Google to Start Penalizing Pages With too Many Advertisements “Above the Fold”

January 25, 2012

Are you tired of doing a Google search only to land on a page that has an entire army worth of ads occupying the top part of the page? Does this make you feel deceived and taken advantage of? Well if you do, you’re in luck. Google has just announced a tweak to its algorithm that will be designed to penalize sites that are saturating the top half of their pages with ads. (Wow, I sounded like the Sham Wow guy there)

The change comes from customer complaints indicating that it takes away from the user experience when you click on a result and have trouble finding what you are looking for due to all of the advertisements. Google posted this on its Inside Search Blog:

“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

According to Google, the algorithm change should only affect about 1% of global searches which means that users can expect to see a reordering of results in about 1 out of every 100 searches. That sounds like a small number and one might be quick to disregard the risk of using pages that are top-heavy with ads, but experts agree that it is always better to play it safe rather than ending up buried in the search results.

Google’s advice “continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks.” This change is just one of over 500 that we can expect to see by the end of the year so fasten your seat belt.

Some examples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google Introduces “Search, Plus Your World”

January 18, 2012

It appears that Google search results are undergoing one of their biggest facelifts to date with last week’s introduction of Search, Plus Your World. This new feature is taking content that you share privately and combining it with matches from the public web and mixing it into a single set of listings. The changes are live but in order to see the personal results you need to be signed into your Google account. When you are signed into your Google account and doing a search on Google.com , it gives you the option to show personal results blended with public results, or you can choose to do a purely public web search. You will find an icon in the top right section of the screen that has the two options.

 

Below is what the search bar looks like as you are doing a search that includes personal results:

 

And you will see a separation between the numbers of personal versus public results:

The new feature will be great for people who are interested in finding privately shared content amongst their friends as well as public content without having to go to multiple places to do your searching. However, there are growing concerns because privately shared content may appear to be public when in fact it is not. Also, there is the possibility of people having more information shared amongst friends and family than they had initially intended.

Google has come under a bit of fire from other social media related companies such as Twitter. They are arguing that this new feature is leveraging Google’s search results to favor its own content and push out competitors. This is because Search, Plus Your World is currently only showing personal results from its own social media network, Google+. So why are results from the others such as Facebook and Twitter missing? According to Google, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service, of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Several blogs are being written on this new development from Google in an attempt to better understand its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. As for the privacy concerns people have, it really just comes down to a simple piece of advice; don’t share anything that you would regret if it found its way into the
public domain. It will be very interesting to see how this new feature evolves. To hear about it straight from the source, check out the Official Google Blog.

Some Social Media Statistics as we Head Into 2012

January 11, 2012

Facebook now commands a whopping 800 million users. 200 million of these users joined up in 2011 alone. Twitter recently hit the 100 million active users mark with one out of every five users living in the United States. LinkedIn has recently reached 64 million users just in North America.

It’s not often that you find a nearly 100 percent consensus among business owners regarding a particular marketing strategy, or any subject for that matter. However, a recent study by Booz&Co and Buddy Media discovered that just over 95 percent of businesses surveyed said they were going to increase their social media marketing budget, with the remaining percent saying that they would keep their budget the same.

In light of these social media statistics I wanted to share a great info graphic that was created by Dream Systems Media. Click on the link below to check out some amazing stats. Some will come as no surprise while others will really get you thinking. Enjoy!

http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com/blog/index.php/social-media-statistics-of-the-day/

Search Engines Are Number One Choice for Finding Local Businesses

January 4, 2012

A recent survey was conducted by Pew Internet to determine where people get information about local businesses. For the study, 1100 adults (18 and older) were interviewed by landline and cellphone in both English and Spanish.

People looking for information about local businesses said they rely on the internet, particularly search engines over all other sources. Printed newspaper as well as websites of newspaper companies was the second most popular choice that people use to find information and news about local businesses. Word of mouth was a high scoring source as well.

About 60% of adults say that they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars. When they do:

47% say they rely most on the internet, including:
•    search engines – 36% rely on them
•    specialty websites – 16% rely on them
•    social media – 1% rely on social network sites or Twitter

30% rely most on newspapers, including:
•    printed newspapers – 29% rely most on that
•    newspaper websites – 2% rely on them

22% rely on word of mouth from family and friends

8% rely on local TV, either broadcasts or the websites of local stations

5% rely on local radio

Keep in mind that some of the statistics in the bullets exceed the total due to the fact that respondents were able to fill in more than one choice. For example, someone could have selected Twitter and social websites in addition to search engines.

This study is yet another reason why businesses need to be taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to enhance their online presence. 2012 is expected to see more people than ever before looking for information about local businesses online. It’s a very exciting time in the rapidly growing world of online marketing and 2012 is set to be a great year for those who take advantage.