Last month saw what seemed to be a significant milestone in the battle for search market share as Bing broke the 30% mark by powering 30.01% of U.S. searches with 14.32% coming from Bing.com and 15.69% coming from Bing-powered Yahoo Search. Google saw its lead decline from 66.69% to 64.42% in just the month of March alone. These numbers, provided by Hitwise seem to indicate that there could finally be a trend towards Google actually having search competition in the near future.

The numbers are essentially the same for Yahoo as they were back in 2005 when Microsoft muscled its way into the search market by launching Bing. However, what may give Google some pause is the fact that Google has seen an overall decline of roughly 10% of market share since the two merged services back in August 2010, a period of only 6 months. While it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see some dramatic sea change in competition within the next year, it hasn’t stopped some from predicting rather outrageous outcomes. Courtesy of Mashable.com, case-in-point:

So by this logic, Google would be overtaken by early next year, which to put it kindly, is bunk. While Bing has made inroads, the merger with Yahoo has ben anything but seamless. News from today puts some of the starry-eyed projections into perspective. From TechCrunch, Yahoo’s search revenue shortfall for early this year continues, and now Microsoft and Yahoo are passing the blame. The numbers don’t look good:

This is the data since Microsoft took over Yahoo’s U.S. search advertising in return for 12% of Yahoo’s search revenues, with the red line indicating Yahoo’s revenue taking the 12% into account. So even though the merger seems to indicate some increase in market share over the last two quarters, the ad revenue has declined substantially. While Bing and Yahoo may claim that adding the human element makes their paid ad relevancy for search terms better, the data seems to indicate that Google’s algorithm (i.e. Quality Score) is still the best method for getting people to click on an ad, and thereby generate revenue. Perhaps any qualms Yahoo had about AdCenter’s performance versus AdWords back when they chose which company to outsource search to was eased by the magic word “scale”. So far, it appears that the “scale” promised by Microsoft hasn’t made up for lesser platform quality.

After several months of anticipation, Google released its new social networking feature ‘Google Plus One’ (or Google+1) in what, at least superficially, appears to be an attempt to compete with Facebook’s wildly popular ‘Like’ feature. This could have a wide-ranging impact on online search as well as online marketing for a few reasons. The first is that it escalates the very public fracas between Facebook and Google to cull more and more user data for eventual use in more targeted advertising and marketing campaigns for their paying clients.

Until now, Google and Facebook have largely operated in separate spheres; Google revolutionized search engine marketing with AdWords, PageRank, and Analytics, while Facebook has shown the importance of recommendations and testimonials from friends as a powerful tool for learning about virtually any demographic or individual’s behaviors and desires.

Google has recognized this encroaching competition for some time, and Plus One is their bold attempt to not only compete but turn the tide in their favor. While Facebook partnered with Microsoft last year to offer user data and “Likes” for improving search results for Bing, Google is now trying to create one monolithic tool for combining the already proven strength of their search algorithm with personalized user feedback to even more finely tune search results and advertising.

Google search engineer Matt Cutts has said recently that the PlusOne feature won’t initially be added to the search algorithm as it will take at least several months before the data is sufficient to draw any conclusions on how to integrate it. But make no mistake, one of the main reasons for introducing such a tool is for helping weed out spam and content farms and raising the rankings of more relevant, popular sites. If Google is the web’s police, then Plus One turns all of us into the neighborhood watch.

As for paid search, the ability to give a text ad +1 gives both Google and online marketers more finely tuned data and feedback on their advertising. This will have an obvious impact on how PPC ads are developed and marketed because the accumulation of +1s will be desirable for ranking and word of mouth. The click through rates and general responses in testing has been very positive, and because of this, most companies will want to opt-in to including Plus One on their paid search. Sites can also opt-in to include Plus One on their actual pages, and when a user gives a +1 here, it will be included onto the paid ad on the relevant search engine results.

Plus One could be a game changer for online marketing and viral advertising. Some have been less than enthusiastic about the initial roll-out (like the requirement that to use it, one has to be signed into their Google account). And while the critics may eventually be somewhat right, Google will be probably be content with having some modicum of success in the social network sphere, especially after the PR bungle and widespread antipathy surrounding Buzz.

Just last week, after more than a year of planning and adjusting, Google introduced a sweeping change to its search algorithm aiming to strike back against so-called “content farms” that have been increasingly spamming search results over the last few years. According to Google fellow Amit Singhal (who seems to be in the news a lot lately), this problem has been on their radar for awhile and the new change will have an impact on an estimated 11.8% of search queries.

It was a necessary step to maintaining search relevancy and is particularly important since people are now increasingly turning to the web, and search engines in particular, to research products and services that they are intending to purchase. According to Pew, 58% of Americans now research online for future purchases, up from 49% in 2004. Medical queries and health related searches are increasing steadily as well, as The Pew Internet Project recently found that in the United States:

• 66% of internet users look online for information about a specific disease or medical problem
• 56% of internet users look online for information about a certain medical treatment or procedure
• 44% of internet users look online for information about doctors or other health professionals
• 36% of internet users look online for information about hospitals or other medical facilities
• 33% of internet users look online for information related to health insurance
• 29% of internet users look online for information about food safety or recalls
• 24% of internet users look online for information about drug safety or recalls
• 22% of internet users look online for information about environmental health hazards

Much of the press regarding Google’s announcement has centered around Demand Media’s suite of websites such as eHow, et al, that are seemingly ubiquitous nowadays when Googling any question-based search phrase. According to Demand Media’s CEO Richard Rosenblatt, the quality of their eHow articles are screened and have to meet some set standard. But when utilizing a network of over 13,000 free-lance writers to pen these pages, this could be disputable. One of my friends, who works as a writer and copy-editor in the journalistic field, worked freelance for Demand Media while between jobs last year. The main lesson from his experience? Getting paid per article did not translate to creating the best quality, most trustworthy work.

New content on a site is an important facet of maintaining a high search ranking, and that’s perfectly exemplified by the over 300 Demand Media sites and their ilk that put out massive amounts of new content on a daily basis and regularly maintain a Page One presence. Because of this, almost half of their revenue was directly tied to their high Google ranking and the ads that they sold based upon that. Probably the bigger culprits, at least in Google’s eyes, are spammy “content farms” that repeatedly copy the same material over and over again on different sites and link them together, thus creating “new” content and a higher PageRank at the same time. As Singhal and Google spam buster Matt Cutts said on a blog post announcing the change, “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

While it’s too early to tell exactly how the new changes at Google will affect any particular business (Demand Media has seen some rankings go up, while others have gone down); it was a necessary step for maintaining relevancy and repairing a reputation that has taken some hits over the last few years and caused upstarts like Bing top actually surpass Google in some user satisfaction polls. Hopefully, as responsible websites keep maintaining new and user-relevant content on their pages, i.e. don’t have visitors “boomerang” immediately back to the search results page, they should start winning their ranking battle against the spam sites.

Search engine marketing happened to make front-page news recently as the New York Times ran an expose detailing the illegal practices of online proprietor Vitaly Borker and his gaming of Google’s search algorithm. If you’re not familiar with the story, Mr Borker claims to have used loopholes in Google’s search engine, as well as MasterCard and Visa’s charge-back system, to garner more business through negative responses from customers. Over the past few weeks, the Web has been aflame with discussions over how this could have happened in the first place, as well as how it can be rectified. To Google’s credit, as explained by Amit Singhal in a recent blog post in the immediate aftermath, the search giant has gone to immediate measures to shore up its vaunted search algorithm to more precisely pinpoint and demote those sites which use large volumes of negative postings to raise their search ranking. There seemed to be plenty of blame to go around (i.e. eBay, consumer complaint sites, etc.), and many saw it as an opportunity for some particular Google shaedenfraude, but the problem goes deeper than the search engine itself.

DecorMyEyes by kpstahmer

Borker himself theorized that the vast quantity of negative reviews on a variety of online consumer review sites, many highly respected, was what raised his ranking higher. In the original article, one online response to his bilked customers was almost gleefully brazen in his explanation, “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.” Though there are loopholes that he obviously navigated with success for several months, Google casts some doubt on his simple explanation by countering that even before their revision to their own algorithm, to prevent just such a thing from happening, consumer complaint sites typically included special coding so that bad and/or fraudulent companies would not get higher rankings. It might be reasonable to assume that many times, unfortunately, people are more passionate and willing to post reviews online (especially for something rather innocuous like glasses) when they are livid over having been taken advantage of. What does not seem to be reported as much as the search engine optimization part of this controversy, is that much of Borker’s success, at least according to searchengineland.com’s Byrne Hobart, came from auto-generated spam pages and the fact that DecorMyEyes was frequently linked to by mainstream media sites. Among them? The New York Times.

Less than 20 years after its conception, web commerce can still seem like the wild west, especially after stories such as these. But when shopping for any service or product online, consumers should continue to proceed with caution. As stated above, Less than 20 years after its conception, web commerce can still seem like the wild west, especially after stories such as these. But when shopping for any service or product online, consumers should continue to proceed with caution. As stated above, Google’s response has been laudable, and their consumer rankings of local businesses based on the particular searchers zip code now needs to be extended to online commerce – just for these reasons. As all search engines are becoming more aware of the less-savory uses of link building and search engine optimization, this will thankfully make respected, transparent SEM companies like RSO Consulting and the like more prominent. But, as Mr Singhal himself said, it probably won’t be long before another dastardly business attempts to skirt ethical boundaries and risk imprisonment and loss-of-reputation for a few extra bucks.

]]> http://www.bbcreativesf.com/webdesignblog27/2011/02/google-helps-the-good-guys/feed/ 0 http://www.bbcreativesf.com/webdesignblog27/2011/02/black-hat-vs-white-hat/ http://www.bbcreativesf.com/webdesignblog27/2011/02/black-hat-vs-white-hat/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:41:22 +0000 Rob http://www.bbcreativesf.com/webdesignblog27/?p=1435 An effective, on-going link building campaign is an essential part of search engine optimization. But it takes dedication to the rules and ethics, as well as a substantial amount of hard work to be done properly.]]>

Spy vs. Spy Mexican Sugar Skulls by Jonathan Koshi

As mentioned in the previous blog post ‘Google Helps the Good Guys’, search engine optimization can attract many unsavory businesses that are trying to make a quick buck through gaming the system. As with anything, in SEO there can be shades of gray as to what is considered ethical. And while the methods used in the DecorMyEyes.com story were definitively not ethical (criminal actually), there are certain practices that are not necessarily de jure illegal, but are certainly considered de facto illegal in terms of the acceptable behavior agreed upon by search engines and Google especially.

In terms of SEO, ‘White Hat’ and ‘Black Hat’ have become the popular terminology for separating those practices that are ethical and best for long-term effectiveness, and those that attempt any number of unethical, short-term strategies that risk penalties, respectively. There are several black hat methods that have evolved throughout the history of the SEO, but in terms of David Segal’s excellent NY Times article The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, link schemes are the poster child at the moment.

The crux of the story is that late last year, during the holiday shopping season, JC Penney saw its Google organic search rank rocket to number one when searching for any of the hundreds of its products. Of course, the issue was that while it may be one the largest retailers in the US, it was not the most relevant site for most of these products (it even outranked Samsonite.com itself when searching for “Samsonite carry on luggage”). Not to get into the specifics of what ranking number one on Google throughout the months of November and December did to JC Penney’s bottom line, but it was likely quite lucrative. And while Google did take minor action during this period, it did not follow up and notice that the rankings were still inordinate.

What caused the high rankings? According to the story, it was irrelevant links back to the JC Penney site. Most of these links were on pages that had either no relevancy whatsoever to the product they linked to at JCPenney.com, or were merely sites with hundreds of links on them maintained for the sole purpose of increasing the PageRank for other sites. Before the story broke, Google was already initiating a change to their search algorithm to account for low PageRanked, spammy sites. As a result, JC Penney results began to drop slightly in early February; however, once their black hat campaign was revealed by the Times, Google manually dropped the average JC Penney position for search terms to 52 by February 10th. None too happy about the bad publicity, to say nothing of practically disappearing from search results, Penney’s also fired its SEO firm SearchDex.

An effective, on-going link building campaign is an essential part of search engine optimization. But it takes dedication to the rules and ethics, as well as a substantial amount of hard work to be done properly. In previous dealings, we’ve observed several link building services in India doing the exact same things that SearchDex was doing for JC Penney, and there are no doubt hundreds all over the world. While they certainly work in the short-term, link schemes and black hat practices aren’t worth the loss of reputation, loss of business, or even the outright banishment from search results as punishment. Proper link building is done over time by connecting to relevant sites, directories, and social networks, and though it takes dedication and patience, attaining a higher PageRank accomplished through white hat methods is much more ethical, effective, and satisfying.