Channel: SEO Google: SEO Google: Webmaster Central Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Screen Shot Of Google’s New Rejection Notices For Reconsideration Requests

Barry Schwartz

At SMX Advanced last week, Google’s head of search quality, Matt Cutts, announced that they will be revising their reconsideration requests rejection noticed with more detailed responses in some cases. We’ve now located an example of the new rejection notices, as shared by…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Research

Understanding Consumer Search Behaviour: Best Tools for the Job

Oli Archibald

One of the most intriguing aspects of keyword research is gauging an understanding of how consumer search behaviour varies, depending on what niche or field you’re operating in. For anyone with a keen interest in the researching of keywords, you’ll likely be aware of the plethora of tools available. This post will highlight some of […]

The post Understanding Consumer Search Behaviour: Best Tools for the Job appeared first on Builtvisible – A Creative Digital Agency.

Does eBay really hate paid search?

Robert Durkin

Online retail giant eBay (via Blake, Noska and Tadelis at Berkley) argues that paid search or ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM), the largest internet advertising channel by revenue, has had its benefits overstated.

Well, what it says is that ‘conventional methods used to measure the causal (incremental) impact of SEM vastly overstate its effect’. OK, that’s not quite the same thing. That’s related to crude measurement techniques that not all marketers use.

It also argues that:

…the effectiveness of SEM is small for a well-known company like eBay and that the channel has been ineffective on average.

This is coming closer to the bold assertion made by headline writers that eBay is wholly dismissive of the channel. But it’s not clear that a broad swipe has been taken at the whole channel; rather, the wording suggests that SEM simply hasn’t worked for eBay.

The authors also “find a detectable positive impact of SEM on new user acquisition and on influencing purchases by infrequent users.” In short, the report calls into question only certain elements of the search marketing channel, and the current methods of attribution – not the entire concept.

Branded search

The report starts by talking about branded search, that is, consumers typing a company name into a search engine. These people are then served both a paid-for advert and the organic listing for the company.

The report found that turning off these brand-keyword paid search ads for eBay did not lead to a decline in traffic or indeed attributable sales. The report also argues that many customers who click on ads (and go on to purchase – score!) would have purchased anyway.

According to the report: 

Advertising may appear to attract these customers, when in reality they would have found other channels to visit the company’s website.

It’s easy to see why and how this type of budget allocation could be discredited. A click on the paid ad is PPC budget down the drain, surely.

Well not necessarily! eBay is a massive brand, and would of course dominate the natural listings for ‘eBay’ terms. Not all companies rank highly for their own name.

Furthermore, similar studies have shown that turning off the paid ads for some brands, even when they do dominate the organic search results, leads to a (sometimes significant) decrease in sales revenue.

So what about generic product searches?

When people search for a generic term, do paid search ads facilitate product discovery and lead to sales? Maybe, but Google’s recent Clickstream Whitepaper shows that search behaviour, although constantly changing, tends to begin with a branded term, unless the search is for property (nearly 100% generic searches) or travel products.

In other words, generic product searches are on the decrease.

The beauty of paid search, of course, is that it is a lot more nuanced than the reports from Google and eBay may suggest.

Success in this channel will completely depend on your market, your products, the keywords you are looking to target and your approach to attribution. eBay does say “our results show that for a well-known brand like eBay, the efficacy of SEM is limited at best.”

As Econsultancy pointed out when the initial findings were unveiled last year, the report is worth a read… but “the lesson is: find out what works for you and not what works for eBay.” 

Digital Marketing digital pr Instagram Marketing PR Socal Social Media Marketing twitter

The Social PR Hit: The ins and outs of how to achieve social PR

Jodie Harris

Social PR hits are sometimes overlooked when Digital PRs report. If you can report on the brand mention, the platforms they have been mentioned on and the size of the social followings: you have a social PR hit on your hands.

Post from Jodie Harris on State of Digital
The Social PR Hit: The ins and outs of how to achieve social PR

Navigating the complex but valuable South Korean search market

Hannes Ben

This £550m represents approximately 3% of total ecommerce revenue in the country which suggests there is a large opportunity for foreign ecommerce sites.

Overall these revenue numbers place South Korea neatly behind Japan and China in terms of the size of market, and opportunity within the region.

While this may not be a surprise to many considering the populations of the two aforementioned countries, there are additional factors that need to be taken into account when surveying potential market opportunities.

The country boasts an impressive internet penetration rate of 84%, higher than any other APAC country and only just behind the UK and Canada. This is down to South Korea’s highly developed mobile landscape that has a penetration rate of around 70%.

There are a number of reasons for this but it is predominantly driven by an incredibly fast internet infrastructure, advanced mobile technology and a population with a strong understanding of how to navigate the online world, across a wide range of demographics.

A high propensity to purchase

Despite the maturity of this market, when approaching international expansion, South Korea is often overlooked by global brands. This is most likely down to the focus on other APAC nations such as China and Japan.

However, despite only having the 8th largest population in the region, South Korea has the third largest ecommerce market and as a result, ecommerce traffic has a high propensity to purchase. We can measure this by calculating the ecommerce revenue driven per person using the size of the ecommerce market and population.

For China, this figure comes in at $217, while South Korea has a substantially larger figure of $386. This suggests visits driven to your ecommerce site from South Korea are more likely to convert and spend more money, than other APAC countries, providing a really efficient foundation to develop a business.

What does this all mean? Well fundamentally if you’re a business looking to grow a brand in Asia, South Korea is a low risk territory to develop and achieve a foothold in.  

Utilising search is vital in this endeavour this due to the levels of intent consumers show through their search queries. The challenge is that South Korea and Asia in general have a much more complex search engine landscape than in the Google-dominated west.

Loyalty to domestic platforms

Much like in Russia and China, the South Korean population consistently favours domestic online platforms compared to Western services.

Search engines are no exception with Naver and Daum the major players at 80% and 15% market share respectively. Google takes just 3.5% of the share and Nate, another domestic web portal, claims 1.1%.

Despite the low market share, Google is still a fairly strong player due to the search engine recently enjoying an increase in mobile usage thanks to the popularity of Android based mobile devices.  

Ensuring that Naver’s 80% share is well catered for is obviously the priority but ignoring Google’s growing market share on mobile would be missing an opportunity to drive high quality traffic and cover any searches driven by international visitors within the country.

A wide range of SERPs and ad formats to consider

The range of local platforms is not the only thing that affects the search landscape. Each of the search engine’s SERPs look very different from what we’re accustomed to in North America and Europe, making it difficult for conventional international advertisers to succeed. 

In Naver’s case, PPC is called ‘Powerlink’ and shows at the top of pages, but often rotating to the middle or bottom of the page, even for brand keyword variations. Therefore, other Naver formats such as BrandSearch are the key to securing premium positioning.

From the work I’ve overseen for brands in this region, paid ads on South Korean search engines can experience conversion rates up to 166% higher than in the Chinese market, with half the cost-per-clicks. This reinforces the potential efficiency on offer for international brands in South Korea.

With regards to the rest of Naver’s SERPs, it’s important to stress that traditional organic search engine strategies and tactics will not necessarily bear fruit in South Korea. The majority of non-PPC content spots on the search engine, such as Blog, Site and Cafe, are not populated naturally though the engine’s crawlers system, but submitted by brands and advertisers themselves.

Cafe, Blog and Site content areas on Naver

A mobile led market

Mobile commerce is dominating the South Korean landscape. KakaoTalk is available in a number of countries, yet it remains by far the most popular format in South Korea, utilised by over 93% of smartphone users.

The platform offers a plain messaging function similar to WhatsApp, yet also offers the option of creating a profile through ‘KakaoStory’, allowing businesses to engage in advertising and promotional activities.

This has made this application the channel of choice for advertisers and domestic brands in particular. Naver has also strived to develop a mobile social platform called Line. Whilst hugely popular in Japan, as well as Taiwan, Thailand, Spain and Indonesia, it has not yet managed to conquer KakaoTalk in its native market.

Developing a healthy return on investment from mobile is tough enough in Europe and North America let alone in a region like APAC. The mature and experienced consumers in South Korea expect your presence on all these platforms and formats. 

The opportunity is there for new entrants

South Korea is a truly unique market, as consumers visibly prefer local brands to popular international companies. Samsung and LG in the electronics field, Hyundai in the automotive industry, Naver, Daum and Nate in search and KakaoTalk in mobile are all proof of a tendency towards favouring domestic brands and products.

A strong understanding of local platforms is essential for success in South Korea. So too is developing specifically tailored strategies for the market instead of simply adopting a global approach.

When testing the South Korean market for your brand, PPC alone won’t provide the necessary results to judge the potential of the market; a combination of PPC, blog and social is required to give a business a fighting chance entering a valuable but complex market like South Korea.

IPv6, C-Blocks, and How They Affect SEO

Tom-Anthony

Posted by Tom-Anthony

You have probably heard about IPv6, but you might remain a bit confused about the details of what it is, how it works, and what it means for the future of the Internet. This post gives a quick introduction to IPv6, and discusses the SEO implications that could follow from the IPv6 roll-out (touching specifically on the concept of C-Blocks). A quick caveat: This stuff is hard, so let me know if you spot any missteps!

A very brief intro to IP addresses (v4) & c-blocks

You’re likely familiar with IP addresses; they are usually written in the following format:

 

Example IP address (IPv4).

This format of an IP address is the common format in use everywhere, and is called IPv4. There are four bytes in an IP address like this, with each byte separated by a period (meaning 32 bits in total, for the geeks). Every (sub)-domain resolves to at least one such IP address (it might be several, but lets ignore that for now). Nice and simple.
Now a main SEO concept that comes out of that is the idea of C-Blocks (this shouldn’t be confused with Class C IPs; a different thing people often confuse for C-Blocks), which is a concept that has been around in the SEO space for a decade or more. Very simply, the idea is that if the first 3 bytes of the IP address are identical, then we consider the two IP address to be in the same C-Block:

Two example IP addresses in the same C-Block (blue).

So why is this interesting to us? Why is this important to SEO? The old-school logic is that if you have two IPs that are in the same C-Block, then the sites are quite likely related and thus the links between these sites (on average) should not count as strongly in terms of PageRank. My personal opinion is that nowadays there are many many other signals available to Google to make these same sorts of connections and so the C-Block issue is far less important than it once was.
So, as it turns out (surprise!) the two IP addresses above are indeed related:

Disney and ABC have a near identical IP address, both in the same C-Block.

Sure enough they are both companies in the Disney family. It makes some sense that links between these two domains probably shouldn’t indicate as much trust as links from similarly large, but unrelated, sites.

Introducing IPv6

So, there is a problem with IP addresses in the format above (IPv4); there are “only” 4 billion of them, and we have essentially exhausted the supply. We have so many connected devices nowadays, and the creators for IPv4 never envisioned the vastness of the Internet 30 years from when it was released. Luckily enough, they saw the problem early on andstarted working on a successor, IPv6 (IPv5 was used for another unreleased protocol).

IPv6 address format:
IPv6 addresses are much longer than IPv4 addresses, the format looks thus:

An example IPv6 address.

Things just got serious! There are now 8 blocks rather than 4, and rather than each block being 1 byte (which were represented as a number from 0-255), each block is instead 2 bytes represented by 4 hexadecimal characters. There are 128 bits in an IPv6 address, meaning instead of a measly 4,000,000,000 like IPv4, IPv6 has around 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses.
In the next few years we’ll be entering a world where hundreds of devices in homes will all be capable of networking and needing an IP address and IPv6 will help make that a reality. However, we are also going to see websites starting to use IPv6 addresses more and more commonly, and a few years from now we’ll start to see website that only have an IPv6 address.

CIDR Notation

Before we go any further, it is important to introduce an important concept for understanding IP addresses, which is called CIDR notation.

IPv6 exclusively uses CIDR notation (e.g. /24), so the SEO community will need to understand this concept. It is really simple, but normally really badly explained.
As we mentioned, IPv4 IP addresses are 32 bits long, so if we were sick and twisted we could look at the IP address as binary:

Example IPv4 IP address shown in dot decimal format and as binary.

Colloquially, CIDR notation could be described as a format to describe a group of closely related IP addresses, in a similar fashion to how a C-Block works. It is represented by a number after a slash appended to a partial IP address (e.g. 199.181.132/24) which states how many of the initial bits (binary digits) are the identical. CIDR is flexible and we could use it to describe a C-Block would be /24 because the first 24 bits (3 groups of 8 bits) of the address are the same:

Two IP addresses in the same C-Block. The first 24 bits (3 blocks of 8 bits) are identical.

This can be represented in this case as 199.181.132/24.

Now CIDR notation is more refined and more accurate than the concept of C-Block; in the example above the two IP addresses are not just in the same C-Block they are even more closely related as 6 bits in the last block are also identical. In CIDR notation we could say both these IP addresses are in the 199.181.132/30 block to indicate that the 30 leading bits are identical.
Notice that with CIDR the smaller the number after the slash, the more IP addresses in that block (because we’re saying fewer leading bits must be identical).

IPv6 & C-Blocks?

Now CIDR /24 is not exactly catchy and so someone made up the name “C-Block” to make this easier to talk about, but it doesn’t extend so easily to IPv6. So, the question is, can we generalise something similar?
The point of a C-Block from Google’s perspective and the perspective of our SEO is solely to identify whether links are originating on the same ISP network. So that should obviously remain the focus. So my best guess would be to focus on how these IPs are allocated to ISPs (ISPs normally get large continuous blocks of IP addresses they can then use for their customers’ websites).
In IPv4 ISPs would own bunches of C-Blocks, and so if you could see multiple links originating from the same C-Block it implied the sites were hosted together, and there was a far greater chance they were somehow related.

Illustration of an “ISP Block” (/32); the blue part of the address is stable and

indicates the ISP. The red part can change and represents addresses at that ISP.

With IPv6, I believe that ISPs will be given /32 blocks (the leading 32 bits will be the same, leaving 96 bits to create addresses for their customers), which they will then assign to their users in /64 blocks (I asked a few people, this tends to be what is happening, but I have read that this might sometimes be /48 blocks instead). Notice that ISPs now have an order of magnitude more IP addresses (each) than the whole internet had before!
This also means each end user will get more IP addresses for their own network than there are in total IPv4 IP addresses. Welcome to the Internet of things!
These ISPs may be serving home users so each house gets a block of IPv6 addresses (for the techies: IPv6 does away with NAT for the most part, I believe – all the devices in your house will get a ‘real’ IP) for their devices. In the other scenario the ISP is for servers, and here the servers get assigned a /64 block; this is the case we are interested in.

Illustration of a “Customer Block” (/64); the blue part indicates a particular customer.

 The red part can change and represents addresses belonging to that customer.

So, I think the equivalent of a C-Block in IPv6 land would be a /32 block because that is what an ISP will usually be assigned (and allows them to then carve that up into 4 billion /64 blocks for their users!).
Furthermore, in IPv6 the minimum allocation is /32 so a single /32 block cannot run across multiple ISPs as I understand it, so there is no way two IPs in the same /32 could belong to two different ISPs. If our goal is to continue to examine whether sites are more likely related than two random sites, then knowing they are on the same ISP (which is what C-Blocks do) is our goal.
Also, if you chose /64 then each ISP has 4 billion of these blocks to give away, and that is way too sparse to identify associations between sites in different blocks.
However, there is a counter argument here. Note that a single server having a /64 block of IPs means that every website should have a different IPv6 address (even if it shares an IPv4 address).

Geek side note: indeed, the “host” http header accepts an IPv6 address to distinguish which site on the server you want.

 So now a single server with multiple sites will have a separate IP for each of those sites (it is also possible that the server has multiple IPv6 blocks assigned, one for each different customer – I think this is actually the intention and hopefully becomes the reality).
So, if I am running a network of websites I’m interlinking with one another then it is quite likely that if I just have a single hosting account that all these are in the same /64 block of IPv6 addresses. That should be a very strong signal that that sites are linked closely. However, I’m fairly sure that those trying to be manipulative will try to avoid this scenario and end up trying to get in another block of addresses for each site. But if they are with the same ISP then they’ll still be in the same /32 block.

My recommendation on an IPv6 C-Block

So, if you followed all that then I’d suggest:
  • Sites in the same /32 block as before would be equivalent to the same C-Block as previously.
  • Sites in the same /64 block either are on the exact same server, or belong to the same customer, so are even closer related than C-Block level.
These need easier more accessible names, how about:
  • “ISP Block” for /32 blocks.
  • “Customer Block” for /64 blocks.
Then we would be able to say things like:
  • In IPv6 IP addresses in the same ISP Blocks most closely resemble the relationship of IPs in the same C-Block in IPv4.
  • In IPv6 IP addresses in the same User Block are likely very closely related, and probably belong to the same person/organisation.

What should I take away from all this?

As I mentioned further up, I’m not convinced that IPv4 C-Blocks are as important from Google’s perspective as they once were, as they can likely access multiple other signals to tie sites together. Whilst still useful as a substitute for those signals for SEOs, who don’t have all Google’s resources, they aren’t something that should guide your decision making. If you are running legitimate sites, you shouldn’t be concerned about hosting them on the same C-Block. In fact, I’d advise against that as it could look manipulative to Google (who will likely work it out anyway).
With IPv6, I think the “Customer Blocks” could be a very important SEO feature, as it is an even closer relationship than C-Blocks were, and this is something that Google will likely make use of. It is still going to take a while until IPv6 becomes prevalent enough that all of this is important, so for the moment this is just something to have on your radar as it will begin to increase in importance over the next couple of years.

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SEO

You&A with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced 2014 (& Where is the Penguin Update?)

Rae Hoffman

Every year at SMX Advanced Danny does a You&A with Matt Cutts where audience members submit questions, Danny asks them (the ones he feels are the most valid to a large audience anyway) and Matt answers them. I live tweeted this year’s session and this is the roundup of those tweets along with anything I […]

The post You&A with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced 2014 (& Where is the Penguin Update?) appeared first on Sugarrae.

Channel: SearchCap Search Engine Land SearchCap Uncategorized

SearchCap: Google Rolls Out PayDay Loan, World Cup Logos & Pinterest Search

Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Payday Loan Algorithm 3.0 Rolling Out Now Google is now rolling out the 3rd version of the PayDay Loan algorithm. Last night we reported that…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google: Logos Search Engine Land Uncategorized

Google Apologizes For World Cup Logo With Wrong Flag, Not “Ghana” Happen Again

Danny Sullivan

Google scored a goal against itself by mixing up the flags of Cameroon and Ghana in a special logo highlighting the Mexico versus Cameroon match happening today in the World Cup. Well, it is Friday the 13th. Google’s already fixed the logo and tweeted an apology with a pun: p.s. thanks to…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.