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Re: Google Site Search, er, I mean Search in Site

Tanya Rietze — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:20:00 GMT

Thanks for the comments! Is Teleporting really the "official" name? It seems it is a bit of a reach. But I'll buy SiS or Search within Search or Search in Site... at least that makes sense to me. (Albeit still easily confused with site search and site: commands.) As far as trust, if Google would build into webmaster tools an option to turn off site search altogether AND another option to just turn off any paid listings when SiS is used then I'd be happy! Google needs to allow us retain the user experience for our sites - we know what we're doing.

Re: Google Site Search

lanceloveday — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:21:00 GMT

Excellent review, Tanya. This also brings up the question of how Google is targeting ads to these queries. I'd hope that only ads on Expanded Broad Match would be served up in response to these site-specific searches. If Phrase and/or Exact match ads are being displayed, that would be dirty pool on Google's part. The value of someone searching the Web from Google.com is likely to be much higher than the person who is searching an individual site from Google. An initial review of ads showing up for Web results vs. site-specific results on the same keywords seems to indicate that only Broad Match ads are being displayed thus far, but this is definitely something to watch. Given what Google has done with Broad Match (I mean "Expanded" Broad Match), I'm less trustful than I might have been in the past on things like this.

Re: Google Site Search

rishilakhani — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:24:00 GMT

Google actually did announce SiS (official name teleportation), and this was picked up by NY Times as well - see http://www.seosmarty.com/search-within-search which has links to google and analysis on paid search issue. Follow up on http://www.seosmarty.com/search-in-search-follow

Re: Landing Pages - SEO vs SEM?

seopractices — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Hi Tanya, I read the article, very interesting. I believe that you have much control over your paid listings than organic listings, then that's why the author of the article writes about organic landing pages as being highly optimized, keyword rich. On the contrary for Paid traffic landing pages you use certain type of keywords, the ones that call to action like: buy, order, the product name, a combination of them, etc. So this paid traffic landing pages have different aspects that you want to include, so the buyer takes action. You want to include on this type of landing pages: -Attractive titles -Signs of trust -Testimonials -Outstanding call to action buttons -High quality images of the product See the difference is that in organic search you have less control, so you don't really know what type of customer is going to land on your site. It can be visitors looking just for information, people that want to buy but not ready yet, people ready to buy, etc. So this organic landing page is more general to be able to target a more general audience, and depending on the type of customer you drive them to different type of pages on your site.

Re: Hiring In-house SEOs and SEO Agencies

Tanya Rietze — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:10:00 GMT

Thanks for the comments Gustavo. I agree, if you see an SEO (agency or in house) actively participating in blogs, forums and social networks around SEO topics you can really get a sense for their passion and expertise. I guess the best way to find out if someone really is a search geek is to first search for them. Anyone active in the search industry is well aware of what the results are for searches on their name! Tanya

Hiring In-house SEOs and SEO Agencies

seopractices — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:50:00 GMT

Hi Tanya, I'm Gustavo Parra (seopractices), an SEO Geek...he, he...I agree with you. Most SEO's have passion, a great attitude for learning new things and to be up to date on the subject. I can ad a couple more: Are always active participants at forums, Blogs, social networks etc., and usually have their own site or Blog. I Also saw the interview at semoz.org, very enlightened; it gave me a good perspective of the role that should be played by an In-House SEO. Hope to see more information like this on your Blog, specially from some one who is working at a large Company. Thanks.

Re: Landing Pages - SEO vs SEM?

Tanya Rietze — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:14:00 GMT

Thanks for sending this. So this is the gist from that blog post by Google: "How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience. 1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster. 2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results. 3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results. The key is the first statement "When we detect duplicate content...". While Google has done a good job of this on their own it wouldn't hurt for them to open up the communications with webmasters because we could tell them up front about duplicates. The issue arises when Google does not detect the duplicate content and still indexes multiple URLs for one page which still happens quite frequently. My suggestion is that Google offer a similar tool for Webmasters as Yahoo! Site Explorer so we can help them reduce duplicate content we know exists and of course consolidate our link popularity by doing so. Great comment!

Re: Landing Pages - SEO vs SEM?

Tpangakis — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:45:00 GMT

"This is where I think you have to think about search as a holistic experience - considering sponsored, organic and on-site experiences together. " Yes, I agree. I was looking that HP.COM home page and wondered by there weren't more options under the Resources menu on the left side. What about adding pages that are the destinations for frequently search keywords like Warranty, Customer Self Repair, and Specs? Warranty Frequently Asked Questions (http://h40059.www4.hp.com/warranty/information/faq.php) Customer Self Repair (http://h18029.www1.hp.com/support/selfrepair/) Product Bulletin - QuickSpecs (http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/ProductBulletin.html) Tara

Re: Yahoo!'s Dynamic URL Rewrite

Dictina — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:20:00 GMT

Hi, I think that Google also supports this consolidation of link popularity. See their post at the Official Webmaster Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html Regards, Dictina http://dictina.es/

Re: Google Sitelinks-Why Won’t Google Let Us Designate Sitelinks for Our Domains?

Tanya Rietze — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Thanks Kate - you bring up some great points. I hadn't considered the validity the sitelinks bring to a search result but I think you are correct in that assumption. Hopefully Google will move toward SEOs providing the sitelinks going forward. It would be a win for everyone - Google, SEOs, searchers and all of our customers. Thanks for your comment! Tanya

Here here for choosing our own sitelinks!

kate.bell — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:09:00 GMT

Tanya, I've had a similar experience to yours with my EF Education sites. We have sitelinks for our company name in google.com, .fr, .de, .it and .es. As an SEO, I love them because they make it very clear that this is the "official" site when people are searching specifically for our brand. I'm sure they are useful for visitors too when the links displayed are actually representative of the site's organization.

But like you, I have mostly useful links and a couple of not very useful ones in each country. I've tried removing those that aren't useful via the webmaster interface, and indeed they are dropped, but have had no luck getting more useful links picked up. I've done as you have, putting comments into the webmaster tools, but also have tried to figure out how the sitelinks are being generated and move some content around on the page to help get those pages picked up more. No luck though.

For example, I noticed that a lot of sitelinks were coming from my homepage header and footer, so I thought, why not rearrange the footer so the more important links for the sitelinks appear first? I did that, but it made no difference on the sitelinks. Sigh.

I've also, like you, had problems with misleading or inaccurate text being picked up to describe what is otherwise a great page for a sitelink. So for example, instead of a link saying "Jobs", which is what all internal links to that page say and what the page title says, I have a text saying "What's available" (taken from the header of the jobs page). This would make a customer think the link is going to a product page, not a jobs page.

All that to say, my experience has been identical to yours: I love having sitelinks but really wish I had more control over them in terms of which links get chosen and what texts are used for the links. If sitelinks are only for very relevant and popular sites, why not give us some control over how they appear so they are logical for visitors? Even if it's not in the webmaster tool interface, guidelines from Google about how the sitelinks are determined would help us to rearrange our sites to make the appropriate links more clear for the automaton.

Kate