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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

We encourage you to get involved in our blog community - so share your opinions and experiences by leaving comments on our posts.

If you're looking for help with promoting your website - check out our range of affordable search engine marketing services.

Monday, October 31

Google's Jagger Update - Interim Report

Apologies to all those readers who thought last week's article about Google's Jagger update didn't provide enough information. Here's a more in depth look at what is going on.

According to the folks at Google, the Jagger update has three distinct parts. While Google has been seeking feedback to each part individually, the three parts still form just one update which means that, with the third part still to come, you still haven't seen the final shape of the algorithm changes.

The first part, Jagger1, seems to have centered on the way Google treats backlinks, and especially on the treatment of rapid increases in the number of backlinks to a site, which can be an indication that a site employs spamming techniques.

The second part of the update, Jagger2, focused on the recalculation of the number of backlinks that Google recognizes for websites. People have also reported Google being more aggressive towards "canonical URLs errors", which essentially is a type of duplicate URL that Google penalizes. This penality is caused by Google regarding sites with "www" and the same site without the "www" as duplicate content.

The third part, Jagger3, should be starting early this week, and these changes should give a better indication of what the Google index will look like once things settle down. Matt Cutts from Google has stated, "I expect Jagger3 to be the eventual new index, but it will take some time to switch everything over, so people will have plenty of opportunity to report issues or spam to us."

So, what can you do?

If you think you might be affected by the canonical URL issue, implement a 301 (permanent) redirect to your main page (so for example from mysite.com to www.mysite.com).

You can also report problems or search engine spam to Google. Google has a special submission form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - simply fill in the details and include "Jagger1" or "Jagger 2" (or "Jagger 3" once it is underway) depending on whether you have seen the changes you are complaining about at the beginning of the update or more recently. I'd recommend you only contact them if you've got a good case and sufficiently detailed information - unfounded complaints won't help you or anyone else. When you have a justified complaint, Google will use your information to tweak its algorithms accordingly, but it doesn't mean that any 'manual' fixes will be implemented.

And as frustrating as it may sound - you might be best off just waiting and seeing how the third part of the Jagger update unfolds. By the sound of it, there is still lots of activity going on, search engine results pages are still in flux and it won't help much if you start to panic now. I'll try and give you a further update after Jagger3, when we will know more!

Monday, October 24

First Baby Named Google

Google-mania has been taken to new levels, with the first baby being named after the search engine in Sweden. The little boy, named Oliver Google Kai, was born in Sweden on September 12. It will probably not surprise you to hear that the proud dad says he works as an account manager for a Swedish search engine optimization company and is a PhD candidate in search marketing. Read more about this story on the official Google blog.

Google Profits and Revenue Soar

On 20 October, Google announced its financial results for the third quarter of 2005. The highlights were:

Record revenues of $1.578 billion, up 96% compared to the third quarter of 2004, and up 14% compared to Q2 2005.
Sites owned by Google generated 56% of total revenues, up 20% compared to Q2 2005.
GAAP operating income was $529 million, or 33.5% of revenues.
Adjusted EBITDA (income before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, SBC, and IPR&D) increased to $672 million, or 43% of revenues, up from $590 million in the second quarter of 2005.
Worldwide staff numbers increased from 4,183 as of 30 June 2005 to 4,989 at the end of September.

Google's Jagger Update - Depths of Despair

At the end of last week, another Google update was in full swing. The update with the code name "Jagger" appears to be one of the longest, with signs of changes still appearing at the time of writing. Eminent SEO guru Brett Tabke went as far as calling the Jagger update a "milestone update for Google' due to the actual duration of the update (several weeks and counting).

Some webmasters have gone into crisis mood, reporting a total drop in Google traffic or a reversal of rankings which were based on several years of search engine optimization work. Other have been ecstatic, experiencing increases in ranking, traffic and PageRank for relatively new web pages.

Wednesday, October 19

Splogs: The New Search Engine Spam

According to "Wired" magazine, a new blog is created every two seconds - that's 43,200 new blogs every day. At the same time, some experts estimate that 30% of new blog articles today are spam. This phenomenon is so prevalent that a new phrase has already been coined: splogs.

Splogs, as defined by Wikipedia, are "... Web Log (or "blog") sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites."

It's not hard to see that splogs are straight out of the black hat SEO toolbox, and can do significant damage to the ranking of legitimately optimized and relevant websites. How can you combat splogs and make sure your site rankings don't get hurt by blog spam? There aren't any quick fixes.

As a general recommendation, make sure you grow your own site's keyword-rich content - but do this in a natural, non-spammy way. For example, add pages describing why your products are ideal Christmas presents, including ideas of how you could use them, but do not add new pages that are only stuffed full the keywords that you'd like better ranking for, like "Christmas gift ideas", "Christmas presents" etc.

In addition, make sure you monitor your existing pages regularly and update and tweak their keyword content, e.g. add more copy including keywords you are targeting, review the keywords your users use and add any new ones to the copy.

It is also very important to grow the amount of relevant, on-topic backlinks to your site, i.e. the number of sites that link to your own. Links from directories, information sites or sites offering complementary products and services can be a great source of quality, relevant backlinks. It can be cumbersome to contact individual sites and ask for a link to your site (these sites will also often ask for reciprocal links from your site to them), but it's worth the effort. Alternatively, the ineedhits G-Boost and Y-Boost products also include a backlink development component.

Last but not least, if you've found that your rankings have slipped, you could always consider pay-per-click advertising to ensure you still get your desired exposure to search engine users. However, this means you will have to pay for each click you receive. If your site does a good job at converting traffic to prospects or customers, you should still be able to achieve a positive return on such an investment, but you certainly will have to free up some of your marketing budget for it. Nevertheless, paid search advertising offers you a way to quickly compensate for drops in organic traffic. So splogs really cost you money on two fronts - through lost revenue and in forced increases of marketing expenditure.

Tuesday, October 18

Google's Webmaster Guidelines: Straight from the Horse's Mouth

A few members on search engine marketing forums have noted that Google appears to have updated its webmaster guidelines during the past month. This is a good occasion to go straight to the source and recap some of the advice Google itself gives webmasters about search engine friendly website design, content, quality and technical set-up.

Search Engine Friendly Design and Content:

Create a site that is full of useful information for readers. The text on your website should make it very clear what your site is about. Remember you are primarily creating your site for people, not for search engines.
Try to include the words that searchers would use to find sites like yours (if you need inspiration, check out ineedhits' Keyword Starter).
Include TITLE tags (meta tags) and ALT tags that describe your pages accurately.
Make sure all pages of your site can be reached via static text links. A hierarchical structure is often useful to create a good navigation structure which is useful for both visitors and search engines.
Include a sitemap which contains text links to all pages of your site.
Make sure your HTML code is correct and does not contain any broken links (ineedhits offers this service as part of the Optimizer Kit PLUS).
Do not include too many links on a page.
More design and content guidelines from Google ...

Search Engine Friendly Technology:

Use the robots.txt file, which contains information for crawlers about which directories and pages should be crawled and which shouldn't.
Make sure a search engine spider can see all of your site. You can simulate this by viewing your site with a text browser like Lynx.
Check if your web server supports the HTML header "If-Modified-Since". If this header is being used, a search engine spider can tell whether your site was updated since the last crawl, and you save on bandwidth.
More technical guidelines from Google ...

Search Engine Friendly Quality:

This is all about not using any spamming techniques. Google does not like spamming, and it's very likely that they will drop you from their index if they catch you spamming. So, make sure you avoid any of the following techniques:

Do not create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with basically identical content.
Do not use hidden text or links.
Do not create pages just for search engines.
Do not create pages with keywords that are not relevant to your site.
Do not bombard Google with automated queries, e.g. for rank checking.
Do not use deceptive redirects.
More quality guidelines from Google ...

If you have any questions or need advice on certain elements of your page, feel free to contact our search engine optimization experts here at ineedhits!

Monday, October 17

Australian-Scandianvian Partnership Takes on European Search Market

Australian directory business Sensis has announced a joint venture agreement with Norwegian search technology company Fast Search & Transfer and Scandinavian media firm Schibsted to market Internet search and advertising capabilities throughout Europe.

Sensis used Fast's search technology on its Australian search site sensis.com.au, which had over 1 million unique users in September (considering Australia only has a population of 20.5 million, this number is not bad at all). The joint venture will aim to sell its capabilities to directories and media company who want to create a search engine of their own which contains both proprietary local content and relevant web results. Sensis and Schibsted themselves are the joint venture's first customers, with others in the pipeline. However, since the big boys of search, especially Google and Yahoo!, are also heavily investing in local search, the joint venture will most likely face stiff competition.

The new joint venture aims to employ 50 staff members by the end of the year, even though Sensis has announced that it will lay off up to 250 staff in Australia as part of a strategic realignment. The joint venture's headquarters will be located in London.

Yahoo! and MSN Bridge Instant Messaging Divide

Yahoo! and MSN have announced that they will link their instant messaging networks to enable users to chat across the two platforms. The capabilities that will enable users to chat, see other users' online status and swap emoticons will be launched in the second quarter of 2006. Additional features such as voice over IP telephony are expected to be launched once the combined network is up and running.

The new combined Yahoo! and MSN network will have a reach of about 275 million users, making it a much stronger competitor to AOL's instant messaging tool. This in turn might force AOL to also adopt uniform messaging standards which users have been demanding for a long time. Google's instant messaging service, which was only launched this August, is still too small to be of any real significance at this stage.

Wednesday, October 12

Britney Spears and Her 1126 Misspellings

How many different ways can you spell "Britney Spears"? According to Ask Jeeves data published by the German newspaper "Die Zeit", there are exactly 1126 different variations on spelling her name. For "Arnold Schwarzenegger", Ask Jeeves registered exactly 1193 different spelling variations.

So the margin between the two megastars is actually pretty thin. Considering that Arnold Schwarzenegger is probably a bit trickier to spell that Brit's name, I don't think this bodes well for the brand "Britney Spears"!

Check out all the misspellings for Britney Spears here.

The misspellings for Arnold Schwarzenegger are here.

And here's some similar data about Britney Spears misspellings from Google.

Tuesday, October 11

Did Google and Sun Really Declare War on Microsoft?

Google and Sun Microsystems last week announced a cooperation agreement regarding the promotion and distribution of their software technologies. Sun has agreed to include the Google Toolbar in its downloads of the Java Runtime Environment, and the press release also mentions that Google and Sun have agreed to "explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite".

The Australian newspaper "The Courier Mail" seized on this fairly vague statement and boldly declared that "Internet search engine Google has declared war on Microsoft, announcing plans to launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online." As attention-grabbing as this may sound, there's really nothing in the press release to indicate that such a thing will happen with certainty or what timeframe the two companies may be looking at.

On the other hand, the optional inclusion of the Google Toolbar in the Java downloads poses some interesting privacy questions since Google could be able to gather vast quantities of information about user activity, with users possibly not realizing that this is happening.

SEO for Multilingual Sites

Most of us can only wish that our customer base was so diverse, widespread (and big!) that we need a multilingual website. However, it's not that difficult to come up with examples of where multilingual websites can be useful closer to home. If a large section of your customer base is Hispanic and speaks Spanish at home, there is a good chance that they also surf the Internet in Spanish and would come across a Spanish version of your website before they find the English version of your website.

What are the main things to consider for multilingual websites? As basic as it sounds, apply the same rules of search engine optimization to your foreign language web pages. These rules include:

Translate your English keywords or identify relevant keywords in the new language. Remember that it's not always as easy as looking up a word in a dictionary. Dictionaries are not always perfect when it comes to technical terms or slang, some words can have a number of different meanings in a different language or a number of possible translations. Remember the car company that wanted to launch a car named "Nova" in Latin America, where "No va" means "it doesn't go/work"?
Translate your existing Web content. Make sure a qualified translator or fluently bilingual person works on the translation, and ideally get a native speaker to check the translation. There's nothing worse than translated text that just didn't quite get it right (remember the last time you tried to read an English instruction manual from South Korea?).
Optimize your foreign language Web content, i.e. make sure the translation contains a good amount of the keywords you identified, make sure your title and other meta tags are written in the foreign language, include appropriate ALT tags and so on.
The URLs for your new pages should also contain foreign language words, e.g. instead of the URL http://www.mycompany.com/products-and-services/spanish.html use http://www.mycompany.com/productos-y-servicios.html.
Link to the new pages from your existing website, and try to obtain links to your foreign language content from relevant and suitable external websites and directories. You'd be surprised how many foreign language directories there are that target United States residents!
Make sure your language options are clearly visible on your English homepage.
Include the new foreign language pages in your sitemap.

Once your new pages are up and running, make sure that you also have appropriate foreign language support in place. You might get email questions and telephone calls in Spanish. Don't stop once you've attracted someone to your website - make sure you also close the sale!

ExactSeek Network Expands

While most people think of Google and Yahoo! when they talk about pay-per-click advertising, Tier 2 search engine ExactSeek.com has quietly been busy expanding the Independent Search Engine and Directory Network, which now has over 70 members like TowerSearch.com, Koogle.com, BusinessSeek.biz and MetaWebSearch.com.

ExactSeek offers flat fee keyword advertising with front page exposure of keyword ads throughout the entire network. Instead of paying per click and running the risk of being the victim of click fraud, the low flat fee of $12 per keyword term for a three month listing makes ExactSeek's Featured Listings program an attractive option for especially for companies with a limited online marketing budget.

The founder of the network, Mel Strocen, also sees ISEDN as a lobby group for smaller search engines. As he said in a recent interview with DM News, "None of the members are large enough to have a major voice in search, but as a whole they can have an impact on the search engine industry."

Tuesday, October 4

Yahoo! Search Advertising for Cell Phones

Yahoo! has launched a trial in Britain and Japan displaying text ads on cell phones together with Internet search results. With cell phones selling at a three times higher rate than personal computers, the trial is seen as Yahoo!'s move to tap into a growing usage trend and revenue source.

Senior Vice President of Yahoo!'s mobile group, Doug Garland, said in an interview last Wednesday: "The way that Yahoo! is going to stay relevant and essential is by extending our services beyond the PC browser to all devices that consumers use. There will be a paid search market that develops."

Google and MSN have also stepped up their activities in the mobile and local search field.

Free Wireless Access for San Francisco, Thanks to Google?

Google is amongst 24 companies to submit proposals to the city of San Francisco for the provision of free, high-speed wireless Internet access throughout the city.

Other vendors submitting proposals included telecommunication giants like Cingular and EarthLink as well as the local wireless broadband start-up Feeva. San Francisco's major Gavin Newsom compared citywide wireless Internet access to the provision of public utilities like water and electricity and said that for him, it was "a fundamental right to have access universally to information".

If Google's proposal was successful, it could put pricing pressure on traditional Internet service providers who rely on access fees for revenue and do not have advertising revenue as a source of income.

Google in Space

Google and NASA have announced plans to cooperate on R&D activities in the fields of large-scale data management, supercomputing and the "encouragement of entrepreneurial space industry". The cooperation plans also involve Google occupying up to 1 million square feet of office and lab space at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley.

NASA's press release sounds very impressive and somewhat mysterious to the scientific layperson, with NASA Ames Center Director G. Soctt Hubbard quoted as saying: "Our planned partnership presents an enormous range of potential benefits to the space program. Just a few examples are new sensors and materials from collaborations on bio-info-nano convergence, improved analysis of engineering problems, as well as Earth, life and space science discoveries from supercomputing and data mining, and bringing entrepreneurs into the space program. While our joint efforts will benefit both organizations, the real winner will be the American public."

In plain terms, this cooperation could make huge amounts of previously inaccessible information available to Internet users. Imagine being able to search and view data from the Apollo space mission via Google, or being able to look at crop patterns or local temperatures via Google Earth. While Google engineers won't get access to the NASA supercomputer named "Project Columbia", they will be able to discuss supercomputing problems with the NASA engineers to assist their search engine and other technologies. It will be interesting to see how Google exploits the commercial potential of this cooperation!

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