SiteStream SEO - Online Marketing Blog

Google + gains more than 10 million users in first two days after going public.

Paul Allen has been watching Google + closely and published his results at plus.google.com. 

“……..it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding — 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already.”

Facebook have been making many changes to their user interface, changes which, according to Mashable, are hated by 72% of Facebook users. This is not encouraging for Facebook, although, there is no sign of a mass exodus.

‘Site Health’ added to Google Webmaster Tools home page.

From the home page of Webmaster Tools you will now have access to a site health report. Issues covered are:

• when malware has been detected
• when important pages have been removed via Google’s URL removal tool
• when important pages are blocked in the robots.txt file

According to Google, “important pages” are defined by the number of clicks that pages get; They are considering adding other factors in the future. They also say they hope to expand the health check beyond the three issues stated.

Bing are breeding a Tiger to speed up their searches

Bing and Microsoft engineers have been working on a new index serving platform, called ‘Tiger’ for the search engine. Incorporation of the new technology began in August and is expected to take a year to complete globally. With the new index-serving technology, Bing aims to deliver more relevant results, faster. Danny Goodwin, at Search Engine Watch notes the similarity with Google’s ‘Caffeine’ update which aimed to increase search speeds by 50% at the same as improve accuracy.

Bing adding ‘Action Buttons’

“Helping you get things done faster is a big focus for us at Bing“

The idea here is that Bing will choose the most likely actions which a visitor is likely to want to take and display Action Buttons to take take you straight through to the relevant page. One of the examples they give is if you are booking a flight:

On the face of it definitely a good thing. Two comment streams on the Bing blog are worth a look:

Q: “This is brilliant. It’s not working perfectly – hotels just has a stupid “Locations” button, Bank is just “Login”. I can’t find a software company or restaurant that has buttons. PS, what a pain in the butt it is to figure out how to leave a comment on this blog!”

A: “Thanks for the feedback on the “comments.”  I will put something in place this week to make it easier to comment.”

and

Q: “Is it possible for webmasters to identify with a tag which 3 buttons are the most important action buttons on the site? Otherwise it could be possible that bing will display action buttons that are not very important.”

A: “We use a combination of algorithms for site categorization, site structure determination and click log analysis to determine the top actions for each of the sites.  And we will be constantly looking at new ‘verbs’ or actions we can add – stay tuned.”

We’ll take that as a no then!

Bing Strategy to compete with Google

All this is well and good but not even Bing thinks that extra buttons will do much to help it gain market share,  make a profit and challenge Google’s dominance. Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since 2009. Independent commentators predict that at the current rate of growth they will move into profit in 3 years time which is not bad considering the size of the deficit.  It does of course depend on continued growth. The folks at Bing are not looking to maintain the current rate but to eat into Google’s market share as fast as possible. To do that they know that they must do something pretty dramatic. We do not ‘Bing’ we ‘Google’. Bing need us to start ‘Googling’ on Bing!

Microsoft’s director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, expressing the opinion that if they can change the way people think about search people will eventually move over them from Google, told money.cnn.com:

“Our challenge is that no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I really wish there was a better search engine.’  That’s why  for us, it’s always been about figuring out how to accomplish more than we thought was possible with a search engine. Eventually, people will expect to do more with search, and if they can’t, they’ll be disappointed.”

In this sense the competition can only be good for the consumer. We await with interest what will change the way we think about search. A good start will be to realise that there might be different or even better results available elsewhere and to start using more than one search engine at a time.

Google’s Eric Schmidt questioned at Senate Hearings

Google’s Eric Schmidt appeared before a Senate subcommittee this week. The issues revolve around unfair competition, monopoly and Google’s alleged favoring of its own sites. The best place to follow the story is over at Search Engine Land.  Greg Sterling found that very little new was said and describes the whole thing as more theater than fact-finding. He predicts that there will be some sort of  case brought against Google through the FTC’s antitrust investigation. Lest we forget that much of this is about power and money, here is a telling quote from Serling’s post:

Both humorous and unseemly, several senators explicitly asked Google to consider their states for projects before launching into questioning. Most obnoxious was New York’s Charles Schumer (Democrat) who first offered a kind of commercial for New York and then asked Schmidt to consider investing in the Hudson River Valley, all but implying it was a condition of his support.

In many ways it can be hard to decide which applies: It would all be very serious  were it  not so petty, OR, it would be so petty were it not so serious. This is what Sterling had to say about the break-down in cooperation being Google and Nextag and Google and Yelp:

Nextag CEO Katz credited Google with being a good partner in the past but now it was more self-interested and less fair and reasonable. I wish he had used the word “evil.” Alas he did not.

The most effective testimony against Google came, however, from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. He described a timeline of events in which Google and Yelp were partners. But after that ended, Google later began including Yelp reviews in Places (a competitive product) without permission. Yelp said that the company asked that those reviews be removed, which Google declined to do without removing Yelp from the index entirely. It was only after the FTC investigation was announced, said Yelp, that Google complied.

To redress the balance I should point out that Sterling felt that Eric Schmidt dealt with most of the questions put to him “quite effectively”.

Interesting also that one of the Google lawyers cited Facebook as a major competitor defending accusations of monopolization. In the process, Facebook was incorrectly stated to be the main carrier of SMB advertising. The fall of MySpace was used as an indication of the volatile nature of the market arguing that government regulation would be inappropriate. Today’s near monopoly can be struggling to survive tomorrow. Google of course has no intention of following MySpace nor does it look likely to do so in a hurry. Facebook as their main rival at the moment will not be resting easy, not least because:

Google + is now open to the public

As well as Google + opening to the public and announcing 9 new features, it has been a week of changes over at Facebook.

Google buy the review site: Zagat

Google have bought the review site Zagat. This is how the official blog begins its announcement:

“Did you know there’s a place in Menlo Park near the Safeway that has a 27 food rating?” one of my friends asked me that about two years ago, and I was struck because I immediately knew what it meant. Food rating… 30 point scale… Zagat. And the place… had to be good. With no other context, I instantly recognized and trusted Zagat’s review and recommendation.

Zagat have more 32 years experience delivering consumer surveys, reviews and recommendations.

Their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of  UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed.

This purchase will be a boon to Google Places and local search in general. Reviews play big part in local search and Google has been under fire for taking reviews from other sites like Yelp. Now in the food industry they will have their own very valuable source.

TouTube founders plan Delicious revival

One of the most popular social bookmarking sites a few years ago, Delicious, may be back later in the year. The site lost favor with its users and  owners, Yahoo!, were planning to sell or close it down. YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley bought it and plan to revive it. There was a time when getting on the home page of Delicious could bring a site huge boosts in traffic and backlinks. Chad Hurley told the New York Times:

“What we plan to do, is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

US Legislators working on laws to cover Internet privacy

You may have been reading about the many cases involving data security and consumer privacy and wondering if it is causing any political and legal reaction. Internet Attorney, Richard B.Newman, gives us a scholarly run-down on legislative proposals and recent bills in the US. In general the proposals cover three areas:

• Online and point-of-sale privacy
• Mobile device privacy
• Data security and breach notification

It is an area in which all Internet based businesses will increasingly need to keep themselves informed.

Bing announce new ‘Adaptive Search’

Bing announced this week that they will be adding a new Adaptive Search feature to their search results. It will begin over the next few days in the US. The feature seeks to use your search history to add context and improve your results.

“Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you’re trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn – and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.”

How much this improves the user experience remains to be seen. The Bing announcement reaffirms their commitment to “maintaining an industry-leading privacy stance” and points out you can “clear” or “turn off” your search history at any time. They also say:

“We certainly don’t want to make any assumptions that prevent you from seeing a diverse set of results and lock you into a “filter bubble”, so the results that correspond to differing intents (e.g. travel to Australia) will still be available to you on the page.”

Google warning to sites that sell links

In this video, Google’s Matt Cutts gives his three main suggestions for a drop in page rank:

1. You simply lose a link from a third party page that had a lot of high PageRank.
2. You have weird canonicalization issues with your site and domains that caused confusion.
3. The selling of links is given as the most common reason for page rank drop. Selling of links is against Google’s code.

Matt Cutts also points out that the Google PageRank Toolbar is updated only 3 to 4 times per year because they do not want webmasters ‘obsessing’ over page rank instead of concentrating other SEO factors. Given that page rank is by now a very unreliable metric this is good advice!

IDC predict that by 2015 more users will access the Internet from mobile devices than PCs

By 2015, more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices. As smartphones begin to outsell simpler feature phones, and as media tablet sales explode, the number of mobile Internet users will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6% between 2010 and 2015.

“Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet,” said Karsten Weide, research vice president, Media and Entertainment. “Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it’s going to make the Internet a very different place.”

This report from the IDC also makes the following predictions:

• Worldwide, the total number of Internet users will grow from 2 billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, when 40% of the world’s population will have access to its vast resources.
• Global B2C ecommerce spending will grow from $708 billion in 2010 to $1,285 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 12.7%.
• Worldwide online advertising will increase from $70 billion in 2010 to $138 billion in 2015, with its share of total advertising across all media growing from 11.9% to 17.8%.

Bing and Twitter announce extension of deal

Twitter and Bing have announced that they are extending their deal which allows Bing to use Twitter information to inform its search results. The announcement was publicised by Twitter in an ‘aw shucks’ style Twitter exchange:

The relationship between Twitter and Google on the other hand seems to have gone somewhat cool. There, at the moment, no sign of a similar deal and neither company is commenting.

Google testing up to 6 sitelinks in Ads

eCommerce circle is reporting that Google are testing the use of up to 6 sitelinks per ad in Google AdWords.

The Google help center is saying the following:

“If a user search triggers your ad to run with Sitelinks, our system may include up to six of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link. The higher the quality of your ad, the more likely Sitelinks may be able to run on that ad.”

Sitelinks allows you to use a range of landing pages within your site which can be targeted at specific searches. Google clearly intends to use them as another way to reward what they think of as higher quality ads. Careful targeting of your ad groups at tightly controlled sets of keywords becomes ever more important.

Digital Advertising, Performance and Retention Solutions Will Be 70% of SMB Marketing Budgets by 2015

BIA Kelsey have brought out a report which forecasts that only 30% of small and mid sized business advertising spend will be going to traditional advertising media by 2015. This is a drop from 52% in 2010. The trend is now well established and this report is confident that it will continue:

” By 2015 SMBs will allocate 30 percent of their marketing budgets to traditional advertising (down from 52 percent in 2010), with the remaining 70 percent going to digital/online media (mobile, social, online directories, online display, digital outdoor), performance-based commerce (pay-per-click, deals, couponing) and customer retention business solutions (email, reputation and presence management, websites, social marketing, calendaring/appointment-setting).”

The most bullish prediction:

Small business spending on digital/online media will grow from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $16.6 billion in 2015 (24.9 percent compound annual growth rate).

Google Includes Daily Deal on its Home Page

On Wednesday Google included Google Offers on its home page for the first time. With sites like Facebook and Yelp pulling back on their commitment to daily deals and Yelp questioning the sustainability of the mark-up enjoyed by Groupon, Google are showing no such reticence.

Google Change Link Categorization in Webmaster Tools

This week Google has changed the way they categorize links from subdomains. Previously considered external links they will not be categorized as internal links.

“Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.”

News of this change was given on Google’s webmaster tools official blog. The post gives no mention as to whether or how this will affect how subdomains are treated in search results. Nor can we yet tell if it will affect the link weight given to links from subdomains.

Google may be thinking of a Trusted Store Badge

This cannot be considered more than a rumor, although it is clear that the idea is being tried out at Google. Google Operating System, which gives unofficial news and tips about Google, spotted a video on Google’s YouTube channel announcing the new feature. The publishing of the video turned out to be either a leak or a mistake and has since been made private. Google currently publishes an average rating and a link to customer reviews in the search results. If this turns out to be true then it will add to the power over online businesses which Google has. There are obvious dangers both for businesses and ultimately for Google. However, it would be better to discuss that when we know if it is going to happen. Google are not giving anything away:

“We’re always exploring new ways to help improve the online commerce experience but don’t have anything new to announce today. Stay tuned for more.”

Google is expanding its Get Your Business Online Program

With its Get Your Business Online program, Google clearly wants to be a one stop shop for all small business online needs. The program has been active in Ireland, Austria and Canada since earlier this year. Google have now added more than 100 getonline domains to their portfolio as they expand the program in the US.

Bing Integrates Yahoo Data into Bing Webmaster Tools

From now on Bing will integrate Yahoo traffic data in many of their Webmaster Tools reports.

Steve Jobs hands over to Tim Cook at Apple

Management Direct takes a look at what makes Steve Jobs so special.

Google on the wrong side of privacy laws in Belgium

Google must consider an offer from Belgian authorities to accept a 150,000 euro fine or face a court case, higher fines and the possibility of a prison sentence. The Belgian federal prosecutor has said that Google breached national law in the collection of private data with its Street View cars.

Facebook’s Like button has been declared illegal in Schlewsing-Holstein

The Centre for Pivacy Protection in Schlewsing-Holstein, Germany,  stated that the Facebook ‘like’ plugin infringes on the Telemedia Act and the Federal Data Protection Act as Facebook transfers data back to the US.  Privacy,  the Internet and data collection is becoming an ever bigger issue. The authorities in Schlewsing-Holstein say they expect website owners to remove the button or face serious consequences.