Could it be that we don’t really need to get the first spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) in order to attract our most qualified prospects i.e. the supposed 20 percent of prospects who generate 80 percent of sales?

Well, some research from MarketingSherpa indicates there might be some truth in this…

In a recent study, MarketingSherpa found that certain kinds of search engine users are prepared to wade through more SERPs than one might normally expect. It found that among industrial engineers:

• 14 percent just looked at the first few results on the first page of results;
• 39 percent looked at the first page of results;
• 10 percent stopped looking after the second page of results; and
• 37 percent looked through more than two pages of results.

MarketingSherpa reckons these findings would be typical of niche searchers. Presumably, anyone highly motivated to find uncommon (i.e. niche) information is more inclined to look through more pages of results than other kinds of searchers.

Given that search engine optimization (SEO) - like anything - comes at a cost, it *may* follow that at a certain point it may no longer be cost-effective to keep striving to become number in the SERPs, simply because niche prospects are prepared to look through more results anyway.

Maybe…

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Optimize All Your Web Pages For Niche Searchers Seeking Relevant Results”, MarketingSherpa, October 14, 2008

Yesterday, we debunked the duplicate content penalty myth. However, it would be wrong to suggest that duplicate content is completely harmless.

Why? For two main reasons…

Firstly, Google DOES penalize those who blatantly scrape content from other websites:

“There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value,” writes Ms Moskwa.

Secondly, Google may not PENALIZE… but it may equally not INDEX duplicate pages on your website. For example, if you have two landing pages that are the same (e.g. because you are running some kind of landing page test), Google will tend to index one and not the other. This also applies if you have multiple URLs on the same domain pointing to the same content.

But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Google and the other search engines are aiming to give search engine users relevant results based on their search query. If one result doesn’t happen to satisfy a searcher, then there should be lots of other – different - results to select from. How helpful would it be if Google’s index was full of the same pages? Not very.

Equally, you will often find that, over time, Google begins weeding out the results for many of those duplicate articles on the Internet. Again, it’s not to ‘penalize’ anyone - it’s to deliver relevant, distinguishable results to search engine users.

Okay, so that’s the duplicate content penalty myth out of the way. What’s the other myth that bugs me? I’ll leave that for a later issue…

Source: Susan Moskwa, “Demystifying the ‘duplicate content penalty’”, The Official Google Blog, September 12, 2008

NBC only got fool’s gold (I’ll call it bronze) in its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and Google failed to medal, according to Erik Qualman.

Writing in Search Engine Watch, Mr Qualman makes the point that NBC was, among other things, fooling itself by keeping prime Olympics events (such as the swimming and gymnastics) for its television audience and not showing them live on the web.

NBC presumably did so to preserve the popularity of its television broadcast since that’s what is supported by big-spending, brand advertisers. But advertisers really want to be where their prospects are. And Mr Qualman explains that it’s self-deceptive to rely on a traditional, “antiquated” indicator of where people are and what they’re doing, such as Nielsen ratings.

Meanwhile, by being unable or slow to deliver relevant search results when little-known athletes scored medals, Google failed to medal at all during the Olympics. Evidently, Microsoft and Yahoo attempted to ensure more relevant results by rolling up their sleeves and manually tweaking their search engines… something that Google did too, but only during the latter stages of the Games.

All in all, a less than ideal coverage of the Olympics by NBC and Google, given the possibilities offered by the web. Let’s see if the broadcasters and search engines medal at the London Olympics in 2012…

Source: Erik Qualman, “NBC’s Olympic Fool’s Gold; Google Comes Home Empty-Handed”, Search Engine Watch, August 21, 2008

Well, in his blog post, Amit Singhal DOES explain the three main principles governing Google’s search technologies. And explaining the principles is probably as revealing as Google is willing to be…

So what are the three principles governing Google’s ranking technologies? They are as follows:

1. Understanding Pages

Google aims to understand pages by, firstly, associating important concepts to a page even if these aren’t obvious on the page. It also seeks to distinguish between important and less important words in the page, as well as the freshness of the information on the page.

2. Understanding Queries

Google aims to understand what users are looking for - beyond what they type into Google’s search box - by utilizing such technologies as its spelling suggestion system, synonyms system, and concept analysis system. This last system aims to identify critical concepts in the search query in order to deliver more relevant results.

3. Understanding Users

Here Google aims to return results people really want, not just what they seem to want by virtue of their search query. To this end, Google uses its localization system, a personalization technology, and other technologies to help interpret users’ real motivations.

So what does all this tell Internet marketers and search engine optimizers? Everything and nothing.

“Everything” because Amit’s post reinforces the fact that Google’s main aim (apart from global domination) is to deliver relevant results. Your best bet in optimizing your website(s) for given keywords and keyphrases is to offer content that is relevant to those search words.

Yet it also tells us nothing… simply because it tells us that Google’s main aim is to deliver relevant content.

We already know that Google wants to give people search results that are relevant to what they’re looking for!

What we don’t know is why and how Google’s algorithm reaches the conclusion that our competitor’s websites are more or less relevant than ours. And why this conclusion keeps on changing based on… what?

Sure, SEO experts have theories. Theories that are probably close to the truth.

But Google certainly ain’t gonna lay it out for us any time soon!

Source: Amit Singhal, “Technologies Behind Google Ranking”, Google Blog, July 16, 2008

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google, has just issued a blog post explaining Google’s approach to ranking sites in its organic or natural search engine listings.

The three principles underpinning its approach are:

1. Best locally relevant results served globally.
2. Keep it simple.
3. No manual intervention.

According to Mr Singhal, the first principle is that every user query should generate the most relevant results. The second principle is that despite the temptation to let complexity creep into the system, Google should strive to keep its system simple without compromising on the quality of results.

The third principle is that the final ordering of the results should be decided by algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by Google. Google also believes that any need to manually adjust results is symptomatic of a greater need to improve its algorithm, and that if improving the algorithm improves one query, it will also improve an entire class of queries. The only scope for manual intervention relates to sites that violate Google’s policies (i.e. policies relating to such matters as legal compliance).

Not sure that Amit’s post adds much to our general understanding of how Google’s algorithm works… but he has left a carrot dangling: he has promised to explain the technologies behind Google’s ranking, and give examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action, in a later post.

We’ll keep you posted right here in Kikabink News.

Source: Amit Singhal, “Introduction to Google Ranking”, Google Blog, July 9, 2008