Masterlink Interactive Blog

Google recently announced another big change in how they will be presenting search results. They are extending their Personalized Search to everyone, this means all Google users, whether logged in or not, will start seeing personalized results.

Google explains Personalized Search:

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

The customized search results are based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. And you can tell when customized results are being shown because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your search results and also let you turn off the customization. But I’m guessing the average “Joe web surfer” won’t know about the personalizations or how to turn them off.

Previously Personalized Search was only provided to users who were logged into a Google account and had Web history enabled (Google has it turned on by default when creating a new account).  This caused some confusion with many of our Dallas SEO clients as they began to see their own site rankings fall in the search results pages for their major keywords. Clients would call in a panic about their rankings and I would explain about Personalized Search and most of the time the client was logged into Google and once they logged out their own site was back to ranking where they had previously seen it. Turns out these clients had been studying their competition’s websites for their main keywords and were not clicking on their own sites, so Google assumed they actually preferred the competitor’s sites over their own.

So what does this mean for SEO?

As WebProNews puts it:

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

Rest assured the internet marketing team at MasterLink is keeping abreast of the changes at Google. I don’t personally foresee this affecting the way we preform SEO, but may increase the need for social media marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach your targeted audience.

The biggest change I see happening is that focusing on keyword rankings to gauge a SEO campaign’s success will become completely irrelevant as everyone will be seeing different results for the exact same queries based on past browsing history (if they have not figured out how to turn it off). So, as always, but even more so now, we will focus on actual results that show a positive ROI to determine success. Is your site gaining traffic for your top keywords as well as long tail keyword phrases? Are you getting more conversions, sales, leads from your website? These are the types of statistics a results-orientated, ROI-focused SEO campaign should be tracking. SEO for rankings is dead!

If you haven’t heard, Google has been working on a major update on the architecture for Google’s web search. The update, named “Caffeine”, was made available for testing by the public back in August at the following site: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ but the test search engine has now been replaced with a message from Google:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts talks more about the Google Caffeine update in this WebProNews interview:

The official Caffeine announcement states “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”  Google says they’ve mostly focused the changes around infrastructure, indexing and speed.  Though some SEOs who have analyzed the new search results speculate that they are giving even more weight to authority sites.

Matt Cutts says “I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays” adding that most searchers won’t immediately notice a difference with Caffeine but they want to minimize the stress on webmasters during the holiday season.

So what does this all mean? Well, beginning next year we can likely expect to see rankings doing a little dance in the search results pages for a while but the main differences, according to Google, will be that we will see more pages being indexed and faster search results.

A Cash-Flow Positive Facebook Helps the Industry

Facebook is making money. It shouldn’t be shocking, we know.

But let’s be honest—social media is an industry that’s been more often rich in potential than profits. And no social media platform embodies this gap more than Facebook.

Despite the site’s massive growth, Mark Zuckerberg’s enterprise—launched in a Harvard dorm room five years ago—has actually struggled to break even. 300 million users (traffic has tripled from just 100 million a year ago) means a massive advertising base, but it also means prohibitive bandwidth and operations costs (a growing percentage of users come from developing countries, where advertisers are reluctant to invest).

But for the first time since the site hit the mainstream, enough cash is flowing in for the ballooning site to cover its operating expenses and continue to expand. It’s not quite profit, and major questions remain, but it could be a landmark step in the right direction.

So how should we—the social media community—read this latest news?

Facebook as the “Bellwether”

A profitable Facebook is good for the social media industry, primarily because an unprofitable Facebook could be devastating.

Look at it this way: While Facebook’s success would signify a well-run, innovative company capitalizing on an unprecedented user-base, Facebook’s failure would say more about systemic, industry-wide limitations. If a massive, efficient, innovative, pioneering company can’t turn profits, how are smaller ventures supposed to earn investor confidence?

In other words, with 300 million users, Facebook profits seem to some almost inevitable. But if even Facebook falls short on the bottom line, investors could see the basic premise of social media success—profits via advertising embedded in free content—as too inherently flawed to overcome any significant amount of operating costs.

It all comes down to targeted advertising, and the fact that Facebook has appeared to finally figure it out bodes well for the rest of the industry.

Investment Capital is Coming

Improved confidence should only signal an easing in venture capital, and the hard numbers appear to be particularly welcoming: $240 million from Microsoft in 2007. $200 million from Russian investment group Digital Sky last May.

Overall, since its 2004 launch, the site has raised nearly $600 million, and — with expected revenues of $500 million this year — appears to be in much better shape for a potential IPO in 2010.

“This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term,” said Zuckerberg on his blog.

Belief in the system — and belief that the potential can, in fact, turn into real profits — boosts social media and internet marketing ventures industry-wide. Bellwether Facebook is again leading the way.

After almost 15 years in the Internet industry, I have heard so many horror stories about problems when companies use a small or one-person design “firm” to create their web presence. One of those horror stories that I have heard over and over is when those “firms’ go out of business or simply “disappear”, customers then may find out they do not own their domain name. Instead, the web designer registered themselves as the owner of the domain name. This sometimes also happens even if the designer has not gone out of business so it’s always important to know who “owns” your domain.

Today a small company with this problem called me for help, and to make matters worse, his designer did not pay to renew the domain name, which then expired. He no longer has a website or an email address and unfortunately, the best he can do is wait 60-90 days and try to register the domain name again when it becomes available. He also has to rebuild his site from scratch. Obviously, when you have advertised your website and email address, you are not only inconvenienced by this issue, but also losing business!. I’ve also heard of designers holding the domain name “hostage.” We had one small company call us who eventually had to hire an attorney and pay several thousand dollars to get control of their name – hey, but at least they saved money on their web design!

So, what can you do to protect yourself? First of all, make sure you are working with a reputable design firm that has been in business for many years. Secondly, we recommend you register the domain name yourself to insure you have complete control of the name.

If you are unsure of how your domain was registered, click on the link below, put in your domain name and make sure you are listed as the Registrant. If not, immediately do whatever is necessary to get that changed! Your business could depend on it.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp