Is anyone seeing this in their account? Do you want Google personalizing your results?

The RavenTools team was in attendance and kept a running blog of each speaker. (My PPC session). I was lucky enough to have Benjamin Rudolph, David Kyle and Kate Morris present during the same session.

This was my first time presenting this topic, and while I felt I did well, I plan on adjusting some of the information and flow. My presentation was also radically different from almost all of the other presenters. Jason Keath’s (SocialFresh – Social Media Conference) presentation on Social Media was somewhat similar as he just used graphics and minimal text as well. Wayne Sutton didn’t even have a PowerPoint presentation. He chose to read his notes of his iPad and actually converse with the crowd. I hope to be able to give an updated presentation soon in the RTP area.

The amazing drawings in my presentation were created by Rachel Nabors She offers web design/web development services via The Pink Crow. I plan on having her add more “people” to the presentation in the future.

What has been amazing is that hardly any of these issues occur at my current employer, FTP site for business and virtual data rooms provider ShareFile.

If a user then thinks, “oh, hey. I know PING.” and then clicks the PING brand in the area between the paid and search they will then see this result:

Now the results change.

In other searches I conducted the brand that shows up nowhere on the unbranded search organically is now at the top of the list after adding the branded term via the Google brands link.

A few thoughts:

• This will make bidding on Competitors names even more essential.
• Longtail keywords will be increasingly more important than “head” words (great point by Linking Geek Brian Chappell).
• Google is caving to big advertisers who are consistently getting beaten at SEO and PPC.
• How does Google decide what brands to show?

If I’m a smaller company with a product that is just as good, or better, why can’t I have the same opportunity to get exposure in that same slot? Is a Google engineer making the decision?

This all reminds me of this Great Gatsby quote:

They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

and this exchange as well:

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

I could be reaching there, but hey, I was an English major. My earlier point is still valid. Google knows where there money comes from: big brands with deep pockets.

A bit more on the branded results subject from Barry over at Search Engine land

Google Ad Innovations

A couple of items really stand out with these changes/new features:

Re-marketing – This is huge. Knowing now that I can target users who have been to my site and not signed up for a free file sharing trial is a great feature. Many banner networks offer re-targeting, but having the ability to make quick changes via Google is much easier.

Video Ads – The targeting within a certain video via keyword is also a great new feature. I’m not sure what kind of impact this will have, but being able to target videos on YouTube could enable marketers to put ads on competitor’s videos.

Google Stars for Search

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

Oh boy, “makes search more relevant and fun“. I’m not sure if there is any SEO impact or not. If a SERP gets starred by multiple users, will that listing get a bump?

Real-Time Search

I’m not a huge fan of real-time search results as I don’t want the latest result, just the “best” result. When I am looking for real-time results I either use a search column in TweetDeck or the search functionality at Twitter.com.

Bing’s Search Updates

Bing announced a number of changes at SES NYC including:

Quick Tabs – These tabs are meant to help the user refine their search. Bing stated 42% of all search queries required additional searches.

News – Real time searches not only give the latest results from the leading news sites, but also provide the most popular shared links from that publication.

Maps – Bing added Foursquare integration into the mapping functionality.

The Google “Caffeine” updated that was supposed to be launched during the post-holiday season has still not been pushed live according to Matt Cutts. I’ve seen some significant adjustments in the SERPs that are close to what was on the Caffeine sandbox, but I’m not sure if that is due to the update actually being pushed live or just a coincidence. I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

Google recently rolled out some changes to how personalized search will work. Many people believe that if you log out from Google OR turn off web history and search that you will be given “clean” results. This isn’t the case. I’ve done quite a bit of research within ShareFile for terms that we have been targeting and found that when I search for them within the office that I rank high for each and when I search from home, I am ranked a bit lower.

I have had numerous people do the same searches for me out of state and found that they each have different results. I have conducted the searches logged in and logged out, and even on different computers. I have had others within our office conduct the same searches and found that their results in the office often mimic mine, but differ outside of the office. The results even differ depending on the browser used.

While this does create a major headache when trying to check rankings for key terms I feel that the bigger issue is that when searching for general terms, I do not necessarily want to see the same site over and over. For example, I search for “hockey gloves” and click on a site. I go to the site and buy them. Now, the next time I need hockey gear, I will most likely search for the website name or just go directly to the website. If I do search for “hockey gloves” (or another similar term) again after visiting that site, it would be because the site did not give me what I needed or gave me bad service and I was looking for an alternative. I’d rather see a clean list of sites and not ones that I might have clicked on in the past. In my opinion, search engines are for discovery and comparison shopping while bookmarking sites are for repeat visits.

Just because you are logged out, does not mean that Google does not know who you are and where you have been. The influence of others in the same office and network is also something to watch closely. I’m not sure I like the idea of a “hive mind” within my search results.

For some data on personalized search visit HuoMah Seo Blog.

Photo Via: Wheatfields

Here is another example of an SEO company using the same method.

I don’t have an issue with an SEO company having one link to their own site. The company should take credit for the SEO work they are doing (as long as it is GOOD work). What I do have an issue with is the numerous companies that use clients sites to be backlink generators for their own company. The footers should simply have one link to their own website and just use the company name as the anchor text. If the SEO discloses the fact that they will be using the client in the examples above and gives the client the option to not have the links, then I also have no issue.

The amount of links on a website that point away from a site plays a huge role in search rankings. If a website is full of links at the bottom of the page that point to other sites, the site’s SEO strength helps those sites and dilutes the strength of the numerous internal pages. An SEO company that decides to use a client’s website to help their own business and not that of their client, just does not have the client’s interest before their own.

Take a look at this post by Derek Powazek if you want to read another person’s take on the subject of SEO companies and a follow-up by Danny Sullivan.

(Please note that I adjusted the example images above to exclude any SEO company names and other information.)

Photo credit: CodiceInternet

My stance: I still use it and will continue to use it. Why? I’m not saying.

Of course, people have asked me, “but Dan, now your competitors know what terms you are targeting.” My response has always been, “If they are looking at my meta tags in order to optimize their site they obviously lack the SEO skills to actually rank on those terms.”

Just keep making good content and having a well-structured website and you will rank. Hard work pays off. Trust me.

Google Japan vending machine image courtesy of Gyazickr.

I do suspect that we will see Gowalla or Brightkite get bought by a big player. I really doubt the founders of Foursquare will sell after the Dodgeball debacle with Google.

Photo Credit: DeanJ

The post talks about how Google uses historical data to predict the search volume of certain terms during a certain time period.

As we see that many of the search trends are predictable, we are introducing today a new forecasting feature in Insights for Search, along with a new version of the product. The forecasting feature is applied to queries which are identified as predictable (see, for instance, basketball or the trends in the Automotive category) and then shown as an extrapolation of the historical trends and search patterns.

The post is a follow up to an earlier post from back in April of this year, Predicting the Present with Google Trends. This post included the white paper of the same name that is a MUST READ for all search marketers.

The post from April has some interesting information in it as well.

Google queries in a category like “Automotive/Vehicle Shopping” during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.

Very interesting information and a great tool that I have been using since it has been launched.

Google Trends
Google Insights for Search

Photo Credit: Dullhunk

“Google is quite serious about scrutinizing our codebase regularly and rewriting the parts that don’t scale well to make them more robust, more elegant, or faster.”

One thing I did notice while digging into Caffeine, was that many of the results lacked dates when compared to the current Google results. I couldn’t find any real consistency though.

I feel that in my short time with Caffeine that I found better relevancy in the search results and less “SEO garbage”. I’m curious to see if the final push is what we were given a sample of, or a mix of the current and Caffeine. It is almost as if this update is less of a “real time” push, but more of a time to “clean out the garage” push.

Twitter search is great if I want to follow along with a conference or news that is happening right at that moment, but I’ll still stick with Google to do research. I might turn to Twitter search after I find a result that interests me in order to see if anyone has an opinion on the service.

Google is the phone book while Twitter search is the people in my neighborhood I ask for advice.

Play around with the new SERPs HERE and read the rest of Matt’s post HERE

Photo Credit: Biskuit

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