Discussion forums are a popular way for people to find answers online, but forums often have multiple “threads” or conversations on the same topic. Now Google’s listing forums in a new way to better expose relevant threads.
In searches that bring up a forum listing, Google’s now showing additional forum threads below the main listing, like this:
The format is similar to Google Sitelinks, small links that sometimes appear below the main listing that shows at the top of a Google search results page or recently, within the description as well. Internally, Google calls this “forum clustering.” They been spotted earlier this month when in testing, and now they’re official.
In simple but still dramatic fashion, Google has upgraded browser based local search on mobile handsets. It has also tied Maps on the PC to mobile in a very effective way. And recognizing the limitations of keying in queries into a search box on a mobile handset, Google has taken a page from its Places Directory Android app and incorporated search/browse by category (with location awareness). These changes don’t appear to be major at first blush, but they potentially are and make Google’s browser-based local search on mobile devices much more formidable than it was yesterday.
Beginning tomorrow (September 30), Google will send out 100,000 invites to Google Wave. The product has received a lot of buzz, both for being innovative and not quite ready. Actually, Google admits it’s not ready for prime time, which is one of the reasons why the invites are limited.
If you’re not familiar, Google Wave is a collaborative tool that features real-time features. They’re still working on features, including group definitions, draft mode and permissions.
Those who can expect an invite are developers who participated in an earlier preview, the first people to sign up for invites and select Google Apps customers.
Microsoft has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and Western Union to serve consumer protection PSAs in Bing’s search ads. The new ads address scams involving mortgages, foreclosure, credit repair and money transfers.
Some of the keywords included in the PSA effort are:
foreclosure rescue
mortgage foreclosure
fix my credit
credit repair
money transfer
When a searcher clicks on one of the PSA search ads, they will see a landing page with warnings about scams related to the keyword. The FTC hosts the landing pages for credit repair and mortgage foreclosure while a landing page for avoiding advanced fee fraud is hosted by Microsoft.
With all the hype around global growth of search engines and so many companies looking outside their borders for their next round of revenue, it’s no wonder a flurry of articles have been written on globalizing your search marketing programs. Unfortunately, some of these recommendations have been incorrect, confusing, or not focused on some of the biggest mistakes people make.
Top-Level Domains & Local Hosting
Everyone says the most foolproof method of signaling to a search engine your content is unique to a country is to get a top-level domain (TLD) and host it locally. The problem? You don’t always need to, and should evaluate the need on a market-by-market basis.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that every visitor is a potential prospect or buyer for your goods or services. The mythical 100 percent conversion rate simply doesn’t exist. It’s a delusion.
There are three types of visitors to your Web site:
Noes: Those that won’t ever take the desired action.
Yesses: Those that will always take the desired action.
Maybes: Those that may take the desired action.
You should completely ignore the first two and concentrate on the last group. Let’s examine this more closely.
Noes
Some visitors to your Web site aren’t prepared to take action.
Part of an SEO consultant’s job is to make people click to land on a page, so I understand quite clearly the following tools may screw our efforts because they make a surfer much smarter and selective as to which links to click. However I found the tools interesting enough to share because (apart from saving our own time when surfing) they introduce us to new browsing experience that we need to be aware of.
Earlier last week, and with much anticipation (from me anyway), Facebook launched their new ad manager. I was lucky enough to get access to the beta, but I have to admit that I’m very disappointed with the new interface. Which is way worse than being angry, right?
According to Facebook, the new ad manager includes “in-line editing capabilities, improved navigation and search abilities”. I’ll admit that the in-line editing capabilities are a big step up from the previous interface, but adding a search box and the ability to edit multiple ads simultaneously just isn’t quite what I had in mind from this juggernaut.
The Google AdSense for Feeds (aka FeedBurner) blog announced that all of their links will be 301 redirected, as opposed to some that are 301 redirected. In summary, when you use FeedBurner to create and host your RSS feed, FeedBurner creates special links that are used to send the reader to your web site. Some users selected to use a 302 redirected link, as opposed to a 301 redirected link, to obtain better tracking.
It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.
First, a brief example:
In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal – get your email address so they can show you how their product works. There may be a few secondary links for registered users to login, access to the blog and about pages, and some logos to help improve credibility, but basically, we’re looking at remarkably driven intent behind the design.
If you’ve been around the SEO world a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard the old adage:
Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings
Along with its peer:
SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative (black/gray hat) and will eventually be discounted or penalized
In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading. When I first considered the issue, I thought that perhaps, years ago, these opinions were more accurate than they are today. However, after visualizing the issue, I discovered even that isn’t true:
The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog announced that your search ads will now automatically be displayed on iPhone & Android mobile phones. Yes, Yahoo said, this is an automatic opt in for all advertisers.
Yahoo said, “As of today, your ads should begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches, if they have not already.” Yahoo boasted, if you didn’t have your ads on mobile devices, then “we’ve done it for you.” I assume there is an easy way to opt out, if you specifically do not want to show your ads on these devices?
Appropriately top Microsoft executives, coming off the “worst year ever” for the company, are sharing some of the pain. As PaidContent reports, the top executives at the company took a compensation hit based on the sales and revenue declines. Here are some of the numbers:
CEO Steve Ballmer $1.265 million vs. $1.34 million a year ago
CFO Chris Liddell: $3.5 million vs. $4.8 million
COO Kevin Turner: $5.4 million vs. $8.6 million
Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach: $6.2 million vs. $8.3 million
Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google.
The NY Times discussed the report, released today:
The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the Web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.” The results were later adjusted to reflect Census Bureau patterns in categories like sex, age, population density and telephone usage.
Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There’s a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that “the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds” and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it’s slow and it frequently returns errors.
Google started to show an OneBox at the bottom of the search results for the queries listed in Google Hot Trends. The OneBox mentions that a certain query is “#N of 100 most popular searches in the past hour”, even though Google Hot Trends doesn’t aggregate the most popular searches, which are pretty boring and don’t change very often. As Google’s blog explains, “Hot Trends lists the fastest rising searches on the web at any given hour”.
Google uses the fact that a query is suddenly popular in various ways: for example, to include recent web pages in the list of top results or to show results from Google News and Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, Google Hot Trends doesn’t do a good job at explaining why a certain query is popular, so Google should add more real-time news sources like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.
One of my link builders recently had the brilliant idea of putting together and sending out a questionnaire designed to gather information how the other link builders in our agency perform their daily link building tasks. We’ve always worked on the assumption that each link builder will naturally be drawn to using certain specific tools and techniques. We’ve also found that overall, our clients benefit from working with link builders who all do things a little bit differently from everyone else. If someone gets stuck, so to speak, there are many other favored methods that can be tried.
