Interesting fact emerging from Rosetta Stone’s case against Google
The complexities of the Rosetta Stone – Google case are beyond the remit of this blog but here is one pertinent fact:
- Google AdWords provides Rosetta Stone’s best advertising return on investment.
They are also quoted as having found Google very helpful in identifying counterfeiters. Another piece of information which Rosetta Stone initially tried to surpress was that it takes a consumer between two and four weeks to decide to buy or not. Whether or not this should be public information is not for me to comment on here, I just had to point out that monitoring as ever produces crucial sales information.
Social signals and how they affect Google and Bing search results
Number of tweets, authority of twitterer, authority of link source affecting link weight are all factors in both Google and Bing results. Danny Sullivan got some interesting responses in a recent interview with both Google and Bing. He concludes:
“In the end, it’s clear that Twitter data especially plays a role in web search, these days. Who you are is being understood. Are you a trusted authority or not? If there’s PageRank for pages, both search engines have a form of TwitterRank for people.
Meanwhile, retweets serve as a new form a link building. Get your page mentioned in tweets by authoritative people, and that can help your ranking in regular search results, to a degree.”
Google shows intent on cloaking for 2011
A tweet from Google’s Matt Cutts reminds site owners not to use different headers or redirects to Googlebot than users. This is a clear signal that Google with look closely at cloaking in 2011.
Cloaking is defined by Google as:
“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.”
The simplest way to look at it would be that if you are showing anything to the search engines that you do not show to the visitor then you are cloaking. Of course, it is not quite as simple as that but you should take care. I am reminded of a blog article I read the other day which asked the question: Do you know what your SEO is doing on your behalf? Of course your SEO shouldn’t be cloaking, it has been spam since the dawn of time. A better question might be: What is your web developer (probably unknowingly) doing on your behalf?
Sponsored tags in local search
Yext are starting a local search sponsored tagging product similar to Google tags which will run on a range of local search sites including yelp and yahoo!. We will watch out for the results of testing in the US.
Google search results informing searchers that a site has been hacked
It is worth making sure you are aware of this. Adding a new notification to search results helps searchers avoid compromised sites but also helps site owners become aware of a problem. The notification looks like this:
If you click on ‘this site may be compromised’ you get more information about the problem.
Facebook is top search term and most visited site in 2010
Just in case you are still wondering if you need a facebook page: Hitwise press release.
Happy New Year from SiteStream SEO!