There has been a bit of a buzz in the SEO community this week with the announcement from Google about their new version of Google. Essentially it is still in a testing (sandbox) phase, and they have opened it up for feedback. I still have to see some real major differences, but it does show some slight changes in the algorithm.
Some quick points noted about Google Caffeine :
Image results seem to have lower priority.
Search results appears to be about 50% faster.
Larger index size.
A different sensitivity to keywords in domain names.
Right now we have a US .com and Irish .IE targeted versions, more can be added upon request. Just say the word !
Updates
Given the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to implement some changes:
Added .CO.UK version , the tool is now available in .COM / .CO.UK / .DE & .IE versions
Ability to see more than 10 results, now has the option to show 10/20/50/100 SERPs
Personalised search is turned off. Result changes on the current version of Google SERPs won’t be effected by what you have clicked / searched previously.
Today Microsoft has relaunched Windows Live search and it is now called Bing (www.bing.com). Right now Bing looks very promising, at least for the US market, their image search and some localisation seems to be better compared with google.com. For some searches like [thai restaurant 33308] the results are very similar indeed. Bing’s image search has a nice slight zoom in featyre , and “similar images to this” option which is rather nice. They present the results rather clearer than google, and have an easier navigation system on the left hand side to drill down on queries.
For Bing.IE the results we looked at seem on a par with google.ie, i.e. as good or even better, when it comes to general queries of facts ([horse racing] for example). But when we start to ask more localised and to ask for [doctors in Cork] or [cooking courses], bing starts to show it’s weakness. I would generally expect more local search results to be returned, even without specifying “only pages from Ireland”. I’m sure that this will be improved over time, and Bing.IE’s deficiencies are not always a bad thing. Right now there are very little ads on bing.ie, so you can be sure that the results you are getting are not confusing you with paid ads. This alone would move me to check bing before google.
Compare Google & Bings Search Results
For SEOs we have thrown together a quick tool that basically compares the two search engines side by side in one frame. Check out our Google compared with Bing Tool . Here you have the option to compare the .com or the .ie version of the search engines . The query will check and display the results for both search engines so you can see the difference in their ordering of the SERPs.
Google vs. Bing
Search Results compared
Submit your site to Bing
Hat tip to Michele for the link toBing’s URL submission. If you were previously in MSN Live Search results, then your site should also be listed in Bing, but if not you should take the time to add your URL.
Is Bing the Google Killer ?
Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real Google killer, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money. I’ve read that Microsoft are planning an ad campaign in around the $100m mark, so after that I’m sure everyone will know what it is ‘to bing‘ just like they know what it is ‘to google‘.
Over the last few days I’ve noticed that on some queries on google.ie there new feature added to the SERPS. Now certain search results will result in blending in a listing of local businesses. These have already been active on google.com and google.de for sometime now, and it’s great to see their roll out in Ireland. Right now Google Business Listing are under used in a selection of queries that would lend themselves to listing actual local businesses, see this example for [doctor cork].
Business Listing
So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.
Hotels in Dublin
List your business on Google Local Business Listing
Here is a quick run down on how to get your business listed on the google local business listings:
Enter your business details and link to your website
Select your business categories and add opening hours
Verify by phone/SMS/post
When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.
For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.
The Bad of Google Business Listing
Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]
Spam in the Business Listings
Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.
The traffic data in this example has been removed on purpose, but general information used with permission from client.
One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.
example of a Google penalty
The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic. Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:
Jan 1st to Mar 10
We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.
Our actions against the penalty
The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.
Google on Reconsidering Request
Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”
Over the last few days I’ve seen that google is starting to decrease the space where they display sitelinks. Previously sitelinks were displayed for some search phrases, for the first SERP result. They could have up to 4 extra lines, and 8 inner links to other pages on the top result. As you can imagine that having sitelinks for a top keyword would really increase your relative CTR, because of having more options to inner pages and the fact that you have more real esate on google.
Here is an example of the older view, for the keyword “Recruit Ireland”
But now on certain phrases (perhaps more general queries) these site links are compressed on one line.
Site Links Jobs
In this climate the keyword “jobs” is highly sought after, but it’s also possible that it is just too general of a keyword to merit expanded sitelinks.
upon searching for “jobs.ie” you will get the full expanded version of their sitelinks.
Site Link Cars
And here is a further example for a highlight competitive keywords “cars”, on google.ie.
It will be interesting to see how traffic is effected by this recent change by google. It could mean that there will be a higher CTR through to your homepage, as sitelinks are not always shown up so prevalent. For those of you in positions other than first, I would expect that by making sure your keyword description that little bit more appealing you will be able to benefit from this change.
Sitelink Tip
Did you know that you can control your website’s sitelinks on the google webmaster console ? Here you can remove links that you don’t want to appear in your sitelinks.
Recently I was searching for a list of all the regional google domains, and my searching failed. I was interested in seeing just how many regional versions of google, do they offer. Plus it would allow me to update my Google Global Firefox extension with a few more domains. Most people are aware that the version of the Irish Google is located at www.google.ie and that in Germany you can use www.google.de . But what about in Turkmenistan or Rwanda or Jamaica ? Searching a bit more I came across Google’s Langauage Tools page. This is the basis of their translation engine, their listing of what languages you can make google search appear in, and right down the end, a listing of all the Google regional domains.
Ranking on Regional Domains
The regional domains give preference to websites that are related to that region. Things that can influence your standing here include:
Also it is possible that language of a website and keywords in the domain have some lesser effects too.
While most people are aware of Google.com, there are also significant numbers of people using their local version of search. In fact Google will often redirect users to their local version of the search, as they know that the results which appear on regional search is typically more suited to searchers.
The net effect of having regional rankings, is that there can be different results in the SERPS for each version. Logically this makes sense, when someone searches google.ie for mortgages, it’s clear they are only looking for companies related to the Irish market, and the same is true on google.co.uk, etc. And the sensitivity tothe Irish market can be cranked up even more by selecting the “pages from Ireland” option.
For users this is great, but for a SEOs it can mean that we need to check multiple versions of google, to see the regional differences. But of course the positive side is that the competition to rank locally is a lot less
Listing of Regional Domains
As the format that google provides is rather awkward to use, I decided to put together an excel list, maybe this will be easier for people to use. In all there are 162 regional google domains, which took about 15 minutes to organise into a nice formula. The list can be downloaded from google docs and I will updated it if google adds some more regional sites.
It is also notable that google doesn’t show versions on all it’s domains, i.e. google.us redirects to google.com. And there are even some domains that they don’t own , namely Google.by and Google.cm.
EDIT : Seeing as someone emailed me and pointed out that the google docs version isn’t that easy to use, here is a CSV version of the regional google domains. I hope this works for people a bit better.
