“Self censoring” – a new social media trend?
Filed under: Social Media — Tags: facebook security, Search Engines, social media, social media platforms, twitter — Marcelo Silva @ Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
What do social media and tattoos have in common? They’re both things you might live to regret!
At the end of 2009 the major search engines brokered deals with the larger social media players (i.e. Twitter), allowing them to index real time content and thus further embedding social information within search results.
Will consumers and businesses start trawling for information via the likes of Google and what will they come up with?
As we continue to live in the now, we tend to forget about the potential long term implications associated with Social Media. For example, a recent security flaw on Facebook highlighted that there is the potential to compromise private conversations.
Should consumer privacy concerns continue to mount; what are the implications to businesses? Will consumers tend to shy away from engaging with brands within Social Media platforms? How will consumer behaviour change? (more…)
New Match Type from Google
Filed under: Paid Search, Updates — Tags: cpc, google announcement, match types, modified broad match, Paid Search — Jacqui Tourle @ Friday, May 14th, 2010Google announced this week that they had released a new open beta in the UK and Canadian markets for ‘modified broad’ match. To me this is good news. The launch of expanded broad match almost two years ago brought some definite problems for well built conversion-focused campaigns. Yes, expanded broad match allows Google to capture terms you haven’t considered, but it also had some interesting matches. We had one example where a brand term in one of our accounts was matching to a very generic head term – blowing out the brand reporting & CPC, & more importantly having our ads show on something we definitely didn’t want to target.
We resolved that by lowering our max CPC significantly, running multiple match types and reviewing negatives, but it does need ongoing careful consideration.
Broad match is fantastic for:
- A new account launch where it enables you to capture terms you may not have considered in your research (as much as we’d all like our research to be all-encompassing, there will always be new ideas in search query reports)
- When running multiple match types to cast a ‘wider net’ on an ongoing basis, as long as search query reports are routinely checked, useful terms included in the account and irrelevant terms added as negatives
- People are typing in longer and longer search terms and it can be next to impossible to include every single combination in your account (more…)
MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Filed under: Algorithm Changes, Google, News, SEO, Search Engines, Updates — Tags: Google, google algorithm change — Outrider Team @ Friday, May 14th, 2010In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.
Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.
But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.
Forget keyword density, the real world is far more complicated…
Filed under: Updates — Ian Lavelle @ Friday, May 14th, 2010As my esteemed colleague Amye Saunders covers in her blog post Mayday, Mayday!, the search engines have been rolling out some changes that look to have affected webmasters across verticals. I had an idea for a blog post on the topic of “keyword density”, and thought this an opportune time to tie it back to some real-world events… (Disclaimer: this is just my theory, and thus by no means gospel!) 
Oftentimes clients will ask us about how many times they should use their keywords in their page copy, or “what is the optimal keyword density?” The answer is that there is no magic number, and the optimal keyword density changes for every search term, and I’ll explain why.
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The New Google Search UI and What It Means For You
Filed under: Google — David Boyd @ Wednesday, May 12th, 2010One week on after the launch of the new Google Search UI and reaction to the updated look and feel has been positive for the most part. Google has added a left panel to search result pages (SERP’s) to help searchers refine their search queries and find what they are looking for in a faster, easier way.
What’s New?
- There is a new panel on the left hand side to give quicker access to relevant search options and tools. The left panel is automatically open + fixed as opposed the show/hide options.
- The Google logo is bigger.
- The search field is 1.5 times longer.
- The search button now sits within the right end of the search field, whereas it used to be off to the right of the search field with a separating gap.
- Advanced search link is wrapped under the search button.
- No more horizontal blue bar between the search field and the results below it.
- Results data is now pulled up under the search field in a smaller text size.
- Results data now omits showing the results position. Showing us that by being on page 7 showed ‘Results 61 – 70′ was always helpful for manual ranking checks.
