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.
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.
Some of you might remember the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin we released way back in February 2008. This plugin was neglected for a while but we’ve now rebuilt the entire thing and re-released it with a few very nice improvements.
The plugin shows a chart of all the visits by Google & other major search engines to your site for any time period you want and also shows crawl information for specific pages. We’ve added the ability to see number of pages crawled per day as well as number of crawls.
Any feedback please leave either in the comments or on the WordPress site.
Branded3 is currently recruiting for the role of SEO Strategist and also 3 Link Analysts.
We’re expanding rapidly with 29 staff in Leeds & another 25 in Malaysia. Thanks to a strong reputation we’re lucky enough to work on some of the UK’s largest SEO campaigns and are delivering number 1 rankings for some of the worlds most lucrative keywords.
The roles offer quick career progression and are a fantastic opportunity for the right candidate to work with some of the UK’s largest brands and help develop their SEO strategy.
The role will be based in our Leeds office which is based around 15 minutes outside the city centre and very easy to commute to on the motorway (no rush hour traffic).
If you would like to discuss the roles please email contact @ branded3.com or send across your CV.
Yahoo has just sent an email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August. This shouldn’t be a big deal for most sites because they have only a few percent market share but it certainly will double the influence that the Bing algorithm has in the UK.
We wanted to let you know that we are now ready to transition Yahoo! organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the Yahoo! search page) to Microsoft. This is an important aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and will help us toward our goal of further improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic results globally.
The organic search transition will begin on August 3rd 2011 for Yahoo! European properties in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
While no action is required on your part for this transition, if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change:
Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimise your website for the Bing crawler, to help ensure your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo! and Bing organic search results.
Please note that Yahoo! is NOT transitioning paid search results at this time, and you should continue managing your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as usual. We will provide you with ample notice prior to the paid search transition of your market, to help you prepare for a smooth transition.
Last week Google appears to have made a significant change to how image search referrals are reported in Google Analytics.
The change means that the traffic is reported as Google Organic rather than as referral traffic like it used to be. This means that you are likely to see a chart like the one below.
It’s not yet clear whether this is a change in Google Analytics or whether the new Google Images design is sending traffic in a different way. If it’s the latter then other analytics systems might show the same change in figures.
This will certainly cause some increases in the perceived success of SEO campaigns around the UK over the next few weeks!
This patent covers methods which could solve one of Googles biggest problems – the fact that older pages with lots of links are outranking newer & more relevant pages which have fewer links just because they are new.
As long as Google relies on traditional links they are always going to struggle to be up to date and relevant.
The patent details how documents could be ranked based on factors such as:
Number of visits
Frequency of visits over a recent time period
Nature of the visit
Country of the visitor
It’s quite clear that a document that is getting lots of attention and visits from users in the UK should rank higher in the UK search results than a document that is getting very little attention.
Methods and apparatus consistent with the invention employ usage information to aid in organizing documents. Based purely on raw visit frequency, the documents may be organized into the following order: 610 (40 visits), 620 (30 visits), and 630 (4 visits). If these raw visit frequency numbers are refined to filter automated agents and to assign double weight to visits from Germany, the documents may be organized in the following order: 620 (effectively 40 visits, since the 10 from Germany count double), 610 (effectively 25 visits after filtering the 15 visits from automated agents), and 630 (effectively 4 visits).
It’s interesting that this patent has surfaced a the same time as we see Google+ getting wider adoption and also as we learn that Google is timestamping every single click from Google+ in order to track both the frequency and count of all outbound clicks.
