Bing Webmaster Tools Review 2011

Ever since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Bing has been integrating Yahoo’s search (i.e. Yahoo SEO and Yahoo Search Marketing) into Bing SEO and Bing Adcenter through Bing-Yahoo Search Alliance.

Bing has been offering SEO data to webmasters through Bing Webmaster Tools long before Yahoo Site Explorer got shut down. With Bing’s SEO data, webmasters can understand more about:

Bing’s Webmaster Center Blog has listed 2011′s updates of Bing Webmaster Tools regarding:

  • Traffic Reports Depth
  • HTML5
  • Crawler Control
  • Index Tracker
  • User Permissions
  • Sitemaps
  • User Experience and Communications
  • Block URLs
  • Improved Speed
  • Know More, Faster
  • Expanded Crawl Details
  • URL Normalization
  • Webmaster Account Verification
  • Adcenter CPC Integration

Traffic Reports Depth

Early in the year saw us adding more information in the Traffic reports. This includes the new detailed traffic stats feature. We are showing much more information to the webmasters including:

  • Average impression and click positions for their top 100 queries.
  • The specific pages showing up for a particular query, including their impressions, clicks, CTR, average impression and click positions, and position details.
  • Their top 100 pages including their impressions, clicks, CTR, and average impression and click positions.
  • The specific queries showing up for a particular page, including their impressions, clicks, CTR, average impression and click positions, and position details.
  • Trending over time for their top 100 queries.

These additions made it easier for Webmasters to see which phrases were driving traffic, and to which pages on their websites that traffic was going.

HTML5

Around this same time, maybe a little earlier, we addressed the need to install Silverlight to view the reports by moving the tools to HTML5. With this move, we made it easier for users to interact with our reports and saw report load times slightly improve as well. This move meant our reports were now viewable in all modern browsers and on smart phones as well.

Crawler Control

Users asked loud and clear for ways to control the crawler, so in addition to the usual avenue open via your robots.txt, we built a tool that allows you to easily drag and drop a graph to set the crawl rate specific to your website. It’s as simple as creating the crawl patter you want. This means it’s easy to tailor our crawling efforts to times when your bandwidth is least affected. Telling us to stay away during peak business hours, and visit when everyone is asleep is as easy as clicking your mouse. We added a checkbox for you to let us know if we’d encounter AJAX URLs along the way, and there is an option to simply let us figure it all out for you.

The times shown were all GMT, so we added a layer to display your server time relative to GMT, hopefully making it easier to understand when your peak business hours hit, and allowing you to build a control graph around those hours.

Index Tracker

Our Index Tracker tool received a thorough backend rewrite, improving coverage, performance, depth and latency. When these improvements released, even brand new websites saw all of their data as the Bing index held it. No longer having to wait 48+ hours meant Webmasters could understand what Bing was actually indexing and how it was performing much faster.

User Permissions

We introduced user controls and permissions. Site owners could now grant admin, read / write, or read-only access to other users for their site using their existing verification code. This made it much easier for businesses to manage their accounts, share access and control who could turn the knobs and pull the levers. This layer of control allowed businesses to manage account ownership and access at a new level, ensuring, as employees moved around, access and control of these tools remained in hand.

Sitemaps

We enhanced the Sitemap UX by showing not only user submitted sitemaps, but all sitemaps we know of. We also expanded the types of feeds we accept enabling folks to submit Atom, RSS and xml.

User Experience and Communications

Working to make it easier to navigate inside the tools, we added a second layer to the tabbed navigation, which you see when logged in.

In an effort to improve communications, we enabled the ability to tell us where to email you and what to email you. If there was an alert appearing inside your account for malware, as an example, you can now opt to receive an email alert to the address of your choice. This made it much easier to know when something was happening.

Block URLs

Our “Block URLs” feature got a backend overhaul to include more built-in safeguards, helping to protect webmasters from accidently blocking large numbers of URLs. While the control is still in your hands, there are added layers of checks on our end that prompt confirmations before actions take place.

Improved Speed

We did some work on how we cache all of your website data, as well, resulting in a dramatic drop in latency from, in some cases 5 seconds for a report to load, to 400 milliseconds for the same report now. That dramatically improved the performance of reporting.

Know More, Faster

Later in the year, we expanded user email communication preferences and controls. It’s easy to stay up to date on the latest announcements and alerts applied to your account. You can set frequency preferences, select options on which alerts you want notifications for and set a dedicated email and contact number.

Expanded Crawl Details

The expansion of Crawl Details meant you would now see all URLs attributed to header codes and notations made. This was a great step forward to understanding which URLs Bing was having issues accessing, and makes it much easier to understand if any high value URLs are being seen by us in ways you’d like to change.

URL Normalization

To help you manage parameters in a more in depth manner, we expanded the number of parameters you could assign us to manage from 25 items to 50. This made it easier for larger and older sites to manage legacy URLs.

Webmaster Account Verification

This was one folks were asking for all year, and we managed to get it in with one of our Fall releases. Being able to verify a website via a DNS change. Past choices included adding a snippet to your <head> code or uploading a dedicated XML file to the root of your site, and both options remain as valid ways to verify your domains. This third option will allowed you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain as well.

Adcenter CPC Integration

In an effort to help businesses understand how they can easily expand their inbound traffic, we began showing CPC data from Adcenter inside your Webmaster accounts. When looking at Traffic data, to the left of the keywords you now see CPC amounts associated with those keywords in Adcenter. This is an excellent way to understand the practical cost of driving more traffic through paid search, and can help in targeting keywords you perform well for in organic search, thereby increasing your business’s footprint on the search results page.

When building a website, focus and review the items below that will improve the quality of your site to visitors and SEO for Bing.

Crawlability

If a crawler can’t access your content, the content won’t be indexed by search engines, nor will it be ranked. Enable and use XML sitemaps with a low error rate to build trust with search engines. Make sure your website navigation is clean and strive for a simple, search-friendly URL structure. This means the URL is keyword rich and avoids session variables or docIDs. We suggest you use robots.txt files to instruct the crawlers on how to interact with your webpage and more easily find your content.

Site Structure

Provide a site structure with strong functionality, which helps encourage link building. Linking to both trusted outside sources and internal content shows a search engine you care about users getting the best data around their query. In addition, HTML sitemaps ensure a good user experience and help search engines discover all your pages and content.

Content Hierarchy

When you plan your website’s content hierarchy, take care in aligning your content with what searchers are looking for and their intent during their journey on your URL. Basic keyword research can also help you understand how searchers are interacting with search engines, and can help craft your content strategy. Also avoid placing links and content inside rich media applications, such as Flash and Silverlight, which make it almost impossible for crawlers to find and read the content. Just gotta have your rich media? Not to worry. Make sure a solid downlevel experience exists and we’ll still find your content.

RSS Feeds

Get them up and running and keep them clean. By following your feeds, it’s easier for the engine to get your latest content. This means we see it faster, so indexing, ranking and showing in the SERPs can happen faster. Want to really impress Bing? Get into your Bing Webmaster account and insert your RSS feed URL into the sitemap submission flow.

Rel=canonical

Being able to tell the engine which version of your URL you’d like to have attributed as the original is pretty useful. This handy command can help you build value on the version of the URL that matters most to you, and help combine value attributed to many version of the URL into one location, helping boost the rank of that one, original version of the URL.

The tough part here is usually getting the code installed on each page, and of course, each instance needs to point to one selected URL for this to work. We’d rather you didn’t use the rel=canonical to cover issues where your CMS needs work. If the CMS is causing instances of duplicate URLs to occur, you should fix the problem. We see increasing usage of the rel=canonical across huge numbers of pages on large websites. While we don’t really like this, either, we can work with it, as we understand the need to balance the workload and the returns.

The bottom line, though, remains that you need to be able to manage the rel=canonical, and if you don’t have control over when its deployed, which URLs they point to and when it is used, you need to work it out.

Robots.txt

Seems like a no-brainer, this one, but so many websites remain without a robots.txt file. In some cases it’s a purely missed opportunity, or the site owner is unaware of what a robots.txt file is. In other cases, though, it’s the inability to place a file on the root of your domain.

Regardless of the blocker, the robots.txt file is one of the most important files you can place on a web-server. Given it is the location search crawlers reference to understand how to interact with the website, it’s a pretty powerful document. If you do not have access to place your robots.txt in the correct location, you need to understand why this control is lacking. Then solve the problem.

Sitemap.xml

This is another file missing from a huge number of websites today. Another important file the search crawlers look for. One that is referenced inside the robots.txt mentioned above, and one which can help get more of your pages into the search index. Overall, it’s almost as important as the robots.txt file, and if you cannot place these files in a location the crawlers can find, you need to fix this issue.

This file typically lives on the root of the domain, but for larger websites, where multiple files may exist to capture all of the URLs present, maybe only a sitemap directory file is on the root. Whichever your case, it’s important he crawlers can find it, and if you cannot access the root on your server to place files there, it’s a missed opportunity.

Rich Snippets

Marking up your content has been around for a few years now, and with the launch earlier this year of www.schema.org, the major engines have made a clear statement there is value in marking up your content. By embedding these elements in your page code, we can extract information more accurately and use that information to provide increasingly richer search results. You are credited as the source for the data used. This is important work for sites seeking to differentiate themselves from the pack as we move into 2012.

Websites need to balance the future value versus the workload to implement, and still need to keep in mind that implementing these elements won’t immediately increase rankings. This works helps us better understand relevancy.

What’s important here is planning for the work and ensuring you have buy in across your organization.

Title, Description, Alt Tags, etc.

Managing your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc. is still important. All these basic, on page/technical SEO factors add up to help us understand what your content is relevant for. The bottom line with these items is you need to be able to manage them. If you cannot change these elements on a per-page basis, you lack needed control. We only mention three here, but you can think of all of them.

That meta description you don’t care to alert and let appear across all you pages? While writing unique ones for each page won’t suddenly vault your pages to number 1 in the rankings, it can make the difference between a searcher clicking on your result in the search results or not. Think of the meta description as the “call to action” then, when read by a searcher, tells them why they should click your result. Better to have your words appearing in our search results than random text we take from the page because your meta description was low quality.

We use the meta description as an example, but the same level of thought should be applied to all of your on page optimization efforts.

Content

This might seem pretty obvious, but with so many website still aggregating content or using article services to build out pages, its worth mentioning. We talked about how to build good content a little while back and the value of “article-site content“, but we still see websites trying to get ahead in the rankings by basing their websites on a thin content model. Such sites are often very polished looking, and while may provide value in aggregating a lot of items in one location, they still aren’t adding anything new and unique to the conversation. A website designed primarily to hold affiliate links that get the user off the website quickly and into a shopping cart on another website is an example of a thin content website, though not the only example. Affiliate links on a website can be completely useful, but when the content on the site is duplicating that from the original website, there’s simply no reason why that thin content site should outrank the real deal.

Control as applied to content means you can influence the creation of quality content on the website. If the website is not producing unique, quality content, it won’t last long in the search results.

Verification Access

This is pretty straight forward. You need to be able to place the verification code in place to use webmaster tools. This could be in the form of embedding a tag in the <head> code of your webpage, or by a notation added in the DNS for the website. No matter the option used, you need to have access to make this happen, and if you do not have that access, you lack the control needed to then be able to access some of the richest data about your website online – our webmaster tools data.

UX Improvements

If you don’t have a website your visitors love, you’re missing an opportunity. Get cracking on a user experience review and see where you’re bleeding users. By staying tuned in to what users like and dislike about your website, you can make the myriad small changes needed to field a UX-winning site. And if you keep visitors happy, they share you more often with friends, netting you more links. Visitors are also more likely to come back to you again in the future if they like the site and find it easy to get what they’re after.

It might seem like a small thing, to focus on the user experience, but that UX directly influences the happiness of visitors and the engines can see that in how they reach to your site when they see it ranked in search results. If you don’t have input on UX improvements, you need to push. This is an important aspect of optimizing any website.

Social Sharing Integration

This almost goes without saying, but we still see so many websites not involved socially with their visitors. Social isn’t going away folks, and while it does take work, skipping social integration is a missed opportunity. People share what they like with friends. If you have social sharing icons embedded in your pages, you are much more likely to get shared by visitors. At the very least, you need to cover this angle. Get the buttons embedded into your pages so your visitors can share you content with their friends and followers.

One of the major SEO issues to any large websites is duplicate content/URLs. Bing Webmaster Central Blog reveals how to handle duplicate content URLs and how canonical URLs, 301 permanent redirects and 302 temporary redirects work:

301 redirect

The 301 redirect defines a redirect which tells the search engine the content has moved permanently to a new location. This is preferred as it clearly states the intent to move and instructs the engine to transfer any value the URL has accrued from the old URL to the new location. It’s important to know that the 301 redirect does not pass all of the value from an old URL to a new one. The new URL does need to build its own level of trust with the engines, which is why we won’t simply transfer full value to new URLs.

302 redirect

The 302 redirect defines a redirect which states the content has moved temporarily and will return to its original URL shortly. This redirect will still move people to your content, but the engines are essentially being told to hold their assigned values on the original URLs and wait for the content to return to the original URL. This is not what you want. Be careful when requesting redirects be implemented, and clearly define that you need to have a 301 in place. Otherwise, you can lose value from your original URLs, leaving your new ones to struggle on their own.

rel=canonical

It’s important to understand that a rel=canonical is not a true redirect. There has been a lot written that it’s “basically like a 301 redirect”, which can be misleading. The purpose of the rel=canonical is to help the engines understand when an individual URL is essentially a duplicate of another. The rel=canonical element does suggest to the engine that any value assigned to the duplicate URL be assigned to the original URL, though. This is similar to how the 301 functions, which is the origin of the over-simplification noted above.

The biggest difference between the two is that while a 301 redirect physically moves a visitor to the new URL, the rel=canonical does not physically move anyone anywhere.

Something else you need to keep in mind when using the rel=canonical is that it was never intended to appear across large numbers of pages. We’re already seeing a lot of implementations where the command is being used incorrectly. To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website.

A lot of websites have rel=canonicals in place as placeholders within their page code. Its best to leave them blank rather than point them at themselves. Pointing a rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us “this page is a copy of itself. Please pass any value from itself to itself.” No need for that.

We do understand that doing work at scale requires some compromises, as it’s not easy to implement anything on a large site page by page. In such cases, leave the rel=canonical blank until needed.

Review the definitions of 301/302 redirects in HTTP status codes 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx.

Other Search Engines’ Webmaster Tools

Besides Bing, other search engines also offer webmaster tools to webmasters:

Posted on January 23, 2012
Category: Bing SEO | Leave a Comment

HTTP Status Codes, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx

A HTTP status code is returned by your server in response when a request is made to your server for a web page on your website. Examples are:

  • When a user accesses the web page in a browser.
  • When a search engine spider (e.g. Googlebot) crawls the web page.

HTTP status codes are of 5 different categories:

  • 1xx Provisional/Informational Response
  • 2xx Successful
  • 3xx Redirected
  • 4xx Client/Request Error
  • 5xx Server Error

The first digit of the status code represents one of five classes of response.

HTTP Status Codes

Google provides a list of HTTP status codes to webmasters, in which the most common and imporant status codes are below:

200 (Successful) – The server successfully processed the request. Generally, this means that the server provided the requested page. If you see this status for your robots.txt file, it means that Googlebot retrieved it successfully.

301 (Moved permanently) – The requested page has been permanently moved to a new location. When the server returns this response (as a response to a GET or HEAD request), it automatically forwards the requestor to the new location. You should use this code to let Googlebot know that a page or site has permanently moved to a new location.

302 (Moved temporarily) – The server is currently responding to the request with a page from a different location, but the requestor should continue to use the original location for future requests. This code is similar to a 301 in that for a GET or HEAD request, it automatically forwards the requestor to a different location, but you shouldn’t use it to tell the Googlebot that a page or site has moved because Googlebot will continue to crawl and index the original location.

400 (Bad request) – The server didn’t understand the syntax of the request.

403 (Forbidden) – The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Web crawl page under Diagnostics in Google Webmaster Tools), it’s possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot’s access.

404 (Not found) – The server can’t find the requested page. For instance, the server often returns this code if the request is for a page that doesn’t exist on the server. If you don’t have a robots.txt file on your site and see this status on the robots.txt page of the Diagnostic tab in Google Webmaster Tools, this is the correct status. However, if you do have a robots.txt file and you see this status, then your robots.txt file may be named incorrectly or in the wrong location. It should be at the top-level of the domain and named robots.txt. If you see this status for URLs that Googlebot tried to crawl (on the HTTP errors page of the Diagnostic tab), then Googlebot likely followed an invalid link from another page (either an old link or a mistyped one).

500 (Internal server error) – The server encountered an error and can’t fulfill the request.

503 (Service unavailable) – The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state.

HTTP Status Codes for SEO

Other sources on HTTP status codes:

  • SEOmoz.org – Regarding Google SEO, webmasters’ main objective is to increase Google PageRank (link juice) or to maintain Google PageRank values of their web pages. Only web pages returning either HTTP status codes 200 and 301 are Google SEO friendly and are able to pass link juice.
  • SEO glossary includes the definitions of 301, 302, and 404 HTTP status codes as well as many other definitions related to search engine optimization.
  • W3.org has a complete list of HTTP status codes.

HTTP Status Code 301

This test shows that Google recognizes 301 redirects and passes link juice from the redirecting web page to the redirected web page, as Google SEO traffic is not lost.

To set up 301 redirects on Microsoft’s Internet Information Server ( MS IIS ):

  • You can redirect either a domain or an individual web page.
  • You will need one source web page or site, and one destination web page or site.
  • You can use the IIS control panel to create the redirects.

To set up 301 redirects on Apache:

  • You will need one source web page or site, and one destination web page or site.
  • When you have the mod_rewrite extension installed by default and need to redirect .htm files from an old server to the equivalent .php files on a new server using a 301 redirect, use a combination of mod_rewrite and the redirect directive to do the URL change and redirection.
  • Use the redirect directive syntax in the .htaccess file: Redirect permanent /yourdirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory or Redirect 301 /yourdirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory

A example from SEOmoz shows it previously did 301 redirections involving redirecting canonical hostnames and redirecting specific files and folders from one domain to another.

HTTP Status Code 404

How Google prefers webmasters to handle 404 errors:

  • Google defines the 404 response code should be returned for a file “Not Found” request.
  • Google explains “hard 404s” and “soft 404s” and suggests avoid returning “soft 404s”. A soft 404 occurs when a user requests a non-existent URL on your site, but the server returns a web page with an error message and a 200 HTTP status code.
  • “Soft 404s” may be confusing to both users and search engine spiders, and cause the Googlebot to spend unnecessary time crawling and indexing non-existent and duplicate URLs on your website.
  • Google offers a soft 404s reporting feature under the Crawl errors section in Google Webmaster Tools.

To improve user-friendliness, webmasters can set up the servers to return a beautifully/friendly designed 404 error pages with messages.

Posted on January 16, 2012
Category: Google SEO | Leave a Comment

SEO, PPC, Web Analytics Trends in 2012

For a B2C website, search engine marketing (PPC/SEO) is about acquiring targeted search engine traffic (potential website users) to the site and making sure a portion of this search engine traffic converts into sales. Search engine marketing involves:

Search Engine Optimization Role

SEOMoz has this Venn diagram: The SEO role stands at the center of technologist, statistician and marketer, and needs to possess partial skills of an analytics consultant, a PPC specialist and a social media marketer.

    SEO Role - Center of Technologist, Statistician and Marketer

The gurus in the roles of SEO, PPC, and web analytics:

Product Management Role

While SEO and PPC have taken care of search engine traffic acquisition, creating/managing a B2C site falls onto the operations of product management / product development. Creating a website involves improving the site’s:

  • Conversion rate
  • User friendliness and user engagement

Mind the Product provides the definition and the Venn diagram of a product manager.

    Product Management is the center of UX, Tech, Business

In the modern days, a product manager lies in the middle of user experience design (UX), technology and business. This SlideShare document shows you 7 things that a product manager must know. Product managers must understand technology and user experience design:

2011′s SEO and Web Analytics Reviews by Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Watch offers this Biggest Search Events of 2011:

  • Google’s Panda update
  • SSL search
  • Social signals and integration
  • Yahoo Site Explorer shuts down
  • Google’s freshness algorithm update
  • Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance

Search Engine Watch has this Web Analytics Year in Review 2011:

  • Online and offline data integration
  • Social media analytics
  • Omniture Site Catalyst launches
  • Super “cookies”
  • Mobile analytics
  • Google Analytics Real-time
  • Google encrypts search data
  • Google chrome passes Mozillia Firefox

Web/Social Analytics Metrics for 2012 by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik explains the best KPI metrics for small, medium and large websites. Different sets of web analytics metrics should be measured by small, medium, and large-sized websites.

Web Metrics for Small-sized Business Websites:

  • Acquisition: Cost per acquisition
  • Behavior: Bounce rate, checkout abandonment rate
  • Outcomes: Macro conversion rate

Web Metrics for Medium-sized Business Websites:

  • Acquisition: Cost per acquisition, click-through rate
  • Behavior: Bounce rate, checkout abandonment rate, page depth, loyalty (count of visits)
  • Outcomes: Macro conversion rate, micro conversion rate, per visit goal value

Web Metrics for Large-sized Business Websites:

  • Acquisition: Cost per acquisition, click-through rate, % new visits
  • Behavior: Bounce rate, checkout abandonment rate, page depth, loyalty (count of visits), events/visit
  • Outcomes: Macro conversion rate, micro conversion rate, per visit goal value, days to conversion (or time lags for content sites), assisted conversions

Avinash Kaushik defines the best social media metrics with conversation, amplification, applause, and economic value. Know what social metrics to measure and how to measure the social metrics.

Conversation Rate:

  • Conversation Rate = Number of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post

Amplification Rate:

  • Twitter: Amplification = Number of Retweets Per Tweet
  • Facebook: Amplification = Number of Shares Per Post
  • Blogs/YouTube: Number of Share Clicks Per Post (or Video)

Applause Rate:

  • Twitter: Applause Rate = Number of Favorite Clicks Per Post
  • Facebook: Applause Rate = Number of Likes Per Post
  • Google+: Applause Rate = Number of +1s Per Post
  • Blogs/YouTube: Applause Rate = Number of +1s and Likes Per Post (or video)

Economic Value:

  • Economic Value = Sum of Short and Long Term Revenue and Cost Savings

Japan, Korea and China Reviews by Clickz Asia

Clickz Asia has this SEO Matures in North Asia, Key Trends for 2012 which refers to social signals, mobile app market and mobile SEO in Japan and Korea.

  • Social signals in SEO have resulted in Facebook pages to rank in Google Japan for competitive terms and Korea’s Naver blog platform (Cafe) having pages appeared in the main search listing on Naver’s top pages.
  • The rise in adoption of smartphones in Japan and Korea will lead to an increased focus on mobile SEO as Japan has 14 million smartphone population (or 11%) and Korea has over 20 million smartphone population (or 40%). The mobile app market is the second most popular activity on mobile after search.
  • SEO will be the increased focus on optimizing for local search. In Japan, search queries on Google Places in 2011 has more than doubled as people have increased their on-the-go search. With Korea’s Naver, the search query volume of Naver Map, the premier map and local search platform has also doubled in 2011, coinciding with the surge in mobile usage in Korea.

A Starter’s Guide to Search in Korea briefly explains the landscape of search engines in Korea:

  • Naver vs Daum – Korea’s 2 largest search engines are dominating search market share.
  • SEM in Korea – SEM models in Korea include cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-time (CPT).

Chinese search engine Baidu is definitely on the way to:

2012′s SEM Predictions by Business2Community

Business2Community offers 2012′s Search Engine Marketing Predictions:

  • PPC advertising will become more interactive and engaging as non-search options increase viability, and will become bigger in Youtube and social media.
  • Websites will shift marketing budgets to directly converting leads into sales (from only generating leads) when more websites are using conversion tools and SEM automation systems to automate their conversion optimization process.
  • Social’s integration into search engines continues to increase as social signals and sharing will have an even greater impact on search engine rankings. Companies will focus increasingly on Social Media Analytics, as the importance of measuring the ROI on social media campaigns continues to increase.

2011′s SEM and Analytics Events by Gordon Choi’s Blog

Gordon Choi’s Blog mentioned year 2011′s events related to search engines, web analytics and social networks.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search Engine Marketing and Tools:

Web Analytics, SEO Analytics, Social Analytics:

Google+ / Social Networks:

Search Engine Conferences:

Posted on January 3, 2012
Category: SEM | 3 Comments

Google Web Search Let It Snow

On Google’s web search homepage, type in “let it snow”. You will see snowing effects with some snow flakes coming down the search results page:

    Google Web Search Let It Snow

Google Web Search’s side navigation is covered by a layer of thin snow:

    Google Side Navigation Let It Snow

A mouse click on the snow (i.e. anywhere on Google’s search results pages), a round spot without snow will appear. You can wipe off more snow by holding down and dragging the mouse across Google’s search results pages.

    Google Wipe Off Snow

Posted on December 19, 2011
Category: Google | Leave a Comment

Hao123.com New Logo

Baidu’s Hao123.com, China’s largest navigational site, now has a new logo:

    Hao123.com's New Logo

Hao123 officially explained the meaning of the new logo:

  • The green leaf represents dedication and growth.
  • The orange “hao” means passion and quality.
  • The green “123″ represents the Internet journal Hao123 has gone through in the past years.

Hao123′s old logo used to look like:

    Hao123.com's Old Logo

Hao123 as Baidu’s Business

Hao123.com’s business model is based on ad sales, i.e. Many text links (but not all text links) on Hao123 are for sale, especially most text links on Hao123′s homepage that point to other Chinese websites could cost a fortune.

Hao123 may even be already generating 6%-7% of Baidu’s total revenues, making it one of the major Baidu revenue contributors.

Hao123.com Improvements

To improve users’ experience on finding Chinese websites without Chinese search engines, Hao123 has made incremental site layout updates which can be found on older versions of Hao123.com’s homepages over several years.

Hao123 has also recently made improvements to the left side navigation:

    Hao123.com's Left Side Navigation

Posted on December 19, 2011
Category: Hao123 | Leave a Comment

Google Adwords Top Ads, Side Ads, Bottom Ads

Adwords could previously show search ads above, on the right side of, and below organic search results within Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). Now, Adwords may only show top ads and bottom ads, but not ads on the right side.

Showing ads at below organic search results:

  • Provides better user experience, as users’ preference is to scan Google’s search engine results pages from top to bottom.
  • Results in higher ad click-through-rates (CTR) – CTR is one of the major factors in Google Adwords Quality Score which determines your ad’s ranking.

Top vs Other Segment Adwords Ad Report

Use the Top vs Other segment to find out the performance of your Adwords search ads when showing up on different positions (above, below, and on the right side of organic search results):

  • Google Search “Top”: Top ads above Google’s organic search results
  • Google Search “Other”: Bottom ads below Google’s organic search results and side ads on the right side of Google’s organic search results.
  • Search Partners “Top”: Top ads above search partners’ organic search results
  • Search Partners “Other”: Bottom ads below search partners’ organic search results and side ads on the right side of Google’s organic search results.

Reviews for Google Adwords

Advertisers or online marketers who manage Google Adwords accounts should review:

Posted on December 14, 2011
Category: Adwords Reports | Leave a Comment

English Blogs on China Internet, Business, Culture, Travel

I came across several English blogs and community about China that cover:

  • All China-related aggregated topics
  • Leisure, entertainment, food and travel in China
  • Life and Culture in China
  • Business in China
  • China’s Internet
  • Chinese “web” glossary

Aggregated (All) China Topics

  • Haohao Report – China blogs, news, pictures and videos on travel, business, technology, current event, and entertainment topics that are submitted and voted by the Haohao Report online community

China Leisure, Entertainment, Food and Travel Blogs/Sites

  • Lonely Planet China – China tourism and travel information including facts, maps, history, culture, transport and weather in China
  • ChinaTravel.net Blog – Blog of a China travel guide and community, featuring information, reviews, opinions, tips, and photos of China attractions, hotels and restaurants
  • Shanghai Expat – Shanghai city guide, bulletin board and advice from foreign/expat residents
  • Smart Shanghai – Community about nightlife, dining and culture in Shanghai with galleries, guides, an interactive map, events and forums
  • City Weekend Guide – Local listings, events, reviews and classifieds for Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

China Life/Culture Blogs

  • Lost Laowai – China expat community for expatriates and travelers in China, featuring reviews and information about traveling, living, teaching and working in China
  • Seeing Red in China – Guide to modern China on topics including politics, rural life, Chinese language, traditional festivals, education, and the environment
  • China Hush – Chinese cultures and lifestyles, translated stories, and the latest memes and trends in China
  • Shanghai Novice – Shanghai lifestyle guide for young expats living in Shanghai and China
  • Tom’s China Blog – A honest look at China
  • Moving to China Blog – Information on Shanghai fake markets, TaoBao English, internship in China, apartments in Shanghai, and VPN connections
  • China Snippets – Life in Shanghai and China, observations and comments
  • HK Girl Talk – Fascination to all the interesting cultural phenomena in Hong Kong and China
  • Sascha Matuszak – Chachin ain’t easy
  • Shenzhen Photos – A photographic documentary of Shenzhen, with images of people, places, and life

China Business Blogs

  • US China Today – A student-driven publication by the US-China Institute of the University of Southern California, focusing on economic, social, culture, and political issues in the evolving US-China relationship
  • China Law Blog – Offers China law for business
  • This is China Blog – The trends reshaping China society, economics and business
  • Danwei – A web magazine about China, focusing on translation and research in China.
  • Technomic Asia – China business blog and podcast

China Internet Blogs

  • China Vortex – Views the global business economy and media, and Internet technology from the Chinese perspective
  • China Web Radar – Topics on the next generation web in China
  • Little Red Book – Offers China’s social media, advertising, communication and cultural insights
  • Resonance China Blog – Resonance China’s social media blog on Chinese social media trends
  • Rocky Fu’s Blog – Provides holistic digital marketing and branding strategies, trends, and tactics in digital era with a focus on Asia Pacific market
  • Clickz Asia (China Topics) – Marketing news and expert advice for online marketers in China, Hong Kong, Japan and South East Asia
  • Digital Marketing Inner Circle – Mathew McDougall provides digital marketing news in the Chinese Internet market
  • East West Connect – Online marketing blog by Nanjing Marketing Group focusing in the Chinese Internet

Chinese Web Glossary

  • China Smack – A glossary list of Chinese language Internet terms, expressions, acronyms, or slang most commonly used by online Chinese users in recent years

China Internet on Gordon Choi’s Blog

China Internet related topics on Gordon Choi’s Blog:

Posted on December 8, 2011
Category: China Internet | Leave a Comment

Google Adwords View-through Conversions

Google has Adwords View-through Conversion, a PPC metric for Adwords Content Network, that measures the number of online conversions occurred within 30 days after a user saw but did not click a display ad on one of the websites within the Google display network.

For example, a user sees your Adwords display ad on a Google Display Network placement and remembers the ad and your brand name. Later (within 30 days), the user searches for your brand name on Google.com, clicks on one of your Adwords search ads and completes a conversion (e.g. a purchase) on your site.

  • The original source of interest was an Adwords Content Network ad (Google display ad), but the conversion would be attributed to the Google Adwords search ad.
  • Google Adwords View-through Conversion metric identifies the Adwords display ad as a contributing factor to the conversion.

Google Adwords View-through Conversion Tracking

How Google Adwords View-through Conversion Tracking works:

  • Google Adwords View-through Conversions are only available to display ads in Google Adwords content/display network campaigns. i.e. View-through Conversions are not reported for search campaigns or for text creatives in Google’s display network campaigns.
  • Adwords conversion tracking must be enabled for Google Adwords to report View-through Conversions.
  • Adwords View-through Conversions can help you to understand which websites that the display ad campaigns work well on, even if users don’t click on the display ads.
  • Adwords View-through Conversions are tracked through the Adsense cookie. If a Google display network ad click happens before the conversion, the conversion is attributed as a click-conversion.

How are Google Adwords View-through Conversions recorded, counted, and attributed?

Recorded: View-through conversions are recorded for the date of the associated impression.

Counted: Clicks on search ads do not interfere with View-through conversion tracking reports. Conversions are counted when there’s a display impression on the Display Network. We count all conversions not associated with a click and attribute them back to the last impression in the last 30-days. Consequently, a single impression can be associated with multiple View-through conversion events. In cases where a conversion follows both a search click and a display impression, both a clickthrough conversion and View-through conversion are attributed, respectively.

Attributed: View-through reporting attribution follows the industry standard of last click, last impression attribution. This implies that the conversions are first credited to the last click, and if there’s no click in the last 30-days, then they’re credited to the last impression, preceding the conversion.

View-through Conversions vs Click-conversions

Google Adwords View-through Conversion metric should be used as an indicator to how display ads affect your website users to convert. Never count View-through conversions the same as click-conversions, otherwise you will run into conversion double-counting issues.

View-based conversions are an indicator of banner advertising’s influence on a consumer’s propensity to convert, and the conversions you see being reported on shouldn’t be part of your total conversions – Real conversions should have some sort of source click attached to it.

When you count view-based conversion the same as click-based conversion, you can end up double-counting conversion when you bring all your data together into a consolidated dashboard.

Other opinions on the View-through Conversion metric:

Posted on December 1, 2011
Category: Adwords Content Network | Leave a Comment

Yahoo Site Explorer Shuts Down, Replaced by Bing Webmaster Tools

Yahoo’s exit in search begun with the Bing-Yahoo search alliance. Shortly afterwards, webmasters focusing on both Bing SEO and Yahoo SEO in
the US and Canada were advised to use Bing’s Webmaster Tools.

Yahoo Site Explorer’s Closure

Now Yahoo Site Explorer is officially shut down after Bing’s search algorithm has started to power all global Yahoo organic search results, except Yahoo Korea.

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.

Bing’s Search Algorithm Integration into Yahoo

While integrating Bing’s search algorithm to replace Yahoo’s search algorithm, Yahoo had to overcome the technical issues below:

We had to cutover web, image and video search experiences from Yahoo!’s search technology backend to Bing’s algorithmic backend for 40-plus markets, across desktop and mobile devices.

In addition to Yahoo’s owned and operated search experiences, we also had to cut over hundreds of our syndication partners in more than 50 markets, while ensuring a smooth transition for users of our wildly popular Yahoo! Search BOSS service.

Cutting over to the Bing backend was not simply a matter of technical integration through the Bing API. We worked with Microsoft to ensure that Bing’s algorithmic quality in each of these markets was on par or better than Yahoo!’s quality. Wherever we found quality gaps, we worked collaboratively with our counterparts at Bing to provide data driven assessments of quality gaps to help us close the gaps quickly. Only when both teams had established that the quality bar in a market was met, did we green light the cutover.

A very important design principle was to ensure availability of all key user experience elements of the Yahoo! search experience post-cutover. This meant that we had to perform a comprehensive analysis of product features per market, assess which of those would require support from the Bing platform, and which features Yahoo! would have to continue to develop and invest in.

Creating a migration path to Bing Webmaster tools for users of Yahoo! Site Explorer, while continuing to support Site Explorer for international users during the transition period proved challenging.

We had to confirm Bing could handle Yahoo’s capacity across multiple global datacenters, including new ones that were brought online to serve the needs of the Search Alliance. The fact that all the cutovers went remarkably smoothly and were essentially non-events from an operational perspective is a testament to the thorough job both teams did.

For all our major markets, we ran comprehensive bucket tests to compare the Yahoo! search experience going against the Yahoo! and Bing backends. We monitored key user experience metrics to ensure that the product experience post cutover would be on par or better for our customers.

We had to put in place support and customer care processes that ensured user concerns and content issues were handled appropriately between our companies, working through policy differences to ensure the right outcome for all stakeholders.

Yahoo’s Slurp

While Yahoo Site Explorer has been shut down, Yahoo’s spider, Slurp, will still be crawling websites when required.

Although the organic results will be powered by Microsoft Search platforms, Yahoo! will continue to innovate on the search experience beyond the services delivered by Microsoft. In order to provide Yahoo! users with an amazing search experience, our slurp crawlers may continue to selectively crawl websites to help support these efforts.

Webmaster Tools, SEO Reports from Google, Blekko, Yandex

Posted on November 22, 2011
Category: Yahoo SEO | 3 Comments

Google Plus Keyboard Shortcuts

For those Google+ users who prefer using Google Plus Social Network via the keyboard, instead of a mouse, make good use of the Google+ keyboard shorts below:

  • Space: Scroll down the stream
  • Shift + Space: Scroll up the stream
  • J: Move to the next post
  • K: Move to the previous post
  • Enter: Open a post’s comment box, while reading a post in the stream
  • Tab + Enter: Submit the comment after writing a comment on a post
  • Tab + Tab + Enter (press Tab twice, then Enter): Cancel the comment box
  • Q: Go directly to the Google chat box

To mention other Google+ users within a post or a comment, use:

  • + or @ symbols before that Google+ user’s name – e.g. +Gordon Choi or @Gordon Choi

For the the + or @ symbols to work, the name must be already be a Google+ user.

To change the text style in a post:

  • * (asterisk): Bold – e.g. *bold text*
  • _ (underscore): Italic – e.g. _italic text_
  • - (dash): Strikethrough – e.g. -strikethrough text-

Posted on November 21, 2011
Category: Google+ | Leave a Comment

Older Posts »

01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20