Google has changed the way they display results for locally-related queries.  They now show about seven local results for a query along with a rating of each site before you ever see the organic results at the bottom of the page.  The page now has a total of thirteen listings, but only six of those are organic results.  This will probably tank traffic for webistes that rely on their organic listings to drive most of their local traffic.  Notice in the screenshot below that 60% of the height of the listings is now taken by the local listings.  This is a major shift for Google.  Why are they doing this?  It’s Christmas shopping time and people are going to be looking to Google to help them find things locally.  This just reinforces my previous post about local search optimization and my article on local search in the KC Small Business Magazine.

Google Mixes in Local Results and Reviews (click for a larger view)

I just noticed that Google is testing a new feature where you get a preview of a website by hovering over their result in the listings.  It’s very interesting to see this especially since it’s covering up the PPC ads on the right.  I suspect that they will change the way this displays because their main money maker is PPC ads.

Google's Website Preview - Right from the results! (click for larger view)

This is changing by the minute.  After a couple of minutes of first seeing this in my browser, I started to see snippets of text included with the previews:

Google is pulling summary text to display in the preview (click for larger view)

It’s a sad state of affairs with foundational SEO is ignored, by SEOs!  One of the first things I tell my clients is that you HAVE to have well-written, targeted, unique, and properly optimized meta tags.  Your page’s title and description tags are your first impression on your potential visitors.  The title should be a complete thought accomplished in a specific number of characters. It’s your first chance to attract attention.  The second most important tag is the often ignored meta description tag.  This tag, when properly formatted, controls the text that is displayed below your blue link in the search engines.  If it’s not properly formatted, Google will grab text from your page and display it.  You’d better pay attention to it!!  This is your best chance (aside from ranking) to attract a visitor.

Check out the screenshot below that highlights all the deficiencies of my competitors in the search results for “kansas city internet marketing.”  Come on guys… you’re supposed to be pros!  The worst offending result is emfluence – the description tag they wrote in their HTML is so long that Google ignored it and grabbed some text from their page.  Their title tag is just their company name.  Luckily Google pulled some text that includes “interactive marketing” because otherwise their listing is completely ineffective.  Check out their title tag – it’s ONE word and that word is their name!  The title tag is a super important to the ranking and relevance of a website and they’ve completely ignored it.  I hear good things about emfluence, and they have some serious money, but they’ve really missed the boat here.

Inexcusable oversights in optimization by SEO companies! (click for full size)

If you’re going to contract an SEO for your company, you should check out their site in the results. Do they rank well? Is their result crafted well? If not, how can you be sure they’ll be able to help you?

Some people are saying that Google Instant is an “SEO killer.”  I’ve heard several things heralded as SEO killers over the years, but nothing has really been as bad as people think. It’s just too important for a site to be ranked well, regardless of how quickly the results are displayed. You get ranked well by having great content, strong links, and a spider-friendly site. One “SEO killer” that comes to mind was a feature allowing users to “star” a result. If you’re signed into your Google account you’ll see little stars next to the results. Clicking the star allows a user to “vote” a result to the top of their results. This was supposed to revolutionize search and make SEO irrelevant because each user’s results would be completely customized. It never really caught on. SEO pundits had fits about that functionality and the industry got in a panic about it.

Another Google “innovation” was mixing in results from previous queries in with the results they present for a new search. This was really supposed to lead to completely customized results based on a user’s history. Though it’s still in place, it hasn’t resulted in the customization and that people expected and it sure didn’t kill SEO. Here’s a post I wrote about it: Google’s Mixed Results

There are people talking about the instant results affecting the “long tail” of search, but I doubt search behavior will change a lot for most industries. People shop for products online in a pretty specific way; they start broad and as they learn more about what they want, their search becomes more specific focusing on finding the best deal. I think that all the “instant” results presented for a shopping for a specific product will be an annoyance, a distraction, and most users will end up at the same organic results that they did before instant results.

The impact on news will probably be negligible because Google’s index can’t keep up. Let’s say you’re interested in the Ferraris catching fire. As you type, Google’s results change with each letter as they try to guess what you want. When you start typing Ferrari you are presented with several sets of results that are irrelevant to your search. Start typing “ferrari recall” and you’ll get all the way to “ferrari rec” before you start really seeing relevant results. If the user selects “ferrari recall” from the suggestions, they see the same results as they would if they organically searched for it.

There’s a recent story about a USB hack for playstations. I checked the results about this story and it wasn’t until “sony playstation hac” that Google presented results relevant to my search.

Google’s idea is pretty cool, but for news searches they just can’t keep their index fresh enough to present relevant news results in every set of their suggested results. Users are probably still going to have to get pretty darn close to exactly what they are searching for before they see results, just like it is now.

This may change things a little bit for users that conduct traditional shopping searches online because they might be able to find what they are looking for quicker. For example, I looked at results for “buy wind chime.” I got to “buy wind c” and right then Google presented relevant results. Before that it was about wind turbines, microsoft windows, wind power, etc. A shopper will still have to get very close to their intended search to get the results they want, but probably won’t have to get all the way into the long tail to find what they want, unless they are really trying hard to find the best deal. In this economy, everyone is looking for the best deals so the impact might not be immediate.

I’m really interested in the impact on PPC. What a great way to force PPC advertisers to pay for short tail phrases. It’ll really affect the travel industry and force advertisers to bid on things like “disneyland” and ”cancun” because people are less likely to get all the way to “disneyland hotel” and “cancun beach resort” if they see immediately see ads at ”disneyland.” This could really hurt the smaller companies that can’t afford to compete for “disneyland” in the sponsored results, and will probably lead to more complaints about people bidding on brand names without authorization. Over the past several years more PPC advertisers have been getting sophisticated with dynamic keyword insertion, regional campaign targeting, and exhaustive lists of short-tail keywords to make sure they brand is represented. It’s great for advertisers because it allows them to pay fifty cents for a click and get traffic. Now they are going to have to spend $10 or more per click just to compete. They will also see a reduction in their impressions because their ad won’t be displayed as often. A reduction in impressions will also reduce click through rates which, to Google, means that an ad is less popular so the cost per click bids will go up. The bids on short phrases will go through the roof as companies start to feel the squeeze of “instant” results. Good for Google’s bank accounts, bad for advertisers and searchers.

The instant results are a direct result of Google’s caffeine update which greatly increased the search giant’s capacity to handle queries on the back-end. Caffeine was not an algorithmic change, but an infrastructure change and I have to say that it’s pretty impressive to see some of the fruits of the labor of all those nameless computer nerds making Google’s systems smokin’ fast.

Google is not going to continue to support their Wave product blaming low adoption.  It’s really too bad because quite an innovative tool.  Google Wave allowed character-by-character live-typing collaboration, drag-and-drop functionality from your desktop to your browser, and even allowed you to “play back” the changes made to a document by a collaborator.  I just don’t think people get it yet.  Remotely located workers or companies with multiple offices just aren’t ready for a tool that’s straight-forward to use, relies on cloud computing, allows for document authoring among collaborators, and is free.  Google will continue to support the tool at least until the end of this year.  Maybe it’s time will come and we’ll all look back on Google’s innovation as something that was just too ahead of it’s time.  Maybe it’s a case of Google’s reputation of being “the man” that made people reluctant to offer Google access to their company files.

I was reminded again how important it is to have control of your local search listings.  Google will pick up business information from multiple sources and list it as a fact.  A client of mine has an office in their home as well as a “real” office location.  Google, unfortunately, picked up both so now this client’s home address is listed.  Luckily once claimed an address can be removed from Google Places but claiming that listing can take time, especially if Google lists the wrong phone number.

The Postcard Google Will Send You (Click for Larger Version)

You have two options to claim your listing, Google can mail a postcard to you which takes about two weeks, or they can try calling the phone number THEY have on file for your business.  If you have a client and you’re trying to claim their local listings for them, you’d better first take an inventory of the information Google has about the locations and confirm that the client can be reached by those means.  Also, make sure that if you’re using the phone option that someone at the location is aware that the call is going to come in.  The phone option only works well when one person answers the phone 100% of the time.  If the client has a phone system that “hunts” it’s best to just mail a postcard and wait.

I’ll be talking more about local search in the future including what you can and cannot change, how the search engines go about finding your company information, the differences between Google, Yahoo, & Bing, as well as how you can get the most out of your local listings.

It was recently discovered that Google had been collecting data transmitted over unsecured wireless networks points through packet captures and then stored the data.  Google’s Streetview cars have been driving around all over the country – and the w0rld – compiling a list of unencrypted hot-spots so they could then filter the information and post the hot-spots to their maps.  I can understand the motivation of adding Wi-Fi hotspots to their maps, and I can also understand the implications.  Just imagine all the businesses without “IT guys” who have unencrypted wireless access points that would show up in the results.  What a gold-mind of data for identity thieves.  Anyway, Google was building this list but was also going around doing packet captures on the wireless network and storing that data.  That means that they were intercepting the traffic of the networks including logins, passwords, bank info, etc. and as part of the lawsuit against them, they are being forced to turn over all the data they collected.  I hope you don’t use unencrypted networks because if you do and Google drove by, chances are that they grabbed that hot email you wrote your wife and will be providing that to the courts where it might just become public record.

During all this controversy Google applied for a patent the technology used to snoop out those unencrypted networks.  I don’t think they are sorry.  Turns out that Google is getting into the WarDriving business.

Along with trying to get into your living room with Google TV, Google is trying to get into your netbook with Google Chrome OS.  Netbook sales are booming and netbooks honestly could use a lighter operating system.  Their smaller processors, hard drives, and RAM capacities make it tough for a full-featured operating system to work without bogging down the system.  I will admit there’s a niche there.  The hitch I see is the fact that the “OS” isn’t much more than a web-browser.  From Reuters:

“The Chrome operating system will be centred around the web browser, with all software including high-end applications such as those used in photo and video editing housed in external servers known as a cloud.”

So what exactly will your computer be doing?  Accessing everything “out-there” putting all of your files in someone else’s hands.  You will also need to run apps, like on android phones, to access services.  The real challenge to this kind of model is the fact that a Google OS based computer will be a fancy paper-weight when there’s no internet access.  I keep going back to the rumors I’ve been hearing for years about Google getting into the wireless business.  It would be nice for them to have a strong mobile phone platform, a mobile computing platform, and then jump into offering cut-throat rates on wireless broadband / wireless phone service.  Big brother keeps getting bigger…