To test things, I sent myself two direct messages from the @smx account that I oversee to my personal account at @dannysullivan. The messages had these links in them:

http://searchengineland.com/math-engines-for-multiplying-mixed-fractions-its-wolfram-alpha-over-google-bing-37653

http://selnd.com/du5hRX

When these links arrived as direct messages, as viewed through the Twitter site, they were unchanged. Nothing had been altered. My understanding is that links WILL change in direct messages in the near future, however.

When Twitter emailed me these messages, the links within them had been shortened as follows:

http://twt.tl/q0TtFzY

http://twt.tl/ch4FcsH

From a marketing perspective, I wondered whether Twitter was stripping out my own URL shortening entirely. If so, I potentially lost important tracking information as well as link credit.

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Yahoo lost some share again and so did Ask, while AOL was “stable.” Yahoo’s search losses, attributed by the search team there to lost “default” toolbar and other similar deals, is now a kind of chronic, month over month phenomenon — a decline in slow motion. I might also argue it reflects a weakening of Yahoo’s brand in connection with search over time.

The combined “search alliance” share (MicroHoo) is “flat” at 28.3 percent, according to the comScore figures. Here are the February share data as presented:

• Google: 65.5 percent
• Yahoo: 16.8 percent
• Bing: 11.5 percent
• AOL: 2.5 percent
• Ask: 3.7 percent

For comparison here are the January comScore share data:

Credits to: Greg Sterling

Googlers convicted in Italy. The biggest news in Europe in February without a doubt was the conviction of three Googlers in Italy. They were convicted to a suspended sentence after the company had allegedly failed to respond quickly to an uploaded YouTube video over a year ago which showed Italian youngsters harassing a young boy with Downs Syndrome.

Yandex sees income growth. Russian search giant Yandex reported that 2009 was a good year, with earnings up 14% on total revenue of 8.7 billion rubles (about 205 million euros). The number of advertisers grew 55%.

Bing reduces search data storage in Europe. Microsoft agreed to cooperate with the European Commission by reducing the amount time it retains Bing search data to six months. The European Commission had put a lot of pressure on the software giant to adjust the privacy policy to comply with EU regulations. Up to now Microsoft had been holding data for 18 months.

EU approves Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance. The EU, as well as the US, has given clearance to Microsoft and Yahoo to go on with their search alliance. The EU sees no restrictions, which means they can go ahead and implement the partnership immediately.

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Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog:

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each . . .

Google’s partner slide at launch:

Google has enjoyed some momentum in the enterprise with Apps but adoption has been tiny relative to Microsoft’s installed base of software users. This however would appear to be a “game changer,” to use the overly used phrase, by bringing all sorts of creativity and new functionality into Google Apps. It also instantly creates a broader ecosystem around the offering that will drive interest and adoption.

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Having a solid keyword monitoring tool in your SEM toolbox is absolutely crucial for proper PPC management. Remember, paid search operates in a constantly evolving environment. For the most part, it’s auction based, so knowing who else is bidding on your terms, how often, with what messages and how their ad/landing pages combinations work together can be some of the most important intelligence you gather for the successful management of your account. Some keyword landscapes involve literally millions of keywords and dozens of competitors. Without a good piece of software working for you to track all of these variables, you could be missing valuable optimization opportunities.

Some of these tools include (and there are others—please list your favorites in the comments below):

• AdGooroo
• The Search Monitor
• Keyword Competitor

(As a side note, even though we’re talking about paid search, these tools generally track organic terms as well.)

Although these tools differ in terms of interface, feature list, methodology, etc, here’s an example of some of the important research you can get from a keyword monitoring solution:

More accurate average position rankings on your terms. For those of you who are thinking: “Why do I need to shell out good money on a tool when I can just go to Google myself and see where I rank?” I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the search engine results pages (SERPs) you see when you search may be (and most likely are) dramatically different than what someone else in another location at another time sees. Google is smart. They know relevance is the key to great search results and are tailoring each SERP on the fly for every query. A searcher’s geolocation, time of day/day of week, previous search habits, previous click habits, context of your most recent searches, etc. may influence where your paid search listings may show.

Keyword monitoring tools track engines at multiple locations across all times of the day so your average position is calculated in aggregate. This blended metric is much more accurate than your own searches from the same browser in one location.

Here’s a screenshot from Keyword Competitor that shows how what a gift basket advertiser would see when tracking average positions from their keyword list:

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Here are the comScore “expanded” search data:

Meanwhile over on the other side of the globe Motorola has made a very public statement that whatever happens with Google in China, it will be working with Bing search on its Android handsets there.

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Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen much discussion around fluctuations in Yahoo’s search index recently, but maybe some significant changes are coming soon?

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

Here is an example look at Microdata in HTML5 for use in Rich Snippets:

To learn more about Rich Snippet support in Google, go here.

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Internal partnerships are always a big part of SEO. It is such a holistic process that you need to get everyone on your side when you’re starting a new InHouse SEO job. Just like selling the company on why it is important, you need to sell to individual teams how they are important to the holistic process.

List out all the partners that you need to make in the organization: PR/Marketing communications and how to leverage PR, Biz Dev and how they structure partnerships, engineering and how they architect the site, and the list goes on and on. Spend the down time to build and solidify those relationships and go on coffee/lunch breaks, plan happy hours, and do other intangibles that will help win people over and get things moving in the right direction.

External partnerships & business development

Sales efforts, creating partnerships, and finding business development opportunities is so important within SEO. It’s crucial to make deals with others in areas like link building and content distribution. Take a step back and look at the opportunities out there and the companies that you can parter with. Find the in’s, ask yourself “what they are lacking?”, and find a way to make it mutually beneficial for both organizations.

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Before I start with a problem site, I take a few measurements.  Whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, you need to figure out where you’re starting from to make sure you’re helping and not hurting your efforts. I start by pulling a variety of data:

1. Note the number of submitted and indexed pages from Google Webmaster Central. Generally, you need to submit a sitemap to get this data, and if you’re having indexing problems,  this can really help. That being said, I don’t always submit an XML sitemap to Google. There are times to do it, and times to not worry about it. If I haven’t submitted a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, I do a site:domain.com query in Google and look at the number of pages listed initially. By paging through all of the results of the site: query, you’ll see that number reduce as you get to the “end.”  This is the true number of pages Google has in the index showing as query results.
2. Run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings I have.
3. Use a crawling program to pull a realistic page list from my site.  Once I have this list I move through and eliminate any pages I don’t want in the index and figure out how I have or should have eliminated them, either by no index tags, roboots.txt exclusion, or parameter exclusion in Webmaster Tools (see more about parameter exclusion below).

NOTE: If my number of indexed pages matches my total page count pretty closely, I’m not really looking at a problem. The reality is – the larger the site, the more problems I generally find.

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Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

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Chris Sherman will moderate, and scheduled speakers include:

• Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
• Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google Inc.
• Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media & Chief Strategy Officer, iProspect, Range Online Media / iProspect
• David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

It’s all set to start at 9:00 am, so come back then to follow-along with what’s being said (or at least to watch me fumble desperately as I try to keep up with what five people are saying at once).

CS: We’ve had an interesting year in search. Quite often, it’s just Google, Google, Google. But in the past year, we’ve seen more radical change than I’ve seen in the past 15 years of following the search industry. It’s very exciting. And that’s why we’ve assembled this panel.

The key question, when we were here last year, we were in the early stages of an economic meltdown. One year later, how are we doing? Does search still have a bright future?

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The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, and were called the “consumer” group. The second group was told to simply look for information on a product, and were called the “forager” group.

The study, conducted last month, sought to answer the following questions:

1. Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results?
2. Are consumers finding and clicking on real-time results?
3. And simply, the bird’s eye view: what are the consumers saying about real-time results?

At the highest level the results showed the following:

• 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
• Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
• The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

Here’s the age distribution of the 44 participants:

Below are screens showing the differences in the eye movements of the two groups.

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• Analytics Action Plans For PPC, BruceClay.com
• Ask The Search Engines, Outspoken Media
• Ask The SEOs, Outspoken Media
• Blended SERPs Presentation SMX West 2010, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
• Bringing SEO In House: How To Be Successful!, Outspoken Media
• Event Hashtag Etiquette: Overheard @ SMX, AIM Clear Blog
• Keynote – The State of The Search Union, Outspoken Media
• Keynote – The State Of The Search Union, BruceClay.com
• Liveblogging: The State Of The Search Union, WebProNews
• Measuring How Search Ads Drive Offline Conversions, BruceClay.com
• Microsoft-Yahoo: What’s It All Mean?, BruceClay.com
• SMX West: Analytics Action Plans, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Ask The Search Engines, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Ask The SEOs, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Bringing SEO In House, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Conversion Ninja Toolbox, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: PPC Tune Up Clinic, Search Engine Roundtable
• Social Media 60 Minutes A Day SMX West 2010 Presentation, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
• Social Media, Search & Reputation Management, Outspoken Media
• Social Media, Search & Reputation Management, BruceClay.com
• Don’t Slap Rainbows: Diversity Marketing Realness, AIM Clear Blog
• Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine, PageRank, PuSH, Buzz, and Much More, WebProNews
• Research you can use in search marketing efforts from SMX West panel, community.microsoftadvertising.com
• SMX West 2010 Recap and Canadian Olympic Pride, www2.webmasterradio.fm
• The Energy Was Up at SMX West 2010, blog.efrontier.com
• YouTube SEO at SMX West RECAP, vidiseo.com

Credits to: Matt McGee

• Liveblog: SMX West 2010 Keynote – An Insider’s Look At Google Research
• Google’s Norvig: PageRank Is Overhyped

But there was much more going on during the individual sessions. Here’s a recap of the SMX West coverage we’ve found; feel free to leave a comment if there’s something we missed.

• 60 Minutes Per Day For Social Media Success, Outspoken Media
• Adwords Grows Up! Formats, Sitelinks & Universal, AIM Clear Blog
• Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1, SEOmoz
• Bing Cashback program and customer success stories from SMX West, community.microsoftadvertising.com
• Bing Talks Local Business Listings, WebProNews
• Bring In The Bling Via Bing Cashback, BruceClay.com
• Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters, BruceClay.com
• Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues, Outspoken Media
• Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers, BruceClay.com
• Free Ways To Market On Facebook, Outspoken Media
• Google ‘personalizes’ one in five searches, The Register
• Google May Start Calling PageRank Something Else, WebProNews
• Google mulls blend of education, search, CNET News
• Google Research head dubs holy PageRank ‘over-hyped’, The Register
• Industrial Strength SEO, Outspoken Media
• Keynote – An Insider’s Look At Google Research, Outspoken Media
• Keynote: Peter Norvig, Google, BruceClay.com
• Live: Google Keynote at SMX West in Santa Clara, WebProNews
• Peter Norvig offers an insider’s look at Google Research during SMX West, Search Engine Watch Blog
• SMX West: Free Ways to Market on Facebook, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Optimizing Your Content on YouTube, Search Engine Roundtable
• SMX West: Paid Search Bullseye, Search Engine Roundtable
• Trends, ZombieBait & Sideways Keyword Research, AIM Clear Blog
• Steve Ballmer Unplugged: SMX West 2010 Keynote, AIM Clear Blog
• The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters, BruceClay.com
• Way Up Google’s Research Snoot with Peter Norvig, AIM Clear Blog

Credits to: Matt McGee

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According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.

Credits to: Matt McGee

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Types Of Listings

To understand where we’re at now, let me start with some core concepts. There are two basic ways to show up in search results:

Editorial / Organic / Natural Listings:  Any good search engine, such as Google or Bing, has “editorial” or “organic” or “natural” listings. These are listings that appear without anyone paying for them. They are provided as a core product of that search engine, in the same way that a newspaper has a core product of writing stories about topics it believes are of interest to its readers, rather than to its advertisers.

Paid Search / CPC / PPC Listings: Search engines also have paid search ads, sometimes referred to as “CPC” or “PPC” listings. Those acronyms come from the way advertisers are charged for these ads, on a Cost-Per-Click or Pay-Per-Click basis. If you pay, you get listed. When you stop paying, your listing goes away. Similar to newspapers, these ads typically appear alongside — but separate from — editorial content. They’re also not supposed to influence the editorial coverage.

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In the Business 1.0 world, employees were often treated as depersonalized, faceless drones, replaceable cogwheels in corporate machinery. This perspective often seems to be reflected in traditional corporate websites where individual employees are relegated to the background, and rarely are any individuals highlighted or recognized on those company webpages.

For example, one of the most famous employees of the Masry & Vititoe legal firm in California is Erin Brockovich, the famous legal clerk and crusader for pollution victims depicted in the film that bears her name, starring Julia Roberts. However, Masry & Vititoe’s website does not rank in the first couple of pages of search results for “erin brockovich” keyword searches in Google, in large part because the site does not have a profile page dedicated to Erin.

There’s no employee profile page dedicated to Erin Brockovich on the Masry & Vititoe website. As their most-famous employee, this constitutes a missed opportunity.

Now, I can imagine that Masry & Vititoe might feel conflicted about presenting a profile page about a former employee, but they should’ve had a profile page while Brockovich was still an employee, and then altered the page slightly after she left the firm, clearly marking on it that she’s a former employee, and linking to her personal site. Masry & Vititoe likely does not realize that they’ve missed out on having more traffic and in-bound links because of this squandered opportunity, and those inbound links could be the difference between having their site rank better than their competition’s for various keyword searches.

In some companies, the only employees mentioned on the corporate website are the executives, but even for these companies, those pages are rarely designed properly for search. Quite a few major corporations list out all of their executives on a single page (including Google!), and this just is not effective as having a dedicated page for each exec which “sings” a unique song that’s more precisely targeted for the individual’s name than a group page ever would be.

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