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Google Good or Evil Part II

Rachel Fisher — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:38:19 +0000

Google caused a stir in the Internet a couple weeks ago. Google announced that they would encrypt the search sessions of users signed into Google accounts (also called SSL or secure socket layer encryption.) Why would Google do this? That’s a great question. This question is creating heated Is Google Good Or Evil debates all around the web (read my colleague Brian Chiou’s Google Good Or Evil article for his take).

What does SSL Encryption really mean?

SSL encryption means search queries and search results are private. Search results are only visible and accessible to the individual user on the other end of the computer (or phone)…well, AND to Google of course.

Did search engine optimization get harder?

Yes, since search engine optimizers lost the ability to identify keywords searched for a large portion of web traffic. SSL encryption means Internet marketing analysts can’t tie a keyword searched to a goal (or conversion) on a website for users signed into their Google Account.

Were we spoiled with free access to such valuable information in the past?

Google’s decision to limit analysis comes as a blow. SSL encryption isn’t Google’s first paradigm shift and won’t be their last. But why would Google cloak something we are used to knowing? Something we used to help clients optimize content for search marketing?

Google says in their official blog that they want to “make search more secure”:

As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users.

Is Google really concerned about our privacy? I just looked up my house in Google Earth. There is my car sitting in the driveway. I could zoom and see me sitting on the couch watching TV. Security? Really?

Google says they will continue to pass across secure socket layer data for those using Google’s advertising platforms. SSL encryption only affects organic (non-paid) search results. The lesson here: Pay the price and Google will giftwrap keywords, tie a bow around them and drop them in your lap.

Not convinced money is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption?

SSL kills retargeting, the practice of showing ads related to recently visited sites. Retargeting works for old advertising reasons. Retargeting works because repetition works. Retargeting works because customers think serendipity when a massive, intelligent, invisible hand sends subliminal messages and influences free will. Leaving aside the used car salesman feel to retargeting for another post, Google killed retargeting because of how this marketing tactic impacts search. Retargeting reduces search volume. Reduce search volume and Google’s PPC money takes a hit. Money–not security–is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption change.

Does Google have something else up their sleeve?

The answer to that question is always YES. Are they prepping us for a paid tool that will allow access to this valuable data? Is Google pushing us to pay for data to improve their $10 billion revenue (from last quarter alone)? Answer: YES.

Or is Google responding to a security backlash? An “adbusters-like” attack on retargeting? Is Google taking steps to improve their privacy policy to benefit the end user? Like most things Google, the answers to all of these questions and many more is always YES. Personally I will believe in the divine Goodness of the “do no evil” company when my house isn’t so easily accessible from any cell phone, iPad or computer on earth.

So, where do we go from here?

As Internet Marketing Specialists, SSL encryption means we have our work cut out for us. We need to be creative in how we collect, analyze and report with our new search engine marketing (SEM) reality. Our Internet marketing world is challenged once again. But who isn’t up for a good challenge?

We say bring it on, Google. We’ll adapt. We’ll figure out ways to help clients understand your new SSL world as we’ve figured out all the other new worlds you’ve created. You’ll make us better Internet Marketers because of it. So thank you Google. I knew I loved you for a reason.

Google Boost : Local Business Marketing

Brian Chiou — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:07:49 +0000

Google Boost allows businesses to advertise to consumers who are seeking local products or services. If your business has a physical location and relies on walk-in customers, this blog post will show you a useful advertising channel to increase foot traffic to your business. As always, comments are appreciated.

What is Google Boost?

Google Boost is a new advertising platform that Google has begun to roll out to all industries across all cities in the world. In short, the platform allows you to pay for placement at the top of the page when an individual searches for a keyword that matches your industry. In the example shown below, you will notice the individual has typed “Asian restaurants San Francisco.”

Can you spot the Google Boosted ad?

Aside from the red box highlighting the Google Boosted business, the blue arrow is quite noticeable both on the map and at the top of the page. Google Boost gives the business room to place a well written ad that explains their business in more depth. ”A fresh take on Asian street food. Made with farm-fresh ingredients.”

Assuming the individual is in San Francisco, I believe that they only needed to type “Asian restaurants” to get the same result. If you type in “Chinese food” in Google without a city, it will most likely display results of local Chinese restaurants. Not only will the individual who is searching for “Asian restaurants San Francisco” pull up the Google Boosted ad, but so will another individual who lives in San Francisco that searches for “Asian Restaurants.”

The Business Case

Why should I be interested in Google Boost? And, what does a local consumer mean to me?

Did you know that there have been multiple studies that have shown the majority of customers who buy local conduct research online?

Here is a quick snapshot of the result of those studies.

% of individuals who research online before buying locally:

Google.com : 97%

Compete.com : 94%

BIA/Kelsy and Constat : 97%

The results are staggering at first, but does the survey necessarily apply to your business? If my business relied solely on returning customers, had zero competitors in the local market, or does not rely on local customers – I would be less inclined to invest in Google Boost. However, if you are a retailer with competitors in the market I would consider signing up for Google Boost today.

For the purposes of this blog post, let’s assume you are the owner of a business that has 5 competitors in the local area. Your product or service offerings are substitutes of one another and customer loyalty is zero. It is important that once you get that customer, you had better make them happy. Otherwise, they will go elsewhere for the product or service. The online market has created a bargain hunting wonderland and forces businesses to keep a watchful eye on their profit margins, overhead and customer satisfaction (all good things to keep an eye on obviously).

The latest .com sensation leads me to believe that bargain hunting \ smart shopping will only become more prevalent as time progresses. I have seen the research that shows this, but an easier place to look is the potential $15 billion IPO of the deal website Groupon. (source)

Back to our scenario, you have 5 competitors and your business.

Let’s assume there are 3,000 conversion focused individuals who want one of your products. They performed a Google search for your product / service… in this case “luxury cars.” Which ad would you want to be? Which one is more prominent? Which one has more real estate with longer messaging?

In the following screenshot of a click density report on a Google search engine result page, can you identify where the BMW ad would be? If you said the dark pink area, that is where a Google Boosted ad would be placed.

Another way Google Boost can help (or hurt)

If you take a better look at the Google Boost ad, you will notice five yellow stars. By now, most Internet users are familiar with the yellow stars and can quickly associate that with reviews. The following report performed by Kudzu.com tries to show how important consumer-generated media (CGM or in layman terms reviews) really is.

When 600 users were surveyed in December 2008:

86% of shoppers said product evaluations and reviews influenced their purchasing decisions.

Of those 3,000 conversion focused users, 2,820 – 2,910 are searching online for your product / service before setting foot into your store. Of the 2,820 – 2,910 visitors 2,425 – 2,502 are allowing reviews to influence their purchasing decision.

So, if you start getting reviews that are negative it may be wise to hire someone who takes care of your online reputation management. It is also a good move to give some perk to customers who choose to give your business feedback / review online.

Why Google Boost then for this audience segment?

Your business is local.
Your ad / business is displayed prominently in the area where clicks are coming in the most.
Low cost (several hundred dollars a month) for a local person interested in your product / offering.
Pay per click is only growing in popularity.
You have the opportunity to tell people about your business first before they read the rest of the page.
Your UVP is displayed first. UVP stands for Unique Value Proposition. Remember, these individuals are still smart shoppers and most likely bargain hunters. So, having your UVP (also known as competitive edge) be the first thing they read is extremely important.

I would like to expand on point #6 because it is 100% necessary to have one when targeting online shoppers. In the previously shown screenshot, the UVP is that they use, farm-fresh ingredients.

Let’s assume the example business we own is a car repair shop. There are five competitors who will most likely rank within the top half of the Google page when the user searches for “car repair in Raleigh.” Having your Google Boost ad say, “Car Repair Shop located in Raleigh.” is less effective than delivering a clear UVP such as, “Car Repair Shop with Competitor Price Matching.”

Oh…nobody trusts pay-per-click…right?

It is true that a year ago, there was a study conducted that showed 85% of all online searches do not result in a click on a paid advertisement. However, the growth of the industry leads me to believe that the sponsored search area is only going to get more prominent and more targeted as Google attempts to make the searchers experience relevant and enjoyable.

Paid Click Stats

18% more clicks Q4 2010 compared to Q4 2009.
11% more clicks Q4 2010 compared to Q3 2010.

Combined PPC revenue for Google (Google Sites revenue and Google Network revenue)

$8,170,000,000 of its $8,440,000,000 billion dollar revenue came from pay per click.
26% growth when comparing 2010 to 2009.

Takeaways

If you are a local business who relies on customers, I’d recommend getting started today.
The pay per click market is growing. Google Boost is similar to a pay per click system and I maintain that it will have a high chance of growing alongside that market or turning into pay per click altogether.
The majority of people making purchases are doing research online for local shops prior to the trip to the location.
Have a Unique Value Proposition ready if you want to create a Google Boost advertisement.

Please feel free to comment with any questions or counter points.

How To Detect When Google Penalizes Your Website

Mark Thompson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:20:05 +0000

Do you have a website that used to rank on the 1^st page of Google for all of your primary keywords, then it suddenly vanishes out of the SERPs? It could be that Google has penalized your site. So you are probably wondering how can you tell if your site has been penalized, and why did it get penalized? There are a number of off-site and on-site factors that could be the reason. Unfortunately there is no easy way to tell if Google has penalized your site. However, there are indications you can look at to assume it has be penalized.

Before you start to try and diagnose your site, it is best to understand the difference between Google penalizing your site and Google banning your site. When Google penalizes a website, they will decrease your site’s visibility by bumping your organic ranking down in the search engine results. Google has different levels of penalties based on the severity of what they feel is “unethical” or “malicious” SEO practices.

When a site gets banned by Google, this means that your website is completely removed from their index. This happens only in extreme cases, when Google feels you are trying to deceive the search engines by tricking them into giving your site better search rankings without merit. Usually if your site gets banned, it can take anywhere from 6-12 months to get your site re-indexed (assuming you remove the problem). You can try re-submitting your url to Google once the issues have been fixed.

Here is a quick checklist of things to look at when diagnosing a site to see if it has been penalized.

PageRank: The first thing you will want to do is check your PageRank and see if the bar is grayed out. That is the easiest way to know if your site is penalized. Unless your website is brand new, it will usually have at least a PR of 0.

Search Query: Do a Google search for your company name. Does it show up? If you do not even come up for your company name, that is a sure sign that Google has penalized you.

Check Your Server: It is possible that if your website was offline the last time a GoogleBot crawled your site, that it removed it from the search results because it thought the site was no longer available. You can use some site monitoring software to make sure that your site is online.

Hosting: If you are using a shared hosting account, you could indirectly be penalized from Google. There could be other sites that share the same IP that are doing malicious or blackhat SEO tactics that could potentially penalize all of the other sites on that hosting account. Try doing a Reverse IP Lookup to see what other domains are sharing hosting. YouGetSignal will highlight sites in red that pose a problem.

Content: If you have lots of duplicate content that is scraped from other sources on the web, Google may penalize you for that too. Run your site link through a duplicate content checker like Copyscape, Virante, or Plagium. If you only have a few paragraphs that are duplicated, that will not be enough to get you penalized. Usually if an entire site is bootlegged content, that is when Google will take action.

Links: If you are getting a lot of paid links or acquiring a lot of inbound links from “bad neighborhoods” that can also hurt your rankings. Try putting your site through Majestic’s Bad Neighborhood Checker to see if any of your links are coming from sites that may be link farms. You can also use any backlink analyzing tool to see all of the backlinks coming to your site.

Blackhat SEO: If you are practicing any blackhat SEO tactics like cloaking links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc…you can be penalized by Google.

Google does have a page called Safe Browsing Digosntic that allows you to enter your url and Google will give you some useful feedback on if they can detact any malicious activity.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com

Make sure you add your website url to the end of this url where it says =mysite.com.

There is also another Spam Decector tool that will analyze a website and point out any characteristics of a site that a search engine could consider spam.

Related Posts:

How Many Google Penalties Are There?

How To Handle a Google Penality

SEO 101: Google Penalities

Google Search Results Improvements in 2008

Mark Thompson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:58:21 +0000

Google has made an on-going effort to give the end-user the best online experience possible. That is why during the past year they have implemented many new concepts to their search results pages.

Universal Search Results

With the increasing amount of online users looking for videos, images, maps, books, products, and news; Google has incorporated rich media into their main search results.

The concept is to help users find what they are looking for faster. For example, if someone is looking to purchase the book “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown, they can perform a search in google and it will return not only websites on the book, but places to purchase the book directly from sites like Amazon and Google Product Search.

If you were looking to watch a tutorial on how to put hardwoods in your family room, Google may pull relevant video results from video sharing sites like YouTube, Rever, and MetaCafe.

If you are searching for the latest news on President Obama, you may get results from news wires like Google News, CNN, Technorati , and MSNBC.

Personalized Search Results

Google has also placing an emphasis on personalized search results. Meaning that one user may see totally different search results than another person doing that same search. The idea is to understand users search patterns and to give them results that they feel are most relevant to that particular user.

Google’s SearchWiki is a way for a user to customize their search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Google will remember the way that you ranked your results and will show ONLY YOU those results the next time you perform that

search.

It looks like Google will be improving these new concepts for years to come.