search marketing blog: ambergreen

A post at WebmasterWorld is discussing notable changes in rankings at Google which began to be seen towards the end of last week.  It seems to be quite strange timing to rearrange the search results at the busiest time of the shopping year. 

Matt Cutts is denying any major changes, but there’s a huge outcry, with some people claiming to have lost 50% of their usual traffic, and a prevalence of Wikipedia results ranking where internal site pages used to be. 

Have you noticed any changes?

Search Engine Roundtable have been good enough to review about 40 sessions from the Chicago SES show for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to get over there – although it is about -12° just now so let’s not be too sad about it.

The sessions covered range from Podcast & Audio Search Optimisation, the Keynote sessions from Jason Calacanis & Danny Sullivan, Mobile Search Optimisation and more. There’s so much information here that it might take a while to go through, but there is some great information and it is well worth taking the time to read through it.

All the sessions are listed below – thanks to Search Engine Roundtable

Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)

Business Issues For the small SEM Shop

Drive traffic to your site with Google

Session: Business Issues For The Big SEM Shop

Ads in a Quality Score World

Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix

Working with Ad Agencies

Podcast & Audio Search Optimization

Ad Testing: Research and Findings

ClickZ Forum: Advertising In Social Media

Video Search Optimization

Bulk Submit 2.0

Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

Getting Traffic from Contextual Networks

Local Search Marketing Tactics

Earning Money From Contextual Ads

Mobile Search Optimization

Bot Obedience Course

Beyond The Single Site Mentality

Mobile Search Engines

Successful Site Architecture

Social Search Overview (Google Custom Search Engine, Yahoo Answers & MyWeb, Flickr, & Ask.com)

Images & Search Engines

Search Arbitrage Issues

Dealing With Affiliates (Pepperjam & Performics)

Linking Strategies

Buying & Selling Links

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Converting Visitors Into Buyers

Link Baiting & Viral Search Success

Search & Regulated Industries

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

Keynote: Danny Sullivan

Meet the Crawlers

Search Engine Q&A On Links (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & Windows Live Search)

In House: Big PPC

Organic Listings Forum

SEO Spyglass is a new tool that makes it easy to discover the linking strategy behind client or competitor sites and does it nice and quickly too. SEO SpyGlass examines competitor web pages to give you details of its link popularity and more.

The information includes

· The total number of backlinks and exact URL of each,

· The PageRank of the domain of the backlink and the backlink itself,

· The IP address of every backlink and the total coming from it which makes it easy to spot site-wide links,

· The anchor text used and the number of times competitor’s keywords appear within the anchor and title text of their backlinks

And this is only a snapshot of the information provided. Not only does SEO Spyglass do all of this and more, but it’s also a free tool so is well worth trying out.

The video demo is really good and it gives a really clear indication of how powerful and easy to use it is.

Let us know if you think that the tool is beneficial and get your review on the blog!

This is one for all of you people who actually understand algebra and the like (ie not me). The American Mathematical Society is running an article explaining the type of sophisticated mathematical equations that power PageRank.

Or you might want to take a look at this slightly less complicated version.

Good luck!

Search Marketing Now webcasts give you the chance to hear from some of the industry’s leading experts talk about what’s hot in search engine marketing. They’re all free to sign up for and should be well worth seeing. The next three sessions are down to Chris Sherman and feature the following topics; How to Find the Right Search Marketing Partner, Measuring Search Success 2007 and Social Search: New Marketing Opportunities.

In How Google Handles Hacked Sites, Matt Cutts discusses a specific example of a site being bounced from the index as a result of rogue activity. When the talkorigins.org site was hacked and dropped from the Goggle index, the site owner got a little upset; when his feelings about the way Google had handled the situation reached Matt, he stepped in to explain how Google typically deals with situations such as this. With specific examples of how the site was hacked, why and when it was dropped from the index, this post makes very interesting reading.

Matt Cutts has posted some notes from a panel he did at Pubcon in Las Vegas last week which make really interesting reading. Looking at some SEO issues faced by real sites, Matt explained some of the common issues and talked about mistakes that webmasters should avoid.

With the site review panel consisting of Matt, Danny Sullivan and Tim Mayer to name a few, it was always going to be value for money. There’s not much in the way of things we didn’t already know, multiple domains, reciprocal linking, URL naming conventions and sitemap usage, but it’s worth a read as always.

It may seem obvious, but there has always been a little confusion when it comes to the use of meta tag information, with some quarters saying that the meta description tag is important, while others say not. It is a well accepted theory that the meta keywords tag is not important, but in a Google Groups post Vanessa Fox, Product Manager at Google Webmaster Central Blog said that using the meta description tag is beneficial;

In response to an indexing query, Vanessa told the poster;

“For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page - in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.”

Not exactly earth shattering news but it’s always good to hear this type of info straight from the horse’s mouth (no offence intended to Vanessa!).

Google has launched a new sitemaps protocol for Google News for use by publishers, giving greater control over the content Google crawls for inclusion in the Google News network, one of the largest online news distribution sites available. 

Compiling news from more than 4,500 sources, Google News allows users to search the news by keyword or set up alerts based on personal interests.

Publishers currently included in Google News can now use RSS feeds or use a sitemap to direct Google to specific news articles, ensuring that readers get the freshest content available.

Visit Google’s webmaster support for more information on the News Sitemap tool.

Keyword analysis can be a bit dull, but as we know it’s also one of the most important parts of the SEO process. You really need to be on the ball when doing a keyword analysis, otherwise it’s easy to pass over keyword variations which might otherwise be really useful to a client’s campaign, so when a range of tools designed to make the process as easy as possible came along, I had to take a look.

All of the tools below find keywords that are related and come up with variations that might be difficult to pick out with your own wee SEO addled brain.

Quintura – offers a visual representation of words related to your main query

Ontology Finder - This easy to use tool checks Google’s top 1000 results for your query by doing a related keyword query, before returning the related keywords found.

AdCenter Search Funnel - Microsoft’s tool shows you how users refine their searches, making it really easy to source related keywords that you probably wouldn’t have thought of.

Clusty Cloud - This tool makes a tag cloud with related keywords. Some of its related results are a bit random, but it gives some good results.

Adwords Site-Related Keywords - I’m sure that you all know about the keyword suggestion tool from Google, which suggests related keywords based on a URL or keywords you provide.

If you have any other brain saving tools let us all know!