Google’s ‘Panda’ update is receiving a high level of search, SEO and even mainstream media attention, but the repercussion for brands engaging in social media is one can of worms begging to be opened.

Big fat juicy worms, like will sites currently considered valuable for brands to engage with suddenly lose their influence?

And has Google search become a crowdsourcing exercise, enabling uninitiated users – or even deliberate hacktivists with a bugbear – to hypothetically ‘block’ a credible brand website out of search?

Malcolm Slade sheds light on the latest Google algorithm, summarising as Google’s effort to provide better quality content-rich results and flush out the thin, low-value ‘spammy’ ones.

Known as the ‘Panda’ update, the algorithm launched in February and lowers the rankings for sites deemed ‘thin’ (affiliate-based, link farms, those with too much mirrored content). According to Google, this impacts 11.8% of queries.

Though we’ve yet to see the function rolled out in the UK, US Google users can now ‘block’ sites they consider to be of little value and in so doing, reduce a site’s rankings.

Without clarity on the algorithm, it is still unclear how UK sites are already caught up in the cross-fire; though Searchmetrics analysis indicates that the impact on a number of UK sites is both intuitive and surprising in equal measures.

While online newspapers such as The Independent, The Metro and The Mirror have all improved in rankings – unsurprising given their rich and frequent content – influential tech and gadget sites such as Zath, Pocket Lint and Electric Pig have significantly dropped in rankings.

Our sources tell us that some of the sites reported to have dropped in rankings are also seeing their traffic plummet as, one can only assume, a direct result.

It already looks like rich-content sites, which built influence through SEO link-building are now becoming the victims. Google itself, acknowledges this, by stating on Google webmaster central that if anyone “knows of a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread.” To-date the post has received 1620 replies.

It’s easy to see SEO and content as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but if the latest Google update highlights anything, it’s the necessity to make creating rich content priority number one.

Source: Holistic Search Marketing

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You may have seen news of Google’s latest attempt to introduce social recommendations to its platform. +1  (US only service at the moment) allows people to up vote any website they like; this can then be seen by their social connections on Google in much the same fashion as you might like a friend’s post on Facebook. This can be considered a blatant, somewhat belated, but very welcome addition from Google in the social media arms race, but it also throws up a number of questions.

Could it be gamed?

I’m positive Google’s beta testing will place lots of whiz bang algorithms to stop unscrupulous people +1ing select sites to death. But, it does raise the query: will brands who have worked hard to appear in the Google Golden Triangle through great stories, competent SEO practices and positive reviews see smaller sites leapfrogging them in people’s search due to lots of local +1s?

What would motivate someone to +1?

Your +1s can only be seen by your Social connections on Google.

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

But, how many friends do you currently have on your Google profile? Is this group big enough to provide meaningful search impact? In addition people currently understand, or have been taught to understand the motives for liking something amongst their social group, but does this motivation transfer to search?

The upside

I may have seemed pretty critical of this new service, but I’m sure Google will iron out these potential issues. +1 in search can only be a good thing, we have been saying for months that human recommendations need to be considered in search; it shouldn’t just be down to algorithms and will combat SEO blackhatting.

When +1 comes to the rest of the web population, what site would you up vote? Oh yeah and Google, where’s the -1?

For further information check out Google’s overview video.

For a more detailed overview of the service there is a great description on Search Engine Land.

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Search is a hot topic at the moment. With innovations in mobile and local search and the impact of real time mentions and social media, the competition for the much sought over front page position is hotting up. For some, the temptation may be to take advantage of one (some) of the many free press release distributors in the hope of creating  a few of those juicy Google links –

Here’s why we don’t think they should jump in, without looking deeper…

Death by association:

Your content might be good, but there’s no saying what it might be next to.  Scanning the headlines on a couple of the leading free press release sites shows that “Innovative Bilingual Program Builds Bright Future for YCIS Beijing Students” is next to “New Website Scores You On How “Do-able” You Are” and “Sceneric relaunches Frasers Autographs on hybris”  precedes  “Inspired or expired meat! Can cancer make you feel horny?” With little say in what your content will sit alongside – both in terms of other stories and links –  the reputational risk is definitely worth considering.

But press release pages are for journalists and not consumers, right?

Well, yes. It could be argued that journalists are accustomed to sifting through press releases to identify the relevant stories; however, what you’re paying for in traditional press release distribution sites – direction, focus, proactive targeting – is lost when you take out the price. As Daryl Willcox from DWP Publishing said in an Econsultancy interview last year: “You get what you pay for with free press release distribution services. Enough said.”

So, free press release sites aren’t great at taking a story to the right person, but what about generating online links?

An SEO strategy?

As one of the determinants of page ranking, the promise of online links might be enough, on its own, to tempt businesses towards free press releases. There are few flaws in this thinking. For a start, not all the free press release sites that we reviewed permitted live links, and the majority did not permit anchor text. And then, the risk to reputation that we were talking about earlier? With some recent noise around the quality of Google’s search and the consequent demotion of low quality, spammy sites, a link is not always an asset.

This extract from the Google blog illustrates the point:

“As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.”

Recommendations

Google’s emphasis on relevance is the key, we think, to both effective online content strategies and getting a news story out. The internet may have opened up the media, but some of the old rules still apply:

• Targeted approach: Invest time in identifying, targeting and developing relationships with appropriate online influencers. Individually pitching your news angle to the top people you’ve identified within your market is more likely to result in coverage and any links will be more valuable due to the relevant content they’re associated with.

• Content strategies: Having high quality content online is more likely to generate natural linkage and encourage share-ability.  Ensure that content is well optimised for search so that news is discoverable and will appear in any relevant online searches.

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I came across an infographic entitled, ‘Fear Google’, yesterday. I first spotted it on imjustcreative, who in turn credited the source as onlineschools.org.

Using bold red colours and imagery of a laughing devil, the infographic warns of the power of analytics and user data. Step by step, it takes you on a journey through the process of how Google comes to acquire user data.

The infographic highlights international government requests Google received to disclose user information between July 1st and December 31st 2009, (the UK government requested details of 1,000 users); as well the specific data Google collects from, for example, a Normal Google Search, (query, IP address, country code, domain name, browser) verses a Google Personalised Search (content analysis of visited websites).

What’s the story here? Google knows everything about you, Google has unlimited power and Google is everywhere. IMHO big deal.

Let’s play devil’s advocate. According to ‘Just How MASSIVE is Google, anyway?’ another infograpic on computerschool.org, you would need 1.2 million trees to facilitate the amount of paper needed to print out the 24 petabytes of information Google processes daily. At least human privacy loss is the environment’s gain.

Then there’s the Christchurch Google Person Finder, the free tool helping people caught up in the New Zealand earthquake. In this instance human privacy loss becomes the facilitator to reuniting loved ones.

For better and for worse, Google has become bigger than we can comprehend. Here’s a final thought to make the mind boggle:

If it took you one minute to search each page on Google it’d take 38,026 years to look at them all. It takes Google 0.5 seconds, tops.

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There are loads of free tools out there designed to provide insight into what is being said about you or the brands and products you work for on the Internet. One such tool that is worth checking out is G’lerts.  Using Google Alerts as the base of the service it provides you with a daily email (example shown on the right) that rounds up what has been happening on your Google search over the past week.  It includes some simple charts as well as the all important links to the stories Google has found for you.

There is also an online dashboard but this is where things start to get a little flaky in my opinion.  One thing to be aware of is that you only have access to the last seven days information (come on it is free).  So do not rely on this to provide you with monthly reporting. The other is that I have only been seeing results for web, no news sites, blogs or Twitter, which I seriously doubt given one of my searches was regarding flu cases this winter.

Yet, if you are using Google Alerts for tracking issues, stories, clients, individuals or anything else, over the recent past, forget the Google Alerts emails and set this up.  Oh, just watch out for that sentiment analysis. We all know sentiment is nigh on impossible for automated systems to get right – no matter what the monitoring tool guys tell you.

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There’s been a flurry of activity and attention around the rapidly growing question and answer site, Quora, and this week it hit the mainstream media.

For anyone who’s missed the news, here’s a brief introduction, and some of the opportunities and risks that we have identified:

What is it?

In their own words, “Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” It is a combination of conversation, information and question forum: think Yahoo answers meets Twitter, with a Wikipedia like information page at the end.

How does it work?

Quora users follow topics, people and questions. They are able to add answers and edit existing answers, as well as rate those that have been provided by others. Accuracy is ensured by the biography that is provided by the users and the expertise that they bring to the topic, as well as the self-regulating nature of the site: inaccurate information can be commented on or rated by other users.

What does it mean to brands?

Quora aims to create “question pages” which bring together all the most relevant information relating to a particular questions.  These pages will provide content about the brand, derived from answers given by the Quora community.

This provides a number of risks and opportunities for brands, including:

• Insight into questions/needs relating to the brand /product
• Opportunity to engage in conversations relating to the product
• Opportunity to identify brand advocates, experts and influencers.
• Community-generated content and conversation about product/brand

Initial research suggests that Google is pulling in information from Quora. This could impact brand’s position in search ratings, as well as sales deriving from recommendation or consumer opinion.

The popularity of Q and A forums on the internet suggests that Quora will be one to watch in 2011. Signing up is through Facebook or Twitter profiles, and we’d recommend that you have a look.

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Because we’re slightly geeky and we like to spot a trend, we’ve been keeping an eye on a few key Christmas search terms over on our Christmas dashboard page.

Amongst other things (like kids’ presents and favourite Christmas puddings), we’ve been monitoring Google searches for “Christmas presents.” For the past few days, “presents for men” has been forging ahead. This suggests that, as we predicted, shopping for men can prove to be a bit of a headache.

An interesting anomaly emerged today.

It appears that men might be struggling even more than women – it’s just that they don’t use the same words.

The table below shows Google searches relating to “Christmas gifts.” A slight turn in phrase and the picture is entirely different.

There’s a lesson there in semantics and making sure that the search terms are right….

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Rumours, insinuations and accusations have been bubbling around for a while now, but today’s announcement that the European Commission has launched a preliminary anti-monopoly probe into Google’s affairs is the first concrete action to challenge the firm’s tactics.

Brief summary without getting too technical – Google allegedly artificially demotes articles in its search results to discourage users from visiting particular companies.

Google’s response to today’s allegations has been simply to swat them aside, claiming “this kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company.” They will also be encouraged that much of the disquiet can be traced back to Microsoft, making the claims seem like a case of sour grapes.

Google would also argue that its search engine algorithms are as much a part of its unique appeal and success as, say, Coca Cola’s or KFC’s recipes are part of theirs. SEO experts feel they have a general idea of how Google works, but many of the intricate vagaries and updates remain closely guarded secrets only revealed to an inner cabal. Google believe this is its intellectual property, and that making too much of the information available would weaken its position and open the company up to its competitors. All companies have their own ideas, and in a free society, they should have the right to hold onto them shouldn’t they?

The position is weakened somewhat by the fact that Google’s formulas are constantly being tweaked and updated. Coca Cola and KFC introduce new products, but their core offering remains basically the same as it has always been. Google can change its algorithms at a whim, constantly updating and reacting to patterns as it likes.

Many in the industry have a love/hate relationship with Google. For some, Google is a team of evil scientists, seconded in Silicon Valley bunkers coming up with ever more diabolical schemes to rule search engines and, one day, maybe even achieve total world domination. Google Government anyone? For others a paragon of what can be achieved through always being one step ahead of the competition.

My suggestion to Google would be: a little transparency can go a long way. Give us a crumb of insight, enough to dampen the criticism, but you can always leave your audience wanting more.

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You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently more hype than reality, it seems likely we’ll see the technology being used a lot more over the next 12-18 months, so online PR and marketing people should be paying attention.

What is real-time search?

In conventional web search, results are influenced by the authority of a page – well established websites with a high number of links from other trusted sites tend to rank highly. Real-time search is much more focused on what’s hot right now – what are people currently talking about on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

If you searched on the word “Pie” using a conventional search engine, you would expect to see some websites of big pie manufacturers, pie recipes from big cookery sites, the Wikipedia page about pies, and so on.

Real-time search, would be more likely to show you a current news story about the Prime Minister being hit in the face with a custard pie, a popular viral video of puppy stealing a pie, or some reviews of a new American Pie movie -anything related to pies that is currently generating a lot of buzz.

This is all very exciting, so it’s led a few people to declare that old-search is dead and real-time search is the future. This is nonsense. While real-time search is certainly going to get bigger, conventional search isn’t going away – if anything, the two will simply merge to provide blended results of high authority content alongside real-time results.

What does this mean for brands?

We know what we want from conventional search – our clients should be at the top of the page for relevant keywords, and the rest of the page should be filled with authoritative third party recommendations. This is what SEO and online PR is all about.

But what’s the goal with real-time search? If you want to consistently appear at the top of real-time search results, your brand is going to have to consistently be interesting enough to get people talking. This, I would suggest, requires a kick-ass online PR strategy.

What should you do about it?

Brands need to get a lot better at monitoring what’s happening online, to stay informed about what the rising trends are in their key markets and what subjects are generating online buzz. Forget monthly or even weekly reports – too slow, you lose.

Second, reaction times need to improve. If it takes you a week to get anything approved, you’re wasting your time. As real-time search becomes more important, comms teams will need the flexibility to respond to issues quickly, while the public is still interested. When one of those funny complaint letters about your company goes viral, nobody will care that you responded brilliantly if it doesn’t happen until a week or two later.

Take a look at your crisis comms plan and consider updating it for the real-time comms environment.

It’s not just about responding quickly to the bad stuff. Keeping on top of trending topics will help you to spot opportunities for positive conversations that your brand can be a part of, although this doesn’t mean you have to pounce on every new meme and beat it to death with corporate messaging.

The essence of all this is reaction time. If your brand wants to be involved in fast moving online conversations, you will have to find ways of keeping up or risk being left behind.

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Last week Google quietly added an interesting new feature to its Insights for Search tool, predictions of future search trends. If you don’t already use Insights, you should, it’s a useful tool for monitoring search trends in order to get a good picture of how consumer interest in specific brands and topics rises and falls over time.

Google’s latest improvement to the service, based on some very clever science which I won’t try to bluff my way through, enables you to see what the future consumer interest in brands and topics could be.

There are a couple of points to make about this. Firstly, for a lot of searches you don’t need a sophisticated algorithm to predict future trends, because the annual pattern is so consistent that it’s easy to make an educated guess about how the chart will look for the next twelve months. For example, the trend for the search term “cheese” is highly predictable, so most people could figure out the pattern for themselves.

Secondly, there’s no way the prediction algorithm can account for unexpected events, since it relies purely on past data to extrapolate future trends, so like all predictions it’s only of limited value. However, it may well prove to be helpful for planning, once we’ve ascertained how accurate its predictions are for the less obvious trends.  For example, the search trend for the keyword “ninjas” is much less obvious than that of “cheese” and this is where the tool could be really useful, in spotting more complex trends and patterns that a human observer would not be able to identify.

This is obviously going to take a little time – we need to record Google’s predictions for search trends now, and revisit them in future to see how accurate they were. If they stand the test of time, then we’ve got a powerful new tool at our disposal.

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