search industry Archives - Lost Press Marketing

Tag Archive for search industry

Conversion Conference London Keynotes

Posted on October 6, 2012 by David

Conversion Conference 2012 has kicked things up a gear with the announcement of two amazing keynote speakers. Running during Data Driven Business Week, Conversion Conference is focused on acceleration of online competitiveness through best practices, smarter adoption of web analytics and discovering better methods and technologies to provide detailed insights into your customers. Some of the other amazing conferences running that week include eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit and Predictive Analytics World.

The opening keynote is run by Professor Wolfgang Henseler of Sensory-Minds who is a recognised expert of natural user interface design, usability and user experience. He is also a consultant to Google & Microsoft on what you will see in the next generation of interface designs. His keynote will examine challenges the role of applications in multi-touch computing and future dimensions in user experience.

Matthew Finlay, CEO of Rising Media responded about the keynote announcement “Professor Henseler is a global expert on customer and user-oriented e-business solutions as well as a user and brand experience specialist. He is creating the blueprint for the next generation of websites and as a result is in demand by global enterprises for his expertise in human-computer design.”

also adding that

“We are thrilled to have Professor Henseler open this year’s conference in what promises to be a very thought provoking keynote presentation.”

The second keynote is being presented by Nick Holzherr of Whisk who has built a service to simplify the buying process for customers by converting recipes automatically into shopping lists within online supermarkets.

Matthew Finlay, CEO of Rising Media was quoted saying that “Nick is one of the UK’s most innovative young entrepreneurs and his new venture Whisk is set to change the way people do their food shopping online. The foundation for Whisk’s success lies the company’s focus on strategic conversion and delegates will see how this is being implemented in this exciting new business.”

A final speaker Nathahlie Nahai of Web Psychologist has been added as a keynote speaker for Conversion Conference London. Nathahlie is an award-winning speaker with a background in digital strategy and psychology and one of the leading voices in her frield to have both academic and hands-on experience in online persuasion. Nathahlie is also a member of #OglivyChange that utilisies cognitive psychology, social psychology and behavioural economics to produce behaviour interventions in real life.

Conversion Conference 2012 Pass Options

Two Day Conversion Conference Pass (Access to Conversion Conference sessions and Expo Hall on 27th November AND 28th November)
One Day Conversion Conference Pass (Access to Conversion Conference sessions and Expo Hall on 27th November OR 28th November)
Combo Pass eMetrics (Access to Conversion Conference & eMetrics sessions + Expo Hall)
Super Combo Pass (Access to eMetrics, Conversion Conference AND Predictive Analytics World sessions + Expo Hall)
Exhibit Hall Only Pass (Access to Exhibition Hall Only – no conference sessions)

Conference Discount & Registration

Book early for London 2012 and save with our 15% Discount Code LOSTAGENCY12 and register for conference here

Conversion Conference Venue

Business Design Centre, Islington 52 Upper Street, London N1 0QH, United Kingdom Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7359 3535 Conversion Conference Social Media Links Follow them on twitter @ConvCon, and track the 2012 conversation with hashtag #ConvCon

No comments Posted in conferences

SEO Desktop Tools

Posted on October 2, 2011 by David

This a review of one of the leading platforms that I’ve trusted for my SEO research and client campaigns over the past 4 years but has actually been in the market since 2002. The platform I continue to trust for my SEO tasks has been Advanced Web Rankings and it’s sister package Advanced Link Manager. One platform I use for checking my keyword rankings and the other I use for monitoring and link building campaigns but also for analysis of competitors websites. This is not the only package I use but it’s one platform that I’ve been consistently using over the past 4 years and certainly wonder sometimes how I can do my analysis without it.

Go Desktop or go home

Some of the many reasons that I’ve been such a fan of their platforms is they run a desktop application which means that when my internet connection goes down or I need have to access their data offline I’m able to, unlike many of their competitors which are built on web 2.0 platforms. They offer the most powerful seo software in the business and I’ve stuck with it as it offers the hardcore analysis you need to get the best data possible to make the right decisions, no need to wait 2-3 months for new data it can be mined and ready for analysis in just a few hours. If you have done something wrong such as tracking the wrong keywords you can make a change such as add in an extra keyword and re-run the update to get a fresh batch of ranking reports. The other benefit is that once the data is in place and you have to track a new competitor you can just drop their domain or URL into the platform and it will map them against your existing keyword data.

The performance of desktop software compared to web 2.0 is one of the other reasons that I prefer to do my hardcore analysis in a dedicated platform, just as you export your data to Excel when you want to do real number crunching.

SEO software suitable for the paranoid

While it’s not a massive concern for myself currently, there are a number of people in the industry that are reluctant to use web-based SEO platforms as the T&Cs can imply that they in fact own all your SEO data. I have found there is also the bonus feature of AWR is that your campaign SEO data is stored locally so there is no concern that other people are able to access your tracking data so the package is perfect for the paranoid marketers and those who may need to keep such data private.

Main benefits of SEO Desktop Tools?

My main reason why I love the AWR and ALM platforms and continue to use them and recommend them is that their platform is that it is available offline, but that it also offers enterprise/hardcore crawling & keeps my data stored locally. While the upgrade process can sometimes be a bit time-consuming the other advantage of running a desktop version is that you are not force upgraded to the latest version without consent. This forced upgrade of web 2.0 properties often causes users a lot of head ache as they might be happy with the current features and interface and having to go through a major change and re-learning process does not feature on their weekly to do list. It’s also another great source for tracking how some of your sites or your competitors sites have been hit by recent Panda 2.5 updates.

Primary Benefits of Web Rankings & Link Manager

Search engine rankings on your desktop
Most accurate, reliable and comprehensive seo data
Automated SEO reports for make your reporting process faster
offering automated data backups to safe guard your search data
always improving and rolling out progressive updates/refinements
access to the most comprehensive and accurate keyword research tools
data privacy is ensured as all data is stored locally no-one has access to it
add personal touches to your SEO reports and deliver straight to their inbox

Why website owners should use Advanced Web Ranking

Keyword research tool
search engine friendly
Choose from more than 2000 search engines
Import keywords from file, URLs, websites or automatically
Get automatic keyword suggestions from Google
Sort all keywords by priority
Manage your keywords and create compound keywords
Get keyword data from WordTracker
View information in interactive reports
Quick overview of website ranking
only gather the relevant results
evaluate your competitors before optimising your web page
request new custom search engines
quickly analyse your website and learn how to improve it
query Google Maps to check local rankings

Why SEOs should use Advanced Web Ranking

Google preview search engine
use multiple proxy servers to decrease update time
constantly monitor search engine updates
get onpage analysis for keywords
email your customers automatically
export your ranking reports in multiple formates
automatically upload client reports via FTP
schedule updates for multiple projects at the same time
easily organise hundreds of projects
manage multiple user profiles
setup automatic triggers to send special reports
export your data to your in-house tools
get the same result your customers see in their part of the world
schedule updates to be done while you are away from your computer
use multiple API keys for search engines

Caphyon continuously improving their platform

There have been some amazing updates to their platform since I previously reviewed it back in April 2010, but the biggest change has been the move to the new interface which has increased some functionality but also streamlined some work processes. The new platform is much similar to popular web 2.0 interfaces and offers a far simpler interface for daily tasks and the analysis while taking a bit more to adjust if you are used to the old platform does make it quicker to do quick analysis. The biggest difference I’ve seen over the years is the radical improvement in the platforms ability to deal with massive amounts of historical data as some of my projects have 3+ years of tracking data.

Advanced Web Ranking (Old Interface)

Advanced Web Ranking (New Interface)

The new platform has been scaled right back to focus on the 6 key aspects of your campaigns, but it is a learning curve when you are switching from the old version to the new interface and some of your standard seo ranking features take a bit more digging to find them first time round. The only aspect which is not yet possible is to customise the primary icons or create shortcut icons for common reports that you might need for your day-to-day tasks. The only 2 new features that are not showing in the screenshot are the backlink reports and google analytics data that you can now import into AWR so you can start to have a central platform for making analysis on how your SEO campaigns are performing.

Why not use Multiple IPs?

One of the issues with running desktop software is that you risk having your IP address blacklisted by Google for scraping its SERPs but also it can take far longer to do a complete your ranking update. But after struggling with this issue for a number of years I finally made the jump to multiple IPs and I haven’t looked back, besides a few technical hiccups with the supply of some below average IPs the process has been fairly awesome and i’m considering how much I can scale this process up so I can get updates done in minutes and not hours?

Advanced Web Ranking Update History

Version 8.5 (Sep 29th, 2011) – Import SEOmoz Linkscape backlink data, synchronise ranking data with Google Analytics data
Version 8.1 (June 14th, 2011) - Improved printable reports user interface, ability to display best position in charts for multiple date reports, ability to copy/paste keywords from Project settings, ability to modify an existing keyword, browser manager
Version 8.0 (April 18th, 2011) - Redesigned the application User Interface, Over 1000 improvements to usability and design, new and improved scheduler service, search from location in Google
Version 7.5 (October 5th, 2010) - overview printable report grouped by keyword category, Google Suggest for countries, Website Optimisation Overview (Top 10 comparison), Export to HTML for the Website Optimisation
Version 7.4 (August 10th, 2010) - Overview chart, the Website Optimisation report, ability to get keywords from the Google Webmaster Tools API, ability to display not ranked items in the multiple dates chart, Overview by keyword category, ability to display mozRank in reports, FTP over SSL
Version 7.3 (May 28th, 2010) - ability to group proxies by category, SEMRush API for keyword suggestion, Bing API, FTP profiles per project, table summary to the competition report, XSLT transformation for the competition report, ability to import local search engines from CSV, ability to import Google Preview locations from CSV

Advanced Link Manager Update History

Version 7.5 (October 5th, 2010) - Website Optimisation Overview (Top 10 comparison), Export to HTML for the Website Optimisation, ability to gather up to 10000 links from SEOMoz
Version 7.4 (August 10th, 2010) - the Website Optimisation report, FTP over SSL, ability to run only Rank updates, the index page by default to a project, ability to update broken links on scheduler
Version 7.3 (May 28th, 2010) - ability to gather links from a SEOMoz Pro account, mozRank column to interactive Unverified Referrers and Referrers reports, Bing API integration, proxy server categories, Automatically add the meta keywords and the title as keywords on a new project, progress for FTP files uploading

It’s free so why not try it?

As no-one want’s to take the dive into a new platform without some insight like most of the leading SEO platforms they do offer a free 30 day trial download, which includes both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager. I suggest you take it for a spin and see how this can help your day-to-day SEO tasks and certainly make end of month reporting that much easier.

No comments Posted in search industry

Yahoo Clues for SEO

Posted on June 30, 2011 by David

Yahoo has today rolled out an updated to their Buzz platform that put’s it far ahead of Google Trends and Google Real-time and the usability places it in the grasp of being useful to everyone who is able to operate a mouse. I really love the potential power of the platform combined with its pure simplicity with huge vaults of almost real-time demographic data and is large enough that I can see what users in Queensland, Australia are looking putting it on par with many enterprise social media platforms.

The platform is very much pitched around what celebrities get the most buzz but I see the platform has some very powerful features outside the paparazzi knowing who to stalk online for the next high of traffic to their fashion blogs. If you are involved in marketing or search you should be testing some of your primary keywords to see what insights you can learn and measure this against your Facebook fan page analytic data to gauge the variance in the data, but I can tell you damn it’s cool!

What it Yahoo Clues tells you

what other popular queries relate to your term
what is the previous search query before your term
what is the next likely query after your term

What can I do with Top Trends?

This platform is very cool because it offers the ability to quickly filter through data to find most popular search queries and then drill down by time period, gender, age range, location and even category of interest. If you were a Melbourne based travel site looking for content ideas of what to write about you could see what are the current top search queries but also where you should considering buying PPC traffic or adding to your weekly email newsletter.

Melbourne Most Popular City Search Queries

There are some limitations currently around the depth of categories but this will hopefully increase as more data is added to the platform, so best you look at using “trends” to find specific keywords or terms in more detail.

What can I do with Trends Analysis?

I have run two quick sample queries to show you if you were looking to understand the demographics of people who are searching for SEO online and even where you might be targeting your Facebook Ads you can do in an instant.

Yahoo SEO Trends

SEO versus PPC Traffic

See Yahoo Clues in Action!

I did a video review of the platform and how you can use Top Trends & Trends Analysis for your keyword or article research, but also so you know more about your Facebook demographic before you start targeting them via Facebook Ads, please check it out below and then go and play with it for yourself.

No comments Posted in search industry

Social Search Impacts

Posted on May 23, 2011 by David

Google Social Search powers out of the gate with a global rollout in 19 languages starting in the US but rolled out over the coming weeks, but it’s not clear if this will delay the rollout of +1 or if the two products will eventually be combined into a single platform. Google Social Search is not new it was first rolled out as a search experiment back in 2009 but it appears to have mostly sat on the sidelines for the past 2 years with only gradual improvements. The growth in the value of social media is clear but the only point that is left out in this arms race is the winner will have a solution that requires no real effort to use on a daily basis and the flood of new share buttons will just annoy most users and very few businesses will choose to implement into their websites.

Google cannot afford to lose it’s gain to the combined Facebook/Bing platform but the question is will chasing trends keep it ahead of it’s competitors or lead it away from it’s core competencies of making massive piles of money for it’s investors? Google has tried and failed with most of it’s social products because it’s not a core part of the companies DNS so what will make +1 or Social Search any different?

Impact on Search Traffic?

The obvious change is that any websites with a large number of shares by friends/connections will get far more attention from viewers and also help lift their CTR as you can see below in the heatmap test. The only issue is that having social shares and likes is great until they are so common the only one that stands out is the website that has none, so in a strange twist of irony will being unpopular be the new trend in 2012 to stand out in the SERPs?

Example Social Media Heatmap (Feng-GUI)

AdWords CTR Impact?

The Google +1 platform initially has a far smaller impact on AdWords as the +1 button is typically blended into the background but when you move your mouse over the button it changes to a brightly colour box with an annoying popup message advising you to “recommend this page”. This extra distraction from the visitors clicking on your AdWords result and also how will Social Search integrate into AdWords will it advise what AdWords results your friends have clicked on and will that massive invasion of privacy lead to consumers abandoning the AdWords platform or Social Search?

How Many People aren’t using social?

There are estimated to be just over 10,072,000 Australian users on Facebook which is far less than the population of Australia of 21,874,900, so 54% of the population is likely not able to take advantage of the new Bing/Google products. Even accepting a number of these people may never user the internet much at all, that is still a fairly large portion of their possible users that can never offer Bing/Google any social signals on what content they like or their friends like because they don’t use platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The only interesting insight into the Bing solution according to FastCompany is they their solution won’t always rely on Facebook likes to understand what is related or suitable.

How can you customise and improve your Google social search results?
As Google is a company built on data they need to expand their data points that they know about you and your friends but unlike Bing/Facebook they can only do this by you expanding the number of public profiles you have starting with a Google profile. They then need you to add links to all your public connections such as your link to your blogs/websites and also connect your public Twitter and Flickr accounts to your Google Account/Profile. To further increase the data points they understand about you, following this you should find people to follow on Google Buzz, but also remember to add all your friends and contacts in your Google contacts and categorise them by friends/family/coworkers to complete the circle of trust. Now when you do a friend/collegue a favour by sharing or liking a piece of content of theirs your vote will likely be discounted due to the close personal connection, so be careful how many pieces of the puzzle you link up….

To finish off the pieces of the Google’s social search puzzel, they also need your to start subscribing to people on Google Reader to be automatically subscribed to all that person’s shared items, this enables them to start to evaluate which celebrities should have a greater share of voice in social search based on the number of lemmings following them. Just as Twitter has it’s own internal social analytics to understand trust and Facebook has EdgeRank Google needs you to fill in the blanks for it’s social search product to function.

2011 Updates to Google Social Search

Bing Likes Facebook
Last week Bing started the rollout of their “Friend Effect” to their search results, so you will start to see more personalised search results based on the opions of your friends and can see what your friends like across the web. According to Bing research the “Friend Effect” helps deal with the 80% of decisions that are delayed until you can get a friend’s stamp of approval, which can last from a few minutes to a few days. The only side issues around the Facebook tie-in is the possible issues of privacy of user data and how elements you share privately maybe made public to your friends and connections via Bing search results. Currently Bing “Friend Effect” is only available within the USA but will be rolled out internationally over the next few months once the bugs are ironed out.

The elements of the Bing “Friend Effect” is made up of a few key elements

Trusted Friends – liked results, answers and websites, more personalised results
Collective IQ – popular sites, integration of social messages
Conversational Search – expanded Facebook profile search, travel wish list, friends who live there, flight deals, shared shopping lists

Impact on Bing CTRs?

It’s also harder to estimate the possible impact of Bing social search integration as the team has removed all the photos from their official blog post, but you can see their video about the platform here Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing (VIDEO)

No comments Posted in Social Media

Apture Helps with Highlights

Posted on May 2, 2011 by David

One of the cool plugins I noticed last week on the WSJ was Apture, it was being used to link to a relevant YouTube clip. What I liked about the plugin was that it did not open a new tab or take me away from the article it simply opened a popup window. The advantage is the user experience is improved but also the visitor is much more likely to stay on your website. Apture advise that their plugin offers publishers around 2-3 times more engagement on average.

Apture already has publisher integrations with

Scribd
Venture Beat
The New York Times
The Financial Times
Wall Street Journal
Economist

Limited scalability with manual tagging
One of the issues that publishers have flagged in the past about Apture is that it can be too much work to create each of the Apture links manually. While it’s great to have control over what content or sites you link out to, it’s also very time-consuming if the whole process is manual. It seems that a number of the publishers don’t always make full use of the plugin and how extensively it is used often comes down to the writer or editor who needs to be more proactive.

Plugin makes it scalable
Back in August 2010 Apture rolled out the first version of their Browser plugin. This meant that it was possible for anyone with the plugin to enable Apture links on any page. this is an improvement on the previous version which only allowed searches within Apture content with the same version of Apture installed.

Apture Highlights Chrome Plugin
There is currently 25,312 Chrome users with the plugin and the audience is growing at around 1,081 weekly installs. You can download the Apture chrome browser plugin here.

Apture Highlights Firefox Plugin
There is currently 366,684 Firefox users with the plugin and the audience is growing at around 20,175 weekly installs. You can download the Apture Firefox browser plugin here.

Search quickly through content

One of the advantages of the plugin for SEOs is that you can quickly define terms and source content directly from within the CMS to bulk out the article you are writing. You don’t have to even highlight the whole word as Apture is smart enough to highlight the whole phrase or keyword. The auto-round feature for your text selection ensures you can highlight text recklessly but still get the right results.

Get more information in one place
Once you have highlighted the phrase you can get information from Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Images and Twitter by clicking the Learn More icon. The Apture window also offers results from both Google & Bing which is useful for quick research.

Apture SocialLinks “Beta”
One of the cool new features they are rolling out is Apture SocialLinks (beta). The Apture Highlights automatically turns the most popular search terms into links. The other advantage of this new sociallinks is that it offers click analytics data.

Apture Plugins don’t work with AdBlockers

One of the downside to any technology like this is that because of how it operates, many Ad blocking plugins prevent it from functioning correctly. The problem is that many basic users won’t have the patience or technical expertise to implement the work around so it will work with Ad blockers installed.

CMS Plugins still needed?

I believe that there is still a need for website owners to have a reasonable amount of control over what external content you are linking to but also to expand the platform beyond just those who have the browser plugin. It would be useful to specify a certain list of keywords that should always be changed to a SocialLink where possible. Similar to Affiliate or Kontera style plugins I should be able to advise of keywords or phrases not to auto tag.

So I suggest you check it out as it’s a fairly nifty little browser plugin and you will wonder how you did without it soon enough.

One comment Posted in technology

Bing Auto SERPs

Posted on January 13, 2011 by David

While the world turns back to Detroit for the 2011 North American International Auto Show, we see a new feature being rolled out from Bing that adds in an enhanced auto result to it’s decision engine. It seems that this move follows their Farecast platform that presents much of the information you need to book flights, hotels or holidays, but is not yet as closely integrated within the search results. It is interesting that this Auto product wasn’t released sooner as it does seem a much smarter way to search for a new car or fall in love with the Ford Mustang once again.Below is the current standard Bing search result for a “2010 Ford Mustang”, but you can now see a new tab “Autos” showing just next to “Web” at the top of the search results. The new Bing results don’t currently blend the Auto results into the standard results but keep the results more transparent by segmenting them into a new Autos tab.

The new Bing Autos results are shown in the two screenshots below and are vastly visually different from the standard Bing results but the primary bits of information are already showing in the standard search results but this may increase as Bing understands user behaviours and preferences overtime. Just as Google is able to adjust and adapt their product quickly due to the sheer volume of users testing it’s platform as Bing grows expect to see more radical changes to new products like Bing Autos occurring faster.

New Bing Auto Results

Bing Auto Reviews

You can see from the hyperlinks from the page that much of the information is still being drawn in via Autos.MSN.com but using the Bing platform they are able to make the data more searchable and the usability has also been greatly improved with a much lighter and quicker loading interface than the old Autos.MSN.com portal. While much of the owner reviews information is been linked from Autos.MSN.com it still prevents a lot of information in a nice clean, clear and concise way and it’s mostly free of advertising except for 2 at the top right side. The auto reviews tab does allow for some fairly cool analysis of your car with owner ratings & reviews and even video reviews of your car.

How does Google compare against Bing Auto?

The closest comparison that I could find was Google Shopping tab but that seems to be mostly occupied with Die Cast Metal Collectibles and some Ford Mustang spare parts, not really anything spectacular at this stage.

Google Shopping Results

What could make Bing Auto better?

While it’s clear that the platform has just launched and will certainly undergo some massive changes, here are a few initial points that I wished had been there at launch, including a comparison engine where you can view multiple cars side by site. I can understand that they are being more commercial sensitive to their commercial partners and don’t yet want to ruin them by launching a loan comparision website as Google did covered in more detail in my post Google Mortgage Rates.

The left side menu offers 3 primary filters for Auto Results

Model (sorted by Price)
Competitors
Model years (sorted by year)

Suggested Bing Auto Improvements

It would be great to see some new types of filters – fuel type, drivetrain, transmission, seating, coupe?
It would be useful to see 3 call to action buttons (Buy, Lease, Rent) even as sponsored links/sites
Consider using language specific to regions such as outside the USA “Bing Cars” instead of “Bing Autos”

It’s very interesting to see how Bing is working to differentiate it’s platform from Google but based on this Auto platform they could expand quickly to other verticals quickly and easily using data within the MSN network. I suggest you check out the Ford Mustang and have a play around with their platform, just remember you may have to set your preference for country to USA by the link at the top right if you are based outside USA.

No comments Posted in bing

Trunk.ly – Link Engine

Posted on January 10, 2011 by David

Everyone know the pain in having to search back through hundreds of past tweets trying to find exactly what was that link URL that you ReTweeted that you need to use right now or want to help out friend request on Twitter as someone looking for that exact URL. Well Trunk.ly has created what I term as a “Link Engine” where you are able to make all the links you have shared socially to be search-able. Most people freely admit that Twitter’s search functionality is fairly limited and and most platforms don’t allow for searching across multiple data sources from a single search window but Trunk.ly appears to have solved that issue.

It was highlighted today in a Tweet via Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz who made the bold prediction that this platform could get big. I would have to agree with his statement as I was able to create an account, follow a few suitable friends it suggested and add in my RSS feed from my blog and all my previous tweets in less than 5 minutes. The point is that the website got the usability down to a fine art and my account is created and progressively expanding my history of links. It was covered by RWW back in December last year but didn’t seem to make that much press elsewhere until more recently when a number of members in the SEO and Marketing industry such as Rand started promoting their use of the tool. While Trunk.ly was first created to deal with the pending death of Delicious it also emails you to start to manage the ever growing mountain of links shared via social media in a personal link engine.

Trunk.ly Interface

You can see below a partial screenshot of the interface with the ability to tab between your own links or those friends you chose to follow with a enhanced search as you type module to find links via keyword. Their search platform is very powerful and allows you to conduct a search via keywords, phrases, partial domains extensions, link urls, link title, text of the tweet and even text on the linked page. That’s right if you share a link but can only remember what is the content on the page you can now discover this using Trunk.ly along with who else shared the link, total number of shares, ability to delete the link or edit the link details.

The downside is that at this stage you can only view Friends links and cannot search through them as a whole group but can click on a user and you can quickly search through any of their links from all the sources they have connected to Trunk.ly. You can see in the screenshot below you can see you bio, one web link, location and the total number of your links that are now searchable via Trunk.ly and anyone you are following or following you. The image is powered by Gravatar.com which makes it easy to ensure you have a consistent profile picture across a number of web 2.0 properties, but it is slow to update and may require a click on the “check this gravatar” to speed up the refresh.

What about no results?

It’s kinda cool that Trunk.ly thought outside the box when it provided the zero results screen as it encourages users that if they just connected it may take several hours to process your initial links but you should also connect to some social networks. The more data they have the better your results will be and the more data they will have to refine their search algorithms and suggested users you should consider following, but it would be great if it then could allow you to click and search the links of those friends you are following.

Who else shared the Links?

Trunk.ly offers a far more advanced understanding of who has shared a particular link, but is limited to those who are Trunk.ly users. But you can start to see the potential of the platform as you can start to see how the value of the link stats will grow with more users joining Trunk.ly, including how many people shared the links, when it was first shared and who first shared it. This can be useful to complement platforms like Bit.ly for measuring your social media campaigns as many users may select to share links generated by other shortners such as TinyURL or FB.me or via a standard link and the sharing data could not be captured.

Edit Trunk.ly Links

It is possible to retro-actively edit links stored within your Trunk.ly platform to fix incorrect titles, update URLs, descriptions or add tags to improve the search results. It’s important to note that any #Hashtags used in a tweet will be automatically added as a tag for the link saving you time, but also making it possible to search based on Hashtag later to see what related links you shared. While it may not be used much it is useful as often a link URL Title might not be accurate or the note/text related to the tweet might be incorrect or scrapped from a site’s meta description providing no real value on what the link relates to.

Trunk.ly supports what platforms?

It’s great that one of the key benefits of the platform is the ability to connect multiple social platforms, book marks and even RSS feeds. Trunk.ly makes it easy to import your blog URLs for a searchable record of what links you included and when you added those links and has tested it with WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr & Instapaper. It is likely that other platforms such as Reddit, Digg, Linkedin and email might be added in the future as the platform expands it’s userbase and demand for alternative platforms rises. Most websites these days do provide a public RSS so it’s easy to add these to your Trunk.ly connections and you could potentially add your favourite RSS feeds to monitor what links are being shared/promoted without having to read the article.

Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feeds
Delicious
PinBoard

Trunk.ly Connections

You can easily load your links from 5 main networks within just a few minutes via their authorisation page but at peak times Trunk.ly advises you might have to wait a few hours. I found that this was not the case and unlike a number of other web 2.0 platforms within just minutes I had access to both everyone link I have ever included in this blog and also every link I have tweeted via @TheLostAgency. This was a great start to using a new platform and now that I have authorised these 2 accounts Trunk.ly will continue to check these services for new links every few hours.

You can see above that as part of the transparency of the Trunk.ly model it lists what connections you have linked to your account, when it was last updated, when it was last checked and the type of connection it is. This is useful in your search results as you can see what platforms that you might have shared that link by including Facebook, Delicious, Twitter or Pinboard.

Trunk.ly Limitations & Privacy Warnings

When you first connect Trunk.ly to Twitter they can store your last 3,200 tweets but you are unable to search any links prior to this due to Twitter limitations but can capture everything from that point forward. If you delete or unfavour a tweet once it is in Trunk.ly this will not automatically remove it. You cannot currently extract with the Facebook API any links that you just selected to Like but did not comment on, also no privacy settings are followed so any links you share will be stored and available to all Trunk.ly users. If you don’t wish to have your links that you share public you can set your Trunk.ly profile to private. The advice from the developers is that Trunk.ly will continue to grow and look at privacy features but you can read about it in more detail here.

Discover my Shared Links

If you find that you want to see what links I have shared on this blog or via Twitter you can see my Trunk.ly links here, and don’t forget to signup and test the platform for yourself.

No comments Posted in Social Media

Reading Level Filter

Posted on December 10, 2010 by David

In what looks to be a fresh update to Google Advanced Search has enabled a new feature and is available both on Google.com.au and Google.com search engines, there is little information out so far as to how it classifies the results and what might be the potential impact on user behaviour. Offering the feature as an advanced search feature will likely mean that it’s not commonly used by everyone but it also gives an insight into how Google is starting to using linguistics to understand and possibly re-rank material algorithmically.

How to access Advanced Search Settings?

You can find the new feature under “need more tools?” where you are offered a nice drop down menu, the downside is there is no explanations or help guides on how this might be calculated. The new Google advanced search settings now make it possible to change the search result to match one of 4 different reading levels: all,basic, intermediate, advanced. Obviously it is fairly explanatory but would be great to have some more clarification that is basic grade 1 or grade 5 level of reading before deciding you need to re-write your page content. While Google has supplied some details about it’s new reading feature here, it is still not quite as detailed as it should be.

If you select the option to annotate results with reading levels, the Google search results now show both a filter at the top of the page along with a graph showing the different percentages of results and how Google rates their reading level. This feature is potentially useful for filter search results for research projects and gives a guide on how basic or readable particular topics might be and you can see below the small grey text showing below the page title shows the first Google Analytics result is “Intermediate reading level”. It also appears to have some issues with languages other than English at this point as not all the results for a Malaysian website showed a reading level.

So how does the readability of the search results change for Google trademark terms?

It does seem that a majority of Google’s product language is focused towards intermediate and basic but it’s reassuring to see that 69% of the Google News results are intermediate level. The big surprise is the Google Discussion product that has a massive skew towards intermediate reading level but not much for those seeking information written at a basic level.

Google AdWords Reading Level

Google Images Reading Level

Google News Reading Levels

Google Maps Reading Level

Google Adsense Reading Level

Google Places Results Reading Level

Google Blogs Results Reading Level

Google Books Results Reading Level

Google Discussions Results Reading Level

So how does the readability of the search results change for Google’s competitors?

It is interesting to see that a large portion of both Groupon and FourSquare material is actually classed as intermediate level, which does question how the analysis is made as these sites are not trying to be complicated.

Twitter Results Reading Level

Facebook Results Reading Level

Groupon Results Reading Level

FourSquare Results Reading Level

Yelp Results Reading Level

So how does the readability of the search results change for The Lost Agency?

It seems that my Twitter account is classed as the top basic result using the reading level filter, which could be accurate considering the short 140 character messages don’t leave much room for complexities, but none of my content shows up when you select the advanced filter so it might be potentially missing out on some advanced users.

How Does the Google Results Change for a sample search query like Google Analytics?

You can see Google might actually have a problem in the language it uses for it’s Google Analytics platform as the basic filter knocks out most of the top 10 results leaving it’s testing centre, a support forum post, a post on Knol’s, a help document from Tumblr and one of their old blog posts. Not really anything of value for someone looking for basic information on Google Analytics as almost all the search results are for intermediate level of reading level. The slight benefit you can see using the filter is that you get presented with advanced support topics on benchmarking, how DoubleClick Ad Planner anonymizes data and a Google code article on sampling subsets of data from your website.

Google Results Reading Level All

Basic Results Reading Level

Intermediate Results Reading Level

Advanced Results Reading Level

It is all very interesting to see, but my guess is that the product is not yet fully tested and needs a bit more analysis and refinement before it’s ready to use, but it is a great potential content research tool if you are trying to understand more about the readability level of your content. I suggest give it a try and see how this might impact your search rankings should this feature be expanded into standard search results or started to use across other Google products such as mobile devices only showing basic results….

No comments Posted in google

Google Instant Censors

Posted on September 27, 2010 by David

The 2600.com has seen the humour in how overly active the new Google Instant censorship filter has been with their post “Words That Google Instant Doesn’t Like” and the 2600.com readers have taken time to find out exactly when the partial term or word will be censored by Google Instant.

I agree with 2600.com about the same issue that it shows that your content or what you find and view on Google can be very easily manipulated, filtered to suit and information may be suppressed. The Google blacklist is a great read with some very offensive terms obviously listed but a large number make it to their list with no apparently reason or questionable content linked to that term.

I do agree with a number of the terms suggested on the 2600 Google Blacklist should be reviewed to see if they even need to be indexed but a big solution is to disable these terms showing universal results that includes images/video. That solves the main problem with partial terms showing NFSW material and reduces the need for heavy-handed censorship. If people want or need to find information it should be available and since the Google Instant works on if you are signed into a Google Account it should be able to see that im over the age of 18 so should be mature enough to see nudity if I choose to search for it.

Google is changing your behaviour

The issue is that Google is changing user behaviour but it appears they are using broadmatch terms to block what they think you don’t want to see and it should not be Google’s decision that their ” autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech”. Taking a person’s right to make their own decisions away from them cannot be accepted and will not end well.

I have already covered what Google Instant means for AdWords so I have already got my head around understanding more about the possible ramifications to businesses or websites caught up in the Google Instant censorship I decided that I should work off the 2600 list and find out more about what was starting to be left out. I spent a fair amount of time today working their extensive lists of partial words which would active the Google Instant censorship and using MoreWords was able to find a whole lot of clean words that would also be filtered.

Words that start with…

The example of using More Words I was able find a good number of words starting with cocks that would be filtered out from Google Instant results based on 2600.com Google Blacklist. It also wouldn’t be that hard for Google engineers to also add exceptions to the algorithm that included places, businesses or plants & animals as these were the common key phrases that were blocked through false positives.

No instant results leads to no long-term traffic

A majority of the terms shown below were the top results which signify that the results are mostly clean and accurate and should not have been censored. It seems for a number of these businesses due to their brand name, location or similarity are being unfairly blocked from Google Instant results and these businesses are blocked once the partial word has been typed and most even when the full phrase is typed it still shows no results the results shown below were ONLY shown after Enter was hit. I have included a screenshot of the Google Instant search box to show that suggested results are also censored and no results are automatically shown for any of the terms when this article was written.

They are facing a possible complete loss of Google traffic due to the rollout of the censored Instant results and they mostly do not resemble the partial word which caused them to be blocked. I know not all of these terms are high traffic terms but a number of the companies that are blocked or censored should raise some concerns about the longer term implications for their business model if they no cannot be found easily by Google Instant users. The partial term or keyword that activates the Instant filter has been highlighted in red for each example to reinforce the simplicity of the censorship.

Censored Keyword: amateur athletic union

Amateur Athletic Union - The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) is one of the largest, non-profit, volunteer sports organizations in the United States

Showing the expanded "amateur" search term isn't so offensive

Censored Keyword: Bimbos

Bimbo’s 365 Club - A San Francisco institution since 1931, now featuring live rock and jazz.

Showing the "bimbos" search results aren't so offensive and include Google Maps

Censored Keyword: booboo

BoobooTV - Online TV network with 40+ channels of content
BooBoo Davis - Boo Boo Davis Website by Crossroads – Bluesagency, Black and Tan Records

Showing the "Booboo" search results aren't so offensive

Censored Keyword: butthole

Showing the "butthole" search results aren't so offensive

Censored Keyword: butthole surfers

Butthole Surfers - Butthole Surfers is an American alternative rock band formed by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in San Antonio, Texas in 1981

Censored Keyword: Carol queen

Carol Queen - My own educational events are organized through Carol Queen Workshops and The Center for Sex and Culture, a non-profit sexuality education center

Showing the "carol queen" search results aren't so offensive

Censored Keyword: Cocksfoot Grass

Cocksfoot Grass - Dactylis glomerata, Orchard Grass, Cocksfoot or Cocksfoot Grass, is a common grass, native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa.

Censored Keyword: Cockspur

Cockspur - Produced in Barbados. Company website includes history, distributors, products, and promotions.

Censored Keyword: Cockspur Island

Cockspur Island - Cockspur Island is an island in the south channel of the Savannah River near Lazaretto Creek, northwest of Tybee Island, Georgia, USA

Censored Keyword: hedop

HEDOP - Hydrodynamic Effects on Design of Offshore Platforms

Hedop Search Results include did you mean for Hadoop

Censored Keyword: Hardcore

Hardcore Punk - Hardcore punk, is an underground music genre that originated in the late 1970s, following the mainstream success of punk rock. Hardcore is generally faster

Hardcore Search Results are not all suitable for work further down the page

Censored Keyword: Harcore

Harcore - ”Har” is one half of “har har” which signifies laughing. “Core” is the middle, essence, or center of something. “Harcore” therefore was intended

Harcore Search Results are mostly typos for the keyword Hardcore are most are not suitable

Censored Keyword: Latina

Latina - Latina | The #1 lifestyle, entertainment, beauty and fashion site

Latina Search Results are mostly safe with a slightly racy Youtube clip at #3

Censored Keyword: Naked Juice

Naked Juice - Offers 100% juices and juice smoothies. Product details and company information.

Censored Keyword: Naked

Naked - Naked Communications Agency

Naked Search Results are safe

Censored Keyword: Naked Communications

Naked Communications - We are communications consultants, uniquely objective.

Censored Keyword: Nude

NUDE - Hercules N.U.D.E. the New Users Documentation Effort. Mainframes – We are back…. & we are pissed. This is ongoing work in progress (hopefully),

nude - Nude Cafe (Suffolk Street), Dublin

Nude Search Results are mostly suitable for all audiences

Censored Keyword: Nude magazine

nude magazine - UK magazine of the strange and exotic things which exist at the margins of pop culture

Censored Keyword: Pantyhose

Pantyhose - Pantyhose (also called tights in the United Kingdom) are sheer, close-fitting legwear, covering the body from the waist to the feet

Pantyhose - Find hosiery by style, color, size, or brand, including Falke, Spanx, Donna Karan, DKNY, Hanes, and more. Get Fast, Free Shipping.

Pantyhose - Online shopping for Women’s Pantyhose from a great selection of Clothing & more at everyday low prices.

Pantyhose - Shop American Apparel – Our Opaque Pantyhose are a stylish and slimming accessory that enhance any outfit.

Censored Keyword: Rapeseed

Rapeseed - Rapeseed (Brassica napus), also known as rape, oilseed rape, rapa, rappi, rapaseed (and in the case of one particular group of cultivars, canola)

Rapeseed - Brassica napus Linnaeusï–known as rapeseed, rape, oilseed rape, and in some cultivars, Canolaï is a bright yellow flowering member of the Brassicacea

Rapeseed Search Results are safe including images

Censored Keyword: Scat

Scat - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: navigation, search. Look up scat in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Contents. 1 Education; 2 Games

Scat Enterprises - As the VW market grew so did Scat and their volume of top quality VW performance products. Today Scat is the largest manufacturer of high performance VW

Scat Crankshafts - Home · About · News · Scat Tech · Product Questions · Scat Crank Anatomy · Scat Rod Anatomy · Scat VW · PROCAR by Scat

Scat Search Results feature Automotive & Transport companies

Censored Keyword: Seduced

Seduced - to lead astray usually by persuasion or false promises. 3. : to carry out the physical seduction of : entice to sexual intercourse

Seduced - tr.v. se·duced, se·duc·ing, se·duc·es. 1. To lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct. See Synonyms at lure

Seduced - Faust seducing Marguerite. Seduction is a popular motif in history and fiction, … Eve herself was verbally seduced by the serpent

Seduced Search Results also feature Seth Godin's Blog

Censored Keyword: Seduced by numbers

seduced by numbers - We are seduced by numbers. Sometimes if we hear the same statistic repeated over and over again, we believe it, even if it makes no sense

Seduced by Numbers Search Result are safe

Censored Keyword: Suck

Suck - Directed by Rob Stefaniuk. Starring Jessica Paré, Paul Anthony, Mike Lobel. A comedy centered on a rock ‘n’ roll band that will do anything to become famous

Suck The Movie - Directed by Rob Stefaniuk. Starring Jessica Paré, Paul Anthony, Mike Lobel. A comedy centered on a rock ‘n’ roll band that will do anything to become famous

Suck Search Results are suitable for audiences

Censored Keyword: Suckfish

Suckfish - suck·fish (s k f sh ). n. pl. suckfish or suck·fish·es. 1. See remora. 2. A clingfish (Caularchus maendricus) of the Pacific coast of the United States

Suckfish - Suckfish is the debut LP by Audion, an alias of Matthew Dear. It was generally well-received by critics, with a score of 80/100 on Metacritic

Suckfish Search Results are safe including images

Censored Keyword: Suckless

Suckless - suckless.org Dedicated to software that sucks less · home/ · code · download · man/ ·dwm/ · libs/ · st/ · stali/ · surf/ · tools/ · wmii/ · wmi/

Suckless Search Results

Censored Keyword: Teen

Teen - Want to know who the hot Hollywood newcomers are? Teenmag has the scoop on the next big stars!

Teen - Video destination for original webisodes, celebrity interviews, exclusive performances, skateboard tricks videos, on-the-street style, teen.com.

Teen Search Results

Censored Keyword: Teen Vogue

Teen Vogue - TeenVogue.com is your source for teen celebrities, fashion, style, hair, and makeup trends. The online home of Teen Vogue magazine.

Teen Vogue Search Results are safe enough for AdWords

Censored Keyword: Teen Health

Teen Health – TeensHealth offers a safe, private place to get information about health, growth, and emotions. We give you the doctor-approved info you need to understand

Teen Health - Ask questions on teen health and receive personalized answers that address your health questions as a teenager. Also features health tips for teens and

Teen Health - Directory of health related resources concentrated on the health of teens.

Teen Health Search Results are safe enough for AdWords

Censored Keyword: Twinkie

Twinkie - Twinkies are an American snack cake made and distributed by Hostess Brands. They are marketed as a “Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling”

Hostess Cakes – One of America’s best known and most loved snack cakes, Twinkies have been tantalizing taste buds and filling lunch boxes since 1930. Twinkies are the stuff

Twinkies Project – Featuring a variety of scientific experiments on this popular snack food.

The top search results for Twinkie seem suitable for most audiences

Google censors if you overtype some branded terms

Censored Keyword: Dick‘s Sporting Goods
Dick’s Sporting Goods – Shop Dick’s Sporting Goods for the finest quality products at competitive prices, backed by the best service anywhere

Google censors until a majority of the phrase is typed

You must type atleast "latina st" before the results are not censored

Censored Keywords: Latina St
Latina Style Magazine - LATINA Style Magazine is the first national Hispanic magazine to address the concerns of the contemporary Latina working women in the United States.

Broadmatching censorship?

So its very interesting how using what appears to be very broad or general keywords seems to compound the issue of what happens with information is censored, while most people don’t need to see animal porn or explicit acts during their daily searches. Google Instant censorship filters does show the true reach that Google has into how you find and gather information online has shown deep concern for the future of freedom of speech and transparency around what it wants to be shown.

What can you discover when not logged in?

(i did notice that the search query url for “Twinkie” had a secondary query term oq=twink appened to the URL which did not match any of my previous queries or partial match terms. You can see the full search query shown when using Google Instant from a different browser.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&expIds=25657,26751&sugexp=ldymls&xhr=t&q=twinkle&cp=5&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=g4g-o1&aql=&oq=twink&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=8d9c50a61d5b9175

Getting the Wikipedia definition “a Twink or twinkie is a gay slang term describing a young or young-looking gay man (in his late teens or early twenties) with a slender build”. So the question is where did the extra search query string &oq=Twink come from?

Is Google Instant Homophobic?

Some of the terms were re-tested on a browser not signed in as Google seems to be tweaking the terms listed by 2600.com already, so is google assuming possible base terms and then actively filtering them out, but tracking them? Or the bigger concern looking at some of the many terms censored on the list is google homophobic censoring search results for terms like lesbian, licked, gay man, gay men, gay sex, anus, anal. The list of keywords and phrases that Google has censored continues to grow at 2600.com and you are able to view the entire Google Blacklist, and you will be shocked at what is not yet included on the censorship list which is also listed at 2600.com.

Google Instant is an issue for the following brands/companies/websites

Carol Queen
Butthole Surfers (Band)
Booboo TV network
Bimbo’s 365 Club

Any organisation or charity with amateur in their name

Naked Communications
Naked Group
Naked Juice
Nude Cafe
Nude Skin Care
Nude Magazine
Scat Enterprises
Scat Crankshafts
Teen Vogue
Teen.com
Hostess Cakes
Latina Style Magazine
Dick’s Sporting Goods

Rolling back Google Instant it is a commercial importance if you sell

Pantyhose
Rapeseed products
Suckfish
Suckerfish
Suckless vaccumm cleaners
Twinkie’s
Sex Toys

It is a concern if you use the following terms in your product, company names or location

Suck
Scat
Seduced
Teen
Dicks (Richard)
Latina
Cocks

You should be concerned about Google censorship if you are targeting the following audiences

Teens
Lesbians/Gays/Transsexuals

Google is retraining its users search behaviour

Even some of the very hardcore terms are still indexed by Google and many of the terms censored from Google Instant are still displaying Google AdWords when you hit enter to see the censored results. There are appears to be a full move towards trying to emulate Apple in visually hiding the terms they might not want people to see, Google is not yet de-indexing them but maybe that’s only a matter of time? As you can see there are a few major issues with this as this new Instant search function will start to adjust users behaviour so they might start to see a blank screen and accept there is no suitable results and give up or try a different term/brand/keyword.

Google is effectively able to retrain users not to use keywords by not rewarding them with quick results a sweet or sour option for consumers and best of luck to those businesses/brands caught in the false positive trap as you see even the biggest players are at the mercy of Google Instant.

No comments Posted in google

Fox.com fails SEO

Posted on September 22, 2010 by David

Ok so when I started this post I did not initially see it to be a massive failure but more of a minor issue but still saw it as a significant problem that such an oversight could be happening on the night of Fox’s most anticipated shows “Glee” is returning to TV. So as most people do I went to Google.com to do a search for Fox looking to find out if there was anyway I could watch “Glee” online but I did find it strange the such a large site would have index.html showing at their primary homepage. The more I dug into Fox.com the more issues I saw around a lack of understanding about SEO and well there is a lot of room for improvement as for consistency across just Fox.com not including the hundreds of other websites News Corp operates.

Fox 404

The Google search results show Fox.com/index.htm but when I clicked to visit the link it produces a 404 error page, this a both a major issue for Fox and a provides a very bad user experience for other fans using Google to get to Fox.com. I would expect a fair amount of traffic would flag a warning sign somewhere that a huge number of visitors were now viewing 404 error pages when coming from Google. The only upside is they have a nice simple 404 page that has a direct link back to Fox.com which works. There is Omniture tracking code on the Fox 404 error page so its fairly easy for their web analysts or web developers to notice the large spike in views of this page and that the source is a Google search referral, this would indicate failure by someone.

It’s not consistent

It seems that the use of index.html is not consistent across the site as you can see the 2nd result shown in the search results was the link to watch Fox full episodes on demand. It is indexed in Google as http://www.fox.com/fod/index.htm but unlike the homepage it doesn’t resolve to a 404 error, this would indicate a failure by someone not a site wide policy change or update. If you are going to run a website it’s always best practice to make a decision if you are going to use index.htm and stick with it. It causes problems for link builders, internal staff and other web developers within the Fox group who try to work out quickly which is the best URL to link to.

Meta refreshes signal failure in seo

They are a very old technique and one that according to people on Google’s spam team are typically wary of its uses as its been commonly misused in the past and is not a very search engine friendly technique. But Fox is using Meta Refresh to redirect users from http://www.fox.com/home.htm to http://www.fox.com/index.php which does not make sense to send them to a file instead of the root domain. Fox.com is not a small mum & pop business it should be able to get the basics around SEO right and not cut corners with a poor man’s redirect “meta refresh”.

Multiple links going to multiple Fox homepage URLs

Fox.com needs to consolidate its variations of the homepages as you can see below a number of the variations actually carry a decent amount of link juice that is likely going to waste. Once again if you are going to swap between index.php, home.htm and index.htm it will result in lost link juice and confuse everyone.

Best practice is consolidation of homepages

It is good practice to look using 301 redirects to consolidate any of the following variation of homepage that you have used or has inbound links to a your domain, it is possible that Fox.com will have links to almost all these variations of their homepage URLs.

http://www.fox.com/default.html

http://www.fox.com/default.htm

http://www.fox.com/index.html

http://www.fox.com/index.htm

http://www.fox.com/index.asp

http://www.fox.com/index.apsx

Note: you need to test this to ensure that you don’t create an endless redirection circle as has happened in my past projects

Fox.com doesn’t use canonical URLs

This is part of the issue around why these variations of the home page are being indexed and shown in the search result, it is another good practice to where possible use canonical URLs to signal to search engines where the primary or original source of content and not counted as duplicate content should be found by using the tag Rel=”canonical”

An example for this article would be <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://lostpr.es/2010/09/22/fox-com-fails-seo-2455236″ />

Who is linking to Fox.com/index.htm?

Looking at the backlink profile of that particular page using SEOmoz Linkscape it seems that only part of the issue is within Fox’s control. The issue of index.htm showing in the search result is more an external link issue with only 8.5% of the backlinks are internal or coming from other Fox.com subdomains. So even if Fox.com fixes their internal linking policies it seems its only part of the problem the easiest solution is to look at consolidation of those inbound links via 301 redirects.

Fox.com is using 302s

While it seems part of the issue is the non-use of 301s, the continuing use of meta-refreshes it also seems that for subdomains Fox.com has chosen to use the less than useful 302 redirects.

So how can Fox.com fix it?

Ok so here is how if you were Fox.com you could fix the issue since they are running the server on Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) PHP/5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch they will likely have 2 easy options to organise the 301 redirects.

.htaccess file
Use cPanel

So what is a .htaccess files and how can you use them? Apache has a free tutorial on .htaccess files and how to use them to create permanent redirections

So what is cPanel and how can it help your website with Apache & PHP Customisation? Once again there are a number of web hosting companies that have already enabled cPanel so it is ready to go but you can find out more about it here.

So what is a 301 and how can it help your website? A 301 is a request to advise that the old content now has a new home, SEOBook.com has a nice breakdown around 301 Redirects.

Please fix Fox.com

So there you have it even the biggest corporations sometimes forget to do the basics when it comes to seo we won’t even get started on indexing issues or how they could have used Google Webmaster Tools to identify the problem in any more detail. Most of the points and tips are something any good web developer or seo agency should have addresses long ago, so that is why this is being classed as a failure in SEO it should not have happened.

No comments Posted in Public Relations

SMH publishes garbage article on seo

Posted on September 13, 2010 by David

It’s clear sometimes that personal blogs and open forums are not always the best source of information about SEO from a best practice “white hat” perspective, but you can usually rely on main stream media to not screw up and publish garbage like I read today that encourages spam as a SEO technique. There are lots of blogs,communities and forums that specialise in SEO covering practical/training, guides, tips and from a pure research perspective such as: SEOmoz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, SEOBook, SEO Dojo, Webmaster World. A majority of these sites work hard to educate their members about not spamming or following the advice contained in the SMH article I read today.

Before I upset every journalist who writes for The Sydney Morning Herald or any of their other papers such as The Age, this is a story that shouldn’t have gone to print and there is another related articles by the same writer that do nothing but cloud businesses view on SEO and increase businesses view that the whole industry is made up of Snake Oil salespeople. From my many past conversations with business about what is SEO and how it can help their business get more traffic from Google there often confusion around what you should and shouldn’t be doing as part of getting more organic traffic from Bing & Google. Garbage articles like this break down all that good knowledge and understanding with cheap parlour tricks and spam.

“Search engine voodoo: little-known SEO tricks” should not have been published as one it’s based on a technical paper published back in February 16th 2010 and its fairly clear that the SMH journalist didn’t take time to even read it as many of the points he later suggests are not advised by Nicholas Carroll. The two so-called experts he quotes in the piece don’t appear to be anyone known in the industry and if I have the website right one expert is more of a snake oil salesman that is out of his depth in being quoted for this article as knowing what was is seo.

Comment spam is back in

The biggest failure around this article is the around the encouragement of comment spam, where readers are encouraged to use your keyword phrase as your name using blog finder software to pick which sites to attack with your spammy comments. This is one of the many parts to the article that is not in the spirit with the original article by Nicholas Carroll that this article is apparently based around. So there you go its official from 2 experts no-one has ever heard of and a journalist how you can get ranked #1 in Google that no-one else has ever tried and failed to use successfully. Now go search for a general blog topic and comment spam away and you will notice a huge increase in your search rank in no time, no need for link building campaigns or creating content just comment spam what’s already out there! It’s article like this that encourage the constant bombardment of your blogs with crappy comments and irrelevant statements just to get that link, no comment on how well it works in the short-term but its not something business should be using if they value their reputation.

Fact check please

I would expect that publications like The Sydney Morning Herald would at least take some time to vet or fact check what garbage some of their journalists are pushing out into the market place under the Fairfax brand. It wouldn’t take more than an email phone call to the Fairfax owned Advantate to fact check the article or even provide some guidance around what is SEO for the journalist. Publications like SMH’s My Small Business carry a lot of weight for business wanting to stay ahead of their competitors, so seeing low quality articles like “How to rocket your search engine ranking to the top of Google” make me understand why Australian businesses struggle with SEO, it’s the garbage they read online.

One of the previous articles written by the same SMH journalist uses terms like mysterious or art when he is discussing SEO does nothing to improve both a reader’s understanding of search optimisation, unless you are doing blackhat/greyhat practices it’s not a mystery it’s just hard work!

Keyword stuffing??

The rocket your search ranking article talks about peppering pages with keywords and every page should repeatedly feature one keyword and to embed that keyword several times. This amounts to nothing more than keyword stuffing or spam and shows the misunderstandings the website designer has about effective SEO and to the writer for publishing it, where is your journalistic skills in vetting both the subject being interviewed about a subject he doesn’t understand and a topic you vaguely don’t care about. If you are unsure of his experience his background states that he “vaguely specialises in the internet” in an interview back in 2007.

Don’t make SEO harder

If you are going to conduct an interview with a focus around SEO that is just going to make the job of SEO consultants and SEO agencies that much harder, please just don’t publish it. Articles like this are often brought up during discussions with business owners when talking about SEO, and often the business owner will stand by the article’s points because they read about it in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Small Business section so it must be of reasonable standing.

4 comments Posted in search industry

Google mortgage rates add up

Posted on September 3, 2010 by David

Rodrigo Stockebrand noticed earlier today that his search queries for the generic term “mortgage rates” had started to show a new style AdWord’s result at the top of the organic results and it seems to be more than just a small test group. It was covered briefly in a quick post at SEL by Barry Schwartz, but I thought there was more to explore around the new comparison ads and evaluate their longer term impact for advertisers and business.

It seems that the early Google’s AdWords comparison ad experiment has been expanded to cover home loan and mortgage products but has also taken place at the top of the search results in a 4th sponsored link. The issue is that Google websites have an artificially inflated Google Quality score which guarantees any of their products top placement and potentially inflates the costs of advertising on that keyword, and the additional box is clearly a separate module as you can see thin white line between it and the standard AdWords modules. Below is a screenshot of the new Google AdWords product which is exclusive to Google’s own comparison products, it’s not clear if it was manually placed for certain search queries to guarantee it would show just below the search bar. But other advertisers should be able to check in their AdWords account under average position on if its showing even thou they are shown as top position.

Less space for organic results

One of the bigger concerns is that it doesn’t just affect competitors who are buying traffic with AdWords it compounds the problems for those trying to rank organically, there is more paid space and more Google products and less room for natural listings. While this extra Google comparison ad has obviously pushed down the other ads, on my 1920×1080 resolution monitor it was less dramatic, but a majority of users don’t have a monitor so large so I dived into my visitor information contained in my Google Analytics accounts to find a baseline monitor size. Looking at the average website visitors from my Google Analytics data around 48-54% of people have a screen resolution of between 1024×768 to 1280×1024 so I thought I would test the 3 smaller monitor sizes as to how it impacts the competitive landscape.

1920×1080 Resolution Monitor

Analysis: You can see that there is actually now only 5 organic results showing above the fold (visible without scrolling down) and the 6th result just creeps in. The problem for organic rankings is that unless you are in the top 5 you are now going to miss out on a majority of the clicks, where in the past top 7 rankings still keep you above the fold. Dynamic AdWords like these will also continue to change Google users behaviour and may have a dramatic long-term effect on the perceived importance of the organic results and further increase the market share of Google’s own products.

1280×1024 Resolution Monitor

Analysis: You can see that with the 1280×1024 resolution SXGA monitor but you can see that with the new Google Comparison Ads that showing below the 5th result on the first page will mean that you miss a majority of the potential clicks. Its hard enough for some clients to get to the 1st page on Google now it’s a case depending on your typically visitors you have to be in the top 5.

1280×768 Resolution Monitor

Analysis: By shrinking the monitor size down slightly more to 1280×768 resolution it even cuts out the Google News results and also now only 7 AdWords ads are showing, decreasing the number of advertisers who are able to be seen. It also reduces the organic results down to 3 which further increases your reliability on buying traffic from AdWords or from the new Google Comparison Ads.

1024×768 Resolution Monitor

Analysis: The final screenshot is actually based on 1024×768 which is a 19inch monitor far larger than most laptop screens and still if you view the same result on a netbook you can actually only see the first organic result because of the 4 AdWords results showing at the top. Again Google News results are gone and there is 1 less Google AdWords spot on the right hand side.

Advice: If you are in this vertical start to examine in your web analytics solution the screen resolution of your typically visitors who just visit and those who generate a lead or revenue. It will start to provide you a guideline as to if you are trying to increase your paid traffic what position you should try to bid for and from an organic ranking where you should be aiming if you want more clicks. You want to break it down by those who just browse and those who actually generate a lead or revenue for your company.

Google’s potential audience?

The potential audience which is now able to see these new comparison ads is huge and its likely that the CTR from the other ads will plummet, which will likely impact their quality scores and lead to them having to pay more to bid for the same positions. By Google offering a better quality Ad they are changing the behaviour of how people will select what ads to engage with but are also limiting other advertisers clicks as consumers are draw to the new style ad box. The traffic volume based on the single generic keyword “mortgage rates” has estimated 1,000,000 monthly searches in the US with an average CPC rate of $14.88, according to Google’s own Google AdWords tool which is a massive audience to test the impact of its platform. The question is how much cheaper is it to buy the lead directly from Google compared to fighting with other advertisers in the AdWords market?

Google’s invasive ad box

While its interesting to see how Google is experimenting with new Ad types, I have discovered that there is also a second ad that Google is running which offers a bit more interactivity for users with a drop down menu for the approximate home value for quicker rate comparisons.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the bigger issue is that when consumers actually interact with the ad it blocks a majority of the competitors advertising message and also close to half of the first 2 organic results. This type of ad seems to lack any aspects of tact by how it impacts and overrides the competitors presence on the page. These types of ads show that Google is testing the ads for different markets where you might want to compare two pricing points before visiting the website. Obviously Google is tracking all the interactions and may start to refine the pricing points as it gathers more data on users, so those who are based in a lower economic area may start to see slightly different approximate home values or even APRs….

The CTR between the two ads modules being tested would be quite interesting as if users with different motivation or at a different stage of the buying cycle. Obviously to further understand the mortgage market Google is bidding on search traffic for its comparison ads around a number of keywords, but I’ve select the top 20 related keywords based on estimated monthly search volumes, but it’s also interesting what keywords they are choosing not to bid on.

Google is also bidding on the following keywords

mortgage loan rates
mortgage loan interest rates
home loan interest rates
mortgage interest rates
current mortgage interest rate
best mortgage interest rates
current mortgage rates
home mortgage rates
home mortgage interest rates
refinance mortgage rates
refinancing mortgage rates
mortgage rate calculator
current home mortgage rates

Analysis: obviously most of these keywords are very high volume but are also closely related to “mortgage” but you notice that “home loan” is also featured which shows they might be testing language for different markets such as the UK or Australia.

Advice: Look at the ROI around these terms and if you are not already bidding on them, I would advise doing a trial with their own campaign and own budgets. Remember Google buys search traffic with AdWords for branding and for testing so you should look at buying the same traffic but for testing.

Google is not bidding on the following

compare fixed mortgage rates ($0.05/cpc)
bad credit mortgage rates ($35.72/cpc)
home mortgage loan rate ($18.72/cpc)
best mortgage loan rate ($36.37/cpc)
current mortgage rates canada ($4.61/cpc)

Analysis: Obviously the product is US focused so any terms that focus outside the country such as “current mortgage rates canada” are likely to be ignored. The keyword that The Google AdWords tool said has the most traffic “compare fixed mortgage rates” is likely a bug or very low quality traffic. It’s likely that Google is avoiding some of the very expensive terms because the ROI doesn’t match with their comparison ad business model or they are just overpriced.

Advice: Best look at what other keywords Google is not bidding on and if you are take a closer look at the ROI and KPIs around those terms as they have been ignored for a good reason.

Google protects its mortgage leads

The screen shot below shows you a sample of the Google mortgage comparison page, where you can filter out and compare mortgages with a few clicks. The comparison mortgage is generic enough to be expanded to feature an entire comparison shopping site as the URL structure also hints at future products can easily be added google.com/comparisonads/mortgages.

Google doesn’t want to miss out on a single dollar of commission or miss a single conversion if possible and have built a fairly idiot proof contact system that can be automatically tracked and optimised. When you visit the comparison mortgage page you will see there is 3 contact options available for each lender: phone, call back and email. Call back and email appear to be exactly the same contact form but are coded slightly differently for tracking purposes which will affect future AdWords bidding strategies.

Google is actually fairly smart in how their built the platform as the number listed above is a special Google phone number that will forward your call to the lender, but it can also be used to track the lead generated. If you fill out the request a call or email lender contact form Google provides the lender with another special Google phone number that will forward to you which they can also track as a lead. Any details that you enter such as Street Address or Zip codes are just passed onto IntelliReal that has partnered with Google.

Will Comparison Ads expand to other verticals?

I say yes, based on how Google is growing its maps & technology platforms its only a matter of time before it expands its product to include other verticals. It’s easy to see Google expanding its comparison ads to include Real Estate & Hotels as they already offer a simple search function within Google Maps as shown below. You have already seen one comparison ad that featured a drop down box which shows they have the technology to place other interactive items into their text ads now.

Search for New York hotels directly from within Google Maps

Search for New York real estate from within Google Maps

It’s likely that Google has a number of options to increase its revenue by competing for direct leads and sales and cutting out resellers and affiliates but the question is how quickly they will risk upsetting their advertisers or how much money they can make on the comparison ad platform. Do you take the path to doing more of the work generating leads and hope the reduced revenue from your advertisers doesn’t drop quicker than you can grow your comparison shopping products?

Google Comparison Ads expanding internationally?
If you want to know when Google Comparison Ads might be expanded to your country I suggest keep an eye out for any new financial licensee such as when Google registered Google Payment Australia back in 2007, in what was thought to be part of Google Checkout Australia. Google Payment Australia Pty Ltd was supposed to be setup for local Checkout services and has a Australian Financial Services licence (No. 318755). Google Australia holds the licence under which it is authorised to offer Google Checkout as a “non-cash payment product”. The Google company is not licensed as a bank or deposit-taking institution in Australia and does not provide banking services but might allow it to soon offer a similar comparison ad platform in Australia soon.

One comment Posted in Adwords, search industry

Blog Spam works

Posted on August 18, 2010 by David

Much of the focus for the search industry has been around building up content networks and everyone has promoted directly or had someone else directly plug their article, application or website via a comment on a blog or a post, but why do it? The point is that basically it works and will continue to work either via driving traffic, developing a level of trust via links or improving indexing of the promoters website. Rand wrote up a big open letter calling for the Google webspam team to review how they are evaluating what is spam based on a decreasing level of relevance for a number of popular terms. As for the best process for defining spam or making a broad decision that a particular method or intention is black/white or gray is not the purpose of this article its to look at why it will continue to happen.

I have been meaning to look into this matter in some more detail so by just picking 2 random but popular articles that have been published on this blog that had obvious self promotional links dropped, was it worth it for them? This site being a run on the WordPress.com blog platform so I can make it clear that all the links placed into the comments are “nofollow” so their should be no direct benefit for “link juice” or ranking benefit for you, but why does it keep happening and what is classed as spam?

Author Name Keywords
There are 3 sides to using Blogs for self benefit or promotion, the first and most common to slip through is to use the author details to place in keyword friendly names as part of the websites backlink strategy. The use of keyword friendly author names is usually heavily frowned upon by a number of popular blogs as some do follow the author URL so the link text does have relevance and a benefit for the poster. Often the author’s name is matched to the blog post but often so not relevant that the following listed below are classed as spam.

Internet and network marketing tutorial
Link Building
Demo
capodimonte figurine
limo in baltimore
iPad
business inspiration
iPad Frenzy – Everything Frenzy on the Apple iPad!
22 inch car rims
Zone of the Dead | Playstation3 Blog
Mrs Anti-Virus
Get Paid for Your Opinion
Online Casino Roulette
SEO

Author Website
The next part will be that they will usually to match the author name to their website URL but often automated bots or low quality link builders often increase the chance of being flagged as spam by trying to matching the URL to a similar focused keyword domain. So the author name used for the comment would be “website designers” will be matched to “http://website-design-ers.info” which is fairly easy to spot. The author usually owns, manages, benefits or is paid to increase the traffic to the website they have listed. A number of the URLs listed below have been used in comment spam and have been flagged automatically as spam and I have not included the full website address because this post is not designed to provide them with a benefit. Often much of the comment spammers are not just link spammers but drop links to sites that contain malware, MLM schemes and mostly just not suitable for work audiences. The author websites listed below are easily classed as spam and many are low quality template websites that are mostly not suitable for this blog to be found associated with even it is just via nofollowed links.

antivirus-free-download51…
game101guide
roulettestrategie.fast-instant-money
23-inch-car-rims
webuytool
limobaltimore
ipad-tipps
infinitydownline
relevantlinkbuilding

Spam Comments
It may not always be done with evil or spammy intention in mind and the comment maybe be manually approved after its viewed if the comment is relevant to the post. The following is a list of spam comments that have recently been posted on this blog, they are good example of the types of blog comments which are used and flagged automatically as spam:

This was a great post, thank you very much
thanks nice..
Thanks for your awesome post,! More to come on Monday….
nice work guys really impressed with your marketing style.
Thank you for your info, Recommended to read!!! i’ll bookmark your site and hope can find more hot info for the future.
hy man thanks for the comment on my blog ,hope will be back soon
hi every body
I found your article very interesting, do you still have another article? maybe we can share the article
This is a really useful post. Thanks for the info.
I found your article very interesting, do you still have the article with the same theme? maybe we can share the article
nice blog and nice articel..coool ha !!

Often the comments are even less relevant, and if created by spam bots or lazy link builders just take sections of your own article and post that in the comments as if they had written something relevant and useful, this does not add value to a blog post so are classed as spam. The comment combined with the author URL is a clear sign if the comment is a spam comment or one that should be approved as it is relevant to the blog post and is suitable for visitors if they should want to visit the authors page to learn more about them.

Link Dropped in Comments

The aspect of dropping a relevant link to a related post or product is a tougher conversation to have with both blog owners, search agencies and link builders. Placing a link into a blog post still works well and can often add a relevance to a blog post where an author may have not referenced some details contained in their post, you might have seen or read a post that disputes their post or seek to create some more discussion. I don’t believe that there is a single person in the industry that can claim they have never dropped a link to one of their sites/posts/clients at one time or another, but when it moves away from relevance then it can border on being spam. If I have written a post about AdAge Power 150 failing, dropping a link to a dating site is clearly spam and is not going to be approved. Here is a short list of some of the many comments and links dropped shown in blue text that are not relevant to the blog post shown in (example) or often even spelled correctly and are regarded as spam:

(Article was written about links)

This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are great and needs to be appreciated by everyone. Auto Marketing
I don’t generally reply to posts but I’ sure will in this case. Seriously a big thumbs up for this 1 C CLass IP hosting!

(Article was about advertising)

free advertiser to all bblogger bussnines
free advertiser
free advertiser
free advertiser

(Article about a marketing failure)

Nice Blog thanks ankara evden eve nakliyat Hosting

Summary of comment links

Sometimes the links match the author but often gmail accounts are used with the author’s url being squidoo.com, blogspot.com or wordpress.com sites. These are flagged automatically as spam by WordPress so its a waste of time and resources trying to get ranked #1. Often blogs automatically approve comments so you will see the same comment or link being posted under different authors name/email to try and get around spam filters but it will mostly lead to failure. Spamming in foreign languages will also be flagged as the blog author won’t automatically approve it if they don’t know what the text says.

Links dropped in comments get clicks

3 Links that were dropped into 2 posts on this blog, actually showed to give the website a decent CTR actually in aspects higher than any links that are contained within the actual post. So if you are doing article writing for the pure purpose of driving relevant website traffic to your site, it maybe more beneficial to have a decent link placed within the first few comments if you are looking for traffic, people are curious so that is why dropping links into comments works. The click-through rate for the links was actually well above what I expected which is why I wrote this blog post, 3 samples show:

Link 1 click-thru-rate 5.88%
Link 2 click-thru-rate 1.13%
Link 3 click-thru-rate 0.27%

Summary of Spam Strategies

So dropping links and spamming blogs can work for some sites/projects but in the long-term it’s not sustainable or going to help your brand/site if you get flagged as a spammer. There are a number of things you can do to ensure you get more benefit when using blogs as part of your social/content strategy but this blog post is not the place you can learn about that. If you choose to go down the path of heavily spamming blogs, your problems will compound overtime and eventually even if you are not spamming a blog you will be automatically flagged for review every time by Akismet, so best not try to make things that much harder for you and play nice.

5 comments Posted in search industry

SEOmoz launches SEO Web Application

Posted on August 12, 2010 by David

SEOmoz has finally launched their new SEO Web App today and Rand has covered the launch with a detailed post, including screenshots and a video discussing more about why it was done and what to expect next. Some of the major points about their new web application has been listed below. Their new web application seeks to offer some of the functionality of enterprise level seo products such as Conductor offer but within the price range that consultants and SMEs can afford to automate some of their site analysis. The new seo platform seeks to leverage some of SEOmoz’s unique tools in one central platform with a long awaited update that allow you to track campaign metrics overtime to allow marketers to measure results.

SEOmoz PRO Accounts updated

The seo web app is now part of the package, and PRO members can now run unlimited Linkscape reports, where in the past they were limited to a certain number each month, larger companies and sites will likely have to look towards upgrading to PRO Elite or PRO Premier accounts to ensure they can make full use of the new SEOmoz web application.

SEO Web Application Features:

Crawling to identify potential site issues
Automatic Tracking of Keyword Rankings
On-Page Grading & Recommendations Report Cards
Link Analysis of your site and competitors
One Comprehensive platform to rule them all

5 Quick Tips to Get Started with SEO Web App

Import some of your top referring keywords from your web analytics
Find pages that rank in the top 10-30 with low grades (Cs, Ds & Fs)
Use the “grade any webpage” feature
Apply labels to your keyword groups to separately track relevant data/metrics
Point out crawl diagnostic issues to a friend or potential client

The site is experiencing a few initial issues with the massive influx of users wanting to test the platform, but once the server issues are resolved you all PRO members can test the SEO Web App. They are also offering a free SEOmoz webinar on the new SEO Web Application preview this Friday if you are not a PRO member and want to test their new SEO web application.

No comments Posted in search industry

Updated Bing Webmaster Tools

Posted on July 22, 2010 by David

Following on from Google Webmaster Tools update, the team over at Bing have been busy and have finally taken the wraps of a vastly improved Bing Webmaster Tools. The official Bing blog states that the platform was rebuilt following feedback and all the updates were based on the webmaster and seo community feedback which called for more transparency on Bing. The platform also offers a hint of further updates coming in the following months which will likely add or adapt many of the Yahoo Site Explorer functionality. There has been much concern that much of the functionality that Yahoo offers maybe lost to webmasters so its great to see such a large improvement in the Bing search tools.

The new Bing webmaster tools offer more data on how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, what content is contained in the Bing index and guidance to help you optimise your sites for Bing.

The new Bing Webmaster tools provides a more intuitive experience focused on 3 areas key for search.

Crawl
Index
Traffic

Bing Webmaster Sites Dashboard

The top level view shows a master list of all the sites you have verified in your Bing webmaster console, it shows an overview of clicks, impressions, pages indexed and pages crawled. The other cool feature is it shows the percentage of change and an easy colour coded arrow to show if the change was positive or negative which makes it easy to spot problems or issues when you have a large number of sites.

Bing Webmaster Dashboard

The drill down into an individual site shows the current status of your site in Bing and the recent trends of your website’s activity within Bing search results

Bing Crawl & Index Summary

The top level view shows you a summary of pages crawled, pages with crawl errors, pages indexed and impressions and clicks. You can drill down into each of these section to see more details and information.

Bing Crawl Summary Details

The crawl summary shows upto 6 months of crawl data so you can learn more about any issues that the Bingbot might have had while crawling your website.

Bing Index Summary

You can explore your site’s directory and pages contained in the Bing index.

Bing Traffic Summary

Similar to the recent Google Webmaster tools update, but much better as Bing offers upto 6 months of traffic data so you can track search query performance over time.

Bing Search Queries

Bing also offers details around what keywords are showing in Bing search results, how many impressions they are getting along with clicks and average click-thru-rate from search results to your website.

All Bing webmaster accounts get it!

The great point is that all the Bing webmaster accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new interface, no beta requests no delays just wonderful fresh interface ready to explore today.

Bing webmaster tools supports Chrome

The other point is that the whole platform runs perfectly in Google’s Chrome Browser which is what was used to generate all the images shown in this post.

Bing offers transparency

The more comprehensive and refined view from Bing gives the webmaster and seo community more transparency around whats contained in the Bing index, and i’m excited to see what new tools are going to be rolled out next. This webmaster re-development seeks to improve transparency to help marketers and business make better decisions and offers more control over your sites in Bing. So I advise that you use Bing webmaster tools today! If you haven’t verified your website in Bing yet, do it now and start to explore how you can get more traffic from Bing, the interface is free to use and offers some wonderful insights into your seo.

3 comments Posted in bing

« Older Entries

Lost Press Marketing

Business & marketing news, articles, interviews, product reviews relating what's important to Social, Search and Analytics

Tag Archive for search industry

Conversion Conference London Keynotes

SEO Desktop Tools

Yahoo Clues for SEO

Bing Auto SERPs

Reading Level Filter

Google Instant Censors

Fox.com fails SEO

SMH publishes garbage article on seo

Google mortgage rates add up

Blog Spam works

SEOmoz launches SEO Web Application

Updated Bing Webmaster Tools

Why not Like or Follow?

Looking for SEO Software?

Recent News/Articles

Blogroll

David Iwanow

Lost Press Marketing

Business & marketing news, articles, interviews, product reviews relating what's important to Social, Search and Analytics

Tag Archive for search industry

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Share via

Why not Like or Follow?

Looking for SEO Software?

Recent News/Articles

Blogroll

Article Keywords Cloud

David Iwanow