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July 6, 2012August 29, 2021

SEO & Google Shopping

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO.”

Over the next several months, Google’s free Product Search feature will start costing ecommerce sites a lot more. Since the launch of Google’s Froogle in 2002, Google has provided a free product search service. The newly launched Google Shopping marks the first time that the company has converted a free service to a pay-for-placement model. Search marketers wonder, what does this mean to organic search?

For those who focus purely on search engine optimization, the change may actually be a positive. Some of the placement tests for Google Shopping results actually improve the organic results’ position on the page compared with other paid modules. For example, a search for “teddy bears” before the move to Google Shopping would have resulted in the result at left below. The shopping results are beneath the paid results, pushing the organic search results lower on the page. We can only see one full organic result in this image, and the top of the second.

Today’s shopping results are still in flux as Google tests the best placement for these new ads, but many of the placement experiments are appearing in the upper right. In the example above and to the right, the shopping results appear as an anchor point for the paid search ads, to the right of the top block and above the right block. As a result, Google is able to squeeze two more organic results into the same space that the previous shopping module had taken up.

The experiments are still running, however, with the full launch set for sometime this fall. Until then, Google will likely continue to test and revise placement of the shopping modules to find the balance it needs to strike between revenue and searcher satisfaction….

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

May 18, 2012August 29, 2021

WI 2nd Grader Represents with Pirate Google Doodle

I may live in Illinois as a Flatlander at present (and have previously for several brief periods of early childhood) but I spent most of my life between Colorado, California and Wisconsin. That, plus the fact that the Web Pierat loves all things searchtastic and piratical makes my especially fond of the doodle that second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, WI, created to win this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google National Contest. His doodle “Pirate Times” is featured on the U.S. Google homepage today. For his artistic efforts he’ll receive a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for his school. Congrats, Dylan, and keep towing that pirate line. Those ninjas are sneaky buggers 😉

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

May 15, 2012May 18, 2022

Google’s Ever-Changing Algorithms

Excerpts from my latest article at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog: “Site Quality & Google’s Ever-Changing Algorithms.”

Google released 52 algorithm updates and changes in April 2012—1.73 per day. The Panda and Penguin updates received the most attention because they affected the most sites, but 50 other updates impacted search results as well. Most were focused on Google’s crusade to improve the quality of sites that rank the highest in their search results, but others included updates to changes in indexing, spelling, sitelinks, sports scores features and more. Of course, April 1st also brought a new round of Google’s April Fools’ pranks including the super geeky 8-bit Google Maps and Google Australia’s Street Roo instead of the usual Street View.

The most important updates in May, however, focused on site quality and spam prevention. First, Google quietly released the Panda 3.5 algorithm update on April 19. The Panda update, named for the Google engineer who developed it, targets sites with thin content or that repost content found on other sites. This 3.5 update is just the latest of the Panda releases that tend to happen every four to eight weeks.

Sites that create fresh, unique content on a regular basis—such as ecommerce sites that release new products regularly and write their own unique product descriptions—shouldn’t have much trouble with Panda updates. Consumer product sites that feature unique content about their branded products as well as blog posts, Twitter feeds and other sources of unique content should likewise have no Panda problems.

A few days later on April 24, Google released another important algorithm update they codenamed “Penguin” that intensified Google’s war on webspam. Three percent of Google’s search rankings were affected in the U.S. The algorithm update seems to have hit sites that have overoptimized anchor text and low anchor text diversity, as well as a high number of links from topically irrelevant sites.

Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

April 28, 2012August 29, 2021

Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty a 3% Step

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty an Evolution, Not Revolution.”

Google’s much discussed over-optimization penalty turned out to be a moderate evolutionary step in Google’s site quality crusade. Launched April 24, Google wrote in a blog post of its update, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another step in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.” I addressed the over-optimization penalty on Practical eCommerce last month at “Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty,” and expressed optimism for the impact here at “Cautiously Psyched For Google’s Planned Over-Optimization Penalty.” But it seems the impact will be less than I had hoped. Only time will tell.

According to the Google blog post, an estimated 3.1 percent of U.S. search results will be affected by the algorithm update, while sites in countries like Poland that are more prone to produce webspam could see as high as 5 percent change in rankings. The algorithm will more aggressively penalize webspam tactics like keyword stuffing and irrelevant linking from sites that “spin” content with barely readable content. “Spinning” refers to the practice of scraping content from other sites and then manually or mechanically rearranging the words to create a “new” piece of content.

Read the article, as well as how to determine if your site was hit, in full at Practical eCommerce »

Originally posted on Web PieRat.