Central Perk

vineri, 4 noiembrie 2011

You tell me

Good afternoon,

When President Obama says that we can't wait to put Americans back to work, he's not just talking about the White House. He's talking about all of us. That "we" is everyone.

The President has a proposal -- the American Jobs Act -- that economists say could put nearly two million Americans back to work. But some in Congress are determined to block that jobs plan, so we're getting started with concrete actions that President Obama can take without waiting on lawmakers to debate legislation or pass a bill.

We are looking at everything that the government can do, and we know that some of the best ideas are going to come from people like you.

If you have an idea for something President Obama can do without the help of Congress, or know of a program in your community that needs to go nationwide, I want to hear from you.

Submit your recommendations at WhiteHouse.gov/Advise

President Obama believes that creating jobs and growing the economy are national goals, ones we all share as Americans.

And as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, I want to make sure that the President hears about plenty of proposals to help accomplish those goals.

For the past few weeks, I've been leading a series of meetings here at the White House to come up with steps we can take right now to create more jobs -- without Congress.

That's why President Obama has signed orders to streamline research grants for entrepreneurs, help families refinance their mortgages, and make it easier for graduates to repay their student loans.

These are all actions that couldn't wait.

Now we're looking for more ideas just like these, concrete steps we can take right away to put people back to work and help make communities stronger.

Take a minute to share your idea:

WhiteHouse.gov/Advise

I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Thanks,

Nancy-Ann DeParle
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy

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Google's "Freshness" Update - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 03 Nov 2011 02:03 PM PDT

Posted by caseyhen

Yesterday, Google announced that they released a new update that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and can better determine when to give you more up-to-date relevant results. What does that mean for you as a search marketer? Rand, with special guest Mike King (@iPullRank) dive into what this mean for you and your clients. Let us know your thoughts on this most recent update in the comments below!

p.s. from Rand: I'd also recommend reading this excellent post from Justin Briggs on Methods Google May Use to Evaluate Freshness.

Video Transcription

Rand: Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I am joined by none other than Mike King. Mike, so great to have you.

Mike: What's going on, Rand? Thanks for having me.

Rand: Mike is out of Publicis in New York. He spoke recently at the Search Love Conference and spoke here at the Seattle Interactive Conference.

Mike: Absolutely.

Rand: Getting big on the scene. And Mike, we've got some supposedly big changes from Google coming out today.

Mike: We had the Google Freshness update today.

Rand: So Google announced it, right? So Amit Singhal, head of Search Quality at Google, writes on the blog and he says a few things, and we've got some questions about this. He says, "Google's new Freshness Update affects 35 percent of queries. It prioritizes recent and timely results, and it's based off their Caffeine infrastructure."

Mike: So far what we're seeing is it's 35 percent of queries, but I think people are expecting that to mean 35 percent of keywords. That's not what's happening. So we're seeing it on a lot of head terms. For example, here's a SERP that we saw for football. What we're seeing is really recent posts being annotated to the SERPs, so they're having 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, 18 minutes ago.
We're also seeing that for basketball, Microsoft Courier, Wall Street, and Top Chef Texas. You can google those right now and see these in the SERPs.

Rand: When they say affects 35 percent of search results, and we're seeing, like, boy, it feels a lot more subtle than Panda. A lot of SEOs are like, "Boy, 35 percent of queries. You said Panda only affected 11 or 12 percent." Something feels disconnected. Talk about the difference between affecting keywords versus affecting query volume.

Mike: Right. When they're saying 35 percent of queries, these are words that people are actually searching for. It's not necessarily just every keyword in the keyword universe.

Rand: Gotcha.

Mike: So it could be a much smaller set of keywords than we're talking about here.

Rand: If 10 percent of people in the world google "Kim Kardashian wedding," tragically - they really shouldn't, but they do - then that could be a huge part of what they're saying is affected here.

Mike: Absolutely. That's what we're seeing, a lot of celebrity keywords that are being affected. But that kind of makes sense because those are inherently QDF keywords.

Rand: Right. Query deserves freshness. One of the things that we noticed is it seems to help lots of date-specific content, not just hyper- new, meaning some of these results are 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, but we're also seeing a lot more stuff that's . . .

Mike: It's like two days ago or seven days ago, but it's all date-specific, like you're saying.

Rand: Yeah. Then there are some of these new annotation types of results. So this, fundamentally, looks different to us. It's not site links.

Mike: Absolutely. They're direct links to individual articles rather than site links.

Rand: And we think these are RSS-based. Is that right?

Mike: Absolutely. So we did a few, like, poking around a few different feeds and things, and we saw that they did match up almost directly with the RSS feeds.

Rand: So if you're trying to illustrate specific content in your fresh links, which Google is now providing you an opportunity to do, RSS seems to make a ton of sense.

Mike: Definitely. For example, they have the last mod . . . what's the word?

Rand: Oh, the last modified date? You mean the stamp?

Mike: Right, exactly. So that time stamp seems to be something that's affecting that. So keep those up-to-date, and your XML sitemaps could definitely help with this.

Rand: Right. We were talking about the Top Chef Texas query. And when you look at the Top Chef Texas page today, it's basically Bravo TV, and then every result in there is from the last 12 hours.

Mike: Absolutely.

Rand: Meaning, Mike, you and I write a great blog post about Top Chef Texas last week, and it's ranking well. Today, forget about it.

Mike: Yeah, you really have to stay on top of it. So if you're writing content about Top Chef Texas, make sure that you continue to have content on it. That's like a TV show that happens regularly. If you're going to do that, you need to write about every episode to stay on top of it.

Rand: Yeah. And this is kind of a big change for Google.

Mike: Definitely.

Rand: So that could be part of that 35 percent that it's affecting.

Mike: Absolutely.

Rand: I'm going to make you come this way with me. We've got some takeaways for marketers here. One of the ones, tell me about this, "Watching Your Important SERPs for Signs." How do I check this? How do I check whether I'm going to be affected, and what search results should I be watching? If we're talking about most important SERPs, we've got to thinking about things that drive the most conversions, the thing that drives the most traffic, and the thing that drives the most engagement. And then for fresh and time saved content, basically if you're seeing . . .

Mike: Blog posts.

Rand: Yeah. If you're seeing the eight hours ago, you're seeing the days, you've got to do that. I mean, you and I are both huge believers in this, right?

Mike: Absolutely. Content marketing, if you're not doing it, like it's says, you're crazy.

Rand: You crazy. I wrote that there.

Mike: He did. He did.

Rand: And then finally, we've got to watch whether and how Google is grabbing this time stamped content. We have some questions about the RSS feeds are being pulled in here. It doesn't always seem to be just the most recent items.

Mike: It doesn't seem to be like a one-to-one thing, so it's hard to say. Maybe they're looking at shared or how much is being pushed on social.

Rand: Google+.

Mike: Exactly, Google+, how many people are pressing that magic +1 button. So it's hard to say, but I would venture to guess that they're thinking about social, because if it's the most relevant, it makes more sense that it's shared the most.

Rand: And if it's coming from RSS, they've got have all that data about who's clicking on those RSS feeds.

Mike: Absolutely. Like Will Reynolds was saying, they own FeedBurner, so they have all this data. Are people reading this stuff?

Rand: Sure.

Mike: So this may be that final application of it.

Rand: Fascinating. All right. So supposedly there's a huge change, but we're not feeling it nearly as dramatically as Panda.

Mike: Not at all.

Rand: So we'll see how this rolls out. I certainly look forward to comments and feedback from you guys. Mike, thank you very much for joining me. Appreciate it.

Mike: Thank you for having me.

Rand: Cheers, gang.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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West Wing Week: "Let's Get Moving"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, Nov. 4, 2011

West Wing Week: "Let's Get Moving"

This week, the President urged Congress to pass the infrastructure component of the American Jobs Act and continued to take executive action to strengthen the economy and put folks back to work. The President also celebrated Diwali and hosted Halloween, spoke at the Italian American Heritage Gala, signed two Executive Orders, welcomed NASA Astronauts in the Oval Office, and interviewed with local news stations from across the country.

Watch the video:

SEOptimise

SEOptimise Wins Best Blog at the UK Search Awards 2011

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 04:53 AM PDT

Last night 300 UK search marketers attended the Emirates Stadium, London for the very first UK Search Awards.

With 16 categories and over 50 nominees, including SEOptimise for best agency, best travel search campaign and best blog, the event brought together some of the best agencies in the UK.

The search awards started with a drinks reception followed by dinner, before the host – Andy Crane from the lunch time show on BBC Radio Manchester – started proceedings. With only two speeches from the all the winners who collected their awards, the ceremony went very quickly.

The speech of the evening came from Majestic SEO's Dixon Jones who simply said "Majestic SEO is f****** Good!" and walked off, but you have to agree with him, as it’s a tool that is used widely throughout the industry.

The first UK search awards event will go down as a success, and hopefully will inspire more agencies and in-house teams to get involved in future awards.

A full list of the awards and winners are below.

Best Integrated Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results through an integrated campaign using a variety of both online and offline activity.

Winner
• Fast Web Media – Coors Light – Closest to Cold

Best Local Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign based around a specific geographical location that has delivered outstanding results or visibility in search engines.

Winner
• Adido – The Colbornes Group Dominance of Google Locally

Best Use of Search – Retail:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the retail sector.

Winner
• Fast Web Media – Bravissimo

Best Use of Search – Travel:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the travel sector.

Winner
• Further Search Marketing – Richardson's Boating Holidays; Book Direct

Best Use of Search – Finance:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the finance sector.

Winner
• Koozai – Payday Power Organic Search (SEO)

Best Use of Search – Leisure:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the Leisure sector.

Winner
• Further Search Marketing – Richardson's Boating Holidays; Book Direct

Best Mobile Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in mobile search engines.

Winner
• Found/Autoglass – Smashing the Glass Repair Market on Mobile

Best Blog:
Recognition of an outstanding industry blog.

Winner
• SEOptimise – Search Marketing & SEO Blog

Innovation:
Recognition of search innovation in the development or use of a campaign or platform.

Winner
• Stickyeyes – Stickyeyes Search Dashboard

Best PPC Management Software:
Recognition of the development of an outstanding management software package that successfully manages and enhances pay per click marketing campaigns.
Winner
• Marin Software

Best SEO Software:
Recognition of the development of an outstanding software tool that successfully manages and enhances an organisations search engine optimisation efforts.

Winner
• Majestic SEO / Receptional – Majestic SEOs Site Explorer

Best PPC Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results through PPC advertising.

Winner
• Fuse8 / Persimmon Homes – Intelligent Internet Landing Pages with Brains

Best SEO Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results in search engines in natural, free or organic listings.

Winner
• Verve Search – SEO Services for Yale Door

Best In-house Team:
Recognition of an outstanding in-house team or practitioner that demonstrates consistently great understanding and use of search.

Winner
• www.just-eat.co.uk

Best Agency:
Recognition of an outstanding agency that demonstrates consistently great understanding and use of search and / or PPC.

Winner
• Fast Web Media

Search Personality of the Year:
Recognition of talented and inspiring practitioner who has revolutionised the UK search industry.

Winner
• Lisa Myers

Grand Prix:
Recognition for being the best of the best with a grand prix award to be selected from the previous categories.

Winner
• Fast Web Media

Is Reading Level a Google Panda Algorithm Factor?

Posted: 03 Nov 2011 10:07 AM PDT

I had a thought earlier today, funnily enough whist interviewing copywriters, which led me to think how important is the quality of writing as a ranking factor following the panda update?

Obviously the panda update has had a negative impact to website’s which have low-quality content – but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal, does higher quality written content now have more of a positive impact to search rankings?

Well I thought I’d do a few tests with Google’s reading level search filter to compare the differences between how content ranks which is either basic, intermediate or advanced.

How is the reading-level split between Google SERPs?

I wanted to get an idea about how the reading levels of content is spread between content which ranks on the first page of Google. Does content have to be well-written, or is the fact that it’s unique sufficient enough? Here’s an example query, with the reading levels highlighted in red – please note, not all listings are classified with reading levels.

So what can we read into this (no pun intended!)? Well, looking at these results, it’s interesting to see that no advanced content ranks at all for this query, despite the split between indexed content being very evenly spread across the three categories. In fact I didn’t find a single “advanced” piece of content listed at all in Google’s top 100 results at all!

But what about individual sites?

Ralph Fiennes said earlier in the week that Twitter is to blame for dumbing down the English language and making people use shorter words:

Ironically this was written in the Daily Mail, whose overall website reading level has an advanced score of less than 1%!

So is reading level a factor?

Based on the results I’ve seen so far, I would have to say no. And if it is, it’s not rewarding advanced content – in actual fact the opposite effect is taking place if anything. These results aren’t very fitting with what the panda update was intended to achieve – and I’m actually quite surprised by this. It does make a large assumption that all things are equal with link profiles (which of course is never true), but even so I’d expect to see Google varying the results between different reading levels to a wider extent.

Perhaps it’s something they are (or will be) looking at though – we haven’t even got to panda 3.0 yet!

So what factors is the panda update looking at?

Myself and Daniel Bianchini presented at a4uexpo a couple of weeks ago on this subject – and there’s a wide range of factors we believe to have affected this. Dan goes into more detail in his panda algorithm update post, but to summarise a couple of key points – here’s what I think are the main things which need to be addressed.

Unique content
The biggest success stories so far have been from sites who have really cleaned up their act and removed low-quality content. Those who had thousands of pages and have now trimmed this right back to ensure that it’s only the top quality content that is indexed and visible to Google. Or splitting content across several domains or subdomains.

User intent and bounce rate
Do Google monitor bounce rate? In my opinion, yes of course they do. Maybe not from Google Analytics directly, but if you’ve clicked a search listing in Google and bounced straight back out to visit the next site, it’s not a good sign of quality.

They’re likely to test things like this all the time, for example what’s the user intent behind the query “Apple”? Are you looking for the fruit or an iPod? Only bounce rate can really tell Google the user intent behind this – and it’s probably the main reason why the fruit industry is in ruins after the success of Apple, Blackberry and Orange!

But what is high-quality content?

Based on the results of this, I’m not sure it is writing standard. Or at least it’s not a huge factor. I’m sure Google will be aware of sites with spelling mistakes and perhaps poorly written content or grammar, but whether they are being penalised in any way, I’m not so sure.

I’ve recently heard stories of how some SEOs have tried buying old newspapers from the 1960′s off of eBay, scanning them and uploading each article as a unique webpage. The theory being that it’s a professionally written level of content, and because it was published well before the internet era, it’s also likely to be unique content once indexed. I have to admit, I was very impressed by that idea – with the theory being that you should be able to rank highly for these terms – and even if you’re just doing it to collect affiliate ad revenue via Google AdSense, it sounds like it should be a very effective strategy. But it is forgetting about one key thing…

Links!

Personally, I think the biggest losers from the panda update are those which have low volumes of links to internal content. If you’ve been hit by panda, try asking these questions:
- How much long-tail traffic do you get vs head of tail? How has that changed?
- How many links do your internal pages have vs your homepage?
- How many pages do you have indexed vs pages which are generating search traffic?

If can analyse the detail of these, then you can get a clearer idea about what content you need to either tidy up, remove or build links to. And from most experiences I’ve seen so far, it’s not a quick process – it will take gradual steps towards building the recovery back up. But if you have content that can naturally attract direct, deep links – then you’ve got much more chance of coming out of this the other side with a large spike in traffic – just in the right direction this time!

Would be great to hear from anyone else’s experiences in this? Especially if they’ve seen a change in rankings across different quality of writing standards.