SEO, Ever Evolving
SEO on your site is an ever evolving trial and error practice. But to minimize the “error” part of that effort consider some of Google’s activity beyond trying to reverse engineer their secret algorithms.
Oftentimes, they’ll give you some pretty broad hints, even open statements about what they have planned. Recent statements by Product Manager for Ad Quality, Nick Fox, are a case in point.
On the company blog, he states:
“Starting today, and over the coming weeks, we’ll be implementing an ads quality change designed to show fewer ads on queries for which our users might prefer not to see them and more ads on queries for which ads are useful.”
As examples, he offers:
“[O]n queries such as ‘car insurance’ or ‘flowers,’ we try to show a wide selection of relevant ads to our users. And, for queries where users are most likely not interested in a product or service, such as ‘dog friendly parks in Mountain View,’ we may aim to show fewer ads.”
That’s straight from the, as they say, horses mouth. (Why they say it, when there are so few talking horses around, is a mystery we leave for etymologists to unravel.)
(Hat tip to Marketing Vox for the story.)
Coming just before the release of a study suggesting MSN is equal to or better than Google in certain respects is probably coincidence. Even so, the Intralink Search Relevancy Report makes for interesting reading.
The company is tight-lipped about the details of how it carried out the study, making it difficult to judge its relevance. Even so, that MSN should rank so highly, when their market share is so low, can’t hurt.
The study comprised a mix of relevancy, freshness, and other factors from 250 searches.
Top it off with Danny Sullivan discussing his 10 years of writing about search and you’ve got a day full of news about search. (But beware the evil ad from pointroll that simply won’t go away, despite being Closed a dozen times.)
As if you didn’t have enough to do trying to keep your site among the first three pages in the SERPs…. Good luck and hang in there. PPC is still profitable, done well.