword dilution, user experience, etc.

Management Headaches: When you have a large site you may have many departments working on a page. What rules are in place? It's confusing. Why are 5 links nofollow'd on this page? How do you preserve it?

It's a Band-Aid: People are using it to try and address a symptom they're seeing on a site. They're not taking care of the problem.

Where's the User?: Think of a site with tons of PageRank feeding that into mediocre places, thereby raising those pages in the SERPs. Are we giving more power to high authority domains?

Open to Abuse: Every tool is open to abuse, but you can think of all kinds of creative ways to use nofollow. When will nofollow start being abused and how will the search engines react? Matt Cutts says it's okay, but there are good and bad ways to use a technique. He may look at your site and think you're using it in a bad way.

Too Focused on Search Engines: Advanced search engine optimization has always been about what's right for your users and what's right for search engines. Too much use of the nofollow puts too much focus on search (specifically on Google). Does this help your users? Would you do this if the search engines didn't exist?

There's No Standard: There are multiple definitions for nofollow and each engine may treat it differently. Nofollow started for blog comment spam. Then it went to paid links. Now it's to control your internal PR. What's it going to be next? It moves too much.

[Rand shares a detail but says you can't ask him how he knows it. He says 5 percent of pages on the Web currently have a nofollow'd link on them and 85+ percent are using it internally.]

Stephan Spencer is up.

Duplicate content is rampant on blogs. Herd bots to permalink URLs and lead in everywhere else. (Archives by date, category pages, tag pages, home page, etc). You can use optional excerpts to mitigate that a bit. [Whatever that means.] It requires you to revise your Main Index Template theme file.

Stephan says to include a signature link at bottom of your post/article. Link to original article/post permalink.

On ecommerce sites, duplicate content is rampant because of manufacturer-provided product descriptions, inconsistent order of query string parameters, guided navigation, pagination within categories, tracking parameters, etc. Selectively append tracking codes for humans with white hat cloaking or use JavaScript to append the codes.

Pagination not only creates many pages that share the same keyword theme, but it also creates very large categories with product listings not getting crawled. Thus lowered product page indexation. Do you herd bots through keyword-rich subcategory links or View All links or both? How to display numbered links? You have to test because your mileage will vary.

PageRank Leakage: If you're using Robots.txt Disallow, you're probably leaking PageRank. Robots.txt Disallow and Meta Roberts Noindex both accumulate and pass PageRank.

Stephan talks about the magic of regular expressions/pattern matching and I'm not even going to pretend that I followed any of it.

Some expressions I did manage to catch:

Mod_rewrite specifics
Proxy page using P flat
QSA flag is for when you don't want query string parameters dropped.
L flag saves you on server processing

Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use rewritemap

He talks about conditional redirects. It's way black hat. I'm covering my eyes.

Error Pages: Drop them out of the index by returning a 200 status code instead so that the spiders follow the links. Then include a Meta robots no-index so the error page itself doesn't get indexed. Or do a 301 redirect to something valuable and dynamically include a small error notice.

Hamlet Batista is up to talk about white hat cloaking.

Good vs. Bad cloaking is all about your intention. Always weigh the risks versus the rewards of cloaking. Ask permission - or just don't call it cloaking. Don't call it cloaking. Call it IP Delivery.

When is it practical to cloak?

The main idea of cloaking is about making more of your content accessible to the search engines. Parts of that can be because you're using a search unfriendly CMS, if you have content behind forms or if you're a rich media site. It can be that you're a membership site (free vs. paid). He's also going to talk about using it for site structure improvements, geolocation/IP delivery, and multivariate testing.

Practical Scenario 1: Proprietary Web site management systems that are not search-engine friendly.

Regular users see URLs with many dynamic parameters, but the search engines see friendly URLs. Your users will see URLs with session IDs, but with simple cloaking the search engines see URLs without session IDs. Your users will see URLs with canonicalization issues. The search engines see URLs with consistent naming convention. Your users see missing Titles and Meta Descriptions. The search engines see automatically generated tiles and Meta Descriptions.

Practical Scenario 2: Sites built in Flash, Silverlight or any other rich media technology.

With cloaking, you can give users a completely Flash site and the search engines will see a text representation of the graphical, motion and audio elements.

Practical Scenario 3: Membership sites.

Search users see a snippet of premium content on the SERPs and when they land on the site they are faced with a reg form. Members see the same content the search engine spiders see.

Practical Scenario 4: Sites requiring massive site structure changes to improve index penetration.

Regular users follow the structure designed for ease of navigation. Search engine robots follow a link structure designed for ease of crawling and deeper index penetration of the most important content.

Practical Scenario 5: Geotargeting

Practical Scenario 6: Split testing organic search landing pages.

How do we cloak? In order to cloak you have to ID the robot and then deliver the content. You can do that via a few methods:

• Robot detection by HTTP cookie test.
• Robot detection by IP address
• Robot detection by double DNS check
• Robot detection by visitor behavior

Hamlet runs out of time and Rand nearly yanks him off the stage. Poor Hamlet. He didn't get to finish his presentation, but Rand was just doing this job.

Priyank Garg is up.

Robot Exclusion Protocol: Allows publishers to tell Robots access permissions for their content.

Robots.txt: Introduced in '90s. Defacto standard followed by all major search engines. Allow site level directives for access to content.

META Tags: Page level tags. Allow finer controls.

What is the standard? Does everyone work the same? Priyank says the engines are working together to make standards across all engines. The engines all support page level tags like HTML Meta, noindex, nofollow, nosnipper, no archive, noopd.

They want to have all the engines come out with this at the same time so there is no confusion.

In the Q&A, Evan Roseman says they don't view uses of nofollow as some type of "flag" for SEOs. They're standard of nofollow has not changed over the years. People have simply begun using it in new ways.

Nathan Buggia says a nofollow'd link is viewed as any other link. MSN Live does not support nofollow. [Update: Nathan retracts his statement later on, much to the disappointment of bloggers everywhere.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0)

SMX Advanced Opening Keynote: Kevin Johnson - Microsoft

Hey kids, it's time to kick off another SMX. This time we not only have bagels and orange juice but there are power outlets in the front row. It's like blogger heaven! Getting us started will be Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platform & Services Division.

Before Kevin starts, Danny is going to give us a quick talk. He calls it the "hangover break". He's wearing crazy-colored socks and thanking people. Danny says he got Microsoft a little gift - Yahoo is waiting out back. Hee! Danny's now making fun of the bloggers. He calls out me and Tamar and Marty. Okay, time for the good stuff.

Kevin says that Microsoft is focused on four core businesses - desktop, enterprise business, the consumer electronics business and the online business.

At the center of online is the concept of the advertising platform. You think of search and display and the end-to-end platform. When you look at the ad platform, it's about scale economics: The more inventory you get, the better it's able to deliver. It's a software problem. Microsoft believes they can bring value to the ad area because it's about software and that's something Microsoft knows about. It's about what ads to serve, how to improve the buy/sell process, creating software that provides workflow and manages massive amounts of data. It's involves a significant investment in capital. When you look at the industry, they believe it will be better served when there are N numbers of players and N is greater than one (hee). They're looking to invest and to provide choice for advertisers, publishers and consumers.

They hope that through their investments, they'll be able to play a significant role in creating choice. They think they have some unique value to bring.

Danny: Is there a danger that Google becomes so entrenched that you can't pull away share?

Google is already entrenched. When you have a competitor like that you have to focus on disruptive ways to change the paradigm. That can be in the user experience, in the business model, in the distribution, etc. Their focus is how they can continue to innovate on the broad horizontal relevance of search. They're going to amplify the areas where they look at verticals. They want to connect buyers and sellers. It's a long-term investment.

Years ago they said they were going to get into the process of building servers, and they were told they'd never do it because they were a software company. People joke that Microsoft NT stood for Nice Try. When they look online, they're going to take the same long term approach. They're going to be thoughtful and recognize that they have an entrenched player. They're going to deliver on innovation and grow their share and value to the market.

Danny: What is the most innovative and disruptive thing Microsoft has done?

Improvements in image search, video search, the integration of Tell Me on mobile, Farecast, etc. They're changing the way people go from individual queries to a task. There are a lot of areas they can point to for innovative. With Cashback, they're trying to change the business model. They want to reward consumers for shopping and do it in a way that's good for the merchant and the advertiser. They're trying to differentiate the product in a way that benefits advertisers.

Danny asks about the Cashback program. Have you had any results in where it's going yet?

The team looks at it every day. They're monitoring it and watching traffic and making sure that everything is working effectively. They're on top of that on a real-time basis. Over a year ago, they had this concept that said search is about connecting the buyers with sellers. In the process you ask why the middle man keeps all the money. They're looking for a way to reward users for their actions. The concept of Cashback has been around for a year. A year ago they tested the concept of consumer loyalty in search. They launched Live Search Club and saw a 2 or 3 points of share increase in a 60 day period. That led to them acquiring JellyFish. They think Cashback is one element of changing the business model.

[It concerns me how much hope they're putting into Cashback. It's not going anywhere.]

Danny: Are there any other kinds of loyalty programs we're likely to see?

You'll see loyal among three verticals - Entertainment, Commercial Intent, Reference - and on the broad horizontal. They're focusing on all of those. The first wave that they're going to amplify is Commercial Intent. Over the next year you'll see much more focus on that. Cashback is a key pillar. As they learn, you'll see that evolve. He expects to see Cashback evolve over a lot of new loyalty programs.

Danny: What's the biggest obstacle to getting people to use your search product?

You have to recognize that the brand Google is a very strong brand. When users think of Google, they think of search. When you have an entrenched competitor you need to make your brand and your offering stand for something. They need to focus more on distribution. This week they announced their distribution deal with HP. As users try it, that user experience starts to create a brand image. Then you have to do the marketing that reinforces that brand image or brand perception.

Danny: What's your top advantage?

They have great engineering resources. They have the opportunity to take the long term perspective. They're going to deliver innovation in a way that is impactful for the consumer. By doing that they think when consumers think of product search or travel search, they think they should use them. They recognize that commercial intent queries make up 30 percent of the search queries but it makes up 80 percent of the revenue.

Danny: Google's greatest advantage is their brand. What's their weakness?

User experience hasn't changed much. Any time you have some legacy experience, there's some risk of change. That's their Achilles heel. He wants Microsoft to think out of the box and do new things. They have teams constantly trying different ideas. They're constantly measuring. He thinks there's a new paradigm that users will wants and embrace, but it's up to them to deliver.

[I love how Microsoft is suddenly the "underdog" and Google is the one stuck in its corporate ways.]

Danny: Why not go back to the MSN brand? People don't seem to like Live.

Their marketing teams are focusing on the brand problem. They can deal with it more now that they've backed away from Yahoo. He acknowledges that they need to get that fixed. He asks Danny for suggestions. Heh.

Danny: In terms of the fixing, does fix mean change or build or what?

Fix means fix. If that means you have to change it, then change it. If that means build it, then build it. Fix means fix.

Danny tries to get some dirt on the Yahoo acquisition but Kevin's not giving him any. It's the same spiel we've been hearing for weeks. They made a bid, hoped Yahoo would find it fair, but now they're moving on. They'll see where the dialogue leads.

Danny: Back to distribution: the HP deal was a big win. What other places are you looking to make changes?

You think of distribution broadly. There are a variety of ways you can get distribution. They're going to work the full range. Some ways are better than others. It's a combination of distribution and good marketing. To get good marketing, you have to make your brand stand for something.

Danny: Do you think search is being over-credited for conversions happening online?

Search provides great line of sight metrics and analytics for the advertisers. What they're trying to do with the Atlas institute is engagement mapping. They want to see how display and rich media ads are performing to provide advertisers the end-to-end view they need to balance their media mix. Everyone is interested in how they're driving conversions. It also provides tools for search marketers to look at the broad set of investments that really drive what they want.

Danny: If search is a long term gain, one of the things I'd give Google credit for is Google Books. Then in September you rolled out Microsoft Books and Academic [Danny means Live Search Books--Susan] and then you took it away

It's not gone. We've scanned millions of journal articles and books. We're going to keep doing that. What we've done is say because of the advanced tools, it's more efficient to have first party publishers doing that scanning themselves. Users are still going to be able to find them. We're putting the publishers in control of their content. We'll be there to help them with tools. The industry is maturing.

Danny was upset with Google's DoubleClick acquisition, but Microsoft also has its own search company. Shouldn't you do what Google did and split them off?

When we acquired aQuanitve it also included Avenue A | Razorfish. They're operating it at arm's length. The ad platform is there to serve publishers and it's there to serve advertisers. They think running those things in conjunction help them to run their ad platform better.

Danny: What's Microsoft's tagline?

In the online world we're investing to create a world class ad platform. They're investing in that in a way that provides the industry choice.

Danny says that's not a tagline. In 4 or 5 words, what is Microsoft about?

They're a company that believes in software plus services.

Danny: How do you define success?'

Getting more and more publishers and more and more inventory. They've had success in that but it's been in things other than search. They really need to increase search. To him success is if they can carve out the differentiation and make the brand stand for something related to commercial intent.

Question and Answer

What improvements are going to made to adCenter? Can we get an offline editor?

Last September, he spent a week in NY visiting search marketers. The feedback fell into buckets - make your tools easier, it takes too long to get keywords into the system and more inventory/share of search. That was the feedback. With adCenter, they've continued to make improvements. This week they'll announce an adCenter offline tool. That's just one step in the process. Visit the Microsoft booth for an invitation to the editor.

When I think of search I think of Microsoft as The Man and Google as a way to get at The Man, how do you plan to overcome that perception?

Google's entrenched. In any industry, choice is good. At the end of the day you have to deliver a great product. If you do that, users will use your product. They have to grow their market share and they'll do that by innovating.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

SEO Headlines

The Belgians Are Back Bothering Google!

I received quite a treat this morning when I was listening to the DailySearchCast and heard Danny mention that those funny Belgians are back in the spotlight and causing trouble for Google. You may remember that I've been rather vocal about how stupid I find this whole situation to be. If you don't remember, here's the breakdown: A group of Belgian newspapers sued Google for copyright infringement because they (the Belgians) were too lazy to use a robots.txt file, which landed their articles in Google News. They didn't seem to like that. In some crazy universe where fair use does not exist, the Belgians actually won their lawsuit and Google had to place a ridiculous note on their home page and remove the content. And now the Belgians are back!

Since we last heard from them, Google appealed the judgment and tried to negotiate with the Belgian newspapers outside of court. Sadly, the negotiations weren't going as quickly as the newspapers would have liked and Google began referencing the papers again. Now the Belgian newspapers are asking the courts to award them $77 million in damages. Seventy-seven million dollars!

I'm sorry, but I'm still inclined to file this away as the Most Ridiculous Lawsuit Ever. I know we have commenters who like to come and correct me each time I mention the Belgians and their idiocy, but I haven't been swayed. And this new twist to the story just adds to its lunacy. As Danny joked on the SearchCast this morning, I doubt that the Belgian newspapers have made a combined $77 million since Google News was born, so that seems a bit hard to claim that Google has cost them that much. We'll see what happens. All I know is that Google vs. The Crazy Belgians are what good blog entries are made of.

CW: Watch This Show Online, That One Offline

In stupid company news, after taking Gossip Girl offline due to too many viewers, the CW is now looking to create "cwingers". What in God's name is a cwinger? It's an ad-supported video clip that lives half online/half offline. Basically, viewers will get to see a short video inside their favorite CW show, and then they'll have to go online to get the next installment before the conclusion airs on TV. [...huh? --Susan] It's three parts. The first airs on television, the second airs on the Internet and the third airs on television. See how confusing?

Um, hi, as a loyal CW television, you're completely confusing me. What do you want me to do? How do you want me to consume your programming?

The CW is sending a mixed message with the way they're handling online video. You either embrace it or you don't. I don't think you can pull your flagship show offline one week, and then decide to create a whole new "cwinger" format the next. Maybe I'm wrong. The CW has been pretty nonconventional with the way they've done programming in the past, so it may just work.

Horrible name aside (Cwingers? Is this a child porn ring?), I think the CW is going to confuse viewers. You're telling them not to watch X online but to remember to tune into Y and Z so they can see how the story unfolds? Pick a brand message and stick with it.

Yahoo Will Soon Announce A Deal With...Someone

BusinessWeek says that amidst pressure from shareholders, Yahoo will work out a deal with Microsoft...or Google. Yup, the deal is so close that Yahoo doesn't even know who it will be with yet. Either way, BusinessWeek says that "something" will definitely happen soon. Right. Like my head will explode from all the baseless speculation.

Oh, the stupidity headache.

Fun Finds

Andy Beal gives us all a reminder that SEM Scholarship entries will start appearing Marketing Pilgrim today, so make sure you keep your eyes open for the next big SEO/SEM superstar.

Wired's founding editor Louis Rossetto writes a letter to his sons and recalls the dawn of the digital revolution.

Do WiFi allergies exist? [No. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/28/08 at 2:04 PM | Comments (1)

March 20, 2008

OldTimers On Search

Kevin Ryan is stalking me and moderating the OldTimers On Search panel with speakers Rob Graham (Laredo Group), Kevin Lee (Didit), Doron Wesly (Millward Brown Inc) and Stephen DiMarco (Complete). For serious. I have never seen Kevin Ryan as much as I have this week. Not that I’m complaining. Kevin makes me laugh.

Kevin says it’s hard to set up a session like this because he’s known all the speakers for many years. The OldTimers group was started about 10 years ago and it was a group of people who were “social outcasts” in their respective industries and they were old then. One of the requirements was that you had to live in your parent’s basement. It was started as a discussion group for people brave enough to get into the interactive space when it was not popular and when we were not talking about “googling” things. Basically, they were doing this when nobody else was. Today’s panelists are some of the founding fathers of the industry as we know it today. They’re going to talk about search as a brand health metric.

Rob Graham is up first.

We’re often focus on existing brands. We don’t think about “what if I come up with a great idea – how do I test if it would be successful in the market?” He suggests using search in that way.

How do we know what we know about your brands, about our customers, about how our customers perceive the appeal of our brands, and how our brands should be position to achieve the greatest life in brand awareness?

Ask yourself if marketing research asks the right questions. Rob was once questions about salad dressing. They asked him: Do you like this product? Would you consider buying this product in the future? Would you be willing to recommend this brand to your family or friends?

In most cases, the answer is probably “sure”. These questions don’t tell you much. What they should have asked was:

• How often do you eat salad?
• What factors would make you choose this brand over others?
• Would you be willing to go out of your way to find this brand?
• If you intend to buy this product in the future, where would you look for it?
• How important is salad dressing to you?
• Does this dress make me look fat?

They observed consumer behaves very differently from the unobserved consumer. Consumers often tell marketers what it is they think they want to hear. Sometimes the market research doesn’t reveal real consumer intention. People try to be polite.
What marketing needs to think about when introducing new brands: Will my product find an audience? Do I have the right distribution? Will I sell enough?

It’s never cheap to launch a new product or service. Before you do consider the costs involved like – Product Design/ Marketing/ Web Site Development, Distribution, and Staffing.

Use search as a market research tool. Create a report or white paper which addresses the solution you’re selling. Then, create a simple landing page which offers a free copy of the report. Tweak the keywords and ads for the campaign to optimize results. Run the campaign until you have enough data to know if it will be successful.

Effective Market Research:

Hit what you’re aiming at: Know exactly how to position your brand across media. Generate a refined list of keywords to use with search and other campaigns.

Doron Wesley is next. Kevin says he’s one of the most interesting people he’s ever met and to ignore those photos of Doron feeding Kevin a cherry that ended up on Facebook. All right then.

Media weight & Search queries:

What is the interaction between search and traditional advertising? Is that helping our brand health metrics?

1. Search volumes rise immediately after the start of a print campaign.
2. Search volume remains higher after TV campaigns, when the print campaign is continued.

They wanted to ask people what they were thinking as they went through a search engine. However, then they were told that was a bad idea. Don’t interrupt a person when they’re searching. They couldn’t put a survey between the query and the site visitation. What they did was look at the brand health metrics for these companies. They looked for the search volume in the market place. In some cases, it does move emotional attributes. In some cases it opens up considerations.

If a person is researching the new BMW and they don’t have Audi at all in their mind, Audi can change that by having a strong search presence and impacting users consideration set.

We know search does branding and drives traffic; we need to take into account what our objection is and what the cost is to getting to that objective.

Stephen is next to talk a bit about himself. He’s a new guy in the OldTimers. He says I can only blog about the “hazing” process they go through if I agree to go through it myself. I politely tell him I’ll pass.

Kevin Lee now gets to talk about himself. He writes a weekly column for ClickZ. He’s written something like 280 columns.

Kevin talks about the idea of branding and says it was invented by ad agencies. They needed to create something that hypothetical aligned with sales. They came up with these concepts of brand metrics and then they did a lot of work to try and correlate those metrics to sales. Things like brand and message associations.

Internet brands build brands but not necessarily favorable ones. Brand metrics and sales don’t always go together. Brand awareness isn’t always a good thing. Ask Elliot Spitzer. One thing that many brand marketers forget is that it’s not just the SERP that creates brand lift. It’s engagement on the site that moves the needle much further. That’s what influences consumers to get closer to the holy grail of a sale. When you think about branding, don’t just think about the SERP. Think more about the SERP only being stage one. Consider the post-click engagement.

People search because they were stimulated to search. Often it’s media that stimulates them.

Doron calls out Kevin for saying that branding doesn’t work and then saying that branding is what stimulates people to search. He’s contradicting himself.

Kevin tries to clarify and says that branding metrics don’t work alone. That’s what he meant.

Now they’re fighting over brands of diapers. When Kevin had his daughter, he had to decide on Huggies, Pampers or No Frills. He said he knew he definitely wasn’t going to go with No Frills (hee, aw). Doron says that proves brands matter because Kevin thought that Huggies or Pampers would be better for his daughter.

Aw, I like that we’re talking about babies.

Kevin stops the madness. Are we seeing traffic start to decline or seeing people pulling back on money in the search category?

Steven says it's category specific.

Doron says advertisers are rethinking Q2 and Q3 plans. They are spending less. He says he can attest to what Compete has seen and that the threat of a recession is definitely changing behavior.

Kevin says the media dollars are driving search activity and that’s at the core of any brand discussion. Are we going to see the bottom fall out of the business because of this pullback?

Rob says they’re seeing that search as an ad medium is still increasing in numbers. The cost of admission is low. People can get in without a huge amount of money. If advertisers are pulling out because their segments aren’t being met, that just opens the door for other advertisers to get in the game. In any market, there are opportunities on either slide of the swing. As consumers, we’re not going to stop searching.

Kevin says we’re now seeing SERP becoming destinations. How many people have run brand-only search initiatives? Not many people raised their hands.

Don’t put search in a bucket. You can’t say if people don’t click that it doesn’t work. That’s short-sighted.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

Morning Keynote: Andrew Tomkins

It’s starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day with all these early morning keynotes, isn’t it? Another keynote. Another cup of coffee. Another mysterious headache that feels like there are oompa loompas dancing on my head.

I’m actually curious to see what the turnout will be for this one. I’m pretty sure half of the attendees are still stumbling to make their way home from SearchBash. I’m also curious why there is loud, angry music on at 8:30am when half the crowd is surely hung over. That just seems mean.

Okay, we’re starting.

Kevin Ryan says that Mike Grehan called Andrew the smartest guy in the business. He understands the world of search and everything in it. He can also explain it to dumb people like us.

Andrew wants to walkthrough where he sees search going. What are some of the trends in the industry? He’s going to give us a detailed look. That means lots of typing. Yey.

The Internet has firmly moved from a curiosity to a substrate for life activity. Content is growing, changing, diversifying, and fragmenting, with search evolving in response. Value migrating to ecosystem. Semantics of content unlock the value of the ecosystem.

Getting Things Done

No one really goes online to search. It’s just a tool that they use to do what they really want to do.

For example: I want to book a vacation in Tuscany. I start off by going to Google, which leads me to Yahoo Farechase. I find a site specific to Tuscany. I order a rental car. I’m weeding my way in and out of search. I’m going for information and for services.

I go to Tuscany and come back. I loved the vacation and want to make that sweet Italian coffee at home. I search for how to make great espresso at home. I find an enthusiast site. I go there and come across a really detailed information article. I’m moving from my broad landscape into specific details. I decide I want that machine. I get pricing information and then I look for a merchant. My search helps me find one.

This process can take months or years.

Dawn of search: Navigational queries and pockets of information

Today: Increasing migration of content online. New forms of media only available online. Infrastructure for payments and reputations sufficient for many years.

Things to Notice:

• Long running users’ goals
• Search as a hub – start there, return for resource discovery and at task boundaries, traverse Web broadly to complete task
• Web services integrated into task

Content Growth

Search is going to be less about integrating social and being entertaining, and more about hardcore productivity. Going online to get things done that you need to get done. The Internet is for the important life stuff.

Content Trends:

Published content – 3-4 GB produced every day
Professional Web content -- ~2GB a day
User Generated Content – 8-10 GB a day
Private Text Content -- ~3 TB a day
Upper bound on typed content -- ~700 TB

Metadata Trends

Anchor text – 100 MB of metadata produced per day
Tags – 40 MG a day
Page views – 180 GB a day
Reviews – Around 10 MB a day

Content Complexity

Consumption is fragmented. Nobody owns more than 10 percent of the Web’s page views. No single place will own all the content. Best of breed processing will operate on the Web version. Value transitions to ecosystem.

Content consumption is fragmented across users. They did a study of the interests people self-defined themselves in the context of LiveJournal broken out by ages. The 1 to 3 LJ users (people who create blogs for their baby/pet) are interested in treats, catnip, daddy, mommy, playing, etc. The greater than 57 demographic is interested in death, cheese and photography. Heh.

The thing that stood out in the study was that you can be cohesive within your demographic group and really experience that as the universe without needing to be bombarded by the larger set of topics going on out there.

Content access is fragmenting: He looks at Facebook. We’re not used to dealing with access control on that level. We’re used to info either being private or public. Facebook gives us more segments through networks.

Content itself is changing. It used to be that you go to a page, you open it open, you parse it and you index it. Now, Web pages are increasingly based on AJAX. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. It’s all little fragments of XTML. Crawling it is a hard thing to think about.

The Search Interface

We saw very few changes in search through 2005. Now we’re entering a period of massive change to handle more complex content. Rich media, aggregation, simple task analysis, etc. Moving beyond the stateless query/response paradigm because users need it. Personalize theory.

Rich Media and Search Assistance

In Yahoo, you type in “the game plan” and you get all sorts of neat stuff. You get the Search Assist player, a movie shortcut (shows task level ambiguity – what do they want to know?), etc.

Andrew show’s how Google solves simple task-focused queries like giving out flight times and definitions. Shows Microsoft’s product search results.

Open Ecosystems

Structured database power a vast majority of pages on the Web – Certainly ecommerce catalogs but also UGC. Content owners open to exposing structure, but don’t see how and why. Micro-formats adoption at an all time high, yet it produces much more than is consumed.

Experiments with “pure” structure data aggregation have met with limited success.

The data Web needs a killer app.

What we have announced:

• The Killer App is search
• Wide-ranging support for semantic Web standards
• Vocabulary to surface structure and semantics
• Community tools to evolve standards and vocabulary.

Search as the Killer App: Publishers and search engines are going to collaborate together. The users will see a richer search experience and accomplish their tasks faster and more effectively.

Andrew shows some search results of the future. They basically look very blended.

The industry needs comprehensive support for emerging Web standards. That includes:

Microformats: hCard, hEvent, hReview, hAtom and more as they get adopted

RDFa and eRDF makeup

Open Search

Atom/RSS Feeds

After a site does this, there will be richer information about them in the search engines.

Yahoo Open Search does not modify rankings. Richer abstracts may provide more information to users and draw higher quality/quantity of clicks. They want rich abstracts that give users a better experience.

The Whole Story:

User needs are becoming more complex. Content is growing, change and diversifying. Search is responding by increasing its sophistication.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/20/08 at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Afternoon Keynote: Jason Calacanis

Take a deep breathe. You know this is going to be good. Jason Calacanis is giving the afternoon keynote at SES NY, which is an SEO conference. Do I even need to say anything? I’m just hoping no one gets shot. Or if they do, they don’t bleed on me.

[Jason just walked by and said I have to be nice to him in my recap. Why do people always ask me to be nice? Am I really that mean? I have such an innocent face.]

Kevin introduces Jason and asks everyone to keep it PG. Heh.

Jason starts by clearing the air. A few years ago he was here for SES San Jose talking about Weblogs Inc and someone asked him if he did SEO. He said they didn’t; they build sites and make good content and it ranks well. He says he called search engine optimization bullshit and then everyone in the audience gasped. That’s when he realized there was an SEO industry (hee). He thinks what’s changed is the definition of what is SEO, it’s becoming clearer.

Search engine optimization used to mean gaming your way to the top of the engines, because that’s what you heard from the cold callers. Since his fatal comment, Jason has gotten a big education about what search engine optimization really is from people like Bruce Clay (holla!), Michael Gray and Neil Patel. He knows SEO is about making sites that help people and having a good structure. That’s when Jason learned the difference between search engine optimization and blackhat SEO. He thinks blackhat SEO is BS and a waste of time. He likes building long term value. He thinks the whitehat SEO is really important. In some ways, he is an SEO. He’s a whitehat SEO. If SEO is defined as building a site that helps people, that’s what he is.

Hear that? Jason Calacanis is an SEO.

Mahalo was launched on May 30, 2007. The first question he got was, “isn’t this just DMOZ?” It does look a lot like Yahoo and DMOZ; it has that directory-like feel. Yahoo and DMOZ failed. You have to ask yourself: why did it fail? Why doesn’t it exist anymore? Yahoo Directory failed because they sold it out. DMOZ failed because it was neglected by its owner. But they were both amazing in their own time.

How is Mahalo going to Scale?

It will scale with a distributed work force. In June, they launched the Mahalo Greenhouse to let people work from home to create search results. They have 400 people doing it from home currently. It’s the largest distributed work force on the planet behind Wikipedia and (probably) About.com. They’re at 40,000 pages right now. It can scale. In theory, it shouldn’t. In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but it does.

How are you going to keep it up to date?

Having seen Delicious and StumbleUpon use site owners and people with a vested interest, he knows people will tell them when they make a mistake. That’s why they launched Mahalo Social, which is basically like Delicious. It dramatically lowers his cost of keeping the pages updated. They’re building a trust world.

The engines created the SEO industry so they didn’t have to talk to site owners. If you have a problem, talk to them. The SEOs are the intermediary. The Mahalo discussion boards are kind of the same thing. It allows people to have a discussion in a public forum about something they don’t like.

Jason talks about the Mahalo Toolbar/Mahalo Share and how it helps SMOs. He stumbles trying to figure out what SMO stands for and it’s actually kind of cute. See, Jason’s really not a jerk. He’s just like us, getting confused by oddball industry acronyms!

Where is all this going?

How we (re)search today:

We use machines, experts, our friends and the wisdom of crowds. He’s shows the audience how he’s using the social graph to connect users and information. That’s the future of search. It’s not just machines or the wisdom of the crowds. It’s all of those things plus the social graph. It’s creating semantic relationships between people and objects. The objects are the SERPs. They define states between people and objects. What is the state between you and a book? You could have read it, are wanting to read it, are reading it now. The new PageRrank is knowing if you can trust people through their behaviors. If you can, then you can let them contribute more to your site.

The new MyMahalo will make social graph features more prominent on the Mahalo search results. Page will show pictures of friends that have shown an interest in a specific topic. Reviews will be imported directly onto the page (with user permission). It’s giving users the chance to leverage all of their data into one spot.

One More Thing:

Not everyone wants to give up Google or Yahoo. If you’re doing a search on Google and you have the Mahalo toolbar, they’ll syndicate out some of their content so you can see it in your Google result. They don’t want you to give up your experience on Google.

Question & Answer

Can you define what you think an SEO does?

Jason: My perception has changed radically. The SEOs I’ve met are outsiders in the technology industry. You have this elite group (Digg, Yahoo, Microsoft) and then you have your SEOs and site owners. He’s found that the SEO folks are some of the smartest hustlers, get it done kind of people. (He means hustler in a good sense of the word.) Like Jay-Z (hee!). His mom was a nurse and his dad was a bartender (Jason’s, not Jay-Z’s). He worked his way up. He thinks SEOs are just like that. A lot of them are stuck in short term think. They want to make some money today, but they may be spinning their wheels a little bit. By the time you get a page ranked and you make 10K off affiliate links in a weekend, you basically expended all this energy and you maybe could have built the next Engadget. He thinks maybe they’re more into the gaming then they are of creating something of quality. SEOs are really intelligent people. The blackhats are polluting the Web and that makes it bad for all of us. Then consumers don’t trust the Internet.

Kevin: My experience with the blackhats is different. I tend to try not to piss them off. There’s an element there of let's think a little bit more altruistically. You gotta take it in order to get it, but maybe we could contribute a little bit more.

Jason: Just because you can take the number one spot doesn’t mean you should do it or that it’s right.

You tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and I was caught by an example where the Mahalo listings were supplanting paid listings (via the Mahalo Toolbar).

Jason: When the Web page reaches the person’s desktop, it's theirs to do what they please with. If people want to put up ad blockers, that’s their right to do it. If people want to put Mahalo on their page, I’m okay with that. If Google says they have a problem with that, we’ll change it. He doesn’t have a problem with people remixing in the privacy of their own home. He doesn’t think Google will complain.

Is this your model now: The more people get upset at you, the more links you get to your site?

Jason: Are we talking about linkbaiting? What is that?

Kevin: You say something obnoxious and 500 people link to you and it’s basically just a small group of people who are big fans of themselves. (Kevin, 1; Linkbaiters, 0)

Jason: You can only take linkbaiting so far. I like to have a good time but even I know when to call it a day. I don’t want to be at war with the search engine optimization industry. He’s more than willing to evolve the discussions. You can link bait a couple of times until people figure out you’re just schmuck. You get the reputation you deserve over time. You just need to be authentic and real. Don’t make linkbaiting your strategy. He’s turned it on his head. He’s made it affection-baiting. You have to say nice things about him in order to get him to link to them. People should be nice to people.

If you were an online marketer, how would you promote your content?

Jason: The best way to market is to have a great product. Make products that speak for themselves. Then you have to authentically insert yourself into conversations. If you want to engage someone, you write a comment on their blog about something that has nothing to do with you. If people add Jason on Twitter, he tries to go to their site, checks it out and then sends that person a message. Products without human beings behind them will never do as well as companies without them. People don’t want products with no personality behind them. Make yourself available.

Is there a risk for being overexposed?

Jason says he’s the first to admit that he’s overexposed. He has his cell phone number on his presentation slides. A stalker showed up last week at the office.

Kevin says yeah, keep leaving your cell number on your slides. Hee!

What about the long tail? Most searches have never been seen before. What about that?

Jason doesn’t believe that one solution is going to solve the search problem. He thinks it’s going to be a blend of techniques. If you’re looking for the pizza place around the corner or the girl you staked in college, Google is the way to go. But if you’re looking for info on Paris, that’s where human editing comes in handy. Sometimes you need a hybrid and there are those too. The person who will win big and create the next Google is the person who finds out how to blend these different disciples to create a single product. Users do not care how pages are built. They just care if the result is good.

[Jason breaks into a strong NY accent that is…well, it’s horrible considering he’s actually from NY. It’s like movie gangster.]

How do you categorize the traffic relationship you have with the other search sites?

Jason thinks that there are going to be a series of services that are dependant on search engines and some portion of them will be able to convert that traffic into direct traffic. Right now they get a majority of their traffic for search engines. Mahalo is a content company. They’re like Wikipedia or About.com. If they do good original content and they rank us, great. If not, we’re in it for the long term.

Can you explain why you chose not to implement canonical redirect?

He wanted to have URLs that you could type mahalo.com/keyboard. It’s easier for people to remember. It’s a personal preference.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 1:09 PM | Comments (1)

Top Search Trends

Hey, hey, happy people. Lunch is over and it’s time to learn about the Top Search Trends. Speaking we have Heather Dougherty (Hitwise), Jeremy Crane (Compete) and Roger Barnette (SearchIgnite). I had a brownie for lunch. It tasted like rainbows and sunshine.

Kevin is making jokes about the SES box lunches and no one is laughing. It’s awkward. He’s dying up there. I giggle at his expense. Affectionately, of course. Who doesn’t love Kevin Ryan?

[20 minutes later: Speaking of lunch – Did anyone have the tuna salad and is now suddenly feeling sick? I’m not trying to cause an epidemic, just asking. I’m not feeling so hot.]

Heather Dougherty is up first.

She works for HitWise and all of their data has been collected by studying 10 million Internet users. That’s a lot.

Google and Yahoo continue to capture the majority of the share of searches – 88 percent combined. Together the four top engines account for 98 percent of the search market share. There hasn’t been much shift compared to last year. Interesting is that time spent on Google has also increased. I noticed from the chart that Ask.com users spend the second most time on site, beating out Yahoo and Microsoft.

How many people are returning to the sites over a 30 day period? Almost 94 percent of Google users return. It’s about 89 percent for Yahoo, 77-79 percent in MSN and mid 70s for Ask.

Besides reach, there needs to be a way to differentiate the search engines by specific objective. They use Mosaic to get segmentation. From there, they compare how the segments translate into the audience of the search engine.

Heather whips out a chart that shows that the majority of Ask.com users are, in fact, female. Which means that if Barry Diller really is turning Ask into a “search engine for married woman” that they would be going after their core market. Whatever. I hate him.

The ubiquity of search behavior drives frequent return visits, creating creatures of habit.

Shopping and Entertainment categories currently benefit most from search traffic, but there is little reliance on specific categories to drive referrals. Using segmentations based upon behavior can help differentiate between the search engines beyond reach.

Jeremy Crane is up to talk about the state of search.

Seven out of ten Web search queries performed in the US are on Google. Ask is the only other engine with year-over-year market share gains.

What about that second click through?

Yahoo searches result in a search referral to another Web site more often than the other major engines. Ask searches are the least likely to result in a referral.

Average search fulfillment: 65 percent for Google, 75 percent Yahoo, 61 percent MSN and 12 percent Ask. Ouch, Ask.

Percentages of Web search queries that result in a referral to another page in the search property domain:

Google – 11 percent
Yahoo – 17 percent
MSN – 5 percent
Ask – 29 percent

The slow death of the 10 blue links: We’re seeing this evolution of the search results page, what it looks like and how people interact with it.

Ask 3D made the biggest impact with blended search. The rollout of blended search has yet to have a major impact on the top 3 engines but the story is different for Ask. The amount of people clicking off an Ask results page plummeted. Shows Ask keeping people in their own domain.

Ask is all about the ladies, or is it?

Among major search engine properties, Ask has the highest concentration of women and Family Oriented users – 55 percent (I love that Google has 51 percent, yet Ask’s bar is about twice the size. Way to not scale things to make them more dramatic.).

Kevin asks the panelists if it’s smart for Ask to target women. Kevin says he’s found that it’s not wise to tell women to do anything. Heh. Heather chimes in that not all women are alike.

Last but not least is Roger Barnette.

Marketer Trends

Marketers are spending more money in paid search in Q1. Same advertiser media spend is up 43 percent. Paid clicks are up 47.2 percent.

Search engine market share is basically flat and has been over the past year with slight gains for Yahoo.

User Trends

On the user side, impressions are up dramatically. Advertisers’ ads are being seen substantially more than they were a year ago. Google is up 60 percent year over year.

Cause for concern: Click through rates declined 18 percent in Q1 and conversion rates have also dropped.

User Engagement: Users are getting smarter and searching. The average number of clicks it takes to lead to a client transaction has gone down 1.43 percent. The average keyword length has declined 6.8 percent to 15.46 percent.

Industry Trends

• Flight to quality in uncertain economic times.
• Beginning of momentum towards blending of search and display campaigns
• Auction media platforms beginning to move beyond paid search in earnest.
• Marketing demand for better cross-channel marketing attribution measurement.

Okay, that was a whole lot of stats.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/19/08 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2008

Orion Panel: Universal Search

Did you have a good lunch? I had a granola bar. No, I’m not bitter about it.

Time for another Orion Panel. This time the subject is Universal Search. Speakers John Battelle (Federated Media), James Lamberti (comScore), Lyndsay Menzies (bigmouthmedia), and Jack Menzel (Google) will debate the issue with Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan moderating. I should also mention that we’re all sitting at round lunch tables. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Kevin asks for feedback on the lunch and gets none. Heh. I’d say something but I haven’t yet had an SES box lunch. I’m sure they are delicious. And don’t at all taste like cardboard.

Kevin says “universal search” is the generic term, but that’s a dirty lie. Blended search is the generic term. Universal Search is a Google term. I promise to stop ranting now. Until someone says something dumb.

Lyndsay introduces herself and says she’s the token female. I giggled. Kevin wants to clarify that at no point did he say the words “token female”. SES is hilarious.

James gets us started. At comScore they’re tracking everything on the page and that’s the information they’re leveraging to report on Universal Search. He says you can divide Google Search queries into two buckets: Queries that contain a universal result and queries with no universal result. Universal results are queries that include video news, images, blogs, etc.

According to James, of 1.2 billion queries conducted on Google, 220 million contained a blended search result. Eighty-seven million people searched, and 58 percent saw some sort of blended search result. Universal search is dominated right now by video and news, and then secondary by Images. Fifteen percent of results had more than one type of Universal result presented.

Google is being very targeted with what they show. It’s not like Ask.com where it’s a fuller multimedia experience. Google is remaining fairly siloed with what they’re doing. James says a lot of people get emotional here, but we train the consumer to search in a specific way and adapt. The fact that the engines are wading in the blended search waters carefully shows that they’re protecting them.

Two takeaways from the comScore data:

• Organic search will be increasing critical
• Search result pages becoming the destination
• Technology and content super cede marketing spend.
• Internet “view thru” value will challenge measurement.
• Paid search will become more competitive
• Fewer paid click options on fewer pages
• Consumer in control, not marketers
• Conversion rates should increase

Consumers are the priority, not the marketers. Blended search prevents marketers with a new challenge and gives consumers what they want. As marketers, we need to take advantage of the content and make sure that the inventory of video, images, etc, is set up to be captured by the engines. His inclination is that if you as a content creator come up with a better result than what’s found on YouTube, Google will present it.

Mike: 212 million queries are blended search queries. Is that indicative of what we’re seeing elsewhere?

James says he doesn’t know yet. They’re still in the process of figuring that out. Jack says he doesn’t have any stats on that either.

Mike says it’s safe to say that it’s not necessarily people following the lead of Google. There are other engines where you see them working in these blended type results, as well. You’re putting your data together. At the end of the day, the end user is the Holy Grail. If you have great data, they’ll use it.

John starts some trouble asking if Universal Search isn’t killing Google’s core model. He says there was a beautiful alignment between the Google model and ten blue links. This is breaking it completely. Is that a factor?

Jack says it’s not breaking it. The idea behind blended search is to be as relevant as possible and Universal Search lets them do it. He would argue against that it’s breaking the ten blue links idea. Jack says they talk to consumers and 80 percent say they are aware of what’s paid and what’s not. They said they understand the idea of the top rail/left rail. [I don’t buy that for a second – Lisa]

John says fine, but universal search is a different interface. You’re not making any money with maps and stock quotes. How do you make money with universal?

Jack says they’re seeing a segmentation of the query stream. A lot of universal-type queries wouldn’t bring up monetized results anyway. Google is trying to innovate with different ad formats. He says he doesn’t know all the details. It’s not accurate to say that Universal Search is not compatible with their ads model.

Kevin mentions some recent comScore data that was badly misinterpreted to claim that Google was getting less clicks. He says we have a situation where it looks like the click rates are going down because we have fewer ads, so there are fewer ads to click on. How are the engines going to make money?

Jack says that there was a follow up to that report that said it wasn’t nearly as bad as initially reported. He doesn’t have any evidence that Universal Search is less monetizable. They’re trying to keep an eye on the number of clicks but they don’t want to be terribly disruptive.

James says there was no reissue of the comScore data. What we’re seeing is half the equation. The other half of the equation is that things are more relevant and each of those links (ads) that a user does click on should be more valuable. We don’t know the conversion rates.

Mike says we can now do better than ten blue links, that we should have a richer end user experience. He watches people surf now. They’re on Facebook, social media, sites, etc. This is a really rich user experience. Then you go to Google and you get ten blue links? Who wants that? As for monetizing it, he’s looked and seen that many PPC results have some Universal-type features. He talks about that Google Bourne Supremacy link.

Lyndsay says the biggest problem brands have is that there’s a lack of control for them. For a big brand, to even have video or images released, it’s problematic. They’re being more concerned with how their brand is being portrayed online. This will give users better results but there are still teething problems.

James agrees that it’s an organization challenge. Lynsday says there’s a fear around it. She had a client release a viral video and it was received really badly. They spent so much time making that and trying to get it into the universal results and it flopped. There’s a fear of that happening.

Kevin asks if it’s easier now to optimize a piece of video and get traffic against it?

Lyndsay says it is. Brands know it’s not just about ROI anymore; it’s also about building the brand.

Kevin: Lets’ talk about the “view thru” as a success metric. To me, that’s a little like a soap opera. You can miss 5 years of episodes and jump back in and the same people are still sleeping together. [OMG. What?]

James: Just because we measure search as a direct response vehicle doesn’t mean that’s the only value it provides. We’re already past that. He spends 50-70 percent of his time talking to brands about the value of “view thru” impact on search. Consumer behavior elements are just way too valuable.

Lyndsay agrees with that but says there’s still a massive shift to get to that point.

John says there’s a lot more to be done with US. There are models we haven’t come up with yet.

John’s harping on his old question and says that Google has to have some hesitation of giving too many Universal Results that sacrifice advertising.

Jack says that yes, there is a certain segment of the queries where you can just answer the question. But at its core, the Google SERP is still about getting people to the information that they want. Most queries can’t be answered with a little image or a preview. To be realistic, they’re going to be diverting traffic and driving it.

Mike says conventional wisdom in SEO terms is all about writing a great Title tag. In the research that he did for his new book, he spent a lot of time looking at Shakira. (oh, here we go…) Every time he did a search, up came images of Shakira half naked. He doesn’t care about Title tags when there’s a naked woman on his screen. [Kevin says, great, now we all know you like to click on naked women. Hee.]

John says we lived in a text driven world. It’s easily processed by machines. When you have images and video, you’re changing the game in a really big way. Both in how you monetize and how the industry monetizes and how consumers behave.

Jack says they’re not surfacing YouTube all the time. The reason YouTube shows up the most is because most of the videos on the Internet are on YouTube. In everything we’ve done, we don’t believe we’re changing this ad model. If people search for Shakira, it’s likely people are looking for naked images. [Mike Grehan agrees. And we laugh. Kevin says Mike searches with the Safe Search off. And we all laugh again.]

Mike says way back in the day, millions of pages were being uploaded and they were static HTML pages and that was it. In web 2.0, now million of videos and images are being uploaded and they’re competing with those static pages.

Kevin says most of the YouTube video is crap. It's men setting their own testicles on fire. It’s Mike searching for Shakira naked. What’s the shelf life? John says this morning he was at an Ad Age event and on the panel was Damon Waynes and he has a new partnership with YouTube. He was guaranteed by YouTube to get 6 million views from the home page for his videos. Does that mean he’s going to automatically end up on the Google home page?

Jack tries to say he has no knowledge but John basically cuts him off. He worries about how that’s going to get in the search stream.

John and Jack are getting heated. John wants to know why Google Finance comes up first when people search for stocks. He’s basically attacking Jack here. I feel bad. Someone needs to give John a puppy and level him out.

Jack says they try not to promote themselves any more than what they think is fair. They try to be true to the “we will present the top results for that query”. They’re trying to rank only the most relevant stuff. There is nothing in the algorithm that is biased to Google properties.

John lets out a big sigh. Kevin fears he’s having a heart attack.

John says Google is becoming a media company and they should just own up to that. They have these media properties – Finance, Video, Local – and yet you have this vision of the brand that is indifferent on where to go next. He doesn’t think the brand can sustain that without conflict. He thinks Universal Search is in the heart of that conflict.

Kevin is happy we’re finally back on the topic of Universal Search. Yey!

Mike mentions that Google always said they wouldn’t be a portal site and that’s what they’re turning into. Google needs to admit that they’re a destination site.

Jack agrees but says that’s just them trying to get them the information as soon as possible. It’s not their fault they just happen to own said information and can therefore place it right on the results page.

Kevin ends things by making everyone give Jack a round of applause. Poor Jack. He deserves it.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/18/08 at 2:12 PM | Comments (1)

March 17, 2008

Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right

Day 1 is almost over already. Can you believe it? The topic of this afternoon’s Orion Panel is Getting Vertical Search Right with speakers Bill Tancer (HitWise), Jason R. Finger (Seamless Web), Paul Forster (Indeed), Steven Krine (Organized Wisdom), and Joshua Stylman (Reprise Media). Kevin Ryan and Rebecca Lieb is acting as moderator on this one.

As an aside, Jason works for SeamlessWeb and offers up a special promo code for attendees to get free food or free delivery on their food. I don’t know. Something. The code is “ses2008” so go use it and let me know what you get.

Bill Tancer starts things off by rattling off some statistics and talking points.

Where do we search? If you combine the major search engines, they add up to 98 percent of all searches on the Internet. There’s two percent that fits into the “other” category. Hitwise is tracking millions of other search engines. There are the searches that occur on the major engines and then there are the searches we conduct on vertical-specific sites. And a lot of people get to those sites via the search engines.

Where is Search Leading Us?

Combine the search sites and look where people go when they leave search. The bulk of them are going to computer and Internet sites – mostly other search engines or social sites. It’s a good way to see where the search funnel is going in the US. The top ten sites users are going to after they leave their original search are: Google Image Search, MySpace ,Wikipedia, eBay, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Mail.

People are going to the URL and they’re typing in Orbitz or Travelocity. A lot of that manual behavior still exists. There is a part for vertical specific sites to play. The complexity is that people start at search engines. If that’s the case, what’s to prevent them from dominating that space and what value can a vertical-specific engine to play?

Rebecca: How vertical and how fragmented can we get until people become too confused and splintered?

Bill: The search engines can tackle vertical. The question is how much do they want to do and lose potential for revenue? Back in the 1990s, local search was the end all and be all of vertical search. The major search engines have shown they can dominate it.

Paul: People know that vertical sites exist and that they’re a different product. They may go through Google, but they end up on another engine and have a totally different experience. They’re trying to do the same thing on all the different sites they touch. The general search engines are becoming an entry point to the vertical engines. People go there to do a second entry search.

Josh: Everyone is trying to be a vertical engine. When someone is performing a job search, Google wants to a job search engine. When someone is doing a local search, Google wants to be a local engine.

Paul: Search engines are not designed to do vertical search well. There are various attributes to the data that general search engines are not good at searching.

Bill: Bill agrees. He mentions Google Base. Here’s an engine that allows you to put in multiple variables and it’s slowly getting some traffic. It’s clear that search engines can address some of these vertical aspects.

Rebecca: Brand is an interesting factor. Rebecca found out about SeamlessWeb because she sees stickers for it in her neighborhood. It doesn’t come up in the search results. She asks Jason how they’re marketing the service.

Jason: They operate in 14 cities but only within certain neighborhoods of those cities. They’re focusing on direct and word of mouth marketing. Kevin says he’s doing the Seth Godin approach to search engine optimization, meaning they do no search engine optimization at all. Heh. The site and their efforts are growing. They now allow users to rate and review users now since they have hundreds or thousands of reviews on the site. That information is more valuable now that there are more users.

Kevin asks each of the speakers what problem their site solves. What’s everyone’s niche? [Why are we asking this? Is this an infomercial? – Lisa]

Paul: There was a gap for a service that provided a comprehensive job search. That’s why they launched Indeed. It enables the job searcher to do one search. They’re really applying the general search model to the job vertical.

Steve: Organized Wisdom Health really came out of a problem him and his wife had when they were trying to have a baby. They realized how broken the algorithms were when they were looking for other people’s stories with infertility issues and couldn’t find them. He wondered if you could ever hire someone to search for you, to search all the different health-related sites and give you the most high quality links. Organized Wisdom does the searching for people. They have Wisdom Cards – high quality list of links to the best resources. It’s sort of Mahalo-like. You can see pre-published search results. They’ve also layered Request Wisdom where you can ask people to do search for you if the card isn’t already made. They also have Live Wisdom searching where you can talk to someone (for a fee). They look at as a service on top of the algorithms.

Kevin: Yeah, but people are stupid. There are a lot of really stupid people. When you pull all these stupid people together, sometimes we have mass hysteria. How do you create the environment where people are going to be sticking around because it’s valid information?

Steve: This isn’t user generated search results. It’s guided. They employ full time guides to hand craft the search results and keep up with them over time. All of their traffic comes from the search engines. They use the same platform as Wikipedia. They don’t let people muddy up the high quality search results. They keep out the stupid people.

Jason: He worked at a law firm. He worked overnight and got very hungry. Called a number of restaurants and everything was closed or they didn’t deliver. He got a bit frustrated, handed the memo in, and told a friend he couldn’t find a restaurant open late for delivery. They began thinking of ways to solve that problem from the user perspective. How can they keep it updated in real time? They tried to solve it initially from the user and employer perspective.

Kevin: Let’s talk about the audience. How are people getting to the site? He was on SeamlessWeb and a little Facebook app popped up and freaked him out.

Jason: Jason admits that yes, they have a Facebook application. They also provide Google with a feed of all their restaurants that they work with and that information comes up in their search results for local searches.

Steven: They launched OneSearch so you can search all the vertical search engines that are out there at the same time. The health vertical is a very important vertical; it's high stakes. They look at what they do as holding the hand of people going to the Internet to look up a very serious issue.

Rebecca: Isn’t Google Health already kind of doing that?

Steve: Google Health will give you the top 5 libraries of content that everyone licenses, but there’s so much more than that out there. His service knows what sites are the best for which category. They talk to people to decide what needs to be added. Google just points you to libraries.

Josh: Is part of the local search about taking the content and freeing it from the container?

[A good question that no one really answers.]

Steven: There are obviously general social networks like Facebook, but then there are more specific networks, as well. Social networks are one of the many resources you need to look at if you’re looking for people who have had different experiences.

Josh: There are two dimensions of social networking. There’s people looking to find someone (or avoid someone) and then there’s the growing community.

Rebecca: How much are social networks a search tool as opposed to a discovery tool?

Kevin: You’re here for the altruistic reasons, right? Not because of ads. /sarcasm.

Paul: It’s an interesting point. With the PPC model, there’s a real tension there between optimizing the experience for users and sales. You just can’t do it. With the search model, that tension isn’t there. You can include everyone’s listings for free and create a comprehensive list for free.

Steven: They look at this as each wisdom card they create with very filter, handcrafted search results. They allow sponsors to sponsored wisdom cards. There’s a huge value on the service that we’re providing. In order for us to do that for free, we have to support it with advertising. They charge you to talk to a doctor about what you’re searching for. They’re trying to keep it as free or low cost as possible.

Jason: As it relates to restaurant is that it’s not a technology advanced community. They also offer consultancy programs to restaurants. They’ll tell them if they don’t have popular dishes for their area. They’re enabling customers to make an informed purchasing decision, while also helping business owners to better serve these customers.

Kevin: That’s going to play out in these models. We’ll see vertical specific search in the areas where it’s necessary to provide users with a better way to search for things. And we’ll also see more vertical-related content.

Joshua: If you think about the peanut butter manifesto is was that Yahoo needed to focus. The engines are really good at finding stuff on the Web. They’re trying to be all things to all people. People on the panel are showing you can go deeper and provide a richer experience. Things about the analogy of cable TV. A 24 hour news network seemed crazy at the time.

Jason: Service on top of search is a really powerful tool. Are the engines too broad or do they have an opportunity to drill down? At SeamlessWeb, they try to facilitate a transaction.

Kevin: The value is in important. Serving the audience in unique ways is important. We hear Yahoo Buzz climbing against Digg. Talk about that.

Bill: It’s another example of a search engine leveraging content that they have can beat out an entrenched player. As Josh mentioned, when you look at search engines, 90 percent of it is really search content downstream. It’s very rarely their own content. They help us to find things better. It will increase the opportunity for business that specialize in vertical content to find an audience.

Paul: Vertical search is idiosyncratic. It’s not easy for a general engine to knock off all the niches. Niche search is very different and the vertical engines are becoming more sophisticated. To what extent can you tap into the behavior of users to improve the relevance of search results? To what extent can you tap into the clickstream data? This is all different from one vertical to another.

Rebecca: What are the big untapped marketing opportunities in vertical search engines?

Joshua: Marketers will go where the eyeballs are. You have to train your father NOT to go to Google first or to use Google as a true portal. If you think about the common attributes of all the search engines, structured data is a huge, huge thing to have.

Audience Question: Why should the top results in Google be based on the firms who have the best SEO efforts? What’s your advice to SEO and SEMs about how they can use you to compliment their blended search efforts?

Steven: Their cards start at a Google search and then weed out the stuff that shouldn’t be there and add the stuff that should be.

Paul: One of the keys is to look at the metrics. It doesn’t make sense to say you haven’t heard of a vertical search engine and say you’re not going to bother. You want to look at the traffic and the growth and decide if that’s the kind of audience you’re looking for.

Bill: Be aware of the changes in user search behavior. There’s an increase between single term queries. It’s about increasing brand. Then we see this increase in multiple word queries. Consumers are getting more intelligent and are searching for things more specifically. Use HitWise data.

Kevin: Users aren’t getting any smarter. You can train a monkey to search better.

[Yikes. Kevin is just as snarky as he was this morning.]

Steven: High quality sites do well in the search engines and with users. With a human being taking a look at your site, will they want to include your site in their search results? On the SEM side, the biggest opportunity is that you can go so deep and so specific that you’ll find your exact audience. In vertical search, it’s about going really long tail. It’s teeing up your audience on a single platter for you.

Key Takeaways:

Paul: Take away the immediacy of vertical search engines. Look at the metrics. See what the traffic is for the sites that are important to you. Do your analysis and run tests and then build on campaigns

Josh: Vertical Search is only in the early stages. It’s going to grow. If you’re an advertiser, think about how to create content and make it accessible and you’ll rank well. [Kevin cuts him off.]

Bill: Layer some value-add on top of the content and provide a way to search that’s not available in the search engines

Steven: The future of vertical search is service. Think about people clicking on your site and making a decision about whether or not they’d add you to their listing. Human search is here to stay.

Jason: Vertical search is going to become an increasing paradigm in the future.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/17/08 at 2:56 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2008