Search Engine Musings

You can always rely on an “expert” to keep you right.

Professional SEO readers will be fascinated to learn that according to a recent BBC news article all the search engines are basically the same. They quote Jupiter analyst Nate Elliot as saying that the “underlying algorithms that powers search are also very similar among the main players”. Google will doubtless be interested to learn that Yahoo and MSN use a PageRank-based algorithm.

Not only that but the results are the same too! Apparently he said “Strip out the brands and just show the results and there is not often a lot of difference. The biggest difference between them is the logo at the top of the page,”.

When you’ve picked your jaw up from the floor you’ll be happy to know that you’ll never need to check a client’s positions in more than one engine ‘cos they’re all the same.

Which internet is he looking at?!? What exactly does he analyse? It certainly isn’t the same one I’m looking at and I seriously doubt that he’s involved in SEO or anything like it. Anyone who’s ever compiled a spreadsheet of search results knows that this is complete tosh.

Makes you wonder about the advice from all the medical and scientific experts they trot out all the time doesn’t it!

Microsoft’s shrinking reputation in the search market took another blow with the release of figures by Comscore showing that they are no longer in third place in the ranks of major search engines. Chinese company Baidu have apparently overtaken them and and Korean engine NHN are only just behind as the far eastern markets become ever more important.

Given that according to Marketshare their worldwide search share already ranks considerably below the searches carried out on Google.co.uk and is only just above Google Canada I wonder what would happen if all the SEOs stopped running checks on all their clients keywords!! Considering that this is the search engine that is the default one for new Windows machines it shows how little faith people have in it.

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that there are some pretty major differences between these two sets of figures. Which, if either, is correct I have no idea, but it’s pretty clear that with Google miles out in front Yahoo is the only other serious player. Despite considerable hype Ask don’t seem to be getting anywhere and you have to wonder about their future. Clearly the far east is a completely different market with its own dynamic and will develop very fast in the next few years. How the western companies respond to this will be interesting to observe.

Steve Balmer, not exactly the shy and retiring type, has been having a go at Google again. With a fine eye for a good headline he basically said that Google reads your email - while of course those nice people at Hotmail wouldn’t dream of such a thing.

Now regular readers of this blog (probably Mrs Trellis of North Wales) will know that I’m not exactly unconcerned about online privacy matters in general and Google’s desire to index everything everywhere in particular, but even I wouldn’t go quite that far.

Naturally no-one is sitting reading your mail - in this case specifically Gmail - but what they are doing is parsing through it to find subject matter to suggest adverts to display. How detailed that parsing is only Google know; and whether the CIA or whoever would be able to get personal information about you if they obtained access to the records is another open question. Since I wouldn’t use a Gmail account under any circumstances anyway it doesn’t worry me unless I’m communicating with someone who does.

From the search point of view the important thing to realise is that essentially Google isn’t really a search company - it’s an advertising company, and it’s increasingly THE advertising company. And it’ll use any data it can to push more, and more targeted, adverts at more and more people. The days when it was a simple search engine company with a simple interface and low revenue streams are long gone.

With considerable fanfare (Searchification?) we had the launch of the new style, new index, Live Search. Overwhelmed yet? Me neither, unless you count overwhelmed with crap search results. In what sounds increasingly like desperation in the face of Google’s continued growth, Microsoft claim to have 4 times as many pages in the new index. Looks to me as if they’re listing all of them before the ones that used to rank in their search queries!

To be honest I seldom bother to check MSN/Live now for my own sites - with so little market share they’re becoming an irrelevance - but I happened to be checking a client’s site which we rescued from a unindexed situation earlier in the year and which is now beginning to rank well in Google. I wanted an overall picture so I was doing a full check in all three engines. One of the first terms I checked was a very specific phrase that I’d used purely as a spider penetration test and it had quickly ranked in the top three on all three engines. I was astonished to find it had dropped out of the top 250 in MSN/Live. So I started to look at what was ranking for this phrase. Number 1 was a site which was pretty relevant for one of the words but didn’t appear to be at all relevant for the other, being in the wrong country entirely. The second word wasn’t in the body text, the title tag, or the description. By searching the source code I eventually found a single instance of the word - in a country list in a jump menu. Yet my client’s page is about the subject and has the phrase in both title and H1 tag.

I’ve looked at a few such searches since that one and they are no better at returning relevant results (with one notable exception - one of my own sites has good Google rankings but was lagging a bit in Live until now, although even there the results it did have have been turned upside down).

Maybe it’s still bedding in, maybe after a few more indexing runs it’ll improve. But didn’t they test it? Extensively. Didn’t they conceive that any poor relevance results initially would attract bad press and poor user response when they were making such a fanfare about it? They really need to do better than this if they expect to be taken seriously in the arena against Google. If they can’t then perhaps they should rename it Live and Let Die Search.

A few months ago I blogged about trust and how it relates to websites - both in the eyes of the search engines and the users. I’ve also written more recently about reputation, particularly that of our industry. Some recent occurrences have led me to think further on these subjects and on how trust is hard won but so easily lost.

Gaining the trust of users

To achieve trust in any sphere you need to have an overall air of reliability and integrity as well as demonstrating many small areas of competence and professionalism. Similarly on a website it’s not just about having a padlock symbol on your shopping cart - there are many factors at work to develop trust amongst your users. Some of the ways to ruin your chances of achieving trust are:

• A badly built or maintained site
  I’ve seen sites with missing images, buttons which don’t work, internal links that are broken or pages missing. None of that gives an impression of a company that is taking due care.
• Bad spelling or grammar
  Suggests a sloppy attitude and/or poor supervision. Will they treat orders the same way?
• A tortuous or broken ordering system
  Suggests a lack of logic, thought, or consideration for customers.
• Lack of contact details
  Raises a big red flag about what happens if things go wrong with an order, as well as suggesting the company is ignorant of the law.
• Is anything demonstrably untrue?
  I’ve seen sites displaying a W3C HTML validity symbol that actually had over 180 validation errors. No matter how much I wanted their product there’s no way I’d give my credit card details to a company who is either stupid or dishonest.

You need all of these things (and many more) to be right in order to earn trust; only one needs to be wrong in order to lose it or at best to sow the first seeds of doubt. Only if you’ve already built up trust in your brand will mistakes be forgiven. But even then a serious mistake can blow years of work. Even organisations such as major long-established banks have suffered downturns after exposing customers’ details via an insecure site and it could be argued that this has contributed to the general lack of trust in banks that is apparent now.

Gaining the trust of business clients

The same principles apply in business-to-business practice. If you, as an SEO or web designer, are going to attract contracts and the long term trust of a client then you have to earn it by ensuring that you provide what you promise and act in a professional manner.

• Be open about what you are going to do to a client’s site
  Using smoke and mirrors to convince a client you have expertise will rebound on you eventually because they’ll always worry that they aren’t in control.
  
• Don’t try to baffle them with science
  If they ask questions then take the opportunity to gently educate them; time spent at the beginning should pay dividends later when you’re sorting out what keywords are working and what aren’t and want to make changes or refocus.
• Don’t try to juggle too many jobs
  If you promise results by unrealistic dates you’ll simply end up missing deadlines.
• Don’t rush to re-prioritise every time a client calls
  If a client is pressing for priority treatment you have to respond realistically - if you promise them a date then you have to deliver, but you also have to deliver on previous deadlines for other clients as well so there’s no point hoping you can fudge it. If it’s not possible then you have to tell them that. You may lose the odd client but you’ll gain the trust of the ones that are left and the lost ones would probably have been on your back all the time anyway.
• Be clear about cost schedules and invoice on time
  A professional client will expect a professional payment regime. If you’re late in sending an invoice then it looks sloppy. And an unprofessional client will just take the opportunity to pay late.

Gaining the trust of search engines

And search engines? Just like the established brand, once you have an old and trusted site then you can probably get away with the odd mistake without any great damage. You’ve built up a track record and will be given the benefit of the doubt as long as it’s not too serious. If you’re a new site they have no initial reason to trust you so if you do anything dodgy then they’ll likely jump on it and it’ll take a lot longer to develop trust and good rankings. You need to be squeaky clean and give the right impressions.

• Don’t try to take shortcuts
  Padding content with other people’s material to bulk up your site, or joining link schemes to boost your link profile is easily found and will hold you back.
• Don’t stuff your content or meta content with too many keywords
  Your potential keywords should grow with the size and age of your site.
• Get the links that a good site should have
  Do make sure that the links that would be expected from a professional site are in place - if you aren’t in the local council’s business directory or chamber of commerce site then make sure you join and get in there. One professional link source is worth a hundred cheap directories or blog comments.

The old joke goes “If you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made”. The fact is you can’t - you have to mean it and you have to show you mean it.

After the recent episode during which some rankings were bouncing around unpredictably and I theorised that Google was dumping data due to a corruption in their indexes, we now seem to have returned to a rather more stable index with most of the sites I monitor being back to their normal positions or in some cases a little better. The erroneous backlink information seems to have disappeared as well so I suspect that the big reindex has pretty much finished and we are back to the normal everflux situation.

Let’s hope that this year there are no further dramatic shifts of the kind that have occurred leading up to the Christmas period in recent years, or the conspiracy theorists will be out in force again suggesting artificial Adwords boosting. Given the current state of near panic in the financial markets the world economy could do with a stable and prosperous festive period.
Which raises an interesting thought - one search engine, which didn’t even exist 10 years ago, now has the power to affect the world’s economy in major ways, just by changes in its search results; quite apart from what it does with the mountain of money it’s amassing. I wonder what the governments and the international banks think of that?