Come see me!  Pubcon Vegas 2012

Check out this list of winners and losers.  Pretty interesting.

This change is just the most recent onslaught of Google on the free organic results.  I have noticed several changes over the years which pushed organic results to lower-prominence positioning.  Today I saw an old screenshot of my site’s positioning and I really noticed the difference.  Over time you get used to one little change at a time and before you know it, there is a drastic difference.  The image below compares the old results to the new results and it’s really quite amazing.  What used to fit six organic results now only fits three.

What used to house six results now only holds three. The rest of the space is taken up by whitespace and Google properties. Click the picture to see the real impact.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article it was announced that Google is going to implement some changes to the results pretty soon that will present “facts” and “answers” to questions, presumably at the top of the results.  I suspect it’s a way of trying to stem the tide of people leaving the Google search results and going to websites that actually have answers. (Isn’t that what a search engine is for???)  Google doesn’t want you to leave – they want you to spend more time on their site click their ads more.  The fewer clicks they “give away” to organic results, the better for their bottom line.

The WSJ article says:

Under the shift, people who search for “Lake Tahoe” will see key “attributes” that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for “Lake Tahoe” today would get only links to the lake’s visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.  For a more complex question such as, “What are the 10 largest lakes in California?” Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.

Note the part I bolded above.  I wonder how many sites will see their traffic slashed because Google presumably knows the answers which they provide.  As webmasters, we’ve been feeding the beast and now it might really bite us.  If you’ve got a tourism site, you might want to reconsider your line of work.

It’s estimated that Google’s eventual switch to semantic search will impact up to 20% of all searches conducted.  Twenty percent.  Considering Google takes around 12 billion queries from the US per month, the change impacts 2,400,000,000 searches each month, and 28,800,000,000 searches per year.  Those folks won’t see the results as we see them today, and the sites listed in those results won’t get nearly as much traffic.

I found this information on the 15th but have been mulling it over since then trying to get my mind around the impact.

Hang on people.  Things are changing faster than any time before in my 15 years of experience as an SEO.

Choosing a Maintenance Time
The first thing you need to consider when choosing when to take your site down for maintenance is during your lowest volume hours.  The easiest way to do tell, if you don’t know already, is to look at both your sales volume and your analytics data.  Both should clearly point to period that should be off-limits to downtime.  When you look for an appropiate time of day, be sure to examine the same day that you plan on taking the site down.  If it’s going down on a Saturday, look at the previous Saturday’s data.

Google Analytics Report Showing Traffic by Hour - It's pretty plain that low tide happens from midnight - 5am.

When Do Search Engines Come?
It’s very important you don’t take your site down during your heaviest indexing time.  Google indexes each site a bit differently and the best way to tell when they are the most active on your site is to pull a raw log file for a week and use a program like Sawmill (my personal favorite) to analyze the log file and show you when Google is most active on your site.  Below is a screenshot of a Sawmill report on Googlebot’s hourly activity crawling a website. (The actual report is far more detailed than the line graph below)  Google’s spidering drops off during the same non-peak hours as human traffic does, and interestingly enough, Google’s 9:00pm spike in traffic coincides with an actual spike in user traffic.  Keep in mind that Googlebot and other search spiders do not execute javascript so they will not fire the analytics tracking code.  Your server’s raw log file is the best way to see their activity.

Sawmill report on Googlebot's hourly activity.

Server Side / NOC Processes
If your server is scheduled to be backed up at a particular time of day, every day, it’s important to either stop, pause, or postpone your backup if possible.  You don’t want your backup file corrupted when you take your server down.  Also, if your downtime is for a rather extended period, you don’t want your backup to pick back up during high-traffic and bog down your machine.

Website Maintenance Notification for Users
No matter how well you plan, you will probably still have some people visit your site during your downtime.  The best thing you can do is serve up a page notifying them of the maintenance in progress asking their patience and give an indication to when the site will be back up.  I’ve seen some maintenance notifications that put up a counter that counts down to when the site is expected to be live again.  A growing trend is to place an amusing graphic for users who happen to show up.  I saw the placeholder below on a site once and grabbed a screenshot.  It might not be appropriate for your website, but an amusing message can go a long way to bringing a customer back who otherwise might try a new company.

I can't remember where I saw this maintenance message, but it made me smile.

Website Maintenance Notification for Search Spiders
One visitor you definitely don’t want to ignore is a search bot.   You don’t want them to think even for a minute that your site is broken.  Sure, they are understanding, but imagine if you had to take your site down several times in the same week.  Not good.  I rarely allow a client to serve a 404, even when they remove pages.  404s mean BROKEN.  What’s worse than a 404?  Serving up a temporary holding page for every requested URL with the server returning a 200 OK.  I see this a lot.  It’s really not good.  When your site goes down for work, you need to return a 503 server response.

503 Service Unavailable:
The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay may be indicated in a Retry-After header.

Google’s own Webmaster Central Blog says that they prefer to receive a 503 response instead of a 200 or a 404.

Configure a 503 Response
Unfortunately configuring a 503 response isn’t as straight forward as flipping a switch.  There are several different methods of implementation depending on your server technology and version. I recommend a little bit of research and testing before D-Day.  Setup a single page to 503 and then test the server’s response using a response header checker.  Be sure your 503 response specifies the time you expect to have your site back up and running.

Back it Up Before You Take it Down!
Enough said.

To sum up, a little bit of knowledge and research will go a long way to retaining your rankings and customers during a planned site outage.

Feel free to bookmark this post and reference it again in the future when planning required website or server maintenance.

Google has put up a total of $1,000,000 as a bounty for people who can identify and exploit holes in their Chrome browser.  The hacking competition will be called Pwnium and run sepeartely to the already popular Pwn2own hacking contest that covers a broader range of software.  Google will pay $20,000 to any participant who can exploit hackable bugs in Windows, Flash, or a device driver, which are security problems that would affect users of all browsers. For hacks that identify exploits specific to Chrome, Google will pay $40,000 each, and for those that exploit only bugs in Chrome, the company will shell out $60,000, up to its million dollar limit.  They are running the contest for two reasons; one to build up publicity because the browser is so hard to crack, and to proactively seek out exploits that they can fix before they become a problem.  Google says that their browser is already so secure that nobody has been able to hack it since it’s debut in 2009.  We’ll see if a little month can take some of the shine off of Chrome.

The company which launched this cool idea is called Solve Media (SolveMedia.com).  According to Solve, their ads (compared to non-interactive static ads) increase brand recall by 111% and message recall by a factor of twelve.  That’s pretty significant.  For more you can check out their white paper and look at examples ads on their site.

As an internet marketer I think this kind of advertising is a double-edged sword, at least for now.  On one hand, it really does reinforce brand and message recall, but on the other it annoys the living daylights out of some poor sap that just wants to submit a comment form.  Since brand recall is so high, and message recall is typically linked to the emotion elicited by the message, a user who is annoyed and inconvenienced by an advertisement may go away with a sour taste for the brand.

There are some kinks to be worked out with this new form of advertising (as shown in my screenshots below) but I think they really might be on to something here.

This type of captcha ad makes the user watch a short video, typically 15 seconds, to reveal the captcha solution.

A shot taken during the Bonobos captcha video advertisement.

The unfortunate ending to the Bonobos video ad. There's no captcha solution here.

This is a much better, much less inconvenient ad which gives you a quoted brand message in an image which is the captcha solution.

This video ad for a Camry is executed well. It's a high quality video with the caption solution apparent throughout the message.

The captcha solution for the Camry is displayed the whole time.

Not only will Google become more intrusive into their users lives, it also means big things to SEOs because of an an even bigger loss of referrer data in analytics.  Google Analytics used to report on all the keywords that people used to find your site in Google’s search engine.  This is very important to measure the importance and ROI of your organic campaign.  They recently changed analytics to “protect” Google users data by removing referrer information for any logged in user.  (Protect, or hoard the data?)  That means that anytime a Google user is logged in they do not send keyword data to analytics and people like me have no idea what they searched to find our sites.  When Google requires more people to be logged in, more organic keyword information will be lost and being an SEO will become even more difficult.

Guess what data isn’t impacted… Adwords.  That’s right.  If you pay for advertisements on Google, you get your referrer data.  Free = no data.  Paid = data.  I think I see a trend here and I don’t like it.  They are trying to choke us out in favor of making a few more bucks.  I wonder how long until there are no “free” organic results on the first page at all.  I can see it now – a list of paid advertisements on the first page which are disguised so well that people don’t notice and all organic results pushed to page two.  Google has already pushed the number four organic listing “below the fold” for many users (depending on screen size) by expanding the blank space at the top of the page.  Basically they added 40px worth of blank space that pushed off an organic result so paid ads were more prominent.  This is even worse for queries that have local relevance and Google Maps results push organic all the way off the page.

I also wonder what this change means to websites that currently embed things from Google products like YouTube, Google Custom Search, Analytics, Adsense, etc.  If a user has to be logged in to access any Google service, won’t that mean that these embedded services won’t work for people who aren’t logged in?

I don’t like Larry Page’s Google.  It’s getting evil.