Thu, 2 Jul 2009 09:11:53 by Matt Hopkins
Everyone has been eagerly awaiting the impact of Bing's first month of operations and the news seems positive for Microsoft.
Online research firm, StatCounter, has released its analysis based on the monitoring of more than 4 billion page hits across a network of websites.
They state that Bing grew to 8.23% of U.S. search market in June. This number is up from 7.81% for May and 7.21% in April. They also report that Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48% down from 78.72% percent before Bing (nothing to worry Google too much).
This is just the beginning as other research organisations such as comScore will be releasing their own reports on Bing over coming few weeks.
For me - I want Bing to be successful. Not because I am such a fan of Microsoft.. but the search market needs healthy competition. Google is far too dominant and that - in my opinion - is unhealthy. Has anyone actually considered the ...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:40:17 by Joe Bursell
Micheal Gray does appear to like a bit of controversy, and who can blame him, it gets him traffic and builds awareness- I’m doing it right now. He recently blogged about how you can invalidate a Wikipedia article in order to effect some shunting in the SERPs if they outrank your page for a target keyword.
If you find yourself competing with Wikipedia it can be the bane of your SEO life, I know. My point about the “how to invalidate Wikipedia articles” post is that it shows you how to play Wikipedia and devalue target articles.
Now, I’m struggling to work out why someone working to get rankings to increase business would give two-hoots about Wikipedia, so why invest so much time and effort fighting them? They might outrank one or two of my sites for useful keywords, but searchers looking with those keywords are simply not interested in Wikipedia, so it’s no competition.- and I’m not the only one.
...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:57:16 by Kerry Dye
Since the relaunch of their Webmaster Tools interface, there have been a few rumblings about it, and it seems that Google is listening as they have asked for product ideas for future improvements.
This is slightly unexpected, not because Google doesn’t listen, but because the new redesign is based on survey results from users.
In fact Pete has previously posted on what he would like to see in Webmaster Tools (some of which they have already added).
None of the current questions deal with the recent issue of slow XML sitemap submission, although they have already responded to this in part.
Most popular ideas at the moment are:
"In [Links to your site] I would like to see an additional summary view that just shows the domains that are linking to my website rather than individual pages. This will help me to easily see when word of my website has spread somewhere new."
"Send any violation (which page, which link, which line...Read More.
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Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:57:38 by Emily Mace
I mentioned in my blog yesterday that some sites in Google webmaster Tools are showing that their sitemaps are “Pending” and not showing any data. Well Google have posted to their help forum about this subject.
Google’s response is that this is normal and that the data will be updated once the sitemap has been downloaded again. They reassure us that this is nothing to be concerned about and that the information from the sitemap will be updated as soon as the sitemap has been downloaded again.
Google prioritise the downloading and crawling of sites in their Webmaster Tools so the longer your SEO campaign has been going, and the better reputation your site has with Google will speed up the downloading of your sitemap.
It may be, that as the new upgrade to Google Webmaster Tools has only just been released to more users that they have more sitemaps to download than normal. As Google try to make the Google Webmas...Read More.
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Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:40:59 by Emily Mace
Google announced on Thursday last week that they had made some changes to Sitemap.xml files and how they handle them. Google is now able to handle 50,000 child sitemaps, this offers you the ability to create a lot more sitemaps for your site if you need them.
As Google’s maximum sitemap size is 50,000 entries or 10mb file size. This means if your site is larger than this 50,000 pages it is necessary to have a sitemap index page which references each sitemap.xml file you have on your site. Previously you could have 1,000 of these sitemaps listed in the sitemap index page. With more sitemap references now allowed in the index file you can cover more of your site’s content from one sitemap index file.
A sitemap.xml file is a good way to monitor what is on your site and what Google can see from your website as well as letting Google know about new pages or updates to pages on your website.
An additional benefit from ...Read More.
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Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:46:10 by Kerry Dye
The last couple of days I've noticed that Google has been changing the way that it displays long URLs on the organic search engine results pages (SERP) on Google UK and .com.
So for a keyword that is in the end of the URL, instead of the beginning they are displaying:
www.domainname.com/.../your-keywords-are-here
instead of the full URL
www.domainname.com/some-directory/your-keywords-are-here
It is most visible for longer phrases, where there are more likely to be results with longer URLs. E.g. here is a search for [paris hotels champs elysees]
This result also shows up the fact that they don't always take out characters at the directory level as in the sofitel result where the actual URL is http://www.sofitel.com/gb/hotel-1184-sofitel-paris-champs-elysees/index.shtml. So Google have snipped the number and the repeat of sofitel out of the URL.
If you want to see what they previously did, compare this Flickr scree...Read More.
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Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:20:53 by Kerry Dye
Google has just announced that you can now use your Analytics Goals in Adwords.
Ostensibly, the reasoning as this opens up the Goals that you use in Analytics to analysis in Conversion Optimizer . My guess is that Conversion Optimizer is quite an underused tool and this is another way to plug it for Google. It is a great tool, and a lot of sites could do with the help it could give, but it is rarely used.
However, what is more interesting to me (partly because we’ve been talking about conversion tracking in Google Adwords recently in the office), is that this changes the onus from the code insertion type of conversion to a simpler page name based tracking. Page based tracking does have its pitfalls, particularly if your form submits to itself and doesn’t change URL, but it is a far more common form of tracking. It is used in both Google Analytics and our own Apollo Analytics that feeds into our search marketing system.
Last year, Google removed t...Read More.
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Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:36:28 by David Thomas
Many speculations and mutterings were heard toward the latter part of 2008 about the push into online marketing due to the oncoming recession, for many businesses from large blue chips to smaller SME's. The talk of recession set the jungle drums booming last year but 6 months in what have we seen?
Firstly yes! Spends across many platforms have risen in 2009 suggesting that many companies are in fact realising that older much more stayed platforms of reaching the global market are not proving to be cost effective anymore, or even utilising them in much smaller ways to compliment their online advertising efforts. A recent blog post of mine singles out the percentage drops in these previous platforms.
With this massive shift to online we ( PPC Agencies) have seen a vast number of newbies to the paid search field, which in some areas has a detrimental effect. Badly managed campaigns and lack of Pay Per Click Marketing know how has led to higher cost of clicks.
F...Read More.
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Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:31 by Emily Mace
In May Google announced a redesign to their Webmaster Tools, but when the first announcement was made the new interface was not available as the default for users visiting the tools, only as a “try the new look Google Webmaster Tools” link once you had signed in. The new Google Webmaster Tools now appear to be the default when logging in.
This is a useful development for webmaster as it provides a slightly easier interface for users, making it a little clearer what you can get out of using their tools.
When you select one of your websites from your list of sites within the tools you now see a “dashboard” type landing page with a summary of some of the information available, including the keywords which lead to impressions on your site and a summary of any crawl errors on the site.
The new design also allows you to see sitemaps which have been submitted by any other people who have access to your site, ...Read More.
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Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:20:12 by Matt Hopkins
It seems that many consumers don't understand what a web browser is... or know the difference between a browser and a search engine.
Take a look at this video compiled by a Google research intern who asked people on the streets of New York.
I believe that this is not atypical of the majority of consumer internet users. The search engine is the internet to many people and the reason why Google has become so powerful - and the reason why Search Engine Optimisation (or perhaps Browser Optimisation - BO) is an essential part ofeverybody's marketing strategy today. Search is ubiquitous.
This is also the reason upstarts like TweetDeck are trying to become the defacto interface (call it a browser, call it a search engine) for the real-time web including Twitter. They announced today the release of their version for the iPhone and it is already making a splash. They want ...Read More.
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