Survey: 50% of Users Say No to Facebook Search Engine
Facebook already has the social media market cornered and is even throwing its hat into the Wall Street arena, but any plans to create a Facebook search engine could be a bone of contention.
Greenlight’s Search & Social Survey 2011-12 asked 500 people their opinion on whether Facebook should start a search engine similar to Google or Bing. Facebook has no current plans to start work on this type of venture, so the survey was more of a “what-if”. 48% of the respondents replied that they dislike the idea of Facebook going into that direction.
It is important to remember that most surveys actually question far more than 500 people. It is also important to note that Greenlight said their participant pool was comprised of people from different professions and walks of life. While this sounds like a broad spectrum, Greenlight doesn’t really go into how they came across all these participants. It is possible they just found them through someone’s Facebook friend’s list!
The survey also found that if Facebook did go into the search engine business, they would be able to corner about 22% of the search engine market globally. While the study’s first set of findings seem to imply that half of consumers wouldn’t like a Facebook search engine, 22% of the American market alone still equates to about 13.5 billion individual searches per year. It’s this very number that could eventually sway Facebook to go into the search engine business.
The study went on to say that Facebook could potentially take 50% of the global search engine market within a few years if they were able to convert Google users. Though this claim seems plausible considering how big Facebook has gotten, looking at the actual numbers show what an uphill battle this would be for Facebook. Google currently has over 65% of the search engine market cornered, so it seems unlikely that any other search engine could take 50% within a few years.
Facebook already has plans to improve its search feature, but only within the confines of Facebook. It will be interesting to see if Facebook takes notice of this survey and chooses to look into the possibility.
Google Labels Penguin Update a Success & How to Recover If You’ve Been Hit
Google’s Penguin Update has been a hot topic in the SEO world for around three weeks now. With widespread reports of ranking penalties and false positives, Google’s Matt Cutts has chimed in on the debate labelling the Penguin Update a success.
“It’s been a success from our standpoint”, Cutts said.
When asked about the issues of false positives (people who feel they’ve been unfairly hit by Penguin when they weren’t doing any spam) Matt went on to clarify,
“We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this change hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida,”
“No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, our litmus test is, ‘Do things get better than before?’”
Matt also went on to clarify that penguin was designed to be quite precise, only acting against pages where there was a high confidence of spam being involved.
So what should you do if you were hit?
Google have said that those hit by the penguin update will need to make changes to their website or link profile in order to recover.
As we’ve mentioned before, bad linking practises seem to be a major cause of this penalty. Some of the things to look out for include,
- Paid text links using exact match anchor text: For companies that want to rank for a certain term (such as “red widgets”) one way to accomplish this is by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link that exists solely to manipulate PageRank, rather than to provide any value to visitors.
- Comment spam: Two things proved problematic for websites trying to unnaturally rank for specific keywords: signatures in comments that contained exact match anchor text; and people who used a spammy user name (e.g., Best India SEO Company) as exact match text.
- Guest posts on questionable sites: Although guest posts are a legitimate way to earn links to your site, sites dinged by the Penguin had links pointing to their website from sites filled with low-quality articles where the focus was on the anchor text rather than the content.
- Article marketing sites: Thin content featuring links with exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites.
- Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings, so links to and from web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” are a danger.
If you’re looking to clean up your link profile one technique you can try is called link pruning. This basically involves identifying poor incoming links to your website and taking steps to remove them.
Here is a basic outline of the steps to take,
- Identify: You need to gather a comprehensive backlink profile for the site in question. There are several tools available that would accomplish this, including Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks Report, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
- Investigate: Go down the list of backlinks to find the rotten ones. It’s a time intensive step that requires you navigate to each link to evaluate its quality. After a while you may start to get a sense of what’s bad by the URL of the linking page alone. If you opt for using Majestic SEO, you have the benefit of their proprietary ACRank, a quality score that you can use to judge link value.
- Send Requests: Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed. To send the request, you may find contact info on the site, you may need to do a whois search, and you may need to do some sleuthing to get names and email addresses.
- Follow Up and Repeat: Expect to receive four types of responses to your requests:● Remove link and tell you.
● Remove link and not tell you.
● Not reply or do anything.
● Will remove the link if you pay them.In the case of the first, verify by going to the page where the link was and if the link was removed, check it off the list. If you haven’t gotten any response back from a contact in 2 weeks, check to see if the link has been removed. It may or may not. If it’s been removed, cross it off the list. If it hasn’t been removed, send a follow-up request.The process of link pruning requires multiple cycles. Each successive cycle will see more links removed. If you run across a webmaster requesting payment for link removal, let’s just say there’s a search engine who will be very interested to hear about this.
- Communicate with Google: Throughout this process you must keep detailed records of your actions. A spreadsheet with columns for the linking URL, the contact name, the contact email, the date a request was sent, and responses or actions taken by the linking site. In the end you will not be able to extract all dubious links from the site but you will want to be able to show you’ve done everything in your power to extract manipulative links from your backlink profile.
Have you been impacted by Penguin? Feel free to leave a comment below.
5 Ignored Page Elements That Will Boost Your Sales
We’ve written many times about the does and don’t of creating a landing page that will convert.
But a recent article from the team at Kiss Metrics caught my attention when it outlined 11 elements of a page that are often overlooked. It certainly made me look twice at the most popular pages on our own site to see if we are overlooking these particular elements ourselves. The good news for us is that we’re not, but for most website owners you could be killing your conversion by simply glossing over these elements.
I have outlined below the 5 elements that I believe are most important, however you can read the full article here.
1 – Clear, Differentiated Pricing Information
Have you ever checked out a product online and been unsure what the difference between the Silver and Gold plans were? Did Pro seem a little too much like Basic? The most effective methods can be boiled down to a simple philosophy – focus on the benefits, instead of features, and highlight the differences. The best pricing tables allow you to quickly ascertain the value you’ll personally get out of each option, and discern the differences between each.
2 – Customer Confidence
There are many ways to build this trust though, and almost all are fairly easy to implement. For instance, if you use an SSL certificate to secure your transactions (and you really, really should be if you’re processing credit card info), show it! Many consumers know to check for secure web pages when proceeding with a purchase, so they’ll be looking for that all-important padlock icon.
3 – Unconventional Social Proof
Incorporating social proof into your product pages is a way to complement and reinforce the positive influences on your visitors for a given product. It can take many forms, ranging from customer testimonials, to star ratings, to simply exposing the number of units of that particular product left in your inventory.
4 – A Clear Next Step
Too many product pages clutter up their pages with excessive calls to action. View customer photos, view pricing, view our knowledgebase, get customer support, talk to a representative, read reviews. Without good design, these calls to action all blend into a confusing mess, and make your user feel like they’ve just been blindfolded and spun around.
Typical methods for designing a good call to action include using high-contrast buttons, treatments or callouts that are unique to the overall design of the page, as well as giving the actionable elements plenty of breathing room to make them stand out.
5 – Wayfinding
How many steps lie between your product page, and your transaction confirmation page? If you don’t know, then it’s probably too many. A convoluted and laborious funnel is a sure-fire way to kill conversion.
If the customer is on the checkout page, then get them to their final purchase as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t make their purchasing effort seem like an arduous journey that can leave them second guessing their purchasing decision along the way.
Are your product pages missing some of these elements? If so, it might pay to give it a bit of an overhaul, especially if it means more potential sales.
AdWords Ad Rotation Now Limited to 30 Days
Google has recently announced a significant change to AdWords.
Advertisements on AdWords will now be limited to thirty days. Before this announcement, advertisements could stay on a site for an indefinite amount of time. As the recent Panda and Penguin updates suggest, Google is making a strong push to get rid of spam and to encourage fresh and unique pages. It is only logical to assume that fresh advertisements would be next; fresh advertisements that reflect the fresh content on a page.
After the thirty-day period, AdWords will keep and optimize the best performing advertisements. Advertisements that are doing well are ones with high conversion percentages and ones that are receiving the most clicks.
According to the official announcement on the Google AdWords blog “Every time a creative is enable or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of thirty days.” Advertisements that are already on a website will automatically auto-optimize.
The new ad rotation is seen by Google as “a preference that determines which ad in your ad group should show (when you have multiple ads).” However, the new update does give advertisers some control. For instance, they can request to have their best performing advertisements appear more. They can also request that the advertisements be distributed more evenly.
AdWords users will also be able to control the settings. They will be able to choose one of the three advanced settings:
- Optimize for Clicks: this is the default setting of the rotation. This setting bases advertisements off of previously successful clickthrough rates (CTRs).
- Optimize for Conversions: Instead of relying on clicks, this setting factors in advertisements that will yield the most purchases and opt-ins.
- Rotate evenly: setting is performance-blind; it will showcase each advertisement equally.
The goals of this new update are supposed to benefit the consumer, advertisers and to optimize AdWords itself. The first goal of this change is that website readers will get to see more relevant advertisements. The second goal is that websites will get more clicks. The final goal is that it will improve the functionality of AdWords.
However, this announcement has not been met with much enthusiasm. Many advertisers do not appreciate the loss of control over the length of time that their advertisements will be available; other advertisers call the change a waste of time.
What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts below.
Yahoo! Launches Online Marketing Dashboard for Small Business
Here’s something new from Yahoo: a centralized location where business owners can get quick overviews of the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
Dubbed The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, it’s a one-stop-shop for small businesses to track their marketing and includes the following features:
- Reputation Tracker: This feature scans over 8000 sites across the web to see what customers are saying about a business. Since social media and social proof are fundamental to a marketing plan, the tool pays close attention to Facebook and Twitter. The tool looks at online reviews, customer ratings and mentions.
- Local Visibility: Gives a small business owner a snapshot of where and how a brand appears in search engines. This allows a business owner to correct any errors. Incorrect information can deter and confuse potential customers. The tool can also find new places to add listing information about a business.
- Site Traffic: Using tools, like Google Analytics, this feature reports the number of visits to a company’s website, the number of page views and the average time a customer spends on a website. The site traffic feature simultaneously compares data from the previous week while also providing a breakdown of the types of traffic including direct traffic, traffic generated from search engines and traffic from referring sites.
- Campaigns: Gives an overview of a brand’s email marketing, SEO and efforts through a partnership with ConstantContact and Orange Soda. The tool highlights the total conversions that occur during a one-week period. This tool also conveniently breaks down conversion distribution by campaign types. It also gives you new marketing opportunities that you may not considered before. This user-friendly feature uses pie charts, bar graphs and other graphics to guide business owners.
Best of all, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard is free and pretty easy to use, although some of the features are only available under the paid version. You will no longer have to waste money and time in marketing strategies that are not producing results.
It’s currently only offered to US small businesses, but fingers crossed this spreads world-wide soon. You can sign-up for the dashboard here.
Google Announces 50 New Search Quality Changes
Late last Friday, Google announced over 50 new changes that are set to change how search results are displayed in some big ways.
The big topics of focus with this update are on how Google handles spelling errors, classifies keyword stuffing, focuses more on freshness being factored into SERPs and adding a larger website index size. Other features that have been added and upgraded in this month’s list of updates include tweaking results for images and video, altering how local search results are displayed and fixing some minor bugs.
You might recall that April saw the release of Penguin, Google’s latest ranking algorithm update (not to be confused with Panda).
More spelling corrections are to be added globally to the search engine. The same type of autocomplete spelling correction already available in English is to be added to over 60 different international languages. On the other hand, there are supposed to be less unproductive spelling changes, such as those for phrases like “mint tea”.
On a related note, the “did you mean?” feature will now be suppressed in non-English search results. This is meant to happen when an auto correction to a search term is found that a user doesn’t find helpful.
The flags Google use to classify a page as stuffing for a keyword have been altered and improved. This should further encourage the use of keyword variations and synonyms. It should also bring a marked decrease to pages that are solely spam. Ranking has been altered for fresh results and for search terms to better display relevant results.
Freshness is a major focus for this month’s update. The algorithms that detect freshness have been tweaked to be able to better detect fresh results. Another modifier has been added that will prevent freshness from being added to low-quality content and therefore keep it from flooding result pages by taking advantage of the freshness signal.
The base index size for Google’s searches is to be increased by 15%. This means that the very same index that is used to search for results when a query is entered is meant to become much, much larger. Indexing will also have another “tier” added. This latter update will change how often pages are indexed.
SafeSearch is to be improved for both image and video results. This improvement will also spread to over 40 different languages.
The likelihood that a user will find search results from a local region’s website will also be increased when compared to finding a global site.
So, as you can see, April was a busy month for the team at Google. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that May is going to be just as hectic. You can see the full list of changes here.
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