This was also spotted by Ray “Catfish” Comstock and Benj Arriola on their blog post PDF’s Author Metadata in Google Search Results . It certainly is an interesting time in Google with lots of tests running over the summer months!

google-wonder-wheel

It allows you to drill down further into related keywords which is an excellent tool for performing keyword research.

google-wonder-wheel1

How Do I Access Google Wonder Wheel

To access Wonder Wheel do the following:

1. Perform a typical search in google
2. Click on “Show Options” at the top of the page
3. Click on “Wonder Wheel” in the left side bar that has appeared

]]> http://www.leofogarty.com/search-engine-optimisation/google/keyword-research-with-google-wonder-wheel.html/feed 6 http://www.leofogarty.com/search-engine-optimisation/google/google-using-breadcrumbs-in-the-serps.html http://www.leofogarty.com/search-engine-optimisation/google/google-using-breadcrumbs-in-the-serps.html#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:17:20 +0000 Leo http://www.leofogarty.com/?p=613 I came across an interesting result whilst using Google this week. The result listed breadcrumb data before the meta description in the results. I was lucky enough to see it on two related searches and obtained screenshots shown below: The 2nd result: Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see it since when performing searches but after a [...]]]> I came across an interesting result whilst using Google this week. The result listed breadcrumb data before the meta description in the results. I was lucky enough to see it on two related searches and obtained screenshots shown below:

The 2nd result:

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see it since when performing searches but after a little further research it turns out I haven’t been the only person to see strange things in the serps regarding breadcrumbs. Rob Hammond also came across some strange results which utilised breadcrumbs in the url structure of the search results. Screenshot below:

As for the seo implications of this, it’s too early to tell as its obviously just a test but it does show that google can read and understand breadcrumbs. Has anybody else seen anything like this in the serps?

Q: How do I check out the Caffeine update?
A: If you search on http://www2.sandbox.google.com you can get a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.

Q: It doesn’t look any different to me?
A: The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

Q: Is this Caffeine Update because of Company X or Y is doing Z?
A: Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.

Q: The url http://www2.sandbox.google.com doesn’t seem to work for mobile phones? I can only test on google.com, not google.co.uk?
A: That’s right. For now this is a only a preview, so we didn’t hook up a mobile version or an international version at this point. You’ll have to search on google.com to see the results right now.

Q: How do I give Google feedback?
A: If you want to give us feedback on how the search results are different, look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link and type your feedback in the text box. Make sure to include the word caffeine somewhere in the feedback.

Q: Is there a way to give feedback in person?
A: Yes! If you want to give me feedback in person, I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies San Jose this week. I’m doing a site review panel on Thursday, or just walk up and say hello!

So How Does it Do When Measured Against the old Search Engine?

As usual Google lives up to expectations. The following are how it faired under the following tests:

Speed:

It’s almost twice as fast

Compare that to the original Google search:

Index Size:

The index size seems to have vastly increased.

Compare that to the original:

So why don’t you try Caffeine out for yourself!

One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

• 6,526,440 Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity (Google, Inc.)

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

1. Initial Query
2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.

So the big buzz for the past week is the anouncement on Perry Marshalls blog of a Google Slap to Affiliate review sites. So how did all this come about? Well Perry had received an email from Glenn Livingston which led to Perry publishing the following on his blog:

“I got word from several affiliate marketers that Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages.   Many pages went from quality scores of 10 —> 1 overnight.

And these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page  … everything else Google loves.

When we analyzed which pages survived, and we take it in combination with other information, it seems pretty clear they’ve added code which screens for affiliate links on the landing pages.

At the moment it seems cloaking and PHP redirects are untouched, … but I can’t imagine these are far behind.  (I’m guessing they’re just avoiding this in order to decrease their server burden … takes some CPU cycles to visit every link on the page and evaluate for affiliate code)

I’d say it’s safe to conclude Google’s on the war path against affiliate review sites, and we should be advising clients towards a different business model… at minimum it seems necessary to avoid placing affiliate links on landing pages, but ideally, I think people need to move towards a deeper list building/relationship building strategy and/or a strong e-commerce model.Time to stop “building on sand”.”

So what does all this mean?

Well first off this only effects your google ads account, it hasn’t become part of googles search algorithum yet and it doesnt mean it will in the future. Low Quality scores in adwords, increases the price you pay for your ads so it does have a major effect on your income. I’ve checked my campaigns and I haven’t been hit yet but I do cloak my affiliate links, this doesnt mean I wont be hit in the future. I would definitely recommend cloaking your affiliate links in the mean time.

There are others who suggest  that it has nothing to do with naked affiliate links in your landing pages. Mark Ling from Affilorama suggests the slap is is more based on onpage optimisation:

The common theme that I’ve noticed has tended to be more to do with the on page optimization of the landing page. I’ve found that when I use Traffic Travis and run a page analysis on any keyword phrase that got slapped, I find that the page that it was directing traffic to received a B- or lower as the rating.

Below I’ve included an interview between Alex Goad and the man who brought this slap to everyones attention Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Have you been affected by the slap? Let me know in the comments.

One thing I hate about building sites targeting multiple locations is checking the serps manually in each region. The thought of manually altering the address bar from google.com to .co.uk or .com.au just irratates me.  It is such a mundane task that it should be automated and now thanks to Dave Davis and the fabulous team at Redfly Marketing it has been.

Redfly Marketing have developed a firefox plugin called Google Global. Google Global now allows you to view organic and paid Google search results as they appear in almost any location on Earth.

Some of the Features of Google Global:

• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.
• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.
• Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.
• View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.
• View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.
• View paid and organic search results from different language results pages.
• Custom advanced saved searches.

How to use Google Global

The easiest way to use Google Global is to simply do a search for something on Google. When you see you search results page, simply right click anywhere on the search results page, select “Search Google Global” and select what geographic location you would like to see the results from. It is as simple as that.

Get Google Global

To get Google Global, just click this link

Now theres a lot of bitching on the internet about John Chow, some say he’d sell his grandmother for a few bucks. I don’t buy into this, in my opinion you can’t knock what he has achieved and those that do I reckon are not jealous of his income from affiliate marketing but more of his notoriety on the internet. He is basically one of the poster boys for Affiliate Marketing.

Having said that, this is probably the reason that Google decided to make an example of him in 2007 for his paid posts and text link ads. Google don’t like paid posts or text link ads, it messes with their system and they consider it spam. In 2007 Google decided to penalise JohnChow.com and pulled it’s rankings. Basically JohnChow.com couldn’t rank for anything including his own name. Google did fix it a few months later but the ranking for his internal pages never fully recovered.

So what has he done now? He has created a duplicate site to JohnChow.com at JohnChow.ca, removed all the items considered spam by Google and he has 301 redirected googlebot from JohnChow.com to this site.

Why has he done this now? Well Google seem to be cracking down on Affiliate Marketing and paid posts, there is the recent situation with Matt Cutts unfollowing Shoemoney on Twitter due to paid tweets and perhaps John is trying to smooth things over with Google to get ahead of this. The other reason I suspect is for testing purposes. After it was anounced on Shoemoney.com that John Chow had done this, there was a lot of speculation that John would be hit with a duplicate content penalty. Well a couple of weeks earlier I read an interesting post on SEOMoz that google anounced that there wouldn’t be a duplicate content penalty for using identical content when geotargeting which is exactly what John is doing. This is I suspect Johns main reasoning and he’s trying to raise his readership numbers by using geotargeting but you decide!

If you don’t know what PageRank is, PageRank is a number between 1-10 assigned to your site which classes how authorative your site is. The higher the PageRank, the better. PageRank is actually assigned to every page on your website. Usually your home page will have the highest PageRank, as in our case where our homepage is a 4 but a lot of our internal pages have been assigned a PageRank of 2.

Given the fact we’ve been assigned PageRank and do offer “do follow”, it makes it a no brainer for somebody link building to participate in the comments on this site!!

Let me start off by stating that this is a new blog, it’s been up a little over a week. Since it’s a new blog which we havent actively promoted it yet so our traffic is quite low around about 20 uniques a day.

You can imagine my surprise last week when I logged into Google Analytics and seen that the sites traffic had jumped over 500% in one nite to 130 uniques.

Now this was all down to one post we put up on our blog last week about Facebook Personal URL’s becoming available.

Google Analyitcs

Google Analytics

So What Have I Learned from this?

Blogging about topical trends or events can have a huge influence over your traffic. So if there is an upcoming event for your niche, even if your not going to it, blog about it.

Let me know if you’ve had any similar situations on your blog in the comments.