Unlike BMW in 2006, Matt Cutts did not make a public spectacle (or at least not yet) regarding their black hat behavior that has landed them both algorithmic and “manual” re-ranking. Although JCPenney has reportedly fired it’s agency SearchDex, who has yet to update it’s response to Google’s Guidelines. It is not clear if their agency was to blame for the questionable links, simply the “fall guy” or if these links were purchased on behalf of JCPenney.

No matter the case, it is extremely important that, as with any other form of marketing, SEO is subject to qualitative scrutiny that can be more destructive than productive. I am not sure if David and Doug were looking into JCPenney because they stumbled upon this or they were trying to level the playing field for a client, they don’t like the retailer or are just trying to be good citizens of the web, but I am sure that information probably won’t make it to the NY Times.

I am sure JCPenney or SearchDex will be talking to the public, but regardless if these links were purchased or were just built by the agency, the fact of the matter is that they were poor links because they were located on sites that had little or no topical value and hence no value to ultimately pass to the destination or linked page.

Reviewing a previous post from 2008, Fishing for Links, it does appear that some algorithmic adjustments have been made that has lowered the value of links from irrelevant sites that help sites rank for competitive terms.

Will this change the face of questionable SEO linking practices on the web? I would love to hear your thoughts…

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Less than two months after its release, Google has started pushing reviews and ratings from Hotpot into Google Maps.

Google’s aim for this is to make the Google Maps results more personalized for users by providing more personal, relevant and trustworthy reviews and to stay up to date with the latest places recommended or reviewed by your Hotpot friends. All Hotpot users on logging into their Google accounts will see recent activity from their Hotpot friends in the left-side window, as shown below.

Does Google have an ulterior motive for this integration? It would appear that Google is taking a direct shot at Yelp, the review site whose user’s ratings were included in the Google Maps results. Google Hotpot was launched last November in direct competition to Yelp who offers a similar service. With the introduction of a system that will recommend sites based on personal preferences & reviews and by integrating it into mobile, map and search pages it would seem that Google no longer has a need for Yelp.

Google says this new feature is available to both desktop and iPhone users and also that the integration of Hotpot reviews to Google Maps is still in its beta stage so users can expect to see the feature being further developed, making it even easier for them to keep track of their friends’ activities. Hotpot recommendations will also appear, in the Google Places search results when appropriate. With such an extensive user-base Google is all set to take advantage of these numbers and the fact that people are getting more and more interested in looking up reviews and recommendations from trusted sources.

Even though in its initial stages for now, Google has a lot of work to do to get at par with Yelp who are better off in terms of presentation and updating the reviews by the users.

We will have to watch closely to see how Google plans to develop this feature into a sophisticated, yet user friendly feature.

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The three million mark for available titles is more than just impressive — it makes them the industry leader right out of the gate. Each of these books cost an average of $12 or so, with exact prices varying. Google has gotten a lot more than those three million into a digital format, though, with a total of about fifteen million books having been put into electronic format since the project began in 2004. However, Google has stated that its only about ten percent of the way to its goal, with that goal being the digitization of all the world’s books.

The eBookstore’s cloud-based system means that you can access the book immediately after purchase, assuming you have a web connection. You can then download the book to your preferred device for later offline access.

While Google is selling many of the titles directly, they also want the framework to be open to any member of the American Booksellers Association, meaning that a number of independent retail book stores and promoters will be posting content here as well. Google stated that they wanted to keep the option of purchasing from independent stores open so that you could continue to support brick-and-mortar locations that serve across the U.S.

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The recent changes at Google prompted me to dig out a research paper we wrote a few years ago called “Search Engine Results: 2010.” In it, I interviewed Marissa Mayer along with a dream team of search pundits and usability experts. A lot of what we’re seeing today was hinted at in those interviews.  

For example, Mayer said: “If you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through — to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format. When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.”

Michael Ferguson, who was the UX lead at Ask, which had just rolled out Ask 3D (which, in hindsight, was well ahead of its time), went further: “There might be a time you might see people advertising and providing content not just on web pages and blogs etc. but with short discrete self-contained video answers and audio answers that come up either as sponsored or relevant content. So you might have a breaking down of search marketing that takes some of the things that have been learned like optimization and designing good text ads and seeing how that would work when you’re delivering an audio 20 second pitch or delivering an audio content that drives traffic to your site.”

There’s a delicate balance that must be respected when you’re combining the presentation of advertising and the way we search for information. As the results themselves become increasing rich and interactive, advertisers won’t be very happy if the ads start to lag behind in terms of visual prominence. Mayer touched on this: “As you know, my theory is always that the ad should match the search results. So if you have text results, you have text ads, and if you have image results, you have image ads. So as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page. That said, trust is a fundamental premise of search. Search is a learning activity.”

It’s this trust that makes the presentation of advertising a precarious proposition on the search results page. We’re not there to find ads, we’re there to find relevant information. If ads are highly relevant, we’re receptive. If they’re not, we’ll skip over them. We accept ads not as ads, but as potential paths to relevant information.  

This is an important distinction. If ads start to look too much like ads we start to skip over them. And that decision is made in milliseconds, before the relevance of the information that lies on the other side of the ad is even considered.

This phenomenon is called banner blindness. Jakob Nielsen explains: “If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well. The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document ‘down the page’ type of pattern.” 

I believe that Google is now responding to the multi-screen search challenge. Search on a desktop needs to be different than search on a mobile device or on a tablet. Mayer’s “encyclopedia” format makes sense here. But experimentation and the resulting change come at the potential price of alienating users.

Why have ads been the least changed part of the search page? It’s certainly not because advertisers have been demanding that they remain as boring lines of text. It’s because Google, along with Bing and Yahoo, are acutely aware of how important that trust is. The nature of our engagement with ads on a search page is far less straightforward than you might think. There’s a lot of subtle psychology at play here.  In the words of Hector Barbossa, “You’re off the edge of the map now mate, and here there be monsters!”

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The new update, though has raised doubts about, how it will impact the page traffic to a Website. However, responding to all speculations, Google has assured that the latest update will have no significant impact on the ranking of search results. Google also added that the new feature will not change the way ads are served but now they will be displayed as per the “predicted query.”

What Benefits Does Google Instant Gives:

• Fast Search Results: Google Instant, by predicting the search query shows relevant results, even before the user finishes typing. It has the ability to save up to 2-5 seconds per search.
• Smart Predictions: The user sometimes might not be sure, what to type in the search box to get the desired result. Google Instant guides the user with better search predictions.

Its Impact On Ad Impressions On Google Instant, ad impressions are counted only when:

• A user starts to type a query in the search box and clicks on any part of the page – a search result, an ad, a spell correction or a related search.
• A user selects to click on a particular search result or selects one of the predicted search queries.
• If a user stops typing further and the search results stay on the page for minimum 3 seconds.

Google said that with Google Instant, advertisers might find their impression levels to increase or decrease depending on the predicted queries. However, it has the potential to improve the quality of clicks as because, users type such terms, that they believe would give them the desired answers. This may lead to improvement in the overall campaign performance.

Its Impact On Long Tailed Keywords

Google Instant is surely going to give a boost to long-tailed specific keywords. With it, the user will keep on typing until the desired results are not displayed. This will help in better conversions unlike before.

Its Impact On User Experience

A former Product Manager for search quality with Google, Avichal Garg, points that “It will have a tremendous impact.” According to him, the effect of Google Instant on SEO and search performance, will be defined according to the user experience rather than ranking algorithms now. He also, predicted that users’ click patterns, page scanning behavior and query construction patterns will see a major change with the emergence of Google Instant.

“If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year” said Google’s Matt Cutts

Google Instant has been launched for users in US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. In the coming weeks and months, Google has plans to make changes on it, in order to cater to different geographic locations and platforms. Google also said that, it is planning to make it available on mobile quite soon.

These improvements to Google will certainly manage to change the way how people do their search. What only remains to be seen is how good or bad, it will be for ad impressions.

The Google Instant can be enabled with this URLComments

Why should the music industry care? Just as Apples iTunes App Store opened up new avenues to  deliver and monetize music, the Chrome Web Store will offers a new opportunity to reach a much larger set of potential customers – anyone with a computer or web enabled device.

For example, an artist or label could sell a web app with music plus bonus content. Another could sell access to a complete audio and video catalog or a regularly updated stream of content.  The possibilities are endless. Google has just provided a music bigger sandbox to experiment in and a much clearer path to monetization.

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As we talk about often it’s not even that Google is on top anymore. That’s a given. In fact, its dominance is what makes the uninformed cry monopoly. Once again market dominance doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. People just like it better and use it more.

What is interesting is the drop in share of the next three biggest players. Google is up one percent but all three of the others are down 4%. There is no search ‘cannibalism” going on here where they are feeding off each other. Are people looking for other search options other than Yahoo, bing and Ask that are not named Google?

While this is always interesting it is certainly getting a bit mundane. I would love to see true competition for Google if only to stop the silly talk about Google’s dominance restricting others’ opportunity. I just don’t see it happening. Do you?

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You know the one. They play it a lot at NC State football games?

C’mon, you know it. “Boom, here comes the boom….”

No?

Forget it! I’ll Google it instead!

Yes, that’s it!

And, pretty soon, you’ll never have problems finding a song, artist, or album again–thanks to a new “Discover Music” onebox from Google.

Maybe you remember only the chorus — or maybe you remember who sang it, but you forgot the exact name of the song. If you’ve ever heard a catchy song in a car or cafe, but just can’t figure out the name of the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This search feature also helps you find many of those songs by entering a search containing a line or two of lyrics.

Cool, huh? Google has partnered with MySpace and Lala to source the results and Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody are standing by to help you discover music related to your query. Not only does the Onebox show the result, but you can click the play button to activate the pop-up–and play the song!

**Time out! Google is allowing pop-ups now? That’s the topic for a another blog post!**

If you’re not seeing the results yet, Google has launched a music search site you can try out.

The only thing missing? Maybe a partnership with Shazam, so I can play music to Google and have it recognize it–without me knowing anything about the song. That would be cool!

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