For anyone who would like a recap on the 100 best Arnie quotes, check out this 9 minute video:
 

“It’s Turbo Time”

Was Arnold really highlighting the importance of accelerated ad delivery?

Ensuring your ad delivery is set to accelerated is essential to ensure full daily visibility and reliable data. If you run ads on ‘standard’ delivery you’re effectively saying that you want Adwords to show your ads evenly according to your campaign budget. So what’s wrong with that? Well, If you’re campaign budget  is not set high enough you’ll have periods of the day where your ads won’t run – which means potentially missing peak periods of business. So how do you work out the best time of day for your ads to run?

Solution: Leave your ad delivery to accelerated and build up a reasonable amount of data within your campaign (while looking for statistical significance). Then run an ‘Hour of the Day’ report from the dimensions tab to gain which time of the day should highlight your peak periods of the day – adjust your bidding strategy accordingly!

“Stop Shouting, I’m not deaf”

Arnie doesn’t like loud things, so why are you shouting in your adcopy?

Full capitalisation might seem like a good idea when it comes to ad copy awareness, but it’s against AdWords policy and will end up with your ad being dinged and not showing (ouch). If left disapproved, this means that you’re missing out on traffic and potential revenue due to policy violations. What should you do?

Solution: You can gain attention and play by the rules using title capitalisation. To easily convert all your ad copy to title capitalisation, use AdWords Editor and right click all your ads and select the option “change text capitalisation” and then “Title Case” – easy.

“Who are you?!”

Not one for conversing, Arnie’s a stickler for understanding audiences.

How well do you think you know your customers? It’s easy to say that you think your target market is X & Y – but when you check the AdWords data, you often get a reality check that can often positively feed into other marketing mediums you utilise.  So how can you use AdWords to find out more about your audience?

Solution: Check out your search query report and review top converted keywords for an idea of search language (are you using those keywords on your landing pages?). What about digging into your AdWords search funnel analysis to gather information like lag to purchase, searches before purchase and first click analysis?

“You Lack Discipline”

Targeted dumbbell reps helped Arnie, what tasks can help you?

It doesn’t matter how big or small your PPC account is – you need routine tasks that you perform every day/week/month to ensure you’re always on top of things and delivering value. Without routine, you end up falling into the habit of optimising by memory or short term goals (which can be harmful).  So what’s the best way to get some routine in your optimisation?

Solution: Setup a list of tasks to be completed by the end of the Day/Week/Month using an easy to use task management task list like Sandglaz (which is free).  Utilising this approach will force you to think about what’s important today and in the next 30 days!

“Com’on don’t bullshit me”

Arnie’s learnt to look at the whole picture, so should you!

AdWords gives you a host of data that’s meant to help you optimise your account’s performance, but also makes it difficult for you to easily understand the algorithm! Almost certainly driven by revenue because if you knew the secret formula then you wouldn’t need to spend so much time testing (which means less revenue for AdWords). So what the hell does this mean?

Solution: Don’t overlook time honoured gut instinct and hard won experience when it comes to optimisation. You’ll find that things like low Quality Score seem to haunt you wherever you look, but keep focused on what’s important! Remember that the Quality Score metric in the AdWords interface is only an indication of your actual real Quality Score used to calculate your Ad Rank, so focusing on relevancy rather than this single number should be your principal driver for optimisation.

Related posts:

1. 97 Tips and 2 Quotes from SMX Advanced London
2. Visible Quality Score A Tale of Two Cities
3. Page load slowly?  Now it costs you (even more).

It showed up in a search that clearly wasn’t considered by Google to have fully ‘local‘ intent, as there was no map pack section of Google Places results. Instead Google decided to display the address line with the option to drop down and see the map.

Personally I like the change. It means Google Places – and its buggy process, reliance on fake reviews and inconsistent citations (can you tell I don’t like it?) – warps the results a little less, and the Adwords-style drop-down has been shown to perform pretty well in PPC ads.

However the eagle-eyed among you will spot it’s returned the address of a place hundreds of miles away instead of the depot just down the road. Looks like we’ve a while to go yet before we escape the Google Places randomness, but we’ll continue to work on those location-based signals!

Related posts:

1. Adwords location extensions now charged cost per click
2. Local Search – Google Boost
3. Google Latitude – another step towards location aware advertising

current sitelinks

enhanced sitelinks

So with the new sitelinks being a lot bulkier and imitating the natural listings even more, they should manage to live up to their intended purpose (assumed purpose) and drive users through to more relevant landing pages.

measuring the relevancy

All good so far – happier customers less likely to bounce after reaching the site, but Google has also said that the content of the enhanced sitelinks are actually just ‘related’ ads from your campaigns, though they’re not clear how they select these ads. Google claims it picks ads that are ‘closely related’ to your sitelinks, but how does it measure this relevancy? Google measures the relevancy of keywords to search queries by using crowd-sourced click through rates, from both your account and other advertisers. If it applied the same technique, this would mean testing several of the campaign’s ads until it could establish a pattern of reliable click through rates, except as other advertisers don’t use the same ads as you, it would be based entirely on your data – and collecting data/ testing costs money. Is it unfair for you to foot the bill of this testing when we’d already stipulated strategically chosen sitelinks?

 one possible method

Perhaps Google is venturing into the semantic realm and identifying keywords that exist in both the ad copy and sitelinks? Very much doubt that though. More likely, they’re identifying ads which received a greater CTR improvement from the addition of sitelinks compared to others ads in the rest of the campaign.  At the moment,  an ad receives a good CTR when matched to a particular keyword and deemed relevant and eligble to display sitelinks. So equally if the particular ad-keyword-sitelink combination receives a good CTR, then the ad can be deemed relevant to the sitelink and eligible for enhanced sitelinks. This is of course just a theory and I think there’s going to be a lot of testing, theories and discussions before the truth starts to become clear.

Related posts:

1. Ad Sitelinks: More Than a CTR Booster
2. AdWords in Gmail: Relevancy of Adverts Improving?
3. AdWords Sitelinks: Migration & Revelations

Ah, I mentioned Google, now you’re interested…

Disclaimer: This is a bit of a techie post, and it includes discussion of code implementation. Even if you don’t understand the code please try to understand the opportunities provided by microdata, start reading the resources and chat to your developer or agency about it. 

what is microdata?

Microdata is HTML markup for pages used to better indicate what content is contained therein to sites including the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo (urgh) and, from November 2011, Yandex.

For a few years microdata usage has been a bit haphazard and all over the place. There are a load of competing ‘language’ formats, and you’ll also hear them use as generic terms to describe the process of marking up the data. I’m using microdata as my generic term in this post.

Update: I’ve been informed the correct generic ‘group term’ for the three different syntaxes described below  is ‘HTML data’. 

The main three HTML data types

And how to identify them:

• microdata for HTML5
  <span itemprop=”CATEGORY”>
  .
• RDFA
  <span property=”v:CATEGORY”>
  .
• microformats
  <div class=”hCATEGORY”>

They’ve all got slightly different markup and standards. Yay!

Recently Google and Bing decided to stick their nose into things and at least recommend a standard ‘vocabulary’ using Schema.org and where Google goes everybody else follows. Using a common vocabulary means that at least we’ll all be marking up the same properties like ‘people’, ‘organization’ [sic] and ‘place’, however Schema (originally) only supported the ‘microdata’ markup method.

<div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/CATEGORY“>
          language                       vocabulary 

(credit to SEOmoz for helping to clarify this)

While it’s good they’ve gone with a nice HTML5 method it’s only proper that they’re expanding out to RDFa standard to increase the accepted markup types; in the meantime alternative markups are still supported by Google so don’t worry too much if you’ve already used them.

But if you’re in any doubt or just starting then follow the Schema.org recommended microdata markup.

schema.org

So, Schema.org. The website is fairly well structured to help you see the different attribute categories and they include marked-up examples to give you a better idea of exactly how the markup is implemented. There’s a huge hierarchy of different ‘things’ you can markup, with ‘thing’ funnily enough being rather near the top.

The most popular ‘things’ include:

• creative works (e.g. written content, book, movie, recipe)
• event
• organization
• person
• place
• product
• review/ rating

The schema creator from the guys at RavenTools makes the application of Schema even easier – simply type in the details and it’ll wrap the HTML elements for you.

Google and rich snippets

How does making your data accessible to search engines help you out? How do they use microdata?

Well Google has a little something they call rich snippets – these are the extra bits of information about a page that they display in search results.

example 1: authors/publishers

You’ll hopefully have noticed that Google have making big inroads into social search with Google Plus my World. In a nutshell, social search makes people and authors and the connections between people more important. As such you’ll want to ensure Google knows who you are and what you’re writing, and for that you’ll need the rel=author markup. In addition to the standard Schema markup you’ll want to add rel=author and rel=me markup, and a bit of rel=publisher…Easy eh?

author

1. Link to your author page on the same site using rel=”author” markup:
   <a rel=”author” href=”http://www.EXAMPLE.com/profile/AUTHORNAME/”>Author Name</a>
   .
2. Link that author page to your Google (Plus) Profile using rel=”me” markup:
   .
   <a rel=”me” href=”https://plus.google.com/YOURPROFILENUMBER/”></a>
   .
3. Link your Google Profile back to your author page on the website by adding a website link within your profile information. When you add this link to your profile, be sure to check the “This page is specifically about me” checkbox. This creates a rel=”me” link to that author page.

If you don’t have a profile page on the website that features your work then rel=”author” directly to your Google profile, and add the domain of the site you’re writing for to your Google profile links.

Author microdata showing in Google results

Google plus pages

If you’ve created a Google Plus page for your business you’ll want to link that as well, as you’re verifying the profile is official and make it more likely to be included in Google activities in the future. It’s actually done through applying a Google Plus button/badge which contains rel=”publisher” markup.

This rel=”publisher markup should only be put on the homepage of your (multi-author) site.

If you don’t want to add the badge the the code is:

<a rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/YOURPAGENUMBER”>

Then add your website link to your Google+ page:

1.  Go to your profile by clicking the profile icon at the top of the page.
2. Click Edit Profile.
3. On the ‘About’ tab, click Links.
4. Click Add custom link.
5. Enter a title for the link and a URL.

example 2: reviews

See the little stars? That’s drawing through the reviews on the edinburgh-flats.com page into the search results. Getting positive reinforcement of your offering through reviews has always been our recommended Internet marketing strategy, and rich snippets mean you’ll be seeing the benefits from the first step – the search results. If you see two competing sites from a search result and one includes a great star rating which are you going to choose?

TIP: star ratings

Although the standard markup is for five star reviews your site might work on a different scale, such as ‘out of ten’. Check out these tips for ratings implementations.

TIP: reviews vs votes

There’s a difference between reviews and votes: votes are ratings while reviews need accompanying text (“Best article on microdata EVER” or some such). You’ll also need to markup reviews differently if you’ve aggregate reviews/votes or just one.

example 3: recipes

I’m a big fan of Moroccan chicken with almonds and apricots. Seriously, try it, it’s quick and incredibly tasty. But the point being that if I’m searching for a recipe and Google returns loads of options then I need something to help me differentiate between the options, and rich snippets help me do that. Be it by the rating, the preparation/cooking time or the whichever photo I think looks most appealing, the extra data helps me make a choice and if you include this data you are more likely to be clicked.

Heck, there’s even a dedicated Google recipe search. Want in?

so why use microdata?

And now we come to the crux of the issue – why bother?

1. Easier for search engines
   The mention of Google earlier should have piqued your interest; if Google decides to include something in its search results then you should really be paying attention. Search engines are getting fairly good at understanding the content of web pages but they always like a helping hand, and you’ll only ever put yourself in a better position by making such information easy to access, ‘read’ and display to searchers.
   .
2. Be more relevant, get clicked more
   Provide more information to the search engines and they’re likely to show it to searchers, making your site a more attractive proposition. Some initial studies have suggested there’s a significant click-through rate uplift on pages with microdata (review) markup.
   .
3. Easier for other applications
   Hey, search engines aren’t the only ones that could make use of your data and help promote you. Apps are where-it’s-at in mobile marketing, and you’ll only gain from making your company, products and/or content accessible to them.
   .
4. Improves the web experience
   Microdata helps to organise information on the web and makes it more easily accessible for everyone: a more usable and accessible Internet is a better Internet. Plus Schema and microdata is HTML5 compliant, so by taking part you’re helping to move everybody onto a more flexible and easier to develop t’interweb. It’ll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

implementation

• Use the rich snippets testing tool to check you’ve implemented correctly and see how Google might show your data, if it feels like it. If you’re having any unexpected issues this great Knol article will tell you why you’re getting an error
  .
• You don’t need to think of these microdata elements as things that need to be added to your page. You can simply add the tags to your existing data, and they can be included within each other – for example if your recipe summary says that it feeds four people, include the “yield” span class within your “summary” span class:

<p class=”summary”>
Super tasty recipe that
                 <span class=”yield”>
                 serves four</span>
</p>

• If you’re an e-commerce site you simply have to be using microdata markup or you’re missing a trick.

TIP: price ranges

Although not officially supported, rich snippets allow the pricerange attribute if you need to display a bigger selection of prices.
.

• Continue to use Google Product feeds and Places as normal – microdata doesn’t supercede them, but marking up your data will only help your presence in natural listings.
  .
• Be careful your <div> or CSS classes don’t clash with microdata markup, and don’t use hidden divs.

summary

Use HTML data and microdata. BOOM! But seriously, you want to give your business and products the best chance of being seen and if you ignore microdata you’re not doing that. Don’t allow your competitors to gain an edge.

the useful resources

For more information see also:

• Schema.org
• Google Webmaster Tools microdata help
• Google Webmaster Tools microdata FAQ
• Rich snippets testing tool
• Microformats.org wiki

Related posts:

1. LINK: Yes it is time to include HTML5 microformats in site code
2. LINK: rel=”author” markup

the low hanging fruit

The value of different audience groups and search queries can be drawn on a sliding scale from the ‘absolutely, guaranteed, desperate to make a purchase user’ to the ‘zombified passive browser’ who coincidentally stumbles across your site. Naturally, most new PPC campaigns will focus on targeting the former, and if not will soon be stripped back to these core terms. Most of us are playing it safe, picking the low hanging fruit and spending the budget in the areas we’re confident will drive the most sales.

correlation between growth and inefficiencies

Take the hypothetical niche advertiser of  popular 90′s WWF wrestler British Bulldog action figures. Excusing the fact that expanding beyond this one sole product may be a suggestible business idea, how would he otherwise go about expanding in his current market? While there’s only a very limited number of people who would specifically search for such a niche product, there must be a way to drive more business through PPC? The problem is that the other eligible users out there who are happy to convert are also sharing their search queries with more and more users who just aren’t interested. The couple of users who search for ‘buy british bulldog wrestling toy’ are money in the bank before they even click on the ad, but there’s equally only a couple of convertible users from the hundred or so users who search for ‘buy 90′s wrestling toys’ because the vast majority of them are just looking for something else – most likely the Ultimate Warrior cause he was way cooler.

A well structured PPC account will target a group of highly relevant terms at it's centre, and expand out into less and less relevant areas as far as conversion rates and cost per clicks will efficiently allow.

so, how does one go about expanding then?

Each new audience, no matter how vague or generic they may be, still has a value. There’s still a conversion rate there that just needs a balancing Cost Per Click to create your target Cost Per Action. If one of your fringe campaigns receives a 0.5% conversion rate it can still meet your target CPA of £10, you just have to find a way of receiving a 5p CPC. You effectively need to draw a line through the audiences, like finding the way through a maze, jotting down the conversion rates and calculating the CPCs as you go. Once you’ve got this mapped you can start the fun bit – reaching the CPC while not completely falling off the first page. Bar a few bid changes, the way to do this is by improving your Quality Score (which is Google’s way of measuring the relevancy to the user/financial benefit to Google, of your account).

Technically, through improving your Quality Score virtually any CPC is achievable! However, no matter how streamlined your ad groups are and witty your ad copy, you’ll eventually end up conceding that your PPC campaign just can’t reach the necessary CPC. However you don’t have to give up on these fringe audiences just because you don’t have the CPC to balance your Conversion Rate – instead, why not consider how you could optimise your Conversion Rate to balance your CPC.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Conversion Optimizer – CPA Bidding
2. Free Clicks in AdWords – More Sponsored Links Explained

So dreich old January is thankfully done, and now that our arithmetic exertions are no longer being spent on post-Christmas calorie counting, we can happily sit down and trough our way through a big plate of biscuits, and statistical goodness. Tuck your napkin in, here’s some tasty stats cooked up in January’s big numbers kitchen…

100

A pretty impressive stat from the YouTube camp – this is the amount of video in years uploaded to the site every 10 days. Full article.

3.6

The percentage of web referral traffic that digital pinboard site Pinterest drove in January, a mere sniff behind Twitter’s 3.61%, indicating that the wunderkind network is living up to its (pretty major) hype, with the potential for great things in 2012. Full article.

71

This is the percentage of UK consumers who prefer printed vouchers to mobile ones, according to research by the Direct Marketing Association, showing that although mobile marketing grows ever apace, trust and user experience issues means it’s a nut that’s far from cracked. Full article.

402 000

But having said that, one for the mobile marketing corner – this is the number of iPhones sold globally per day, now more than the number of babies being born in the same period. Another nice “tot-al” for Apple! [everyone at Attacat dies of exposure to terrible puns] Full article.

5

The percentage of 18-35 year olds who go to Twitter or Facebook to first make a complaint about a company’s product or services (and a category I fall into myself). Full article.

13 million

A cheeky December-in-January stat, this is the number of hours British consumers spent shopping online on Boxing Day. This and other big e-commerce numbers from Christmas 2011 can be seen here. Full article.

Related posts:

1. Month In Numbers – January 2011
2. The Month In Numbers – January 2007
3. Month In Numbers – November 2010

There's a difference between being similar and being relevant. Image sphericalnotions.com.

 how does broad match actually work?

When analysing the search queries which have been activating your ads, it’s easy to become confused by the depth of strange search queries that Google shows your ads to. Why is the search query ‘football fixtures’ ever considered relevant to the keyword ‘rugby socks’? The truth is Google doesn’t directly measure relevancy in the semantic way humans do – it’d just be too complex – how would they know that ‘Usain Bolt’ isn’t related to ‘nuts and bolts’, and that ‘Cheryl Cole’ once was, but is no longer, relevant to ‘Simon Cowell’? Google puts it to the user to decide, and uses relative click through rates to measure how relevant a term is. After a few tests, Google can confidently show an ad with the keyword ‘diy tools’ to the search query ‘red paint’, but won’t bother when someone searches ‘paint the town red’.

why broad is bad (kinda)

So this leaves us in a sometimes difficult situation because we’re susceptible to users who are just coincidently browsing. A user searching for ‘irish food recipes’ may still click an ad for ‘buy scottish food’ and so Google would still show an ad, even though they’ve no intention of making a purchase. In fact, if enough users were to click, your broad match keyword could show an ad for absolutely any search query possible!

using modified broad and negatives

So with normal broad match you actually have ZERO control over where your ad appears. There’s no semantic relevance and your ads will be eligible to appear anywhere there’s a chance they’ll get clicked. But using a mixture of modified broad and other match types will easily filter this out whilst keeping the keywords as flexible as possible. In our example above, lets say that we’re absolutely sure that any search query mentioning recipes will be irrelevant to us, so adding ‘recipes’ as a negative will block out any further traffic like this. However we wouldn’t add ‘irish’ as a negative incase a user searched for ‘scottish and irish food’ – so instead would tweak the original keyword to be modified broad on ‘scottish’, ensuring that all search queries targeted would at least have to include that term.

should I add search queries?

This brings us to an interesting point – If there’s no semantic measurement of the relevancy of a keyword to a search query, and it’s (generally) all done by measuring click through rates, then why bother adding new keywords from the search query report into the same ad groups that activated them in the first place? Example: if my keyword ‘rugby socks’ picks up the search query ‘buy rugby socks uk’, then is there any point in adding it as a new keyword? Regardless of which keyword picks up the search query, it’s going to receive the same click through rate either way and therefore both be deemed equally relevant for the search query ‘buy rugby socks uk’.

no, don’t add search queries

You could argue that adding search queries into your ad groups as a keyword is a waste of time, as your current keywords are already picking them up and they’ll receive the same click through rate from your ads either way. In most cases however, this highlights the importance of segmenting your ad groups as it gives you the opportunity to tailor the ads further and therefore improve your click through rate on these search queries. If you can create an ad that better suits the search query ‘buy rugby socks uk’ than the current ‘rugby socks’ ads, then the search query needs to be added into a new adgroup with tailored ads.

yes, do add search queries

In reality though, as you may have guessed, there is still a point to adding search queries to your current ad groups as new keywords are one of the easiest forms of keyword research. Each search query will have a circle of search queries which are relevant to it, with each one of those search queries having another circle of slightly different search queries also relevant to it. By regularly adding search queries as new keywords, which are very similar to your current keywords, you can slowly build out the coverage. You don’t add the search query into your ad group because you want to target that keyword theme ‘better’, you add it because you want to use it to target the other search queries which are ‘relevant’ to it.

so wait, what should I do?!

Firstly, remember the sobering fact that the search query report shows only a fraction (often below 10%) of the actual search queries that are activating your ads. Do not rely on it as a way of auditing your traffic – use a combination of match types, negative keywords and a lot of common sense to filter out unwanted traffic in advance and don’t wait until you’ve already paid for it before deciding to block it. The Google Keyword Research Tool is a great resource for finding negatives in advance, and with a few tweaks of it’s settings can be really powerful in doing this. If you do find search queries from blatantly unwanted traffic coming through into your account, chalk it up to experience and get back to doing some negative keyword research pronto.

Secondly, when you uncover new search queries triggering a particular ad, ask yourself if you’re really doing that user justice by serving them that ad. If you have any inkling at all that you may not be, then get the search query added as a keyword in it’s own ad group and give it the ad it deserves!

Finally, if the search query really isn’t doing any harm receiving the current ad, then ask yourself if your ad group would benefit from having it added as a keyword? Could there be even the slimmest bit of chance that there are search queries relevant to this new keyword that your current ones may not pick up so easily? Remember that it’s measured by user’s clicking, not semantically how the human brain works, and therefore trying to accurately predict what AdWords will throw up as being relevant is not (technically) even humanly possible.

Related posts:

1. PPC keyword research: Building dams and washing dirt
2. Google Adwords new keyword match type
3. 1 Other Unique Queries and other stories of PPC stupidity

This project included:

• Moving the existing site to the WordPress platform
• Optimising content for SEO, specifically wedding catering which has become their focus
• Making the experience more conversion friendly with some CRO

Website launched – what’s next?

As with any new website the launch is just the starting point! We will continue to work closely with Foukou and will be launching a PPC account for them in order to drive targeted traffic to the website and generate enquiries.

Related posts:

1. New Website Launch: InTime Data
2. New Website Launch – Royal Mile Recording Experiences
3. New Website Launch – Convivium Wine

What is immediately obvious is that at almost every retailer I looked at, in almost every case the calls began with “Add To…” See below:

ASOS

Apple

The North Face

Clarks

HMV

Sofa Workshop

Guitar Guitar

Amazon

I actually had to hunt quite hard to find calls such as Buy Now or Buy Online. Thank you Pets At Home!

What I would really like to know is have these calls been chosen because they have been tested and shown to work better or is everyone just following the herd? There is no doubt that Amazon constantly test and even the smallest detail will be deliberate but can the same be said of Sofa Workshop or Guitar Guitar?

An interesting case study from Semorganic suggests there is a huge difference (although I would like to see some information on the statistical significance of these results). If their numbers are right Pets at Home could be closing the door to a lot of customers!

There are several other studies out there but what I would really like is for you to share your experience and any stats you have from your own testing and post them in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Link: Big Orange Buttons – the Future of the Call to Action?
2. SEO-ing Georgie Barlow: Technology Choice

Google+ or bust

Just when we had thought Google Plus was going the same way as Google’s previous attempts to create a social network, Google has shown it intends to bet the crown jewels on making it work.

The ridiculously named Search Plus Your World (SPYW) has yet to make it to our shores but it can’t be far away. If the pages for brands were a carrot for businesses to play on Google+, SPYW is the flipping big stick.

Gem up with this great Google+ SEO primer because engaging with Google+ is now a must, however unexcited you may be by that prospect.  (Even I’m having a go)

Remember Social Search?

Showing your friend’s food poisoning rant or deliberations over the eloquent presentation of the scallops when you search for local restaurants has been the promise of social search for many years.

photo credit: foto.bulle

SPYW is a very large step on this road. As ever Search Engine Land explains it all perfectly. Of course its a bit more serious than just raw chicken fails as this applies to your business too.  People and relationships are becoming key to ranking.

(There’s something ironic about the word “Spy” being in SPYW acronyn – my iPad even auto-corrects it to SPYWARE)

Crap results? Here to stay?

Google has received a lot of flack about the relevance of SPYW and abusing it’s monopoly to promote its own social network.

Will it stick around? It will evolve but it looks like it will. “Like it or lump it” seems to be the message coming from the CEO. It’s either the beginning of the end for Google or the reinvention. Only time (and possibly regulators) will tell which.

Google updating it’s privacy policies at the same time is no coincidence – data from Google’s products won’t just influence the adverts you see, it will start playing a significant role in your search results.

You feel a post IPO Facebook will find it hard to resist spicing things by stepping into the search engine game.

Attacat Joel also discusses Google+ in his Social Media Roundup for January. Overlap between SEO and social is only going to increase.

Rank reports are dead. Long live rank reports

One of the challenges of increased personalisation of results is that rank checking software is struggling to cope. We’ve slowly been losing faith in rank report tools but this month saw a new source that could actually be pretty good – an updated Google Webmaster Tools.

Algorithm updates

Google has stepped up its efforts to reduce the ranks of advert heavy sites . How can they detect ads? This very intelligent speculation provides good reason to question what we assume about what Googlebot can “see” and could well be how Big G is identifying these ad sites.

A monthly update to Panda has now become par for the course. This month‘s stood out though for the fact that it was described as unchanged from last month for the first time.

Quality Rating

My last roundup discussed the accidental release of Google’s Quality Rater’s handbook. The quality rating process is fascinating because it gives insight into what Google wants to see in its search results. Understanding that is an SEO-must so reading this interview with a quality rater will stand you in good sted.

Google penalises itself for paid links

The paid link debate (do or don’t) took an interesting twist with Google Chrome being outed for paid links and then being compelled to award itself a ranking penalty. The paid links were the result of Google outsourcing some marketing to a third party (who then outsourced again). The most interesting question this raises if Google can’t keep control, how do they expect the rest of us to do so. They are pushing water up a hill.

January Resources

Here’s a selection of links worthy of a browse:

• The impact of freshness on ranks – As SEOs we tend to talk about the importance of fresh content a lot. This is one of the best posts I’ve ever seen that explains it
• The Rise of Mail Online – It is a sign of the times that I can now learn things about SEO in the mainstream press. I found this BBC article about the Mail Online’s SEO quite intriguing
• An European Union press release (that isn’t about privacy) – Seems the EU are going to open up it’s data – there will be many an SEO opportunity for those who look.
• SEO Book has been busy producing a couple of cracking infographics on the evolution of SEO (below)

Infographic by SEO Book

SEO Infographic by SEO Book

And finally a word about the English

This happened before the rugby this weekend but hey ho.  Perhaps Mr.Salmond knows how to Googlebomb.

Related posts:

1. Social media roundup: January 2012
2. SEO Roundup: How SEO evolved in November 2011
3. Month In Numbers – January 2012