While doing a few personal searches at work today I came across a new feature in Google search engine results pages – rating from Google Products as an extension of certain Google pay per click ads. Read More
Yesterday, Google announced that it will be sending professional photographers to business in an effort to beef up the quality and quantity of content in listings on Google Places. Apparently, the company isn’t satisfied with satellite photos, street views, a camera-equipped bicycle, and even a snowmobile for helping people find things in the real world. They are now interesting in actually going inside the businesses they list.
To feed this insatiable lust for information, Google has hired professional photographers in select cities in the United States, Australia and Japan. Businesses can apply for a photo shoot at the Google Business Photos site. Apparently, the shoots will take about an hour, and will be minimally disruptive for pretty much all types of businesses. And best of all, like most things Google, the photo shoots have the competitive price of $0.00 (which, regardless of the exchange rate, is also ¥0 in Tokyo and Kyoto).
A few weeks ago, DTC was selected as a “Favorite Place” on Google. Based on information gathered from user behavior and local listings, this means that we have been selected among the Top 10% of businesses, calculated by the popularity of our local business listing.
Google informed us of our status with the following letter:
Dear Business Owner,
Congratulations! You’re a favorite Place on Google. Between July 1 and September 30. Google users found your Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing business listing xxxx times, and requested driving directions or other information about your business xxxx times. Read More
Last week, a few of us here at Digital Third Coast attended the first-ever Stratigent Google Analytics User Conference at the Field Museum in Chicago. The conference brought together a variety of users of GA and gave us all an opportunity to interact with many of Google’s top Analytics engineers. During the days’ presentations and discussions, one exciting (and soon-to-be-released) feature kept coming up: Google Analytics Intelligence.
On a basic level, GA Intelligence will provide alerts whenever there is an unusual spike in activity from virtually any user location, page section, referrer, and so on. The feature will have customizable settings for sensitivity, meaning that users will have the option to determine with precision just what level of activity will trigger an alert.
There’s been a lot of chatter about Google’s latest augmentation of their local map results. Earlier this year, there were many additions of map results to local search queries (explicit or implied). Then Google announced new Local Listing Ads that would show above the natural map results – currently a regional trail only in San Francisco and San Diego. Most recently, we’ve seen a change to local map results in every region – a reduction in the number of local results from 10 to 7. In this reduction Google also made an addition – they took away 3 “natural” maps listings while adding 4 paid listings above.
There are a few interesting things happening here: Read More
Looking at some local search queries this morning, it appears as though Google is testing a new 7-pack of results as opposed to the 10-pack we have all gotten used to.
Here is a screenshot of the new layout:
The results are still in the same order as yesterday for the searches that I performed, just missing the last 3 on the list. For those businesses rounding out spots H, I and J this is definitely a big blow in larger markets, but a great reason to work that much harder to improve visibility!
Will this move from 10 to 7 listings create a more authoritative appeal to searchers?
For businesses that have taken the steps to sign up with Google’s Local Business Center, Google has a new offering available – Local Listing Ads. Unfortunately it is only currently available in San Diego and San Francisco as a trial! While they are not intended to compete with AdWords in any way, I can see there being some overlaps in the positions used to display ads, as well as by the businesses who choose one platform over the other. It all seems very easy to set up and a good value add to customers that are taking advantage of Google Local already (even more value add to those that aren’t!). Ads are displayed based on the following:
Earlier this week Google updated their Local Business Center. Now included is some analytics data including how many impressions (how often your listing was shown), actions (driving directions to your business, clicks to your website, etc.) and which search queries triggered your local business listing.
If you don’t already have a local business listing, you can add one here – www.google.com/local/add.
I’ve been asked this question several times over the last few years and so I’d like to do a run down on the initial aspects of PPC that any new account holder will have to go through. Of course there are particulars that apply to specific industries or goals which I do not touch on. So – in some semblance of order here you are:
1. Goals – Set your goals. Read More
Google recently announced that they will be making some changes to their referral string format which will be rolling out this week.
The old url referral string looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
The new one will look something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Read More
Today Google announced that they are rolling out longer meta description snippets for some keyword searches. The new feature will appear in search results for queries that are 3 words or longer and have a very specific intent. So for example, if you are searching for something like “Google Rolls Out Extended Snippets” you’ll see some results that have longer meta description snippets (3 or 4 lines instead of only 2) like this: Read More
Big news in the SEO world folks….Google, Yahoo and MSN have recently announced that they will be respecting and following what’s known as the “Canonical URL Tag”. This new tag (if it works) allows you to avoid duplicate content issues by letting the search engines know which pages are duplicate and which are the preferred versions. This is actually a very big deal for SEO’s since it sort of makes our lives a lot easier…we hope. Until now, we’ve had to play the role of duplicate content evangelists. Part of our job was to create complex webs of 301 redirects and noindex pages to handle duplicate URL’s. We have been plagued by pagination, “sort by” features like sort by price, test landing pages, and other similar devices that have been helpful for site visitors but create multiple URL’s for the same or similar content. Now all we have to do is use this tag to avoid a giant duplicate content mess all over the place.
Here’s the technical explanation of how it works quoted directly from Google’s blog: Read More
Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has posted some new search engine market share figures…Google gained another 6% in search market share in 2008! What? Are you surprised?
What’s even more interesting is that Google’s profits are rising as well, even in this bad economy. Microsoft, which has never ever had massive layoffs in it’s history is laying off 5000 employees and Google actually posted an increase in profits in the last quarter of 08. Amazing.
Here’s the story:
Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized
Recently, Google released a starter guide explaining some of the basics principles of SEO. I believe this is a very positive thing for SEO’s since it confirms what we have been preaching (and practicing) for years. Things like title tags, meta descriptions, useful 404 pages, search engine friendly URL’s are the cornerstone of any well ranked site and should always be implemented before getting to the stuff that REALLY helps you rank above your competitors….that’s why I like that they appropriately named this a “starter guide”. It’s similar to a starter guide to renovating a house, you can probably cover a few of the basics yourself but if you want to do anything major and you want it done right, you’re better off calling in the pros.
In their ongoing quest to dominate the universe, Google has announced that they are coming out with their own web browser called Chrome. Interesting news considering they were so “in bed” with Firefox before. It was a win win relationship for Google and Firefox but now it doesn’t look like that relationship will continue much longer. It sort of makes sense that Google would come out with their own browser. I guarantee that over the past 5 years or so, as FireFox has steadily grown in popularity, they have also grown a backbone and don’t bend to Google’s will as easily as they used to. I was actually kind of surprised that Google didn’t just buy Firefox a long time ago considering they have bought their way into so many other markets. If Google dominates the browser market they can control which search engine a lot of people use since many people use the default search engine that comes installed in their browser.
I just downloaded Chrome and started testing it out. Read More
