Nick Garner's Blog

How will the new Google Caffeine update affect your business?

Original Article here
My blog post about the article here

Nick Garner
Thursday 20 August 2009 10:00

The advent of Google Caffeine will see Google’s technical infrastructure undergoing a massive change, the biggest one since Big Daddy in December 2005, and if you’re not prepared for it, your site will sink down the search engine rankings.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, explains this update: “Caffeine is a fundamental re-architecting of how our indexing system works.” Now after two years of development Google Caffeine has gone public.

Google are making sure the roll out is not disruptive as they don’t want a repeat of the public relations disaster of the Big Daddy update, where the indexes were in flux for a couple of months during peak shopping season Christmas 2005.

In short, as a result of lessons learned from that incident, you and I won’t really see much of an immediate change in search engine ranking positions.

So if the results are not different, then why the fuss? Being an infrastructural upgrade, it allows Google to process more data more efficiently. This means more signals can be incorporated within the search algorithm and so it can move closer to generating what it thinks is the perfect search index.

As we know, search engine optimisation (SEO) is about making a site friendly to search engines and exploiting their weaknesses. However, with a profound shift to a far more intelligent Google search engine it will be really hard to break open these weaknesses and game your way to the top of the rankings.

Today we can pay our way to the top through good site optimisation, careful link buying and online PR. Tomorrow, the only way businesses will have prominence on Google will be via Pay Per Click Adwords (PPC), demand from end users, clever social engineering or luck.

As fas as PPC is concerned, Betfair PPC expert Kemley Sellars, believes Caffeine will allow Google to make niche phrases on its index more relevant and thus more profitable for both Google and the businesses advertising. He sees a broader distribution of spend across the search index, allowing more advertisers to profitably work with Google.

Generally users are not interested in commercial offerings, unless they are actively seeking this information and are in buying mode. So for Google to filter relatively irrelevant commercial listings from non commercial indexes is good for the user and good for Google since it will motivate businesses to spend on PPC around more commercial phrases.

With organic search, businesses looking to generate revenue online will need to think hard about building websites users care about. Unless you want to face potential exclusion from Google, you will not be able to fake solid indicators like click through volumes to your site from the search results.

So the answer lies in ensuring your website is useful to your users, or doing some clever social engineering to make sure your website looks like it is useful for users.

I think links will still be valuable for SEO, but Google will rely more on signals you can’t fake. In the end there may be only one choice… to build a great website. I know this will be a tough call for lots of businesses.

In any case a profound change is coming, so get ready.

Nick Garner is SEO and Social Media manager at Betfair. He blogs at NewRedBook and can be followed on twitter.

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Opinion: Will the Microsoft Yahoo deal change your online marketing?

Original article here
My blog post about the article here

Nick Garner
Wednesday 05 August 2009 00:00

The Microsoft and Yahoo deal announced last week is going to take at least 18 months to come to fruition and will result in a combined UK share of Yahoo/Bing search traffic at about 8%, so will it change your online marketing plans?

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz explains the deal: “We have two giants (Yahoo and Microsoft) who are willing to go at it with each other and spend a lot of money. In essence, we can get virtually all of our search revenue at no cost because Microsoft wants to make the investment and wants to win. That just frees me up to invest in a better portal, better display, better advertising. We have to be realistic, it’s nice to say you want to do everything. All of us in the economic times have learned focus is more important than spreading the wealth around.”

If you run PPC (pay per click) campaigns, the main question may be whether ‘BingHoo’ traffic is going to convert to extra clicks and whether it is worth your time administering two campaigns across separate platforms.

Microsoft has tried to make its platform interoperable with Google. Its account mangers will even offer to port your Google account across for no charge, but with such a troublesome past it’s hard to turn around such a negative brand perception.

Its widely understood that PPC return on investment from Bing and Yahoo combined is marginally better than Goolge’s. But offset this ROI against weak traffic volumes and challenges associated with optimising separate accounts, if you are anything other than a big PPC spender, you end up with a neutral to negative case for marketing spend on ‘BingHoo’.

The bottom line is 8% volume may not be enough for the majority of UK advertisers to shift their efforts exclusively from Google PPC, even with easier campaign management.

From an search engine optimisation perspective, Bing is loved by aggressive SEO’ers who use spammy links and heavy on site manipulation to rank well.

The consequence is a poor search index which typically only naive users will want to use. As a result, Bing will have to step up it’s search game and will probably end up ranking on ‘signals’ similar to Google’s. What may end up meaning what’s good for Bing could be good for Google.

However, it is unlikely the Bing algorithm will change dramatically in the next 18 months, so you can go ahead and rank on Bing but destroy your Google rankings. Or you can have a partitioned approach, ranking one site on Google and another on Bing, but ROI on this approach is questionable.

If reality does not match hype then why so much noise about this deal? In the US, Yahoo and Bing collectively have 21% of the search market. By combining resources they hope to slow down Google’s steady march to total domination.

The catch is that ‘BingHoo’ is no where near such a ‘popularity tipping point’ in the UK and may never be so. For UK search marketers I believe that means its business as usual with Google.

Nick Garner is an SEO and Social Media manager for Betfair

You can follow Nick Garner on Twitter and via his blog