Google has released an algorithm update today designed to penalise websites that have too many ads above the fold (in the visible area of the page). This is a great move by Google because nobody wants to see pages full of ads.
The problem is that Google is being very hypocritical here because over the years the amount of ads on the search results pages have been getting bigger and bigger. When you take into account YouTube and Google Places the space for organic search results (the only real content that Google offers) is getting much smaller.
As suggested in Googles blog post I went to their Browser Size tool to see how much of the Google search results were above the fold but surprise surprise the tool doesn’t work with Googles own websites so I had to load the pages via a proxy.
The screenshot below (click for larger version) shows the search results for “credit cards” in the UK and you can see how only 30% of users will ever see the top organic result without scrolling and only 20% see the top two organic results without scrolling.
Contrast this to the fact that 98% of people see the ad for Googles own credit card comparison engine and around 70% of users can see a total of 8 Google PPC ads.
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005. For an average searcher they probably wouldn’t think this was amazing but I think it’s pretty mind blowing. To have Google searching the web and images stored in my Picasa albums is just amazing to see working.
I think the way Google has launched this is really clever. In the past both Twitter & Facebook have tried to stop Google indexing all their content and wouldn’t give them full access to crawl sites. Twitter used to give Google a feed of all tweets but turned that feature off and killed the real time search that Google used to show for breaking news events. Now that Google has launched with a massive favouritism for Google+ data we here Twitter making statements saying that this isn’t fair.
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
So Twitter stopped the agreement to give Google a feed of tweets and is now saying that this new system isn’t fair and wants to be included. All Google has to do is agree to include Twitter and ask for full access to data and Twitter will probably agree.
At the moment unless you use Picasa and Google+ or have friends that do then the new system isn’t a major change to the organic results. But once Google gets Facebook and Twitter on board as well as perhaps LinkedIn then this will be amazing.
SEO at present is about getting people to link to sites and the search results are based on a voting system that takes into account how trusted each linking site is. This has no relation to whether the person linking for the site is actually trusted by the searcher or not. I can see in a few years that Google will be focussing more on surfacing sites and search results that a users friends like as well as relying on links from sites that the searcher might have never heard of.
The new changes have a major impact on PPC. A search for “cars” brings up the Google+ results shown below for Ferrari & BMW above the PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. For BMW & Ferrari where PPC is mainly a brand play I’m sure they would much prefer to have their logo and a long snippet of text rather than a PPC ad, especially when it’s totally free.
Getting users to share your content on Google+, Twitter & Facebook has to be a part of your SEO strategy for 2012. Certainly brands need to be working on building up followings on these social networks every single month.
For those people who think this is the end of SEO I can assure you it isn’t. As long as people still search for things then there will still be sites needing to use SEO to get to the top of the list of search results. Whether SEO is about on-site optimisation, links or encouraging sharing via social media sites or some other method is irrelevant.
Searchmetrics published some research yesterday showing the winners and losers of the Google Freshness update but in my opinion the issue is a bit more complicated than this.
The freshness update is like an enhanced version of the QDF algorithm. QDF applied to searches that were trending whereas the freshness update applies to searches where a user is likely to need new information.
Brands
The big losers in this update are going to be brands. Anybody who has carried out a reputation management campaign knows that the golden rule is to first move the negative listings down to page 2 and then to take over the brands landscape with strong pages that are hard to shift – sub-domains, twitter pages, wikipedia pages and facebook pages are all good examples of pages that can keep negative results on page 2.
This worked fine in the past (unless there was a huge story that triggered the QDF algorithm) but now that Google is continually surfacing fresh stories the task of reputation management gets a lot harder.
A good example of this is a search for “Prime Visibility Media Group” an agency that has just been acquired by blinkx for £22m. Google is ranking 3 news articles higher than the official site in the organic results. There is a universal search news result at the top as well.
Looking at the brands we work with there are similar trends with fresh results appearing on lots of their brand terms. This is fine until a negative story appears.
Voucher Sites
Any voucher sites that rank for brand terms are going to struggle to stay ranking when news sites write stories about those brands. Looking at search results for a few brands now we are already noticing this trend. The freshness algorithm doesn’t seem to have been back dated (as far as I can see) to older articles so we are likely to only see a change in the brand search results when a new article comes out and is boosted by this freshness algorithm.
As a footnote I should point out that this algorithm doesn’t seem to have been rolled out in the UK as much as in the US. The example Google gave in their blog post was a search for “subaru impreza reviews” which on Google.com shows articles which are almost all from 2011 and a few from October 2011. Doing the same search in the UK shows a Parkers article from 2000 and and Autotrader one from 2008.
The “best slr cameras” example is better but there are still a few old articles in there. Perhaps sites are just not publishing articles on a regular enough basis?
Google is displaying some interesting behavior and is indexing Facebook comments even though they are behind a javascript loaded iframe.
The comments don’t appear in the text only cache but are showing up when you search for strings of text from the comments.
I’ve been searching for a few comments from techcrunch and they are not ranking very well. Certainly not as well as I would expect for such a powerful site.
Facebook previously said that users needed to use the Facebook Graph API to pull comments in if they wanted them to be indexed which resulted in a nice plugin being developed for WordPress.
There is an interesting post in the Grocer today about how Waitrose is struggling with SEO after a £10m website relaunch earlier this year.
“Waitrose.com is so technically hampered it is going to have a problem ranking for anything – it’s terrible,” said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, after analysing SEO measures determining the visibility of Waitrose, Ocado and the big four’s websites to search engines such as Google.
All were found wanting. And they were losing out because they were failing to optimise their webpages for popular search terms, said Simon Hall, retail manager at Google UK, adding that describing content with more relevant terms – such as recipes – would help them win more business online.
Now I’ve had a look at the site and it doesn’t seem to be too bad for a large corporate site. It ranks well for a few of the recipe searches I tried.
What is interesting is to look at the visibility via Searchmetrics recently and how it had a slight drop in July. This is to be expected when a major site gets relaunched because it’s almost impossible during a £10m rebuild to get all the SEO aspects sorted. The bigger the project the harder it is to optimise.
Also interesting to see how Asda & Tesco are surging ahead in the last few months.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
How to run this analysis
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.
