Local Searches Becoming More Important

According to a 2009 study by the US-based ComScore, local Internet searches are growing at a much faster rate than search as a whole.

The figures stated are a 58% growth during 2008 for local searches, compared to the overall 21%, and similar figures are expected for 2009.  This suggests that attention to geography is becoming more important when considering an SEO campaign.

Local phrases account for over 12% of all searches, which is good news for directories and other websites that focus on a certain town, city or county, as well as certain business directories like yell.com, which are popular with people looking for businesses in their area.

While Internet users have always been keen to make use of the net to find information and the bargains that may be found with such a huge choice at their fingertips, these figures may suggest an eagerness in consumers to deal with local businesses.  For website owners, this may mean that while the Internet can open your doors to potential customers across the country or even worldwide, it may also pay dividends to optimise your website for your local market.

Murdoch, Bing and Google

Rupert Murdoch is reported to be considering a partnership with the Microsoft Bing search engine, giving it exclusive rights to publish articles from his News Corp group of newspapers online.

Murdoch is apparently frustrated with the manner in which Google distributes content from his publications, gaining benefit while giving little to News Corp in return.

Analysts are divided about the wisdom of such a move.
Around ¼ all traffic to the Sun and many other News Corp online papers come via Google, and many industry experts however believe that this is a big mistake.

Would searchers really change their search behaviour because Murdoch's articles can not be found via Google or will they simply click on the content that is available.  It could be good for Bing but maybe not so good for News Corp. Bing only receives around 4% of UK searches.

Would the consumer lose out? Less news would be available to those who choose to stay with Google, perhaps because they are unaware of Bing and this exclusivity deal.

What is Wolfram|Alpha?

A new product from Mathematica, WolframAlpha is a new addition to the world of search, but is not in direct competition with Google, Bing, Yahoo or the other major engines, as it works in a very different way. Therefore, it should not be a factor in any SEO strategies at the moment.

Like Mathematica - an online computation system used for many scientific and engineering industries, it is a useful for highly technical questions.

For example, if you were to ask a normal search engine a question such as:
"uncle's uncle's brother's son" you would get SERPs that contain those words, whereas, WolframAlpha could compute this family tree relationship and return a blood relationship fraction - 3.125% for this example.

More information on 'Alpha':
- SERPs on Alpha will include a link to sources used for computations
- if a fact was disputed, Alpha would mention this in its footnotes
- it will feature advertisements in a sidebar
- toolbars will be released for FireFox and Internet Explorer
- it will display results from major search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo! - and include links to any Wikipedia pages that are relevant.

Does the Sandbox Still Exist?

It has been reported by numerous SEO experts that the Google Sandbox is still alive and well.

The term 'Sandbox' is often used interchangably with the reported 'Ageing Delay' for new websites. It is believed that a kind of probation period is put on new websites to discourage webmasters from creating multiple sites for the same business, with the goal of targeting different phrases and / or creating a link network to artificially boost rankings for all of them or the main site.

The idea seems to be that by requiring webmasters to take a long term view, they will be less likely to look to quick success techniques based on multiple mini sites that just clutter the internet. It seems like a good idea.

It typically takes 6-12 months for sites to start ranking well with a good SEO strategy.

The Sandbox also refers to a probation period where sites can be restricted ranking-wise if they have recently gone through a major change - perhaps urls changing across the whole site, a sudden change in size or anything else that could suggest a change of ownership or theme.

Google seems to like establishing 'trust' in a website, so if you focus on steady, ethical SEO then long-term, your site should do well.

Toolbar PageRank "Not Important"

Earlier this year, a Google employee reported on their webmaster forum advised:
"Don't worry about PageRank".

It seems that glitches can occur during Google Toolbar PageRank updates, which are made 3-4 times per year.

However, whatever the outcome of the latest update for your website, "this is generally not something that will affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking".

It is widely believed that the publicly available Toolbar PageRank data is not necessarily the same as the Actual PageRank that Google uses as part of its algorithm.

The best thing to do for long term SEO benefits, is to follow the basic principles:
- Develop quality, unique content that will prove useful for your visitors.
- Source incoming links from high quality, relevant websites.

Regardless of PageRank, these two actions should lead to steady and sustainable progress.

Canonical Tag - Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

One of Google's blogs recently stated that they have introduced a new 'canonical tag' for the head section of websites to help webmasters specify the preferred version of a url.

Many websites, particuarly large e-commerce sites with multiple search options, encounter problems where accessing the same product via different variable choices leads to identical or extremely similar content being indexed by search engines. It can also be caused by a site attributing a session id to each site visit.

To avoid being punished for duplicate content issues, you can use the new
link rel="canonical" tag in the head section of any web pages that could throw up duplicates.

Eg add:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item="blue-widgets"

inside the head section of the duplicate content URLs eg:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=blue-widgets&category=industrial-tools

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=blue-widgets&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

This will let Google know that the duplicate content urls should not be indexed, but rather just the primary url.

This page:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

of the Google Webmaster Central blog gives more information on this new tag.

Most Users Look at the Top 2 Results

A Google study published in 2009 looked at the eye activity of web surfers when looking for relevant information from its SERPs - search engine results pages.

The study showed that when participants searched for a given topic, they tended to look at the results returned in order from top to bottom (as you would expect) but often found what they were looking for within the first two listings, so never needed to look further down.

Although a web surfer's eyes dart all over the results page, the concentration on the top of the page, often largely on the top 2 results, shows the importance of being listed near the top.

Many people regard first page results on Google as a benchmark of SEO success, but perhaps you should not be too pleased until you are near the top of that first page.

Most Users Look at the Top 2 Results