Business Insider announced today that Google has made a major change in the way they rank websites.  They have changed their algorithm so that sites that offer valuable information and originality will rank higher than those that are low quality or copy content from other sites.  Business Week suggests that Google has done this is an effort to adjust the ranking of content farms. 

A content farm such as Demand Media, which is mentioned in the article, is a site that might:

• Buy the most expensive keywords
• Hire a person to create content that fits with the keywords
• Select the best domain name for that content and uses advanced SEO techniques
• Sell Google ads next to the content
• Do this on a massive scale

With the old algorithm, a content farmer could trick out the search engines, get top-level search engine page results and make money by selling ads.  With the new algorithm, it will be harder to pretend that a site is written in a thoughtful way by a person who has original input or who may be very knowledgeable about the subject they are writing about.

This is also good news for the searcher.  It could mean that when you go to Google to search you might be able to find information that gives a more realistic or answer from a real person or company.

The change to the algorithm is also good news for bloggers and website owners who provide thoughtful, relevant, and original information.  If the strategy of buying expensive keywords does not produce the results a content farmer wants then maybe the cost of those keywords will become more reasonable giving more opportunity to be purchased by pure content providers. I don’t know, it’s just a thought.

You may be reading this and thinking, what in the world does this have to do with me.  Well, if you own a business and have a domain which you want people to find then it means a lot.  A high percentage of people begin their journey toward making a buying decision with a Google search.  So, knowing that Google has changed the algorithm should change how you approach developing content for your site.

So what do you think?  Does it make sense to you what Google has done?  What are your thoughts as to whether this change will help level the search engine page results playing field?

Should pay per click (PPC) advertisers buy their way to the top of search results pages? New eye tracking research from User Centric suggests that if an advertiser wants to maximize the number of views their keyword triggered ads generate, then they need to buy their way to a sponsored position at the top of the page.

The User Centric eye tracking study indicated that only 28% of participants viewing Google and 21% viewing Bing looked at the sponsored results on the right hand side of the page. Approximately 90% of participants looked at the sponsored results above the organic results in each search task. This number was comparable between the two engines. The complete study is available at User Centric. 

Eye Tracking Heat Map – Google Vs Bing

The finding that sponsored PPC ads at the top of search results pages garner three times as many views as ads on the right is a factor in the bid inflation that has made sponsored ads so profitable for the search engines. As bidders compete for the limited number of sponsored spots above the organic results, the competitive aspect of the bidding in these Dutch auctions fuels bid inflation that seems to rise to ever higher levels.

Of note, two changes made by Google to their display of search engine results: 1) moving the sponsored ads on the right closer to the organic results; and 2) Google Instant, have not had a statistically significant impact on the views on the sponsored ads on the right. The view rate of Google’s right sponsored results in a previous study (25%) conducted prior to the changes was comparable to the hit rate in this study (28%).

The study also demonstrated how little time sponsored ads have to grab a viewer’s attention.  The sponsored ads on the top of Google search engine result pages only received 2.8 seconds of gaze time. Bing viewers spend even less time viewing the sponsored ads at the top of the page, an average of just 1.9 seconds of gaze time.

Viewers gazing at the sponsored results on the right hand side of the page spend more time on average looking at these ads. Google sponsored results on the right hand side of receive 4.4 seconds of gaze time versus 3.0 seconds on Bing.  The longer time spent viewing the ads on the right hand side of the page may be due to the specific behavior of viewers checking this section of the page versus just briefly scanning the ads at the top of the page as their eyes moved down to the organic results. The longer time spend gazing at sponsored ads on the right is also due to more ads being displayed. Typically, two to four sponsored results are displayed at the top of the page versus five to ten on the right hand side. Regardless of whether sponsored results are at the top of the page or on the right hand side, the short quantity of time spent gazing at ads demonstrates Internet viewers facility for rapidly scanning information and spending little time viewing most sponsored ads.

Randy Pickard is a former employee of User Centric. He left the firm to start his own business, and recently launched ShoppingBasketsPlus.com, a vendor of shopping baskets for retail stores. He is also the editor of Internet Marketing Remarks

If you’re like me, I love some parts of my job while other parts I would rather not deal with.  Take the whole subject of search engine optimization or SEO for example.  As a marketer, I know that the internet has changed forever the way we find business.  Yes, we will still use more traditional methods such as print, TV, and radio, however, the traditional married the new media and now they can’t get divorced!  They are linked forever.

SEO has always been the toughest part of my job as a marketer.  Yet, I know that it is a part that I must master at least to the point of understanding the definition of such terms as search engine results page, meta tags, H1 headers, and link building, just to name a few. 

Why is this important to a marketer?

It’s important because when people are in search of a product or service the internet is the first place they’ll turn to find it.  Will they find my clients?

Being found online is simple but not as easy as it might seem.  The most important thing to remember is this:

 Online sites must be a friendly as possible to the bots and spiders that go hither and yonder all over the world wide web looking for information to give to those who keep asking for information.   This may be giving away my age but, do you remember a movie that was very popluar many years ago called Short Circuit?  The scenario is that the military creates these robot warriors and one gets fried by lightening causing it to dump all it’s input.  For the first part of the movie, the robot just goes over the city looking for input (information).  As it gets more input, it starts to sort it into relevant themes and blurts it out whenever it recognizes a relevant prompt.  That’s what a search engine does!

Now, search engine friendly sites have three major threads in common.

They use relevant keywords.

A keyword is a word or phrase that the person who is search for something online will use in the search engine browser in the hope that a list of relevant sites will be displayed for them to explore.  It’s important to remember that the use of keywords is an on the page and off the page effort.  On the page, keywords can be used in titles, headers, and links, and the body text.  Off the page, keywords can be found in meta tags, title tags, the URL, and other digital assests such as Micorsoft Word documents or YouTube video.  The biggest mistake when using keywords is just being random and stuffing the words on a page. 

A good quantity and quality of inbound links.

Inbound links are any other site that uses your URL on their site.  Having great inbound liknks is a way for one site to align itself with another one.  For example, an insurance company might want to have a link back from a major, well-respected car dealer.  Some one looking for a car online might need to have new insurance too and find it very convenient to use the links it finds associated with the dealer’s site.  Plus, if the car dealer is well-respected then the insurance is well-respected by defualt.

Fresh content on a regular basis.

Search engines thrive on change.  New content, links, videos, photos, or whatever is new will attract bots and spiders to crawl a particular site over and over and deliver that site in the search engine results list.

Now before I lose you as you drift off to sleep, go ahead and hit play on the video below.  This is one o f the most user friendly talks on the subject of SEO that I have heard.  It is part of a class that Lee Odden of Top Rank Marketing delivered through Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University.

SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102)