Latest Articles
comScore’s July 2010 US Search Engine Rankings
August 20, 2010 By Sue Spiker
comScore’s July 2010 US Search Engine Rankings report is out. And, starting this month it includes two versions of the search engine query statistics – the traditional “Core Search” numbers and the new “Explicit Core Search” metric.
Here’s the difference. Core Search captures all qualified searches and remains consistent with comScore’s previous monthly reports. The new Explicit Core Search is an extracted metric of Core Search, and it contains only searches that are the direct result of users interacting with the search box. It excludes supplemental system-generated queries such as slideshows.
Because of this new metric, comScore’s July numbers may initially leave some confused and making it difficult to compare with last year’s figures.
|
Core Search |
Explicit Core Search |
||||
|
Google |
61.6% |
-1 point |
Google |
65.8% |
-0.4% |
Last month, Cameron Meierhoefer, comScore’s Executive VP of Analytics, discussed the reasoning behind the then-upcoming change. And in his Monday blog post, Meirhoefer describes Explicit Core Search as a way to provide “increased transparency into the search market” and that it’s meant to enable “each interested stakeholder to determine which view of the market they deem most appropriate depending on the particular circumstance.”
Essentially, comScore is responding to the recent changes in how some search providers are generating portions of their search results and is presenting a way to categorize each type of search, letting its clients choose which is most applicable for them.
But however you look at it, Yahoo has made the most progress while Bing remained relatively flat. Over the past couple months, Yahoo’s numbers have been in question due to the implementation of its slideshow feature, but with the Explicit Core Search we can now see the true gains in market share. Only time will tell if it can maintain this momentum and while some may worry about the decline in Google’s market share, these numbers are almost surely encouraging to Bing and Yahoo as they move forward with their partnership.
In the meantime, analysts still hold on to their wait-and-see approach as we look forward to seeing how Explicit Core Search impacts the ever-evolving search industry.
Yahoo’s Score Still a Topic of Conversation
June 4, 2010 By Sue Spiker
Up from 16.9% in March to 17.7% in April, Yahoo’s comScore data remains a hot topic among industry analysts. But amidst the abundance of expert opinions, it’s important to remember that comScore’s data isn’t in question – numbers are numbers.
It’s the addition of a new slideshow feature to Yahoo’s UI that has analysts questioning just how impressive the search engine’s gain in market share really is. Why? Because a query generated when a user scrolls through the pictures in the slideshow is not the same as a query generated when a user enters a term into the search box. Yet comScore counts both.
Considering the impact that these automatically generated queries can have on the numbers, many analysts remain dubious of any significant growth. Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth “would prefer to see share gains come more from higher quality searches that could have a greater direct impact on revenue.”
Even if Yahoo truly has made gains, many doubt whether it can maintain its newfound traction. And with good reason – Yahoo’s market share had been in a 13-month downhill slide until February of this year when it added the slideshow feature.
With Yahoo’s apparent increase in market share happening almost overnight, it’s important to temper optimism with caution. As Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali stated in a recent MarketWatch article, “It is critical for Yahoo to stabilize its search-market share in 2010 to remain relevant in the search market.” Only time will tell if Yahoo can sustain this momentum or if the search engine’s gain in market will ultimately slow.
comScore’s April 2010 Search Engine Rankings
June 2, 2010 By Sue Spiker
comScore’s search numbers for April are out and although the numbers don’t lie, they don’t give you the full picture either. Thanks to significant changes to the user interface for all three search giants, making a straight comparison between April and March figures is not necessarily an accurate analysis.
| Search Engine |
March |
April |
Difference |
|
65.1% |
64.4% |
-0.7 |
|
| Yahoo! |
16.9% |
17.7% |
+0.8 |
| Microsoft Sites |
11.7% |
11.8% |
+0.1 |
(Source: comScore)
If Yahoo’s growth were taken at face value, it would be impressive. However, much of its growth is being attributed to its new “slideshow” feature, which automatically generates additional queries as one image is displayed after another. Not the same as user-generated, intentional web searches. As Broadpoint.Amtech analyst Ben Schachter points out, “This will likely continue to benefit YHOO’s numbers going forward, and also likely explains why YHOO has been so confident in saying that the March quarter would be its bottom in terms of share.”
And, according to eWeek.com, much the same can be said of Microsoft’s Bing, which also started using new “slideshow” image searches in several of its search categories in April.
On the flip side, Google’s UI changes have actually lowered its reported query volume by combining organic web searches and any following news/video searches all into one search. Regardless, despite a mild 0.5 percent decrease in its market share from March, Google is still king of the mountain with 64.4 percent of the market and its query volume consistently growing 6 percent each year.
It is worth noting that Yahoo has been working closely with comScore to make sure that the queries generated by its slideshow interface are counted incrementally. UBS analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald both say the slide shows accounted for about 6% of Yahoo’s total traffic. And, moving forward, it will be interesting to see how comScore adjusts to account for these non-user generated searches resulting from such methodologies.
International SEO, A Check List for Improving the Rankings of International Web Sites.
December 20, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
by Scott Goodyear
Need to improve a site’s rankings in an international search engine? Have you already tried traditional optimization of content and link strategies? What else can an SEO do? Surprisingly, there are a few more steps to be considered in order to improve an international web site which can also prove helpful when pursuing improved international search engine rankings.
Is .COM Considered An International Domain?
The .com domain is typically the most sought after and well known of all domain types. While a .us top level domain does exist for US companies to register, it is thought that search engines consider a .com address as related primarily to US based websites or often used by sites that are not typically country specific. If your site is based in the UK, you might still consider a .com domain as it is easy for customers to remember, but if you are focusing primarily on UK search engines, register a .co.uk domain. If your site is in Ireland, an .ie domain should be considered, .fr for France, .in for India, .ca for Canada, and so on.
If you have both a regional and .com domain, the next question is do you use both or do you use only one and forward visitors from one URL to the other? If you have the resources to maintain both web sites, it is not a bad idea to keep both URLs up and running. If you do this and they are both in the same language, make sure that each has its own unique content to avoid duplication penalties. You may even link between the two domains to provide some link popularity between the domains but don’t over do it. There is an line drawn between what some engines consider a “articifical linking network” and simply two or more sites that link to one another. On the other side, if one site is one language and you have another URL that has roughly the same content but in another language like say Italian, search engines generally do not penalize for duplicated content in different languages.
International Hosting
Like a domain name, where your site is hosted can play a role in rankings. In real life, if you spoke with an accent, this non-verbal clue may help someone to identify where you were born or grew up. Similarly, if you are a UK or Scottish company, the IP address can be a give away. Does your site have pages served from a fairly local server in Edinburgh, Scotland or is it served from a location like Dallas, Texas? Search engines can use this information to further identify your site for regional or international rankings.
If the hosting company you use tells you that their offices are in the UK or they use a .co.uk domain for their site’s URL, be aware that they could be a reseller for another company in another country. In some cases, they may use a co-location service to host or manage web hosting servers in another country rather than in the country that their domain would seem to specify. Get in touch with your current or potential web hosting service to see where they host from. You may find that you will need to seek other hosting options or you may need to simply ask them to move your site to a server that they manage in the same target country.
If you are already online, you may be able to check where your site is being hosted from on your own. There are various tools online like those at DNS Stuff and Canvas Dreams’ Web Host Locator which can check on your URL and give you the data that you need.
Don’t Hide Your International Address, Phone Number, Etc.
Have a local or international phone number (a non-800/888 number)? Do you have an international business address? While it may seem like over-kill on some sites, depending on the design/style of the site, it’s not a bad idea to keep this type of information readily available on many or all of your web site’s pages. There are both SEO and non-SEO reasons for this.
SEO reasons: Niche keyword searches. While there are many keywords which are very difficult to rank on such as mortgage, real estate, realtor, etc., some searchers use a combination of items like a postal or zip code, a partial street address, a partial phone number, or other information along with a keyword or two during their search in order to narrow down general searches to something more specific. Since many of these combinations provide only a few hits per month, many companies ignore trying to optimize for these keyword combinations, and thus improve your chances of appearing with the addition of your contact info on the page or some basic optimization.
Customer Service reasons: Customers generally should not have to dig through your site’s architecture in order to contact you if you have a high contact or regional specific company such as in real estate, mortgages, building supplies, local groceries, etc. While you generally want customers to read through your site in order to answer most of their questions before they contact you, every one reads/understands information in a different manner and they may not know or understand that they should click the ‘contact us’, ‘about us’, or a similar page for such information.
Directions To Your Location
Although I think you should keep your contact information on most your pages, this doesn’t mean that you should remove or forget to use some type of ‘contact us’, ‘about us’, or a similar page on your site. When you create this page, do use words that represent your country, regional naming conventions, states, zones, and other words that describe your location. If you have any abbreviations, spell them out as well. After all “St.” could reference a street, a suite, or a saint.
Give driving directions from a few well known locations rather than simply relying on external services. The content on your site helps you for SEO reasons and helps your customers to find you. If you want to also place links to an external mapping/driving directions service in order to give your visitors a means of double checking directions, go for it, but these external links normally do not play a direct part in helping you to obtain higher rankings.
Localized Language
Even if you speak the same language as the country and international site that you are attempting to get ranked, there may be regional or local spelling differences, slightly different terms to use, grammar differences, or other challenges to take into consideration. Although I speak US based English, it makes a difference if I am trying to SEO pages for boot repair parts and trunk repair parts in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. A boot is a type of shoe in most of these areas but outside of the US it can also indicate the storage compartment of a car. In the US we would call this area a trunk where as both in the US and elsewhere, a trunk usually indicates the main portion of a tree or a large container for storing items.
In Mexico and Span the way that one would optimize for mortgage lending services differs as well. The term “bienes raices” in commonly used in Mexico and in the Spanish speaking areas of the US and roughly means “real estate” or literally “root assets”. In Spain you would use a term like “inmobiliaria” to describe real estate. In Mexico and the US you would use the term “prestamista” for a lender such as a mortgage broker or loan officer where as in Spain this term is often used for dishonest or questionable lenders such as “loan sharks“. So you would not necessarily use the same terms in the same language to optimize for different countries that have a common language.
I love tools like Babel Fish and search engine based translation systems, but I would not put complete trust in them to accurately and meaningfully translate any web site for strict business and SEO purposes due to language nuances. Because of factors like these, a good translator or regional copy writer is a must.
Summary
SEOs are constantly working to improve website rankings but international and regional web sites often need a few extra tweaks to help them rank well. If you are attempting to improve a web site’s ranking in an international engine, there are some basic steps that can take to increase the odds of ranking well. Use a domain that relates to your target country rather than a general domain like .com. If you use both a regional domain and a .com, provide unique content on both sites. Obtain hosting services from an IP address/host that is actually located in the country that you are targeting. Be obvious about your company contact information by placing it on all or many pages of your site so that it is easy for customers to find and easy for search engines to index. Even if you have basic contact information on many pages of your site, do have a “contact us” or similar page. Do research your target market’s keywords and language style, if you are not native to the target country, and consider hiring some one to translate or regionalize the text for you. While these ideas may not cause your site to rocket to the top rankings in a international search engine over night, taken as a whole (along with traditional linking and SEO strategies), they can give you an edge toward improved rankings.
An Introduction to the Social Scene: Social Bookmarking and Tagging
August 14, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team
by Scott Goodyear
Have you been wondering what all the recent talk about social search, social bookmarks, and social SEO has been about? In this article we’ll go over a few of the services that you may or may not be familiar with, what they do, and how you may be able to take part in these services.
What is it? Simple and Social.
The essence of many of the sites that I’ll be touching on, is that they offer a means to converse with others in a community based web site. A wide variety of web based services and sites fall into a broad category labeled as ’social’. Many of the features that we now take for granted like email, forums, instant messaging, Usenet (most know this as Google Groups now), free web space providers, and others could all fit in the broad definition but these are not what most people are referring to when they talk about the subject today. What differentiates the old from the new? These days I believe that the ’social’ category is primarily defined by sites and services that provide many of the same overall functions listed above but often with a focus on simple interfaces along with their social functions. Simplicity in that you often fill out a profile and then you are ready to start contributing vs. having to know HTML and set up a website to post links or photos… And of course the social aspects of publicly contributing comments, photos, blogs, links, or other items to the larger community of a website. Then a discuss by the community leading to the promotion or removal of the contribution in a very public fashion.
Social Bookmarks
In the past if you had several bookmarks that you thought were wonderful and you would like share them with others, you could send an email or instant message to a friend. If you were HTML savvy you would post the links to your web page, or log in to a forum to share them. Today many turn to social bookmark services like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Jots, Socializer, Simpy, browser tool bars like StumbleUpon and a bevy of others. Create a profile and start reviewing links that meet your interests, submit new links that others might like which are added to your profile. These links/bookmarks are viewable from just about any computer, pda, or other device that has web access or accepts RSS feeds.
When you post your bookmark most of these services will allow you to give a short description of the page, video, graphic, or other item that you are bookmarking. What makes these services ’social’ is the fact that these links are available to the site’s community for review. If people ‘digg’ your bookmark, it can reach critical popularity and arrive on the front page of the community site and sometimes bring additional traffic. Alternately your bookmark suggestion can be buried where the community’s thumbs down means that the link will be available only through a search or when checking your profile page.
Social Tagging
Also different from a normal bookmark on a normal web page, services like Del.icio.us and Simpy, additionally let users ‘tag’ keywords to links. This allows a tagged link to be made searchable for specific words and word combinations, available through directory like lists, as well as other methods like ‘tag clouds‘. Searches can be set as RSS feeds and sent to your RSS reader, APIs can be used to publish searches and feeds, and there are new uses just about every day.
Social Search
While throwing a link out to the masses for judgment is less personal than sending it to a friend, the overall process can help to winnow down the wheat from the chaff. In many cases, results are considered ‘more relevant’ than a search engine’s algorithm because the results are hand picked.
Some services even go a step further. Eurekster and Rollyo for example can assist you in creating a personalized/shareable search engines based on your own set of criteria. The subjectivity that engines lack is one of the factors that appear to keep these services popular with their users, which follows on the basic blue print that the Open Directory had set long ago.
Social SEO/SEM?
During the SES San Jose conference, social book mark services, tagging, and social search engines had been brought up quite a lot. Could this new breed of tagging, bookmark, and search service be of use in promoting a web site? There seemed to be two types of answer to this. Some were optimistic but hesitant. Others had an attitude of, “do what you can, while you can”.
Both answers boil down to the fact that a link back to your site from many of these services can gain you some small or large amount of traffic. But the traffic may not be very useful if you are trying to sell a product or service.
Most of these users are looking for topical information or entertainment rather than commercial sales links. So news, blogs, article links, entertainment seems to work best.
A link from these pages may cause a page or site to be indexed quicker because these sites are very popular.
Links from specific sections could potentially pass a little page rank.
The potentials above aside, there are consideration to be made. If you hammer only your links using an account or by using several accounts, it may look bad to the community and your profiles will likely be shut down by the community or the administration of the service. While many of these sites do not use a ‘no-follow‘ tag or other method, it may be a matter of time before they do. Also consider that there is discussion that normal engines like Google may not give credibility to paid text links on large sites. I would imagine that well known social bookmark sites may end up in a similar boat if SEOs aggressively promote their own sites and significantly skew normal search engine rankings.
On the other hand, search engines are investing in things “social”. Yahoo owns tagging site Del.icio.us, there are ‘answer’ sites by Yahoo, Google and a beta site by MSN as well as APIs to help you connect these services to your site. MSN has Live Spaces. Through Google’s Personal Search you can share your searches via an RSS feed. A normal tagging service or shareable profile doesn’t seem that far off if the engines only decide to fully embrace these services. Some tentative steps are already in place so that you can tag using Yahoo’s browser tool bar. Some turn to creating their own integration using tool bar APIs or third party apps.
On the SEO side, if some one answers a question on one of these answer sites and points back to one of your pages, does this pass any benefit to you? Should it? There are a lot of unanswered questions regarding the future of these social sites and services but they will likely evolve and continue to hybridize into something new. Taking part today at the very least, may help you to understand future developments and issues.
There may also be not so obvious benefits from taking part in these social sites. Some sites like Technorati and Meetup may help you to meet others in your industry. Be aware, read the FAQs as some sites do not want companies signing up for their service directly, but they do like individuals. If your company takes part in charitable causes, community fundraising, sponsors large events, etc. take pictures and submit them to your personal account. Submit them and tag them with appropriate tags including your business name if appropriate to the photo. Put on rose colored glasses for this, you never know what will happen. You may find a way to gain more volunteers, a new way to reach out to a constituency, or enough prestige to be fought over if you take part in some of these social networks in a meaningful way, even if you are not taking part for traditional rankings, link gathering, or other reasons.