Google has announced the removal of the “supplemental index” label in their search engine results pages (SERPs). For the time being the labelling appears to be all that has changed and there is still a difference in the way pages in the supplemental index are treated. However, the announcement states that this difference will narrow and that changes are underway to narrow the gap between the main index and supplemental.

To recap on the main issues, supplemental pages don’t rank very well and they are not crawled as often. Consequently the supplemental index has been given a lot of attention by search engine optimisers with much debate about how to get out of “Google Hell” as it was named.

Now it seems that the issues are still there but it’s harder to determine which pages are not in the main index. One method appears to be to search for a unique expression from a page and see if the page comes up in the search results. If it doesn’t then the page isn’t in the main index. The label was easier and more convenient even if there was much disagreement on what to do with the information.

So, the causes and remedies are still relevant for the time being. No doubt there will be more discussion over the next few weeks as the promised enhancements are rolled out.

I’ve been in the UK for 3 weeks and fully intended blogging during that period but it didn’t happen. Anyway, I’m back on board now and will make up for it.

I’ll ease in gradually with a report on a great article by Gord Hortchkiss that was published in searchnewz.com. It’s a transcript of his interview with Nick Fox and Diane Chang from Google’s Ad Quality team. The subject is the adWords quality scoring and it’s a long read (well worth it though) so here are my highlights:

The bulk of the interview centres around the positioning of sponsored links at the top of the left hand side of the page above the organic listings. This is a very desirable position. Scanning studies have shown that the top of the left hand side is in the primary scanning path of the user. The links at the top of the left hand side are viewed more frequently than links on the right hand side.

Not all searches result in the display of ads in this top left hand corner. Often there are only sponsored links on the right hand side and there hasn’t been much information on the criteria for when ads are shown in the yellow box and when they are not.

The interview clarifies this to some degree in that the broad criteria is outlined

• Only high quality ads are placed at the top so the quality score has to be high
• The auction order is never broken (if someone bids a high enough price with a low quality score and their ad rank is number one, then the ad will be shown at the top but on the right hand side
• The maturity of the market plays a part and ads will be shown less frequently at the top in immature markets (China was used as an example of an immature market, US and UK as mature markets).

Here’s the interview transcript.

Meg has opened up a discussion on the growing trend for bloggers in Australia to receive pitches from companies seeking to form relations with bloggers and use their blogs as a vehicle for product promotion.

Co-incidentally the same weekend there was a heated debate on the issues of payments and disclosure as they apply to bloggers. The story centres around a Microsoft ad that features quotes from several prominent bloggers. The quotes all answer the question “when did you know your business was people ready?” with “people ready” being a phrase promoted by Microsoft to describe their business philosophy. The bloggers received payment for providing the quotes and their ethics in doing so were questioned by valleywag. There were mixed reactions with some agreeing with valleywag that it somehow crossed a boundary and broke readers trust in the bloggers. Others claimed it was a storm in a teacup, it was clearly an ad and should have been apparent that the bloggers received payment.

So, why does it matter?

There is a perception that bloggers provide a personal, unbiased opinion and, in the eyes of their readers, this makes them more trustworthy and credible than mainstream media and corporate websites. It’s not surprising that companies seek to capitalise on this trust.

It can be a fine line for bloggers to walk particularly for those who run ads on their blog or who provide paid reviews. It makes sense (and is covered by the law in some countries) to disclose when payment is received for a blog post. The reader can then take this additional information into consideration and in fact it might not make any difference if enough credibility and trust has been established. There are quite a number of grey areas though, for example posts that are not paid reviews but that mention a company advertising on the blog or with whom there is a business relationship. There are also other motivations for writing something which might not be apparent to a reader and which nevertheless provides some tangible benefit. Link baiting can fall into this category.

It’s good that these issues are being discussed and I expect that more bloggers will publicise disclosure policies. My opinion is that it should and will be self regulating. Individual bloggers can decide where they stand in terms of incentives for blogging and how and when they should disclose payment. The audience will in turn make up their own minds on the trustworthiness and credibility of the blogger. I’m in the camp of believing honesty and transparency is the best policy and I think it’s the best business decision as well as the fairest. I would be stupid to assume that this is the case with every blog I read though.

Be careful when using broad match keywords in a Google adWords campaign.

On the positive side, broad matching means that ads will run for variations of your keywords without the need to specify what all these variations might be. So in the example given in the adwords help file, the keyword web hosting might trigger ads for the search phrases web host or web hosting company.

However broad matching incorporates expanded matching so not only will ads show for variations in word order, and queries with additional words to the keywords, but ads will potentially show for synonyms and other related variations.

This might not be what you want and there may be times when the expanded matching can be much broader than you might expect. In a campaign I recently set up, a broad match on a generic product name triggered ads for search queries for a manufacturer name, very specific model numbers (not relevant to my client) and other products sold by the manufacturer.

There are two main ways to deal with it.

1. Build up a list of negative keywords and add them to the campaign

• use the keyword tools (particularly the adwords keyword tool as this will indicate potential expanded matches); extract the words that are not relevant and including them as negatives in the campaign
• run searches and seeing which words and phrases come up in the search listings and ads to uncover potential negatives
• analyse your website logs to extract non-relevant search queries or words that can be input as negatives
• run the new search query performance report to see which search queries triggered ads and what negatives are necessary in the campaign

2. Opt out of expanded match by using phrase and exact matching

By doing this you know when the ads will be triggered and you eliminate the instances of unwanted expanded matching.

1. Search in google.com

No bias towards Australian websites

2. Search in Google Australia

Google Australia is biased towards Australian sites - you’ll see more .au sites in the top 10

3. Select “Pages From Australia”

“Australian” pages only based on the domain name (.au sites) and the hosting location (.com sites hosted in Australia are usually included)

4. Personalised Search on by default

If you are logged into any Google account such as gmail, gtalk, adwords, analytics etc then you will get results biased towards your search history. Personalised search is activated by default.

5. Natural Fluctuation

The top 10 for any given search fluctuates all the time due to algorithm changes, changes to web pages and even different Google data centres delivering different results.

6. Universal Search Arrives in Australia

It doesn’t look like universal search has fully arrived yet for searches in Google Australia. When it does, expect a different top 10 for many searches.

There was never an easy answer to the question “How do I get in the top 10 in Google?”. Now even the question itself is making a lot less sense. I’d like to see Gord Hotchkiss follow up on this post “Planning for Personalisation“.

Edit: When i wrote this I tried to find stats on the numbers using google.com.au compared with google.com. I couldn’t find any so i emailed Google Australia and got this reply.

” We don’t disclose specifics, but the vast majority use google.com.au.”

20 to 25% of search queries that Google gets in any one day are unique. The queries have never been seen before. This statistic was given at the recent Google searchology event.

I spent some time analysing the searches that resulted in a visit to my website during the previous month. Here are some of the stats:

• 42% of queries were unique
• 85% of queries were made up of 3 words or more
• The longest search query was 17 words!

The figures aren’t surprising. Having a blog means that I rank well for a large number of longtail searches on the subject of adWords, pay per click or Google. Search queries are getting longer and queries with 3 words or more are much more common now than they were previously.

Some observations:

Keyword analysis is a good way to uncover hot topics and common questions or concerns

For example, quite a few people came to my blog because they searched, in different ways, on the topic of adWords being expensive. It’s interesting to know this and I can take action by writing more on the topic or addressing it in a frequently asked questions section.

Of course I had to have written something on the topic in order to rank for the combination of “adWords” and “expensive” in the first place. There are obviously a range of other popular topics that I haven’t written about and therefore the search phrases don’t appear in my log files. However, blogging is a great way of producing a variety and volume of content to get visibility for those long tail phrases in the first place.

Did people get the information they wanted with the long tail searches?

People phrase things awkwardly, or use odd combinations of words, in an attempt to get information on something they don’t know a great deal about, particularly when the topic is complex. I tried out quite a few of the searches trying to assess the experience from the perspective of the searcher. Sometimes I thought there was a good chance they got relevant information. Sometimes the content probably didn’t cover what they wanted to know and just happened to contain the same words as the query but in a different context. That’s going to happen and the searcher may just leave immediately to try again. Maybe they weren’t part of my target audience anyway. However, it really made me have another look at overall usability and reminded me how important it is to have clear navigation and help people find what they want.

Details are good but focus on the overall trends

I love the detail in analytics and could happily spend hours pondering some puzzling aspect of the data. There are always a few puzzling things as well. One of the keywords someone used was the single word “Australia”. I’ve no idea how someone arrived at my website from that because of course I don’t rank anywhere for the word Australia (I checked :-). The details are interesting and can offer insights. However, overall trends and some key pieces of information are what is important.

On that note, I’ll finish with a link. I just ordered Avinash Kaushik’s book on web analytics.

I was sent a copy of Search Marketing Standard. It’s a quarterly publication and is solely devoted to search engine marketing including pay per click, organic and social media.

I enjoyed reading it. There are some good quality articles and it made a pleasant change to be browsing through a magazine rather than reading online.

The publishers are in New York and all of the advertising and the conference guide is aimed at a US based audience. Having said that, the articles are varied enough and relevant to make it a worthwhile read here in Australia.

The current issue has articles on:

• Web design
• Mobile marketing and usability
• Paid search quality scores
• Link bait
• Local search
• Blogging
• Search engine friendly HTML
• RSS
• SEM training and certification

Here’s a link: search marketing standard

I was looking through blogs I subscribe to this morning and this made me laugh. I have to be amused at small things. I work by myself.

Problogger, Darren Rowse posted this morning and there was this exchange in the comments between Darren and a reader:

Wow Darren, you wrote this article from the future?

Brian - no not the future - from Australia : -)

I told you I was amused at small things. I personally like the time difference. I can read through a whole lot of updates in blogs, news and forums first thing in the morning. I know that it won’t be updated much during the day (my day) so I get on with whatever I have to do. It’s an enforced discipline and I know how distracting online interaction can be. I’m sure I would hate twitter.

If you read my blog please leave a comment and tell me where you are

Search Engine Land spoke with Seth Godin on the subject of search marketing. Seth has been critical of search marketers in the past and dishes out a fair bit of criticism in the interview. For example he makes this assertion:

“Spending money on ads or commodity-focused SEO is the last gasp of someone who is short on innovation, imagination and great stuff!”

Well I do spend money on ads, for my search marketing business and for my clients. Same with SEO although I’m not quite sure what is meant by commodity-focused SEO. If there’s a better way then I’d rather be doing it so I made a summary of Seth’s points to consider how to be more innovative.

1. SEO isn’t a replacement for doing the right things (the right things being building remarkable products, getting your best customers to talk about those products, building relationships and playing the long game without being too impatient to get a quick sale).
2. Personal recommendations are better than any alternative so the future is in blogging, private channels such as RSS, and human controlled sites such as squidoo. Search in its current form is broken.
3. Many advertisers are lazy. They don’t customise offers to match ads and instead send people to generic or home pages.

At the core of all this is trust, credibility and relevance. If someone we trust and whose opinion we respect recommends something of interest to us then we are quite likely to take action. If the outcome is good to the point that it’s worth remarking on then we are likely to be motivated to tell someone else.

We know this to be true when we’re talking about actual human interaction. I’ll try a restaurant if a friend tells me she had a fantastic meal there.

However, just because something on the Internet has attributes that might indicate a degree of trustworthiness and credibility doesn’t mean that it can actually be trusted or that someone will accept it as being so. I’m talking about attributes like putting a name and perhaps a photo to blogs and comments, or a third party recommendation for a product rather than the company’s own endorsement. These factors can help but we know social media can be manipulated, abused, and used for short term gain. Social media participants can “cheat” just as search engine optimisers can use aggressive tactics to rank highly.

Seth Godin claims that “search is broken” and elaborates by saying:

“Well, if search worked, then you wouldn’t need a strategy! People would find you when you needed to be found, and find someone else the rest of the time. Of course, search is always going to be a bit broken (though it keeps getting better) and the more human person to person recommending that gets included (including squidoo.com), the better it’s going to work.”

Introducing a human element for recommendations isn’t going to mean the true deservers rise to the top. Search and social media are just different mediums. They can both be manipulated and in both cases the “best” content (whatever that means) can remain hidden because the right things weren’t done to get the most visibility.

The search landscape is certainly changing and there are many more opportunities to get a message out other than ranking highly in Google. As Seth says the message may best come from enthusiastic advocates rather than self promotion. I don’t disagree with that.

Seth does actually say what he’d do in place of unimaginative ad placing:

“If I ran a travel site, I’d engage my best customers to build blogs and Squidoo lenses and to use Digg to point to reviews and insights and things that would make people WANT to seek me out.”

A good proportion of my clients’ prospective customers have never even heard of blogs, squidoo lenses and Digg never mind actually created content or looked at any examples.

I manage a paid search campaign for a travel site. We’re always looking at different ways to promote the products and are starting to see a lot more referrals from sites with consumer generated content such as tripadvisor.com. The reality though is that if someone wants to book accommodation online they are most likely to search using Google. A proportion of these people will find the paid ads to be more relevant than the organic listings. And yes when they click they get to an appropriate page and often a custom landing page if it’s a specific offer. Spending money on ads might not be the most innovative, imaginative thing to do, in comparison with say, creating a squidoo lens, but the good thing is, it works.

The big news this week is that Google is rolling out Universal Search. Danny Sullivan describes it as “the most radical change to its search results ever”.

So what is it? This is what I can gather after reading a few different blog reports:

1. Google has different indexes for different types of data such as web pages, images, video, blogs, news etc. Currently when you do a search you mostly get web pages and occasionally images depending on the query. When Universal Search is rolled out, results will be drawn from all of these media types and blended together on the main results page. This will depend on the search query and how relevant Google determines particular data types to be. So for some queries you might still get a list of web pages. For others there will be a mix of web, video, images etc.
2. These results have always been available from a navigation menu on the Google search page. What is new is that the user won’t have to specifically request different types of results by clicking on the navigation links. Google will present a selection of results on one page depending on what is considered most relevant for the query.
3. The searcher can still have an input to this. So, if for example “video” wasn’t initially included as a relevant data type, the searcher can opt to include videos in the search.

The impact from an SEO viewpoint:

1. Searchers will be much more aware of the full range of media options whereas previously they’ve been somewhat hidden from the average person who doesn’t explore the nav menu. Consequently, there will be much more incentive to optimise for video, image, news etc if these results are going to have far greater prominence. How to optimise is going to be important and early players in this game will have an advantage.
2. The competition for page one spots for web pages will be greater. For some search queries there may only be 5 or 6 spots available.

The impact in Australia?:

1. There might be a delay in the rollout of Universal Search here. I haven’t seen any specific mention of timelines for specific countries so we may see it at the same time as users in the US or we may get to see the impact there before it comes into play here.
2. There are opportunities for people who take advantage of the changes early on. I haven’t paid that much attention to the other data types so far but I searched in “video” for a popular, competitive keyword relevant to one of my clients. There was only one result so if that was blended into the main search page the impact would be noticeable.

The impact on paid search?:

1. Will it make paid search more desirable? I’m not sure whether they have to be looked at as two separate things entirely or whether you take the attitude that there are 20 slots on the page and it might be easier to pay for an ad than optimise for video. I don’t know yet.
2. Also, I’m wondering how users will react to these changes. Presumably, the usability tests have been done but if users find the organic results less relevant rather than more relevant then I think they are more likely to look to the paid ads to find what they want.

Any thoughts?