This week we welcome James Murray as blogger on State of Search. His opening post “Why do People Search for Contact Lenses in October?” was a post which gives an indication of what we can expect, great content!
James also hosts webinars on different topics. Below you can find the latest webinar on the Importance of Search in a MultiChannel world. Enjoy!
Google once again has to answer to the EU. Yesterday Commissioner Joaquin Almunia wrote a letter to Eric Schmidt containing four major ‘concerns’ that the EU has when it comes to their investigation of several antitrust complaints which were issued last year.
Almunia also posted the concerns online and in that same article seemed to be hinting at a deal with Google. This might mean the EU is not to certain about the complaints and looking at the complaints at first sight there is no need for Google to be scared of the consequences, even though some points really touch in the core of Google’s business efforts. (more…)
Every SEO wants to check his rankings. Even though the world of search is changing, rankings still play a big role when it comes to the everyday job of the SEO. Yes, we have Universal Results, yes, Search Plus Your World is playing a huge part in our visibility, but rankings still are an important relative key performance indicator.
And with the ever internationalizing world of search (we can see how important internationalization has become by all the great content coming from the International Search Summit last week for example), we want to know how we do in different part of the world, on different search engines, not just Google.
Linkdex has understood the importance of the combination of the both and has added Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo to the list of search engines you can track your rankings. It has also added language options, which means you can check these search engines in over 35 countries in multiple languages. (more…)
Last Friday Facebook went ‘public’. Facebook stocks went up and down but did not as well as many would have thought beforehand. Still, Facebook got a lot more money from going public than Google did back in the days. But that probably isn’t that surprising considering the change in time and the more digital focus these days.
Both Google and Facebook make their money through advertising. And that money is what investors are after. So how much chance will investors have when it comes to getting a lot of money out of both? Which one is best to focus on? Wordstream made the below infographic to figure out just that. (more…)
This morning the nominees for the European Searchawards have been announced. The nominees are divided in 13 different categories, two more categories have no nominees, but these winners will be announced on the awards night which will be held in Amsterdam on July 5th.
State of Search has been nominated in the category “best blog”, which off course we are very proud of. Other known nominees are Linkdex and Majestic SEO for best tool, Branded3, Verve Search, Carat, Latitude, Performics, Koozai and LBi/bigmouthmedia in different categories. You can find the entire list below. (more…)
Education is very important and with a quickly evolving industry like the search industry it is difficult to keep up. Especially if you are not just focussing on one specific country or region. So some extra education when it comes to International SEO and Social Media is not a luxury to leave aside.
This week at the International Search Summit London Webcertain, the leading international SEO company who also organize the ISS, launched the “International SEO School” in Barcelona to give marketers the opportunity for that extra piece of international knowledge. Courses so far are International SEO, PPC and the Search / Social Media connection. Trainers include Andy Atkins-Krüger, Anders Hjorth and Bas van den Beld. (more…)
At SMX London last Monday Amit Singhal was already talking about the direction Google was going in. He there gave the example of the Taj Mahal. Are you looking for information on the monument or the closest Indian restaurant with that name. Google wants to give the right answer on queries like that.
Last night Amit Singhal gave the same example in a blogpost which announced the launch of the “Knowledge Graph“, it is the actual roll out of the tests we saw last week. With Knowledge Graph Google wants to “help you discover new information quickly and easily.” Simply said: its about answers, not the links. At SMX Singhal also said “Google has always been about giving the best answer on search queries” and this is an extension to that given.
The data Google is showing is gathered from specific sources which means the SEOs can’t ‘touch’ it and will be part of the discussion on whether Google is ‘stealing’ traffic from sites.
The Knowledge Graph is about connecting people, places and things and giving facts and data about the search you are doing. You are getting more information on the query than just the links to other sites. Google is actually giving you direct information in the SERPS.
The Knowledge Graph does a few things:
Find the right thing
Google figures out, based on your personalized data, what exactly you mean when you are looking for the Taj Mahal. But next to that they also show a box with results which could be about the other meanings of Taj Mahal.
Getting the best summary
Google says it can now better understand your query so it will give you facts on the search you are looking for and primarily shows you the data which fits your needs best. This is what we spotted last week as a test.
Deeper and broader
Finally Google says they give us more specific types of information, right in the search results.
Two questions arise: how does Google know what exactly we want and where do they get the data from?
To start with the first question: Google studies the users and looks at relationships, not just in sites but all entities together. They are taking the social graph and the link graph and are combining the data from there together. In short: they are tracking our every move to figure out what kind of results we would like to have returned. Are you looking for (Indian) food or restaurants a lot? Your “Taj Mahal” search will show you more information on the Indian restaurants close to you, while if Google has figured out you love travel or culture you will see more about the monument.
The second question is where do they get that information? Google itself says they primarily use public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. But it could also be that the data comes from another site. Google says it “currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.” And at Searchengineland Danny Sullivan noted that Amit Singhal has said: “Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it”.
In his post Singhal also points out this is “a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Google is moving into the direction the Wall Street Journal was talking about: giving straight answers and ‘ignoring’ the regular ten blue links.
Is Google really moving away from the ten blue links and are we as website owners doomed? Is this the actual first step to the end of SEO as we know it?
According to Singhal at SMX this kind of traffic is not taking away traffic from most sites but some sites might lose some traffic. That sounds like trying to be politically correct and it reminds me of the things that were said about the ‘not provided’ in Google Anlaytics: they said it would be a small percentage, but it seems to be growing.
SEO will not ‘die’ over this, but it does mean that search is becoming much more about being visible within the results, you need to stand out, so the focus of many search marketers will not just be on ranking, but also on optimizing for the SERPS: making sure you stand out.
Google however is step by step changing search with first Search Plus Your World and now this. Whether or not they are changing it in the right direction remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: they are far from done…
Find more on Techmeme, Searchengineland and Google’s official post
It’s the question everybody wants answered: how to rank number one on Google. And since Matt Cutts is answering questions in his Google Webmaster videos, why not asking him how to rank number one? This video might give you answer or might not…
Linkbuilders love Pagerank and Mozrank. Even though Pagerank has no influence on rankings it shows us what a site and a link on that site can be “worth”. But is it the best way to figure that out?
Majestic SEO probably has the most insights on the worth of any link out there since they have the biggest database of links on the web. Majestic SEO feels Mozrank and Pagerank as well as the AC Rank they have been using could use some improvement. So they decided to develop a new quality metrics “Flow Metrics” with two “scores”: Citation Flow and Trust Flow. (more…)
Things are going in all directions for Yahoo these days, but its far from a steady road ahead. Even though the former search giant keeps developing they are also experiencing a lot of headwind.
Yesterday Yahoo announced that its president Scott Thompson has resigned. His place will be taken for now by Yahoo’s global media head Ross Levinsohn. Thompson has been under fire for lying on his resume but health issues are supposedly also part of the reason he is leaving.
Thompson came from Paypal after Carol Bartz was fired last September and thus has not been in charge for very long. Recently it rumors came up suggesting Thomspon had been lying on his resume. This is one of the reasons the CEO is stepping down. (more…)
“Social” is hot. But “Social” for many still means consumer stuff, not business stuff. Still there is a lot of movement in Social for Business, and rightfully so, after all, we are all humans. But how can you make Social work as a company? The trick is probably to actually be social and not act social.
Someone who is successful in social is Social Entrepeneur Alex Bogusky. He is someone who knows PR and Communications and has used that in many ways, including for Al Gore. He knows how to make business out of social as well. In this talk he talks about just that.
Bing has been a bit ‘quiet’ over the past few years, we were all wondering whether the people at Microsoft had given up on the battle with Google and if they might even consider selling the engine to Facebook.
Then last week Bing suddenly came out with a new whiter design. Much more like how Google used to be. Was this a move which was a response to Google’s more and more cluttered search results? Maybe a little, but yesterday it became all clear why: Bing ‘relaunched’ into “The New Bing”, “a brand new information architecture with a three column design”.
Bing integrates social into search as well as what they call a ‘snapshot’, a column which helps you ‘do’ things a lot faster, like instantly booking a hotel. (more…)
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