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Google Position Preference is Dead…Long Live Position Preference

Mike Churchill — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:02:29 +0000

On April 4th, 2011, Google announced they are retiring the Position Preference Bidding option in May 2011. If you want to emulate the Position Preference option, you can set up two rules (per campaign, adgroup, or KW, depending on your needs) to control the bidding. The downside is that the bidding adjustments are done at most 1 time per day (but see below) and managing the rules in AdWords is a little clunky.

KeyRelevance’s Recommendations:

Use CPA Bidding instead, if that is an option.
Make small adjustments (e.g. 5-10%, $0.05 – $0.10)
Make sure to set upper and lower limits to bound the changes that can be made
Make the automation rules at the appropriate level. They can be set at the campaign, adgroup, or keyword level.
Use overlapping rules to handle exceptions. Note that when multiple rules apply, ALL will trigger, so approach this techinque with caution.
Running rules during a campaign’s “off” time makes sense for a cleaner transition. I have my rules set up to run at 1am using the previous day’s data.

Note: Using CPA bidding eliminates the need to make these finer-grained adjustments all together.

Example: I have a campaign using Position Preference, and I am typically using a 3-6 position preference (avoiding the Top 2). To set up an Automated Rule to approximate this, I would add the following rules.

The first rule raises bids if my avg pos is too low:

At the Ad Group Level, add a “Change Max CPC Bids When…” rule to boost a “poor” Avg Pos:

A similar rule should then be set up to Adjust downwards if the Avg Pos gets too “good”.

Limitations of Automated Rules

Editing Automation Rules is like editing ads: the old version is deleted and the new one inserted, but the old rule lingers as a “deleted” rule. Changing the Notifications setting counts as changing the rule, even if the triggers and effects don’t change. The good news is that there are no bidding history issues created by this swap-out.
The Automated Rules Management Section lumps ALL rules for the Account together in one huge list, so good naming conventions for organizing the rules is a good idea. (see below).
Rules at multiple levels might apply within an adgroup/for a specific KW. Example, you might target Position 3-6 for most of the KW in an adgroup, but exceptions for just one highly competitive term. This KW’s rules might have different avg. position triggers, or a higher max CPC with the same triggers.
Rules might not run:
- Google downtime might prevent a rule from running.
- Timeouts in pulling data for the account might cause the rule to abort.
- Finally, rules have a 1 year lifespan after which they won’t continue, unless you manually update the ads (see Caveat #1). You will be warned as this anniversary approaches.
  (Seehttps://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188713"> https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188713 for details on Rules Execution).

Naming Rules Well Will Make Make Maintenance Managable

Since all of the Automated Rules for an account are lumped into one report, with limited sorting/filtering abilities, setting up a good naming convention will help make the rules more manageable. I like to sort the rules from broadest to most detailed in scope, so at the top level, sorting into Campaign level, AdGroup level, and Keyword level buckets is a good first cut.

My approach: prepend each rule with a two letter designation of its scope. For example, my CPC bidding adjustment rules can trigger at the campaign, AdGroup, or specific Keyword level. I use the following Shorthand:

CA – for Campaign
GR – for AdGroup
KW – for Keyword

The rules are presented Alphabetically (no filtering or sorting allowed), so by using this naming convention, the broadest-scope Campaign rules are listed first and the limited-scope KW rules are last.

I follow this with a verb indicating whether the rule will Improve (make higher) or Degrade (make lower) the bid price. One could also use bid up/bid down, cheapen/upgrade, etc. depending on preference. Finally, I indicate the trigger for the rule executing (ex: Avg Pos < 3). Putting it all together, I get a rule name like this:

[Scope] [Action] [Trigger]
or
GR Degrade Avg Pos < 3 and
GR Improve Avg Pos > 6.

Note that this naming convention works for me, but if you have very large campaigns, you might need to indicate the campaign/adgroup/kw targets between the scope and the action. Thus if you have a Branding KW adgroup, and the rule only applied to it, the Rule name might become:

[Scope] [Target] [Action] [Trigger]
or
GR Brand Terms Degrade Avg Pos < 3 and
GR Brand Terms Improve Avg Pos > 6.

Multiple Adjustments per Day
The above discussion suggests making bidding adjustments at most 1 time per day. In practice, you could do two updates per day: the first update would use a pair of rules as outlined above. Then, you could add a 2nd pair of rules that would trigger perhaps in mid-afternoon, and which used only TODAY’s positioning information to adjust. We recommend that this 2nd set of rules make smaller adjustments since they are operating on a small data set, and therefore more sensitive to noise in the data. Where your primary adjustment rules might make a 5% change, this 2nd set of rules could make a smaller 2% adjustment. This would make your rules more responsive to changes in the marketplace without causing your spend to bounce all over the place.

There is a limit to how far you can take this technique, however. Since the Automated Rules can use “same day” data as the smallest slice, if you were to run a run in the morning using today’s data, and run a similar rule again in the afternoon, the afternoon test would be using the data from the morning as well, so you would in effect be performing a double-bump based on some of the same data, even if the morning rule corrected the underlying issue.

Is Position Preference a Good Match for Your Account?

Position Preference works, but is not a good fit for everyone. It works best for phrase and exact match keywords since broad match may make you eligible for a different group of search terms if your bids raise, and this in turn could cause your Average Position to plummet, in turn causing your bid-up rule to trigger on consecutive days trying to regain your position. You need to have a good Measure of Performance (a Key Performance Indicator, or KPI) so you can properly track which positions are actually working best for you. Finally, you need to have the attention to detail to build, monitor, and adjust the Automated Rules based on your results.

Finally, Rules are Subject to Change
The Automated Rules feature of Google AdWortds is still in its infancy, and we fully expect it to evolve over the coming months. As such, be prepared for new rule features to come into play, and perhaps some to be dropped. Even so, the judicious use of Automated Rules can help take some of the drudgery out of managing an AdWords Account, and replace features missing or lost from the User Interface.

SMX East 2008 – Great show, great people, great content

Christine Churchill — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:41:11 +0000

Great conferences don’t happen by accident. That said, the recent SMX East show rates as fabulous. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and the rest of the ThirdDoorMedia folks did an incredible job of putting together a first class show. How they do it is an art form. First, they entice the best speakers in the industry to come and openly share their knowledge. (Looking over the list of speakers, I feel privileged and humbled that I’m even allowed to participate.) Then Danny and Chris develop a killer agenda that has broad audience appeal yet is balanced enough to offer something for everyone from the novice marketer to the advanced expert. Throw in sponsors and exhibitors to help finance the show and provide the attendees cool stuff like wireless connections (thanks Rand), tee shirts, and light-up promotional items that max out the geek meter. Lastly, you need a hard working staff to run the lights, music, microphones, registration, and all the other behind-the-scenes things that make the show the A+ event it was. Great job to all of you.
The week leading up to the show was tough on me personally. Employee and friend Li Evans unexpectedly lost her father. Another employee had to be rushed to the Emergency Room and spent the week in the hospital undergoing breathing treatments. If that wasn’t enough trauma, during the week, a close family friend succumbed to cancer after a long arduous struggle. While that death wasn’t a total surprise, I found myself emotionally drained. The world felt a little smaller and colder.
Arriving in NYC after such a week meant I really wasn’t in the mood for parties. I was craving quieter smaller exchanges with close friends. One positive thing about conferences is that it brings old friends together. Conference friends have a special place. They may not physically live near us but because we share time and adventures in locales far from our homes where we are without our usual support networks, there is a special bonding and closeness that occurs. I have conference friends who are like extended family to me. We take turns looking out for each other and we’ve cried on each other’s shoulders on more than one occasion.
This trip my dear friend Scottie Claiborne popped up to NYC to visit our group of friends and stayed with me. A few years ago Scottie had withdrawn from the conference limelight to focus more on kids and a balanced life. Within a few minutes of seeing Scottie my spirits were brighter. Scottie has that effect on me and most people she comes in contact with. It was great catching up with her.
One night during the conference a group of friends assembled in the hotel bar to celebrate Debra Mastaler’s birthday. It was comforting to be in the midst of friends and I was genuinely happy to see them. Debra is a popular lady in search and a dear long-time friend. Some of the many friends who stopped by to wish her well were Jill Whalen, Scottie Claiborne, Mike Grehan, Brad Neelan, Mona Eiesseily, Andrew Goodman, Stacy Williams, Li Evans, Kim Krause Berg and her charming husband Eric, Kevin Newcomb, Simon Heseltime, and many others.
I sat in on a number of sessions at the conference and was delighted with the content. It would be hard to choose which was my favorite this conference, so many were excellent. If I was forced to pick just one, I would have to say I enjoyed Gregory Markel’s presentation on video search engine optimization the best. I’ve known Greg a long time and consider him a friend. I have also learned over the years that embedded in his enthusiastic presentations are really great marketing jewels. You can tell he loves what he does and Greg is very willing to share his knowledge. If you missed his session at SMX, watch for him at another show. I’ve been in the search business for ten plus years, and I walked out of the session with a few new tricks. Thanks Greg.
That leads me to another topic. The search industry moves too fast to sit on your laurels. You have to actively grow and learn new skills….constantly. If you stand still the industry will pass you by. One of the easiest ways to stay up to date of new changes in the industry is to attend conferences. Books in our industry are outdated before they are printed. Attending conferences gives you more current information and is one of the best professional development practices you can do. Sure, it costs money to attend, but if you get a couple nuggets of new information and network with folks who can help you do your job better, it’s worth every cent.
My next conference, SMX London, is another month away. I’m already looking forward to it. Each conference has its own flavor and the London show is a great place to learn about all things search, but especially learn about international marketing techniques.
I’ll be speaking on two panels in London. Dear friend Tor Crockett (who is not only drop dead beautiful, but is a first class marketer) and I will be paired up in a Keyword Research Bootcamp. I’ve spoken on panels with Tor many times and it’s always thrilling to share the podium with someone as knowledgeable and fun as Tor. There is good chemistry between us. Keeping us in line (or trying to) will be moderator and conference co-chair Chris Sherman. Good luck Chris, we outnumber you. 
My other speaking session at SMX London is the Paid Search Checkup panel. Paid Search wizard Mel Carson and I will interactively review paid search campaigns and provide constructive advice to improve them. Live clinics are my favorite type sessions because you never know what will be thrown at you. They are also where you, as an advertiser, can get free advice from experienced marketers. If you are already an expert marketer, it’s nice to get a second opinion if you’re looking for new ideas on marketing. The cross fertilization of tips and experience in the clinic makes for a rich exchange where everyone benefits.

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Well, I’ve managed to ramble on a number of topics and even cross the globe in a very short time. You have things to do, so I’ll close by saying I hope to see you at a conference soon. And please, do come up and say hello if you attend. I’m very approachable, human, and always open to make a new friend.

A Few Interpretations of Google’s Response to DecorMyEyes.com

Chris Silver Smith — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:55:01 +0000

All the recent hubbub over DecorMyEyes.com, and their claim that treating customers poorly in order to obtain more negative reviews resulted in better Google rankings, has left a small cloud of confusion. The ruckus was sufficient to get Google’s interest, and motivated them to react to it, but what they may have done is worth considering, not least because their statement around it has caused part of the confusion, perhaps purposefully.

First, it seems likely that Vitaly Borker, the offensive proprietor of Decor My Eyes, is likely not some stealth marketing genius. Rather, he sounds more like he rationalizes bad behavior in a variety of ways, according to the NYT article about him, and one of his prime beliefs is that negative ratings have helped his Google rankings. His supposed reasons for this were likely wrong by some degree, but he may’ve accidentally derived some benefits from the practice without knowing actual causality.

What makes him more important is that he got Google’s attention, and caused them to react — or claim they’ve reacted — by making some changes to their algorithms. It’s possible that Google responded mainly out of concern over negative press. It’s also possible that they may’ve said they’ve made a change but did not, but it seems equally possible that they could have indeed tweaked their algorithm. The incident really seems to call for us to consider that “where there’s smoke, there may be fire.”

First of all, I think it’s worthy to note that a few different free/public analytics services appear to indicate little or no major changes to DecorMyEyes.com traffic in the past year, and they indicate the site has relatively little overall traffic anyway.

Compete.com shows fairly consistent, unremarkable traffic:

Alexa shows a sharp spike around when the New York Times article hit, and a subsequent decline, perhaps as traffic went back to normal. Previous to that, it also appears there was pretty consistent, unremarkable traffic:

So, if increasing/ongoing negative reviews helped the site in some way, it’s not clear that it was sudden, dramatic, or providing ongoing increases.

A number of people have tried to reverse-engineer what may have been happening with DecorMyEyes.com, and to also analyze what Google may have done in response. Google states that the negative ratings didn’t help the site, pointing out that a number of those sites nofollow their links. Other analysts have found that the main sources of the site’s PageRank came from links on many low-quality sites, and were likely paid links of some sort. From the Compete/Alexa evidence, it appears very likely that the main traffic to DecorMyEyes may have been primarily longer-tail traffic where they had pages that better matched phrase combinations that fewer popular sites have.

For the analysts believing Google’s statement that the nofollowed links provided no value, and instead ascribing the site’s ranking ability primarily to paid links, their seems to be a small conflict that has gone unrecognized: Google states that they are adept at recognizing paid links, and that they don’t count them. So, it seems dichotomous to simultaneously believe that the nofollowed links that a few review sites may’ve included were worthless to Decor My Eyes, while believing paid links may’ve helped.

As I pointed out in my article on the Decor My Eyes fiasco and local reviews tactics, it is possible that they could have ranked due to citations provided in the text of reviews. As you may be aware, in local search algorithm patents, Google engineers have written that it could be possible to use mere mentions of a business’s name and address information as a signal for popularity. While this may never have been used by Google in local search or otherwise, it’s possible that they have been using it and may have even extended some of the algorithmic behavior into regular web search rankings where it could affect sites like Decor My Eyes. If such a ranking factor were at play, it could also explain why major brand names seem to have better ranking ability, as many SEOs have observed.

Google’s post about their action towards Decor My Eyes is the most obscure when describing changes they made to demerit the site due to customer complaints. The rhetoric surrounding that aspect is particularly worthy of politicians. They point out that merely basing rankings or penalizations around sentiment analysis would have negative consequences — such as making it difficult to find politicians’ websites, which would be a poor consumer experience. However, they state that they’ve come up with some solution that may negatively impact sites which offer such poor customer experience.

As I noted, Google personnel have explicitly stated that they may choose to still use some nofollowed links from sites with data that they deem to be valuable. So, it’s possible that they were counting links to Decor My Eyes from any consumer review site which had nofollowed links. After all, before the NYT article aired, consumer complaint sites probably were not a widely-exploited target for links, since most people would’ve assumed they would harm websites’ reputations unacceptably, counteracting any possible value obtained from their links. If this was the case, Google’s action may have been as simple as halting link flow from complaint sites.

However, another explanation could be related to both sentiment analysis and citations. If Decor My Eyes was deriving citational benefit from consumer complaint sites, Google could have applied algorithmic rules to the effect that citation rank benefit would not be passed if sentiment analysis of surrounding text/context indicated it was a complaint rather than a compliment/recommendation.

Conclusions?

Google’s actions and rhetoric would appear to strongly indicate that there was something about what Borker was doing that may’ve benefited him. From external traffic reporting services, and from analyses of what terms the site seemed to be ranking for, it appears he was mostly getting long-tail phrase matches. However, even his ability to get longtail matches indicated he had a small amount of ranking weight from something. So, theories expressed by some people that he was doing nothing that helped him at all appear to me to be off-base. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
The analysts who say that DecorMyEyes.com ranked only because of paid links, at best are painting an incomplete picture. If it was the case, Google could’ve then simply demerited the site’s external links’ voting ability and done nothing else to penalize them. However, if you’re going to believe Google any, then they are strongly suggesting they altered something else in penalizing Decor My Eyes, and you have to also suspect that many of the paid links and nofollowed links were not passing any PR anyway. If that’s so, there was some other, hidden phenomenon going on.
Citations might be the hidden phenomenon — the “black matter” missing from our unified field theory of the ranking algorithm universe. If so, Google’s actions may’ve involved tweaking some aspect of assessment or transferring of citation ranking weight.

New Yahoo PPC Network Distribution option to go live on Jan 19, 2010

Mike Churchill — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:24:59 +0000

Yahoo! will be launching their new Network Distribution feature on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010. This will allow advertisers to optionally opt out of the Yahoo Search Partners sites for PPC ad display, and will also allow Yahoo! PPC advertisers more control over how they bid on ads.

Advertisers will have the option of displaying ads on:

The Entire Network – including Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners
Yahoo! Search – includes all Yahoo! O&O properties and co-branded sites only
Yahoo! Partners – includes all Yahoo! Partners Only

In addition to opting out entirely, advertisers will also have the ability to apply a premium or discount (measured as a percentage of Max Bid) to their bid on the Search Network. This comes with a couple of caveats:

Bidding Adjustments (up or down) is done by % only, not dollar amounts
These bids are relative to the Yahoo! Search Network bids, so no discounting on the main Yahoo! Search bids
This is for the Search Network only – not Content Match

Yahoo! gives the following warnings:

Important Notes:

Blocking Yahoo! Partners will greatly reduce traffic. Test by maintaining “Entire Network” settings and bid Adjusting
Using the Bid Adjustment feature may cause some keywords to fall below MRP, making them inactive
Your specific campaign objectives will determine the best use of Network Distribution controls.
Utilize the Ad Delivery Report to get insight into where ads are showing on partner sites. Use conversion data to determine which partners to add to blocked domains.
Utilize Domain Blocks by adding any low conversion partners to this feature
Conversion Tracking data is crucial for making decisions about which partners to block and place premium or discounted bids on(sic)

Once the new features are launched, Yahoo! will also make available a Network Distribution Performance report.

So, once this new feature launches, how should you use it? If Yahoo Search Partner site ad displays are adversely affecting your Yahoo PPC Performance, I recommend three approaches, which can be used in combination, depending on your agressiveness in tracking campaigns:

Use the Blocked Domains list – this gives fine control over blocking specific domains, but many advertisers run up against the 500 domain limit, and still have problems with underperforming domains.
Bid down agressively – if you have a gauge of the relative performance of your Yahoo! Search vs Yahoo! Partners sites (you are using Conversion Tracking and Analytics, right?), you can use this measure as a guide to how much you should discount bidding on the Yahoo! Partner sites
Opt out entirely – this will eliminate the poorly performing domains, along with perhaps 50% or more of your ad inventory. Opting out entirely would provide the best immediate change in performance, at the potential cost of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

We are all eagerly awaiting this new feature since it will give PPC advertisers much more control over the ad delivery and bid prices for Yahoo! PPC Campaigns.

I think my computer must be tired – it’s not thinking too clearly

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:01:14 +0000

I was checking the weather this morning (raining again – Ugh!) and when I went to look at the detailed hourly predictions, I got a suprise.

It was interesting find that the Google Toolbar thinks that the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website is written in Sovenian !

Image Search Vital To Rankings

Chris Silver Smith — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:52:36 +0000

A MediaPost article by Laurie Sullivan reported on some of the comments from reps of search engines Google and Bing at the recent SES conference in San Jose. According to them, consumers rely on images in search results more than previously thought, and, knowing this can help SEO professionals to better optimize sites.

Microsoft sees increasing importance of images to searchers - and their search engine's homepage design reflects this

The representative from Microsoft Bing stated that after regular web search, Image Search was their next most-popular feature. This also reflects the same user behavior that Google and Yahoo! have reported in the past (at least until Google purchased YouTube – before that acquisition, Image Search was Google’s second most popular feature).

With the advent of “blended search” or “Universal Search”, where images and other vertical search content are mixed into the traditional keyword search results listings, the usage picture becomes a bit more blurred. Users are now able to find image content in the regular search results, and they don’t always have to click into the specific image search pages to be finding and clicking through to that content. As such, marketers desiring to dominate keyword search page “real estate” must seriously consider targeting some image content to be able to exploit this channel.

If you’re familiar with me, you’ll know that I was one of the earliest SEO experts to write articles on optimizing images for search, and particularly a pioneer in optimizing images via Flickr and optimizing images through other image sharing services. (See also my Comparison Chart for SEO Value of Image Sharing Sites.) I’ve also spoken numerous times at marketing conferences on the value of Image SEO and how to go about optimizing images for search. It’s safe to say that I’m a proponent of it!

Google is also promoting image content in regards to search presence. At SES, Google’s representative, R.J. Pittman stated, “Images are no longer a ‘nice to have, but a must-have’ piece to promote businesses online.”

Google is also continuing to aggressively develope innovations in their image search engine sophistication. Google is no longer merely focusing upon the contextual text keyword content surrounding images in order to interpret their subject matter, they are now using a number of strategies for actually analyzing the graphic content of images and their relative quality compared with other similar images.

One of the biggest issues that I see facing internet retailer sites, travel portals, and other online commerce sites is the fact that they’re often incorporating thousands of product images supplied by their providers. Those manufacturer or content provider supplied photos are replicated across many competitor websites, and the search engines like Google expend great effort at detecting duplicate content such as this so that they can offer up a variety of images when their users conduct searches (trying to avoid offering up a page of search results where all thumbnails reflect the same identical image).

I know a number of ways around the duplicate content filtering in addition to how to optimize for contemporary image ranking factors. If there’s sufficient interest, I might soon provide a list of tips on how to optimize for these paradigms, so leave a comment below if you’d be interested!

Should You Use .TEL Top Level Domains (TLDs)?

Chris Silver Smith — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:55:10 +0000

Periodically, someone will launch a new, specialized Top Level Domain (“TLD”), claiming it’s the next big thing on the net. As we’ve seen time and again (such as with the .MOBI TLD), most of these efforts are never going to achieve the same level of recognition or adoption as the .COM and .NET standards, and businesses which muck about with them are likely to expend valuable resources resulting in zero ROI.

Such is likely to be the case with the .TEL top level domain which launched in March. .TEL, operated by Telnic Limited, is intended to be a sort of domain-based authoritative location for contact information – a sort of grand new evolution of phone directories, white pages, and yellow pages. When you obtain a .TEL domain, you don’t manage it on the servers of your choice, but instead it will generate a site hosted on the Telnic service. Justin Hayward, Communications Director for Telnic, is quoted as saying:

“We consider .tel to be the first global live contact site directory. Once contact details are populated in a .tel, anyone can type a known .tel address into any browser or use keywords that describe the person or business they want to find. Keywords are free so the more keywords that are used and the more descriptive they are, the easier it is to be discoverable.”

On the surface, this all sounds good, but the first problem I see with it is one of adoption: if people know to look for you, they will not be likely to type in a .TEL domain name — everyone looks for .COM. Even if you specifically tell someone about your .TEL URL, you’ll expend extra time explaining that, yes, .TEL *is* a type of web URL, and even then they’re just as likely to type it in as “something.tel.com”, which is operated by Tokyo Electron company, and not the proper Telnic page URL.

This is the exact same issue with .MOBI, which was intended to be used as an authoritative URL for the mobile-friendly versions of websites. Most people don’t know/understand the protocol, so they won’t be naturally typing it in when out and about with their mobile devices (and, .Mobi has the additional downside of creating one-letter-longer URLs, which make it that much more tiresome for someone on a wireless device to type in).

From a marketing perspective, .TEL domains have additional downsides. You don’t appear to be able to control the UI or look-and-feel of the generated contact pages, and slapping on yet another domain can split the effectiveness of your natural search engine optimization work. Links pointing at that additional URL will dribble away portions of the PageRank you could be sending or keeping for your primary domain.

And, how will search engines treat it? As with many of the lesser top-level-domains, they’re likely to be more mistrustful. I see zero toolbar PageRank values for the top-ranking .TEL pages, though this may be due to the domains only getting launched recently. But, their public statements touting keywords (“…Keywords are free so the more keywords that are used…the easier it is to be discoverable…”) and the fact that domainers seem to be excited by having another channel to potentially exploit makes the TLD concerning in terms of potential search engine performance.

Bucking standards in favor of creating your own proprietary one, and flying in the face of established adoption rates in terms of internet consumer behavior are not a good formula for success.

In a very self-serving blog post by Telnic CTO, Henri Asseily, titled, “Why .tel and not a free hcard microformat?“, they seem to also be taking aim against the increasingly popular hCard Microformat standard in favor of .TEL. What’s funny about this is that this is comparing apples and oranges, and Telnic has deployed example domains (see emma.tel, henri.tel) which provide a vCard at the bottom of the pages.

It’s absolutely stunning to me that they took the trouble to provide vCard off of their contact info pages when they could easily also embed all the vCard information into the page itself, using semantic markup! Meanwhile, his blog is suggesting that using .TEL in some way should be done instead of using hCard! And, I totally fail to see the significance of protecting info he’s referring to with privacy settings — are the .TEL pages a publicly-findable directory of contact info, or not?!? It’s disappointing that they wouldn’t simply incorporate the hCard and thereby gain additional advantage from the special display treatments that Google has begun applying to microformat-enriched pages.

Telnic is partly promoting their service as a way of providing individuals’ and businesses’ contact info on the internet, “even if you don’t have a website”. Ummm… don’t the online white pages and yellow pages already do this?

For companies considering adopting the .TEL for online marketing advantage, you should seriously reconsider. This is not going to become the defacto online standard anytime soon, and expending time playing with this domain is going to take resources away from efforts which are likely to be far more beneficial. At worst, linking to new .TEL domains could also subtract some of your existing PageRank value to little advantage.

The only case in which a .TEL domain could potentially provide advantage is in the case of a project to improve online reputation, if you’re looking for additional webpages to come up in SERPs, helping you to push down some sort of negative content which may be ranking for your brandname. However, there are a lot more social media sites, business profile pages, and additional strategies which you should be employing in that case, and the unproven nature of .TEL sites in organic search rankings relegate use of the new TLD to the bottom of your list of possible online reputation weapons.

Is Geotagging Worthwhile for Search Engine Optimization?

Chris Silver Smith — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:50:09 +0000

I posted an article today on “Should You Geotag Pages For Local SEO?” on Search Engine Land. In it, I describe the cases in which I think you should geotag a webpage.

Essentially, I state that locally-oriented webpages for businesses or content pages which have full street addresses should probably be tagged with hCard microformats, as I’ve described before.

Otherwise, if you have a locally-oriented webpage about something which has a place in the physical world, but which is not associated with an actual street address, I believe use of geotagging makes sense. Increasingly, specialized search engines (and even Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Bing Maps) are pinpointing such content and making it readily available for online users.

The other frequently-confusing aspect of geo tagging of webpages is caused by the fact that there’s no clearly-dominant standard for formatting of geotag information. At least four major standards have been deployed out into the wild, with no clear winner! Luckily, one could probably use all four simultaneously on a page without taking extreme measures — and, considering how relatively easy it is to add the geocoding to the page in the first place, I see no reason not to add all four at once if you have a valid reason to geotag the page.

I believe we’re going to see increasing adoption of geotagging as the major online mapmakers make more geographic information available to map consumers. Google’s recent deployment of “Rich Snippets” is a prime indication that more semantic markup data may become enabled in order to enrich online users’ search experiences, and local mapping data is one of the prime areas where they’re likely to add more functionality. (See also my article on Optimizing Search Listings for more details about how semantic markup such as hCard Microformats may position your site for greater online success.)

Making Your Content Portable For Your Audience

Liana "Li" Evans — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:00:51 +0000

At the beginning of the week I wrote a piece for Search Engine Watch entitled, “Do You Know Where Your Audience Is?” Knowing this is a piece of the social media puzzle that can decide whether your strategy is going to be a successful venture or a failure. There are a few other pieces to that puzzle, but generally, knowing where your audience is is foundational to any social media strategy.

It affects even how portable you make your content. What I mean by making your content portable is making it easy to share, making it easy for your audience to move it across one social platform to another. If your audience finds your content valuable they are going to want to share it whether its through social bookmarking, social news, email or twittering, people want to share great things they experienced. Content that has value can create buzz and word of mouth without the author really realizing what’s going on. If it’s really valuable to the audience and there’s no way to share it, that content might not take off, however just the opposite can happen. If you believe you are always putting out valuable content and you want it shared and you have too many options to share it, this can be a turn off as well as confusing to your audience.

Lets take for example a blog, there are a few ways a blog can be shared. The blog itself can be found to have a lot of great content, and people who just get to your blog via a twitter link, Stumbleupon or a link through email might not be quite that educated on RSS. So having a dozen or so of ways to subscribe to your blog by RSS can be confusing and a turn off, rather than a turn on to people coming to your blog. If you use Feedburner or other like services to handle your subscriptions, take a look at your audience – what are they using to read your blog and choose those top 3-5 icons to show for RSS subscriptions. While you may think you need every single RSS aggegator listed, your audience is likely telling you differently, listen to them, they understand what’s valuable to them. For the most part, Google Reader has become the giant here, people share blogs and blog posts through the “share” option in Google Reader as well as porting out their list of blogs so their own readers (if they own a blog themselves) can keep up to date on what they view is valuable.

Then there’s blog posts and making them easy to share. Again, just like having too many aggregator icons listed, having too many social bookmarking and social news icons in a drop down or spread across the bottom of your posts can be a real turn off. Look at your analytics, listen to your audience, what are they saying about how they found your content? Is your content the type that would really get traction on Digg? Is your audience even on Digg? You’re audience might be on a very niche site like Boudica, which caters to women and not on Digg. In this case having a sharing option for Boudica or sites like it, just might be the better option. Generally the audiences can cross platforms and if your audiences feels its good enough for Digg, they’ll get it there. The point is make it sharable for where your audience hangs out, not an audience who isn’t interested.

When making your content portable, it’s also important to keep in mind, content doesn’t always equal text. Content that’s valuable to your audience can take the form of pictures, podcasts, videos or even slideshares. Making these types of content easy to share is just as important as making your text content easy to share. Make it easy for your audience to embed things, provide the embed code or the link code and well as the sharing buttons you’ve decided are valuable to your audience. Don’t forget to also provide ways to share through email and social networking sites – if your audience is there.

Don’t stress that you need to have every way to share out there. Yes there are plugins for blogs that can list all the popular sites, and are easy to install, but is your audience on those sites? Are you loosing out on having your content on a site where your audience is because you are focusing on where someone else’s audience is? Before you decide to plaster your content up with a million “submit to” buttons, analyze your audience and listen to where they want to submit your content first.

eMetrics: Google Analytics 6 New Features & Improvements

Liana "Li" Evans — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:57:52 +0000

I think Google’s outdone itself here. Seriously!

I already had a sneak peak this morning at something I knew Google Analytics was changing. I figured “that” was the announcement at the 2 p.m. special session in the ballroom here at eMetrics Marketing Optimzation Summit. Early this morning, I was surprised to run into my friend Avinash Kaushik in front of the WAA booth, because he told me back in August he wouldn’t be here at eMetrics. I had a feeling something “big” was onhand.

I mentioned to Avinash, about the change and asked if that was the announcement. He smiled in his “coy” way and just said “Li, make sure you are in the ballroom at 2!” Needless to say, Avinash doesn’t have to say anything to me twice, I get it. So I was there.

Not 1, not 2, not even 3 features or improvements, they announced 6!

So here’s a quick rundown:
1. Interface changes
2. Adsense Integration
3. Visualization Charts (these are way cool looking)
4. Custom Reports
5. Segmentation
6. API! (this got huge cheers from the audience)

I’ve got video on three of the announcements, I’m working on getting them up to the web, so you can hear Avinash explain it in his own words.