I can’t lie to you, dear Outrider blog lovers, I was really excited to write the Halloween post. And then, *sigh*, I just couldn’t think of anything good. What to write about for Halloween in the search industry? Everybody writes about the top-searched costumes. It’s cool to see, and it’s always fun to look back and remember our pop culture icons. Angry Birds this year; Hulk Hogans, Kate Gosselins, and Snookies in our past. Yeah, they’re funny, but I don’t have anything new to say about them.

I started to think back to my childhood costumes. I’ll never forget the look on my 3^rd grade teacher’s face when I marched into the classroom in a black sweatshirt adorned with mini cereal boxes, all with a little plastic knife through them and red nail polish dripping down, as I proudly announced “My mommy made me a cereal killer!” I’m pretty sure that I had no idea what a serial killer was back then, but when my mother proposed that I eat lots of cereal to empty the boxes and that I got to wear a sweatshirt so I wouldn’t freeze in the annual Pumpkin Parade, I remember being stoked.

This has a point, I swear.

My Cereal Killer duds got me thinking about how we find out about new costumes, and specifically, how the Web makes it easier on us. Back when my mom made my costume, she didn’t Google it first. I’m not sure how exactly she came up with it, but let’s say that she’s just incredibly intelligent and creative (hi Mom, I love you! Related: muahaha Alex, I will TOTALLY be her favorite this week!).

So, how do we come up with costumes now?

I, for one, know that I’ve spent countless hours making sure to get the details right. This year, I’ve applied glitter glue to my short shorts in the shape of fireworks to perfect my Katy Perry. In the past, I’ve created Pendants of Life for Legends of the Hidden Temple, gotten the exact location of Serena Van Der Woodsen’s mole, and painstakingly created cardboard bumper stickers for an Indian rickshaw. Without easy and immediate access to huge libraries of images, I doubt I’d have done as good of a job on any of these.

While some argue that Halloween has just become a mess of sexy this-person-shouldn’t-be-sexy costumes, it’s also a huge outlet for creativity. You can read posts, watch how-to videos and see pictures to get inspired for an awesome costume all year round. E-commerce stores sell just about every costume you can think of if you don’t have the artistic touch to make one yourself. No matter what you want to dress as, you can find it on the web. Even generic searches like “best halloween costume” give you a huge variety of inspiration from army men to a dinosaur imprisoning a man to a video of the coolest Transformers car ever.

So get out there and search for an awesome costume! And don’t forget to gorge yourself on candy. J

Happy Halloween from Outrider!

With research claims under it’s belt as the most important social network platform, LinkedIn just keeps getting better. The more recent feature announced earlier this month includes being able to post company status updates directly from your LinkedIn Company Page. It was the next logical step after LinkedIn News, really. In fact, I’m quite surprised that it’s taken this long for LinkedIn to add this functionality.

Previously, the only way that a Company Page could be “updated” with fresh content was either via the company blog RSS feed or opting in to the news module. Neither very personal nor very engaging. According to LinkedIn, status updates from Company Pages now lets brands engage with their followers on a deeper level within the professional yet social environment that they trust. Similar to your professional profile, status updates look something like this on a Company Page:

The advantage of a status update as opposed to a blog RSS feed is that professionals who follow a Company Page can ‘like’, comment or share the update with their own professional networks, as seen above. This will also subsequently appear as network updates on follower homepages:

I was just testing the waters with that update. But how can businesses start using this feature to its full potential?

Not just another Facebook Page

Sharing, commenting, and ‘liking’ status updates… this sounds exactly like Facebook! While LinkedIn Company Pages may have engagement qualities similar to that of FB Pages, don’t treat it like one. Your LinkedIn followers have different expectations from your brand compared to your Facebook fans. You can afford to be a bit cheeky and laid back on Facebook if it fits within the character of your brand. But on LinkedIn, I believe it’s important to maintain a level of professionalism to establish your business as a company that people can trust and work with, especially if you are B2B.

Getting Buzz through LinkedIn News

I think the real potential with Company status updates lies in the possibility of your update surfacing as a featured headline in your vertical on LinkedIn News to generate buzz. Hence creating valuable, timely content for your followers is essential.

In hindsight, I suspect the amount of time taken to launch this feature was purely intentional by LinkedIn. They probably don’t want companies randomly spamming their followers with any old random update. They want to keep the level of quality and trust that professionals all over the world have come to recognise in LinkedIn.

Looking forward, it will also be interesting to see how search engines take this into account alongside other social signals. Here’s a quick video on how to update your status:

Did you like this post? Follow the Outrider Australia page on LinkedIn for more updates like this!

Here at the Outrider blog, we’ve written a lot about mobiles and what they mean to the search industry.

Think about it – how much time you spend on your mobile every day? See, they deserve to be written about! So I’ll keep with the trend, and talk to you about what Google hopes to be the next big thing in mobiles: the Google Wallet.

Google Wallet allows you to use your phone to pay for things and will do other stuff too, you just need to wait awhile! This has gone live in the United States on Monday (currently just for CitiBank MasterCards and Google pre-paid credit cards), so let’s have a chat about what it means.

I remember my dad’s thoughts on his first mobile:

“This is going to be bad, Liz. Now my boss can find me ANYWHERE.”

My father was worried that if his boss could talk to him from anywhere and at any time, he’d have to work from everywhere and all the time. Has this happened? Well, probably. My dad’s not hard to spot; he’s the one with the afro, typing away on his BlackBerry.

Now, not only will your phone be a way for your boss to always find you, (and for you to spend hours finding out that your entire high school has decided to marry each other, and for you to meticulously slice through fruit with the rapid speed of a ninja, and for you to inform the world of just how delicious your lunch was, and, ok, you get the point), but also to pay for things! Actual real things from real stores.

How Google Wallet works

Instead of using a credit card, Google uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to allow you to just tap your phone and the Google Wallet application will connect with your credit card and pay for whatever you want. They say that instead of a big bulky wallets (you can check out some videos showing how Americans have super-sized their wallets even more than they have their french fries, apparently), you can just carry around your slim and attractive mobile phone, which you were going to have with you anyway (Louis Vuitton and Salvatore Ferragamo are shaking in their ridiculously expensive boots, I’m sure.) Google even goes so far to say that Google Wallet is more secure than a physical wallet because it’s protected by a pin number while I can just take your physical wallet from you and have all your cards.

So, Will People Use It?

From the keyboard of my father (who owns just about every credit card I can think of):

“Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t think I will be using it. People are hacking smartphones more and more (think naked celebrity pics); this would be another reason to hack.  I get the ecological thing, no plastic, but we are not secure enough yet.  I’ll wait a few years until they work out the kinks.”

ScarJo couldn’t protect her saucy shots from being leaked – can she protect her millions?

How Google Wallet Will Evolve

The current state of Wallet is pretty lame (limited availability, no real benefits). However, it is in Beta (and we all  know how Google just loves betas!) and the possibilities for the future are pretty cool. Having just one credit card on your phone is one thing, but having all of your cards, loyalty cards, train and bus tickets, coupons, and more in one place would be really great. Ever gone to a store and bought something only to come home and realize that you could have saved $20 if you only remembered the coupon that’s been sitting on your coffee table for the past two weeks? With Google Wallet, you can have all of your coupons with you all the time, and just show them to a merchant at the time of purchase. If you’re buying using your Google Wallet, it will even remind you that you have a coupon before you pay.

Something that will save me money? It’s sounding better already!

You can read a Mashable review of how it works, and we’ll let you know when it rolls out Down Under.

Happy shopping!

The recent research commissioned by Outrider Australia into online consumer purchase behaviour has delivered some very powerful insights into how Australian’s are researching and buying products online. As many of you know, some of the findings were presented at last weeks AIMIA sponsored event, Online Retail: Brand Engagement in a Multi-Channel Environment.

One of the key insights which has been doing the rounds in the media for the past week has been that brand and shop terms have overtaken generic terms when people begin researching to buy products online.

49% of people were also more likely to click on a brand they trusted compared to 29% of people clicking on a link relevant to their search. This is a significant change when compared to the 40% of people choosing relevancy over brand (39%) in 2009 (See below).

Q: Why did you click on the search links you picked? (Check all that apply)

The findings raise some interesting factors for marketers to consider when designing their search strategies.

1. With brand search continuing to increase, the first is brand protection. Google allows advertisers to submit their trademark to them for consideration, to prevent other brands from advertising under it. This is fairly critical, otherwise you leave yourself open to competition advertising under your brand and leveraging your investment into other marketing channels to generate brand related search traffic.

2. With the ‘pool’ of generic searches becoming a smaller percentage of overall searches, add to this more brands and businesses advertising online than ever before, it is absolutely critical that you have a multi-pronged approach. The smartest brands are now using search at the core of their digital marketing strategies and leveraging an integrated approach across search, display, EDM and Social Media to maximise cost efficiencies for brand awareness exercises and not be at the mercy of rising paid search and affiliate marketing click costs.

3. From a brand exposure perspective, search is still very cost effective, and for smaller brands that may not have the marketing budgets of the bigger players, search is still an extremely important channel. But in saying that, it is getting harder to get the results you may have achieved with the same budget a couple of years ago, especially with more of the major traditional bricks and mortar retailers waking up this year and investing in e-commerce and online marketing. This means you need to be more vigilant in addressing other aspects in the consumer purchase journey. Elements like site design, website user experience and targeting are now more important than ever.

Outrider is happy to provide further insights into the research and work with you to practically implement some of the key findings into your current digital marketing campaigns. We welcome you to contact our Commercial Manager, Victor Navarro on (02) 8968 4068 or victor.navarro@outrider.com with any questions or to arrange an appointment.

What is gTLDs (Dot Anything)?

Worldwide Internet revolution is to be announced in June 2011, where web addresses will expand beyond dot com. Generic Top-Level Domains (dot anything) can be acquired for a price of $US185,000. Governments, businesses and entrepreneurs are expected to race to apply for popular Top-Level Domain names in a 60-day application window that will come after the official announcement. The first Top Level Domain names will likely be active mid next year.

The Implications for SEO

While experts predict there will be less confusion and dependencies on search engines like Google, that’s not necessarily the case. They argue, rather than doing searches on Google for something like “restaurants in London”, it is much simpler to browse “restaurants.London”. However, how would users know if such an address / directory exists? They would have to do a normal search in the first place.

For illustration, it is safe to say that most people know the exact web address of Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo. But they still search to find these sites anyway, even by typing the complete address on search engines.

Top Search Terms

Moreover, listings like “restaurants.London” would be very similar to existing web directories, and not much different than for example Yahoo! and dmoz. The organisation who runs the gTLD could also charge the advertisers some fees to be listed.

Search engines have not given any comments yet regarding this development. Therefore it is too early to conclude the implications for SEO and rank algorithms. But some questions that can be addressed are:

• Would we trust a site more if it has a gTLD?
• Would the click-through rates increase by having a gTLD?

If the answers are yes, then presumably search engines will think the same, and will update their rank algorithms to benefit these gTLDs.

We should also anticipate how it may affect the impact of keywords in domain name / TLD, and geo-targeting ability. For example these URLs:

Domain or TLD?

• Which would be weighted more by search engines, the domain name or TLD?
• In this case, which one is better; restaurants.sydney or sydney.restaurants?
• Would we be able to control geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tools for our gTLDs?

Conclusion

Having said the points above, it is quite a big change in the Internet addressing system. Would it be beneficial to buy a gTLD? We would say yes, but merely as a defensive measurement against competitors and investors willing to spend more to buy our brand gTLDs. Will our gTLDs rank better than our usual dot com website? It is still too early to tell. Another question to be asked is: Would we invest US$185,000 to buy a gTLD, or spend it on an SEO / SEM campaign where the ROI is more measurable?

Those that haven’t signed up for Google Analytics in the last year may not have noticed that Google have updated their Google Analytics tracking code! The migration to the asynchronous (async) tracking code is probably the most significant change to the data collection mechanism of the analytics product since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 – for the first time allowing users to place the tracking code anywhere on the page without interfering with page load times.

The benefits of the new tracking code include: -

1.       Faster page load times,

2.       Increased accuracy in tracking of visitors,

3.       Less page interruptions,

4.       IMPROVED SEM AND SEO RESULTS!

Should you upgrade to the new tracking code?

Read on to find out the benefits to you (The Good), why you might not want to upgrade (The Bad) and instructions on how to upgrade tracking code (The Ugly – for those that don’t code).

The Good:  Benefits of the Async Tracking Code

Improved SEM and SEO Results: For us at Outrider, Australia’s largest search engine marketing and optimisation agency, we think the best part of implementing the new tracking code is the improved page load times and the effects of this on SEO and SEM. Google is no stranger to enhancing online user experience and has publicly stated that they use site speed in determining Google organic search engine rankings, as well as using page load times to determine quality score for ranking of Google sponsored links. By implementing the new tracking code, you’re improving your SEM and SEO and you’re opening up the opportunity of increased ROI through lower CPCs and increased rankings in your paid and organic listings!

Optimised User Experience: Compared to the traditional ga.js tracking code which stops all other activity while it’s loading, the new Async tracking code improves page load time by using code that is able to load in the background while your page content loads. Page load time tests by Position 2 show that the Async code does provide faster load time of websites compared to the traditional ga.js tracking code. By having a website that loads fast without any errors, your visitors are more likely to be in a good mood and ready to convert.

Better Tracking Accuracy: The new Async tracking code increases accuracy of reporting by tracking website visitors as soon as they visit the webpage compared to the traditional code which tracks visitors after the whole page content has loaded. Google recommends that the new async tracking code be placed at the top of the page in the <head> section of the source code, which allows for tracking of visitors that may exit or click a link before the whole page loads. After installing the new tracking code, your bounce rates may rise but at least you will know your true weakest pages and maybe even identify several that don’t work!

The Bad: Why not upgrade to Async Tracking Code?

Flash websites: If your website is mainly flash, it’s likely that you’re using the Adobe Flash component approach to track your site and simply inserting the new code in the <head> will not work.

The Ugly: The Tracking Code

Place the following Async Tracking Code at the bottom of your <head> section on every page of your website and get rid of the old ga.js tracking code.

Customised tracking tags:  Custom tracking tags such as virtual pageviews, e-commerce, and cross-domain tracking will require basic recoding. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t upgrade just because you have custom tracking tags.  However, be warned that tags will require updating for features to be retained.

Note on Site speed: The new Async tracking code doesn’t automatically track page load times, however to activate this feature you need to modify your traditional code anyway. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and update your tracking code as well as insert the Site Speed code to your website. Read Outrider’s blog article on Google Analytics Site Speed Feature.

These days, I’m sure if you ran into somebody from Google they would do their best to make you believe that mobile is the next big thing to happen in the world of online marketing. And there definitely is a strong reason why you should start to take note.

The number of mobile Internet users is growing at an incredible rate. Consumers are increasingly reliant on their mobile devices for information while they are on the go, be it on a train or bus, reading news articles, checking sports scores, or searching for nearby restaurants or movies.

According to research data released by Google, mobile internet usage and engagement is exploding in terms of growth:

• More people will access the internet using a mobile device than via a PC by 2013
• 9 out of 10 Australians have mobiles (43% have smartphones)
• 63% of Australians connections are 3G (Globally only 20%)

Growth in Mobile Usage

Small Screen – Big Opportunity: Google’s mantra

This all translates into a huge opportunity for advertisers to connect with their customers anytime, anywhere. With Google mobile ads, you can engage with the fast-growing mobile audience while they search and browse content on their mobile devices. And you can do so throughout the whole day, as consumers have their mobile devices close by at any given moment or location.

You have the flexibility of choosing from text, display, and even rich media ads. Simply place your ads across mobile search pages, mobile websites via the Google Display Network (GDN), mobile applications or YouTube mobile.

Display / Banner Advertising on Mobile – Looking Beyond Mobile Search

You must be thinking that we haven’t yet fully explored the mobile market for Search, so why should be talk about Display advertising on mobile?

I have a strong belief that Search & Display go hand-in-hand on any device, with mobile devices being no exception.

As highlighted in my previous blog post, there is a high level of synergy between these two approaches and Display does have a positive impact on overall Search metrics.

We can definitely extrapolate this theory to mobile devices as well. In fact, Display advertising on mobile is a great way for advertisers to engage smartphone users with compelling and interactive experiences. This is particularly useful for online retail / e-commerce business, where it’s vital to give customers immediate ways to shop – especially for last-minute purchases.

Another thing that works in favour of mobile advertising is the fact there are fewer advertisers, i.e. ‘early adopters’, using mobile platforms, which means less competition, leading to lower CPCs.

Putting this into practice

One of Outrider’s clients (an online retailer selling magazine subscriptions) concluded that a well-timed Display campaign, targeting mobiles, can deliver positive results and significantly improve the overall efficiency of Display activity.

For this online retailer we decided to experiment by running a test display campaign targeting high-end mobile devices, using the Google Display Network and another, targeting desktop devices.

The test ran in the final days (May 3 – May 8, 2011) in the run up to Mother’s Day.  (A big gifting opportunity for this advertiser each year).

Below are the top line highlights for the 2 display campaigns for the above time period*;

• Mobile display impressions formed  21% of the total impression volume across both sets of display activity
• Clicks from the mobile targeted campaign were an impressive 7% greater than the total from the Desktop campaign
• Click-through rate (CTR%) for the mobile targeted campaign was 0.29% compared to 0.07% for the desktop targeted campaign
• Average Cost-per-click (CPC) for the Mobile display campaign were 50% lower than that of the Desktop campaign

Google have recently released a new reporting function within Google Analytics  to measure ‘Site Speed’.  The report has been developed to measure page load time and I have to admit, it is insightful.

The report sits within the Content section of Analytics reports:

• Avg Page Load Time—The average amount of time (in seconds) it takes that page to load, from initiation of the pageview (e.g. click on a page link) to load completion in the browser.
• Pageviews—The actual number of times the page was viewed for the selected date range.
• Page Load Sample—The actual number of pageviews that were sampled to calculate the average page load time.
• Bounce Rate—As for Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the only one viewed for the session.
• % Exit—As for the Pages report, the percentage of views to this page in which this page was the last page in the session.

How does it work?

Although there are other products in the market that provide similar reporting, they only measure part of the picture.  With Google’s Site Speed report you can measure page load times from the time the page was actually requested, until all the elements of the page have finished loading.  

How does this compare with traditional methods?

Traditional methods: Document loaded, start tracking time, all objects loaded, stop tracking time

Google’s method: Page requested, start tracking time, document loaded, all objects loaded, stop tracking time

Site Speed Tracking set-up

In order to activate the site speed report and start the data collection process, you need to make a small adjustment to your current Analytics code.

Simply insert the additional tracking code snippet shown below to your existing Google Analytics code on your website, and away you go.

_trackPageLoadTime();

Sample Google Analytics snippet:

 <script>
 var _gaq = _gaq || [];
 _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
 _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
 _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

 (function() {
   var ga = document.createElement(’script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
   ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
   var s = document.getElementsByTagName(’script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
 })();
</script>

It is worth noting that before you enable Site Speed reporting for your website (by the addition of the additional code snippet) both ‘Page Load Time’ & ‘Page Load Sample’ will show zero values in the Site Speed report.  You may need to wait until at least several hundred pageviews have been accrued to view a small portion of data in your report.

Data should start to appear within the report a few hours after publishing changes to the code snippet.  (Just select the current day, from within the date range selector and if you see data, you know set-up has been completed correctly).

How can Site Speed data be used?

The report is most useful for measuring the latency (delay) on your critical pages.  Poor performance could be caused by browser type selection or poor internet connection speeds in a given geographical area.  The additional insight will allow for a more targeted approach to tackle overall site performance.

For example:

• For those areas with poor internet connection speeds, trial rendering alternative landing pages,  better- suited to the reduced speeds

Good News for Advertisers and Clients!

Sub-optimal landing page load times, in a given geographical area or when using a particular browser, lead to a poor user experience.  In turn, this may lead to negative sentiment towards a brand or a potential loss of conversions.

By reviewing data provided within the Site Speed Report, small changes to landing pages could provide the win-win situation that we all strive to achieve.  What do you think?

The past couple of weeks leading up to ad:tech Sydney have been all about planning and preparing for the exhibition and the conference sessions. And like any other exciting event, the two days arrived in style and we were there amongst our fellow industry players, on the 9th and 10th of March. Positioned right next to Google, we represented Outrider with a stunning exhibition stand that highlighted the meaning of our business: “experience relevance” – and what better way to do this than a beach theme! The inspiration of the wave of course came from our slogan – “Make your way to the top”

Oh and the Harley Davidson was a nice touch to let attendees go into the draw to win a 2 people ride around the coast… just wanted to congratulate the winner again, Danielle Wilmot!

So the two days were filled with mingling with attendees and exhibitors, which gave the team the chance to be part of the excitement!

For more of our funky pics of our team and the exhibition, check out the photos on the Outrider Australia Facebook page.

Google Places & Local Search

I also wanted to cover off the topics which I discussed on the second day of the conference. The first was the Impact of Local Search and Google Places. This presentation was held amongst the exhibitors and in the beginning, I didn’t think I’d have an audience except for a few friends, but at the end I was glad to have a variety of people who attended the session… so for those who came along, a big Thank You! Here are some of the key takeaways of this session:

• Google Places is not just about getting yourself on the map, but it’s about letting people to know what your business can offer consumers in their location.
• Local search has been around for sometime (Google introduced Local back in 2004), but really the whole thing spiralled into one of today’s buzz words because of maps going mobile, and the current enhancement to localised search in the SERPs.
• 17% of Google SERPs show Google Maps – hence there is opportunity to take advantage of this unique position where your location can drive you brand awareness and traffic.
• It’s not just about adding your business location to Google Places… it’s about optimising your listings to include custom details such as open times, photos, videos, description and of course adding the social aspect of getting customer reviews. All of these additional attributes can help improve the visibility of your maps listings in the SERPs.
• For businesses that have multiple store locations, use bulk uploads to alleviate the stress of adding one location at a time; but still make sure you optimise the additional custom tabs so you can take advantage of localised search results.

These are only a few tips that will help you get started with your local SEO strategy, but here’s the whole presentation:

Mobile Location Marketing

On a similar note, I also presented at one of the last conference sessions of the day, amongst a panel of 3 mobile development experts, on the topic of – What are the Real Opportunities of Mobile Location Marketing? As the first speaker, my presentation was primarily focused on defining the concept of location-based marketing and how this benefits users/businesses in the mobile space. Some of the key takeaways from this session include:

• To keep it simple, mobile location marketing is the promotion of goods/services via a wireless mobile device. The info that’s provided through this device is usually specific to a location and is personalized to what the user wants at a specific time.
• The evolution of location-based marketing has only been around for a few years and yet it has taken off in countries such as US and Japan due to the high usage of mobile phones. Foursqaure being one of the main catalysts to this form of marketing.
• Who does this benefit? …well from a user’s point of view, apps and location-based websites allows people the opportunity to find information or incentives quickly when and where they want it.
• Businesses of course can take advantage of this demand (43% of Australian’s use smartphones) to get in front of their consumers when they need their information and build customer loyalty.
• 1/3 of searches on mobile are with local intent, so how does your business get found on mobile:

• Check-ins – most common ones in Australia are Facebook Places and Foursqaure (although the question was asked if Foursqaure would live on? Thoughts?)
• Google Places – using things like Hotpot to give mobile users directions to your store but also coupons for taking the effort to find it.
• Search Engines – using “open times” and other custom attributes to give away enough information for consumers to find your business.

Check out my part of the presentation:

That’s all the info for today, but if there are any questions about either presentations or ad:tech, contact us.

Word emanating from the US over the past few days is that Google have made a change to their organic ranking algorithm, which they claim will positively affect 12% of all searches (don’t they always?!). The official Google blog announcement states the change is designed to improve relevancy in their results and “reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. While the general online population should (and do) welcome this change, as always when Google makes major algorithmic tweaks, several sites/webmasters are claiming unjust punishments.

Informed commentary believes that the change is aimed at what we know as scraper sites and content farms (despite no official confirmation from Google). “Sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful” will likely see previously strong rankings drop significantly. Many of these sites hold what some see as artificially inflated rankings attributable to things like link schemes (JCPenney, anyone?), and usually don’t offer much of substance to a web surfer. Google’s ongoing mission is to provide people with useful information relevant to their query and eliminate spam from their results.

In one of the first blog posts on the topic from SearchEngineLand, the ever nimble Danny Sullivan coined the term ‘farmer update’. Some of the more interesting comments over there include:

TeacherPaul: “Many high quality sites got hurt deeply by this change. We’re not talking about content farmers or even extremely small gardens. Good people, great content, using honest methods…. a 40% drop in Google referrals on average”

Feedthehabit: “My original content at FeedTheHabit.com gets copied, re-copied and posted all over the Web the second I click publish. I saw a 25% drop in traffic from Wed to Thurs…”

Miker d: “After 10 years of creating content to help others, it looks like our traffic took a 30-40% dip from Google starting Feb 24th”

TheTopTens: “Despite the fact that the site provides a genuinely positive user experience based on user behavior and conversion rates, US traffic after the update is down approximately 50% with high traffic keywords being the hardest hit.”

Dan Coxon: “All of my articles are original, in-depth, and written by myself. But the traffic seems to have dropped dramatically overnight, sometimes by as much as 60%”

(The above comments need to be taken with a pinch of salt – despite the consistency with traffic dips, the bigger picture needs to be examined here such as the link profile etc. of the sites in question)

We move into a slightly grey area when we try to define a content farm. Is it fair to say that article sites could be considered content farms? While not all content these sites publish is necessarily high-quality, some of it can be very useful and topically relevant for searchers – how would distinction be drawn between high-quality original and low-quality republished content on the same site?  Can an algorithm categorically grade content high/low quality?

Going back to scraping & copying content, Google could look at the original date each webpage was found & indexed, but what happens if your content is scraped, published and indexed before the bots revisit or visit your site? Also, the ‘last modified’ header in itself cannot be used as the sole determinant, since the original page may just have been slightly updated, moving it’s ‘last modified’ date further in time than the scraped content. The official line from Matt Cutts is that “we look at various signals to determine which page is the original one, which usually works very well”, but in reality they cannot always get it right. One would imagine that identifying and flagging these issues becomes somewhat of a manual process in cases where it’s not clear cut. I would also suspect other factors like domain authority/link reputation/topic clustering come into play.

For now it looks as if we’ll have to sit tight and keep an eye on how this one plays out – just like every update. Fortunately for those of us in Australia, it has been mentioned the change currently only affects US traffic, so we’ll have a bit more time to absorb the effects stateside leaving us in a better position when the tweak goes global.

As always, more than keen to hear others thoughts/experiences!