A short time ago Google officially launched a change to their algorithm targeting websites that are cluttered with paid advertisements above the fold. According to Inside Search the Google update “looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”
Sites that have little quality content above the fold will be most affected by the change.

A bad user experience results from visiting a website and being presented with poor quality content, excessive advertisements making site navigation confusing and difficult, or requiring the user to scroll down the page in order to read the website content. This is something Google is trying to punish by introducing this algorithmic update. Moving forward these types of sites might not rank as highly.

The algorithm change does not affect sites that place ads above the fold to a normal degree. The change will affect sites where there is a small amount of visible content above the fold and/or relevant content is pushed down by ads.

Google asserts that websites that implement ads to a normal degree will not be affected by the change, with only around 1% of all searches impacted. But how do you determine a ‘normal degree’?

Google recommends using the Browser Size tool, along with other chrome based tools that demonstrate just how much on screen real estate is being occupied by advertisements.

Impact on SEO

On paper the new algorithm change could be viewed as a good thing, with less ads meaning more relevant quality content, right? But this raises a question about whether or not Ads can be considered irrelevant content.

What about Google themselves? A large proportion of Paid Search ads appear above the fold before the user has to scroll down to reach the natural listings. Using their own logic the Ads would appear further down SERP results.

Danny Sullivan has touched on whether Google’s own search results are top heavy in an interesting and informative blog post on Search Engine Land.

On the above image the yellow box washed out and blends into the white of the natural listings. Is this deceptive or misleading?

The response from Google regarding the algorithm change was that “this is a site-based algorithm that looks at all pages across an entire site in aggregate. Although it is possible to find a few searches on Google that trigger many ads, it is vastly more common to have no ads or few ads on a page.

This algorithm change is designed to demote sites that make it difficult for a user to get to the content and offer a bad user experience. Having an ad above the fold does not imply that you are affected by this change. It is excessive behavior that Google are working to avoid for users.”

Danny asked the question how Google knows what an ad is.

“Google have a variety of signals that algorithmically determine what type of ad or content appears above the fold. It is completely algorithmic in its detection. Google do not use a hard coded list of ad providers.”

Conclusion

This change is one of over 500 Google expect to roll out to search this year. From an SEO perspective the update is another facet in the equation which must be considered.

It is probably too early to consider completely revamping your paid advertisement strategy, but it is worth keeping it in the back of your mind and using common sense. Continuing to deliver relevant content and the best possible user experience is always the best practice recommendation for web users.

Content will always be king, long live the king.

It is one of Google’s most dramatic search updates; integrating personal/social search and website content all in its patented search algorithm. Introducing Search Plus Your World!

Rather than going through the list of its features (which you can find out by searching here) and discussing Google’s latest antitrust law breaches, let’s dive into the bigger scheme of Google’s intent with Search Plus Your World and its implications for SEO.

Who Knew Swimming with Sharks in Australia would be so awesome?

I’m sure a lot of people these days know that there are awesome things to do , if you search hard enough for it. Care to swim with the sharks in Australian waters?

However, it is more than likely people would only try something new & awesome (like swimming with sharks) through trusted recommendations from personal connections via word of mouth, rather than simply reading it online. Here’s how Search Plus Your World actually comes into the picture.

The Lead up to Search Plus Your World

Search Plus Your World is the missing piece of the social media puzzle that has brought together Google’s attempt in delivering a rich and useful “Google” content experience to search engine users, positioned for businesses. This is through organising content by named entities i.e. people, places in search results, rather than content only provided by website owners.

The past few years have also seen many product inclusions in Google’s SERP’s (with many failures) which have brought them to this point, including:

• Google Social Search.
• Google Rich Snippets.
• Google Buzz.
• Google Plus One Button.
• Google +.
• The Google Bar UI Change.

However to provide a clear distinction between personalised/social search & web content, other changes were required to “clean up” its SERP landscape.

• Google Panda Updates – lowering search engine rankings for websites with low-quality content.
• The introduction of schema.org – rich mark-up to provide more structured data to search engines.
• Expanded Site links – Most often for brand queries to provide even more relevant results for users
• Improving search filters for other Google verticals, particularly image & social results.
• Implementation of the authorship tag – To associate content with named entities.
• Query Encryption (SSL) on Google.com – To protect personalised search query data.
• A toggle to distinguish between personalised/social search and website results – Search Plus Your World (as below)

Search Plus Your World for SEO Impact

Basically, the use of Search Plus Your World will allow search users to find content based on:

• Google+ content from your circles.
• Related people and pages from Google+.
• Photos from you and your friends.
• Profiles in search.

So what does this change mean for businesses depending on Google for their website traffic?

All users signed in to their Google account will see the personalised results as the default. At the moment there are observations from SEO professionals i.e. John Doherty suggesting Google is hiding local listings for personalised results. Danny Sullivan also demonstrates no Adwords results, as they are currently being replaced by Google+ brand pages.

Raven Tools co founder & CPO Jon Henshaw provides a great summary of its impact.

“In theory, it will provide more relevant search results that have been pre-screened by trusted connections.
1. Your participation and GPA in G+ will influence some of the search results for other people.
2. Your participation will not affect the search results for the majority of people doing searches outside your network, with your GPA being the possible exception, assuming it has some impact on the algorithm.”

Overall, for the time being, the quality of personalised results has not made any significant contributions to Search Plus Your World. This is due to the lack of engagement by Google+ users and the adoption rate of the Google Authorship tag.

Search Plus Your World for SEO Recommendations

It is clear that Google+ reinforces Search Plus Your World. Since other social media channels i.e. Twitter and Facebook aren’t integrated in Google, this places an ever greater emphasis of playing by Google’s rules.

Here a few tips for businesses to get ahead of the game:

1. Treat your Google+ profile like a website – ensure it includes all relevant yet optimised information about you. Include links on your profile back to your website.
2. Create a Google + Brand page and become an active member to become influential in other users circles.
3. Include targeted keywords in all Google+ posts to increase the likelihood of it being found in search.
4. Treat +1’s like quality backlinks. Only link to content that is worth sharing with your personal connections. SEO managers should focus on gaining high quality links for a website, as this will influence the authority of a Google+ page.
5. If blogging is a part of your SEO strategy, it is important to implement the authorship tag by linking it to your Google+ profile. This will help your profile gain more authority on Google.

Final Thoughts on Search Plus Your World

Even though Google is trying to make this a central part of what they do, it is my opinion that they have brought this latest update too soon. Like other newly introduced products, i.e. Google Places, Google should have introduced it on the right hand side of the SERP’s. Over time and with more user feedback, it could have then placed it “in” the search results.

Group M have also commented on the development of Google Search Plus Your World in a recent press release.

Let us know your thoughts!

Time to Search + Your World in Google.

It was a great experience getting to speak with Amanda Connors from Priceline at Online Retailer on the 27^th of Sept. The topic we discussed was our journey last year building the new Priceline website; and how SEO helped build the key foundations to their overall online success.

Here are some of the tips that were mentioned about developing a website with SEO in mind:

• Understand your online users and how / what they search
• How do these search terms integrate as part of the content strategy?
• Alleviate technical roadblocks during the development to save production costs for your website
• Identify the SEO requirements and integrate this with the CMS build
• Consider search accessibility at the wireframe phase
• Repurpose existing digital assets such as videos, images, PDFs – the eMags for Priceline are a good example of this
• Most importantly, think about migration, migration, migration!

Layering the SEO foundation is like icing a multi-tiered cake! The key elements include:

What did this all mean to Priceline?

Amanda was kind enough to take us through Priceline’s success in creating a website which acts as their hub to all other multi-channels.

The highlights include:

• Building pages and content that caters to their target audience groups has helped segment the website. It provides these women with what they would look for in a Priceline store, in the online space:  Inner Girl, Savvy Woman, Spiritual Woman, and Contemporary Woman.
• Increase website exposure through all channels to gain: 350,000 page views, which included a 18% growth in organic traffic!
• Living the success of better brand visibility through organic results
• The organic conversions grew by 35%
• Priceline now have over 3.1 million members

The innovation doesn’t stop here for Priceline… the team at Priceline are evolving their website to include an eCommerce system where the Priceline store can be accessed anywhere online! As part of this expansion, SEO is yet again a key element that Priceline are embracing to maximize the exposure of their brand through the search engines.

Overall the presentation was exciting to be part of!

Here are some of the questions we were asked & their respective answers:

Q: What impact did SEO have to the page views growth for Priceline?

A: As we track the organic visits to any website, we can attribute that 18% growth was seen for Priceline in the search engines.

Q: Is there any tool which allows an old page to be compared to a new page?

A: Although there is no ‘magic tool’ which highlights the success of an old page vs. a new one, analysis and benchmarking can help determine what worked in the past and how this can then be integrated into the new website. A good starting point for the analysis would be to use a simple cache of the old page to highlight what the search engine saw of that page and compare this to the new page.

Q: What do I tell my developers when migrating the old site to a new website?

A: Ensure the developers migrate the old website using the right type of redirect! (server-side 301 redirect). This will help minimise the loss of links and facilitate a smooth transition for the new website to get indexed by the search engines.

Thanks again to anyone who attended the session and visited us at the Online Retailer booth.

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.

Following on from Google launching extended sitelinks last week, we’ve been doing some analysis to test how you can leverage the most out of this new format. We know that the new Google sitelinks appear mainly for brand related search terms, in particular for results that appear in the top position. Google only shows sitelinks for pages that they believe are relevant to the user search query.

The purpose of this post is partly to help you avoid sticky situations with sitelinks like what happened to DFO a few years back. But my main goal today is to present 3 SEO tactics that may improve the quality of your sitelinks, and the relevancy between your key pages and important keywords.

1. Keyword rich internal links

Sitelinks use an automated algorithm and one of the first indicators that Google looks at is your internal linking; more importantly, the keywords you use within an internal link. Make sure your internal links use keyword rich anchor text and ALT text (if an image link) that is informative and avoids repetition, as stated in the Google Webmaster Help for sitelinks.

2. Relevant metadata, headings and content

Google may decide to use keywords used in your metadata, headings, and content to help decide on the most suitable name to display for your page. An example would be the Outrider Sydney page on our site, which has been displayed as follows due to the phrase being repeated in the metadata and <h1> heading tag:

3. Using GWT to demote sitelinks

If you think that an existing sitelink is not relevant to a user search query, you can ‘demote’ that sitelink in your Google Webmaster Tools account. A maximum of 100 URLs can be demoted and will be effective for 90 days from your most recent visit to the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools.

Demoting sitelink URLs may be used to help upweight campaign or promotional landing pages to the top 12 sitelinks of your result.

Example of relevant, helpful sitelinks

Sydney Morning Herald is a great example where a strong internal link structure and purposeful metadata reflects concise but relevant sitelinks when users find their result on Google:

Sitelinks that can be improved

I like Zara. I like their clothes. I like their competitive prices. But what I don’t really like though, are their sitelinks. A Flash based website, extensive URLs with no relevance, and little to no keyword rich content to differentiate country specific sites. It’s no wonder that every page pretty much looks the same in sitelinks:

Name and shame!

Have you seen a site with good sitelinks? Bad sitelinks? Comment below! You know you want to.

As you may have noticed over the last week or so, Google have been experimenting with extended sitelinks.

At Outrider we have been busy testing these sitelinks for various branded keywords for our clients. These new sitelinks have been appearing on and off since early last week, but now the official word from Google is that they are here to stay.

Below is an example of these extended sitelinks for the keyword term “Outrider”

As you can see the new sitelinks have been expanded to show up to 12 deeper level page links rather than the 8 that were shown previously. A spliced (shortened) version of the URL is also displayed, along with a short snippet description of the page itself.

Just like with the organic listings on SERPS the content that is displayed (and highlighted) in these URL and description snippets are dependent on the keyword query.

According to Google these extended sitelinks will make it easier for users to find the exact page they are looking for on the website by providing them with more content to read through before even clicking through to the website.

These extended sitelinks will not only improve user experience and click through rate; they also highlight the need to include keyword rich and relevant descriptive content to each page of your website, and not just the homepage.

Algorithm changes with sitelinks

Another exciting announcement from Google relating to sitelinks is a modification of the algorithm currently in place. According to Google the sitelink algorithm will be combined with regular organic results to further improve the quality of links displayed according to the users search query. It is safe to assume, then, that this algorithm will go through a few tweaks and changes over time.

Outrider will be continuing to test the impact these new extended sitelinks have on click through rate and general organic traffic performance in the coming weeks.

With the ongoing algorithm changes Google makes in determining the value of links through article marketing, it is important to constantly revise your websites link building strategy.

Important questions to consider are;

1) Do search engines still see this type of article as valuable content?
2) Are your efforts being rewarded with a tiny amount of link juice or the full amount of link juice?

Let’s go through the “traditional” method of article promotion;

1) Article content optimised for relevant keywords
2) Article syndicated across a variety of article directories

This method still provides varying degrees of results. Google will crawl through the content of the article and assign value to the links you have pointing back to your website. But with the panda update and the big hit that the many article directories have taken (as I am sure you have all read) how much value does this traditional type of link really hold today?

How do we tell Google that our article provides unique, relevant content?

With the panda update targeting so called “content farms” the process of promoting and sharing article content has become more difficult. We need to look at more than just article promotion websites when sharing your content, but the ever expanding medium of social media.

Ask yourself, if content is not being shared around on social media, how likely is it that users will find your article?

Generating Article Buzz through Social Media

By sharing a link via social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc… you start to create a buzz surrounding that article which provides more natural links than slamming 20 article directories with the same article content. At the same time you are indicating to search engines that this is an interesting, authoritative and valuable article.

In the article marketing model above an extra step has been added. After creating and optimising your article you’d select a few highly reputable article sites, preferably ones that have a very strict submission process.

By submitting to a site that uses a strict submission process, you can be more confident of quality assurance. Your article is less likely to be grouped together with thousands of spun, spammed and copied articles.

The next step of the article promotion process is driven through social media.

With Facebook for example, you could browse to some pages and discussions that are relevant to your article (looking for pages with high and recent activity, not necessarily high “likes”) and simply share a link to your article with some catchy text.

An additional way you can promote great links back to your website is by turning converting the content of your article into a slideshow or video and posting it onto various video and slide sharing websites, such as SlideShare or as YouTube. The more visual your article the more likely it will become valuable link bait for your website.

Final thoughts

As always the most important part of article promotion is ensuring that the article is full of unique, useful and relevant information.

Before creating any content that will represent your own personal or business brand you need to ask yourself the key question – is this content worth sharing?

We’re all on a journey. Actually, we’re all on a lot of journeys. Some of them we know about and are actively pursuing, and others, well, others we’re just on and we probably won’t even know that we’re on them until years later. A lot of the time we don’t even know how the things that we do affect all of the other things that we do, think, and choose.

As paid search specialists, we tend to care a lot about getting customers to make a conversion (a sale, a lead, etc.), and it’s easy to think of it as a single event instead of a part of a journey. Which keywords drive the most conversions? Which search engines are our customers converting from? Which day of the week do they convert? Which time of the day? We have a lot of questions like this. But conversions online, just like the actions in our lives, aren’t all directly tied to just one event. 

Looking at each conversion as a journey helps us to see the bigger picture of what customers are looking for from our sites, and looking at all of the aspects that make up a customer journey help us to decide what to focus on to get more of those coveted conversions.

The following can all help you with analyzing and improving the journeys for your customers:

Click Path Analysis

Our best friend in understanding customer journeys, Click Path Analysis lets us see first click, assist click, and last click attribution models to determine the value of a keyword. If a keyword has no sales directly attributed it in last click attribution (assigning the total value of a sale to the last click), we can then look to both first click (assigning the value of the sale to the first click that drew a customer to the website) and equal (assigning the value of the sale evenly across all clicks in the customer journey) to see exactly where it fits into the customer journey. Some keywords are used in research stages while others are used right when a customer is ready to buy. If you ignore all of the research keywords, customers will start their journeys with other companies and might never find you.

Organic vs. Paid Clicks

An SEO specialist cares a lot about organic traffic while an SEM specialist cares a lot about paid, right? Well, yes and no. When we look at a customer journey and see which type of link they clicked first, second, third, etc. SEO and SEM are able to work together to see the most profitable way to reach customers.

Google Content Network

The Google Content Network is probably a lot bigger than you thought it was, reaching over 80% of all global internet users with their web of affiliated blogs, news sites, and just about every type of website you can think of. Even though the click-through rates are pretty low here, there’s substantial value in getting your message in front of your customers as often as you can. You never know what they’ll remember, and you’re only paying for clicks anyway.

Offline Activity

If a television commercial comes on with a crazy new made-up word, I don’t know, like EOFYS, people will start searching for it. Especially if it comes with a so-bad-it’s-good song that gets stuck in your head. Today it’s possible to track online searches from offline activity, and making sure that your messaging is consistent is a crucial part in maintaining a smooth customer journey.

Remarketing

As discussed at length just last week, Remarketing is a great way to reach out to the customers who you know have already been to your site. Having the ability to bring a customer back to your site is invaluable and a great way to give them a gentle nudge in the direction of continuing on their journey with your website.

The recent publication by searchengineland.com of the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors has offered a great introduction to the basic concepts of SEO in the form of a funky infographic.

It offers those new to search engine marketing a good foundation on how to optimise a website and what needs to be considered – for example the architecture of the website i.e. can the site be easily crawled and if inbound links to your website are from trusted, quality websites will this aid your rankings?

Although the infographic makes for a good start, the more experienced search marketers still struggle with the decision of where to focus their SEO efforts in order to best optimise a website and get the most from their SEO activity. For example is it better to concentrate efforts on link building or focus on onsite content to achieve better rankings?

It could well appear that our prayers have been answered by SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin, who has published the 2011 edition of the Search Engine Ranking Factors which gives insights into the segmentation of the search ranking algorithm into various components like “page-specific, link-level features,” or “domain-level, keyword-agnostic features.”

SEOmoz did two things to obtain their results for Ranking Factors 2011; first of all they surveyed the opinions of people in the SEO industry (132 SEO experts) on what features they felt mattered most to rankings and then correlated their data.

Secondly, SEOmoz took a sample of 10,000 results from Google and looked at which features correlated with high rankings.

The Future of Search

The key findings indicate that the future of search will rely heavily on user experience and social signals and less on keywords contained in domain names and the effectiveness of paid links.

Correlations were identified between sites with high social activity (i.e. Facebook Shares and Tweets) and high rankings, thus strenghtening the argument that social signals are considered for ranking positions.

However, it is worth noting that the websites tested would need to be of a certain quality to attract high volumes of social signals and links. It would be difficult to draw consice conclusions without knowing which sites were included in the survey.

The ranking factors for 2011 differ from what were considered important ranking factors in 2009. For example, the authority of the domain was considered the highest ranking factor when optimising a website back in 2009, whereas 2011’s findings demonstrate a greater importance on linking.

This is probably influenced by Google, who are becoming more instantaneous allowing news and twitter feeds within its results pages. This gives newer domains an opportunity to occupy slots on the search engine results pages.

As mentioned above, social metrics have been indentified as being an important ranking factor to consider and it appears that domain hosting longevity is no longer as critical.

This is just a snippet of the findings available.

The report is detailed and insightful and for search marketers wanting a more in depth look into SEO Ranking Factors it is a must. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

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?