'Net Features : serps

Desktop Search On The Rise

Allison Howen — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:05:00 GMT

Despite mobile’s momentum, desktop search activity has been on the rise.

In fact, a recent comScore study reveals that October’s overall desktop search activity saw an increase of 8 percent compared to the previous month – with a total of 17,623 searches conducted.

Other statistics show that Google gained two-tenths of a percentage point and continues to lead the search industry with 66.9 percentage of the market share. However, Microsoft also gained a tenth of a percentage point and now makes up 16 percent of the search market share, followed by Yahoo at 12.2 percent.

This means that even though many Web workers have focused on mobile lately, desktops should still not be overlooked – especially during the holiday season. In the coming weeks consumers will be conducting a lot of searches, both on mobile devices and on desktops, and the only way to guarantee your business is found is by continuously monitoring your brand’s placement on the SERPs. For those Web businesses who need a little help to do so, check out Website Magazine's Master List of SEO Tools.

Journey to the Top of the SERPs

Michael Garrity — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered why everyone seems to make such a big deal out of search engine optimization (SEO) and reaching that coveted top spot in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Well then, new data from Compete may just enlighten you, as a recent study of tens of millions of consumer-generated SERPs from Q4 of 2011 shows us just how massive the difference between a first and second place listing can be to a website.

According to the data, approximately 85 percent of all the listings shown are organic, with 15 percent appearing as paid search listings; they also found that 55 percent of all SERPs have ads.

But the more telling information comes from looking at the clicks on organic results. Compete says that 53 percent of those clicks go to the top organic listing, and the number decreases significantly from there. The second link gets 15 percent of the clicks, while the third gets nine percent, the fourth sees six percent and the fifth is clicked on just four percent of the time.

Being on top is also beneficial for paid listings, as well, though having the number one spot in the ad block is less important than simply appearing in the block at the top of the page. The study shows that about 61 percent of paid search ads show up on the right-hand sidebar, but they only account for 13 percent of the paid search clicks with the top listing getting just four percent of all paid search clicks. In contrast, the third listing in the top ad block receives around nine percent of all paid search clicks; in fact, the ads in the top block see an impressive 59 percent of all the paid clicks.

The report also shows that around 24 percent of the ads on a SERP appear at the top and make up an impressive 85 percent of the clicks, while 15 percent of them appear at the bottom of the page and get a paltry two percent of the clicks.

In other words, this report wants you to know that it pays off (big time) to invest in getting your site at the top of the SERPs. But as we all know, that's easier said than done.

Just a few weeks ago, Google released a list of 65 new changes to its search engine algorithm from August and September, many of which may have direct implications for how websites and pages will be able to move up in the SERPs. Here's a look at six of the most important updates; webmasters and SEOs take note.

The Role of Authority

One of the updates from August focuses on page quality and intends to help searchers find "more high-quality content" from sources that the search engine trusts. This means that building that kind of trust is crucial to improving your search ranking. You can do this by receiving (and giving) links from trusted and authoritative sites, creating a sitemap, lowering your bounce rate and not "over-optimizing" your content.

Matters of Location

Two updates now look more at location to determine a site's place in the SERPs. The first now determines relevancy of pages for queries containing locations, and the other "nearby" change improves the precision and coverage of relevant local Web results, helping it better identify results that are localized for each user (and ranks them appropriately). To better find these local, relevant searchers, optimize your site for local search by registering with a search engine's local business registry, getting links from local directories, developing location-specific landing pages and adding geographic keywords into landing page content, <h1> and <h2> tags and metadata.

The Return of Keyword Density

The changes also included an update to term-proximity scoring, which means it would behoove you to improve the keyword density on your site. You can do this by inserting keywords into page titles, headlines, ALT text, page URLs, rich footers and, of course, your copy.

The Importance of Freshness

Being fresh is crucial, and the last two months saw a number of changes aimed at rewarding sites with fresh content. Now, Google will apply a more granular function based on document age, and also seeks out and favors the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant to a search query. So make sure you're continually adding fresh content to your site, and if you're busy schedule makes that difficult, don't be afraid to ask for guest contributors or even press releases that you can publish. Anything to keep your site from just sitting there and getting stale.

Title Tags in Focus

It's difficult for Google to generate preview snippets for pages that it does not crawl because of robots.txt, so now a replacement snippet will be included that explains that there is no preview because of robots.txt. To prevent this, include titles and descriptions in the metadata of your Web pages.

Universal Intent

In addition to all of this, Google can now show improved Universal Search results through a better understanding of when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.

Take these key updates into consideration as you continue to optimize your site for the search engines (and maybe take a look at the other 59 changes, as well), and before you know it, you'll be movin' on up the SERPs.

Bing Redesign Gets Top Result in Social Search

Michael Garrity — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:25:00 GMT

A few weeks back, Bing made some design changes to its search results pages that were meant to offer a new de-cluttered experience and make it easier for users to quickly find the best results for their queries.

Microsoft’s search engine added some more changes on Thursday, one that highlights different results types in three vertical columns and, most importantly, finally does social search right (and much better than Google).

Now, when a SERP pops up, everthing from the center to the left side of the page will show the algorithmic text results. To the right of that, context results will appear, including maps, reviews and actionable input fields. Finally, the far right side of the screen displays “social assistance” results; this focuses on social network connections (notably from Facebook) and experts who can help searchers find the information they want.

One of the best social assistance features is an “Ask Friends” option that lets users request help from their Facebook friends in sorting through results. After entering a question, Bing will automatically post it to the users’ Facebook profile along with a link to the user’s current search. If any friends make recommendations, the searcher will be notified in the social assistance sidebar.

Overall, this is a solid addition and further advances the company’s efforts to cut down on a lot of the clutter that can quickly become distracting and cumbersome for users.

Of course, this is also probably a shot at Google’s attempts at social search with its integration of Google+ to create Search Plus Your World, which has been accused of overemphasizing the importance of Google+ content.

In addition to the latest design tweaks, Bing is including more social functionality into its product. Thanks to an instant personalization partnership with Facebook, users will be able to see what their friends have liked in search results, which shows up as a thumbs up icon next to the text results. However, Facebook Likes won’t have an effect on search result rankings.

For more information about the new design, click here, and here for a video highlighting the new social search features.

How Does Breaking News Affect Search Results?

Michael Garrity — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:15:00 GMT

Business-to-business (B2B) inbound marketing software provider Optify has released new data about the differences in the way that search engines react during breaking news events.

The study specifically looked at three hot-button news topics from the past few years: the Japanese tsunami, Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple, and Amanda Knox's return to Seattle after being released from an Italian prison.

Optify conducted the study by identifying specific keywords for each event that would drive the highest volume of results on Google and the Microsoft-owned Bing. The evolution and performance of these keywords were observed on each search engine over a period of time, and Optify found that to react to the news, both Bing and Google made dramatic changes to their search engine results pages (SERPs).

Both sites diminished or eliminated the presence of sponsored content, increased the amount of results containing integrated or multimedia content, and pushed recent news content to the top of the page at the expense of ranked results. Overall, about 70 percent of all the content shown above the fold was breaking news.

However, there were some expected differences. Mainly that when it comes to surfacing news results, Bing favors the most recent results and those coming from MSN.com, also Microsoft-owned. Google prefers authority and reach and serves more results from "prominent" publications.

The study ends up concluding that organizations with higher authority and social reach tend to do better in a breaking news cycle.

Leave Explicit SERP Feedback for Google

Administrator — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Google is on the hunt for content farms - sites with shallow or low quality content - announcing the release of an experimental Chrome extension for people to block sites from appearing in their Web search results.

In addition to blocking the site from appearing, the extension also sends the blocked site's information to Google. Should Google opt to use the feedback as a ranking signal in the future (since they will have the ability to analyze that feedback individually and in aggregate), those responsible for SEO are going to want to keep an eye on the impact.

When users block a site with the Chrome extension, they will not see the results from that domain again. Site blocks can be revoked at the bottom of the SERPs, and lists of the blocked sites can be edited.

The extension is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

WM Radio: Investigating New Search Trends, SES Preview

Mike Phillips — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:34:00 GMT

A new study released by Performics reveals some very interesting data about users' search behavior. We investigate. Also, we preview this year's Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago by speaking with Grant Crowell about online video, and Liana Evans about social media strategies. You will hear parts of those interviews, but be sure to subscribe to our podcast feed or sign up to Website Magazine Radio in iTunes so you don't miss the rest of those conversations with these two SES presenters, to be released shortly.

Listen now, and subcribe to Website Magazine Radio in iTunes!

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If you would like to have your questions answered on Website Magazine Radio, please send email to mike@websitemagazine.com with "WM Radio" in the subject field.

Google: Site Speed a Ranking Factor

Mike Phillips — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:42:00 GMT

Google has officially announced that site load speed is a factor when determining rankings, not that it's a deal-breaker. According to Matt Cutts, ""While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point."

So, the chances your site will be affected are slim. But read between the lines on this one. Or, let Google's Webmaster Central Blog do it for you: "But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings."

It's only common sense that faster sites are more appealing to Web users. But knowing that Google places "a lot of value in speed" means that you should, too. The fact is, when Google decides to make a change to their search rankings -- any change -- website owners should take notice. While it might be a small factor in rankings today, it could loom much larger in the future.

Also from the Google blog are these suggested tools to check your site speed. Sometimes we can get caught up in the "cool" factor of Web page and lose sight of what's most important to users -- usability. Don't fall into that trap.

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

Google Steps Up Social Search

Mike Phillips — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:31:00 GMT

Google has posted on their blog that Social Search is now available to everyone. Within the next few days, users will be allowed to participate in Social Search by simply creating a Google profile then linking their online content and profiles from other websites. Then, when searching, users will see results from those people connected to the profile, and connected through other websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

Why is this significant to Web business? Simply put, the more connections you make, the better chance you have of appearing on the first page of search results of those with whom you are connected. For example, if you build a robust profile on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and have many connections, you stand the chance of being featured in any one of those users' Social Search results every time they use Google. Within your Google profile, you can also add other, non-social websites, such as your company blog. Again, when you are connected to a user, your blog content (if relevant) could show up as a Social Search result to that user. It's a quick, free and easy way to get your content in front of people who likely share common interests. In essence, the more connections you have, and the more outlets you have to share your content online, the better chance you have of appearing in users' search results.

While logged in to your Google profile, take a look at "My social circle" after conducting a search on Google. This will show those with whom you are connected and gives you the option to add and remove connections. According to Google, it will take "a few weeks" for Google to make all the connections and start returning Social Search results. The video below gives a brief overview of Social Search.

Read the official Google blog post on Social Search.

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Yahoo Monkeys with Facebook

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:57:00 GMT

I know, I know - again with the Yahoo! improvements. This time it's the search results that Yahoo!'s been monkeying around with. Yahoo! is now presenting Facebook profiles within search results - but the good times don't stop there.

Yahoo's enhanced results will display Facebook users, meaning users can add a friend, poke, send a message and view a person's friends directly from the search results pages.

This would not have been possible without Facebook sharing the structured data for this app by adding semantic markup to their public profile pages.

Here's how my own Facebook profile information appears in the SearchMonkey enhanced Yahoo! index:

You might think this is a privacy issue, but Yahoo made it clear that users will only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed. Another reason to be on Facebook? Absolutely - you can see how "universal" listings are starting to become. If you like the SearchMonkey app for Facebook in Yahoo! SERPs, you might also enjoy other social SearchMonkey apps for networking sites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and MyBlogLog.

Does Whois Information Matter To Rankings?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:59:00 GMT

There is a fascinating thread happening now at Webmaster World regarding the public versus private availability of Whois information and the impact on search engine rankings.

The original poster had forgotten to renew his private Whois information and argued that his rankings dropped as a result. While it is difficult to say in no uncertain terms that the change did result in lower rankings, it is most certainly curious that Google is an official ICANN accredited registrar (but does not actually register any domains) which gives them access to Whois information in real time.

The result (if you believe the domain owner) has been a general devaluing of the inbound links. Other forum participants are not so sure. One poster said, "I think this is speculation more than specifically being tested. Some people have reported drops, such as SEOPTI. However, it is difficult to measure those drops and whether other factors did not come into play in terms of that drop that coincided with the automatic change."

And this poster was not alone. "I've not seen any impact of changing WHOIS information, from an edit or even via the adding or removal of 'privacy protection' from a domain name. I don't think it's improbable that WHOIS is a factor, but IMO it must be a small one, or one that can only be sufficiently amplified by other, unrelated, factors."

In the end, I think it is conceivable that Google would look for change in registrar data, when it correlates to a drastic change on the website. Best practice in this instance might be that if you buy a site from someone, you should wait a while before changing the content drastically if you change the registrar data right away (as you should).