To celebrate the launch of their new PPC Tools the guys at Distilled are launching a fun PPC competition.
The idea is that you create some ad copy suitable to be used for the “Myanmar cyclone appeal” keyword and a landing page of www.worldvision.org.uk, the winner gets a whole host of prizes including SEOmoz membership, a years subscription to the Distilled Reputation Monitoring tool and a Distilled hoody.
Sometimes Yahoo and MSN offer pretty similar results to Google and I find myself wondering whether they have a chance of gaining market share.
To stop this fantasy I always return to the search result on Yahoo for “mobile phones” which has been exactly the same as this since 2006. There is no way in the world this is a natural search result. Having the 4 biggest mobile networks in the UK listed in a row just isn’t possible especially when they don’t have the keywords in their titles and certainly don’t have the link profiles.
Having results that are manually edited like this in such a strange way year after year makes me think money has changed hands and that makes me never want to use Yahoo for my searches.
According to this article in The Times the Scottish National Party is launching a campaign to create a .sco domain for Scottish websites.
The Times has some odd quotes in the article that will worry siteowners who have no desire to change their domain suffix.
THE Scottish National party is to take its campaign for independence into cyberspace by seeking to change the endings of all websites based in the country, from “.co.uk†to “.scoâ€.
Most Scottish government departments and agencies would be expected to change their website suffixes immediately. However, there would be no obligation on the part of other Scottish organisations to change their internet address.
SEO consultants in Scotland are probably already preparing for the onslaught of clients who can’t figure out how they lost all their traffic by switching to a new domain.
Personally I don’t see the problem with .co.uk and .com domains, why confuse people? The fact we have .uk.com domains is bad enough without adding more to the mix.
The most interesting part of the article for me was to find that Catalonia has the .cat extension. Of course somebody already has lol.cat and is redirecting it to Google, of all places.
Update: Some of the information originally posted below has been retracted
The High Court has recently dismissed a case brought against Yahoo by the UK businessman Victor Wilson. Mr Wilson sued Yahoo for failing to prevent brands such as Sainsburys and PriceGrabber.co.uk bidding on the trademark of “Mr Spicy”.
According to the court documents the case hinged on the fact that the advertisers were bidding on the general term “spicy” rather than targeting the trademark directly.
The Yahoo! companies argued that advertisers whose sponsored links appeared had not purchased “MR SPICY†as a keyword. Instead, sponsored links appeared due to matching technology which responded to the input of “MR SPICY†by displaying sponsored links to advertisers who had bid on related keywords, such as “SPICYâ€. Mr Wilson claimed this was also trade mark infringement.
In short, the judge agreed with Yahoo:
Yahoo! asked for summary judgment, arguing that it had not ‘used’ Wilson’s trade mark or that any use by Yahoo! did not amount to ‘trade mark use’.
Mr Justice Morgan accepted Yahoo’s arguments.
“The trade mark in this case is not used by anyone other than the browser who enters the phrase ‘Mr Spicy’ as a search query in the defendants’ search engine. In particular, the trade mark is not used by the defendants. The response of the defendants to the use of the trade mark by the browser is not use of the trade mark by the defendants,” he wrote.
He continued: “That is enough to decide the case in the defendants’ favour. But the matter does not stop there. If, by some process of reasoning, one were to hold that the search engine’s response to the words used by the browser was, itself, use by the defendants, in my judgment, it is not use of the mark ‘Mr Spicy’. What, instead, is being used is the English word ‘spicy’ as it appears in that phrase.”
“Mr Wilson is not able to prohibit the use of the words ‘Mr Spicy’ even when they are being applied to goods identical to those for which the mark is registered if that use cannot affect his own interest as proprietor of the mark having regard to its functions,” he wrote.
He pointed out that the text of the adverts complained of made no reference to Wilson’s business. “There is a reference to Sainsbury’s,” he wrote. “It does not say that all food sold at Sainsbury’s has Mr Wilson’s trade or business as an origin. It is not pretending that Sainsbury’s food all comes from Mr Wilson’s trade or business, MR SPICY.” Thus he concluded that the text of the ads could not have an adverse impact on Wilson’s trade mark rights.
Reading ReadWriteWeb last weekend an article caught my eye in which they mentioned the concept of “SEO resistant search”. Apparently Scoble has coined this term to refer to a search engine powered by the social graph which isn’t subject to the same SEO manipulation that Google is.
The social graph is key to ad relevance because it enables “SEO resistant searchâ€. This is what Scoble calls it in this great series of Podcasts. Skip to # 3 if you know the basics. His closing remark (made in August 2007 for historical record) is kinda fun in the circumstances “watch Yahoo, they are the wild cardâ€.
He is right, look at all Yahoo’s social assets. Massively underexploited but great. If the social graph is the key to SEO resistant search and thus search relevance and webmail is the key to the social graph….
The problem with switching to another method of search is that it won’t stop SEO. SEO is about optimising a site so that it gets higher rankings in a search engine – it doesn’t matter whether the search engine uses social data, link data, traffic data or any other kind of signals. SEO’s will figure out how to make a site get higher rankings no matter what factors the algorithm uses.
If Yahoo starts using del.icio.us data in their results they could end up with some amazingly cool search results. All of a sudden all the cool stuff on the web that is buried in normal search results thanks to missing title tags or Flash navigation will become visible and start getting lots of traffic. People like Scoble might think that this is “SEO resistant” but what about the scores of SEO consultants who have been using Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and even Facebook for viral marketing over the last two years? These people, and their clients, were early adopters of the social graph and will have a massive headstart over the small companies that are only just figuring out normal search let alone social networking.
Imagine how hard it would be for a commercial site to get high rankings on a search engine powered by the social graph. The marketing department probably wouldn’t have a clue where to start and are likely to be labelled a spammer at the first social network they target. The only way for a commercial site to see good results would be to hire a social media consultant / SEO to create a long term social media strategy for them.
Search can’t ever be SEO resistant because any signal can be manipulated – a good SEO consultant will figure out what the search engine needs to rank a site highly and give it to them. No tricks just give the search engines what they want whether it’s links, keywords, bookmarks, RSS subscribers or anything else.
According to The Times Britain’s biggest private sector union is holding a war against Marks & Spencers today using Google.
It seems they want to use Adwords to place sponsored results when people search for the brand in Google and divert them to their own site.
Unite, which has nearly two million members, plans to use searches for M&S on Google from 5am today to divert users to its list of grievances.
Anyone typing “M&S†or variations of “Marks & Spencer†into Google will see a direct link to the “Look Behind the Label†campaign put together by the T&G section of Unite, as well as normal search results.
The cost to the union of taking its views on to the global stage could be as little as £500.
Tony Woodley, the Unite general secretary, said: “The power of the internet gives unions the potential to go beyond its membership and reach out directly to millions of people and influence consumers.”
The only problem is that Google doesn’t let people bid on trademarked terms such as “Marks & Spencer” so the ads stopped showing after a few hours. The click through rate is likely to be very low and the whole stunt will have cost a tiny amount.
The real eye opener here is that 4 major newspapers in the UK wrote about the campaign.
Today Microsoft launched Big Snap Search where you can win prizes for searching. Pretty cool idea.
The only problem is the new search engine hasn’t found itself yet.
Google, as ever, is spot on already. In fact Google is already hard at work indexing the search results from BigSnapSearch.com because Microsoft forgot to add a robots.txt file.
Can anybody explain this query and this one?
Obviously the correct way of carrying out the query is without the + but it’s interesting to see Google returning results and especially interesting to see the results are totally different on google.co.uk
Most of you have probably heard about the minus 6 penalty where people with number 1 rankings have moved down to number 6.
The interesting thing to me about all these penalties (previous ones were minus 30 and minus 950) is how does Google chose what number to use?
My theory, to be taken with a pinch of salt, is that 6th place gets the least clicks out of any result in the first 10.
6th place is right in the middle of the page and we know doesn’t get a lot of clicks because of the leaked AOL data. Also 6th place is right on the fold of most screens so is easily missed when people scroll down. 6th place is also the lowest result to still have Adwords to the right hand side of it.
Techcrunch and Mashable have thousands of people up in arms today saying that Google is changing the algorithm to favour brand new blogs over trusted content.
Don’t worry, it isn’t.
As usual both publications have got the wrong end of the stick when it comes to SEO.
The whole issue is based around Google creating a new years logo about the birthday of the TCP/IP protocol, the logo was liked to a search for “January 1 TCP/IP”. This search had very few results and wasn’t commercial enough to trigger any kind of spam filtering so straight away bloggers started to rank highly purely based on simple factors like title tags.
Duncan Riley of Techcrunch comments:
TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.
Sorry Duncan but no matter how much Google loves Wikipedia they aren’t going to rank them highly if they don’t have a page about that subject. This page is closest and doesn’t include the search term in the title or the text. Digg is almost as much of an authority site as Wikipedia and will rank very well for an exact match search term such as this. The fact that Digg is an authority means their pages are not subject to the same ageing delay filters as those of a brand new site.
Kristen Nicole at Mashable has written an entire post with the same uproar that would happen if Google replaced the entire index with blog spam.
What the flaw allows for is an outpouring of spam results appearing at the top of a query, out-ranking Wikipedia results and other resources that you’d expect to be at the top of the page.
Just because Wikipedia is normally at the top of the page when you search doesn’t mean it should be. Try searching for something that doesn’t have a page in Wikipedia and you might see what I mean.
Google has an algorithm called Query Deserves Freshness in which they look at search volume and blog post volume to decide if a topic is “hot” or not. If 100,000 people search for “New York” every day then on an average day the results will show trusted content from older sites. If, one day, a million people search for “New York” then something major has probably happened and Google will pull in as many new blog posts and news articles as possible to give people relevant results.
Because the search term “January 1 TCP/IP” went from no previous search history and very few results to millions of queries in one day it triggered the QDF algorithm ranking new content highly.
Google still used domain trust to figure out that Digg should be one of the top results and would probably have put Wikipedia at number 1 if they had an article about the subject.
The only “problem” here was that Google chose to link a logo to a set of search results without sufficient history to be trusted. The algorithm behaved just fine, it was Google’s logo team not talking to the algorithm / web spam team before unleashing millions of searchers on a low volume query that caused the “issues”.
RT @randfish: Correlation between link metrics and higher rankings quantified: http://t.co/OMtSmh6B via the @openalgorithms project
@patrickaltoft / about 3 hours agoCheck out this presentation : SMX London - Tools for Pulling Rank http://t.co/yHKGoCE6 via @ipullrank
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@patrickaltoft / about 1 days ago