As always, we searched for the commercials (see my in-depth post on Marketing Land for what went right and what could have gotten better), but what else did we search for on game day?

Recipes!

Super Bowl Start Time (of course)

Just like every year.

In 2012, I noted that the NFL finally got it right, and set up a page to answer the question that clearly is on everyone’s minds. This trend continued last year (when Google also started providing the answer right at the top of the results). But this year, it was just like 2011 all over again. The NFL site didn’t say anything about the start time of the game and so the page with last year’s start time showed up on the second page of results. Oh, NFL, how you missed out on all those potential visitors, clearly your target audience.

People

You thought I was exaggerating before, but just look at Google Trends. Anytime anyone showed up on TV to wear a big fur coat and toss a coin, or sing a song, or randomly introduce players even though no one has any idea how he’s related to football, we searched.

Skittles!

Fine. Maybe we mostly searched (and bought and ate) Skittles in Seattle.

What matters is that I was able to enjoy a refreshing Skittles-based cocktail while watching the NFC championship game before our entire city ran out.

(Go hawks!)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2009: Start times and other searches 
• Super Bowl 2010: Still looking for when it starts
• Super Bowl 2011: The search for start time continues
• Super Bowl 2012: The NFL gets it right and tells us when the game starts
• Super Bowl 2013: How are we searching?
• Super Bowl 2013: What we searched for during the game

The post Super Bowl 2014: How We Searched appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Taking a closer look, the Bing search results weren’t www.bing.com/search URLs, which are correctly blocked by Bing’s robots.txt file. They were coming from www.bing.com/entities/search. This pattern is not blocked, which is how the related URLs ended up indexed by Google. As for why those URLs are no longer indexed? Google may have noticed and pulled them.

But what are these /entities URLs? They seem to be a hybrid of map results and search results. Take a look, for instance, at this Bing search for [cable television seattle].

The first few listings (after the ads) are web results, with a map on the right. The link to “cable television” (circled above) is to an /entities page.

Scrolling down below the fold are local listings and a link to “see all business listings”, also a link to the /entities page, followed by more web results.

That /entities pages is slightly different from the regular web search results (a larger map, more local listings, web search results above or below the business listings, and yet not exactly like the Bing Maps page. A “Local” tab is highlighted (which isn’t an available tab in the regular web search or Maps search).

For reference, here are the web results at the bottom of the page (missing from the regular maps results page).

Arguably, these pages are basically Bing search results, which Google doesn’t want to index. As Google notes in their webmaster guidelines:

“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

Google wants to send searchers to an answer, not to more search results (for that matter, that’s what Bing wants to do too). Google (and not to make it weird or anything, but by Google I mean, in part, me) started talking about this back in 2007. In this case, Bing hasn’t yet added /entities to their robots.txt file, but Google appears to have removed the pages (and fairly quickly; yesterday, over 30,000 URLs were indexed). Google has noted before that they may remove these types of pages from their index if the pages don’t provide additional value beyond the aggregation of listings.

How do you add value to search results pages? Give the user a reason to visit that page first. Do the Bing pages do that? The yellowpages.com listing just above where the www.bing.com/entities result was is still there. Isn’t it a search results page too?

It’s hard to say. Both pages include data beyond the web listings, including address, phone number, and ratings.

The question of how to add value to these types of pages is an ongoing challenge and it’s clearly a work in progress for search engines too.

Related:

• Google’s Cutts: Auto-Generated Content & Search Results In Our Index Violate Our Guidelines
• Google Warning Against Letting Your Search Results Get Indexed

The post The Curious Case Of Bing Search Results In Google Search Results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. We sincerely regret this inconvenience.”

But one day, the government will start up again and government agencies will once again focus on ensuring that the information their sites provide is easily available to US citizens.

We know that Americans primarily use search to access government information, so once the shutdown is over, it won’t be enough that the web sites power up. They also need to be indexed and ranking in search engines such as Bing and Google for relevant queries.

And that may take a while.

The .gov sites that have shut down have done so in one of two ways:

• The page content is replaced by an unavailable message. The URLs remain the same and return a 200 status code.
• The pages 302 redirect to a different page that contains the unavailable message (and that second page returns a 200 status code).

Both scenarios result in the same outcome from an SEO perspective: the original URL remains indexed, but with the contents of the unavailable message. All of the context of what the pages are about will be lost and the only relevance clues will come from links to those pages.  That means that as the pages are recrawled they may stop ranking entirely for some queries and will rank lower for others.

That’s fine during the shutdown, since the pages aren’t available anyway, but once the sites are live again, it will take some time before the search engines recrawl the pages (think of the thousands and thousands of pages most .gov web sites contain) and the rankings return.

Let’s take a closer look at why this happens. (And of course, I’m not positive that this will in fact happen for .gov sites. The search engines are certainly aware of this situation and may implement special handling, such as pausing .gov site crawls and leaving the previous versions of the pages in the index during the shutdown.)

Scenario 1: Modified Page Content

In this scenario, the page content is replaced by an unavailable message and the pages return a 200 response code. You can see this, for instance, with www.census.gov.

All pages on the site contain the following content:

As a result, as the pages are recrawled, the search index is updated with that content.

Scenario 2: 302 Redirect to Unavailable Message

In this scenario, the URLs 302 (temporarily) redirect to a different URL that contains the unavailable message.  You can see this, for instance, with www.nasa.gov.

www.nasa.gov redirects to notice.usa.gov:

The typical search engine response to a 302 (temporary) redirect is to continue to index the first URL, but with the contents of the second URL.

You can see in this example that www.nasa.gov remains indexed, but the page title and description are coming from notice.usa.gov, where www.nasa.gov currently redirects.

Bing has previously said that they may treat 302 redirects as 301 redirects, which would remove the URLs from the index entirely (see more on this below), so I’m not sure how they’re handling things in this case.

In some cases, Google is trying to construct a better title and description. You can see, for instance, with this query, that Google is using the description from the Open Directory Project:

Anytime you make large-scale changes to site infrastructure, things can go wrong (especially if your government has just shut down!) and NASA isn’t immune. In this case, they’re redirecting the www version of the site, but someone has forgotten the non-www version. So if you try going to nasa.gov, you simply get this:

And the National Park Service site (nps.gov) redirects to a page that looks like this:

Scenario 3: 301 Redirect to Unavailable Message

None of the .gov sites I checked 301 (permanently) redirected to a different pages. In most cases, a 301 is always preferred over a 302, but in this case, the 302 is a much better way to go. A 301 tells search engines to drop the first URL from the index and replace it with the second URL. In this case, once the .gov sites were live again, the search engines would have to start from scratch on crawling and indexing the sites.

Is There A Better Way? How About 503?

This clearly isn’t a great situation. But could the sites have done anything to preserve search visibility? One option would be a 503 response code rather than a 200 (whether 302 redirecting or not.) A 503 is typically used when the server is down for maintenance and the search engines interpret as “leave the previous content indexed and come back later to try again”. And arguably, the government shutdown is “planned downtime”.

This would eliminate the potential lag time in search visibility once the sites are online again, as the content would remain indexed and associated with the pages.

Of course, in order for any of this to matter, the sites need to be live again. And the longer the shutdown lasts, the greater the number of pages that will need to be reindexed.

Related:

• How Do Americans Access Government Data? Search Engines
• Google Helps States Surface Government Information
• 301 and 302 Redirects Explained

The post What The Government Shutdown Means For .gov SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is a factor in how Google ranks results for smartphone searchers.

Below are more details on that, as well as resources on how best to architect your site’s mobile experience for optimal search acquisition (and happy mobile users).

Responsive Design, Dynamic Content, or Mobile URLs?

If you’re designing the mobile experience from scratch, this question is the first place to start. If you already have a mobile experience set up, then you can just jump to the section that applies to your site. All three options work well for users and for Google, so use the best implementation based on your infrastructure, content, and audience.

Responsive Design

Using responsive design that detects the device and adjusts the layout accordingly can be a great one-size fits all implementation. You just have one URL for any type of device and the layout adjusts. This works great for smartphones, tablets, laptops, huge monitors, and the dashboard of your flying car. The crawl is efficient, users don’t experience the slowdowns that redirects bring, and search engines have just one page to index and rank.

Users love it; Google loves it; everyone’s happy.

Google recommends that you don’t block crawling of resources such as CSS and JavaScript as they need to be able to construct the responsive page elements (not blocking these resources is also something they recommend more broadly.)

One potential pitfall is page load time. Make sure that the page is speedy to download on mobile devices and that you aren’t loading a bunch of weighty content (like videos and ads that you end up not displaying to mobile users anyway) that hinders the mobile experience. If you find that’s a problem with the content on your site, that you might want to consider dynamic content.

Another facet to consider is content focus. If what you end up showing vs. hiding for the desktop version compared to the mobile version is entirely different, separate mobile URLs may be the way to go.

Dynamic Serving

With this set up, the server detects the device before returning content and serves the response on a single URL (as above with responsive design). The difference is that the content that’s loaded onto that URL may be totally different depending on the device type.

This is a good option if loading the full content from the desktop version would slow the mobile page down, but it can be more complicated to implement.

For this implementation, ensure you are using the Vary: User-Agent HTTP response header since you are serving different content in different instances. (Note that some CDNs, such as Akamai, may not cache pages that use this header. Google recommends you still use it and you can configure Akamai to ignore the header.)

Mobile URLs

Back in the olden days, when we all rode in horse-drawn carriages, churned our own butter, and had flip phones, sites couldn’t possibly have used responsive design for mobile users. That poor flip phone would have requested the page, seen the massive code headed for it, and just curled up in a corner and cried.

So, mobile best practices for the Web initially called for separate mobile pages (typically at an m. subdomain), often coded particularly for mobile devices (XHTML mobile profile/WAP 2.0,WML/WAP 1.2, or cHTML (iMode).

Google’s mobile Web index stores these pages and feature phone users can search through them (yes, still). Mobile XML Sitemaps are for listing these types of pages.

But if your site has separate mobile URLs in these futuristic days (of flying cars and free espresso everywhere), it’s unlikely those pages are using one of these markups. It’s probably just a page you’ve constructed differently to better be used on a smaller screen.

Since Google sees different URLs as different pages, you can do several things to ensure that Google understands the relationship between your desktop and mobile pages so that your site is as visible to mobile searchers as it is to desktop searchers.

Google searches both desktop and smartphone users from a single index, and in cases where both a desktop and a mobile page exist, clusters them together and serves the appropriate version. (See more about this in the ranking section below.)

This implementation is still a great choice, despite the newer options available. It can be a lot easier to keep track of technically and as long as you follow the tips below, it works well for both users and search engines as well.

In particular, if the content you’re serving mobile users is fairly different from what you’re serving desktop users, this options makes a lot of sense.

Mobile URLs & Redirect Mapping

The first and best thing you can do for both search engines and users is to ensure that both your mobile and desktop pages redirect appropriately. Mobile user-agents that access the desktop pages should be redirected to the mobile versions and desktop user-agents that access the mobile pages should be redirected to the desktop versions. Sounds so simple. So many sites don’t do it.

I recommend this all the time, and I’m always asked why it’s so important to redirect the mobile pages to the desktop equivalent for non-mobile users. Beyond the SEO implications, we live in a world of mobile consumption and sharing. I might be standing in line to board a flight, reading an article while I’m waiting. I share the (mobile) link (it was a fascinating article! like this one!) via Twitter and you click on it while sitting at your desk at work.

If the site doesn’t redirect to the desktop version, you see the mobile page, which in addition to not being a great experience, doesn’t make the site any money since it doesn’t serve any ads.

See an ABC news mobile page has it looks like when I load it on my laptop:

Mobile URL

And here’s that same article on the desktop URL. So much more user-friendly! Ads!

You don’t need to do anything special for Googlebot-Mobile, as it crawls as a mobile browser, so both it and the regular Googlebot will be redirected correctly if these redirects are in place.

It’s bad enough to not redirect based on device type, but you know what’s even worse? Redirecting mobile users to the home page. If you don’t have a mobile equivalent and a mobile user accesses the desktop page, let them see the desktop page! Accessing a page on a mobile device that’s not designed for that screen isn’t great, but it’s better than being redirected away to a completely irrelevant page and  not being able to access the information at all.

What if you have a mobile page and no desktop equivalent? As with the desktop page with no mobile version, let everyone access the mobile version.

Google recommends redirecting tablet users to the desktop, rather than the mobile, version as their data show that’s what uses prefer.

Don’t block the mobile pages from being crawled via robots.txt as this prevents Google from mapping the desktop and mobile page into a cluster.

Mobile URLs & Adding Meta Data

As I mentioned earlier, Google uses a single index for serving content to desktop and mobile users, but clusters the desktop and mobile pages together and serves the appropriate version. In addition to redirects between them, you can add meta data to send signals to Google to make this mapping clear.

Rel=canonical

Use the desktop value for both the mobile and desktop version. This consolidates indexing and ranking signals (such as external links) and prevents confusion about potential duplicate content.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/desktop-version/my-new-favorite-show-is-scandal/”/>

Rel=alternate media

This attribute enables you to map the desktop and mobile URLs.  Use this attribute on the desktop page to specify the mobile version. (You don’t include this attribute on the mobile version to specify the desktop version.)

One the desktop page, include following (where max-width is whatever you’ve set the page to support):

<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”https://m.example.com/my-new-favorite-show-is-scandal/”/>”

You can also specify the alternate in the XML Sitemap.

Make sure you specify the canonical version of the mobile URL (and don’t dynamically just include the URL in the browser address bar, which might include optional parameters).

Rel=next/prev

If the site includes paginated content, you would also include the Rel=next and Rel=prev attributes. However, keep in mind that if the number of items listed per page is different on the mobile vs. desktop version, you can’t use Rel=alternate media to cluster the corresponding pages together since the content doesn’t match.

Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header

Whether the site redirects based on device type or simply shows different content (dynamic serving), configure the server to return the Vary: User-Agent” HTTP response header (see more on this above in the dynamic serving section).

Rankings & Mobile Devices

When someone searches Google from a smartphone, they are searching through the same index as they would from a desktop. Because Google clusters the desktop and mobile pages, the following happens in results:

• Searchers see the desktop version of the URL listed
• When the searcher clicks, Google loads the mobile version, not the desktop version (this improves the user experience because the page loads faster).

Different ranking signals for all kinds of things (type of query, location of searcher, type of device searcher is using). In the case of mobile searchers, signals include the mobile user experience of the page. (People try to pin down ranking signals, but they vary widely from query to query and searcher to searcher, so coming up with a fixed list of ranking signals is a trip to crazy town where you might end up crying in the corner with that flip phone!)

Mobile issues that prevent an ideal user experience may hinder the site’s ability to rank well to mobile searchers, but won’t impact the site’s ability to rank well to desktop searchers.

The following ranking signals are specific to Smartphone searches:

Mobile-only pages

Since Google consolidates indexing and ranking signals for pages with both a desktop and mobile version, then pages that are mobile-only will have fewer signals and may not rank as well.

Page load times

Maile showed a case study that looked at the impact of an additional 1 second latency for pages loaded on Smartphones. The study found a 9.4% decrease in page views, a 9.3% increase in bounce rate, and a 3.5% drop in conversions.

The point is that Google wants to send searchers to pages that provide the best experience, and slow loading pages hinder that. So slower pages may not rank as well.

Maile said Google recommends trying to display above the fold content in less than a second (the average load time on mobile devices today is 7 seconds).

Redirects

It takes .6  seconds for a mobile device to get a connection for a page request. This means that each redirect adds a minimum of .6 seconds to the load time.

Sometimes redirects are unavoidable, but make sure that you are redirecting directly to the target, and eliminate redirect chains and loops.

Also, as noted earlier, make sure that you don’t redirect mobile users from desktop URLs to the mobile home page. As you might imagine, this could definitely impact ranking of those URLs, since from a mobile user standpoint, they don’t exist. Similarly, don’t show an error page to smartphone users, telling them that the page doesn’t exist.

Overlays and Popups

I know, you really want users to install your app. It’s a great app. Way better than the mobile site. And maybe it even makes you money, unlike your mobile pages since no one can figure out a mobile revenue model. I get it.

But Google is trying to get the searcher to an answer, and roadblocks like overlays prompting for app installs keep the searcher from that quick answer. Maile’s presentation recommended “reconsidering forcing users to make an extra click with ‘download our app’ interstitials”.

I know. This causes the number of app downloads to plummet. But if the page stops ranking, you won’t get as many visitors, which will also cause the number of app downloads to plummet. Look at adjusting the mobile page layout to better showcase your app instead.

In the example below, The Car Connection includes both content the searcher wants above the fold and a prompt to install the app (that’s closable).

Supported Content

Make sure that the mobile page serves only content supported on mobile devices. If you serve up a page that contains only content that the user can’t see (or video the user can’t play), Google isn’t getting the searcher to the answer quickly in that case, and might not rank that page as highly.

To Recap

• You can serve mobile and desktop users with either the same URL (responsive design or dynamic serving) or different URLs (mobile-specific pages)
• Use the Vary: User Agent HTTP header for pages that serve dynamic content based on device or that redirect to device-specific URLs
• Use the canonical attribute (to the desktop version)
• When using separate URLs:
  • redirect both desktop and mobile users to the appropriate page
  • don’t redirect users if you don’t have an equivalent page
  • redirect tablet users to the desktop version
  • use a canonical value of the desktop URL
  • use the rel alternate media on the desktop version to specify the mobile version
  • make sure the page loads quickly
  • reduce unneeded redirects
  • don’t keep the searcher from the content with an interstitial advertising your app

Happy mobile!

The post The Definitive Guide To Technical Mobile SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google uses the location of a site in its ranking algorithms. A searcher in the UK is more likely to see sites from the UK in results. But for top level domains that aren’t restricted to a particular country, Google uses other signals, such as the location of the server in determining what country a site is most relevant for.

Site owners can specify the target country for these generic top level domains in Google Webmaster Tools (but can’t specify a different target if registration of the TLD is restricted to a specific country). Thanks to Googler Pierre Far for letting everyone know!

This is a great solution, but over time, more countries (such as Columbia, with their ccTLD of .co) have opened up registration. Site owners with these domains have been frustrated that Google hasn’t supported the new generic nature of the TLDs. A .co could end up ranking only in Columbia, even if the site didn’t target users in that country.

Now, Google has expanded the list of ccTLDs that they recognize as generic. So if you have a .co or .io, you can now specify the country that it should be associated with. (and @dotco is pretty happy about that.) As always, if your site is not country-specific, don’t specify a target country. Google’s index now recognizes that the unrestricted ccTLDs shouldn’t be associated specifically with those countries so they won’t be seen as more relevant for those users.

Great news for owners of these types of domains and for searchers.

The post Google Expands List of “Generic” Top Level Domains and Makes Them Geotargetable appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Bing tells me that while they still support the #! version of crawlable AJAX originally launched by Google, they’re finding it’s not implemented correctly much of the time, and they strongly recommend pushState instead.

Why AJAX Can Be Difficult To Crawl & Index

One common use of AJAX is to make the website experience faster for a visitor, but this implementation can have drawbacks for SEO. Imagine, for instance, a page with several tabs of content.

A web developer could implement this one of several ways.

• A separate URL for each tab – with this implementation, when the visitor clicks a tab, a new request is made to the server for a completely new page. The URL structure might look something like:
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=one
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=two
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=three
• CSS for each tab – with this implementation, the server returns the contents of all tabs with the first page request. When the visitor clicks a tab, the CSS rules cause the browser to hide the contents associated with one tab and show the contents associated with clicked tab. Only one URL is associated with the page, like this:
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page
• AJAX rending of each tab – with this implementation, when the visitor clicks a tab, only the changing portion of the page is replaced. The URL structure might look something like:
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page#tab=one
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page#tab=two
  • https://www.example.com/my-web-page#tab=three

As with most things, pros and cons exist for each option. A separate URL for each tab is easy to share and bookmark and is easy for search engines to crawl and index (they can extract all of the content from each page and have a separate URL to associate with each), but reloading the entire contents of each page can be slow.

CSS for each tab is also easy for search engines to crawl and index, and in some cases, the combined page may rank higher than the same content broken into three pages (due to consolidated incoming links and relevancy signals). But the request for all of that content at once can be the slowest of all to render, and users can’t share or bookmark the page with a secondary tab as active.

AJAX rendering is fastest and enables easy sharing and bookmarking. But, search engines have historically had the hardest time with this implementation. Search engines have trouble extracting content from AJAX/JavaScript calls (although Google has been getting better at it). And # in a URL started as a way to link to content within a page, and so search engines tend to ignore everything in a URL past the #.

Crawlable AJAX

In 2009, Google put together a way to make AJAX crawlable. With this method, a the webpage would use #! rather than #, like this:

• https://www.example.com/my-web-page#!tab=one
  

For a normal user agent, such as a browser, the # would trigger the AJAX portion of the page, just as it would in a normal AJAX implementation. However, a search engine user agent such as Google would see the #! section of the URL and then request a special version of the page (replacing #! with ?_escaped_fragment_=). In response, the server would return a static version of the page with the contents normally rendered through JavaScript. The benefits of this implementation were that search engines could associate a separate URL with each set of content; and even better, could extract all of that content.

In 2011, Bing began supporting this implementation and included a checkbox in their webmaster tools so site owners could let them know it was being used on a site (they’ve since removed the checkbox, as they’ve gotten better at detecting and crawling it).

As with the other implementations, this has its drawbacks as well, not least of which is the complicated implementation. Bing’s latest blog post notes:

“Developers had to rely on overly-complicated protocols such as “crawlable AJAX”, which uses the #! (“Hash bang”) signature.  This was meant to make AJAX development easier in regards to SEO, but it actually complicated things both for search engines as well as webmasters trying to implement, maintain, and debug their AJAX-driven web pages and applications.

With pushState, we can fully omit the complexity of transforming between “pretty” AJAX URLs and “ugly” static URLs. Search Engines will crawl and index the same URL used by you customers. We are back to business as usual for SEO, including pretty SEO well-understood URLs schema https://domain/path/file?name=value_parameters. This helps you focus on the usual SEO activities (links, page content, etc.) without having to do worry about complex page transformations.”

I asked Bing’s Fabrice Canel, who wrote the post, if Bing still supports the #! version of AJAX URLs, and he told me:

 “We are still supporting the #! crawlable AJAX method but as I said, we do not recommend it at all and we really prefer pushState which is far easier for webmasters and web developers to adopt and maintain.”

HTML5 pushState

With HTML5 pushState, pages can take advantage of the best of both worlds: URLs without # (so search engines can easily index them) and dynamically rendered content for only the change portion of the page (to make things as speedy as possible).

With pushState, URLs look like the first example (a separate URL for each tab), but operate like the third example (AJAX rendering of each tab and the resulting URLs look as follows:

• https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=one
• https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=two
• https://www.example.com/my-web-page?tab=three

There are other, more complex ways of getting to this same result, such as Hijax, but pushState can be much easier.

Google has been supportive of HTML5 since the beginning (Google’s Maile Ohye in particular began recommending it in conferences since early 2012) and recently published a video in support of HTML5 pushState.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiAF9VdvRPw[/youtube]

In the video, Google’s Matt Cutts noted:

“A correctly implemented site that uses pushState typically doesn’t need any extra support in order for us to be able to crawl it. We do support both [pushState and #!] and we do handle both standards… but [pushState] is something that I would encourage you to look into and it can be quite helpful in making sure things can be crawlable.”

And now Bing has announced support as well.

Of course, HTML5 has its drawbacks as well, notably that not all older browsers support it, and can require significantly engineering resources to implement (as you’re replacing the current site’s HTML implementation).

If your site uses AJAX-based URLs (either the # versions noted above, or versions that don’t change at all when  content changes) and subsequently, the site is not fully crawled and indexed and you’re looking for solutions, HTML5 pushState is definitely worth looking into.

If your site uses the crawlable #! URLs and isn’t having any trouble being indexed, then you can leave things as they are for now. Both Google and Bing continue to support this implementation.

If you’re considering adding AJAX to your site, make sure you think through the implementation carefully and take into account what content search engines can extract and whether the URLs are indexable.

Related:

• Bing Now Supports Google’s Crawlable AJAX Standard
• Google Can Now Execute AJAX and JavaScript for Indexing
• How to Best Take Advantage of Google’s Crawlable AJAX

The post Bing Offers Recommendations for SEO-Friendly AJAX: Suggests HTML5 pushState appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For some time, Google’s been letting site owners know when their sites have been hacked, but this new help center takes the next step and walks through how to fix the site and get the warnings removed from Google’s search results. Although as Maile notes in the blog post: “while we attempt to outline the necessary steps in recovery, each task remains fairly difficult for site owners unless they have advanced knowledge of system administrator commands and experience with source code”.

The blog post also provides steps for avoiding getting hacked in the first place: “Just as you focus on making a site that’s good for users and search ­engine friendly, keeping your site secure ­­ for you and your visitors ­­ is also paramount.”

The help content is a collection of videos (totally over an hour in length) and articles that provide comprehensive and detailed information about how sites get hacked and why, and spam techniques and how to detect them, in addition to explanations about how to recover from the hacking. It’s all pretty fascinating stuff, even if your site hasn’t been hacked (well, fascinating if you’re kind of geeky, like I am).

[youtube]https://youtu.be/ubklMNgC6x8[/youtube]

Related:

• Google: 12 To 14 Million Searches Per Day Returned Hacked Sites
• Google Sent 20,000+ Hacked Notification Messages To Webmasters Today

The post Google Launches Help Center For Hacked Sites appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For the last five years, I’ve tracked where advertisers are trying to send viewers, where those viewers are actually going, and in particular, if advertisers are taking full advantage of the furious searching that happens post-game. Both Google Trends and Yahoo data show that even as we turned to Twitter in droves, we also, as in past years, flocked to the search engines.

Google Trends: Super Bowl Sunday 2013

Yahoo Search Data: Super Bowl Sunday 2013

Last year brought a record high of brands advertising their own websites. This year, that trend was down, replaced by hashtags. If the goal of a Super Bowl is to get people talking about you, how better to encourage that than to give a little nudge and a way for those talking to find each other. (You can find the full infographic with these images on my site, Nine By Blue.)

But, brand confusion crept in online. Many online versions of the commercials sent viewers to different places than the TV versions, and the paid search ads sent searchers somewhere different still. Several brands had one owned site ranking in unpaid results, two different sites showing up in paid search results (at the same time!), and a different site still advertised in the ad.

Many sites are better than none, as in the end, your potential customers are finding you… somewhere. But this structure is not an ideal way to built up long term search value (to take full advantage of the engagement and links that a Super Bowl commercial brings), and it seems impossible to measure success. Is no one going to the special microsite built just for the commercial because they didn’t find the commercial engaging? Or, is it because no one knows the microsite exists?

Search Visibility

This year, those searching for Super Bowl advertisers could mostly find them! The majority of brands bought paid search ads for their names, and half bought paid search ads for their advertised taglines. Every single advertiser other than Fast and Furious 6 had a website that ranked in the unpaid search results.

Brands were harder to find for those searching for taglines. Half of the advertisers did realize someone might search for those though, and bought Adwords, which is much better than past years.

Paid Search

Eighty percent of brands bought AdWords for branded searches and 50 percent bought AdWords for commercial taglines, but where were these ads sending people?

Mostly, the ads were sending people to an official site. This was great, although I’m giving some brands a little too much credit, as in some cases, these ads seemed to be part of long-running AdWords campaigns unrelated to the Super Bowl. This became more apparent when ads for both the official site and a microsite or YouTube URL showed up. The agency (or department) managing the Super Bowl commercial may not have been talking to the agency (or department) managing the regular AdWords spend. That can result in a company bidding against itself, paying more than it has to for ads, and confusing searchers.

How’s The Searcher Experience?

Let’s take a closer look at a few brands.

Dodge Ram Trucks

The Ram truck ad was popular among viewers and generated a lot of search volume. Google Trends showed that it was one of the most popular searches on Sunday, and Yahoo told me that it was the most searched for commercial.

But, after doing related searches, I ended up totally confused. Is a Ram a Dodge? Are Ram trucks and Dodge trucks different?

The paid search results for [ram trucks] show no less than four ads that could be the official site (and three that say they are). The first result — www.ramtrucks.com — is, in fact, the best place to send Super Bowl searchers.

It ties in perfectly with the commercial, lets you watch it again, and showcases the trucks. Dodge is advertising www.dodge.com against the [ram trucks] search, and its website doesn’t even show Ram trucks. If you didn’t know Dodge owned Ram, then you’d think it was a competitor, swooping in and trying to lure potential customers away.

Mercedes Benz

Mercedes may also have had uncoordinated campaigns going as a search for [Mercedes] showed a paid search ad for mercedesbenz.com, and a search for [Mercedes CLA] (the car advertised in the commercial) showed a paid search ad for the page within the mercedesbenz.com site created for the commercial.

I can’t be too hard on them, though. To their credit, the home page features the ad and links to the Super Bowl page, and the Super Bowl page itself is actually on the mercedesbenz.com domain and not on a separate microsite (that has to be maintained separately and has to start from scratch for search engine indexing and ranking). They’ve also got a Google+ page with recent posts, which makes their Google search results look even better for their brand.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen had great intentions, and in many ways, great follow through. They released the ad early and got people talking and they included a hashtag that helped build buzz on Twitter.

But then things get confusing.

A search for [vw] returns what are likely regular branded AdWords, unrelated to the Super Bowl commercial.

As with Mercedes, that’s not too much of a problem, since the home page features the commercial.

Searches for variations for the tagline (“get happy” and “get in get happy”) brings back an ad with a display URL of www.vw.com/gameday (which 404s if you type it in directly) that redirects to the home page. Totally fine, except that [get happy] doesn’t return VW in the unpaid results, and something peculiar happens in the unpaid results for [get in get happy]. A microsite shows up!

Look, I totally get the reasons brands have to use microsites. It may be utterly impossible to get the content onto the main site due to technical reasons or bureaucratic red tape.
But why invest so much into a separate site and then not advertise it? Maybe because it’s broken. When I try to load the microsite with Chrome, I just get a guy in a Beetle, with a directive to click on his head. Doing so, however, does nothing. That doesn’t make me get happy.

The full site loads for me in Firebox, but apparently requires a Facebook login (although that’s not clear until you start trying to use it). I’m still not happy.

And the videos (both the commercial and a funnier video that shows YouTube famous sad people getting happy) play in an overlay with no way to share them. Now, I’m sad.

Huyndai & The Secret Microsites

Hyundai has an even more secret microsite, as they don’t seem to be advertising it anywhere anymore. When the #pickyourteam commercial aired online before the Super Bowl, it advertised a microsite: www.findyour7.com. But when it aired on TV, it showed a hashtag instead: #pickyourteam. It makes total sense to drive online viewers to a website and TV viewers to an active discussion, but why use two different phrases?

They also put together a microsite for another of their ads: www.epicplaydate.com, but they didn’t advertise this anywhere but in the paid search ad that appears for [hyundai santa fe] (even though both the #epicplaydate and #pickyourteam ads were for the Santa Fe). The paid ad for [epic playdate] searches is for hyundaiusa.com. As is the ad for [#pickyourteam] searches. (Searches for [pick your team] didn’t trigger an ad for me).

Confused yet?

Of course epicplaydate.com doesn’t rank in unpaid results for [epic play date] and findyour7.com doesn’t rank for well, [pick your team] because the microsites have similar problems as Hyundai’s microsite during the 2009 Super Bowl: they don’t actually have the words in the page that people are searching for.

In the case of epicplaydate.com, if you have JavaScript disabled, all you see is “loading.” Oddly, that’s not what Google sees, as the cache version of the page is full of everything about the Hyundai Santa Fe (other than the words “epic playdate”) and claims to be for allnewsantafe.com (which 302 redirects to epicplaydate.com) so some weirdness is going on that requires some additional digging.

www.findyour7.com does rank for [find your 7]. If only anyone knew to search for it.

The website doesn’t mention the Super Bowl commercial. Maybe they realized that the commercial only had six kids on the team. And he only had to pick five.

The post Super Bowl Commercials 2013 Edition: For Search Visibility, Most Brands Bought AdWords Too appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Most Popular Topic of the Day: Beyonce vs. The Blackout

According to the (sadly now significantly scaled back) Google Trends, the popular topic of of Super Bowl Sunday was Beyonce, with over one million searches.

Yahoo also found Beyonce to be popular, as related searches spiked  7236% (and searches for Destiny’s Child rose 4000%).

But according to Yahoo, the big winner of the day was the blackout, as viewers turned to their devices to ask [why did the lights go out], [superdome power outage] and [what caused power outage].

It may have taken just four minutes for someone to advertise on related terms of Twitter, but did anyone but the terms on Google? In order of popularly, Yahoo found we were most interested in:

• the blackout
• Beyonce
• the commercials
• kickoff
• watching online

Google’s blog post  today on Super Bowl search activity found M&Ms as the top trending search and found interest in the blackout was the eighth most popular topic. M&Ms? Really? Some trending searches during the game from Google, over time:

The Power of Commercials

As always, I’ll be doing more in depth analysis of the commercials (check back for that tomorrow), but which ones caused us to search the most yesterday? According to Google Trends, we were most interested in:

• Ram trucks (Paul Harvey: God Made a Farmer)
• GoDaddy
• Iron Man 3
• Fast and Furious 6

Yahoo also found that the Ram trucks commercial drove the most interest and found that in addition to what Google listed, we were mostly searching for:

• Taco Bell
• Doritos
• Budweiser
• Tide
• Oreo
• Calvin Klein

As noted earlier, Google found that the most searched for commercial was for M&Ms, although this was apparently on YouTube, which still seems a little… unusual.

Yahoo data also shows the power of a Super Bowl commercial for raising awareness of an unknown brand as searches for Sodastream spiked 5244%.

And although Hyundai sponsored the pregame show and had the most commercials of anyone, according to Yahoo, the most popular car brands during the game (after Ram) were Jeep, Kia, and Mercedes and According to Google they were Mercedes, Lincoln, and Audi.

The Popularity of Celebrities

Every year, I note that advertisers who use celebrities in their commercials should not only think about searches for their brand, but about searches for the celebrities as well. Commercials with celebrities always cause search spikes for those celebrities and often, the brand is nowhere to be found in search results. That trend continued this year, with Yahoo finding the top five most popular celebrities:

• Kate Upton
• Kaley Cuoco
• Stevie Wonder
• Paul Rudd
• Seth Rogen

Searches for Oprah (who voiced the Jeep commercial) jumped 7o%.

But What About The Game?

Apparently, a football game was played yesterday and some viewers were interested in that! Google found that the Ravens were searched slightly more often than the 49ers and that the most searched for players were:

• Colin Kaepernick
• Joe Flacco
• Michael Oher
• David Akers
• Jacoby Jones

The post Beyonce, Blackout, Ravens And M&Ms — What We Searched For During Super Bowl 2013 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

This year, Google just provides the answer right at the top of the page: February 3rd at 3:30 pacific.

Just as we saw last year, the NFL understands what their target audience is looking for and has built a page that provides exactly what they need (that ranks first in the search results), as well as invites them to tour the rest of the site (which gives the NFL the page views they need – win/win!).

Super Bowl Start Time: Search Results Through the Years

This query is a great example of how far search has come (both for search engines and for organizations who want to reach their audiences online). Let’s take a quick journey back in time.

2009 Super Bowl – Google offers up the 2007 game (and Microsoft Live Search provides a Wikipedia result about the history of the Super Bowl).

2010 Super Bowl -Google attempts to fix the problem of choosing either spammy results or spammier results (“So when is the Super Bowl 44 start time? What is the Super Bowl Time? Football fans all over America would be anxious for the game to begin on 2010 Feb 07 at Land Shark Stadium, Miami, Florida. The Super Bowl 2010 start time is pretty well set…”) to rank by adding a Onebox with the start time at the top of the page. (Bing mostly just provides the spam.)

2011 Super Bowl – Google gives news organizations the benefit of the doubt, and puts Google News results above the Onebox that gives searchers the answer they are looking for.

Sadly, news organizations have decided that what works for churn and burn spam sites works for credible organizations with names that would hurt more to lose and thus began HuffPo’s tradition of crafting articles almost solely out of search queries (“Are you wondering, “what time does the Superbowl start?” It’s a common search query, as is “what time is the super bowl 2011”, “superbowl start time” and “superbowl kick off time 2011″, according to Google Trends the evening before the Super Bowl.”).

Bing is also ranking pages with wisdom like “But a whole bunch of people don’t even know when the Super Bowl starts. As of noon EST today, here are some of the most frequent Google searches, based on the Google Trends site…”

2012 Super Bowl – Everything changes, and the angels rejoice (or maybe that’s just me). Sure, HuffPo is still at it, and still ranking (“For starters, it’s two words, not one. “Superbowl” is an incorrect spelling”), and the Onebox on Google mysteriously goes missing, but the NFL creates a page that is intersection of target audience analysis and organization goals and builds it in such a way that it shows up for searchers.

By the way, that multiple spelling technique isn’t  isn’t just a Super Bowl strategy for the Huffington Post. Take a look at this article about Kanye West’s fashion sense (“He had on a straitjacket (perhaps more commonly spelled “straight jacket”)…)”:

2013 Super Bowl – And this year, the NFL is once again meeting their audiences needs and Google has rewarded them by ranking them first. The Onebox is also back and above the news results this time. And Bing is also providing the start time at the top of results.

Who Should Be Ranking?

What about the organizations other than the NFL that should be ranking?

TV Guide

tvguide.com ranks for [what time does the super bowl start] but not for the slightly more popular [super bowl start time], which is a sign that Google still has work to do in truly ranking based on intent vs. the specific words in the query (and gives HuffPo a little ammunition in defending their choice to sneak in as many query variations as possible). I applaud TV Guide for understanding what their audience is looking for and providing answers, but they could probably do a better job of showcasing other content on the site that would appeal to this audience (right now, they include links in the article, but no images or video that would catch the viewer’s attention and encourage clicks.

CBS

The game airs on CBS this year, but their site isn’t ranking for this query. Amazingly, YOU CAN WATCH THE GAME ONLINE ON THE CBS WEB SITE THIS YEAR (finally, finally, we live in the future), but cbs.com doesn’t rank for those searches either.

My new favorite site, nfl.com, ranks for both (fortunately for CBS, they just link right over to cbs.com). What’s the problem? Same old story. The cbs.com home page links to just a pop up player with the live stream, and doesn’t have a real page available that search engines can index and rank. In fact, the only page on cbs.com that seems to mention the Super Bowl at all is the home page. And without JavaScript enabled, well, the page looks like this:

San Francisco 49ers

The home page does list the start time, but as with teams in years past, that this is the start time of the game can only be inferred. The actual words that people are looking for aren’t there.

Baltimore Ravens

To be honest, I can barely tell that from the Baltimore home page that they’re in the Super Bowl. Sure, they’ve got a hashtag, but this page looks designed for aesthetics rather than based on what users might want to accomplish.

So, it goes. In 2013, large organizations still don’t have the basics down and still aren’t connecting with their target audience as well as they could be.  Knowing what a hashtag is just isn’t enough.

But things are definitely improving. The NFL is getting it right two years in a row. CBS is offering live streaming on your pick of devices. And the latest offering by the Huffington Post is actually about the game, and not an ode to Google Trends:

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