Today I was speaking about link-building at the Searchlove conference. This conference has rapidly become the best SEO conference in the calendar and the quality of tips and information is always excellent. This year was even better than last year.
My slides from the event are below – any questions email me patrick @branded3.com. Please note that these slides have been edited slightly.
Google has today announced that any users that are logged in to Google.com will be automatically sent to the https version of Google. This has the (presumably intentional) side effect that web analytics tools will no longer be able to see data on the keywords that people used to get to websites.
You might need to read that bit twice because it’s a lot to take in.
The net effect of this is that Google Analytics and all the other web traffic & analytics tools are going to get some very big holes in their data. Of course Google AdWords click data will still be fully available – they are just blocking the organic click data.
What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools. This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic. If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.
A full summary of this decision is here but there are a few key points to note.
Firstly this is only for google.com at the moment and only for logged in users so there is no need to panic just yet. However we saw with the Panda update how Google starts off with Google.com and then rolls things out worldwide and increases the number of affected people every few weeks.
Secondly we have seen the growth of Google+ and Gmail is already huge so there is no reason to assume that the number of users this affects will be small. I can see a very large percentage of people being logged in to Google at all times. Why wouldn’t they be?
Thirdly there is no reason at all that Google wouldn’t migrate everybody to SSL in the future whether they are logged in or not.
To me this seems like a move designed both to make Google appear to be protecting users as well as an opportunity for them to take away data that helps big sites build more effective SEO campaigns.
There isn’t much point worrying about this because there is nothing that anybody can do about it. The SEO industry has lots of challenges to deal with and losing what may turn out to be a small percentage of data won’t make a material difference to campaigns at this stage.
If Google turns off keyword data altogether then that’s another matter.
Today I presented at A4U Expo in London about SEO for Super Affiliates. The conference was great and the new venue being 10 minutes from Kings Cross was certainly a bonus.
The slides are below. Any questions drop me a line.
Panda updates in the past have not really seemed to hurt ecommerce sites as much as content sites and affiliate sites. Last week this seems to have changed a bit and more ecommerce & comparison sites are suffering.
Matt Cutts sent a tweet today saying that we can expect Panda to hit 2% more sites in the near future but there are already quite a few sites contacting us about a major loss in traffic last week.
If you have been hit please leave a comment or email us for some help and advice.
Recognising the high-quality search results we deliver to our clients, Branded3 has been nominated for eight prestigious Search Awards, including Best Blog for Blogstorm.
Honoured to have even been nominated for just one award, our SEO team here at Branded3 are proud to have our hard-work and innovation recognised on such a large scale and have updated our ever growing awards page with the full details.
These awards celebrate the best in SEO and PPC across the UK, and to be nominated for eight out of the 15 available award categories is fantastic.
Acknowledging the success and effectiveness of our innovative SEO strategies; we’ve been nominated for Best Use of Search in the Retail sector (with Interflora), the Leisure sector, the Travel sector (with Spa Breaks), and the Finance sector (we entered this award jointly with the excellent team at Money Supermarket).
Our recently launched Twitter-based app, Competwition.com, is shortlisted for the Innovation award; and of course I couldn’t be happier that Blogstorm is competing for Best Blog.
We’re also nominated for Best Local Campaign, on the strength of our SEO work for international gym chain LA Fitness.
On top of all of this, Branded3 has been nominated for Best Agency, along with six other highly-regarded and established agencies.
As well as being a huge compliment to the work we do here, being nominated for eight Search awards contributes greatly to our good reputation in this industry, and reflects the accomplishment and success we’ve achieved in the last year.
Congratulations to the team at Branded3 and thanks to all our clients for the hard work everybody has put in over the last few years to achieve this.
The next 6 weeks are super busy for Branded3 and I will be speaking at 3 really great conferences in London.
First up is A4U Expo on the 18th & 19th of October where I have an hour to talk about “How to SEO like a super affiliate” which should be great as we have worked and run training for quite a few of the UK’s biggest super affiliate SEO teams so we really know how they work.
At A4U I’m also doing a clinic in the afternoon where you can come along and discuss how to do SEO analysis & link analysis etc.
Then on the 24th & 25th is the excellent Distilled SEOmoz SearchLove event which quite honestly is the most cutting edge SEO event you will ever attend. I’m going to be talking about how we do large scale link-building campaigns.
Finally Conversion Conference on 30th November & 1st December where I’m talking on day 1 with Richard Baxter about SEO and SEM vs. CRO – Tactics for Optimising Both Search & Conversion and then later on in a panel discussion entitled CRO, SEM & SEO – Find the synergies, find the potential! with Stephen Pavlovich & Prashant Puri.
The Conversion Conference are offering 15% off if you use the code BLOGSTORM011
Come and say hello if you are at one of these events!
The Court of Justice of the EU has today ruled in favour of Interflora in the brand bidding case against Marks & Spencers.
The full judgement is here.
Interflora had argued that M&S shouldn’t be allowed to bid on the keyword “interflora” via Adwords and it seems that the European Court agrees with them.
The ruling is good news for brands because it could (in my personal opinion) eventually spell the end of controversial brand bidding in the UK, assuming that the High Court in London decides to uphold the European Courts ruling sometime in 2012.
Brand bidding is something that costs brands heavily and rarely delivers much ROI for the people piggybacking on other companies brand terms. The only real winner with brand bidding is Google.
Interflora has blogged about the ruling and their statement is below.
Interflora is delighted by the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union which today ruled in their favour. This ruling will enable brand holders across Europe to deliver quality service and ensure that trade marks guarantee the origin of the goods bought by consumers online. Keyword advertising is a very powerful tool and so it is vital for consumer protection that internet search results take consumers immediately to the brands they were looking for.
This judgment goes much further than previous rulings by saying that the use by a competitor of a keyword identical to the trade mark in relation to identical goods or services has an adverse effect on the investment in the trade mark where that use substantially interferes with the brand’s reputation and its ability to attract and retain consumers. Further, a competitor may be construed as free-riding on a brand when that competitor uses the brand owner’s trade mark as a paid for keyword to deliver sponsored advertising along side natural search results. This is exactly what Interflora and other global brands have been arguing for many years.
However, Interflora acknowledges that the judgment of the Court of Justice needs to be applied by the High Court in the UK to determine the question of Marks & Spencer’s liability. This is expected in the course of 2012.
Thanks to Leeds SEO for the tip!
Google Analytics took a step forwards in August by launching Multi Channel Funnels to the general public. This allows users to see all the different methods that customers used to find a website in the days & weeks before they made a purchase.
Analytics by default is based on the “last click” so if a user searched for a keyword such as “sofas” and clicked on an organic SEO result one week and then the next week visited your site via a PPC brand keyword then that would be attributed to a PPC visit.
The new Funnels allow you to attribute any visits of this nature and report on them as SEO assists.
We’ve run this analysis across all our clients large & small and the numbers average out to 30% – this is the additional revenue on top of the amount reported in Google Analytics that our clients are making from SEO on average.
Running this analysis isn’t particularly easy. First of all you need to be in the new version of GA and then you need to set up some filters.
Remember that we want to find conversions that would not be reported as “non-brand organic” under the normal Analytics system so first we need to ensure that we are including non-brand organic search from the assisted conversions but excluding it from last interaction conversions.
Here are the filters you need:
Include Last Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
OR
Exclude Last interaction from: Source/Medium containing google / organic
AND
Exclude Assist Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
AND
Include Assist Interaction from: Source / Medium containing google / organic
THE OR/AND FUNCTIONS MUST BE DONE THE WAY I SAY OR THIS WON’T WORK.
It is also be useful to have a Last Click Conversions segment. This way we can find out what Google normally attributes to Non-Brand SEO. This is easier.
Exclude Last Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
AND
Include Last Interaction from: Source / Medium containing google / organic
Update: Turns out this was a plugin after all. I used to have a screenshot plugin called Awesome Screenshot which has 420,000 users and makes no mention of the fact that it adds affiliate links into your search results. I had actually disabled the plugin a few days ago but for some reason it was still changing the search results. I have now uninstalled it and the issues have stopped. Seems a like a plugin Google needs to ban & I have reported it.
The screenshot below is from Google Chrome incognito mode with no plugins. It shows how Google has replaced the standard Shopping results with a set of Amazon Results.
The links don’t look like standard Amazon affiliate links so they must be some kind of partnership links.
This is an example link through to the product page.
I’ve never seen this before but it’s very good for Amazon no doubt.
Google has today rolled out the Panda algorithm internationally in all languages apart from Chinese, Japanese,and Korean.
For most languages, this change impacts typically 6-9% of queries to a degree that a user might notice. This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected almost 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount.
RT @rishil: If you want learn about Press Releases and how to work them for SEO - read this>>> http://t.co/yt764fv6
@patrickaltoft / yesterday@MarriottGolfUK If you want to run a competition to get followers you should try our http://t.co/urrpvJh1 site to do the giveaway
@patrickaltoft / yesterday@randfish You have email support system for @seomoz so you need to divert your work related emails through that rather than thru you
@patrickaltoft / about 2 days ago@randfish Try emailing patrick@blogstorm.co.uk and see what it says. Emails now come to the company where we can scalably manage them
@patrickaltoft / about 2 days ago