SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 19, 2012

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 19, 2012
http://bit.ly/QJ3q31

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Google Gives Update On Shopping Going Full Paid Inclusion, Hints At AdWords’ Future On Q3 Call

    Now that Google’s new pay-for-play Shopping is in full swing (the changeover took place October 17), the company used its earnings call to share thoughts on its success thus far, and its future vision for the product. Additionally, Google execs came out with some tidbits about the status and future of other elements of its [...]

  • Search In Pics: Blue Google Win, Googlers At Dreamworks & Google Sand Mandala

    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google’s Sand Mandala By Buddhist Monks: Source: Google+ Doodlers At Dreamworks: Source: Google+ Google’s Gundotra With [...]

  • Happy Birthday “Not Provided” – One Year Since Google Began Withholding Search Terms

    A year ago (and a day), Google began encrypting searches for signed-in users, so that the terms they searched for were no longer passed to publishers, except for advertisers. The “single digit” withholding predicted by Google at launch has turned into more than 50% of terms being withheld, in some cases. I explore how things [...]

  • Pay To List French News Sites? “Non,” Writes Back Google To France — It’ll Just Drop Them

    Google has sent a letter to the French policy makers about a proposal to charge Google for linking to their content. France 24 reports Google threatened French publishers by telling them they will not pay to link to their content and if they are forced to, Google will simply stop linking to them. The official [...]

  • Infographic: How Google Fights Bad Ads

    Google carries billions of ads each year, but it’s not anything goes. The company seeks to stop “bad ads” that might push illegal products or harmful goods. A new infographic from Google, out as part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, covers the process. The infographic explains that 134 million ads from 824,000 advertisers were stopped last year, [...]

  • Google’s Updates Ngram Viewer, Showing How Words Have Evolved Over time

    Google announced earlier today that version 2.0 of the popular Google Books Ngram Viewer is now available online. What’s an Ngram Viewer? In a nutshell, Ngram Viewer lets you find and visualize how words and phrases have developed and been used over time using the 30 million print books Google has scanned working with libraries located around [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

Link Building

Local, Maps & Mobile

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Related Topics: SearchCap



SMX - Search Marketing Expo Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here. Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Infographic: How Google Fights Bad Ads

Infographic: How Google Fights Bad Ads
http://bit.ly/RK80iI

Google carries billions of ads each year, but it’s not anything goes. The company seeks to stop “bad ads” that might push illegal products or harmful goods. A new infographic from Google, out as part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, covers the process.

The infographic explains that 134 million ads from 824,000 advertisers were stopped last year, a figure we’ve heard before, and highlights parts of the process used, automated systems, Google’s internal expert review and reports from outside the company:

Want the infographic yourself? You’ll find it here in PDF format.

Of course, the process isn’t perfect, perhaps most notably in that Google agreed last year to settle a dispute with the US Department Of Justice over illegal pharmaceutical ads. Google paid a $ 500 million fine and said the ads should never have been allowed to run.

This year, Google’s been trying to open up more about the ad screening process, with a blog post earlier this year about fighting bad ads and a video on keeping ads safe:

YouTube Preview Image

Behind The Scenes In Google’s Battle Against Bad Ads from us, also earlier this year, provides more behind-the-scenes information from Google, from an interview with David Baker, Google’s director of engineering for its advertising team.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Infographics



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France Tells Google To Pay For Linking To Content But Google Says No

France Tells Google To Pay For Linking To Content But Google Says No
http://bit.ly/RK7lOa

Google has sent a letter to the French policy makers about a proposal to charge Google for linking to their content.

France 24 reports Google threatened French publishers by telling them they will not pay to link to their content and if they are forced to, Google will simply stop linking to them.

The official letter, written in French, doesn’t appear to be written in such a direct tone. The letter describes how this proposal can hurt the internet as a whole, can hurt French readers and most importantly – hurt French publishers. Google says they send four billion clicks per month to publishers and 1 billion of those clicks comes from Google News. Google News is free, there are no ads on Google News, but yet Google has an AdSense program that paid out over $ 6.5 billion to U.S. publishers from in 2011. So Google believes they are doing their part in helping news publishers remain financially fit.

French news publishers obviously feel otherwise. Google does make it sound that if the law is passed, Google will not participate and remove all French publishers from their index.

Meanwhile, Brazilian publishers may boycott Google News.

Google and France have not always seen eye to eye, here are some headlines on Google and France:

Related Topics: Google: Business Issues | Google: News | Google: Outside US | Top News



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Google’s Updates Ngram Viewer, Showing How Words Have Evolved Over time

Google’s Updates Ngram Viewer, Showing How Words Have Evolved Over time
http://bit.ly/WJZUeb

Google announced earlier today that version 2.0 of the popular Google Books Ngram Viewer is now available online. What’s an Ngram Viewer? In a nutshell, Ngram Viewer lets you find and visualize how words and phrases have developed and been used over time using the 30 million print books Google has scanned working with libraries located around the world as its dataset.

The service debuted in December, 2010 at the time this research paper was published in Science.

Ngram Viewer was developed as a research tool for linguists, lexicographers, historians and others but has proven to be popular tool for others. Google says that more than 45 million word comparison graphs have been created in Ngram Viewer’s first 22 months.

In a Google Research Blog Post, Google Engineering Manager and Ngram Viewer co-creator, John Orwant, says that version 2.0 is using a new dataset with material from more books.

Orwant adds that along with more data, the optical character recognition (OCR) that Google uses when scanning books is better, and Google has also made improvements in how it deals with the metadata provided by both publisher and library partners.

The quality of Google’s scanning and metadata has been under scrutiny since the beginning of the project.

We covered some of the initial problems with Ngram Viewer when it launched in “When OCR Goes Bad: Google’s Ngram Viewer & The F-Word.” Note: Adult language used in the article and demo searches. 

As an example, the “medial S” appears to still be causing inaccurate results.

Here’s the current version of a search used in the story where you’ll see some of the same issues raised back in 2010.

Of course no scanning method, metadata source or database are 100% perfect, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of what Ngram Viewer offers. Our only advice, as is the case with any database or reference resource, is to review and question what you find.

Ngram Version 2.0 also can now automatically automatically identify parts of speech and compare how a word is used. For example, how the word “cheer” is used as a verb and noun over time:

With the new version, you can also now add, subtract, multiply and divide Ngram counts. For instance, you can see how “record player” rose as the popularity of “Victrola” declined:

You can learn more about how Ngram Viewer works on this info page.

With a bit of understanding of what Ngram Viewer can and can’t do, because of its size, it’s a unique resource that can be both educational, informative and even fun for just about anyone who is interested in the history of how language evolves.

Related Topics: Google: Other



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After Sting Operation, Yelp Outs 8 Businesses That It Caught Trying To Buy Reviews

After Sting Operation, Yelp Outs 8 Businesses That It Caught Trying To Buy Reviews
http://bit.ly/PcSYGf

yelp-consumer-alert-logoYelp is now showing “Consumer Alert” warning messages on the profile pages of eight businesses that it says it caught in a sting operation trying to buy reviews.

As the New York Times reports, Yelp conducted a sting operation in which one of its employees pretended to be an “Elite” reviewer and responded to review solicitations on Craigslist. As the article explains:

A pest control company offered $ 5 to anyone who would post a review that the business itself had written. The moving company was willing to pay $ 50 but wanted original copy. An appliance repair shop provided a start: “I really appreciate that the service tech was on time, the problem was solved, everything was cleaned up and he was very professional. Please add 50 or more words,” the shop suggested. It would pay $ 30.

The highest payment was offered by a jewelry store in San Diego, which said it was forced to solicit reviews after others got away with doing it. “We have noticed that some of our larger, corporate run competitors have been unfairly trying to get reviews written for them on Yelp, which puts us at a disadvantage,” wrote Bert Levi of Levi Family Jewelers. He said he would pay $ 200 for a review of a new custom-designed ring.

This warning is now showing — and will remain for three months — on the Levi Family Jewelers profile page on Yelp, and on the pages of seven other businesses that Yelp says it caught trying to buy reviews:

yelp-buying-reviews

That’s not all Yelp is doing. You can see that the word “here” at the end is blue — that’s a link to a JPG showing the correspondence that took place during Yelp’s sting.

Yelp has posted the evidence for its visitors to read. Here’s a portion of the original email allegedly from the business owner to the Yelp employee that was pretending to be an Elite reviewer.

evidence-letter

“Bert” tells the reviewer that his company has noticed “some of our larger, corporate run competitors … unfairly trying to get reviews written for them on yelp, which puts us at a disadvantage.”

Right or wrong, that’s emblematic of how competitive the reviews space is right now and how desperate business owners are to get positive reviews. The problem is perhaps worse on Yelp due its review filter, which can be very hit and miss when it comes to choosing reviews to show or hide. But it’s certainly not a problem that only Yelp faces; business owners can buy reviews for Google+, Amazon, app stores and other sites from sites like Fiverr, Freelancer.com and others.

Eric Singley, Yelp’s VP of Consumer and Mobile Products, tells the Times that the group of eight businesses being outed now “is just a sample” of businesses that are soliciting reviews.

The article implies that additional businesses were caught trying to buy ads and will later have the warning added to their pages. We’ve reached out to Yelp for more information about that and will update this article if and when we learn more.

Postscript: Shortly after publishing, a Yelp spokesperson sent us this statement: “If/as we find more, we will put consumer alert notices on their pages, as well.”

Related Topics: Legal: General | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | SEO: Local | Top News | Yelp



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SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 17, 2012

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 17, 2012
http://bit.ly/PcSbVH

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • 6 Underrated Content Marketing Assets For B2B SEO

    One of the biggest obstacles to B2B search engine optimization is developing new content marketing assets for targeting important keywords and acquiring link assets. While our organization has seen this in client relationships throughout the years, this degree of difficulty was further supported by industry peers in the 2012 MarketingSherpa Search Engine Marketing Report. Even [...]

  • Romney’s “Binders Full Of Women” Takes Over Google Images

    I don’t know what images were showing up for a “binders full of women” search on Google Images before last night’s US presidential debate. But today, they’re dominated by a meme started from a comment last night by Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Romney was commenting that he sought to increase the number of women in [...]

  • WebmasterWorld Sold To Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas

    One of the more popular Webmaster and SEO forums, WebmasterWorld, has been sold today to Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas. Jim Boykin has been acquiring several forums this year, including all of the Developer Shed network including SEO Chat forums and Cre8asite Forums from Kim Krause Berg. Cre8asite Forums has been around since 1998 as [...]

  • Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement?

    Engagement is a magnetic “measure” of online effectiveness. You might call it an “engaging” metric. This is because it is a nice stand-in when real measures of sales, leads or subscriptions are too difficult to track or deliver disappointing results. “No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” is the mantra. The definition [...]

  • How To Jump Start Display Ad Campaigns With Look-A-Likes

    Advertisers will tell you that they don’t like to waste money. This is especially true heading into the holiday season. However, that is exactly what many advertisers do by not taking advantage of Look-a-like technology, which has made great advances in recent years. Look-a-likes can reduce waste, save time, and improve performance by defining highly effective [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Related Topics: SearchCap



SMX - Search Marketing Expo Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here. Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google's Disavow Tool - Take a Deep Breath

Google's Disavow Tool - Take a Deep Breath
http://bit.ly/R3n2Ac

Posted by Dr. Pete

Disavowed LynxAt Pubcon Las Vegas on Tuesday (10/16), Google's Matt Cutts announced a new tool to disavow links. After absorbing the news for a day, I have some advice – put down the keyboard and the Red Bull and breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, and then repeat.

As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility, and my rice turns out Perfect Every Time®" – or something like that. My SEO friends are already reporting that their customers are asking to have links removed, and this has the potential to get ugly fast. I think this is, on balance, a good tool (one particularly handsome SEO petitioned Google for a text-file-based disavow back in December of 2011), but it also has the potential for serious destruction.

I. Who Should Use It?

I’m going to write this post backwards, for two reasons. First, if you’ve read about the disavow tool, you’ve already seen how it works, so I’ll save that for last. Second, if you haven’t read about it, I don’t want you to just run off and use it before I get my sermon on. So, sit down in your pew and listen.

Especially now, with almost no data about the tool’s effectiveness, there are really only a few groups of people who should consider using the disavow tool, in my opinion. If you fall into one of these groups, then proceed – with caution…

1. You’ve Received Bad Link Warnings

While people have had mixed reactions to Google’s bad link warnings, and there has been at least one false alarm, bad link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools are currently the only direct signal from Google that they have a problem with your link profile. The warnings look something like this:

Sample GWT bad link warning

If you’ve received a direct warning, you’re pretty sure which links are suspect, and you haven’t been able to get them removed, then the disavow tool may be for you.

2. You’ve Been Manually Penalized

I hesitate to add this one, because determining if you’ve been penalized can be more art than science, but if your site has clearly been hit with a manual penalty, you’re reasonably certain that penalty is link-based, and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, then disavowal may be up your alley.

3. You Were Denied Reconsideration

If you’ve been trying to fix (1) bad-link warnings or (2) a link-based penalty for months, with no success, then disavowal is a logical next step. Google has not been forgiving about these situations, and even if you’ve filed for reconsideration, will often not take action unless the majority of your bad links have been removed. Sometimes, that’s just not feasible, so now you have one more option.

4. You’ve Been Hit By Penguin

Diagnosing Penguin can be a bit tricky, but your best clue is a clear traffic drop on or immediately after April 24, 2012 (the release date of Penguin 1.0). To the best of our knowledge, Penguin primarily targeted aggressive link-building strategies, especially excessive use of unnatural anchor text. If you can fix those links (diversify anchor text and/or remove bad links), that’s your best option, but if you’re still struggling with Penguin then the disavow tool may be useful to you.

Keep in mind that we’re still unclear on the Penguin update cycle, specifically whether you can recover outside of a Penguin data update (and there have only been two of those – May 25, 2012 and October 5, 2012 – as of this writing). Add to this Google’s statements that disavowal could take weeks, and the new tool is far from a magic wand for dispelling Penguins.

This has no real relevance to SEO, but Facebook added a Penguin emoticon this week <("), and it’s the greatest thing ever. Please use it with reckless abandon.

5. You’re a Victim of “Negative” SEO

If you think that you’ve been a victim of a link-based attack (someone has purposely created bad links to harm your site), and you haven’t been able to get those links removed – which is, unfortunately, common in these situations – then disavowal is a new weapon in your arsenal. I hesitate to mention this because negative SEO, while very real, is also very rare. The vast majority (90%+) of people who think they are victims of negative SEO are usually suffering from other SEO problems. So, make sure you’re solving the right problem before you start disavowing links.

II. Which Links Are Bad?

Even if you’re sure that bad links are your problem, discovering exactly which links are bad is an outright perilous journey. Here’s the problem – most links, even low-value links, still help your rankings. So, if you start removing absolutely every questionable link, you could be throwing out a lot of SEO babies out with that polluted bathwater.

Many posts have been written on how to dig into Google Webmaster Tools links, Open Site Explorer, Majestic, etc., and those techniques are incredibly useful, but please be very, very careful. You don’t just want to assign a number to your links based on Toolbar PageRank or Domain Authority and start disavowing everything under some arbitrary limit.

This is a very advanced and difficult topic, but I’m going to try to provide some general advice on pinning down which links might need removing…

1. Assess Your Risk Level

This is step one. If you’re worried about a potential future penalty and are proactively removing links, please do not start taking a hatchet to your link profile. You risk doing a lot of damage to fix a problem that you don’t even have yet. Not to sound conspiratorial, but what is Google going to think when your currently unpenalized site submits 500 links for disavowal?

On the flipside, if you’ve been decimated by a penalty (manual or algorithmic) and lost the majority of your traffic, the downside to cutting out a chunk of links is a lot less. If you’re considering any kind of drastic measure, like completely moving to a new domain, then I’d certainly give the disavow tool a shot.

2. Isolate the Diseased Links

The more you can isolate the diseased portion of your link profile, the more effectively you can target treatment without damaging your site in the process. To do that, you have to understand the nature of your particular disease. For example, if you were hit by Penguin, you might want to start by looking at links with certain exact-match anchor phrases. If you were hit by Negative SEO, then you probably want to target links with anchor text that’s clearly suspicious or out of place.

Let’s look at a real-world example. A while back, Rand decided to challenge the black-hat community to hit SEOmoz with negative SEO, thereby shaving roughly 20 years off of the marketing team’s collective lives. Long story short, SEOmoz survived, but what if we hadn’t? How could we isolate and target the suspicious links?

One of the clearly anomalous phrases this attack tried to rank us for was “dog snuggies”. So, I might start by loading up Open Site Explorer, and clicking on the “Anchor Text” tab. From there, I’d browse the anchor text until the suspect phrase appeared, and then click [+] to see the links using that phrase:

Romney’s “Binders Full Of Women” Takes Over Google Images

Romney’s “Binders Full Of Women” Takes Over Google Images
http://bit.ly/R3fZHP

I don’t know what images were showing up for a “binders full of women” search on Google Images before last night’s US presidential debate. But today, they’re dominated by a meme started from a comment last night by Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

Romney was commenting that he sought to increase the number of women in his cabinet as governor of Massachusetts by asking for more women candidates. As a result, he was delivered “binders full of women” to review.

While some are now questioning the story, others are taking part in a new meme, making pictures poking fun at the idea of “binders full of women.” In turn, those pictures are filling up Google Images for the term:

 

Here are some of the individual photos. From the National Memo, a mashup of binders and the movie Dirty Dancing (“No one puts Baby in a binder”):

From E Online, a mashup of the movie Say Anything and binders:

From Token Skeptic, Lord Of The Rings meets binders:

My favorite, a mashup featured at Boing Boing of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing surprise that “Romney still uses binders?”

These images all actually originate off a funny new Tumblr blog, Binders Full Of Women, where people are submitting all types of mashups, such as this one:

Because Google Images likely visits news sites more quickly than other sites, in an attempt to find fresh content, these images drawn from the Tumblr blog seem to be doing better on those news sites than on the Tumblr blog itself.

This search filling up with the pictures also reflects what we reported on before, how in some cases, fresh images can dominate the Google Images search results for unusual terms. That’s why images of Romney were recently dominating Google Images for a search on “completely wrong,” as our Google Images Dominated By Pictures Of Romney For “Completely Wrong” Search story from last week explains.

By the way, the “binders full of women” images are also filling up Bing Images, though with odd relat suggestions, such as “38Ddd Women” and “Full Figured Ladies:”

Related Topics: Google: Images | Link Building: Link Bombs | Search & Society: General | Top News



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Google Lucky Number 7: Differences In New Google SERP Across Retail, Finance &amp; Technology

Google Lucky Number 7: Differences In New Google SERP Across Retail, Finance & Technology
http://bit.ly/WnU57J

What do 26,000 keywords tell us about the latest Google 7 change and the new Google SERP?

Google Lucky Number 7 – Differences across retail, finance and technology

As the Google SERP continues to evolve and brands aim to increase their control over search results, the emergence of a new type of SERP has interesting implications for SEO Managers.

Since August, Google has been serving for some keywords, SERPs with 7 organic listings, instead of the usual 10 listings as discussed in 7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain.

This fits in with what Google says is its ultimate goal – “Overall, our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given search query as possible.”

While this change has caused an expected uproar from many a marketer, a large opportunity presents itself for brands that invest in universal search techniques.  Not only can brand sites dominate the Google SERP with multiple results from a single site, but also negative content can be combatted and pushed out of the first page.

Now that the ‘dust has settled,’ so to speak, I want to walk you through these changes and explain what this means to a search marketer. These recommendations are based on an analysis of SERPs, using a wide sample of 26,000 keywords across industries including: Technology –  B2B, Technology – B2C, Financial Services and Retail.

In this article, I will cover:

  1. The exact nature of the Google 7 change
  2. How widespread the change is and what triggers this change
  3. Impact of change on traffic and conversions
  4. Adjusting keyword rank reporting
  5. Adjusting keyword goals
  6. Targeting universal search and blended rank

A New Google SERP: Seven Results Accompanied By Breakout Sitelinks

In the below screenshot, you can see that when I type [twitter] in the Google search bar, the Google SERP displays seven, not ten, natural blue link results. The first result has breakout sitelinks.

New Google SERP - 'Twitter' Search Screenshot

 

Now, if I type in [Toyota], you see a similar pattern – a set of seven results, with the first result having breakout sitelinks. In addition to the seven organic results, there is a Places pack also with links to Toyota dealerships near my location (set to Los Angeles, California).

New Google SERP - 'Toyota' Search Screenshot

 

Page 2 and page 3 look the same in the number of results before and after the change. However, the first result on page 2 is what used to be in position 8 in the older version of page 1.

Change Is Widespread: Number Of Keywords Affected Varies By Industry

New Google SERP - The Number Of Keywords Affected Varies By IndustryWhile the observations I made above may be helpful, the real value lies in understanding how widespread this change is and where it occurs.

To examine this more closely, the team at BrightEdge looked at a random sample of 26,000 keywords across the Technology – B2B, Technology – B2C, Financial Services, and Retail industries to identify patterns. Here is what we found:

1.  Virtually all keywords with seven results have sitelinks.

We noticed that almost 95% of keywords with seven results also have breakout sitelinks. We also found that the sitelinks show up on all keywords that are brand keywords. So, you can expect that all branded keywords – for you and your competition – will now have seven link results.

2.  The number of keywords affected increased four times after August 20th.

Since the change was first noticed on August 20th, the number of keywords with seven results increased four times. As we monitored the changes, we realized that what started as an experiment by Google was clearly being rolled out on a wide scale and consistently across data centers and regions.

At the time of this writing, this change is visible in North America and Europe, and several countries in Asia and South America.

3.  With 8% of keywords affected, this change touches more keywords than Panda.

The percentage of keywords impacted is currently 8% across the industries we examined. This is significant, considering that a critical update like Panda affected 5% of searches.

4.  The number of keywords affected varies by industry.

We have found that the impact varies by industry. The Technology – B2B sector has 9.4% of its keywords affected, while Technology – B2C industry sees 12.1% keywords impacted. Financial Services industry has about 2.7% of keywords affected, and about 3.5% of keywords in Retail are impacted by this change.

New Google SERP - Percentage Of Keywords Affected By Industry

 

The Change Impacts Traffic & Conversions

The impact of this change on your traffic and conversions may be significant.  This is especially true if you previously ranked between 8 and 10. In this case, without any changes in your rankings, your presence has changed from the first page to the second page. As a result of this, you will most likely see a decrease in website performance.

We all know that click-through-rates vary by the page on which the result shows up. Traffic from keywords in positions 8-10 (now on page 2) will decrease. Instead, your traffic will be similar to what usually comes from positions 10-12.

Even if you were ranking between 1 through 7, it may be worth taking a closer look at the keywords which are affected. You may just find that you end up with a higher visibility on the first page and therefore, an increase in website performance. Indeed, keywords above the fold will continue to get most of the traffic and might even see an uptick, due to fewer choices on page 1. This is one of the most serious implications of the Google change.

Keep two things in mind. First, unless your competitors are greatly ahead of you, they will see equivalent drops. Second, if you realize your keywords have dropped out of page 1, take a closer look to spot what’s behind this change – the new Google SERP or declining SEO performance. It may well be possible that your rank stayed the same, but page 1 simply shows fewer results.

As we just saw, the ‘Google 7’ change impacts all brand terms, many with significant search volume. This impact could be extended to other keyword categories in the future by Google.  The following steps may be helpful if you find yourself affected  by this change:

  1. Adjust your keyword rank reporting.
  2. Re-think your keyword goals.
  3. Pay greater attention to blended search and measure blended rank.

Adjust Your Keyword Rank Reporting

If some of your keywords have been impacted, you will need to make adjustments to your keyword reporting. Make sure your keyword tracking technology reflects this.

For instance, for keywords with 7 results, positions 8, 9, and 10 should be reported as falling on page 2; for keywords with 8 results, positions 9 and 10 should be reported as appearing on page 2, and so on.

If it is not possible to configure your technology to reflect this, ask your technology provider to do so. You may also want to investigate how your technology provider keeps up with Google’s algorithm changes as these changes are becoming more frequent.

If you do a lot of reporting outside your tool, or you use Excel for keyword performance tracking, you may have to make these adjustments manually. ?Beware – this might get a little tedious if you are tracking a lot of keywords.

Adjust Your Keyword Goals

If your keywords are impacted by this change, you also need to recalibrate your keyword goals. Adjust your goals to reflect the ‘new real estate reality’ for some of your keywords.

Finding keywords within striking distance should now start with selecting keywords on page 2. In your

LinkedIn Announces the New LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Announces the New LinkedIn Profile
http://bit.ly/RSHFz9

At a rare announcement event today, LinkedIn announced the “new” LinkedIn, which includes an updated profile page.

“[It's] one of the biggest changes to a pillar product in LinkedIn’s history,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO. Weiner introduced today’s event, which was a rare Apple-style live announcement for LinkedIn.

After Deep Nishar, senior VP of products at LinkedIn, highlighted how quickly LinkedIn is growing (50 million new members this year), Aaron Bronzan, product manager at LinkedIn, took the stage to announce the new LinkedIn profile page

Bronzan stated that LinkedIn’s design goal was to simplify the page and provide new tools to provide relevant insights to LinkedIn members so that they will use the service every day.

At the beginning of the event Weiner made the point that LinkedIn users are now updating their profiles even when they are not currently looking for work. The biggest change to the LinkedIn profile page, streamlined profile editing, reflects this.

“We’ve taken profile editing and re-built it from the ground up,” said Bronzan.

Members can now edit their profiles in-line, changing things on the fly. The skill endorsements that LinkedIn rolled out last month have also been made simpler, and members can now endorse specific skills for people in their network with one click.

To provide members with those relevant insights Bronzan mentioned, LinkedIn has provided new tools that display profile information and network connections in a more visual style. Activitiy is now front-and-center at the top of the profile, to encourage members to interact on a more regualr basis. There is also a tool that compares members’ interests and skills when visiting the profile of someone they’ve connected with, or other other helpful information to help connect with people they do not yet know. Members can also now filter through their connection’s connections with a search feature, allowing them to find people with specific skills to network with.

The new LinkedIn profile rolls out to members starting today.

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