Internet Marketing Revealed

Last week, I was lucky to join Joe Apfelbaum of Ajax Union and Ben Kirshner of Elite SEM on a panel (ably moderated by Jules Kibbe of  TicketNetworkDirect) for the Ticket Summit on the recent changes in search marketing. The attendees are ticket brokers an dpartner sthat move most of the seats for entertainment and sporting events in the U.S., so you can imagine that they have a fierce interest in search marketing. It fell to me to explain the dreaded Google Panda update of its search ranking algorithm. I say “dreaded” because so many people have treated this latest reshuffling of the search results as something approaching apocalyptic disaster. If it has been a nightmare for you, my condolences, but there’s no going back, so we all need to understand the idea behind Panda and we might need to change the way we think to succeed in the brave new Panda world.

First off, Panda isn’t named after a bear–it is actually the surname of the Google engineer whose ideas lay behind it. And, although it is about to celebrate its first birthday, it isn’t a single event wrapped in the past. Google Panda has ushered in a series of changes over the past year, with a couple of ranking algorthm updates interpsersed with more regular changes in the data that it depends on.

Panda is revolutionary because it adds a new ranking factor to Google’s algorithm–a quality score imposed on sites by human raters that decide whether the site would be worth visiting again, for example. Dozens of human raters might visit the same site and Google averages their answers. High quality sites get boosted in the rankings, with lower-ranking sites, well, not so much.

Now, this wouldn’t be terrinbly interesting if that is all there were to it. For even Google, with its vast resources, can’t afford to pay human raters to visit all the sites that reside on the Web–not when they need many raters to judge each site and when those sites change regularly and need to be re-rated. No, they needed something a lot cheaper than that approach.

Enter machine learning, a technology that looks for patterns in data. Instead of Google having to use human beings to rate every site, they instead rated a small number of sites and then applied those ratings to all the unrated sites that were similar to the rated sites. So, if your site wasn’t rated. but it has the same characteristics as sites that are lkow in quality, your site will be treated as low in quality.

You probably want to know what patterns Panda is looking for, so that you can avoid them, but no one is saying. In fact, the very way that the algorithm works makes it a difficult question to answer. Machine learning algorithms are trained with some of the human data that Google collected, and then tested on the rest of the data. So the algorithm keeps trying to find more and more patterns until it can actually preduct the answers that the human beings gave. At that point, the algorithm is unleashed on pages that have not been rated, assuming that the training it received against known answers will now allow it to predict the quality level of sites that have not been rated.

What this means is that, for the first time, what human being sthink of Web pages is an explicit ranking factor. So, if you’ve been just following some rote rules about how to optimize for search, you might be in trouble if people don’t actually like your pages. This is, alas, the fate of most search optimizers who are only trying to feed the Google beast what it wants, instead of creating a quality experience for searchers. Thise that give searchers what they want are now being rewarded more than ever.

Google is believed to be going after so-called “content farms” with Panda–low-quality sites produced at low cost by hack writers. But some marketers worry that there are other sites affected. Google reassured marketers that merely having a repeated product description from the manufactuerer is not considered content scraping, but searchers might find it to be a low quality exprerience when they have to look through so many stores and keep reading the same information.

Does this mean that Panda never downgrades a site unfairly? Hardly. All of this technology is imperfect, although Google is constantly tinkering with the training data and algorithms. In fact, Google is collecting lots of data from people pressing +1 buttons, and might find someday that those are all the human raters that they need–and they won’t have to pay anyone.

So, many more changes are still ahead. And if Google’s Panada update is successful, you’ll see Bing go in that direction, too, affecting 30% more of the U.S. searches. And who knows how Panda might evolve in the future. To check out all my slides from the event, take a peek at “Google Panda Update” on Slideshare.

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Today Google announced a dramatic change in the format of search results coming to your browser in a steady roll-out across English results. The change is called Google Search Plus the World which will present users logged in to Google with search results mingled with a myriad of socially derived results from friends on Google Plus.

Haven’t we Seen this For a While Now?

This may sound similar to what you have seen over the past while where certain results had a profile shot of a friend next to them because your friend had recently given it a social nod (liked, +1?d, etc.) but this is far more intense. The new additions are opt-out only and include any of the following content showing in results if it is relevant: images, video, and websites. In addition, these results can also include semi-private and private content such as content shared with you via a limited circle in Google Plus or directly from someone in your network; note that does not mean this is visible to anyone else on Google so don’t get freaked about privacy unless you plan on leaving your browser logged in to your Google profile.

Here is the official (and rather cool) video Google used to demonstrate the functionality all Google users will soon see:

The biggest and most alarming takeaway here is that the only social content found within these socialized search results is that of Google Plus! That’s right, Google did not include one iota of content from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any other social platform. Their excuse is painfully simple and transparent; the others won’t let them spider their content to that degree (the simple part) and Google is whacking them over the head for it (the transparent part). Welcome to a classic case of cause and effect except in this case Google has tread heavily on dangerous ground.

So, based on this news did you pick up how Google just dropped its pants for its competitors? The outright antitrust implications of Google integrating its own social network into supposedly neutral search results without catering to the competition – the pants loosen. The full bare arse is revealed when Google made this new functionality opt-out by default; in other words you are in whether you like it or not until you manually remove yourself. This, in my opinion is the dumbest move imaginable and has the social industry quickly aiming at Google’s privates.

Here are a few examples of the rush of heated headlines spurned by this news:

• Twitter Really, Really Hates Google’s New Google+ Integration by Jason Kincaid at Tech Crunch
• Twitter: Google+ Integration In Google Search Is “Bad” For Everyone by Matt McGee, Marketing Land
• “Search, Plus Your World As Long as it is Our World” by John Battelle
• “Twitter Dumps on Google for Pushing Google+ in Search” by Liz Gannes of AllThingsDigital
• Many more are found here (this link will show the latest) courtesy of TechMeme

What Google Could Have Done to Minimize Anti-Trust Exposure

I don’t understand when a company willingly puts itself in the path of legal harm which Google clearly has done by not including its competitors in Search Plus; perhaps it is just another clear example of corporations having too much money to care. At any rate, I would have done one or both of the following options to minimize exposure:

1. Included the content that Google does have access to from the other social platforms. For example, they can index public information from any of the platforms; there is a lot to be had and we see it often in everyday searches on Google. By adding this information they would have the ability to say, “well we would love to include more but we need to create better relationships with each company to get more of that data.” At least that position would have held more water than simply not trying which opens a downright palatial foothold for an antitrust lawsuit.
2. Not everyone has a Google Profile but the advantages of having one is made abundantly clear if you want to take advantage of Google’s vast array of free applications. Since Google’s entire future strategy relies critically upon pushing Google Profiles it just makes sense to make Search Plus a very bold opt-in option when signing up.  And for those who already have a Profile, just use ads to push the benefits of Search Plus and make it dirt simple to enable the option. Chances are that many will take the option and by going this route Google is free and clear of antitrust; at least I think so based on my admittedly puny knowledge of law.

Living With Google Search Plus

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I’ve just finished reading through a great post over at SEOMoz about SERP (search engine result pages) click-through rates and thought it would be perfect to share on our blog.

In a nutshell, the post explores how different factors can impact the click-through rate of any listing in Google’s search results.

Given this data is quite difficult to obtain, a dummy search page was built to replicate Google’s search results. Users were then encouraged to visit the page and select the search result they think best matched the query.

Test 1: Great White Sharks

The first test was set to determine if users would click on the first result out of habit, or if they searched for the best match for the query. To do this the search term ‘great white sharks‘ was used with top 3 search results for ‘sharks‘ inserted at the top of the page. This means that the best result for ‘great white sharks‘ was now sitting in position 4 as indicated below.

Here are the results with the percentage of clicks that each listing received,

As you can see, the results indicate that a combined total of 65% of people clicked on the first three results for ‘great white sharks‘ even though they were in positions 4-6 on the page. It’s also interesting to note that the two listings with the highest click through have the text “Great White Shark” in the title of the listing – a well-known ranking factor.

Test 2: The Wikipedia Effect

The second test was created to determine if Wikipedia listings still claim a higher click-through than other search results. In order to do this, the test was run with the search results for ‘barack obama‘ modified so that the number 1 listing (a Wikipedia entry) was moved down to position 2 and then position 3.

The results for Wikipedia in position 2 are on the left, and the results with Wikipedia in position 3 are on the right.

In the first set of results, even though the first listing is extremely relevant to the query, the Wikipedia listing still comes in with the highest click-through rate in the second position.

In the second set of results, the Wikipedia entry again receives an unusually higher percentage of clicks in position three, despite the second listing being a relevant whitehouse.gov link.

So what learnings can we gather from these tests? Well for the benefit of those who have skipped to the end of this post, here’s a summary of some of the key takeaways:

1. While listings in position 1 do get a fair share of clicks, the majority of searches will still spend time to look for the most relevant snippet, even if it is lower down on the page.
2. Having an exact match of the search phrase in the Title of the search result will result in stronger click through.
3. From the test results above, Wikipedia listings by their nature will attract a higher click-through rate.

If you’re interested in learning more about the test I encourage you to have a read of the original post over at SEOmoz.

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