Archives for the month of: June, 2009

I Just Cant Stop Searching You

June 28, 2009 //

It seems like Michael Jackson and more importantly his reach and fan base, is actually bigger than the Internet can handle. The king of pop’s demise brought the Internet to a standstill this week as Google interpreted the spike in searches for his name as a malware attack and users querying it received an error message for a period of around 25 mins. Microblogging tool twitter crashed through the sheer volume of users logging on to the service and performance issues were reported on usually reliable services such as AOL, Yahoo and CNN.

It takes some sort of surge to bring down Google and it is difficult to think of any other occurrence other than some sort of natural disaster which would have had the same sort of effect on the Internet in a 24 hour period. It is surely also making the affected services question their ability to handle large volumes of traffic in a short period of time, it would appear that in exceptional circumstances, their infrastructure simply isn’t up to the task.

Surge in Michael Jackson Searchs Brought Down Google

This instance also shows a changing shift in how people are turning to the Internet for up to date information. As SERPs speed up their indexing, and twitter continues to be the go to location for breaking news, when people hear of a news story in passing, their immediate response is to head to the nearest Internet service, be that mobile or computer based, and use the web to find out the details of said story. In times gone by the answer would have been to turn on the TV, or wait for the next scheduled news bulletin, but in a time of immediacy this is no longer quick enough. if you want an answer now, you turn to twitter or the SERPs.

Undoubtedly the question will come in future years, “where were you when you heard about jacko?” And for many people it appears the answer will be “I was at my computer when somebody twittered it”.

It is an ironic fact, that after his unfortunate demise last week at the age of 50. Michael Jackson will sell enough records in the next few weeks, and earn enough radio airtime to erase the debt problems caused by years of frivolity and legal bills from fighting off child abuse accusations. You cant turn on the radio it seems at the moment without hearing a Michael Jackson song, he has no fewer than 14 singles in the itunes top 20, 9 albums in the itunes top 10, and music stores such as HMV have big displays of his work around shops.

Jacko will go down in history as one of the greats, and will hopefully be remembered for his musical brilliance rather than his car crash personal life, but he may also go down as the man who brought the Internet to its knees.

Categories Digital Marketing

Would You Pay for a Voice?

June 21, 2009 //

There has been a lot of speculation in the world of social media about how twitter plan to monetise their huge user base. It is a big decision for twitter as if they get it wrong, it could all come tumbling down overnight. Bombard users with adverts, and you will put them off, decide you are going to charge for accounts, and they could all walk away. The owners themselves have stated an intention to utilise paid corporate accounts rather than advertising, but that in itself surely wont bring a return on the investment they have received.

But the Social Media Insider this week made a good point in its bulletin this week suggesting that paying for elements of social media, or giving members the option to pay, may not be so much of a crazy idea by asking the question “How Much Would a Protester in Iran Pay to Have a Twitter or Facebook Account?” The political situation and media black out in Iran has once again thrown twitter into the limelight with protesters using the microblogging platform to get stories out of the troubled country. It became such an important channel for getting comment out of Iran that the US government intervened to prevent some planned maintenance which would have pulled twitter down for a few hours (read more here).

By either charging for social media accounts (it wouldn’t need to be much) you would undoubtedly lose some users. But those who are regular users and involve it in their everyday life would probably be willing to pay something. And if that figure was only a nominal $5 or so it would soon add up across millions of users. On top of that, by stripping out the infrequent users you would free up a large amount of server space and overheads too. Win, win.

There is also the option pointed out in the article of charging for additional functionality, the Facebook vanity URLs for example. A couple of dollars a pop to secure your URL probably wouldn’t have stopped millions of people for bagging theirs. The problem is of course, once you have been giving something away for so long, it is difficult to start charging for it. You could do a radiohead and ask people how much they are willing to pay, but you run the risk of everybody offering up a big fat zero. From somebody who works in the industry, I think a nominal fee for an account, or maybe a “pro” account would be easy for me to stomach, but it would need to be nominal.

What do you think? Would you pay for your twitter or St, what about spotify, last.fm, myspace, bebo or any other social tool for that matter?

Categories Social Media

Google Keeps SEOs Guessing

June 17, 2009 //

Its been an interesting couple of weeks for UK SEO’s as Google makes a couple of changes and announcements which keep them guessing about the best methods for better search engine positions.

Pagerank Sculpting Debate - Google came out with the news that around a year ago they changed the way pagerank was passed between pages. The original model was that a pagerank score (not necessarily the one shown in toolbar but the ture link score a page can pass) was split evenly between the links out from that page. So if a page had a link score of 10 and linked out to 5 pages it would pass a score of 2 to each of the links. Realising this SEO’s started to use the nofollow attribute to “sculpt” this pagerank to those pages it wished to page link score to. So they would nofollow the 3 links to pages they didn’t want to benefit, anf the 2 remaining would get passed a link score of 5 each. But Google are now saying that this tactic hasn’t worked for around a year and in the example explained above the 2 links would still only receive a link score of 2, and the other 8 would stay unused.

Queue a thousand SEO bloggers coming up with a new way of displaying links you do not want to be given credit (iframes? flash? or simply robots.txt?) and webmasters scampering to amend their current links. In truth, if this has been in place since last year, you are not going to see any new changes in your SEO efforts by leaving things alone. And given there is yet to be a definitive way to deal with this issue, it is probably best to leave things alone. Matt Cutts himself recommends not attempting to sculpt Pagerank and to leave it to flow freely within, and outside of your site read more here.

International Confusion and Bungee Results – Also in the last couple of weeks there has been a strange shift in the SERPs which has producing natural search results reminiscent of a bungee jumper with websites bouncing up and down the rankings on a daily, if not hourly basis, and strange occurrences of international sites appearing in .co.uk results. US, Australian, and even Finnish websites have been spotted in the google.co.uk SERPs causing confusion amongst users and SEOs alike. Andrew Heaps, Head of SEO at Latitude Group, puts the changes down to a push in trusted sites gone wrong, but there has been no official comment from Google. Whatever has changed, it seems to be in error, as there is no way these changes can be improving Google’s user experience. For now, SEOs are watching their results and waiting for them to settle down to see the real impact the changes have had on their rankings.

Have you seen major changes in positions? Think you know the changes and how best to use the to your advantage? Feel free to share with the rest of us!

Categories Search Engine Optimisation

Bing Hits the #2 Spot….For Now

June 10, 2009 //

So one of the big news stories this week has been bing overtaking Yahoo! to become the second most used search engine since its launch last week. On its launch date of June 3rd bing received 10.8% of search engine traffic ahead of both Yahoo! and Ask and whilst this figure reduced to 3.1% of search engine traffic by June 6th but it still remained ahead of its rivals.

This news will obviously delight Microsoft but I cant help but thinking it is just an initial spike as people check out the new kid on the search engine block. I like bing, and I think given time and more importantly awareness, it will gain an increased market share for Microsoft but right now, noone but those who are involved in search engine marketing, or who previously used Live Search, are too aware of its existence.

Apparently users are also spending over 8 minutes a piece on bing which will also please Microsoft as the more time spent on site, the more ads displayed, the better chance of revenue generation. Again this stat could again be skewed by users playing around with the new bing functionality so time will tell on this one too.

Early indications are good, but there is still a long way to go before bing can be described as a success.

Bing stats

Categories Search Engine Marketing

The bing Review

June 7, 2009 //

So this week saw the launch of Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain a foothold in the search marketing world. Originally thought to be named Kumo, but finally released as Bing, this is Microsoft’s latest attempt to challenge Google’s supremacy and prove they have something different to offer. Backed my a multimillion dollar advertising campaign in the US announcing the end of the search engine and the revolution of their “decision engine” they seem to strongly believe they something new and improved to offer the world of search engine marketing. But what have they really changed? Below is my summary of the various features of Bing, and also, where nothing in particular appears to have changed.

Live Search Suggest

As you type in the search box Bing brings up a list of suggested searches you may be looking for, auto completing single and double worded phrases. In the screen shot below you can see as I type in the word car, bing starts to suggest words like “cartoon network” “carrie underwood” and other words beginning with car. Google obviously does a similar thing but also displays the numbers of results alongside each keyword. Google’s functionality is actually a little more sophisticated and interprets your search meaning more accurately, so nothing new or ground breaking here.

Search Refinement

One of the new features which forms part of bing’s “decision engine” positioning is the search refinement suggestions which appear in the left hand margin of their new SERP when results are displayed. Again, nothing ground breaking, but it does add a little bit more usability to their results, and from their point of view, allows for a more accurate search experience and obviously more searches means more ads displayed and more potential ad revenue.

Website Preview

Another part of the decision engine functionality is the ability to preview website content for the SEO rankings to allow the user to make a more educated decision on which is the best website to visit. On hover Bing displays a text snippet from the website along with some of the navigation links to allow entry into a different part of the website. Google has been offering site links on some website for a while but not on such a wide scale, and the ability to view additional website content is a nice addition which should allow users make a better decision on a websites suitability without leaving the search results. At last something Google doesn’t have! (yet)

Image Search

The changes to th Bing image search functionality are more aesthetic than any improvements to the results. On hover an image is enlarged to give you a better view, and you are presented with the details of the image, i.e. size and file name. There is a little added functionality in the option to view similar images which could be useful, and they have also added the ability to feedback on image results. Some nice usability amends but again, nothing which is going to shake up the world of search and scare Google too much.

Video Search

The video search function also has some nifty (but not necessarily groundbreaking) features aimed at keeping you with Bing, and helping you make your “decision”. Once within the video SERP you can hover over one of the videos and it will begin playing a snippet so you can see some of the content. Once you click a video it will also play a full size version, within Bing, without you needing to visit the video owners site. This obviously means that users can use Bing in a youtube format, and not need ot navigate away from Bing to different video sites. I did find a couple of instances of this functionality not working meaning it was necessary to visit the website hosting the videos though, so maybe it can be blocked in some way, and if it can most video owners will do so as they would prefer to viewer to enter their site. I like the hover functionality, one up on Google there.

They have also added some additional search functionality (again using the left hand margin, I see a common theme developing!) which enables a more advanced search quickly and easily. The ability to filter video search results by length, screen size, resolution and source. Again, nothing that cant be done using Google advanced search but actually done in a much more user friendly way removing the need for a completely new search query.

Natural Search Algorithm

Not much news here I am afraid, it looks like there has been some minor tweaks to the Live Search algorithm but nothing major. I have seen some movements up and down of maybe 5 positions but nothing major. This is going to be one of the big changes and a test of Bing as a search decision engine. More usable search results so that all the awareness generated by Microsoft’s advertising spend doesn’t just result in single visit users who revert back to Google after disappointment with the sites their queries return.

Paid Search Results

Again nothing new to report, Microsoft’s claims of taking their search engine beyond “ten blue links” didn’t actually result in taking PPC any further than it was on Live search. I believe a new adcenter is due later in the year so maybe they will roll out some changes or additional functionality with this release. But for now nothing changes, other than a possible uplift in impressions as people check out bing to see what all the fuss is about.

So will it change anything?

Although I have pointed out here that a lot of the features are nothing new, I actually like what Microsoft have done with bing. The image and video search functionality is good, the bing platform is user friendly and I like the design and layout. They still have a long way to go until they are a true challenger to Google though. The usability will help them keep some of the new users they get from all the publicity, but more needs to be done on the technical side with the SEO and PPC results and options. Advancements in the adcenter options and their PPC system, as well as improvements int he natural search algorithm are going to be the next big challenge, and wll be crucial if they are going to eat away at Google’s market share.

A lot of what they have done well can be picked up by Google and implemented pretty easily and that is the main problem. Until they come up with a ground breaking innovation which is unique to them and difficult to copy, they are always going to be playing catch up. I have said in the past, I really want somebody to step up to the plate and challenge Google, and it is only real innovative thinking and something truly new and fresh which will achieve this. Getting better, Microsoft, but still a lot of work to do!