IMPORTANT UPDATE!!!
Guys.. 4 days ago at SES Toronto the keynote from google spoke, Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google.
There was a major Q&A and guess what! A LOT of what we revealed here was
CONFIRMED by them!!
Here are the major snippets that applied specifically to what we discuss here:
After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking). The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update. What exactly is that it?
We tweak little things in our algorithm all the time. Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms. A lot of people were leveraging long tail phrases for lots of traffic but it was frequently done via automated methods. We?ve looked to eliminate spam, and that?s been a big priority for us. At the same time, there were people developing not quality content (not a violation of guidelines, but also not providing value). What it does is for long tail queries, is we now just consider them queries like anything else. We are going to put as much value in those search results as all search results.
So, you can?t just add a bunch of keywords on a page and expect results just on that. This type of update is continuing and it?s a focus we have. We have other projects too to help continue making long tail traffic highly relevant.
Translation - Long tail queries no longer up for easy grabs without a fight. Just the regular old spam isn't going to cut it.
What?s the difference between Mayday and Caffeine?
Mayday is a pure ranking change ? just looking to make the results more relevant. Caffeine is a huge infrastructure change. It?s the idea that we can now take our entire index and update it a document at a time. It gives us the scalability we didn?t have before ? now we have the ability to grow even bigger and better. On top of which, caffeine is really cool because we can attach more meta data to each document. We have all these ways to push a document out faster and get it to users quicker.
Translation - Infrastructure change - meaning breaking up search into several different types of search - video, images, shopping, news, blogs, discussion and so on.
Can you talk about snippets for a second? How do I decide what comes up in a snippet?
For most people, when you design a document you?re not thinking about what a snippet is going to look like in your document. What we take for the snippet is the context of the keyword in the snippet. The other place we look is in your meta description. If you put your keyword in your meta description it?s a good idea as then you have control over your snippet. The reason we used the meta description is it?s one of the few areas that people weren?t spamming. We do want to give webmasters an option.
Translation - Meta Descriptions - Use it or lose it! More importantly, the context of the keyword in the snippet is clearly a factor. This seems to fall into line with ipopbbs findings about tag data and keywords. Bottom line is google looks at the entire page content for snippets and the keyword that relates to it. Be consistent in your page keyword data and you will do better. Clearly though, much to ipopbbs dismay, they are recognizing spam within snippet data as well through out the pages.
Is there a specific way people should think about creating a document?
Overall there is a strategy you need to have with your site. What type of users do you want to attract, and what is your call to action? And so your pages should be designed with that intention. Think about your content and lay it out in a way that converts. Titles are important for search engines and semantic markup is still good. Mayday took out information that was auto-generated or not relevant. Design each page with an intention of what you want from users.
Translation - That's what I said!
You have to match the type of content you deliver to the type of query the user is making! What is sort of cool though is that google is saying 'be better marketers'... make a
CLEAR CALL TO ACTION! Click here, buy this, share your ideas, enter here.
So there?s a big shift in the SEO world. Everyone was always focused on keywords/ranking algorithms. Now everyone thinks about social. Where does social fit within search?
There?s a way search is evolving, and when it comes to personalization we want to deliver results that are more and more unique. That?s where social search comes in for us ? it?s expanding a theme we really want to pursue. For social search it comes from the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph. But prioritize by having a great website first, then get involved in social media.
Translation - Personalization is Web 3.0, and thats were they are trying to go with this. Note that they put priority on a site becoming established and THEN getting involved in social media. Notice they said they put the social graph ON TOP of the link graph. This gives us a peek into how google precieves different types of links.
What are your thoughts on getting better links to your website?
When you create a site, unique and compelling products or services content is what matters most. How can you make yours different from all the other sites on the web? Your customers will link to you when they think it?s great and that will happen naturally. But, you can also look for opportunities for links too ? not just by emailing a webmaster asking for links but expanding in the same way you?d expand your business. I.E., forging partnerships and adding value to others.
Links are a big part of our PageRank algorithm which is a major component on the 100?s of items in it. Links are not just based on quantity but more so on quality. We know on a link by link basis what is valuable to what and we value them all differently. It is done algorithmically and we also have a manual spam-fighting team. Just because you have a lot of links doesn?t necessarily mean you are getting value. Look for quality links not quantity.
Translation - A manual spam fighing team? This is in relation to discussing links. I have always precieved this spam fighting to be on pages, not links. This is new to me. The link relationship has been illustrated as forging business partnerships for added value to customers. Is it just me, or does that sound like affiliate marketing to you? Perhaps google doesn't hate affiliates like everyone is saying, but rather just wants to see it presented in a way that is a value add to the visitor, instead of just another page of another page.
Why was site speed recently highlighted as important?
The site speed update was purely from our user metrics ? we know people like faster performance. We find that even when slowing results by half a second, they were actually searching less. When we removed the delay, they went back up but never to the same level (this was actually a costly experiment). This was just due to latency. We also found in tests that conversions will increase with sites that load quicker ? it?s a very important aspect of your website. Faster sites can potentially outrank you.
Translation - Someone brought this up earlier, and it looks like it's confirmed. They outright said if someone has a faster page than you, they can outrank you potentially. They say its 'very important'. So make this an important part of your building plans. This also means how and where you host is more important than ever. You need to get some excellent hardware and uplinks behind your site.
Now CHECK THIS OUT.
GOOGLE OFFICIALLY CALLS FOR THE END OF THE MICROSITE!
What about microsites? Are they a good idea?
Microsites were originally created to dominate search results. It was originally kind of a spammy technique. I normally don?t suggest it, Mayday and future updates are only looking for quality sites. If you want to dominate search results, you can do things like add videos/images and other data. Microsites confuse users, there are links coming in to another site that isn?t your main site, and they are hard to maintain as now you have multiple sites. It?s a jarring user experience; I don?t think they are going to work in search results in the future as they did in the past.
Translation - Many of you suspected it, I always knew it, and now google confirms it. They HATE microsites and they are taking them OUT. People always ask why, well here are the clear answers. Users don't like them, and they are known for search engine manipulation. Now the cool thing though, they gave a HINT, that you want additional data on your site if you want to dominate search. This goes with what I said earlier about making sure you use multiple content types to rank. I still maintain you don't want to mashup as it will impact your page speed.
What about for e-commerce sites that are extremely large with lots of products? We?ve seen sites with fewer items and more information on each product outranking us.
That?s what we would expect from Mayday. Users don?t care if your site has many items, they care about descriptive content. They don?t want to see content that is just a title and an image. It comes down to creating unique content on each page. We crawl what we want to keep in the index and we keep in the index what users want to see in the search results. The drop off you are noticing is because we are focusing on content-rich pages and less on sites that are just tons of pages without value. If you link content up and bring the link structure up, we?ll crawl that more often. But at the end of the day, more content matters.
Translation -
YES! More product data per page the better! Less on tons of pages without value, and more on content rich pages. This is EXACTLY what I have been seeing in my testing and results. The top pages always had lists of product and information.
Final Thoughts - These are some important highlights to add to our own observations. I think this puts to rest a lot of what some people suspected/theorized, but could never proof. We now have a better picture of the new Mayday update and things that can be done to handle it. I for one am totally psyched because everything I am doing is totally on target with this.
If you want to get the full story with some of the other snippets (there are only a few other parts that were irrelevant) go here:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/06/google-maile-ohye-ses/
This all leads to the quesiton, what types of changes will YOU make to your sites in order to gain footing in this new google?
Hope this has helped a lot of you out in getting your sites up to #1 where they belong! :slomo:
Mister Gemini
