Produced by Online Schools

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html

When the Panda update was implemented in the USA there was a major shakeup in the search results with many, many site owners having their rankings crushed overnight and suffering from the obvious knock on this had on revenue for some of those sites.

The Panda update has been rolled out by Google in order to address the amount of low quality websites appearing in their search results. The update pushes down lower quality sites, in an effort to have better quality, more relevant sites rank in the search results for any given keyword term.

Google have suggested the update affects some 14% of search queries on this latest implementation of it’s update (which is an increase of 2% over the original implementation in the USA).

We are gathering data at the moment to try and understand the actual impact on UK websites in general and hope to report back on our initial findings in a few days.

If your site has been impacted by this Panda update, please leave a comment and let us know what the impact has been and why you think it has affected your site.

We should point out this is not all doom and gloom. Naturally, if some sites loose rankings, others will gain and all round Google is trying to do the correct thing for their user base – serve better quality, more relevant search results for their queries. Long term this is good. Short term there will be fall out.

• The EU have launched an official investigation into Google’s business practices.
• Look like they are acquiring local coupon goliath Groupon for a rumoured $5.6 Billion.
• Have added to their algorithm to filter businesses with perceived bad customer feedback.
• Have launched boutiques.com as they advance into ecommerce territory.
• Highlighted social media signals that may affect ranking of a web page.
• Have had numerous product updates.
• The list goes on.

When you read the magnitude of some of these elements you cannot help but admire how they appear to act nimbly and in an entrepreneurial way and also appear to take in their stride investigations that would finish most businesses.

Having said that the quiet (or not so quiet) assault on the new markets (for Google) and further dominance they are gaining across our lives, that is driven from data that you and I provide, is really going to change the ecommerce landscape for ever.

Lets take Googles recent more aggressive push into price comparison. They don’t dip their toe in the water they go straight after the juggernaut. Financial Services – probably one of the most lucrative industries for lead generation online.

Do a search for mortgages or credit cards – number one spot – Googles own comparison engine. Don’t under estimate the significance of this – they are basically giving themselves free number one PPC ad slot. This is huge – the volume is incredible – the money they receive for each lead will be huge and margins will be extremely high. Much, much higher than their competitors. How and why did they choose this market? – the likes of you and I told them this is the most lucrative. They have our adwords PPC data, our Google Analytics data, our conversion data, our landing page data, click data of users that land on our pages etc etc. Oh and yes they also own their own affiliate network so no real middlemen to snip away at margin either.

Staggering.

And then…

Lather rinse and repeat.

Boutiques.com – apparel – same model (more or less) CPA driven – they drive into fashion.

Where next – who knows. But it will be somewhere and how deep will this get? Socks, skateboards, wedding favors, baby gifts ?

Of course we knew this was coming – people denied it, but it was relatively easy to spot in hindsight. Oh lets buy an affiliate network- what the heck else are they going to do with it.

And yet we continue to feed the mighty G with data that may one day put us out of business.

What are the alternatives – if you operate online frankly very few – but ecommerce companies must, must, must start to diversify their traffic sources and start to look at other ways of tracking and monitoring. Is this anti Google – no – this is just good business practice. You can’t rely on one (external) company to provide your livelihood.

In what other industry would a company be allowed to collect data from every customer of a product, every supplier of a product, provide the marketing, payment and data platforms and then turn around and use that data to dominate a market, and in the same process put swathes of businesses out of business.

And the EU got pissy with Microsoft just for bundling the Internet Explorer browser – this is a significant order of magnitude higher in my book.

Of course this is my opinion, but it doesn’t take much thought to cause you sleepless nights.

• Unemployment is getting higher.
• The economy is in the doldrums.
• Personal debt is high.
• The level of feedback about lack of opportunity is very high.

BUT

• The use of video games consoles is at an all time high.
• The use of online games is at an all time high.
• The use of social networking sites is at an all time high.
• Television audiences for popular soap operas are still extremely high.

Any connection?

Maybe not, but just think of all the hours that could collectively be spent trying to create opportunity rather than throwing away those hours in front of screens, wasting time.

It is too easy to get side tracked and pigeon holed as this or the other, when the real goal is to solve a problem.

As an SEO we can say yep we’ll get you to number one for the term ‘blue widgets’, but what use is that if there are no people ready to TAKE ACTION searching for that phrase?

Much better to study psychology of a searcher and understand that the people ready to take action are searching for ‘xt10-2 blue widget’ – this may get 10% of the search volume but searchers are 99% more likely to buy.

It’s all about human behaviour, search psychology, putting your self in the mind of the searcher – whatever you want to call it. We are in the human behaviour business.

Without the upfront research, understanding motivations, understanding psychology, solving the searchers problem and crafting a compelling online message - any online campaign is doomed to failure.

All too often a business gets so caught up in the running of their company, the internal terminology they use, and their own way of thinking - that they miss the crucial aspect of starting any online campaign or building any web preseence – they forget the very audience they are trying to serve. Spend time researching what your customers want, what they are searching for, how they are searching for it – get out of your world – you are more often than not too close. Be a customer.

Your online campaigns will sky rocket.

It is a natural extension for Google to expand their product set further into the living room and our bet is Google TV will be a huge game changer.

For the full details see Googles New Website dedicated to their TV product.

http://www.google.com/tv/index.html

A Blog Post From Google with updates is here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/here-comes-google-tv.html

There is so much mis-information around it is frightening. There is also a lot of great information around.

To the average small business owner or manager, the prospects of diving into Social Media as part of their business development programme must be monumentally frightening, if they start by researching online first.

The reality is, most of it is common sense,  and I see too many people get eaten up with the hype of it all rather than take a step back and be a little bit more strategic about their Social Media plan.

Our view is that social media works best when you are focusing on the correct audience and giving that audience real value. This is true of most business development activities. Those that give the most value to their audience get the most customers from within that audience. It doesn’t matter if you are in field sales, internet sales, telesales, starting a new company etc. If you deliver real value to your audience and you are remarkable – you will get customers.

Social Media is no different.

If it is Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Web Forums, etc. deliver value to your specific audience and you will generate customers.

Delivering Value is not tweeting your new discount codes every hour, it is not stating how great you are four times a day on Facebook, it is not spamming forums.

Delivering value is finding your audience online through in depth research and DELIVERING ANSWERS TO THEIR QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS. The answers could be on your website, they could be via a research paper, they could be via a free consultation, they could be providing a couple of insider secrets freely, it could even be referring your audience to a competitor for specific instances.

Its all about delivering solutions to problems. It’s how the world of commerce works and Social Media is no different.

We can help those of you who are lost in the Social Media whirl define a strategy and deliver real results for your potential customers and your business. Please do give us a call.

I am not sure where the problem was – if it was Google or some kind of internet backbone that failed – to be honest I don’t really care – the point of this post is to highlight the impact of that outage.

This outage got me thinking. Now keep in mind that it was just Google sites that were inaccessible.

The impact was absolutely staggering.

1. Could not access www.google.co.uk – 90% of my work is related to search results. Major Impact for me. Our clients who pay to advertise, our clients who achieve stellar search rankings… etc etc.
2. I could not access email – not sure if this was me but I use gmail extensively and google calendar etc – Fairly major impact when you have clients emailing you etc.
3. Every, that is 100%, absolutely every website I visited in that outage period did not load correctly. Why:
   1. They were using Google Analytics on their site (Google Analytics relies on websites communicating with Googles Servers – which at this point were not accessible).
   2. They were using Google Adsense to monetise the site with adverts.
   3. They were using Google Ad Planner as the advert management platform.

Ok, so on the surface this does not appear to be a huge deal. But lets really think about this for a moment.

If the outage was prolonged. A massive proportion of websites would have been affected.

They would have lost revenue.  An hours worth of issues most companies can suck up, but a days worth of revenue, a week?

Our reliance on Google as web entrepreneurs is absolutely colossal.

We rely on Google for the majority of our traffic. Without traffic no commerce takes place. We rely on Google to serve relevant adverts on our pages (publishing sites / news sites etc), we rely on Google for our statistics regarding what is profitable and what is not. We rely on Google for email communications (well several million of us do anyway).

Web businesses are now responsible for employing millions and millions of people from small one or 2 person e-commerce shops to larger businesses like play.com, amazon.com etc. not to mention a lot of mid range news sites and other publishers.

Of course I am not stating that Google is responsible for all of these employees but even the big brand websites that have a captive audience of returning customers would be severly impacted if their Google traffic went away.

So indirectly Google is responsible for the livelihood of millions of people.

Why. They build good products. Everyone wants to use them and for the most part they should.

But do they have too much leverage?

If Google controls the traffic (generalisation), controls the advertising, controls the statistics and analytics, controls the communcation (email and soon to be voice), will soon control the ads we see on TV (my guess) – couple this with the enormous amount of data they hold on pretty much every customer that uses their service and you have a goliath that has more control than most of us would be comfortable with.

If you then add in to the equation that Google can stop web traffic at will – either through change of algoithms, banning sites, throttling traffic etc.

There really is no point to this post other than my observations, but to me this is getting very, very scary and diversification is the order of the day. Traffic diversification, tool diversification, monetisation diversification.

If Microsoft got in trouble for bundling internet explorer with Windows surely Googles power is ten fold of that.

Having said all of that – fair play to Google. The have created something really, really powerful that many entrepreneurs can only dream of replicating.

This is obvious right?

Then why do sooooo many companies expect their website to rank in the top 10 of google for [insert fairly competitive keyword here] without creating more content than ‘Who We Are, What We Do, & Contact Us’?

If you don’t have compelling content, offering real value, then you will not attract links (other than pure rubbish), and links are what matter for search engine ranking.

Think of content creation like, adding more stock to your shop or your sales team making calls, or a carpenter buying wood – it has to happen. No results happen on the web without content.

• If you are an ecommerce store that means creating product listings that are outstanding, different from the norm, have a story, really sell the benefits to your customers, give examples of experience.
• If you are a B2B operation it means giving away some of you knowledge for free to everyone on the web.
• etc.

Content on the web can now come in many forms: Written (read typed), Video, Audio, Graphical (infographics for example), Games, etc.

If you are serious about the web, developing top tier rankings within the search engines, and generating new business via online mechanisms you absolutely have to devote time and / or/money to content creation.

We recommend daily content creation in some form or another. But don’t churn out any old rubbish, make it compelling. If you can only do that once a week then do it just once a week – but do it.

Many businesses don’t have the time or resources to generate the content – that is fine companies like interactive3 can help with the process. But companies like us will have to spend time getting to know your business inside and out before even trying to create content. So clearly there is a financial element there. The best people to generate content for your business are the people that work in and on your business every day and really understand the workings of the industry, customer pain points etc.

When the content is created, then it is down to your SEO company/person to promote the content and hopefully garner links to it.

Make content creation for your web presence part of your daily schedule and watch the results follow.

Rick was recently the recipient of the Domain Industry Pioneer award from Epik at their recent domain developers conference.

Rick is a truly great inspiration, the classic American dream story, followed through with passion, rigour and vision.

Rick is very deserving of this award, in my opinion, for the changes he has made in people lives. From the world class domainers he has helped to the likes of me. Rick has been a mentor to me (although I have never met him or spoken to him) through his blog and formerly his bulletin board. I can truly say together with the likes Frank Schilling & Sahar Sarid, they have changed my life and helped us steer our business and stay focused on the importance of TARGETED TRAFFIC.

To see all of the comments received from other domain industry leaders, watch this video.

Rick Schwartz & Epik Domain Pioneer Video.

Well Done Rick, and thanks.