Once a day SEO

Search Longtail - Hitwise Data

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:58:00 +0000

How long is the long tail? Bill Tancer of Hitwise wrote an interesting post on the Hitwise blog about the very subject. Using 3 months of their data, he pulled more than 14 million search terms. Though they are looking at a small and limited data set, there are some interesting findings:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

What I found surprising, this means that the top 0.07% of the terms generate nearly 20% of all search. Tancer says, "In summary, the long tail aspect of the search is true, but the data tells us that there may really be no head or body." which I agree with, but I think he misses the concentration at the front. The Long Tail is supposed to be a steady curve to 80/20. To say there is no head is not quite accurate. Flattening out to a longer tail than was originally postulated would be correct but you can't dismiss 20% of traffic in the first 1/10 % of search terms.

I think it's also noteworthy to mention that the slice was 10 million US specific users and no adult terms. (why does everyone try to ignore the adult traffic, as if it doesnt exist?)

Link Profile Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:20:00 +0000

This is really a great post by Aaron on ways and tools to look at your site's link profile. There are also some nice historical anecdotes in there. I was surprised to find 2 gems that I had somehow never seen before:

This link analysis tool

And this independent web crawl and free index

Google Testing - Forum Search Results

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:04:00 +0000

Google is testing this in the SERPS for any result which they think is a forum:

Click - New Book by Bill Tancer

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise. He just wrote a book called Click, What Millions of People Do Online and Why It Matters. He was featured on Good Morning America and 20/20 yesterday, Aug 28.

The book sounds interesting and it's written by a data analyst which is a plus. I found this humorous, you can read the first chapter, (PPC) Porn, Pills, and Casinos here. He talks about the prevalence of Porn in daily users habits, does a comparison of the search histories of 'online poker' vs. 'sportsbook' and the blue pill.

Global Page Load Time and Browsing Habits

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:20:00 +0000

I looked for this data a couple months ago and it was not easy to find. ClickTale, the hosted, live analytics company compiled usage data of their subscribers to come up with a pretty good overview.

Both posts are worth a read, but here's a summary:

Part 1:

There is a good graph of main country average pageload times
Graph of on page time per country
Countries with slower load times, users spend disproportionately MORE time on each page
China has the lowest speeds
Dutch and Israeli surf the fastest

Part 2:

Pageviews per country
Overall average time spent on 1 site per country

Web Habits Across the Globe Part 1 and Part 2.

Googler Comments on Links at Google Groups

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:48:00 +0000

JohnMu added this comment to a Google Groups discussion about a site owner who thinks his t-shirt website has been penalized. It's looks like the site is indeed suffering from a penalty of some sort and does not rank well for 'Web Site' or 'WebSite' or 'WebSite Product', but does return a #1 result for 'WebSite.com'.

JohnMu's response is enlightening, especially reading though a bunch of rambling theories from various commentors.

It might be that the links to your site are not counting the way they
might have in the past. In general, it is important to us that links
are not just exchanged, bought/sold or otherwise used in an attempt to
manipulate rankings, as we have detailed in our help center article at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
If you find that your site has issues with regards to our Webmaster
Guidelines that can be resolved, I would recommend doing that and then
submitting a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you
have made.

These guys seem to have a failry large % of links with similar link text, in sidebars, sitewides, and on blogs. It also seems that they have a large amount of paid posts with very targeted link text.

'not counting the way they might have in the past' is a general way of phrasing that I have seen Google use before as a response. I think most have taken this to mean that the links have been 'devalued' in some way and maybe the act of devaluing really is a penalty. This must be algoritmic in other words there is a threshhold that is passed.

But what acutally happens? Is it that these links really are devlaued for their anchor text and the other top phrase search terms for the destination site? Is it an 'upper limit' ceiling which is imposed on the site, it can't rank above a certain level no matter what they do for a certain period of time?

If it was basically a 'devaluing' of the specfic links, a site owner could get around that by simply working hard to build new links for their brand terms. However, JohnMu's suggestion to file a reconsideration request seems to imply that the whatever has been imposed on the site can be 'lifted'. In other words, they can't get out of the cellar until they clean up their act.

Paid Link Reports in Google

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:28:00 +0000

There has been much speculation about what happens to paid link reports that are filed in the Google Webmaster Tools. Eric Enge of StoneTemple just interviewd Maile Ohye, Tech Solutions Engineer from Google who worked on Webmaster Tools. I think this is pretty clear:

Eric Enge: Right, so then next question for paid links that get reported in Webmaster Tools. I think it’s fairly well stated that the primary thing you do with it is use it to improve your algorithms. But, if you do confirm a link is a paid link when you get the report, is it normally disabled from passing PageRank?

Maile Ohye: Yes, we do disable such links from passing PageRank.

and a bonus tidbit from the interview, with Google now indexing some Flash text:

Eric Enge: So, will a link embedded in Flash pass PageRank?

Maile Ohye: Yes, it functions as a regular link.

Russia 4th in the World for Mobile Internet Useage

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:26:00 +0000

Another reason to market to Russia. From the QuinturQ Blog:

"11.2% of Russian mobile users accessed the Internet on their mobile devices, trailing only the U.S. (15.6%), UK (12.9%), and Italy (11.2%) and ahead of Spain, France and Germany,..."

That's 17 million users!

Paris Hilton - The SEO's Wet Dream

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:17:00 +0000

It is amazing to me how Paris still has it, man can she drive traffic. Google Trends has been lit up all day over this one.

John McCain came out with a new TV commercial campaign comparing Obama to a no-substance celebrity. The intention was to paint Barack as a candidate who does not have the experience to lead. (apparently the ad has been highly successful as the poll gap has narrowed to nil)

In the ad the McCain camp shows shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears juxtaposed with images of Obama. You can see the ad here; TV Ad; Celeb.

Paris came back with an ad of her own today, a mock Paris for President satire bit that is really good (she even sounds intelligent). FunnyorDie.com is hosting the video and I can't even imagine the traffic they have seen today. Awesome piece of linkbait. Paris for President Video.

Check out a slice of Google Trends from about an hour ago:

1. funny or die

2. danny mcbride

3. tampa tribune

4. paris hilton commercial

5. mauritania

6. good morning america

7. msn.com sign in

8. sarah pender

9. elance

10. elizabeth pena

11. tom waddle

12. tuatara

13. gma.com

14. paris hilton mccain video

15. joey cheek

16. www.msn.com

17. funnyordie.com

18. steven curtis chapman

19. mountain lion

20. amanda beard peta

21. jennifer ertman

22. paris hilton political ad

23. gma

24. michigan election results

25. tampa bay bucs

26. simple jack

27. paris hilton site youtube.com

28. elizabeth pena 16 and jennifer ertman 14

29. my.msn.com

30. american solutions

31. who won i survived a japanese game show

32. elance.com

33. x tube

34. darth nihilus

35. paris for president

36. olympic soccer

37. team darfur

38. funny or die paris hilton

39. steve harvey morning show

40. indiana state fair

41. heather mitts

42. espresso gone wild

43. olympics 2008 tv schedule

44. msn home page

45. kohls

46. goodmorningamerica.com

47. ann arbor news

48. mary lou mcfate

49. magnavox progressive scan dvd recorder

50. washtenaw county election results

51. funny or die.com

52. yge

53. good morning america steven curtis chapman

....

94. derrick o brien

95. laugh or die

96. kem kimbrough

97. hiroshima

98. idledale colorado

99. ks95
100. space camp

Google Now Showing Customized Results Message

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:59:00 +0000

This is great news, Google just announced that they will be showing a message to searchers stating that their result has been customized based on Geo region or on personal usage data. Clap Clap.

Cool or is it Cuill or is it Kuil?

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:18:00 +0000

I must say i got a kick out of this today, the new Google killer search engine Cuil.com launched with great fan fare yesterday. Jury is still out but long way to go to be a threat to anyone. Pretty unanimous, reports I have read indicate poor relevancy and not only from those in the search industry, seems to be the general consensus of average users as well.

No question that the Cuil marketing campaign was a fantastic success. In fact they got hit with some much traffic, their site came down a few times. However, Cuil pronounced 'COOL', huh? Seems a stretch and potentially confusing to consumers doesn't it? Well, this morning's Google Trends seems to bear that out pretty well. The amount of misspellings is pretty surprising really. The one I liked the best is Cool.com and Cool.

You would think a start up with $30 million in financing and with a crazy spelling pronounced 'Cool' would have considered buying or leasing Cool.com, which is a parked domain.

And the list goes on; quil, cool search engine, kuil, guil, coil, cuill, and I supposed this says it all; cuil sucks.

Spamming Google Trends

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:53:00 +0000

Google Trends, July 13, 2008, 7pm GMT:

Special People

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:48:00 +0000

Too good to pass up:

Google SERP Clicks and Attention Distribution

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:10:00 +0000

This pretty much says it all:
From a 2006 Cornell eye tracking study. This is a good summary of the study itself.

XML Sitemaps Might Not be Great

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Finally someone has addressed this. All the crazy drum beat in the SEO community over the last year to create site maps was loud. It became almost a mantra. Of course the fervor really originated from Google, heck if they say it, it must be good right? I haven't been able to pin down the true benefit to Google. But it seems to me that there is no clear benefit to a site owner if your site is crawlable and indexed well.

SmallBusinessSEM address the topic and gives some vague anecdotal evidence that when he implimnented a site map his site took a hit, when he took the map down everything came back.

Facebook Tops Myspace in May

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:33:00 +0000

According to comScore, Facebook passed up Myspace in May for number of unique visitors, 123.9 million to 114.6 million. Most of the growth for Facebook has occurred overseas where Myspace has appeared to stagnate a bit.

ICANN Paves the Way For Unlimited Domain Extensions

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:23:00 +0000

This is pretty big news, at their recent meeting in Paris, ICANN opened the door to basically unlimited domain extensions. Soounds like it will be an application process that will also likely involve hefty fees. ICANNs big concern initially was on a technical side and whether that many extensions could be supporsted at the root.

comments here at WebmasterWorld

SEO and SEM Job Boards

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:20:00 +0000

Here's a list of links to SEO and SEM related job boards.

Data Answers All

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:07:00 +0000

Interesting read from Wired, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Notable quotes:

"All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

'But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete...'

'Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.'

What Data Google Collects

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:26:00 +0000

This is worth a look, basically a very detailed look at all the sources Google uses to gather data on users. Pretty staggering or Why Google is the Web. Skip the top part of the article and go straight to the list.

Serving Different Content Based on User Search Query

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:58:00 +0000

This is an awesome question and I surprised the topic hasn't been more deeply covered by someone. A thread in HighRankings asks whether or not he is risking it with Google if he serves different content on a page based on the search term source. He switches out content by looking at the HTTP_REFERER details for the specific search query if its avaliable but serves Google the default content when GoogleBot comes crawling.

Certainly this is against Google's guidelines, however the site owner is simply trying to customize content for his user thus enhancing their experience, Google mantra 'design for the user not the search engines'. Only 2 comments but both seem to suggest that the site owner is dangerously walking the line here.

I have to believe this is going to become a big issue down the road for search engines as sites look to customize user info more and more. Consequently I would have to believe that Google will come to accept this practice. Guess it remains to be seen.

SERPs on Google.co.uk

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:08:00 +0000

For the last 6 months or so, I have seen a number of threads on WebmasterWorld about Google.co.uk issues. Everyone is in agreement that there have been big changes.

The latest WebmasterWorld thread, Google.co.uk SERP Changes started a long discussion with more of the same. Random theories and off tangent disscussion abounds, but the big point in all this is that there are still inconsistent results and a lot of movement, though things have settled down a bit.

It seems to me that Google is using Google.co.uk to heavily test localization. This is bourn out by experience that .com site previously hosted in the states with powerful backlinks in the US, moved to the UK has developed great search results in the UK and retained positions in the US. I suppose the tweaking will continue but it appears that Google has come a long way in the UK.

Another Reason Not to Use Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:17:00 +0000

Search Engine Land did an announcement of the new Google Trends functionality and it sounds like had RJ Pittman, Google's Director of Product Development walk them through the product. What was interesting was this bit in the article, which I am led to believe came from RJ Pittman:

'...this tool basis its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. In addition, the search volume numbers are estimates...'

Hmm, so that Google Analytics 'private' data that i have about my site is being shared with my competitors, freely?

SEOBook does a great job of covering the issue.

More Website Data in Google Trends

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:46:00 +0000

This is pretty cool, Google Trends in now offering more data for websites. See regions that brought traffic to the site, top search terms, and other sites that visitors to that site visited (suppose downstream traffic) and you can do comparisons of websites. Here's a few examples:

Single Site Trends

Trends Comparison

Google Webmaster Tools API

noreply@blogger.com (gshumay) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Need to look into this a bit more, but Google now has and API for Webmaster Tools. Depending on the functionality this could open up some really cool options.