 February 25th, 2010 by John | Posted under Google, Search Industry News
Just over a year ago, Google made some changes in their algorithm that appeared to be giving weight to “brands.” Now, “brand” is a short word that’s loaded with a lot of meaning. When this change took place, there were plenty of people running around in circles waving their arms in the air thinking that the big, rich corporations were going to dominate the search engine rankings and the whole purpose of organic search would be lost forever (the purpose being bringing users relevant results that could be from anyone, anywhere if they were right on target).
Fortunately, the passage of time has let people make some more considered analyses of that change. To get up to speed, let’s take a quick look at some of the ancient history (dating back to 2003) in search engine technology.
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In December 2009 Google rolled out Personalized Search for users who were not signed in, and in over 40 languages. Personalized search has been around for awhile for signed in users who have web history enabled. This allows Google to fine-tune your search results based on past searches and on the sites you’ve clicked on in the past. This is how Google tries to optimize searches for you when your search terms have more than one meaning.
For example, Googling the term “blackberry” while signed in with web history on gets the results you see on the first screen shot. From my search history it is clear that I’m much more likely to be searching for information about the BlackBerry PDA than about the actual fruit. On the other hand, my mom, who does a lot of baking and jam-making, would probably end up with search results about the fruit rather than about the electronic device, based on her history of looking up recipes.
So now that personalized search is on offer for signed out users, exactly what does that mean?
It means that personalized search can use an anonymous cookie on your browser to base your search results on 180 days of search activity linked to this cookie. This is completely separate and apart from your Web History and your Google account. When you have the option of personalized results while signed out, you will see a link that says View Customizations in the top right corner of the results page, as you can see in the second screen shot. When you click on it, you can see how the results are customized and, if you want, you can turn off this type of customization, as you can see in the third screen shot.
Now, there are obviously computers where lots of different people search, so the browser cookie might be influenced by multiple people’s search activity. To protect the privacy of the non-signed-in users, you can’t actually view the specific search activity upon which the signed-out personalized search is based. Plus, you can turn off personalized search settings for signed-out personalized search altogether if you want.
As for signed-in personalized search, you can clear the history upon which your personalized results are based at any time to protect your privacy. That way, if you stay signed in and someone else wants to know what you’ve been searching on, they won’t be able to do it through your personalized search history. Of course they could still go through your web history, so if you’re concerned, you should use your browser to clear your web history.
If you’re a webmaster, you might be wondering whether personalized search, adopted on a massive scale, will affect your ability to reach the people you want to visit your website. The answer, unsatisfactory as it may be, is “Yes, and no.”
Consider this. If a user searches for, say, “pith helmets,” and visits the top result and the last two results on the first page of listings. Then those three websites will be added into the person’s personalized search data. Next time the user decides to do a search for “pith helmets” then those two sites from the bottom of the first page of results will rank higher than they would in an organic, starting from scratch search.
But what if the user finds another search result, say the 7th one on the new results page, and bookmarks it and goes there henceforth rather than searching for pith helmets anymore for the time being. But then, a few months later, he thinks that maybe there’s a better pith helmet out there so he does another search. But this time, the one he bookmarked shows up as the top result. What gives?
Even though that site didn’t do any special SEO, there it is, right at the top of our pith helmet-loving searcher. However, other searchers will find other pith helmet dealers at the top of their results pages.
So how do you, the webmaster, change your SEO strategy? Or do you need to change it? If you’re doing legitimate, white-hat ways of getting traffic to your site, then your site will be more likely to bubble to the top of the research results for personalized search. A first time searcher might find your site perched at No. 1 simply because he has already visited it a bunch of times through other routes. This is true even if your site wouldn’t be tops in an organic search.
There’s nothing really that you should change in terms of your SEO strategy. Keep doing the on-site SEO as you have been, and you’ll probably do fine. But there’s nothing wrong with using off-site SEO to build up your brand and keep your visitors happy. Again, it boils down to having great content that people will find compelling and that will make them want to come back. This helps you whether the game is organic search or personalized search.
The takeaway is this: Google personalized search isn’t so much revolutionary as evolutionary. It’s not going to take all the search engine results and shuffle them massively. It may mean that sites that focus on the mechanics of SEO without focusing on great content could lose some ranking, but even that seems unlikely. Personalized search will change things up a little on an individual basis, but it by no means throws out the concept of organic search results based on SEO.
On Jan 27, Google promoted its social searching algorithm from the laboratory to “beta,” which means it’s now a regular search option. Reactions so far are mixed. Social searching has been praised by those who care what their friends on Twitter think of the new iPad, and criticized by those who wonder how anyone could care what their Twitter friends thinks of the iPad.
To partake of this new morsel on Google’s search buffet, you need to sign into your Google account and update your Google profile to include links to your accounts on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. But the Facebook link is a little deceptive. The only thing Google can index from Facebook are the public parts of people’s profiles. There isn’t a way for Facebook users to make their status updates available to the entire web.
So Google won’t be searching it to see what relevant things you have to say about a topic one of your Facebook friends has researched as of now. But if there is something relevant in the public part of your Facebook profile, it can use that. Somewhat ironically, FriendFeed, which is now owned by Facebook, is geared toward public information sharing, so if you are on FriendFeed and modify your Google profile to reflect this, that content will eventually become available.
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January 28th, 2010 by John | Posted under SEO Certification, Search Industry News
Lil Engine Announces OSC Certification for SEO Companies
Lil Engine, an established resource of information on SEO and internet marketing, is excited to release OSC, Organic Search Certification, as a way to verify and recommend professional SEO companies.
 January 27, 2010 Winston-Salem, NC Furthering their ongoing effort to provide useful information and tools to site owners, Lil Engine now offers a certification for SEO Companies. OSC, which stands for Organic Search Certified, is a vetting process to verify the professionalism and quality of a company’s SEO techniques. Unfortunately, in the SEO industry there are a significant number of businesses that either knowingly or unknowingly are not performing quality SEO work. Concerns when choosing an SEO company range from whether or not they can achieve the results you need at the price they quote, or worse that they will engage in ‘black hat’ SEO tactics to achieve short term results that can often lead to a negative outcome in the long term . The challenge in choosing a reputable search engine optimization company is compounded by the fact that many are required to keep their client rosters confidential, making it difficult to publicize case studies and references.
An OSC certified company has been independently analyzed and examined to provide an additional level of reassurance that the company offers value, quality, and ethics. In order to receive Organic Search Certification from Lil Engine, top SEO companies must pass a thorough company analysis including complete on-site and off-site examination of client referrals. OSC companies have:
- Provided 3 confidential client references that confirm their improved search engine rankings and significant increases in targeted traffic over a specified period of time.
- They have demonstrated a history of quality SEO work on their client’s sites, as evaluated by multiple industry veterans.
- Have kept up to date with the latest SEO developments by attending conferences, industry networking, and participation in SEO forums and blogs.
SEO companies benefit from the certification by being given a company listing on Lil Engine, and by being able to display a verifiable banner in their own marketing materials. A company can apply for certification at http://www.lilengine.com/seo-certification-evaluation-criteria/.
Contact:
Jen Thames
admin@lilengine.com
Lil Engine is a free comprehensive resource for webmasters and site owners sharing internet marketing information. Offerings include useful SEO tools, an SEO blog, a database of expert guides, forum, and directory.
December 1st, 2009 by John | Posted under Events & Conferences, Search Industry News
 Watch FTC webcast live Watch the stream live from the FTC 2 day workshop titled ‘ How will journalism survive the internet age? ‘ from Washington DC. Questions will be taken from @ftcnews during the Q & A session.
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November 16th, 2009 by John | Posted under Google, Search Industry News
 News Corp Vs Google An epic battle is brewing between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Google, as early as next month we could see News Corp controlled websites disappear from Google’s search results. It all started when Google began to index News Corp websites such as the Wall Street Journal / Fox news and returns to the minute results in Google News Search.
There has been a lot of commentary and discussion between the News Corp supporters and Google supporters, the case has been made by News Corp that Google is stealing content from their websites and basically not paying them for it, Google has not provided an effective business model for these websites to benefit from having their content on Google News.
What has baffled a lot of people is, why doesn’t News Corp simply block access to its websites from Google? Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineland describes in this great post.
Any webmaster worth a decent salary should know how to implement robot.txt and rel=noindex, I can not believe a large corporation like News Corp can’t just set this up. The reason? because News Corp doesn’t want to loose out on the massive free traffic from Google!
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November 5th, 2009 by John | Posted under Google, Search Industry News
Has this been a busy week or what? We’ve barely had time to dissect the new Google Social Search from last Monday and now the big G is hitting us with even more announcements. Why the sudden spurt of new products ? Is Mr Schmidt planning something? Is Google feeling threatened by ‘Bing’ ?
These questions will have to wait, for the time being lets see what has happened;
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 FTC announces guidelines for disclosures What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.
In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;
Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF
Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF
A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .
While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.
Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.
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August 17th, 2009 by John | Posted under Grow Your Traffic, Search Industry News, Tools
The buzz within the search marketing industry is torn between 2 of this quarters biggest announcements:
1. First been the search partnership of Bing ( Microsoft ) and Yahoo! ( more )
2. Secondly Google has announced a major update to its search infrastructure code named #caffeine
We are going to explore what caffeine is all about and the major differences in part 1 of this 2 part post. In part 2 we will be dealing with some direct data comparisons and delivering our own conclusions based on this data.
[ don't forget add our RSS or Twitter to get notified when part 2 is released ]
On August 10th, the Google Webmasterblog announced public testing of their new #caffeine search quoting :
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
The caffeine update is been reported as a complete rewrite of Google’s search infrastructure – lets check out what this means;
Have the search results changed in Google Caffeine? ( Changes in the Google algorithm / ranking system )
Yes most definitely, although Google is stating otherwise ( for now ). When we first heard about #Google #Caffeine I posted this question to Matt Cutts from Google.
john chen August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hi Matt,
Been sussing this out all morning, from the Google blog and your post its seems there are algo changes / updates on the current sandbox. I’ve noticed some definate changes in the how the SERP is different in the sandbox in my play this morning.
Could you confirm this?
Matts response was:
john chen and Daniel Sterling, most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference
From our own research and you can verify this yourself in the #caffeine sandbox, this is simply not the case! There are major differences in Caffeine SERP that will ultimately effect users, SEO and most of all companies that depend on their search positions.
Some changes we have identified in Caffeine SERP
- Google Sitelinks disappearing from some results.
- Rich Snippets disappearing from some results.
- Caffeine has difficulties handling 301’s. ( This is a bug )
- Page 1 results mostly contain the same sites, however positioning is quiet different
- Page 3 and onwards seem generate completely different results.
- The index page on root domain now has more weight.
- Pages with heavy keyword stuffing are been penalised.
- Pagerank Sculpting is no longer effective. ( further confirming the rel=nofollow topic )
- Brand name / Domain trust further effecting SERP. ( a step further in the Google Vince Update? )
- Number of inbound links from external domains
- External links using targeted keywords as anchors carry more weight.
These changes come from our initial research in comparing a sample data of searches, and by no means represent a concrete conclusion. Google caffeine is still under development, as such the algorithm and infrastructure will change and alter in the near future. These are just preliminary conclusions for your consideration ( food for thought ) and therefor I recommend that you make no immediate changes to your SEO strategies, but simply keep the above in mind.
How have your websites performed in Google Caffiene?
Google has released #caffeine for general public testing here
If you are after a direct comparison tool between #caffeine and current #google search Try http://www.goobinghoo.com/
 Goobinghoo - side by side SERP comparison You can easily compare the search results side by side, but don’t forget to sign out of your Google account. ( otherwise you may see your own preferred results )
Part 2 of this Google Caffeine update post will expand further into our findings above and with real data + example comparisons, as well as some SEO tips that you can perform today.
Did you find this post informative? Have anything further to add? Please leave a response in the comments section.
July 30th, 2009 by John | Posted under Search Industry News
Dear Li’l Engine members and readers,
I am honored to introduce myself as your new content editor and go-to guy for the revamp Li’l engine website and community.
During the next 6 months I will be working with top designers, programmers and writers together to bring you a better browsing experience, more SEM / SEO and internet marketing related news and online tools to help boost your productivity and sales.
Our little website is now into its 7th year, during this period we have evolved and grown alongside the SEM and internet marketing industry, which has now grown into a 23 billion dollar monster.
“They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.”
- Vint Cerf
As we start the 3 quarter of 2009 and well into the global financial crisis, the SEM industry continues to grow steadily as more corporations and business see SEM as a cheaper and more effective way of advertising.
While a major new player in the internet advertising market is breaking out and making businesses and marketers take notice. I am speaking of course about Social Media Marketing.
Lets take a look at some quick stats;
What is interesting from this graph when comparing SEO and Social Media Marketing is that only 8% of marketers counted SEO as not relevant / don’t know, where as 27% answered the same for Social Media Marketing.
This is great news for SEO’s as the market is now almost completely aware of the benefit of SEO, but the stat also introduces an uneducated / uncertain market for Social Media Marketing, perhaps where SEO was 7 years ago, what does this mean?
It means there is potential to convert the 27% of marketers who either don’t know about social media marketing or don’t care into the same 8% for SEO!
I see Social Media Marketing as a great potential for internet marketers in the next 2 – 3 quarters, but to achieve great results we must educate ourselves, the public and in particular the business owners / corporations to the benefits Social Media Marketing and most importantly how it alongside SEO and other internet marketing strategies will combine to generate more business and ultimately increase the bottom-line, more sales and revenue.
The goal of the new Lil Engine website is to continue to bring our readers the most up to date information on SEO and SEM but also to focus on new emerging strategies that are going to shape the future of internet marketing.
Updates you will see on Lil Engine in the last 2 quarters of 2009
New Logo. To usher in the fresh new ideas and direction of Li’l Engine, and to represent ourselves as the forerunner for internet marketing resources.
Updated site design. Easier navigation and sorting to help you get access to our resources easier and faster.
More frequent posts and updates on all SEO, SEM and internet marketing related news. We plan to provide the latest content via out blog, Twitter and RSS.
More Insight. More insight from our industry veterans. Learn from the SEM/SEO bests as they share their techniques, research and experiments with the Li’l Engine community.
More interaction. Our blog content will be more engaging towards the readers, we encourage you to ask the questions, challenge each other’s views in a respectful and learning environment.
More feedback. We plan to re-structure our discussion forum to a more productive experience for everybody. Whether you are a novice SEO looking for more knowledge, a season SEO pro or simply a business owner seeking SEO advice, our forum will be a great place to start, our seasoned SEO/SEM veterans will also navigate the forum answering your questions.
New tools to boost productivity and revenue! We are planning to introduce SEO, SEM and Social Media Marketing tools and updates to our existing tools such as our free Google PageRank checker
Expert guides. Our goal is to create an online library focusing from the very basics of starting a website, marketing a website to managing and tracking ROI.
Online Market Place. Our exciting new marketplace will connect providers to businesses;
Li’l Engine has a unique structure planned for this service which will be announced shortly
All about our readers
Who should read our blog and join our discussion forums?
SEO’s.
Whether you are a seasoned SEO looking for the latest search engine trends or a novice SEO, Li’l Engine will give you the in-depth insight along with clear explanations.
Web designers.
O’dear, I’ve gone and said the D word… Truth be told there are many capable web designers out there that are interested in SEO and internet marketing. Why? Because it is an added value to their clients and employers, designers that can provide a stylish, search engine friendly and conversion driven websites are hard to find, but are desperately needed within the industry.
Marketers.
Are you still wondering what all the fuss is about with internet marketing? Consider my post above, internet advertising is worth $23 billion dollars and growing, can you afford not to educate yourself?
Business Owners.
A little knowledge goes a very long way, next time you are approached by an SEO company, you will be armed with a certain amount of knowledge that will help you judge the competency of the SEO and you might just save yourself some $$$ at the same time! Those that are a little adventurous and curious can also try out some of our strategies themselves, the discussion forum will be a great place to network with other business owners and to get advice from seasoned SEO’s.
All about me
My name is John Chen, a creative director and accounts manager for a large E-business firm in Brisbane, Australia. My day to day duties include web design, following up on SEO campaigns, traffic and conversion ROI analysis and speaking with my clients whom are generally small to medium business owners.
My background in internet marketing begun by way of fire, a start-up eshop for consumer electronics, I had knowledge in web and graphic design but little knowledge in internet marketing.
It was a steep learning curve to find out why my website wasn’t making any sales, but luckily for me, I had 2 great mentors that were prepared to answer my dumb questions and always pointed me in the right direction. They were Napoleon Pham from evrsoft and Dejan Petrovic from DejanSEO.
But I realize not everybody is as privileged to have access to mentors, this is one of the major motivations that I decided to take on the role as the new editor of Li’l Engine, to help build a community where experts and novices may share and learn.
I am very much looking forward to bringing about the changes in Li’l Engine outlined above as well as chatting and participating in discussions with you on our blog and forum.
In the mean time, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions for me or just want to say hi, I would love to hear from some of our regular readers. Alternatively if you want to contact me directly, I can be reached on info [at] johnchen.com.au .
To start following the progress of our development on twitter @little_engine head to
http://twitter.com/little_engine
- John
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