Search Longtail - Hitwise Data

How long is the long tail? Bill Tancer of Hitwise wrote an interesting post on the Hitwise blog about the very subject. Using 3 months of their data, he pulled more than 14 million search terms. Though they are looking at a small and limited data set, there are some interesting findings:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

What I found surprising, this means that the top 0.07% of the terms generate nearly 20% of all search. Tancer says, "In summary, the long tail aspect of the search is true, but the data tells us that there may really be no head or body." which I agree with, but I think he misses the concentration at the front. The Long Tail is supposed to be a steady curve to 80/20. To say there is no head is not quite accurate. Flattening out to a longer tail than was originally postulated would be correct but you can't dismiss 20% of traffic in the first 1/10 % of search terms.

I think it's also noteworthy to mention that the slice was 10 million US specific users and no adult terms. (why does everyone try to ignore the adult traffic, as if it doesnt exist?)

Link Profile Analysis

This is really a great post by Aaron on ways and tools to look at your site's link profile. There are also some nice historical anecdotes in there. I was surprised to find 2 gems that I had somehow never seen before:

This link analysis tool

And this independent web crawl and free index

Google Testing - Forum Search Results

Google is testing this in the SERPS for any result which they think is a forum:

Click - New Book by Bill Tancer

Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise. He just wrote a book called Click, What Millions of People Do Online and Why It Matters. He was featured on Good Morning America and 20/20 yesterday, Aug 28.

The book sounds interesting and it's written by a data analyst which is a plus. I found this humorous, you can read the first chapter, (PPC) Porn, Pills, and Casinos here. He talks about the prevalence of Porn in daily users habits, does a comparison of the search histories of 'online poker' vs. 'sportsbook' and the blue pill.

Global Page Load Time and Browsing Habits

I looked for this data a couple months ago and it was not easy to find. ClickTale, the hosted, live analytics company compiled usage data of their subscribers to come up with a pretty good overview.

Both posts are worth a read, but here's a summary:

Part 1:

• There is a good graph of main country average pageload times
• Graph of on page time per country
• Countries with slower load times, users spend disproportionately MORE time on each page
• China has the lowest speeds
  
• Dutch and Israeli surf the fastest

Part 2:

• Pageviews per country
• Overall average time spent on 1 site per country

Web Habits Across the Globe Part 1 and Part 2.

Googler Comments on Links at Google Groups

JohnMu added this comment to a Google Groups discussion about a site owner who thinks his t-shirt website has been penalized. It's looks like the site is indeed suffering from a penalty of some sort and does not rank well for 'Web Site' or 'WebSite' or 'WebSite Product', but does return a #1 result for 'WebSite.com'.

JohnMu's response is enlightening, especially reading though a bunch of rambling theories from various commentors.

It might be that the links to your site are not counting the way they
might have in the past. In general, it is important to us that links
are not just exchanged, bought/sold or otherwise used in an attempt to
manipulate rankings, as we have detailed in our help center article at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

If you find that your site has issues with regards to our Webmaster
Guidelines that can be resolved, I would recommend doing that and then
submitting a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you
have made.

These guys seem to have a failry large % of links with similar link text, in sidebars, sitewides, and on blogs. It also seems that they have a large amount of paid posts with very targeted link text.

'not counting the way they might have in the past' is a general way of phrasing that I have seen Google use before as a response. I think most have taken this to mean that the links have been 'devalued' in some way and maybe the act of devaluing really is a penalty. This must be algoritmic in other words there is a threshhold that is passed.

But what acutally happens? Is it that these links really are devlaued for their anchor text and the other top phrase search terms for the destination site? Is it an 'upper limit' ceiling which is imposed on the site, it can't rank above a certain level no matter what they do for a certain period of time?

If it was basically a 'devaluing' of the specfic links, a site owner could get around that by simply working hard to build new links for their brand terms. However, JohnMu's suggestion to file a reconsideration request seems to imply that the whatever has been imposed on the site can be 'lifted'. In other words, they can't get out of the cellar until they clean up their act.

Paid Link Reports in Google

There has been much speculation about what happens to paid link reports that are filed in the Google Webmaster Tools. Eric Enge of StoneTemple just interviewd Maile Ohye, Tech Solutions Engineer from Google who worked on Webmaster Tools. I think this is pretty clear:

Eric Enge: Right, so then next question for paid links that get reported in Webmaster Tools. I think it’s fairly well stated that the primary thing you do with it is use it to improve your algorithms. But, if you do confirm a link is a paid link when you get the report, is it normally disabled from passing PageRank?

Maile Ohye: Yes, we do disable such links from passing PageRank.

and a bonus tidbit from the interview, with Google now indexing some Flash text:

Eric Enge: So, will a link embedded in Flash pass PageRank?

Maile Ohye: Yes, it functions as a regular link.

Russia 4th in the World for Mobile Internet Useage

Another reason to market to Russia. From the QuinturQ Blog:

"11.2% of Russian mobile users accessed the Internet on their mobile devices, trailing only the U.S. (15.6%), UK (12.9%), and Italy (11.2%) and ahead of Spain, France and Germany,..."

That's 17 million users!

Paris Hilton - The SEO's Wet Dream

It is amazing to me how Paris still has it, man can she drive traffic. Google Trends has been lit up all day over this one.

John McCain came out with a new TV commercial campaign comparing Obama to a no-substance celebrity. The intention was to paint Barack as a candidate who does not have the experience to lead. (apparently the ad has been highly successful as the poll gap has narrowed to nil)

In the ad the McCain camp shows shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears juxtaposed with images of Obama. You can see the ad here; TV Ad; Celeb.

Paris came back with an ad of her own today, a mock Paris for President satire bit that is really good (she even sounds intelligent). FunnyorDie.com is hosting the video and I can't even imagine the traffic they have seen today. Awesome piece of linkbait. Paris for President Video.

Check out a slice of Google Trends from about an hour ago:

1. funny or die

2. danny mcbride

3. tampa tribune

4. paris hilton commercial

5. mauritania

6. good morning america

7. msn.com sign in

8. sarah pender

9. elance

10. elizabeth pena

11. tom waddle

12. tuatara

13. gma.com

14. paris hilton mccain video

15. joey cheek

16. www.msn.com

17. funnyordie.com

18. steven curtis chapman

19. mountain lion

20. amanda beard peta

21. jennifer ertman

22. paris hilton political ad

23. gma

24. michigan election results

25. tampa bay bucs

26. simple jack

27. paris hilton site youtube.com

28. elizabeth pena 16 and jennifer ertman 14

29. my.msn.com

30. american solutions

31. who won i survived a japanese game show

32. elance.com

33. x tube

34. darth nihilus

35. paris for president

36. olympic soccer

37. team darfur

38. funny or die paris hilton

39. steve harvey morning show

40. indiana state fair

41. heather mitts

42. espresso gone wild

43. olympics 2008 tv schedule

44. msn home page

45. kohls

46. goodmorningamerica.com

47. ann arbor news

48. mary lou mcfate

49. magnavox progressive scan dvd recorder

50. washtenaw county election results

51. funny or die.com

52. yge

53. good morning america steven curtis chapman

....

94. derrick o brien

95. laugh or die

96. kem kimbrough

97. hiroshima

98. idledale colorado

99. ks95

100. space camp

Google Now Showing Customized Results Message

This is great news, Google just announced that they will be showing a message to searchers stating that their result has been customized based on Geo region or on personal usage data. Clap Clap.

Cool or is it Cuill or is it Kuil?

I must say i got a kick out of this today, the new Google killer search engine Cuil.com launched with great fan fare yesterday. Jury is still out but long way to go to be a threat to anyone. Pretty unanimous, reports I have read indicate poor relevancy and not only from those in the search industry, seems to be the general consensus of average users as well.

No question that the Cuil marketing campaign was a fantastic success. In fact they got hit with some much traffic, their site came down a few times. However, Cuil pronounced 'COOL', huh? Seems a stretch and potentially confusing to consumers doesn't it? Well, this morning's Google Trends seems to bear that out pretty well. The amount of misspellings is pretty surprising really. The one I liked the best is Cool.com and Cool.

You would think a start up with $30 million in financing and with a crazy spelling pronounced 'Cool' would have considered buying or leasing Cool.com, which is a parked domain.

And the list goes on; quil, cool search engine, kuil, guil, coil, cuill, and I supposed this says it all; cuil sucks.

Spamming Google Trends

Google Trends, July 13, 2008, 7pm GMT:

Special People

Too good to pass up:

Google SERP Clicks and Attention Distribution

This pretty much says it all:
From a 2006 Cornell eye tracking study. This is a good summary of the study itself.

XML Sitemaps Might Not be Great

Finally someone has addressed this. All the crazy drum beat in the SEO community over the last year to create site maps was loud. It became almost a mantra. Of course the fervor really originated from Google, heck if they say it, it must be good right? I haven't been able to pin down the true benefit to Google. But it seems to me that there is no clear benefit to a site owner if your site is crawlable and indexed well.

SmallBusinessSEM address the topic and gives some vague anecdotal evidence that when he implimnented a site map his site took a hit, when he took the map down everything came back.

Facebook Tops Myspace in May

According to comScore, Facebook passed up Myspace in May for number of unique visitors, 123.9 million to 114.6 million. Most of the growth for Facebook has occurred overseas where Myspace has appeared to stagnate a bit.

ICANN Paves the Way For Unlimited Domain Extensions

This is pretty big news, at their recent meeting in Paris, ICANN opened the door to basically unlimited domain extensions. Soounds like it will be an application process that will also likely involve hefty fees. ICANNs big concern initially was on a technical side and whether that many extensions could be supporsted at the root.

comments here at WebmasterWorld

SEO and SEM Job Boards

Here's a list of links to SEO and SEM related job boards.

Data Answers All

Interesting read from Wired, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Notable quotes:

"All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

'But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete...'

'Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.'

What Data Google Collects

This is worth a look, basically a very detailed look at all the sources Google uses to gather data on users. Pretty staggering or Why Google is the Web. Skip the top part of the article and go straight to the list.

Serving Different Content Based on User Search Query

This is an awesome question and I surprised the topic hasn't been more deeply covered by someone. A thread in HighRankings asks whether or not he is risking it with Google if he serves different content on a page based on the search term source. He switches out content by looking at the HTTP_REFERER details for the specific search query if its avaliable but serves Google the default content when GoogleBot comes crawling.

Certainly this is against Google's guidelines, however the site owner is simply trying to customize content for his user thus enhancing their experience, Google mantra 'design for the user not the search engines'. Only 2 comments but both seem to suggest that the site owner is dangerously walking the line here.

I have to believe this is going to become a big issue down the road for search engines as sites look to customize user info more and more. Consequently I would have to believe that Google will come to accept this practice. Guess it remains to be seen.

SERPs on Google.co.uk

For the last 6 months or so, I have seen a number of threads on WebmasterWorld about Google.co.uk issues. Everyone is in agreement that there have been big changes.

The latest WebmasterWorld thread, Google.co.uk SERP Changes started a long discussion with more of the same. Random theories and off tangent disscussion abounds, but the big point in all this is that there are still inconsistent results and a lot of movement, though things have settled down a bit.

It seems to me that Google is using Google.co.uk to heavily test localization. This is bourn out by experience that .com site previously hosted in the states with powerful backlinks in the US, moved to the UK has developed great search results in the UK and retained positions in the US. I suppose the tweaking will continue but it appears that Google has come a long way in the UK.

Another Reason Not to Use Google Analytics

Search Engine Land did an announcement of the new Google Trends functionality and it sounds like had RJ Pittman, Google's Director of Product Development walk them through the product. What was interesting was this bit in the article, which I am led to believe came from RJ Pittman:

'...this tool basis its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. In addition, the search volume numbers are estimates...'

Hmm, so that Google Analytics 'private' data that i have about my site is being shared with my competitors, freely?

SEOBook does a great job of covering the issue.

More Website Data in Google Trends

This is pretty cool, Google Trends in now offering more data for websites. See regions that brought traffic to the site, top search terms, and other sites that visitors to that site visited (suppose downstream traffic) and you can do comparisons of websites. Here's a few examples:

Single Site Trends

Trends Comparison

Google Webmaster Tools API

Need to look into this a bit more, but Google now has and API for Webmaster Tools. Depending on the functionality this could open up some really cool options.

GoogleBowling, Myth Busted?

GoogleBowling:Sending links to your competitor’s web site from bad neighborhoods in order to harm their ranking on Google.

There has always been speculation that this works to tank a competitors site. I ran across a good Google Webmaster Groups discussion where a poster said his site he had proof his site had been hit and that was the reason his rankings tanked. There indeed were a high percentage of shady porn links from shady forums all over the place linking back to his site.

Googler John Mu entered the discussion and basically dismissed the effect of the links, blaming specifically the content on his site as being the culprit:

"Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying
our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines,
would be time well spent. Most of these guidelines involve the content
on the site itself..."

No one was satisfied with that response and it sounded like John was dodging the question, but the reality is that he had pointed out directly what the issue was and completely dismissed the influence of foul backlinks, which is what is really interesting in the whole discussion. His successive responses:

"I think what the original poster is worried about is not links on his
site but rather links to his site from other (bad) sites. In theory, I
can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that
would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing
website issues I have not once run into a situation like that."

and:

"There are a lot of factors involved and this is certainly not
something we take lightly. Google is a very data-driven company, so
you can be sure that people are looking at a lot of data about this
kind of problem. When we make adjustments because of issues brought to
our attention, they are generally on an algorithm level: we made over
400 changes last year alone. "

John comments a 4th time, basically tearing the guy's site apart, finding paid links, anti-virus issues. Ultimately the poster would have been better off not saying anything and he hasn't seen anything yet as far as a penalty goes.

GoogleBowling, myth busted? Verdict is still out, but the degree of this case (% of total backlinks that were crap) seemed like a situation which would cause concern for most webmasters and Google easily dismissed it. Though Jonh didnt claim it wasn't possible in theory, it seems like the threashold is much higher than most would have expected.

Post on How Google Measures Search Quality

This is a very good article which would those who are more interested in the technical side of how search works. The article is based on an interview with Googler Peter Norvig, Director of Research and the previous Director of Search Quality . The most intriguing point, usage data is not a good metric for the quality of search results:

Peter confirmed that Google does collect such data, and has scads of it
stashed away on their clusters. However -- and here's the shocker --
these metrics are not very sensitive to new ranking models! When Google
tries new ranking models, these metrics sometimes move, sometimes not,
and never by much. In fact Google does not use such real usage data to
tune their search ranking algorithm. What they really use is a blast
from the past. They employ armies of "raters" who rate search results
for randomly selected "panels" of queries using different ranking
algorithms. These manual ratings form the gold-standard against which
ranking algorithms are measured -- and eventually released into service.

GooHoo, My Thoughts Exactly

Echoing my comments on the Yahoo-Google deal concerning cross platform functionality of instant messaging services, SearchEngineJournal picked up on the same kernel of information that everyone seemed to overlook.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

GooHoo, Jerry Yang's Perspective

Jerry Yang did a post on the Yodel Blog commenting on the Yahoo-Google deal.

Jerry says that Yahoo already allows other advertisers to place ads on Yahoo, this is essentially nothing new. Also, they will have complete control over the delivery of the search ads with a non binding agreement.

GooHoo or Comentary on the Google Yahoo Ad Deal

Yahoo has signed and agreement with Google to place Google Adwords on Yahoo search results and in Yahoo content. The agreement is specific to the US and Canadian markets. It also includes cross platform functionality for IM services which I think is huge and has been underrated in the articles.

Here's a list of items worth reading:

Yahoo Google deal press release from Yahoo on SearchEngineWatch

SearchEngineLand summary

Announcement on the Google Blog

SEOBook brief mention

Bloomberg Article

Forbes - 10 Signs Yang Made The Right Move

ValleyWag

Interview With SEO ROI

Nice interview with Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI. I really enjoy reading his stuff. He's a guy that gets it. This piece on the ROI of SEO is great. Only 20 years old, wow.

www5.Google.com, What is it?

Checking deep search referrers and this popped up, www5.google.com. Have never seen it before. Checking the server headers its returning a 200 but resolving to Google.com. Optimus mentions it in this thread on WebmasterWorld, but no one has an answer. He also mentions seeing www6.google.com, www1.google.com and www4.google.com.

Anyone out there have an idea?

YouTube Cloaking

This is a great post by Slightly Shady SEO, "YouTube is Cloaking, So why can't I?"

For questionable content, YouTube is showing users the inappropriate content page age verify page but showing Googlebot the page behind the age verify.

More on Geo-Targeting in Google Webmaster Tools

This has been debated since it was launched. Does Geo-targeting in Google's Webmaster Tools actually help a non-local or generic TLD rank better for in country searches? Regardless, a Googler in Google Groups responds and gives some insight. Basically, it helps some but is not as good as the country specific TLD.

How Much of a Web Page do Online Users Actually Read?

Interesting study called "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use". Jakob Nielsen summarizes it here:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Other interesting point: Though users spend more time on a page with more words, past 100 words on a page, they typically spend an additional 4.4 seconds per 100 words. There's no way to read all that information at that rate. The more information on a page, the smaller a percentage of the total content that users are actually reading.

Study: The Impact of Blended Search Results

Search Engine Watch covers a study done by Jupiter Research on blended search. Simply put users are more inclined to click a listing in blended SERPs than they are in specific vertical searches.

* 36% click "news" results within blended search results

* Only 17% click a "news" result after conducting a news-specific search

* 31% click "image" results within blended search results

* Only 26% click an "image" result after conducting an image-specific search

* 17% click "video" results within blended search results

* Only 10% click a "video" result after conducting a video-specific search

Finding Employees Who Make a Difference

Its about the little things on a day to day basis, real progress is made incrementally. This was a nice piece by Aaron Wall, The Value of Small Daily Incremental Improvements.

I liked these quotes about employees:

Aaron: "You really need to find that 10% of people who want to add value...and
then you need to find the 30% of those who's loyalty exceeds their
greed."

Comment by timmcg: "My old football coach would say winning comes down to blocking and tackling and getting better at them everyday."

Comment by bookworm.seo: "My soccer coach in high school, when I asked him how to pick great
players for teams I would coach eventually, told me the following:

Pick players for their work ethic first, and their talent second. Skills can be taught, but a positive attitude can't."

Interview with Udi Manber, Google Vice Pres of Search Quality

This was a really nice interview by Popular Mechanics and worth a read.

A few notable points:

"I wish people would put more
effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting
the right keywords onto their pages."

"Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm. "

"At Google we do not manually change results....We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm."

"The results we show you are based not only on what we know of the Web, but also what other people have searched for."

China #1

I thought this was a notable milestone, the US getting passed up for the number of internet users by China. At 220 million people online, that is only 17% of the Chinese population vs. 71% of the US population with 217 million surfers.

Widgets, SEO, and Google's Opinion

I watched this for the last few months as it developed. A web developer working for SEOMoz left to go work with a younger start up company, a free dating site called JustSayHi. He posted on the Moz blog about his link building technique, which was essentially to create widgets that were quizzes. A user would then peel off some HTML code that they could paste on their site that was their quizz score. His topics were a wide range of things like, 'How many 5 year olds could you take on in a fight' or 'How well could you survive a zombie attack'. His successful campaigns resulted in great rankings for the very competitive terms, 'free online dating' and 'online dating'.

The dating site was owned by a larger company which owned a network of other sites. They liked his link building success and asked him to do the same for a number of their other sites, namely payday loan sites and education sites. He added links to those sites into his widgets off the dating site. Google took notice and JustSayHi was penalized. After unsuccessful and not completely truthful reinclusion requests to Google and personal emails to Matt Cutts, they simply decided to scrap the old domain and start fresh with a new domain.

He continued his same strategy with the new dating site, OnePlusYou, similar widgets, linking back to OnePlusYou using terms like 'online dating'. Low and behold, out of the blue they got a note from Google basically saying, 'Watch yourselves, you are creating off topic links and this is considered gaming the system'.

All this bring us to this latest blog post on SEOMoz which summarizes in more detail what I just described. All this is notable for 2 things:

• If you spread your tactics out there for all to read on a site like SEOMoz, you will be noticed
• Matt Cutts is very clear in his comments what is acceptable for widgets, keep everything on the topic related to your site and make it worthwile for users
  

Matt's comments:

"Our reconsideration request was truthful but not as forthcoming as it might have been."

I'll
just highlight this point. If your reconsideration request gets a
personal reply from me, it's safe to assume that I'm paying close
attention to that situation. If that's the case, I recommend being very
careful to be clear when communicating.

A reconsideration
request that is technically true but leaves out what we consider to be
vital details comes across to us as "Maybe they don't know about these
other domains, so let's not mention them." That's why we recommend to
provide as much information as possible when requesting
reconsideration.

And:

Jeremy, I'll try to post on
that at some point, but clearly some widgets are less helpful than
others. When you wrote about this back in January:
http://www.xuru.com/linkbait-gone-spam/ , I think you made a pretty
good point that "Find Ultrasound technician schools
near you" with the link going to
http://www.medical-assistant-training-schools.org/ultrasounddiagnosticschools.htm
is not that helpful, and that a zombie apocalypse widget has very to do
with payday loans. If you were trying to promote your ultrasound
technician school, you probably wouldn't think it was fair if a
competing site ranked highly only on the basis of widgets.

And
Loren at
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-loves-transparent-links-hit-counter-spam/5615/
made another really good point when he called up people that had
installed widgets and asked them if they knew that they were linking in
such a way. One person replied "I had no idea - I looked for a free
counter and placed it on the site - how did you find out that it linked
to jerks?… I have removed the counter from my site including (I hope)
all the html they provided to paste on my site for the counter, thank
you for pointing this out."

Final note, I suppose that JustSayHi might not have had a better option that to simply start over. Though I would expect that Google would have simply devalued those widget links, they obviously took a harder look in this instance. What is a site owner to do? It's not like you could go out there and shut off all those widgets that you have out there in the wild. If Google is truely penalizing you in part for those, you can't make them go away.

Google Now Filling in Forms and Crawling Those Pages

From the Google Webmasters Central Blog, Google states that they are doing limited testing on high quality sites of automatically filling in forms to discover new pages. Sounds like they use onpage content to establish terms to enter into the form and they are avoiding any personal information related forms of those which require a login.

Obama vs. Clinton, Stats

The Compete analysts just did a post for their blog covering the primaries and overall attention, Obama and Clinton. Most of the data we see is a fairly narrow view, ie specific poll data, web traffic stats, etc.

It seems clear that in the relatively new field of using web data to gage candidate interest there is a serious gap in the quality of the data and actual interest. Best example for this season was the Ron Paul campaign. Time and again his web traffic numbers were stronger and faster moving than any other Republican candidate and just as strong as the democratic candidates. Apparently, the best explanation I heard in the end was that Paul's support base was simply more skewed to be proactive on the internet.


This Compete article takes a more holistic view, showing a number of metrics, not just web metrics, side by side.

Informational, Navigational, or Transactional?

A recent study by Penn State on the types of queries of search engine users has identified that 80% of all queries are Informational, with the remaining 20% being evenly split 10% and 10% between Navigational and Transactional. Penn State Web Search Study Press Release.

Google Introduces Previous Query

In what is likely to be one of the biggest changes to Organic Search in a while, Google will be adding a user's previous query data to shape the results of organic results. In other words, if you search for 'SEO' then search for 'Blog', your second search will be tailored more to SEO related blogs. Google has been employing this for Adwords so I guess it was just a matter of time. The real implication and where it will theoretically improve the quality of results for searches is in single word queries. So, in reality, optimization for multiple keywords is the direction of things to come.

This is not based on personalized search, but on cookies, so its not like users can really opt out of it. SearchEngineLand broke the story and covers it well.

Trademark SEO

I got a kick out of this one and you have to hand it to the guy, trying to trademark SEO. Apparently he has gotten quite far in the process, though you cant imagine what he would do with it. SEOMoz covers the Search Engine Optimization trademark drama.

Who Says Google Won't Control The Internet?

Google just launched Google App Engine, a developer tool to create your own web apps and they will host them for you.

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of
storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We
expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million
pageviews per month

Global Internet Ad Spend

Attended a conference yesterday in which one of the sessions a presenter mentioned that the total online ad spend per year is about $500 billion. I just ran across this piece from CNN Money which discusses a recent JPMorgan study (could not find a copy of it) called the 2008 Global Internet Snapshot. The CNN piece mostly addresses the mobile phone market, but there was this:

He highlights a stat showing that the global population of people
connected to the Internet - now 1.3 billion - has had a compound annual
growth rate of 20.3% for the past eight years. Meanwhile, Internet ad
spending of $40 billion remains only 6.6% of the global total of $605
billion and is growing at an annual rate of 33%.

Great Idea, Great Place - SEO Roadshow

Instead of paying money to go to an SEO conference then waiting for the bar afterwards for the good stuff, some SEOs got together a few years ago and came up with the idea of SEO Roadshow. Basically, bypass the conference, use that money to go somewhere cool, then hang out in a bar with a bunch of SEOs. Sounds like a great idea and Ireland is the choice of location this year!!

How to Move Your WordPress Blog to a New Domain

Here's a good little step by step tutorial by Joost on moving an existing WordPress blog to a new domain.

SEOBook Training Program

SEOBook just announced and launched a new subscription based training program and online community. It sounds interesting and Aaron's content is great. $100 a month, but the first 100 to sign up get is for $50 a month.

Who's Googling You?

I got a kick out of this story that is hitting Google Trends for the search term, 'Who's Googling You?' Basically there was a news piece done about 'caller ID' for the internet. It begs the obvious question for an SEO, how would a company be able to provide data about who is doing a search for your name as they claim to be able to do?

A bit of digging revealed the answer, Ziggs.com (sorry no link for this service), is a site in which you can create a personal/professional profile page. In there you can search other profiles, blah, blah. But the search engine data for queries on your name? It's a premium service they offer, charging $5 a month. With that, they buy PPC placements with using your name and send you an email alert each time someone clicks on your profile page in the sponsored results. Brilliant business model. Had to laugh on that one. What is really ridiculous is that they are getting major media coverage with this.

So how many clicks is your name going to generate in a month? 2, 3, wow, even 20 at $0.10 a click? Then they pocket the difference. Suppose it would be fun to spam all their listings and drive a bunch of clicks through.

Search Marketing Spend by Search Engine and Continent

This compares the big boys, Google, Yahoo,and MSN search advertising spend. Interesting that Yahoo is actually dominant in Japan.

European Internet Usage

This is a good breakdown of internet usage, penetration, and main properties by European country. The data is from April 07.

Hitwise Presidential Candidate Demographic Data

Hitwise offers demographic data as an option with their web data service. One of their analysts offered this look at traffic to McCain's, Clinton's, and Obama's websites, based on bucketed demographic persona types. Overlaying the data allows for great a comparative look at the candidates breadth and level of appeal.

The short of it is that McCain appears to appeal to a broader population segment than Hillary and a far broader than Obama.

Duplicate Content Answer From Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts received a question about duplicate content at a recent conference. He gave an expanded answer on his blog that is the normal stuff on the topic. However, he expanded a bit by stating that one site having even 1-3 versions on the content on theri own site would not pose a problem as long as it wasn't a spammy site to begin with.

The real great tip he passed along though was that if you are going to syndicate a piece or post the item on various sites, just be sure to include a link on the 'copy' back to the 'original' so that value is pointed back to the 'original' ensuring a higher PageRank.

Google Focuses Country Specific Results

Some people are noticing big changes with respect to Google results in certain regions and country specific sites, specifically sites not located in a given country slipping in rankings. This could also partially explain some recent movement in SERPs. SEORoundtable comments on it and WebmasterWorld has the forum thread.

Removing or Blocking Your Content from Google

Here's a good list of resources on removing content from Google.

SEO Contract Template

SEO contract template.

This Blew Me Away

Craigslist.org - according to Compete.com, has ranked for the last 6 months between the 15-20th most trafficked site on the internet in the US. They receive about 28 million visitors a month. None of this is surprising.

But this, wow. In a recent interview at the Real Estate Connect NYC 2008 conference, the founder Craig Newmark was asked the following question and gave this response:

AW: Do you find that social news sites like Digg (which often promote your Best of Craigslist content) help your traffic or user involvement at all?



CN: We don't have the stats for referrers, so no real clue, but I'd guess they don't help significantly.

Google URL Removal Feature Works for 90 Days

I was surprised to find out that the Google URL removal feature only functions for 90 days. The intention of this according to a Google engineer is to avoid any accidental removals. The short of it is, you still need to handle properly blocking internally in your back end via robots.txt and NoIndex tags.

Optimizing Porn Sites

I actually thought this was a really interesting topic, how to optimize a porn site. There are huge challenges there, bad neighborhoods, no text, no one wants to link to you, huge reciprocal linking issues. I did a search to try to find any info how how porn SEOs (if there is such a thing) or porn webmasters do it and found a serious lack of info. SEO4fun did this nice post on the subject of the challenges of porn optimization, based on a login crawling study that Sebastian is trying.

I guess the big enlightening point was that porn IS based on images and video, so you have to target Google image search and heavily optimize your photo content. By the way, Google is truly the largest single collection of porn on the internet.

SEO Interview Questions

This is a good list of questions to ask a candidate in an SEO or SEM interview.

The SEMMYS

The top SEO and SEM blog posts of 2007 voted on by the best in the industry. Certainly worth a look.

College SEO/SEM Courses

I found this comprehensive list of all current universities which are offers any courses on either Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing. I suppose this would be a great recruitment source for new SEMs.

Google Online Marketing Challenge

Google is offering a college competition targeting local SEM. The idea is to generate interest in SEM in the universities and with a focus on local business. The teams are to pick one small, local business that currently does not run Adwords and during the 3 week challenge period get the best ROI they can.

I've mentioned this competition before when it was announced but was surprised to see that 724 college teams from all over the world have signed up.

Google Only Crawls News Items Once

This is a really interesting piece of info. Google News only crawls news bits once and it was confirmed by Google.

More on the story and Search Engine Roundtable

Compete.com Top 20 Moving Sites of 2007

Fastest Moving Sites: December 2006 to December 2007, Compete.com

Nice Site Link

What happens when someone in IT drops the ball. Nice 404:

MSN Live Search Can't Handle 301 Redirects

Interesting and this has been conjecture for a long while, that MSN Live Search is having difficulties with 301 redirects to the point of not evern picking then yp. Search Engine Roundtable covers it here and ads this quote from someone who spoke to someone and Live Search:

Yeah, I spoke to various people even a particular person from Live
Search. They confirmed that at the moment, Live can't handle 301
redirects. I trust they are working on this issue, hope so at least.

What Makes a Great SEO

The guest post on SEOBook today by Hugo Guzman is really worth a read. Using his own personal SEO journey as a model, he lays out what he thinks really separates SEOs from great SEOs.

This pretty much sums it up:

So what did I mean when I said that the great SEOs don’t need a day
job? It’s simple. Great SEO requires an entrepreneurial spirit and an
understanding of the underlying business and marketing considerations
that will help a particular company be successful. Failing to
understand this, whether you’re a garage marketer, in-house optimizer,
or agency SEO, will ensure your continued failure to ascend from good to great.

SEMPO Search Marketing 2007 Salary Survey

I forgot to post this last week and fortunately ran across it again today. SEMPO did a survey of in-house search marketers for salaries and responsibilities.

Some worthy points:

• Only 25% of the respondents said they managed both PPC and SEO
• About 10% of those with less than 3 yrs. experience said they earned over $100,000 per year
• About 35% of those with 5-7 years experience said they earned more than $100,000 per year

I think that experience time gage is a bit vaguer in search marketing being that the path for virtually all those in search was probably meandering and no-one 'started out' in search 5 years ago.

Italian Main Web Portal Data

December 2007 Traffic data for main Italian web portals. Interesting to note that the largest portal, Libero.it, with a 130,000,00 Google.it as the default search engine.

No, You Are Stupid

Ha, had to use that title, especially since it was so fitting.

The CIA released their site search data. And topping the list...'ufo'. hey, at least 'area 51' came in at #20.

November, 2007:

ufo: 2115

korea: 1517

iraq: 1507

December, 2007:

ufo: 1831

korea: 1705

brazil: 1606

Of course the CIA are no dummies, 'Intelligence', so they wisely capitalized on this topical interest by creating a Nav item and special section called 'UFOs: Fact or Fiction'

You can also learn more in this long piece 'CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90', yes authored by the CIA. Notable quotes:

An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or
read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent
believe they are real.

the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily explained
and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost all
sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and
hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects.

UFOlogists had long argued that, following a flying saucer crash in New
Mexico in 1947, the government not only recovered debris from the
crashed saucer but also four or five alien bodies.

Yes, thats a word:
u·fol·o·gy (yōō-fŏl'ə-jē)

n.
The study of unidentified flying objects.

[UFO + -logy.]

u'fo·log'i·cal (yōō'fə-lŏj'ĭ-kəl) adj., u·fol'o·gist n.

Best SEO Pluggins for Wordpress Awards

Voted the best and winner by Search Engine Blog readers for 2007 was the All In One SEO Pack. Looks like a great product. Automatically optimizes Titles, auto generates Meta tags, and allows fine tuning and overrides.

The remainder of the nominees and results are list here at Search Engine Journal.

Also, heres the link to the complete 2007 Search Blog Awards. There are a variety of categories and worth a look.

Italian Internet User Data

Here is a good overview of the Italian online user market as of November 2007.

Interesting fact that Italy is far behind the UK, France, and Germany for usage of the internet related to e commerce, 44% vs. 60-67%.

World's Biggest Domain Taster

This is pretty awesome. While
domain tasting, or kiting, is pretty common, especially for bigger domainers, what is
astounding is that they are claiming that this company alone is responsible for
72% of all tasting in the world.

To give an idea, some estimates put the number of tasted domains
returned each day to be about 1% of all active domains that exist in the world,
which is probably around 150-200 million owned domain names.

Needless to say, domain tasting is likely the majority of all domain
purchases.

SEO Moz Domain Tasting