Accurate delivery of long tail items through a integrated search tool is the next step in online search engines. Google is WAY behind. Google Base is supposed to deal with that, but I get the sense that Google Base is Google’s bastard stepchild. The frustration of contributors to the Google Base’s user forum has gotten very high about the product’s deep inconsistencies, poor performance, and apparently arbitrary organization.

This is a serious problem for Google, because the one thing it does not do well from a relevancy perspective is manage long tail products for low-volume consumers.

This might seem like a trivial problem, but in fact it could be the thing that prevents Google from remaining the web’s “one-stop shopping” search engine. If you enter an album for a deeply obscure band such as, say, Nomo’s supercool and reasonably obscure afrofunk album “New Tones” into Google, you get something like this:

The most relevant result — the album — is third on the overall list. It turns out that the second result is also the album, but this is not immediately clear from the actual description. The top result is an ad for an iPod, which is far far off.
Now compare it to Amazon’s results for the same search query:

The very first result is exactly what I’m looking for. The key thing to understand about this result is that Amazon provides this search engine to small vendors who can sell their wares through it at about a 15% markup. To put it another way, those vendors don’t have to build a sophisticated website, because they can use Amazon.

Google Base is supposed to change all that, but right now it’s obvious that there are so many critical problems with the system that it hardly seems worth uploading products. The interface is easy and straightforward, but frankly it just doesn’t work very well, either in terms of getting the products out there or linking them to actual search results on the main google site.

Essentially a product search on Google right now, for people near the end of the search process — i.e., PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO BUY — produces noise, confusion, and a poor relevancy experience.

A key component of search engines is the ephemeral nature of their reputations. (Remember Alta Vista? Exactly.) Right now Google is the king of relevancy, but as people become more and more accustomed to searching for products online, they will start to discover that it doesn’t do a good job at certain points in the sales cycle, ironically enough those points being the ones that are most valuable to merchants.

If Google does not get Google Base up and running soon, companies like Amazon and even Yahoo’s excellent, excellent product shopping system will start to make inroads on both its credibility–and its traffic.

Keyphrase cost inflation has happened faster than we expected, but we still think that small companies should invest heavily in Paid Search relative to other traditional media forms.

The reason for this is that Adwords subverts the typical advertising paradigm. In most advertising spaces, companies get to a size where advertising is as much an exercise in drowning out the competition as it is in getting their message out. Typical advertising lends itself nicely to this. Examples of this are yellow pages ads, billboards, advertising on buildings, radio ads, etc. The idea is to completely drown out competitors whenever possible.

Adwords changes things. Adwords (and now Yahoo! with Panama) has two major attributes that can be controlled: the RANK of a bid and its frequency of delivery. A small company could conceivably have ads ranked just as high as large companies if they decided to rotate them less frequently. The closest metaphor would be that they had a huge ad in the yellow pages, but in only 5% of the books.

What does this mean for small business? Well, for one thing, it means that they can effectively get their message out and the cost of that message can actually be commensurate with their size. A smaller company doesn’t have to move as much volume as a large one to be successful, so having more high-quality ads less frequently might be a great strategy. They can maximize their click-through rates with highly placed ads.

More importantly, it lets the smaller company compete on content with the big boys. If a keyphrase-ad combination is a portal, a company’s website is the tool that closes the deal. High-quality websites are surprisingly affordable, which means that a smaller vendor has control over their conversion rates. If a smaller vendor has a better site than one of the big players in a market, they will have higher conversion rates, and their overall cost per sale will be lower.

This, in turn, will give them more money to spend on the frequency that they deliver high quality ads.

So let’s hear it for Google giving a fair shake for the little guys!

This is an interesting adwords problem that has an impact for keyphrase matching for industries where terms are often hyphenated, something often found in the product titles of many industrial goods.

Here are three ways to spell the company name Allen Bradley:

Allen Bradley
AllenBradley
Allen-Bradley

We are the KeyWord matching algorithm in our copy.

What we’ve found is that if the capitalized keyword match function {KeyWord:foo} is set in our ad copy, the three entries look like this:

Allen Bradley. Okay, that looks about right.

Allenbradley. Well, this is understandable. What algorithm would know how to break this word up?
Allen-bradley. Oops. Lower-case “b” after the hyphen.
We’ve notified Google and it’s a known bug. If it gets fixed we’ll let you know.

UPDATE: We just received this from our Google Account Executive:

Google’s system doesn’t recognize commas, periods, hyphens, or non-letter characters when they appear in keywords, the hyphens in your keyword are stripped out of the search terms and treated as spaces. Thus, a search on either allen bradley or allen-bradley will match up to the same term, regardless of punctuation. So, if two search terms match equally, the one with the better calculated rank (Quality Score * Max CPC) will get the impression, regardless of punctuation.

For example, a search on the keyword ‘ALLEN BRADLEY distributor’ within this account is currently matching your keyword ‘Allen-bradley Distributor’ (with a hyphen), because that keyword has a higher calculated rank than ‘ALLEN BRADLEY distributor’ (without a hyphen). Since the hyphenated keyword is being matched, it is also being inserted into the ad with keyword insertion. And since, keyword insertion recognizes ‘allen-bradley’ as one word, due to the hyphen, the ad displayed contains a lowercase ‘b.’

To resolve this issue, I would suggest that you delete all of your keywords that contain the hyphenated version of the company name. This will prevent the hyphenated company name from being inserted into your ad text (and avoid the cheesy looking ad copy). Also, if a user searches for ‘allen-bradley distributor’ on Google.com, the keyword ‘allen bradley distributor’ will still be matched in the account. Therefore, you won’t be missing out on any traffic by removing the hyphenated versions of the keyword.

If you do a site:domain.com search for your domain, you might see pages that are labeled as “Supplemental Result.” This means these pages are in Google’s supplemental index. In general, this index is supplementary to Google’s main index because pages from the main index usually appear before pages from the supplementary index for search engine queries. One way or another, these pages haven’t gained trust. A page might find itself in the supplemental index if:

• It is an island. i.e. No other pages in your site or other sites link to it.
• It has substantial duplicate content to a more authoritative page.
• It has very little content at all.
• It is deeper in your site and doesn’t have outside links to it.
• It hasn’t had certain filters applied to it yet.
• It is being redirected.

Of course these observations are officially unverified, but it’s a good guide to what might get your pages in the supplemental index. SEOs also speculate that PageRank factors are used to determine how many pages a site might have in the main index of Google.

Pages in the supplemental index are spidered less frequently. They should be thought of as lower quality than main index pages. If you have important pages in the supplemental index, the best way to get them out is by getting good links to them. You might also revise them so that they have unique or substantial content, if they don’t already.

You may be asking why people are using blogs for SEO? Part of the reason is blogs are easy to link to and new content is easy to generate. But there’s another reason . . .

If you do a general query in Google, the chances are you’ll see a host of “non-commercial” resources (including Wikipedia). I put non-commercial in quotes because these sites are all probably ad-based or otherwise serving as a gateway to a commercial site. Try it out – a couple sample queries to use are “internet marketing” or “seo.” On Google, you’re likely to see a bunch of sites offering information, tips, articles, discussion, or advice. Now why in the world would that be true? If any queries would generate a large list of companies, these are them, right? Google appears to have a bias towards “non-commercial” sites (or commercial resources that claim to be offering useful information) for queries that aren’t overtly commercial in nature.

Of course it is speculative to say that Google has programmed something into their search algorithm that helps informational sites rank higher for general queries. However, there’s good reason for Google to do it. Google talks about having variety in the search listings. If a company appears for a large number of general queries and also buys commercial listings, they might get multiple listings on a single page. In fact it might become common. So favoring informational sources helps increase variety because it is less likely that a site would spend money advertising an informational resource. This strategy would also increase the number of clicks on paid listings. Google would have a natural proclivity to display non-commercial results for general or border-line queries because it would make visitors more likely to click on paid links instead.

Is this idea coming out of left field? Maybe a little bit, but Google has talked about distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial queries in past patent applications. Both for limiting the number of sponsored search listings that appear for non-commercial queries and for identifying spam sites that may be leaping through the rankings a little to quickly. If they’re adept at identifying commercial queries, why not use that knowledge to make a little extra money and give visitors the impression that they are trying to provide relevant information rather than become another Yellow Pages?

This is why companies are starting to come out with blogs and other informational sources. To get better rankings.

It looks like Google had a bug that allowed invisible titles to be created for ads. We saw this on Monday and Tuesday of this week; it’s been fixed now. But the bug created an interesting set of conversations around here.

People here at Pure Visibility were of two minds about it:

1) This is great! You could maximize your impressions and get some stealth marketing in!

2) This is a disaster! The people who will come to your site will drop off a cliff and you’ll go broke!

I think that both are right. I’m in the second camp, largely because I feel as if ads are there to be clicked, not admired. Adwords is not branding.

Lostremote.com recently had a chance to compare traffic from a breaking Television Report about the Boston Aqua Teen Hunger Force story. Traffic to their site doubled in the day after the report broke from visitors searching for “lost remote” or entering the name directly. However, it tripled the day after that from people who were coming from the posted youtube video or through google using a much wider variety of terms.
Good stuff.