Microsoft has proudly announced the addition of something that looks very similar to Google sitelinks to their search results.
In fact if I was Google I would be digging out the patent they have that shows how these results are generated and thinking hard about whether to challenge how Microsoft is doing this.
One commenter put it quite well after the announcement:
Last week Britannica.com decided to adopt a “first click free” strategy allowing web publishers to link directly to article pages. Readers who clicked through to the page were allowed to see the content of that article for free and if they wanted to explore further they need a subscription.
This is a very interesting piece of linkbait from britannica.com and one that could see them challenging Wikipedia if they can sort out their on site SEO strategy.
Currently the site has over 1.6 million links to the homepage compared to Wikipedias 4.3 million (for the main homepage) so clearly it has the potential to gain top rankings. The main problem (and one that is being addressed by last weeks announcement) is that britannica.com has only 2.2 million links to the domain compared to 117 million links to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has allowed deeplinking for years and as a result has been gaining links at an astonishing rate. The best part of these links is that they quite often have the right anchor text and are totally natural. In short the link profile is 100% perfect.
Britannica has a long way to go to catch up with Wikipedia but they can certainly start to challenge them in the long term. The first step has been taken, the second step is to sort out on site SEO and offer the first click free to spiders as well (content is king). Finally they need to structure the site in the same way as Wikipedia with cross linking between articles.
The main question I have is would Google want two encyclopaedias ranking for each search result?
After GoCompare suffered a Google penalty (which was recently lifted) one might expect the car insurance industry in the UK to pay attention and stop buying links.
This doesn’t yet seem to be the case with Kwik Fit apparently suffering a minus 50 penalty after aggressively trying to rank their kwik-fit-insurance.com domain. Another site called BestDealInsurance have also been hit while there are no doubt a few more sites with lower profiles that have also been hit.
Is this a sign of things to come?
Searching Google this morning for the word “blog” i discovered that the london2012.com blog was ranking 4th.
Now 4th is a pretty good result for a blog that only launched in 2006 and is pretty unlikely to attract many links. In fact the site is doing quite well on the link front with 393 but that’s far below what most top blogs have so what is the secret?
Looking at the links we can see that the majority of the links are nothing remarkable aside from the 5 that are from very highly trusted pages on the BBC website.
This just goes to show that building 5 good links can be just as worthwhile as building hundreds of thousands of low quality ones.
Google has been enforcing foreign legislation on people from the UK for some time now and they are losing money because of it.
Here in the UK gambling is a perfectly legitimate pastime with proper regulations and yet Google won’t let people advertise on Adwords for gambling related terms.
Why?
How can banning advertisers for things like “online casino” make any difference? The only thing hurting here is Google’s ad revenue. If they want to be responsible and stop people gambling then surely they should remove the organic listings too.
If I can walk down the high street and place a bet then why won’t Google let me do this by clicking on their adverts?
News that Google is to sell Performics comes as no suprise and is welcomed by pretty much everybody.
However the rumour that Google might be about to buy Expedia (owners of TripAdvisor) is slightly more worrying. The problem is that TripAdvisor and Expedia get a HUGE amount of traffic from Google and there is bound to be a conflict of interest either real or perceived if Google owns these properties.
Imagine if TripAdvisor was to start getting higher search rankings, what would their competitors say? It wouldn’t do any good for Google and it certainly wouldn’t be good for the search industry as a whole. Most people are not aware of how Google works and it wouldn’t take much for the rumour that “site x ranks highly because Google owns it” to spread round.
Personally I think that Google owning any sites that rely on search traffic is a mistake.
Monitoring what people are doing as they interact on your websites is one thing. Launching a chat application to talk to them as they browse is quite another.
TechCrunch today has details about Woopra, an analytics provider that lets you chat to your users in real time as they browse your site.
The implications are pretty huge, you know that they arrived at the site by searching for “blue widgets” so you can ask them if they found what they are looking for and direct them to the right page if they are having trouble with the search form. The only problem is do people like to be watched in this way?
I know that webmasters can watch my every move online but most people think that browsing the web is a fairly anonymous affair.
As Arrington says in the comments: “Someone opens up a chat window on me while I’m visiting a website, I never come back.”
Jill Whalen has become the latest SEO to join the SEO standards debate with an interesting post on Search Engine Land.
In the UK SEO doesn’t seem to be suffering from a reputation crisis, aside from frustrations about people being cold called. The industry is healthy and, in the main, people are seeing strong results and very few companies seem to be ripping people off.
If SEO companies started upsetting too many clients then the authorities in the UK would be quick to take action I have no doubt which sort of makes any SEO standards obselite. What would the standards say about buying links? If buying links wasn’t within the standards and a company got caught would they be ejected from the system? If so then this would no doubt cost them a lot of business.
Personally I don’t think the industry needs regulation and can’t see how an independent body could hope to govern such a diverse set of businesses.
Judging by some of the links to diy.com, the website of B&Q, there has been some buying going on. Of course we don’t know this for sure but the links look unnatural and are next to links for things like “home insurance” etc so they appear to be paid links.
What stands out to me is the fact that whoever has been buying the links is doing it in a really stupid way. For instance they are linking to the homepage with the anchor text “wardrobes” when the homepage doesn’t have that word in the text. They do this with countless different terms all with links to the homepage instead of a category page or directly to a product.
Aside from being a total waste of money we can’t see any reason why a site like this needs to buy links. They could rank for anything with some half decent on page optimisation.
Previously I thought that a search box only appeared when a domain was enough of an authority to get sitelinks.
Legal and General is being given a site search box without having sitelinks, I can’t see any other examples of this happening though.
Wasn’t the process you went through more like this?
1/ We looked at what Google were doing
2/ We copied it