April 2006 Archives

Yesterday Google announced a "quality change" to the AdWords ad delivery system. Danny Sullivan explained that the ads displayed on a search result page will differ in quantity based on the commercial nature of the keyword phrase. So if a keyword is more educational (non-commercial) in nature, less ads will be displayed. If a keyword phrase is more commercial in nature, more ads (up to 11) will display on the search results page. How does Google change the number of ads? Well, if it is less commercial, it will tend to use less of the broad match criteria in displaying ads (which tends to bring up more ad inventory).

As you can imagine, this will affect impressions for ads, which affects your CTR and your quality score - ultimately your ads rank in Google.com. Also, advertisers will get more "qualified" leads this way. I also guess this means that Yahoo! will continue to lead in displaying more ads as a percentage of Web searches. Makes you think, doesn't it? Google is lessing it's ads, making the ads more relevant but will Google make as much money? Yahoo? well, they just seem to want to show more ads, and give it up to the highest bidder.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As you already know from my coverage Google has updated Google Sitemaps to include many new features I discussed at SEW blog including;

+ New verification method
+ Indexing snapshot
+ Notification of violations of the webmaster guidelines
+ Reinclusion request form
+ Spam report
+ New webmaster help center
+ More about our new look
+ Adding a Sitemap
+ Navigating the tabs

But the main change, for Webmasters, in my opinion, is Google notifying webmasters of penalties as Matt Cutts describes it. They don't necessarily tell you, hey - your site is kicked out of the Google index because you did X, Y and Z. Plus Google doesn't necessarily tell you that you have no pages indexed, it tells only "some" webmasters. They have a message that reads;

No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we''ll evaluate your site. [?]
Submit a reinclusion request

Many Webmasters are happy about this and discussing it in the various forums. Two forum threads I found discussing it include; DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

Earth Day was this past Sunday and there was a ton of news and blog buzz on the search engines being creative with their engines on that day however, there were no threads in our forums. Today, I finally noticed a thread at DigitalPoint Forums about the special day. The thread creator notes which engines made an effort for Earth Day and which did not - also asking you to comment on which you find to be your favorite.

Continue reading "Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006"

There is a new WebmasterWorld thread that made it to the front page very quick named Flattening Effect of Page Rank Interations - explains the "sandbox"? I feel like I have to quote the majority of the post for you to understand this new Sandbox theory that many in the thread find "refreshing" and "intelligent."

Note the PageRank equation (sans filters) is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) .

The first observation about this equation is that it can only be calculated after a statistically significant number of iterations.

If you analyze a site with 5 pages that all link to each other (the homepage having an initial PageRank of roughly 3.5), what you see in the first iteration of PageRank is that the homepage is PR 3.5, and all other pages are PR .365 – the largest PR gap that will ever exist through multiple iterations in this example.

This homepage PR represents a surge in PR because Google has not yet calculated PR distribution, therefore the homepage has an artificial and temporary inflation of PR (which explains the sudden and transient PR surge and hence SERPs).

In the second iteration, the homepage goes down to PR 1.4 (a drop of over 50%!), and the secondary pages get lifted to .9, explaining the disappearing effect of “new” sites. Dramatic fluctuations continue until about the 12th iteration when the homepage equilibrates at about a lowly 2.2, with other pages at about .7.

I believe that the duration of the “sandbox” is the same amount of time it takes Google to iterate through its PageRank calculations.

Therefore, I think that the “sandbox” is nothing other than the time it takes Google to iterate through the number of calculations uniquely needed to equilibrate the volume of links for a given site.

Did you digest that? WebmasterWorld Administrator, tedster, adds that deep links may "short circuit the flattening effect that PR iterations might produce, especially if they were added at decent intervals." To which an other WebmasterWorld Administrator, trillianjedi, adds "You have to begin to consider whether actually the entire PageRank system of old has been replaced with something entirely different....." but he continues to explain that this and all the other theories are speculation, which is why these threads are so enjoyable.

Google has continued to say that PageRank is used and part of the algorithms. Many SEOs believe it is only used now (1) to determine which site should rank higher when site A and site B are equal in all other characteristics (like that ever happens) and (2) to determine the crawl frequency of certain documents. But maybe this theory is right, or maybe it is wrong - maybe Google is using PageRank for this purpose? Who knows....

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Please read the comments in this entry by clicking here.

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums had an interesting title, Are you click-o-phobic? I never really thought about this. Publishers are so trained not to click on their own ads, it becomes second nature to look at the ads, but never ever click on them. This constant wrist slapping training has possibly caused some to subconsciously never click on any contextual advertisement from Google or Yahoo and the others. Honestly, if you are a publisher, do you feel a weird sense of gratification or accomplishment after clicking on a contextual ad, on any site? I believe that I have a weird feeling after clicking on one of those ads.

Click-O-Phobia is the proper term for such a condition.

Do you have click-o-phobia? Are you click-o-phobic? Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I posted under embargo that Yahoo Adds Babel Fish at midnight, Wednesday night. Yahoo! has has revitalized Babel Fish at http://babelfish.yahoo.com/. Babel Fish is a translation tool first on December 9th, 1997 by Alta Vista (see SEW). You can translate up to 150 words of text to dozens of languages, you can translate a Web page, you can download babel fish widget to your Yahoo! toolbar, or you can add the feature to your web site. In addition, there are special features for German and French users that enables a "searcher's queries and looks across the entire Web in multiple languages to find the most comprehensive set of relevant results. Yahoo! Search results are returned on one multi-lingual page." For more information on Bable Fish, see the Babel Fish Help page at Yahoo! Also, see Gary Price's historical roundup on Babel Fish and the Yahoo! Search Blog.

WebmasterWorld members seem to be overall very happy with this announcement. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator, Discovery, posted an interesting new thread named Google POPS off. He says that he tested pop offs, ads that pop up after you exist a site, and realized a 8% increase in conversions. However, Google clearly does not allow any type of pop up to be present on a Google AdWords landing page, so Discovery can not implement this as he would have liked to. The deal is, how come larger companies, such as Lower My Bills and Network Solutions can implement pop offs and still use AdWords?

If pop offs only pop once per session, upon exit, when the site's goal has not be reached, should that be allowed by Google? If implemented "professional" should that change things?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Brett Tabke has split out a thread that has been getting a lot of attention named Pages dropping out of the index. GoogleGuy replied to that thread stating;

One thing to bear in mind is that Bigdaddy will have different crawl priorities. That can account for some of it. If you've run into any spam problems in the past, you might also want to do a reinclusion request. Otherwise, please send an email to bostonpubcon2006 at gmail.com with the subject line "crawlpages" (all one word), and I'll ask someone to see if they notice any commonalities.

This post, deserves its own thread, so Brett split it out and named it With Googles New Big Daddy Index, Crawling is Changing .

Currently we don't have much more information, than what GoogleGuy posted above. Does "different crawl priorities" relate to Google's new Crawl Caching Proxy? Or is it cache independent? I believe it has to be cache independent, due to the volume of posts in the original thread.

Forum discussion on GoogleGuy's comments at WebmasterWorld.

After Google announced the new Google Sitemaps features, a bug became visible in the tool. In fact, I noticed the bug when it was first being presented at SES yesterday, but the presenter was quick to cover it up. The folks at WebmasterWorld reported the glitch around 11:55 AM (EST), right when it was launched. Google would tell you that your robots.txt file was invalid or something, when in fact, it may not have been. Google confirmed and fixed the bug soon after.

Thanks to our users for alerting us to an issue with incorrectly reporting that sites and Sitemaps were being blocked by robots.txt files. We have resolved this issue. If you were unable to add a site or Sitemap because of this issue, you should now be able to add them.

If Sitemaps was reporting that your home page was blocked by robots.txt, you should soon see an updated status. Thanks for your patience as we refresh the display of this data.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

As an FYI, we reported a total of four Google bugs in the past two days.
(1) Google Fixes Extended URL Broken Page Issue
(2) Google AdWords Glitch: Bid Tool Conflicts With Position Preference Tool
(3) Google AdWords Showing Same Two Ads On Search Results Pages at Google.com
(4) And this one.

Many WebmasterWorld members are reporting that Google has been displaying the same ad and same creative more than once on the same search results page at Google.com. The, what seems to be, "bug" has been reported to Google, no confirmation as of yet has been made by Google.

WebmasterWorld AdWords moderator, eWhisper explains the two ways this can be happening;

1. A glitch in the AdWords system (which is admittedly happening quite a bit now). 2. When a domain has special approval to show upto 3 ads at a time (this is usually based around the landing pages being independent from each other).

Either this is a policy change or a bug - we will see.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The past two days, as many as you know, I have been covered SES Toronto. The main takeaways from the conference, at least in terms of new items, includes;

(1) Google launches new Sitemaps with a spam feature.
(2) The Searcher Behavior Research Update session is always interesting, but this time it was mostly focused around relevancy and which engine is most relevant and why. I have an interesting (I think) entry on Is Google Search More Relevant Or Is There A Brand Factor?

Those are the two main "take aways" from the conference, here is the complete run down on sessions.

• Danny Sullivan's Keynote
• Search Marketing in Canada: Roundtable
• Search Engine Friendly Design
• Searcher Behavior Research Update
• Ad Agencies & Search
• Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior
• Meet the Crawlers
• Fun With Dynamic Sites

Now for the ride back, since you know about ride options to Toronto, the ride back I took 17, instead of NYS Thruway. Just a bit more turns and stuff, same deal I think with time. But check this out. I get to the border and they ask for ID, etc. like they always do. They ask me to turn off my car, give them my keys and open the trunk. I do exactly what they say and they search and find nothing. Now they ask me to pull into a garage, as a "random check." I do, they lock me in this garage, and ask me and my friend a few more questions. They look up to make sure the car is actually registered to me, which it was. Then they let me go. I drive a nice car, and I think they thought I stole it, because who in there right mind would drive from Toronto to the NYC area with a car like that?

They were right. I pulled out of the garage and got back on the highway, hit 65 MPH and bang, some rock hit my windshield. This is common, but this time, I notice a crack in the windshield. The windshield remains solid, so I continue to drive. The rest of the 6 hours back, my friend and I guess how long it will take the crack to reach the middle of the windshield (yes we were bored). So this AM, the crack is twice as large and I need to wait for the Lexus shop to open up to check how much it will cost to fix. I guess it is a good thing, since the windshield is filled with bug splatter from the 1,000 mile commute back and forth, trust me the windshield is covered with bug juice.

That is my story - the hotel was sweet, the conference was nice, and overall it was a fun experience like last year.

Chris Sherman moderates this session.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is up first, sporting his bright red suit. He explains that search engines want your content. SEO Basics; indexing, ranking, traffic, actions. With dynamic sites, the problems are normally with indexing the site. When it comes to the rankings side of thing, you can easily make changes to templates to increase or tweak rankings. Dynamic Web site Architecture; he explains how a dynamic site works. He explains that you can deploy URL rewrites, static replication and so on. What is not a problem? Content in a database is not an issue. A question-mark is not an issue. Server side include is also not an issue. Extension names are not an issue (i.e. php, cfm, asp, html). Indexing barriers include; long and ugly URLs, duplicate content (session ids, click is, time stamped URLs), spider traps (infinite loops), server downtime and slow response. There are also indirect issues with dynamic sites; required support of cookies, JavaScript, flash, etc, SEO-targeting and personalization, Form (post method) based navigation. Some non-related issues; robots.txt issues, password protection. Solutions that work; there are many ways to solve the system. (1) Fix your system (2) Add a "bridge layer" and if that isn't possible, you can "replicate your content." One fix he called the "one parameter web site" that makes sure all the parameters are limited to one. Identifying spiders; identify on a global level (session ids, geo targeting, spider traps), look for generic part of the agent name (googlebot, msnbot, slurp, etc.). Also think about building static Web pages (limit the use of dynamic pages, use dynamic objects on hard coded pages, create a site map). You can also use pay for inclusion, directories and PPC.

Jake Baillie from TrueLocal with a Dr. Phil slide. Common Dynamic site issues... (1) Circular navigation, same two links go to the same place. (2) Print-friendly pages to fix, block them in robots.txt or use CSS/Ja to generate them. (3) Canonical URL problem (what is my homepage, index.asp, default.html, / or what?) (4) Looks dont count, just add content. (5) Badly implemented mod_rewrite code, DNS errors with multiple domains. make sure to 301 redirect them. (6) Don't use a poorly written cloaking scripts. To prevent duplicate content, the same content should not be accessible via multiple URLs. What are URL rewrite URLs? He examples it. If your site is fully indexed by the search engines - don't use URL rewriting. He shows some of his "tasty tips" which I am not writing here.

With conversions being all the rage for web site owners, first thoughts are more likely on attracting first-time visitors and ways of converting this traffic into sales. However, they are not the only target group to be considered.

Ammon Johns starts a discussion in the Online Marketing and Promotion forum at Cre8asiteforums :

"Indeed, certainly within two years of business, one would hope that the majority of sales were coming from existing customers, happily returning. Of course, only you will know what the consumption cycle is for products or services of the type you deal with. But you would certainly hope that each sale you make would lead to at least one recommendation to a friend, and to repeat business from each customer."

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Google Sitemaps Launches New Features
Shiva Shivakumar from Google to talk about Google Sitemaps new launch. A live demo of site maps new features. He logged into his account and showed the "my sites" section. The pages look new, there is a "diagnostic" tab that shows summary data, including indexing summary, potential indexing problems, and so on. The tab on the left, gives you more detailed information, it looks like they moved those links from a sub tab at the top to the left hand side. Google now shows you that "no pages from your site is in the Google index" for constitution.org. He goes to the site and shows at the bottom of the page, hidden text - and that is the reason Google shows the message "no pages from your site is in the Google index." This is pretty big stuff. He then moved back to an other site, showing "statistics" main tab and showed "query stats," "crawl stats", "page analysis," and "index stats." He then clicks on the "sitemaps" main tab, and pulls up google.com/sitemap.xml to show the XML document. He then clicked on "robots.txt analysis" under the "tools" section on the left hand side. It allows you to see if you will be crawled or not.

Stephen Evans from MSN Canada. New products; windows desktop search, refreshed user interface, MSN local search beta, windows live search beta, crawling images and news and more. As much as possible MSN Search will attempt to crawl and index pages that help the user find what they are looking for. Basics; build a site map, use robots.txt, be conscious of URL length, query parameters, session variables, beware of text in images, unique content, links to your site or submit your URL, nothing can replace high quality content. Also use descriptive titles, redirects (HTML redirects are best, 301 or 302 are hard), JavaScript, page weight (150KB) and canonical domain. Things to avoid; keyword stuffing, duplicate copies, cloaked content, hidden text and link farms.

Andy Renieris from Yahoo! Canada Search goes over the vision, find, use, share and expand... How to get into the index, link new URLs from existing page in index, make sure all URLs have an inbound link, good authoritative links, don't make site depth too extreme, or use free add URL. Index friendly pages are unique content and avoid spam... French sites, use french meta tags and meta descriptions. He puts up the classic "how yahoo handles redirects" slide. URL rewriting is important, parameters often changed to pseudo-paths, remove session ideas, limit the depth of the URL. He showed the yahoo crawlers, web, shop, audio, news, etc... Recent Yahoo Additions; Site Explorer (not so new); rss and atom feed submission support, ping interface via API, added internal link filter and more things coming to Site Explorer soon. They also have My Web 2.0, the save to my web button... They just did an index update on April 21st.

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com who goes over the stats... #6 US web property, 28.5% reach, 48.8 million domestic unique users, 5.9% share of US searches and a division of IAC. Crawler Goals; follow robots.txt standards, politeness (crawl delay, noarchive, noindex, nofollow), efficiency (compressions, avoid duplicates), freshness and multiple file types (html, pdf, flash, ms-office, etc.). (Barry notes; when did they add "nofollow?) Date-stamp content, it helps, so put a "last modified" stamp on your pages. Simplify site-organization and navigation, ensure crawlers can reach all parts of site, use site maps. Watch out for infinite pages, calendars (year 3001) and session IDs. Crawler challaneges; javascript, dynamic pages, image with urls.

Moderated by Andrew Goodman...

Kevin Lee is first up and he shows the Google Golden Triangle, eye tracking study heat map. He explains that targeting will enable you to make a more profitable sale. Targeting brings us one step closer tot he holy grail of advertising. What is the holy grail? Marketers get to put more of their budgets towards their best prospects/customers, Searchers only see the ads that marketers really want seen, and Publishers get a higher yield on their search and impression inventory. MSN adds increased targeting options by allowing you to raise your bid by demographics (age, gender, geographic), plus with say parting, daily scheduling... Behavior segmentation; better conversion from click to lead/sale, higher immediate value, better lifetime value of the customer, offer responsiveness. Targeting by behaviors; prior search behavior, prior click behavior and content preferences. When do you want to target by demographics? :) A power segment is when several of these demographics and behavior criteria overlay each other, this segment is worth so much more to you. Look at conversion rates by geo and time of day, do an analysis of your current customers, gender and age, use your CRM system. He shows some MSN adCenter screen shots. Use your keyword data to buy other type of media, which sites rank well organically for your keywords? He then puts up his lunatic slide...

Jennifer Slegg is now up. Behavioral Ads are ads targeted based on specific user's previous surfing behavior. Different users see different ads. She then explains the difference between demographics and behavioral. She explains how behavioral works, how it looks at person A's past search and browsing experience - to show ads related to that data. Users are tagged normally via cookies and also 1x1 transparent gifs. Publishers can earn money by dropping cookies on your sites within networks such as Tocoda, Kanoodle and Advertising.com. There are privacy issues with his, there is a misconception of "big brother," no personally identifiable information used, only the fact that you viewed specific sites or pages are used to determine targeting. Behavioral versus Spyware. Why is behavioral targeting not spyware? Spyware installs software onto the computer, behavioral simply drops a cookie or an image, spyware often hijacks searches and web sites, behavioral overwrites ads on web sites, spyware doesn't overwrite ads, ads are served by the site itself or by a 3rd party chosen by the owner. Problems that can affect targeting with behavioral include; multiple users on the same computer, spyware and virus programs that flag and delete cookies as "dangerous" or "suspicious" causes misconception about purpose and targeting is lost when deleted. Other issues with behavioral? only small % of ads are behavioral, not widespread availability of ad space across variety of sites, and launch of a large scale publisher program for this. Companies that offer it is for Tacoda, Kanoodle, Advertising.com, AlmondNet.

Jason Dailey of MSN is now up. He restated why targeting is important, most from Kevin's speech. He shows a screen capture of MSN adCenter. It shows an overview of all the campaigns currently running, and how they are performing. He then shows a keyword generation tool which contains demographic information, with trends over past 12 months. These tools are important for writing your search creatives. He goes through the process of setting up the campaign, select locations ads should run, the days it should run, the times it should run, and continues to go through the steps of setting up a campaign. He then shows a screen which allows the targeting, you can add incremental bids for certain demographic and/or geographic information. He then shows off the reports within MSN adCenter.

Word from Cline at WebmasterWorld that if you are using both Find and Edit Max CPCs Tool and Position Preference is enabled, the Edit Max CPCs Tool will not update your bids. He noticed this when the tool was "failing to put into effect the bid changes." So he asked his AdWords representative, who responded that this was "indeed a technical problem" with the Google AdWords system.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

(conference coverage, missing the first session, have a meeting in 10 minutes, will catch the next sessions, but I am also skipping the last session, so I can get home at a reasonable hour tonight).

Yesterday, I reported at Search Engine Watch blog that Google added new street level details and driving directions to its European Google Maps. You can see it in action by zooming into London. You can get the idea of a before and after by zooming partially into to Moscow, notice the surrounding areas are missing the street level detail, but inner area has the detail.

Yesterday, Google also increased the resolution of some cities in the US.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday morning, a WebmasterWorld member reported on a Google bug, where Google would append '?sa=X' on some links. Appending that extra snippet lead to a page that was not existent on the server it referred the page to, hence taking the end user to a 404 page not found page.

You can see for yourself what Google adds to the URL by doing a search on gmail for example, and then mouse over the quick link named "New features!." That link looks like http://www.google.com/url?q=http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html&sa=X&oi=smap&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=2

It is a tracking feature for Google. Google has quickly fixed the issue by encoding the URLs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a basic, but interesting thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Does Title Tag Need To Come First? The question is more detail is, does the title tag within the HTML code of a page, need to come at the very top or can other code be above it, without it affecting search engine rankings?

There is a core rule in SEO that your keyword specific content for the page, should be as high up in the source code as possible. Meaning, your introduction content and your header tags, should be as high up within the source code as possible. There is also the belief that these keywords are important to have in the visible content as high as possible, not just for search engines but also for your readers.

But does that apply to the title tag and meta data for the pages? Good question.

Danny Sullivan and David Wallace both say it should not matter. But for standardization purposes and having clean code, it might be best to place the title tag at the top. But in terms of ranking, they both say, in the past it has not mattered and it probably doesn't matter today.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Reports come from Cre8asite Forums that Google Blog Search has added a "Search the Web" button next to "Search Blogs." Prior, there was only, "Search Blogs" but within the past week or so, Google reportedly added the "Search the Web" option to Blog Search.

This is not major news, a slight change - possibly something Google will stick with or may not.

Forum discussion about the addition at Cre8asite Forums.

Every now and then, when you do a search on google at Google.com, you notice sponsored ads on the right side of the page. Soon after, those ads seem to always disappear. Google doesn't like it when other companies bid on the name Google, in their search campaigns. It is a branding and trademark issue, that all brands have concerns about. But like anything with Google, people get through the system and get an ad up under the keyword "google."

Last week, I was notified of a weird looking ad, that lead to some sort of Arabic model site. The add came up in the sponsored results at Google.com for a search on google. It looked like;

and it linked to this landing page, which I can not understand, but looks to me like a model site. The ad is no longer present, but as you can imagine, the ad stood out on the page, due to its unique looking title.

Which brings me to the next case, of advertisers using weird unicode characters to make their ads stand out from the competitors. One such case, was posted in Search Engine Watch Forums for a search on sitemaps at Google.com. The search brought up an ad that looked like;

Again, this ad is no longer present, but you see how folks are targeting Google or Google products and making the title of the ad, look unique and flavored. Happens all the time.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The last session of the day, moderated by Danny Sullivan.

Kevin Lee from Did-It.com is up first. When we think about buying search, in comparison to other media is more complicated. Most online and offline media buying is predictable:
- IOs that have a fixed price
- IOs that generally are delivered
- Demographics based on averages but assigned to the publisher or network
- Cost per publisher ad unit is high
- One keyword has over 7,000 bid permutations in MSN
- Thousands of permutations in Google
- Many in Yahoo as well
- Click quality and profile changes with position, source engine, time of day and week, and competitive landscape.

Action marketing places sort of change things
- Limited high value inventory (in demand)
- Lack of predictability as to inventory availability
- Pricing escalates over time (marketers recognize value and get desperate)
- Best inventory zero-sum-game scenario
- Unlike other media, search has media urgency

When Do Auction Market Places Work? When...
- Media placements can be well defined
- Marketers/advertisers know and understand what they are bidding on
- All media in the network is of high quality or can be auto-discounted (like Google's smart pricing concept)
- There is sufficient scale in the network
(Barry Adds: Danny touched on this this morning, with his Time Warner Cable trying to auction off TV spots, read that keynote to understand his points on this).

When they don't work?
- When a publisher's inventory has special attributes that can not be defined a network style auction marketplace may leave value on the table
-- Media placements could be auctioned off individually (eBay, who is very developer API friendly)
-- API driven auctions still feasible
- Internal sales channel resistance also can derail an auction marketplace

Future Media May Be Auctioned
- Google Yahoo and MSN proved that...
-- Valuable, scarce media can be auctioned with high yield
-- Auctions make publishers lots of money and a high effective CPM, even if the advertisers is billed a CPC
-- Banners, Text, Radio and Print...
-- Next TiVo, IP TV, Video Ads
- Are traditional media agencies ready to become experts in auction media?

PPC Auctions, Two Types at the Top:
- Brilliant Marketers
- Total Lunatics
- Success Requires figuring out how to either;
-- be a brilliant marketer / afford top position
-- Deal effectively with the total lunatics

- Search is both media and a by-product, people don't search because it was spontaneous. Something stimulated that search... You need to know what else is going on, what is going on, may drive search behavior.
- Marketers are beginning to reach their price limits in search.
- Agencies must figure out how to buy the best clicks first
- That is why they need better technology
-- Segmentation marketing, new metrics...

Search is now more numbers driven, much more than compared to other media. This puts SEMs in a good position as the landscape changes.

Tim Daly from SendTec is next up. He tells a story about his 3 year old daughter, who "knows all about Googling." That tells us what the next generation will be and what agencies need to look at in the future. How has the world changed? From slinky to sony robots (pleo - so cool). We played cops and robbers and kids play play station. TVs were made out of wood, today we have TiVo. Social networking was the boy scouts, and now there are Web sites. Dating was by friends hooking up others on blind dates and now there are dating Web sites. Research was in a library and now it's on Google. To be a player in search, you have 3 choices; you can buy a search company, build your own search division or finally partner with a search company.

1) Buy a search company:
- Pros are gets you into search fast and new rev stream
- Cons are there are not too many good ones left, choose the wrong one you are in trouble, you still will need highly trained and expensive people to integrate a search company within your agency.

2) Build a search division
- Pros are you can own it, design it, profits are yours, a new revenue stream, and client loyalty
- Cons is very expensive, you will need technology, infrastructure and processes, and you need new people with new expertise.

3) Partner with a search company
- Pros, you're in the search biz overnight, immediate new source of rev, protects and solidified client relations
- Cons, pick the wrong one and you're in trouble, less control and the partner can potentially cut you out.

His company had a similar decision to make. They partnered, and it bombed. They lost one of their clients, because of the 3rd party firm. He was hired to figure out why it failed. They choose the wrong agency because it wasn't the right fit for the client, and there was too much stress on technology. So they went and built their own division, which cost $500k and built the technology, and an internal commitment by senior management to make it a go. And it translated into a great success.

It's all about people, with technology as an aid. Technology not as the decision maker, but as an aid to people.

If you partner, base it on; trust, knowledge, search experience, accountability, reliability, recognize what is at stake, reporting access in real-time, details, technology, and agency experience.

If you can buy a search vendor, or build your own division that operates on a very high plane and produces the result you want, all the more power to you. It is a huge under taking and it creates a lot of stress, he showed a picture of him before he did it himself with hair and how he is bald.

Dave Carberry from Advertising.com is last up.

Questions:
How many clients you have in house now?
Would your search spend warrant hiring employees to fulfill that need?
Can your firm handle maintaining an ROI focus rather than creative only?
Would you prefer to hire an SEM firm and split the client fee?
SEO is technical and time consuming - should you bill by the hour?
How often would you change bids?
Would you work 24 x 7?
What happens if you lose your SEM?

He put up a slide of which companies are hiring SEMs.

Tools of the Search Trade:
- SEM Specialist and/or SEM Specialist
- Static bidding vs. portfolio bidding
- Onsite analyst to determine client CVR and ROI
- Qualified AdWords Consultant
- Banner Ad Placement
- Landing Page Creation
- comScore Networks, Nielsen NetRatings
- Ad Serving
- AdRelevance

Thoughts for the Road
- Billing the client, how are you going to do it?
- Structuring the Fees (the engines don't bill in gross numbers)
- Trademark issues
- Indirect Competition (affiliate programs)

This can be very lucrative.

Chris Sherman is the moderator of this session. He introduces this as a unique panel, compared to the others. Recently, he said, we have real metrics on search behavior. That is the whole focus of this panel.

Gord Hotchkiss is up first. He is going to talk about his two stage eye tracking study. The first study he showed the "Golden Triangle" in Google. So a search on the blog for "Golden Triangle" for our past coverage of this. Phase two involved, 54 participants, recruited MSN and Yahoo users, applied 5 scenarios (free to completely scripted), interactions on MSN, Yahoo & Google, the study will be out later in May. He showed the eye tracking heat maps of all three engines. People had to go deeper on the page, to look for better results. The ideal User's Search Engine; if it was up to the user, the 1st top most result would be the only result I want and that is it. When you compare Google to MSN, it seems Google is more ideal. They had the same control users for the second study, so they redid the Google test with the same users to be sure. The 2nd study was remarkably consistent with the first study. So they sliced it differently, male versus female, by engine. It is not the searcher that is the variable, but it is the searcher... Are Google more results more relevant then? He said they did an internal study with his employees, that showed MSN was more relevant. He brought up my study, "RustySearch" where Yahoo was most relevant, but now Google is more relevant. The bolding in the title, bolding the keywords in the title and description, makes the listings more relevant. MSN didn't bold the keywords at the time of the study, hence the deeper and longer eye scans at MSN. That may affect this eye tracking study when comparing Google to Yahoo to MSN. He then discusses "Semantic Mapping" where if you do a search for "Digital Camera" and you see brands or attributes of digital cameras, it will resonate with the searcher as either relevant or not. 6.5 seconds was the time it took to click, and 4.5 seconds of scanning the page, to read 6 to 7 search results. Then he discusses "thin slicing" when you view the bolded terms on the search results page. Findings; much more scanning on MSN and Yahoo than Google, Even MSN and Yahoo users seem to find what they're looking for faster on Google, Google appears to be perceived as the more relevant and other....

Lance Jones is next up from Keynote Systems. He will be talking about Google's brand. They did a recent study, to study the brand of the top search sites. First time they are talking about this publicly. Google is now in the Webster dictionary, now that is something, when your company name turns into a verb. He shows a Reuters story of Google's increase market share, from March 28th. Top three brands, Google, Yahoo then Ask.com. Usage, Google, Yahoo and than Ask.com. Satisfaction; Google Yahoo and than Ask.com. So is Google that much better, really? Brand study goals. (1) How important is the brand? (2) Which engine produces best results (3) Which engines produce best paid results (4) Who has the best presentation and layout? He will answer the first Q. How do they take the brand out of the question? He explained the Pepsi versus Coke challenge, blind taste test. They asked people to interact with one search engine. They used an unbranded search interface, and a branded search interface. Pages are live and screen-scrape Google results. Page design is held constant. The Google results were the same on both sites, only difference, was if the name Google was on the page (not even the logo). No paid results on the page. Feedback based on 1,600 queries. 12 distinct satisfaction metrics. Keynote calculates scores from 0 to 1,000 scale. For the unbranded condition, Google achieved 737 score. Some of the panel comments; "why would anyone ever leave Google for this? and many of these type of comments. The branded versions scored an 800, the unbranded 737 - there is a brand factor. Part 2, Google Web and sponsored results., and the same layout, same type of test, just added sponsored results. Unbranded scored 763 and 809 for branded version. Part 3 was Google Full Featured design. They stripped out all references to Google logos and images, but left text and bolding and you see A 753 score for unbranded and 806 for branded version. Google brand acts like a magnifying glass. Google's brand opens doors (google desktop, gmail, finance, analytics, earth, pack, base, etc.). Google's brand keeps the competition thinking.

Michael Ferguson from Ask.com is next up to talk about some of the innovation they went through. He is a senior user experience analysis from Ask.com. He explained that people love Jeeves but they used it for a very fixed reason, very infrequently. So they decided to take the risk to change that perception. Gives the stats run down on Ask.com and shows the sponsored listing program.

Changing Behavior on Ask.com then Trends in Search Use and show the opportunities for search marketing. He shows % of queries by category; 20.8% general reference and education, 15.2% other, 12.1% science and technology, 9.3% entertainment, 8.6% local and so on. Re-branding to change Behavior; Mental model - more occasional usage than competitors, iconic butler locked up with mental model, low awareness of huge suite of search tools on site, it was a risk.

Ethnography; soccer dad, office concierge, urban hipster, academic writer, creative professional, hydro-geologist and recruiter. He shows the topics of those types people listed before, searched on (from widow spiders, foot in mouth, and so on). Users spend much more time than they expected in their search time investment.

Focus on Ask: How can change behavior? So they pulled the butler off, replaced with a bar on the right, says "search tools". What this did, they looked and saw this, it was about the same height as the butler, so they saw it, when the butler was missing. He showed a sample search on "toronto" which has a the "search tools" at the top with a wikipedia listing and image search result. They also have "narrow your search" and "expand your search" (zoom feature, they show up 60% of the time and then clicked on 20% of the time) in place of where most engines have sponsored results. He also shows the binoculars feature. Results; usage of several tools up 10 times, binocular use up 5x, maps up 7x, and related search up 15%. Frequency, retention is changing and query mix and characteristics changing. Google's Test: They are testing expanded results (the blue arrows on the left side). He shows how Google tends to try things that Ask has been doing for a while, innovate here and there.

Opportunities for Marketing:
- Search Tools: More Qualified Clicks
-- Following the stream through these may change strategy and pricing
-- Information you offer to SE will become more rich
- Expanding Vertical Use
-- Images, maps, local, etc...
- Contexts
-- Mobile, position in the buying cycle
-- Pricing based on time of day, season, buying cycle stage, data from personal and social search will play in.
- He then quotes Danny's keynote, "remember, complication is nice job security!"

This is a classic session, with a classic presenter by the name of Shari Thurow from GrantasticDesigns.com. Shari has been doing this session, since the first SES - I believe. Anne Kennedy is the moderator for this session. It has been years since I have seen this presentation, so I figured I sit in to cover it again.

Search engine friendly design is not a site designed specifically for a search engine. She shows a text only page, with crazy h1 tags, and so on - she describes it as a doorway page.
Search engine friendly design is a user friendly Web site that can be easily found on both the crawl based and human based search engine (web directory).

Importance of the site design:
- End users/site visitors/target audience should be primary
- Human based search engines
- and then finally crawler based search engines

How you arrange words, how you place graphic images and multimedia files, will communicate to the search engines, what is important on those pages.

5 Basic Rules of Web Design
- Easy to read
- Easy to navigate ("sense of place")
- Easy to find (externally and internally)
- Consistent in layout and design
- Quick to download
--- Easy to Use ---

Easy To Find:
- On search engines, web directories, and related sites (industry sites like findlaw.com, thomas, etc.)
- Go directly to the relevant page (people should be sent directly to the relevant page)
- Within 7-8 clicks, preferably less, as long as...
- Most important information "above the fold" (she shows an example of Lake County Crisis Center FAQs page)
- Contact information should be easily visible and find (footer, header and never put contact info after your copyright, about us page, locations page)

Search Engines:
- Index Text
- Follow Links
- Measure Popularity

The first two, index text and follow links, are what all search engines do and will always do.

TEXT COMPONENT:

- Are you using words on your pages that match what your target audience types into the search engines?
- Do you have a site navigation and URL structure that the search engines spiders can easily follow?
- Bring in an SEO early on the site design phase... This happens all the time...

Success SEO depends on those three components... and all three are all important. She explains on the page criteria and off the page criteria. She calls those that claim they can control "off the page" criteria, "spammers."

What kind of text?
- The words your target audience is typing into search queries are called keywords or query words.
- When visitors view a Web page, does the content appear to be focused? Title tag, headings, breadcrumbs, cross links, intros and conclusions, product/service descriptions, and graphic images...
- Visible body text should not have perform any type of action to view the most important text of an individual web page in a browser.
- She shows how to select all and copy and paste it into notepad to show body text.

Primary Text:
- Title tags
- Visible body copy
- Text at top of the page
- Text in and around hypertext links

Secondary Text:
- Meta tag content
- Alternative text (alt tags)
- Domain and file names

Optimization Tip:
How you title and headline your Web pages play a roll in your rankings.

LINK COMPONENT:
Site and page architecture

Site Navigation Scheme (from best to worst)
-- Text links
-- Navigation buttons
-- Image maps
-- Menus (from and dhtml)
-- Flash
-- Consideration: dynamically generated URLs

-- You can use two alternative navigation methods on your site. I.e. flash and text links, etc.
-- She now shows types of text links, including navigation, breadcrumbs, contextual links, embedded text links (within the content and she shows examples of going overboard), optimize your sitemap page well.

- Informational Pages
-- Contain info your target audience is interested in
-- Do not contain a lot of sales hype but rather factual info
-- Are spider friendly Web pages
-- Often have a simpler layout
-- Visually match the rest of your Web sites
-- She shows the difference between an informational page and a doorway page

Ok, she says something I do not like. If your web developer or seo says they will host everything for you and you don't have to worry about it, they are generally a spammer. I know what she meant, but this is a beginners session and I am not sure how many others understand it. BTW, she is a very detailed and good presenter.

Ok, back.

She shows more examples of well optimized pages. Info pages, glossary pages, tips and how to pages, locations page, category/product pages,

Cross Linking

- In addition to a spider friendly nav scheme and a site map, all sites should have related, relevant cross links.
- Hierarchical (vertical)
-- Breadcrumbs
-- Cats - > Sub cats
-- etc..

Type of Web page
Page layout and structure
URL Structure

POPULARITY COMPONENT:
- Number of links
- Quality of links
- Number of times people click on links to your site
- How long end users visit your site
- How often people return to your site

Do people continue to navigate your site, link to your site? bookmark your site, return to your site.

Factors the Affect Popularity:
- Substantial and unique content
- How other sites are linked to your site (all about anchor text)
- Site usability - what are the 2 of the biggest complaints about site design?

Other Design Considerations:
- What is a splash page?
- Why don't search engines like splash pages?
- It is either a huge graphic saying click here or flash site with a skip intro link
- If you do a splash page, put text below the fold, with text nav also

Home Page Design:
- SEF characteristics to include in your home page:
-- keyword rich text
-- At least one spider friendly nav scheme
-- Link to the most important sections on your site
-- Visible link to a site map
-- She shows examples

That is all... Great presentation...

Moderator:
Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media Inc. gives us some background on the event. It is the 3rd SES in Toronto. The first two times they did this session, they had formal presentations. This time it will be more interactive. It will be a Q&A, where Andrew has Qs for the panel.

Panel Includes:
Gino Coutu, President and CEO, NetWorldMedia
Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image
Jonathan Lister, Vice President, Audience, AOL Canada, Inc.
Nancy Peterson, President, HomeStars.ca
Richard Zwicky, CEO and Founder, Metamend
Eric Morris From Google

Q: Sophistication of searchers and SEMs?
Jonathan said SEMs are getting more sophisticated. From offline marketing, and its impact on online and search efforts.
Mitch said the sophistication falls under the "long tail." The "niche" keywords, three to five keyword phrase searches.
Gino said SEMs are lagging behind in using tools, such as metric tools and so on. Very few are tracking here. And searchers are also lagging behind, using 1 to 2 words for searches mostly.
Eric said Canadians are not a lot more sophisticated than they were two years ago. On the SEM side, marketers have become more sophisticated.
Jonathan said he is not sure on searcher sophistication, but he is sure the product is not where it needs to be today. You are typically refining your own searches.
Andrew said he agrees, searchers don't need to reach a level of searching that Gary Price or Chris Sherman is at. Lazy search will be here with us for a while. So the products are what we need to see improved.
Nancy added, ummm :) ill leave it out

No real data here....

Q: It has been a chicken and egg Q... Has the made in Canada shopping site changed user experience? Or a US based site that ships within Canada?
Gino said the currency is very important and we have seen major conversion differences, in both French and English.
Mitch said from Amazon.ca is so different from Amazon.com, and the .ca is like 3 versions ahead. The flip side of it, is that, Canadian based companies are building fantastic sites that can be used globally.
Eric said it almost doesn't matter. The point is to sell things. Just because people aren't buying them online at the moment, they may buy in a store later. It is more difficult to measure, but a good marketing opportunity.
Mitch says that site search has got much better these days.
Jonathan said Canadian portals haven't done a great job of getting Canadian searchers in front of Canadian merchants.
Richard said TigerDirect does a great job, but sectors like Travel do worse. The usage rate in some sectors has not risen with the quality.

Q: Size of the Canadian market...?
Andrew said it is an opportunity, a first to market issue.
Nancy said she also looks at it as an opportunity, and with her site, she helps the market build some sort of Web presence.
Eric said, if the Q is about retailers and not having enough is one Q. On the SEM side, it is an opportunity, the ppc market is an auction. The CPC is lower than in the US. Also, more people in Canada search, by percentage, is higher than in the US.
Mitch said, as a marketer we always want bigger, better, faster... So we keep pushing our clients, our markets forward. Right now, there are no standards or rules.
Jonathan, we may be at the low hanging fruit phase. But early results have been fantastic.
Gino echoing others....
Mitch ads there are also portals and other sites where you can create traffic for your site.
Nancy adds that testing is the best part, since you can measure it.

Q: How has the art of search, integrated with the science of search?
Mitch said the science comes out of the creativity (art). That is where the "sweet" opportunity is. Part of that is the ability to play with it (low cost ads).
Jonathan added, you need to know your target customer - their behavior, how they search, etc.

Q: Search has exploded for a lot of individual marketers, looking for opportunities. In Canada, we have the same process going on. Are there certain verticals that are the big money areas? Are there big dollar verticals in the US but not exploited in Canada?
Andrew said anything in Financial, Travel, Jobs.
Jonathan said there is still a lot of content that needs more traction. Entertainment is one area. The content creates the new avenues to market against (um, yeaaaa - so).
Mitch asked the panel, do you see a vertical that is specific to Canada?
Richard said 22% of Canadians research travel online but very few book online, but in the US it's totally different, more people book online.
Andrew added, customer acquisition online, there is a bigger lag in the acquisition from time of inspection.
Eric added, there are two types of companies - niche companies and the big ones. The niche companies are always on search, year round. The big companies, they are all lagging behind their US counterparts, in every industry. 18 - 24 months behind US SEMs. US marketers are far more likely to track their results. In Canada, many are not using analytics to track. US companies do a better job of typing search with other marketing initiatives. In Canada, not yet.
Mitch adds the SEMs should educate the rest of the marketers.
Gino adds there are a few leaders that show a presence all year round in Canada. ING, TD Bank, FutureShops, etc. all deploy search year round (in response to Eric).
Nancy said the challenge is not in measurement, but rather - there is a million different sites. The biggest question-mark is how to drive them to a site. The creativity...

Q: Regional search behavior differences...
Richard has some slides...
- Search Traffic Comes From
-- 34.60% from ON
-- 25.93% from BC
-- 15.14% from AB
-- 11.45% from QC
-- 3.30% from MB
- Toronto v.s Vancouver
-- The engines that send the traffic to the Web sites vary greatly. 48% came from Google CA targeting Toronto, but 69% targeting Vancouver. 22% MSN CA for Toronto, 4.8% MSN CA targeting Vancouver.
- He then extracted search phrases that brought in traffic to a particular site. He shows how they search differently between Toronto and Vancouver.
- In Canada they search for "homes" in the US you search for "houses"

Q: Canada is a small market, so Quebec, is a small market within the small market. How can we tap into the French speaking Canadian market.
Gino said the assumption the traffic will come from is Google, Yahoo and MSN. But the local engines drive more searches that are specific to more companies and products. Gino sees the searches that are different between a Google search and a local search. The market is split between them and Google, they have 45% of the market share and Google having 50% of the share. They see the traffic in Quebec being different from the rest of Canada. Do not assume Google is the end all, look at the other engines as well, to put your budget towards.
Mitch adds that it may not be significant, in terms of the numbers - but there is a certain level of maturity in terms of how people search. The level of usage is pretty high, and search plays a huge component of that.

Q: Local search is one of the most exciting trends going on these days. He asks the the audience a few Qs.
Richard said they are seeing a lot of local advertisers coming in, in this market. Social networking sites, you can see 14% of Google Local referrers and 7% for Yahoo Local.
Eric said its important to use local keywords and local tools.
Andrew added said geo targeting is huge these days.
Eric said if you are not a local business, you can still use local ads in a smart way.

Some audience member said that Yellow Page is huge in Canada. SuperPages in the US has 10% of the local search market share, he said. But in Canada, it is 35% of the market share and Google has 15% share. In Quebec, he said SuperPages has 50% share. Interesting... I don't have this data, so I currently can not verify it.

He starts off, with I know Canada...
- Molson beer
- So clean at this conference
- Aboot

Ok...

Danny Is Ten Years Old
- Starting writing on search engines in 1996
- Maybe this search stuff has some legs, Danny says, when he first began his writing
- Then again, he was amused reading a Business Week article that said search is slightly below classified ads and above telephone poles...

Danny then shows some slides on stats, all these stats have been posted at the SEW blog. He doesn't need stats to show you that search is doing well.

What does the stats all mean?
- People are spending on search, it is a fundamental marketing medium.
- People are spending a lot more on search
-- Some due to contextual pollution of figures
-- Some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, more competition, brand money flowing in.
-- Some due to increasing search volume
--- Up 55% from Dec 04 to Dec 05.

Get on The Googletrain!
- Time Warner cable said we can auction ads on TV, like Google...
- He cites the Reuters article (search on SEW blog for Time Warner Cable, it is a recent article there)

AdWords Vs. AuctionWords
- It's search marketing, not auction marketing, that's a success
-- IE, the type of marketing - not the pricing model
-- Besides, many would prefer "Buy It Now" pricing
- Who else doesn't get it?
-- Carter from Vanity Fair (search on it at SEW Blog)

Saving Pvt. Search Marketing
- Remembering! They don't need to remember you want them to buy something they probably don't need at that moment

What is Search Marketing?
- Putting messages in front of people who overtly and explicitly express a desire - usually via keywords - for a particular product, search or information
- Search engine optimization is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones
- Search Advertising is the act of doing this through paid methods
- Search engine marketing - search marketing is combination of them both

Reverse Broadcasting
- Search is a reverse broadcast medium
- Broadcast ads (tv, radio, print, contextual) is all about trying to broad cast and build desire among millions of people, most of whom aren't interested
- Reverse broadcasting is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on search engines

What Search Marketers Do
- Identify key desire broadcasting stations
- Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations
- Scout the location, write the dialog & deliver a customized commercial
- A unique job; be proud

What Search Is Not
- Having an auction doesn't equal having search's reverse broadcast impact
- Nor does ppc define it
- Nor is contextual

He shows the difference between search ads on a search engine and contextual ads on the NY Times.

Contextual Pollution
- Google & Yahoo just reported earnings but didn't break out contextual/display from search
- Lumping the two together pollutes the data
- Especially worrisome as vertical search grows... they won't break it out then?

Generations of Search
- Vertical search part of 3rd gen jump
- 1st Generation: Words on page; humans
- 2nd Generation: Link Analysis
- 3rd Generation: Vertical & Personalized
-- Links not abandoned; trusted ones used but also supplemented with other data

What is & Why Vertical Search
- Info, News, Health, Shopping, Music, Video, Cars.....
- Narrow focus/index/database means less off-topic junk
- You can sort in different ways, use different display metaphors

Personal/Social Search
- Reshaping results based on
-- What you personally do or visit
-- What others you know do or visit
-- What people in aggregate do or visit
- Definitely helps to solve the spam problem by greatly multiplying the "fronts" in the arms race
- He shows screen captures of Google Personalized search
- Explains Ego search, where your site is #1, because it is customized for you and your site is #1 in your eyes
- He then shows Yahoo personalized search (add notes to search results, My Web)

Success in Gen 3
- Watch your vertical; focus on key ones for your industry
- Have great content (improve time spent on pages)
- Especially great titles & descriptions (improve CTR)

Going Beyond Search
- Sea