Google

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)
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Personalized and Customized Search

Moderator Danny Sullivan says that it was very hard to get speakers for this topic because many people aren't sure what they're doing yet as far as personalization and customization are concerned. But Bryan Horling, Software Engineer, Personalized Search, Google, is hoping to give an overview of what's going on, what changes to expect and the history behind personalized and customize search.

Here's an example using "dinner" as a query. The top two results are a Wikipedia article and a site with recipes. Basically, the results will help you research what dinner is or find a site that requires additional work. In a personalized version, there's a result for a manicotti recipe and a result for an area restaurant. This shows the difference between what a user might want and what is being provided, and the two are miles apart. If every person was to write out a list of what they'd expect from the query "dinner", everyone's would be different, so it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. [I've heard that about personalization somewhere before... --Susan]

Why personalize? You get the user to the right information as quickly as possible. Many searches are inherently ambiguous, so they can be a challenge to answer correctly for the individual user.

He won't be talking about: search preferences, iGoogle, custom search engine, subscribed links, and Google Desktop, although these things can all affect a user's search experience.

Early personalization history at Google

• Kaltix acquisition (2003): Three guys from Stanford wrote some cool things about personalizing PageRank.
• Personalized search on Google Labs (2004): Explicit, specify your interests.
• Personalized search launched (2005): Implicit, based on your Web history.

Web history records a user's queries and clicks and gets a good idea of what the user is actually interested in. It's better than models where users enter their interests because sometimes people don't answer in the way that best shows their interests.

Principles of Personalization

User privacy is key. Without the trust of users, no one's going to allow their information to be used. This is done through:

• Transparency: Inform when and what changes are made.
• Security: Sensitive info, including personalization based on that info is only available when signed in.
• Control: Users can edit or delete underlying data or turn the service off.

Web History

On the search results page, click on "Web History" for a page that displays Web history. The date and time of all activity is shown, and there's a calendar where heavy search days occurred as well as a place that categories are sorted, from images to news to blogs and videos. This is the transparency arm.

Web history control is letting the user remove or pause Web history. Individual items can be removed from the history. A user can also clear their entire Web history. This has been around for a few years.

More recently, there are customized results for locations. By clicking on the "more details" link, there is info shown for the location and you can compare results if the Web history was not applied.

Ranking Changes

Localization is:

• Using the searcher's geolocation to affect search.
• Different levels of granularity.
• Both explicit and implicit information.

Country level localization will serve results that apply to the country you're in. He uses the query "got talent" as an example, and in the UK the result is Britain's Got Talent while in the U.S. the result is America's Got Talent.

Regional localization is, again, intuitive. When querying "metro" in D.C., you'll get results for public transit, but if you search in San Francisco, you'll get results for the publication.

City localization will show local results, especially for queries with strong local intent, like "pizza". That query will result in local business results for pizza in your town or city.

Personalization

• Using the searcher's personal context to rank results
• Recent searches (short term)
• Web history (long term)

Recent searches - Disambiguation

Searching for "jordans" would probably result in the sneaker, but if their recent queries were about furniture, the results will show Jordans the furniture store. Generally, it results in a re-ranking that still includes shoe results.

Web History - Disambiguation

A search for "galaxy" will mostly show pages about space for non-personalized results. But if the searcher has been looking at soccer sites, the LA Galaxy will show up more proficiently.

Web History - Refinding

A result that is visited previously will show that it has been visited and that site's listing may possibly rise in the position it shows up for.

What does this mean for SEM?

Half empty:

• Collecting metrics
• Seeing how your pages rank

Half full:

• Easier for people looking for your service to find you.
• Easier to retain customers who prefer your business.

The top position is not winner-take-all. To take advantage of personalized search:

• Create compelling and interesting content.
• Appeal to users, not search engines.
• You can control personalization for your searches. Use search details. Disable it by appending &pws=0 to searches.
• Sign out.
• Firefox extension, greasemonkey script.
• Edit or turn off Web history.

Q&A

If I want to create personalization on my site itself, how can I do it?

A lot of what we try to address with personalized search is ambiguity, but within a particular site, there's probably not the same need.

What's the percentage of people that are actually using this on a regular basis?

All Bryan can say is "a bunch".

How does this all tie into local business accounts?

He doesn't know a lot about local business, but the issue is what if you're looking for a result in an area that you don't live? We probably aren't serving those as well as you might in the short term. But in the long term, Web history would help resolve this as it figures out that you like to visit some place. Of course, if you're looking for something out of town, you'll probably make it a town specific query. There's nothing stopping searchers from refining queries.

Could personalization help a site that seems like another site?

People with similar interests will see similar results.

Do you need to have a Google account to be served personalized search results?

Previous queries and geo-based queries don't require a Google account.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
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SMXE Keynote -- Tim Armstrong

Welcome back to SMX East. I expect nothing less than awesome after yesterday's great sessions and the rocking IMNY Charity Party. And we're kicking it off strong with Google's Tim Armstrong, President, Advertising and Commerce, North America, & Vice President - Google, Inc.

Danny Sullivan: We're at the point where people are starting to wonder if Google is getting too big. Is Google a monopoly?

TA: Our answer is definitively no. When I started there eight years ago, Google had virtually no market share. But the core thing we focused on over time is getting information to people. Google's also been very innovative in transparency. We're doing anything in their power to make it open. We're an important part of the industry environment, but we're by no means a monopoly.

DS: The review by the DOJ was supposed to be a voluntary thing, but if they say don't do it, will you follow them?

TA: One of the things that some of the larger advertisers haven't like about it is that Google has allowed all sizes of companies to play on an even field. There are a lot of big companies that are used to having pricing power over the smaller competitors. So some people are making arguments in their best interest. In general, we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

DS: The ANA is opposing the Yahoo ad deal. Is the ANA like 30 big advertisers?

TA: Most of the ANA are customers of ours. There are different levels of understanding about what our advertising is. Overall, the vast majority of them have great relationships with both Yahoo and Google. One of the things we've been offering the ANA is an open town hall. We want to talk about the deal with people in public. In general, they're great customers of ours and we'd like to have them understand the deal better, because I think overall they'll support the deal if they understand it.

DS: There's a concern with advertisers that you're going to dictate the prices. Are you guys going to get together and decide that any ad is going to start at $10 per click?

TA: For us it's really about user quality. From my past experience in media, the whole point is to help customers and sell ads. But the respect around end users is always in the conversation. It's in many cases a way to make sure the highest quality bids show up. But whether it's landing page quality or loading time, it's all about the end user. Google wouldn't set bid pricing because our focus is on user quality.

DS: What else are you doing to aid transparency?

TA: From Google Analytics to Google Trends to setting your own bid price, the planning stage of what you're going to buy from Google through the delivery stage of what you get - it all has transparency. Transparency slices through the auction, and the Google model is probably more transparent than traditional media. As we try to define what quality is for advertising, there's a responsibility on Google's side to make things more transparent. A big help is listening to customers. We don't have a specific plan for transparency, but I think people will see it over time.

DS: What's behind the idea that you're both working with and competing with ad agencies?

TA: I think there's no conflict because we work with them. If you're a big agency and you have a big client and you don't know what you're doing in search marketing, you may want to start to call us names. I think the market has really reset and Google's got a growing number of relationships with agencies. As the search market becomes bigger and more sophisticated and starts to bleed into other areas, search marketers are the only people to be able to connect all the changes together for their clients. The notion that Google is a frenemy or a froe is outdated and I think many of our clients would say that we're a great partner and have helped agencies grow to an extent.

DS: When clients go directly to you and bypass their agency, it has led people to ask "Who owns the client?"

TA: I think the clients own themselves. I don't think that Google owns the clients. I think agencies are the best people to connect clients to Google, eBay, Amazon -- they're the only people that can help companies connect all the dots together. They can figure out how to optimize across the board. When you look at the examples of what people are saying when they make this point, it's usually because the client had a specific question or were trying to solve a specific issue.

DS: What's the relationship between Google and Publicis?

TA: We started talking to them about a year ago. The Publicis clients were looking to Google and together we decided to get closer together. There are a few basic principles behind how we work together. First, people need to understand what the other company is doing, so we've been swapping employees. On the systems front, Publicis has a tremendous amount of information and they want to mix their data with Google's data, so we need to figure out the format to do that. The other question is how does Publicis add the most efficient value to their clients. We're working on all these things and I would expect us to work with more agencies in the future. Email me at tim[at]google.com if you're interested in working together.

DS: Is there anyone left that doesn't get search?

TA: The good news for us is that there are still many people that don't understand search. When we start showing people statistics about how many divisions of a company are taking advantage of search marketing versus how many are signed up for Google Analytics and trying to understand search traffic, it's sometimes a shock to them because there are people in the company hungry to understand how to get more traffic and people to their site.

DS: Are their big areas that are still going to blow up in search? It's been the year for mobile for the last five years.

TA: If you look back five years, there's a lot more available online now. But local is still a big opportunity. Mobile 1) works really well and 2) is sometimes more important than online search. It's going to happen but the question is when. We tested mobile in Japan and it was a big business success. I don't know when the year of mobile is, but it's coming. The other area is video. Search on video has the potential to be like AdWords in its long term value. It's important now, from a traffic perspective.

DS: Sometimes it's hard to keep track of everything Google's doing in video.

TA: Video is a few different markets. There's the traditional model (banners), there's version 2.0 (overlays) and also version 3.0 (promotion for what people are searching for). Engagement level is probably going to be very high considering the opportunities available on YouTube.

DS: Is AdWords for video still running?

TA: Going back to user quality, when an ad comes up in search results we try to deliver the best available ad at the time. We're testing to find out when is the right time to serve videos as ads. We don't have any findings to report, but it's what we're looking at.

DS: There was an honest to goodness banner ad on Google images. What's going on?

TA: We decided to finally test serving banner ads and we figured Google image search was the best place to try that.

DS: You've got Yahoo doing banner ads across the Web that are influenced by search profiles. Then Google is saying "we're not doing that", other than maybe not showing the same ad twice.

TA: We've thought about behavioral targeting for a long time. It's beneficial for both advertisers and end users. But we'd want to watch the area carefully before we do that, if we do that. We're watching BT be successful and it's on our radar, though we don't expect to do anything with that now.

DS: Audience, how many are worried about the Google Yahoo deal?

[Just a few people (I can see about five hands) are and most aren't (more like 50 hands), although many think it will cost more for advertising. Tim's glad to get the feedback.]

Audience member: It looks like you've tried to purge some poorly performing advertisers. Do you think you got everyone off you wanted to and is this a process that needs to be repeated every so often?

TA: We've never targeted specific advertisers and as we've grown, we've had to look at how to scale quality controls. But quality is not something we're ever going to stop addressing. Are we done? Have we reached the pinnacle of quality? No. I think you should expect us to keep ratcheting quality up over time and on a daily basis. You can expect us to continue to do more quality-based changes to the system. There are also times when we've done a bad job of letting more ads into the system, so you've seen us do both, but there's constantly a back and forth.

Audience member: What happens if the DOJ investigation takes a number of months?

TA: We'll patiently wait, I think. We're committed to seeing the right outcome so we're working with them to figure out what they're figuring out. I don't want to comment for the DOJ because they're on their own time table.

Tim wants to know if anyone has anything they'd like to see.

• Business search options (as opposed to consumer search)
• Grand Central
• Purging Maps spam

DS: You've been at Google since 2000. What's the most significant thing you've seen happen to the company?

TA: Some things haven't changed at all, so the biggest surprise is that I'd expect more change in the fundamentals we concentrate on. But one thing that's been surprising is that I thought search quality and ad quality would be something we'd master overtime, but it's actually an ongoing task. Also, it's surprising that the rest of the market hasn't caught onto ad quality. We treat ads like information, and a lot of the markets haven't adopted that, which is really surprising. Targeting criteria and ads targeting hasn't bled into the rest of the market and I think that's a huge advantage for us in general. Those early hard choices we made about letting end users choose the best ads are something we're proud of. The general culture hasn't changed. We've got great people and great projects. It's still exciting to go to work and that hasn't changed.

[ Awww ;) ]

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)
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September 23, 2008

Google's G1: Something Else To Get Unjustifiably Excited Over

So I'm curious, are you excited about the Google Phone announcement? Do you even care?

Personally, I don't. I just bought my first BlackBerry Curve (in pink!) a few weeks ago so I'm contently sitting in my corner ignoring all of you. However, I know Susan is pretty amped on it. The idea of an all-Google phone just isn't that appealing to me. The third-party apps may be cool, but until I see something worth switching to T-Mobile for (like an app that finds me free cupcakes), I'm not paying attention.

But plenty of people are, and for them, today was a big day. It was the glorious day that Google announced (for reals) the lovely creation called the Google Phone. Obviously all the essentials are present and accounted for. It has a three inch touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, browser buttons, trackball, copy and paste technology, and even the neat ability to transfer photos without the use of cumbersome email.

It's cool. But it's not that cool. So why do people care? [Better Google than Apple. --Susan] That's why I don't have an iPhone either.

I don't get it. This phone turns me off for a few reasons. First, have you seen it? It definitely got hit with the ugly stick. It looks like a 13-year-old boy was asked to sketch up his dream phone and then the Google engineers just went with it. Slick, it is not.

I'm also skeptical to adopt a phone that is so closely tied to Google. Mostly because I feel like if I do I may as well just go in to get the barcode imprinted on my forehead now, even if I do already use all their services. The illusion that I have a choice is nice. This phone is intended for those who already live and breathe by Google. Walt Mossberg says the phone can't even be used without a Google account, which is a bit scary. That's a brilliant move by Google to scoop up the remaining 17 people on Earth who don't have one.

I guess the hype about the phone comes from all this potential fairy dust people are talking about. It's "open". It's on the Android Platform. People can make applications and then share them ala Facebook. Again, I'll be impressed when I see something worth getting excited about. On the Google Mobile Blog, Mark gives us the Google pitch about how the new G phone will take advantage of all the features of the Android Platform. Developers can upload and distribute the applications they create through the Android Store which delivers apps directly to the handset. And thanks to all the hype around the Google phone, ReadWriteWeb says there are already more than 1,700 applications waiting to be purchased. La, la, balloons, puppies and unicorns, so what?

I don't get it, so maybe you guys can enlighten me. Why should I be excited about this? Or should I not be? You figure it out, I'm going to be over here spooning with my Blackberry. [I'm already on T-Mobile and here's why I'm excited: 3G network! Full Qwerty! Touchscreen! It's RIM's fault I don't have a Blackberry Bold already and I'm tempted by this. --Susan] Are you whining? Get off my niche,

[BoyGeniusReport has lots of screenshots of the Google Phone. And Pandas.

And if you're already drooling at the mouth for one, you can have your very own Google baby bottle next month here in the States. Otherwise, the device will be in the UK in November, across Europe in 2009.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 09/23/08 at 3:48 PM | Comments (4)
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August 21, 2008

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

Whose idea what it to have just a little snack break instead of lunch? I can't work like this. And by like this I mean covered in chocolate from my delicious ice cream sandwich.

This session the moderator is Anna Maria Virzi (ClickZ) and panelists are Carrie Hill (Blizzard Internet Marketing), Laura Wilson (New England Journal of Medicine), Scott Brinker (ion interactive) and Tom Leung (Google).

Our first speaker is going to be Carrie Hill. She thought she was going to have to bribe us with alcohol to get people to this session instead of SEO secrets. The real secret is knowing that Lisa's over there liveblogging it; it's just like being there!

Qualified traffic is the key to good post-click marketing. Buyers know what they want and that's what they'll search for. Use segments to deliver language and interface on those pages that will appeal to your shoppers. Use your trigger words. Buyer use words they relate to in their queries. If they use a word in their search, you should use those words on your page in order for them to see relevance. It should show up in the SERP and on the page.

Example: Free shipping-- Apple doesn't have free shipping prominently on their page so it's easy to over look. Zappos makes it obvious that they have free shipping.

Make sure that your visitors are landing on the right page. The home page is not right for every query. If they're using a word, give them a page that's relevant to it. Give your traffic the trigger word that they're looking for. If they do land on the home page, let them segment themselves.

Carry the message through the segmented path. IF they travel down the 'free' trigger word path, repeat that message.

Remember each piece of PCM can lead to more revenue from your site. Many pieces work dependent upon each other. Remember that halfway is only halfway but every little bit helps. Use Web site optimizer, do tests, let the users design their experience through self-selection.

Laura Wilson is going to present a case study on how this worked for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Five Key Ingredients of Their Success:
1. Know what the audience is looking for
2. Engage and Convert visitors with relevant content and offers
3. Give the visitors a reason to come back to the site: Videos, beta site, free weekly audio summary and more.
4. Deepen relationships with the audiences: newsletters and subscriptions, information about updates to the site.
5. Optimize conversions through testing

Tactics:
1. Navigation links with calls to action: both home page navigation and global navigation
2. Offers on Sign In Pages -- offers that are relevant to visitor based on the content they're trying to reach.
3. Free trial upsell on the registration confirmation page -- after registering for the newsletter, they offer them a trial to the online version of the journal.
4. Offer in authentication string message -- offers based on level of access.
5. Targeted emails -- welcome e-mail series and a "new features" e-mails. Free trial member will also be getting an email series with a countdown on time left.
6. Promotions in Weekly NEJM E-mail table of contents.
7. Banner ads throughout the site
8. A/B testing, multiple tests

Scott Brinker is discussing segmenting. That's been the big thing this conference that I've noticed.

Two Takeaways:
1. To increase conversions have more specific landing pages.

A/B testing -- for your respondents, it's still just one page. You need to understand who your respondents ARE. Some might think that one thing is more important than others. What you need is more than one landing page to reach more than one audience.

2. Self-segmentation after the click

Some keywords won't give you intent. Have two step landing pages in those cases: "Dinner" -- do you mean "hamburger" or "pasta". You'll speak differently to small businesses than enterprise level pages. Tailor your second landing page to that self-selected audience.

Don't ask them to do too much work though or they'll bounce.

Figure out which ads attract which segment. Then see how well you're converting those segments.

5 reasons that 2 clicks are better than 1:

1. Easy Engagement - makes it easy for them to move forward
2. Self Identification - we respond to self-identification cues, more accurate than forms, sets expectation
3. More focused content - contextually relevant content sells better
4. Signaling - Investment reflects commitment. "If you target me, you much think I'd be a good fit..."
5. Market research - which ads attract which segments? Which segments convert best? How do prospects think of themselves?

Last to speak is Tom Leung from Google's Website Optimizer

In the old days, you just implemented stuff and hoped for the best. Or you listened to the "HiPPO" the highest paid person in the organization. If you were a little more advanced, you'd do a before and after test but that wasn't that enlightening.

Website Optimizers allows you to test different variations of a page to see which version is most effective at achieving results.

This puts power into the visitors and they'll tell you what they like best. Sites can be a living laboratory.

[He quickly goes through how to do testing with Website Optimizer.]

The only opinions that matter are the opinions of the people who go to your site.

Don't assume, make sure that your revisions aren't going to HURT your site. You have to test with a control. Your interesting idea might not work.

Basic questions:

• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?

Advanced questions:

• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objection elegantly?
• Does it provide all the essential information?

If you're thinking about outsourcing:

• How many experiments have you run?
• Referrals? -- screenshots and contacts
• Can you justify ROI?
• What was the average lift?
• Can they work with your IT department?
• Are they willing to tie their payment to performance? (not required)
• Do they have marketing, proj management?

Ask yourself if it really makes sense to show ads on your landing page. Tell people what you're about.

He likes the Netflix landing page: It's clean, legit, informative and not too complex.

Q&A

How do you get buy in?

Laura: We present data and do projections on what the impact could be.
Carrie: We had to do a little bit of free work to show them how to make the lift. Sometimes one test isn't enough. But once you can show them the difference that a little work does, it's not that hard to convince them to do more.
Scott: It comes down to two things: Make the argument about conversion rate. Also web site optimization is a huge task. Landing page optimization is smaller and easier.
Tom: Agrees with Scott. Don't make it a huge plan, just do the simple A/B test and show them the results and the lift. People find it hard to disagree with more conversions for the same money.

How do you use Website Optimizer on your home page?

Tom: Put the goal tags in multiple places and all those are considered conversion OR they'll do a time on page test and consider that a conversion.

How long should a test run?

Tom: Never shorter than one or two weeks. Have about a 100 conversions per combination.

Is it possible to use optimizer against a segmentation page?

Tom: I've seen people run tests where A is the regular landing page and B is the segmentation page.
Scott: It's hard to answer that without sounding like a sales pitch but yeah, that's what our tools do. It's possible to do even with just a simple test. You can at least take a first step in that direction.

[Skipping an asked and answered question and a very specific question.]

[I don't know what his questions was but he said statistically relevance about ten times. I think it involved math. Tom's answer was all complicated and technical too. I'm sorry, I can't even begin to interpret. HOWEVER: Green = high confidence, Yellow: mid level confidence, Red = low confidence loser]

How do I test on low volume keywords?

Tom: Keep it simple. Just do an A/B test. Also, change your conversion metric. Make it time on page instead, so that you can take that as a leading indicator to conversion.

Scott: There's nothing wrong with A/B testing. It works.

Carrie: Don't get sucked into the idea that a conversion is 'they bought something'. It can be moving to the next step. You're testing a path sometimes.

Tom: I'd agree about the power of A/B testing. At the end of the day, people get the best results from very small tests. Small tests make you focus. Multivariate tests can make you lose your focus.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Google, Pay Per Click, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, sessj2008

August 19, 2008

Re Search Online, Purchase Offline

I don't know what's up with the panel name. Do they know research is all one word? Maybe I'll take it up with moderator Kevin Ryan after the panel. Speakers this time around are Michelle Stern (iProspect), Dan Quinn (Research in Motion) and Ken Robbins (Response Mine Interactive). Kevin's got a snazzy pink shirt on. I know it's this color (no pun intended) commentary that the readers are really looking for in a liveblog.

Kevin reminds us that this session is all that stands between us and the Google Dance. Yes, do let's hurry through this.

Michelle Stern is our first speaker. We're going on a walk. Yay! Oh, down memory lane. Got it. We're reliving pin the tail on the donkey. She's saying that's how most marketers do their bidding. They spend too much or not enough on keywords. They pick things because of 'gut instinct' or because the CEO wants that. They're just taking shots in the dark and they don't have any idea what's going to convert.

Case study! World Travel Holdings. Their objective is to generate cruise reservations either online or over the phone. 90 percent of their reservations come over the phone and the average revenue is greater over the phone than over the Web. They didn't know what they were leaving on the table though because they didn't have a phone tracking system. [I really like her. She speaks nice and slowly. Very easy to follow. A++]

They have online tracking and know those steps all the way from search through purchase and confirmation. They can then tie conversions back to keywords.

For phone tracking the first steps are the same: Search, PPC ad, Cookie, User directed to the site.

Then the steps change. User calls and books. User is sent a confirmation email. User clicks on the email and gets sent to a confirmation page and now they have the link back to the original search and keyword.

Why use this approach and what's the benefit?

• Can use the existing 800 number
• Minimal human error and nothing that wasn't already there before.
• Ability to track revenue to the keyword.

The email confirmation gives the user benefit because they have a chance to confirm that what they ordered over the phone is correct. They're motivated to click the confirmation button.

[Shows a sample email. Confirm button is at the bottom]

When they started, they only had a 50 percent click through rate on the emails. They made some changes and got it up to 80 percent.

[Shows the revised email. Confirm button is higher up]

*To increase motivation to click, you could offer an incentive.

After enabling the phone tracking system, they increased ROI by sixteen percent.

Key Considerations

• Evaluate the sources of offline leads or sales
• Build upon your current business process [WTH already had an email confirmation]
• Know your prospects or consumers behavior
• Leverage technology
• Data analysis -- you have to use the data. Do segmentation.
  • Positive ROI keywords
  • Negative ROI keywords
  • Uncategorized keywords -- not enough data to decide.

Test your positive ROI keywords. Play with the position on the page, the ad copy. Resist the instinct to lower the bid. Take advantage of opportunities present. If conversion is low, test landing page options.

Considerations for uncategorized keywords:

• Conversion rate
• Number of clicks (accumulate at least 100)
• Number of conversions (have at least two conversions)

The idea is to find your hidden gems. Move them into more prominent positions to test their viability and then categorize them positive or negative.

Kevin asks about buy in from clients on that. She says it depends on their business model and capabilities. It's just a handful who have adopted it. It's not a tough sell if the resources are there.

Dan Quinn from BBGeeks' favorite company steps up. He says we're allowed to keep our Blackberries on. They don't consider it rude to type away at lunches and meetings.

All of the panelists have Blackberries. Curve, Pearl, Curve and his undisclosed one (He says he can't tell us what it is. Dude, is it the Bold? I want!)

They're in 140 countries. They really only sell accessories online, the main hardware sells are offline. They have the hardware and software side. He has to justify an ever growing advertising budget when the majority of sales happen offline.

Search works best of leveraged across media. They have a centralized search team so that they can look at all the different stakeholders from corporate marketing to advertising to the Web team.

There's a funnel to conversion. Awareness to Interest to Consider to Purchase. There are times when you want to support the partners in some parts of the funnel, particularly broad match when it's about awareness and education. They don't measure success only as a dollar amount. They consider it important to educate people and reduce churn and return rate. That's incremental dollars and changing the brand perception does too. It's not only about direct conversion.

In order to increase conversion they encourage participation through co-funding. They're probably not going to sell a Curve directly but they can drive partner sales.

A few thoughts:

• Ensure that you're harvesting insights from search
• Understand buying behavior by audience
• Communicate the "Voice of the Customer" internally
• Work with your partners and resellers whenever possible

Kevin asks how RIM handles channel conflicts, like the differences between providers. He bashes Verizon a little again. Hee.

Dan says they really just manage budget allocations to try to control partners from bidding on keywords that they don't have a right to. But that there's not really any good way to ensure it.

Ken Robbins steps up. He's an agency guy who handles a lot of retailers with call centers and brick and mortar stores.

He's here to say definitively that online marketing drives offline spend.

Case study! Rooms to Go. 150 showrooms in 9 states the #1 National Furniture Retailer. They do a lot of financing. They have three Web sites: Roomstogo.com Roomstogokids.com and CindyCrawfordHome.com

Google came to them and said they wanted to try content match with them.

Challenges:

• Furniture - expensive, considered purchase, highly tactile
• Financing - Hard to execute online
• Doubts about Web to store effectiveness
• Want more store sales - for the upsell.

Their objective: Use controlled online media test to driven in-store sales.

Execution:

• Isolated markets - they picked 4
• Cut out the noise - no real world media spend during the test and optimized for the area
• Tracked closely - used market-specific coupons
  • Manager, salespeople training (no cheating, had to be a clean test)
  • Established definite time period
• Creative - coupons, landers conformed to market
• Media - Saturated the Web using all Google tactics

They used paid search, banners for local and vertical interests, local business ads,

Results:

• Markedly higher sales
• 86 percent campaign sales at RETAIL STORES
• Overall ROAS $7.50
• 20 percent higher Average Order Value in-store for coupon holder

What next:

• Strategy rolled out annually
• Bar-code system instituted (Keyword level tracking that's onetime use only)
• Significantly beating $7.50 ROAS new
• New learning - NON-BRAND KEYWORDS DELIVER 48 PERCENT OF OFFLINE SALES

Measurement and Attribution:
1. Direct Attribution - trackable coupons, unique offers
2. Incremental sales attribution - isolate markets, isolate product, measure lift over mean
3. Consumer engagement - store locator, page views, bouncing, site time, product views
4. Consumer intent, post-purchase surveys (Weakest way, very inaccurate.)
5. Don't worry about it. Support all ad initiatives with online components.

The key is to agree on a methodology and priorities first, then coordinate execution.

Does offline drive online? Of course. No one wanted a Foreman grill before the commercials. Real world media drives searches.

Big Mistakes:

1. Consumers can't find your promotions on you Web site (match real world offers online)
2. Call center use is discouraged (burying the 800 number)
3. Stores or Online DC is out of stock
4. Promotional campaign metrics not separated
5. (and more)

Better Practices:

1. Consistent messaging
2. Campaign one the same schedule
3. Coordinate with your stores, managers, call center
4. Universal pricing
5. If attribution is important - isolate variables (market, noise)
6. If attribution is problematic, use engagement metrics
7. Get vendors to assign co-op $ to Web Promotions
8. When driving to store, use campaign landers (better messages and CTA)

Someone asks if they track the lag and yes, they do. They also keep them very timed. They get instant response because it's timed.

Kevin asks about response rates and volume from the Google local ads. The Search ads converted the best but all the rest of the things they were doing got much better in aggregate. The text did the best.

Q&A

Does the email tracking work across platforms? [It should, yes.] Can you elaborate on the method about how the cookies interact between the confirmation email and the tracking code?

Michelle: You can link them up in Omniture.

Did you continue to black out the Real World media efforts?

Ken: I actually don't know the answer. I believe that it's a 360 degree campaign now.

[Kevin's little between question rambles are great. Hee]

Good tools to track phone calls that can be tied back to analytics? Are there any other ways to track than 800 #s?

Ken: Yes, there are vendors out there who can deploy thousands of 800 numbers linked to keywords. It's gets a little unwieldy. [And audience member uses Call Source but says that small business don't like masking their number]

Has anyone used something like Web IQ or Keynote or something like that to track online to offline for surveys with clickpath analysis?

Dan: Done a bit and it was tracked back to the campaign level. They were mostly tracking profiling. Directionally it works but it depends on your objectives.

Kevin wants to know if it's effective and worth it to add the layer. Dan says yes.

Client with lots of store locator visits: How do you get the client to understand that it's important and how do you track those visitors to the store?

Ken: [refers him to Measurement and Attribution section of the presentation. In a nice way.] The most successful thing I've found when trying to break through to the execs is to show them what other people are doing and how effective it is.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/19/08 at 5:16 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click, sessj2008

July 9, 2008

SEO Headlines

Google's New Keyword Research Tool

Our PPC guru Nick Guastella was all aflutter this morning over the news that Google has added search counts to its keyword research tool, thereby turning on another light for SEOs and search marketers. According to Google:

When you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you'll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords' monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool.

The new data will help search marketers with keyword choices, spotting trends, budget planning and will help them outline their account structure. I supposed props go to Google for being so aggressive about pushing out new tools to give search marketers more data, more numbers and more insight into optimizing their campaigns. I'm going to do my best to avoid the conspiracy theories and be excited about the new data. Nick seemed to be.

For more details, Google has an extensive guide to its Keyword Tool. I don't think many are still mourning the loss of Overturn's keyword research tool.

But Srsly, WTH is Lively?

Yesterday afternoon word started to spread about Google's new virtual world nicknamed Lively. It's a browser-based virtual environment that will tie in to social networks like Facebook, OpenSocial, and MySpace. Okay. The whole think smells of Orkut. It's just another social networking attempt that Google's audience never asked for, doesn't want, and will likely never use (or at least not here in the States). I'm not impressed; in fact, I'm confused as to why they even bothered.

It feels like not even Google knows what it wants to do here. As GigaOm notes, in a recent Virtual World News article Google's Head of 3D Operations (I love that a 3D division even exists) Mel Guymon makes it sound like they're only in the virtual space because it seems like that's the place to be. That's a great way to induce Product Fail. The obvious assumption would be that Google developed Lively as a way to (in time) get users to generate content that they can then place ads on. Lively has integration with Google products like YouTube and Picasa so that may be another way to generate more clicks and ads, but that's not nearly enough to make it exciting.

It seems that if you're going to release something like this, it darn well better be superior to its nearest competitor. In this case, though the missions are different, that's Second Life. And Lively's not even on the same wavelength as SL. People in virtual worlds demand complete control of their surroundings and freedom to explore. Lively fails to offer that. So where's the incentive to switch? There isn't one.

Google, I know you're all excited about another chance at monetizing something, but next time try and do a better job of masking it behind something that's maybe useful.

adCenter Makes Impressive Strides Against Y!SM

Barry reports on the buzz that Microsoft's adCenter seems to be on the rise much to Yahoo's dismay, with advertisers reporting more spend on adCenter than with Yahoo Search Marketing. Over at Search Engine Watch one member noted that adCenter as outperformed Yahoo in both conversions and CPL over the last month. At Sphinn, Kate Morris argues the same. Barry says the "tide is turning". Is he right?

I certainly hope so. I'm not a fan of much of what Microsoft puts out there, but adCenter has long been touted as the superior platform despite its pea-sized traffic. Maybe with search marketers starting to see rewards, they'll be more likely to increase their spend over there. But if they do, it doesn't curb adCenter's major hurdle - the fact that the audience isn't there. And the audience isn't there because the Live search engine is....nowhere near where it should be. Maybe the folks in Redmond could stop bullying Yahoo and get on that. They just may have something here.

Fun Finds

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Winfield's recent article The 10 Best Ways to Find the Perfect Image for Your Blog Post. Some seriously good stuff in there.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 9/08 at 4:29 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Yahoo

June 30, 2008

Weekend Update

SEO Newsletter Hitting Inboxes Today!

It's the last day of the month which means two very important things: Payday and SEO Newsletter day. Huzzah!

Today's edition of the SEO Newsletter features expanded commentary on two subjects we've previously written about as blog posts. First, Virginia Nussey will tell you everything you've ever needed to know about implementing 301 redirects to clear up any confusion/questions/concerns not addressed in our How to Properly Implement a 301 Redirect post from last year.

From there, I'll take you through an in depth review of our favorite jeans retailer Joe's Jeans and highlight several SEO recommendations that we feel would help them improve the spiderablity of their Web site. You may remember, we first introduced you to Joe's Jeans early last week. Now we're taking a deeper look and taking off the kid gloves!

All that and more will be hitting you later in the day, so if you're not subscribed, subscribe now! And if you're not satisfied with today's pay check, let me also take this time to direct you to Bruce Clay, Inc.'s employment page. ;)

Google Uses Log Data, Cookies To Improve Results

Matt Cutts issued a posted on the Official Google Blog late Friday afternoon explaining how Google uses data to fight webspam, and boy, were eyebrows raised. In his post, Matt wrote that Google uses log data such as IP address and cookie information to "make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of [its] search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam)." I took the statement as Google making good on their promise to be transparent and possibly to ease European Union concerns, however, some aren't so convinced.

Dave Naylor jumped into the mix questioning why this information is being released now before immediately spouting off ways users can spam the index using the tidbit revealed by Google. Way to go, Dave. Let's take shots at Google for being secretive and then immediately publicize ways to abuse the system once they hand over the smallest morsel of information. No good deed.

I'm not so freaked out by Google using this information (mostly because we all assumed they did anyway, right?), but if you want to get yourself worked up, super Mozzer Danny Dover had a stellar post last week about the evil side of Google. You may want to give it a read.

Performics Gets Re-branded as the Google Affiliate Network

Because just one Google controversy wasn't enough, we also got word that Google has decided to re-brand Performics as the Google Affiliate Network, officially making them the most evil company in the entire world. Or something. I think that's what it said on TechMeme.

The Google Affiliate Network will work like all others in its class and pay publishers for each lead they bring in. The affiliate network is still being hosted by ConnectCommerce.com, but it won't be long until it's fully integrated within Google AdSense. Target, Kohls, Citibank, Circuit City, Bank of America and Barnes & Noble are all listed as existing advertisers.

Is there anything left in the ad space for Google to conquer or do they officially have it all?

Fun Finds

Louis Gray grabs my interest with On The Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying. A mighty interesting read. Maybe you should go Google Trends yourself.

Tamar's talking about Twitter and Plurk and says they're not even in the same league. That said, which team are you on: Twitter or Plurk? So far we're Twitter here in the office.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/30/08 at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click

June 25, 2008

All Your Ads Belong To The Goog

Barry Schwartz says if you thought Google Trends for Websites was scary, meet Google Ad Planner. Beta testers can enter in demographic information and sites associated with their audience and Google will spit out a list of other sites their audience is likely to visit. Barry says he was able to find information like unique visitors, their income, gender, behavior, page views, category information, and lots more spy stuff. Right now the tool is in beta, so in order to play you'll have to request an invite.

The purpose of Google Ad Planner is obviously to help publishers find sites they want to place ads on by giving them more information about the publisher site. I get that, but good Lord is that a lot of information to be handing out. I wonder if this will send Google Analytics numbers through the roof, as well, as that's where they're getting their information, right? Knowing that Google pulls this info, if you're a publisher looking to find advertisers, you'd start using Google Analytics so they could get your information and make you look attractive, wouldn't you? I would. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this as an advertiser though. Would you trust the person who's selling you ads to also tell you where to put them?

Interestingly, Arthur Freydin gave readers an in depth walkthrough of Google Ad Planner and noted that it isn't yet integrated with AdWords. I wonder how long that will take to add on. Seems like a natural progression, for sure.

It's scary to see Google take complete control over the advertising world like this. Now, not only are they selling you ads, giving you tools to see how those ads convert and make them better, now they're telling you where to put them. I know; why don't you just hand Google your advertising budget and let them use it however they'd like. Oh wait. You're doing that now. Carry on then.

I know I said this last week, but it's a little scary to watch Google jump into this space. And poor ComScore and Nielsen? With Google Ad Planner they should just plan their permanent trips to the Caribbean now. Maybe you can get a deal if you book six months in advance? They're pretty much dead in the water. They can't compete with the amount of information Google has on its prisoners er, customers. No one can.

Barry has lots of screenshots of the new program over at Search Engine Roundtable. Head over there to check them out and then tell us what you think.

You'll also find some startling commentary by Brett Tabke in the WebmasterWorld thread on the topic. It's scary when you consider how many sources Google has for collecting your data, how much they know about you, and what they could possibly do with all that information.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/25/08 at 11:15 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click

June 20, 2008

Google Trends for Websites? Not Cool, Google.

Quite a bit of commotion today in response to Google's decision to do something with all your site data they've been sitting on. Starting today, savvy site owners can use Google Trends for Websites to do some competitive research and discover unique site metrics like estimated traffic, also searched for, also visited, and traffic for different regions/countries. And it looks like there's no way to opt out. Wow, way to go, Google!

In order to power its new spy tool, Google is combining Google Analytics data, search volumes and other third-party market research. The traffic information will be neatly plotted out for you in a line graph, with the rest of the information listed underneath. Site owners will have the opportunity to get secret data on five domains at a time.

It does come with some caveats though. For example, beware that the information may or may not be totally accurate. Since Google Trends is in Google Labs they claim to have no way to improve the quality of the data. They also add that since the data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may lose some of its validity. Then by all means, still put it out there.

You're also dealing with a pretty limited data pool as the information typically only goes as far back as mid 2007. This is Google "Trends", right? How well can you spot long term trends with only a year's worth of data? And if you're a small business, don't even bother putting in your domain. You probably don't receive enough traffic for Google to care about you or your competitors. Sorry. Have a cookie instead.

Barry Schwartz calls the tool "a great way" to find additional keywords, link partners and resource, but I'm not so sure. Personally, it makes me a bit uncomfortable that Google has no problem handing out site owner's information like this. What if you don't want your keywords and traffic information published for everyone to see? Sure, there are plenty of other ways to get this information, but let those other independent companies do it. Google's just shelling it out there for no reason and without getting consent first. Lame. I'm no Google conspiracy theorist, but it makes it hard to continually hand over information to Google when you know "features" like this are running around in the back of their heads. Who knows what's coming next.

Again, it's not that the information Google's handing out is super secret, but what in the world made them think site owners would want them to use their information in this way? It's also interesting that you can't get information about Google itself, but you can get information about Microsoft and Yahoo. Now, now, Google, play fair.

I don't know. Take the new feature as you will, I guess. Just try and use it for good.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/20/08 at 3:45 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

June 12, 2008

SEO Headlines

Should Your Employees Be Your BFFs?

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

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

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

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

Yahoo, Microsoft, Google & The Internetz

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

Better?

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

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

From the press release:

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

Companies With An Identity Crisis Fail

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

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

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

Fun Finds

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/12/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

June 4, 2008

Search Friendly Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternate Implementation

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

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

Sharad Verma is up.

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

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

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

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

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

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

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

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

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

Best Practices:

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

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

Duplicate Content

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

Other Best Practices:

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

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

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

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

Maile Ohye is up last.

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

Crawlable Architecture

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

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

Consider sIFR for Flash

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

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

Consider Hijax for AjAX

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

Google Webmaster Central

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

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

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

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

Proper Use of Response Codes

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

Anatomy of a Search Result

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

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

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

Final thoughts from Maile:

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, Google, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

June 3, 2008

SMX Advanced Keynote: You&A With Matt Cutts

Danny and Matt have a cute repartee. I guess Danny lent Matt a pair of Vans. Nice. By way of introduction, Danny explains that Matt leads the Web spam team at Google. They're matching in red cotton shirts and jeans, plus their Vans. Hey, that's cute.

Danny starts off the Q&A asking about the link bait/fake news story about a 13-year-old using his dad's credit card for hookers. The story showed up in major news outlets. Danny wants to know what does Matt thinks about this? Matt's not the truth police, now, right?

Matt says that the big difference between this situation and a joke is that it was presented as truth and readers had an expectation of news. As far as Google policing the Web, he says that was not the case. This situation landed on Google's lap and was forced to address it. People are happy when they're prevented from getting malware, people are happy when they've been protected from spam. Matt thinks this issue was along the same line, although not a typical situation. Don't look for Google to be policing the Web in the future.

Danny asks Matt about the link building debate and what Google's current stance is.

Matt replies by asking the audience who here is an in-house SEO or looking for long term gains. Ninety percent of the audience raises their hand. With that in mind, it's safe to say that you don't want to burn your sites to the ground. You want to do what's good in the long term and what's good for your site. Your trust and your credibility within the industry is a limited commodity, so it's probably better for the industry to recognize if something's been taken too far.

Danny says that earlier they were talking about a funny story about PageRank.

There was a person that was scraping Google PageRank. When Google saw it they messed with him by tweaking the PageRank so that all his scraped info was useless. This just shows you not to obsess about any one element.

Danny wants to bring up Matt's blog to show a post from an hour ago.

The key parts of the post are a brief statement about Google's take on nofollow. Also, a small addition to Webmaster Guidelines is worth noting. "Make Web sites primarily for users, not search engines." It's been changed because people were saying, well, why submit an XML Sitemap when you say not to do anything for search engines.

What do you think of widgets as a link building tool?

Is the widget relevant to the sponsor? Is the anchor text stuffed? These are things to keep in mind.

Google's made conflicting statements about whether or not to have forms on sites.

There are limited situations where Google can crawl into a form. The rule of thumb is would a user be annoyed when they come to the page. There are two parts to the Google guidelines: technical and quality. "Don't have search results in search results" (like Mahalo) is a quality guideline.

Cloaking?

It's not a good idea. We've punished very large sites for it. In almost all the cases where you might use cloaking there's usually a bigger architecture issue to solve instead.

We've had a number of penalties. The minus 6, minus 650. What's going on?

If you think you have an algorithmic penalty look at what might need to be changed. But sometimes people are looking too hard for a penalty, so of course they think they've found one. There are degrees of penalties. Over the years Google has seen a lot of spam and has a nuanced view of spam, and a nuanced system for penalizing as well.

What are the guidelines for re-inclusion?

For manual penalties, there is a timeline. We try not to be overly harsh because there has to be room for mistakes. If it's an algorithmic penalty, then you've got to adjust the site to address those issues. We also look at reconsideration requests. A lot of times people complain of being hacked, and if they fix it and file reconsideration, they are back in the index within days.

Wall Street Journal has different headlines on Google News than their own site. Isn't that deceptive?

Matt says he's not familiar with that particular issue, but he wants to mention First Click Free. With that program users can see the news story they click on without having to register or pay and cross the wall. That's fair as far as Google sees it because that page is presented as the same for both users and engines.

Can you explain your policy on paid links?

We've been studying the different ways people are buying links. Every action leaves a footprint. Google is willing to take both manual and algorithmic action to improve results. Paid links is definitely an advanced technique and high risk.

Can I knock someone out by buying links and pointing them to their site?

We try very hard to make it impossible to hurt others' sites. If you make a great site that's compelling and has good ideas, you'll attract a lot of good links naturally. I'm not sure we want to be in an industry where people try to make them selves look better by making people look worse.

The next question is about PR sculpting - Danny calls out BCI and says siloing. Sites are doing this now. YouTube is doing a bit of it. Is this something people need to do?

If your architecture is right, then it's not something you should really worry about. He says Michael Gray also made a good point that there are more important irons in the fire to worry about. Rather than playing around with the PR flow on your site, it's better to plan it out from the beginning. If you're really advanced and want to play with PR, go ahead and do it. There's no penalty for nofollow.

[I'm going to jump in and note that siloing encompasses a lot more than just PR sculpting. It's an architecture/theming issue. --Susan]

What's it like being the moral compass for SEO?

He says he doesn't feel like he's a moral compass. The vast majority of the time people know what Google's answer is because it's the common sense, right thing to do. People know there are a lot of great ways to get links. People don't really need him, he says. They already know how to do SEO really well.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 6:05 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

Buying Sites For SEO

Stephan Spencer is moderating our panel with speakers Gab Goldenberg (SEO ROI), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl), Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney Media Group) and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media). Jeremy Schoemaker couldn't make it in person because his wife is about to have a baby so he sent a video presentation. Sweet!

In 2004 during a conference, Jeremy heard that there were all these domains out there that were expired but were linked to by government, military and .edu Web sites. People listened and laughed it off, but Shoemoney asked how many sites like that were out there. He then went home and started doing some research. Him and a partner talked about how they could find these expired domains with all these high trusted links. They built a spider that used GYM to seek them out and check how many backlinks it had and if the site was listed in any of the major directories. In a month and a half they found more than 1500 domains that were out in the wild. They used them to dominate a lot of niche markets.

What did it tell them?

People thought that when a domain expired that it "reset" to Google. Not true. The test showed them that Google gave weight to the links, not to the domain. What's not bread and butter search engine optimization has a very limited shelf life. The link age still works today.

Fast forward two or three years, they're slowly starting to die off. He found Joe Lieberman's 2004 Presidential campaign domain. He registered it, made a blog about Joe Lieberman and instantly it was a first page Google results and ranked fourth for [Joe Lieberman] then he switched it over to a niche site. Within 3 or 4 days it was completely delisted in Google. That told them there's something going on where you have to stay in the same niche zone. It's not as easy as it used to be. You can't just register a site and throw whatever you want on it. There's some kind of human element at play.

Fast forward to now and he says it's probably not worth your time to do the domain thing.

Be careful when 301ing. If you buy domains that are expired or parked, you want to slowly 301 the links. You'll set off alarms if you do it overnight. There are many domains out there that are expired to this day that have great links to them. You may not get the keyword value, but you'll get the PR value.

Now they buy domains for branding, not for search engine optimization. He thinks the value of search engine optimization is falling a little more each year. He paid $9,000 for the Auction Ads domain. They're for branding, not for SEO. If you can get the keyword domain for what you're doing, that's almost priceless.

And that's it from Shoemoney. Most awesome video presentation ever!

Jeremy Wright is up.

Jeremy lets us know he's not a search engine optimization guy. He runs a media company. It's not quite as sexy as SEO.

They buy sites for eventual revenue purposes. Potential, specifically unrealized potential, is what they're looking for. They're not an SEO company!

Core metrics: Existing traffic, uniques, revenue, feed subscribers, Google PageRank.
Secondary Metrics: age of a site, stability, age of domain, amount of content, existing search engine optimization metrics, stableness, etc.

Tertiary questions: Is it/can it be a blog/ Does it cover a unique area? Does it add non-core value we can put a number to? Does it have a real brand name in its industry?

Tools they use to valuate blogs: Blog Valuation Calculator (an internal tool), Compete.com, ComScore, Search Depth Calculator (another internal tool).

Mistakes You Can Avoid

• Always verify traffic (Google Analytics, SiteMeter, Omniture)
• Don't believe the potential someone else pitches you on, arrive at your own.
• Don't deviate from your playbook (though your playbook should include some flexibility for lager purchases).
• Don't be afraid to buy partners early if you see early success
• Avoid properties that depend on specific personalities being bought in for the site to retain its value to you
• Watch out for "inflationary schemes".
• Buy early, buy often, admit failure quickly.

Gab Goldenberg is next.

Buying sites for search engine optimization is like climbing Mt. Everest. You want to do your research, protect yourself from changing conditions along the way and have a good base camp to start from. As far as search engine optimization goes, that means having a good domain to work from.

Content is extremely undervalued. You want to look for indices of high quality Web sites. Google is doing "submarine crawling" where they'll query a search form or they'll execute JavaScript to find deep Web content that isn't linked to from the site itself. If you can find out that Google is doing this kind of crawling, you know that this site is well trusted by Google.

How do you find those sites?

Do a [site:] search. That will work for one site, but what if you're looking at an entire industry? You can look for a footprint.

What's a footprint? A footprint is an identifying characteristic that many Web sites share. If you look at a CMS, there will be various footprints that are attached to it. He shows us the footprint for a high quality WordPress blog.

You've done your research and found the site, but if you change the WHOIS and the hosting, you can get the value reset. How do you protect your investment? You use a trust.

A trust is legal mechanism whereby one person holds legal title and the other person gets to be the beneficiary of the site. This allows you to get away with not changing the WHOIS while still taking over the site.

How do you get one? Go to a lawyer specializing in trusts. Make sure the contract includes the intent to create a trust, that there's certainty over the property and that you consider other specifications like including that the hosting is part of what you're buying.

The single greatest value you're buying when you get a site is the domain. Realize that.

Todd Malicoat is up.

Todd doesn't have an intro because he was fearful of even speaking on this panel. To make up for it he starts off with a joke: What's orange and looks really, really good on a hippie?

Fire.

Oh Jesus. Back to buying old sites, eh?

Finding Old Sites

Think like an old site: If you were an old site, where would you be? That's how you come up with the creative queries. And beyond that, you want to automate that process.

When you're contacting the site owner, it's tough. Be Credible, be brief, be lucky.

When you're valuating a site, look at the domain, age, links, theme, traffic and revenue.

Negotiating and Closing a Site Purchase

1. Lowball, but don't offend.
2. Get a price.
3. Counter.
4. Agree.
5. Sign Agreement,
6. Escrow Service
7. Transfers - files and WHOIS

Todd ends with more jokes!

How do you starve a hippie?

Hide his father's credit card under a bar of soap.

Oh, brother...

Question and Answer

Aside form domaintools.com, can you recommend any other tools to use?

Todd: Premium Drops.
Jeremy: A couple of the URL shortening services will let you buy data from them.
Stephan: Get good with your advanced query operators.

Are there things you can do to crash, reset a competing site that sold?

Todd: Same as you can do in the search results. He's sure you can, but he doesn't know anything specific.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 4:40 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

Organic Track: Bot Herding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deciding What to Sculpt Out

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

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

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

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

How to Sculpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephan Spencer is up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some expressions I did manage to catch:

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

Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use rewritemap

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

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

Hamlet Batista is up to talk about white hat cloaking.

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

When is it practical to cloak?

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

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

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

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

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

Practical Scenario 3: Membership sites.

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

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

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

Practical Scenario 5: Geotargeting

Practical Scenario 6: Split testing organic search landing pages.

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

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

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

Priyank Garg is up.

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

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

META Tags: Page level tags. Allow finer controls.

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, SEM Events, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

May 22, 2008

Google Docs Gets Best Feature Ever

There are some moments in your life that help you to see just how geeky you've really become. Mine came just a few moments ago when I stumbled up on the Google Operating System's post Print Layout in Google Docs.

No, go read the title of that post again.

Did your heart just skip a beat? Did your toes wiggle in excitement? Did you have to immediately share your excitement with someone? No? Then I'm totally way geekier than you are.

I've always loved the idea of Google Docs. Having access to my document wherever I go, regardless of what machine I'm on, is something that as a writer I'm a really big fan of. However, I could never get myself to use the darn thing because of the funky wide screen format. Seriously, I can't tell you how many bar conversations I've had about my frustrations with Google Docs viewing options (this solidifies the geek thing, doesn't it?). Maybe Microsoft has me completely brainwashed, but knowing how far along I am on a page helps me to visualize and plan out what I'm writing. With the old version of Google Docs I wasn't able to do that. I would just write from one side of the screen to the other forever and forever with no end in sight. Google to the rescue!

By heading to the View options in Google Docs and then selecting Fixed-Width Page View, users can easily make their Google Docs page resemble Microsoft Word. See the pretty?

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