Posts Tagged ‘google’

It is easy for everyone to think that Google owns the search market. If I want to be on search, I need to be on Google simple as that. Well it isn’t so simple when it comes to international markets. Though Google has a strong grip on the US market, this isn’t always the case in other countries especially when compared to the local search engines.

Who are the players?
Some of these engines are familiar. Yahoo Japan owns more than half the market of Japan. They also have a strong grip on many other international countries. However you will also find country specific engines such as Baidu in China which owns about 60% of its market. Naver in Korea also owns over 60% of it’s market. Yandex in Russia owns little less than half it’s market. Seznam controls nearly 65% of the Czech market.

How is it that these search engines are able to compete with the likes of Google?
They know their market. They have the competitive advantage of targeting a local market and studying on their behaviors, their use of language as well as their preferences. They have worked on their technology and algorithms specifically catering to their local audience. Google unfortunately due to their sheer size and international presence have a more difficult time focusing on their individual markets. For example did you know in Korea, the more busy and complex the page is, the more authority the site is given by it’s users? This goes completely opposite of what one should do in the US where simplicity and targeted pages are key to a good conversion.

Foreign Laws
Another aspect is foreign laws. Local engines like Baidu are well aware with the regulations and as a local pioneer has a lot of say and influence. Large engines like Google have a hard time dealing with all the various laws especially as many countries favor local companies as opposed to foreign competitors. Many of these search engines were started before Google and has firmly established themselves as the market leader.

Google however has put a lot of investment in trying to target these local markets and it is Google’s hope that continued investment and effort will eventually entrench them deeper into these markets.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM

Google has finally launched Google Suggestion, a tool which was started back in 2004, but was never released. If you go to Google.com and start typing out a search query, you will now see “suggested keywords” appear in a drop down. This seems to only work on their homepage. Once you make a search query you will no longer see the suggestions. For people who need keyword suggestions for the SEM campaigns, this can be a pretty handy tool to use.

Don’t forget that this is a great way to discover negative (google) or excluded (yahoo) keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you specify in your SEM campaign as keywords you DO NOT want your ad to show on. For example if you are selling books, but don’t sell education books, you would have the keyword books, but negative out the keyword education.

Yahoo! has had a suggestion bar for a while now. How this affects the way searchers behave remains to be seen. One affect it could have is to lower the cases of misspellings. Another is to potentially increase the use of longer search queries by users who previously only used 1-2 word queries. If there are any dramatic changes in either of these areas, it could potentially shift the way you should setup and maintain your Google SEM campaigns.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM

Today I am posting a presentation on the new first page bids and dynamic quality scores for Google AdWords. It is my hope that the new quality scores and bidding algorithms will force pay per click marketers to become smarter; however I do agree with Paul Lee that there is a chance that more “dumb money” will be floating around. My belief is that after all of the “dumb money” is spent, many advertisers will look back to see that they received very low ROIs and will be forced to either leave pay-per-click marketing or use an agency that is ROI-focused. It looks like SlideShare.net does not properly sync up PowerPoint 2007 presentations as well as I hoped, but it gets the message across.

Please remember that many agencies are not focused or concerned about your returns and only wish to spend more of your money on pay-per-click systems. Just in business, less can sometimes mean more when it comes to keyword bidding.

LeadQual has some internal algorithms for determining keyword bid positions, called MONACO (Monetization and Cost Analysis) and I am very eager to be working on updating these algorithms with the new first page bidding and dynamic quality scores in place!

- Nicholas Abramovic

The following is a type of match that less than 1% of all advertisers are familiar with.

Quick Definition: Negative embedded match gives an advertiser the ability to show every variation of a keyword, except for the keyword.

What does this mean?

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate”

This will allow me to show up for “Real Estate San Francisco”, “San Francisco Real Estate Today”, “Francisco Real San Estate” but not “San Francisco Real Estate”

Why is this useful for search engine marketers?

1. Negative embedded match allows you control over conflicts between multiple keywords (with multiple match types) that are all eligible for triggering potential ads.  – This is critical if you are running multiple keyword match types in various AdWords accounts.

Example: Account 1 has only broad keywords while Account 2 has the same exact keywords but in exact match. In this example Account 1 would be implementing negative embedded match.

2)  Allows ads not to be displayed for keywords that produce low return on investments, but yet appear for specific keyword variations.

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate” derives a conversion rate of 1%, while variations such as “Cheap San Francisco Real Estate” or “San Francisco Real Estate Companies” produce 5% conversion rates. With endless variations of “San Francisco Real Estate” it is most efficient to run negative embedded match.

How does this work?

Let’s use the example of just “real estate” this time.  We are a national chain that sells real estate, however the keyword “real estate” brings in very little conversions, or conversions at an unaffordable price-point.  We know that three word combinations and four word combinations (“San Francisco real estate”, “Denver real estate”, “real estate in San Diego”) have excellent ROIs.

In our example we would insert –[real estate] into our ad group to appear for all variations except “real estate” when someone searches Google.

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Final NotesEffective search marketing requires more and more control over keywords.By using negative embedded matching we can pull search query reports to see what variations users typed into Google and which of keywords provide the highest return on investment.

If your vertical contains high traffic and there is budget for keyword testing, I strongly encourage implementing negative embedded matching to hunt the long-tail of effective keywords.

Happy Hunting,
Nicholas Abramovic

When avoiding work, Nicholas spends his day -[blogging about] 

Recently I had a customer who had many of their pages missing from the Google index, including the home page and all other top level pages.  The home page was indexed, but there was no cache for it, and the title and snippet were from some other source, not the current home page.  It appeared that somehow their pages were being ignored by Google, or they had incurred some kind of penalty.  The pages were indexed fine by Yahoo and MSN, so this was something specific to Google.

We looked carefully at many things to find the problem, including robots.txt, use of redirects on the root URL, XML site map files, linking, use of session IDs, etc etc.  Finally, we isolated the problem: a piece of JavaScript code that conditionally redirected the user to a test page.  Normally the JavaScript variable would not trigger this redirection, but it appears Google did not trust the code, and interpreted this as a cloaking/spam technique where  users are redirected to a different page and do not see what the search engines see.

The code was something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var test=”yes”;
if (test!= “yes”) {
document.write(“<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0;URL=http://www.mysite.com/testing/’ />”); }
</script>

This code was was on all pages that were not indexed, and not present on those pages that were indexed.  When we removed this code, the pages started to get back into the index within hours, and already over 1,500 pages have been added to the index.   Thus it was obvious this was the culprit, even though this was just an innocent way of making it easy to show a test page with a simple variable change.

Normally you would not expect a search engine, even Google, to  follow this code.  It is a meta refresh dynamically written by a JavaScript document.write() command.  However, Google spam filters look for “tricky” spam techniques, and they obviously evaluated this code, and did not trust the conditional check on the “test” variable.  I think what happened was that they always followed the meta refresh and indexed that page instead of each original page.  Ouch!

Google has been very clear that their algorithms look for spam techniques that try to fool them.  For example, see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/

I suspect there are many other ways to get your pages banned or penalized by search engines.  It appears that Google is using some very sophisticated techniques, though not quite sophisticated enough in our case!

So, if your pages are missing or removed from search engine indexes, look carefully at any areas where you have JavaScript-controlled redirects, meta refresh commands or other techniques that might be interpreted as spam attempts.

John Erickson
LeadQual