| |
Archive for the ‘search engines’ Category
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
Ask.com has reported that it is leaving the search engine wars and taking up Q&A. Just as well. They were losing the war. BAD!
So what does this really mean? I don’t see this decision really affecting any of the other search engines in terms of market share or how they approach search. Do you?
The real answer to the question “what does this really mean?” is: It depends on how Ask.com implements its next phase of operation. Does it mean that Ask.com will now focus its efforts on Answers.Ask.com, or is something else going to happen instead? Let’s look to the Ask.com blog for clues.
We know that receiving answers to questions is why Ask.com users come to the site, and we are now serving them in everything we do. ?
OK, so Ask.com knows its audience. That doesn’t surprise me. However, simply stating that they plan to serve their customers in everything they do doesn’t really answer the question. Wouldn’t we expect that?
Ah, but what about this?
Unfortunately, this absolute focus means that we need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic web search development. This investment in independent web search is not required by our strategy, nor is it required in the marketplace. We have access to multiple third party structured and unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a web search experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower costs.
The emphasis above is mine. What this sounds like to me is that Ask.com is planning to become an aggregator. Will they just use other websites to provide answers to questions that people ask? If so, that will be an interesting thing to see.
There are already plenty of aggregators on the Internet, but what about aggregators that use data feeds to answer questions? Would it work? Do you think that’s where Ask.com is headed? Would you use it if it were?
Tags: search, search engine
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Saturday, November 6th, 2010
Rich snippets are the kind of tool that most business people know little about. Yet, used properly, they can give your business a huge boost. The latest from Google is that prices, reviews and stock availability data will be included in search results. If you search listing has this information, particularly if your prices are competitive, then that listing may well draw a click from the searcher.
Small businesses need to take advantage of every feature that comes along. What small business doesn’t need is for big business to incorporate these features while they are left languishing in the dark. (I suggest you subscribe to Google’s Webmaster Tools blog so you are kept up to date with changes as they occur. ) Rich snippets for shopping sites is the latest release and, while it does involve getting used to a little coding, is not that hard to include in your web pages coding.
Should you include rich snippets in your pages code? If you sell products then it makes sense. However, if your products are overpriced then you may want to consider this option carefully. If competing businesses are using rich snippets and their prices are lower than yours, then your more likely to see a huge drop in traffic.
Rich snippets will be good for consumers. They may also help consumers weed out sites that rank highly, but rather than sell products, a created only to generate Adsense revenue. If you’re a shopping site, and your products are competitively priced, then incorporating rich snippets is a must if you want to stay in business.
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
New search engine Blekko has finally gone live. I’ll let others judge the worth of Blekko as a search engine. I’m more interested in its SEO data.
So what’s so good about Blekko’s SEO data? Glad you asked.
For starters, it has SEO data. On just about any site for which you’d want it. As a sampling, here’s what you can find out about websites you find through Blekko:
- Hostrank
- Number of inbound links
- Site pages
- Crawl stats
- Duplicate content
- Copy of cache
- IP address
- Whois data
- And guess what else …
Blekko will even tell you which other websites your site is cohosted with.
That last one is very important. If you are on a shared hosting plan and can get a look at who your neighbors are then you can improve your hostrank just by switching servers or hosting companies. Follow the links of your hosting neighbors and see what kind of websites they are. If there any link farms, warez sites, or other black hat or spammy sites on your server then you need to ask your host to move you to another server or switch hosting companies.
I, for one, find this information extremely useful – even if I’d rather use Google for search.
Tags: search engines, SEO
Posted in search engines | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 8th, 2010
UK search professional Patrick Altoft wrote a blog post saying that Google was testing full page previews in search results. I tried to corroborate his story with a U.S.-based report, hopefully from one of the many top-tier SEO experts who blog. The closest I came was this report from TechCrunch.
Two other sources that have written about this so far are ReadWriteWeb and Business Insider.
Note that all three of these sources are news sources, not practicting SEOs. There are a few more lesser known news sources that have reported on this as well. But all of the online news websites that have written about this point back to Patrick Altoft and offer no new insight.
So what’s going on here? It’s strange that no U.S. SEOs are reporting on this while only one UK-based SEO has discovered it and written about it. You’d think that if this were really happening then it would be all over the Web. But if you’ll read down the comments on Patrick Altoft’s blog then you’ll find this little gem:
Christian this was on google.co.uk I tried google.com but couldn’t see it.
That was Patrick Altoft responding to a reader question about the test appearing in the U.S. Evidently, this is a test that only took place in the UK, which makes me wonder how often Google conducts such tests. Do they ever test in Australia and nowhere else? How about Asia? Is this a common practice for Google to test new search features overseas but not in the U.S.?
What’s your take?
Tags: google, search
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 27th, 2010
Increasingly, you are hearing more and more about social media marketing and less and less about SEO. Are we experiencing a turn in the tide, a paradigm shift from search engine marketing to social media? One would think so.
On the other hand, SEO is still alive and well.
There is a contingent of online marketers who, I think, would like to see SEO go by the wayside. They are sold on social media (as am I). If you know me at all or read my blog regularly then you know that I am also a social media advocate. It is an essential marketing channel in this century.
But I wouldn’t abandon SEO or search engine marketing. I think, in fact, that SEO and SEM will always be important to marketers online.
One might think this is an outdated idea considering that Google itself is always trying to find more ways to go social. But if you consider that Google considers its closest competition to be Bing and not Facebook then you might begin to understand that there is a place for social as well as search in your marketing plan.
To what degree you use social media in your online marketing versus SEO is your business, but I think it’s clear to most marketers that both are necessary. And I would fall in that camp.
Tags: SEO, Social Media
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 20th, 2010
Danny Sullivan and other journalists challenged Google at a lunch meeting during a Google Zeitgeist conference over the secret recipe of the search engine’s ranking algorithms. The bottom line, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is it’s a business secret. Sullivan just wants to know why Google won’t publish the list of ingredients rather than the complete recipe.
Let me just say that I have no way of knowing what’s in Schmidt’s head or what’s in the secret sauce. SEOs and Internet marketers have guessed about those ingredients since Day One. But it’s safe to say that most of those 200 ingredients are already public knowledge. Some of them have been acknowledged by Google itself. Others are just things that have come to light as a result of SEO testing and experimentation.
So why doesn’t Google publish its list of ranking factors? Schmidt says it’s because the company doesn’t want the pressure of being obligated to serve those ingredients up on a regular basis. In other words, as I’m interpreting it, if Google said X was a ranking factor then later wanted to take X away as a ranking factor then there might be some sense of obligation to keep listing it as a ranking factor. But, of course, there’d be no obligation. Google can do whatever it wants with its ranking algorithm.
But I think there is a deeper reason why Google may not want to divulge the ingredients to its secret sauce. In a way, it’s the same reason why Danny Sullivan thinks Google should.
Sullivan says Google would benefit public relations-wise by listing those ingredients. I say it would hurt Google to list them. The reason it would not benefit Google to list those ingredients is because they do change, as Schmidt said, on a regular basis. Let’s say that today Google announced that X, Y and Z were ranking factors. Next week, let’s say that Google decided that X and Y no longer needed to be ranking factors. What now? They’d have to publish a new list of ranking factors. Every time Google changed its ranking factors, which is every day, then it would have to publish a new list. That seems like a lot of work for a relatively low PR pay off. In the end, many users would become confused about what the latest ranking factors are.
Many Google users do not get their information from Google itself, but from other blogs and news sources like Search Engine Land and Small Business Mavericks. What if certain news sources didn’t update their list when Google updated its list? The potential for confusion and misinformation is greater doing it the way that Sullivan suggests. Isn’t it already confusing enough?
Tags: google, search engine ranking
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Saturday, September 18th, 2010
While social media and social media marketing may be the flavor of the month (or is that year), search engines are still holding their own when it comes to the important issues. For small businesses, there is nothing as important as steady sales. According to a recent report, 57% of consumers still use search engines as their primary tool when looking for products.
Okay – so does that leave 43% for social media? Apparently not. It seems that 20% of consumers prefer to head straight to a brand site and another 18% search for products through retailers. When it comes to social media, they only receive 3% of consumers traffic.
It is understandable really. If you know what you want to buy, why go to a social site? It makes more sense to search for the product via a search engine, or to go directly to a known website. Social is more interactive. Consumers are more likely to seek opinions on products or services through social media than look for sellers.
What is missing from a set of statistics like this is what has preceded the product search, or indeed the visit to a retailer or known brand. For example, have they spent some time reading reviews, talking to friends and acquaintances to find information. From the statistics mentioned, 20% of consumers go directly to branded web sites. Has social media had any influence?
Search engines are still are primary source of traffic when it comes to product searches. However, social media is now one of the primary channels for building brand awareness, and for interacting with potential customers. These days, both are important to the future viability of any online business.
WebProNews has an interesting post on these statistics here.
Tags: product search, Social Media
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 16th, 2010
John Battelle is proud of the fact that he predicted Bing would surpass Yahoo! as the No. 2 search engine. OK, one point for John Battelle.
Dear John, that’s not really much of a prediction. When you consider that Yahoo! has been on the downward slide for about two years now and that it’s been public knowledge for most of that time that Bing would be taking over their search functionality, well, that kinda spells it out for us, doesn’t it?
Of course, no one could predicted exactly when Bing would pass Yahoo!, but I think all of us with an eye on the search industry have seen it coming.
So what’s the big news? According to Nielsen, Bing now has 13.9% of search and Yahoo! has 13.1%. Google is still way ahead at 65.1%. But if you add the Bing and Yahoo! numbers, which I think we should all start doing now, then that spells 27% for the Bing-Yahoo! team. Ask and AOL are still way down the line.
In fact, AOL lost 1.1% of its share of search (to Bing) and I think we might just go ahead and expect AOL to bow out gracefully. It’s not really a search engine anyway. It’s an aggregator and always has been. But fewer and fewer people are using AOL and I think that will continue to be a trend. Who will pick up those users? Probably Bing.
What do you think? Will Bing ever be a true competitor with Google?
Tags: bing, google, search
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 12th, 2010
One of the benefits that Google has claimed for its new product Google Instant is that it will save you time on searches. But will it?
Let’s review what Google Instant is exactly. Google Instant is Google’s new algorithmic innovation that delivers results to you as you type them in, which means you no longer have to wait until after you’ve typed in your search results to see what they are.
There are some definite benefits to this search feature. No. 1 of those is that there is huge potential to save some time on searches. Google claims you’ll save a few seconds for each search. However, you could end up spending more time searching. Here’s how.
Let’s say you want to find an auto mechanic near where you live in Chicago, Illinois. You type in “Auto” and you see a drop down menu of results that includes “autotrader”, “autozone”, “auto zone” and “auto locator”. Not seeing anything close to what you are looking for, you decide to keep typing. You type in the letter “m” and see another menu; it’s changed. Back up, you need a space between the “o” and the “m”. There’s another menu, which starts with “auto meter”, “auto museum” and a few other results. At the bottom you see “auto mechanic” so you click it.
Of course, you get a list of search results showing you auto mechanics. But are they all local? Chances are you’ll see a 7-pack or 3-pack Google Maps result. Maybe some of those are close to you and maybe some are not. But you don’t see any auto mechanics that are close to your neighborhood in Chicago. Back to the search drawing board.
This time you type in “chi” after “auto mechanic” and you get a narrower list of results. Did you save time? Maybe.
But what if what you are searching for is a bit more complex than auto mechanics? If you keep clicking on potential results in your drop down box while typing in search queries there may actually be a loss of time. Is that good?
We can discuss whether you’ll save or lose time on your searches, but from a business perspective, will Google Instant deliver you more traffic? I think it could. But you may have to tweak your SEO a bit. What do you think? Will you see more traffic as a result of Google Instant?
Tags: google, search
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Google has always been an innovator. Of course, they’ve done their share of following too. But in the core business where Google makes its money, it is an innovator. Google Instant is the latest development by the search engine to maintain its leading edge and competitiveness over other search engines, particularly Bing.
So what is Google Instant? In a word, the search engine has changed its search feature to give you results as you type them in. The net savings, in time, to you is a few seconds for each search. But if you perform a lot of searches throughout the day then you’ll save a lot of seconds. Seems like such a small deal, but when you go to use Bing it will seem awfully slow.
Looking around the web, I’ve noticed a few other headlines about Google Instant. I think you’ll want to read some of these.
I think the important thing to think about here, from a marketing perspective, is how will this change search behavior? If it changes search behavior in any way, and we won’t know for at least a week how it will change, then search marketing behavior must change with it. I say give it a month before making any judgments either way.
Tags: google, Google Instant
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
|
|
|
|
| |
|
