SEARCH CLINIC

Google has updated it’s search engine results algorithms in response to timely search queries.The update is designed to work out whether a person wants up to date timely results or historical data.

The search engine estimated the alterations to its core algorithm would make a difference to about 35% of searches.

The changes try to make results more relevant and beef up features which Google believes set it apart from rivals.

By contrast, Microsoft’s Bing search engine emphasises their results from social search news.

“Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh,” wrote Google fellow Amit Singhal in a blogpost explaining the changes.

The changes sought to understand whether a searcher wants results “from the last week, day or even minute” said Mr Singhal.

The update is supposed to offer a better guess of how “fresh” the results should be.

For instance, said Mr Singhal, anyone searching for information about the “Occupy Oakland protests” would probably want up to the minute news.

These need to be distinguished from searches for regular events such as sports results or company reports.

Other types of searches could call on older results, he said. Those looking for a recipe to make tomato sauce for pasta quickly would be happy with a page that is a few months or years old.

The update to improve the “freshness” of results builds on the big update made to the underlying infrastructure of Google’s core indexing system in August 2010 known as Caffeine. That change made it easier for Google to keep its index up to date and to add new sources of information.

Writing on the Search Engine Land news site, analyst Danny Sullivan described the changes to google’s search engine results as “huge”. The last big update to the Google algorithm, known as Panda, affected only 12% of searches.

The update could have potential disadvantages, warned Mr Sullivan.

“Rewarding freshness potentially introduces huge decreases in relevancy, new avenues for spamming or getting “light” content in,” said Mr Sullivan.

The Google search engine algorithm changes are announced at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search

You’ve got a wonderful new website- so the world is going to be knocking your door down. Or so you hope.After the initial disappointment comes the realisation that it’s a big world out there.

If your website starts with the word “welcome” congratulations- there are over three billion other websites listed by Google making the same mistake.

Go on- ask yourself how often do you search for “welcome”?

To get online traffic depends on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO has a number of factors:

1. Technical (how well can it be crawled by the search engines)
2. On page (what’s on the page being crawled)
3. Off page (mainly building links)

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value and has greatly improved the quality of web search.

Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Of course Google does not just use links; they use over 200 indicators such as:

• domain name
• meta tags
• alt tags
• directory names
• filenames
• heading tags
• link popularity (how many links back to you there are)
• link text (anchor text indicating the subject of the link)
• page title
• Page Rank

PageRank™ is Google’s patented method to assign a numerical algorithm and weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

In short the whole basis of Google’s success- is that success of website pages breeds success.

If you think that buying links is the key to your future success- hold on!

To find the pitfalls of blindly building links, just have a quick look at Google’s own links building rules .

As the article on paid links makes clear: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRanking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”

So, what you need are good quality links and lots of them.

But what is meant by good quality links?

The seven most important factors for link quality are:

Contextual links. One way is obvious and contextual just means appearing within the natural flow of a page’s text. If the link is reciprocal, Google sometimes discounts some of the value of that link.

High authority websites. Getting one link from the Telelgraph or DMOZ is possible worth more than 10,000 links from your new site. Authority does not
just mean high PageRank- but a site that is also well established as one of the most important sites for a topic.

Relevant / related links. If you have loads of sites that are irrelevant / unrelated to your sites topic you will probably lose out. In natural linking by people, they tend to link to one another within the same topics and industry. Spammers- like addicts don’t care where they get their fix- or link.

Diversity of link sources. Having many links from another site is good but it’s probably better to have one link each from many sites. The former could be spam. The latter is harder to achieve.

Deep links. If you only have links pointing to your homepage and no deep links to other pages in your site then you will probably have less success than with a proportion of deep links.

Different anchor texts -the actual text of the link. For example “Dr Search is an online marketing professional” is something we might be able to place with small variations, but hundreds and thousand of individuals who may link to us will vary the text they use just because they will as they all think slightly differently.

Consistent links growth. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Acquiring 20,000 links on one day unless your marketing goes viral is very unlikely for the vast majority of sites, so any search engine will rightly be suspicious.

Google has defended recent changes to its search ranking algorithm that reduced the prominence of some popular websites.

One of the worst hit websites by the “Panda” update was Ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft-owned company that had been leading an EU competition case against Google.
Its web visibility fell by 94% according to analysis by Searchmetrics.

Google often changes the algorithms that determine the results that users sees when they search for something. Such updates are often done to weed out “content farms” – websites that copy material from other sites in order to get hits.

Where a keyword search may previously have returned their site on Google’s first page, afterwards it may be relegated to further down the rankings.

When the update, known as “Panda”, was rolled out on 11 April, Google published a blog post explaining that it was designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites-sites which are low-value add for users.”

Shopping and price comparison sites such as Ciao.co.uk sometimes suffer when Google algorithms change because they carry comments and reviews replicated elsewhere on the internet.

However, experts said that it was unusual to see a legitimate website hit as badly as Ciao.

Ciao.co.uk was involved in initiating an EU investigation into Google in November 2010. Its parent company, Microsoft claims that the Google has used its dominant position to limit rivals’ products.

Searchmetrics analysed Google results in response to a range of keywords, both before and after the Panda update.

Alongside Ciao’s 94% reduction in visibility, it found that hubpages.com fell by 85% and eHow.co.uk dropped 53%.

A Similar analysis by Sistrix found a 81% drop in visibility for Ciao.co.uk, 72% reduction for hubpages.com and an 84% fall for eHow.co.uk.

The Search Clinic has long been warning that pay per clicks- and Google’s AdWords in particular are not your magic online marketing channel, now new research proves my caution.

Online searching has become a nearly ubiquitous online activity and Google remains the undisputed king—receiving the largest share of search ad revenue and traffic.

But an eye-tracking study by user experience research firm User Centric adds a new perspective.

Its research indicates that most search users overlook search ads almost entirely.

The findings showed organic search results were viewed 100% of the time, and participants spent an average of 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at organic search results on Google and Bing, respectively.

However, only 28% of participants looked at right side ads on Google, and just 21% did the same on Bing—spending around 1 second viewing all ads combined on each search engine.

To put this in perspective, searchers who viewed the left hand site navigation spent more time doing so than they did viewing ads on both search engines.
Viewing Metrics for Search Results on Google and Bing, July-Aug 2010 (% of participants and time spent (seconds))

With users spending nearly all their time viewing organic search results, Hitwise’s latest numbers give some further insight.

Bing and Yahoo!’s success rates, meaning searches that resulted in a click, are just over 81% whereas Google sits much lower at 65.6% in December 2010 and January 2011.
Although the sheer volume of searches Google handles may bring down its success rate, the difference been Google and Bing is still large enough to draw conclusions.

First, users were shown to spend the vast majority of their time looking at organic search results on both search engines, and Bing’s success rate is 16 percentage points higher than Google’s.

Therefore, even though Google has more traffic than Bing, the Microsoft search engine generates a greater share of relevant traffic per search.

Additionally, this data indicates that SEO is more essential than ever. Users have learned to overlook search ads, and they will continue to ignore such ads as they become even more search-savvy over time.

SEO will become increasingly challenging as users start to rely on search engines for different reasons.

A recent study from Forrester Research found that internet users were 22 percentage points less likely in 2010 to rely on search engines to find websites than they were in 2004.

Although this doesn’t mean people are using search engines less to find information about product types or branded goods, it does mean that they are relying on search less to find websites specifically.
Perhaps this change is because internet users are becoming more knowledgeable and do not need to rely on search to find popular sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Also, they may be relying on social media more to find websites. No matter the reason, this data indicates that search users’ behavior is in constant flux.

As search users continue to change their behavior, marketers will need to adjust their SEO strategy to keep up.

This research was initially published on: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008270&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Google and Bing have recently confirmed that social media reactions are a ranking factor with both search engines.
It may be stating the bloomin’ obvious, but search engines- in the business of delivering quality search results, would not ignore these signals.

Are Twitter and Facebook just other sites that are/may be treated specially by search engines, the idea of a social graph as a current reality being a trendy spin on something has existed in some form for a while, or are they a completely new type of influence on organic results?

Before Twitter and Facebook, for a number of years the vast majority of social online discussion was carried out on various bulletin boards and forums. Google can identify discussion results of this type, and it seems plausible that links from such pages could be treated differently to the rest of the web.

The same could be true of links in blog comments. If Akismet can identify which comments are spam, would it not be conceivably possible for Google to do so too?

After learning of their reasonable surfer patent, granted earlier this year, we know that spiders can identify different areas of content on a page and process them by different standards.

Historically, we don’t know how Google has treated links from sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us, many of which were around before Twitter and Facebook.

They could be handled the same as any other website, but as social bookmarking became more and more significant in shaping the content people view and consider to be notable, does it not stand to reason that someone at Google would have considered factoring the role of these sites into ranking algorithms?

Social discussion online in itself is obviously not new. Usenet used to be a particularly social platform, distinguished from walled off forums by being decentralised and entirely public.

The same metrics used to grade the value of Tweets and Tweeters could be used in any other public arena of social discussion where links or their equivalent are shared.

There’s no reason search engines couldn’t already have been using methods like these to determine quality of article submissions and submitters on, say, Digg for a long time already, but unless a specific announcement was made the SEO community would be in the dark.

No SEO person outside of the search engines knows all the intimate details of Google’s ranking algorithms, either currently or historically.

I think many in web marketing mistake this information void as evidence that ranking algorithms are simpler than they likely are in reality, and see info like this as announcement of something that’s new.

Whatever the case, it won’t change the fact that producing unique, compelling content and marketing it well is the simplest strategy to attracting online traffic.

The European Commission has finally launched an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position.
The EC will examine whether the world’s largest search engine penalised competing services in its results.

The probe follows complaints by firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.

Google denies the allegations but said it would work with the Commission to “address any concerns”.

The objection is that Google manipulates its search results.

“The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search,” the ec said in a statement.

It said the action followed “complaints by search service providers about unfavourable treatment of their services in Google’s unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google’s own services.”

The European Commission’s competition watchdog has quite a track record with technology companies- Microsoft and Intel both received massive fines.

This case, though, will be a tricky one, because to determine the outcome the Commission will have to look closely at Google’s all-important search algorithm, the rules that determine whether your company shows up high or low in Google’s search results.

Google regularly changes this algorithm, and as it changes the ranking it can make or break companies when they re rank websites.

To pin down the US search giant, the Commission will have to find a smoking gun, either in the algorithm itself, or in Google’s e-mail trail.

The Commission’s investigation does not imply any wrongdoing by Google.

Google offers two types of search result – free results produced by the firm’s algorithms that are displayed in the main body of the page and pay per click “ads”- or called sponsored links.

The investigation will try to determine whether the firm’s method of generating free results adversely affects the ranking of other firms, specifically those providing competitive search services.

These are specialist search providers, and can include sites that offer price comparison, for example.

Dr Search points out that Google has never published it’s full free results ranking algorithms in full, so it will be very interesting if they ever become accidentally leaked during the investigation.

Google unveiled a new version of its search engine yesterday- Google Instant, which produces results before you have finished typing and offers suggestions for what you wanted to look for.
‘Streaming results’ will save two to five seconds on every 25-second query, says search executive Marissa Mayer – but SEO people may be less happy

Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search and user experience, said that until now, each search typically lasts 25 seconds – 9 seconds of typing, 1 second in which the query reaches Google, is processed and sent back, and 15 seconds during which the user considers which search result to click on.

But with Google Instant the average search will be shortened by two to five seconds per query – which, given the billions of people who use the service every week, would mean 11 hours of searching saved every second.

The service will also display a series of its best guesses as users type, and searchers can then scroll down to the most appropriate.

The service began being rolled out to users in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Russia on Wednesday evening.

However, like the playful logos shown off by the company over the past two days – on Tuesday a set of animated balls which evaded the cursor, and on Wednesday a grey logo which changed colour as you typed – the new system will only be available on modern browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Google’s own Chrome, and Apple’s Safari.

You will also have to be signed in to a Google account to get the results. Older browsers, and users who are not signed in, will not see the auto-completing results.

Mayer acknowledged that the idea that the search engine might know what you’re looking for before you finish asking it – in fact, which will begin offering results as soon as you type a letter – seems so bizarre that 10 years ago it was the subject of an April Fools’ Joke by a large company. The company in question? Google.

“In 2000 we thought the idea of being able to search before you typed was so weird we made it our April Fools joke,” Mayer, one of Google’s longest-standing employees, noted. “Just 10 years later we’re seeing that it’s actually possible.”

Users who begin typing will be able to get completed words from a single letter by hitting the tab key, or choosing from a list that will be presented as they type. The letter “w” begins a search which includes “weather” – one of the most common searches.

Mayer showed it off by typing “SFmoma wom” and was presented with a result for the painting “woman with a hat” at the museum – without hitting the return button. “The results are just streamed straight to you without you hitting the return key.”

She added: “We’re really excited about what Google Instant means for search – faster search, and providing results in real time before you’ve even had the opportunity to type your query.”

But the impact could be dramatic on another group who have previously relied heavily on Google’s old search results page. “Search engine optimisation” (SEO) experts have built a gigantic business from analysing what results appear for a particular set query, especially to Google.

However the new system, with its live updates of queries, means that it will be more difficult for SEO analysts to work out which results will do well from which query, because the results will keep changing as the user types. It will also be harder to examine the results mechanically.

Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt suggested in an interview in August that “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant.”

Optimisation Explained- seo Google requirements YouTube Video PT4 6mins 36 secsTopics covered in this video are  more information on current google optimisation requirements, the importance of text and headers and the fundamentals underlying the need for links popularity.

This is the fourth part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

The third part of Dr Search’s lecture focused on  Website Focus= Customer Focus

The content of the third video explains why brand names aren’t enough, Keyword phrases explained, Tips to find where your customers are, why optimisation is at heart of online marketing,
What’s Good for your customers=good for search engines=good for social media=>profits
Similarities between icebergs and websites and Google’s UK database current key optimisation requirements

Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s lecture at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Search Engine Optimisation SEO tips, tools, tutorials guide and techniques Part 2 YouTube VideosContinuing the series on online marketing today Dr Search publishes his second video on search engine optimisation (SEO) tips explaining organic listings and guiding the pros and cons of organic listing- a long term great value but seldom instant results process.

Second part of Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s lecture at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and plan the most cost effective tools for online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel.