How many ads is too many?

As a user, I appreciate Google’s attempt to take on ad heavy sites. It’s annoying to have to dig through a page of ads to find the one snippet of content I am looking for and it creates a bad user experience. On the other hand, who is Google to tell a website owner how to run their business? I don’t have AdSense ads on my site because that’s not how I earn revenue. However, a blogger might rely heavily on those ads to supplement their income. And with the AdSense guidelines saying “ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold,” why wouldn’t a site owner place ads up top?

Google says their page layout algorithm update is designed to target websites that “load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree,” but doesn’t spell out exactly what’s excessive. In Danny Sullivan’s article, he interviewed Matt Cutts who said that Google isn’t going to provide any official tools to determine if your site was guilty of excessive ads, making it even harder for site owners to know where the line is. It’s easy to tell when a site has gone overboard, but what about the ones that are borderline?

Something very important to mention from Sullivan’s article—one ad heavy page can impact the ranking of your entire site, not just that page. If you think you might be toeing the line of “excessive” with your ads on any page of your website, it would be wise to remove a few to protect yourself from the update as much as possible. Keep in mind that if your website is whacked with a penalty, it could be weeks before that penalty is lifted and your site regains some of its old rankings. Much like the Panda updates, Google has to recrawl your site to see what (if any) errors you have corrected or if you are guilty of new ones.

What are your thoughts on the latest update from Google?

So what does this mean for website owners? Google spelled it out in the same blog post

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools.

Understandably, the SEO community was more than a little nervous after this announcement. Being able to identify which keywords a person searched for before they arrived at a website is one of the most important pieces of information we have to make educated SEO recommendations for our clients. Website owners who manage their own SEO rely on this information as well. Targeting the right keywords is one of the fundamental musts of any SEO campaign. If we can’t see what search queries people are using to find our site, then we don’t know if we are targeting the right keywords! I don’t like to blindly pick and choose what keywords I think are best for a site without having the data to back it up.

Matt Cutts, the director of web spam at Google, announced that Google estimates this change would impact less than 10% of searches being conducted on a daily basis, but I’ve heard grumblings among the search community that it might be much more. As for my own site, I noticed a significant jump in the number of “Not Provided” organic search visits. While it isn’t yet a percentage I feel I should be worrying about, if the trend continues I feel that I won’t be able to trust Google Analytics for vital SEO data!

One of the reasons Google’s new and improved encrypted data is making many site owners nervous is because, even though Google is making the search experience more secure for users, they are also focusing on increasing the number of people with Google accounts. I have a Gmail account that I am almost constantly logged into on my home computer. That means most of my search behavior is being hidden 24-7 from the sites I visit! Droid phones (which now have over half of the Smartphone market share) require a Google account in order to be activated, meaning data from mobile devices (which I suspect will become an increasingly important market for SEO) is being limited as well.

One of the more frustrating aspects of encrypted search is that it doesn’t affect PPC data, only organic search. Search data is still being provided for Google advertisers, even if someone that clicks on the ad is logged in to their Google account. It makes you wonder if Google is trying to kill two birds with one stone with encrypted search—they make searching more secure for the users (quelling privacy concerns) AND they get advertisers to spend more on their PPC campaigns just to get more accurate data that can be used in their SEO campaigns.

What are your thoughts on encrypted search?

Here are 3 ways the search engines personalize the SERPs:

Location
Type “pizza” into Google; what does your SERP look like? Chances are the first results Google pulled are all pizza places near your town. After those come the national brands like Dominos and Papa John’s. But how does Google know where you live? Easy, it uses the IP address from computer to determine your location. Google knows that when most people search for things like “pizza” or “dry cleaner” they are looking for local results, even if they didn’t search using localized keywords.

Search History
Think of the search engines as a technological Big Brother. They know where you’ve been, how you search and what you look at online. It may sound a little creepy, but knowing your search history means that Google and Bing can deliver results that you are more likely to find useful and interesting, based on your previous search activity.

Social Signals
Back in May, Bing and Facebook teamed up to bring the “Friend Effect” to Bing’s search results. The Bing-Facebook integration allowed users who were signed into Facebook to see what websites their social connections had Liked and Shared in Facebook right in the Bing SERP. Some pages would actually rank better when a user was logged in to Facebook than they would normally, just because that person’s social network had Liked it.

Meanwhile, Google was busy creating their version of the Like button, the +1. When a user is logged into their Google account, they can publicly +1 a webpage they like. That +1 will show up on their Google profile and their profile image will be placed next to the +1 button in the SERP for their social network to see.

Some have argued that this kind of personalization takes the “fun” out of search engines because it narrows the search results to what Google and Bing think you are most likely to find interesting, choosing what you do and do not see. They believe that personalized search results are actually narrowing our worlds and not expanding them. Other says that personalized search means better search results, making the search engines more valuable to the users. Personalized search reduces the clutter and noise of the Internet and focuses on what the user really needs.

What do you think about personalized search?

Here’s the scenario:

My company recently moved to a new office (you can read about the SEO lesson I learned from that move) so I needed to update our Google Places listing to reflect the new address. Any business owner who has tried to update their address of phone number knows it’s not a simple task. First off, in order to update an address they need to send a verification pin to that address (to make sure it’s not someone trying to mess with the listing) but it takes 2-3 weeks for that postcard to arrive! So I patiently waited my 2-3 weeks and nothing came from Google. I had to resubmit the changes for a new verification pin, which would take ANOTHER 2-3 weeks to arrive.

Here’s where it got really frustrating. I didn’t realize this until about a week into the process, but while my new address was “pending” in Google Places, Google had pulled the listing entirely! For some business owners, this is deadly! If your customers can’t find you in search engines, most won’t know you exist. Even though my SEO firm doesn’t rely on foot traffic for survival, that listing probably drove 15 unique visitors through to my site every month. I’ve even gotten a client from my Google Places listing, so to have it just disappear was very frustrating.

What was even more frustrating is that a few days after that, Brick Marketing was showing up in Google Places but it looked like this (right click to view full image):

No address, no local phone number, no website, no nothing! What’s worse is that even though the address shows “United States” as the address, the actual dot is where our old office used to be! Needless to say I was more than a little frustrated with the whole situation.

The second verification pin arrived (finally!) and said the changes would take effect in 24 hours. 24 hours went by, then 48, then 72….nothing! My Google Places account said everything had been updated and was good to go but clearly it isn’t. I still have none of the new information in my listing and all the old information has pretty much been pulled out.

Here’s the kicker, and a problem that many business owners have run into before, Google Places offers ZERO customer service. There is no phone number, e-mail or contact us form for business owners to reach out for help. Yes, there are crowd-sourced help forums, but many of the comments are business owners all dealing with the same issue and no one can come up with a solution.

I can appreciate that Google has millions of customers and running an actual customer service department for Google Places would be impossible, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. I KNOW that Google Places is important for local SEO and I manage the listings for my clients all the time. To not be able to control my own is a little embarrassing.

What problems, if any, have you encountered with Google Places?

***Update! After several months and hours of research and tweaking our Google Places account it finally is online and accurate, although I am happy it should not be this hard!

2. Doorway pages
A doorway page is built to make one site more relevant for numerous search queries by stuffing it with keywords. This page is not part of the site’s navigation (meaning no visitor could find it), but it is built into the site structure so the search spiders can crawl it. Sites that use doorway pages to make it look like they are more relevant are often de-indexed once the search engines realize what they are doing.

3. Keyword stuffing
Repeating the same keyword a hundred times on one page of content may make it appear more relevant to the search engines, but it absolutely kills the user-experience. The search engines aren’t looking for a magic number when it comes to keywords. Stuffing your content will only hurt you in the long run.

4. Duplicate content
Some duplicate content was created on purpose (stealing another site’s article and claiming it as your one) and some duplicate content is an accident (homepage.com and homepagedefault.com). Either way, duplicate content can get you in a lot of trouble with the search engines.

5. Dead links
Nothing is more frustrating for a visitor then running into dead pages all over a site. The search spiders will also discover these links and flag them.

The people behind the search engine algorithms are some of the best in their field. They know that the spammers are just waiting to exploit a loophole in the system for their benefit. That is why they are constantly updating and tweaking the algorithm to make it better and, in a sense, smarter.

I’ve spoken with numerous site owners who don’t understand why their competitor (who is employing black hat SEO techniques) is outperforming them in the SERP. I have to keep reminding them that success gained from spamming is short lived. Sooner or later the search engines catch on to what they are doing, and the site will suffer because of it.

As TechCrunch reported,
…the idea is to return users a single page of relevant results across many of Google’s products for whatever query is typed into the wdyl search box. The “search” button is even a heart. Cute.

TechCrunch also reported that the best queries for WDYL are for vague, broad terms.

Being intrigued I strolled over to the new search engine (note, you have to include the www. in the address, otherwise you get an error message) and searched for something very near and dear to my heart, the Boston Red Sox.

Here are a couple screenshots of what I saw:

Talk about Red Sox overload!

On the WDYL results page, it looks like you’ll find every Google tool as it pertains to your search query. For instance, I can purchase Boston Red Sox merchandise with Product Search, call someone about the Boston Red Sox with Voice, find patents about the Boston Red Sox (really?) with Patent Search and translate Boston Red Sox into 57 languages with the help of Translate, plus just about everything else Google does.

While I can’t see WDYL turning into an actual search engine spinoff, it is a very clever way for Google to introduce their services to users that may not be aware of all that Google has to offer. Other blog and news sources seem to agree that WDYL is going to be a marketing push for Google more than anything.

If you’ve got a few minute to spare, head over to WDYL and mess around with some of your favorite search terms.

What do you think Google’s plans for WDYL are?

At the SMX Advanced Marketing Conference held two weeks ago, Matt Cutts confirmed that the Panda 2.2 update has been approved, but not yet rolled out.

The next update will reportedly target sites that re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content. This was a common complaint among many web site owners about the first Panda update. Since Google couldn’t accurately identify the original source, the real author was sometimes penalized as a content farm along with the spammers. “A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” said Cutts during his Q&A with Danny Sullivan, producer of the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series and Search Engine Land leader.

The first Panda update was designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” said Google in a blog post back in February. About 12% percent of search queries were affected. In April, Panda was rolled out globally and incorporated Google “blocking” data. About 2% of US searches were affected from that update. To learn more about the original Panda update, check out this Search Engine Optimization Journal post from early March.

Many site owners who were negatively affected by the first Panda update claim they have yet to fully recover. Google released a set of guidelines for sites to help them make their site more Panda-appropriate, but they insist that no manual exceptions have been made to help penalized sites.

During the Q&A, Cutts noted that the Panda is update isn’t run on a regular basis. Google manually runs the algorithm (presumably when the algorithm is improved), which means that site owners who updated their site might not see immediate recovery. This has been a great source of frustration for many site owners who A) aren’t necessarily sure why their site was affected with the first update, B) aren’t sure if they are making the appropriate changes to be more Panda friendly and C) want to know when their site will recover.

It will be interesting to see what happens to sites when the Panda 2.2 rolls out. Will sites that unfairly escaped the first attack on content farms finally get penalized? Will sites that were unfairly affected be redeemed as the original author’s of widely plagiarized content? Time will tell.

What do you think Panda 2.2 will do?