Google

June 16, 2009

Nofollow on Your Site Will Not Cause It to Explode

Photo from Matt Cutts's blog

"Nofollow is dead!"

"Your PageRank can't be directed and if you try you'll be penalized!"

"Ceiling Matt is watching your site funnel PageRank!"

It started at SMX, when Matt Cutts said that nofollow wouldn't pass PageRank like it used to. Then the plot thickened when Matt posted an update aimed at clarifying some of the questions that have been swirling for the last couple of weeks. Virginia's got the facts over in this month's feature article, Matt Cutts on Nofollow and the Siloing Solution. I'm not going to rehash them here so I recommend you read at least that before we go on.

Go on. I'll wait.

Back now? Good. Now, I know that everything is really confusing right now and you're desperate to do something, anything, before you lose your shirt in the horrible, devastating wake of this nofollow change. Maybe you have clients beating down your door and they're out for blood because they've heard that if there are any nofollow links on their site, the seas will turn red with blood and apocalypse shall begin. Or maybe you're the client and you're worried that your SEO company has implemented things on your site that now are going to harm your bottom line. Okay, everyone just sit down for a minute and take a deep breath. It's going to be okay.

There's a lot of discussion going on over at Matt's entry regarding this topic. I particularly liked this reminder from Rae Hoffman: "1. SEO tactics can always change regardless of who first endorses them and 2. Not everything Matt says is etched in stone."

The conversation on this is by no means over and the smart marketer won't jump to conclusions about it. I know this isn't the sexy solution. I know the cool thing to do is rail at Google for making all our lives harder, for adding confusion with each attempt to clarify. If I were really part of the cool kids, I'd probably come up with a really awesome conspiracy theory, but alas, I'm not cool.

It's fun to get all excited and fired up but if it's not going to help our clients, well, in the end, what's the point? So I get to be the stick in the mud who waves the caution and risk-avoidance flag again. What are you going to do about nofollow? Well, right now, you're not going to do anything.

If you're feeling a little weak in the knees and you're having visions of rankings plummeting, don't panic. Here's what I want you to do. First, stock up on some Ben & Jerry's. That part is key. Next, I want you to repeat after me:

Dear [Insert your client here. If you're the client, ensure that your SEO has this stance.],

I'm your SEO and you hired me because you trust me to stay on top of the search industry and to apply my brain to the information I find there. As a result, we've developed a strategy for your site that is focused on long-term goals and not knee-jerk reactions. Therefore, I'm not going to change anything about that strategy at the moment with regards to nofollow. I will monitor the forums, blogs and industry news sources in order to stay informed and once the message has stopped changing and the real effects of Google's statements becomes clear, I will take the appropriate steps.

Yours sincerely,
[Your name here]

Now I want you to get out the ice cream and think calm thoughts. If you absolutely must do something right now about your SEO campaigns, go do some link building. Pound for pound, a good solid backlink will do a lot more for you than obsessing over leaked PageRank to your privacy page.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/16/09 at 5:27 PM | Comments (5)
See more entries in Google, Search Engine Optimization

June 15, 2009

Audio of Matt Cutts's Nofollow Comments in Today's SEO Newsletter

It's the 15th of the month and we just published the latest edition of the SEO Newsletter. Subscribers can expect to find the fresh new newsletter in their inboxes tomorrow, and the Web version is available now. Here's a quick preview of the exciting stories you'll find.

This month's Back to Basics article offers up seven tips on SEO for nonprofit organizations. While basic optimization strategy is the same for both nonprofit and for-profit sites, there are some additional opportunities available to nonprofit organizations. Included in the article is info on Google Grants, the YouTube Nonprofit Program and how to get your hands on free accounts and software.

Meanwhile, the Feature article should help eliminate some of the confusion over what Matt Cutts said at SMX Advanced regarding nofollow-based PageRank sculpting. Throughout the article there are embedded clips from the SMX Advanced You&A with Matt Cutts. Questions about Matt's exact words and intent are addressed with direct quotes from Matt and expert analysis from Bruce. Care for a taste?

Question: Matt, previously you seemed to support PageRank sculpting and it seems to me that is not something that you're supporting or not going to use anymore. Why is that, and is that going to be considered a negative indicator?

Matt Cutts: No, definitely not. Don't think about it like... It's your site. However you want to do the links within your site, you're welcome to do. What I'm trying to communicate, and what Maile and Nathan and a lot of people have been communicating -- in fact, if you look at the nofollow page that we've put up on our webmaster help documentation, we say, you can use it to eliminate links to sign-in pages and things like that, but it's a far better use of your time to have information architecture, or a site architecture, that makes it so that the pages that you want to have PageRank, the pages you want to be crawled, are fairly close in terms of number of links from, say, the root of your site.

From this quote we can gather that:

• The behavior of the nofollow attribute has changed, and Matt later says "the behavior could change in the future."
• Nofollow-based PageRank sculpting is not the most efficient use of an SEO's time.
• The nofollow link element is not a negative indicator for Google.
• The nofollow link element can be used to cut off PageRank flow to pages you don't want to rank.
• The best kind of PageRank management occurs when a site's architecture directs PageRank to intended pages.

The full article includes four more clips of Matt during the You&A. It also includes Bruce's recommendations for the selective use of nofollow, as well as info on a site architecture solution that manages the flow of PageRank. It's called siloing. Maybe you've heard of it?

All kidding aside, there's still time to sign up for the email version of the newsletter before it hits inboxes Tuesday. The newsletter sign-up form is in the right rail on this very page. Or, just click through to the SEO Newsletter from the links in this post. Either way, we think you'll be glad you did.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/15/09 at 4:44 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy, SEM Industry, SEO Tips & Tricks

June 11, 2009

Don't Let Shortcuts Create Bad Habits

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography via Creative Commons

Google's getting pats on the back for a new tool that lets webmasters tell the search engine when a site's been moved to a new domain. According to Google's Webmasters/Site owners Help documentation, if you use the change of address tool, the Google index will be updated to reflect your new domain for 180 days. Before those 180 days are up, Googlebot will have come by to crawl and index pages at the new domain and -- voila! -- your new site will be forever present in the only search engine that matters. [Yay! --Susan]

It's great to hear that at least one task is being simplified for overloaded SEOs, but Google's convenient shortcut may have some unintended consequences. First of all, Google's not the only search engine. Submitting your new domain through Google's handy new tool is not going to affect the index of engines like Yahoo, Bing and Ask. (Rocket scientist here, I know.)

And second, while Google may be the big guy on campus today, that may not be the case tomorrow. Taking shortcuts can have a nasty habit of coming back to bite you. Just because Google's created an easy domain-change-submission process, that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore your responsibilities in optimizing a site for all the engines. After all, we're talking about search engine optimization and not Google optimization. Although, GO would be a pretty catchy title...

Anyway, if you catch my drift and you want to make sure your new site's sitting pretty with more than just Big G, check out this simple instructional on what to do after you've moved your site.

What to Do After Moving a Site

We recommend that all Web sites include an XML Sitemap. XML Sitemaps are used by search engines to find all the pages on a site. More information on XML Sitemaps guidelines and what XML Sitemaps are used for can be found in the SEO Newsletter archives. XML Sitemaps can be generated at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

With your new site chilling until the search engines stop by, you'll want to submit the new domain's XML Sitemap to each engine according to its specific procedures. Now that I've explained what to do, here's the how.

Search Engine	What to Do	Submission Instructions
Ask	Ask does not have an XML Sitemap submission protocol. Instead, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to the old site's robots.txt.	Ask Help Central
AOL	AOL uses Google's index, so follow Google's XML Sitemap submission protocol.	Refer to the Search Engine Relationship Chart
Bing	From Bing Webmaster Tools, select add new site, submit details of the site, including the address of the XML Sitemap, and verify the site with one of two available methods.	Bing Webmaster Tools
Google	In Google Webmaster Tools, add the new site by entering the URL and verifying ownership. Submit the new site's XML Sitemap. You can also use Google's new change address tool.	Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo	Add your new site and authenticate your ownership. Upload the new XML Sitemap.	Yahoo Site Explorer

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/11/09 at 5:35 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in AOL, Ask, Google, Live Search, Search Engines, Yahoo

June 2, 2009

Nofollow Makes News at SMX Advanced

Editor's note, June 15, 2009: There's more to report in the continuing saga of nofollow! Check out Matt Cutts on Nofollow and the Siloing Solution to listen to audio clips of Matt and to read Bruce's nofollow recommendations. There are also additional tips in Susan's post Nofollow on Your Site Will Not Cause It to Explode.

With SMX Advanced taking place today and tomorrow, SEOs could expect that more than one announcement by a search engine might potentially change the search marketing game. Before the first day has concluded, at least one such revelation has already occurred. Those who attended Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag listened to Google webspam czar Matt Cutts explain that, in time, it would become less effective to use the nofollow link attribute for sculpting a site's PageRank.

Witnesses have dutifully shared the news on Twitter and in blog posts, but there has been no official word from Google yet. Until then, the facts remain fuzzy about what was actually said and implied by the Google team regarding the use of nofollow. Was the recommendation about internal links only? Will a flag be raised if the number of nofollow attributes on a single page exceed a recommended limit? PageRank sculpting is "less effective" than it used to be -- by what margin? Some accounts suggest that webmasters have six months to clean up nofollow on their site, so what happens after that? And what does Matt mean by PageRank sculpting anyway? The questions just keep coming.

We can expect to receive some clarification from Google or a representative in the coming days, but Internet marketers who've been dedicated to a long-term strategy aren't holding their breath. That's because a sophisticated, long-term, organic search marketing strategy doesn't rely on quick fixes like PageRank sculpting using nofollow to drive traffic and conversions. Instead, it relies on siloed site architecture and link-worthy content, and abides by the best practice recommendations of the search engines.

The nofollow attribute was first introduced with a specific role in mind: to help dilute the effectiveness of comment spam. Any use that perverts the original intent -- especially one designed to manipulate ranking factors -- was destined to be snuffed down the line. Nofollow is not and has never been the silver bullet. More importantly, a strategy that depends only on nofollow PageRank sculpting risks forgetting what's really important -- strong, theme-supported site architecture.

[Editor's note: Bruce Clay, Inc. has recommended the use of the nofollow attribute in appropriate instances. Please see the update below.]

Today's announcement is another much-needed reminder for SEOs to stop chasing the algorithm. That path only leads to ulcers and extra work. If you got tangled up thinking that nofollow is the end-all and be-all of PageRank sculpting, don't beat yourself up; nofollow sculpting had a pretty popular cult for a while there. Now, use this lesson to remind yourself that a work ethic based on fundamentals and smart SEO will take you farther in the long run. What looks like today's speedy workaround is really next month's time-consuming correction. By relying on nofollow to do all your siloing, you may have to go back and reorganize your site when Google changes in the way Matt suggests they might. Do it right the first time and achieve the same victory without the side of heartache.

Update on June 3, 2009: During the last session of the first day of SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts partially clarified Google's position on nofollow-based PageRank sculpting. There is some excellent liveblog coverage of the informative You&A with Matt Cutts by Outspoken Media, Beanstalk SEO and SEOgadget. Here's a snippet from Lisa Barone's post:

If you're using nofollow to change how PageRank flows, it's like a band-aid. It's better to build your site how you want PageRank to flow from the beginning.

Long before the days of nofollow, Bruce Clay, Inc. has advocated a site architecture practice known as siloing. Siloing relies on two things to create sections of a site that are highly relevant to the targeted keyword: linking and theming. By linking pages with the same theme (virtual siloing) and by including those pages within the same directory (physical siloing), you can create a section of your site that will be considered pertinent to targeted keywords.

With the advent of the nofollow attribute, we recommended nofollow use to eliminate superfluous links to pages that were off-theme. However, we considered PageRank sculpting using nofollow to be a marginal support for siloing. If a forthcoming Google guideline were to discourage nofollow-based PageRank sculpting, it would not affect the core principles of siloing, a powerful site architecture technique that improves site structure and the related relevancy signals. If Matt is suggesting that webmasters build a site with PageRank flow in mind from the beginning, siloing is an ideal solution still deserving of attention and implementation.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 2/09 at 4:42 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy, SEM Events

May 15, 2009

Friday Recap - A Buggy Edition

Friday's made its way back around and not a day too soon! After a big search week, everyone deserves a break -- in the form of a refreshing Friday Recap. Let's do it.

Grasshopper buzz was in full force as people across the country received the chocolate-covered buggers as part of a marketing campaign. The virtual office service provider, Grasshopper.com, expected to get some word of mouth flowing through their creative blogger outreach. I'm always one to oblige -- especially if you're clever and give me things.

So here's the one green sucker out of the five chocolate grasshoppers we received:

And here's Katie after eating one. We decided it tastes like Kit Kat with a woodsy aftertaste, hence the puzzled look:

Katie, James and I were the only ones with the guts to eat one so props to us! There are more pics on the Bruce Clay, Inc. flickr stream for your gagging pleasure. [I helped by taking the pictures. --Susan]

Google got a little buggy yesterday when a traffic jam caused two hours of down time for the search engine. A glitch caused U.S. search traffic to be routed through Asia, resulting in slow services and interruptions. Of course, pictures speak louder than words, so what's a Google traffic jam look like?

Twitter users' security may have been compromised with a seemingly innocent game. Earlier this week I noticed an eyebrow-raising trending topic on the micromessaging site. Turns out it may have been a ploy to make you reveal personal info. Keep mama's maiden name close to the belt, folks.

Now, Mother's Day was a couple weeks ago, but considering the power that moms wield, it's not a bad idea to keep her happy all year long. A recent survey showed that moms control 85 percent of household spending and more than ever are working at home thanks to the Internet. Almost 20 percent of the online population is a mother between 25 and 54 with a child under 18. More stats on how the mom pie breaks down can be found on MediaPost.

What we imagine Lisa's life is like. --Susan

Next time someone walks in to discover the writers cruising Cute Overload or I Can Has Cheezburger, we can point to a study that suggests looking at highly adorable pictures improves performance. Suspicions verified! The study was done using a group of women who were asked to play Operation after looking at kittens and puppies. How do you get that gig?

Other big news coming out of Google this week was about a change to the AdWords ad text trademark policy. Previously, Google prohibited the use of trademarks within ad copy. Now, retailers that sell brands and impartial review sites that evaluate brands can use brand-related trademarks within their U.S. ads.

Debra Mastaler, link builder extraordinaire, compiled a list of handy discounts for search marketers. The list includes discounts for directory submissions, conference registration, news services, link building services, SEO and research tools, and training.

And May's SEO Newsletter just hit mailboxes. Check it out for a roundup of headlines during the last month. There's also an article about XML Sitemaps for news, mobile, code, video and geographic content and one on how to write a strong call to action.

Things I learned from Boing Boing this week:

• A long time lover of food, my food might finally love me back!
• A nine year old rocked Crazy Train harder than the Prince of Darkness himself. Mad skillz.
• Jumping on the data visualization bandwagon, freedom looks a lot like the stars. Look at me getting all poetic.
• If your boss ever gets mad at you for daydreaming on the job, show him how you were just warming up your brain.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 05/15/09 at 3:38 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Fun Stuff, Google, Social Media

May 14, 2009

Jumping into the Real Estate Fray, Part 2

It's day three of real estate week here on the Bruce Clay blog. We don't typically focus on a single industry in our coverage of all-things-SEO, but the current controversy over whether Google should be allowed to "scrape" listing information from IDX Web pages is a golden opportunity. It's timely, too, because this week thousands of real estate industry leaders have converged on Washington for the annual Midyear Legislative Meetings. Before I take the real estate industry as a case study and prescribe some SEO/SEM medicine to cure their ills, there's an update to the story!

Breaking News from Washington, D.C.

The announcement broke just hours ago, and Twitter was buzzing about it. It looks like NAR has seen the light! They've decided to change their IDX policy, which is used as the model for MLSs nationwide. Here's the news in a nutshell:

This means that NAR no longer considers Google a scraper! Another Twitter reporter snapped a photo of the policy change as it was announced:

In case you can't see it clearly, the revised policy reads: Participants must protect IDX information from unauthorized use. This requirement does not prohibit indexing of IDX sites by search engines.

So NAR sees the difference between unauthorized site scrapers and search engines. Hallelujah! This is a happy day for real estate professionals, who know they have been losing the Web marketing battle for years.

What Real Estate Professionals Should Do Next

Don't spend a minute wondering whether you should back out of the IDX data share. It's time to put that old fearful thinking behind and go full-steam ahead into Web marketing. Redefine yourself as a service provider and let go of the role of information hoarder. That self-image should be left crumbling in your trunk with the last edition of the old MLS book.

Instead, instruct your webmaster to allow your IDX pages to be indexed as soon as you hear the all-clear from your local MLS. And consider creating static pages with listing information in addition to your framed IDX searches and displays. You want to give the search engine spiders lots of indexable content to chew on!

And read on for more advice as I use the real estate professional as a case study for applying Web marketing and SEO.

SEO to the (Real Estate Industry's) Rescue!

Perhaps NAR's change of heart was the result of an "ah ha!" moment. Maybe, just maybe, they realized that by allowing REALTORS®'s sites to be better indexed, the industry might be able to claim more search engine real estate (pun totally intended). One can always hope.

Most real estate professionals understand that they desperately need to improve their online presence. But how? Despite the fact that most for-sale property information online originates with their listings, third-party Web sites get the credit. Run a Google search for real estate for any local area and you'll find at most one or two broker sites ranking on the first page of the SERPs. Primarily you find third-party real estate search sites, like Trulia.com, Homes.com, Zillow.com, Movoto.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, and the industry flagship Realtor.com. Many of these sites do direct traffic back to the listing broker's Web site if people click to "view more details," but not all. And there's no reason why a successful local broker's Web site should not come to the top when it's their neighborhood's real estate that's wanted! After all, they ARE the experts.

#1: Befriend the search engines. If you don't already, understand that Google is not your competitor, but your ally. When people search for a property in your area, you want them to find your Web site, right? Do a good job of letting Google know what you're all about. Put plenty of original text content on your site using keywords like "real estate," "homes for sale," "My Town Name" and lots of local area references, and that can happen.

#2: Submit your listings to Google. Brokers should be proactive andsubmit your listings to Google directly. You should be the one to get the information out there first. Consider submitting to the other search engines, as well. Yahoo! charges a hefty fee for this ($49.95 per listing), so check to see if your brokerage firm lets you do this on their dime.

#3: Don't hide your listing information. Many brokers hide listing information behind a form like this one:

Look at all those fields! Now I don't know how many people searching for home information actually take the time to fill out a form like that. Maybe it's working for some brokers, and they're really getting prospects this way. But what I do know is that search engines can't get past these forms. They'll act like a roadblock to search engine spiders, and your listing information won't be indexed. They may also be diverting users away -- after all, why fill out a form when so much listing information is easily available through the third-party sites?

#4: Build links to your site. I checked a bunch of broker sites' link counts. (You can do this using our handy free SEMToolBar, or by doing link: searches in Yahoo!) Not surprisingly, they had almost no inbound links. Seriously, the most I found was "3" links, and those were internal! If real estate is essentially a local business that builds credibility by networking within their communities, why isn't that network being reflected on the Web? As any SEO can tell you, without links to help establish your authority on a subject, you don't have a very good chance of showing up on the front page of Google.

One more point about building links is that not only do search engines quantify the links to your site, they also follow them. So if you're sure that for usability reasons you want to keep that roadblocking contact information form I mentioned before in place on your site, you can at least LINK to static pages all about your featured properties and other information. Spiders can then index those pages by following the links.

#5: Make your Web site unique. Many real estate professionals, knowing that they "had to have a Web site," took the easy route and set up a prefab template supplied by their brokerage firm or some third-party company. It's next to impossible to get indexed by the search engines if all your site offers is duplicate content, because it's the search engine's job to filter out duplicates and present searchers with the original, best, most authoritative version. And guess what -- that isn't going to be the cookie-cutter site. I loved the comment left by Foot In Mouth on our blog yesterday about this:

"I think real estate agents who just get a template based site and do nothing with it have a very expensive business card."

If you want your site to be found in the SERPs, you're going to need to make it different. Write about your local schools, neighborhoods, hang-out places, and your favorite frozen yogurt shop. Talk about new housing developments underway, changes in the rental market, and so forth. Give your site lots of locally specific information for the search engines to index. Then the next time Mr. and Mrs. Homebuyer go to Google and search for homes for sale in your area, your Web site might just be the first one that pops up.

Posted by Paula Allen on 05/14/09 at 2:15 PM | Comments (9)
See more entries in Copywriting / Content, Google, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Integration, Yahoo

May 13, 2009

Jumping into the Real Estate Fray, Part 1

Photo by BlackHawkTraffic via Creative Commons

I'm feeling game today. Not having a snake pit to jump into or a wild animal to tame, I thought I'd venture onto the blog and dive right into the center of one of the messiest, most controversial issues confronting the real estate industry today. Why? Because it relates to SEO. And because it sounds like fun.

Real Estate Lessons to Learn

Virginia broached the dilemma facing real estate professionals in their search marketing presence yesterday. It deserves a closer look, because there are facets of this discussion that can be applied to every industry. Issues like content ownership rights and ranking for your own content may be red hot in real estate, but they have global application. So let's take a closer look at the problem, and tomorrow I'll outline a Web marketing solution.

Waving the Wrong Flag

We should be careful choosing a side to cheer for in the case of the multiple listing service that called Google a scraper and told some of its members to stop allowing certain MLS listings to be indexed. The broker whose Web site received the cease and desist order, Paula Henry, wants to make the issue about embracing technology and giving the public free access to information. She's raising the free-access flag that all of us love to rally behind. Her case paints NAR as old-school and against progress, and describes the local MLS as "an 800 pound gorilla" out to stomp on her rights. It's easy to give this a surface read and jump on her bandwagon. After all, we in the SEO industry are on the cutting edge of progress. We support technology. We're in favor of public access to information, and the more that can be indexed, the better!

But that's not what it's really about. This case is about Web content ownership, duplicate content, and who gets to rank for what in the search engines.

MLSs Are Not the Bad Guys

Multiple listing services do not stop Google from indexing property listings. They can control which information fields should be public-viewable (the banned list is usually short, things like agent-only remarks and showing instructions), but they actually encourage the online distribution of listings. Search engines cannot spider the MLS system directly because it's behind a login. However, selling brokers can and do advertise their listings on the Internet. Besides putting the information on their own Web sites, brokers can send it directly to public Internet sites such as Realtor.com, Google, Yahoo!, etc. Homeowners nowadays expect this extra online marketing, and many MLSs have even required their software vendors to provide easy ways to send new listings to these third-party sites automatically. I know, because I helped fulfill those requests while working for a leading MLS system vendor before coming to Bruce Clay.

Is Content Really Yours?

Paula Henry's indexed pages in question, however, were IDX listings that didn't belong to her. IDX is a different sort of thing. It enables showing other brokers' listings on your Web site.

A listing is like original content, researched and entered by the selling broker. Imagine you create a Web site with beautiful, original text. When someone comes and copies it, which always happens, you're rightfully miffed. If that person's Web site starts outranking yours for your content, though, you're justifiably angry. Won't you complain to Google and everyone else you know to try to get the index corrected? Or will you just roll over and surrender to the inevitableness of duplicate content?

When Broker Joe sends his own listings to Google, the search engine links back to Joe's Web site. That's perfect, no problem. However, if competing sites show Joe's listing information after receiving it through IDX and get indexed for it, it's Joe's loss, as least as far as his search engine marketing efforts go.

In the Web marketing world we know that it is often futile to fight for your rights when faced with content ownership issues. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight. Similarly, it is probably futile for real estate brokers to continue to demand ownership rights to listings and try to block other sites from being indexed for them.

Photo by Aaron G Stock via Creative Commons

I can't help wanting to root for their right to try. However, in the course of writing this article I've come to realize that blocking access just won't work.

So What's the Solution?

Real estate agents need to stop worrying about what to block, and focus on what to allow, instead. In tomorrow's post, I'll recommend some search engine optimization principles that the real estate industry needs to know and apply. Bickering in committee meetings over what Internet content to block isn't going to solve the real estate industry's dilemma. They need strong Web marketing and SEO medicine now in order to survive.

Posted by Paula Allen on 05/13/09 at 4:04 PM | Comments (7)
See more entries in Copywriting / Content, Google, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Integration, Yahoo

May 12, 2009

Google Threatens Real Estate Professionals. Or Does It?

There's a debate raging in the real estate world. It isn't pretty and it isn't simple. The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) has supported a regional association's decision that Google is a scraper site. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR) has issued cease and desist orders to a number of its members, telling them to implement robots.txt directives that prevent Google from indexing certain property listings. NAR has tentatively agreed with MIBOR's claim that the Google index is nothing more than a receptacle of stolen content.

Photo by Phil Scoville via Creative Commons

This week is the REALTORS® Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo. The annual event brings together NAR leadership, and it is expected that real estate professionals affected by the decision will ask the association to reconsider. The impending judgment is being closely watched by real estate professionals the nation over as the final outcome could either set a long-standing course for progression or futile resistance.

I consulted BCI tech writer Paula Allen, who worked for a real estate industry vendor for 12 years, for her take on why the NAR and other professional real estate associations are getting their pantaloons in a bunch. Aren't they aware that getting listings to show up as Google results is as good as free marketing, I asked? Is this just another case of overzealous, old-school types clinging to the past? Where real estate professionals were once the sole owners of listing information, was the solution to educate them on the power of search technology?

As Paula sees it, there's certainly a measure of that mentality getting in the way here. But there could be an even bigger problem that needs to be addressed before Google can be seen as a partner and not the enemy. To explain this requires a little background.

A multiple listing service, or MLS, is a handy cooperative that allows real estate agents to view and share listings with each other. Starting from the old days of the printed MLS book and continuing with today's Internet-based systems, access to the MLS data was long restricted to subscribers and is still governed by a strict set of rules about who can show which property listing information to whom. When competitive third-party real estate sites like Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow started popping up, the MLS established the Internet Data Exchange (IDX), an authorized way to share MLS listings online. Those brokers who opt in to their MLS's IDX have their listings show up on other participating brokers' sites. In exchange, their site can advertise the listings of other member brokers as well. In this way, real estate professionals hoped to make listings available to people searching online while still maintaining some control over the information. But, apparently, it wasn't enough control.

As a member of the IDX, the displayed contact information for listings on your site is your own. So if broker Sally and broker John both participate in IDX, John's listing on Sally's IDX site will show up with Sally's contact info. That way, Sally will get the call, and potentially be able to represent an interested buyer. This is fair enough if someone searching Sally's site has come upon the listing.

However, things start to get fuzzy if that IDX listing is indexed in Google and someone finds Sally that way. According to the MLS, the listing doesn't belong to Sally; it belongs to John. John retains the control to put the listing where he wants. If he's smart, he'll submit his listings directly to Google and other search engine real estate services to get the traffic himself. And if he opts in to the IDX, then he has chosen to show his listing in that way. However, he hasn't allowed Sally to get all the credit for his listing in the SERPs.

Photo by FaceMePLS via Creative Commons

While on the surface it appears to be a simple "get over your power trip" diagnosis, there are a number of complicated implications in allowing Google to index IDX listings as they currently stand. I initially thought I'd berate NAR, demand that they embrace search engine technology as free marketing or be doomed to failure! But under the current system, indexed listings could be unfair to the rightful content owners.

The solution, in my assessment, will be two-fold. There will need to be a restructuring of the IDX system so that the contact info listed is that of the selling agent. Then, if IDX listings are indexed, credit will go where it is due. In the meantime, agents should embrace the power of search engine marketing and submit their property listings to sites like Google and Yahoo. This way they can proactively ensure they get all the inquiries. With an improved IDX system and a partnership mentality in place, search engine marketing education can take root. Down the road real estate professionals may just wonder what all the fuss was all about.

Update: For more on the real estate industry's search marketing challenges, please see our series Jumping Into the Real Estate Fray, parts 1 and 2.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 05/12/09 at 5:32 PM | Comments (13)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy, Search Engine Optimization, Search Integration, Yahoo

April 27, 2009

Do You Yahoo?

It appears that Yahoo and Microsoft are still in the grips of a tangled tango, their long talks about a search advertising partnership remain hot and heavy. For more than a year now, the two companies have been in on-again/off-again discussions about a merger, partnership or some other strategic opportunity that would give the duo an edge against Goliath, aka Big G.

The two search platforms have historically struggled in the face of steadily shrinking market share. And in light of the current deliberations, it would seem that leadership on both sides of the table are looking for the windfalls that cooperation might garner. But rather than face the painful breakup of an all-or-nothing deal gone south, this time the couple is taking it slow with talks of partnership rather than marriage proposals.

In MarketingSherpa last week I read a primer on advertising with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. It just so happens that Yahoo's paid search program has a number of perks compared to Google's AdWords program -- not the least of which is a higher average return! A typical comparison for a single advertiser looks something like this.

Investment in Google: 80%
Investment in Yahoo: 15%
Investment in other engines: 5%
Average conversion rate with Yahoo: 3.42%
Average conversion rate with Google: 3.39%
ROAS with Yahoo: 2.85
ROAS with Google: 1.85
Percent of Google-driven online sales: 80%
Percent of Yahoo-driven online sales: 7%

Obviously, Google has a substantial advantage of market share and overall number of eyeballs, which leads many advertisers to ignore the solid ROI that Yahoo can provide. But as Kevin Lee explained during the Advanced B2B session at SES New York this year, "If you're not in Yahoo and Live, you're missing a chunk of your audience."

In the Bruce Clay offices, we see that our own clients are just as set in their ways. After talking to SEM analyst and BCI guest blogger James Kim, I learned that only 20 percent of our PPC clients are advertising in Yahoo. But as abysmal as that sounds, it's in line with the norm.

Why, I asked James, are so many clients missing the opportunity available through Yahoo and other engines? In his opinion it comes down to two things: market share and maneuverability.

"It is too early to say what effect a partnership would have on the advertisers. I think it will really depend on its interface and data reporting for PPC accounts. This is where Yahoo and MSN are seriously lacking right now. Google has made a lot of improvements to their PPC management, while Yahoo and MSFT are still trying to catch up on the basics. Once they collaborate, if they do it right with the right management tools, they may see an increase in advertisers."

Understandably, the day-in-day-out interaction an advertiser has with his PPC management tools can make the difference between a good day and a migraine. Google's intuitive interface is easier to navigate and includes more robust management tools.

As for the two areas Yahoo and Microsoft have to get right before they get anywhere, the companies will gain great strides in market share if they combine forces. A partnership might also result in the power players of each team coming together to design better management tools. With both market share and management tools wrapped up, we could be witnessing the debut of the next Silicon Valley power couple. They've already got the silly contracted name and everything.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 04/27/09 at 5:15 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Live Search, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, SEM Industry, Search Engines, Yahoo

April 15, 2009

Brands and Search Engine Rankings Revisited

Today on SEM Synergy, our weekly podcast on WebmasterRadio, Susan and Chris gave everybody the lowdown on IM Spring Break and Scott joined the convo to look at how the demand for conferences is growing and changing.

My guest was Danny Sullivan, one of the power figures behind the conference series Search Marketing Expo, and we talked about trends on the conference circuit and the increasing demand for search marketing education. In fact, next week the interactive marketing conference ad:tech is taking place in San Francisco and one day of the show will feature a search marketing track in partnership with SMX -- SMX @ ad:tech. The winds of change are a blowin'.

I've written before about how I think developments in SEO conferences will play out. So instead of your regularly scheduled diet of SEM Synergy Extras, I wanted to point out some other exciting news of the day -- that SEO Newsletter sitting in your inbox! (If, by chance, you haven't subscribed, do your self a favor and sign up already! See where it says "Subscribe to our SEO Newsletter" in the right-hand side bar? No, right under the "Follow Us on Twitter" graphic. Yeah, there. Sweet!)

Photo by Clydehurst via Creative Commons

So, right, the newsletter. There's a great feature piece this month about one SEO's opinion of January's branding update, a.k.a. the Vince update. Fernando Chavez was one of the hosts of the SEM Synergy episode where we dedicated significant time to the topic. While we were recording I remember watching, gape jawed, as Susan and Fernando passionately debated whether the change was indeed targeted toward brands or if the boost brands saw was merely a side effect of a greater goal. Fernando took the opportunity to lay out his argument in further detail in his article. Here are a few of the highlights:

• He doesn't think that Google intentionally increased the rankings of branded sites.
• If Google had made changes to reduce the effectiveness of spam as well as changes to increase certain SEO factors, the combined effect could have easily resulted in increased rankings for branded sites for certain queries.
• Matt Cutts has responded by saying, "We don't really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank [and] high-quality." Fernando believes that while Google representatives are usually vague, they don't lie outright. What Matt said in his video amounts to a fairly direct statement.
• Tweaks to the algorithm that increase the value of link age or domain age or the text surrounding a link are all alternative possibilities that could have caused such a shift in rankings.
• In the end, an SEO won't need to change his or her strategy as a result of the algorithm change. Recommendations for branding a site are just as important as they were before.

Based on years of search engine optimization experience, Fernando's article is heavy with opinion and theory. I'm just guessing here, but I bet you've got your own, too. Was Google targeting brands with the update, even if only in their round-about way? What are some of the value shifts that could have occurred to lead to a brand boost? Has your strategy shifted at all since you learned about the change? Since comments can't be left on newsletter articles, let's open up the conversation here on the blog.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 04/15/09 at 5:14 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Google, SEM Industry, SEM Synergy

April 7, 2009

Who Owns What on the Web?

Photo by foxypar4 via Creative Commons

It's a tricky question that's found its way into the spotlight yet again. As newspapers cry foul and the Associated Press goes for the kill (whether murder or suicide is yet to be seen), Danny Sullivan's response to traditional media publishers' misunderstanding of the Web environment shines a clear new light on the conversation. With the Web we've created a virally propagated content staging ground and, like a germ during flu season, it can be hard to figure out the point of origin.

I don't have any new answers to the media's desires to have their cake and eat it too -- how to maintain full ownership and receive search-driven traffic at once. But, at the risk of adding to the echo chamber, I'd like to play a little connect the dots. Let's see how tangled our Web of online content has become.

Traditional Media

Photo by Matt Callow via Creative Commons

As Danny points out in his piece above, Google has continually introduced features and implementations aimed at rewarding the old-schoolers of the news world. The ACAP, admittance into Google News long before anyone else, and even the Vince algo update are all measures that give more control and credibility (a la rankings) to long-established publishers. The truth is, the search giant just can't keep everyone happy -- no matter what they do.

The AP, not satisfied taking aim at only bloggers, is concocting schemes, like charging Google to obtain licensing agreements. Fortunately, it appears there are a few level-headed publishers left:

At a time when newspaper revenue is collapsing and some papers are closing, the prospect of a share of revenue from Yahoo or Google is more tempting than ever. But executives at some news organizations have called the ire at the search engines misguided, saying that much of their own Web traffic arrives through links on search pages.

Social Media Networks

Image by Mathias Pastwa via Creative Commons

As I see it, the social media space is host to two different content ownership dilemmas. The first is similar to that of traditional media -- the content producer vs. the traffic generator. Social bookmarking Digg set the standard for ethical content aggregation; that is, until they introduced DiggBar this week. The new feature directs users to the content through iframes hosted on the site, keeping users and spiders on Digg. Content creators are frustrated after losing many benefits from the traffic Digg previously generated when linking directly to the site.

On the other side of the social media content puzzle is the question of who owns the account -- the employee or the company? The advent of social media has hit some companies unexpectedly, and the challenges of the new communication technologies are still being sorted out. Company time vs. personal time and company accounts vs. personal accounts can fall under fuzzy designations. The obvious solution is to set out ownership beforehand, but if your company was scrambling to catch up in the social media realm, that conversation may not have happened. Regardless of what occurred when the account was created, it's likely that a lot of value and resources were invested in that account by all parties involved, so cut-and-dry ownership can be hard to determine.

User Content

Photo by Michell Zappa via Creative Commons

When one Pennsylvania couple sued Google for taking pictures of their private property for use in Street View, the judge ruled that the images did not constitute invasion of privacy. Kinda throws into question the concept of private property, doesn't it?

Then there's the content generated by users on the Web in what are believed to be "private" spaces. Facebook did a little hokey pokey dance when it changed its terms of service and then changed them back again. At first the social network wanted to claim ownership of users' data, but an angry mob convinced Facebook that wasn't the best idea. Now a project in the UK will attempt to archive Internet traffic over the next year. E-mails, VOIP telephone calls and Web history are all subject to the directive.

Obviously there are complex ownership issues that have emerged among search engines, content producers, social networks and individual users online. The Web is so named because everything is connected, but all the sticky situations seem pretty fitting, too.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 04/ 7/09 at 5:15 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in Google, New Media, News & PR, SEM Industry, Search Engines, Social Media

March 12, 2009

Google's Interest-Based Ads Prompt Fear & Worry

Yesterday Google announced that "interest-based" advertising is being launched in beta for AdSense and on YouTube. While some advertisers might be drooling over the opportunity to improve ad targeting based on user intent, there's been plenty of backlash from privacy advocates. A history of blogosphere events following Google's announcement can be found on this week's issue of Who's Blogging What?

On the Google Public Policy Blog, the search engine anticipated privacy concerns:

"Providing such advertising has proven to be a challenging policy issue for advertisers, publishers, internet companies and regulators over the last decade. On the one hand, well-tailored ads benefit consumers, advertisers, and publishers alike. On the other hand, the industry has long struggled with how to deliver relevant ads while respecting users' privacy."

The post goes on to outline features that will allow users to opt out of personalized advertising. However, problems with the flawed and overly complex cookie-based technology have been described by webmaster and SEO John Andrews.

Today search marketer Michael Gray was vocal about his concerns over Google's interest-based ads on Twitter. He theorized that announcements by Google regarding Google Voice and Google Friend Connect were intended to be well-timed distractions.

In response to Aaron Wall's post on SEOBook, veteran search marketer Bob Massa lamented the apparent apathy of the search engine optimization community. Viewing Google's use of private data as an abuse of power and a concern for individual rights, Bob called on Internet marketers to raise the issue and create awareness.

So let your voice be heard. What do you think of interest-based search?

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 03/12/09 at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, Personalized Search, SEM Industry

February 12, 2009

Ask the Search Engines

Danny Sullivan, our fearless leader, moderates this panel; he's already in casual mode. Google's rep Matt Cutts, Google Inc., is here. Other search engine reps Keith Hogan, Ask.com, Sasi Parthasarathy, Live Search, Microsoft, and Priyank Garg, Yahoo!, are ready to sit quietly while Matt gets a billion questions. Too harsh? I'm just trying to be accurate.

Wow, big news.

Right before the session started, the big three announced a new tag rel=canonical. There's coverage popping up everywhere and I won't try to duplicate it so just get yourself over to the Google Webmaster Central blog and read about it. In talking to Matt, he emphasized that this is not a substitute for a proper redirect. If you can, do that first. Vanessa Fox covered it for Search Engine Land. Joost de Valk does a good job of explaining what it means over here Canonical URL Links, and he's already got plugins ready for this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal already. Can you say on the ball?

Matt's going to do the official introduction now so if those links aren't enough, you can try to follow along here.

Duplicate content is the bane of a lot of people's existence. There are many many preferable ways to fix duplicate content: Fix your CMS, link consistently, make all non-canonical URLs redirect, etc. However, that doesn't mean that you're going to catch every single instance. Even Her Majesty the Queen has dupe content issues.

So they've come up with a very simple link element that you put in the head section that identifies that clean, pretty, preferred URL. It's .

They'd rather not have to resort to this. Do everything else first. This is a hint, not a mandate. They'll choose. And they reserve the right to treat spammy uses of it as spam.

This only works on the same domain. It does work across subdomains/host. You can use it for https versus http. They don't have to be 100 percent identical but the differences should only be slight. You can use relative or absolute URLs but they'd prefer you use absolute URLs. Google can follow a chain of canonicals but... you know, don't do that.

What if I point to a 404 or have an infinite loop or an uncrawled URL or a non-www/www conflict, etc.? Don't cross the streams. They're going to handle it as best they can.

Thanks go to Joachim Kupke for doing the heavy lifting at Google to implement this.
Okay, ready? Time for questions.

What are you doing about the problems related to deep crawling?

Matt: We try to crawl as best we can. We look at PageRank and backlinks and if you have a higher PageRank, we'll try to crawl deeper. If you're not getting crawled, you might need more links. Also, check for duplicate content and make sure you have a simple site structure.

Priyank: Having a clear site map helps Yahoo. The link canonical will work very similarly to a 301. Be careful; don't mark unique content with a link canonical.

Sasi: Those two pretty much summed it up. Ease of navigation and site architecture is important. At the end of the day, if it's good content, they want to crawl it.

Keith: We go a step further and look at the content. If it's good content, we'll crawl faster. If it's bad content, we're going to slow up and not crawl as much.

Should the new canonical tag be used on pages that we don't think there's a problem with?

Matt: Yeah, you can but be careful about it. Think about what the user is going to want. It is just a hint though so if you pick the one that we think is not as good, we reserve the right to pick the URL we think is best.

Priyank: Be careful. We all want to emphasize that. Use it with caution.

If someone under a penalty 301s to you they can pass the penalty. How do you protect from that?

Matt: We do look at it. We try to be fair.

Does Yahoo have a hard time with special characters like pipes and ampersands in Title tags?

Priyank: That's a very specific question but no, I don't think so.

How is the canonical tag different than IP-based cloaking?

Matt: One is a mini 301 and the other is not in any way.

Why doesn't the canonical tag work across domains?

Matt: You could use it across domains but it would be hard and it could be a little unsafe, so we decided not to implement it like that.

Will the new tag slow down crawling?

Matt: It won't slow it down, but we don't follow 301s immediately anyway so it'll just get stuck at the end of the queue.

Priyank: Same. We also have dynamic URL in Site Explorer so that you can tell us if you have a session ID or something that can be dropped while crawling and that will speed up the crawl.

Let's revisit nofollow. Do nofollow comments mean no impact or help to you?

Sasi: It's not helpful from a search engine perspective, but it may be from a user perspective. We just ignore them.

Matt: We drop it completely off the link graph, nothing flows, no PageRank.

My competitor is spammy. What is going to happen to them?

Matt: White text on white background is definitely spam. Catch me afterward, I'd love to hear examples. [There's much laughter and Danny uses this to segue into...]

Google Japan has been buying links. What the heck, Matt?

Matt: I just want to take a minute and apologize for it. They didn't think about how it was going to affect search engines but that doesn't excuse it so they were lowered from 9 to 5 to reflect the decreased trust in Google.co.jp. They have to file a reconsideration request, just like anyone else. There are a lot of people at Google who were angry about that but that was the right thing to do.

How does the message of what you can and can't do get out?

Matt: I think we took a very clear position that this is bad. I've been thinking a lot about this the last few days. Google can't just assume people know, they have to keep talking about it and they still have a lot of communication to do about it.

How do you determine what's natural and what's not?

Keith: We look at each individual page, at the content.

Sasi: We use neutralization as well as penalization.

Priyank: We run analysis on every page. Cloaking is remarkably ineffective.

Matt: All of the above, particularly what Sasi said. Google's more likely to penalize sellers than buyers because it's usually more clear cut, but they will penalize for it if they have a high degree of confidence.

The new spam technique of 2009 is going to be hacking sites. You need to keep your servers patched, watch your open redirects and monitor them. Watch your server load. Keep your software patched. If you don't have a recent version of WordPress, you're going to get hacked. Stay patched.

Priyank: I agree with Matt. The onus is on you.

Sasi: Security should be a primary focus for webmasters. It's your page, not anyone else's. You'll end up getting the penalty.

Matt: Danny had a really good point about "craphats" and how it's like racist jokes -- they're that out of fashion. Don't put up with it.

My competitor is coming up as a "did you mean" for my site! How do you stop that?

Matt: We do pushes every few months so sometimes that fixes it. OR you should do a blog post and call Google an idiot for getting it wrong. [Hee!!!] You can also report it via a feed.

All others: We want to know about it and want to fix it. Give us feedback.

Will you notify webmasters if you see them get hacked?

Yahoo does already and so does Google. Ask has a partnership with Norton for notification. If you get flagged in Yahoo and you're not malware, there's a link right there in the warning that you can respond. Google and Microsoft will tell you if you've been penalized as well.

Matt: I want to know from those in the audience. Would you want a notification in case of hacking or penalization? Do you want an email? (The audience says YES.) Should it be a check box? (Another YES!)

Priyank: How many people target content at a state, regional or city level? Language? Country? [I can't see the responses.]

Matt: Would people want a fetch as googlebot feature? (The audience says YES.)

Priyank: How many people would like to have their content crawled at a specific time of day? [No one seems to care. Except Hilton.com who doesn't want to be crawled during the day. Um... yeah.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/12/09 at 3:03 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in AOL, Ask, Google, Live Search, Liveblog, SMX West 2009, Search Engines, Yahoo

December 17, 2008

SEM Synergy Extras: My Interview with Matt Cutts

Over at SEM Synergy we wanted to close out the year with style and substance. Today on the show I talked to Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam Team and an all-around authority on Google guidelines and practices.

People like hearing from Matt because he's an open and principled spokesperson representing the most popular search engine on the market. Matt's a regular at all the search marketing conferences, chiming in during Q&A if he's not on a panel himself. He's a master at walking the line between giving away the keys to the Google kingdom and lifting the mystery from the black box called ranking. I may not have squeezed any secret info out of him during our interview, but there are certainly a number of nuggets there for the harvesting.

My favorite takeaways came from Matt's thoughts on the future of search and the Internet. Some of these he's mentioned before, like cloud computing and mobile search. Others, like his new focuses for spam fighting in 2009, I haven't seen or read about yet. Here are a few of my personal picks on what Matt said that you should know about.

2009 will be a big year for mobile. Yes, another big year for mobile -- but for real this time! It's not that the last several big years for mobile were hoaxes, but rather that we've been building to this point for a while now, and the time is finally upon us. The Pew Internet Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center, released The Future of the Internet III report this week and the verdict is in. By 2020 (and maybe even before that), mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the Internet. This is a prediction that has rightly scared a few people who realize that this could blur the line between work time and personal time even further. Matt's concerns lie elsewhere though, focusing on how to make search useful on a small screen and on things like the progress of speech to text, machine translation and face recognition technologies.

The role of SEOs will be broader in the new year. Matt says that the uncertain economy will push SEOs to take on new skill sets in order to offer clients the most helpful services possible. This is a point that he also made during his PubCon interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews. Bruce Clay agrees. As the value of rankings as a metric of SEO success drops, the need to provide more rounded Internet marketing services rises.

The biggest spam issues in 2009 are international spam and hacked sites. The spam that's out there is also more malicious than its predecessors. Hackers and crackers are breaking into sites through vulnerabilities that most users are not aware of, and Google employees are now stepping up to the plate to cut down the breaches and boost education efforts. He says that if a Googler notices that someone is using a hackable version of WordPress, he may drop that webmaster a line to let them know how to patch it. Spammers beware!

Check it out for yourself on WebmasterRadio.fm or SEMSynergy.com. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt!

A quick programming note: Next week's episode of SEM Synergy will be a rerun featuring Mike Moran, co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. We'll be back with a fresh new episode to close out the year on the 31st with guest Barry Schwartz giving us the best of search in 2008.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 12/17/08 at 4:52 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Mobile, SEM Industry, SEM Synergy, Search Engine Optimization

December 1, 2008

Holiday Shopping Made Easy Through Search

I hope everyone had a delicious and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend. I always love Thanksgiving because it hastens the final and most celebratory part of the year -- the holidays! That means sparkling lights lining the streets, sweet, bright melodies that make your soul smile, warm, spicy scents wafting, and for some, presents large and small meant to symbolize the love that has been collecting over the year.

There are always a few people on my list that completely stump me. What do you get the mom who wants nothing? The dad who has everything? The broke college student sister who needs everything? What about the teen whose taste requirements far exceed your own? Every year is a struggle. Luckily for folks like me, the search engines have rolled out some cool features to make getting that perfect gift a little easier.

Everyone's looking for a bargain this holiday season and Live Search is ready to give you one. Building on its cashback program, Live Search is now offering instant cashback when shopping on eBay. Eligible shoppers who make their eBay purchase with PayPal will have their cashback automatically deposited into their PayPal account.

If, like me, you get hung up on what to get your special someones, Google has created a site where all the most-searched-for gadgets, gizmos and gift ideas are waiting for you. Based on recent Google Product Search queries, video games and toys, cold weather clothing, specialty foods and high-tech devices have been rounded up to create the Google holiday shopping guide. Plus, through that site you can redeem special offers when you buy through Google Checkout.

Yahoo's got a similar offering, using search trends to find the must-have gifts of the season. As the close of the year rolls closer, Yahoo is presenting the top ten searches of the year along with a number of top ten searches in niches like news, politics, the economy, celebrities and more. For those looking for gift ideas, movies, tech products, games and shopping top ten lists provide a wealth of information on what your loved ones are drooling over.

The most cheery time of year is upon us. Be free with your affection and fuzzy, happy thoughts. (If you need a lesson, talk to the amazingly generous Susan Esparza or Lisa Barone.) Remember that size and price doesn't matter -- it's the thought that counts. And when you've run out of those, search trend data can keep them coming.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 12/ 1/08 at 4:47 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Live Search, Yahoo

November 13, 2008

Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All

No fancy intro here, just right to the content. The moderator for this panel is Rand Fishkin. Speakers are super funny Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft; Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google; and Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search. Rahul Lahiri, VP of Search Product Management, Ask, is a might show. Hmm.

Ben D'Angelo is up first. He's been with Google a little more than three years. I think that means he went to Google straight out of grade school.

What are duplicate content issues? There are actually multiple disjoint problems.

• Duplicate content within your site or sites:
  • Multiple URLs point to the same page or similar pages
  • Different countries (same language)
• Duplicate content across other sites:
  • Syndicated content
  • Scraped content

The guiding principle behind the search engines' indexing is ONE URL for one piece of content. Why? Because users don't like duplicates in results. It saves resources in Google's index, leaving more room for other pages from your site. And it saves resources on their server. [So Ben is telling us to keep duplicate content low to save Google money? Man, that stock price must really be suffering.]

Sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs pointing to the same page
  • www vs. non-www
  • Session IDs, URL parameters
  • Printable versions of pages
  • CNAMEs
• Similar content on different pages
  • Manufacturer's databases
  • Different countries

How does Google handle this? They cluster like content and pick the best representative. There are variations on this depending on where it is in the pipeline. Different filters are used for different types of duplicate content. In general, it's just a filter and it's not going to destroy your site.

The problem comes in when Google doesn't choose the page you want or makes a mistake in clustering. You need to take back control.

Use 301 redirects for exact duplicates, like tracking URLs, and to solve www vs. non-www issue. You can also address exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools, but that only solves the problem for Google. He demos briefly.

For near duplicates, no index or block with robots.txt. Things like printer pages and site clones should have this.

Domains by country are a little different. Different languages are not duplicate content. Same language, different country? Don't worry about it -- the right one will usually be okay. You can geo-target in GWT or use different TLDs to help Google recognize where the content belongs. Best of all is creating unique content for that country.

Leave out URL parameters if you can. Put that data into a cookie instead.

In Webmaster Tools you can check for all sorts of other problems too, like duplicate Title and Meta data. Fix those things.

If another site has content that duplicates yours, there's less that you can do.

Duplicate content from syndication should include a link back to your site to make the canonical origin clear. Another option is to syndicate different content than what you publish on your site. If you're publishing content you have syndicated, manage your expectations.

Don't worry about scrapers or proxies too much. They generally don't affect your rankings. If you're concerned, file a DMCA request or a spam report with Google.

Duplicate content best practices:

• Avoid duplicate content in the first place.
• Generate unique, compelling content for users.
• Don't be overly concerned with duplicate content.
• Let us know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Forum.

You can always check out the Webmaster Central Blog and check out the Webmaster discussion group.

Priyank Garg is next up. He's got a sore throat so he'll be brief. His voice is all scratchy. Aw.

Much of this will be similar to Ben's presentation -- I'll pull out the Yahoo-specific stuff. Like Google, Yahoo filters at several places in the pipeline. Session IDs and other "content neutral" parameters can really hurt your crawl queue. They might never get to the rest of your content because they're crawling the same page over and over with a session ID. "Soft" 404 pages can also cause duplicate content problems. Repeated elements (perhaps with just a keyword replace) lead to problems.

Abusive dupes include scrapers/spammers, weaving and stitching, etc.

• Slurp supports wildcards in robots.txt.
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to delete URLs or an entire path from the index for authenticated sites.
• Use the robots-nocontent tag on non-relevant parts of a page.
  • Robots-nocontent can be used to mark out boilerplate content
  • Robots-nocontent can be used for syndicated content that may be useful to the user in context but not for search engines.

You can do dynamic URL rewriting in Site Explorer. Tell them which parameters are content neutral for your sites:

• Ability to indicate parameter to remove URLs from site
• More efficient crawl with less duplicates
• Better site coverage as fewer resources are wasted on duplicates
• Fewer risks of crawler traps
• Cleaner URL, easier for user to read and more likely to be clicked
• Better ranking due to reduced link juice fragmentation -- it's equivalent to 301ing all the duplicates back to one URL, saves time because they don't have to crawl it

Derrick Wheeler is up. Here's a bit of vintage Derrick for you all: "This crowd is a perfect Web site. You're all unique. I would crawl, index and rank all of you." Rand interjects "That's dirty." Derrick: "But I wouldn't click or take action." Hee.

Final points (he likes to get these done first):

• Consider search engine crawler detection
• Know your parameters
• Link to URLs with parameters always in the same order
• Dig deep into search results for your domain
• Exclude duplicates by robots.txt first, Meta Robot exclusion second, and nofollow link attribute last
• Don't assume engines can't follow JavaScript
• Get a regular crawl report of your Web site
  • Request a tab file that includes: referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords
  • Open file using Excel 2007, sort by Title then landing URL
  • Review suspect URLs to look for dupes
• Focus on your strengths

Look for spider traps, adding a parameter and creating new pages every time you go back and forth several times.

Make sure that when you're creating sites for users, you still avoid spider traps. Just because you don't think the search engines will need to index it, doesn't mean that you don't have other pages that the search engines won't get to because they're busy with your trap.

Document why you're doing things. One site removed session IDs for search engines and got 10 million pages indexed. Down the line, someone forgot why it had been done, started giving session IDs to the engines again and their index pages plummeted again.

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, based on how someone clicked through the site (Brookstone does this), related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble. Make your internal linking consistent and useful. Some products might be able to live in multiple categories, but you need to make a decision.

Anytime you see related, sort or compare, think "possible duplicate content". When you see "select region" or "sign in", think duplicate content. Disallow those pages in your robots.txt. "Email an article", "send to a friend" -- think duplicate content.
Once you screw up the parameter order, it's hard to fix. Keep it consistent.

Use absolute links, not relative links, especially when switching between http:// and https://. Other people could link to you with https:// as well and you can't really do anything about that.

Priyank suggests going after the low-hanging fruit. Try the dynamic URLs first so that you can see the benefit right away.

Brent Payne asks: How do you credit a story properly when you're the Chicago Tribune? Can I get a link attribute or something? Just linking back doesn't work. Google tells me it's not a big deal but it is.

There's not so much that the reps can say to that. They're trying and he's already doing the right thing. Poor Brent.

Derrick doesn't think there is a solution right now. (He also reminded everyone that he's an in-house SEM, not a search engine representative.)

How detrimental are different link IDs?

Priyank: Every different URL linking to the same content is duplicate content. That's why you should use dynamic URL rewriting.

Ben: We try to handle that automatically. We might have to crawl the page once but we try to learn which parameters don't affect the page content.

[Most of these questions are site specific, so I'm skipping them.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:06 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks, Yahoo

October 16, 2008

What Google's Q3 Earnings Could Mean for the Search Industry

What a difference a day makes. Just yesterday, predictions about Google's incoming Q3 reported earnings varied across the board from decent to dismal. But all the guessing and speculation was for naught, as today the official earnings were announced.

While skeptics anticipated a bubble-buster, Google's earnings beat expectations. The company saw a 31 percent increase year-over-year for a net income of more than $1.5 billion.

This coming mere days after CNET anticipated dark times ahead for Web advertising and Adweek forecasted the beginning of a downturn for the ad business.

As the latter story explains:

"In past recessions, said [Jessica] Reif-Cohen, ad spending has been a 'lagging indicator' -- meaning that typically the business doesn't take a hit until a quarter or two after a consumer recession starts and doesn't recover until a quarter or two after it ends."

However, you read later that:

"The ad marketplace should be less challenging for the more measurable channels, particularly digital, according to Jack Klues, managing partner of Publicis Groupe Media's recently formed VivaKi."

Google Watch said it another way in the post Will Google's Q3 Earnings Offer a Window View to the Recession? "If Google beats expectations, it's hardly proof that online advertising isn't suffering from a recession. All it may well suggest is that search advertising, Google's main moneymaker, is for now better positioned compared to other online ad areas."

Of course Google and the search marketing industry aren't recession proof. But as Adweek reports, the ad industry in general has started bunkering down for the recession, while the person delivering the memo to search stopped for coffee along the way. The comforting fact remains that search advertising provides some of the most profitable returns available. And it looks like there's still room left for growth.

In this time of uncertainty, we hear a lot about lacking consumer confidence -- something that gets brought up around this industry as well. Considering the uneasy footing of the economy, it's especially important to continue to provide the highest quality SEM services you can. That's the best chance you've got for making it past this bumpy road.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/16/08 at 5:29 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, SEM Industry

October 13, 2008

Google's Link Week

Last week, amid the flood of information coming out of SMX East, Google hosted Link Week on the Webmaster Central Blog. It was a week of posts dedicated to the topic of links -- specifically, internal, external and inbound links.

Since I began covering search tradeshows and reading industry publications, I've observed the obvious: links are equal to gold on the Web. I've seen the numerous posts regarding link building, PageRank sculpting, link bait (you get the idea) go hot on Sphinn. At shows, I've noticed that Google reps always get lots of questions about linking best practices, how rel="nofollow" works, paid links (and on and on). Industry members are hungry for information on how to get rich in the link economy, and Google holds its cards close to the vest in order to avoid giving away any information that could be used to forge a fake check, if you will.

So when it was announced on the Webmaster Central Blog last Monday that the week's posts would be aimed at clarifying Google's recommendations for linking, I got excited. There are so many different channels that provide information on how Google values and measures link equity -- even three different Google reps speaking on different panels at a single conference may provide varying information -- so it's always great to get the "definitive" word from an official source.

The post that got the most attention was the final post, Good times with inbound links. At Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz talked about his disappointment in the lack of details while a post on Wiep.net theorized that a cover-up of inbound link building recommendations may be underway. On BlogStorm, Patrick Altoft wondered if Google was embarrassed about the role of links in the ranking algorithm, but I'd venture to say that the real reason is more akin to an argument of security: secrets must stay secret so the ill-intentioned don't infiltrate the system.

Google recently removed a line from the Webmaster Guidelines that read "Have other relevant sites link to you." It was replaced with the advice "Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online." I read this change as an attempt to modify the language from an active recommendation -- to go out and solicit links -- to the more passive suggestion -- that the webmaster makes sure their site is known about. The second wording implies that if a site knows about your site, they will link to it if it has the kind of relevant and valuable information they'd like to share with their visitors.

When it comes down to it, though, Google has their hands tied. Telling SEOs and webmasters to solicit links goes against the best interests of the end users. Unless it's a clearly labeled advertisement, a link implies a related page that will give a user more information on the topic they are looking for. If I know that some deal was conducted behind the scenes, it's hard to trust that link will really be offering what I'm looking for. Hence the carefully crafted line: "when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they're also one of the positive signals to Google".

SEOs will probably never have the answers handed to them in a neat little package, or blog post or guideline for that matter. It would be much too easy to spam. But that part of you -- the user that gets frustrated by rick rolls, comment spam or poor quality pages in the SERPs --- that's the part that's got to appreciate the clever way that Google sometimes dances around the subject. On tip toes. In circles.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/13/08 at 5:17 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy

October 10, 2008

Ask the Search Engines

The last day of SMX East was hectic as I tried to touch base with new friends and contacts, attend all the sessions and make it to my flight in time. I managed to pull off most of those objectives, with the exception of posting a couple of live-coverage entries to the blog. So without further ado, here's what happened at the last session I attended. As my momma always says, "Better late than never!"

Moderator Danny Sullivan has got to feel good right now. Another awesome conference nearly complete! For the final leg of the marathon, let's go straight to the source and talk to the search engine representatives about all the things on our minds.

Danny says that he used to do a session called "I'm So Confused" because of all the conflicting information that is shared at conferences. But this panel will give us the official take from the search engines.

The reps are Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft; Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality, Google Inc.; and Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering, Yahoo.

Sean says that sites should submit sitemaps, either .txt or .xml, and overall it helps with inclusion. He also heard a question about keyword order in Titles. He says that it is important to get right, not because of ranking but for the effect of the presentation in the SERP. Users will react well to seeing the keywords they are searching for in the Title so they should be further toward the beginning.

Aaron says that he's involved in trying to get rid of spam. He hears a lot about companies wanting to put up different versions of content for different countries. They wonder if it's going to be a duplicate content issue. He says that if the URL and the path to the content is reported to Google as specific for a certain location, Google won't see it as duplicate content.

Nathan says that he hears a lot about URLs. He says that session tracking parameters for a page will result in multiple versions of the same page in the index. Competing against own pages for space in the index can be harmful. He recommends submitting a sitemap with one URL for each page, and it should be the shortest form in the canonical version consistently. He also hears a lot about metrics and thinks that people are worrying about metrics that aren't the most important. He thinks it's all about conversions and trying to find the most valuable action. Finally, he doesn't believe that enough people are using the search engine provided tools available.

Now comes the Q&A part that you've all been waiting for. Be kind; Q&A can be hard to blog.

Are there best practice for running A/B tests so search engines don't think you're trying to cloak?

Aaron says that the way they look at it is that cloaking is only a problem if the intent is malicious. So for A/B testing, it is fine because the same type of content will be served. While they don't encourage cloaking, penalties only happen after a human review, so no penalty will be served if it's clearly just testing and not malicious.

Nathan says that A/B generally looks different than cloaking, and while they don't recommend cloaking, it really isn't a problem.

Sean says that the bad situation happens when there are large diversions, not the little ones that are common of testing.

Do you count affiliate links?

Sean says it depends where and in what context the links are coming up. If they are coming up in random, irrelevant places, that's not good. But if affiliates are making them of value to users, it's probably going to be a fine signal.

Nathan says that each link is evaluated independently and it's not necessarily considered if it's an affiliate or not.

We're currently redesigning our site and the only thing staying the same is the domain. The old site had ten pages and the new one will have 100,000. Are we going to have a problem?

Nathan says that the search engine always tries to find the most relevant page for a query, so if there's a page with similar content about a product as the manufacturer's page about the product which has been around longer, your site's page may not show up as it's considered a duplicate. One way to work around this is if you can add something beyond what's already out there, like pictures or reviews. As the question came from someone who has a weapons site, he suggests that she could maybe do videos of tazing pets... The whole audience laughs and groans and I'm pretty sure Nathan is turning pink. Maybe not the best example!

Aaron says that when you have a unique offering in a market, you will stand out by doing something different. He doesn't think that the reputation credited to the old site will be devalued on the new site, but he does warn to be aware of duplicate content from the old site.

When will Yahoo and Microsoft get country-specific targeting? And what's your advice if you want your site seen in another country?

Sean says that you should use a ccTLD because it's a huge signal. The other big signal is where the users and links are coming from.

Nathan says that you should make sure the international site is all located in the same sub-group or sub-directory because it's easier to identify. If a whole sub-directory looks like it's in German, it's a signal that it is targeted for Germany.

What percentage of false positives do you have in spam protection?

Aaron says that it's low but that it's an algorithm so there are sometimes mistakes. Spam algorithm changes are treated the same way as any other algorithm change. They test changes in a large sample and if they see a generally overwhelmingly positive result, they roll it out.

Sean sways that it's low, but if you think your site is treated incorrectly or if it has been cleaned up, submit a webmaster support form for consideration by the right people.

Danny says that Microsoft and Google will report to you if they think you're spam, except for cases that Google feels are so obvious the site is spammy that you should know it already. Yahoo is working on it.

Should people be bothering with nofollow or not to try to flow their PageRank around?

Sean says that in terms of designing for users, it's not helpful at all, so in the long term your energy could probably be better put into other areas. Aaron says that for the most part the issue comes up when there are way more links on a page than are useful to a user. In that case you have to think if the page itself is good for the user. He doesn't think it's going to cause an issue one way or another. Nathan asks who in the audience is doing sculpting (maybe five) and then he asks who has measured a positive change (maybe two). He says it was higher than he thought, but he still doubts the long term value.

Aaron says that sculpting seems like a lot of effort to put into the one signal of the link equity algorithm. He says he thinks it can be done if there's nothing left to do. Danny recommends testing it yourself to see if you see a difference.

It was suggested in a link building session that you could make donations to charities to get a link on their .org site.

Danny says that, to make it more uncomfortable, Matt Cutts has said that's fine. Sean says that if a charity is offering links for sale, he would think that they'd be getting links from bad guys as well as good guys, which will quickly get them flagged. Then the site will be in the universe of people who are bad and that link will be worthless.

Aaron says that if they were to see that 60 percent of the spam comes from charities, then they'll go after it. If it's rampant and makes up a large portion of spam then they'll see it as low-hanging fruit. Nathan says that if you're giving it to charity, then it's good anyway. But really, a charity that is aggressively selling links is probably going to see other attention as a result of their marketing techniques and see an increase in traffic.

Do you ever do direct intervention to penalize spam, as opposed to changes to the algorithm?

Aaron says absolutely. If it's hurting the results right now then they're going to do something manually. But they want to make the algorithm better, too, which they do by learning about the ways people are spamming.

Do reports that come in from a Google account have more weight?

He says that reports that come in from Webmaster Central are considered first over the external submissions because it's a cleaner data set.

Does the Yahoo algorithm in Japan work in a significantly different way than in the U.S.?

Sean says that there are slightly different signals but that it is the same back-end search engine and system, just tweaked for the market.

In natural search, do you offer some sort of endorsement or certification for SEOs?

Nathan says no. He says that he wouldn't want to endorse vendors because there's so much behind it. Sean says that it's the second time he's heard the question and says it's an interesting suggestion.

Is there a conflict behind your content networks showing up in your search engines?

Sean says that the reason Yahoo has SEOs is because they're trying to avoid a conflict of interest. There's search and there's content and it's not the same thing. So, for the content they have to compete for their user base and thus they need SEO. Aaron says that there's no Google policy to boost Google properties, but for certain properties like YouTube they have more information on them than they have on other sites, so they may show up more. Nathan says that Microsoft tries to keep a firewall between all of their businesses. Even advertisers that spend tons of money get no preferential treatment. AdCenter and the search engine are separate.

Are links still the primary signal for popularity and importance?

Aaron says inks are a good measure of reputation. Clicks are a noisy signal, and so the absence of a click for a result is thus way more useful because it signals that it's not the most relevant result. Sean isn't sure if links are the most important signal or not, but he will say that it's a larger signal than Title tags, for instance.

What's happening with personalized search?

(Okay, I actually didn't hear the question, but this is the answer.)

Aaron says there's a lot of data they have access to because of the way people use the search engine. But in personalized search, one policy is that whatever is done will be told to the user. The user can go in and control what is being used for personalization. They want to give you the ability to say "I don't want you to use this".

And that's a wrap for SMX East! Thanks to Cindy Krum, Eric Lander and Kate Morris, who took time out of their whirlwind schedules to come on SEM Synergy and, of course, thanks to all the great speakers who didn't hold anything back when it came to sharing with hungry audiences. All that's left to post from the conference is the highly-attended Give It Up: White Hat Edition panel, which will be hitting the blog November 7.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/10/08 at 1:17 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Google, Live Search, Liveblog, SMX East 2008, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

October 7, 2008

Googleopoly

Finishing out the day on the Issues Track, let's take a look at Googleopoly! Our moderator is Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Marketing, ExactTarget, and he'll be the one asking the questions. Our speakers are: James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School; Shelly Palmer, Managing Director, Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC; Kevin Ryan, CEO and Founder, Motivity Marketing; and Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikia Search.

What does it take to be considered a legal monopoly?

James says a monopoly is simply when you're the only one selling something. There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly. The thing is, you can't do unfair things to get one and once you have one, it's not legal to exploit it to discourage competition.

Are you hearing concerns from advertisers regarding the Google Yahoo deal?

Of course advertisers are concerned because they assume a partnership between Yahoo and Google is intentionally vague so as not to be understood. The world doesn't know what it doesn't know, and people generally don't know that having one source of information on the Internet is a bad thing.

Does Google's growth in the domestic market concern you?

Chris thinks we're going to see competitive responses. In China, Microsoft revealed a new suite of tools that they're going to have which show quite a bit of transparency. He doesn't think that Google's monopoly is bad, and he sees competition coming about.

Hitwise is reporting that Google has a dominance in the video space, which appears to be propped up by the search space. Is that concerning?

Shelly says there several things to think through. First, Google is an ecosystem and it's not likely to go anywhere. The chart shows that Google, if left unchecked, is pretty much unstoppable. But not only is Google a medium, it's a metric. That's a new place advertisers are finding themselves. Google is the metric of how to do other media that has become ingrained and will be hard to unseat. He's only concerned from the perspective of how advertisers will handle the circumstance after never having seen this kind of shift before.

Now Jeff pulls up the Wikipedia page for "Googleopoly" and it's a sad little page. (Go at it, marketers!)

Share your thoughts on Google growth and how it fits into your view as a competitor.

Jimmy says that search doesn't trend naturally toward monopoly. Like big brand spaces, there are reasons why some are going to be big and others are going to be small. He says if he can launch a search engine he's going to be super thrilled to get even 2 percent of the market. To launch in the advertising space is much harder.

Jeff shows a chart of one company's client's paid search spend for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is up at the 70 to 80 percent line, Yahoo is around 15 to 25 while Microsoft is hovering around 5 percent. So what does this mean for the monopoly issue?

James says that from a market share perspective, Google is crossing the point of being considered a monopoly. At around 75 percent, some could start seeing monopoly, but the real question is if they are doing anything to clobber competition.

Jeff asks the audience who is an advocate for the deal, no one raises their hand. Almost everyone raises their hand when he asks who is a skeptic.

Advocates

• 11 members of Congress (CA)
• Ayn Rand Center
• Google
• Overstock.com
• Publicis Group
• Randall Stross (Author, Planet Google
• Yahoo

Skeptics

• American Antitrust Institute
• ...

Ugh, the slide is gone and I missed the whole skeptics list. You'll have to forgive me. :( I did notice that the list of skeptics was longer than the list of advocates.

Are you a skeptic or an advocate of the deal?

Kevin likes Google's culture and admires how they've added to the working environment. He doesn't see people being thrown under the bus. Part of him says that that's a great thing and maybe life would be better if we could all join collectives. The other part of him sees Android, Chrome, and many more things pointing to one dominant source of information, and he views that as a bad thing.

Shelly says that personally he could care less if the deal goes through or not. But, speaking as a representative of advertisers who need to buy advertising, it's not a good thing because the mash-up will take the advertiser's ability to target the distinct differences of the two audiences. As a buyer and a planner he can't be effective. But Yahoo wouldn't do the deal if they didn't think they need to do the deal. Advertising has always competed to the death, but that's not done in technology because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Jimmy says that Yahoo made a huge mistake by not being bought by Microsoft. It looks like this deal is the alternative to the failed Microsoft deal. To Yahoo this is a like giving up on something that should be a core part of their functionality. But his concerns for monopoly factors are that if you're big enough to be a player you don't want to sign everything off to the biggest guy.

Chris says that the deal has been suspended indefinitely. He also heard news today that Yahoo's and AOL's talks about merging have heated up. He doesn't think the Google Yahoo deal will ever occur.

James says that it makes him sad that some large center of innovation has folded. While Yahoo lost the edge years ago, the recent effect is that someone else out there who was figuring out a good way to build tools for advertisers is now lost.

Shelly says that a combined Yahoo AOL would be a content behemoth, but they still can't translate that value into wealth. To the level that Microsoft could buy that combined entity is funny. He also thinks it's funny that the evil empire talk used to be reserved for Microsoft.

Kevin says that Google built everything organically while Yahoo tried to build through acquisition. He thinks we're comparing apples to Buicks (hah!) because the two follow totally different strategies.

Is Google using their market power in organic search to propel YouTube, Google Maps and its other products in a disproportionate way?

Kevin says that Google's acquisitions came fewer and slower. We're going to see a lot more of search and behavioral targeting coming together because it's a means of collecting all kinds of information.

Shelly says that the practical thing is that some things require a certain scale. When the DOJ decided to break up Microsoft, not a whole lot changed because no one understood what a browser was, what an operating system was, or any of the basic terminology that was needed to talk about Microsoft.

Jimmy says that it only occurs to us to be shocked by the idea of the deal because it doesn't match what we understand about Google. Search is a report on the world, like a form of journalism. If people begin to sense that Google is promoting their properties over others, people would be suspect.

What is Google's responsibility to ensure accuracy?

James says that Google doesn't have any responsibility there. Shelly reiterates, saying that Google is a pipeline. It's like blaming radio waves for what's playing on the radio.

If Google knows everything about us, should we be more concerned about the aggregation of this data because of what the government could do with it?

Shelly says that it comes down to it, the electronic footprint that everyone leaves (completely apart from Google) is huge. Jimmy says that one of the interesting things about this is that if you're someone of intense interest, the government will be able to subpoena all that data, but for most people most of the time, it's not likely.

What does the Android phone do to the conversation of Googleopoly?

James says this is one of the best moves for openness in the telecom technology area. This is a great development in the mobile space because it's holding Apple's feet to the fire. Jimmy agrees and says it's good that there's something that will drive innovation.

Do you think the government is wise to look at Google for antitrust issues, or are there other places that they should be directing their attention that bear a far more negative impact on us as consumers and citizens?

Kevin says that they should look toward Google to figure out how to make money (hah!). James thinks we should worry about the ISPs first.

That was a fascinating conversation and I sometimes found myself entranced listening to the panelists instead of typing. That said, you can always check out alternative coverage. I saw Tamar Weinberg blogging away for Search Engine Roundtable, so if you like what you read so far, check it out!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, SMX East 2008, Yahoo