I’m writing this on a phone so forgive the formatting and lack of links and screenshots, i’ll tidy up later.

There’s a lot of change on Google these days, a lot of activity in spaces that Google were once content to monetize with ads.The clear separation that once existed between Googles organic results and its paid ads inventory is becoming increasingly blurred as it pushes on into query spaces that were once the preserve of a diverse bunch of web publishers.

Unwritten Contract? WTF – Explain Yourself Man

Defining the contract is important, it went a little like this. Google would spider and index webmaster content and show the outputs to user queries in its web results. It would overlay these with ads and monetize through clicks from people interested. It wouldn’t participate in the SERPS directly unless there was a clear deficit in the marketplace. The distinction was clear and plain for all to see. Organic and paid were separate, Google wasn’t in the business of ranking its ad supported services over competing services. It was not an abuser of its monopoly position.

So, let’s look at a very recent change and ask the question, “Has the unwritten contract between Webmasters and Google been broken?”

For this query http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=distance+from+rome+to+geneva I’m seeing that Google now displays a map, with the distance and a link to directions above its organic results.

This reduces the likelihood of a click through to an organic result and helps drive traffic to Googles map product. You can see it in action in the graphic below.

In a week where the search giant announced a change to it’s tos regarding the map api, what are your thoughts on what appears to be yet another step of many encroachments into the organic space? If you were Google, you might well say, ‘Encroachments’ wtf, how very dare you but read on, as it’s a little more sophisticated than that and Google well knows it.

It’s our dinner plate and we are going to eat it

Last week or so it was ‘what’s my ip‘ and their learn more hyperlink.Providing users with both an answer to their query and a link to a Google page explaining. Net effect, other tools and publishers all lose as google pushes its own content.

Whilst some might “say no big deal move along”, others might see the wider implications of things like this and note how Google continues to eat at the table of organic.

What may seem like innocuous moves, the reality is that they often reduce people’s need to leave Google (take dictionary queries or date/time/currency/math based queries) taking traffic away from publishers that build content and thus increasing queries and ad clicks on Google. If the user finds what they need, then why even leave Google. Net impact, happy user, blissfully unaware of the slow death of content creators.

The logical extension of much of the above is that ultimately, Google finds ways of replicating what others do to a point of Google becomes a super affiliate feed of products and suppliers. Organic traffic becomes marginalised and joe public is hoodwinked under the guise of a better search experience. Meanwhile publishers become poorer dying a slow death and Google grows richer.

If you’re a brand then you might be safe or erm, maybe not as this post about yelp describes.

Before anyone shouts deal with it, or that’s business, or go build a search engine and do it yourself, please, let’s try and be intelligent here and react from the perspective of a publisher. Many of the “Google deserves it all” type debates have been done to death so I doubt anyone want’s those back and forths rehashed. My view is that with great power comes great responsibility. Google has a responsibility to behave in ways that aren’t anti competitive or that stifle creativity.

Publishers built the web but it’s ok as we’ll just replace them

I’m more concerned with what if anything publishers can do about it. Sure, the answer of build a fabulous product that everyone wants and loves and needs rings true, but that doesn’t do much about the fact that for many people, a chrome browser or a search box on Google is their default way of finding things. If Google keeps chipping away like it does, then one day it might very well be your cool ecommerce/travel/hobby/science/news/art site that gets marginalised.

Without traffic, publishers on the web can’t survive. The unwritten contract that once existed between Google and webmaster is effectively broken.

What say you?

Meantime, here’s a nice track by the O’Jays

Related posts:

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2. Dear Google, Stop Trying to Control the World’s Information

Yet Another Woe No More Analytics Post

So, Google decided to take the gloves off and twist the screw that little bit harder down on organic search. Caution, I suspect I might curse and swear and rant a little but hey, you can always hit the back button

I’m not going to rant about the outrageousness of it all as that’s been said by all and sundry. If you’ve landed here and don’t know what I’m talking about then, the short explanation is that Google have made a move in the name of privacy but have added a pretty hefty “by the way clause”  that’s sending shock waves through the online marketing community.

Put shortly, if you are one of these people who enjoys crunching numbers and delivering actionable insights derived from user queries to a domain then, that’s all about to change as you will no longer be able to determine the query part of the journey. All you’ll know is that they arrived on your site from Google. If it’s a paid click then no worries there, Google will allow that to stay as it’s valuable to the advertiser and useful to Google.

Valuable in the sense that advertisers need to know how their adspend on Google converts. (No point spending money if you don’t know how well it performs)  and useful to Google as if people don’t spend money their whole house falls. Google isn’t interested in how your organic campaigns perform or convert. There’s no money in it for them.

Privacy – We Care About Your Boss Snooping On Your Search Behaviours

Senior Google folks  have played the privacy card saying lots of things around how currently, people can spy on what you are searching for and that’s all a bit terrible.

It isn’t for me to say that that’s a big pile of horse shit other than many people don’t really buy it and are choosing to use language that’s a whole lot more culturally base. What I would say is that I’m far from convinced and somewhat disappointed by it all as to be honest, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t think that they’d ever encroach on this ground and that they’d be happy with existing levels of cash flow and profit, which if memory serves for Q3 were around the 10 billion dollar mark.

I’m not going to point to  lots of examples, you can take my opinion or leave it, but in my view Google isn’t a fan of SEO at all.  They know precisely how much commerce is generated through their platform and perhaps understandably would like more of the actual marketing spend to find its way to their bottom line. Put simply, if  SEO is too easily measured, too easily demonstrated that X spend on SEO channel equals X ROI then quite rightly marketing budgets are going to be adjusted to reflect this. This of course means less of such spend for Google.

Sure, Google have produced 100′s of videos, run webmaster forums designed to support webmasters, there’s WMT and a host of other initiatives designed to deliver help and insight in to creating better websites. Yet for me, like most things Google does these days, the impact of these are always two fold.  Owning the message for me is an important part of controlling or influencing what it is you want people to believe. There’s no point in saying you’re a plumber if you are dressed in a Dr’s outfit holding a chainsaw. If you want to be the authority, the go to guy, then you’ve got to walk the walk and make sense to those who care about what it is you purport to deliver for them. Who you going to trust? That brand new shiny SEO agency who give you lots of probables and perhaps’s or that nice authoritative search engine who sends you buckets and buckets of free traffic daily, giving you tools that allow you to query their data and take actions that’ll improve your bottom line.

SERPs Should Be Diverse Ever Changing Places that Reflect the Interwebz

For an age and then some, Google have come up with all sorts of double edged swords that have been presented as being user focused tweaks designed to improve the user experience.

Whilst a sizeable number of these have, a side benefit (for Google) has often been that SEO as a channel has often been marginalised. Let’s have a quick looksy at just three that are fresh to mind (i’m sure there are lots of others).

Universal Search is Lovely and For You, You Lovely Users

Take Universal Search – User gets to see pretty pictures and youtube videos and news items related to the query. Great, just what most people need, right? We all need pictures, news from time to time and videos too. Google saves us the time of typing the extra words like news, or pictures or videos to our search term and just shows them regardless. It’s no accident that they all appear above the fold too right? Right where we need them, distracting our attention and pushing down those other pesky organic results that little bit further down the page.

Net impact for organic  site owners in positions 4, 5 or beyond? SEO became that little bit more difficult. Difficult meaning, costing them more of their marketing budget to get where they need to be.

Google Instant – Giving Users  What They Need Instantly, Coz Percolated Takes Forever to Brew

Take the whole Google instant thing – great bit of UI, see results change before your very eyes as you type out your stuff. The really cool part is that Google can even show you related terms with high adwords publisher interest and funnel you to where they’d like you to be.

Net impact on organic is that  long tail searches with low CPC’s tail off as people are steered to head terms with more value to Google.  Why show you stuff that’s obscure or that advertisers aren’t aware of? Google doesn’t earn on those.

Pandas – Big Fluffy Lovely Bears You Want to Hug

Then there’s the so called Panda update(s). Designed to remove crap from the search results for terms important to searchers. Stories abound of how all sorts of crappy content farms have been hit and pushed down the SERPs. Great! Yay! But wait, there’s also lots of stories too that suggest that quality publications have also been hit and the affect on search generally has been to cause flux and disruption across lots of otherwise relatively stable verticals.

Net impact on organic is that yet again the message to site owners is subtle yet clear. Organic search marketing is a risky use of your marketing budget. Be too successful or too aggressive then you might fall foul of the many hundreds of vagueries that pepper the Google guidelines. Far better to spend you marketing budget on something safe and measurable, something like adwords perhaps.

Facebook is Evil and Doesn’t Respect Your Stuff – Come to Google – We are Lovely and Do No Evil and Give you Your Data

Google+ is that new social network where you can do a lot of what you already do on Facebook but just find that your main friends and family aren’t there or if they are, then they aren’t really doing very much. My weird friends and family aside, the fact remains that a reported 40 million people are now on it. Google has been a little guarded around how people are using it and probably have a plan around how it all ties up and binds their multiple properties in to one little happy Google web where we all spend our time using the 100′s of Google products to satisfy our busy lives because that’s exactly what facebook is doing and it scares the pants off of Google stockholders!

If you aren’t sticky then you’ll end up getting stucky

The Google of old was a place where most user activity was downstream – People came, searched, found and went on their merry way.

Today the web’s changed, technology and the barriers to entry have changed. Web properties with huge user bases have the ability to change and adapt at a frightening pace.

Facebook could for examples sake, release an amazing new way of finding content, delivered on their platform. The access to billions of ‘likes’ and user metrics from embedded code is providing them with terrabytes of user behaviour which, make no doubt will be used to develop products and tools that will be monetised and value added. Google knows this and would be foolish to ignore the threat to its model and product. Removing the ability of landing pages on visited websites to read the query string is a big step in insulating  itself from further encroachment on what it considers to be its own intellectual property. In one fell swoop it can deny such properties the ability to glean this.  The fact that it’s presented as a progressive privacy move would be near on genius, if it weren’t for the fact that they are stuck between in a rock and hard place and have no choice other than to make an exception for its advertisers.

So ok, a lot of what I’m saying could easily be shot down as conspiratorial – the subtleties of Google are such that they seldom do anything without a back up plan or reasonable point of view for doing so. I’m merely reflecting my gut and echoing the sentiment of a lot of what I’ve read either publicly, or to an increasing extent discussed privately behind closed doors. There’s a 1001 other conspiracies around Google, its algo, its penalty systems, its quality raters and more. There’s no surprise there, it’s a consequence of secretive mysterious organisations that people will add 2 and 2 and often get 5.

Google isn’t evil, don’t be farking ridiculous

To say Google is evil is of course ridiculous. I have many fine friends who are lovely decent people who work for them, impassioned clever people with dedication and a love of the web. I don’t doubt that the majority of the employees within it are of similar mind, striving to deliver and iterate and incrementally improve upon what it is they work with. But let’s not pull punches on what the wider impact and actions of more senior decision makers are here either.

A Message to you Googly

Just because you’ve built a product that’s changed the world, generated massive wealth for millions via a product that has the most buy in known to modern man, does not mean that you can just rampage unchallenged and change base fundaments at will! Come on, guys, you know this already – stop making out that you’re this infallible piece of humane perfection that is putting us all first all of the time with no thought for personal profit! We don’t believe it, we aren’t idiots! If anything you have a whole lot more responsibility to do things for the right reasons; half cocked excuses that purport to be one thing whilst being another cannot be hidden in the depths of a secret sauce, they are transparent for all to see, as this case quite clearly reveals.

Please stop trying to be everything,  stop trying to control the world’s information, that’s fucking dangerous and leads to tyranny! Just be happy with what you have, what you’ve created and continue to enjoy the billions that you’ll continue to make YoY. We don’t fucking want you to be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple or Amazon or insert long list of others… Just focus on what you do well. We aren’t dummies, you know that. Just stop, please? Thanks.

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Don’t feed the pigs excrement

I was thinking about the recent farmer update and around some of the things said and around how the algo might work and how new or existing farmers might keep on feeding the pigs and chickens.  A side win is that it also helps one to refocus ones efforts through prudent little implementations and tweaks that might help engagement and perhaps insulate from similar future changes. You can never afford to sit on your laurels in someone else’s playground. We might think that this web thing is open and accessible to all, but for today at least Google still is the defacto gateway and for that reason alone any business intent on getting traffic from them, would be foolish not to sit up and take note.

Are the Sheep Happy? Be a good Shepherd

Kates’ post here http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/ppc/google-bounce-rates-the-untold-story/ reminded me of past considerations of bounce rates and the masses of misunderstandings that were out there around the issue. I’d both heard and read people going on about bounce rates as a quality metric as if it was some one size fits all thing that applied carte blanche to every web page out there. As Kate rightly says different pages have different outcomes. If user A gets what they want, and leaves within a short time, then the less informed amongst us might be forgiven for sniffing and thinking, crap page, hit and run, poor user experience.

Yet of course this is patent nonsense as the page in question might just have exactly what the user wanted, requiring no more time or interaction on the page other than the hitting of the red x or the back button. Some sites  like blogs, often have a one hit wonder effect, be they shared through a social network or arrived at through a search engine query. The user visits with the express intent of reading about that particular issue and that’s that.

They don’t want to go deep and read about a lot of  indirectly related topics as their focus is elsewhere. Old style forum threads in comparison have much lower bounce rates, due in the main to things like pagination or general time difference between search indexing and user visit. Lots of page visits of very small time samples followed by rapid exit might be a signal of a poor user experience. OTOH, it might also be the obverse (photo gallery for example) . The truth is that unless, there’s some like for like standardised similar type site to compare it’s very difficult to determine algorithmically, what is and what isn’t a poor user experience based upon single metrics like bounce or time on site.

There are lots of other examples, that have differing outcomes most of which I’m sure the experienced Internet user has encountered at one point or other, and I’ve kind of veered off the main point a little as this isn’t directly related to the content farm thing; at least not in the totality of reasons why you’d get your arse kicked in this update but it does nonetheless, bring to mind the core of what you should be considering when bringing people to your site and making them happy. Give them a shitty user experience where they don’t want to come back againor begin to rank for everything they want and they’ll start to complain about it. If they complain enough in sufficient numbers, then sooner or later you might just be toast. Thinking about shit like the above, get’s you back on track.

Elsewhere on the farm..

A thread at webmasterworld http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4276279.htm cites the Cutts and Singhail http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1 post on Wired which is full of interesting little nuggets.

From an algo watcher perspective it’s fascinating stuff full of little clues and perhaps the odd red herring, yet much as I snark the truth is that in many ways it’s full of things that should really be common sense to the accomplished Webmasters of this world. A look at the list from Sistrix http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html shows the various winners and losers.

Outside quality raters were involved at the beginning

…we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

The cynic in me had already covered the ground of hmmn, how many low quality type Q and A sites are out there and how long would it really take a multi billion dollar corporation to task a team of individuals to seek out and identify crap sites, or sites that were clearly just taking the piss a little with ads and stuff like that.  How long would it then take to run the sites through a bunch of  quality raters http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/new-google-spam-recognition-guide-for-quality-rater-reviewed/ and score them across the various metrics? So this kind of re-inforces that as fact

Excessive ads were part of the early definition

There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?”

If you look at some of the sites involved prior to getting Google thumped, you’ll see that a lot of them were indeed rife with adsense and ads from other networks (some still are) . It wouldn’t be so difficult to have a script look for such instances and then determine a threshold above which, you get issued with a nice pair of lead boots to weigh you down.

The update is algorithmic, not manual

…we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons.

This part is of course all the more interesting as it more or less says that here are a bunch of sites with lots of quality signals and on the other are sites with not as many.  I’m not going to sit here and dissect the strategies of all those bumped, but there really is gold in them thar hills. Sure there are anomalies. Mahalo has been hit despite a big PR push on it’s recent change in approach. The powers that be IMO have decided that a continual get out of jail free card just wasn’t in their PR interests. EHow, that much maligned repository of textual verbosity has also survived the cut no doubt someone demanded that their media http://www.demandmedia.com/ was worthy of a little more time http://www.fastcompany.com/1723737/did-demand-media-ipo-just-in-time.

Some people (aka spammers) will no doubt have seen the opportunities that these ructions present and will have been up bright and early repositioning downgraded content into new loftier place holders. Lessons will have been learnt, content will take account of things said by Messrs Cutts and Singhail and the show will roll on. Only time will tell if Google has done enough to slay the beast of public scrutiny, these things come in cycles and for now at least the monster seems to have been given a bit to chew on.

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Bing Bong Bell, Google’s in Da Hell

There’s a been a lot of noise about Bing and Google this week regarding Bing stealing Google results. Matt Cutts is at the centre of it having had a bit of a ding dong with Harry Shum see video below (40 mins long) over Googles assertion that Bing have been a little sneaky and have scraped/stolen/reverse engineered/indexed Google SERPs.

I’ve no axe to grind with Matt or Google but on this one they seem to have got it wrong and misread the landscape.

Emulators emulate emulators emulate emulators…

Like for Like

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Pretty big news from Latitude,  Google are to allow gambling ads on UK Adwords!

Due to recent changes in legislation laws surrounding online gambling advertising, Google had decided as of tomorrow to allow gambling PPC adverts to be shown in the UK. They have been speaking direct to clients to ensure all the correct licensing information has been processed in time and there will be a frantic scrap for both clients and their respective agencies to get their accounts setup and put live in time for tomorrow, of which there is no guarantee.

Interesting times indeed, huge move which will shake up the market no end. All sorts of speculation as to why, the obvious one being it’s about the money dummy

What next? Alcohol, PR0N? Lean times call for harsh actions, especially when you have a profit annoucement in the offing.

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1. Google Like it – Promote your site in your SERPs

Here’s an interesting little thing.

This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Maybe it’s old, I haven’t seen it previously. Looks like one of those personalization of SERP features  that allows you to manipulate your own returned search results.

At the moment it seems like you need a Google account to use the thing, which may be a sign that they’d like to use such signals to affect SERP outcome. Not to mention user demographics, behaviours and all that other track your movement stuff.

What I’d like to know is whether or not they will be taking such factors into account long term. If a lot of people continually push a result to the top, does this mean that it’s a great result, or does it just mean that some group of SEO’s have found a way to cut in and mimic a few natural behaviours? How many Google accounts do you have?

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Very soon, you’ll no longer have to confess to being a sinner in order to use Googles re-inclusion or reconsideration request ( I suspect it’ll be called the take me off the naughty list next week, being xmas and all that)

This is a good thing, a small thing, but a good thing nonetheless. Anything that allows you to challenge without putting you on the back foot from the off, can’t be bad, can it?

Whilst Google are probably of the view that it’s an easy thing to do and even almost a no brainer for them to implement, you do nonetheless find yourself wondering why they employed the whole nasty evil language approach from the outset.

Still, at least now if you find yourself with a white bar or an inability to rank, you can just toodle along to the webmaster tool page and make a bit of a tool of yourself and ask to be let back in, without admitting guilt! Yay! Um…they’ll probably ignore you or leave you where you were at, but at least you get to ask without fessing up!

Seriously – it’ll be a good thing if people get feedback, like ‘no dude you have a paid post on blogpost number 234 of your 1500 that you’ve made’ …don’t you agree? Shouldn’t it be a two way process?

I suspect that there’s a strand of thought that runs through the plex of ‘aaaargh, it’s one of those evil bastard spammers asking for some feedback on their evil wicked spammy ways’, and that this might just contribute to a view of ‘let em stew’. But hey, I’ve been wrong once if not a thousand times. I’m sure I’ll be wrong again.

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Maki wrote a good blog post today that for me spoke about marketing and creating things of value that have the efffect of creating converted users; that’s, people who will buy into whatever it is you do or are trying to achieve.

Be it via a comment, a hit of a subscription button, an add to favourites action , a credit card transaction or a link through to what you wrote or advertised, the bottom line is that without any of these sorts of actions, the likelihood is that you are either writing for yourself or selling something that is overpriced and overvalued or just not worth discussing.

Don’t rely on search engines

Free search engine traffic is great. A most welcome bonus that if used correctly, can help build a following, but that’s where it stops. If you are obsessing about building your rankings then your target sight is off kilter, you are looking at the wrong part of the equation.

Posts like the ones from across the blogosphere today and in the previous weeks regarding PR and paid links should be a wake up call for anyone who is serious about earning a living from a website online. If you remind yourself that your free traffic is very likely to be a transitory thing, if you tell yourself everyday that your free search engine generated traffic is likely to disappear tommorrow, then you’ll be doing yourself a huge favour.

Search Engines are not automated non policed systems, they do employ people to look at certain things and do take actions against people as and when they see fit.

You can complain until the cows come home but at the end of it all, rightly or wrongly they can do whatever the hell they like, when they like and how they like. There is no court of appeal, you can’t storm parliament, go on strike or sit out in the road, neither can you chain yourself to a fence either, if they kill your site and you care about or genuinely need or rely upon the traffic they send to you, then as harsh as it might sound – without a plan or loyal following you might as well just shut up shop, or get used to talking to yourself!

Yeah yeah, so what’s the plan then smarty arse?

Well…but of course there are positives, you don’t have to sit around burying your head in the sand hoping that you are never hit, you can at least try and adopt a meritocratic world view and build real traffic, *your* traffic, people who visit you because others have discussed you in some way because you are doing something or selling something or just saying something that adds value to the world and the playground in which you are kicking your ball around in. Be it via word of mouth or some href piece of html.

Take a look at these blogs here, all of whom have seen a reduction in their visible toolbar PR

Auto Blog
Engadget
Problogger
Copyblogger
SEG
SEJ
Andy
Maki

Then look at their webstats and their site metrics, look at their published subscriber numbers. Look at their Alexa, compete and technorati numbers. Look at the people who are commenting on their stuff, look at how well they are linked to and on what sort of terms. Then ask yourself why that is, I tell you what, I’ll save you the bother with the answer, as the answer is simple – All of the above are quality resources with something to say, it really is that simple.

Maki’s right

Google is an factor that is outside of your control. Sure, you can follow their rules or adjust your behavior to fit in but that still doesn’t put Google within your palm. What do good entrepreneurs do with uncontrollable factors? They create what-if contingency plans to accommodate for possible loss

Sigh – I’ll leave you with this little Portishead track, cos it kinda has a few on target lyrics, ‘you don’t get something for nothing, gotta try a little harder’

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