Official Google Blog: Being bad to your customers is bad for business

Official Google Blog: Being bad to your customers is bad for business

Being bad to your customers is bad for business

12/01/2010 12:06:00 PM

A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business.

We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.

As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you. Consider the obvious responses we could have tried to fix the problem:

• Block the particular offender. That would be easy and might solve the immediate problem for that specific business, but it wouldn’t solve the larger issue in a general way. Our first reaction in search quality is to look for ways to solve problems algorithmically.
  
  
• Use sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes. While this proposal initially sounds promising, it turns out to be based on a misconception. First off, the terrible merchant in the story wasn’t really ranking because of links from customer complaint websites. In fact, many consumer community sites such as Get Satisfaction added a simple attribute called rel=nofollow to their links. The rel=nofollow attribute is a general mechanism that allows websites to tell search engines not to give weight to specific links, and it’s perfect for the situation when you want to link to a site without endorsing it. Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article was about someone suing the company behind Decor My Eyes, but the language of the article was neutral, so sentiment analysis wouldn’t have helped here either.
  
  As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.
  
  
• Yet another option is to expose user reviews and ratings for various merchants alongside their results. Though still on the table, this would not demote poor quality merchants in our results and could still lead users to their websites.

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.

Google Webmaster Analytics Update 2010

Sometimes Images explain more than words J  (Saves Time too for think).

Today once I login into Google Analytics notices some enhancements there, reference image are attached too.

Instead of playing with words, I think I must keep my discussion to the point and be specific about Topic.

Here you go:

1.    Parameter handling as Separate Tab

2.       Inside Parameter Handling

3.       Search Queries

**Queries manually removed by me

4.       Links to your site

In a more in-depth look with 100 anchor text

5.       Keywords

Keywords shows variants of keywords as well.

Look forwards to hear from readers and researchers. J

Google SEO Updates

Can Google's new search features impact SEO and internet marketing strategies? 

Yes
No

During the course of last one year, I have noticed certin changes in Google Search Result Page. Where I a trying to make a list of change on result page, yet my order could be wrong :).


1. Google trying 4 Paid Listing above natural results:

2. More Than 8 Site Links:

More Important Pages Are Shows with Links.


3. Left Hand Side Tool Bar for more in depth Search, After Bing :)

4. Google Checkout Option in Adwords

Source: http://www.ebuzzmaster.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/google-adwords-images-folded.gif


5.Google Product Search Results

Source: http://www.ajazi.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/google-product-search.gif



6. Google added breadcrumbs to search results

 7. Caffeine Update

Please Let me know If I missed something................

Benefits of Article Submission

Why Use Article Submission:

1. Article submission helps in drawing one way back links for website.
2. Theme based (Website related content) links can be drawn with the help of article submission.
3. Articles websites have a larger reader database, so you can get potential reader who are often read and write about products and services on their blog and websites, so increase the possibility of natural linking.
4. Article submission directories offering subscribe option (RSS Feed), which will help in getting larger reader database.
5. I would recommend an article section on website, which will get ranking for targeted key phrase and helps in achieving ranking on keywords as well via internal linking.
6. Key phrase based Article titles also helps in ranking on key phrases.
7. As we know SEO is all about content, to make website more crawl able and rank in NEWS section in Google and under latest update. It will also results in faster indexing of website.
8. With Google new search index caffeine on 6/08/2010 – that provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than Google last index. Lead to availability of fresher content on website.
9. Article submission generates interest in the content of your website so as to attract new, unique visitors.

Sitemaps many content types

Sitemaps: One file, many content types

 Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

        xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
        xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
   
    http://www.example.com/foo.html 
    
       http://example.com/image.jpg 
    
     
    http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv    
      Grilling tofu for summer 
    
  

Here's an example of what you'll see in Webmaster Tools when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:



We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap submission. The rest of the Sitemap rules, like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you have questions or other feedback, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/sitemaps-one-file-many-content-types.html

5 Easy SEO Tips

5 Easy SEO Tips For Starting An Internet Home Based Business

You may also have recognized how much information overload there is concerning SEO and starting an internet home based business, which makes it difficult to separate the correct tips from the useless scams.

However the truth is that SEO is not difficult for a newbie, when the logic has been explained to you correctly. SEO is a greatest and most effective way to drive traffic to your site, when you are starting an internet home based business. So read these tips carefully, they are especially for a newbie.

1.Write SEO Articles, Blog Posts, Forum Posts And New Pages.

All these promotions follow the same requirements as to the SEO or search engine optimization. This makes it wise to use all of these methods together and to guarantee the maximum visibility and reach in the Internet.

2.The Keywords Are The Most Important Elements In The SEO Content.

But they will never be more important than the content, their job is to serve the surfers and the search engine spiders, so that they will find your information. This feature is based on the fact, that the Net is ran by the information and majority of searches will start from the search engines.

The keyword selection starts from your internet home business idea or from your promise to your target group. When you are starting an internet home based business, you have decided what, how and to whom you offer something unique.

Now to get converting traffic to your site, your keywords must draw related people to the site, i.e. people who search information by keywords that leads to your site or which you have used.

I recommend that you will select long tail keywords, i.e. keywords, which include several words, of which many phrases are already separate keywords. These keywords are normally low demand ones, but will drive more targeted visitors and are especially effective during a longer period of time.

3.Finetune Your Keyword Density Correctly.

The keyword density means the amount of keywords compared to the total number of words in your article. When you are starting an internet home based business, I recommend that you use keyword after every 100 words in your article, not more often.

4.Use Bolded, Italic And Underlined Keywords.

You can make your SEO more effective by using your keyword once in bolded, italic and underlined form. This serves also your readers, because it will put more strength to the core idea of your article.

5.The Author Box Is Important.

In the end of the article you can write the so called Author Box or Bio Box. This is the place for your own name, a short enthusiastic description, why the reader gets more useful information, when he will click the link, which has the major keyword in the hyperlink.

This is all. Now you can make your SEO article work when you are starting an internet home based business. And it will work online for a long period of time.

Source: http://tutorials-tips-tricks.info/5-easy-seo-tips-for-starting-an-internet-home-based-business/

International SEO Keyword Research Trends

International SEO: Keyword Research With Google Trends

If you run multiple stores for different English-speaking countries (geo-targeted with subdomains, subfolders or top-level domains like .co.uk, .co.au, .ca etc), it’s important to pay attention to the keywords in your category names and product page titles. The terms that your countrymen (and women) use to describe your products may not be the same as the lingo abroad. And the keywords you choose to describe your categories and products have a huge impact on SEO in your international markets.

Example: “flash drive” vs. “USB drive” vs. “memory stick”

According to Google Trends, the term “USB drive” is most popular in US and Canada, and “memory stick” most popular in the UK.

Example 2: “slow cooker” vs. “crock pot” vs. “crockpot”

Americans love the branded term “crock pot” and are most likely to use the 2-word rather than “crockpot.” The rest of the English speaking world is more likely to call it a “slow cooker.”

Ideally your category labels and product page titles will be optimized to reflect the most popular search for each respective region. (Make sure you’ve geo-targeted your domains using webmaster tools). Synonyms should be included in your meta data so customers who use them can still find your products in your on-site search, and in product descriptions so you can still be found in search engines for any of the synonyms.
Another reason to use the more common term in navigation menus is users tend to scan menus with a “trigger keyword” in mind. They’re thinking “memory stick” and if they don’t find that quickly in your menu, often it’s off to the search box or off to another site.

Not only can you apply this research to on-site optimization, but also pay-per-click and email campaigns (hint, geo-segment your PPC and email campaigns).

Even if you don’t target geographic regions, you can still benefit from using Google Trends data — find out if the keywords you’re using are really the most popular of its synonyms in your region. Can’t think of synonyms? Google’s Keyword Tool can help you out. I suggest you start with your most profitable category.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 1:03 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. 

Source: http://www.getelastic.com/international-keyword-research-with-google-trends/