Plusbox has in fact been around for a couple of years now in areas such as maps and finance, but Google has only recently decided to expand this into retail in the UK.

Much like its other Plusbox offerings on maps and finance, clicking on the Plusbox icon gives the user an expanded view of related products with further information on each and the option to land on the specific product landing pages.

Collapsed View:

Expanded View:

How does it work?

By uploading a product feed to Google Base including prices, inventory and product images Google then incorporates this into AdWords and then allows its system to automatically match an advertiser’s offer with the most appropriate ad for the user’s query.

Why is Google trialling Plusbox in the retail sector?

Google has always strived to offer the most relevant search results for their users and this is just another one of their products they hope will help them achieve this. By allowing advertisers to offer multiple products for a single ad Google believes it will increase conversion, and therefore increase their spend too. If this is the case, then trialling this product now seems the most sensible option as Q4 is by far the biggest spending quarter for retail and any product that helps advertisers spend more money on Google is ultimately their goal. We will wait and see if this turns out to be reality for IT247.com and our other clients.

Alex Turner meets ALEX HOYE, chief executive of Warrington digital marketers Latitude Group

RUNNING a marathon is a gruelling physical challenge, made no easier by the biological clock slipping the wrong side of 40.

At the other end of the pain-pleasure spectrum is a trip through 50 chateaux in the Médoc region of south-west France, calling in at the vineyards along the way to indulge in wine and fine French food of oysters, cheese and steak.

Alex Hoye, though, will spend a Sunday in September combining the two pursuits as he joins 8,499 other runners in the Marathon du Médoc – where the 26-mile course is punctuated by 23 wine stations.

But then Hoye, chief executive of Warrington-based digital marketing agency Latitude Group, doesn’t seem content with doing just one thing at a time.

Read more on the Liverpool Daily Post.

A little while back I blogged on the impact that the introduction of Google Suggest could have on search trends. Some of the key trends expected and discussed were:

• Search Volume on suggested terms would increase
• A drop off in the level of traffic being generated through long tail terms
• Suggested terms becoming more competitive in terms of their bidding landscape

By running a few tests through the Google Insights for Search tool, it is pretty clear that this development has had a defined impact on the way users are searching for specific products. By starting a search for Car Insurance, Google now presents the user with a number of options, including those highlighted above.

So, what is the impact of presenting users with search term refinement?

The answer seems pretty clear from the information generated through Google Insights:

(click on the image to display a larger version)

Based on these statistics, it can be estimated that search volumes have developed in the following way between March and June 2009:

• Car Insurance Quotes – up by 64%
• Car Insurance for Young Drivers – up by 103%
• Car Insurance Compare – up by 52%
• Car Insurance Comparison – up by 9%

Car insurance and home insurance are clearly two of the most competitive marketplaces for paid and natural search, so by looking at home insurance suggestions made by Google, we can also make the conclusion that the keywords being pushed are also those being increasingly searched upon by users. The following graph displays the same date range but for a search on home insurance:

(click on the image to display a larger version)

Again, using the statistics within Google Insights, we can see the following shifts in search volume over the past 3 months:
• Home Insurance Quotes – up by 154% (this is the first suggestion made by Google)
• Home Insurance UK – up by 43%
• Home Insurance Comparison – up by 41%

From these results, as well as a number of other searches being performed, we can see that the suggestion which Google makes first within the list receives a significant boost to search volumes.

Within the pet insurance market for example, the growth in comparison led search is clearly evident, despite a relatively limited number of aggregator sites for the product. As well as this general shift in market search volume, the Google Suggest development in the UK has also further fuelled this trend, with search volume for the “pet insurance comparison” keyword increasing by 131% since the change at the start of April.

A more extreme example is “travel insurance comparison” which again is Google’s first suggestion should you type in “travel insurance” as your query. Growth of 367%! Admittedly, awareness of aggregators is on the up and peak seasonality looms, but last year’s data gives us a pretty good indication of seasonal impact and discounts this as the overriding influencer. These stats are displayed below:

(click on the image to display a larger version)

So what about the Long Tail?

When looking closely at Google search query reports, we are able to not only identify the search terms which people are typing when they are being matched, we are also able to identify the shift in the number of words being included in their queries. Some interesting stats about the long tail are highlighted below, comparing Q2 2009 (since the introduction of Google suggest) with last quarter and the same quarter last year:
• The frequency of unique queries has declined by 6% between Q1 2009 and Q2 2009 for home insurance
• Unique queries declined by 12% between Q2 2008 and Q2 2009
• The length of user queries has been relatively consistent with the same period in 2008

What you should be doing!

Make sure you are taking advantage of the relatively basic information that Google provides through its insights tools and constantly work to improve the quality and relevancy of the keyword list you are using:

• Use the Google search based keyword tool
• Make sure you run search query reporting on your campaigns
• If you have access to Hitwise, utilise their Search Intelligence hub to find search term suggestions
• Conduct search term Gap Analysis to spot opportunities and compare your keyword lists to those other sites and your competitors are using to drive traffic
• Remember to negative match effectively if you want to improve the efficiency of your campaign

The most important consideration outside of growing your account is ensuring that these changes in search patterns are not damaging your campaign. If comparison search is being fuelled by Google suggest, but you aren’t price competitive then you might need to consider how you position yourself in the listings. You may even want to avoid comparison led search.

Horses for courses!

Google US Trademark Policy

You may have read recently that the Google trademark guidelines have been amended yet again for the US market.

This change has been introduced to benefit retailers who have perhaps struggled historically to sell branded goods, such as the latest Adidas trainers, for fear of falling foul to the stringent guidelines.

With the new changes coming in US advertisers are now able to use trademarked terms in their PPC ads which is sure to bring about a sigh of relief from advertisers who have struggled to sell popular good online such as iPods where the ads have had to remain very generic.

Below we can see the SERP for iPod for UK users where the change has not been introduced:

Apple’s official ad takes the top spot with the remainder making their best attempt at being relevant. Most run generic MP3 ads whereas several opt for the “|” character that bears some resemblance to “I”. Another strategy is to combine brand plus product as one word – as with Budson.com who lead with.

However, the US is now much more open and we can see below that every single ad showing for the term “iPod” contains the trademark in the headline.

The impact of this change will be that trademark owners are likely to see CPCs inflate.

Prior to the change trademark owners have been protected by a CTR cushion subsidising their CPCs but, with any ad being able to use the protected terms, we expect to see the CTR increase across the board and, as a result, CPCs become much more viable for interested advertisers and making the previously protected terms much more competitive.

The Google change has been introduced as a way to ensure advertisers are able to capitalise more effectively on buzz generated around the release of new products;  footwear, for instance. However, PPC advertisers know all too well that many will be out to game the system in order to secure cheap incremental volume which, all too often, comes at the expensive of the honest advertiser looking to maintain a presence on their own brand terms.

When advertisers simply see an upturn in the number of ads appearing for their brand term it can bring about a significant uplift in CPCs. One advertiser in the Financial Services vertical saw a 45% increase in their brand traffic after a slew of affiliate activity occurred:

With the advent of the revised policy from Google it will be interesting to learn how this changes the strategy of trademark owners and advertisers.

Trademark Monitoring

Latitude is well-placed to offer this level of insight with the introduction of our new Trademark Monitoring tool. We are often asked by our clients to undertake sector and competitor analysis and with this tool we can:

- Capture the SERPs daily or hourly for any number of keywords
- Return the Ad Text and position of each listings to understand
      o Who is appearing in the paid results
      o How strong their offering is
- Return the organic listings to evaluate the cross-channel strength of advertisers
- Analyse paid listings for the presence of your brand terms (or any other terms for that matter!) to see which advertisers are using it

This is an extremely powerful tool and we use this to provide insightful analysis for our clients on a regular basis.

Campaign Benchmarking Tool

Latitude’s intelligent approach to SEM does not end there and our goal is to provide you with as much information on your campaign as possible rather than just delivering a set of numbers each month.

Our bespoke benchmarking tool is a database-driven solution that allows us to objectively evaluate the quality of our accounts on a regular basis.

The time-served Vertical Insight Team has been created to provide this high-end analysis and ensure that we are always aiming for a gold-standard for our clients.  After benchmarking an account we agree a list of actions and a score with your Campaign Manager which, coupled with your targets, will be included when strategising for the future of your account. This truly is a best of breed approach to SEM and if you would like information on the Trademark Monitoring Tool, Benchmarking or anything else for that matter please just give us a call and we’ll be happy to talk things through.

• Yahoo is established. Yahoo originally was a directory of other web sites as opposed to a searchable index of pages. By the end of 1994 Yahoo! had already received one million hits. (1)

• Lycos went public with a catalogue of 54,000 documents. Ranked first on Netscape’s list of search engines by finding the most hits on the word “surf” (7)

• Infoseek is established (43)

• AltaVista delivers the Internet’s first Web Index (8)

1995

• Yahoo was incorporated (1)

• The MSN network of Internet services debuts in the United States. (2)

• Lycos had identified 394,000 documents (7)

• Netscape decides on Infoseek for their default search, which gave Infoseek major exposure. (7)

• Open Text Launched (12)

• Megallan is launched (12)

• Infoseek is launched (12) – who originally hoped to charge for searching.

• Excite is launched (12)

• LookSmart is founded (24)

• The term “Search engine optimisation” is added to the dictionary (20)

1996

• Yahoo raise $33.8 million dollars by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each (1)

• Ask Jeeves founded by David Warthen. The new search engine was to allow searcher to type questions in natural language in order to get results. The Jeeves character, based on the butler in the Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse (3)

• Lycos claim to index over 60 million documents – more than any other web search engine. (7)

• AltaVista partner with Yahoo! (9)

• Excite buys Megellan and WebCrawler. (12)

1997

• BackRub search engine (originally created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin) re branded to Google. (4)

• Snap is launched by CNET (12)

• Open Text ends its operation. (12)

• AOL Search launched, powered by Excite (later to be powered by Google) (12)

1998

• “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognises Google as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998. (4)

• Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com) was released. (5)

• Direct hit Launched (12)

1999

• Google completes a $25-million round of equity funding. (6)

• Yahoo! launch Yahoo! Messenger (1)

• Ask Jeeves revenues increased and completes its initial public offering of stock. (5)

• AltaVista announce the addition of relevant paid placements. The first sponsored placements on search results. The keywords are auctioned every two weeks. (9)

• It is reported that in 1999, the market share per search engine were Google <1%, Yahoo 55.81%, MSN 1.25%, Lycos 5.05%, AltaVista 11.18% (26)

2000

• Google Ad Words launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback. (4)

• Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share.(1)

• Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which would make Google power searches made on yahoo.com. (1)

• Ask Jeeves acquired Direct Hit Technologies, Inc (5)

• Ask Jeeves Purchase Direct hit (12)

2001

• Google launch Image Search, offering access to 250 million images. (4)

• Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time low of $8.11. (1)

• Ask Jeeves purchased Piscataway. (5)

• Megallan closed in April (12)

• Infoseek closed early 2001 (12)

• Snap closed early 2001 (12)

• The top gaining queries in 2001 were 1) Nostradamus, 2) CNN, 3) World Trade Center (27)

2002

• Google overhaul Adwords. The new Adwords includes a new cost-per-click pricing, a set of APIs, and a partnership with AOL. (4)

• Froogle launched (later called Google Product Search). (4)

• Direct hit formally closed (12)

• It is reported that in 2002, the market share per search engine were Google 55.1%, Yahoo 20.6%, MSN 9.4%, AOL 3.5%, Lycos 3%, AltaVista 2.4%, Others 1.7% (42)

• The top gaining queries in 2002 were 1) Spiderman, 2) Shakira, 3) Winter Olympics (29)

2003

• Google launches its content-targeted advertising service (4)

• AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. (10)

• Yahoo acquired Overture Services, Inc (Pay Per click advertising solution) (1)

• It is reported that in 2003, the market share per search engine were: Google 55.2%, Yahoo 21.7%, MSN 9.6%, Ask 1.5%, AOL 3.8%, Lycos 2.6%, AltaVista 2.2%, Others 3.4% (30)

• The most popular queries in 2003 were 1) Britney Spears, 2) Harry Potter 3) Matrix (31)

2004

• Google introduce Google Local, offering relevant local business listings, maps, and directions. (4)

• Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results. (1)

• Ask Jeeves acquire Interactive Search Holdings (5)

• It is reported that in 2004, the market share per search engine were: Google 56.4%, Yahoo 21.1%, MSN 9.2%, ASK 1.7%, AOL 3.8%, Lycos 2%, AltaVista 1.7%, Others 4.1% (32)

• The most popular queries in 2004 were 1) Paris Hilton, 2) Qantas, 3) Australian Idol (33)

2005

• Google Maps goes live. (4)

• Google acquire Urchin, a web analytics tool (4)

• Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable. (1)

• Microsoft unveils adCenter which allow clients to manage paid search listings on MSN together with more than 30 other leading search engines. (2)

• IAC/InterActiveCorp agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for 1.85 billion dollars. (5)

• It is reported that in 2005, the market share per search engine were Google 46.2%, Yahoo 22.5%, MSN 12.6%, ASK 1.6%, AOL 5.4%, Others 11.7% (34)

• The top gaining queries in 2005 were 1) Myspace, 2) Ares, 3) Baidu (35)

• It is reported that in the UK £768.3m was spent on PPC (paid for listings) in 2005. A market share of 56.2% of online advertising (18)

2006

• Google release Google Trends (4)

• Google completes its acquisition of YouTube. (4)

• Google introduce it’s BPF (best practice funding) agency incentive (23)

• Microsoft adCenter is launched – replacing Overture on MSN Search (21)

• Microsoft and Facebook announce its partnership. (2)

• Jeeves the butler was phased out. Ask Jeeves is renamed as “Ask.com” (3)

• AdWords Editor was released January 24, 2006 (14)

• It is reported that in 2006, the market share per search engine were: Google 49.6%, Yahoo 23.9%, MSN 8.8%, ASK 2.8%, AOL 6.2%, Others 8.7% (36)

• The top search queries in 2006 were 1) Bebo, 2) Myspace, 3) World Cup (37)

• It is reported that in the UK £1,165.6m was spent on PPC (paid for listings) in 2006. A market share of 57.8% of online advertising (17)

2007

• Google Hot Trends is launched (4)

• Google Street View debuts in Google Maps in the U.S. (4)

• Ask3D launched (3)

• Microsoft acquire aQuantive for a reported $US 6 billion (25)

• Yahoo!’s Search Marketing’s Panama is released, providing features such as “Quality score”, Geo-targeting, Ad Testing, Campaign Budgeting, and Campaign scheduling (11)

• It is reported that in 2007, the market share per search engine were: Google 56.3%, Yahoo 21.5%, MSN 8.4%, ASK 2%, AOL 5.3%, Others 6.5% (38)

• The fastest rising queries in 2007 were 1) iPhone, 2) Badoo, 3) Facebook (39)

• It is reported that in the UK £762.3m (H1) and £1,619.1m (H2) was spent on PPC (paid for listings) in 2007. A market share of 57.12 (H1) and 57.6% (H2) of online advertising (15) (16)

2008

• Google complete the acquisition deal for DoubleClick. (4)

• Google Website Optimizer comes out of beta (4)

• Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for US$44.6 billion.(1)

• Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, (1)

• It is reported that in 2008, the market share per search engine were: Google 59.3%, Yahoo 16.9%, MSN 13.3%, ASK 2.1%, AOL 4.1%, Others 4.3% (40)

• The fastest rising queries in 2008 were 1) Sarah Palin, 2) Beijing 2008, 3) Facebook login (41)

• It is reported that in the UK £1,986.9m was spent on PPC (paid for listings) in 2008. A market share of 59.3% of online advertising (19)

NOW
As you can see, over a 10/11 year period, the balance of power has shifted from Yahoo to Google. The way we search has changed. The internet is evolving and as a result, everything it touches is being forced to evolve and improve too.
I find working in search engine marketing exciting, challenging and rewarding. With the emergence of Bing.com, Local advertising, evolving PPC and SEO techniques, display, content and social targeting I am confident that search and search engine marketing will continue to evolve and push the boundaries of technology, innovation and communication.
What do you consider to be the next big thing?…..

Getting the point across…

The problem is always context.  In a binary world, there is no simple way to differentiate between what a word like “bass” relates to.  In isolation, “Bass” could mean the guitar, the fish, the British Alpine Ski School, the musical register, or the brewer.  Within a web page there are clues to meaning.  If the page includes the word “beer” then the chances are that “bass” refers to the brewer; however there is still a chance that the subject is an alcoholic fish.

While there is no doubt that search engines are getting smarter at “understanding” the meanings of web pages based on their content, this is not an exact science.  We often see results cropping up in Google that defy logic.  We are still some way from machines that can read at anything above the most basic level.

Things are getting better.  Google recently announced that they would be starting to incorporate the richer information delivered by using microformats such as the vCard standard into their results so that an address or phone number could be extracted from a web page and displayed in the results.  This is helpful when trying to find a business or using a mobile device to browse the web; however the technology is inelegant and takes time – which means it is expensive and people don’t use it.

A better solution on the horizon?

Yahoo and some of their partners have released an alternative solution for general content. Common Tagging is designed to be used at a page level rather than highlighting specific data, and essentially requires the addition of a few lines of code into a web page that link to information about the subject in Freebase.  Going back to our “bass” example, if I wanted to indicate that my page was about the fish, I would need to use the following code to surround the content on the page:

<body xmlns:ctag="http://commontag.org/ns#" rel="ctag:tagged">
<span typeof="ctag:Tag" rel="ctag:means"
resource="http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.fish"
property="ctag:label" content="Bass"/>
CONTENT ABOUT THE BASS FISH GOES HERE
</span>
</body>

Despite the fact that the technology has been led by Yahoo with their small and dwindling market share, it shows promise.  Ease of implementation is essential if a new technology is going to have any real impact, and adding a couple of lines of code is much easier than the kind of complex mark up required for a vCard. It can even be integrated into publishing platforms like Wordpress, which takes almost all the effort out of the process.

In theory, common tagging should make it easier for search engines to categorize content, and provide users with more relevant results based on an authority source.

Haven’t we seen this before?

Search marketers have been doing something similar for a long time using Meta Keywords to provide information about a page.  The problem is that SEOs have been abusing it for years to the point where it is barely considered by the major search engines.

In fact, you name pretty much any development from the search engines over the last decade, and the SEO community has found a way to exploit it fairly quickly in order to make websites rank.

So, will it work?

The Common Tag, like all the other RFDa tags and microformat protocols is doomed to the same fate as the Meta Tag.  It relies on a webmaster’s good behaviour for implementation, so it’s open to abuse. Soon enough, it will be discovered that by adding content about Vanessa Hudgens to a page tagged “High School Musical” it is possible to rank adult material quickly in Yahoo.  That’s when it all goes wrong.

The Common Tag like all xml formatting of data is no more than a step on the way to genuine semantic indexing of content.  That will require computers with a processing power an order of magnitude above what is currently available.  I for one forecast that the technology for this is still a  year or two away :-).

Well, you have likely spotted that our website has changed as part of our brand re-launch from earlier this year. The re-launch reflected our focus on performance and our diversifying product range as well as evoke who we are: A client-driven, consultative organisation which combines advanced technology, creativity and unmatched analytical talent. We have continued to evolve since then with our launch of a new conversion analytics service and a £1m investment in technology.

The new website has modernised to deliver on the values that our new brand evokes. As such, we hope that from the new site you will find an improved user experience, improved technology and information that reflects our position as a leader in digital marketing. We will also be using conversion analytics packages on our site and will share the results on our blog to show you the value that testing can provide to your bottom line.

Interestingly, our blog has become an important part of our brand, with industry experts recommending it. Our new blog aims to continue delivering this insight, albeit on a more interactive platform, as well as with a new name; Digital Marketing Matters. This will mean you can continue to benefit from our experts knowledge here, as well as interact with them more effectively.

As part of the new website launch we are also opening up our, previously client only, newsletter to everybody. Our newsletter includes features such as 5 must read articles of the week, our latest blogs and it is also where we first reveal our recently launched finance, retail and travel quarterly summaries. To subscribe to the newsletter go to the homepage and enter your email in the relevant box.

We hope you like it and as always we like to be interactive and welcome your feedback, so please leave comments below or email marketingteam@latitudegroup.com.

What this all means of course means that often, the results you see are now not particularly relevant to your search. For example:

• A search for ‘Wales holidays’ shows nswholidays.com.au ranking on the first page. This is obviously an Australian site, and I am obviously a UK searcher (using google.co.uk with an IP based in the UK).
• A search for ‘ADSL’, again from the UK shows a .edu (American university) and a Finnish university paper ranking in the top 15, above many UK ADSL providers that you would expect (and used) to rank for that term. These web pages have been around for a long time and have a lot of trust - so much that they are able to outrank UK web pages. (Thanks to Rob Nicholson for pointing that one out)
• Another good example taken from Search Cowboys is a google.co.uk search for ‘family homes Kent’. As it stands at the moment there are more US websites listed in the top 10 than UK!

It’s pretty obvious from all the chat amongst the search community, and the results themselves that this update hasn’t quite gone to plan. There has been no official response from Google as yet, but previous poor quality algorithm updates are often followed by a series of smaller subsequent updates to try and eradicate the flaws. That’s what we have been seeing this week and are expecting to see over the coming days and weeks.

Why?

The reality is most of these elements have Live Search and were Live Search by industry insiders.

So, if Bing helps Microsoft grow its share of the search market it will not be because of any new whizzy functionality, it will be because they shouted about it.

We’re already seeing the growth in buzz around Bing following its launch last week, and the reported $100m US ad spend will surely continue this shift in awareness. In fact, this investment in advertising is so large it surely MUST have an impact. AdAge helped put this in context by pointing out that $50m is a large budget for a consumer roll-out and Google spent $25 in the whole of last year.

I’m sure Mr Ballmer will be kicking himself for not spending the ad budget sooner if Microsoft does manage to grow market share through Bing!

PageRank Sculpting

Firstly, the now apparently invalid technique of PageRank sculpting. To give you a bit of background – this phrase and SEO technique was first coined back in 2007 and is the idea of applying nofollow tags on internal links to unimportant pages of your website, enabling key pages of your website get the maximum benefit from internal ‘link juice’. So, webmasters around the world went away in their thousands and started adding nofollow tags to links to login pages, T’s and C’s pages and other pages that would serve no purpose being indexed.

However, Matt Cutts yesterday explained on his ‘You&A’ panel that this technique is no longer effective. Danny Sullivan used a nice analogy to explain it: “Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in ‘authority’ to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2”.

So, should you undo all your PageRank sculpting work? No. While apparently ineffective it’s not a risk to your website’s Google rankings.

JavaScript Links

This on the other hand is a completely different kettle of fish. First mentioned at Google’s I/O conference a few days ago and debated heavily ever since, JavaScript links now pass PageRank and anchor text in Google. Why is this such a big deal? Well, not only are Google back-tracking on previous guidelines, but they are implying that those websites that have followed these guidelines to date are now at risk of suffering penalisation if they don’t make appropriate changes.

In their attempt to eradicate paid links, Google stated in their guidelines that any paid-for advertising must not be implemented in such a way that it will directly impact your website’s rankings. I.e. links must be implemented using one or more of the following techniques:

• Nofollowing all advertising links
• Blocking the landing page from being indexed via robots.txt
• Redirecting through a 3rd party URL
• Linking via JavaScript.

Note the last point. Having paid-for advertising on other websites that links to your site via JavaScript can now pass PageRank and therefore influence your rankings. So, should you change all those JavaScript links used for your banner campaigns, affiliate campaigns etc.? According to Google, yes. Such links may now be seen as paid links thus contravening their guidelines and potentially risking penalisation.

I agree with Danny Sullivan – Google needs to keep getting better to stay ahead of the competition. However enforcing potentially difficult, expensive, time consuming changes on people who have so far gone out of their way to do everything by the Google book doesn’t seem a particularly fair way to go about it.

If there’s one thing to be said for SEO it’s never dull!

Further SMX Advanced (day 1) commentary: http://searchengineland.com/smx-advanced-day-1-live-blogging-coverage-20386 .