Posts tagged Results
Bing/Yahoo Organic Results Transition Complete
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WebProNews posted a short piece concerning the facts behind the long-rumored Bing and Yahoo! search results merger, and we’re here to summarize it for you.
Bing announced in 2010 that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo! results which is a byproduct of the merger between Microsoft and Yahoo corporations. As of now, the merger of both US and Canadian results is complete and users can expect to find merged SERPs in the instances of content, images, and video on both desktop and mobile browsers.
Shasi Seth, Yahoo’s VP of Search Products says, “”With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.”
Both companies express a deep desire to get all advertising formats transitioned quickly and at the least inconvenience for consumers and advertisers. The transitions on all formats is now complete, and users should expect to see a full Bing/Yahoo transition as of now.
Summary provided by Heather Hendrick
Mobile Carriers and Search Engines: A Dangerous Relationship
Suzzicks over at SEOmoz recently had some interesting insights into the crazy search results shown through mobile carriers. We’ve broken down the highlights for you here, below:
Universal Results are by far the most mobile friendly as they allow users to be totally interactive. For example, you can click on a phone number to call, a map to get directions or even listen to a simultaneously buy a song.
Though Universal results are interesting, they’re often fraught with trouble considering you never know what kind of result you’re going to get, depending on the phone you’re using. Along with Google’s algorithm changes, results vary week to week. For example, using an iPhone to look up “Britney Spears” a year ago produced vastly different results this year as the mobile carrier displayed results based on availability of adjoining apps.
The recent Verizon/Google net neutrality news has deepened the issue of mobile carrier/search relationships since SERP results could be affected by a potential deal, and neutrality may be threatened. As it stands now, carriers offer users three search options which is still at a level less than impartial.
Universal Triggers vary from phone to phone, and many of the carriers currently have deals with the phone companies to provide search engine services if their engine is the default search method on the phone. Many customers assume that when they search on Google.com on their phones they’re getting the same results they’d get searching Google.com on a PC, but this is incorrect as Google chooses search results based on the carrier, the type of phone, and the websites’ structure. As an example, T-Mobile sets a cookie so that users who search for mobile results one time will get the Universal Results displayed to them every time thereafter or until they clear their cookies.
Most people don’t take the time or even know how to change the Start default page on their mobile phones, or even their home computers for that matter. Universal Listing results are therefore having an effect on mobile SEO that SEOs and seo hosting companies have never had to deal with before, pushing traditional listings down and affecting rankings altogether.
This formatting makes it nearly impossible to determine rankings in a general sense and make an SEO’s job very difficult. As search engines and phone carriers are quiet about their connections it becomes even harder to determine who’s working with who, and exactly what kinds of deals are affecting “organic” search results.
Thanks to Heather Hendrick for the summary
Google Now Showing More SERP Results From a Single Domain
Google announced late last year that they were tweaking their famously secret algorithm to reflect the importance of a single domain in an seo cloud more accurately. Google hopes to make it easier to find multiple pages from a single site rather than limit their customers based on a one domain, one listing rule.
For example, searchers looking for a list of exhibits at a particular museum can now expect to see several of the top search results from that museum’s domain, each one linking to a particular event or exhibit at the museum. The thought is that the user is likely looking specifically for that museum’s domain and therefore can find what they need faster through a Google search than ever before.
Google makes thousands of tweaks and changes a year and this one is specifically aimed at helping consumers find deeper results from a particular site while maintaining the varied search results that users have come to expect from a Google search.
This change could have a positive effect, but perhaps Google should consider ranking tagged pages, commonly news or blog related, in the top rankings for key searches, thereby providing users with the news they’re looking for faster. The idea that pages without populated backlink profiles are less important for certain queries than other, better PRd pages is not necessarily a correct one.
Heather Hendrick is responsible for this summary
Microsoft Search Results now being shown by Yahoo
Back in 2010, WebProNews started reporting on the Yahoo and Microsoft merger and how that affected search results. At that time, up to 25% of results shown on Yahoo were coming from Microsoft and up to 3.5% of paid ads were coming from Microsoft’s ad network.
Yahoo’s VP of search stated, “The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft, however, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.”
For SEO, Microsoft’s team provides the following helpful hints:
- Keep comparing rankings in Yahoo and Bing to find out which keywords make the most sense for you to pursue
- Modify your paid search campaigns based on what you forsee changing in the organic sphere
- Get invested in Bing webmaster tools as Microsoft software will be responsible for reporting going forward
It was also a good time to check and see that crawl policies concerning Yahoobots as well as Bingbots were congruent, and users should have noticed a spike in Bing bot visits after the merge.
Bing Webmaster Tools had been completely redesigned for the merge and had a bunch of new features and tools that many SEOs might find useful. As summarized by a Bing spokesman:
“The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.”
The good news is, a lot of businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, so with the merge and increased Bing market share, many SEOs could see a bump in traffic. The announcement was followed with the news that by September of 2010, users should expect that one hundred percent of all Bing and Yahoo results will be powered by Microsoft. The time for Bing optimization is now.
Heather Hendrick, writer
Wrong Page Ranking in the Results? 6 Common Causes & 5 Solutions
Posted by randfish
Sometimes, the page you’re trying to rank – the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query – isn’t the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.
When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion – yes, it’s great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled. The first step should be identifying what’s causing this issue and to do that, you’ll need a process.
Below, I’ve listed some of the most common reasons we’ve seen for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.
- Internal Anchor Text
The most common issue we see when digging into these problems is the case of internal anchor text optimization gone awry. Many sites will have the keyword they’re targeting on the intended page linking to another URL (or several) on the site in a way that can mislead search engines. If you want to be sure that the URL yoursite.com/frogs ranks for the keyword “frogs,” make sure that anchor text that says “frogs” points to that page. See this post on keyword cannibalization for more on this specific problem.
_ - External Link Bias
The next most common issue we observe is the case of external links preferring a different page than you, the site owner or marketer, might. This often happens when an older page on your site has discussed a topic, but you’ve more recently produced an updated, more useful version. Unfortunately, links on the web tend to still reference the old URL. The anchor text of these links, the context they’re in and the reference to the old page may make it tough for a new page to overcome the prior’s rankings.
_ - Link Authority & Importance Metrics
There are times when a page’s raw link metrics – high PageRank, large numbers of links and linking root domains – will simply overpower other relevance signals and cause it to rank well despite barely targeting (and sometimes barely mentioning) a keyword phrase. In these situations, it’s less about the sources of links, the anchor text or the relevance and more a case of powerful pages winning out through brute force. On Google, this happens less than it once did (at least in our experience), but can still occur in odd cases.
_ - On-Page Optimization
In some cases, a webmaster/marketer may not realize that the on-page optimization of a URL for a particular keyword term/phrase is extremely similar to another. To differentiate and help ensure the right page ranks, it’s often wise to de-emphasize the target keyword on the undesirable page and target it more effectively (without venturing into keyword stuffing or spam) on the desired page. This post on keyword targeting can likely be of assistance.
_ - Improper Redirects
We’ve seen the odd case where an old redirect has pointed a page that heavily targeted a keyword term/phrase (or had earned powerful links around that target) to the wrong URL. These can be very difficult to identify because the content of the 301′ing page no longer exists and it’s hard to know (unless you have the history) why the current page might be ranking despite no effort. If you’ve been through the other scenarios, it’s worth looking to see if 301 redirects from other URLs point to the page in question and running a re-pointing test to see if they could be causing the issue.
_ - Topic Modeling / Content Relevance Issues
This is the toughest to identify and to explain, but that won’t stop us from trying
Essentially, you can think of the search engines doing a number of things to determine the degree of relevancy of a page to a keyword. Determining topic areas and identifying related terms/phrases and concepts is almost certainly among these (we actually hope to have some proof of Google’s use of LDA, in particular, in the next few months to share on the blog). Seeing as this is likely the case, the engine may perceive that the page you’re trying to rank isn’t particularly “on-topic” for the target keyword while another page that appears less “targeted” from a purely SEO/keyphrase usage standpoint is more relevant.
Once you’ve gone through this list and determined which issues might be affecting your results, you’ll need to take action to address the problem. If it’s an on-page or content issue, it’s typically pretty easy to fix. However, if you run into external linking imbalances, you may need more dramatic action to solve the mistmatch and get the right page ranking.
Next, we’ll tackle some specific, somewhat advanced, tactics to help get the right page on top:
- The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) & Rebuild
In stubborn cases or those where a newer page is replacing an old page, it may be wise to simply 301 redirect the new page to the old page (or the other way around) and choose the best-converting/performing content for the page that stays. I generally like the strategy of maintaining the older, ranking URL and redirecting the newer one simply because the metrics for that old page may be very powerful and a 301 does cause some loss of link juice (according to the folks at Google). However, if the URL string itself isn’t appropriate, it can make sense to instead 301 to the new page instead.Be aware that if you’re planning to use rel=canonical rather than a 301 (which is perfectly acceptable), you should first ensure that the content is exactly the same on both pages. Trying to maintain two different version of a page with one canonicalizing to another isn’t specifically against the engines’ guidelines, but it’s also not entirely white hat (and it may not work, since the engines do some checking to determine content matches before counting rel=canonical sometimes).
_ - The Content Rewrite
If you need to maintain the old page and have a suspicion that content focus, topic modeling or on-page optimization may be to blame, a strategy of re-authoring the page from scratch and focusing on both relevance and user experience may be a wise path. It’s relatively easy to test and while it will suck away time from other projects, it may be helpful to give the page more focused, relevant, useful and conversion-inducing material.
_ - The Link Juice Funnel
If you’re fairly certain that raw link metrics like PageRank or link quantities are to blame for the issue, you might want to try funnelling some additional internal links to the target page (and possibly away from the currently ranking page). You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify the most important/well-linked-to pages on your site and modify/add links to them to help channel juice into the target page and boost its rankings/prominence.
_ - The Content Swap
If you strongly suspect that the content of the pages rather than the link profiles may be responsible and want to test, this is the strategy to use. Just swap the on-page and meta data (titles, meta description, etc) between the two pages and see how/if it impacts rankings for the keyword. Just be prepared to potentially lose traffic during the test period (this nearly always happens, but sometimes is worth it to confirm your hypothesis). If the less-well-ranked page rises with the new content while the better-ranked page falls, you’re likely onto something.
_ - The Kill ‘Em with External Links
If you can muster a brute force, external link growth strategy, either through widgets/badges, content licensing, a viral campaign to get attention to your page or just a group of friends with websites who want to help you out, go for it. We’ve often seen this precise strategy lift one page over another and while it can be a lot of work, it’s also pretty effective.
While this set of recommendations may not always fix the issue, it can almost always help identify the root cause(s) and give you a framework in which to proceed. If you’ve got other suggestions, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments!
Google Now Using Breadcrumbs to Order a Site
WebProNews recently published a great piece about Google’s use of Breadcrumbs in displaying search results. For readers who don’t know, breadcrumbs are Google’s hierarchal navigation system that displays results as follows: HomePage>ProductPage>Product1Page, etc.
The good news here is that if webmasters can get their breadcrumbs in Google’s index, they can essentially get more links in the SERP results since each breadcrumb serves as a separate link. Google has stated that breadcrumbs will mostly be used in cases where the URL is not specific enough to describe a page. There’s definitely added incentive to use Breadcrumbs, though, since it can mean more links.
Generally, the SEO and SEO hosting communities received the news well. There’s certainly been a shift in the last few years from semantic to contextual content and breadcrumbs are just the latest step.
Matt Cutts offered questioning readers a tip that they should have delimited links that accurately describe each page on their site. As with any new product, he warned, Google’s use of breadcrumbs is going to take years to perfect and there will be many rounds of testing and experimenting before the search giant gets it right.
Cutts goes on to say that if people have suggestions of questions about Breadcrumbs, they should submit them via Google Webmaster Tools. He never specifies which character is best to use when delimited breadcrumbs but based on past press releases and examples published by Google itself, the best bet would be to use the “>” character when differentiating pages. Some people have reported seeing Google replace other delimiters such as “|” with the standard character.
Remember that there are three types of breadcrumbs which are path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs let the engine know how the user got there while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located within the site. Attribute breadcrumbs give context around the page itself and help the engines determine placement.
Heather Hendrick, freelance writer
Social Marketing: Social Bookmarking For Traffic Results
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Google Looks Like Bing? Google Gives its Search Results A New Look
Google has given its main web product, web search a much needed redesign. And while this is a welcome development since it’s been quite awhile since Google has done this to its major service which happens to be the company’s bread and butter, the new look of the search results pages will kind of remind you of Bing though. It’s actually a simpler kind of Bing’s search results pages.
Anyway, putting aside its similarities to Bing’s search results pages, Google’s redesigned search results pages now features a contextually relevant, left-hand navigation which highlights Google’s search verticals including – news, blogs, images, books and more. The new side panel is powered by Google’s search technologies – Universal Search, Search Options Panel and Google Squared.
What’s good about the contents of the left-hand panel is that it is dynamic and changes depending on the type of your search. Through Universal Search technology, the items on the left-hand panel changes and suggests the most relevant genres of results for your query. And you can switch seamlessly to these different types of results. It could also suggest different views on how you want your search results to be displayed or even display the search results together with other related topics.
In addition to the said enhancements to the search results interface, Google has also tweaked the color palette as well as the Google logo – giving the search results pages a modern and still simple look and feel.
The redesigned Google search interface is being rolled out globally today, although I haven’t seen it when I tried visiting Google Search. Have you seen the changes already? How do you like the new design and navigation of the Google Search Results Pages?
View full post on Search Engine Journal
The Relationship Between Web Hosting and SEO Results
Practicing effective search engine optimization involves many factors, and just when you think you understand it all you find out that there is so much more to learn. Every aspect of your website needs to be considered when optimizing your site for targeted traffic from the search engines. This means you’ll even need to consider the kind of web hosting you use. The reliability of a web host is perhaps one of the most importation attributes in the industry. If your web host is not efficient at keeping your site up and running then your search engine optimization efforts could lose their efficacy in time.
Downtime and Crawlers
If you’re in the business of search engine optimization then you know that search engines use crawlers to index the entire web including your site. If your site is down when these crawlers visit your site, then the search engine cannot crawl the site and index any new changes made to your site. This means any optimization efforts you recently made will go unnoticed. If this happens several times you could be greatly hindering your search engine optimization efforts without even realizing it.
Server Speed
Having a slow loading website is another factor that could hurt your search engine optimization efforts. This means you’ll need to use a web host that is known for having reliable and competent servers, and you’ll need to purchase a plan that gives you all of the server resources needed to keep your site running smoothly even when you’ve uploaded a plethora of content and you have hundreds of daily unique visitors. If the page takes too long to load then many visitors will become annoyed and leave the page.
The interesting aspect about Google is that it uses an algorithm to detect how long some on stays at your page before they return to the search engine results. This information is then applied to your site SEO score and it directly affects the way your site is ranked. If your visitors are leaving your site within a few seconds due to s low loading home page, then you can be assured that your site is going to experience a drop in page rank. If you want your site to get to the top of the search engines and stay there, then you will need to make sure you have a reliable hosting plan with plenty of server resources.
IP Addresses
Another factor that plays into your search engine ranking is the IP address of your website. If you use shared hosting then you will be sharing an IP address with other websites. If one of those websites does something to get their site deindexed by the search engines, then you may suffer the same fate. Therefore you may want to consider a hosting plan that gives you your own IP address such as dedicated web hosting. If you really want to get handle on the search engines then you may even want to have access to several IP addresses. To do this you can use SEO hosting services that will lease you several IP addresses per month.
View full post on Web Hosting Geeks’ Blog – News, Trends, Discussions.
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