Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing

Testing - my blog was down for a couple days. I’m trying to work out the kinks with hosting and domain registration. I should of transfered my domain over to moniker =/.

Check out the results for these two keywords:

Cingular Ringtones

Sprint Ringtones

You noticing this across all the terms you are tracking Jeremy? =P

Anyone else think these posts resemble a MFA site? (from the Official Google Blog)

Hints from Google on how to improve your AdWords landing pages:

From Digitalpoint:

We don’t typically give recommendations about what to change/add as we can’t guarantee it will help improve your site quality score. That said, you may consider adding content such as:
- more information about what distinguishes your service service and how you provide the best solution.
- information for home buyers - things to consider, how to pick a real estate agent
- information about real estate - median home value, common issues to watch out for (like termites or mold), etc.

From WebmasterWorld:

1. Not enought content.
There was only one opt-in email form and 1 page of text about why you should opt in, what you’ll get and a few tidbits about privacy.
2. The website needed a complete privacy policy on a new page as what was there was not detailed enough.
3. There was no contact us page.
4. There were no external links to other related and useful webpages.

Google.com is #26 on the search for Google.com using Google Accessible Search.

Boris Mordkovich, Publisher of Search Marketing Standard, emailed me today letting me know that the 2nd issue of Search Marketing Standard is hitting the printers within a week and will be out in August.

The first issue contained less content than most expected, but this upcoming issue will be significantly larger.

Boris:

This time, it will be 30% larger than its predecessor and will contain more intermediate to advanced material as our readers have requested.

I recently left Search Engine Optimization Inc. to pursue new opportunities. For the past several weeks I’ve been making the transition from client to in-house work. I joined Search Engine Optimization Inc. in January 2005 excited about search marketing and working for a large firm. Almost a year and a half later my excitement for the search marketing industry is still high, but it’s time for a change.

The firm has accomplished a lot in past year and half, growing rapidly in terms of services and employees. Originally a purely SEO firm, Search Engine Optimization Inc. is now offering pay per click management, copywriting, and optimized press releases. Even though the firm has been through several public snafus, the team at Search Engine Optimization Inc. is still going strong.

I’m leaving on good terms and I wish everyone at Search Engine Optimization, Inc the best.

So what’s next? I’ve joined Shopzilla’s SEO team in a strategic role. I’m helping drive natural traffic to Shopzilla’s local and international web properties. I am excited to be part of a very strong SEO team that is competing with some of the best corporate SEO teams (Amazon / Ebay).

Shopzilla is a shopping search engine that provides users with a powerful and easy way to search through more than 30 million products from more than 60 thousand stores. In addition, Shopzilla also features price comparison tools with BizRate (operated by Shopzilla) reviews.

Shopzilla powers shopping search for many large web properties like AOL and Lycos.

I’ll continue to keep blogging and sharing with the community. Lately my posting rate has plummeted due to the job changes and my trip. But now that I’m back and settled, expect to see more posts in the near future.

Been a real slow posting month due to some changes and planning for my trip. I’m headed off to Thailand tommorow. Will update the blog with the recent changes when I get back.

Google Office’s second application: Google Spreadsheet. (via Steve Rubel)

Ask launches blog and feed search. Yahoo launches improved video search.

For some time now, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have been using ODP (Dmoz) descriptions for search engine results descriptions. These descriptions are supplied by human editors overseeing the ODP. Although usually relevant and valuable, these descriptions at times are outdated, unrelated, and even incorrect.

Webmasters have been asking for a way to opt out of these ODP search engine results descriptions and MSN is the first engine to offer a solution.

So what we did was introduce a new option at the page level - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.

So in your Web page you’d put

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

or

<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Once MSN’s crawler revisits your page, you should see the changes reflected in the search results.

So far MSN is the only engine to recognize the tag, but hopefully the other engines will follow MSN’s example.

Following the launch of Yahoo’s new homepage design, the Yahoo UI team discusses the patterns behind the homepage and the technology that powers the new interface.

From the Yahoo UI Blog:

This principle captures the idea that every piece of logical content does not have to be on a different page. Instead when we design a content page, especially a home page, we should consider how we can expand the user’s virtual space. In many ways this is similar to creating a play. At any given time the view on the stage is only a small part of the action. The backstage, props, and other actors are all being prepared for the next scene. A home page can provide ways to allow a user to take a “sneak peek” at additional content and essentially “open up” the page space.

This is just what the new Yahoo! home page has done.

From ConfusedOne’s Flickr Set:

Just a short Google update since there is better coverage over at SEW/SE Roundtable.

During Google’s Press Day yesterday, Google announced the release of four new products:

Google Co-op is a way for users to help us improve search. It lets people and organizations label web pages and create specialized links related to their unique expertise. Whether it’s information about a hobby, a profession, or an unusual interest, everyone can contribute to making Google search more relevant and useful for the entire community.

Google Desktop 4 gives you another way to improve search, by personalizing your desktop. New “Google Gadgets” deliver an array of information–ranging from games and media players to weather updates and news–straight to your desktop.

Google Notebook (which we’ll be launching next week) is a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you’re searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others.

Google Trends builds on the idea behind the Google Zeitgeist, allowing you to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries.

I’ll be taking a look at Google Co-op and posting more information about it in the future.

Yahoo just launched a new feature called “Livesearch” on AlltheWeb.

Livesearch is a combination of Google Suggest, Related Searches, and Instant Search. With some slick use of AJAX to make searching faster, Livesearch aims to speed up search time.

Yahoo plans to introduce new search features over at AlltheWeb in the future:

AlltheWeb is a search destination that has its roots as a showcase of new and innovative technology - for example AlltheWeb was the first site to roll out the calculator functionality within the search box. The site will remain true to its roots as we continue to introduce new technologies there in the future.

Just got this email from Boris Mordkovich - the Publisher of Search Marketing Standard magazine.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that after 5 months of hard work, the inaugural issue of the first and only SEM publication is now officially out.

It has been mailed to over 15,000 subscribers last week. U.S. based readers can expect it in their mailboxes this week, while International will be receiving it within the next 10 business days.

The magazine will also be distributed to all attendees of the Affiliate Summit conference in Florida in July and PubCon conference which will take place in Las Vegas in November.

Once you receive the magazine, please email me (boris@smstandard.com) with your questions, comments and suggestions. We want to know what you think and your feedback is very important to us. Every single email will be read and responded to.

Thank you for your support and we hope that you will enjoy reading our Summer issue.

Best Regards,
Boris Mordkovich
Publisher

I’m looking forward to getting my copy soon!

From Wired:

Google has informally complained to U.S. and European antitrust regulators about what it says are biased settings on Microsoft’s latest web browser, marking the latest spat between two companies whose business models are increasingly bumping up against one another.

Here’s the feature that Google is complaining about:

The next version of Internet Explorer, available now in test form, includes a box in the corner that lets people perform an internet search without going to a separate web page, much like what’s available from Google’s downloadable “toolbar.” Users who download IE 7 will be assigned a search engine preference based on the AutoSearch function from the previous version of IE, which is likely to be MSN Search.

Funny isn’t that the same feature as Firefox? Except with Google as the default search engine?

Update: This article discusses how Google determines the snippet links - not how Google determines what sites return snippet links. I hope that clears things up.

There’s been a bit of discussion over these snippet links over on SEM 2.0 and no one really knows how Google is determining these links. I spent some time researching the links and I believe Google is using traffic data to determine these links.

First off a bit of background for those of you that don’t know which Google UI snippets I’m talking about.

For some sites, Google exposes “useful links” from within the site. For example, Google will show extra links from Berkley’s web site for a search on “Berkley”. Matt Cutts has said before that these links are generated algorithmically.

People who know Google well will go “Cool” and move on. Other folks will ask things like “Are sites or their links selected by hand–can my site get in on this? Is money involved?” And the answer is: it’s all algorithmic. The algorithms pick the sites where this could be helpful. Of course money isn’t involved at all.

But how exactly are these snippet links being determined?

First off let’s analyze an interesting example - A search for “adidas” will return to you 4 snippet links: Style - Originals - Performance - Change Location.

This is a good case study because adidas’s homepage only contains 5 links in total and out of those 5 links, 4 are shown as a snippet link. From a user standpoint, you’d be suprised that Google did not return the shop link as a snippet link. That’s because the link is to a page (shopadidas.com) not on the home domain, adidas.com.

Now let’s take a look at the Style link returned by Google. It’s actually a javascript link around an image on the homepage. Google has indexed the link and the alt text.

Interesting, so how is Google picking up the javascript link? They’d have to parse the javascript and that could potentially lead to some security issues. There’s an easier way though - Google could use toolbar data. If you are using the Google Toolbar’s advanced features, when you visit a web page, the toolbar sends Google some information including the url of the page. This data could be used to track linking data that Google’s crawler can not successfully crawl. In other words, with the Google Toolbar, you are Google’s crawler.

Could Google’s toolbar traffic be determining which links they are showing as Google snippet links?

Since you don’t have access to Google’s toolbar traffic data, you have no way of seeing what Google knows about a site’s traffic. But you can compare Alexa traffic to Google snippet links to see if there is a correlation. It’s easier to compare snippet links to Alexa traffic if the domain contains many sub domains, so I took a look at some of those domains to see if there was a pattern. Take a look at this excel sheet to see some domains that resemble Alexa traffic trends (go.com, cnn.com, zdnet.com, netscape.com, w3c).

Best example:

Craigslist’s snippet links are a perfect match to Alexa traffic. There are some discrepancies for sites with multiple “homepages” - for example yahoo, where people may start off at different yahoo properties and thus affecting Alexa traffic data. It’s hard to tell whether or not you traveled to another page from the homepage or you started from that different page - both ways, Alexa counts that as traffic to the page. Most likely, Google is only considering traffic that originates from the homepage.

Summary:
Google snippet links are most likely determined by traffic patterns. Since Google does not allow access to toolbar traffic data, there is no way to know for sure. Many site’s snippet links closely resemble Alexa traffic stats.

Findings:
Google snippet links do not return links outside of the home domain.
Google snippet links do not have to be from a text link, it can be an image link or even a javascript link.
Google snippet link text can be determined from an image’s alt text.
Google snippet links can be subdomains of the home domain.
Google snippet links are not determined by PageRank.
Google snippet links are displayed for the top result for a “brand” search or “domain” search. (For example, “zappos” and “zappos shoes”)

Via threadwatch.

Some more screenshots of Google’s expandable results UI from earlier this month.