Posts on State of Search about ‘Search Engines’

Understanding Search Engines

What we commonly refer to as Search Engine Optimisation is something which I relate to treatment of a disease. The various treatments of SEO, from title tags and headers to information architecture and linkbuilding, are all focused on the symptoms of a disease.

Truly understanding the disease – i.e. going beyond the symptoms and superficial treatment – requires a deeper understanding of SEO. It requires that you understand how search engines work.

This aspect of SEO is, in the opinion of many including me, thoroughly neglected in our industry. Too many search engine optimisers focus exclusively on the symptoms and are entirely oblivious to the underlying causes.

Understanding how search engines work and how search engineers at these search engines tackle problems is a vital aspect of becoming a truly well-rounded SEO specialist.

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Are social signals ever going to usurp links

There has been a lot of noise over the last couple of weeks regarding Google Patents such as those on dynamic linking, which have prompted conversations on whether SEO as we know it is due for a significant change. In particular the advent of social media is one that many experts in the sector have suggested is likely to see greater infliltration into the mainstream algorithm, particularly should Google start to look at other factors to replace the existing heavily link centric framework.

There is no doubting that social media already has a significant place within SEO, and the search engines themselves. Take a look at many results – particularly in logged in accounts – and you will notice features such as ‘Social Circle’ included within your search results – and allowing peers and friends to potentially recommend and influence your decisions based on previous behaviour. This adds a new layer of complexity to many search campaigns, and a new consideration in terms of channel choice and integration. Further to this Real-time search, which includes data from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed has also seen a lot of exposure over certain months, and looks a feature permanently included within the organic search results. (more…)

Battle of the World Cup SERPs

The World Cup, the biggest sports event on the planet, is underway! And because I’ve always wanted to do a sports-themed blog post, I’ve compared the “world cup” SERPs for five different search engines to see what information they present and how.

Google

When you search for ‘world cup’ in Google, the top of the SERP consists of the results of the last few matches played, and an overview of the upcoming matches.

The matches played have links pointing to recap articles on the FIFA site. Below this list there are links to the FIFA.com homepage, the World Cup schedule, current standings and the overview of the England team – Google after all knows where I am, never mind that England is not the UK and the Northern Irish don’t have any particular reason to cheer for the England squad. But we’ve all come to understand that American search companies have great difficulty coming to grips with the intricacies of European nationalities and cultures. (more…)

Future dilemmas in the development of search

Search is evolving fast. With search engines growing smarter every day they will be facing dilemmas they didn’t have before. Some choices have to be made when developing their algorithm, but it probably will result in a considerable amount of brain crunching to make those choices. I will discuss some of those dilemmas here. (more…)

Ranking Matters? Some Additional Key SEO Metrics

There has been a lot of thought-provoking debate and discussion of late, (both here and elsewhere) around the issue of the importance and validity of keyword ranking as a sole measure of success in search engine optimisation.

As personalised search is now default for Google users, rank variations and swings can be witnessed first-hand by anyone trying a few searches; interacting with certain results, rinse and repeat.

Whilst I personally, think that rank checking; (providing clients are informed and educated as to the individual and variable effects of personalised search) is still a fundamental benchmark for SEO campaign effectiveness, I thought it might be useful to mention some other complementary measurements. (more…)

The value of keyword rankings

Time to tackle another trend in SEO that may not necessarily be accurate: There’s an increasingly negative attitude towards keyword rankings as viable metrics of SEO success. I’m going to argue that keyword rankings are still valuable and should be an integral part of your SEO reports.

Over the years there have been many changes to the SERPs that, according to some, heralded the end of keyword rankings. From Local Search to Universal Search, every new tweak and addition to the results pages was seen as another apocalyptic event that now, Once And For All, made for keyword rankings truly useless.

The most recent Google features that have once again reopened the assault on keyword rankings are Personalized Search and Social Search. These would really make any monitoring of keyword rankings utterly and totally obsolete, some claimed.

That’s, of course, not quite the case.

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SEO and the Multi-layered Search Experience

There is a pervasive mindset in the internet community that search engines such as Google are an entirely different class of website. Instead of a destination in and of themselves, search engines are seen as gateways to real content. The search experience as many search engine optimisers define it is limited to what users do in Google, Bing, and such.

However, I’d argue that this is a limited perspective that no longer accurately reflects how users find content on the web. Instead I would call Google and its rivals first tier search engines – the first step in a multi-layered search experience.

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Why Bartz Won’t Sell Yahoo! (Just Yet)

Microsoft want Yahoo! Search… All of it.

It is no secret that Microsoft wants this business, and those who have been in the industry will recall previous attempts, most significantly the shennanigans of 2008, which saw an unsolicited proposal to buy the whole Yahoo! business in February of that year, for $44.6 BN dollars in cash and shares. Following the rejection and counter-position of the offer from Yahoo! to $53 BN, (equivanlent to $33 a share and almost double the then shareprice) Steve Ballmer, in a letter to Jerry Yang, announced Microsoft were pulling out of the offer and would not be willing to meet the asking price.

Later that year an opportunist alliance between activist investor Carl Icann and Microsoft, saw yet another unsolicited bid; this time for the search business only, under the terms that Icahn would depose the board of directors for the remaining Yahoo! business and install a new board of directors under his leadership. Chairman Roy Bostock issued a statement resoundly rejecting the proposal (which was issued with a 24 hour response deadline) on grounds that a carve-up of the business would be damaging and undervalued the company’s assests. Again the “buy the whole company for $33 dollars a share or get lost” message was loud and clear. (more…)

Microformats and RDF, is this the right time?

A low-level buzz in SEO that’s steadily becoming louder is the use of microformats. A brief primer: microformats, also known as ‘structured data’, is extra markup that surrounds your content, containing metadata that give search engine crawlers extra information about the content.

There are many different types of microformats, each with their own unique schema and rules, and each useful for a different type of data. A few examples:

  • hCard – the microformat version of vCard, useful for content describing people, places, and organisations.
  • hReview – the microformat for reviews of products, services, events, etc.
  • hCalendar – the microformat version of iCalendar.
  • XFN – a microformat for quantifying human relationships in links. (more…)

SEO: Where to Next?

So where is SEO going? Like lifes many mysteries, similar to “Why are we here?” and “If a tree fell in a forest would it make a sound?”. There is no clear defined answer which is why SES kindly put together a panel of experts within the online environment to discuss…

It is always nice to be in an open session, I feel it allows the speakers more freedom to say what they want on a variety of aspects of search. More importantly it lets us hear them talk with their guard down; this hope of a slip up was mainly aimed at the Google employee, Maile Ohye.

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Is Search evolving into Online Anthropology?

This post was originally posted by Lisa Myers on Searchcowboys

I’m fascinated by search marketing, both paid and organic and I think most search marketers can agree that search is much more than just the relationship between a website and the search engines. It’s about the relationship between:

  • The user and the search engine
  • The user and the keyword/s they use in the search engines
  • The search engines and your website
  • The user and your website

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