TechCrunch reports that Google is testing integrating results from its shopping search engine (formerly known as Froogle) with its regular search engine results. The upshot is that when you search on a given search phrase, you may see a few shopping results squeezed in between traditional search results.

Now TechCrunch’s article is based on tips it’s received, and it’s not apparent whether, if true, the integration is confined to U.S. search results… or whether Google is just conducting a small test…

But if true - and total integration between Google’s shopping and regular search engines is on Google’s agenda - it might be a good idea for YOU to get listed in Google shopping search engine sooner rather than later…

Source: Robin Wauters, “Google Starts Blending Web And Shopping Search Results Again,” December 15, 2008

What should you do when the top few search engine results for your company include one or more listings that are blatantly negative? Articles that are wrong, biased, misleading or worse?

One approach is to contact your lawyer. If the person behind the negative listing has lied or defamed you or your company, you may have a case for defamation. But litigation is costly. Moreover, the culprit in question may not necessarily have defamed you in the legal sense. They may have simply published an item of ‘free speech’ that is negative, but not strictly defamatory.

Another approach is to complain to the search engines. But they’re unlikely to do anything unless you can show them that the negative listing is unlawful or the result of ‘gaming’ the search engines.

A more practical approach is to beat the negative listing at their own game: use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to push down their listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, as with anything to do with SEO, you can take a ‘white hat’, ‘black hat’ or ‘grey hat’ approach. A ‘black hat’ approach is to try to game the search engines; a ‘white hat’ approach is to follow the ‘rules’ i.e. the rules of relevance and authority; and a ‘grey’ hat approach is somewhere in between the two.

The problem with black and grey approaches is that while you may be able to get rid of the negative listing in the short term… in the long term you run the risk of losing your own listing altogether and damaging your reputation among the search engines.

This is rarely a risk worth taking when dealing with your company and/or brand name and main website.

On that basis, a ‘white hat’ approach is the only approach I recommend for optimizing your main site AND for defending against threats to your search engine positioning and/or reputation.

And what if you actually rank highest for your company name anyway, and are simply trying to get rid of a negative listing that sits BELOW your listing? In that case, it’s not so much a matter of optimizing your main site or page any further… but to get other favorable listings to rise above, and push out, the negative listing.

One way to do that is to build and optimize alternative websites… but that’s likely to take a long time and a lot of effort on your part. This is because, among other things, the search engines tend to be slow to rank brand new domains highly in the SERPs.

Here’s a much easier - and more effective - way suggested by Aaron Shear: build a presence on various popular social media sites.

The search engines tend to rank the popular social media sites highly. Therefore, by establishing a page on all the major social media sites - Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and so on - you’ll have a shot at getting those pages ranked… and ranked higher than the negative listing you’re trying to get off the first few pages of results.

The key, of course, is to put some unique, compelling content on those pages, and attract in-bound links to those pages from authoritative sites. But it may not be as difficult as you think. Placing videos on YouTube, for example, is something you might be interested in doing anyway, and will likely to have many benefits (in terms of traffic and conversions) other than ousting those negative sites from the top listings.

Indeed, building a presence on the popular social media sites is a recommended traffic and SEO strategy and, by including links to your main site, can also aid in achieving or maintaining a high ranking for your main site.

It’s certainly your best bet in terms of getting rid of those negative listings that just don’t seem to go away.

Source: Aaron Shear, “Maintaining Your Company’s Image in the SERPs”, Search Engine Watch, November 4, 2008

Google has made two further tweaks to how it calculates the Quality Score of each Google Adwords ad that appears in the search results. The tweaks are likely to significantly affect which ads appear at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The first change is a welcome acknowledgment of the fact that top-placed ads naturally get a boost in click-through rates (CTRs) by virtue of their position… while the reverse is true of lower-placed ads that may be as ‘relevant’ as those above them. Google is taking this discrepancy into account, which should result in higher quality scores for lower placed ads.

Secondly, Google is now making it easier for ads to occupy the positions above the natural search results. Previously, only ads with the highest ad rank and a minimum Quality Score would be placed here; now ads can be placed here if they meet the minimum Quality Score without having to be first in terms of Ad Rank.

Both of these changes should be welcome news to Google Adwords advertisers… but let’s not kid ourselves. As TechCrunch points out, the moves are also calculated to boost Google’s ad revenues. More ads above the organic search results means more clicks… which means more revenues for Google.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Google Tweaks AdWords To Reward “Quality” (And Juice Revenues)”, TechCrunch, October 31, 2008

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

Frank Watson, writing in Search Engine Watch, reckons the real threat to Google may not come from Yahoo, Microsoft, or indeed any other search engine. Instead it may come from social media.

“People are starting to move away from being satisfied with search results,” writes Mr Watson. “They’re starting to develop trust groups with social bookmarking tools and other community or social networks. If this behavior continues, we may see a change in the way the majority of people use the Web.”

Watson seems to be saying that as more people use social media… and as more advertisers follow people onto social media… search engines will lose their pre-eminence, if not relevance.

Hmmm… I dunno. While I appreciate the rising popularity of social media, I don’t see it happening at the expense of the search engines. What may emerge is a kind of morphing of the two - where search results are more informed by social media.
But that’s kind of happening already, isn’t it? At least to the extent that the search engines seem to favor social media results in the organic search engine results.

As for social media advertising displacing search advertising… I don’t see that happening any time soon. Not among direct response advertisers anyway. Nothing yields an advertising return on investment (ROI) quite so high as advertising your product to people who are specifically looking for that product.

So unless social media can start delivering a direct response kind of ROI, it won’t beat Google or the other search engines on the advertising front either.

All the same, I think Watson is on to something. A Google beater may well emerge from social media or ‘Web 2.0′… and it may not be anything we’ve seen yet.

Source: Frank Watson, “Could Social Media Be the Google Killer?” Search Engine Watch, Sep 19, 2008

No one, except the search engine themselves, knows exactly what goes into the algorithms that determine where a website ranks in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

But there is a general consensus over the four (4) critical factors that affect your ranking. And it’s these factors that you really want to focus your attention on in order to improve your ranking:

1. Domain Age

In general, the older the domain, the higher a website will rank in the SERPs. This is for a number of reasons. One of which is the fact that Google’s patent specifies domain name age as being a factor in how it ranks websites, another being that older domain names (e.g. expired domain names) are likely to have more sites linking to them.

2. Content

The search engines tend to favor websites containing plenty of copy. According to Mark Jackson of Search Engine Watch, you want at least 150 words on a webpage, and this should include a decent smattering of your targeted keywords, which should ideally be within the first paragraph of text, and in your H1 tags.

3. Title Tags

Your webpage title tags should include the keywords targeted for that webpage.

4. Links

Domain age, content and title tags are all necessary… but not sufficient. Getting back links from authoritative and relevant websites is where the real search engine optimization game is at. The more quality back links your website has, the more highly it will rank in the SERPs.

Source: Mark Jackson, “Search Engine Optimization: Back To Basics”, Search Engine Watch, August 19, 2008

If you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) you’ll know that getting QUALITY back-links is critical to moving your website up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting a few links from trusted and authoritative websites beats getting a lot of links from “junky” or irrelevant websites every time.

So too, as SEO expert Michael Gray says in a recent blog post, most SEOs would define a good back-link as:

“a keyword rich link from a well linked/important/popular page on a trusted and authoritative website, that is preferably topically relevant to your site.”

Mr Gray goes on to point out the major problem with a definition like this: there is no publicly available or agreed upon metric for what is a “trusted and authoritative website”!

While search engine optimizers will point to sites such as the New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal as trusted and authoritative websites, that isn’t much help to webmasters who have little hope of ever getting a back-link from such news sites.

Consequently, Gray advises webmasters to:

1. Do your research and consider all the available metrics – such as Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Quantcast, Hitwise and Feedburner - looking for correlations between such metrics; and

2. Consider the blogs in your space to see who is getting the most links.

I would also add this:

3. Consider the content of the website. Does it strike you as being of high quality?

If a site scores highly on all the above-mentioned metrics, has tons of links, and is of a high standard… chances are it’s considered reasonably trusted and authoritative by the search engines.

And if you get mixed results for a given site, do what all search engine optimizers do: use your judgment!

Source: Michael, Gray, “Teaching Advanced Link Building and Why Pagerank Will Never Die”, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog, August 13, 2008

According to Tech Crunch, Google and Digg have signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal whereby Google will buy Digg, and bring it under its Google News arm, for around $200 million.

Among other things, this may help solve two issues for Google:

1. Digg will give Google News a big boost - which, according to some, has failed to reach its potential in terms of popularity and, to date, hasn’t had a revenue model (see http://www.kikabink.com/news/46/is-google-news-a-dog/).
2. Google can take the Digg-like voting technology its currently testing for its search engine results straight from the source.

Having said all this, the deal could still be derailed. Who knows, Microsoft might wish to intervene, either by offering a higher price or, as Tech Crunch has suggested, offer a much lower price if Google pulls out of the acquisition.

Source: Michael Arrington, “Google In Final Negotiations To Acquire Digg For ‘Around $200 Million’”, Tech Crunch, July 22, 2008