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Great article. This issue seems to be related to Google's pronouncements a while back (in late '06? early '07?) that it didn't want to continue to index site search results in general, and sites allowing their site search results pages to be spidered might see some sort of bad rankings outcome; whether that would amount to a rankings hit to the non-search pages or just a hit to the search pages, I don't recall. My understanding, however, is that nothing ever came of that, i.e., we *didn't *see huge numbers of webmasters complaining that their sites had been penalized due to their indexed search results. (If I'm wrong about that, someone here will set me straight!)
So how's this scenario? A client has a B2C site as well as a third-party site search solution with attribute-based navigation built in. The B2C site's web host automatically provides a sitemap.xml file just for the site pages, so Google's getting ongoing sitemap data just for the "real" pages, not for the site search pages.
Absent implementing a robots.text or nofollow attribute scheme for the site search pages, could the sitemap-only-for-site-pages impementation help by making sure the "money" site pages with order buttons are indexed, leaving the indexing of the site search pages more at the whim of Google?
Looking at three substantial B2C sites, Chrome's averaging 0.21% of the browsershare. By way of comparison, Firefox didn't break 18%. The rest? All miniscule. And then there's the big you-know-who (i.e., IE).
"Are results being skewed in some cases toward non-commercial sites? If so, could the searcher choose more commercial listings, if they want?"
Now *that* would be cool. I imagine a little slider control (like I recall seeing on an MSN Search Beta site a while back) along a horizontal axis with something like:
{-- NON-COMMERCIAL ... COMMERCIAL --}
Slide it to the left, and it becomes heavily weighted by .EDUs and non-obviously-ad-studded sites. Slide it to the right, and it becomes weighted with ecommerce and even AdWords listings. Let people decide which mix is best for them.
That Andrew Goodman picture is of the three voting rights / "Freedom Summer" workers who were slain by KKK members in Mississippi in the summer of '64 (the basis for the movie "Mississippi Burning"). The man on the right of that picture would be Andrew Goodman, the civil rights activist.
Importance? High. Relevancy to "our" Andrew Goodman? Low.
I just did some half-serious ego searching for [winooski], and didn't find anything about me...Which is good, because there shouldn't be! (The real Winooski's a lovely little city outside of Burlington, Vermont...sort-of like Alston compared with Boston.)
However, one of the results tabs read "Missouri Winooski", so I clicked it out of curiousity. Whoa. Wall-to-wall scraped spam pages. Like, 7 pages-worth.
Not to be the dumb kid in the class, but...how do ya do upside-down text?
I "ditto" Mr. Enge's comments re India. If I'm hiring for marketing communication tasks, I want someone whose language skills and understanding of popular vs. traditional culture (and accent, if phone work's required) is up to par for the target country. I'd venture to say that only someone who's fully immersed in a culture, including consuming that culture's media and, oh yeah, living among members of the culture, is a good candidate for significant marketing communications with that culture.
I'm interested, but I'm a bit wary. For example, when I compared Google Trends reported visits for a client's site vs. visits as reported in their analytics package, GT was underreporting by, like, 50%. Oh, and that package is Google Analytics.
C'mon Rob, I can't believe you didn't call this post "Mr. Snell Goes to Washington". [;-)]
A very interesting story from a guy with beau coups experience. I appreciate the preview of what Rob Snell will be saying over in the Rayburn Building, as well as hearing about some of the logistical details (You have to bring 75 copies of your testimony? On your own freakin' dime?!?)
The only thing I saw that could have used some tweaking prior to testifying:
"Buying paid search ads insures you control your advertising message, and you're not at the mercy of shifting search engine ranking algorithms."
I dunno, maybe everyone knows what that means by now, but I seem to hear them thinking, "Hah? What's an algorithm?"
Otherwise, a really strong effort. My favorite quote:
"Bigger retailers cannot compete when we go head to head, product to product. They sell too many things."
Here's looking forward to Mr. Snell's follow-up post.
That's a really good point, thegoldenhat. I just assumed the graphs were a linear function, but if not, then that might limit the amount of slicing 'n' dicing that my meager math abilities can do at this point.
Bob Massa recently had a post I dug (but didn't Digg...Dugg...) where he essentially said that a metric's importance is in the eye of the beholder:
I always watch indicators and as for the term "important indicators", that's a subjective term. If you think they are important – you're right.
In that context (e.g., if your client's rankings-obsessed), you may have to pay the piper, no matter how cacophonous the tune.
Great stuff about the nature of forming habits as they pertain to Google's hard-to-touch market share and to the searcher's likelihood of clicking one of those first few precious links on the first SERP. As goodnewscowboy says, the article also veers into design by establishing the rapidity with which we can "tell" good vs. bad design (or, really, appropriate vs. inappropriate design for the task at hand).
My only gripe with this and some of the other articles I've read from Mr. Hotchkiss is a deficit of attribution. I've no doubt but that he's on firm ground with everything he's stating, but the truth is anybody can come along and tell you that a natural phenomenon works this way or that way, but unless they're documenting what they're saying (via published science), they might as well be making it up.
Good find, good point, and well worth publicizing.
I'm sure it's just an oversight on Google's part, but for a company that's ratcheting up their lobbying efforts in Washington, DC, they're not doing themselves any favors by observing worthy American holidays such as Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, then ignoring the one honors the American men and women who have lost their lives while serving their country in the military. I mean, it wouldn't take much of a grass-roots movement to cause them trouble among the more military-minded members of Congress.
PS, I wasn't able to find evidence that they've ever had a Memorial Day Google Doodle in their Holiday Logos gallery.
Ouch! Good find Chris1, and it didn't even occur to me to look for a Veteran's Day logo, but there it is.
In fact, now I recall that, when I was discussing this with my wife the other day, she said a Veteran's Day logo would be more appropriate (if they have to choose one of the two), since it honors members of the military both living and deceased.
Consider me unsubscribed from taking any umbrage...Until November 11th, when we'll be a-watchin'... [;-)]
Sphunn just on principle for including both a Victorian writer and The Cluetrain Manifesto in the same post. [:-)] Oh...and very valuable advice, to boot!
Actually, a lot of people have written about this for over a week now, but it's certainly a worthy subject.
The outage hasn't endeared Google Analytics to the clients who were looking to it for reliable stats in the run-up to Mother's Day. And now? A sales call from a major analytics platform...
"Search engines can't follow image links or clever animated links like Flash"
Uh, did anybody edit this prior to publication? Search engines certainly CAN follow image links ("follow" in this context meaning both "spider through" and "utilize for determining relevancy and keywords via the Img tags' Alt attribute"), and they --at least Google-- certainly CAN follow links in Flash, as we've known for over two years.
Thanks for the Jacob Nielsen link, Bill. He (rightfully) gets the last word in many a design argument.
Loved this post, and I hope it helps me advocate successfully for short URLs for an upcoming significant platform migration.
At the end of his post, Spencer advises us not to take it on faith but to test the URLs to see which size and combination of factors works best. However, my intuition is that, for sites without huge categorization issues (i.e., *not* the Home Depot example Spencer uses), the ideal URL structure is going to be the shortest one.
I think this dovetails really nicely with Eric Enge's recent post advising us to "Simplify, Simplify, Simplify". Enge's referring to the need for SEMs to simplify our explanations to clients and other stakeholders, but I think that timeless advice to simplify is applicable to just about everything we do.
@javaun wrote: "I'm waiting to hear that Twitter is building shelter for refugees in Myanmar and that Twitter is also distributing food and medicine in Sichuan Province."
Hear, hear. I understand that we're all new media marketers, so it behooves us to assess the degree to which new channels are worth putting resources into, but I have to say I'm disappointed by anyone for whom the speed of the communications channel, however you measure it, is more important than the need to process, analyze, and respond to the information.
I hope we can all take a moment from our beyond-busy, attention-deficit-inducing, overmediated techno-realities to consider whether we're currently putting enough time into *thinking* about what any particular new story means, what we can do about it, and whether we should try.
(And yes, I do Twitter...)
Insightful interview of a small business owner in the trenches (or should that be "in the garden"?). It's always refreshing to hear about marketing from a successful, real entrepreneur.
Sound advice, and persuasively presented. Hey, if it's good enough for Henry David Thoreau...
Agreed on the 'helicopter vision' thing. This type of analysis is where Danny really shines.
Crazy Egg rocks. I love the fact that, unlike Google Website Optimizer, there's just one piece of code for the entire site, so you can keep stopping and re-creating tests as much as your service level allows without having to go back and update that code.
Of course, it doesn't track conversions, so that's a limitation re ecommerce (and doesn't play nicely with Flash or with popup menus), but otherwise, it seems to be fairly robust at what it's supposed to do, tracking exact clicks on a page.
Story: Cleaning Up the Retail Site Navigating Mess