Posted by randfish

It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)

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Posted by Dana Lookadoo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.  

Presentation Off

Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).  

Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:

Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!> 

Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:

Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO

Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:

<If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...>

Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.

“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."

Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:

And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.

OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.

Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”

She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:

1.     What is your website trying to do?

2.     If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?

3.     What is the biggest threat to your success?

You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)

Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:

Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.

MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any  number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().

Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”

Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:

Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds:

Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO

Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:

High Priority Tactics:

Low Priority Tactics:

Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point.

Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:

Optimize all assets!

Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.

Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:

 Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.

Tom Critchlow

Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:  

 Keyword harvesting tools:

The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)  

Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)

Build an SEO friendly CMS:

Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:  

Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:

The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:

It’s not that hard! <sigh>   Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc  that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.  

Thank you, Tom!

Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits

Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.

Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.

The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:

She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:

Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.

She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.

Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization

The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.

Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.

Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:

How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...

Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.

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Posted by Dana Lookadoo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.

Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."

When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.

Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.

From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between

1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."

The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:

Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.

The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image

Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."

Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:

Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.

So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.

Video SERPs

It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:

Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit Step #4: PROFIT $$$

See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.

Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:

"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."

2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:

Straight from Google’s mouth: Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)

And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)

Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:

Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:

Takeaway:

"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."

"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"

Resources to claim your listings:

"The Big Three" major data providers:

Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder

Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.

3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.

Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:

Takeaway: Don’t talk about  yourself so much.

Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!

Takeaway: Try to stay positive.

If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.

Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.

Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.

Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:

Timing for retweets:

Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.

Tip:  Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?

Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...

He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)

Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.

Check out Dan's set of social media tools.

4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.

I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.

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Posted by Suzzicks

So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.

All One Index Soon?

Why does this happen?

Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.

Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?

Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….

Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones

But I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!

As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.

There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.

You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.

Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines

The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.

If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer,  and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.

Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!

You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.

Mobile Usability Options:

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Posted by Tom_C

We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let's mash those two things together. In this post I've collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained...... :-)

Which Are My Top Folders

The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I've been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:

Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.

Creating Geo Link Maps

Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled's backlinks:

Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep's wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic.... I can but dream :-)

Pretty Tag clouds

Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website....

These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let's you make the pretty pictures.

Visualising Directory Links

When quickly scanning a site's backlink profile there's a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It's not that the non-quality links don't work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:

=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")

This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn't catch everything I've found that it get's you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:

Venn Diagrams

Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor's links that looks a bit like this:

Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.

Broken Links

I know this tool has been written about before and it's not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole's chrome extension "SEO site tools":

Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it's useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:

I like this view, especially when I'm looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.

SEOmoz Labs

While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:

Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.

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Posted by randfish

Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.

50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)

You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google's rankings and Domain Authority.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart) _

 You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We've heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don't make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I'll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.

In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain's top Page Authority URLs.

New Partnerships

Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us:

Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!

You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven't done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.

We're also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.

Improvements to Anchor Text

 If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:

Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)

Index Stats

This month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!

p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:

My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP.  Thanks for sharing this information with us.

p.s. Update #2 - I've added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We're working hard to make this better.

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Posted by Danny Dover

 In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.

Video Transcription

Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Google's recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let's look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here's a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google's argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It's nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn't get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don't succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there's also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn't have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown's Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn't want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there's a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it's obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they're on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn't only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let's see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn't send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools. :)

That's 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3.    “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions. :)

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4.    Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it. For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there's no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let's motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we're currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5.    Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you've optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn't spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the... what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I'm stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we're completely sold out!

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Google has not let its recent setbacks (the closing of Google Wave comes to mind) stop it from launching new services.

Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account, and this is why it now attacks VoIP phone service Skype by turning Gmail into a regular phone.

All you have to do is to install a voice and video chat plug-in, and you can use your computer’s microphone, loudspeaker and — if needed — video camera to communicate. And yes, a dedicated head set with mike is useful.

Now, Google’s voice and video chat has been around for a while, but its usefulness has been limited. You could only connect with others having a Gmail account. Now US users of Gmail can call anyone with a phone anywhere in the world.

The Google Blog says:

“Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.”

So far Google Buzz hasn’t made much of an impact on the Facebook crowd. May the Gmail phone make Skype users switch to Google? We doubt it, but Gmail users who have not been using Voice over Internet services before, may start using Gmail Phone, and that will tie them even closer to Gmail as their default communication tool. That would in itself be a success for Google.

Google reported that they had clocked 1 million calls made through Gmail during the first 24 hours.

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And then they were two…

This week the world lost another search engine giant. Yahoo! in the US and Canada has switched over to using the Bing database, and the rest of the world will soon follow. This means that the North American market is now totally dominated by Google and Bing.

This does not mean that Google and Microsoft have achieved global domination, though. Yandex is, for instance, the big player in Russia and Baidu is dominating the Chinese market.

Still, this does not bode well for search engine innovation in what we used to call the Western Hemisphere. There are no alternative big search engine players left in Europe any more.

Here are some other search engine headlines we have found interesting this week:

Google Adds A Filter For Finding Blogs SE Land New Awesome Ways to Search within Current Site (Using Google’s site operator) SE Journal Has Google Purged Places Of Yelp? All Signs Point To Yes TechCrunch Google Realtime Search Gets Home Page, Conversation View, Alerts & Geosearch SE Land Google News Changes Again, Adds Collapsible Right Side SE Roundtable Bing’s Market Share Up 51% In Past 12 Months SE Land Google’s Latest Buy – Like.com Confirmed! PageTraffic Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform Yahoo! switches over to Bing search results in the US and Canada. Twitter hashtags: quick guide Phil Bradley 4 Cool New Gmail Features You Should Know Search mail and docs, sign into multiple accounts, and more; Google Tutor

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Google has relaunched Google Replay as part of an improved real-time search feature.

Google Replay was Google’s attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period.

The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page.

You can also find this microblog search tool by doing a regular Google search and then click on “More” and “Updates” in the left hand column of the search result page.

Resourceshelf reports that the “Updates” database contains content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz. Only Twitter is covered by the Replay tool, and then only back to February this year. The idea is to expand the historical Twitter database back to 2006.

You can narrow searches by clicking on the time-line (to select a month or a date) or by selecting “location” in the left hand column. A link to “Updates with Images” give you the same results with image thumbnails fetched from the blog or the page the microblog entries are linking to.

In the right hand column you will find links to the most popular web site links at the time of your search query.

Finally, Google may also add a link to the full conversation leading up to a tweet or update if possible.

Is this and important upgrade for Google?

We think so, as Twitter and other social web sites contain a lot of interesting references to online resources that will be of use to journalists, librarians, researchers and other investigators. Remember that Twitter & Co is much more than senseless chatter about making dinner and going to bed. People use this services to look for information, and by using Google Realtime you can tap into those searches.

Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal.

See also Google Tutor: Google Increases Focus On Realtime With Realtime Search Page

A World of Friends!

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Here at Pandia, we have gathered tools and tips for all kinds of searching. We even have a page dedicated to shopping search which was recently updated, which will help you find quality shopping sites online.

Pandia Shopping Search has three parts. The first part is a list of shopping search engines and online malls. There are separate sections for comparison shopping, customer information, shopping trends and more.

The second part contains links to selected online stores in 16 categories. Find established online shopping sites for home & garden, food & drink, gifts & flowers and much more.

The third part is a collection of links to shopping sites listed in our own Pandia Plus Directory. This part contains links to some 40 categories each containing hand picked links to quality sites. Give it a try to find quality shopping web sites!

photo credit: jk+too

A World of Friends!

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Social media of all kinds are a source of huge amounts of fresh information about news and events, likes and dislikes. But the signal-to-noice ratio is not good: Much, maybe most, of the material posted is personal and it can be hard to find the pertinent information. You need help to sift and sort the items, so why not try one of these five great real time search engines.

There are all kinds of search engines out there, searching the real time web. Some search a particular channel, like Twitter or Flickr. Others search for particular media, like images or video. These five search engines all search several sources and present results in several kinds of media.

Collecta

My personal favorite is Collecta. This is a powerful search tool, yet it is easy to figure out and navigate. The front page holds boxes, each containing a hot topic represented with both images and text, so you have a feeling of reading a real time newspaper.

When you do a search, the screen is split into three columns: The main column shows a live stream of fresh items matching your query. These are updated in real time and the stream can be paused if you want a closer look. The stream contains:

When you select an item, it expands in the right column, where you can get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, there is no way to play videos on the results page, you have to click through to the source, e.g. YouTube.

In the left column, you can sort your results by type (updates, images, stories etc.). In the same menu, you can share the results: You can send them directly to Facebook, Twitter, Mixx, Delicious, Reddit or StumbleUpon or you can grab the URL to the page or the feed.

Topsy

Topsy has no fancy front page like Collecta, but the search results page holds plenty of options. By default, the results include news, tweets and photos (no videos). You can sort the results by type in the left menu. You can also sort by time: Choose between news from the last hour, day, week or month, or see all hits for your query from Topsy’s index.

Experts is a feature unique to Topsy. Click this link and Topsy will present you with a list of people on Twitter who appear to be authorities on your query. This can be very useful for research purposes or when you seek to expand your Twitter network.

Topsy’s sharing options include Twitter, Facebook, RSS and email alerts.

48ers

48ers is a new contestant in the real time search race. The search results display hits from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious. A tiny icon next to each result shows the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.

I love that 48ers search Delicious. This is my most indesposable web tool. I use it not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.

There is no RSS, but a button at the top of the search results list lets you share your search with friends through a large number of channels or networks (choose from a list of 287).

There are links to trending topics and a list of recommended searches help you make the most of your search.

Leapfish

Leapfish is a search destination with a lot to offer. If you log in, you can customize the front page to display your favorite news sources (you can log in with your Twitter or Facebook ID). And Leapfish is both a regular search engine and a real time search engine. Enter your query and choose the Real Time button.

The main column displays the results. LeapFish does a good job of sorting and presenting them: The latest from the news corporations tops the list. Then comes the most tweeted links related to your query. Below this is a list of the latest related tweets. To the right are boxes for video and image results.

On the far right there is a set of links that lets you do your search on a sub set of the index: Images, videos, news and blogs along with options for web search and shopping search. Very convenient. There are also links to related searches and trending topics.

Scoopler

Scoopler is a powerful search tool. The front page displays top stories, top videos and hot searches to give you a feeling of what’s going on. There are also links that give you one click access to popular categories: entertainment, technology, sports, world, science, gaming, and politics.

The search results page holds a lot of information. The main list of results contains the most relevant stories from all the sources. A menu on the left lets you sort them to display links, images or videos. You can play the videos without leaving your search results. On the right you can see new tweets matching your query and the list is updated in real time.

The only option for sharing is through RSS.

I also want to mention Sency

Sency is not among the top 5 because it doesn’t meet all the criteria for our list. It only searches microblog updates and displays no videos or images. Still, I want to draw your attention to this swiss army knife of Twitter search. The list of features include local search for a number of US cities and some international destinations, search in French, Spanish, Italian and German, and an easy option to respond to tweets in your search results + much more.

A World of Friends!

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If you are an avid user of social networks or if you want to monitor the hive mind for news about, say, a brand, a sports team or a celebrity, you know it can be hard to keep up across the different networks. Here’s a solution.

48ers is a new search engine in public beta. It lets you search Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious all at once. All you do is enter the search term and hit Search. By default, results from all five networks are displayed. The search results are entire entries (tweets, updates etc). A little logo next to each result lets you know the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.

There is no RSS, but a button to share search results with friends through a large number of channels.

I am particularly happy that Delicious is included among the sources. For years, it has continued to be my most indesposable web tool, not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.

(In case you are wondering: The name 48ers refers to the pioneers of the California gold rush.)

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Twitter is a storehouse of information, but how to sort out the gems from among all of the nonsense? Here are some little known tools that will help you find what you need.

Twitter’s own tools

Searching Twitter became easier once the search box was added to the menu on the right of your tweets. Here you can perform searches and save them for later.

But what if you search results are still not great? Visit Twitter Advanced Search where you can modify your search to bring results in a particular language, from a particular person, reflecting a particular mood and much more.

If you don’t want to leave your Twitter home page to search, many of the options on the Advanced Search page are available as operators that you can add to your search in the regular Twitter search box.

Search Twitter in two languages

2lingual Twitter is a cool tool that lets you search Twitter for information in two languages at the same time. It can also translate your query for you (default setting). At the moment it supports these 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai. Here is an example search showing results for iPad in English and French.

Find images and videos on Twitter

On Twitcaps, you can search for images shared on Twitter. This is useful in many circumstances, but particularly for breaking news, like this example search for images from the flood in Pakistan.

You can find videos shared on Twitter with Twitmatic. You do your search and a list of tweets appear. When you decide which video you want to watch, click Play Video and the video is displayed inline.

Another great image search engine for Twitter is Twicsy. In addition to searching the index of 140 million pictures, you can filter search results by date or browse related tags.

Twitter search intro

If you are new to Twitter search, have a look at this short video from CommonCraft that gives a fun and easy introduction to Twitter search:

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Ask is relaunched with a question and answer database.

We have always had a soft spot for the Ask search engine. Throughout the years they have managed to make some serious innovations as regards search technology and the presentation of search results.

For instance: When Google and Bing presents search results in three column table, with results in the center, that is an idea they stole from Ask. But for some peculiar reason Ask seems to lose its direction. Ask abandoned that design for one that looked like the old version of Google before Google and Bing copied them. It is as if Ask lacks the courage to follow its ideas through, and ends up as a bleak copy of its competitors.

Natural language

Ask (or Ask Jeeves as it was called) originally was known as the natural language search engine. The idea was that you could enter a regular question in the search field: “Who is the president of the USA?”, instead of the queries we all use now: “president USA”. Ask Jeeves had a database of such questions, where the results were hand picked by human editors. If a relevant response could not be found in the search engine fetched results from its regular search index.

It turned out that this wasn’t much of a competitive advantage after all, partly because searchers quickly learned the short hand of search engine queries, partly because Google became very good at guessing what you were looking for and partly because it takes a lot of work to manage a human edited database.

A return to answers

Ask has not given up on the idea, though. In 2008 and 2009 it announced that it was going to revive the idea of natural language search, this time base on automated semantic search. It didn’t make much of a difference.

This week Ask (Ask Jeeves in Britain) was relaunched as a natural language search engine again, this time based on a human edited database of responses. Although the search engine will generate automatically produced search results, like Google and Bing, the main focus in on its Q and A feature. It looks a bit like Yahoo! Answers.

The new Ask

On July 26 the Ask Blog announced that they had officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com

“..which combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques. Now available on an invite-only basis …, the capability to pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address.”

The idea is that you may send in a question. Ask will reroute the question to one of many volunteers, who will then send you a response within five to ten minutes. Gradually this will help Ask build up a database with unique content.

Problems

The problem with this approach is twofold. First you need to ensure that your experts really know what they are talking about, and you need some way of controlling the quality of the answers. I guess user comments and voting could help out in that respect.

Second you need some way of updating the database. The world is changing. The web is changing. What was a relevant answer a year ago, may not be so today.

Ask is now displaying its Q and A feature prominently on its front page. The idea is clearly that the featured question will be interesting content for their users regardless of what they have come to search for.

When in Rome

We have not had the time to test the new feature. We have done some searches to see what the database can bring you, though.

A search for “what shall i see in rome?”, for instance, brought up the answer to “What to see in rome?” (fair enough) and that answer was the following sentence:

“Rome is located in Italy. Tis (sic) is one of the most visited city’s. You can see the Colosseum, The Vatican, Piazza Navona and Spanish stairs.”

The next relevant result was a response from another Q & A service, Wiki Answers:

“In Rome you can see many interesting things like:The Colloseum (sic), aqueducts, and other various building remains. ”

Anyone who has been to Rome realize that these are both completely unhelpful answers. A regular web search with a link to a tourist site would be immensely more useful. It should be noted that some of Ask’s responses do include links to relevant sites. When that is the case, a one sentence response may be useful.

One of the questions showcased by Ask is:

“What is Glycogenolysis?”

Again the responses are less than helpful:

“Glycogen is the storage form for glucose in the liver and muscles. Glycogenolysis is the conversion of glycogen into glucose in the liver and in the muscles.”

An alternative answer given is:

“Glycogenolysis is the breakdown of glycogen to glucose for use as metabolic fuel. It maintains the normal blood concentration of glucose in the fasting state.”

These are both correct, but for someone unfamiliar with terms like glucose and metabolic, the answer only leads to new questions. Links to relevant articles (like on the Wikipedia) would have been helpful. But that would, of course, bring up the problem of link rot and the need to update old questions.

The wrong approach to knowledge

These answers remind us of the debate on Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha believes there is one correct answer to any question. This isn’t the case even for quantitative questions in the natural sciences, let alone for the social and cultural questions Ask tries to answer.

Learning is to look at a large number of sources, changing you whole understanding of the world in the process. This is what regular search engines are good at. They deliver a large number of alternative results, helping you find more extensive information on different sites. If you want to replace those sites with information produced by yourself, you need to deliver more than a “factual” sentence.

The fact is that Ask’s Q & A service is not so much competing with Google, but the Wikipedia. And if that is the march Ask is aiming for they need to gain some weight.

New design

Ask has also presented a new design for the site. It is a bit old fashioned, but simplistic and easy to read. There are now links to alternative search queries, alternative questions and your search history in the right hand column — all very useful features.

See also: Search Engine Land: Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering

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Google has redesigned its image search engine.

Covering the search engine scene from outside the US sometimes leads to surprises. Features that are introduced in the US are not found elsewhere. When researching the new Google Image search engine for this post, I suddenly realized that I was not looking at the new one, but the old version.

This is how Google Image search results look in my Firefox browser on our PC:

On the Mac I got the new version, and by opening the Google Images US version in Chrome on the PC I finally managed to see what the search blogs are buzzing about:

The main difference is, as you can see, that the old version gave you thumbnails with image information below the images: the title, size, URL and a link to search results for similar images, like this:

Attractions in Oslo 480 × 348 – 40k – jpg thebesttraveldestinations… Find similar images

In the new version, the thumbnails are larger and there is no new information under the images.

However, this is another example of how Google is using new web standards to turn static web pages into a dynamic experience. Hover your cursor over the image and a small window pops up with a larger version of the picture and the same information as above:

You could say it does not make much of a difference, but the larger sizes makes it easier to see what the pictures depict.

If you click on the image, the old version would give you a page consisting of two frames – image information at the top, the original page at the bottom.

The new version makes this a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. In the foreground you get a large version of the image, while the original page is rendered behind it, greyed out. This is another example of what modern browsers can deliver.

A river of results

The old version was based on the paradigm of having several web pages for results. At the bottom of each page there was a next page button that forwarded you to the next set of images. Now all the images are included on the same page. As you scroll downwards Google will add new set of images. This is an idea Google has stolen from the Bing image search engine.

In fact, the new Google Image search is very much like Bing’s solution, although Bing stick to frames when it comes to presenting individual images.

Bing has one very useful feature that Google is lacking: It has a row of buttons that lets you select the sizes of the thumbnails. There is even an option where you can get the file information under each image, as in the old version of Google images.

Both Google and Bing allows for advanced search. Some features are found in the left hand column (Size, Color, Style and People in Bing; Size, Type and Color in Google), and Google has a special advanced search page.

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We are back with a new review of the latest search engine news articles and blog posts.

Google’s purchase of twenty years worth of renewable energy from an Iowa wind farm (Inside Google July 26 2010)

Want to read like a Google exec? Don’t expect any laughs. (Beyond Search July 27 2010)

Is Apple working on an app search engine and trying to stop Google from doing the same? (Google Watch July 27 2010)

Google Images have had a make over. (P Bradley July 28 2010)

It’s hard not to think of the new Ask.com community search section as a glorified Yahoo Answers (PC World July 28 2010)

Yahoo is currently testing Bing powered results on about 25 percent of the traffic. (SE Land July 20 2010)

Google tries to ‘get the app out of the way’ (techradar July 2010)

French newspapers is partnering to create an online news site that they hope will be an alternative to Google News. (SE Land July 23 2010)

Google adds “news settings” or “source preferences” which lets you block some sources (SE Roundtable July 26 2010)

AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search (SE Watch July 27 2010)

Android VP at Google, Andy Rubin, is having “accelerated” talks with music publishing firm Harry Fox (SE Watch July 27 2010)

Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time (SE Land July 27 2010)

Yahoo Japan — an independent entity from Yahoo — has decided to forgo the Bing transition (SE Watch July 27 2010)

Google’s report offensive image feature is no longer found in the new design. (SE Land July 29 2010)

Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service (SE Land July 27 2010)

IAC CEO: “Ask itself is not a large segment of the company.” (SE Land July 29 2010)

Next-generation tool for browsing street-level imagery. (SE Land July 29 2010)

Stay on Search: Long outdated SEO techniques based on pure, unadulterated myths. (July 30 2010)

The search results were about a sexual harassment case between her and a guy 10 years ago (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

Beta release for computational engine apps (techradar Jlu 2010)

Jeremy Sussman, a Google Local Product Manager has been pretty frank and clear (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition(s) for certain words you’re searching for. (Blogoscoped July 30 2010)

Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. (SE Land July 30 2010)

Metaweb is a successful and popular semantic search start-up and it will help make Google’s searches a lot more efficient (Google Tutor July 20 2010)

About.com on the top ten alternative/niche search engines out there on the Web. (July 23 2010)

Video of the week:

Google’s Matt Cutts talk about Google and search engine optimization at Search University in Belgium.

If you haven't already seen it YouTube has recently added two targeting features which enable advertisers to have more control on what videos their ads are placed on. Age restriction and video or channel URL restriction. Age restriction is not a self service feature, and will require you to work with your official Youtube representative but URL restriction is a feature you can enable yourself.

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Today Apple launched Ping. You can get the full story on ClickZ who covered the announcement. Were you expecting apple to launch a music social network today?

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At some point during the crush of Connected Marketing Week, Experian Hitwise announced the launch of two new premium Search Intelligence products that can improve your search marketing performance. I just found the press release in my email, so I hope you don't mind if I finally get around to reporting the "news."

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Following their new computer to phone calling service Google have launched a new beta feature for Gmail users, called priority inbox. It ranks your email according to what you read.

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Hot on the heels of the organic results integration in the US, Yahoo & Bing both announced today that now is the time to begin preparing your paid search accounts for the final integration, in which Microsoft Adcenter will power all paid search ads on Yahoo! Search in the U.S. & Canada.

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One of the events that was part of Connected Marketing Week was a one-day forum on the "Future of Display: Ad Networks and Exchanges," which was co-programmed by the IAB Networks and Exchanges committee.

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Last friday, Google launched the Googlebeat channel on Youtube, which aims to bring the value of services like Google Trends & Hot Trends, Google Insights for Search and Year-end Zeitgeist to a wider audience. This strategy is of passing interest as it seems that Google is squarely positioning itself as generating the equivalent value as trending topics in Twitter. Something which the latter has had great success with in garnering media attention. For example, FastCompany, called Twitter a "Human Seismograph Measuring the World".

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Today, Bing announced the Bing for Mobile Android App. Significantly, Bing also announced that Verizon will launch new Android devices pre-loaded with the Bing for Mobile app over the coming months.

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Last week at SES San Francisco, Brent Payne, the SEO Director of the Tribune, shared some of his social media link building tips during the News Search Optimization session.

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Google Voice launched a 'call phones' feature this month that works within your Gmail account. Not much to say about it, except that it could make Google Apps for Business an even more attractive proposition, as they are offering international call rates (computer to phone) starting at 2 cents a minute to Japan, Britain, Germany and France. Arguably everything required to launch a business from your computer now sits in the cloud of Google Apps... But you'll still need to file your tax returns.

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Now, I've known for months that SES Chicago 2010 was being moved from it's traditional slot in December to October this year, but I was surprised at SES San Francisco last week to hear an industry veteran blurt out, "SES Chicago is being held in October!?!"

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Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products announced today that Bing now officially powers Yahoo's organic search results in USA and Canada, saying "Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come."

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Yahoo announced today on the Y! Mobile Blog that they have partnered with TIM Brasil, and displaced Google, to provide the search facility to one of the largest mobile carriers in Brazil.

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Wow, SES San Francisco was awesome wasn't it?

Over 6,000 people registered to hear about the latest skills and insights into search marketing.

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SES San Francisco attracted 6,000 attendees last week -- and now the leading search and social marketing event heads to Hong Kong. SES Hong Kong, which will be held September 13-14, will feature Avinash Kaushik, author, blogger, and analytics evangelist at Google.

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