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.
Working in the SEO industry for quite a few years now I’ve talked to a lot of small business owners frustrated by their experiences working with SEO companies. Small business SEO is very different to doing SEO for larger brands and we’ve always focused on working with larger businesses at Branded3.
This week I’m pleased to say that we are launching a new business called Baby SEO to service smaller businesses with respect and deliver the sort of good, honest service that small business owners expect from an SEO company.
Although we are just officially launching the business this week we have already built up a few dozen clients over the last few months and the company has a dedicated small business SEO team in place.
Baby SEO packages range from £300 to £1500 per month and we are offering 20% referral fees – perfect if you have any friends or clients needing better rankings. We also offer a white label option.
If you have any friends who are looking for a specialist small business SEO agency or perhaps you are a designer wanting to find a reliable service to outsource some SEO to then please get in touch with Baby SEO and we will be gladly be of assistance.
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.
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.
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
