Market Appeal

Archive for February, 2009

Even today how to deep search Google is a little known secret. Better still, Twitter Search now has these features too!

Despite Google’s advanced search builder, there are still more powerful features than most people appreciate, for example the following search combines three elements:

seo|sem “offers * tip”

You can try it straight away here.

What that does is search for people who have used either the phrase seo or sem, the pipe “|” meaning “one OR the other”. It also looks for the words “offers and tip” in that order with any old word between them.

Now, here’s a lesser known secret, Twitter’s new search tool uses these advanced search functions too!

Try it for yourself now:

seo|sem “offers * tip”

(On Twitter you can only use single word phrases either side of the pipe.)

Now play with it and create your own power searches!

There appears to be increasing chatter about the prospect of Twitter’s real-time search being a threat to Google, however, like many industry professionals, I’m still rather cynical.

Of course, we all love a “Could this kill that?” post and hyperbole livens up an otherwise dull day, but such passion is rarely a hallmark of deep thought.

The argument goes that Twitter with its rapid growth, both in terms of users and searches, and “real-time” engagement could become a threat to Google, in the form of an alternative, even more attractive advertising platform.

The problems, however, are numerous.

The most obvious one is that Google’s AdWords-AdSense combo, their reverse auction based advertising platform, generates over $1B in spare cash per quarter, while Twitter is still raising funds from (admittedly willing) investors to help fuel it’s rising (bills and) users.

Granted, there was a time when Google wasn’t making money either, however, that doesn’t exactly prove that every website that is’t one day will. It’s also possible that Twitter’s search engine will turn into a tidy little money spinner, without ever growing to Google’s epic proportions.

More to the point perhaps, despite its global success Google hasn’t killed MS or even matched its earnings, as yet, so despite some claims to the contrary even if Twitter does develop a business model its ability to threaten Google is far from certain.

Also, it’s claimed that Google’s search isn’t real-time, which is somewhat true. In some senses, it’s not that far off. New pages (such as this one) for example are indexed within the hour and entirely new websites are index by Google in a day or two, as discussed a while ago.

Leading news websites with regular updates may be indexed quicker still and I don’t consider within the hour far off real-time for most purposes, as few websites, aside from micro-blogging social media such as Twitter, update any quicker than that anyway.

It’s also not beyond reason that Google with it’s skill and resources in search could roll out real-time indexing of Twitter, nullifying much of their advantage. – It’s interesting to note that it’s presumably searching Twitter where half of the value lies. – The catch is that Twitter probably still won’t be much use for searching the rest of the web, and Twitter isn’t about to replace the world-wide-web any time soon, so it looks like Google web search will always have a place, even if dedicated Twitter search doesn’t.

Equally, even if Twitter grows into a massive property (more page views than Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace combined, for example) that still doesn’t prove it’s monetisation potential, least of all beyond a few popular sectors such as Entertainment and Fashion.

Twitter, much like Facebook currently has fantiastic growth, but is atctually still running at a loss. So, rather that asking whether Twitter could kill Google, perhaps we should still be asking “Will Twitter Kill Twitter?” as it’s escalating bills could bite long before Google bothers too.

SEO savvy webmasters after free links to their website can now claim free link by submitting their website to our new online marketing directory at:  http://directory.marketappeal.co.uk/

In addition to standard free links, up to five featured links with improved visibility will be available in each category, initially for $30 per year.

Links increase in value with time and no doubt our SEO friendly web directory will gain authority as it matures, so we suggest that you submit your website to it now while it’s still cheap or free.

You’ll also benefit from the small number of outbound links in the early stages, leaving you a decent share of its link juice.

So what are you waiting for? Submit your site here.

There has been a lot of discussion about black vs. white hat SEO over the years, but which colour are you?

Take our SEO test to discover your hat colour…

Have you ever?

1. Paid a blogger to write about you? (e.g. using Pay-per-post)
2. Leased links to your websites primarily for their SEO value? (Text-link-ads for example)
3. Scraped other websites for their content either directly or through RSS feeds?
4. Posted spammy, off topic or brazenly self-promoting comments to blogs or forums?
5. Submitted your website to hundreds of web directories or search engines?
6. Submitted near identical content containing backlinks – such as articles or press releases – three or more websites at a time?
7. Created a content-rich landing page and then changed it over to a sales page? (link bait & switch)
8. Sold or leased out links or whole pages from your website without nofollowing them?
9. Joined a link exchange with a view to exchanging links primarily for ranking purposes?
10. Hidden (cloaked) text on your website, or used redirects to deceive the search engines?

Now add up how many questions you said yes to.

Your Score

0-1 You are a search engine angel, or work for them, or have never heard of SEO. We admire your whiter-than-white morals, but fear that your competitors have already outranked you.

2-3 You’re more ethical than most webmasters, but is this because you dismissed the black hat approach as underhand, or wouldn’t know where to start? Either way, we congratulate you (and are in this group ourselves too).

4-6 Are you trying to be black or white hat? It isn’t clear from your answers. This suggests either a carefully conceived strategy [dubbed 'grey hat'] or a ‘try anything’ approach that could do with some direction, before you get into trouble.

7-8 Do you realise how dangerous your dubious tactics are? If not, you are in for a shock. All it takes is a jealous competitor to report you and a ban could soon follow. We suggest cleaning up your act while you still can…

9-10 You’re as black hat as they come and are could also be using scummy techniques that we (almost) dare not mention here (see below). You are at serious risk of being banned by Google but then for a pro like isn’t that just an occupational hazard?

10+ Of course, if you really are a black hat spammer – and not just an everyday webmaster dabbling with the dark side – then all of the above will look pretty tame to you. Equally, however, if automated blogspam (commenting or mass creation), DNS subdomain hijacking and cross site scripting are your sort of thing then you don’t need us to tell you how black hat you really are!

What’s Your Score?

[poll id="1"]

From Friday afternoon UK time onwards Google stopped importing data from unlinked AdWords and Analytics accounts, but forgot to tell anyone.

As a result of this seemingly innocuous action some Google Analytics profiles stopped correctly identifying traffic coming from AdWords accounts with differing administrator details, meaning that many Analytics profiles suddenly started to show zero paid search traffic, instead of the regular flow.

For example, see the orange line, representing paid search traffic, that dropped right to zero over the weekend (despite there actually being over 100 visitors sent by Google AdWords).

Google paid search traffic (orange) apparently drops to zero

The AdWords ads continued to run unaffected, it’s just that their traffic is now being reported as organic rather than paid search.

Upon discovering this ‘error’ Monday (16/02/09) afternoon I called Google’s AdWords support line seeking an explanation as to what had gone wrong. The Support Engineer initially had no idea and eventually came back to me with the following explanation.

“We have stopped the auto-tagging of urls from unlinked AdWords and Analytics accounts in order to enhance account holder privacy. We were going to announce the changes, however, that got help up and we didn’t think that many people, unlike yourself, would notice all that quickly anyway – an announcement will soon be made.”

So, there you have it. According to a Google AdWords Support Engineer nobody thought that users might notice that their paid search traffic had suddenly disappeared from their Analytics accounts.

Of course, this won’t affect everyone. But, what about you?

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