Now, I see a wide range of numbers of reviews for all sorts of industries — from zero or just a small handful, to around a hundred, all the way up to a few thousand for highly-popular eateries located in big cities. So, a range of these numbers is normal, and for some cases it’s normal for there to be a few thousand.

For instance, the famous Union Oyster House in Boston is showing a couple of thousand reviews. Considering it’s the oldest restaurant (in continuous service) in the entire country, this even makes sense. It makes even more sense when you see that they have quite a few hundred reviews in Yelp, and OpenTable as well. When someone has placed a reservation for the restaurant in OpenTable, they may be receiving an invite to rate the restaurant after they’ve had their visit there. I’d say this is is a great practice and works well for everyone — the business itself, the person rating, OpenTable, and for consumers shopping for an eatery. The natural outcome is that they’ll have hundreds and thousand of reviews in a relatively short time period.

But, there’s something else going on in vacation rentals which is similar, but isn’t ideal.

Here’s an example from Avalon, California, on Santa Catalina Island where the main industry is tourism and there are dozens of vacation rentals which people stay at annually. Notice the high number (over 1300) of reviews Google shows for a rental agency there:

What I see happening is this: some travel information sites are listing vacation rentals, and allowing consumers to rate/review those rental properties. The rental properties are associated with a particular rental agency, and the travel info site is assigning all those reviews to the rental agency that they roll up under.

Now, this works well for cases where the property is handled by one company which handles the rental and property management. However, there are a lot of cases where multiple rental agents from different companies may be renting out the same property, depending upon who lets it out to a renter first. In those cases, having all the reviews rolling up under one company is unfair.

Where vacation rentals are concerned, I believe that consumers are also fairly naive about what it is that they are reviewing. They are likely being led to believe they’re reviewing the property itself — and if they property isn’t owned by the company managing it, details about its amenities maybe shouldn’t be applied to the rental company. For instance, the process of reserving and renting the property may have sucked, but the consumer is mainly being asked about how great the Wi-Fi was, the hottub, and the quality of the window views.

In most cases I’ve looked at across the country, the large bulk of these reviews are coming from FlipKey, operated by TripAdvisor.

FlipKey’s interface for reviewing the rentals encourages the property be reviewed more than the rental agency, as I suspected. The review form is titled “Rate this vacation rental”, rather than “Rate the property management company”, and it says “Review your stay”. Their tips do suggest that one “Describe the service you received”, but it also says “Tell us how you liked the home”, and to “Talk about the location and amenities” — neither of which are necessarily controlled at all by the property agency.

But, as I see it the primary issue is whether reviews of individual rental properties ought to be rolled-up into an aggregate to represent the rental agency in this manner. Google has no quick way of assessing instances where properties may be represented by multiple rental agents, and property owners sometimes switch the agents representing them — in which case do the reviews then get reassigned to the new rental agency, or do they stay associated with the first rental agent as part of their legacy?

This appears to be a form of spam. FlipKey has been clever with design this so that individual vacation rental reviews will roll up collectively under rental agent listings, and having their data associated importantly with so many businesses is useful in terms of some referral traffic as well as a promotion vehicle for potential advertisers.

This is yet another problem which Google has associated with user reviews and business listings. Not long ago, Google Maps rolled out “Descriptive Terms” derived from user reviews, causing undesirable and often unfair effects for local businesses.

For internet marketers, there’s a really compelling reason why one should seriously consider paying the fees and going through the steps for obtaining a trust seal: they can inspire consumer confidence.

Some of the more popular website trust seals include Trust Guard, ValidSafe, Merchant Safe, TRUSTe, VeriSign, McAfee Secure, and VeriSign.

There have been a number of different academic researcher studies which have found that trust seals can improve rates for online purchases. In one research paper from 2001, “Myth or Reality: Effect of Trust-Promoting Seals in Electronic Markets,” Xiaorui Hu, Zhangxi Lin, and Han Zhang found that the seals can encourage consumers to buy from storefronts they are not familiar with, and that the seals that consumers recognized more influenced them more. David Gefen’s earlier paper, “E-commerce: the role of familiarity and trust,” also found support for the theory that trust seals influenced online book purchase decisions.

However, online website trust seals decended from their offline counterparts, which already had a long history, if not track record. In 1894, due to faulty electrical parts causing fires, the National Board of Fire Underwriters started performing the first tests on the combustibility of insulation materials — their mark was the Underwriters Laboratory or “UL” seal of certification. But, even before that, seals of quality, certifications, trustmarks, and seals of approval have been in use by tradesmen or service providers. Royal seals of approval likely date back a few hundred years more.

Although there is not as much research on the subject, I think there’s sufficient evidence to indicate that trust seals on websites probably will also translate into increased brick-and-mortar visitors. Trust seals or trustmarks and other visual cues are absorbed by consumers online as they are researching to decide which business to go to. If a consumer is comparing two different local businesses, a trust seal could potentially tip the scales if many other factors are similar.

We know that store owners are also concerned about various ratings and reviews websites — quite a few businesses even choose to proclaim their great ratings on their webpages by displaying the official ratings badge, such as from Yelp.

And simply having a “Zagat Rated” sticker on your restaurant window is likely to increase your walk-in customer traffic for restaurants. I’m always mildly impressed when I walk up to a restaurant with the Zagat sticker. In districts which have a lot of shopping and restaurants, the Zagat sticker could get more conversions as people walk from eatery to eatery, reading the menus before deciding on a place to dine.

For both online and offline, the Better Business Bureau probably has just about the best and widest degree of recognition. I suspect that placing your BBB badge on your site may directly result in increased referrals and increased conversions into paying customers because it increases confidence.

Now, is there any evidence that trust seals on websites can improve rankings for local brick-and-mortar stores’ online listing rankings? I don’t know of any study as of yet, but I suspect it would be very hard to isolate such an effect for certain, because I think that many sites which display the seals may tend to already be more-popular and more-successful businesses.

Now Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that he considers one of the future issues that’s critical to the future of the internet is the security of webservers (see video below). We know that Google has spent a lot of effort around alerting users who click on pages from sites deemed to be risky, as well as they’ve also alerted webmasters when they sense that their sites may’ve become compromised. So, it’s just possible that Google has pretty good data on whether some of the website security certification services are any good or not, too, and they might choose to use those services’ badges as a signal for trustworthiness of sites. But, there’s no absolute proof that they are doing this.

If I were Google, I might choose to add the presence of trust badges into assessments of trustrank and overall popularity assessments. While Google themselves already have a lot of data around whether a site has malware and such on it, they’re open to other security assessment data, and they might also decide that consumers tend to like sites that have such badges more as well.

But, you shouldn’t consider it just for search ranking purposes — you should consider it for improving consumer perceptions of your company. This is one way to inspire confidence and impress potential customers.

In fact, there are a few different badges that I’d recommend you consider beyond the BBB or industry-specialized badges such as Zagat’s. Some local chambers-of commerce provide member badges, or you could even have your graphic artist manufacture one, if you’re a member of your chamber. Also, there are now green business certifications, fair trade certifications, and more which could enhance your profile in consumers’ eyes.

Of course, some of the online trust badges really will not make much sense from a small business’s perspective, since they may be priced more for large online retailers than for a small, local, brick-and-mortar store. This advice is really more for higher-price product retailers and for businesses operating within hotly-contested business verticals. If you’re in a highly competitive business vertical, you just might consider leveraging a trust seal in order to help squeaze every last chance of edging above your competition in the search engine results pages. I could easily see this as being one of the many potential ranking factors in Google Place Search and Google Maps.

Photo CC Attribution Share Alike 2.5 by DrL

For instance, the story of a plagiarized blogger who was told by Cook’s Source magazine that she should actually pay for being ripped-off by them outraged the blogosphere this fall, resulting in the editor ultimately choosing to shut down the magazine entirely. And, even seasoned politicians may coopt other peoples’ content, despite the fact they should know better.

So, copyright infringement is definitely alive and well in the 21st century, and it seems particularly rife in the blogosphere where the casual and ephemeral nature of blog pieces seem to tempt IP thieves into adopting text and republishing it in their own names.

It’s so common, however, that it’s not likely that each and every incident will turn into a blogstorm of popular outrage like the writer who was plagiarized by Cook’s Source magazine. So, what’s to be done if you’re a writter who doesn’t want their stuff taken and used without permission?

One option could be to use the Blog Protector WordPress plugin. It works by disabling your blog’s readers from being able to right-click on the pages and it disables the ability to select text for copying.

However, I’d suggest that this might only be marginally worth the trouble of installing it, and it could result in fewer people giving you brief quotes and links to your posts. While it appears to me to be safe for the purposes of search engine optimization (“SEO”), since it operates via Javascript, while still allowing search engines to spider the page, it doesn’t really protect the text perfectly.

I expect that it only will protect your posts from naive, less-technically-savvy plagiarists.

Savvier thieves might turn off the Javascript in their browsers and then be able to copy the content. Or, they might be able to copy the page down onto their desktops locally and open it in word processing software.

Further, you’d need to also set up a robots metatag to direct the search engines to disable the cached view of the pages, or else your thief might view the Google cache and copy the text from there, where the Javascript might not operate properly.

Yet, the biggest deficiency is the fact that probably the most plagiarism is now automated, with people setting up bots to spider posts on various themes to be regurgitated up onto their blogs and websites. The Blog Protector plugin likely will not stop these systems which clone your posts.

Blogs are often set up with RSS feeds, allowing your content to be syndicated out where more people will be able to find it and read it. The benign level of syndication use will display a snippet of the blog post or a synopsis, along with the title and link back to the original post. This is usually something that would be okay under copyright laws, as brief quotations are allowable in most cases.

But, the malignant use of syndication is where people will take the entire article and regurgitate it up on their sites with improper attribution and often with no links back to your original. For instance, this blog by “Richard Geasey” has copied a few of my articles and others from Search Engine Land entire, with his own name in the “by line”, making it appear to readers who happen onto his pages that he wrote the articles instead of me. I suspect that this wholesale adoption of the article is done via automated means.

Now, you can also remove your RSS links, but I’d advise against that, because it can negatively impact your readership. Some people use RSS to collect posts from all blogs they read, into an RSS reader or they’ll have it emailed to them. Also, allowing RSS helps distribute links to your content, as others opt to Tweet out links to your writing, and as sites report on articles of particular interest or list blog posts according to themes and keywords. If you shut that off, you’re hampering your marketing efforts.

Shutting off RSS doesn’t halt blog post theft, either, since there are software “scrapers” that can still access the pages and copy off the text contents.

You can also set your RSS to only provide initial snippets with links back to the whole article. However, I think it’s still better to enable full posts to appear in the RSS, since there are people who will have their RSS readers set to download the entire article for them to read later on, off-line, such as on airplanes and trains.

There’s unfortunately a dichotomy between enabling people to find and read your content, and protecting it from being stolen. As it stands now, I think the best way is to not place impediments upon people accessing and reading your content, while also trying to use social pressure and legal avenues for enforcing your content licenses and copyrights.

This is a particular boon to the internet retailer sites which are savvy enough to be able to format their data properly for Google to recognize it — a Rich Snippet graphic treatment can be eye-catching, allowing a search result to stand out from the crowd a bit, and this attention-getting display apparently results in a significantly greater click-through rate (if not even a higher conversion rate).

The new shopping Rich Snippet allows e-commerce sites to display information such as price, availability and product reviews in their search engine results page listings. For instance, here’s how a snippet for Buzzillions appears for a Cabela’s jacket:

Google is providing a few different methods to structure e-commerce catalog page data in order for the Rich Snippet treatment to get invoked. One of the prime methods is to code the catalog page in hProduct microformat.

We’ve been recommending the use of Microformats as a component of overall search optimization for quite a number of years at this point — our clients and those who’ve heard us speak at search marketing conferences will hopefully have benefited from the advanced recommendations from us and will already be ahead of the curve.

Additionally, Google is reading the GoodRelations schema which is another good semantic data structure based upon RDFa.

And, sites which are providing Google with Merchant Center feeds may also benefit from the new snippet treatment. In the case of feeds, Google adds the proviso that merchants must begin including the Canonical tag to their product pages so that Google can associate the page with the item in the Merchant Center feeds.

If you use the Merchant Center feed option, I’ll add an assumed requirement that’s not stated by Google outright: the URL you specify in the Canonical Tag would have to be an absolute match to the URL found in your Merchant Center feed, or else it’s not going to help Google associate your page with the correct product item in the feed. I see this as problematic for many, though, so let me explain further.

Google’s announcement notes that those who have more frequently changing prices probably ought to use the Merchant Center feed option. That would be because when you upload your feed, you can specify how long a time period the feed may be in effect. So, by uploading a new feed, you can change out your prices more rapidly than waiting for Googlebot to circle back around and respider your pages — which is typically a cycle that may happen only ever month to two weeks.

But, using the Merchant Center feed route may not be all that optimal, and this is why. Many if not most internet retailers are using special tracking parameters in their feed URLs so that they can associate online sales with different channels, and so that they can differentiate sales from their Shopping Search product feeds versus their organic search engine optimization efforts. If you set your canonical tag to be the same as the URL in your product feeds, then Google will drop what have been your organic URLs out of the search results in favor of the feed URLs — negating your ability to differentiate clickthroughs and sales from each channel within Google.

In some cases, your legacy organic URLs will also have been better-established and may have been around longer than your URLs in your product feeds — if that’s the case, you might lose some of the search engine “good will” associated with those pages’ seniority.

Now, Google provides a method for you to specify URL parameters that they may encounter in crawling your site which are unimportant for indexing purposes, and you can direct Google to ignore those parameters. However, Google has not said what the effect would be if you set your canonical URL in catalog pages to match your Merchant Center feed, and then asked them to drop the tracking parameter out of the URLs — this could result in the URLs not being allowed to match up for the Rich Snippet treatment, or it could result in the tracking parameter getting dropped out of the Shopping Search results pages losing the tracking ability. So, I’d recommend NOT attempting that combination of settings to solve the dilemma!

For those e-commerce sites which desire to have differentiated tracking between the Shopping Search feed versus the organic traffic, I think your best approach would be to use hProduct or GoodRelations format for your organic pages, and not attempt to connect them to your catalog pages — until or if there are more detailed specifications as to how to connect both without losing tracking capabilities.

Regardless of this issue, the possibility of getting more attention-grabbing listing treatment should make for a very happy holiday season for e-commerce sites!

CNN's homepage checked with Google Page Speed - Google introduced Site Speed as a new ranking factor in 2010, and provided tools like this Page Speed extension in FireFox to assist webmasters with Usability improvements.

Other elements I described have been cited by other experts as beneficial for search marketing, even though they may’ve recommended them for reasons other than those I outlined. Inclusion of images, maps and locations pages make sense for multiple reasons in local business websites.

The thought and methodology behind coming up with these factors is sound, and has allowed me to successfully predict present and future search engine optimization factors where others have not. It makes logical sense that while Google is interested in Usability, they will seek ways to quantify and measure it on websites, just as they have done with Site Speed. And some very easy usability elements to quantify include common website elements such as the About Us, Contact Us, and Locations pages.

Back in 2006, I began predicting that the practice of Search Engine Optimization might become replaced by Usability. Unquestionably, this change is occuring to some degree right now.

I’ve known a lot of top corporations which are involved in very sophisticated paid search marketing and search engine optimization, but few of them are also including usability testing and user-centered design considerations when performing a site redesign. Google has tried to make the importance of user-experience abundantly clear by actually going public with their adoption of page load times in determining search result rankings, but many companies are still not connecting the dots.

Here at KeyRelevance, we have long prioritized usability in our assessments of web sites’ design. When companies contract with us to audit their websites, we offer both a Technical Website Review as well as a Usability Review. However, many companies eschew our Usability Reviews or dismiss them as less-important.

For some reason, people often react to usability recommendations from experts in an emotional way, rather like how a portion of the population avoids going to their doctors for a yearly physical. For some companies, there are already so many dependencies and requirements going into web design projects that they can’t include more without losing impetus. For others, individuals with authority over projects have egos which do not want to lose discretionary control over project decisions which could be altered if usability research ran counter to what they desire to do.

Usability testing can be the difference between a design that becomes highly popular versus one which is rapidly forgotten. Google itself is an example of how user-centered design will translate into success. More design options can be scientifically decided, honing down to interfaces which will maximize ease-of-use and enjoyment-of-use. Instead of being avoided, usability testing should be embraced — after all, in the business world we’re looking to increase the potential for success in our company projects, right?

Knowing Google’s heavy focus upon usability factors, consider that if you’re not doing iterative Usability testing and adjustment for User-Experience, you really may not be doing “Advanced SEO”.

If you’d like a thorough Usability Audit of your site, contact Key Relevance today to schedule our review and get a report of items to consider before your next sitewide redesign is completed.

Also, check out some of the free tools that Google has been providing to help you with portions of usability analysis. Try out Google Browser Size, Google Page Speed, and look at the Site Speed reports in Google Webmaster Tools for your website.

From a marketing standpoint, this poses a significant problem. Marketers desire to promote via as many channels as possible in order to target demographic groups loyal to different ones. As you increase the number of unique social media channels, however, it becomes more labor-intensive, and the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at some point. For a small business, the correspondingly lower return on investment hits pretty quickly.

Enter a whiz-bang new service that addresses this need: dlvr.it, currently in beta, brought to us by the people who made Pheedo.

Dlvr.it enables you to take one or more RSS feed sources, and then set them to automatically deliver to some of the most common social media sites out there: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Identi.ca.

I’ve tried out a few different services for accomplishing this sort of delivery before, including Pingdom and Twitterfeed, but I find dlvr.it to be superior. For example, Twitterfeed has been very klunky to try to configure, and I’ve found to be very, very slow at sending updates out. By contrast, dlvr.it provides a number of fine-tuning settings to allow you to specify frequency of checking feeds for updates, and when set at the most-frequent update checks it will publish status updates within minutes of a feed.

The Filters settings are even better – allowing you to make the service distribute posts according to criteria such as if a feed update uses a certain Category or if it contains a certain keyword sequence within the text or title, etc. So, for instance, I contribute to a few different group blogs, such as SEM Clubhouse, and for my Facebook and LinkedIn updates I might only wish to have the blog posts distributed which I’ve personally written. So, I could set a Filter that checks to see if the SEMClubhouse RSS feed update contains the “by Chris Silver Smith” attribution within the post and only deliver if the character string is present.

Now, dlvr.it has only recently been launched into beta service, so it will be interesting to see if it starts having any sorts of lagtime issues as I’ve seen with other services that have been in production for longer, and likely have more users to excuse what may be their growing pains. Also, it’ll be great to see if dlvr.it begins to broaden out to allow more social media sites for you to integrate your feeds into.

But, it seems clear that dlvr.it may be the current best-in-class for social media syndication services, and will be an invaluable tool for marketers to use for social media optimization.

Write once, and automatically deliver many!

My theory has been supported to a degree by the announcement that Google was planning to incorporate website speed into the 200+ signals they use in their algorithm to rank webpages.

But, there are even more compelling arguments for focussing higher levels of priority upon refining your website with usability in mind. Highly usable sites make it easy for consumers to find what they’re seeking rapidly, and don’t frustrate their audiences. Usability impacts performance over the long-term, and that has a direct effect on market share and future growth. Google itself prospers on this philosophy, and other sites like Craigslist are similarly successful because they are simple and usable.

For these reasons, one of the standard services that KeyRelevance provides is a careful and comprehensive Usability Review. Optimization of a site in order to streamline user interactions will help to make all other site promotional activites such as SEO and PPC advertising more successful.

Google Labs provides a very useful tool for analyzing one of the many aspects of Usability which we commonly look at when reviewing clients’ sites. The Google Browser Size tool allows one to input the URL of a webpage, and they provide a semi-transparent overlay which outlines the area on the page which is visible to certain percentages of users viewing on various sizes of monitor screens and browser window dimensions.

This is extremely similar to an analytic tool I created quite a few years ago which “sniffed” my website visitors window sizes when they visited the homepage, stored the values, and then provided percentages of size ranges. Such tools are invaluable when writing the specifications for site designs/redesigns.

The reason this is so important is that one should not create a website design that is so large that key elements are pushed outside of the viewing area horizontally. The vertical area is important as well, but it’s considered of far greater importance to be careful with width, because it’s expected that very few consumers want to scroll horizontally, so content falling off the right side of their screens simply gets missed.

The area of a webpage which visitors can see initially upon arriving, without any scrolling, is called “above the fold”, using old newspaper terminology. Many studies have supported the premise that content “above the fold” on a website typically will receive the most attention and perform the best.

Many designers are using much larger monitor sizes than their site visitors may have, often resulting in designs which do not fit the audiences they’re targeted-to. The egos of corporate employees often figures in as well, and there’s a human tendency to be impressed with larger, graphically-intense splash pages with too much key content falling outside the horizontal width or below the fold for many users.

Magazine sites frequently neglect to design towards internet users, perhaps because their designers may often be more accustomed to print media design where there are far fewer variables in designing a common user experience for the audience. For example, Vogue’s website when viewed with Google Browser Size shows that a significant percentage of the audience will not see content on the right side of their homepage, including the important badge ads that are intended to generate revenue:

You can see that their masthead navigation links for “International” and “Video” are falling into the band of “90%” in Browser Size along with the site search form – this means that 90% of internet viewers are viewing pages with their browser windows large enough to see that right side content. The other 10% are not able to see this content, and might miss that it’s available. I’d bet that if we looked at Vogue.com’s analytics we’d find that those links get significantly lower click-throughs compared with more-commonly-visible areas on the page.

When we look into the 95% band, we see header links for “Renew”, “Parties”, and “Style.com” get lopped out of the viewing area, along with the ad content.

Vogue’s site is designed to be about 980 pixels wide – at the upper end of the typical range of non-dynamic width websites. When you see how the larger size results in a less-optimal experience for 5% and 10% of their overall audience, one can’t help but ask if the designers could have created a design at a smaller width while still retaining all the beneficial aesthetic value. I’d say that they most definitely could have, but they likely were ignoring the statistics when they set the site design specifications.

The wider design represents a lot of untapped opportunity, and money left on the table. While 10% may not seem like a large percentage, when you figure how many visitors Vogue’s website must receive annually, the raw numbers of people that fit into that demographic really add up. That 10% of people whose monitor screens were likely too small to easily see that right-side content on Vogue resulted in fewer people clicking through to view the Video content, International content, and the search form. The 5% of visitors would have missed the “Renew” link and the ad content, resulting in a little less revenue.

If you’d like to see a site that’s done a far better job of setting their size with user browser window limitations in mind, check out Nordstrom. Their site fits in a width closer to 770 pixels, making it work for a much greater percentage of internet users.

There are some caveats to using Google’s Browser Size utility. For one, the striations of browser size percentages that they display in that tool are based upon Google’s usage statistics, and not your site’s. While Google certainly has a huge usership sample to base these numbers upon, your site may have a significantly different demographic of users who have larger or smaller monitor sizes and browser window widths.

Google’s Browser Size utility is a fast way to check size based on overall internet averages, but if you want to do even more precise checking of your audience’s capabilities you need to check your analytics to see how many users are accessing your content with what size of windows and/or monitors. Here at KeyRelevance we do calculations based off of your analytics package for this — a lot of top web analytics (such as Google Analytics) will give you detailed numbers over time.

Regardless of which method you use, you need to take browser window size into account when redesigning your site. This is an easy way to bake more success into your website without trying to do anything complex or tricky.

The premise is fairly simple, although I see relatively few companies and individuals using the custom maps (“My Maps”) feature in Google Maps to help market their website or business.

Many users are generating custom maps, some of which garner tens or hundreds of thousands of views, depending upon how well they’re optimized and how much they target subjects of general interest. There are maps pinpointing crimes around cities, maps to find wifi locations, tourist points of interest, and maps showing where to go for certain types of shops or charitable organization donation dropoff locations.

Here’s one example of a entrepreneur leveraging My Maps effectively in Google:

The user, “Sister Diane”, has provided a very helpful map for people interested in her industry. The map shows stores where one may obtain various craft supplies all over the Portland, Oregon area. When one of her location listings is clicked, the information bubble that pops up on the Google Map contains a great description and address, and for some locations there are pictures, phone numbers and URLs.

She also filled out her Google Profile, so when her username is clicked or moused-over by the cursor pointer, map users can see her website URLs for her blog and another site where she writes articles.

This is a really good example of how developing and providing useful content within Google Maps can help to further promote your own content by exposing you to more consumers. While crafts in Portland is very much a small niche, Sister Diane’s map has achieved over 28,000 views since its creation two years ago.

Custom maps may be created by hand, using the simple tools for editing My Maps on Google. For larger lists of locations, I highly recommend creating a KML file as per Google Maps and Google Earth documentation, and either manually uploading the KML or submitting it via a geositemap from your website.

For more examples and tips on how to effectively leverage this long-tail marketing tactic, ready the full article at Search Engine Land, “Google Custom Maps: A Goldmine For Local Businesses“.

So, if you’re an online marketer of a site which publishes large amounts of articles and news stories, is the hNews microformat worth adopting to improve your online optimizations?


(AP's Diagram Illustrating "Protect, Point & Pay" System & hNews Microformat)

I’ve long been a proponent of incorporating microformats within webpages as a component of overall good usability and potentially valuable formatting for search engine optimization purposes. Microformats can provide some additional, enhanced usability for advanced users who are using devices which can read the information and store it for future use, and they can potentially improve search engines’ ability to understand the content within webpages which could lend a marginal increment more SEO value.

Both Yahoo! and Google have been sending signals for the past few years that they consider some of the microformats to be potentially useful as well. They’ve both marked up their own local search results with hCard microformatting for end users’ benefit, and they’re both starting to make use of microformatting to give certain types of data special treatment. In the case of Google, they announced that they’d begin displaying some microformat data with slightly different listing layouts in the search results, a treatment that they’ve dubbed “Rich Snippets”. And, they say they’ll be rolling out more treatments based on microformats in the future.

With this background in mind, it’s not surprising that the AP has jumped on the microformats bandwagon, but it also appears that they’re trying to influence the development of them where news articles are concerned, with a major agenda in mind. They wish to include some sort of webbug in each news story’s markup, so that publishers of the content can be tracked more easily by them – it will be clearer when sites are reprinting news stories, and how frequently those stories are visited and viewed by consumers online.

Other portions of the hNews microformat appear to be more useful from both a search engine viewpoint and publisher site aspect. Labelling of items including keyword tags, headlines, main content, geographic locations and including author’s vcard info all appear to be valuable standards.

(I could really criticize their “geo” tagging of the articles as quite inadequate, though. Merely adding a longitude and latitude to an article seems quite short-sighted, because there needs to be further definition of what is being geotagged. If an article is about multiple locations, it would be ideal to label each geotag to tell what item is being located. Further, it would be ideal to label the article with an assumption of the geographic region that the article should be expected to appeal to. Is it mainly of interest to people within a particular city, state/province, region, nation, or is it of international interest? Still, having some geotag is better than nothing.)

For any marketers out there considering adopting the hNews Microformat standard, I’d advise waiting until the dust settles on this one. Other microformats developed perhaps more objectively, and there’s a lot of distrust and disaffection with the heavy news industry influence that is involved in this proposed standard. Currently, I’m not convinced that it will be widely enough accepted to become valuable for use. While having AP partners all adopting the standard may be sufficient enough to reach a tipping point where many other sites and companies will make use of hNews, Google’s public response to it was unusually cold-sounding.

Blogger/reporter Matthew Goldstein quotes Google’s response on the matter: “Google welcomes all ideas for how publishers and search engines can better communicate about their content. We have had discussions with the Associated Press, as well as other publishers and organizations, about various formats for news. We look forward to continuing the conversation.” While sounding expectably neutral and noncommittal, Google is also stating that this has not been widely-accepted by everyone, even within the news industry itself. This in combination with widespread skepticism within the developer/microformat community and blogosphere signal that hNews may have a very long way to go before it becomes something worthwhile for optimizing articles on publisher sites.

So, for now I advise avoiding this proposed standard, sit back and see how the dust settles. If you’re already syndicating content via RSS and Atom feeds, then you’re already distributing your content in a manner that’s easily absorbable and readable by search engines.