My Top 10 Insights From 10 Years In Search. I recently reached my nine year anniversary in the search industry, which means I’m now on my tenth year in SEM. I started buying keywords on Overture with a company I wasn’t even doing marketing for, which got me into some early e-commerce activity, and then to the agency world. It definitely feels like a marriage…there have been some good times, some bad times. Some amazing times, and some really down in the dumps times. I’m nowhere near the person I was when I started and neither is the search biz. We’ve both grown tremendously in the last decade and I don’t think either of us realized just how big this thing was really going to be. I’ve learned a lot in ten years too — usually by making mistakes. 1. This was one of the first major best practices I learned all of those years ago. 2. I’ll credit SearchRev with really hammering this home when I worked with them in 2008. 3.
Sometimes, we overdo the research just to ensure we’ve done enough. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. This took me years to learn. 9. How Searchers' Queries Might Influence Customized Google Search Results. Why does Google customize some search results based upon a previous query that you’ve performed? Is there a special relationship between those query terms, and if so, how did Google define that relationship? Imagine searching for “luxury car” at Google, and then performing another search for “infiniti.”
On the second search, you find a page in the search results that looks like it will provide you with information that you are looking for, and you select a page. Now imagine that a number of other people perform the same series of searches and select the same page. It’s possible that Google might start considering the search for “luxury car” and the search for “infiniti” to be related queries. It’s also possible that the page selected in the second search for “infiniti” might start ranking more highly for the query “luxury car.” A patent originally filed by Google in 2003 was granted this week, and it explores how search rankings might be “improved” by looking at related queries.
What do people type in the address bar? Earlier this year, I added a feature to URL Fixer (a browser add-on that fixes errors in URLs that you type in the address bar) that collects anonymous usage stats from users who opt in in order to help improve the ways that URL Fixer corrects typos; the collected data includes domains that are typed in the URL bar as well as the locale (language/country) of the user who typed them. I now have six months of data, and I’ve run some statistical analysis on it in order to share some interesting stats with you.
(If I were more creative, I would make an infographic out of this information.) Note that this data does not include bookmarked links or links that users click on in websites. It is strictly domains that have been typed directly into the address bar. Care to guess the most commonly typed domain? That’s right: facebook.com. The top 10 domains account for 20% of all typed domains. The most popular TLD for typed domains is .com, followed by .org, .net, and .de. Like this: Like Loading... How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job. The author of the web's first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dresses as a medieval warrior and goes to battle on the weekends and a woman who follows World of Warcraft, acupuncture and ballet, have raised $24 million dollars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got incredible press coverage when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week - but they are probably going to get slaughtered. In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they've built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger.
Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we'll use it well - for as long as it lasts. Blekko CEO Rich Skrenata, photo by Robert Scoble What is Blekko? Blekko was the name of company CEO Rich Skrenta's first networked computer. What have these people built? It's awesome. Quick tips: Lead Gen Sites Pose Challenge to Google - the Haggler. Google: Enemy of the Scalable. Search engines' rules on what constitutes "Black Hat" SEO often make sense: if you're deliberately tricking search engines, or showing users irrelevant content, that's clearly something search engines should prevent. But there are plenty of behaviors that are downright contradictory.
Google opposes paid reviews; Google pays people to write reviews on their local site . Google doesn't want you to pay for links that put your site on page one; Google's main revenue source is charging for what are quite literally links on page one. ( Aaron Wall has thoroughly and entertainingly documented this phenomenon.) The best answer is that Google, as a near monopoly—and search engines, as an industry with few players and a cohesive agenda—wants to ensure that the only scalable forms of online marketing are the ones they control. That turns the whole web into a massive positive externality for search engines: site owners will rush to invest time and effort into creating good original content. What Will Google Plus Google Places Equal?
I have no idea what social network Google Plus (Google+) is going to kill. I have no idea if it is going to be huge or not. But I do have an idea of what it’s going to do to Local Search, or at least I have a vision. Whether my vision is right or not will likely be borne out over the next few months. But I am part pundit and therefore accountable to no one but my ego, so here goes… The Places Stream One day, we are all going to wake up and find “Places” as a default stream in our Google+ experience and a business’ “Plus” stream as part of the default Place Page experience.
Circle Your Customers In some ways, Google+ Circles are no big thing. So what does this mean for SMBs? When you start communicating with potential/existing customers via Google+, it’s extremely simple, not to mention satisfying, to group these people into different categories (e.g. You can start segmenting your audience and targeting specific communications to them. Customers Circle Your Business Social Adwords.
Google, Yelp and Why Review Counts are Meaningless. Google has been copying Yelp’s approach to “social local” for some time now, with things like its Hotpot ratings/reviews service, the creation of “community managers” that work on the ground in several cities to increase awareness and usage of Google Places and several other things that I detailed on Search Engine Land a little while back. But there’s one important area where Google is doing exactly the opposite of Yelp, and it’ll probably be the measure by which experts say Google has someday surpassed Yelp. What’s Google doing so differently than Yelp?
In one sentence: Google is incentivizing reviews at almost spam-like levels. Consider a recent event that Google hosted in Portland: On June 6th, Google and a local arcade called Ground Kontrol announced a “special party” with free “food, drink and prizes provided by Google Places.” This is important: The event was scheduled for June 22 — just 16 days after it was announced. So, how did you get an invitation to this special party? Result? SEO Blog. Wrastlin With The News The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse: #FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017 CNN promised vengeance. Something To Believe In The pretense of objectivity has been dropped: These reporters aren't ideologues.
The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral. The news is fake. "I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods: "A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. Current Headwinds for Online Publishing I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change.
Some of this stuff is cyclical. Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. Is this a test, @Google?