Tag Archive for: Search Engine Watch

Facebook Updates Their Contest and Promotion Rules for Businesses

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Facebook Sticker IconFacebook appears to be undergoing large changes to their rules for businesses as they have recently created the opportunity for verified paged, embedding posts, and even giving advertisers access to a large stock photo library.

But, the change users are most likely to notice is a huge revision to the rules for how businesses run contests on their pages. As Jessica Lee from Search Engine Watch reports, businesses will now be able to run contests and promotions directly from their own timelines without the use of third-party apps, greatly streamlining the process.

As they announced last week, Facebook has reversed their original rules to allow for users to like, comment, or create posts on a page solely as a voting mechanism or entry into contest. Facebook stated in its promotions help document, “we want to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions of Facebook and to align our policies to better meet the needs of marketers.”

All of this means businesses can run promotions directly from their timeline and

  • Collect entries via posts, comments, or likes on a page post.
  • Collect entries via messages from users to the page.
  • Utilize likes as a means of voting.

Facebook did say they don’t intend to put an end to contests run through apps. Instead, they see apps as a means to “create a more personalized experience, more in line with your branding strategy.”

They explained the differentiation more, saying:

Apps provide more space and flexibility for content than Page posts alone. Promotions run through apps can collect data in a secure, structured way that may be appealing to advertisers, particularly larger brands.

Creating a promotion with a Page is faster and easier. Additionally, as with all Page posts, Page posts about promotions are eligible to be displayed in the News Feeds of the people who like the Page and can be promoted to a broader audience.

Businesses always have the option of using both an app and their Page to administer a promotion.

On the other hand, Facebook also updated its page terms to restrict pages from encouraging users to tag themselves in content “they are not actually depicted in.” So it is acceptable to ask for likes or comments as part of a promotion, but you cannot post a picture and tag users or ask them to tag themselves, unless they actually appear in the image.

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Google Makes Changes To Their Link Schemes Help Document

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After two fairly explicit warnings about advertorials this year, Google has added advertorials to their webmaster guidelines, as well as other popular spammy linking techniques in the Link Schemes help document.

Google Continues To Downplay Links

The biggest change is the removal of the entire first paragraph from the help article, which addressed how incoming links influence rankings. Search Engine Journal says the removed paragraph read:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links influences your ranking. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

Links have been steadily falling out of favor throughout the past few years, and it appears we are finally reaching a tipping point for Google’s reduction of linking’s role in search algorithms. Or, as Google has been advising, high-quality sites matter much more than links of any quality.

Keyword-Rich/Optimized Anchor Text Links

Google also tackled heavily-optimized anchor text used in press releases that are usually distributed across other sites. The technique has enjoyed a quick rise in highly competitive markets, and Google appears to finally be putting the squash on the practice. They did note that guest posting is still a popular practice, which can be valuable when done correctly. However, sites that accept guest blogging have been using nofollow or an optimized URL link to avoid issues.

Advertorials

And of course, the final change is the addition of advertorials as an example of unnatural links that violate Google guidelines.

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.

Google has been making swift changes to linking policy and practice, so it is highly likely changes like this will keep occurring. Links can still be a strong weapon in your SEO strategy, but you have to tread carefully, and they maybe shouldn’t be your highest priority when optimizing.

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Google Makes Changes To AdWords Help Center and Quality Score Reports

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Google has begun the process of pushing over the last few stragglers to Adwords Enhanced, and to reflect the big changes taking place, they’ve also been updating just about everything related to AdWords. Over the past week, they’ve redesigned the AdWords Help Center, as well as making some changes to how AdWords quality scores are reported.

AdWords Help Center Redesign

AdWords Help Center Graphic

The AdWords Help Center has always been an important resource for both new and old PPC campaign managers. Just as Google offers best practices for SEO, the help center for AdWords helps break down exactly how managing ads works and the best suggestions for those just getting started. The new redesign came with three major updates aimed to improve how the help center works and update the information contained within.

  1. Improved Navigation – To start out, Google has made the site much easier to get around, making the information more readily available. From the main navigation, you can now find portals to information on setting up and basic AdWords info, managing ads, community resources, and guides to success.
  2. More Visual Help – Google has openly said they will be making the Help Center more visual by filling it with infographics and screenshots. But, the Search Engine Journal report on the update found very little visual additions from the update. It is possible these additions are taking longer to implement, or that they have stepped away from this addition, but there are some new graphics to help explain AdWords, such as the one above.
  3. Guides to Success – Google has added a collection of instructional guides and tips to help get greener PPC managers started with their AdWords campaigns, but the information can also provide a helpful refresher for AdWords veterans who might not have checked up on Google’s latest suggestions.

Quality Score Reporting Revisions

The more functional change Google has made is an update to how the AdWords quality scores are reported within accounts. The company says these changes are aimed at making it easier for advertisers to adjust and revise any ads based on quality score, and to make it easier for users to gain more information on what is and isn’t working.

In their announcement, Google said:

As part of our ongoing efforts to help improve the quality of our ads, we’re announcing an update that changes how each keyword’s 1-10 numeric Quality Score is reported in AdWords. Under the hood, this reporting update will tie your 1-10 numeric Quality Score more closely to its three key sub factors — expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. We expect this update to reach all advertisers globally within the next several days.
We’re making this change so that the Quality Score in your reports more closely reflects the factors that influence the visibility and expected performance of your ads. We hope that providing you more transparency into your 1-10 Quality Score will help you improve the quality of your ads.

The way Google is calculating quality scores hasn’t changed at all, so there isn’t a great need to suddenly change how you’re running your campaigns, but they are simply changing the way these scores are reported to us and expanding on the information available.

However, advertisers using quality scores as part of automated rules will need to change or correct how the rules are interfacing with the new display methods.

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Is There Such Thing As a 10 Minute PPC Workday?

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Egg-Timer

We all have busy days where we seem to be running from the minute we get up, but as PPC managers, we can’t just ignore our campaigns for a day. There are many aspects of a campaign that have to be tweaked and worked with on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage to take care of all the most important PPC tasks in 10 minutes? According to Melissa Mackey from Search Engine Watch, you can.

Of course, no good PPC manager is doing just 10 minutes of work a day, but on those days when work is piled up and you’re forced to squeeze it in, her “10-minute PPC workday” might just be able to help you keep all your basis covered.

It all starts with checking the stats on your top KPI. If conversions are your KPI, look at both your total conversions and cost per conversion. If you’re already doing this daily, you’ll be able to notice any anomalies immediately. Once you’ve spotted the outliers, you’ll spend the next nine minutes focusing on them.

The best step on fixing outliers is to pause the worse performers. Any ad group or keyword that has cost quite a bit but isn’t performing can be paused. You can re-enable it later when you have more time to focus in on the problem.

Next, you’ll want to check out your underperforming keywords. Whether they simply aren’t earning back the cost or maybe they just aren’t leading to conversions, you’ll want to see what keywords are dragging you down. The fastest method is to use in-line search query reports in Google to check the details of the keyword in question and create negative keywords directly in seconds.

Once that is over, we can move on to the positive things: top performing ad groups and keywords. Start with your best-performing ad groups (generating the most conversions at the lowest cost) and up the bids. Then, use AdWords editor to make any bulk bid increases on the best keywords. Keep it short, but tackle the most important and best few performers.

You will want to move on to quickly checking out your ad copy tests to see if you have any obvious winners, and try to replicate it by pasting it into your ad group a few times. The last couple minutes of actual work will be devoted to positive keyword research by running a quick search query report for your best performing keywords. Sort by conversions, and then add the best queries as positive keywords.

Once all is said and done, you’ll want to make notes for the next day. If you’ve kept yourself limited to 10 minutes, you’ll have noticed many issues you weren’t able to deal with at the moment, and you will probably have some questions to address. Jot down some quick notes while everything is fresh so that you’ll be able to tackle it all properly tomorrow.

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Google Begins The Forced Upgrade to Adwords Enhanced

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Yesterday was the big day. July 22 marked the deadline for the roughly 2 million Adwords campaigns that have held out on converting to Adwords Enhanced and will be automatically upgraded. Google had blatantly stated the that yesterday was a hard deadline for the last 25 percent of Adwords users to migrate, but as per usual, the process will actually occur over a long period.

In an Inside Adwords blog post about the change, Google explained, “…starting today, we will begin upgrading all remaining campaigns automatically, bringing everyone onto the new AdWords platform. As with many product launches, the rollout will be gradually completed over several weeks.”

The forced upgrade brings about quite a few changes in how you should manage your campaigns, and to help everyone get started, Search Engine Watch brought together a group of professionals in the field to offer their advice.

Google also offered their own suggestions.

  1. Review your mobile bid adjustments – For most campaigns, the auto-upgrade default is based on bids from similar advertisers. You will need to visit the ‘Settings’ tab to optimize for your business.
  2. Identify unwanted keyword duplication in overlapping campaigns – If you previously were using similar legacy campaigns for every device type, it is suggested you identify matching campaigns and remove any unwanted duplicate keywords in the enhanced campaign.
  3. Review Display Network campaigns – You will want to verify that your display ads are reaching users on all desired devices and that you are using the correct bidding strategies.
  4. Explore the Enhanced Campaign features – It is recommended you try out upgraded sitelinks and upgraded call extensions to start. Then you can further boost results by creating mobile preferred ads and setting bid adjustments for location and time.
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Seven SEO Considerations That Need To Be Taken Before a Site Redesign

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A website redesign can be unbelievably exciting, but it can also be dangerous to your traffic. If you don’t communicate well with them, designers and creative teams can accidentally throw out all your hard work on optimization in favor of purely visual aspects of the site. You can lose content, functionality, and all the other optimization that has won you the favor of search engines.

With a few considerations and regular contact with the design team, all of these problems can be prevented. Brad Miller pointed out seven factors you should consider when tackling a redesign. Just don’t get to eager to delve into changing how your site looks, and you can end up with a great looking site that works as well or better as your old design.

  1. Always start with research – Any design that is going to give you results is built on research. You need to know who you’re targeting, what the best functionality practices are, the current standards, and doing extensive market research. This shouldn’t come part of the way through the design or after the site is built. It should always be the very first move you make.
  2. A Redesign Changes Your Site Structure – A quality redesign can be much more than a new coat of paint on an old frame. It gives you the opportunity to change how your site is structured entirely, which should be used as an opportunity to optimize your site for visibility and conversions. Consider what pages are succeeding and what isn’t on your page and reassess how you can efficiently design your site.
  3. Redirects – Before redesigning begins, you should make an inventory of every page and incoming links on your site, including subdomains. As the structure of your site is changed, including the URLs, a strategy will need to be put into place for redirects to protect any SEO rankings. Audit where links are coming from and going to, then map out all your pages as well as their new redirects.
  4. Navigation – You need to consider how people will be finding your site from the start, and putting that information into your URL structure. Can you shorten URLs or make them more streamlined? As sites grow, URLs can become unweildly, and should be trimmed as much as possible. Once you have people on your site, however, you need to understand how they will navigate around the site. Where are they entering your site from? What do you want visitors to do? If you know how visitors navigate your site, you can design it to direct them where you want.
  5. How is the Content Going to Be Presented? – Content is the keystone to a successful online marketing campaign, but it is still an afterthought for many site designs. Content should be visible and worth the attention of your viewers. Decide before hand whether you will have a blog and how that blog is going to be used.
  6. Technical SEO – Way too many redesigns play with factors that need to be controlled for proper optimization. They build sites that look great, but take ages to load losing visitors and credibility with search engines. However, you can use the redesign to toy with some behind the scenes factors like ensuring your site is compliant with all the standard best practices of design and SEO and cleaning up your code to make sure search engine crawlers will be able to easily understand your site.
  7. Testing – Test everything you can afford to. Not only do you gain invaluable data about your consumers and how your site is actually being used, but you get the chance to actively connect with customers and mold your new site to their needs.
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Bing Continues To Grow While Yahoo Deteriorates

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Bing has been regularly growing its market share over the past year, but don’t think it is at the expense of Google. In June, Bing’s share of all searches went up to 17.9 percent, but it was Yahoo who dropped to 11.4 percent, according to comScore. Yahoo lost exactly as much search as Bing gained, which may not have been what Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was hoping for when they signed the search deal with Microsoft.

Earlier this year, Mayer said, “One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other. We need to see monetization working better because we know that it can and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

Meanwhile, as Search Engine Watch reports, Google has held steady with exactly two-thirds of the market share, though it is down .1 percent from last year’s June share of 66.8 percent.

In 2012, Bing held 15.6 percent of the market, but they have been making regular gains, almost exclusively at the expense of smaller search engines. Yahoo on the other hand is at an all-time low, down from 13 percent last year.

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Taking The Step Beyond Google: Establishing Your Brand on Bing

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Bing LogoWhen companies take the leap to establishing their brand’s reputation online, the focus is always on taking advantage of every opportunity Google gives you to try to connect with potential consumers.

However, any SEO or online business who is only paying attention to Google isn’t completely controlling their online reputation. Online reputation management requires understanding a complex ecosystem of sites where users are able to connect with your brand, and those include other search engines, social media, local search platforms such as Yelp, and business accreditation sites like those for the Better Business Bureau.

Of course, taking control of the first page of Google is the best first step for a company hoping to take the reigns on their online brand, but it isn’t the only step. Google controls roughly two thirds of all search traffic, but that also means you’re missing out on a third of all of the marketplace.

The second most popular search engine is Bing, and they’ve been making notable gains lately, rising to 17.4 percent of the market share from 13 percent last year. Microsoft has been marketing Bing rather strongly and it is clear the search engine will only keep gaining ground for the near future. Once you’ve taken control of the first page of Google, George Fischer suggests trying to capitalize on the often forgotten market of Bing, and he explains how you can do so in his article for Search Engine Watch.

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Google Revises Rankings Help Page To Demote Linkbuilding

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For those still pushing backlinks as the golden goose of SEO, a recent revision to Google’s Ranking help guidelines could be potentially frightening. But, if you’ve been watching the changes in SEO over the past few years it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Google has become more and more strict about backlink quality and linkbuilding methods, and links were bound to be dethroned.

As reported by Search Engine Watch, it was spotted late last week that Google updated the Ranking help article to say “in general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.” Before, it told webmasters that they could improve their rank “by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

There have been countless signs that Google would officially step back from linkbuilding as one of the most important ranking signals. There were widespread complaints for a while about competitors using negative SEO techniques like pointing bad links to websites, and every Penguin iteration that comes out is a significant event in SEO.

To top it all off, when Matt Cutts, the esteemed Google engineer, was asked about the top 5 basic SEO mistakes, he spent a lot of time talking about the misplaced emphasis on link building.

“I wouldn’t put too much of a tunnel vision focus on just links,” Cutts said. “I would try to think instead about what I can do to market my website to make it more well known within my community, or more broadly, without only thinking about search engines.”

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The Top Search Result Gets a Third of All The Traffic

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If you’ve ever doubted the importance of SEO and high rankings, a new study from online ad network Chitika shows the higher the rankings, the more traffic sites get. And the differences are drastic. First place rankings pull in 33 percent of the web traffic from search engine results pages. Second place can receive as much as 18 percent of the visitors, and traffic steadily drops off from there.

The recent study has very similar results to one the team ran in 2010, which suggests that there is little expected change in how users are interacting with search engines and highlights the importance of SEO in receiving web traffic.

Chitika Search Analysis

 

 

Chitika said in their announcement, “While being the number one result on a Google search results page is obviously important, these numbers show just how big of an advantage websites of this type have over any competitors listed below them. The importance of SEO for online business is seemingly quantified by these latest statistics, which, judging by their similarity to those observed as part of the 2010 study, are not likely to change significantly in the near future.”

Another expected find of the study is the drop off of traffic from Page 1 to Page 2 of results pages. The search engine result page users see gets 92 percent of all traffic, so getting stuck a couple pages back can result in practical invisibility for your site. However, if you aren’t showing up on the first page, it appears gaining the top spot of whatever page you are on will get you higher rankings than the others on that page.

If you’re interested in Chitika’s methodology for the study, you can see their full report, and Jessica Lee provided further analysis over at Search Engine Watch.

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