http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q1_google_earnings.html

“Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.43 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2011. This represents a 19% increase from first quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.04 billion. ”


What’s interesting to note is that roughly 70% of that goes to AdSense Publishers. That’s based on Google’s statement regarding Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC):

“The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.70 billion in the first quarter of 2011. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $337 million in the first quarter of 2011. ”

In a similar vein, average CPCs are up 8% year-over-year from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011. Yet another reason big PPC investors get fed up and eventually seek SEO services…

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http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

1. “It’s best to do one thing really, really well. We do search.”

Yet look at Buzz, Wave, JotSpot, Chrome, Blogspot, Feedburner, Picasa, Talk, Jaiku, SketchUp, Gears, Android, Page Creator, Friend Connect etc… (see more at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products )

Granted, Android has been remarkably successful … but look at all the other things Google has branched out into and either failed at or been only average at.

Similarly, from the UX principles page (http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html ):

2. “Focus on people[:] their lives, their work, their dreams. [...] Above all, a well-designed Google product is useful in daily life. It doesn‘t try to impress users with its whizbang technology or visual style – though it might have both. It doesn‘t strong-arm people to use features they don‘t want – but it does provide a natural growth path for those who are interested.”

Whizbang technology that tries to impress users … features they don’t want… Google Wave?

3. “Google teams think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature.”

Ditto.

4. “Add a human touch.”

When was the last time someone applauded Google for a positive customer service experience? Outside of times where Matt comes to conferences and answers questions, I can think of a variety of stories where people could not get through to a human rep at AdWords, or were told to get stuffed when they did get through. And that’s not just crummy affiliates, but ordinary people too. Or the rep who suggested to a PPC pro that they work together to increase the client’s spend by $1M/month ….

5. Roughly all the software principles (http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html )

The Google Toolbar sends URLs back to the mothership for indexing purposes, the browser bar in Firefox searches with Google by default … Where’s the disclosure? What about installation of Google as the search provider? Is this not snooping?

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I recently failed to find things when searching by name. I tried looking up a foreign song by its name, and a restaurant by its name, address and city (all in one query). Both those searches failed.

What did work was looking for the category of the song. It’s no secret that if your search is too specific, you want to broaden it, but sometimes it’s difficult seeing how to make something broader when you’re already searching on a general term.

To give an SEO analogy, if you wanted to read about improving registration page conversions, you might look up ‘conversion rate optimization blog’ and then dig around sites on the topic. It may take a little longer, but it’s a way to find stuff in the longtail when Google’s algorithms suck too much.

With regards to the restaurant, it seems the Google Places listing hasn’t been claimed. Presumably that’s why the query confused Google, which gave me a country-level view of its map. Obviously useless.

What did work was just looking for the address itself, which Google somehow does know. So if you’re looking for directions to a restaurant or place, type in the street address… not the name.

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Continuing the SphinnCon deadblogging, here are the notes I took on Barry Schwartz’s excellent and fascinating preso on mobile and on ranking factors in the Apple Appstore and Google Android app market. (Barry Schwartz’s RustyBrick developed the popular iPhone Siddur and offer iPhone Development, and mobile web dev.)

What apps does Apple like to promote and drive traffic to in its mobile store?

- Look at their suggestion dropdowns.
- Check out the top apps in the store.
- Mobile apps that appear on app review sites
- Apps that get shared a lot.
- Apps that update often.

Some related tips
- Offer free review copies.
- Ask for reviews
- Keyword stuffing still matters … consider also piggybacking off the brand names of popular apps
- Cross promote between apps
- There are directories for mobile apps – they are worth submitting

On the Android Market:
- It’s got lots of junk, spam etc
- People aren’t interested in buying in anywhere near the proportions they are interested in the Apple App Store
- Update your app a lot to appear in the ‘This Just In” new apps section

Barry gave a remarkable preso with a lot more detail, but unfortunately he went through it very quickly and so note-taking was remarkably difficult. You can email him and try asking for a copy of the slides.

If you liked this post, you might also be interested in what the pros encourage with regards to mobile web design best practices.

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This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, an SEO at Virginia based SEO & Reputation Management firm MangoCo. You can follow Brian on the Twitter at @brianspatterson.

Many businesses may be confused or worried with all of the changes that have been happening in Google’s local SERPs lately.  Google literally turned local search on its head about two months ago, and as the dust settles, many of the long-term effects are becoming clear.  One specific change which I’d like to cover here has many of our clients filled with pride, and has helped us close some new local SEO client deals.

The change has to do with local listings being more aggressively inserted into queries that previously did not trigger a local 7 or 10-pack.  To illustrate my point, lets take the phrase ‘roofing’?  What is a visitor’s intent when they type ‘roofing’ into a browser?  It could be a few things:

1. To find out information about different types of roofing materials
2. To look for roofing supplies
3. To find a roofing company
4. To learn the skill of roofing
5. others???

Until recently, Google assumed it was everything except #3, and they displayed whoever was best optimized for the word ‘roofing’.  Now, however, local results are included in the mix.  See the image below (with my location set to Washington, D.C.) for the current SERPs:

You’ll notice that the local 7-Pack is inserted after the third listing.  Effectively, ‘National Roofing Contractors’ now ranks for the term ‘Roofing’ when that is searched in their locality.

What are the client implications of this?

Is this a particularly surprising behavior to SEO’s?  Probably not, but clients absolutely love this.  We’ve noticed that many of our clients love to have a keyword they can ‘show off’, and this result in the SERPs scratches that itch for those that are local-focused.  

We’ve had referrals call us saying, “Jenn told us that you were able to get her on page #1 for XXXXX” where XXXXX is a head term like roofing. Although we do compete for some really competitive terms straight-up, in this case the calls were coming from people referencing the local insertion we’re detailing here.

Because we’ve had multiple clients react in such a positive way as they are now starting to see head terms in their SEO reports, we’ve adapted our sales pitch a bit for local clients to include information on this.  

The main piece of this is educating the client on how this works and what it means.  

Teaching a client about the search engine results is tricky enough, so explaining local optimization and inclusion is even more tricky.  We try to explain everything in the most simple terms possible and use a lot of analogies to help them understand the concepts.

But ultimately, a potential client is interested and excited about the prospect of being on Page 1 for a head term in their locality (which is all that matters to them).  This added benefit makes selling a local-oriented campaign even easier.

So, how do you optimize your local site to rank in this way for head terms?

Optimizing for this behavior is pretty easy – just do exactly what you would for any other local SEO campaign.  Consider the screenshot below, which is a search for ‘Roofing Washington, DC’:

You’ll notice that the blue boxes in each of the images are identical.  The 7-pack did not change at all.  So, ‘roofing’ triggered the same 7-pack as ‘roofing washington, DC’.  Thus, to optimize for a head term that triggers local results, you just need to optimize for the ‘head term’ + your location.  If you need some resources on local SEO, here are a few to get you started:

1. Local Ranking Factors
2. The Local SEO Guide (blog)

When are the local results being triggered on head terms?

Google is getting more aggressive in including local results in non-local search queries.  In taking a closer look at what they selected to include local results in, it seems as if they are pretty simplistic in their implementation.  It’s as if they just chose the most obvious head terms where local results might help, the surface if you will, but did not dive any deeper (yet).  For example, the following obvious head terms return local results:

• Landscaping
• Moving
• Packing
• Stationary
• Picture Frames

The above terms are pretty straightforward words with local companies in almost all localities that provide related services and products.  Now, lets dig into some other markets that are also present in near every location, but are of a more complex nature:

• Executive coaching consultant
• Trade show exhibits
• Pressure washer parts
• Infrared hair straightener

Given Google’s track record of including local results in more and more queries, I think its just a matter of time before they get smarter and include local results for more complex terms such as these.  As they do that, local SEO will become even more important.

Conclusion

Local results seems like an active experiment for Google, with ranking factors and displayed results constantly being tweaked.  Staying up to date with the changes can mean the difference between the success of some local businesses and mom-and-pops, and the death of them.  What are some other interesting local changes you have seen in the SERPs and the resulting client reactions?

Brian and his team run SEO campaigns for their clients as well as a number of their own online properties, including niche sites such as a Vibram Five Fingers Review site, a roofing jobsboard, and even a hair straightener site, among a bunch of other random stuff

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What’s The Future of Adsense?

In the past month, I’ve noticed retargeting campaigns on a few quite random websites. Retargeting means targeting ads to people who already visited your site.

The remarkable implications for AdSense may forever change the AdSense publishing industry!

PPC company Webrageous has been following me all around the web because I read something they wrote about the content network.
A/B split testing company Unbounce has similarly shown me their ads as I watched streaming illegal video, err, porn, I mean, How I Met Your Mother.

What really made me notice how significant this could be was IfByPhone’s retargeting while I was on a camera review site.

If you’re in the digital camera adsense biz, or read about Darren’s Digital Photography School, you know that AdSense can be a good earner in that niche.

Speaking of which, I just saw this…

Digital Photography School with a retargeting campaign

When I was getting into internet marketing, I recall that people used to publish lists of AdSense niches with high CPCs.

(Ex.: “Mesothelioma,” a form of cancer that features tort lawyers advertising for class-action lawsuits.)

Now suppose retargeting via the Google content network (now renamed Google Display Network) becomes mainstream, or even default.

The results are wide-ranging.

For AdSense publishers, niche selection becomes virtually pointless.

If call-tracking ads show up when I’m looking for camcorders, and PPC management / split-testing when I watch How I Met Your Mother (instead of the more logical DVD sales/rental option) – what use is it to publish about camcorders?

Why not publish about something that requires less expertise and capital?

Political blogging may become profitable.

For AdSense advertisers, optimizing becomes more difficult.

- For ordinary content network campaigns, you can just look at an AdSense block and see who else shows up.

With retargeting, you can’t see who else is bidding for that ad space unless you happened to have visited their site before.

- Site exclusion tools may be less effective, because you’re targeting users and not sites/contexts.

- Category exclusion tools may be less effective for the same reason.

What results do you guys anticipate from this change? Will it last long term? Or will this be a temporary trend whose ROI won’t be shown to warrant wide adoption? Perhaps it will be adapted with impression caps?

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Trying out Google instant, I saw a particular query on which Google blanked. Notice the size of the below screenshot.

Yeah, Google ain’t got nothing. (And I got double negatives and great grammar.)

p.s. Wonder how many searches (percentage wise) come from browser search bar, where Google Instant doesn’t apply.

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While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump.

A few thoughts come to mind.

1) This is a response to longtail queries. Forums have traditionally been a great place to learn subjects in depth, online. The first social media I really got into were forums around 2002-2003, when I was really into hiphop and Counter-Strike. Both had some amazing forums around where you could soak up information to your heart’s content.

2) I think this is part of the May Day update. It’s interesting to see how effective the update probably is in some cases, as I explained in point 1.

It’s also interesting how ineffective it can be.

- I still have no idea what the hell a RAID access failure is, except that it’s something to do with the motherboard, graphics card, or hard drive. And that’s virtually the whole computer, so not narrowing things down much.

- I’m also not sure really how to fix it. I got some idea it’s to do with the drivers, so I had my sister get the latest ones, but the other points were about reconnecting SATA cables etc.

- All these forums are by techies – for techies.

It’s like expecting my mom to come here and understand this post.

I don’t blame the forums mind you – they claim to be for an advanced audience and that’s fine.

- Any search engine that directs a non-techie to them, however, has some important questions to ask.

“How technical is a particular page?”

“Does this query need a more technical or more generalist response?”

3) I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Nvidia’s #1 ranking is [mostly] because they have the most posts/authors and thus the richest discussion. By extension, that would often make it the most authoritative thread.

Two arguments suggest that other ranking factors may be predominant, here.

a. From reading other forums, I think this is something that specifically has to do with Nvidia hardware, so it may be some kind of brand association. I could be totally wrong on that – please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

b. The PC Help Forum has more posts and authors than HP’s forum – yet it ranks lower.

(The counter argument to “b” is that HP.com has both a load of link juice and brand factors pulling for it, which overcomes the lower post/author count.)

3.2) Recency also does  not seem to be the driving factor in rankings here, though Google does seem to find it important enough to display.

My guess is because this is not a query that deserves freshness, though some people may have a slight preference for it.

Consider the low – and constant – search query numbers – a newsy item would have seen a spike in searches.

This also supports my earlier suggestion that this is to do with solving the constantly refreshing long tail …

Raid access failure doesn’t even chart on Google Trends…

What do you guys make of this search result?

Have you seen it before? If so, how long?

What explanations for it do you have, and do you think it ties into May Day?

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Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

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“One way to fight this sort of strategy [Google's strategy of playing in every market] is Yahoo!’s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy.” (-Google As A Publisher)

Amongst other moves listed there are the closing/selling of the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo’s answer to AdSense, and the outsourcing of Yahoo shopping to PriceGrabber. If you take that along with Yahoo’s failure to ever take the analytics company it acquired out of beta, you see a pattern emerging:

Yahoo doesn’t stick by its products.

It launches divisions only to let them die later. It buys companies and does squat with them.

It’s well known in sales that large companies like dealing with large companies because they’re associated with greater stability. Stability is code for reliability / trustworthiness.

If you see the above pattern, and Yahoo offers to buy your company or partner with you… what’s your response going to be like?

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In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

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Caroline Glick and others produced a parody regarding the flotilla that’s been covered by most major news organizations worldwide. Google – which owns Youtube – decided to censor it from Youtube, which shows you the danger of having a single player controlling so much of the information highway.

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I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz’s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 .

One of the justifications given was that  search engines ignore everything after the hash tag. As exemplified by Wikipedia and certain other sites, this is no longer the case. Google’s search results provide sitelinks on some Wikipedia articles. This has implications for affiliate links, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Sitelinks are those 4-8 deep links that go directly to a particular page on the site, or in Wikipedia’s case, subheadings within a long article.

The subheadings on Wikipedia are linked to using the corresponding hashtags. Ex.: wikipedia.org/article/#subissue1 . Therefore, it’s clear that search engines are considering hashtags. 

Anyone using an affiliate program that relies on hashtags to track  the source of the visitor should consider using 301 [permanent]redirects, rel=canonical or other equivalents to make sure they avoid duplicate content problems. Each of these solutions – permanent redirects, rel=canonical etc. – are designed to tell search engines what is the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ page. I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary and that search engines won’t figure it out otherwise, but I prefer a proactive approach where possible.

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And that means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for a variety of companies participating in the program, for aggregate savings to SEOs in the millions of dollars!

For those who are unaware, Yahoo bought out Altavista a long time ago. With that purchase came Altavista’s paid inclusion technology.

With paid inclusion, you paid Yahoo to include a list of URLs submitted in a special format (XML if memory serves?). If you were small, you paid a flat fee, or if you were big, you paid on a cost-per-click basis for every visitor sent to your site via their search engine. It was argued that this could benefit sites that had poor architecture, the same way submitting a sitemap could be beneficial.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader. You can also check out my search engines category for more posts like this. It’s mostly about Google, but I also have written items like this one, “5 Things MSN Must Do To Gain Search Share.“

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by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post:

“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[...]“

“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”

Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…

This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. [...] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”

Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday's paper, but I didn't have time to edit this post].

This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.

Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.

Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…

And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…

So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.

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On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that

“Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest. And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything.

So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects. And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others.

It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.”

Here’s the screen cap, so you know I’m not inventing stuff.

Have to tell the truth? Why did it take action by the Florida AG before Google started making ringtone advertisers list prices in their ads? Why are the prices on other mobile content crap landing pages still hidden in nearly invisible text only an SEO would notice?

When you get to this landing page on most people’s screens, the huge headline and graphics (and occasional animation, depending which version of the ad you see) naturally draw your eyes … not the “subscription sent to your cell $9.99 per month” bit.

And why do they let so many scams and snake oil products run on their network?

This next one took in my sister, as it happens, and she’s one of the brightest, most critical-thinking people I know. This shadier side of affiliate marketing has developed the art of lying and deception to a standard the KGB would be proud of. They don’t just take advantage of gullible people. They manage to trick highly rational people with serious IQs (I know, the IQ quiz thing makes this particularly ironic).

Google needs to come clean. From a business perspective … For their users to keep trusting their ads. For the sake of showing the government that they don’t need to be regulated (though the above obviously shows you can’t trust them to self-regulate). And from a simple moral perspective, because it’s the right thing to do. (P.s. Inspiration hattips: Diorex (on scammy aff) and Aaron Wall (spam if you don’t pay G) and Danny Sullivan (Sphinn).)

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Then you’re way ahead of the curve and understand what Matt Cutts is talking about, late in this video, on getting crawled and indexed more rapidly and deeply. If not, it’s time to understand search like Matt Cutts and read up on submarine crawling. This also goes back to what I was writing about thinking like search engineers and what Google wants. These are not merely abstract ideas, despite appearances. Grasping these notions puts you a step higher on the ladder, closer to “SEO Director” and further from “SEO data entry monkey,” because you can solve problems rather than merely execute other people’s solutions.

On a related note, my Tuesday class in Statutory Interpretation with Prof Klinck lead to an interesting observation on critical thinking. My prof pointed out the assumption underlying a provision of some labour law. I asked how he’d gone about identifying the assumption, because I would not have been able to.

His answer was as follows. To identify an argument’s assumption, try asking what is the stereotypical situation it has in mind. What is the paradigmatic example?

Then, alter one fact at a time. Will the situation still fit the paradigmatic situation? In marketing terms, a/b test each variable in the situation and see if you still get a paradigmatic situation or arrive at the same conclusions. By taking a concrete example, you can deconstruct what is necessary for it to fit the paradigm.

There are infinite ways to apply critical thinking like this, and search marketing in particular is rife with examples. Commenting on a blog post, improving existing techniques or practices, assessing whether or not to use a promotional method for a given client…

The possibilities are endless. I’d love to hear what situations this critical thinking could help you with!

(P.s. If you liked this post, you may find interest in link buying even Matt Cutts could love, and link buying’s evolution in 2009. You might even add my feed to your rss reader .)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Google has officially announced first-click free, it’s new attempt to fist clueless fools for all they’re worth.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Huh? What? Read on to find out how Google is encouraging content producers to lose a little more control over their content in its ongoing efforts to fight copyright.

First-click free is Google’s new offer to webmasters: share subscriber-only content with it in exchange for us sending you traffic to those pages. In Google’s own words:

“To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google’s search results and that Google’s crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content.”

So what?

If you do a site:subscribers-only.com search on Google, you see all the pages Google has indexed from that site. You can modify this if you’re clever to show the results from a site on a given topic, by adding keywords to the query. E.g. site:subscribers-only.com pay-per-click

So if I wanted to, I could access all of a site’s private content – or have a bot do that for me – simply by visiting through Google results repeatedly. And if that’s the case, then why subscribe? CD sales tanked at the turn of millenium and have continued to tank since then because many people cared little about the packaging and mostly about the music.

Well, people probably won’t be too bothered by having one tab open with Google site:subscribers-only.com search results – throw in a &num=100 to the end of the query so you get 100 results per page and thus need to click less – and open the results in new tabs as they deem them interesting.

I note that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped asked if you could block people after they’ve visited a few times in the day. John Mueller of Google responded,

“When a user comes in from Google, he should be able to see the full content, always, every time he comes in from any search on any Google site. However, when that user clicks around within the site after viewing the first content, you are able to limit the available content.

“Again, if a user comes in from Google multiple times a day, he should be able to see the full content of the article (as it is crawled and indexed by Googlebot) every time he comes in from Google. It is not limited to the first time that the user comes in from Google.”

I’m sure Aaron Wall will be thrilled.

On a related note, you might like to read the Independent Webmaster‘s Manifesto, and consider starting a search-independent online business in hiring / recruiting, data filtering.

Because in the medium term, it looks like affiliates and ecommerce-only sites are going to get killed off by Google. Get off webmaster welfare already!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

What do Google’s search-within-search, the Google Affiliate Network, and Google Suggest have to do with each other? It’s all about Google’s transformation from being a bridge and toll-gate on the information superhighway to being bridge, toll-gate and destination!

(Image courtesy of Little Odd Forest Boutique)

We’ll see how:

• How Google will eliminate search as an affiliate marketing channel
• How merchandising will need to adapt to the needs of SEO
• Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay

  1) Google will offer sort-by-price options for popular products, eliminating many thin affiliate sites.

  Note also how the definition of “thin” changes over time, since price-comparison was once “thick” and “value-added” (and, officially, still is considered that way). The thing is that when everyone became a price-comparison site (or a dropshipper like Amazon/Overstock/Buy.com/Insert-General-Store-Here) then any given price comparison site wasn’t adding much value as compared to the others.

  In fact, Google already has this ability with Froogle Google Product Search.

  

  2) Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

  As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

  There, he discusses the case of two ice cream shops. One’s your average neighbourhood shop that will sell you a good sized scoop in a nice cone for a fair price. The other’s this extremely indulgent, totally extravagant place that makes your ice cream be a whole five-star meal and, as the brand gurus would say, sells the “experience.” The former gets by. The latter has a line around the block.

  3) After price, Google can offer other modifiers in dropdown menus.

  Things such as color, size, material, brand etc. Again, SEOs will react by going after the most profitable or highest volume colors, sizes etc. To an extent this is happening already, but modifiers means getting into the longtail, an area still largely ignored by ecommerce SEOs.

  This will also reinforce the trend towards keyword consolidation, eliminating much of the medium-tail to the detriment of advertisers established on those terms.

  4) The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.

  For example, anything with a call-to-action verb like buy, purchase, get, request, compare, shop, find, hire, pay … Google Base itself will be transformed from free traffic to an affiliate feed. This is obviously much easier with Google’s acquisition of Performics, now known as Google Affiliate Network. (CJ is surely hoping it does indeed become a big Gaff…)

  

  Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide. For existing affiliates, that means that SEO will become much less viable as a channel while for merchants, this means that writing quality copy for your descriptions becomes more important than ever, since that will be the big differentiating factor against the other merchants. You’ll be competing on CTR, like AdWords.

  Bundling strategies and especially those integrating related services will also be a source of competitive advantage… at least until the competition bundles those too. I recommend Meatball Sundae for finding out what you can bundle to create value, and especially Seth Godin’s bit on what is scarce vs what is abundant.

  5) In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.

  eBay, Amazon and others will use their weight and initial ecommerce marketshare advantage over Google to encourage manufacturers to exclusive deals with them. These ecommerce “general stores” will block Googlebot from indexing their exclusive products to ensure that potential purchasers visit their sites to find these products. Cross-selling and upselling will dramatically gain in urgency.

  Is this all just crazytalk? Well, consider the factors required for this to become a reality, current events, and the incentives for Google to push Froogle 2.0 .

  
  A. Google is aggressively pushing its payment processor, Google Checkout.

  Advertisers can use Google Checkout badges to boost CTR. Merchants can offer customers a $5 discount on items processed using Google Checkout. Plus advertisers’ AdWords click charges cover a corresponding volume of “free” payment processing. (For extra fun, see this post on SEL where, reading between the lines, it seems that Google is cloaking Google Checkout and other URLs to Googlebot .)

  

  “Free”? That’s a reference to the costs down the line when Google Checkout has gone so mainstream that Google is self-contained as far as ecommerce goes. This is the whole moral of the story.
  
  B. Google has shown, by rolling out Google Suggest, that it wants to direct searcher behaviour to a more limited set of keywords.

  Not necessarily short phrases, but just less variety in the phrases that people use. Having more people search for ‘red soccer jersey’ instead of ‘maroon’ or ‘burgundy’ jerseys flows along in that direction. (Photo Alun Machin)

  
  
  C. The move makes sense relatively to Google’s brand, which is largely centred on user experience.
  The homepage is simple and uncluttered. They are constantly testing. And the horse opened its mouth recently to tell everyone “what Google wants.”

  Rather than risk a poor user experience by sending visitors to ecommerce merchants who can’t be trusted to test and iterate as fast as Google, Google can and will host the whole shopping experience on their own site. And since everyone will already be using their payment processor, that’s one less component of the experience to have to worry about being suboptimal.

  Of course, if you think that this is limited to ecommerce, you’re kidding yourself. How about the news vertical, for instance? Surely Google won’t hire armies of content producers?

  Nah, the wire services do that just fine. All Google has to do is get the meat of the story from the wire services, then glue on those paragraphs that are original to individual publishers as “snippets”.

  E.g.

  AP paragraph

  AP para

  WSJ unique commentary/angle para

  AP

  AP

  And of course, once you own an affiliate network and a PPC network, plus multivariate testing software… monetization gets automated and optimized at breakneck speed.

  D. Wikipedia ranks for 970/1000 most popular queries online.

  Knols are ripping off Wikipedia content, and monetizing it. Knols are ranking. Well, perhaps they will recruit that army of content creators after all.

  So where does that leave you, fellow webmasters?

  Well, first, build up cash reserves for the lean years ahead as you prepare to change your business model.
  Second, figure out how you can become independent of Google, and drive traffic from alternative streams.
  Third, get ready for the lobbying fight of a lifetime: the Google anti-trust wars are just beginning.
  Fourth, come back later this week as I share four business plans that don’t depend on ecommerce or affiliate marketing or Google, which plans I will not be pursuing for lack of time.
  Fifth, read XMCP’s excellent piece on Google making their own web. Also, the guy’s back and blogging again .

  If you liked this post on Google and ecommerce, get my RSS feed for more posts like this one!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve just seen this in Google on an experiment an acquaintance of mine is running (she doesn’t blog on SEO, hence it being here; she also OKayed me writing this up). A recently registered domain, without having any links pointing to it, is now indexed.

There’s private registration, although because she didn’t immediately “activate” private registration, with Namecheap, it’s possible to see the old registrant info prior to activation. The person who registered it has some other trusted/well-ranking sites, so it’s possible that by correlating the whois info, Google is expecting that this will be a quality site and decided to index it.

Myself being a Namecheap client (thanks Smaxor for the free SSL tip), I decided to speak to support. They don’t autosubmit domain names to Google. So submission is not the reason the domain is indexed.

What’s also interesting is that when this domain – a nonsense keyword domain – was registered, there were 0 results for the madeup keyword. Now there are a few besides my contact’s domain; she and I have searched for it a couple of times. Perhaps Google [supplemental?] indexes pages that it wouldn’t otherwise index when it realizes they have unique keywords on them that are being searched for. Of course, that could easily lend itself to abuse, which is something Google’s engineers are weary of when deciding if a criteria is worth using.

A final possibility I considered is that there’s a trojan on my friend’s computer or mine. Keystroke logging might then have got spammers to find these keywords and autogenerate the junk constituting the rest of the SERPs [which, again, weren't there when he decided on that nonsense keyword]. I think this is the least likely of the possibilities though.

Update: My friend Andrew Shotland has a post featuring over a dozen techniques to get indexed without links or submission!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.