comScore’s expanded search query report for August indicates that YouTube, not Yahoo, is the second most popular ’search engine’.

In August 2008, web users conducted 2.5 billion searches on YouTube, compared with 2.4 billion on Yahoo.

Source: Miguel Helft, “Search Ads Come to YouTube”, The New York Times, October 13, 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

Undoubtedly in response to numerous questions from concerned and confused Google Adwords advertisers, Google has posted an explanation of its Quality Score changes on its Adwords blog.

In short, here are Google’s responses to the main three issues on advertisers’ minds:

1. How will Quality Score be calculated?

Google will STILL consider (a) the historic performance of you account, evaluating the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in that account; and (b) your landing page quality. However, although Google will evaluate your overall Quality Score at the time of each search query, it will evaluate landing page quality less frequently.

2. What’s the impact of the removal of ‘Inactive for Search Status’?

Google believes that by making all keywords active it will better be able to evaluate keywords for any query where they may be relevant. The company has acknowledged that keywords previously marked as ‘inactive for search’ would otherwise never show ads on Google.com, even where they might have been a high quality match for certain queries. Now it’s giving such keywords a chance.

3. What’s the difference between ‘first page bid estimates’ and the old ‘minimum bids’?

Google says that for queries that don’t have much advertiser competition, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with lots of advertiser competition may have much higher first page bid estimates. This is because you’ll probably need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page of paid search results.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days”, Inside Adwords, September 15, 2008

Last Thursday, Google announced improvements to its Quality Score, which it introduced in July 2005 to vary minimum bids for keywords based on relevance.

Google is making three key changes to Quality Score:

1. Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query. On that basis, Google will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. Consequently, Quality Score will vary according to such factors as where an ad displays (Google, search partner, content site) and where the searcher is located (country, state).

2. Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’. Rather than be deemed inactive for search due to low relevance and/or searches, all keywords will be able to have ads shown on Google and the content network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them).

3. “First page bid” will replace the “minimum bid”. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results in Google, based on the ‘exact match’ version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

So what do these changes mean?

Well, as far as a more dynamic Quality Score goes, it probably just confirms the need to keep keywords relevant. The good news is that, theoretically, YOUR ideas over what is relevant can be borne out by the behavior of your target market, rather than be deemed by Google. Provided, of course, that you get it right.

The lifting of the ‘inactive for search’ restraint is, I think, good news. Again, provided that you know more about your market than Google’s algorithm.

As for the replacement of the “minimum bid” with the “first page bid”… this sounds suspiciously like an excuse to make Google Adwords advertisers pay more. Hopefully not, but we won’t know until Google rolls out these “improvements” over the next few weeks.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score Improvements”, August 21, 2005

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