Google Universal Search has killed SEO, well ok, it hasn’t, but it has changed it. Universal Search places different types of results in with the regular search results. So a search for “Lindsay Lohan” gives you the following results. Note the pictures, and the news results talking about how her friends fear for her life. Very up to date, considering she was arrested for DUI last night.

Of course, everyone must see those very same results when they search on Google right? Well, not if you have a co-branded search site, such as those set as the default on new Dell desktops. In fact, here’s the very same search done at the very same time. Note, no pictures, no news (outside of the paid ad), and a large difference in the total number of search results returned.

I have no idea as to the usage of Dell co-branded Google searches as opposed to actual Google searches, but this just goes to prove that you shouldn’t assume that everyone is on the same page when it comes to new functionality, as they’re quite clearly not!

(note: Firefox co-branded Google searches return the exact same results as regular Google).

Thanks to DazzlinDonna I now have a GrandCentral account. What this means is that I have my own phone number that, when used, dials out to my home phone, my work phone, and my mobile phone at the same time. Whichever one answers first gets the call. So if I happen to be out for lunch, I’ll get the call on my cell, if I’m at home I’ll get the call there, etc. It’ll be interesting to try it out and see how well it works for me (maybe I don’t want to be too accessible for some people)

If you’re interested in trying it out, I have 9 invites remaining, just drop me a comment below and I’ll send them out until they’re gone.

 

 

Since I’ve recently taken the semi-insane step of signing up to run the Marine Corps Marathon, I’ve been looking at a variety of different sites that can help me / reduce the risk of physical injury. Part of the package of signing up with the MCM, is that you get an online training package thrown in. Great, so I have something that sends me an email every day, telling me to either have a rest, or run 12-14 miles… One of the challenges is that there are no real running trails near my house, but there are at least pavements. Of course, I could run on the treadmill, but I find that I have more motivation outside, so how to plan out a route, and know exactly how far I’ve run… Yes, I could use a pedometer, or map out my route with the car, or I could use the USATF website.  So what is there on the USATF website?  Well, it’s a Google map that allows you to map out a running route giving you your mile markers along the way, and a total distance.

Now, the data isn’t perfect, there are a couple of roads listed locally that don’t exist, and some that were finished at the end of last year that aren’t on the map, but overall it does it’s job.

If you have a Dell machine, and use the default Dell branded Google search, you may think that you’re getting the same search as if you were going straight to Google.com.  That doesn’t appear to be the case.  I’ve tried using both to see if they match, and there does appear to be a distinct difference in the organic search results across the board.  Now it could be that it’s just a matter of hitting different data centers and seeing different results, but it could be more than that.  Here’s an example of the results for a search on this domain name on both.  Note the 3rd result shown is different in both…

There has been a minor debate recently about “Supplemental Hell“, with Matt Cutts of Google talking about how having pages in the supplementals isn’t necessarily the issue that it used to be. Of course, people aren’t thrilled to be in the supplementals, as they’d much rather be in the main index and rank highly for searches. I prefer to think of supplemental results as being in a state of limbo - a perpetual state of being neither indexed nor non-indexed, due to their not being baptized with the holy link juice, or due to them not being free of original seo sin, such as duplicate content.

From what I’ve seen in the past, pages in the supplemental index are only shown in the results when the pages in the main index that match the query have all been displayed. Is that true? It would appear not to be. Here’s a search I did for “Manassas speaking Heseltine”. The first couple of results were my personal blog from the main index. Then the next result looks like a cloaking scraper site that Google has placed in the supplementals. So there should be no more main index matches for the query right? Wrong, this blog comes in next, and is quite clearly in the main index.

So the question is, now that the Catholic Church has abandoned the concept of limbo, has Google gone the same way, or is this just something that’s always been that way and I’ve only just noticed?

Google Webmaster Tools were originally released as Google Sitemaps, and were the place to manage your XML sitemap. Since then, they’ve evolved to such a point that you no longer need have an XML sitemap on your site for you to take advantage of the tools available. So what does it give you?

• View any errors on your site (missing pages, pages excluded from indexing by your robots.txt, etc).
• Validate your robots.txt file (a file used to tell the spiders what not to index, as well as other special commands).
• Manage your site verification (so the webmater tools know to give you access to the data).
• View your crawl rate stats, and change the frequency that the engines spider your site (if the spiders crawl you so much that they bog your servers down, you can tell them to slow down the speed of their indexing).
• Set your canonicalization preference (do you want the site indexed with a www or not?).
• Authorize Google to label and display your images through Google Images.
• View the page rank of your pages (not the actual numbers, just high, medium, low or not ranked).
• See which page has the highest page rank (not always your home page).

• See what searches on Google one of your pages showed up for, and what position you ranked (handy for finding long tail searches that you may not have realized people were searching for - i.e. this site shows up 5th for the search term “different tigers and maps“).
• A list of the words that occur on your site (shows you what Google is seeing).
• A list of the anchor text that people are linking to your site with (handy for quickly seeing any negative or positive news about your company that you need to be aware of).
• A list of external links into your site, by each page on your site, with the ability to drill down by page, and see the actual URLs that point to each page, along with their Google Page Rank.
• A list of internal links on your site (helpful to validate that the internal site structure that you believe should work great, is actually seen to do so by the Google spider).
• Sitemaps, any XML sitemap that’s been created and validated for the site (a sitemap for your site created in a format specifically for the spiders to read and digest).

So this tool has evolved over time into a very useful tool for anyone with their own site. Simply log in and validate your site, then you can get in and play with all of the tools / data above, not bad for for a tool that you get for free…

A while ago I posted about the number of campaigns you could have per account on Yahoo and Google. While I’ve come to accept these figures, I have found a problem with Google that could cause you a problem. AdWords allows you to set a campaign to one of three states - on, paused and deleted. The issue here is that any account that’s not in a state of on doesn’t count towards the 25 campaign max. So if you have 25 campaigns that are on, the system prevents you from adding another one. If you have 24 campaigns that are on and one paused, well the system will allow you to add one more. However, should you decide to restart the paused account… you can’t as it’ll make you exceed your max, so you would then have to move one of the campaigns to another account, thereby losing the history. Since there are 3 states, why not have paused count towards the account count? The idea behind pausing an account rather than deleting it, is that you intend to restart it one day, the way the system is currently set up, you may be prevented from doing that.

Update: I’ve deleted the rest of this post as anon points out in the comments that there is indeed a delete function available from the campaign settings tab in Yahoo - Panama. I just hadn’t noticed it. Thanks anon, whoever you are.

Google is the undisputed king of search, but when it gets to the explicit topic of local search there’s currently not a champion, but Google is up there. So how do you get your business listed in Google’s local search solution - Google Maps?

Firstly go to the Google Local Business Center and enter in the information for your business to see if it’s there.



If there is a match/matches, the next screen will offer you a choice to select an existing listing, or to add a new listing. If you select an existing listing you get a map, and the choice to either edit the existing listing, or suspend it. So what’s to stop your competitor from editing your listing and changing your phone number to theirs to steal your online customers? Google has 2 ways that they use to resolve this issue upon receiving a request to edit or suspend the listing. The first is to send a letter with a pin and activation instructions to the address on the listing. The second is only available if the listing is one that is listed with ‘information providers’, which means that the data has been sent to Google from their data partners such as SuperPages. The second method is a phone call to the number on the listing. Putting that aside for now, what information is Google looking for you to enter? Besides the expected address and phone number information you can also enter hours of operation, payment methods, web address, and several other items, as seen below.



The next step is to select the category / categories that your business falls in. Why does this matter? Well, this is used in two ways. Firstly for searches that directly match that category, and secondly for searches that match synonyms for that category i.e. flowers for florists.

Following that you are given the ability to add custom attributes. If there’s something special about your business, then here’s the place to put it - i.e. certifications, bonding, specialty brands, etc.

Next you can upload up to 10 images of your business, products, services, etc. Following that you just have to review the information and wait for the call/postcard, and once you’ve verified your information, your listing will start show up in the google maps results. If you have multiple locations, then you can use a different process through Google Base, which allows you to batch process your listings, but that’s a different topic for a different time.

Looking through one of my Google AdWords account I saw the new quality score displayed. As Yahoo had put in a little shaded in bar showing your quality score on a 5 point scale, Google decided they’d get in on the act. Instead of 5 non-defined points, Google went for 3 vague descriptive words:- “Poor, OK, and Great”. One interesting this is that they show you what the minimum bid for a particular keyword is. As you can see in this example culled from one of my accounts, the “Great” keyword has a min. bid of 4 cents, the “OK” keywords have a range of 6 cents to 20 cents, and the “Poor” keywords all have a 30 cent min. bid.

Quite a difference there. If all of the keywords manage to somehow come in at their minimum bid, or that multiple holds at higher prices, that’s 7.5 great keywords for the same price of 1 poor keyword. Now in reality that multiple doesn’t hold, but there is a differential. Looking at the average CPC for these keywords, the “Poor” keyword is costing us about 33% more than the “OK” keywords, now as to whether the “Poor” keyword is worth that from a conversion perspective, that’s a different story, but if you see this in your AdWords, that’s something that you do want to look at.

Now, I’ve looked through several campaigns, and it appears that “Great” always has a minimum bid of 4 cents. “OK” ranges from 5 cents to 20 cents, and “Poor” is 30 cents and up (I saw some as high as a dollar - naturally these were ones that had been labeled “Inactive for Search”).

Running some reports for various sites that I oversee I noticed a strange occurrence when using the site: command. Several of them that had previously had many thousands of pages indexed suddenly were only showing 260 pages indexed, the same number - 260 - was showing for all of them.

The first one showed me the following stats as the result of the query:-

So only 5 were showing, with the ‘click here to view omitted results’ text at the bottom. Clicking on the text didn’t show me the other 255, it instead showed me the following:-

Maybe it’s a supplemental index issue, I thought to myself. Flipping through the pages to test this theory I got deep into the 700’s, and I still hadn’t seen that piece of green text to inform me that I’d finally found the first supplemental result. Strange. Ok, on to the next one. The Site: command returned the following:-

Clicking on the ‘omitted results’ text gave me the following:-

Again, well into the 700’s and no sign of my first supplemental. So why is Google reporting 260? Why doesn’t it report either the total number of pages in the index (as it did for my other sites), or heck just even the number in the main index with an option to add in the supplemental?

Update: Google has admitted that this is a known bug, and will be fixing it over the next few weeks. There’s a write up on Marketing Pilgrim about it too.