Search Marketing

Last week, Bing announced the most significant update to its platform since its launch three years ago, by introducing a new social structure to its search results.

Microsoft has had the jump on Google for quite some time now when it comes to privileged social data, winning both the Twitter fire-hose deal and enjoying a cozy relationship with Facebook. And with Tweet and Like counts clearly poised to be the new relevancy king-maker signals, the most surprising thing about yesterday’s announcement is that it took so long.

In fact, a week prior to the announcement, it appeared Microsoft took a step backwards, reverting to an old familiar top-ten look for results. This turned out to be clean-up in preparation for pop-out panels, which allow for enhanced results and apps, and a right-rail for social. In this new scheme, the pop-out panels can provide shopping or reservation apps right on location to satisfy the user onsite.

Top Changes

Significant changes to the platform include the addition of “snapshot” and “social” bars to SERPs. Natural search links will remain on the left side of the page, similar to what was rolled out in last week’s UI Update. This section will still include the “gutter” at the far left of the screen.

The snapshot bar will be immediately to the right of natural links and will leverage APIs to populate data related to your search. The social bar on the far right will house social networks that the searcher opts-in to connect to (i.e. – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare, and LinkedIn). This bar will take information from these services and display content relevant to the search query. The bar is divided into three sections: People Who Might Know (it will take info from your friends and say how it matches your query), People Who Know (will leverage experts specializing in the query area that may or may not be a direct social connection to the searcher), and Activity (shows curated posts from your social network).

Bing’s new Search Page Layout

Today, we released 360iTIGER, a powerful cloud-based technology that automatically gathers website data, such as titles, meta tags, tweets, Facebook likes and more, directly into a cloud-based document with the click of a button. You can download a free limited version of 360i’s enterprise technology offering at tiger.360i.com.

360iTIGER addresses a core pain point that arises when conducting website audits as part of a brand’s search engine optimization or social analytics efforts. Marketers have traditionally gathered this data manually, by deploying heavyweight analytics platforms or by purchasing software of limited functionality. 360iTIGER automates the audit by instantaneously organizing data within a web-based spreadsheet, expediting a previously laborious process into something that can be completed in seconds with the click of a mouse. View a demo below.

360iTIGER was concepted and developed by a team of SEO strategists and technologists at 360i, led by Mike Levin, Director of SEO Strategy. In the Q&A below, Mike explains how the idea was born and how it evolved to where it is today.

What excites you most about working at 360i, and within the search industry in general?
Mike Levin: I joined 360i as a full-time SEO Director focused on client service. Previously I was creator of HitTail,a  keyword suggestion tool for SEO. One of the first things I started to do at 360i was program, given the necessity to do so in solving technical puzzles in this field. The fact that I was allowed to experiment and build things as part of my job speaks volumes about both 360i and the natural search industry. Pursuing alternative approaches to common problems is critical to driving innovation. 360i gets that.

At what point did you discover the need for a tool like 360iTIGER?
ML: There is a constant need in SEO and other fields to quickly gather data and start to work with it, but so many products are usually necessary to gather data across different realms. I went looking for a better solution to expedite a process we use in SEO. People like to organize their data in spreadsheets and this insight, combined with the fact that spreadsheets today are web-based, collaborative, real-time, and programmable through web-APIs. Sprinkle in the power of bookmarklet tools and a whole series of dots suddenly connected in my head. I started wondering why spreadsheets didn’t readily auto-populate themselves with data. It just seemed so wrong that they didn’t, and so natural that they should. In the spirit of the Cloud, this shifts so much power from IT folks to average users.

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Google has rolled out a new “Search, plus Your World” product that places Google+ content from a person’s social graph higher in its search engine results pages. This marks a major change in the way people experience search within the world’s most popular engine: everyone logged in with a Google account (such as Gmail), will now experience search results that are highly customized based on the various +1s and shares of people in their Google+ Circles.

Source: Google Blog

Google’s Social Customization Layer

“Your World” is a superimposed overlay to Google’s traditional search results, which are already superimposed with shopping, local and other universal results, which are superimposed over results customized by your web history, over results that have been adjusted to your geographic location. You can therefore view the current Google experience as a layered series, with the latest social layer special because it has been given strong branding that clearly marks social results, pictures of people you know, and a toggle to turn the layer on and off.

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Google is at it again, recently making an update that alters the description area of some natural results rankings pages. The change will only affect certain types of pages – and it’s a relatively small adjustment – but it should encourage webmasters to pay closer attention to their HTML coding structures, tagging semantic and strategy around utilizing advanced markup.

Pages affected will be those that render listed items or structured content links within the page (i.e. a retailer with an online catalog). The Meta description tag remains an important element for SEO, but the latest update could supplant or ignore this tag in the SERPs, depending on the page’s code or structured format.

As shown in the above example, any page with a laundry list of links and/or paginated items can be affected by the update. We’ve noticed more and more affected listings over the past few weeks, and Google has confirmed that the changes are not a test and will continue to roll out globally within results. Read the full article »

Google has begun testing a new paid search ad unit, called Media Ads, which are expandable video units that are guaranteed to appear at the top of the results page. The new units are currently only available to movie studios (360i is a test partner).

Media Ad unit for the Universal Pictures film Hop (image via Google)

The new units allow advertisers to leverage a searcher’s whereabouts (via geo-targeting) in order to deliver them more relevant information, such as when and where films are playing in their region. In addition, Media Ads grant searchers a theatre-like video experience via an expandable movie trailer that plays in full screen HD.

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Microsoft recently announced that keywords within the adCenter platform will soon be assigned Quality Scores similar to those assigned to keywords within Google’s AdWords platform. But, unlike Google and other platforms, Microsoft says its Quality Scores (QS) will not directly affect how ads are ranked. Instead, the new metric will score a keyword’s past performance within the marketplace.

Screenshot via Microsoft

Historically, QS has been associated with Google and its AdWords platform. The metric has long been associated as a relevancy gauge of a keyword’s qualitative relationship to searchers’ queries that trigger an advertiser’s ads. This metric is important as it is directly tied to Google’s algorithm and thus plays a subsequent role in determining cost, position and performance. AdWords combines a keyword’s QS with set bid prices to calculate the keyword’s position and cost-per-click (CPC).

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Recently, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo! Search – also known as the Search Alliance – announced a change to their trademark policy for the U.S. and Canada that is scheduled to go into effect on March 3. The update means that third-party advertisers will soon be able to use trademarked terms as keywords, as they’ve been able to do within Google since 2009.

What’s The Change?

Microsoft says it “will no longer investigate complaints about trademarks used as keywords,” meaning that advertisers are now allowed to bid on any trademark term regardless of their relationship to the trademark owner. This modification puts Microsoft’s trademark policy in-line with Google’s policy updates in June of 2009. Prior to this update, Microsoft had restricted the purchasing of trademark terms to select third-party advertisers. An example of their allowances would have been granted to authorized resellers, among a few other exceptions.

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