Online Marketing News this Week – 3rd Mar 2011

Content is King, Duplicate Content, Content Farms

These are things that are constantly talked about by SEOs.  ‘King’ because the search engines see their task as finding new, original and best content, so you are advised to be constantly generating original, quality content on your site.  ‘Duplicate’ because the search engines do not like it, so don’t repeat content on your site and don’t copy from other sites.  ‘Content farm’ is the name which has stuck to sites which pick high traffic terms relevant or not and then find any way to provide content about them in order to get traffic.  This content is often copied and/or of very poor quality.  Google does not often announce changes to their algorithm but this time they had little choice as they predicted it would affect 11.8% of their search results. (An interestingly exact figure in an imprecise science, particularly given that the dust is still settling with many apparently quality sites claiming to have been unfairly affected.)  If this change does what it aims to do and helps to favour sites with quality information then it will be a good thing.  The SEO advice remains the same: for the sake of your visitors and the search engines, constantly work to deliver quality, original content. 

New look for Google Profiles

This is the new look that Google are bringing out for their profile pages:

Worth noting the following quote from their blog post:

“While profiles work well for individuals, we’ll continue to work on new ways for businesses to engage with their customers, so stay tuned for updates.”

Developments in ‘Natural Language’ Search

There are many reasons why there can be a big disparity between the language buyers use to search and the language sellers use to sell.  One is that search has developed something of a language of its own based on user experience.  Bing are aiming to provide better results in response to what they are calling ‘natural language’, starting with price.  Here is one of their examples:

‘Air Jordans under $100′

Google cannot at the moment ‘understand’ a request like this for example and the implications are many.  I picked this out from the Microsoft blog:

“This is especially handy when you’re on the go, and don’t have time to browse around and click the right refinements.  At the mall and wondering if you’re seeing a bargain? Just fire up the Bing for Mobile app on your phone and say “sony digital camera under $120”. Voila, it’s that easy.”

Related posts:

1. Online Marketing News this Week – 9th Sept 2011
2. Online Marketing News this Week – 18th Feb 2011
3. Online Marketing News this Week – 7th Oct 2011
4. Online Marketing News this Week – 28th Oct 2011
5. Online Marketing News this Week – Feb 4th 2011

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 3:42 pm and is filed under General, Online Marketing Digest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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