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:
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?
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.
Robin Goad from Hitwise posted an excellent report today looking at the search engine market share in the UK.
What I found interesting is that the “Pages from the UK” search option accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic. When you consider that in the UK www.google.co.uk has a 73.74% market share of UK searches (www.google.com has 13.77%) then 13.6% is a very significant number of searches!
Many UK websites are also more likely to convert into sales and leads from referred UK-based traffic so it’s essential you’re listed and ranking well for relevant searches to maximise your exposure from Google UK.
Below I’ve listed 5 important steps to consider towards localising a UK website:
1) Get Indexed: The first step is making sure your site is indexed for “pages from the UK” searches, in order to achieve this a domain name should either use a .co.uk TLD or be hosted in the UK.
2) Set location: Set your geographic target to the UK in Google Webmaster Central. You can even set individual locations for sub-domains or sub-folders if you have a uk.domain.com or domain.com/uk international website.
3) List address information: Ensure your address details are listed on your website, using this in the contact page and footer will help to show Google your physical location and may also boost rankings for “[keyword] in [town/city/county/UK]“.
4) Sign-up for Google Maps: Adding your business to Google Maps is unlikely to improve your rankings but it can’t do any harm and can get you listed for local searches on Google UK and Google Maps business searches.
5) UK link building: Building UK specific inbound links can also help to improve the relevancy of your website for Google UK searches.
Anyone who spends as much time on search engines as I do will have noticed that Google is sporting a black background today in an attempt to persuade people to turn off their lights for an hour tonight and cut down their household emissions.
The search engine often highlights important events such as World Aids Day but it is unusual for it to change its trademark appearance so completely even for just 24 hours.
It will be an interesting study in just how powerful Google has become if it helps motivate people to undertake such a gesture this evening. To shamelessly use someone else’s catchphrase: With great power comes great responsibility.
A recent survey conducted by Superbrands revealed that the engine is Britons’ favourite online brand, beating even the BBC – a broadcaster globally regarded for its editorial policy.
Google’s informal motto is widely known to be ‘Don’t be evil’. As its influence and importance to the modern world expands, that could become an increasingly pertinent phrase.
Google Universal Search was launched last summer and while it didn’t go unnoticed within the industry, many brands didn’t seem to realise the potential impact this could have to their websites traffic and sales. But since the new search box within a search feature they now seem to be catching up, I’ve received many questions from clients during the last couple of weeks asking about how they can get a search box appearing for their own brand queries and which other Universal Search results they can be listed for.
There has been much debate about how useful Google Universal search is, in my opinion this helps provide a better all-round user experience - in most cases producing topical results of interest in real-time and helping to vary the type of listings displayed. But as far as I’m aware not many brands have adopted targeting Google Universal Search and OneBox results as an SEO strategy, Google obviously benefits itself by helping to promote it’s other services, but there are certainly companies which are receiving large quantities of extra traffic from this too, whether they are targeting this intentionally or not.
Below are some of the types of Google Universal Search listings where you may be able to influence rankings: (Continue Reading…)
This question may seem like a no-brainer, but actually, the answer is not necessarily yes in all circumstances. If any of the following examples apply to you’re website, you may not be in need of an search engine optimization campaign right now:
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.
Rumour has it that Google is going to team up with Digg to punish people who continually submit their sites to Digg just to get a PR boost.
A lot of people think the rumour is false but it is interesting nonetheless. Links from Digg are not editorially given - it’s pretty much just a free for all - so there is no reason for Google to count them.
The only time a link should count is when it hits the front page. Perhaps Digg should be nofollowing all the other links?
Remember that the aim of Digg isn’t to get links from Digg, it’s to get links from Digg readers websites.
Wasn’t the process you went through more like this?
1/ We looked at what Google were doing
2/ We copied it