Internet Marketing Blog

SEO Weekly Digest - Issue 51

2009-11-06T20:07:35Z

Twitter Introduces Search Relevancy Features

Trending topics on Twitter are a powerful method of getting behind a cause, promoting a brand, or joining a group of people with whom you have something in common. I’m sure you’ve all seen trending topics which contain spam - i.e spammers use the trending topic’s hashtag so their tweet will be seen by more people. News coming from Twitter yesterday via their blog reveals that they want to do something about it. By showing higher quality results in trends, they hope to cut out the noise and provide relevant results.

MSN Bot 1.1 Retires

Microsoft announced this week that they are officially retiring MSN bot 1.1 and have already introduced MSN bot 2.0. The webmaster blog goes on to say that by the end of this week we should no longer be seeing MSN bot 1.1 in our referrer logs. Hopefully bot 2.0 will be a whole lot more nimble than its older counterpart.

PubCon Iron Man Schedule Released

PubCon Vegas next week looks to have some amazing sessions and events. In addition to the daytime schedule, there’s also a whole host of evening events planned. From Tweetups, to Werewolf parties, to poker tournaments, PubCon Vegas has an evening event for everyone. All events do require a PubCon badge for admission, however.

Google Launches Google Dashboard

You’d have a tough job if you tried to make it throughout the day without coming across a Google product on the Internet. That’s why Google wants to give us greater control and transparency (no, really) over the Google products we use. Here’s an explanation from the blog post explaining the Dashboard:

Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more.

Google News Releases New Sitemap Format

Those of you with news sites will want to listen up - Google released updates to the Google News Sitemap format this week. There is a transition period where Google will still pay attention to the current sitemap format, but recommend that you submit a new sitemap with the new format as soon as possible. They recommend you do this to avoid interrupting your content’s inclusion in Google news, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

Limited Edition PubCon Vegas 2009 T-Shirts from Raven

2009-11-06T20:28:41Z

We’re excited to announce our limited edition PubCon Vegas 2009 t-shirt. We made less than 500 of them and they were made specifically for PubCon Vegas 2009. You can grab one of these shirts for free only at our PubCon booth in the exhibit hall. It’s first come, first serve. We expect them to go quickly, so come early!

We have a women’s and men’s version, both of which are printed on super-soft American Apparel t-shirts. The women’s tee comes in Rasberry and the men’s tee comes in Army Green. These are the designs that will be on the front of the t-shirt. And in typical Raven-style, there’s no obnoxious URLs or product names splattered on the front or back of the t-shirts. This t-shirt was designed to celebrate PubCon and to give you something you would be proud to wear. After all, PubCon rocks!

Bing vs Google: A Comparison Study

2009-11-04T19:07:55Z

Previous iterations of Microsoft’s search efforts were often met by many with skepticism. It’s not like they haven’t made the effort – Yukon, MSN, Live and now Bing – but they still haven’t been able to make significant inroads to compete with Google’s search engine dominance.

With the newly released Bing, an aggressive advertising campaign, and the impending consolidation of Yahoo! search into Bing, it’s inevitable that Microsoft’s search engine use is going to dramatically increase. That means search engine optimizers are going to need to spend a little more time thinking about how to influence Bing, not just Google.

We’re going to take a look at how Bing stacks up against Google and what you can do to make sure your website is fully optimized to take advantage of all that Bing has to offer; regardless of the quality of results Microsoft’s search engine provides.

Ranking Factors

In a Matt Cutts video posted on YouTube, he explained that Google takes into account the following factors when ranking websites:

Trust
Authority
Reputation
PageRank
High Quality

There are also ranking factors and attributes that have been applied to it by search engine optimizers themselves. They include:

Algorithm is easy to manipulate
It heavily relies on keywords in domain and page title
Includes too many spammy websites in its index

Since we have some vague idea of the metrics Google uses to value websites, it’s only fair that we assess Bing on the same metrics to see how it performs.

Bing’s Trust and Authority Issue

The issue of trust can be looked at from both a user’s and search engine’s perspective. A user will decide whether or not a site is worthy both visually and contextually. A search engine bot will take far more into consideration:

outbound, inbound, and internal links
domain age
URL structure
On page factors
Many more factors, including linking relationships with other sites

Theoretically speaking, if we equate the human form of trust with a website, we would be more likely to trust [a website] if it was consistent, provided truthful/accurate information regardless of question (user query), was reasonably mature, and didn’t try to deceive us.

Casual Internet users are more likely to be taken in by less altruistic websites than more veteran Internet users. Unfortunately, casual users make up the majority of users on the Web.

Let’s take the term “weight loss.” Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Bing and Google as seen using Bing vs Google.

The first page results for both search engines contain what appears to be trustworthy and authoritative websites, but there’s a distinction if we look closer. Assuming most people searching for weight loss are looking to lose weight themselves, we can safely assume that they want to know how to lose weight.

Bing’s results are intriguing. The first result is an article from the Mayo Clinic about prescription weight loss drugs. It appears that Bing makes the assumption, based on the user’s query, that the user wants to lose weight and suggests a weight loss method. Wikipedia, About.com, weightloss.com and WebMD make up the top six search results. All are authoritative websites.

Let’s take a look at Google. It appears that Google is not placing as much emphasis on the most authoritative websites, such as Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic (which still appears on the first page results, just further down below the fold). Google includes news results for weight loss which include news items from WebMD and Reuters.

Note that Google also included the quick links snippets in the first result with dieting tips - The Flat Belly Diet, Lose Weight Fast, and 9 Best Diet Tips Ever. Intentional or not, people will click on those links because of the domain with which they’re associated (WebMD).

Google provides me with local business results for weight loss near my current location. I can only presume that Google does this based off my IP or recent query history, because I made sure I wasn’t logged in to my Google account when performing the search.

What Can We Learn?

Bing’s query return lists appear to be heavily favored with authoritative websites. There are two different results from the same domain (about.com). We can surmise that Bing places a high relevance factor on authoritative websites and grants them a certain amount of trust.

I’m not arguing that there isn’t any useful information on these websites. I’m sure there is, but what’s disappointing is the lack of blogs, and universal / local results. This is probably more of an opportunity for Bing to improve. However, based on these results, one might surmise that they would need to direct their marketing efforts directly at these sites, instead of the SERPs themselves.

Actionable Queries

Switching query spaces, let’s take a look at the query fix my car.

This query is informational in intent. What I’m looking for is information regarding fixing my car and car repair (related). The first thing that strikes me is that there are no forums listed - sometimes the best information can come via the way of forums with user input.

The top 9 or 10 results reflect on the query space, and it’s easy to see that both engines rate Wikihow highly. Google seems to have placed a particular emphasis on the query in an informational context - i.e., the exact query fix my car doesn’t appear in the title of a website until the sixth result, whereas Bing’s second-placed result includes the term in both the title and the domain. The content on that blog is about an unfortunate incident about the blog owner’s car being flipped - great story, but really doesn’t help me if I want to get my car fixed.

Bing’s ninth-placed result (a free online game) is completely unrelated and provides no substance or value to my query. Google’s results are much more information-oriented. However, the blogspot domain we just mentioned is listed as #6, so Google doesn’t totally get full marks for the quality of the result it returned. Could this be a domain issue? Another thing to take note of is that Google isn’t without mishaps in its top-ranked terms for the query, either. Take a look at 7th and 8th results, both results for a baby book called Baby Fix my Car. Not the result you would like to see for an informational query.

What Can we Learn?

Something to take into account when you’re in a competitive query space is that a combination of keywords in the domain and title are important to both Bing and Google.

However, it appears that they both can be trumped by domain age. A mature domain with a good reputation, seems to consistently take top spot for a lot of queries. It certainly did in our example with the top result in both Bing and Google being approximately 13 years old.

The second-placed result that we discussed (the blogspot domain) reaffirms that not including high priority, target keywords in your domain and title tags could see you getting ignored by Bing. Indeed, it confirms the majority of reports that show Bing placing heavy emphasis on keywords.

Interestingly enough, Ask.com seems to have picked up on the lack of informational targeting - check out their PPC ad:

Bing’s Version of PageRank: Page Score

The removal of the PageRank metric from Google’s Webmaster Tools was seen by many Search marketers as a step in the right direction — that there’s far too much emphasis placed on PageRank.

Matt Cutts’ reference to PageRank as one of the determining factors when ranking websites is an interesting one. Will the removal of the PR metric lead to the removal of it in the Google Toolbar? Will Google remove it altogether from visibility but still use it as a ranking signal?

Bing has their own version of PageRank which they have named Page Score.

The effect of Page Score as a ranking factor is yet to be known. Many people at the Bing community are asking the question, only to be given a somewhat cryptic answer. However, another thread on the Bing forums point to the page score system as a scoring method for inclusion in Bing’s index. If a site has a low page score (a zero), it could theoretically be removed.

Bing’s official stance on how it ranks your website is as follows:

Bing website ranking is completely automated. The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as webpage content, the number and quality of websites that link to your webpages, and the relevance of your website’s content to keywords. The algorithm is complex and is never human-mediated. You can’t pay to boost your website’s relevance ranking. However, Bing does offer advertising options for website owners. For information about advertising with Bing, see How to Advertise with Microsoft.

Each time the index is updated, previous relevance rankings are revised. Therefore, you might notice a shift in your website’s ranking as new websites are added and others become obsolete.

Although you can’t directly change your website’s ranking, you can optimize its design and technical implementation to enable appropriate ranking by most search engines.

Interesting. No mention of Page Score at all.

What Can We Learn?

The inclusion of a metric that only appears in Bing’s webmaster tools speaks volumes. Assuming that Bing is using Page Score as an indexation method, rather than a ranking method, is interesting. It could be a way to encourage webmasters to work on improving individual pages to provide higher quality results. Alternatively, it looks like Bing is having trouble even indexing sites. Many of the threads in Bing’s user forums suggest that the MSN Bot hasn’t visited their site as often as the Google Bot and isn’t picking up on 301 changes as quickly as Google.

My suggestion for indexation in Bing is to focus on enhancing and optimizing individual pages, instead of building out a copy-thin website. Once you’re confident that Bing is indexing the site, continue to build it out at a steady pace. Know which of your pages has a high Page Score and compare those pages with pages indexed by using the site:http://mydomain.com search operator.

How Does Bing Determine Quality?

To determine if information is high quality, we need to look at an unbiased query term that could be informational, transactional, or branded. Let’s take a look at the results for the term Mac or PC?

When describing something as high quality, we would expect it to be up-to-date, reliable, and reasonably consistent. We can say the same for search results. The query we entered is trying to find information about Mac or PC, but it has a question mark at the end of it — meaning that we’re looking to make a decision.

Immediately, we can see that both Bing and Google have apple.com as their first result (in Bing’s case, the first two). What surprises me is that there is not one Microsoft blog post, website referral or mention (nor PPC ad). Whether this is down to lazy Search Marketing or it’s a fault of the algorithm remains to be seen. However, Microsoft cannot expect to compete for this query with no results whatsoever. If I’m looking to make a decision and all I see for the top results are Mac, I’m going to lean pretty heavily toward making a purchase decision (by the way, if you reverse the search term and enter PC or Mac?, apple.com still dominates).

Let’s take a look beyond the top two results. Bing’s third result is a Wikipedia page for the Mac vs PC ad campaign, the fourth is about Mac PC conversion, the fifth about converting files. It’s not until the sixth result (Wikihow) that we actually get a decent return on our query. Meanwhile, Google provides us with information which actually relates to what we’re searching for - which platform provides better value, an interview with an Apple COO, news results, and returns from related media sites that provide us with information about our query.

What Can we Learn from This?

The fact that there are zero results from Microsoft for this term is staggering. You would think someone at Microsoft would at least be aware that people are wanting to make a decision - a lack of presence in the top SERPs almost makes a user’s decision for him.

Bing’s failure to provide us with any results of value until the eighth result shows Bing to be quite unreliable. Again, Bing’s’ reliance on keywords and matching the user query are its downfall. If you’re looking to gain a SERP increase in Bing, you’d be wise to heavily target keywords in your page titles and content.

The results in Bing (in this brief study at least) have revealed several nuances about Microsoft’s latest search effort:

The first result is generally always from a highly - authoritative website
The third through tenth results are up for grabs. You stand a good chance of ranking highly if you focus heavily on user search queries. Do your research and build your site around it.
Depending on the user query, it seems like Bing is ignoring user intent and is unable to distinguish between the different variety of searches.

An article this year in June on Tom’s Hardware suggests that one of Google’s co-founders is heading up a team to study Bing’s algorithm in an effort to stay ahead of its competitors. They needn’t bother - Bing has a lot of work to do to be able to even come close to Google’s complexity.

Purpose Inc to Host Charity Poker Tournament at PubCon Vegas 2009

2009-11-03T17:30:09Z

Hot off the heels of ThinkTank 2009, DK, of Purpose Inc, is ready to keep the fun going with his annual Texas Holdem Poker Tournament at PubCon. This year the tournament includes free drinks from 8:00PM to 2:00AM (holy crap!).

This is a charity event, and proceeds this year go to the charity of your choice (very cool!). Space is limited, so you should go ahead and signup now before it fills up. I went to the tournament last year and it was a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed watching Brian Chappell get to the final table, all while giving a guy who could easily end his life in a matter of seconds, an antagonistic verbal beating.

Learn more and register here!

Getting PubCon Vegas Fever!

2009-11-02T22:26:27Z

We can’t wait for PubCon Las Vegas. The office has been buzzing as the last details are put into place. It feels a little scary to cross this many things off of my todo list, but I’m also excited about Raven’s Gold Sponsor for PubCon (our first major sponsorship of anything!). I’m still not sure how everything is going to get from Nashville to the booth.

I’ve been putting together a list of things to take or do for the Vegas trip. This is what I have so far:

Alyson’s PubCon Tips

A light jacket. Who knows it might get chilly.
Breath mints or gum or lip gloss with breath fresheners in it
Favorite hangover remedy
Fake wedding band (if you are a female and don’t want to get hit on)
Cash to tip your drivers
You should probably sign up for twitter already!
An extra pair of clothes just in case

Jon is giving two presentations during the week, one on Tuesday and one one Wednesday. Trust me, I hear him talk every single day and you will not want to miss these (although I also hear him yodel, opera sing, curse, and groan in misery every day too).

We also have some huge freebies at our booth this year. So huge, in fact, if I told you, I would have to kill you… not really, but maybe. We will have a limited number, and freebies are only given on a first come first serve basis, or if we really, really like you, we may consider saving something for you.

We will have seven members of our team at PubCon. Both Aliyson’s will be there @RavenAlison and me, @RavenAlyson. We will both be wearing Raven gear, chucks, and glasses some of the time. The Raven team will be giving live demos, one-on-one walk-throughs, and hardy handshakes. So if you want to check out Raven in person, make sure to stop by our booth. If you want to schedule time during the conference to meet with us, just shoot me a message on Twitter (@RavenAlyson) and I’ll make sure we schedule a one-on-one session with you.

We’re also planning on releasing a special promo code, that will include a gift if you use it. We’ll release more details about it during PubCon via our booth and Twitter.

All this to say, we can’t wait to connect with everyone at PubCon. Please make sure to stop by our booth and introduce yourself!

SEO Weekly Digest - Issue 50

2009-11-06T15:32:08Z

Thesis Export Settings Plugin

Many of us use Thesis as our Wordpress theme of choice. For personal usage and for clients, Thesis allows unparalleled customization and tweakage. The one function Thesis lacks is an ability to export those settings and save them for the next time you have to customize the theme. Let me introduce you to the Thesis Settings Export Plugin. With this plugin you can export your Thesis Options, Design Options, and Thesis OpenHook content. With Thesis 1.6 just released, there is no reason whatsever to not be using the best theme available for Wordpress.

Google Launches Music Service

Google announced this week that they’ve made it easier for us to find our favorite bands and musicians with their newly launched Music Search. The results will be listed above the regular search results with links to hear the song. Here’s what the feature looks like when searching for Bob Dylan:

Twitter Lists Go Live

Five or six weeks ago Twitter made an announcement that they would be rolling out lists and making them available to selected members. Well, this week, the lists were made available for all Twitter members. Twitter lists enable you to group Twitter users into categories. For instance, you can follow the Raven team list and perhaps a group of SEO’s?

Google Begins to Use RSS/Atom Feeds to Discover New URLs

Yesterday Google posted on their official webmaster central blog that they recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for finding new web pages. In doing so, they hope to be able get new pages into their index as quickly as possible. Google did mention one caveat however - ensure that the crawling of your RSS or Atom feeds is not prohibited by your robots.txt. They encourage you to test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Webmaster Tools.

Outside.in Expands Its Hyperlocal Search Capabilities

Search Engine Land posted today about Outside.in’s local search capabilities. With its recent relaunch, Outside.in demonstrates some new local search features that include searching by city, zip, or neighborhood from a single search box, doing a keyword search for any of the previously mentioned locations, and subscribing to the RSS feed of any searches you perform on the site. Fore more details, read the full article.

Don’t Spew Link Vomit: Brand the Good Stuff!

2009-11-02T23:55:17Z

Social media has become THE marketing darling of 2009, and being in complete control of your brand and message via the different platforms becomes more and more important as the medium gains momentum. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel last week at BarCamp Nashville with members of the social media team at The Tennessean to talk about content and branding as it relates to social media campaigns, and wanted to highlight some of the discussion and great insight from those guys on how they go about marketing in the social space.

We are now producing and sharing more content than ever before, which is fantastic, but are you sharing the right things? Are you sure your community (and that is what your clients/customers/consumers are) wants to see what you’re sharing with them? Or are you just sharing what you THINK they would want to see? Like it or not, the community is going to have a bigger influence on your message than ever before. To a lot of marketers, there is no greater misery. The way I look at it, it couldn’t be better. If they aren’t interested in certain aspects of your campaign, you have instantaneous feedback on that and can be constantly making tweaks to insure that you’re on target with the message. That is, if you’re tracking your content.

But why does someone in your community click on a link that you’ve shared in the first place? Does the headline that accompanies the link peak their interest? Have you earned a reputation as a trusted source, as well as someone who shares great, quality content? One of the most notable pieces of data gathered when exploring the stats from The Tennessean’s social media campaign was that their branded URL shortener, TNne.ws, owned 92% of the click-throughs in a six month period, even though it had only been used for roughly two of those six months. What we infer from this is that the community is obviously much more willing to click-through to something that they perceive is coming from a trusted source. So that trusted source (meaning the URL itself) along with a quality headline ensures that you are putting your best foot forward as far as your overall campaign is concerned. Track each click. See what the community is reading, what they aren’t, and adjust your campaign accordingly.

I touched on this a bit above, but I think the one thing people don’t tend to think about in social campaigns is owning complete control over the links that they are sharing. A few weeks ago I received a few emails telling me that our generic URL shortener, kl.am, had been blocked by Facebook, so that meant those links couldn’t be shared and tracked. Since it is generic, we don’t have much control over the content that people use it to share, leaving it to be blocked when it shouldn’t have. The ban has since been lifted, but it just goes to show you how important having complete control over your content becomes, even down to something that may at first be perceived as trivial like a URL shortener.

Over the summer I wrote a post on how baffled I was by CokeURL.com, so I won’t go into that again, but I’m still scratching my head on that one. By harnessing the power of your community, you’ll quickly see trends on the content front, what they want to see and what they don’t want to see, and this can go a long way to help you from “spewing any old link anywhere.” The social team at The Tennessean also recommends really determining your audience for each individual social network and tailoring your campaign accordingly. They for example use Twitter for breaking news and Facebook for more entertainment type stories. All decisions made based on feedback from their community and what they were interacting with.

If you take complete control of your social media campaign, listen to your community, and really think about the content that you are sharing, your campaign will reap the benefits.

New Event Manager Enhances Monitoring and Reporting of Internet Marketing Campaigns

2009-10-26T19:45:59Z

Internet marketing campaigns can have several events associated with them. For example, a campaign may include email newsletters, link building efforts, press releases, content distribution, and much more. It’s hard to keep up with so many events, and even harder to include those events in reports. That’s why we created the new Event Manager.

The Event Manager allows you to record any type of event related to your website’s campaign. The event(s) are then displayed on graphs, like the Google Analytics Daily Visits view in Raven.

You can also create branded PDF reports with event details.

Watch the video to see the Event Manager in action.

SEO Weekly Digest - Issue 49

2009-10-23T19:55:41Z

Microsoft Announces Deals with Twitter and Facebook

This week Microsoft announced that they had penned deals with both Twitter and Facebook. The integration of Twitter is available to use, although it is still in BETA. The Twitter updates Bing are providing are updated in real-time and can be sorted by recency or relevancy. When a user enters a search query, Bing will provide the two most shared tweets based on what the user has entered.

Google Reaches Agreement with Twitter

Hot on the heels of Bing’s announcement, Google revealed via their blog that they had reached an agreement with Twitter. The agreement will allow Google to include Twitter updates in their search results. Google describes the agreement as:

…the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Google Launches Custom Search Mobile

Originally released on Google’s Mobile blog, was the announcement that Custom Search’s availability is now extended to certain mobile devices such as Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod touch, and Palm Pre.

Mobile Social Networking Sees Huge Increase

A study by Nielsen reveals this week that mobile social networking has seen a 187% increase since July 2008. What’s most intriguing about this study is that many of those mobile social networkers are switching to mobile only social networking platforms

Yahoo! Reports Q3 Earnings

Yahoo have released their figures for Q3 2009, and they are (for the most part) positive. Their reported earnings for the quarter are $1,575 million. Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s Chief Executive Officer, relates the success to:

“With new products like Yahoo! homepage, our brand revitalization campaign and expansion in the Middle East through Maktoob.com, our execution is improving and we’re focused on what we do best - being the center of people’s online lives.”

Google’s New Search Features Offer More Opportunities for SEO

2009-10-21T15:55:21Z

While Bing debuted several new features with their updated and rebranded search engine, Google continues to one-up them with new features of their own. Google’s new features are changing the search engine optimization landscape once again, and are also providing new opportunities for Internet marketers that practice SEO.

The new features that will have the most impact on search engine optimizers include:

Microformat integration with Rich Snippets
New Search Options allowing you to sort by past hour, sort by specific date range, or include more/fewer shopping titles
Search snippets
Using named anchors to identify sections on your pages

I’m going to show you what these new features do and how you can integrate them into your own campaigns.

Microformat Integration with Rich Snippets

In May, Google announced the introduction of Rich Snippets. Rich Snippets allow a site owner to offer up information based on a user’s search query. As of this writing, only snippets for reviews and people have been implemented.

How to Integrate Rich Snippets Into Google

For your site to display Rich Snippets in the SERPs, you have to include markup structure and attributes that are machine readable. The best way to do that is to use microformats. Here’s an example of the above snippet in HTML before adding microformats:

Here’s the same code with microformats added:

There’s an opportunity here for those performing local SEO services and small business to get a greater share of visibility and traffic. You can visit the official microformat site to review hCard examples and hreview examples.

New Search Options

As Google evolves into a more personalized search engine–displaying less ambiguous results–they are introducing what looks to be like a user prioritization model. Google now accounts for 6% of all Internet traffic and the effort to fit the query with the user’s intent is gaining momentum.

How to Use Google’s New Search Options

When Show Options is clicked on, the + image will open up a side navigation which includes many options to customize your search query. The new items we’re going to focus on are:

Sort by past hour
Sort by specific date range
Include more / fewer shopping sites

Sort by Past Hour

One of the criticisms leveled at Google is its lack of real time results. If there’s a specific event, many people will clamor for information — yet Google struggles to provide it. Of course, it’s not just specific events for which the ‘past hour’ results provide meaningful data.

One of the great traffic generation tips for blog owners is to blog about a recent event or breaking news. If users are searching for that kind of information and redefine their search results to within the past hour, it’s likely that your recent blog post will be one of those listed - of course, there’s way more to ranking highly than providing breaking news, but a well-put-together blog post with optimized titles and content will certainly aid your chances.

Sort by Specific Date Range

Sorting by a specific date range can be useful when presenting sporting news, local news, or reviews.

Normally, when a user wants specific information within a certain time frame, he would have to go to the blog or website and browse until they found news items or updates that have a particular date. Now, a user can enter their search query and date range and see all the sites that have content suitable for the user’s requirement.

Include More / Fewer Shopping Sites

Depending on the user’s intent, it’s possible to eliminate or include more shopping sites.

For instance, a user could enter an ambiguous search query - Levi jeans. Google doesn’t know whether the user is searching for a pair of jeans, or simply wants historical information about the brand.

Here is what the first page is like without any filters applied:

Selecting fewer shopping sites brings up the following listings:

Selecting more shopping sites brings up the following listings:

Gone is the listing for JC Penney’s, Denim Express, us.levi.com, and the shopping results listings. That’s almost one third of the first page listings gone because of a user’s tweak.

If you select ‘more shopping sites’, Google will assume that the user’s intent is to make a purchase. The listings now contain prices, and the shopping results listings now appear at the top.

Search Within Search:

The search within search box is something Google rolled out in early 2008. However, it’s still worthy of a mention.

Upon first glance, you would think that there would be certain factors that would influence Google when deciding which websites would be given this search box. For instance - site links, domain authority, and if the website used Google’s paid search box as their main search function.

We couldn’t find a correlation between any of those factors and remained curious. Certainly, it appears that the larger and more popular the site, the higher the possibility of your site’s being chosen. We can only assume that Google automatically figures out which sites users want this for by analyzing user queries; the site search box is only displayed when Google believes there’s a high likelihood the user’s intentions warrant it.

Students doing homework assignments are probably going to use Wikipedia as their first and main port of call - and why shouldn’t they? For the most part, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of information. A user query of wikipedia keyword 1 keyword 2 is a good indication to Google that the user wants to search Wikipedia on the keywords the user has included. If there are repetitive user queries like this, it would make sense for Google to add the search box for Wikipedia.

We can assume that the search box only appears for major sites because those are the sites drawing enough traffic to warrant the addition of the search box.

Links Within Search Snippets

Links within search snippets are useful for websites which contain informational content.

Currently, the snippet links are Early life, Gunpowder Plot, Reaction and In Popular Culture. If we visit the Wikipedia page, we can see that those four terms are headers for different sections. Once more, these search snippet links are algorithmically assigned, so it’s up to Google to decide which links, if any, that it decides to show.

Direct from the horses mouth:

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.

The words bolded above are facets of good usability and smart UI (user interface).

Here’s a code example with anchor text highlighted:

I covered several of Google’s search features that involve both customization and personalization. As Search continues to grow and evolve, it will be interesting to watch how Google adapts and innovates. One feature I’ll be keeping a close eye on will be real-time search, which will surely change the rules of organic SERPs once again.