The did-it / didn’t it saga rolls on.

Graywolf has posted a brilliant response to the the “is SEO rocket science”, which unfortunately continues ahead full steam

To read the full post click here

Add comment January 29th, 2007

The evolution of SEM

Recent articles by both Gord Hotchkiss and Andrew Goodman both investigated the reasons why Search Engine Marketing firms werent being acquired for large sums. Gord argued that much of this could be attributed to the fact that SEM firms were deemed too tactical and lacked the skills to segment and profile applicable demographics. Andrew Goodman went on to say he agreed with Gord assessment however his analysis of the “current reality” was incorrect.

To a certain degree I have to agree with much of what Andrew Goodman had to say. For example:

True, a big law firm that serves big corporate clients almost never acquires a small firm that has some specialty they’d like to add. And that’s the closest analogy with the notion of, say, the world’s largest ad agency acquiring my very small SEM agency. The law firm just hires new associates or recruits partners with different skill sets. Is that because the small firm is “too tactical”? Or just too narrow/small to have the marketplace leverage to *force* a buyout? If the little guy starts actually taking the big guy’s customers, that’s when the big guy takes notice.

So that leaves us a little closer to the answer: if ad agencies are the likely acquirers in the scenario where the target client is mostly larger enterprises, the only leverage a boutique agency has is either in their client list and growing cachet in their own right, or some expertise that the agency will take too long to develop in-house.”

From my own perspective, Andrews comparison there was spot on. From my own personal experience, traditional advertising organisations have been painfully slow on the uptake in terms of Search Engine Marketing, focussing on the potential challenges it presents rather than any long term benefits it can bring, as part of an integrated campaign. Much of this leads to an “ignorance” of search engine marketing, what it entails, and exactly how it fits in with both offline and direct activity.

Such organisations only start taking notice, once the figures become too difficult to argue against. Over the last year or so the number of organisations entering the online marketing arena has increased substantially, as a result of new startups, web development agencies moving into the search arena and offline agencies starting to take notice. One of the bigger acquisitions in the UK Search marketing arena this year saw Global Media buy BigMouthMedia for around £50 Million. However these acquisitions are few and far between at the current time.

However many of these acquisitons are still taking place between organisations within the Online marketing arena itself, and whilst there are a number of integrated agencies such as i-level and Connectpoint offering a full integrated marketing solution, these still tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Much of this IMO opinion is still down to some pessimism of an integrated approach and much has been said of who is better placed to deal with online marketing, ie is it the integrated agency or the boutique agency.

Much is made of search marketing and its fit in the marketing arena. It should however be considered that in comparison to traditional offline advertising, online (search) marketing is still very much in its infancy (Google only started in the nineties for example), and thus has still a considerable amount of evolving to do. It should also be considered that search IS evolving at break neck speed, with personalised search, online PR, convergance technologies (mobile/voip) and social media all having entered (to a certain degree) the mainstream over the last couple of years.

One thing is for sure, it is only a matter of time….

Add comment January 29th, 2007

Youtube to share revenue with users

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, has announced that the Web2.0 phenomenon will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Read the full story here

Add comment January 29th, 2007

Google takes action over GoogleBombs

Worth reading up a post on the Google webmaster blog that discusses Google’s attempts to reduce the impact of Googlebombs.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Bombs, Danny Sullivan provides full overview of Googlebomb background and context

1 comment January 28th, 2007

Microsoft adjusts Search expectations

According to reports from News.com Microsoft are ‘not happy’ with search results. The report said that Microsoft has lowered their expectations for growth of their search sales in the first two quarters of 2007, from as high as 11% to as low as 3%.

Microsoft CFO, Chris Liddell, responded by saying that whilst they were not happy at losing market share, they were however taking “long-term view of this business.”

Add comment January 28th, 2007

Rocket Science SEO ? What is all the fuss about

There has been a lot of recent discussion within the industry started by Dave Pasternack of Did-it fame regarding whether SEO was “rocket science” or not. As a result of this much debate has taken place within the industry with heavyweights such as Danny Sullivan (of searchengineland fame - and on the “yes it is” side), Clickz columnist Kevin Lee and Mike Grehan (both on the no it isnt side) all having their says.

As a result of this and a lot of heated discussion, a contest to rank no.1 for the term Dave Pasternack has started. I personally have to say its a lot of hot air, and have to agree with some of the points Mike Grehan made. I understand what Danny says about some of the more technical aspects of SEO, semantics and like however at the end of the day, really no matter how technical a campaign is, if it isnt targeted correctly, strategically thought out and well reseached (and obviously backed up with the technical implementation) it is going to fail in terms of ROI.

At a time when coverage of SEO and in particular is on the rise, surely time could be better spent!

Add comment January 27th, 2007

Google advertising Google Audio advertisements

SearchEngineLand have recently reported (via Philipp Lenssen) that Google is now promoting their own Audio Ads product via Google Adwords.

A Google search on audio ads brings back an ad from Google, leading to http://www.google.com/ads/audioads/index.html.

Add comment January 19th, 2007

Can offline marketing continue to ignore online marketing??

There has been a lot written in the press recently about the increase in online sales over the Christmas period, most notably on the Trevor McDonald programme on ITV1. With over 10% of all christmas sales done over the Internet, the online sector is booming, but there is still an alarming number of Internet Retailers not aware of the fact that there is much that can be done online in order to increase their revenues.

I was reading Heather Hopkins blog (from Hitwise UK), highlighting a number of interesting trends

• December 2006 saw search engines account for 36% of upstream visits (those into a site (Retail only)), representing a 20% increase yer on year, which can be primarily attributed to Google and Yahoo UK (which combined contributed to 28% of the traffic alone)
• High Street retailers saw some of the biggest gains and continued to make gains against the purely online retailers. In particular HMV (58% increase on previous year), Waitrose (107%), John Lewis (23%) and Marks and Spencers (25%) saw significant increases in traffic volumes over this period.
• Marks and Spencers in particular saw a 70% increase in online trading (article here), however John Lewis (60%), Majestic (30%) and Threshers all saw significant increases.

With such significant figures having just been released, the effects of a successful online marketing campaign are obvious. Successful websites don’t just happen (well the majority of the time), they take a lot of planning in terms of pricing, positioning and brand awareness, not forgetting whilst keeping this all within defined KPI’s.

Online Marketing is evolving at considerable speed, and there are an increasing number of channels available to companies to advertise their products and services; Blogging, Online PR, Social Media, Mobile Search … the list goes on. However I have still found a reluctance not just from a client perspective, but also from some traditional advertising agencies to embrace online and how it can compliment and enhance an offline campaign, instead choosing to go with the tried and tested. Those companies that embrace emerging technologies IMO are the ones that in the long term are going to see the bigger returns.

For companies looking at embracing the web, shouldnt now be the time you look at the Internet as an effective marketing channel?

1 comment January 19th, 2007

SEMPO launch Search Engine Marketing 2007 survey

SEMPO (if you follow the Search Latitude link) or SEMPO (if you follow SEMPO’s link) are currently running a survey giving marketeers the chance to play a key role in the definition of the “State of the Market” in within Europe. They survey gives you the chance to share your opinions and expertise, and do not need to be a SEMPO member (which we currently are not - although we are reviewing this) as people involved in SEM market (SEM and SEO agency, online and traditional agencies in- house marketers) are welcome to share their viewpoints.

Completing the survey will not only support the SEM industry, SEMPO are also offering the chance to win a full pass for the London edition of Search Engine Strategies Conference taking place in London from the February 13th-15th 2007.

The results of the survey will be announced at the SES Conference, with winner`s names randomly selected once the survey has closed.

To start the SEMPO survey click here or alternatively here

Add comment January 17th, 2007

Google’s January 2007 Search Engine Update

Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted his regular “weather report” on Google ranking and indexing issues. Covered in it were news of visible PageRank updates, supplemental listings, filetype command changes, lost home pages in country-specific results, an update on the disappearing sex blogs, concerns that CSS is being spidered to detect hidden text, duplicate content worries, the Minus 30 penalty and what to do if Google thinks you are a malware site.

PageRank Updated

Matts first point of call was PageRank , where he highlighted the now quarterly update of PageRank. For example our PR has gone up from 2-4 (mainly due to some well overdue TLC over the christmas period). It should be highlighted that this shouldn’t impact search rankings too drastically, since Matt says these scores have already been in use there. Some older data centres are also continuing to show PageRank from an older infrastructure.

Links of interest - Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar PageRank Update Being Reported from Search Engine Roundtable
Google Pagerank update or outage from Dave Naylor

Supplemental Results

Matt’s next port of call, was supplemental results. His first point was to allay those fears of people who have supplemental pages on their site. It should be noted that

• Pages in supplemental index haven’t fallen foul of a Google Penalty
• Sites will do well even if they have some of their pages in the supplemental index.
• Supplemental pages can rank and produce traffic.
• Should be noted that pages in the supplemental index, dont carry the same “link weight” as pages in the regular index

It also doesn’t sound reassuring to say, “we’ll check the good stuff first, then the other stuff only if we need to.” What if some good stuff for whatever reason is in the second index? That’s a fear some searchers had in the past — and it will remain with Google’s revival of this system

Danny on his SearchEngineLand website asks the question: Why not simply expand the existing Google index, rather than go to a two tier approach?

“The supplemental is simply a new Google experiment. As you know we’re always trying new and different ways to provide high quality search results,” said Google spokesperson Nate Tyler.

“OK, it’s new, it’s experimental — but Google also says there are currently no plans to eventually integrate it into the main index. Basically, the supplemental index is a way for Google to hit less important pages in specific instances when it can’t find matches in the main index. Trying to search against tens of billions of pages all at once is time consuming and expensive. Far easier to hit just the “best of the web,” exactly as Inktomi used to do — and for exactly the same reasons. But it’s a continuing reminder that Google can’t do it all. No matter how great those machines are, they have to divide up that index. The “best of the web” might still be tens of billions of pages, but divisions still raise concerns.”

Links of interest - Supplemental results

Breaking Out of Google`s Supplemental Index - Matt McGhee
Gone Supplemental? - Matt Cutts

Filetype Command Changing?

Want to know all the .doc documents in Google? The following command in Google will not return the results you expect

filetype:doc

Google insist on the command also having a search query term, like this:

filetype:doc seo

Country-Specific Results & Lost Home Pages

Matt Cutts also detailed some issues with .com domains hosted outside of the US. To read about this, follow the link at the bottom of the page.

Duplicate Content drama
There has been a lot of blogs and forum posts regarding duplicated content recently including A Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues from Search Engine Roundtable which covers a WebmasterWorld thread with some advice for those with issues, and More Tidbits on Google’s Duplicate Content Filter covers another thread with a ton of advice from Google’s Adam Lasnik (Thanks Search Engine Land for this one)
There is also the recent interview by Rand Fishkin with Vanessa Fox which highlighted how Google dealt with duplicate content issues, which I posted about recently.

To read more about the update, please feel free to visit the following links