Reports started filtering through earlier today that Google had killed off PageRank, as toolbars were starting to show ’0′ PageRank. However the guys at Big Hit Media figured out it was just a URL change by Google.
So, if you need to update your toolbar follow the link above for instructions, if you use a script change the ‘search’ part of the URL to ‘tbr’
So, what’s in store for search marketing in 2010? Well here’s my predictions as to what both SEO and PPC marketers will be looking at in the year to come.
As search starts to move away from Pagerank and towards brandrank a brands social graph will become more important. Merely monitoring social media will not be sufficient, brands will need to engage fully with social media to ensure they have fresh comments and links from the major social media sites.
No two people will see the same results page on Google, this will mean straight forward ranking as a metric will truly disappear. Behaviour will group consumers together and this will require best of class web analytics.
Google Chrome OS and Windows are both moving towards search in context, in other words right from your spreadsheet or word processor. The danger of this move is that search could become interruptive.
Google rarely if ever filters results to display something different to that which is in its index. But, as trends and queries and clicks start to tell Google a story for certain quick moving topics filters may be the only way to display relevant results until the index has had time to catch up. For some the index may never catch up. Universal search was the answer to this but as so few news sources have access to Google News blogs with fresh content still struggle to beat old, authoritative pages.
Pizza, Taxi… enough said? Okay, probably not, Yes people are now using mobiles to search and apparently for more than just Pizza’s and Taxi’s! Those two terms accounted for a huge percentage of searches on Yahoo’s mobile search platform. Mobile is here, it is different to web search. Less navigational terms, lots of misspellings, so be ready…
Like most advertising channels paid search has had a rough time in 2009, budgets squeezed, conversion rates down, longer user journey’s and a consumer focus on value.
Packaged Consumer Goods companies will ‘invent the challenge’ in 2010. Paid search hasn’t been a natural channel for these companies because of it’s direct response nature. With users now spending 13 hours a week surfing the web compared to about 3.8 hours a day watching TV this is a channel that can’t be ignored and won’t be ignored by this vertical. Especially when you consider how many people do both together.
The FMCG company that invents the challenge, asks the right questions and creates a search strategy that works will have competitive advantage. What’s the consumer action if we don’t sell online?
Major PPC campaigns have never had enough split testing. The idea of testing creative copy in paid search adverts is widely used, but testing copy/landing page/offer isn’t. Next years winners will be those who follow the pure players; be able to quickly test hundreds of landing pages against many different offers. The prize will be conversion rates well above industry averages and whilst giving cost benefits will also promote growth and profits.
Watch out in your vertical for signs of your competitors carrying out large multivariate testing on their paid search campaigns.
As CPC inflation will continue the smart retailers are already fully embracing vertical search, feeds will become important, especially if we consider browser-less search.
Last year saw many brands embrace integration and this will continue in 2010 as they look to drive even more value from advertising budgets. I’m not sure the world is going towards full comms planning in 2010 but everything is shifting in that direction. As people live in-line (concurrently off-line and on-line) so integrated campaigns make more sense.
We will see a greater divergence in search marketing from these two differing business models.
Many pure players have ‘mature’ search marketing campaigns, gaining extra impression volume will require them to think outside of the funnel. I can see pure players heading towards becoming publishers as they seek out greater volume from ‘emotional’ as well as ‘functional’ keywords.We may also see the expansion of pure players into bricks and mortar, although Amazon have denied they are opening any physical shops.
The clicks’n'bricks retailers will move further towards multi-channel as ‘click and collect’ becomes more widespread. The key for these retailers will be analytics, finding ways to measure both foot traffic and phone orders prompted by search.
In summary it’s going to be an exciting year for search.
Back in March I added a video on my test video blog regarding the overuse of the ‘nofollow’ tag by social media sites. Just to recap, the ‘nofollow’ tag is a way to link to another site without passing Pagerank. If the ‘nofollow’ tag is used on a link then Google doesn’t use that link in it’s link graph.
There are basically two uses of the ‘nofollow’ tag, firstly to stop sending Pagerank to pages you don’t want Google to value, such as login pages and privacy (although this has now slightly changed, see below) and secondly to stop Pagerank being passed to sites you don’t vouch for. If you want a better understanding check out this post on Search Engine Journal.
The first point (using nofollow on internal pages) was somewhat overused as SEO practitioners used this to ‘sculpt’ Pagerank (PR) within their site. If they had a page with PR5 and it has 10 links on the page they could use ‘nofollow’ on 9 of them and squeeze as much PR to the remaining link.
However, Google decided to stop this practice and now the PR is still divided by the number of links on the page, even if some are nofollow’d, a better explanation of this can be found here by Matt Cutts (Google).
Back in March my argument was that Social Media sites should not use the ‘nofollow’ tag on links to your blog from your profile page, it’s your profile page and you can vouch for the blog. Some sites weren’t using ‘nofollow’, best known would be LinkedIn, but some did, including Twitter and Youtube.
This meant that my Youtube profile had a link to my video blog that was nofollow’d. This for me isn’t a fair use of the tag, thousands of people link to their social media profiles, passing pagerank to those sites and get nothing back in return, my Twitter page is PR5.
Now Youtube have removed the nofollow tag, links to your website from your profile page now pass Pagerank. This brings a whole new perspective to how you utilise your Youtube channel. For instance I’m subscribed to my friends channel at Youtube, his profile page is PR3, because I’m subscribed my profile is linked from his, in turn my profile is linked to my video blog. Pagerank starts to get passed on because the links mentioned are all followed.
Youtube Removes Nofollow
This means that Youtube has stopped being a passive part of link building/SEO and moved into a direct contributor to your link profile. The down side could be if this gets abused.
For me it’s really pleasing to see a Google web property leading the way, my question is of course when will Twitter follow?
I thought it might be a good idea to look at the top SEO bloggers and see if they eat their own breakfast cereal, totally unfair of course, really just a bit of fun after seeing this post about 50 SEO blogs you should read.
So, don’t take it too seriously, I’ve just taken the Pagerank, Alexa rank, average backlinks and a few other (secret) metrics and then created a little formulae to score each blog, the higher the score the better.
Here is the first table for July 2009, I will try and update this each month, probably automate it.
[table id=2 /]
As reported by Search Engine Land, Google announced the death of PageRank sculpting, the practice of squeezing PageRank to certain pages by placing nofollow tags on some links. Danny writes:
So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.
For me, this is good news, I once had witnessed an SEO consultant spend 3 days sculpting PageRank on one page with little or no effect, unbelievable.
This will mean the ‘nofollow’ tag will be used more for its intended purpose, on links such a ‘privacy’ or ‘sign-in’ and of course ‘paid links’.
