Matt Cutts on Google’s on Personalization and the Future of SEO

Gord Hotchkiss featured a very good interview with Google spokesman Matt Cutts regarding a multitude of SEO issues including localised search, personalised search and the future of SEO, and in particular Matt’s perspective on how he sees personalisation of Search affecting SEO in general.

One comment in particular stood out

“Matt: I think that it’s natural that some people would be worried about change, but some of the best SEO’s are the SEO’s that are able to adapt, that are able to look down the road 4 or 5 years and say, “What are the big trends going to be?” and adjust for those trends in advance, so that when a search engine does make a change which you think is inevitable or will eventually happen, they’ll be in a good position. Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for. At the same time, any time there’s a change, I understand that people need some time to adjust to that and need some time to think, “How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect the industry? And what can I do to benefit from it?”

Of course, the big question is how the lack of a monolithic set of search results will impact the reverse engineering that is typical in SEO. How do you reverse engineer something that’s different for everyone who sees it? Which begs the question, “does personalization mark the end of black hat SEO?

I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.”

Source: Gord Hotchkiss - Search Engine Land

Certainly worth a read - the full interview can be found on Gord Hotchkiss’ blog and the SearchEngineLand website

Add comment March 5th, 2007

Search engines account of 13.3% of total web visits

According to recent report by Hitwise, people visiting search engines accounted for 13.3% of the total UK web visits, nearly 2% greater than the number of visits to Adult websites for January 2007. The marke share of the UK’s internet visits to the search engines increased by nearly 21% year on year in January. This compares against a 14% decline for adult sites.

Whilst many organisations in the UK are taking their search engine marketing/advertising strategies very seriously, there is still some reluctance to embrace online. However as convergence technologies become more mainstream, the use as a maintream advertising source can only continue to increase significantly.

Add comment March 1st, 2007

Google Video and Blog… while Local and Froogle bomb

In recent research conducted by compete.com, trends of various Google products were highlighted. The trend was interesting for us Google SEO specialists

Amongst the winners were Google Video, Google Blog, Google Scholar, Google Maps and Google Desktop, whilst the big losers in the report were Google Local, Google Alerts, Google Catalogs and Google’s product network Froogle.

To read the full report, go to the compete.com blog

Add comment February 21st, 2007

Google updates Adwords PPC Quality Score - introduces Quality Score column

Google has recently announced a number of improvements to the Google Adwords “Quality Score”, both in terms of reporting and the Quality Score algorithm itself. This should have significant effects for Pay-per-click specialists.

The two revised changes that Google will be introducing are as follows:

• Greater transparency - via the introduction of a new Quality Score column within the Adwords interface. This will include showing a minimum bid and as well as a Good, OK or poor label for the applicable keyphrase. You can select this column by clicking the ‘Customize Columns’ option in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign).

  The quality label will provide a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or alternatively provide you with the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score.

  Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.

• Quality - will also be improved as part of the new improvements to the quality score algorithm. Google have introduced minimum bids for keywords to improve the quality of the ads. This should in theory make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads.

  “First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.” - Google Adwords blog

To read the full post go to http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/quality-score-updates.html or the Search engine land post

Add comment February 20th, 2007

Google lifts the lid on links

Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, there appears to be a new function added to the system providing us search engine optimisation specialists, with not only a new plaything but a useful tool in order to analyse inbound external linkage to a website.The post on Google Webmaster Central, highlighted that “Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.”

When in this summary view, click the linked number and go to the detailed list of links to that page.
When in the detailed view, you’ll see the list of all the pages that link to specific page on your site, and the time we last crawled that link. Since you are on the External Links tab on the left, this list is the external pages that point to the page.”

Whilst it still doesnt give a totally comprehensive figure to work of (when comparing it to Yahoo Site Explorer and link:) it does at least present useful analysis over the effect/structure of inbound link activity something all us search engine optimisation experts find useful

To read the full post click here

Add comment February 6th, 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

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