Kevin Pike – Kansas City SEO BlogSearch Engine Optimization News, Tips & Fun Stuff

A few weeks ago Google published a post on the webmaster central blog that some next-generation infrastructure project about to effect how the Google Search is going to take place and they call it “Google Caffeine”.

An interview with Matt Cutts at SES San Jose was published a few days later at WebProNews.com providing some high-level overview. In this interview and subsequent posts, Cutts down-played the change as less to do with algorithmic ranking changes and focused on the coding enhancements this update will give Google.

The purpose of this update is for Google to better index and return results on the rapidly expanding web and not directly to effect search results. This does mean that results changes will inherently happen. To give webmasters a preview of what Google Caffeine will do they setup a sandbox for testing. Facesaerch’s Caffeine Compare is a handy new tool that directly compares the search results side-by-side.

1.    Video Results More Prevalent With Google Caffeine:

After conducting several searches on celebrities and well known people you can see immediate change in the results for media types other than standard web pages.

For example, if you do a search for “Michael Jordan” in Google today the 4th listing is image results and the last results are book results about Jordan.  With Google Caffeine search results we get no results for images our books, but get more video options!

If you have videos that are not published on YouTube.com then now is the time to upload them, because Caffeine is going to give them higher rankings than before.

2.    Keywords in URL are more important than ever:

If you sell a single product or service and that word is not in your URL consider re-branding your domain on the web to something that does. Even before Google Caffeine was tested we say Google search results trending to rank URL’s higher based heavily on the domain name.

We recommend you keep your brand or acronym URL is you got one, but if you are considering purchasing a new URL or re-branding then consider your main keyword in the URL for better search results in Google.

3.    Social Sites & Immediacy Results Enter SERP’s (sort of):

When news breaks who do you go to on the web? If you are like most people you likely answered CNN, FOX, TWITTER, Facebook, YAHOO, etc – anything but Google right?

Google wants to curb this online behavior and are exhibiting so in some of the search results in Caffeine. This is so they can become not just the best everyday search engine, but also your online destination source for hot topics and current events too.

The chalenge lies with doing this, while not losing what makes their algorithm the best in biz for search. When it comes to satisfying immediacy while remaining reputable, and reliable for everyday search, no one has accomplished this – not even Google.

The death of Michael Jackson is the best case study for online search facilitating breaking news. Danny Dover at SEOMOZ had a great post on Michael Jackson’s death traveling the web. In this posts he timelines out how major websites were handling the information and displaying in search results.

I’m sure Google hated to see thousands of visitors flock to TMZ’s site for the latest info on Michael Jackson, but this is something Google is not good at. In fact, Google susceptible to false claims if they try to hard with real-time search. Losing credibility by having a “Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed” it is hilarious,  but not something you to have happen often.

Is the best future for Google to be really great at what they do now; or gamble with real-time search?

I’ll leave this for you to decided. I would appreciate any comments on this.

Some quick notes from this video

1) WordPress is fantastic software:
2) PageRank = “the number of people who link to you, and how important they are”.
3) Relevance & Reputation:
Reputation – what other people say abou you.
Relevance – stuff on your site.
4)Writing:
- Write what you love
- Write often
5)Keywords:
- Think about all the ways you can describe something (naturally put it in your post).
- Jargon mismatch – industry norms vs normal user phrase

The best Q&A advice… Should I podcast or videocast?
Answer Put your photo on HotOrNot.com, if you rank 6 or higher you can vidocast.

A couple of days ago I commented on a Media Post article about this story, but after reading more about this online this morning (for free) I wanted to add further commentary.

Background Info First:

News Corp is rumored to be preparing a lawsuit against Google and Yahoo’s news services for indexing and ranking their free content.

1. Yes I said FREE content – available for people and search bots to view and index.
2. Yes these search engines are properly giving credit to and linking to the source.
3. Yes these engines are giving News Corp thousands of visitors daily.
4. Yes News Corp is generating millions in ad revenue from this traffic.

Okay, so why is Rupert Murdoch willing to throw this all away? – Stupidity

Is This About Principals or Profits?

Newspaper sites like the NY Times went away from blocking search engines from online content when they noticed the advertising revenue potential millions of visitors can bring.

Today traditional news print is dying because they don’t have the millions of views to get ad revenues high enough. The decline in viewership is also what causes a decline in advertising. In short, the days where you can sell news to readers and also sell millions of dollars worth of advertising in the same space are over.

Of course, magazines or niche topics are excluded from this because there are fewer topic sources & people are more willing to purchase a subscription. I’m talking about your “everyday news”.

I couldn’t disagree more!!

On News Corp’s Q4 earnings call, Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying “The digital revolution has opened up many new and inexpensive methods of distribution but it has NOT made content free.”

I believe there will always be a free source of news online because of the advertising revenues that inherently exist with free readership channels. Some smaller news channel will always be happy to take these profits. Murdoch is simply wanting more.

There will always be levels of journalism quality and maybe the lower levels are more apt to be free, but as long as the basic story is communicated, people will subscribe to the free versions.  Trust me on this. If I have learned one thing from the hundreds of SEO proposals I handed out,  it is that people are cheap.

Search Engine’s Role:

The open indexing principals that exist at Google, and other search engines, are counter to what News Corp is asking. Search engines want what is ultimately best for the user. I don’t think this = ranking pay for content sites. What kind of a user experience would that be?

If Google or any engine went down this path it’s highly suicidal to their market share. Everyone would start to find alternative sources for news that don’t require you to pull out your credit card. It’s that “everyone is cheap” theory I got going.

The Media controls the Media:

This lawsuit is NOT about trying to “save journalism” as it has been spun by some media sources. The side being played by News Corp is well funded and positioned to present their side and little blogs like this one are the ones that fight back.

The attacks Murdoch is making arepurely profit motivated in my opinion because it would be so easy for these sites to block search engines and start charging on their own.

If the issue was really about journalism, let me be the first  to help by offering up some free advice to New Corp: Drop this code in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

It’s really hard to predict how a 10-year agreement will work out in the first week, but after reading the official press release, several articles from Danny Sullivan, and dissecting what Bartz & Ballmer (Yahoo & Microsoft CEO’s) are saying, we can safely make a few predictions as to what the future holds for search engine marketers.

Organic Search:

“Bing.com is going to take over as the exclusive algorithmic search engine for Yahoo!”
-MSN Press Release

For SEO’s out there, this means your world just got a little smaller. Google & Bing are now the two primary search engines to focus on in terms of improving keyword rankings. Combined Google & Bing Results will control over 90% of search engine market share.

Yahoo is giving Bing all of its 19.6% of market share to add to Bing’s growing 8.4%. Combined these two engines will control roughly 28% of search. Google will remain dominate with 65% of the search market share.

Yahoo Changes:

Let’s rewind the clock a few days when Yahoo updated its home page. This was mainly a cosmetic change, but some underlying agendas were definitely in play as well.

Yahoo wants to gain traffic by not being just a search engine, but a gateway to many portals. One of the best things Carol Bartz has done for Yahoo in her tenure is focusing on the things Yahoo is good at. This means all the websites and portals Yahoo owns that are not search engine related.

Bartz may be a little too eager to step away from the Google competition rhetoric to a fault. Last week she was quoted as saying Yahoo “is not a search company”. Anyone who can remember a Yahoo! commercial before 2004 knows differently; however if you read between the lines, you can see what she is trying to accomplish moving forward.

Yahoo attracts millions of visitors via properties such as Flickr, Answers, Health, Travel, Shine, etc. Don’t expect these sites to go away anytime soon!! If anything Yahoo will look to capitalize on these. In fact, last week we saw twitter integration and better search functionality given to Flickr.

The recent changes in Yahoo home page and other properties are optimizations to make these sites “destination sites.” Their success with this endeavor is still TBD and thus the SEO pursuit is going to be based on traffic over the years. If Yahoo properties stay strong in direct traffic, as well as search engine rankings, then expect SEO’s to pay attention.
Pay Per Click & Banner Advertising:

Yahoo is out of the search business but not completely out of the advertising business via search. Reports indicate that Yahoo will retain 88% of ad revenues generated from their sites. This is a win –win for both Bing and Yahoo considering the amount of overhead Yahoo is spending to service their clients and maintain the Panama system.

It appears that Yahoo wants to keep and grow the revenues via search and their properties and dump the overhead.  One interesting point in the agreement is that Microsoft will hire 400 Yahoo employees and an additional 150 to help during the transition process. If this produces the anticipated $500 million in extra annual operating profits then shareholders will be excited.

With revenues from Yahoo search *powered by Bing* bringing 88% in you can bet that Yahoo will try to focus on banner advertising on their web properties that don’t require them giving 12% back to Microsoft.