Does Google consider SEO to be spam?

Matt Cutt’s breaks it down for us in his video:
“SEO stands for Search engine optimisation and essentially just means trying to make sure your webpages are well represented within search engines”.

And consider the honest to goodness SEO measures (as Cutts does here) taken by righteous and idealistic optimisers – such as:
1. Making sure your pages are ‘crawlable’, or in other words, accessible to SEs.
2. Including the right search terms.
3. Improving usability through good design and internal linking structure.
One Youtube commenter had this to say:

And Matt’s final thoughts….
“There are many, many valid ways in which people can make the world better with SEO”
So the answer is no then. Cheers Matt.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS75vhGO-kk

Google real-time analytics beta:

A new addition to Google Analytics (beta) will allow you to see real-time traffic data for your site. These new metrics include number of users on your site right now, which pages they are reading and referrals. The behaviour of potential customers coming at you live. Knowledge like this could be put to good marketing use.

Source: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html

Useful Takeaways from Day 1 of the SearchLove 2011 conference:

Joost de Valk, Tom Critchlow and Rand Fishkin are just a handful of names from the list of SEO aristocracy who gave speeches at the conference.

Here are some of the best bits:
http://www.koozai.com/blog/events/135-takeaways-from-searchlove-day-1-searchlove/

Adwords ceases to support Internet Explorer 6 and introduces ‘bid-per-call’:

This is a notice to Google Adwords users who browse with IE6. Get yourself a new version by the end of the year.
In addition – Adwords is rolling out a phone call bidding scheme for its users.
Sources: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/retiring-support-for-internet-explorer_27.html and http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-bid-per-call-in-adwords.html

Broken link checker plugin for WordPress:

This new WordPress plugin will check all of the content on your site for broken links, redirects and missing images. It will then notify you on your dashboard or by email.
Site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Google Maps allows you to see inside a shop!

Now, through the power Google, we can look inside a shop whilst exploring a Google map. The next generation of Street View. It just gets better and better.
I managed to get this far inside the comic store –

That shelf at the back looks a bit overloaded to me.

Site: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742568,-117.820365&spn=0.004853,0.013561&sll=33.742814,-117.816672&layer=c&cid=7704649002191693046&panoid=qHPoNvOZOYBaFsE0vGCa5A&cbp=13,127.37,,0,11.85&gl=us&hq=comic+book+store+orange+county&t=h&vpsrc=0&cbll=33.742848,-117.816622&z=17

Insights into Google’s rating guidelines:

Dr. (SEOmoz) Pete lays down a few snippets of the recently leaked Google guidelines document; for those of you who missed it.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines

And finally…

Many of you will have heard or seen ‘Take this Lollipop’. No more needs to be said – just go to the link here if you haven’t already and then check out this NY Times review (in that order).
Site: http://www.takethislollipop.com/

* A reference to the film – ‘Withnail and I‘

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There have been a couple of Google announcements recently that have ruffled some feathers within the search marketing community.

Encryption of organic keyword search data for logged in users which Google is proclaiming as a move to protect user privacy.

The first announcement has come as quite a blow to the search engine optimisers amongst us. The net result of the announcement is that anyone logged in to a Google account when searching won’t pass any keyword information to analytics programs because the data will be encrypted. They’ll still show as a hit but the all-important info of what they searched for to arrive won’t be made known and will instead just show as “not provided”. Google suggests that it’ll account for about 9.9% of organic search data although that number is likely to increase if we see Google+ become the social network of choice over Facebook.

Apart from the obvious blow to the online marketing world from a reporting perspective, I mean it’s already difficult to justify the value of good on-going SEO work without losing a big chunk of supporting data right?, there’s a couple of other issues with Google justification of this change that has got peoples backs up.

1. Awords users will still be able to see this data. So not so much in the interest of user privacy but more like a pay-per-view model.
2. Users not logged won’t have that same encryption. So the privacy of non-Google account holders doesn’t seem to matter.

There’s all sorts of theories being thrown around about what they’re up to (perhaps there’s genuinely nothing more to it than they suggest) like this epiphany from +Jenn Mathews where she considers it might just be Google trying to track the referrals to its own Google+ asset (I’m not convinced). It also appears to have caused some unusual affects as reported by @AlexMoss from Pleer.

My own take on it is I’m predicting that reporting on encrypted keyword searches will become a feature of the Google Analytics Premium service.

The Google Analytics free version has become the analytics program of choice for many search marketers and for the majority of sites being tracked there seems to be little reason to start paying for the premium version. Perhaps this would be a reason for people to start paying? They’ve handed out their samples of meth to us in the form of a free Analytics account and now we’ve become dependent they want us to pay for our Skanté (sorry that’s the Breaking Bad thing again).

There’s a petition to show the volume of dissatisfaction over this change available to sign at http://keywordtransparency.com/ which has been put together by @searchmartin if you feel strongly about this.

Introduction of usage limits for the Google Maps API

This more recent announcement has also rubbed a few people up the wrong way. As of October 1^st Google announce that they will impose a usage limit on calls to the Google Maps API and sites exceeding those limits will need to either pay for the excess usage or purchase a Maps API Premier License.

For most users the usage limits will be more than enough I suspect with only high volume for-profit sites being affected but is it another indicator that Google is moving its previously free services to a pay to play model?

What next?

Will we see more Google free services move to a premium model now users are dependants?

Will we see Blogger offer an improved paid version? There have certainly been some interesting announcements there like Google+ integration and Dynamic Views that has encouraged a few people to switch back from WordPress.

The post Google got us hooked on Crack Codecaine and now it’s gonna make us pay appeared first on PushON Ltd.

For a growing minority of your website visitors, i.e. organic visitors who are logged into a Google account, you will no-longer be able to see the keywords that they used to find you.

The announcement is a bit vague, and tries to explain the benefits of the change to the way keyword data for organic searches by logged in users is shown.

It’s a bit like when your bank sends a letter to say they’re increasing charges and tries to tell you it’s for your own good.

Understandably, the analysts are raging – just check the comments on the announcement.

Google have made this change, which is a clear deterioration in service, due to privacy concerns.

Why would the search term used to find your site be a privacy issue?

Well from your perspective, it doesn’t make a difference whether the user is logged in or not, because the data isn’t segmented by logged in versus not logged in, and there doesn’t seem to be any enhancement in terms of demographic data available. And either way, you can track against a unique reference using a custom variable and form data (not that you or I would do that).

But it’s the data that Google collect.

The search engines, including Google are regularly asked to provide data by government agencies and federal courts.

In fact, in the last recorded figures, for the 6 months between July and December the United States filed a whopping 4,601 requests for user data, of which 94% were accepted and complied with (partially or fully). Despite it’s size, the UK is up in the top four with 1,162 requests of which 72% were accepted.

Country	Data Requests	#
United States	4,601	1
Brazil	1,804	2
India	1,699	3
United Kingdom	1,162	4
France	1,021	5
Italy	837	6
Germany	768	7
Spain	359	8
Australia	345	9
Poland	272	0

If you’re interested to know more, here’s Google’s FAQ on user data requests and the full list of user data requests by country.

Many people will disagree with me here, but I personally prefer security over privacy, and would rather that Government agencies are able to see search data on certain topics, or to assist with court cases. Of course there are downsides, and there will be occasions where this information is used in a hugely negative way. But on balance, while I understand why Google have made this change, I’d like my keyword data back please.

They welcome feedback, so hopefully this will be temporary.

Credit to Sam for mentioning this today.

The post Analytics Keyword Data – Unavailable For Logged In Google Users appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This might be useful for anyone who wants to export and group data in Microsoft Excel by date – e.g. to quickly make sense of ranking results, Google Analytics exports or Basecamp time tracking data.

Pivot tables in Microsoft Excel are super useful, and sometimes you might want to sub total the information. There are so many directions you can shuffle the information in pivot tables, but it’s not obvious how to do this simple sub total.

When you have the information you need in the Pivot table, right click over a date entry, and click ‘Group’.

You will then have a list of grouping options for your dates.

Choose your grouping option, and you will be presented with your data in a neat high level view.

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Personally, I’ve always had a particular interested in integrated marketing campaigns, where you can create a bigger impact and use your marketing budget more efficiently.

The new features will help more accurately evaluate each step in the process – you will be able to isolate certain campaigns, keywords, creatives, etc, and provide both direct (last click conversion attribution) and the indirect impact on sales revenue and goals – e.g. clicked on a PPC advert, signed up to the newsletter, and later visited via a search for the brand term.

This will obviously work well for online channels, but if implemented properly, this could also show how offline, email and mobile applications impact sales.

Here’s how the new interface looks:

And here’s a video from Google demonstrating the new features:

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What have they changed?

Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When a visitor closes their browser.

If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.

In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor. (Stays the same)
• At the end of a day. (Stays the same)
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

Why have they made the change?

The change has been made to more accurately track the source, medium and campaign, etc. that the user visits from. The change is very minor, but will change the shape of the traffic sources shown in your Google Analytics account.

This change will increase the accuracy of multi-channel funnels, which helps you understand the user journey.

Is it a big deal?

No. Google estimates that this will result in less than a 1% change, so put the kettle on and chill.

*Images from searchenginejournal.com and ideachampions.com

The post If You Use Google Analytics, Your Results Will Change As Of Today appeared first on PushON Ltd.

To summarise some of the changes added to Analytics:

Dashboard

The Analytics Dashboard is now much more advanced, allowing you to add a number of widgets, including new visualisations that weren’t previously available.

new google analytics dashboard

Custom Dashboard

Again an update to the Dashboard, you can now customise up to 20 different dashboards per account, allowing you to review quick snapshots of various important information from you Analytics account.

Ability to Add Google Analytics Dashboards

Navigation

There have been a number of navigational changes. Starting firstly with the top-level navigation, there is a now three main options: “Dashboard”, “My Site” and “Custom Reports”. There appears to be a stronger emphasis on custom reporting in general, seemingly pushing you to customise Google Analytics to be specific to the data you actually find important (through the use of multiple dashboards, standard custom reports, Intelligence, etc).

Aside from the top-level navigation, the primary left-hand nav now contains newly-named options:

New Navigation in Google Analytics

In-Page Refinements

Another useful feature brought into the new Google Analytics inteface seems to be the ability to refine and compare data without having to go away and create advanced segments (although this option is still available).

On standard line graphs, you can now quickly compare metrics:

Compare Metrics on Line Graphs

When viewing reports, you can now also take the previous “Containing:” refinement fieldto a whole new level with segmentation options:

Keyword Report Segmentation

Some other points of interest:

The ability to export via PDF has now been removed (found by Neil Yeomans).

All profiles from all accounts are now viewable in a list when you first login to your Analytics account, allowing you to quickly scroll to select an individual profile without first clicking into the account.

What do you think of the new Google Analytics interface?

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It has been unclear as to why Google as taken so long to release the feature as its been one of the most requested by SEO’s in recent years. Up until this point we have had to make do with alternatives such as GA Notes. GA Notes is a plugin for Firefox and in fairness does an ok job. The main drawback to it however is that you can’t view the notes on multiple computers. So for example if you add some notes at home you are not then able to see them at work.

It’s clear that Google has taken this issue into consideration when developing there version as they provide this functionality. Anyone with access to an account can add notes and they can be made either private or public. This is ideal as sometimes you wont want to share certain things with clients however its great that they will be able to see when key changes are made.

Google analytics annotations is also going to be a feature that will greatly appeal to large corporations. More and more big corporations are using Google analytics but with so many different departments workings on a site it can be difficult to track things. Annotations will allow people in different departments to see when different things occured and how they effected the site. It will acts as a type of central repository.

Anyway instead of me banging on about it i will leave it to the guys at Google to explain it in this hand video.

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Promoted as a way to have “24-hour a day access to a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site’s analytics”, Intelligence is aimed at making the job of a web master much easier. The basic premise of this technology is that an ‘alert’ is triggered whenever abnormalities occur in the data that is being monitored. This could be a significant change in bounce rate, spike in new visitors, or your page views increasing by 50% – the alerts are comprehensive.

By default, Google Analytics Intelligence creates alerts whenever there is a significant change in data patterns, but these alerts can be customised in a few different ways. The first, and easiest way, is to alter the ‘alert sensitivity’ sliding bar which is the indicator of how often alerts should be triggered. High sensitivity results in less alerts, and vice-versa.

The second option is custom alerts. Below is a quick setup guide.

1. Go to the Intelligence page and click ‘Create a Custom Alert’.

2. Enter a relevant name for the alert, e.g “10% Bounce Rate Increase”.

3. Leave the ‘Apply to’ field alone, unless you want to apply the alert to multiple analytics profiles

4. Select which period you want the alert to be relevant to. Either ‘day’, ‘week’ or ‘month’.

5. IMPORTANT: Tick the ‘Email me…’ checkbox if you want to be emailed when the alert is triggered. Now move onto the next options.

6. Select which traffic source the alert will be applied to. In this example I’m using “All traffic” – which is self explanatory.

7. For the second drop-down menu, you are selecting which metric the alert will focus on. In this example I have used ‘Bounce Rate’, which then generates fields to its right hand side. I’ve selected ‘% increases by more than’ then ‘10%’ compared to ‘previous week’.

The purpose of these custom alerts is not to do your job for you, but helps to easily identify any abnormalities in traffic without having to manually review the data. Intelligence cannot tell you why these things happened, but allows you identify the areas you need to improve upon (or see how well you are doing, depending on the metrics!). An advantage of this new Google Analytics feature is that it has a back-log of alert data, meaning you can see all of the alerts that have happened in the past.

How will you be using Google Analytics Intelligence?

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Ok so to get started you will need to login to analytics and click on the visitors option in the menu and select hostnames. This will display a list of all the urls including non WWW ones and how many visits have been made to each one. Hopefully the non www one won’t be to high.

Now er need to go a little deeper to find the links themselves. You will need to click on the non www version link and then once the new page has loaded click on the referral option in the advanced segment drop down. Finally you will need to select source in the dimension drop down. All the urls will then be displayed.

As you can see they are pretty quick and easy to find and can be a really useful tool in your seo campaign.

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