Investigating search frequency
January 31st, 2007
Yahoo! have officially stated that their Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is incredibly inaccurate and their were rumours about it being discontinued in the near future. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, after using the tool for any amount of time you can see it gives some very fishy results indeed.
So what are the alternatives? If you’re serious about search marketing, you really shouldn’t be relying on free tools to provide you with data that is critical to your campaign success. There are several companies such as Hitwise which can provide you with far superior and more useful data. Although this can be quite an investment, if you are an agency it is absolutely worth it.
If you are running on a very limited budget, there is a free Wordtracker tool which can give some usable results and I would highly recommend signing up for the beta of Hittail, which is also free.
Hittail shows you real-time search data as visitors arrive to your website and will break down your results into “top keywords” and “long tail” keywords. It builds a database which gives you suggestions on how to build long-tail search content on your site to consistently capture these more specific (and normally higher value) searches. This kind of information is precious when you are working in a highly competitive field.
Yahoo! annouces that they will release a new, “improved” version of their keyword selector and the old tool will remain (in a half working state) until this time.
Poor Google Images change
January 30th, 2007
I wasn’t originally going to write about this, however since I just praised Google I thought it would be unfair not to point out they certainly aren’t perfect. Recently, Google Images changed the way the present their image search.
The new interface hides the image details such as the URL, file size and image size - information that was originally displayed below each image. You are now required to hover your mouse over each image to see this information:
Why would you possibly want to make it harder to me to get information, Google? I thought your main mission was to easily provide me relevant information - not make it harder! Maybe I’m over the top and hovering a mouse over an image isn’t what you’d call “hard work” - however it is an annoyance, just that Google would let something like this go through when they are doing so much great stuff. I can only assume it was done for aesthetic reasons, although if you look at the screenshot the overlay can get messy too.
At least give us the option to turn it off, without having to fiddle with Javascript!
Google Local getting vocal
January 30th, 2007
Something I’ve always wanted present in Google Local has finally made an appearance! When performing a search that gives you a few local results you can now see a star rating and review section.
I’m not sure whether this will affect the positioning of the results (this would lead to teams of company-hired goons writing reviews for themselves and bad reviews for competitors). However, it is however a really nice touch to be able to see some human feedback on the companies that pop up in your search.
Big shakeup with Google Video & YouTube
January 29th, 2007
As most of you will have no doubt noticed, Google Video is now returning results from YouTube as well. I understand Google might want to merge the two services, but this to me seems to divide it even more because of two issues:
1) If you’re a user, what is the point of using YouTube anymore? You might as well use Google Video so you can search both sites, because YouTube doesn’t return results from Google Video. You’re better of sticking with greater choice at Google Video.
2) If you’re an uploader, what is the point of using Google Video anymore? if you want maximum exposure for your video, why upload it to Google? If you put it on YouTube, both Google Video and YouTubers will be able to see it.
They seem to have split the camp here. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact YouTube is going to start revenue sharing with users who upload unique video content?
No more Googlebombing
January 29th, 2007
Googlebombing. A collaborative effort by users to influence the search engine results pages by giving a page a vast amount of incoming links, with certain anchor text. One of the most famous Googlebombs was getting George. W Bush’s biography on the official Whitehouse site to the top of Google for the search “Miserable Failure”, (even “failure” for that matter). A post on the Google Webmaster Central post entitled “a quick word about Googlebombs” suggests that Google is now on top of the problem and Googlebombs should no longer have the impact they once did.
How does this work? Google seems very protective about giving away it’s secret sauce and letting us know, algorithmically how this change works. One user speculated:
…if the target URL has tons of off-page optimization for a certain keyphrase, but very little (or no) on-page optimization for that same phrase, then it might fit the signature of a GoogleBomb.
Which Matt Cutts seems to hint that he’s on the right lines. I imagine the truth is this is only the tip of a very large, complicated iceberg.
