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.

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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?

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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!

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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

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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!

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Twearch engine optimisation, the art of gaining large numbers of followers on Twitter.  OK, so I may have made the word up, but it seems these days to associate anything with Twitter you just replace the first letters(s) with “tw”.

The quest for Twitter followers is a serious one to hard core twitterers and they keep a constant eye on their follower numbers, and notice when they are up and down. Personally I couldn’t tell you from one day to the next how many followers I have but some people seem view it as a measure of importance and also the value you add to the twitter “community”. But how do you get more followers? What are the secrets to a large follower list? It is very similar to the world of search engine optimisation, here goes:

Have a Keyword Rich Domain User Name

This will help you show up when users search for people to follow related to a particular topic. So rather than choosing the username johnsmith, why not go for johnnySEO? It could boost your follower numbers from the SEO community.

Include Your Target Keywords in Your Page Tweet Content

Again this will improve your rankings in the Twitter search engine when users are searching for people to follow. You would be surprised how much a few keyword laden tweets can boost your follower numbers. But make sure you don’t keyword stuff your tweets as this will come across as spammy and have the reverse impact resulting in you losing your new hard earned followers.

Make Sure Your Web Pages Tweets are Search Engine Tweeter Friendly

When somebody follows me, I check out their profile to see whether they are worth following back. If they are consistently posting useful or witty information I am likely to follow back but if their timeline is full of self promotion, affiliate links or insight into their private life I just don’t need, I probably won’t bother.

Write Useful Content to Generate Links Retweets

Retweets mean that your message, and more importantly your username, reaches a much larger audience than just your own followers. If provides access to a much broader audience and opens up the potential for those following the person who retweets to find you, view your profile, and potentially become a follower themselves. They may even retweet themselves which further expands the reach of your message. Obviously to achieve multiple retweets you need to be saying something interesting and/or important, so think before you tweet!

Engage with Your Visitors Followers

Engagement with others is the whole purpose of Twitter, so make sure you do this with your followers. If they provide some useful information, retweet it. If they provide you something of interest, thank them and engage in a discussion about the particular topic. This will help you become a valued member of their network, and mean they will recommend you to others they engage with. If you are really good they may even include you in #followfriday!

Don’t Engage in Black Hat Link Follower Building Tactics

Randomly following large numbers of people in an attempt they reciprocate, or trying one of the growing number of scams which claims to get you thousands of followers will only see you rejected by the twitter community. People want to follow others who are going to add value to their network.

Make Sure You Tag Your Images Tweets

Tagging tweets makes it easier for people to find them in the various Twitter search functions. If you are providing insight or information on the tagged topic, you will pick up followers who are interested in the subject.

Link Out To Follow Other Quality Websites Tweeters in Your Field

If there are Twitter celebrities in your chosen field of interest then follow them, engage with them and become part of their community. Many people will view other people’s lists of followers to find interesting people to follow themselves. By following a high quality of Tweeters you are providing a resource yourself, which will result in more followers, and will also pick up more followers by appearing in the follower lists of others.

Did I miss any?  Let me know.

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Oh dear, a whole month without posting. Don’t worry; I haven’t shut up shop, just been a bit busy on the work front. As always, a lot has gone on in the last month so it seems best to start with a recap of the month gone by to get us back up to speed:

MIVA closes down operations – as suggested may happen by The Digital Lookout back in Sep 2008 MIVA has finally closed down operations. Once a reasonable addition to any search marketing campaign MIVA has failed to keep up with the pace of change in search engine marketing and has been on a downward spiral for the last 3 or 4 years and has finally packed up its SERPs and gone home.

Ask Brings back Jeeves – in a bid to regain some of its character Ask has brought back Jeeves as the face of its search activity. The former front man for the Ask search engine has had a facelift and returned as Ask continues its bid for a foothold in the search marketplace.

Adwords Launches New Interface – Adwords has launched into testing a new interface, and the initial reactions haven’t been good! It appears the “revert to old interface” button has become the most used button in Google’s system! Of course there will come a point when it is forced upon us and we will be force to use it. No doubt in a couple of months we will be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Microsoft and Yahoo Continue to Court – without any seeming progress being made Microsoft and Yahoo have continued to court each other over potential mergers and partnerships in the battle to compete with Google. No solid progress appears to have been made but the feeling within the industry is that Microsoft will be powering Yahoo search by this time next year.

Everyone Still Loves Twitter – Twitter is still the darling of the social media world and its user numbers continue to grow every month. Question marks still remain as to what its long term revenue model will be with some suggesting it will be apps, not ads, which will be the focus of their efforts to make money.

Google Adds Further Functionality to Their SERPs – Google released details of a number of new features to enhance the SERPs including:
• Rich Snippets and microformats
• Date based searches
• Chameleon
• Spellmeleon
• Wonder Wheel

Read about what this means at the Latitude Group Search Marketing News Section

Google Changes its US Trademark Policy – a year on from opening up trademarked keywords to Adwords bidders Google has further expanded this policy and from June is going to be allowing non brand owners to use the company name in their ad text, increasing the cost of brand clicks and making the brand SERPs a very confusing place!

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Patrick Altoft has noticed some changes in the referrer string used for Google natural search results this week which will change the face of position reporting technology. Reported on Blog Storm Altoft analysis the elements of the amended referrer string seen from Google natural search results and points out a variable in the new Google referrer string which indicates the position in the search rankings the website appeared in when the click occurred.

This is major news in the world of SEO as it aids in the tracking an monitoring of search engine positions. Currently specialist tools are utilised for the tracking and monitoring of natural search positions but this change in Google referrer strings could be the beginning of the end for these tools. There is always an element of inaccuracy in position monitoring software due to the various data centres used by Google for serving search results. An update in one data centre means that users of Google would see your website in different positions depending on where and when they search. This issue has been magnified as Google has begun to introduce personalised search results and also the wiki search results for users signed in to Google services. Google has also made a step change recently to less major, more frequent updates to its algorithms which means that smaller variances in search results are more likely, but on a more frequent basis. Add in with this the introduction of universal search elements in sporadic testing stages on various results and the monitoring and predicting of positions has become a minefield and one which many softwares have struggled ot adapt to.

But with the introduction of this variable into the referrer string Google has provided users with a static, standard variable for use in monitoring SEO performance. Regardless of where you are seeing the website today, tomorrow, or yesterday you know exactly where it appeared when that particular click occurred. By including it in the referrer string with a clear indicator Google have also opened the door for analytics packages to begin including the position in their traffic reports. And you can be sure of course, that the Google Analytics team, as well as developers at all other major tracking and analytics tools, will be beavering away to release this functionality imminently.

With all the changes in SEO, and the emergence of universal and personalised search, over the past couple of years, the focus of any most professional SEO experts and companies has moved away from pure positions, and towards traffic volumes and resulting business. This move by Google follows on nicely and in a way is there way of acknowledging that your positions are going to change on a more frequent basis.  Where you see your website will be different to where your customers see it, effectively making the position at any one point in time, unimportant.  What becomes important to know in this ever changing landscape is knowledge of the position it appeared in when a click, ultimately a transaction occurred.

RIP position reporting tools, welcome the new age of SEO reporting.

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There has been more evidence of the dreaded R word hitting the digital world in the past few days as previously untouchable companies face the harsh reality of a less profitable future. The irony is that these companies are seeing the pinch in the way of less than huge profits, where as smaller businesses are seeing the impact come in the form of zero profit and the prospect of going out of business. It goes to show however, that the difficult economic times are hitting companies in every sector, including Internet marketing, and of every size.

Google Feeling the Pinch?

Today, Google is set to post its Q1 figures and experts are predicting a sequential drop in revenue for the first time in Google’s history as a public company. And with 3 rounds of redundancies already in the first quarter of 2009, some cracks are starting to show in Google’s bullet proof exterior. The reality of the situation is that Google will still post huge profits and huge revenue and its biggest concern is appeasing investors and maintaining share price, there isn’t much danger of them going out of business any time soon. It does show however the severity of the situation however that it is hitting even the biggest and most profitable of Internet companies.

Ebay Going Back to its Core

Another Internet giant, Ebay, has announced measures this week which suggest they too, are conscious more difficult times may be ahead and they need to focus on their core business. After selling social content discovery website Stumble Upon back to its founders they have also announced they are planning to take Skype public in 2010 due to a realisation of its “limited synergies with Ebay and Paypal”. Ebay bought Stumble Upon just 2 years ago and Skype in 2008, and despite both posting impressive growth Ebay has since decided neither is a close enough fit to their core business. Both these purchases are evidence of a more frivolous time when large Internet companies had deeper pockets and could make $75M purchases (the price paid for Stumble Upon) without worrying too much about how it would fit in with their business. Now the honeymoon period is over, companies are looking harder at their businesses and spotting the need to streamline and maintain a focus on core activities.

Time to Rip up the Script

With Internet giants such as these cutting back, what chance is there for the smaller business? How does the small website owner survive in difficult times? I think it has been proven in the past that those with a solid business model who react to the changing market quickly, will survive. Sure things will become more difficult and margins will be squeezed, but those who remain agile should be able to ride the storm. Companies need to rip up the playbook of 2007-2008 and make sure their strategy for 2009 is in fitting with what the market demands. Make sure you are meeting a market demand and providing something more, or significantly better than, your competition. Be prepared to change in line with the market, stay agile, and keep in touch with customer demands. Hopefully then, you should be able to survive the difficult times and possibly even come out the other side in a stronger position. There will be casualties, no doubt about it, but for the companies which can stay strong and adapt, there could also be huge opportunities.

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Google have enhanced their image search functionality this week with the inclusion of a colour selection option which filters the image search results based on the colour you select.  It should be a useful little enhancement for filtering the results displayed in Google image search as it will enable you to source images which fit the colour scheme of a particular document.  These are the sort of enhancements which I believe we will see more of in the fight for search engine supremacy (if anyone decides to put up a real fight anytime soon!).  Every major player should have the basis of a solid search algortihm nailed down by now, but an algorithm is only ever going to be so accurate, it can only work on the data inputted.  By allowing the user to refine the results which are displayed you are removing the need for that element of complexity in the algorithm and putting the control in the hands of the user, allowing them to build their own, bespoke results to their particular needs.

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