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Google Tweaks AdWords To Give Landing Page Quality More Weight
Oct 3, 2011 at 7:19pm ET by Pamela Parker
After quietly testing in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost-per-click bids.
“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team told me. This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”
Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was. The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding. Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.
Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.
“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to sort of push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”
The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.
Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Top News
About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker
http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight-95488
Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors
Oct 3, 2011 at 1:28pm ET by Andrew Shotland
Last week, I released the results of a survey of Google News Ranking Factors with some of the top news SEOs in the business. While there has been plenty of response regarding the Top 10 Most Important Factors, I thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at the Top Negative Factors. In my work with local news publishers, I have seen many of them doing a lot of things which hurt their rankings.
1. Duplicate Content
Just as in traditional Web SEO, duplicate content was determined to be the biggest negative factor. And while plenty of news sites create duplicate content on their own, those surveyed focused on the use of other sources’ content on your site, particularly scraped or plagiarized content.
Google is getting better at determining the original source of the content and degrading the rankings of the sites that “borrow” it. And if you are distributing press releases on your site, make sure you separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site and adding “nofollow” tags to all links to press releases.
2. Vague, Abstract Headlines
This is a fancy way of saying headlines that don’t target specific high value keywords. I remember when Eliot Spitzer got caught with the hooker and the NY Post ran the headline “Ho No!” Awesome headline. Amazing linkbait.
If you can write a headline like that, then go for it, but everyone else should stick to “Spitzer Caught With Hooker”. If you are writing headlines for a news site, you need to learn how to do keyword research.
3. No Google News Sitemap
I am always surprised when I find a news site not using these. I have seen dramatic differences in crawling, indexing and rankings as a result of using a Google News Sitemap. It’s not particularly hard to implement. What are you waiting for?
4. Poor Quality Content
Google News has ways of algorithmically and manually determining if your site tends to misspell words, use poor grammar, and generally produce poor quality content. There’s no excuse for bad writing!
5. Blocking Googlebot Via Robots.txt
This is one of those classic SEO screw-ups that keeps a SEO consultant’s phone ringing in the middle of the night. If your organic traffic just tanked, one of the first things you should do is check your robots.txt file and make sure you don’t see these two lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
6. Poor Site Performance
If your site is slow and/or produces a lot of 500 errors, your rankings are going to suffer. Google wants to send people to fast-loading pages. There are variety of tools you can use to monitor your site’s performance including the Crawl Stats and Site Performance reports in Google Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed Tool.
My favorite technique is to use a script to track your server logs for when Googlebot gets 4xx or 5xx response codes, then send out an email to the team notifying them of the errors. Whomever is responsible for performance will have a heavy incentive to keep the site error-free and keep those emails to a minimum.
7. Poor CitationRank
CitationRank is the measure of how well a story on a news site gets linked to from or referenced on other sites, particularly other news sites. These kinds of citations demonstrate that the story is authoritative on the subject. If you can’t get others to link to your story, it’s going to be harder to get it up on top.
8. Low PageRank Domain
If your site’s overall SEO program is not competitive, you will have a harder time ranking. Make sure you are at least getting the basics right. Make sure your site is accessible to search engine robots, targets high value keywords and regularly gets links from other sites.
9. New Site
Just as new sites can have a harder time ranking in Google’s Web results, sites with low/no trust and/or history in Google News will have a harder time ranking well.
New sites must demonstrate trust by getting linked to from other authoritative sites, by getting well-shared via popular social media channels and by getting well-clicked-on relative to other sites in Google News for a particular story.
“Category Authority” was deemed by our panel to be the most important ranking factor, so new sites will likely have the best luck if they focus on a specific niche to be expert in.
10. All Syndicated Content With The Same Titles As The Source Site
While this is basically the same thing as Duplicate Content, the panel seemed to think this case deserved special mention as more and more news organizations put more reliance on syndicated content, without even bothering to rewrite any of it.
If you don’t put your own spin on the news, you are not going to do well in Google News.
For more information on various Google News Ranking Factors, check outwww.googlenewsrankingfactors.com.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Google: News | Google: SEO | Locals Only
About The Author: Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a local search engine optimization consulting company specializing in yellow pages seo and local directory search—the blog is pretty fabulous too. See more articles by Andrew Shotland
Migrant Remittances Still Lifeline to Bulgaria’s Economy
Remittances – money sent by Bulgarian migrants to family members back home – continue to increase slightly, but steadily despite the global downturn, data from the central bank shows. The net sum of the remittances from Bulgarians permanently working abroad totaled EUR 473 M during the first seven months of 2011, Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) wrote.
Bulgarian immigrants sent home EUR 68.6 M in July alone, slightly down from EUR 77.4 in May, which was a record-high level of transfers since the Bulgarian National Bank started collecting data about remittances back in 2004, the bank said.
The increase in the amount of remittances from Bulgarians working abroad has been firm over the last few years. Total funds transferred to Bulgaria annually have gone up from EUR 693.90 M in 2008 to a whopping EUR 759.6 M in 2010. Studies show that the actual money sent home are about 30-40% higher that the official figures.
Bulgaria 5th in Global Broadband Internet Quality
Bulgaria ranks fifth in the world in quality of broadband Internet, according to results of a research by Cisco Systems Inc, conducted by the Oxford University.
The first four places are taken by South Korea, Japan and Sweden, while countries like Finland, Romania and Denmark are placed after Bulgaria.
Among the cities, Sofia ranks 11th in quality of the Internet connection, followed by Lisbon, New York City, Hong Kong, Paris and Copenhagen.
“Having in mind the Internet speed, I would like to live in Sofia,” said Fernando Gil de Bernabe, senior director at Cisco.
The broadband quality ranking measured the proportion of households and businesses with access to broadband, combined with Internet-connection speed.
The quality was defined by taking into account the download speed, upload speed and the average latency.
Sofia residents download with an average speed of 14,7 Mb/s and upload with an average of 7 Mb/s, while the latency is 52 ms.
Bulgaria, however, has showed a slow progress in the distribution of Internet in the country. It ranks last among the 23 countries.
Most of the Eastern European countries have shown a tendency for high quality and low distribution among the population in comparison to the countries that have more developed economies.
“The quality of the Internet connection in Bulgaria is developed enough. The country needs to do more about the penetration of the connection among the population. In order for this to happen, there has to be political will and initiative,” Bernabe said.
According to the survey, Bulgaria occupies the 20th place for the ratio quality-distribution.
UK and USA Christmas Day online sales up 29%
More people are choosing to do their online shopping on Christmas Day than ever before, with sales rising by 29% to reach £132m.
Boxing Day saw even higher sales of £281m, according to IMRG. These stats are backed up by an eDigitalResearch survey (PDF) of consumers’ online activity over Christmas.
More highlights from the survey:
75% of the respondents said they were online on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day, with 15% and 23% respectively making purchases online.
Figures from John Lewis paint a similar picture, with shoppers making a purchase on its website every 10 seconds on Christmas Day, and a record number of visitors to the website between 11am and midday on Boxing Day.
Despite threats from the weather nearer Christmas, and the Royal Mail strike in November, the vast majority of deliveries arrived on time, and 97% said they intend to spend more or the same online next year.
Customer satisfaction with etailers
According to the Christmas Customer Satisfaction Index from ForeSee Results, customers are happier with online retailers this year, with the average score up 6.5% to 71.
Pureplays Amazon and Play.com topped the list with scores of 83 and 79, while Ticketmaster and B&Q were bottom of the class with scores of 65.
ForeSee ran the same survey with US consumers, and US sites scored an average of 79, which suggest that they are outperforming UK websites by 9%.
Which retailers had a good Christmas online?
Online sales at the John Lewis sale were up 23% in its first three days. The retailer experienced its busiest ever hour online when it launched the sale at 6pm on Christmas Eve.
The Hut, which runs Zavvi, as well as providing e-commerce services for Woolworths, Argos and others, said that orders rose by 188% in the six weeks to December 23.
Shop Direct Group reported that online sales over Christmas were up by 19% against 2008, while the internet accounted for 65% of all sales versus 56% last year.
Online sales at M&S were up by 32% in the 13 weeks up to December 27, compared with 2008.
Sales at Ocado rose by 49% in the week leading up to Christmas to £8.9m. Sales in the four weeks to Boxing Day were up 30% from 2008, reaching £40.8m.
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5194-christmas-day-online-sales-up-29?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic
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