Google & Bing Panel Discussion – BrightonSEO 2012

The panelists consisted of representatives from Google (Pierre Far), Bing (Dave Coplin), Expedia (Martin McDonald) and well known Freelancer Rishi Lakhani -

Question 1 – Is SEO doomed, damned and/or in it’s infancy?

Google (Pierre) – SEO has never been dying. It’s evolving, and we’ve seen it change over time.

Martin McDonald – it’s in its infancy – but SEO will evolve, SEO will evolve into any organic medium. (e.g. mobile apps)

Rishi – The industry unfortunately has no standard practice, ethics board or a governing body – until this is implemented it will be difficult for the industry to be a formally recognised industry.

Bing (Dave Coplin) – SEOs were like magicians, alchemists.  No one understand what SEOs do. However, SEO will evolve well beyond what we can imagine -
There is no career path laid out, but SEOs have the ability to shape whatever career they want.
SEOs are passionate; this alone is commendable – you’d never see 1000 attendees for an email marketing conference!

Q2 – Question aimed for Pierre – “Been getting inquiries from people who have got themselves de-indexed. However, it’s been very difficult to define what a bad link is? Could you broadly classify what a ‘bad link’ is? secondly, what is the re-inclusion, process?”

Answer, when you say de-indexed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s out of the index, only that it doesn’t rank in the SERPs. There’s 2 ways of getting penalised: manual penalty (the more serious penalty) and algorithmic penalty (e.g. can get away by changing on-page layout etc.)

So how do you classify if a link is bad? Ask yourself the following questions:

1) does the webmaster of the linking website genuinely want to link to you?
2) does linking to you add value to the user?

In terms of reinclusion – show that you have made an effort – Let Google know that you have identified bad links, you have emailed all the webmasters, these guys say they can’t remove them, these guys never got back to me, etc. and we will make an effort to help you.

Also make sure to tell us what you did, and to be honest.

Rishi – Check GWT, and see if there’s any dodgy links pointing to you

Martin – “How about competitive industries where people buy massive amounts of links?”
Pierre – buying links is a definite NO! Definitely report it!

We use over 200 signals, and there are some websites that rank without any links.

Q3 – What about Content? What should shape a good content strategy?
Bing (Dave Coplin) – Definitely social; it’s the new kid on the block, if you are bloody good, then your content will get shared.

So What is social? (Dave) For Bing it’s Twitter and Facebook

Google (Pierre)- who are my users? what do they want? and do they get it? Every page on your site must supply a knowledge demand. Use rich snippets, when dealing with duplicate content think about what you choose to serve as canonical. Also content doesn’t only mean text, use video, images, apps, reviews etc.

Rishi – Think about whether you are making it easy for people to share?
Does your content have tips?
Update old content. Ask yourself if these need updating, are they still relevant?
Add genuine resources in your posts.

Q4 – Do you test before rolling out Google Analytics redesigns?
Pierre: yes, we do test. We serve webmasters, serve in-house webmasters, agencies, so eventually something will have to give, but we try to cover as much as we can. Also provide us with specific feedback – tell us why the design is bad? Don’t say “your redesign is crap!” tell us what is the deficiency and how we should improve it.

Q5 – What is good social signals?

Bing (Dave)- good social signal is the quantity of the shares, the speed of which it is getting shared.
Google (Pierre)- if you are raising awareness about something, and it is genuinely shareable content, then these will get the coverage naturally.

Q6 – Aimed at Pierre – “you mentioned that you should know who your customers are, and what they’re looking for? Can you tell us about not giving us the search query data”?

Pierre: We do provide this data in in GWT – for most webmasters this data is more than sufficient.

Martin – The data sample size is so small that it’s rubbish, I rank for Expedia!
Rishi – I rank for insurance according to GWT. The data isn’t accurate.

Pierre – GWTs process data differently, our main focus is about protecting users and we don’t want user’s personal data being compromised by providing search query data especially with the roll out of Google plus your world.

Bing – easy to be angry about this – I’m not defending Google, or “dissing” them, but you must genuinely appreciate that there’s a larger issue here. People are getting more concerned about privacy issues.
But it certainly does show that there is an underlying need for more discussion and engagement among all parties; users, webmasters, legislators and search engines.

-Ends-

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

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Top Takeaways from the Search Firestarters Event on Attribution

Last Thursday was the first Search Firestarters event, hosted by Google and Only Dead Fish – and we were lucky enough to get an invitation. Here are our top takeaways!

Don’t try to attribute your way out of a rubbish marketing campaign. If your marketing is rubbish no attribution model will fix that.Modelling is not measuring – it’s about statistics and odds.Concentrate on what you can control – it’s all very well finding out the volume of search depends on cloud cover, but you can’t control the weather so you can’t do anything about it.Some companies will get most conversions from just one click – there’s not much point doing attribution modelling if it’s only for a couple of conversions.Attribution has flaws: People buy and research on many devices, and you can’t track them between these – this is only going to get worse in the futureTracking is based on cookies, and assumes one person only has one cookie.There are several objectives: Want to understand advertising and justify spend.Want to prove worth of the brand.Want to understand customer journey and message differently depending on what stage the customer is in.At Sky they’re using a staged approach: Getting all the data sorted (so everything can be meaningfully compared)Working out the objectives of the stakeholdersGet top line information – what the channels are doingLook at different media partners, keywords – deeper level stuffTest different combinations of different channels, and different ads at different stagesAttribution does provide a wealth of insight. Generics can influence people and push them to the brandLook at different behaviour of people from different sources.But it isn’t a silver bullet. You should only do it if it makes sense for your business.There are lots of things you can fix before it’s worthwhile doing attribution modelling (such as getting the best website possible)We’re missing so many things, such as TV and radio advertising, or the effect of competitors’ advertising pushing generic searches.There are two levels to attribution modelling The macro scale (with econometrics) – for looking at the channel mixThe micro scale (with clicks and conversions) – for optimising at a finer levelThere’s no single standard model. Tom starts with a standard model and customises for each client as they get more data.Beware the “so what?” trap: some clients ask for attribution data but then don’t do anything with them. Take action based on your data. Eliminate non-convertersChange the channel mixBuild an engagement model, based on on-site activity, and feed that into the attribution modelProcess has to be collaborative – you have to involve all the right client-side data holders.Don’t rely solely on attribution modelling – the tools are getting better but the data are getting worse. You could optimise yourself out of important keywords your model can’t assign the correct value to. Accept the limitations of the data.

How do you choose the right model? Martin starts with big chunks of data and working out the relationships between them, and doesn’t get more complicated. He suggests looking at Google Analytics with different attribution models and seeing if there’s a difference between them.

How do you line up everyone in a large organisation? Helen said that it was a challenge, but she got buy-in by having an unbiased and holistic view of attribution, and sold it as it could drive a lot more high quality sales.

Doesn’t last click work best for many real world situations? “Yes”, said Martin. Helen said that it was still worth looking at last click attribution, but using the more complicated models could help understand and optimise.

To round things up, the panel were asked for a single recommendation:

Martin – Keep it simple.Helen – Know your objectives.David – Work with the things you can change today.Tom – Don’t fall into the “so what?” trap. Don’t do attribution unless you’re prepared to do things on the back of it.

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Bing is For Doing – What do You Want to do Today?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just shut down the computer you’re on and go do something absolutely outrageous? Something you never thought you’d do, or be able to do? But, what if one of the world’s top search engines were to help you make those unfulfilled dreams a reality? If you haven’t seen their ads on Facebook already, this is exactly what the search giant, Bing, have set out to achieve.

On the 18th of April, Bing UK, launched the “Bing is for doing” campaign to reach out to their users in order to discover what people really want to be doing. From those lifelong unfulfilled ambitions to those times when they’ve discovered something through a search engine that they’d love to do but think they’d never get the chance to.

The idea behind the campaign is pretty simple; since most people turn to search engines in order to arm themselves with the necessary insights and commentary to make informed choices, Bing decided they’d actually go a step further in offering you the opportunity to experience what you’ve found or discovered on a search engine.

In an email response, a spokesperson for Bing said: “We wanted to ask people of all ages what it is that they really want to be doing – whether that be travelling the world, learning a new skill or fulfilling a lifelong ambition.”

Bing has already received a significant number of submissions: “We’re really enjoying reading through people’s wants and as part of the campaign, the team will be looking to pick out a few select submissions with the view to making them actually happen.”

So what type of submissions are they looking for? According to Bing, “the submissions won’t necessarily be the most unique or the most outrageous – it’ll be a mix of things that make people laugh, cry and most of all make us want to get out there and do – life is there to be enjoyed and Bing wants to help people make the most of it.”

For more information, including examples of some of the submissions that have already got the folks at Bing thinking and video straw polls from all over the UK, visit the Bing UK Facebook page.

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

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Glenn Jones on Microformats and SEO – BrightonSEO

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

There are three different ways to markup structured data.

Microformats let you markup data with pre-existing attributes. Both Microdata and RDFa are more flexible, as they let you use prebuilt schemas or create your own

Which should you use? Glenn uses microformats most of the time as they’re simpler, but they only cover some things. Microdata can be used to describe more unusual objects.

Glenn talked through how to mark-up a Yorkshire pudding recipe using microformats:

You can have a property inside another, such as yield inside the summary.You can have marked up data within paragraphs of freeform text.Some properties have parent-child structure. For example, ‘ingredient’ has the child properties ‘amount’ and ‘name’.Properties can take data that aren’t text, eg has to be an imageSome data are more complex. For example there are many ways to write same date, so you have to use a specific data structure that says what the text means, eg title=”2011-10-27? when text says ‘27 Oct 2011’.

Google’s Webmaster area has a rich snippet page that tells you how they want you to mark up data, and what’s most likely to be pulled into the search results. Not all data are pulled into the SERPs at the moment, but as more may be used in the future it makes sense to mark up as much as possible.

Best thing to do to help is to use Google’s rich snippets testing tool – this gives an example of how how it looks your page could look in the SERPs and shows the data it’s parsed.

There are compound microformats (microformats with microformats nested inside them). For instance hRecipe can hold an aggregated review and author.

To mark up an author, link all recipes (or articles) to a profile page using rel=author, then link form the profile page to a Google profile with rel=me. See the Google Webmaster Tools help page on authorship.

Does this affect SEO? Google are not telling us – Glenn suspects it does affect ranking but doesn’t know.

How does it affect CTR? Paul Bruemmer saw a 30% uplift for rich snippets, while Richard Baxter only saw a 5% uplift. You have to test it yourself: there isn’t one figure for everyone.

Audience Question: there’s spam going on with microformats, how do you avoid it?

Glenn says it does happen: people will game any technique that affects search listings. It will be the usual cat-and-mouse game between Google and spammers. Microformats are about adding extra semantic data to website, improving way machines can parse information: quality content will win out in the end.

Pierre Far from Google said that if someone’s rich snippet spam really affects the SERPs, Google will take their rich snippets out. There’s a form to report rich snippet spam. Don’t abuse it.

Audience Question: Unlike other attributes, rel=author is tied into Google+, so does it belong to google? Will it be able to tie into other social profile sites to be used by Bing and others?

Glenn hopes Google will become more open, as people are interested in connecting up social media identities.

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