Clean Results

Social updates are not present in the search results. Bing has done this to keep the results clean and not jumble them up with updates from people in your social communities. This is much different than Google Search Plus your World, which is social update heavy.

According to Bing, “Beautiful, relevant, results are the first thing you see. Instead of cluttering your results with social updates, we’re honoring the purity of the core web results making it easier to focus on the links you need to get things done.”

Side Note by Bing
Interestingly, in this same section of the blog post they mentioned that they conducted tests that removed any trace of Google and Bing branding. When they did this study in January of last year, 34% people preferred Bing, while 38% preferred Google. The same unbranded study now shows that Bing Search results now have a much wider lead over Google’s. When shown unbranded search results 43% prefer Bing results while only 28% prefer Google results.

Personally, I think Bing will continue to catch on. Google has really made some questionable moves. I think they have been pushing out changes too fast. And that is coming from a guy who wants everything done yesterday.

The New Interface

The new interface is welcoming. You have what they call the Snapshot in the middle, a sidebar to the right with a few ads and another far right sidebar with your social elements. That far right sidebar is very similar to the Facebook Ticker in look and feel, but the functionality is directly related to search. So now we can jump in and talk about the elements.

Bing Social Sidebar

Bing had an interesting lead in to this section stating “90% of those asked said they prefer to listen to their friends when making decisions. Whether it’s making a purchase, deciding on a vacation destination, choosing a great restaurant, or figuring out which movie to see this weekend, the new Bing focuses on bringing friends, experts and enthusiasts into your search experience through a dedicated social ‘sidebar.’ With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets people share, discover, and interact with friends like they do in real life.”

Sounds a lot like the same jibber-jabber all the search engines are pushing, but I’ll bite for now. Here are some notes on the sidebar:

Sidebar is Always There
The sidebar will be present after each query but will remain off to the right. You decide if you want to use it.

Element 1: You can Interact with Friends
The sidebar lets you interact with your friends on Facebook. You can post a question to them, tag friends that Bing suggests may know about a topic and you can share information to your friends on Facebook directly from Bing. Total mind blower, right? But seriously, the level of integration they have achieved is very cool. Bing is able to recommend friends who are an authority on a search topic based on their updates. If they shared a post on Costa Rica, and you have pictures of Costa Rica on Facebook, you will appear in their sidebar when they do a search for a Costa Rica related item.

Element 2: You Can Interact with “People Who Know”
You can also interact with people who are an authority on a topic, as decided by Bing. “You will see top experts and enthusiasts from leading networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Blogger.” These people become authorities by writing and updating on these topics. Bing will let you follow these people and/or even ask them questions.

Element 3: Activity Feed
The last element at the bottom of the sidebar is the activity feed. Again, this is really like the Facebook Ticker, it basically shows you posts, queries and questions from your friends who are using Bing and are your Facebook friends. These activities show up in Bing and in Facebook, so you can comment on either site and it will cross pollinate.

Not Live Yet

This update will be going live in the United States the week of May 14th. Bing also intends to launch a mobile version of this amazing new integration.

SEO Implications

There are many, many SEO implications to consider here. What does the algorithm entail to make these social profiles an authority for search queries? What will the traffic look like that results from a social profile showing up next to a query? Will Bing be displaying company profiles in this area or only people? How will they determine this?

In this case of all new things with the Internet, we will just have to wait and see. This will be a fun one to test.

In the case of keywords, each website has keyword groups or buckets. These buckets are grouped based on similar themes. By analyzing the themes and the ROI of each theme we can make better decisions on keyword groups to build pages for, links to, etc. So that is the premise of this blog, now let’s jump into specifics. As a side note, you could take this up a level and make buckets for all of your online traffic (social, email, PPC, etc). You could even take it up further and look at your overall marketing picture, but for the purposes of this post we will stay granular and focus on organic SEO keyword traffic. Although I am more of a big picture guy myself… 

Common Keyword Buckets

First, let’s take a look at some common keyword buckets. Next, we will determine ways to analyze and use the data, but before we do, we need to recognize that all keywords fall into two main buckets and then there are smaller and smaller buckets under each. This is great because you can get as granular as you want. The top buckets are branded and non-branded terms.

• Branded Terms: Terms surrounding your business or your businesses’ own branded products.
• Non-Branded Terms: Pre-existing terms that categorize or describe your product.

There is a W3C presentation that helps frame the historical reasons for HTML5. The slides are available in plain text ^[1] and Technicolor.^[2] At the risk of confusing the facts,^* I’ll try to explain why this is important and what is important about it.

For over a decade, XHTML1/1.1, a successor to HTML4, has been the most current version of HTML. XHTML1/1.1 leveraged the strengths of XML to create well-formed Web pages. These pages could be validated against a schema to test for compliance to a standard. Perhaps most importantly, it helped fix the issue of cross-browser incompatibility.

XHTML2 was going to be the successor to XHTML1/1.1; as the name suggests. However, this ended up not being the case. HTML5 is. Here’s why: XHTML2 was actually a different language; a new abstract approach to HTML. In at least the immediate future, making Web pages would’ve been made more difficult. It was a departure from the trajectory of many HTML traditions:

• IMG elements were being phased out in favor of OBJECT elements.^[3]
• The anchors, A elments, were being phased out because, “all elements may now play the role of a hyperlink.“ ^[4]

The objections to adopting XHTML2 were compounded by the fact that XHTML2 was not reverse compatible, by design. This meant that browsers that could already read HTML4 and XHTML1/1.1 could not read XHTML2. It kinda’ seemed like an effort by a consortium of smarty-pants engineers to force an idealized hypertext markup language onto the World Wide Web; with disregard for the immediate needs – and sights set on the long run.

Fortunately, there was outrage about all of this ^[5] and the W3C took a different tact. The next generation of Web pages would be made using HTML5, rather than a new markup language. HTML5 would incrementally change HTML, instead of completely overhauling it. It would be a forgiving syntax, one that anticipates that there will be deviation from standards. Instead of forcing compliance – it makes recommendations for how Web browsers should adapt. It also adds some new features.^[6]

*If nothing else, read this: Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML2/HTML5 Comic Strip by Brad Colbow.

1. HTML5, XHTML2 – Learning from history how to drive the future of the Web: http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/05-20-smith-html5-xhtml2/
2. HTML5, XHTML2 – Learning from history how to drive the future of the Web: http://www.slideshare.net/sideshowbarker/html5-and-xhtml2
3. XHTML™ 2.0 XHTML Image Module: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-image.html#sec_20.1.
4. XHTML™ 2.0 XHTML Hypertext Module: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-xhtml2-20040722/mod-hypertext.html#sec_10.1.
5. Jeffrey Zeldman Present: The Daily Report – XHTML 2 and all that (The Sky is Falling): http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0103b.shtml#skyfall
6. HTML5 Differences from HTML4: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/

What is the Update Targeting?

In this portion I would like to list a few choice quotes from Google and then we can talk about them. These quotes are pulled from Google’s Post on Another step to reward high-quality sites.

In the post Google mentions, “Earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

I thought this was pretty interesting. I think a lot of people missed this update. If you did, get that content higher up on the page.

Google goes on to say the following. “In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”

Here we see that Google wants you to create high quality websites. So let’s find out more concerning what they view as a high quality site. Google starts off with an example of a website that is keyword stuffing.

“Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:”

This one is pretty hard to argue with. I mean, no one wants to Google something and then come to a page with keywords stuffed into it like this. So I have to say, they got it right here.

Google then goes on to show another example. “Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition.”

Again, bravo to Google for making this not OK in the search world, but wait, weren’t these things already not OK? The answer is yes! Almost all of the items targeted in this update have been frowned upon and spoken out against for sometime. However, Google says they are now making better updates to the algorithm to catch this type of spam.

Google says that sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; they are being spammy.

This is also multilingual update; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

So now we have a decent idea of what Google says the update entails. Let’s take a look at around the web.

Winners and Loser from Google Webspam (Penguin) Update

There have already been some big gains and massive losses in this algorithm change. In this post by Danny Sullivan, we see who won and lost.

Big Winners Include

• Spotify.com – Traffic up 30%
• Yellowbook.com – Traffic up 30%
• Observer.com – Traffic up 30%
• MensHealth.com – Traffic up 30%

Big Losers Include

• Similarsites.com – Traffic down -73%
• Doc-txt.com – Traffic down -72%
• Cubestat – Traffic down 69%
• 5ty.org – Traffic down -65%

Overall, looks like the update has really made an impact on sites. It’s pretty interesting to see how drastic is really has been. Seeing how drastic this change in traffic has been for these websites leads me to believe that Google may be looking at much more than they let on.

SEO Strategies for Google Webspam Update

This Google Penguin Webspam Update is still very new. So it is hard to make any large SEO policy changes without fully evaluating the change. That being said, we do know a few things.

Briefly:

1.      Get content high on the page
2.      Do not keyword stuff
3.      Do not spin content
4.      Do not internal link non-relevant content

Nothing really new here… We don’t do this anyway.

Comments from Around the Web

The outcry has been tremendous to this update. Here are some of the things people are saying.

•  There is no way it only affected 3% of searches
•  People are angry at Google who have lost rankings (duh)
•  People feel that this is an effort to kill SEO and drive everyone to PPC and Google +
•  People feel that this is an update done to strategically increase Googles income

 References

• Winners & Losers From Google’s Webspam Update
• Google Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results
• Google’s New Anti-Spam Algo Causing Anger, Frustration Inside Marketing Industry
• Another step to reward high-quality sites

What do you think about the update? Leave a comment below!

From an advertiser perspective interest categories are awesome. We use them here at SEO Inc to deliver outstanding results both for client branding and direct response initiatives. We like interest categories because they expand the targeted audience available to an advertiser and provide a layer of control when combined with other display targeting options such as contextual or remarketing.

On the other side of the coin are the internet users who are being classified. Their perspective is not always so rosy because for some it seems like a violation of privacy. Personally I think that behavioral targeting is a great thing. I want to be shown ads that are highly relevant to my interests. I don’t want to see ads for senior living or baby toys – I want to see ads for solutions to my particular wants and needs. If an advertiser can figure out what I need based on my browsing history they have saved me time and made my life more efficient.

Like them or not you’ve probably been classified. Here’s how to view, edit, remove and even opt out of interest category ads. Navigate to the following URL http://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb. Under the “Your Categories” section select “remove or edit” which should bring you to a page that contains table like this:

It’s definitely an interesting experience see the categories that Google has matched to your browsing history for the first time. My demographics are spot on and I’ve been browsing eCard sites for a client which explains that category.

If you’re like me you’d rather not see ads for Cards & Greetings, but marketing and search engine solutions would be useful. First click “remove” on any existing categories you don’t like, then add your preferences:

Google’s transparency and user enabled controls for interest categories are impressive, but there’s much more to the Web than Google. If you’d like to know more about how you’re being tracked online beyond Google try downloading Collusion, a Firefox add-on that allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking you across the Web.

How have you been tracked and categorized and what is your opinion of behavioral targeted advertisements? If you have an interesting experience as a user or advertiser lets continue the conversation in the comments.

According to Klout, Brand Squads are currently in beta and they are meant to be a place where influencers can have a direct impact on the brands they care about. With Brand Squads, you will see a dynamic list of top influencers for each brand, watch conversations flow across social media, monitor information about a brand’s recent developments, and earn access to special Perks.

Now that we know a little more about the pages, let’s take a closer look.

Top Influencers
Towards the top of the page we see the top influencers. These are the people who have the highest Klout score that interact with the brand.

Klout Perks
In the middle of the page we see perks. Perks are rewards for the top 10 Klout users for that brand. The perks are provided by the brands as incentive to their top influencers.

Top Klout Content
At the bottom of the page we see the top content for that brand. This is a nice feature, as it allows influencers and other users to see what is trending for that particular company.

Klout Brand Pages

Key Questions about the new Klout Pages

Do brands want to give this authority to individuals?

Giving users this amount of exposure and association with a brand is dangerous. Many of these users are just random people who have no real interest in the brand’s success. Brands may not want to participate in this platform with this in mind.

Will this help brands create better distribution lists and reach key contacts?

There is of course the advantage that this page makes brand influencers very visible to the brand itself. Because of this, brands will be able to easy identify and award key influencers. But shouldn’t they know who these people are already?

Negative content is just as visible

One major issue regarding these pages is that there is no content filter, so negative content is treated the same as positive. So why would a brand want to reward an influencer when they may be a negative influencer.

Are there SEO implications?

We always ask, are there SEO implications? Well, top content and links are listed on these pages. So these links could pass authority on to the content they link to and eventually back to a website. So yes, there are SEO implications and certainly there are some ways to take advantage of the page.

Are there online reputation management considerations?

Yes! If these pages get ranked and become highly visible they will influence a company’s online reputation. If the content is negative that is listed on the page we could see some issues arise. Due to the way these pages are structured, I would guess they will rank fairly well, especially if brands links to them from their site. While this is the case, the structure of the pages could be improved. I would imagine Klout will hire a smart SEO company like ourselves at some point to get even better onsite optimization going.

Overall, the new Klout pages are very new, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves too much. That being said, we would love to hear insight from you! Please comment below!

References:

• Mashable Breaking Story on Klout Brand Pages
• Klout Blog Introduces new Pages
• TechCrunch Klout Launches new Brand Squad Pages

How to Access Social Media Reporting

To access the new Google Analytics social media reporting tab follow these steps.

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Select your account
3. Select Traffic Sources
4. Select Social

Under social you will see:

• Sources & Pages: Identify networks & communities where people engage with your content.
• Conversions: Measure the value of social by tracking your goals, conversions and ecommerce transactions.
• Social Plugins: Measure your on-site user engagement.
• Social Visitors Flow: Compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site.

Google Analytics Social Overview Tab

This tab shows you total visits, the number of social visits and how the social visits assist in conversions. It also breaks down the social networks and the traffic they deliver.

Google Analytics Social Overview

Google Analytics Social Sources Tab

This gives you a better look at how each one of your sources of social traffic compares to your overall traffic.

Google Ananlytics Social Sources

Google Analytics Social Page Tab

This report shows you the pages that are the most engaged socially.

Google Ananlytics Social Pages

Google Analytics Social Conversions Tab

This tab will show you both conversion from a social network and conversions that were assisted by a social network.

Google Ananlytics Social Conversions

Google Analytics Social Plugin Tab

This area allows you to track likes, Tweets, etc. However, it only shows Google +1s as default.

Google Analytics Social Plugin

Google Analytics Social Visitors Flow Tab

This tab is really amazing. It shows how visitors from social flow through your website. You can see where they start and where they finish.

Google Analytics Social Visitors Flow

Now that you know a little about Google Analytics Social reporting it is time for you to jump in and try it for yourself. If you have questions please contact SEO Inc.

References

• Google: https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1683971
• Google: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1316556
• Marketing Land: http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138?fb_ref=sel-home-stbox

Many things are looking bright for the soon to-be public company, but there are still some troubles.

Facebook Fights Paid Comment Spammers

According to Allfacebook.com, there has been an email circulating that offers the following proposition.

“The email offers the bait of $25 an hour for commenting on walls, then links to a website — the link’s toward the bottom of this post — that buries the switch at the bottom of the homepage: Before you can see any of the opportunities, you need to pay $4.95 for a three-day training program. And if you don’t cancel after that initial period, you’re automatically billed $49.95 a month for membership in a site promising listings of social media jobs.” – AllFacebook

As we can see, the email appears to be a scam. But it does beg the question, is there someone out there who is starting a business based on paid Facebook comments? The answer is… Of course there is! Just take a look at sites such as procomments.com or buyyourfans.com. Getting more comments for your social media sites is just a few dollars away. This causes problems for sites such as Facebook who pride themselves on clean user generated content.

Facebook Like Buy Campaigns

Along with the ability to buy comments, you can of course buy likes on Facebook. For that matter you can also buy followers on Twitter, buy subscribers on YouTube, etc, it’s all possible. But let’s focus on buying likes on Facebook for the moment. For tens to hundreds of dollars you can purchase thousands of fans for your page. The issue is, who are these fans? In most cases they are simply dead accounts or people who will quickly unlike your page after they have received their compensation.

Summary

As Facebook has grown so has their problem with spam. When third parties offer the ability to buy Facebook likes and Facebook comments, and it actually works to some degree, it deeply discredits the authority of the site and speaks poorly about the sites ability to manage their own system. Of course we understand that spam is an ongoing battle. Let’s not forget, Google has a huge full-time team of geniuses working on this issue at their headquarters. Facebook will be working hard to address these issues before they go public.

What do you think about paid comments and likes? Leave a comment below! Sorry, no compensation!

Enjoy!

Pinterest, the upstart that focuses on letting users “pin” things that interest them, has been growing by leaps and bounds in traffic and new users.  This has allowed Pinterest to snatch the 3^rd spot for the largest social network in the United States, boasting 104 million visitors in the month of March alone.

So what is the future like for Pinterest? A new report from the Experian shows Pinterest received 21.5 million visits during the week ending January 28, a nearly 30-fold increase over a comparable week in July. If you think that means Pinterest is going no other way than up, then you would be right. Analysis of Pinterest’s traffic is fueling more active participation by companies whose products are being shared on Pinterest boards.

Interesting statistics from PRDaily.com:

• Comparing the similar time in history with Twitter, Pinterest is attracting users as much as two to three times as effectively. (via RJMetrics)
• According to AppData, Pinterest has 10.4 million registered users and are growing exponentially.
• American users of Pinterest spend an average of one hour and 17 minutes on the site, much more than of Twitter (36 minutes), LinkedIn (17 minutes), and Google+ (six minutes). (via AllTwitter)
• Estimated new visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429 percent from September to December 2011. (via Monetate)
• The average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and seven hours on Facebook. (via TechCrunch),
• Since the beginning of the 2012 year, daily Pinterest users have increased by more than 145 percent. (via Mashable)
• More than 2,000,000 Facebook-connected users are on Pinterest daily. (via Mashable)
• Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota contain the most Pinterest users.
• The largest demographic of Pinterest users are women, ages 25-34 (via Ignite)
• In the U.K., the majority percentage of Pinterest users are 56 percent male vs. 44 percent female. (via Ragan.com)
• Crafts, gifts, hobbies/leisure, interior design, and fashion designers/collections are the top interests on Pinterest in the U.S.: (via Ragan.com)
• Venture capital, blogging resources, crafts, Web stats/analytics, and SEO/marketing are the most engaged interests on Pinterest in the U.K.:  (via Ragan.com)

If you are indecisive about creating a Pinterest profile, we say go for it. It’s filling a niche not covered by any major existing social platforms, and serves as a marketing tool for businesses selling easily photographed products and services. Pinterest has a highly engaged audience of “pinners” which means there is plenty of opportunity to get your brand out there and catch the eye of millions.

References 1:

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/17_Pinterest_stats_to_show_your_boss_or_client_10905.aspx

References 2:

http://go.experian.com/forms/experian-digital-marketer-2012?WT.srch=PR_EMS_DigitalMarketer2012_040412_Download

Watch a Video on Google Project Glass

At this point, SEO Inc. feels it is too soon to jump to conclusions regarding the products success and any Facebook downfall. However, this is one cool new tool!

What do you think about Google Project Glass? Do you think it will give Google + a competitive edge over Facebook? Leave a comment below.