LBi Netrank: August 2007

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Netrank Newsletter : August 2007

Study shows trust in search results, Google launch YouTube Ads, 40% of search queries are repeats

Google allows meta robots instructions in headers

Google have announced support for meta robots instructions in HTTP headers. The header recognised is "X-Robots-Tag:"

This will allow more granular control over pages to be excluded from Google's index, on a per-URL basis and also expands the reach of the Robots Exclusion Protocol to include pages that do not contain html such as Adobe PDF files, video and audio files and other types.

Ongoing debate - Matt Cutts on the dashes vs underscores issue

It is still unclear whether Google has decided that dashes and underscores will soon be considered as the same. Matt Cutts has not confirmed and quoted during August "If you'd already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn't worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you're starting fresh, I'd still pick dashes."

Yahoo! now offers options to ignore specific URL parameters

Yahoo! has announced that by authenticating your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer you will now be able to inform Yahoo! of URL parameters which are not useful and should be removed. Essentially, this gets around the problem of session IDs for websites, but for now this only works on Yahoo!

Microsoft purchases aQuantive

Microsoft has completed its purchase of ad agency aQuantive. The agency will become part of the Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) Group

The group will be responsible for all of Microsoft's ad platforms including delivery technology Atlas, online ad firm DrivePM and Microsoft's existing ad delivery platform AdCenter. Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division said:

"Today we take a significant step forward in our ability to capture share of the $40bn online ad opportunity and the larger $600bn ad market, which is rapidly shifting to the world of online and IP-served platforms, including TV and gaming."

"The addition of aQuantive's technologies and people to the Microsoft portfolio is a core, strategic investment and step forward in our plans to become one of the top two online advertising platforms in the industry," Johnson added.

Microsoft research lauds organic search over PPC

A recent piece of Microsoft research has found huge amounts of money are being wasted by advertisers spending on high ad placements and in particular chasing branded keywords.

Speaking to ADWEEK during August, Young-Bean Song, VP of analytics at Atlas summarised the findings of the research, saying: "Should you be spending half your search budgets on those [branded] terms?...Probably not.”

Song concluded that far, far too much is spent on paid search, "What you're really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing."

The fact that Atlas began the research before Microsoft bought their parent company, aQuantive lends credance to the study, which covered 120,000 users across the three major search engines.

New study shows search users put trust in highly placed results

A study by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication demonstrates how influential search positioning is in creating trust with internet users.

An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in the positions even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.

"40% of search queries are repeats"

On 8 August, Techdirt discussed a new study undertaken by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that claims 40% of search queries are repeats. According to the research, people like to rely on Google as a means of cataloguing and recalling information, so they'll continue to enter the same queries in order to locate the same information again.

MSN to bring back link commands via a new "Webmaster Portal"

MSN have announced that they will be launching a product called Webmaster Portal (similar to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! SiteExplorer) which will provide functionality, including the return of being able to list backlinks.

Fetaured at the Live Search blog, Microsoft said:

"Initially we'll support these scenarios:

Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
Statistics about your website
Consolidation of content submission resources
New content and community resources"

The tool is expected to be available publicly in the late autumn.

Google launches first YouTube ads

Video website YouTube is to feature advertising for the first time, after Google revealed it is offering companies the chance to run ads on some of the site's most popular content. YouTube claims the new advertising method is five to ten times more effective than any other display advertising. During the trials, YouTube found that 75 per cent of those who clicked on the overlay watched the entire advert.

[Further reading: The Telegraph.]

Google gets 8% of US revenues from local search?

An interesting quote by Greg Sterling, analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco claims that: "Google probably got about $500 million in sales last year from local ads or about 8 percent of its U.S. revenue of $6 billion"

If that figure is accurate, it looks like local search is really taking off and may be a good source of growth for SEO.

Analytics final shootout results revealed

We previously mentioned a preliminary analytics software shootout. The final report has been released by Stone Temple Consulting. You can view the report online.

Essentially the report claims that Web analytics packages, installed on the same web site, configured the same way, produce different figures. The report found that in some cases the Web analytics package showing the highest numbers reported 150% more traffic than the package reporting the least traffic. The report explains the major factors in the variance found.

Google to resume sending penalty notification emails

Google have announced that they are going to resume sending penalty notification emails:

"We plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won't keep messages waiting if you haven't previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months."

Yahoo! crawl changes 'weather report'

Yahoo! have announced another 'weather report':

"We're reducing our crawling machines by a significant amount with this update, so you might have observed a significant reduction in crawl load from us along with fewer machine IP addresses hitting you over the last few days.

The new crawler continues to improve comprehensiveness and freshness of coverage while also enhancing crawl efficiency, which reduces spurious load on websites.

We had a brief bout of increased crawl load while testing and rolling out updates, like support for 'Dynamic URL Rewriting' in Site Explorer, announced yesterday. Don't fret, though, if you're concerned about seeing an increased load. We've initiated efforts and established policies internally to ensure this doesn't happen, even temporarily, in the future."

It's possible that this could, where search engine spider visits are recorded in web analytics as visits, affect apparent traffic.