Google

November 13, 2008

Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All

No fancy intro here, just right to the content. The moderator for this panel is Rand Fishkin. Speakers are super funny Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft; Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google; and Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search. Rahul Lahiri, VP of Search Product Management, Ask, is a might show. Hmm.

Ben D'Angelo is up first. He's been with Google a little more than three years. I think that means he went to Google straight out of grade school.

What are duplicate content issues? There are actually multiple disjoint problems.

• Duplicate content within your site or sites:
  • Multiple URLs point to the same page or similar pages
  • Different countries (same language)
• Duplicate content across other sites:
  • Syndicated content
  • Scraped content

The guiding principle behind the search engines' indexing is ONE URL for one piece of content. Why? Because users don't like duplicates in results. It saves resources in Google's index, leaving more room for other pages from your site. And it saves resources on their server. [So Ben is telling us to keep duplicate content low to save Google money? Man, that stock price must really be suffering.]

Sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs pointing to the same page
  • www vs. non-www
  • Session IDs, URL parameters
  • Printable versions of pages
  • CNAMEs
• Similar content on different pages
  • Manufacturer's databases
  • Different countries

How does Google handle this? They cluster like content and pick the best representative. There are variations on this depending on where it is in the pipeline. Different filters are used for different types of duplicate content. In general, it's just a filter and it's not going to destroy your site.

The problem comes in when Google doesn't choose the page you want or makes a mistake in clustering. You need to take back control.

Use 301 redirects for exact duplicates, like tracking URLs, and to solve www vs. non-www issue. You can also address exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools, but that only solves the problem for Google. He demos briefly.

For near duplicates, no index or block with robots.txt. Things like printer pages and site clones should have this.

Domains by country are a little different. Different languages are not duplicate content. Same language, different country? Don't worry about it -- the right one will usually be okay. You can geo-target in GWT or use different TLDs to help Google recognize where the content belongs. Best of all is creating unique content for that country.

Leave out URL parameters if you can. Put that data into a cookie instead.

In Webmaster Tools you can check for all sorts of other problems too, like duplicate Title and Meta data. Fix those things.

If another site has content that duplicates yours, there's less that you can do.

Duplicate content from syndication should include a link back to your site to make the canonical origin clear. Another option is to syndicate different content than what you publish on your site. If you're publishing content you have syndicated, manage your expectations.

Don't worry about scrapers or proxies too much. They generally don't affect your rankings. If you're concerned, file a DMCA request or a spam report with Google.

Duplicate content best practices:

• Avoid duplicate content in the first place.
• Generate unique, compelling content for users.
• Don't be overly concerned with duplicate content.
• Let us know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Forum.

You can always check out the Webmaster Central Blog and check out the Webmaster discussion group.

Priyank Garg is next up. He's got a sore throat so he'll be brief. His voice is all scratchy. Aw.

Much of this will be similar to Ben's presentation -- I'll pull out the Yahoo-specific stuff. Like Google, Yahoo filters at several places in the pipeline. Session IDs and other "content neutral" parameters can really hurt your crawl queue. They might never get to the rest of your content because they're crawling the same page over and over with a session ID. "Soft" 404 pages can also cause duplicate content problems. Repeated elements (perhaps with just a keyword replace) lead to problems.

Abusive dupes include scrapers/spammers, weaving and stitching, etc.

• Slurp supports wildcards in robots.txt.
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to delete URLs or an entire path from the index for authenticated sites.
• Use the robots-nocontent tag on non-relevant parts of a page.
  • Robots-nocontent can be used to mark out boilerplate content
  • Robots-nocontent can be used for syndicated content that may be useful to the user in context but not for search engines.

You can do dynamic URL rewriting in Site Explorer. Tell them which parameters are content neutral for your sites:

• Ability to indicate parameter to remove URLs from site
• More efficient crawl with less duplicates
• Better site coverage as fewer resources are wasted on duplicates
• Fewer risks of crawler traps
• Cleaner URL, easier for user to read and more likely to be clicked
• Better ranking due to reduced link juice fragmentation -- it's equivalent to 301ing all the duplicates back to one URL, saves time because they don't have to crawl it

Derrick Wheeler is up. Here's a bit of vintage Derrick for you all: "This crowd is a perfect Web site. You're all unique. I would crawl, index and rank all of you." Rand interjects "That's dirty." Derrick: "But I wouldn't click or take action." Hee.

Final points (he likes to get these done first):

• Consider search engine crawler detection
• Know your parameters
• Link to URLs with parameters always in the same order
• Dig deep into search results for your domain
• Exclude duplicates by robots.txt first, Meta Robot exclusion second, and nofollow link attribute last
• Don't assume engines can't follow JavaScript
• Get a regular crawl report of your Web site
  • Request a tab file that includes: referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords
  • Open file using Excel 2007, sort by Title then landing URL
  • Review suspect URLs to look for dupes
• Focus on your strengths

Look for spider traps, adding a parameter and creating new pages every time you go back and forth several times.

Make sure that when you're creating sites for users, you still avoid spider traps. Just because you don't think the search engines will need to index it, doesn't mean that you don't have other pages that the search engines won't get to because they're busy with your trap.

Document why you're doing things. One site removed session IDs for search engines and got 10 million pages indexed. Down the line, someone forgot why it had been done, started giving session IDs to the engines again and their index pages plummeted again.

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, based on how someone clicked through the site (Brookstone does this), related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble. Make your internal linking consistent and useful. Some products might be able to live in multiple categories, but you need to make a decision.

Anytime you see related, sort or compare, think "possible duplicate content". When you see "select region" or "sign in", think duplicate content. Disallow those pages in your robots.txt. "Email an article", "send to a friend" -- think duplicate content.
Once you screw up the parameter order, it's hard to fix. Keep it consistent.

Use absolute links, not relative links, especially when switching between http:// and https://. Other people could link to you with https:// as well and you can't really do anything about that.

Priyank suggests going after the low-hanging fruit. Try the dynamic URLs first so that you can see the benefit right away.

Brent Payne asks: How do you credit a story properly when you're the Chicago Tribune? Can I get a link attribute or something? Just linking back doesn't work. Google tells me it's not a big deal but it is.

There's not so much that the reps can say to that. They're trying and he's already doing the right thing. Poor Brent.

Derrick doesn't think there is a solution right now. (He also reminded everyone that he's an in-house SEM, not a search engine representative.)

How detrimental are different link IDs?

Priyank: Every different URL linking to the same content is duplicate content. That's why you should use dynamic URL rewriting.

Ben: We try to handle that automatically. We might have to crawl the page once but we try to learn which parameters don't affect the page content.

[Most of these questions are site specific, so I'm skipping them.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:06 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, Yahoo, pubcon08

October 16, 2008

What Google's Q3 Earnings Could Mean for the Search Industry

What a difference a day makes. Just yesterday, predictions about Google's incoming Q3 reported earnings varied across the board from decent to dismal. But all the guessing and speculation was for naught, as today the official earnings were announced.

While skeptics anticipated a bubble-buster, Google's earnings beat expectations. The company saw a 31 percent increase year-over-year for a net income of more than $1.5 billion.

This coming mere days after CNET anticipated dark times ahead for Web advertising and Adweek forecasted the beginning of a downturn for the ad business.

As the latter story explains:

"In past recessions, said [Jessica] Reif-Cohen, ad spending has been a 'lagging indicator' -- meaning that typically the business doesn't take a hit until a quarter or two after a consumer recession starts and doesn't recover until a quarter or two after it ends."

However, you read later that:

"The ad marketplace should be less challenging for the more measurable channels, particularly digital, according to Jack Klues, managing partner of Publicis Groupe Media's recently formed VivaKi."

Google Watch said it another way in the post Will Google's Q3 Earnings Offer a Window View to the Recession? "If Google beats expectations, it's hardly proof that online advertising isn't suffering from a recession. All it may well suggest is that search advertising, Google's main moneymaker, is for now better positioned compared to other online ad areas."

Of course Google and the search marketing industry aren't recession proof. But as Adweek reports, the ad industry in general has started bunkering down for the recession, while the person delivering the memo to search stopped for coffee along the way. The comforting fact remains that search advertising provides some of the most profitable returns available. And it looks like there's still room left for growth.

In this time of uncertainty, we hear a lot about lacking consumer confidence -- something that gets brought up around this industry as well. Considering the uneasy footing of the economy, it's especially important to continue to provide the highest quality SEM services you can. That's the best chance you've got for making it past this bumpy road.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/16/08 at 5:29 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, SEM Industry

October 13, 2008

Google's Link Week

Last week, amid the flood of information coming out of SMX East, Google hosted Link Week on the Webmaster Central Blog. It was a week of posts dedicated to the topic of links -- specifically, internal, external and inbound links.

Since I began covering search tradeshows and reading industry publications, I've observed the obvious: links are equal to gold on the Web. I've seen the numerous posts regarding link building, PageRank sculpting, link bait (you get the idea) go hot on Sphinn. At shows, I've noticed that Google reps always get lots of questions about linking best practices, how rel="nofollow" works, paid links (and on and on). Industry members are hungry for information on how to get rich in the link economy, and Google holds its cards close to the vest in order to avoid giving away any information that could be used to forge a fake check, if you will.

So when it was announced on the Webmaster Central Blog last Monday that the week's posts would be aimed at clarifying Google's recommendations for linking, I got excited. There are so many different channels that provide information on how Google values and measures link equity -- even three different Google reps speaking on different panels at a single conference may provide varying information -- so it's always great to get the "definitive" word from an official source.

The post that got the most attention was the final post, Good times with inbound links. At Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz talked about his disappointment in the lack of details while a post on Wiep.net theorized that a cover-up of inbound link building recommendations may be underway. On BlogStorm, Patrick Altoft wondered if Google was embarrassed about the role of links in the ranking algorithm, but I'd venture to say that the real reason is more akin to an argument of security: secrets must stay secret so the ill-intentioned don't infiltrate the system.

Google recently removed a line from the Webmaster Guidelines that read "Have other relevant sites link to you." It was replaced with the advice "Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online." I read this change as an attempt to modify the language from an active recommendation -- to go out and solicit links -- to the more passive suggestion -- that the webmaster makes sure their site is known about. The second wording implies that if a site knows about your site, they will link to it if it has the kind of relevant and valuable information they'd like to share with their visitors.

When it comes down to it, though, Google has their hands tied. Telling SEOs and webmasters to solicit links goes against the best interests of the end users. Unless it's a clearly labeled advertisement, a link implies a related page that will give a user more information on the topic they are looking for. If I know that some deal was conducted behind the scenes, it's hard to trust that link will really be offering what I'm looking for. Hence the carefully crafted line: "when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they're also one of the positive signals to Google".

SEOs will probably never have the answers handed to them in a neat little package, or blog post or guideline for that matter. It would be much too easy to spam. But that part of you -- the user that gets frustrated by rick rolls, comment spam or poor quality pages in the SERPs --- that's the part that's got to appreciate the clever way that Google sometimes dances around the subject. On tip toes. In circles.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/13/08 at 5:17 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Linking Strategy

October 10, 2008

Ask the Search Engines

The last day of SMX East was hectic as I tried to touch base with new friends and contacts, attend all the sessions and make it to my flight in time. I managed to pull off most of those objectives, with the exception of posting a couple of live-coverage entries to the blog. So without further ado, here's what happened at the last session I attended. As my momma always says, "Better late than never!"

Moderator Danny Sullivan has got to feel good right now. Another awesome conference nearly complete! For the final leg of the marathon, let's go straight to the source and talk to the search engine representatives about all the things on our minds.

Danny says that he used to do a session called "I'm So Confused" because of all the conflicting information that is shared at conferences. But this panel will give us the official take from the search engines.

The reps are Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft; Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality, Google Inc.; and Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering, Yahoo.

Sean says that sites should submit sitemaps, either .txt or .xml, and overall it helps with inclusion. He also heard a question about keyword order in Titles. He says that it is important to get right, not because of ranking but for the effect of the presentation in the SERP. Users will react well to seeing the keywords they are searching for in the Title so they should be further toward the beginning.

Aaron says that he's involved in trying to get rid of spam. He hears a lot about companies wanting to put up different versions of content for different countries. They wonder if it's going to be a duplicate content issue. He says that if the URL and the path to the content is reported to Google as specific for a certain location, Google won't see it as duplicate content.

Nathan says that he hears a lot about URLs. He says that session tracking parameters for a page will result in multiple versions of the same page in the index. Competing against own pages for space in the index can be harmful. He recommends submitting a sitemap with one URL for each page, and it should be the shortest form in the canonical version consistently. He also hears a lot about metrics and thinks that people are worrying about metrics that aren't the most important. He thinks it's all about conversions and trying to find the most valuable action. Finally, he doesn't believe that enough people are using the search engine provided tools available.

Now comes the Q&A part that you've all been waiting for. Be kind; Q&A can be hard to blog.

Are there best practice for running A/B tests so search engines don't think you're trying to cloak?

Aaron says that the way they look at it is that cloaking is only a problem if the intent is malicious. So for A/B testing, it is fine because the same type of content will be served. While they don't encourage cloaking, penalties only happen after a human review, so no penalty will be served if it's clearly just testing and not malicious.

Nathan says that A/B generally looks different than cloaking, and while they don't recommend cloaking, it really isn't a problem.

Sean says that the bad situation happens when there are large diversions, not the little ones that are common of testing.

Do you count affiliate links?

Sean says it depends where and in what context the links are coming up. If they are coming up in random, irrelevant places, that's not good. But if affiliates are making them of value to users, it's probably going to be a fine signal.

Nathan says that each link is evaluated independently and it's not necessarily considered if it's an affiliate or not.

We're currently redesigning our site and the only thing staying the same is the domain. The old site had ten pages and the new one will have 100,000. Are we going to have a problem?

Nathan says that the search engine always tries to find the most relevant page for a query, so if there's a page with similar content about a product as the manufacturer's page about the product which has been around longer, your site's page may not show up as it's considered a duplicate. One way to work around this is if you can add something beyond what's already out there, like pictures or reviews. As the question came from someone who has a weapons site, he suggests that she could maybe do videos of tazing pets... The whole audience laughs and groans and I'm pretty sure Nathan is turning pink. Maybe not the best example!

Aaron says that when you have a unique offering in a market, you will stand out by doing something different. He doesn't think that the reputation credited to the old site will be devalued on the new site, but he does warn to be aware of duplicate content from the old site.

When will Yahoo and Microsoft get country-specific targeting? And what's your advice if you want your site seen in another country?

Sean says that you should use a ccTLD because it's a huge signal. The other big signal is where the users and links are coming from.

Nathan says that you should make sure the international site is all located in the same sub-group or sub-directory because it's easier to identify. If a whole sub-directory looks like it's in German, it's a signal that it is targeted for Germany.

What percentage of false positives do you have in spam protection?

Aaron says that it's low but that it's an algorithm so there are sometimes mistakes. Spam algorithm changes are treated the same way as any other algorithm change. They test changes in a large sample and if they see a generally overwhelmingly positive result, they roll it out.

Sean sways that it's low, but if you think your site is treated incorrectly or if it has been cleaned up, submit a webmaster support form for consideration by the right people.

Danny says that Microsoft and Google will report to you if they think you're spam, except for cases that Google feels are so obvious the site is spammy that you should know it already. Yahoo is working on it.

Should people be bothering with nofollow or not to try to flow their PageRank around?

Sean says that in terms of designing for users, it's not helpful at all, so in the long term your energy could probably be better put into other areas. Aaron says that for the most part the issue comes up when there are way more links on a page than are useful to a user. In that case you have to think if the page itself is good for the user. He doesn't think it's going to cause an issue one way or another. Nathan asks who in the audience is doing sculpting (maybe five) and then he asks who has measured a positive change (maybe two). He says it was higher than he thought, but he still doubts the long term value.

Aaron says that sculpting seems like a lot of effort to put into the one signal of the link equity algorithm. He says he thinks it can be done if there's nothing left to do. Danny recommends testing it yourself to see if you see a difference.

It was suggested in a link building session that you could make donations to charities to get a link on their .org site.

Danny says that, to make it more uncomfortable, Matt Cutts has said that's fine. Sean says that if a charity is offering links for sale, he would think that they'd be getting links from bad guys as well as good guys, which will quickly get them flagged. Then the site will be in the universe of people who are bad and that link will be worthless.

Aaron says that if they were to see that 60 percent of the spam comes from charities, then they'll go after it. If it's rampant and makes up a large portion of spam then they'll see it as low-hanging fruit. Nathan says that if you're giving it to charity, then it's good anyway. But really, a charity that is aggressively selling links is probably going to see other attention as a result of their marketing techniques and see an increase in traffic.

Do you ever do direct intervention to penalize spam, as opposed to changes to the algorithm?

Aaron says absolutely. If it's hurting the results right now then they're going to do something manually. But they want to make the algorithm better, too, which they do by learning about the ways people are spamming.

Do reports that come in from a Google account have more weight?

He says that reports that come in from Webmaster Central are considered first over the external submissions because it's a cleaner data set.

Does the Yahoo algorithm in Japan work in a significantly different way than in the U.S.?

Sean says that there are slightly different signals but that it is the same back-end search engine and system, just tweaked for the market.

In natural search, do you offer some sort of endorsement or certification for SEOs?

Nathan says no. He says that he wouldn't want to endorse vendors because there's so much behind it. Sean says that it's the second time he's heard the question and says it's an interesting suggestion.

Is there a conflict behind your content networks showing up in your search engines?

Sean says that the reason Yahoo has SEOs is because they're trying to avoid a conflict of interest. There's search and there's content and it's not the same thing. So, for the content they have to compete for their user base and thus they need SEO. Aaron says that there's no Google policy to boost Google properties, but for certain properties like YouTube they have more information on them than they have on other sites, so they may show up more. Nathan says that Microsoft tries to keep a firewall between all of their businesses. Even advertisers that spend tons of money get no preferential treatment. AdCenter and the search engine are separate.

Are links still the primary signal for popularity and importance?

Aaron says inks are a good measure of reputation. Clicks are a noisy signal, and so the absence of a click for a result is thus way more useful because it signals that it's not the most relevant result. Sean isn't sure if links are the most important signal or not, but he will say that it's a larger signal than Title tags, for instance.

What's happening with personalized search?

(Okay, I actually didn't hear the question, but this is the answer.)

Aaron says there's a lot of data they have access to because of the way people use the search engine. But in personalized search, one policy is that whatever is done will be told to the user. The user can go in and control what is being used for personalization. They want to give you the ability to say "I don't want you to use this".

And that's a wrap for SMX East! Thanks to Cindy Krum, Eric Lander and Kate Morris, who took time out of their whirlwind schedules to come on SEM Synergy and, of course, thanks to all the great speakers who didn't hold anything back when it came to sharing with hungry audiences. All that's left to post from the conference is the highly-attended Give It Up: White Hat Edition panel, which will be hitting the blog November 7.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/10/08 at 1:17 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Google, Live Search, Liveblog, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxeast2008

October 7, 2008

Googleopoly

Finishing out the day on the Issues Track, let's take a look at Googleopoly! Our moderator is Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Marketing, ExactTarget, and he'll be the one asking the questions. Our speakers are: James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School; Shelly Palmer, Managing Director, Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC; Kevin Ryan, CEO and Founder, Motivity Marketing; and Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikia Search.

What does it take to be considered a legal monopoly?

James says a monopoly is simply when you're the only one selling something. There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly. The thing is, you can't do unfair things to get one and once you have one, it's not legal to exploit it to discourage competition.

Are you hearing concerns from advertisers regarding the Google Yahoo deal?

Of course advertisers are concerned because they assume a partnership between Yahoo and Google is intentionally vague so as not to be understood. The world doesn't know what it doesn't know, and people generally don't know that having one source of information on the Internet is a bad thing.

Does Google's growth in the domestic market concern you?

Chris thinks we're going to see competitive responses. In China, Microsoft revealed a new suite of tools that they're going to have which show quite a bit of transparency. He doesn't think that Google's monopoly is bad, and he sees competition coming about.

Hitwise is reporting that Google has a dominance in the video space, which appears to be propped up by the search space. Is that concerning?

Shelly says there several things to think through. First, Google is an ecosystem and it's not likely to go anywhere. The chart shows that Google, if left unchecked, is pretty much unstoppable. But not only is Google a medium, it's a metric. That's a new place advertisers are finding themselves. Google is the metric of how to do other media that has become ingrained and will be hard to unseat. He's only concerned from the perspective of how advertisers will handle the circumstance after never having seen this kind of shift before.

Now Jeff pulls up the Wikipedia page for "Googleopoly" and it's a sad little page. (Go at it, marketers!)

Share your thoughts on Google growth and how it fits into your view as a competitor.

Jimmy says that search doesn't trend naturally toward monopoly. Like big brand spaces, there are reasons why some are going to be big and others are going to be small. He says if he can launch a search engine he's going to be super thrilled to get even 2 percent of the market. To launch in the advertising space is much harder.

Jeff shows a chart of one company's client's paid search spend for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is up at the 70 to 80 percent line, Yahoo is around 15 to 25 while Microsoft is hovering around 5 percent. So what does this mean for the monopoly issue?

James says that from a market share perspective, Google is crossing the point of being considered a monopoly. At around 75 percent, some could start seeing monopoly, but the real question is if they are doing anything to clobber competition.

Jeff asks the audience who is an advocate for the deal, no one raises their hand. Almost everyone raises their hand when he asks who is a skeptic.

Advocates

• 11 members of Congress (CA)
• Ayn Rand Center
• Google
• Overstock.com
• Publicis Group
• Randall Stross (Author, Planet Google
• Yahoo

Skeptics

• American Antitrust Institute
• ...

Ugh, the slide is gone and I missed the whole skeptics list. You'll have to forgive me. :( I did notice that the list of skeptics was longer than the list of advocates.

Are you a skeptic or an advocate of the deal?

Kevin likes Google's culture and admires how they've added to the working environment. He doesn't see people being thrown under the bus. Part of him says that that's a great thing and maybe life would be better if we could all join collectives. The other part of him sees Android, Chrome, and many more things pointing to one dominant source of information, and he views that as a bad thing.

Shelly says that personally he could care less if the deal goes through or not. But, speaking as a representative of advertisers who need to buy advertising, it's not a good thing because the mash-up will take the advertiser's ability to target the distinct differences of the two audiences. As a buyer and a planner he can't be effective. But Yahoo wouldn't do the deal if they didn't think they need to do the deal. Advertising has always competed to the death, but that's not done in technology because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Jimmy says that Yahoo made a huge mistake by not being bought by Microsoft. It looks like this deal is the alternative to the failed Microsoft deal. To Yahoo this is a like giving up on something that should be a core part of their functionality. But his concerns for monopoly factors are that if you're big enough to be a player you don't want to sign everything off to the biggest guy.

Chris says that the deal has been suspended indefinitely. He also heard news today that Yahoo's and AOL's talks about merging have heated up. He doesn't think the Google Yahoo deal will ever occur.

James says that it makes him sad that some large center of innovation has folded. While Yahoo lost the edge years ago, the recent effect is that someone else out there who was figuring out a good way to build tools for advertisers is now lost.

Shelly says that a combined Yahoo AOL would be a content behemoth, but they still can't translate that value into wealth. To the level that Microsoft could buy that combined entity is funny. He also thinks it's funny that the evil empire talk used to be reserved for Microsoft.

Kevin says that Google built everything organically while Yahoo tried to build through acquisition. He thinks we're comparing apples to Buicks (hah!) because the two follow totally different strategies.

Is Google using their market power in organic search to propel YouTube, Google Maps and its other products in a disproportionate way?

Kevin says that Google's acquisitions came fewer and slower. We're going to see a lot more of search and behavioral targeting coming together because it's a means of collecting all kinds of information.

Shelly says that the practical thing is that some things require a certain scale. When the DOJ decided to break up Microsoft, not a whole lot changed because no one understood what a browser was, what an operating system was, or any of the basic terminology that was needed to talk about Microsoft.

Jimmy says that it only occurs to us to be shocked by the idea of the deal because it doesn't match what we understand about Google. Search is a report on the world, like a form of journalism. If people begin to sense that Google is promoting their properties over others, people would be suspect.

What is Google's responsibility to ensure accuracy?

James says that Google doesn't have any responsibility there. Shelly reiterates, saying that Google is a pipeline. It's like blaming radio waves for what's playing on the radio.

If Google knows everything about us, should we be more concerned about the aggregation of this data because of what the government could do with it?

Shelly says that it comes down to it, the electronic footprint that everyone leaves (completely apart from Google) is huge. Jimmy says that one of the interesting things about this is that if you're someone of intense interest, the government will be able to subpoena all that data, but for most people most of the time, it's not likely.

What does the Android phone do to the conversation of Googleopoly?

James says this is one of the best moves for openness in the telecom technology area. This is a great development in the mobile space because it's holding Apple's feet to the fire. Jimmy agrees and says it's good that there's something that will drive innovation.

Do you think the government is wise to look at Google for antitrust issues, or are there other places that they should be directing their attention that bear a far more negative impact on us as consumers and citizens?

Kevin says that they should look toward Google to figure out how to make money (hah!). James thinks we should worry about the ISPs first.

That was a fascinating conversation and I sometimes found myself entranced listening to the panelists instead of typing. That said, you can always check out alternative coverage. I saw Tamar Weinberg blogging away for Search Engine Roundtable, so if you like what you read so far, check it out!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, Yahoo, smxeast2008

Personalized and Customized Search

Moderator Danny Sullivan says that it was very hard to get speakers for this topic because many people aren't sure what they're doing yet as far as personalization and customization are concerned. But Bryan Horling, Software Engineer, Personalized Search, Google, is hoping to give an overview of what's going on, what changes to expect and the history behind personalized and customize search.

Here's an example using "dinner" as a query. The top two results are a Wikipedia article and a site with recipes. Basically, the results will help you research what dinner is or find a site that requires additional work. In a personalized version, there's a result for a manicotti recipe and a result for an area restaurant. This shows the difference between what a user might want and what is being provided, and the two are miles apart. If every person was to write out a list of what they'd expect from the query "dinner", everyone's would be different, so it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. [I've heard that about personalization somewhere before... --Susan]

Why personalize? You get the user to the right information as quickly as possible. Many searches are inherently ambiguous, so they can be a challenge to answer correctly for the individual user.

He won't be talking about: search preferences, iGoogle, custom search engine, subscribed links, and Google Desktop, although these things can all affect a user's search experience.

Early personalization history at Google

• Kaltix acquisition (2003): Three guys from Stanford wrote some cool things about personalizing PageRank.
• Personalized search on Google Labs (2004): Explicit, specify your interests.
• Personalized search launched (2005): Implicit, based on your Web history.

Web history records a user's queries and clicks and gets a good idea of what the user is actually interested in. It's better than models where users enter their interests because sometimes people don't answer in the way that best shows their interests.

Principles of Personalization

User privacy is key. Without the trust of users, no one's going to allow their information to be used. This is done through:

• Transparency: Inform when and what changes are made.
• Security: Sensitive info, including personalization based on that info is only available when signed in.
• Control: Users can edit or delete underlying data or turn the service off.

Web History

On the search results page, click on "Web History" for a page that displays Web history. The date and time of all activity is shown, and there's a calendar where heavy search days occurred as well as a place that categories are sorted, from images to news to blogs and videos. This is the transparency arm.

Web history control is letting the user remove or pause Web history. Individual items can be removed from the history. A user can also clear their entire Web history. This has been around for a few years.

More recently, there are customized results for locations. By clicking on the "more details" link, there is info shown for the location and you can compare results if the Web history was not applied.

Ranking Changes

Localization is:

• Using the searcher's geolocation to affect search.
• Different levels of granularity.
• Both explicit and implicit information.

Country level localization will serve results that apply to the country you're in. He uses the query "got talent" as an example, and in the UK the result is Britain's Got Talent while in the U.S. the result is America's Got Talent.

Regional localization is, again, intuitive. When querying "metro" in D.C., you'll get results for public transit, but if you search in San Francisco, you'll get results for the publication.

City localization will show local results, especially for queries with strong local intent, like "pizza". That query will result in local business results for pizza in your town or city.

Personalization

• Using the searcher's personal context to rank results
• Recent searches (short term)
• Web history (long term)

Recent searches - Disambiguation

Searching for "jordans" would probably result in the sneaker, but if their recent queries were about furniture, the results will show Jordans the furniture store. Generally, it results in a re-ranking that still includes shoe results.

Web History - Disambiguation

A search for "galaxy" will mostly show pages about space for non-personalized results. But if the searcher has been looking at soccer sites, the LA Galaxy will show up more proficiently.

Web History - Refinding

A result that is visited previously will show that it has been visited and that site's listing may possibly rise in the position it shows up for.

What does this mean for SEM?

Half empty:

• Collecting metrics
• Seeing how your pages rank

Half full:

• Easier for people looking for your service to find you.
• Easier to retain customers who prefer your business.

The top position is not winner-take-all. To take advantage of personalized search:

• Create compelling and interesting content.
• Appeal to users, not search engines.
• You can control personalization for your searches. Use search details. Disable it by appending &pws=0 to searches.
• Sign out.
• Firefox extension, greasemonkey script.
• Edit or turn off Web history.

Q&A

If I want to create personalization on my site itself, how can I do it?

A lot of what we try to address with personalized search is ambiguity, but within a particular site, there's probably not the same need.

What's the percentage of people that are actually using this on a regular basis?

All Bryan can say is "a bunch".

How does this all tie into local business accounts?

He doesn't know a lot about local business, but the issue is what if you're looking for a result in an area that you don't live? We probably aren't serving those as well as you might in the short term. But in the long term, Web history would help resolve this as it figures out that you like to visit some place. Of course, if you're looking for something out of town, you'll probably make it a town specific query. There's nothing stopping searchers from refining queries.

Could personalization help a site that seems like another site?

People with similar interests will see similar results.

Do you need to have a Google account to be served personalized search results?

Previous queries and geo-based queries don't require a Google account.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
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SMXE Keynote -- Tim Armstrong

Welcome back to SMX East. I expect nothing less than awesome after yesterday's great sessions and the rocking IMNY Charity Party. And we're kicking it off strong with Google's Tim Armstrong, President, Advertising and Commerce, North America, & Vice President - Google, Inc.

Danny Sullivan: We're at the point where people are starting to wonder if Google is getting too big. Is Google a monopoly?

TA: Our answer is definitively no. When I started there eight years ago, Google had virtually no market share. But the core thing we focused on over time is getting information to people. Google's also been very innovative in transparency. We're doing anything in their power to make it open. We're an important part of the industry environment, but we're by no means a monopoly.

DS: The review by the DOJ was supposed to be a voluntary thing, but if they say don't do it, will you follow them?

TA: One of the things that some of the larger advertisers haven't like about it is that Google has allowed all sizes of companies to play on an even field. There are a lot of big companies that are used to having pricing power over the smaller competitors. So some people are making arguments in their best interest. In general, we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

DS: The ANA is opposing the Yahoo ad deal. Is the ANA like 30 big advertisers?

TA: Most of the ANA are customers of ours. There are different levels of understanding about what our advertising is. Overall, the vast majority of them have great relationships with both Yahoo and Google. One of the things we've been offering the ANA is an open town hall. We want to talk about the deal with people in public. In general, they're great customers of ours and we'd like to have them understand the deal better, because I think overall they'll support the deal if they understand it.

DS: There's a concern with advertisers that you're going to dictate the prices. Are you guys going to get together and decide that any ad is going to start at $10 per click?

TA: For us it's really about user quality. From my past experience in media, the whole point is to help customers and sell ads. But the respect around end users is always in the conversation. It's in many cases a way to make sure the highest quality bids show up. But whether it's landing page quality or loading time, it's all about the end user. Google wouldn't set bid pricing because our focus is on user quality.

DS: What else are you doing to aid transparency?

TA: From Google Analytics to Google Trends to setting your own bid price, the planning stage of what you're going to buy from Google through the delivery stage of what you get - it all has transparency. Transparency slices through the auction, and the Google model is probably more transparent than traditional media. As we try to define what quality is for advertising, there's a responsibility on Google's side to make things more transparent. A big help is listening to customers. We don't have a specific plan for transparency, but I think people will see it over time.

DS: What's behind the idea that you're both working with and competing with ad agencies?

TA: I think there's no conflict because we work with them. If you're a big agency and you have a big client and you don't know what you're doing in search marketing, you may want to start to call us names. I think the market has really reset and Google's got a growing number of relationships with agencies. As the search market becomes bigger and more sophisticated and starts to bleed into other areas, search marketers are the only people to be able to connect all the changes together for their clients. The notion that Google is a frenemy or a froe is outdated and I think many of our clients would say that we're a great partner and have helped agencies grow to an extent.

DS: When clients go directly to you and bypass their agency, it has led people to ask "Who owns the client?"

TA: I think the clients own themselves. I don't think that Google owns the clients. I think agencies are the best people to connect clients to Google, eBay, Amazon -- they're the only people that can help companies connect all the dots together. They can figure out how to optimize across the board. When you look at the examples of what people are saying when they make this point, it's usually because the client had a specific question or were trying to solve a specific issue.

DS: What's the relationship between Google and Publicis?

TA: We started talking to them about a year ago. The Publicis clients were looking to Google and together we decided to get closer together. There are a few basic principles behind how we work together. First, people need to understand what the other company is doing, so we've been swapping employees. On the systems front, Publicis has a tremendous amount of information and they want to mix their data with Google's data, so we need to figure out the format to do that. The other question is how does Publicis add the most efficient value to their clients. We're working on all these things and I would expect us to work with more agencies in the future. Email me at tim[at]google.com if you're interested in working together.

DS: Is there anyone left that doesn't get search?

TA: The good news for us is that there are still many people that don't understand search. When we start showing people statistics about how many divisions of a company are taking advantage of search marketing versus how many are signed up for Google Analytics and trying to understand search traffic, it's sometimes a shock to them because there are people in the company hungry to understand how to get more traffic and people to their site.

DS: Are their big areas that are still going to blow up in search? It's been the year for mobile for the last five years.

TA: If you look back five years, there's a lot more available online now. But local is still a big opportunity. Mobile 1) works really well and 2) is sometimes more important than online search. It's going to happen but the question is when. We tested mobile in Japan and it was a big business success. I don't know when the year of mobile is, but it's coming. The other area is video. Search on video has the potential to be like AdWords in its long term value. It's important now, from a traffic perspective.

DS: Sometimes it's hard to keep track of everything Google's doing in video.

TA: Video is a few different markets. There's the traditional model (banners), there's version 2.0 (overlays) and also version 3.0 (promotion for what people are searching for). Engagement level is probably going to be very high considering the opportunities available on YouTube.

DS: Is AdWords for video still running?

TA: Going back to user quality, when an ad comes up in search results we try to deliver the best available ad at the time. We're testing to find out when is the right time to serve videos as ads. We don't have any findings to report, but it's what we're looking at.

DS: There was an honest to goodness banner ad on Google images. What's going on?

TA: We decided to finally test serving banner ads and we figured Google image search was the best place to try that.

DS: You've got Yahoo doing banner ads across the Web that are influenced by search profiles. Then Google is saying "we're not doing that", other than maybe not showing the same ad twice.

TA: We've thought about behavioral targeting for a long time. It's beneficial for both advertisers and end users. But we'd want to watch the area carefully before we do that, if we do that. We're watching BT be successful and it's on our radar, though we don't expect to do anything with that now.

DS: Audience, how many are worried about the Google Yahoo deal?

[Just a few people (I can see about five hands) are and most aren't (more like 50 hands), although many think it will cost more for advertising. Tim's glad to get the feedback.]

Audience member: It looks like you've tried to purge some poorly performing advertisers. Do you think you got everyone off you wanted to and is this a process that needs to be repeated every so often?

TA: We've never targeted specific advertisers and as we've grown, we've had to look at how to scale quality controls. But quality is not something we're ever going to stop addressing. Are we done? Have we reached the pinnacle of quality? No. I think you should expect us to keep ratcheting quality up over time and on a daily basis. You can expect us to continue to do more quality-based changes to the system. There are also times when we've done a bad job of letting more ads into the system, so you've seen us do both, but there's constantly a back and forth.

Audience member: What happens if the DOJ investigation takes a number of months?

TA: We'll patiently wait, I think. We're committed to seeing the right outcome so we're working with them to figure out what they're figuring out. I don't want to comment for the DOJ because they're on their own time table.

Tim wants to know if anyone has anything they'd like to see.

• Business search options (as opposed to consumer search)
• Grand Central
• Purging Maps spam

DS: You've been at Google since 2000. What's the most significant thing you've seen happen to the company?

TA: Some things haven't changed at all, so the biggest surprise is that I'd expect more change in the fundamentals we concentrate on. But one thing that's been surprising is that I thought search quality and ad quality would be something we'd master overtime, but it's actually an ongoing task. Also, it's surprising that the rest of the market hasn't caught onto ad quality. We treat ads like information, and a lot of the markets haven't adopted that, which is really surprising. Targeting criteria and ads targeting hasn't bled into the rest of the market and I think that's a huge advantage for us in general. Those early hard choices we made about letting end users choose the best ads are something we're proud of. The general culture hasn't changed. We've got great people and great projects. It's still exciting to go to work and that hasn't changed.

[ Awww ;) ]

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 7/08 at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, SEM Events, smxeast2008

September 23, 2008

Google's G1: Something Else To Get Unjustifiably Excited Over

So I'm curious, are you excited about the Google Phone announcement? Do you even care?

Personally, I don't. I just bought my first BlackBerry Curve (in pink!) a few weeks ago so I'm contently sitting in my corner ignoring all of you. However, I know Susan is pretty amped on it. The idea of an all-Google phone just isn't that appealing to me. The third-party apps may be cool, but until I see something worth switching to T-Mobile for (like an app that finds me free cupcakes), I'm not paying attention.

But plenty of people are, and for them, today was a big day. It was the glorious day that Google announced (for reals) the lovely creation called the Google Phone. Obviously all the essentials are present and accounted for. It has a three inch touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, browser buttons, trackball, copy and paste technology, and even the neat ability to transfer photos without the use of cumbersome email.

It's cool. But it's not that cool. So why do people care? [Better Google than Apple. --Susan] That's why I don't have an iPhone either.

I don't get it. This phone turns me off for a few reasons. First, have you seen it? It definitely got hit with the ugly stick. It looks like a 13-year-old boy was asked to sketch up his dream phone and then the Google engineers just went with it. Slick, it is not.

I'm also skeptical to adopt a phone that is so closely tied to Google. Mostly because I feel like if I do I may as well just go in to get the barcode imprinted on my forehead now, even if I do already use all their services. The illusion that I have a choice is nice. This phone is intended for those who already live and breathe by Google. Walt Mossberg says the phone can't even be used without a Google account, which is a bit scary. That's a brilliant move by Google to scoop up the remaining 17 people on Earth who don't have one.

I guess the hype about the phone comes from all this potential fairy dust people are talking about. It's "open". It's on the Android Platform. People can make applications and then share them ala Facebook. Again, I'll be impressed when I see something worth getting excited about. On the Google Mobile Blog, Mark gives us the Google pitch about how the new G phone will take advantage of all the features of the Android Platform. Developers can upload and distribute the applications they create through the Android Store which delivers apps directly to the handset. And thanks to all the hype around the Google phone, ReadWriteWeb says there are already more than 1,700 applications waiting to be purchased. La, la, balloons, puppies and unicorns, so what?

I don't get it, so maybe you guys can enlighten me. Why should I be excited about this? Or should I not be? You figure it out, I'm going to be over here spooning with my Blackberry. [I'm already on T-Mobile and here's why I'm excited: 3G network! Full Qwerty! Touchscreen! It's RIM's fault I don't have a Blackberry Bold already and I'm tempted by this. --Susan] Are you whining? Get off my niche,

[BoyGeniusReport has lots of screenshots of the Google Phone. And Pandas.

And if you're already drooling at the mouth for one, you can have your very own Google baby bottle next month here in the States. Otherwise, the device will be in the UK in November, across Europe in 2009.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 09/23/08 at 3:48 PM | Comments (4)
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August 21, 2008

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

Whose idea what it to have just a little snack break instead of lunch? I can't work like this. And by like this I mean covered in chocolate from my delicious ice cream sandwich.

This session the moderator is Anna Maria Virzi (ClickZ) and panelists are Carrie Hill (Blizzard Internet Marketing), Laura Wilson (New England Journal of Medicine), Scott Brinker (ion interactive) and Tom Leung (Google).

Our first speaker is going to be Carrie Hill. She thought she was going to have to bribe us with alcohol to get people to this session instead of SEO secrets. The real secret is knowing that Lisa's over there liveblogging it; it's just like being there!

Qualified traffic is the key to good post-click marketing. Buyers know what they want and that's what they'll search for. Use segments to deliver language and interface on those pages that will appeal to your shoppers. Use your trigger words. Buyer use words they relate to in their queries. If they use a word in their search, you should use those words on your page in order for them to see relevance. It should show up in the SERP and on the page.

Example: Free shipping-- Apple doesn't have free shipping prominently on their page so it's easy to over look. Zappos makes it obvious that they have free shipping.

Make sure that your visitors are landing on the right page. The home page is not right for every query. If they're using a word, give them a page that's relevant to it. Give your traffic the trigger word that they're looking for. If they do land on the home page, let them segment themselves.

Carry the message through the segmented path. IF they travel down the 'free' trigger word path, repeat that message.

Remember each piece of PCM can lead to more revenue from your site. Many pieces work dependent upon each other. Remember that halfway is only halfway but every little bit helps. Use Web site optimizer, do tests, let the users design their experience through self-selection.

Laura Wilson is going to present a case study on how this worked for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Five Key Ingredients of Their Success:
1. Know what the audience is looking for
2. Engage and Convert visitors with relevant content and offers
3. Give the visitors a reason to come back to the site: Videos, beta site, free weekly audio summary and more.
4. Deepen relationships with the audiences: newsletters and subscriptions, information about updates to the site.
5. Optimize conversions through testing

Tactics:
1. Navigation links with calls to action: both home page navigation and global navigation
2. Offers on Sign In Pages -- offers that are relevant to visitor based on the content they're trying to reach.
3. Free trial upsell on the registration confirmation page -- after registering for the newsletter, they offer them a trial to the online version of the journal.
4. Offer in authentication string message -- offers based on level of access.
5. Targeted emails -- welcome e-mail series and a "new features" e-mails. Free trial member will also be getting an email series with a countdown on time left.
6. Promotions in Weekly NEJM E-mail table of contents.
7. Banner ads throughout the site
8. A/B testing, multiple tests

Scott Brinker is discussing segmenting. That's been the big thing this conference that I've noticed.

Two Takeaways:
1. To increase conversions have more specific landing pages.

A/B testing -- for your respondents, it's still just one page. You need to understand who your respondents ARE. Some might think that one thing is more important than others. What you need is more than one landing page to reach more than one audience.

2. Self-segmentation after the click

Some keywords won't give you intent. Have two step landing pages in those cases: "Dinner" -- do you mean "hamburger" or "pasta". You'll speak differently to small businesses than enterprise level pages. Tailor your second landing page to that self-selected audience.

Don't ask them to do too much work though or they'll bounce.

Figure out which ads attract which segment. Then see how well you're converting those segments.

5 reasons that 2 clicks are better than 1:

1. Easy Engagement - makes it easy for them to move forward
2. Self Identification - we respond to self-identification cues, more accurate than forms, sets expectation
3. More focused content - contextually relevant content sells better
4. Signaling - Investment reflects commitment. "If you target me, you much think I'd be a good fit..."
5. Market research - which ads attract which segments? Which segments convert best? How do prospects think of themselves?

Last to speak is Tom Leung from Google's Website Optimizer

In the old days, you just implemented stuff and hoped for the best. Or you listened to the "HiPPO" the highest paid person in the organization. If you were a little more advanced, you'd do a before and after test but that wasn't that enlightening.

Website Optimizers allows you to test different variations of a page to see which version is most effective at achieving results.

This puts power into the visitors and they'll tell you what they like best. Sites can be a living laboratory.

[He quickly goes through how to do testing with Website Optimizer.]

The only opinions that matter are the opinions of the people who go to your site.

Don't assume, make sure that your revisions aren't going to HURT your site. You have to test with a control. Your interesting idea might not work.

Basic questions:

• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?

Advanced questions:

• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objection elegantly?
• Does it provide all the essential information?

If you're thinking about outsourcing:

• How many experiments have you run?
• Referrals? -- screenshots and contacts
• Can you justify ROI?
• What was the average lift?
• Can they work with your IT department?
• Are they willing to tie their payment to performance? (not required)
• Do they have marketing, proj management?

Ask yourself if it really makes sense to show ads on your landing page. Tell people what you're about.

He likes the Netflix landing page: It's clean, legit, informative and not too complex.

Q&A

How do you get buy in?

Laura: We present data and do projections on what the impact could be.
Carrie: We had to do a little bit of free work to show them how to make the lift. Sometimes one test isn't enough. But once you can show them the difference that a little work does, it's not that hard to convince them to do more.
Scott: It comes down to two things: Make the argument about conversion rate. Also web site optimization is a huge task. Landing page optimization is smaller and easier.
Tom: Agrees with Scott. Don't make it a huge plan, just do the simple A/B test and show them the results and the lift. People find it hard to disagree with more conversions for the same money.

How do you use Website Optimizer on your home page?

Tom: Put the goal tags in multiple places and all those are considered conversion OR they'll do a time on page test and consider that a conversion.

How long should a test run?

Tom: Never shorter than one or two weeks. Have about a 100 conversions per combination.

Is it possible to use optimizer against a segmentation page?

Tom: I've seen people run tests where A is the regular landing page and B is the segmentation page.
Scott: It's hard to answer that without sounding like a sales pitch but yeah, that's what our tools do. It's possible to do even with just a simple test. You can at least take a first step in that direction.

[Skipping an asked and answered question and a very specific question.]

[I don't know what his questions was but he said statistically relevance about ten times. I think it involved math. Tom's answer was all complicated and technical too. I'm sorry, I can't even begin to interpret. HOWEVER: Green = high confidence, Yellow: mid level confidence, Red = low confidence loser]

How do I test on low volume keywords?

Tom: Keep it simple. Just do an A/B test. Also, change your conversion metric. Make it time on page instead, so that you can take that as a leading indicator to conversion.

Scott: There's nothing wrong with A/B testing. It works.

Carrie: Don't get sucked into the idea that a conversion is 'they bought something'. It can be moving to the next step. You're testing a path sometimes.

Tom: I'd agree about the power of A/B testing. At the end of the day, people get the best results from very small tests. Small tests make you focus. Multivariate tests can make you lose your focus.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Google, Liveblog, Pay Per Click, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, sessj2008

August 19, 2008

Re Search Online, Purchase Offline

I don't know what's up with the panel name. Do they know research is all one word? Maybe I'll take it up with moderator Kevin Ryan after the panel. Speakers this time around are Michelle Stern (iProspect), Dan Quinn (Research in Motion) and Ken Robbins (Response Mine Interactive). Kevin's got a snazzy pink shirt on. I know it's this color (no pun intended) commentary that the readers are really looking for in a liveblog.

Kevin reminds us that this session is all that stands between us and the Google Dance. Yes, do let's hurry through this.

Michelle Stern is our first speaker. We're going on a walk. Yay! Oh, down memory lane. Got it. We're reliving pin the tail on the donkey. She's saying that's how most marketers do their bidding. They spend too much or not enough on keywords. They pick things because of 'gut instinct' or because the CEO wants that. They're just taking shots in the dark and they don't have any idea what's going to convert.

Case study! World Travel Holdings. Their objective is to generate cruise reservations either online or over the phone. 90 percent of their reservations come over the phone and the average revenue is greater over the phone than over the Web. They didn't know what they were leaving on the table though because they didn't have a phone tracking system. [I really like her. She speaks nice and slowly. Very easy to follow. A++]

They have online tracking and know those steps all the way from search through purchase and confirmation. They can then tie conversions back to keywords.

For phone tracking the first steps are the same: Search, PPC ad, Cookie, User directed to the site.

Then the steps change. User calls and books. User is sent a confirmation email. User clicks on the email and gets sent to a confirmation page and now they have the link back to the original search and keyword.

Why use this approach and what's the benefit?

• Can use the existing 800 number
• Minimal human error and nothing that wasn't already there before.
• Ability to track revenue to the keyword.

The email confirmation gives the user benefit because they have a chance to confirm that what they ordered over the phone is correct. They're motivated to click the confirmation button.

[Shows a sample email. Confirm button is at the bottom]

When they started, they only had a 50 percent click through rate on the emails. They made some changes and got it up to 80 percent.

[Shows the revised email. Confirm button is higher up]

*To increase motivation to click, you could offer an incentive.

After enabling the phone tracking system, they increased ROI by sixteen percent.

Key Considerations

• Evaluate the sources of offline leads or sales
• Build upon your current business process [WTH already had an email confirmation]
• Know your prospects or consumers behavior
• Leverage technology
• Data analysis -- you have to use the data. Do segmentation.
  • Positive ROI keywords
  • Negative ROI keywords
  • Uncategorized keywords -- not enough data to decide.

Test your positive ROI keywords. Play with the position on the page, the ad copy. Resist the instinct to lower the bid. Take advantage of opportunities present. If conversion is low, test landing page options.

Considerations for uncategorized keywords:

• Conversion rate
• Number of clicks (accumulate at least 100)
• Number of conversions (have at least two conversions)

The idea is to find your hidden gems. Move them into more prominent positions to test their viability and then categorize them positive or negative.

Kevin asks about buy in from clients on that. She says it depends on their business model and capabilities. It's just a handful who have adopted it. It's not a tough sell if the resources are there.

Dan Quinn from BBGeeks' favorite company steps up. He says we're allowed to keep our Blackberries on. They don't consider it rude to type away at lunches and meetings.

All of the panelists have Blackberries. Curve, Pearl, Curve and his undisclosed one (He says he can't tell us what it is. Dude, is it the Bold? I want!)

They're in 140 countries. They really only sell accessories online, the main hardware sells are offline. They have the hardware and software side. He has to justify an ever growing advertising budget when the majority of sales happen offline.

Search works best of leveraged across media. They have a centralized search team so that they can look at all the different stakeholders from corporate marketing to advertising to the Web team.

There's a funnel to conversion. Awareness to Interest to Consider to Purchase. There are times when you want to support the partners in some parts of the funnel, particularly broad match when it's about awareness and education. They don't measure success only as a dollar amount. They consider it important to educate people and reduce churn and return rate. That's incremental dollars and changing the brand perception does too. It's not only about direct conversion.

In order to increase conversion they encourage participation through co-funding. They're probably not going to sell a Curve directly but they can drive partner sales.

A few thoughts:

• Ensure that you're harvesting insights from search
• Understand buying behavior by audience
• Communicate the "Voice of the Customer" internally
• Work with your partners and resellers whenever possible

Kevin asks how RIM handles channel conflicts, like the differences between providers. He bashes Verizon a little again. Hee.

Dan says they really just manage budget allocations to try to control partners from bidding on keywords that they don't have a right to. But that there's not really any good way to ensure it.

Ken Robbins steps up. He's an agency guy who handles a lot of retailers with call centers and brick and mortar stores.

He's here to say definitively that online marketing drives offline spend.

Case study! Rooms to Go. 150 showrooms in 9 states the #1 National Furniture Retailer. They do a lot of financing. They have three Web sites: Roomstogo.com Roomstogokids.com and CindyCrawfordHome.com

Google came to them and said they wanted to try content match with them.

Challenges:

• Furniture - expensive, considered purchase, highly tactile
• Financing - Hard to execute online
• Doubts about Web to store effectiveness
• Want more store sales - for the upsell.

Their objective: Use controlled online media test to driven in-store sales.

Execution:

• Isolated markets - they picked 4
• Cut out the noise - no real world media spend during the test and optimized for the area
• Tracked closely - used market-specific coupons
  • Manager, salespeople training (no cheating, had to be a clean test)
  • Established definite time period
• Creative - coupons, landers conformed to market
• Media - Saturated the Web using all Google tactics

They used paid search, banners for local and vertical interests, local business ads,

Results:

• Markedly higher sales
• 86 percent campaign sales at RETAIL STORES
• Overall ROAS $7.50
• 20 percent higher Average Order Value in-store for coupon holder

What next:

• Strategy rolled out annually
• Bar-code system instituted (Keyword level tracking that's onetime use only)
• Significantly beating $7.50 ROAS new
• New learning - NON-BRAND KEYWORDS DELIVER 48 PERCENT OF OFFLINE SALES

Measurement and Attribution:
1. Direct Attribution - trackable coupons, unique offers
2. Incremental sales attribution - isolate markets, isolate product, measure lift over mean
3. Consumer engagement - store locator, page views, bouncing, site time, product views
4. Consumer intent, post-purchase surveys (Weakest way, very inaccurate.)
5. Don't worry about it. Support all ad initiatives with online components.

The key is to agree on a methodology and priorities first, then coordinate execution.

Does offline drive online? Of course. No one wanted a Foreman grill before the commercials. Real world media drives searches.

Big Mistakes:

1. Consumers can't find your promotions on you Web site (match real world offers online)
2. Call center use is discouraged (burying the 800 number)
3. Stores or Online DC is out of stock
4. Promotional campaign metrics not separated
5. (and more)

Better Practices:

1. Consistent messaging
2. Campaign one the same schedule
3. Coordinate with your stores, managers, call center
4. Universal pricing
5. If attribution is important - isolate variables (market, noise)
6. If attribution is problematic, use engagement metrics
7. Get vendors to assign co-op $ to Web Promotions
8. When driving to store, use campaign landers (better messages and CTA)

Someone asks if they track the lag and yes, they do. They also keep them very timed. They get instant response because it's timed.

Kevin asks about response rates and volume from the Google local ads. The Search ads converted the best but all the rest of the things they were doing got much better in aggregate. The text did the best.

Q&A

Does the email tracking work across platforms? [It should, yes.] Can you elaborate on the method about how the cookies interact between the confirmation email and the tracking code?

Michelle: You can link them up in Omniture.

Did you continue to black out the Real World media efforts?

Ken: I actually don't know the answer. I believe that it's a 360 degree campaign now.

[Kevin's little between question rambles are great. Hee]

Good tools to track phone calls that can be tied back to analytics? Are there any other ways to track than 800 #s?

Ken: Yes, there are vendors out there who can deploy thousands of 800 numbers linked to keywords. It's gets a little unwieldy. [And audience member uses Call Source but says that small business don't like masking their number]

Has anyone used something like Web IQ or Keynote or something like that to track online to offline for surveys with clickpath analysis?

Dan: Done a bit and it was tracked back to the campaign level. They were mostly tracking profiling. Directionally it works but it depends on your objectives.

Kevin wants to know if it's effective and worth it to add the layer. Dan says yes.

Client with lots of store locator visits: How do you get the client to understand that it's important and how do you track those visitors to the store?

Ken: [refers him to Measurement and Attribution section of the presentation. In a nice way.] The most successful thing I've found when trying to break through to the execs is to show them what other people are doing and how effective it is.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/19/08 at 5:16 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click, sessj2008

July 9, 2008

SEO Headlines

Google's New Keyword Research Tool

Our PPC guru Nick Guastella was all aflutter this morning over the news that Google has added search counts to its keyword research tool, thereby turning on another light for SEOs and search marketers. According to Google:

When you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you'll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords' monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool.

The new data will help search marketers with keyword choices, spotting trends, budget planning and will help them outline their account structure. I supposed props go to Google for being so aggressive about pushing out new tools to give search marketers more data, more numbers and more insight into optimizing their campaigns. I'm going to do my best to avoid the conspiracy theories and be excited about the new data. Nick seemed to be.

For more details, Google has an extensive guide to its Keyword Tool. I don't think many are still mourning the loss of Overturn's keyword research tool.

But Srsly, WTH is Lively?

Yesterday afternoon word started to spread about Google's new virtual world nicknamed Lively. It's a browser-based virtual environment that will tie in to social networks like Facebook, OpenSocial, and MySpace. Okay. The whole think smells of Orkut. It's just another social networking attempt that Google's audience never asked for, doesn't want, and will likely never use (or at least not here in the States). I'm not impressed; in fact, I'm confused as to why they even bothered.

It feels like not even Google knows what it wants to do here. As GigaOm notes, in a recent Virtual World News article Google's Head of 3D Operations (I love that a 3D division even exists) Mel Guymon makes it sound like they're only in the virtual space because it seems like that's the place to be. That's a great way to induce Product Fail. The obvious assumption would be that Google developed Lively as a way to (in time) get users to generate content that they can then place ads on. Lively has integration with Google products like YouTube and Picasa so that may be another way to generate more clicks and ads, but that's not nearly enough to make it exciting.

It seems that if you're going to release something like this, it darn well better be superior to its nearest competitor. In this case, though the missions are different, that's Second Life. And Lively's not even on the same wavelength as SL. People in virtual worlds demand complete control of their surroundings and freedom to explore. Lively fails to offer that. So where's the incentive to switch? There isn't one.

Google, I know you're all excited about another chance at monetizing something, but next time try and do a better job of masking it behind something that's maybe useful.

adCenter Makes Impressive Strides Against Y!SM

Barry reports on the buzz that Microsoft's adCenter seems to be on the rise much to Yahoo's dismay, with advertisers reporting more spend on adCenter than with Yahoo Search Marketing. Over at Search Engine Watch one member noted that adCenter as outperformed Yahoo in both conversions and CPL over the last month. At Sphinn, Kate Morris argues the same. Barry says the "tide is turning". Is he right?

I certainly hope so. I'm not a fan of much of what Microsoft puts out there, but adCenter has long been touted as the superior platform despite its pea-sized traffic. Maybe with search marketers starting to see rewards, they'll be more likely to increase their spend over there. But if they do, it doesn't curb adCenter's major hurdle - the fact that the audience isn't there. And the audience isn't there because the Live search engine is....nowhere near where it should be. Maybe the folks in Redmond could stop bullying Yahoo and get on that. They just may have something here.

Fun Finds

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Winfield's recent article The 10 Best Ways to Find the Perfect Image for Your Blog Post. Some seriously good stuff in there.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 9/08 at 4:29 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Yahoo

June 30, 2008

Weekend Update

SEO Newsletter Hitting Inboxes Today!

It's the last day of the month which means two very important things: Payday and SEO Newsletter day. Huzzah!

Today's edition of the SEO Newsletter features expanded commentary on two subjects we've previously written about as blog posts. First, Virginia Nussey will tell you everything you've ever needed to know about implementing 301 redirects to clear up any confusion/questions/concerns not addressed in our How to Properly Implement a 301 Redirect post from last year.

From there, I'll take you through an in depth review of our favorite jeans retailer Joe's Jeans and highlight several SEO recommendations that we feel would help them improve the spiderablity of their Web site. You may remember, we first introduced you to Joe's Jeans early last week. Now we're taking a deeper look and taking off the kid gloves!

All that and more will be hitting you later in the day, so if you're not subscribed, subscribe now! And if you're not satisfied with today's pay check, let me also take this time to direct you to Bruce Clay, Inc.'s employment page. ;)

Google Uses Log Data, Cookies To Improve Results

Matt Cutts issued a posted on the Official Google Blog late Friday afternoon explaining how Google uses data to fight webspam, and boy, were eyebrows raised. In his post, Matt wrote that Google uses log data such as IP address and cookie information to "make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of [its] search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam)." I took the statement as Google making good on their promise to be transparent and possibly to ease European Union concerns, however, some aren't so convinced.

Dave Naylor jumped into the mix questioning why this information is being released now before immediately spouting off ways users can spam the index using the tidbit revealed by Google. Way to go, Dave. Let's take shots at Google for being secretive and then immediately publicize ways to abuse the system once they hand over the smallest morsel of information. No good deed.

I'm not so freaked out by Google using this information (mostly because we all assumed they did anyway, right?), but if you want to get yourself worked up, super Mozzer Danny Dover had a stellar post last week about the evil side of Google. You may want to give it a read.

Performics Gets Re-branded as the Google Affiliate Network

Because just one Google controversy wasn't enough, we also got word that Google has decided to re-brand Performics as the Google Affiliate Network, officially making them the most evil company in the entire world. Or something. I think that's what it said on TechMeme.

The Google Affiliate Network will work like all others in its class and pay publishers for each lead they bring in. The affiliate network is still being hosted by ConnectCommerce.com, but it won't be long until it's fully integrated within Google AdSense. Target, Kohls, Citibank, Circuit City, Bank of America and Barnes & Noble are all listed as existing advertisers.

Is there anything left in the ad space for Google to conquer or do they officially have it all?

Fun Finds

Louis Gray grabs my interest with On The Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying. A mighty interesting read. Maybe you should go Google Trends yourself.

Tamar's talking about Twitter and Plurk and says they're not even in the same league. That said, which team are you on: Twitter or Plurk? So far we're Twitter here in the office.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/30/08 at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click

June 25, 2008

All Your Ads Belong To The Goog

Barry Schwartz says if you thought Google Trends for Websites was scary, meet Google Ad Planner. Beta testers can enter in demographic information and sites associated with their audience and Google will spit out a list of other sites their audience is likely to visit. Barry says he was able to find information like unique visitors, their income, gender, behavior, page views, category information, and lots more spy stuff. Right now the tool is in beta, so in order to play you'll have to request an invite.

The purpose of Google Ad Planner is obviously to help publishers find sites they want to place ads on by giving them more information about the publisher site. I get that, but good Lord is that a lot of information to be handing out. I wonder if this will send Google Analytics numbers through the roof, as well, as that's where they're getting their information, right? Knowing that Google pulls this info, if you're a publisher looking to find advertisers, you'd start using Google Analytics so they could get your information and make you look attractive, wouldn't you? I would. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this as an advertiser though. Would you trust the person who's selling you ads to also tell you where to put them?

Interestingly, Arthur Freydin gave readers an in depth walkthrough of Google Ad Planner and noted that it isn't yet integrated with AdWords. I wonder how long that will take to add on. Seems like a natural progression, for sure.

It's scary to see Google take complete control over the advertising world like this. Now, not only are they selling you ads, giving you tools to see how those ads convert and make them better, now they're telling you where to put them. I know; why don't you just hand Google your advertising budget and let them use it however they'd like. Oh wait. You're doing that now. Carry on then.

I know I said this last week, but it's a little scary to watch Google jump into this space. And poor ComScore and Nielsen? With Google Ad Planner they should just plan their permanent trips to the Caribbean now. Maybe you can get a deal if you book six months in advance? They're pretty much dead in the water. They can't compete with the amount of information Google has on its prisoners er, customers. No one can.

Barry has lots of screenshots of the new program over at Search Engine Roundtable. Head over there to check them out and then tell us what you think.

You'll also find some startling commentary by Brett Tabke in the WebmasterWorld thread on the topic. It's scary when you consider how many sources Google has for collecting your data, how much they know about you, and what they could possibly do with all that information.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/25/08 at 11:15 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Google, Pay Per Click

June 20, 2008

Google Trends for Websites? Not Cool, Google.

Quite a bit of commotion today in response to Google's decision to do something with all your site data they've been sitting on. Starting today, savvy site owners can use Google Trends for Websites to do some competitive research and discover unique site metrics like estimated traffic, also searched for, also visited, and traffic for different regions/countries. And it looks like there's no way to opt out. Wow, way to go, Google!

In order to power its new spy tool, Google is combining Google Analytics data, search volumes and other third-party market research. The traffic information will be neatly plotted out for you in a line graph, with the rest of the information listed underneath. Site owners will have the opportunity to get secret data on five domains at a time.

It does come with some caveats though. For example, beware that the information may or may not be totally accurate. Since Google Trends is in Google Labs they claim to have no way to improve the quality of the data. They also add that since the data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may lose some of its validity. Then by all means, still put it out there.

You're also dealing with a pretty limited data pool as the information typically only goes as far back as mid 2007. This is Google "Trends", right? How well can you spot long term trends with only a year's worth of data? And if you're a small business, don't even bother putting in your domain. You probably don't receive enough traffic for Google to care about you or your competitors. Sorry. Have a cookie instead.

Barry Schwartz calls the tool "a great way" to find additional keywords, link partners and resource, but I'm not so sure. Personally, it makes me a bit uncomfortable that Google has no problem handing out site owner's information like this. What if you don't want your keywords and traffic information published for everyone to see? Sure, there are plenty of other ways to get this information, but let those other independent companies do it. Google's just shelling it out there for no reason and without getting consent first. Lame. I'm no Google conspiracy theorist, but it makes it hard to continually hand over information to Google when you know "features" like this are running around in the back of their heads. Who knows what's coming next.

Again, it's not that the information Google's handing out is super secret, but what in the world made them think site owners would want them to use their information in this way? It's also interesting that you can't get information about Google itself, but you can get information about Microsoft and Yahoo. Now, now, Google, play fair.

I don't know. Take the new feature as you will, I guess. Just try and use it for good.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/20/08 at 3:45 PM | Comments (6)
See more entries in Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

June 12, 2008

SEO Headlines

Should Your Employees Be Your BFFs?

Barry Schwartz pointed me to an article from Ad Age this morning that asks Do Bossfriends Create Great Employees. It's funny, because if you asked me that a year ago my answer would have been completely different than what it is now. When I was still wet behind the ears I would have said that a boss can absolutely be buddies with their employees. I may have even rattled on about how it creates team unity and that hitting a beer bong in a social setting with those whose paychecks you sign was totally okay. Now, however, that kind of behavior would make me cringe.

As a boss you should be friendly with your staff. You should create an environment of trust and openness and free expression, but that doesn't mean you should be best friend. There's absolutely a line you have to draw. You don't want to get into a situation where employees' feelings are hurt because their bossfriend suddenly has to care about getting work done or the bottom line. You don't want to open up an environment where employees get too comfortable or too casual and their professionalism suffers. You want there to be chemistry and for your employees to feel supported. That doesn't mean that you have to help them close down the bar.

I think we manage to have a good balance around here. We have a pretty casual environment and open door policy when it comes to getting time with Bruce. We have company BBQs, bowling days, movie nights, spontaneous lunches, etc. But I'm not hanging out at Bruce's house tonight to watch the Celtics beat the Lakers. I'll be doing that at home, with people who are actually my friends.

Sorry, Bruce, but I just want to be friendly. I don't want to be your BFF. :)

Yahoo, Microsoft, Google & The Internetz

Yahoo says that their talks with Microsoft really are over and that no deal has or will be made. Take a moment to compose yourself. It'll be okay. Here's a tissue.

Better?

Yes, TechCrunch reports that though Microsoft and Yahoo had both gone back to the table for negotiations, in the end Microsoft couldn't justify the price Yahoo was after, and Yahoo realized it'd just be neutering its search engine anyway. The two will just have to go it alone.

Don't worry, Yahoo's not about to fall out of the headlines. Just this afternoon they announced a non exclusive search agreement with Google like we all thought they were going to. The deal will allow Yahoo to run Google ads alongside its search results and some of its Web properties in the United States and Canada.

From the press release:

"Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which - and the pages on which - Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo! will define its users' experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search. The agreement also applies to current partners in Yahoo's publisher network."

Companies With An Identity Crisis Fail

Dave Goldenberg had a great article over at Digital Web Magazine entitled Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha. Dave says the biggest reason new companies fail isn't because they don't have the talent or the drive to back up what they're trying to do, it's because they never really identify what it is they want to do. They don't know who they are, where they're going, what makes them different, etc, and as a result they fall on their face.

I mentioned this in Tuesday's Avoiding Product Fail post, but you really have to know what you're creating and what niche your product is going to fill before you launch it. Otherwise you those vital first moments of your existence solving your own identity crisis when you should be out presenting a strong brand image and getting your message out to your audience. As was hailed in the Cre8asite Forums, you don't want to be that nerd in the singles bar. You want to assured, nimble, and ready to woo the masses.

It's hard enough to launch a new company. If you don't have a clear plan for how you're going to do it and become the next TechCrunch, you may as well not even try.

Fun Finds

Christopher Hart, the new Director of Regional Operations for Bruce Clay East, sat down with Jim Hedger during last week's SMX and talked about his plans for the new office, bringing SEO training to the East Coast and how BC East will fight through the noise of New York.

Chris Brogan tells us all how to be sexier in person. C'mon, you know you were googling it last night.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/12/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

June 4, 2008

Search Friendly Development

Good morning, Friends. It's time for Day 2 and I'm coming to you live from the brand new Developer Track. The Developer Track is awesome because it comes complete with a fancy waterfront view. I'd also mention the yummy bagel I'm eating but I think Michael VanDeMar is going to come and kick me if I do. He's over my bagel stories.

Vanessa Fox will moderate as speakers Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Maile Ohye (Google) and Sharad Verma (Yahoo) get us started.

Up first is Nathan Buggia. He says he rewrote his entire presentation last night based on what people were talking about on Day 1.

Microsoft is working on lots of big, hard problems. Stuff like:

• Affiliate tracking
• Session management
• Rich Internet application
• Duplicate content
• Geo-location
• Understanding analytics
• Redirection
• Error Management

Advanced search engine optimization is analytics. That's what differentiates it from regular search engine optimization. It means you're at a larger company with more resources (um, not necessarily). Implement things in a logical order. See what the impact is on your customers and the engines and decide if that's the right thing to go forward with. Do not implement something because you heard someone on a panel say it was a good idea. PageRank sculpting is a good example of that. Everything on the Web is an opportunity cost.

Nathan says to watch out for complexity. If you build cloaking or situational redirects into your Web site, you can add a lot of complexity to your site. It becomes hard to notice if you have problems on your site because stuff is hidden from even you. You want the simplest architecture you can have. Microsoft says cloaking isn't all bad, but it's never the first, second or third solution they recommend.

All Web sites have the same first problems. The first problem is accessibility. That's where people should start. Can a crawler get to your Web site? Are they hitting 404s? Do you use Flash or Silverlight and are they monopolizing the user experience? Take a look at canonicalization. Are you dividing all your PageRank and reputation?

Search engines are always changing. Someone can come up on the stage and claim they have the big new tactic for search engine optimization and then that may change in a year. What is consistent are the Webmaster Guidelines. Those are things that in spirit all the search engines agree with. If you go to Google's Webmaster Guidelines and adhere to the spirit of them, then you're working with the search engines instead of against them.

Nathan gives us an example and uses Nike.com. Nike is a brilliant company. There are few companies that can do the type of branding that they did with Just Do It.

When you go to Nike.com you see the Flash loading. Then you select language, region, etc. Then you get another loading screen because they're going to play a full minute video. It takes eight seconds to get to that video. Maybe people don't have eight seconds. Maybe they only have one second. The second run experience is 3 seconds because of the cookie Nike puts on your computer. The cookie resets every day. If you are blind or ADHD, you have a really bad experience on that site.

The site also isn't great for search. He shows us the HTML behind the page. There's no Title tag. There's nothing. It's just a Flash application. Basically they're cloaking. The site is also really complicated. Nike has over 2 million pages on their Web site and they're cloaking for a lot of them. He shows what the Nike SERP description was for a few days after their cloaking broke. It was a user error.

Every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing all in cloaking, there are other people out there NOT investing in those things. If you type in [Lebron James shoes], Nike doesn't come up.

Alternate Implementation

Throw your rich object at the top of the page and then use JavaScript at the bottom to detect what the div does. (If I mangled that, please feel free to correct me in the comments. As awesome as Nathan is, I don't speak tech geek.)

Advanced search engine optimization is not spam.
Search engine optimization does equal good Web design.
Design for your customers, be smart about robots and you'll enjoy long-lasting success.

Sharad Verma is up.

Sharad says he loves his job. This is an opportunity to serve his customers. When he's not working he loves to travel. Last week he was in Machu Picchu, Peru. He's giving us a bit of a history lesson and telling us how he took trains and buses on his journey. I'm not sure where this I going but it will tie together soon. Oh, I get it. The moral of the story is that Machu Picchu is accessible and easily discovered. I see what he did there.

As a site owner you're serving both your users and robots. You need to design your site so you're not alienating either of them. There are three cranks behind the box - crawling, indexing and ranking. You have control over all three, but more control over crawling.

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

They start with the URL, download the Web page, extract links from the Web page and then follow more links. Sometimes they find invisible links or sometimes they see links but decide not to crawl the content. That could be because the links are excluded in your robots.txt or because they're duplicate links.

Search engines find your contact via the organic inclusion from crawling. All you have to do as a site owner is put up your site, get links, and let the crawlers in. They'll do the magic. If you're not satisfied with what they're crawling, then you can supplement that with feeds.

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

Search engines do not understand JavaScript. They're starting to understand it but they're far away from being able to full crawl it. He recommends turning off your JavaScript and seeing if you can navigate your Web site. Is all the content reachable?

Flash: Make sure your site can be read by a robot. If you're using Flash, make sure you're offering up alternative navigation.

Dynamic URLs: Difficult to read, lead to duplicate content, waste crawl bandwidth, split the link juice and are less likely to be crawled and indexed.

Best Practices:

• Create user friendly, human readable URLs
• 301 redirect dynamic URLs to static versions
• Limit the number of parameters
• Rewrite dynamic URLs through Yahoo! Site Explorer

He asks how many people use Site Explorer and their Dynamic URL Feature. Log in and authenticate your Web site. It allows you to remove parameters from URLs.

Duplicate Content

Consequences of duplicate content: Less effective crawl, less likely to attract links from duplicate pages.
Solutions to duplicate content: 301 duplicate content to the canonical version, disallow duplicate content in Robots.txt

Other Best Practices:

• Flatten your folder structure
• Redirect old pages to the corresponding new pages with 301/302
• Use keywords in URLs
• Use sub-domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove the file extension from the URL if you can
• Consistently use canonical URLS for internal linking
• Promote your critical content close to the home page

You can also get your content included through feed based crawling. You can provide feeds through their Sitemaps Protocol to tell the crawler were to find all the pages on your site, especially your deep content. Sharad recommends using all the Meta data supported by Sitemaps Protocol.

Do not exclude your CSS content in the Robots Exclusion Protocol because the engines want to see the layout of your page.

Search engines want your content. Break down those accessibility barriers and let them do their job.

Maile Ohye is up last.

Google wants to help users create better sites. If you have better sites, we all have a better Internet. Aw. She's going to tell us how to enhance your site at every stage of the pipeline. Maile talks like an infomercial.

Crawlable Architecture

Consider progressive enhancement. This means you don't just begin with Flash. You start with static HTML and then add the "fancy bonuses" like Flash and AJAX later. Then the fancy stuff becomes a complement to your Web site instead of your entire site.

She looks at a page/site that's rich in media with HTML content and navigation - the Dramatic Chipmunk video on YouTube. The video is in Flash, but there's descriptive content on the page (title, description, user generated content in the comments) and HTML navigation.

Consider sIFR for Flash

JavaScript detects if Flash is in installed.
With No Flash, it displays the regular text. With Flash on, you get the Flash.

If you do that the text must match the content viewed by enabled users. It must be accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Consider Hijax for AjAX

Format JavaScript with a static URL as well as a JavaScript function. She gives us a long URL and says that the search engines often ignore fragment (#f00=32) but respect parameter (?foo=32). I'm hoping that makes sense without you having to see the long URL.

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster Tools: They give crawl errors if you verify your site. In crawl errors, be sure that what you see is what you expect. They'll show URLs blocked by robots.txt, make sure that's what you want. They'll also tell you about time out errors and unreachable links. Use it to verify your link structure and that all your links are findable.

Promote your quality content. Set preferred domain to www or non-www. You don't want to run two versions of your Web site. [As a note, this doesn't always fix the problem. Be consistent in your linking and don't rely on Google to do your work for you.--Susan]

To reduce duplicate content, keep URLs as clean as possible, internally link to your preferred version and store visitor information in cookies then 301 to canonical version.

Use a cookie to set the affiliate ID and trackingID values.

Proper Use of Response Codes

Use 301s for permanent redirects.
Signals search engines to transfer the properties like link popularity to the target URL. This applies to situations like moving a site to a new domain and modifying the URL structure.

Anatomy of a Search Result

Create a unique, informative title. It acts as informative signal of the URLs contents to a search engine and user. You don't want your title to say "Untitled". She talks about how Webmaster Tool can help you locate Title tag issues.

Snippets: Provide the user more content about each search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your click-