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Cached Pages on Google and What They Mean to You

Posted by Megan Zlatos at 05:24 pm | Friday, September 18th, 2009 | Filed in Google

Search results on Google often come with a handy “Cached” page link next to the green website address. This cached page link will take you to the version of the page that Google saw when it last visited the site and indexed its content. Some websites change frequently, so these cached versions can be very different from the current page you’ll see if you click on the search result.

There are two ways this can be useful: 1. if the site is no longer available, you can still access the cached page that Google has stored in its archives, and 2. if the site has changed dramatically and is no longer related to your search, the cached page will likely include the content that is relevant.

Sometimes, however, you may not want people to be able to access your cached content. In one case, we had a client whose site had been hacked and stuffed with spammy content about prescription drugs. They had updated their site, but Google still showed the spammy text in the cached page link.

Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to take embarrassing cached pages like this out of circulation. You can follow the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35306.

A few good things to note:

Removing the cached page will not affect search rank in any way.
However, removing the cached page will mean that you search result no longer includes a short description snippet.
The cached page link and snippet will return the next time Google visits the page.
If you do not want the page to ever be cached, you can place the following tag in the <Head> portion of your page’s code: <meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

The Google help page reference above indicates (as of the writing of this blog post) that the cached page will be removed for a minimum of 6 months. According to a Google employee, this is a typo and should indicate that it takes a maximum of 6 months for the cached page to be replaced by an updated page. In our experience, it is usually much shorter than that.

What is Google’s share of search?

Posted by Catherine Juon at 10:58 pm | Monday, April 20th, 2009 | Filed in Google

When we talk about how to build your online sales engine here at Pure Visibility, it’s common for us to use Google in our examples. That generates two common questions:

Does Pure Visibility work with other search engines?
How much share of the search market does Google really have?

Yes, we do work with all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) as well as secondary players. It just so happens that Google holds the largest share of search, as well as the most comprehensive screening for agency participants, so you hear us talk about Google more often for both reasons. (It’s no secret we’re proud to be the only agency in the Midwest that holds combined certifications as a Google AdWords Company, Analytics Partner and Urchin Reseller!)

As far as market share goes, a recent USA Today article quotes a comScore study that finds Google is clearly the leader with “nearly 64% of the more than 14 billion US searches. Runner-up Yahoo had just a 20.5% share.”

And now you know the rest of the story.

Announcements from Google, Plus AdWords Editor Woes

Posted by Steve Loszewski at 11:04 am | Monday, March 30th, 2009 | Filed in Google, Google AdWords

There have been lots of announcements coming from Google lately, as usual. Incidentally, you can get a ton of good news about Google and Google AdWords, by simply setting up an alert for “google” and “adwords.” I usually start out my day browsing the latest news about them and Yahoo!, as well as cruising the blogosphere. Here’re a few Google announcements I’ve encountered over the past week:

1. Google is investing in Pixazza. This is a startup company that enables web publishers to receive revenue by including advertisements on images in their sites. Pixazza allows site visitors to see products displayed inside larger images that are available for purchase. The buzz is this could be an AdSense-for-images type venture. AdSense has been huge for Google. This and using links to determine rankings were the two big things Google has come up with that have made the company huge (besides giving the company the name “Google” – so I guess that’s three big things if you want to count that). It makes sense that they’d continue their quest to make the Internet more of an ad-based medium with images.

Pure Visibility Analyst Featured on Google Analytics Blog

Posted by Mike Beasley at 04:41 pm | Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Filed in Google, Google Analytics

Pure Visibility’s Jessica Hullman, author of many fine posts on this blog, has become the first guest poster on the Google Analytics Blog. Her post is titled Mastering Motion Charts – Trend Analysis.

New analysis tools and visualizations like Motion Charts are always exciting for Pure Visibility and we jumped at the chance to continue or work of helping others gain insight from them. Of course, we were also honored to be recognized by Google as a trusted source in explaining and promoting their tools.

Congratulations, Jessica!

Universal Search aka Blended Search

Posted by Pure Visibility at 10:12 am | Friday, January 16th, 2009 | Filed in Google, Google Relevancy Ranking, Web Video, YouTube

Last month I attended Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago and a recurring theme throughout the week was universal search/blended search and how to leverage it for your online marketing campaigns. In particular I attended 3 panel discussions on online video and in each session universal search was a hot topic. The big takeaway I got was that if you don’t have any videos online and indexed by the search engines then you are missing out on a lot of potential, qualified visitors to your site.

Universal search means the search engines show results with not only blue text links, but a blend of results from images, video, local listings, news, and text links. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, if you search for “elmo” you get image results, videos, and text links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have versions of the universal search results and search marketers are observing a trend of more and more people skipping over text links in favor of clicking on other rich media like video or images.

One case study that was explained in the “Video SEO” presentation was about a cosmetic dentist in Sunnyvale who sees a 16% conversion rate from people that contact him after watching his online video, compared to a 3-4% conversion rate from those who find him from a paid or organic text link. In addition this particular dentist increased his search engine visibility, when a user types “emergency cosmetic dentist sunnyvale” in Google, he owns the number 1 organic spot with his youtube video. Having the video allowed this dentist to appear 3 times above the fold because he had a paid listing, a local listing, and a video listing. This is what we mean by starting to “own page one” because he owns multiple place on the first page of search engine results which greatly increases the likelihood that potential patients will find him.

A lot of the people at SES including myself agreed that video is the wave of the future online and the fact that youtube is starting to beat Yahoo in the number of monthly searches only validates this assumption. My prediction is that in the new wave of search engine marketing you will not be able to survive only on a paid search account with text links. Companies will need to have a universal online marketing approach utilizing paid search, good search engine optimization (SEO), press releases, a social media strategy and different online media like video, images. The days of surviving on simply having good SEO and a high ranking for a few terms is over.

Google Analytics Hits the Big Time

Posted by Daniel O'Neil at 01:49 pm | Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Filed in Google, Google Analytics

We have always argued that Google Analytics is an Enterprise-level application, but with the latest release, the tool has a muscular look and feel that puts it solidly in the Enterprise space, along with long-term giants like Omniture. We recently returned from the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) conference in Mountain View, and it’s clear that Google is committed to this tool and its long-term possibilities.

Now that it’s arrived, how should it be used? Never has such a powerful analytics tool been available for free. But does that make it different? What challenges do companies face when trying to install it? How should it be marketed? In the next couple of weeks we’ll explore these issues and possibilities.

Some authors have already written at length about the new implementation, including Eric Peterson. We recommend you start there while considering the possibilities of Google Analytics for your company, whether you’re a marketing firm trying to improve your web marketing offerings or a company trying to make sense of what’s happening to their website online.

Long Dropdown Menus in Google Insights for Search

Posted by Mike Beasley at 02:51 pm | Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Filed in Google, Usability

Google Insights for Search is an exciting tool and if you haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, you ought to. This tool lets you research what people search for and when they have done it. It’s the sort of tool that can provide hours of entertainment to people interested in Internet marketing.

Certain parts of the user interface, however, present usability problems. It all comes down to an relying too heavily on the dropdown menu when other controls would work better.
Read More

Problems With Yahoo! Search Marketing

Posted by Steve Loszewski at 05:53 pm | Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | Filed in Yahoo

I’ve been having so many problems with Yahoo! Search Marketing lately, that I thought it’s time to post some of these. YSM is generally a decent program to work with, but they need to start doing some things and stop doing others if they want a product that’s competitive with Google AdWords. Consider this post a plea for Yahoo to continue to improve the organization supporting their search marketing.

Here are the problems I’ve had with Yahoo!:

1. YSM editors will rewrite ads for your account and upload them. They do their own optimization without asking. Supposedly, I should have received a notification that this was happening, but come on? Editing ads without express approval from the owner of the account?

2. A Yahoo! “leak” onto the content network. Last month, paused campaigns started showing ads. A Yahoo! Rep described it as a “leak in their back-end.” The “leak in their back-end” wasted money (they’re doing the right thing and refunding it), causing the account to hit budget limits and shut off early in the day, preventing productive ads from showing. Besides the direct costs of the paused campaigns showing ads, there was the opportunity cost from the good ads not showing.

As far as I’m concerned, YSM owes me big time for setting a reasonable budget to limit the insanity, otherwise they would have had to refund a lot more money than what they’re refunding now. This mistake in their system probably could have cost somewhere in the 10′s of thousands for them just for this account if I wasn’t experienced with using their system.

3. I can’t wait for a YSM desktop editor…with clearly articulated account limits.

Poorly defined limits on bulk uploads and downloads through their console. After making a few changes through the Yahoo! console it sometimes freezes up, not allowing me to download or upload changes because I’ve hit my limit for the day. Without a lot of advanced planning, extended roll outs, or use of an API (which also has limits), Yahoo effectively makes it impossible to edit large accounts. YSM reps say they can’t help with this one.

4. YSM’s minimum bidding system is causing less relevant ads to show for a major keyword for the account.

I manage an account with very similar ads and keywords. Basically, they run the same ads across ad groups except for small changes in titles. One ad group doesn’t have a high enough bid to show ads for a particular keyword, but a bunch of other ad groups will show ads for that very same keyword through advanced match, even though bids are set at 1/2 what the minimum bid is listed to be for this keyword.

Worse yet, these ads are sometimes specialized to a particular state and the keyword is not state-specific. I consider it a flaw in their system that it will show advanced matched ads for a keyword that’s listed as inactive in the ad group that is bidding on it directly.

So there you go. That’s one week of problems with Yahoo!! (two exclamations, one for Yahoo!, one for the end of the sentence).

Real world lacks sufficient ad density, Google creates virtual world.

Posted by Jason Young at 09:39 am | Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 | Filed in Google

This post was meant to be quick & glib, with a glimmer of of insightful commentary the future of advertising online, specifically in products like Second Life. However, I ran into some very thoughtful writing on the subject that’s way more interesting than what I had to say. So, I’d like to write about their writing…a metapost.

Google released Lively a couple months ago, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it since July. Lively is a virtual world, like Second Life; users customize a character, or avatar that represents them, and rooms in which to interact with other users.

I found out about the launch from a Hitwise company blog post about Google’s next moves. Hitwise is one of the major competitive intelligence tools for the web. They provide information about web trends relevant to specific industries, and help companies understand how well they’re doing on the web relative to their competitors. They wrote a ‘how awesome are we post’ because six months earlier they predicted Google would launch products around health and entertainment, based on the interests of Google.com visitors.

So, the Hitwise prediction gave me the idea to write about ads in Lively and Second Life. Second Life got a lot of attention over the past few years in part because the “game” developed a vibrant economy involving the sale of real estate, clothing, and just about everything in between. Sensing opportunity, several businesses have established themselves in Second Life. [Link: NY Times] Google’s shrewd. They definitely want in on new opportunities to serve ads. Games? Heck yes! [Link: another NY Times piece]

I looked around to see if I could find any writing about ads in Second Life to springboard my post a bit. Cause, honestly, I never got into Second Life, despite liking Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash…a lot. I hoped to get commentary from someone who really knew advertising and the Second Life community. As often happens on this great series of tubes, I found more than I was looking for.

Here’s Ilya Vedrashko’s 2006 post about American Apparel’s Second Life store. He also wrote his thesis on the subject, for his Master’s in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (cool program BTW). It’s called Advertising in Computer Games. Rather than comment further, I think I’ll read his thesis and revisit the subject in the future. Hey gamers! What’s been your most interesting encounter with advertising in a game?

Google Privacy Policy Update

Posted by Jason Young at 03:20 pm | Monday, September 15th, 2008 | Filed in Google

Last week’s Google privacy update, reveals that the company will anonymize IP addresses after 9 months, down from 18 months. Check out this NPR: On the Media piece about privacy concerns arising from Chrome and other Google services.

Google VP of Search Products and User Experience and Ninjitsu, Marissa Mayer, asserts that Google is better qualified to choose privacy settings than end users, that data storage involves balancing privacy concerns and the utility of usage data for product development, that Google is very open about what user information they collect and retain, that ISPs really have a whole lot more data than Google does.

My favorite line is Bob Garfield’s stinger, “Does Google believe, institutionally, that all the discussion of privacy concerns is actually stifling innovation of your algorithm and other technological development…or do you kind of get why it’s important to all of us?”

Right on. I work for an Internet marketing company that exists mostly because of Google and the ads and search results it serves. Because Pure Visibility is an AdWords and Analytics partner, we get to communicate our successes and concerns with reps at Google. I know a number of Googlers personally. I’ve had a really nice time at lectures at the Google Office in Ann Arbor. None of this precludes my wariness about Google’s effect on my privacy online.

By Christmas this year, I’ll have been a Gmail user for four years. During that time, I’ve sent and received several thousand emails. Google has used the “concepts” in emails I’ve written and received to show me thousands of ads for products and services that might interest me. I’m pleased that I don’t get too much spam, I love how searchable my mail is, and I feel confident that my data won’t be lost. But even after four years, I remain concerned about the decision I made to exchange access to information about me for the privilege of using Gmail. I look forward to looking deeper into Google’s privacy policy and writing about privacy and advertising on the web in future posts.

Check out Bob Garfield’s blog for Advertising Age
http://adage.com/garfield/

Visit the Google Privacy Center for detailed information about the use of your personal data by various products. The videos are pretty good, explaining what data the company collects and why; not too much technical detail.

http://www.google.com/privacy.html

March 2007 Google Privacy Policy Announcement
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html

September 2008 Google Privacy Policy Announcement

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-protect-user-privacy.html