As anyone working in the SEO industry over the last 12 months will know, these are turbulent times. The last two months alone have seen an unprecedented volume of changes to Google’s algorithm that has resulted in rankings rising, falling, disappearing and re-appearing like never before.

As anyone who works in a client facing position in the SEO industry knows, such changes to the algorithm are having an impact on businesses across a myriad of sectors at the moment, and questions are naturally getting asked:

1. “Why has this happened?”
2. “What is the answer?”
3. “When will we recover?”

All pertinent questions that naturally lead from one to the other, but any knee-jerk answers would be ill advised. In order to understand the plan of attack, it is imperative to know the enemy, the size of the task, and what you are up against. Now more so than ever, the time needs to be put into answering question one before you even think of tackling questions two and three

To nod back to my opening line, William Wallace wasn’t faced with a solitary Englishman, he was faced with loads of the buggers, coming from everywhere. To rush in to attack as the first man appeared on the horizon would have been foolish, as he’d soon find himself up against an impossible task. And so too do SEO professionals who react to the first sign of a change in Google’s algorithm.

In order to ensure you take the right course of action, it is key that we take the time to fully appreciate the size of the task ahead of us, and this achieved by spending the time to collate the data on each change we see, analysing the correlations between ranking fluctuations across sectors, scouring link profiles etc…  And then, when we fully appreciate the task ahead, and only then ensuring we act. Our approach is always the same and is always driven by data and always needs to be.

Google isn’t our enemy of course, but we need to know it and taking the time to do this ensures we always have the right plan of attack.

We’ve made an infographic to explain exactly what the ePrivacy Directive is and clarify the options available for complicancy to the new regulations.

Please feel free to share this infographic using the embed code below -

<a href="http://www.epiphanysearch.co.uk/blog/has-the-cookie-crumbled-infographic/"><img src="http://www.epiphanysearch.co.uk/media/59169/cookie_infographic-01-01-1.jpg" alt="Has the cookie crumbled? [infographic]" /></a>

Travel industry websites are great test cases because they get extremely large volumes of visitors, are often well-known both offline and online plus many already extensively use cookies in their analytical and advertising practices too.

I’ve scoured the most popular travel sites out there which should fall under the law and the results are very interesting. You can see a full table of results at the end of this post.

Overview

• No site surveyed had an explicitly opt-in or opt-out of cookies option
• All sites used cookies extensively
• 53 sites were surveyed on 25/04/2012
• Sites were providers of holidays, flights or holiday review websites

2 Sites Didn’t Have a Defined Privacy Policy
Two sites didn’t have a defined privacy policy at all. Cooptravel.co.uk does have ‘terms and conditions’ and ‘data protection’ pages but not a separate privacy policy page, Zoover.co.uk only has a ‘disclaimer’ with very limited information – it does mention cookies but doesn’t cover any privacy concerns.

8 Sites Privacy Policy Didn’t Cover Cookies At All
Nearly 20% of sites didn’t mention cookies in their privacy policy whatsoever. Some didn’t even have a privacy policy or cover their privacy policy details in another part of their website – such as ‘legal’, ‘terms and conditions’ or ‘site conditions’.

This includes some big names and well known sites such as CoopTravel.co.uk, Sunshine.co.uk, Cruise.co.uk, CostaCruises.co.uk and EasyCruise.co.uk.

26 Sites Didn’t Cover Cookies Well Enough
Just under half of the sites didn’t cover cookies at all or offer any more information besides the generic ‘we use cookies’ statement that is found in the majority of privacy policies and fails to explain what cookies are or how they are used.

3 Sites Had Great Cookie Explanations
Travelocity, Fred Olsen Cruises and NCL Cruises had really good explanations of cookies; what they were, how they used them and how third party’s used them. They were written in clear and easy to understand language.

2 Sites Listed the Cookies They Used – 51 Didn’t
It’s important to list all the cookies that are used on your site. Only British Airways and Fred Olsen Cruises listed all their cookies. Although British Airways did not explicitly give the cookie file name – only their general name, such as “Country Choice Cookie”.

0 Sites Made Their Privacy Policy Details Prominent
None of the sites displayed a link to their privacy information anywhere apart from the footer of the site – the last part of the site. The new law requires that privacy policy information is displayed prominently. Not all sites had a direct link to their privacy policy or cookie policy in their site design.
Those that displayed a link in the footer of their site didn’t make it prominent or stand out, a few were even extremely-hard to find such as the Ryanair privacy policy link.

Some sites had a privacy policy but had not linked to it from their footer or their general site template, it could only be found via Google.

A few sites had a dedicated ‘cookie information’ page, but this was linked to from their privacy policy or other parts of the site. Thomson have a link to their cookie information page in their footer – but it fails to clearly explain what a cookie is.

Cruise Companies are Lagging Behind
Although in general, most travel sites aren’t anywhere near compliancy. Very few of the sites provided much information at all, most of the cruise holiday based websites didn’t explain in their privacy policies what cookies were or how they were used, whereas the majority of other holiday websites did.

Summary

Overall it’s not a great picture, none of the sites comply with the strict letter of the law, none allow the user to opt-in or opt-out of cookies and only two provide both clear and extensive information about cookies, how the use cookies and list the cookies they use on their site – British Airways and Fred Olsen Cruises.

Let me know your thoughts on this directive and compliance to it – leave a comment below.

More information and data can be see here:

The full CSV of data is also available to download here:  Travel-Site-Cookie-Compliancy-Data

Only time will tell whether or not Google+ truly takes off and becomes the big player in the social network market. But early assessments on the success of Google+ show mixed results.

Google initially launched the network in June 2011 to a limited number of users and the early signs for Google+ were good, as when the site was fully opened up to the public in September 2011, figures from web data company Experian Hitwise revealed a massive spike in visitors, going from a million unique users to 15 million in one week!

However the early popularity did not last, as more than half of the new 14 million users did not return to use the site during the following week and since September, Google+ has lost nearly half of the visitors who initially came to the site.

This raises the question; why was Google unable to retain the early interest in Google+? To answer this question, let’s first have a look at the site’s usability; here are my pros and cons of Google+:

Pro: Gorgeous UI

Many Google+ users have commented on the sleekness of its user interface. It’s clean, it’s easy-to-use and it’s not cluttered.

Con: Noise in the Stream

Google+ is designed to minimize noise in the stream through the use of circles, but it is still too noisy for most users. The big issue is that posts are pushed to the top whenever there’s a new comment, something that most users think is unnecessary. There are also still issues with collapsing posts with long comment threads.

Pro: Circles

User reaction to Circles, Google+’s friend list feature, has been very positive overall. Users have commented that it’s the easiest system on the market for putting friends into groups, making it easier to share posts with just your business colleagues or your family.

Con: No “wall”

Instead you “share” your posts with circles directly on your own feed. What this means is there is essentially no point in having a profile as people will not be visiting your wall to share with you.

Overall, Google+’s usability is good, however its failure to build upon the initial interest  means that people are already becoming bored of playing on it as a limited number of people they know who use it. This is obviously a huge problem as people will not be interested in using a social networking site that nobody visits.

In the end, the main problem with Google+ is Facebook. According to dreamgrow.com, Facebook still owns 63% of the market share compared to Google+’s 0.55% and with the majority of social networkers set in their ways, Google will need to find a way to convince the vast majority of Facebook users to switch, otherwise Facebook will still reign king.

Share your thoughts on Google+ below.

During the first quarter of 2012, revenues jumped to $10.65 billion (£6.61 billion), which resulted in net income of $2.89 billion (£1.79 billion), or $8.75 (£5.43) per share. That’s good going for investors. Ultimately, it means that Google has increased its revenue by a massive 24 per cent in just one year. After taking into account its ad commissions, the firm had revenue of $8.14 billion (£5.1 billion) in the first quarter, which outdid analyst predictions by around £31 million.

The main thing cited as the primary driver of this rise in profits is the 39 per cent increase in paid clicks, though interestingly, search-driven text ads continued to fall in popularity, dropping by 12 per cent in the space of 12 months.

Chief executive officer Larry Page was happy to weigh in on Google’s success soon after the numbers were revealed, celebrating the fact that his company had a strong quarter. However, the quarter-on-quarter growth of Google was extremely minimal – it rose by just £37.8 million from the base of $10.58 billion (£6.57 billion) registered in Q4 2011, which is a lot less significant when compared to the £536 million rise between Q3 and Q4 2011. That was also short of expectations, too.

However, the fortunes of Google could be given a great push by its board of directors, which has moved to discuss the creation of a brand new class of non-voting shares that will be given as a dividend to all current shareholders. The idea is incredibly clever in that it protects the long-term direction of the company and preserves the voting power of key shareholders.

Employees given stock in Google in the coming years will get these non-voting shares, meaning that existing shareholders keep hold of power. Page himself has been open about the agreement being announced for the good of the bigger players in Google’s future, but still highlighted how it would be nothing but a good thing.

Page didn’t directly reference the fact that profits would be a major focus of this change in stock policy – which will likely be pushed through in June – alluding to the fact that it could hamper future creative projects. Nonetheless, it’s clear that as more people invest in Google, the company needs to protect itself – don’t be surprised if revenue per share has another 24 per cent increase in the coming year.

These ad blocks appear underneath AdSense paid search listings, however above all organic listings. This has resulted in all of the organic listings for these search queries appearing below the fold in the majority of browsers, meaning they are not visible to the user until they scroll down the page. In not displaying any organic search results above the fold, these ad blocks will seriously impact on click through rates of all sites positioning naturally on page one.

Examples of these ad placements include the terms “compare current accounts” and “compare credit cards”.

What do these affiliate comparison ads show?

Initially, Google are using these ad units to compare different credit card, savings account and current account suppliers and will only be active for Google users in the UK and the US.

The product comparison information is pulled in directly from the Google owned property BeatThatQuote.com. BeatThatQuote was acquired by Google in March 2011 for £37.7 million from British entrepreneur John Paleomylites.

All the services shown are done so via Google; they are not paid for in the same way a company would by AdSense advertising. When a user follows one of these adverts and buys into one of the companies services, Google receive payment via their own affiliate scheme.

Why have Google launched these affiliate comparison ads?

Google have hinted over the past 18 months of looking to move into the affiliate marketplace and this appears to be their first major venture into this arena. What is potentially controversial however is that not only are Google shunning organic results, but they are also positioning themselves in direct competition to their paying AdSense customers.

Many will see this as an attempt by Google to simply widen their revenue streams and it could potentially be viewed to contradict their own philosophy; “Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust”.

What can I do about it?

Whether this is here to stay is not yet know, however I believe there is a lot more to come from Google in terms of affiliates which could potentially branch out into many other areas such as flights, hotels and holidays. In this current instance, if you run an affiliate scheme or wish to begin one, I would suggest looking into signing up with BeatThatQuote.com. Google will always favour their own products, and so being visible within this affiliate scheme will give you the greatest chance of achieving visibility in these new comparison ads.

In terms of PPC, clicks and conversions may reduce in volume due to users being drawn to the comparison ads. Cost per click however shouldn’t alter and so any CPA should remain relatively stable.

In terms of SEO, it reinforces the need to have a strong longtail strategy. Due to the comparison ads pushing all organic listings below the fold for the high volume ‘comparison’ related search terms, there is an increased need to ensure websites are also positioning for mid and longtail traffic where conversion rates are higher and SERPs remain unaffected by the new ads.

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Update

Just hours after launching, Google have already made a change to the rollout. Possibly in order to give organic results a little more visibility, they have removed one of the paid AdSense adverts at the top of the page. With there now being one less slot of a PPC advert to occupy, the cost per click on these competitive terms may increase as more people compete to gain visibility on the first page.

With this being a very new and adventurous implementation, expect further changes over the coming weeks.

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If you have any further questions about the new Google affiliate comparison ads, get in touch with us, leave a comment below, or tweet me @PG_Martin

“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal”

Vague, but significant. Patrick @ Blogstorm started to notice the impact of this at the end of last month, and David Whitehouse covered it in more detail on Dave Naylor’s blog recently.

Just to recap, the main point of this update is that if you have your location set while searching in Google, and Google deems your search query to have local intent, then some of the sites served in the results may be locally biased. To clarify – these results are aside from the local ‘pack’ of results that relates to Maps / Places listings. This update relates to regular, organic SERP listings. For example, if I search for ‘double glazing’ with my location set to Leeds, the following three listings are in the organic results:

These are all very obviously Leeds biased, and if I change my location to ‘UK’ none of these three listings appear on page one.

I thought I’d do a little more digging, to try and understand some of the specific reasons why some location specific sites are promoted over others. My initial thoughts were that there’d be a number of strong signals that determine whether a site/page should be promoted based on locality. I thought these would probably be things like:

• Websites with verified places listing (that match the location in question).

• Pages with relevant hCard address markup.

• Sites that had plenty of traditional ‘quality’ signals such as a strong, authoritative link profiles (in combination with one or more of the above factors).

• Sites that already rank well for many of the terms they target.

To my surprise, none of these things seem to be relevant. While this is by no means a controlled scientific experiment, looking at a number of keyword / location combinations gave some further insight.

Starting with the above example (‘double glazing’ in Leeds):

• City Visitor’s Leeds Double Glazing page only references Leeds in the URL, title and page content. There is no verified Google Places listing and no address microformat used. In fact, with a location set to UK, no page of City Visitor ranks in the top 100 for ‘double glazing’.

• Leedsglass.co.uk has ‘Leeds’ in the domain, page title and body content. However it doesn’t have a verified Places listing, and only has a handful (single figures) of links (most of which are low quality) according to OSE.

Looking at the same keyword but changing location to York, one of the ‘local’ sites that was promoted was square-deals.com. Interestingly, York isn’t mentioned in the domain, URL or page title. There is only one instance of York within the content of the whole page that ranks. Once again, there is no verified Places listing, the link profile is virtually non-existent and with location set to UK, they don’t appear in the top 100. When I first saw this, the only thing I could conclude was that this must be the only double glazing supplier in York. The fact that Maps listings (containing many double glazing suppliers in York) also appear in the SERPs for this keyword/location combo quashes that theory instantly.

For my own peace of mind I checked more locations and more keywords. I’ll just show one more example, as they all show a similar trend.

Changing the keyword to ‘car dealers’, with location set to ‘Manchester’ a couple of promoted sites stand out:

• Dace Motor Company (dacemotorcompany.co.uk) – as with many of the earlier examples, Manchester is not mentioned in the domain or URL, only in the title and body content. There is one address listed on the ranking page, but it is a Stockport address and so Manchester isn’t even mentioned there!

• Lookers (lookers.co.uk) again doesn’t have Manchester in the domain, URL or page title. Only once is Manchester mentioned in the body. There is no verified Places listing. What might (or might not) bear some relevance is the fact that this is a well-established website with a relatively decent link profile, and with location set to UK, ranks on page two for this keyword.

As you can see, the way promoted local sites are decided are not as you might have first thought. My conclusions so far are:

• This has nothing to do with Google Places – a verified Google Places listing bears no relevance to whether a site is promoted. Furthermore I’m yet to see an example of a promoted site that also appears in the local ‘pack’ for the given keyword. Maybe sites that rank in the local ‘pack’ are deliberately excluded from being promoted as part of the Venice update?

• Address microformats aren’t a factor, and aren’t present in any of the examples I looked at.

• Website authority bears no relevance to whether a site is promoted – in fact the majority of the examples I looked at don’t otherwise rank for much / anything, and have a very weak link profile.

• Any number of the following factors can result in promotion:
  • Location in the domain
  • Location in the URL
  • Location on the page (title, description, body text)

But as the examples above show, you by no means need all of these.

All of this said, I found plenty of sites that based on the above, should have been promoted but weren’t. It feels like there is a definite element of randomness factored into which sites / pages are promoted!

A few other thoughts / findings I noted during my research are:

• There seems to be a limit of somewhere in the region of four sites that can be promoted for any given keyword / location combination.

• Sites don’t seem to be promoted to the top positions – usually middle of the pack positions (three to eight).

• Sites only seem to be promoted to page one – I couldn’t find any examples of promoted sites to page two. This makes sense and adds weight to the point about only certain SERP positions able to be filled by ‘local’ listings.

• Local focussed sub-pages of bigger, more generic sites are also being promoted (as seen in the City Visitor example above)

• In most cases only keywords that are likely to have a local intent seem to be promoted. That said, one of the comments left on Dave’s blog gives an example of the keyword ‘beanbag’ resulting in local sites / pages being promoted. Maybe that keyword does have a local intent (e.g. lots of people searching Google Maps for beanbag suppliers), or perhaps Google still has a bit of work to do in determining intent!

• Local businesses have a massive opportunity to capitalise on this update. Many of the example affected keywords we’ve seen are high volume, competitive search terms – keywords that will drive a significant amount of extra traffic and business to those sites lucky enough to be promoted.

I can understand why Google has rolled out this update  as the thinking is very logical: matching keywords known to have local intent with local results should be great. It’s surprising though just how few factors seem to be going into determining this local promotion and how many more relevant and obvious factors aren’t used. It does feel like so many algorithm updates from Google, a little premature – and one fraught with potential to exploit it. It wouldn’t surprise me if the SERPs fill up with keyword+location domains because as things stand today, the goalposts have moved. Authoritative websites with high quality content are no longer necessary to secure page one rankings and Google needs to fill that loophole quickly for this to work for them.

Please leave your comments below!

Why is this happening?

Google is possibly trying to create a better environment for both advertisers and searchers.

• Searchers get higher quality adverts
• Advertisers that aren’t giving the searchers what they want are banished. Leaving the Ad space open for the more targeted, better structured campaigns from rivals.

This is a clever move by Google to give more power to the user to review websites. Combined with the whole +1 appearing on adverts, it creates a carrot and stick approach. You get +1 points if you are good and you get blocked if you are bad.

What to do as an advertiser?

These changes will reward better account structure. As long as your website is fairly high quality, all you need to do is follow the best practice guidelines and focus on being as relevant as possible.

Apparently not all users have this option in their search results, so it appears to only be a limited roll out at the moment.

There is no word from Google on the potential impacts of this, but I wouldn’t be surprised that if the user rating becomes a solid measure of quality, it would be integrated into the quality score metric.

What are your thoughts? Leave them below or on Twitter - @matt_buckley

Despite several other opinions, I think the change was advertised and explained clearly by Google. The search engine has contributed a large amount of time and money to notify users of the changes. However, according to research from Big Brother Watch and YouGo, only one in ten users of Google services have actually read the policy. I think this explains a lot about the negative hype that has surrounded this change.  Negative blog posts are being churned out, the FTC is looking into whether the change violates a decree issued last October, Facebook links instructing how to clear private information on Google sites are now inundating peoples feeds (well mine anyway). Even Microsoft has got in on the act using their blog to write a PR laden piece pointing users to articles criticising Google’s changes and Microsoft products that can act as an alternative to Goole’s services.

However, there is an upside to these changes and it’s important not to overlook them.  The new policy combines 70 different existing privacy policies into one policy, making it simpler and more readable (though still not a page turner). The new privacy policy doesn’t actually allow Google to collect any more information about users than it has previously. The difference comes with what they can do with information.  Now Google will be able to merge the data that it has compiled from users as they interact with any Google services. This will allow Google to build up ‘portraits’ of users meaning they can personalise the service more effectively.

There has been backlash about the fact that users can’t opt out its privacy policy change.  If people want to avoid the new policy then you can use Google products without logging into the services – or for the uber private you could even create different Google accounts for each Google product. Users can see which Google services hold data about them by viewing their dashboard.

Personally I’m slightly indifferent about the changes, but I do feel that it will allow the Google services to tailor to me as an individual.  Most of the changes around data share are opt-out-able and the element that isn’t is the sharing of search data. But since you already trust Google with so much, is this really going to make a difference? The overwhelming negative response about these changes does make me think about everyone else’s strong protectiveness about their personal information and browsing history.   Maybe I’m not protective enough about my own internet usage – or maybe my usage isn’t interesting enough to be protective about! I think the main problem is that users feel vulnerable as they don’t fully understand the policy. It will be interesting to see how views change on this over the coming months and whether the negative feeling around Google will drive people to cancel their Google accounts and use Microsoft services like Hotmail, Bing, IE etc.

What’s your feeling on the Google changes and the Big Brother concerns that many users have shown?

It should be made clear that I don’t do this to improve the aesthetic, but because I know that if an account has a poor structure, it is almost impossible to optimise it effectively, and that just by deconstructing and reconstructing it, I can deliver improvements in performance very quickly in most cases.

There are a number of major benefits to having the right account structure, but these are the main ones…

Avoiding Keyword Overlap

Two of the major goals of managing an Adwords account are to make the adverts and landing pages as relevant as possible to the search, and to adjust the bid to reflect the value of the clicks that a search generates as accurately as possible.

But what happens if the same search can trigger adverts in different Ad Groups or Campaigns? It becomes much more difficult to remove ineffective keywords and tailoring adverts becomes almost impossible in some cases. The impact on bid adjustments can be even worse, though. If you have a similar bid in two different Ad Groups on keywords that can match the same search, what happens if you reduce the bids on one of them? All that is likely to happen is that the impressions will migrate over to the other Ad Group.

If you are using Phrase or Modified Broad Match extensively (and you generally will be), the chances of the same search matching keywords in different Ad Groups is high. For large complex accounts, the only solution is to use an intelligent account structure with appropriate negative keywords.

For example, suppose that you sell widgets. You may choose to set up the following Ad Groups:

Widgets – Generic (“widgets”, “widget” etc)

Widgets – Cheap (“cheap widgets”, “cheap widget” etc)

Widgets – Designer (“designer widgets”, “designer widget” etc)

Widgets – Red (“red widgets”, “red widget” etc)

Widgets – Blue (“blue widgets”, “blue widget” etc)

Widgets – Sale (“widgets on sale”, “widget sale” etc)

If you are using Phrase Match, then a search for ‘cheap widgets uk’ could pick up the Generic or Cheap Ad Group. To resolve this, you should put the words ‘cheap’, ‘designer’, ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘sale’ in the Generic Ad Group as negative keywords. Similarly, you should include the words ‘cheap’, ‘designer’, ‘red’, ‘blue’ as negatives in the Sale Ad Group (in case somebody searches for ‘designer widget sale’).

If you are using Modified Broad Match, it’s a little more complicated, as you’ll need to decide which Ad Group has precedence. If somebody searches for ‘cheap designer widgets’, should they be shown the Cheap or Designer advert? Once these decisions are made, it’s easy once more to apply appropriate negative keywords to avoid overlap.

Clearly, in the above example, it’s easy to resolve this problem. However, it is only easy to sort out because the Ad Groups have specific words that identify the searches that are relevant to them. Because I’ve included these terms in the name of the Ad Group, it’s that much easier to apply negative keywords.

I would always advocate ensuring that the keywords in any Ad Group have a common theme like this. Even if you believe that different Ad Groups should have the same adverts running and the same bids, there are benefits. And if you want tailored adverts, it’s that much more important.

Writing And Testing Adverts

There are a number of obvious benefits to writing relevant adverts. Because words from the search query are emboldened in the search results, your advert will be more visible if the search query is contained in your advert (or at least part of it). In addition, searchers are more likely to click on an advert that claims to sell exactly what they are looking for, and the conversion rate may benefit if you land users on a page containing what they are searching for.

Clearly, if disparate keywords are contained within an Ad Group, then the advert cannot be tailored very effectively. In the above example, it would be easy to write a ‘cheap’ advert for people seeking cheap widgets, a ‘red’ advert for people seeking red widgets etc. However, for large accounts, there are further benefits.

When you have thousands of Ad Groups across dozens of campaigns, advert testing can be almost impossible without a good account structure. However, having a distinct identity for each Ad Group and Campaign, and indicating that identity in the title of the Ad Group, you can roll out advert tests or make changes to adverts across a large number of Ad Groups much more quickly and easily.

For example, if you had campaigns for different product types (e.g. Widgets, Thingies, Whatsits), and wanted to promote a sale on all ‘cheap’ Ad Groups, then you could easily filter for this keyword in the Ad Group names, and change the Ad Groups en masse easily.

Alternatively, you could test a new landing page for all Thingies Ad Groups, or highlight the latest model in all Ad Groups advertising Nike Whatsits.

One of the problems with advert testing is that most Ad Groups don’t get sufficient conversions to generate significant results – by being able to group them together, you should be able to test adverts across a range of Ad Groups simultaneously. This means you will be able to improve your adverts across all of your Ad Groups, rather than just the ones with the most traffic.

Bidding

Suppose that you are bidding £1.00 per click on the Cheap Widgets Ad Group, and £1.00 per click on the Designer Widgets Ad Group. Over time, it becomes apparent that the Cheap Widgets Ad Group doesn’t convert very well, so you reduce your bids to £0.50. What happens if somebody searches for the term ‘cheap designer widgets’? Almost certainly, the £1.00 bid from the Designer Ad Group will be used, even if you don’t want it to. And since you aren’t explicitly bidding on this term, the only way to avoid this would be to reduce your bids on all of the Designer keywords, which you probably don’t want to do.

In many sectors, the margins that retailers make on sales can vary dramatically for different product types, or for different brands. By creating campaigns or Ad Groups to reflect this, you can optimise bids to maximise profit much more easily, as you’ll be able to report on profit at Campaign or Ad Group level and adjust bids accordingly.

What are your thoughts? Please leave them below!

As part of the changes, the calculations of impression share data will now only update once per day and unfortunately for those who live by GMT or similar, these once per day updates take place at noon Pacific Time (GMT-8). So that means our campaigns will not show impression share data for yesterday until 8pm today. This is probably too late to make bid or budget changes based on this info.

OK so to get an estimate, which is sensible, I would suggest that there are two things we need.

Firstly, we need some sort of model which represents a ‘typical’ distribution of impressions throughout the day for the account. To do this, grab some top level impressions’ data for your account and segment this by hour of the day. Then find the percentage of impressions each hour that contributes to the daily total. We should also add the cumulative total percentage for reasons which will become apparent later in the calculation.

Bear this in mind: the longer the date range is that you pull this data from, the more accurate model you are likely to get. However, you should ensure this data is ‘typical’ in that it was with the same budget and has no changes which would affect impressions, such as major keyword changes.

Next we need to collect the impression data for the day that you are trying to calculate, remember to segment by hour of day. Now, if we have significant lost impression share, the later rows may be blank. Let’s compare:

So we can see that the budget ran out a little after 10pm. For the calculation, I’m going to assume it ran out at 10pm and ignore the 1,699 impressions after this.

So to calculate, I’m going to sum the impressions received up to 10pm which is 105,094. Using our distribution model we can estimate that this relates to 91.5% of impressions we receive in a day and so, to calculate 100% of impressions, divide our total by 91.5 and multiply by 100.

(105,094 / 91.5) * 100 = 114,857

And finally, to get to get a lost impression percentage:

(114,857 – 105,094) / 114,857 = 8.5% lost impressions share.

There are a few things to bear in mind if you are going to do your own calculations this way:

• It will only work if your campaign delivery method is set to accelerate, and was set to accelerate for the duration from which you take your impressions model data.

• The validity of any result is very dependent on the quality of your impression distribution data.

• If you have campaigns that perform differently, produce a different model for each campaign.

• If you have days of the week which perform differently, produce different models for each day.

Have the changes to the impression share data affected your campaigns? Leave a comment to let me know.

It’s no surprise that they would want to make the most of their service – there have been a large number of projects that have fallen by the wayside. Google Wave was mothballed in 2010, while Google Buzz failed to ignite passion among Gmail users and went the same way at the end of last year. These weren’t really highly publicised, much like other failed ventures such as Catalogs, Notebook and Video, so it’s probably not a surprise that they failed. Maybe Google+ will break this curse?

Probably not, if the latest reports are anything to go by. In fact, it doesn’t look like Google+ is even close to scratching the surface when compared to Facebook. The blue-and-white giant already courts nearly everyone interested in social networking, so to make them join both – or even defect entirely – seems short-sighted, to say the least. Back in February, comScore claimed that Google+ visitors spent a pitiful 3.3 minutes on the service during the entirety of January, compared with around six and a half hours on Facebook. This was down from 4.8 minutes in December 2011 and 5.1 minutes in November.

eMarketer picked up on this surprising statistic, and went on to criticise its lack of “real” users. “[E]ngagement and participation aren’t up to speed with other social networks,” said company analyst Kimberly Maul, “and that has become a major obstacle for turning Google+ into a relevant social network.”

The figures themselves may be a lie, too, if Everspark Interactive’s blog on Business Insider is anything to go by. “Ever since around the time Google made its mammoth privacy policy change, users have had to sign up for Google+ when signing up for other Google products, like Gmail,” they said. “It isn’t entirely surprising, then, that so many people have ‘upgraded’ to Google+, since they are pretty much forced to.”

As it stands, I don’t really know anyone other than those working in the digital marketing industry that uses Google+. It’s a novelty to most – often, people just smirk when you mention it. Fancy gadgets aside, Google+ doesn’t seem to offer anything truly necessary that Facebook doesn’t have already. The newcomer will need a lot more innovation and uniqueness if it’s going to win people over, so it may want to stop mimicking Facebook in the future.

Website testing regularly causes tracking issues and contained below are three basic checks as soon as any new test goes live:

(Assuming website test went live on = www.mywebsite.co.uk/test)

1. Is your site listed under the referrals section within analytics?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

If a significant portion of your traffic is listed under the referrals section, it is highly likely that there is an issue with your tracking.

Yes – Including A Time Period Previous To Test Implementation

Your tracking has probably had issues for a while, and this should definitely be investigated further. At a guess, likely to be a result of subdomain/cross domain tracking issues or a combination of code placement and site speed.

No

Good, no issues so far.

2. Have you seen a sudden spike in Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic (or in fact, any traffic source) that coincides with the test?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

It is likely that the source has been lost for an alternative traffic source such as paid search. Try navigating to the page that contains the test.

Now there are two main ways to see both test variations, use two separate browsers, navigate to the test page, and keep clearing cookies on one of them until you have a browser set to each page (an uncouth but still effective approach).

Google Analytics Specific

(The principal still applies to other tracking solutions)

Force analytics to show you a version by the addition of variables, add the following onto your URL and change the value after preview to view different versions:

# utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

To obtain your utmxid for website optimiser, preview your experiment and take the id from the preview URL. More details can be found here:

http://support.google.com/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=63841

e.g.

www.mywebsite.co.uk/test#utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

This should then allow you to choose which variation you are shown.

Now try adding ‘?utm_source=TEST’ into the URL, after being re-directed by the test, does the utmx cookie still contain TEST as the source value?

If not, it is likely the analytics cookie has not been set before the re-direct occurred, thus losing the original source. You need to ensure that the cookies are set before the re-direct takes place.

No

Perform the test above anyway, just in case a random traffic surge masks any spike you may have noticed (unlikely you say, at least until it happens to you).

1. Appear to have a small spike yet cannot find an issue?

Segment your traffic. If a specific traffic segment is causing the spike it is likely that that particular segment has an issue. It may be that your site breaks for all mobile traffic, does not work in IE, Chrome, Firefox or even the tracking above could be breaking on a single segment. Segmentation should help you narrow down any analytics problem to the source, not just for website testing.

Any questions or comments? Please leave them below or on Twitter -@JamesMHolding

The policy continues down the road of Google’s long term goal where they see internet users never having to leave Google when using the internet.

This focus has been seen by many as Google operating a monopoly on the internet after Larry Page launched “Google Plus Your World” earlier in the month.

The new privacy policy incorporates all of Google’s services, including YouTube and Gmail, enabling Google to share data about a user’s behaviour across these different platforms.

This means for example, that if you’re emailing your car insurance provider about renewing your policy from your Gmail account, when you pop over to watch that clip of the funny cat on YouTube, you would be shown adverts for car insurance before the video played.

Or it may be that you are searching for things to do in New York when you visit next month and are presented with hints, tips and photos from recent trips your friends have made that have been posted by them on Google+.

Alternatively you may be navigating through rush hour traffic using Google Maps when Google Calendar suddenly informs you that unless you catch the 8:27am train, you’ll be late for that important board meeting.

According to Google, this collation of data across all of Google’s properties will create a much more relevant internet experience for the user by only showing them adverts and information that is related to their own personal needs, interests and preferences.

In terms of SEO, it is yet to be fully seen how this will impact. However in theory it could force new avenues to be explored.

Search Engine Optimisation could require a far more socially aware aspect to campaigns that interacts with specific user groups across all of Google’s products. Rather than concentrating almost solely on rankings within Google’s search engine, more focus may need to be put on Google+ and YouTube.

A far greater synergy between organic and paid activity may also need to be developed. Aside from just working together to establish maximum visibility within search, SEO and PPC could be required to combine in other ways to ensure that a user’s activity with one of Google’s products is effectively targeted over on another.

What are your thoughts? - @PG_Martin

The most recent change to the algorithm has been geared to punish websites with excessive “above the fold” advertising, sites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.  According to Google, the changes are to encourage websites to be more user-friendly, stating that “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see that content right away.” This could result in Google dropping any ad-heavy sites from its search results.

Although Google states that this change will only affect about one in 100 searches, with only the sites deemed to “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree,” it is still vitally important to consider how these changes could affect your SEO campaign.

The main thing that jumps out with these changes in mind is that banner advertising, although it may still be of some SEO benefit, it may not be as useful to your campaign as it once was and will definitely mean that you will have to be much more selective with which sites you choose to advertise on.  The changes will definitely lead to much more creative approaches to an SEO campaign, and creating interesting and original content that can be promoted by other sites, also ensuring your own website is constantly updated with fresh content, although this was important before will now be even more crucial. This will be important if you are to effectively drive traffic to your site. I wouldn’t heavily rely on banner ads or put any focus on acquiring links Google could deem as irrelevant to the site user, as theses will have less and less effect on your campaign.

If we have learned anything from this latest update from Google, it’s that it is now, more than ever, extremely important to keep up with the algorithm changes and adjust your SEO campaign accordingly.

What are your thoughts? – @gary_greenall

It is very useful to monitor these metrics, especially the Lost IS (Budget). This shows what percentage of impressions your campaign did not receive because of budget restrictions. If a campaign is showing a level of lost impressions, the advertiser can then decide what changes to make to improve performance, either reducing bids to get cheaper clicks for the same budget or increase the budget.

According to the Google Adwords blog, the impression share metrics will soon be available at ad group level. The Lost IS (Budget) will not be available as budgets are not set at ad group level, but we will be able to see the impression share, lost impression share due to rank and exact match impression share. These three column options will soon start to show in Adwords accounts at ad group level.

Exact Match IS and Impression share have been available through the dimensions tab previously but we will soon be able to see all three in the ad groups tab.

This will give us more insight into where a campaign is losing out on impressions. We will be able to see if a very strong performing ad group is missing out on impressions compared to other ad groups in the same campaign, and make adjustments to improve the performance.

Once this becomes available I will use it to see how I can make improvements to ad groups and will report back any findings in a future blog post! – @aimee_roberts

Like most tools, its usefulness depends on your ability to analyse the data presented to you and selecting the options most relevant to you or your business.

Let’s take the current trends in the UK over the last 7 days (if you’re not sure how to do this, simply leave the search term field blank and change the date range to ‘Last 7 days’ and hit search):

Why are these topics trending? Netflix as a result of their online movie streaming service launch in the UK, Georgia Salpa is a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother (I’ve had to Google some of these to find out I swear!), Beyonce Baby due to the birth of her first child Ivy Blue Carter… all very interesting I’m sure you’ll agree, but not massively relevant for most digital marketers.

Instead, here are some scenarios and uses of the tool that could be extremely useful.

Scenario 1 – The Electronics Store

Let’s say I own an online electronics store and I’m quite keen to gauge how interest for 3D TVs has been increasing in recent years.

If I wasn’t aware already, it’s clear that interest is on the increase year on year and I could expect this growth to continue going into 2012. If my range of 3D TVs on my site isn’t that comprehensive, it’s probably about time I started increasing it! Or from an SEO/PPC perspective, this is certainly an area I need to start investing some time and money in.

Scenario 2 – The Travel Agent

An online travel agent will clearly know that they operate in one of the most seasonal industries out there, but what can Google Insights for Search tell us more precisely?

We can clearly see a pretty standard seasonal pattern year on year here – a spike at the beginning of the year as people start to research holidays for the upcoming year. This tails off quite quickly, before a gradual increase each month leading to a spike once again around August time at the height of summer (or most likely, the summer holidays for kids). Clearly this is extremely useful data – digital marketers can use this to plan out their promotional activity across the year, whether that be in email, PPC, SEO or display advertising.

Scenario 3 – The Newspaper Publisher

The way people are reading their news is changing. The rise of smartphone and tablet devices has inevitably lead to greater visits ro online versions of newspapers and magazines. Can Google Insights for Search show this shift more precisely?

As you can see above, I’ve compared two trends in this example. The blue line represents searches for newspapers, whilst the red line signifies ‘newsnow’ which is an online news portal/search engine. Clearly you can see that as newspaper searches have been on the decline, news searches have been gradually increasing year on year. This data would certainly show the importance of investing heavily in optimising online newspaper sites or downloaded app versions for people to read on the move.

Scenario 4 – The DIY Store

You’re a huge stockist and always looking to increase your range to meet potential customer’s needs on your site. Furthermore, the ‘real estate’ space on your homepage is a key area of the site, so you’re always looking to display the key types of products users are looking for.

You adjust the filter on this occasion to ‘Product Search’ instead of ‘Web Search’ and instead of all categories, select ‘Home Improvement’ with it being most relevant to your business.

On this occasion, we don’t need to focus on the trend line graph, as it’s too general in this instance. Instead, if you focus on the top searches and rising searches in this category, it can provide a wealth of data.

All the products mentioned above indicate users’ needs at present, so it would be worthwhile to ensure these types of products are featured heavily on the site and in any promotional activity.

Are you running a PPC campaign and are you bidding on these types of product categories? If not, now would be an excellent time to start.

The scenarios above are just a few of the ways the Insights for Search tool can be incredibly helpful to business owners, digital marketers or online advertisers in a wide range of industries. I’d be really interested to hear about other ways you’ve used the tool for your business or clients, so feel free to drop me a comment below or tweet me @PeterGould83

Late last week, one of the big four professional services firms – Deloitte – announced that it applied to purchase the .deloitte top level domain. Heather Hancock, managing director of global brand and communications at DTTL, said:

Being a pioneering applicant for a TLD aligns with the Deloitte brand’s positioning and marketplace presence as leader, innovator, and impact maker.

(http://goo.gl/HIBaM)

Their main reasons for them applying for the domain:

• Offer improved site accessibility and usability to Deloitte member firm clients, recruits, and others for an enhanced online experience.
• Ensure that internal online activity and exchange of information among the company’s employees is secure.
• Improve defences against counterfeit operations that could harm the organisation’s reputation, including “domain squatting”. This is the action of purchasing a domain under the trademark of a brand with the intent to sell it back to the company at an inflated price.

Are there any SEO benefits?

• The Google algorithm currently places no preference on particular top-level domains. It doesn’t place any extra value to a .com domain compared to a .net domain.
• It does however, use country specific TLDs as one method of delivering the most relevant content to users. It doesn’t solely rely on this method as many country-specific TLDs (e.g.  .tv and .ly) are used despite of the country origin.

Let me know your thoughts, leave a comment below.

Search plus Your World involves three new features introduced by Google:

• Personal Results – this finds information specifically for you ex.) Google+ photos and posts. This includes not just your own but also those shared with you that only you will be able to see on your results page.
• Profiles in Search – both in autocomplete and results; this would enable you to quickly find people you are friends with or people you may be interested in following.
• People and Pages – this would help you to find profiles and Google+ pages  related to a specific topic or interest, and enable you to follow them in just a few clicks.

By default, you will be shown the Personal Results view i.e. search results based on your behaviour and social connections. However you will also be able to see what your search results look like without personal content via a toggle, as shown below:

This new addition will largely benefit those involved in search engine optimization as it allows you to switch between personalised and unpersonalised results. Unpersonalised will not provide results from your friends, private information or any personalization based on your Web History.

Obviously there are a number of security concerns but Google has informed us that any information provided by signed in users is secured by SSL encryption. Therefore protecting your search results which includes private content by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

Currently, Search Plus Your World does not cover any other social network where content is shared such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. In other words, Search Plus Your World is currently only displaying content from Google+. It will be interesting to see whether or not Facebook allows Google to start using their content despite already partnering with Bing. This would allow them to personalise its search results based on a searcher’s Facebook friends’ likes.

Will this enhance your experience whilst searching on Google? Let me know your thoughts.

Readers in the UK now have access to the world’s largest e-books collection, with hundreds of thousands of e-books for sale – from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin – as well as more than two million public domain e-books for free.

Google is now offering independent bookstores access to sell through Google Books.  This means that independent stores will act as an affiliate and can add the Google e-bookstore to its website. Stores will then receive a commission for sending a customer through to Google Books from their own website. This is a smart move by Google but one of the major concerns with the growing popularity of e-books is the extra strain it will put on independent book stores.  However, by offering to stand alongside the independents, Google is giving stores a chance to get involved with the increase of sales.

Whilst Google’s library is in no way bigger than Amazon’s, Google has the benefit of data! It has access to information that no one else has and when users are searching for authors and book titles, they can take advantage of this.

There are still some uncertainties relating to search however:

• How will Google determine the relevancy of search results in Google Books?
• How will it decide what order to show the books in?
• Who will get the coveted first position?

Unlike websites, there are no links in books that Google can index, there isn’t an internal link structure, and there aren’t separate pages with unique title elements or meta data.  Without any of these elements, Google needs to use other signals to determine rankings.  In June 2011, Google got a patent for ‘query-independent entity importance in books’. The patent is for a computer-implemented method for presenting entities mentioned in books. The abstract from the original application describes it as:

An entity importance engine that analyzes the information in the corpus to identify the entities mentioned therein, and ranks the entities using query-independent importance scores. The importance scores can be based in part on the contexts in which the entities are mentioned by the books. A presentation engine enables searching of the corpus to identify books satisfying a search query.

I don’t think authors will consider these ranking signals when they are writing books any time soon but it’s an interesting concept.  In the future are we going to see these signals weaved into books – especially for books on SEO and ranking success?

Please leave your thoughts below!

Product Listing Ads are made up of an image of a product related to the search term with a brief description of the product, the price and the company selling it.

The screen shot below shows two of these ads and from what I have seen, there is usually between one and three of these types of ads shown at one time.

I have been using these new ads for a while now and have seen a very good performance from them so far. The click-through rate and conversion rate have been higher than other campaigns using text ads within the same account, and has had a very positive effect on the overall account performance.

Interestingly, they have also performed better than text ads with product extensions included. This has been tested during a peak period so it will be interesting to see how it performs during times with lower volume.

I would recommend testing this for advertisers with a Google Merchant Account and a good product feed. You need to ensure the account is linked to your Google Adwords account.

Go into your Google account and select the Auto Target tab and select add product target. You can either select All Products or break it down to into more targeted groups. Many people have recommended starting with All Products and then trying to be more targeted once you have more experience and data with these new ads.

If you have any feedback of your own on these ad formats, please do share it, as it would be interesting to hear how they are performing for other accounts.

@aimee_roberts

When it doesn’t work too well, you often have no choice but to turn it off, until now.

Google doesn’t make it easy for you to see which search partner sites you appear on.

But there is a way to find the poor performing websites in your search partner’s campaign and have them switched off.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Identify the Problem

Dive into your Analytics and create a new filter using the settings below. Here is a quick guide to creating a filter (if you have never done it before). This filter will allow you to see the referring website from the search partner network.

This filter only works prospectively, so you will have to allow a week or so for it to collect data (depending on your volumes).

Once you think you have collected enough data, open up the Adwords campaign report in Analytics. Pick the e-commerce tab, then select the campaign drop down box (just above your campaign names) and change this to User-Defined Value.

Now, find the high-traffic, low ‘per-visit value’ websites that stand out. In my case, it was Amazon and EBay.

Considering I am paying about 20p per click on the search partners network, I would like a per visit value of at least 30p+ to be making any real return. The other search partners have a per visit value of £1+, so I feel I could benefit from having these two switched off entirely.

Step 2: Solve the Problem

A quick call or email to Google highlighting your issues with particular search partners should be enough for them to review your targeting, send them your findings and you should be in a good position. They can manually switch off certain search partners, but be warned, it can take a couple of days to get things sorted.

Step 3: Review the Results

If your account is anything like this one, it will see an improvement for most metrics. The most noticeable being: Revenue Per Click

Return On Investment

Let me know if you have any success with this @matt_buckley

The social data hub aims to enable social network partners to submit their activity streams, making the data available to Google Analytics users within a set of social reports currently in development.

This means that GA customers will be able to determine down to the activity level – e.g. +1 button, comment, vote – what activities are taking place relevant to their content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.

This comes as an extension to Google’s recent development of default integration of +1’s into Google Analytics.

The social web offers a great opportunity for brands to engage with customers in relevant and genuine ways, but social measurement hasn’t kept up. The goal of the new social data hub is to provide marketers and publishers with a comprehensive view of how social helps customers discover their brand and drive sales.

Google has partnered with several social platforms allowing Google Analytics users to integrate their activity streams straight into GA.

The launch partners are:

• Digg
• Reddit
• StackOverflow
• TypePad
• Delicious
• Gigya
• LiveFyre

and of course

• Google+
• Google Blogger
• Google Groups

Google will be following the Activity Streams specification, an industry format for describing socially interesting events, or “Activities,” about the people and things an individual may care about. In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object. For example, “Geraldine posted a photo” or “John shared a video.” Any of the data submitted may potentially be used but it must adhere to the specification. Detailed requirements are available on the GA Developer Documentation site.

This is another fantastic step by Google. There are already paid services that exist in this field but this now makes Google Analytics an even more valuable tool to SMEs as they can really begin to get a handle on the social web without it costing the earth.

What are your thoughts on this announcement? -@danpeden

There are obviously a lot of differences between online and offline advertising, but what are the similarities? Let’s take a look at one online advertising platform, Google AdWords, and see how some of its options can be compared to techniques used in offline advertising.

Now the whole idea behind searching for a specific product or service, and being presented with a list of companies or providers is old news. Think directory books like Yellow Pages, pick your keyword from the index, turn to that page and there are your search results!

So what options within AdWords could you say are borrowed from older offline techniques? How about location targeting? After all, regional yellow pages meant I was always looking for local suppliers. I didn’t look up a mobile car repair service, a builder and a vet from the other side of the country that time I swerved my car into my garden wall whilst trying in vain to avoid my neighbours escaped dog.

How about the option of advanced bid changes? Do you ramp up your bids to 130% of their default between 2 and 4pm because that’s when most people are searching for your product? Does a sandwich shop send out someone holding a sign advertising their new thinly sliced ham with homemade mustard between 12 and 1pm because that’s when most people are looking for sandwiches? My sandwich shop would.

Do you run on the display network? This is a network to get huge impressions for your ads from people who may or may not necessarily be looking for you or your product, possibly as a way of building up brand awareness. Sounds like those carefully placed billboards I pass every day on my way to work.

What about mail shot remarketing through your letterbox? I once ‘showed an interest’ in being updated with the latest developments in the world of Lego (I was mainly in it for the free lego astronaut they were offering in exchange for my address) and some years later I’m still being updated on the new Lego Atlantis range. Some of the best campaigns now include some sort of remarketing i.e. a way to display your ads your message across again to those who showed an interest by visiting your site but maybe didn’t convert.

No matter how many adverts you see and how many third party endorsements they put on there, you’re always weary that their ultimate aim is to make money from you. So are advertisers trustworthy? Sure they are governed by certain standards, but no better endorsement exists than word of mouth. When one of my friends recommended a local barbers for their discreet and professional nose hair trimming service, I knew I could trust them.…. +1 on your AdWords ads?

These are just some ways in which older offline advertising techniques may have influenced current methods of online advertising. Can you think of any others? -@Nastino

Out-of-date content is a major issue for both search engines and users. If the creator of the content chooses not to explicitly state when the content was created, how can a search engine or user ensure that the content is still valid?

Query Deserves Freshness was a major leap forward in ensuring that for trending topics (topics that have a burst of activity), a mixture of fresh and authority content was shown. Here Google takes a risk in saying that we are willing to make X% of the top ten results available for the latest content rather than relying on the algorithm to order results.

Google Caffeine was a major infrastructure update aimed at allowing Google to improve all areas of their search functionality including breadth and speed of indexation. Suddenly it became common place for new content (especially on blogs etc.) to be indexed within seconds.

The new freshness update, announced officially by Google on 3 November, takes QDF to a whole new level, in effect switching QDF on permanently for a range of queries.

This makes a whole lot of sense in that a vast amount of search queries are directly targeted towards the most up-to-date results. “Jamie Oliver Book”, “Leeds United Result”, “Olympics” etc. all have an unstated intent to find the latest information, and these are the queries that Google is targeting with the freshness update.

Although Google originally stated that the update will affect 35% of searches, they later clarified this to be in-line with how it expressed the impact of past updates. So six to ten per cent of searches will be noticeably affected by the update. When you consider the kind of searches this is meant to target, it makes more sense.

How will this affect sites?

The vast majority of commercial sites will be unaffected as their primary goal is not to provide time critical information. A search for “beds” or “accident claims” will remain static as there is no noticeable benefit from having fresher results over authoritative.

Information providers such as the press, blogs and niche / fan sites will be affected as they sit firmly within the domain of this update.

How can sites benefit from this update?

For sites affected, this update is a double-edged sword. Long term rankings will be easier to achieve through good content without the need for a massively trusted parent domain. That being said, fresh content will rank and provide traffic but this will diminish over time as fresher content appears.

To gain any kind of benefit you have to timestamp your content. In an ideal world every piece of content should have a date on it but this is never going to be the case. Google understands this so will be likely looking at three key areas:

1. Date Created – a web server passes details of the document you have requested along with the actual document. One of these details is the creation date, another is the last modified date. Ensure these are correct (you server may be set to 1990 without you knowing it) via checking your header information.

2. XML Sitemap – keep your XML sitemap up-to-date but not only by including new pages. Also ensure that the last-modified field is used whenever a page is updated.

3. RSS – Google own Feedburner. This means they have had access to a massive quantity of RSS data for a long long time. It therefore goes without saying that at some level this update was born out of the analysis of RSS data. Ensure that any form of time critical content is presented via RSS, be it blog content or news.

This leads back to a particular gripe of mine when sites have “blogs” that are not actually blogs as they don’t use any standard blogging software and therefore can’t be recognised easily as a blog. Solutions such as WordPress automatically handle pinging and RSS which all assists with the Freshness update.

So in a nutshell, ensure you produce an RSS feed, an updated XML sitemap and your server is time-stamping correctly. Then keep on producing great content that positions you as a thought leader and authority in your particular niche.

Good luck! - @SEOMalc

The blog claims that, on average, ads at the bottom of the page performed better than when the adverts were shown on the right hand side of the page. This was based on click-through from tests they previously ran. I wrote a blog post on this, which you can read here. Please see screen shot below of how it looks.

This means Google is also changing the Top vs. Side split in your Adwords account. This will now be Top vs. Other, and the other will include ads shown on the right hand side and the bottom of the page.

I am curious why Google has started doing this. It seems to me they are clearing space on the right hand side for other adverts. I have noticed the Product Listing Ads appearing more and more recently. These ads don’t include a message but just show a product image with the product name and price. These ads come from an advertiser’s Google Merchant Account. A screen shot below shows how these adverts look on the results page. This could mean that Google feels these product ads are more relevant to users than the paid search ads not in position one to three.

I am dubious of whether this will increase click-through rate or not but I will be monitoring the effect, if any, very closely.

If you have any of your own insights from this, please do share! - @aimee_roberts

The word from the horse’s mouth?

Perhaps the most obvious place to begin with regards to Panda’s impact on content farms is the publishers themselves. One of the most notorious in this respect was Demand Media, purveyors of the aforementioned water article and owners of eHow and Livestrong.com. Prior to Panda, they were frequently singled out as producing content which was lowering the quality of search results.

In a telling move, the company recently announced to their freelancers that there would likely be a downturn in work given to them.

“Looking ahead, as we continue to publish articles for eHow and our other sites, we want to be sure we are building on what already exists, not replicating it. This is not to say we will stop assigning standard titles in How to and Topic View format for eHow.com. But it does mean that we will have fewer eHow.com assignments for the foreseeable future.”

According to Searchengineland, Demand Media appears to have been forced to take a new approach focusing on fewer, higher quality articles in the face of the successive Panda updates. It’s perhaps hardly surprising for a site that saw an 84% drop in visibility following the first version of Panda, but perhaps not indicative of the overall impact that the algorithmic changes have had.

Impact and exceptions

If you look at the current state of search results, it’s clear that Google is having a harder time controlling content farms than Demand Media’s volte-face might suggest. Indeed looking at the latest figures on the Panda 2.5 update released by Search Metrics, one could even argue that Panda is failing in its stated purpose.

According to the figures, certain high-volume content producers such as PR Newswire and Businesswire have seen a fairly sizeable loss of visibility since the latest update. Yet some publishers, that were initially hit hardest by the changes such as Hubpages, have not only recovered all lost visibility but have in fact exceeded their pre-Panda positions in this respect.

Given that Hubpages’ initial decline was undeniably due to the low quality of content being produced by them, such fluctuation suggests one of two things. 1) that Google is having a harder time eradicating poor quality content than initially thought and 2) that as in the case of Demand Media, publishers are becoming more aware of how to combat the updates and regain lost ground.

Strangely though, one content farm that seems to have suffered no ill effects is Google’s own YouTube, which has seen a 10% increase in visibility since the last Panda update. As Aaron Wall of SEO Book stated on Search Engine Land:

‘Before the first Panda update happened,YouTube was capturing just over 3% of downstream Google traffic. Now they are likely up to [around 9% or 10%]. That means Google is sending YouTube hundreds of millions of referrals every single day.’

If content farms are bad, then why is it that virtually no one is questioning why Google’s content farm keeps going up and up?

It has to a plan for YouTube to grow as a % of overall results. That sort of growth isn’t accidental or driven by an unbiased algorithm (after all, only one site has seen that sort of explosive growth in the SERPs since Panda). I wonder if Google search engineers feel just a tad bit sleazy or if they are just ignorant of what’s in the search results?

Clearly this throws a third and more intriguing possibility into the mix: perhaps certain content farms are seen as less damaging to search quality for whatever reason and thus treated differently. Yet if this is the case, can Panda really be seen as tackling the issue?

Whatever the case, while Panda has had some impact on the practice of content farming, it would be far from true to say that it has managed to eradicate the practice completely. For the time being, it appears that content farms are here to stay. Tech-aware publishers such as Demand Media, have perhaps been squeezed just enough to prompt them to change their ways. However, the algorithm itself clearly seems to be failing in controlling other sites and in some cases, seemingly rewarding content farming. Whatever direction they choose to take, moral confusion and technical hold-ups aside, Google will eventually catch up to the content farmers and when they do, will anyone honestly say that they miss them?

How do you see the current state of Panda? Is it clever content farms, a struggling update or conspiracy? – let me know your thoughts @jameshale88

Google has always been good at adding a bit of fun to their users otherwise humdrum day, and it is not just for fun either. It is a really good way of keeping your users talking about you.

Most people are looking for a moment of delight in their day and some companies are really good at providing these moments with their products or services.

I’ll never forget the first time, during a commute home, I was listening  to music on my iPhone, and received an incoming call. I was amazed when the music faded out when my call came in, and then faded back in when the call ended. That was a revelation! I simply didn’t expect a phone to work like that.

It is things like this that define your product and are a great way to encourage users to talk about your brand.  Googles Doodles are an unexpected distraction to your otherwise goal-orientated search. Similarly, the bottom of an Innocent smoothie carton is not where you expect to find a cheeky message.

By focusing less on the basic design needs of the user, and more on the higher level functions that aim to make the user happy by doing something unexpected, you can best demonstrate those intangible brand values that a traditional approach to brand building can not reach.

My favourite Easter egg of late has been from fashion site www.wakakuu.com. Try typing the following when on the site : ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → BA and see what happens.

What are your favourite unexpected features that brands offer? -@iamgaz

Google+ Business Pages – What Is It?

With a similar feel to Facebook Pages, Google+ Business gives companies and brands a platform to share and connect with their customer base through content such as photos, videos, blog posts and status updates.

Like with the Google+ profiles for individuals, Google+ Business Pages also provides users with ‘Circles’ to help group together people to share content and converse with them based on their interests.

Want to take your customer engagement further? Host a ‘Hangout’ session where you can connect with a group via a webcam for feedback sessions or planned conversations with your most passionate customers.

As Google states:

“The goal is to help you communicate in more intimate ways with different groups of people.”

How to Setup a ‘Google+ Business’ Page

1. If you haven’t already, set up a Google+ account.
2. Once on your Google+ profile page, click on ‘Create a Google+ Page’
3. You’ll then be taken through a simple setup up process including the type of business you are, your company tagline and a few photos that show what your business is all about before viewing your Business profile.
4. Hit ‘Finish’ and you’ll be shown your business page.

At this point it will look pretty empty. Focus on the basic set up which will include the following:

• Add a company logo
• Prepare up to 20 posts so you have content on your page straight away
• Upload any videos and photos and share those on your main page.
• Setup your tag line if you haven’t already
• Link to any sites that are related/relevant to your business including your own company website. You have space for up to 20.

That is your Google+ Business Page set up.

Be sure to plan what you will be posting and how frequently to give your viewers a reason to come back. This could be status updates, videos, photos, latest blog posts or special discounts to name a few.

Google +1 Count Versus Followers

Google+ Pages have both a +1 count and a follower count (see to the left of the above image). What’s the difference? The followers are those who have added the company to one of their circles; these followers will see that company’s updates within their own content stream.

The +1 count is a sum of all those users that have shared the company Google+ page with their own network. Whether the +1 number will contribute to rankings within Google is yet to be known.

How to Add the Google+ Badge to Your Website

Along with the release of Google+ Business Pages, Google have also launched the Google+ badge that can be added to your website to inform visitors that your company is active on Google+. To add the G+ badge:

1. Copy your profile ID (this will be the number in the URL when on your profile page).
2. Head over to the Google+ badge configuration tool and add your profile ID where prompted
3. Choose one of the badges underneath and a code snippet will show.
4. Copy and paste the code to a suitable position within your website’s source code.

Google+ Direct Connect allows your audience to find your Google+ page easily. By adding a ‘+’ in front of a company name, you will be shown a preview of that company’s Google+ page.

Remember – your website must be verified. To do this:

1. Link to your website from your Google+ Business Page
2. Add a Google+ badge to your website
3. Add the following code to your website (changing ‘[yourpageID]’ to your profile’s ID number):<link rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]” />

Want to Know More?

Google has a couple of videos to show off the new Google+ Page features:

Google+ Pages Video

Google+ Direct Connect Video

You can also view a number of Google+ pages that have already been created including:

Pepsi

Barcelona Football Club

Burberry – (Definitely check out their profile photo set!)

H&M

Toyota

WWE

The full list can be found on Google’s own blog post.

Ask Away!

If you have any questions about the new Google+ Business pages, certainly leave us a comment below. And if you’ve set up and are managing a page, we’d love to hear what your thoughts are so far.