The use of video online is still increasing at rapid rate. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the UK, generating more searches per month than Yahoo! or Bing (MSN). We've mentioned concerns about the long term viability of YouTube in the coming years on Twitter recently but regardless of how Google takes the website in the future, it still never fails to entertain.
Here are our favourite YouTube videos we've seen in the last month.
Stop motion magic (The PEN story)
Created as a viral by Olympus cameras, it shows the beautiful elegance of photography in a touching three minute video.
The ultimate golf shot?
Tom Watson nearly achieved the impossible by winning the Open aged 59 but unfortunately lost out on the last hole. Although Tom didn't make it, this video shows Leif Olson achieving the impossible by hitting a once in a life time shot by getting a hole in one by deflecting off another golf ball. (Ok, nothing to do with the Internet but amazing anyway!)
What is a web browser?
Google have been very keen to promote their new Google Chrome browser in the last few months to try and eat into the market share of Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's starting to work (very gradually) but they still have to make it work for some of the people interviewed in this research video. Good luck Google!
Welcome to MeetDraw
MeetDraw is a networking group for digital agencies and those in the industry who are based in Dorset. See Gary, our Sales Director, meet some of the attendees at the event in this video.
Stay tuned for more of the best videos of the month next month along with some of our own creations in the coming weeks.
info@adi.do0845 260 2343
Exclusive Google Adwords discount!
As digital marketing experts, we know the power of search marketing. Millions of people in the UK spend billions of pounds online each year and a large majority of searchers spend their money having done a search first. In the UK nearly 90% of all users search using Google so to attract visitors to your website, it makes sense to advertise your website there first.We are happy to offer one business a massive 10% discount on their Google Adwords advertising if they work with us over a six month period and sign off on their campaign before the 31st of August. We are only able to offer this deal to new advertisers who spend over £3000 a month with Google Adwords, so if you have already used Google for PPC advertising in the past, this won't be available to you.
To take advantage of this offer, please call 0845 260 2343 and speak to one of our team.
As a Google Adwords Qualified company, we get access to many offers from Google via their agency team and newsletter updates. If you would like to find more about Google PPC advertising why not visit our website. Alternatively to receive information about Adwords offers as we get them, subscribe to our blog by adding our feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/adido to your favourites!
Does Google manually filter its results?
We've spoken before on our blog about the main way Google came to prominence - through it's superior system of ranking websites. It's this algorithm, based around the idea of PageRank, which meant it could deliver the best results to users searching the internet.
In very basic terms, algorithms are just calculations used to come up with an answer to a problem. They are automated and require no human input. This allows them to address massive problems (such as sorting the whole of the Internet) with a relatively low human input. Once the algorithm is written, it just needs to be updated and tweaked over time.
However, on my trips onto Google recently I've noticed somethings which don't look very 'automated' and look like some manual intervention has happened.
Here are just a couple of examples. This week I was looking for the logo of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing. Google doesn't know what Bing - the search engine - looks like (yet). In fact, the results it's returned were less than family safe (I have my image search setting on 'Moderate' and was a bit surprised at the images presented!). I have included a 'strict' version of the results below as the 'Moderate' and 'Off' versions definitely shouldn't be shown here!
Secondly, I was looking to find out information about a link buying service called 'Text-Link-Ads' (TLA). I know that this site is used to buy & sell links to help improve SEO positions; something that is something that is frowned upon by Google. I also know that there is a lot of conversation around this website on many forums as to whether it is a good thing or not.
Therefore there must be links to the site which would mean that Google WOULD know about it. Given I was searching for the name of the company, and the company had its name in the URL, it should've ranked #1 easily. But does it return any results when you do a search for them? See for yourself...
Nowhere to be seen.
I find both of these examples slightly strange. I can sort of understand why there are no images returned for just 'Bing' - it is a new name and there maybe a long history of other images being attached to the word 'Bing' (but no sign of Chandler character from Friends for some reason). Given the amount of blogs/tweets created about the new name Bing recently I would have expected to have seen at least ONE logo show up! But there were none. A more specific search for 'Bing logo' does indeed return the result I was looking for.
It does also make me think that perhaps Microsoft should have thought a little bit harder about the name of their new company. That's another matter...
On the TLA issue, this looks seriously suspicious. Why would a well known and well linked site not appear #1 on Google for it's own brand term? It has a PageRank of 5, which is pretty good (and indication that Google knows about the site and rates it fairly highly) and over 100,000 back links according to Yahoo! Very few sites have this amount of backlinks.
I believe that Google may well be adjusting its results to stop this website getting rankings and hence traffic. It would do this to stop people from buying links and then increasing their rankings artificially, something which they do not endorse at all.
Google has said in the past;
"Our search results are not manipulated by hand. We're not able to make any manual changes to the results."
but I can't see that their algorithm is so smart as to take out sites which it thinks do not adhere to the Google webmaster guidelines (taken from this post - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23155.htm). If it is, then they're even better than we give them credit for!
If they are changing the rankings then this does open up a big trust issue. Why try and get ranking results if it's possible that Google manually filters rankings to suit it's own needs? How can we trust an algorithm to provide the best results when they could be changed to suit Googles own interests?
If anyone else has examples of where Google may have manually filtered, it would be interesting to hear them.
In very basic terms, algorithms are just calculations used to come up with an answer to a problem. They are automated and require no human input. This allows them to address massive problems (such as sorting the whole of the Internet) with a relatively low human input. Once the algorithm is written, it just needs to be updated and tweaked over time.
However, on my trips onto Google recently I've noticed somethings which don't look very 'automated' and look like some manual intervention has happened.
Here are just a couple of examples. This week I was looking for the logo of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing. Google doesn't know what Bing - the search engine - looks like (yet). In fact, the results it's returned were less than family safe (I have my image search setting on 'Moderate' and was a bit surprised at the images presented!). I have included a 'strict' version of the results below as the 'Moderate' and 'Off' versions definitely shouldn't be shown here!
Secondly, I was looking to find out information about a link buying service called 'Text-Link-Ads' (TLA). I know that this site is used to buy & sell links to help improve SEO positions; something that is something that is frowned upon by Google. I also know that there is a lot of conversation around this website on many forums as to whether it is a good thing or not.
Therefore there must be links to the site which would mean that Google WOULD know about it. Given I was searching for the name of the company, and the company had its name in the URL, it should've ranked #1 easily. But does it return any results when you do a search for them? See for yourself...
Nowhere to be seen.
I find both of these examples slightly strange. I can sort of understand why there are no images returned for just 'Bing' - it is a new name and there maybe a long history of other images being attached to the word 'Bing' (but no sign of Chandler character from Friends for some reason). Given the amount of blogs/tweets created about the new name Bing recently I would have expected to have seen at least ONE logo show up! But there were none. A more specific search for 'Bing logo' does indeed return the result I was looking for.
It does also make me think that perhaps Microsoft should have thought a little bit harder about the name of their new company. That's another matter...
On the TLA issue, this looks seriously suspicious. Why would a well known and well linked site not appear #1 on Google for it's own brand term? It has a PageRank of 5, which is pretty good (and indication that Google knows about the site and rates it fairly highly) and over 100,000 back links according to Yahoo! Very few sites have this amount of backlinks.
I believe that Google may well be adjusting its results to stop this website getting rankings and hence traffic. It would do this to stop people from buying links and then increasing their rankings artificially, something which they do not endorse at all.
Google has said in the past;
"Our search results are not manipulated by hand. We're not able to make any manual changes to the results."
but I can't see that their algorithm is so smart as to take out sites which it thinks do not adhere to the Google webmaster guidelines (taken from this post - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23155.htm). If it is, then they're even better than we give them credit for!
If they are changing the rankings then this does open up a big trust issue. Why try and get ranking results if it's possible that Google manually filters rankings to suit it's own needs? How can we trust an algorithm to provide the best results when they could be changed to suit Googles own interests?
If anyone else has examples of where Google may have manually filtered, it would be interesting to hear them.
How accurate is the Google Keywords Tool for SEO?
Being SEO & PPC obsessives, we spend A LOT of time using the Google Keyword Tool to predict traffic and therefore sales for our clients. The information presented by the tool help us decide which phrases to target and which ones to avoid. In fact, it's fair to say that the data from the Google Keyword tool actually helps shape our clients future online!
The information from the tool only started to show Google search volume in the last few years. But it seems that the data has not got any more accurate at all. Being in the unique position of overseeing many thousand page one rankings in Google, we thought we'd share our data with our readers to prove just how accurate the tool really is.
Some points to note on how we've presented the information.
Here are the statistics collected;
Ok, so there are a lot of numbers here. Some of the predictions from the Google Keyword Tool do not seem to correlate when compared to real clicks, while others are fairly good. Here are some of the findings that we can draw from the information that we've collected;
Further research in conversion rates and PPC clicks to estimates would be good and if we have time we'll look into this further. For now, if you've any comments, we'd be very pleased to here them!
The information from the tool only started to show Google search volume in the last few years. But it seems that the data has not got any more accurate at all. Being in the unique position of overseeing many thousand page one rankings in Google, we thought we'd share our data with our readers to prove just how accurate the tool really is.
Some points to note on how we've presented the information.
- We've decided not to use the exact search phrases here to maintain client confidentiality so have instead just made reference to the industry & location that they operate in.
- In addition, we have also split the phrases up by what we deem to be general and specific. General refers to phrases which don't contain any geographical search terms or additional words / phrases which would reduce the amount of results returned considerably. Specific phrases are those which target a particular county or place or contain something specific to what the searcher is looking for. Ok, this isn't an exact science but it helps as a guide.
- The majority of our rankings use correct META tags and don't contain ...'s in them which might potentially influence whether the listings are clicked or not. Same for TITLE tags and page names as well
- We use a piece of software to record our rankings. This information is pulled from Google UK data centres and is accurate for the large majority of the time.
- Our traffic data is collected using standard installations of Google Analytics.
- All search engine listings are in what we'll call the traditional SERPs. Very few, if any, of the phrases selected have news, local,product or video results as part of the results returned, thus making it a fair test in that respect.
Here are the statistics collected;
Ok, so there are a lot of numbers here. Some of the predictions from the Google Keyword Tool do not seem to correlate when compared to real clicks, while others are fairly good. Here are some of the findings that we can draw from the information that we've collected;
- Google Keyword Tool groups related phrases together when showing search volume. It isn't very clear how this information is grouped. For example, several phrases entered all returned the same search volume prediction, yet the specific phrases received very different amounts of clicks. Where the same search predictions were returned we omitted some of the possible results
- Overall, the amount of clicks compared to the estimated search volume from the Google Keyword Tool was just about 1%. When making predictions on what sort of traffic you can get from SEO, don't be too optimistic!
- There is a big difference between the clicks to prediction on specific phrases when compared to general phrases. In our test, general phrases get less than 1% of searchers clicks compared to something like 12.5% on specific phrases. So just because a phrase doesn't look like it will generate click volume, it may well actually perform better in terms of clicks than some phrases with supposedly higher search volume. This is another good reason to try your phrases out using a paid (PPC) search campaign.
- Unsurprisingly, phrases which rank at #1 get more clicks than those that don't. Our data shows that when a phrase gets to #1, it tends to get 2x more traffic than those that don't. This is a general rule of thumb and is obviously different depending on the phrases being searched for, the amount of traffic etc. It does however highlight the fact that your SEO efforts don't stop until you hit the top!
- A few of the phrases that we focus on had huge amounts of clicks compared to the amount of estimated searches carried out. These phrases tended to be very time specific and on newer phrases (e.g. containing 2009, 2010). This suggests that on phrases which are new or gaining search traction are not accurately estimated by the Google Keyword Tool.
Further research in conversion rates and PPC clicks to estimates would be good and if we have time we'll look into this further. For now, if you've any comments, we'd be very pleased to here them!
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