Commercials Drive Searches

Since the 2009 Super Bowl, I’ve monitored how the ads influence search interest, and every year, the trend has been the same. As people watch the Super Bowl, they search for everything they’re watching: teams, players, performers, and of course, commercials. The trend continues the day after the game as people talk about the commercials and turn to Google (and Bing) to watch them again. Take a look at the spiking searches for February 7th, the day after the game according to Google Trends:

Nearly every search is Super Bowl related, and searchers are clearly seeking out the ads. As you can see from search #8, commercials often cause people to search for the brands directly. Google Insights for Search shows that brands that advertised saw significant search spikes on Sunday. See for instance, the search volume for [bud light platinum].

They seemed to have really liked those ads in Iowa.

Google reported that searches for [super bowl ads] were 122 times higher this week and that the big search winners were Acura, GoDaddy, and M&Ms.

Where Are Advertisers Sending Potential Customers?

As I do every year, I took note of what advertisers included in the commercial. Did they include a web site URL? A Facebook page? Did they seem to even be aware of this crazy new thing called the internet? And then I looked at the advertisers’ search visibility. I was looking for the following flow:

Last year, many only paid attention to a flow like this:

I understand that Super Bowl commercials are about branding, not necessarily instant purchases, and I realize other positive outcomes exist (discussions on social media and the like). I’m just saying that if someone is searching for you, you may as well show up. And if you’ve gotten potential customers to view your commercial, you may as well make it easy for them to view more information about your products.

This year, many advertisers simply included their domain name in the ad (33 of the 53 advertisers I tracked did this). This approach can help cut out the search step, although as the response to the Dockers ad during the 2010 Super Bowl showed, advertising a URL causes people to, well, search for the URL. So you can’t always cut out the search step, no matter how hard you try.

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were all about Facebook fan pages (that often were impossible to find; don’t say “find us on Facebook” unless that’s an achievable task). This year, only fourof the ads included a nod to Facebook and all used actual URLs. Pepsi Max even went with an easy to remember redirect to Facebook: pepsimax.com/facebook.

Four commercials advertised Twitter hashtags (last year was the first year for this, and then it was mostly only for movie trailers). I was astonished to find that when a hashtag was included in a commercial, people instantly started using it to tweet about the commercial and the hashtag began trending. (As you can see, even the bands with songs in the commercials started trending.)

Of course, there’s a risk in this strategy. Things may go really well, as Audi found with #SoLongVampires, or very awry as Bud Light found with #MAKEITPLATINUM. (Did people really even use the same capitalization in the hashtag as was used in the commercial? Amazing.)

What began trending on Twitter also tended to show search spikes. For instance, take a look at searches for [echo and the bunnymen]:

So what we talk about, we also search for.

The Future is… QR Codes?

It may have seemed like GoDaddy used the same tired formula as always in their ads (although, apparently sex does sell, so I can’t knock sticking with something that works), but in fact, they tried something new this year: including a QR code in the ad.

The online version of the commercial includes the QR during the entire length of the ad, but when aired during the Super Bowl, it appeared only briefly at the end, so I’m not sure if  anyone managed to pull up the QR code reader on their mobile phone, rush to the TV, and scan it before it disappeared from the screen. Including it in the online version seems even more nonsensical though, as the idea seems to be that you’re watching the ad on your computer, see the QR code, scan it with your phone, and are brought to the godaddy.com site on your phone. I would guess that including a link to the web site in the commercial so that you can simply click and access the web site on your computer would make entering your credit card information for all those domain names quite a bit easier.

Scoring Search Visibility

So how did advertisers do in search? It’s difficult to come up with exact search coverage percentages. For instance, if a brand advertised multiple products and ranked well in search results for one product but not the other does the tick mark for that brand go in the yes or no column for search visibility? What if the product showed up for its name but not for its tagline?

For the purposes of the stats below, I used the following guidelines:

• I counted each brand once, even if they aired ads for multiple products
• If they ranked organically for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the organic search column
• If they had a paid search ad for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the paid search column

In a follow up column, I’ll point out some interesting choices, but for now, let’s just look at how well advertisers thought out web sites, search, and social media.

Of the 53 brands I tracked:

• 33 ended the ad with a URL to the brand site, 4 went with a Twitter hashtag, and 4 sent viewers to Facebook.
• 44 bought a paid search ad
• 51 ranked organically for the brand name (although far fewer ranked for the promoted taglines or hashtags)

Chrysler and YouTube

Last year, Chrysler’s Eminem ad was one of the most popular commercials of the game. I found it odd at the time that although they designed their site’s home page to tie in quite well to the vibe of that ad, they bought search ads to the commercial on YouTube. I felt they lost an opportunity to further interact with potential customers and lost some control of the experience (related videos could easily be to competitors, for instance). Their flow looked like this:

That’s not a bad outcome, but I thought that if they had used paid search to drive visitors to the commercial on their site, they might have been able to better leveraged the opportunity. This year, Chrysler once again had a much-talked-about ad, and they decided to mix things up a bit.

For [chrysler]-related searches, the paid search ad points at their home page, which is a great tie in to the commercial. But for other searches, they’ve once again chosen to promote YouTube.

This time, the YouTube link makes a lot more sense as it’s to the channel, so there are no competitor links and the entire page is focused on getting votes for the YouTube AdBlitz, engaging socially, and even includes an ad for the car featured in the commercial. All in all, I fully support this approach. They keep the branded searches pointing at their home page (after all, not everyone searching for the brand is searching for the commercial), which is tightly-integrated with the campaign, and they send those looking for the commercial to a page designed to specifically engage with them.  What a difference a year makes.

2012 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

2011 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

Acura NSX vs. Bud Light Platinum

We’ve already seen that the #makeitplatinum hashtag strategy both worked and didn’t work for Bud Light (they definitely got it trending, but for perhaps the wrong reasons). What about organic search visibility? Sadly, the brand web site doesn’t appear at all in Google for searches for [bud light platinum] (although they have bought a paid search ad to the YouTube page).

Acura NSX, on the other hand (which was a spiking search on Monday), does an excellent job with organic search, taking the top spot with a page devoted to it. (Although including the commercial on the page would have been a good idea.)

Overall, I felt brands did a much better job of keeping things simple and driving viewers to interesting, relevant pages that engaged them. Watch for my next post in the coming days for some specifics on what went right and spectacularly wrong.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• Super Bowl 2011: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2010: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2009: Commercials and Search Visibility

Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now, organizations like the NFL, the playing teams, and the broadcasting station didn’t show up at all in search results because none of their sites answered the question. Seem crazy?

• 2009  Results: In 2009, start-time related searches were among the most popular the morning of the game, but neither the NFL nor NBC were anywhere to be found.
• 2010 Results: In 2010, both nfl.com and cbs.com had significant technical infrastructure issues that kept search engines from crawling and indexing the content. Again, the search results were sad and this time, full of spammers trying to capitalize on the search volume.
• 2011 Results: In 2011, problems continued. But news organizations jumped in, and the Huffington Post in particular ranked well for its article that simply listed all of the various ways people were searching for the Super Bowl start time. (That article was later “edited for clarity”).

This year, things are finally getting better. Even the Huffington Post, while still getting every variation of spelling and tagging in the article for maximum search coverage (“For starters, it’s two words, not one. “Superbowl” is an incorrect spelling.”), has filled out their article a bit with actual information.

The results could still be better. While [Super Bowl start time] has overall higher search volume than [Super Bowl kick off time], the latter is the top search this morning, and NFL.com only ranks for the former (HuffPo does quite well with the latter). Superbowl.com, which redirects to the NFL site, ranks, but as I mentioned in earlier years, this domain 302 redirects to nfl.com. A 301 instead would consolidate the domains (including value signals such as links), which might cause the target URL to do better overall in relevant searches. But still, compared to earlier years, I’d call these results a win for the NFL.

Sadly, NBC, the Giants, and the Patriots, and TV Guide all fail to appear in results once again. Even though both Google Insights for Search and my articles over the years should have prepared them for this year’s search interest.

Why should these sites care about showing up for these searches? They’ve invested substantially in site content and those seeking out the game start time are a perfect audience for that content. Searchers would click for the start time and stay for the fan jam videos and view the ads.

Of  course, Super Bowl viewers will see lots of ads anyway today. But that’s a topic for the next article.

Related:

• 2009 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2010 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2011 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2009 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2010 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2011 Super Bowl Commercials

Search Queries: Download Chart Data

Search query chart data downloads provide access to information not easily available before. When you view search query data, the chart in the user interface shows impression and click data per day, but in the past, this detail has only been available if you hover over a dot in the chart.

Now, you can access this data by clicking the Download Chart Data  button below the Top Queries and Top URLs reports. (You can use filtering options to drill into specific data or date ranges).

The data downloads to a CSV file as shown below:

When you click on a specific query in the Top Queries report page, you see a similar chart, but its data is not available for download. In the example below, clicking on [track santa claus] query in the Top Queries report brings up the query details for that single query, and you can download the page and position information, but not the chart data. (Note that a display bug seems to be preventing the buttons on this page from displaying in Internet Explorer.)

You can filter the Top Queries report and download the impression and click data from there (although you may not be able to filter to a single query). In the example below, a filtered report for [track santa claus] resulted in 16 queries.

The chart data in this case can be particularly useful due to how Google reports trended data. Watch for a separate post detailing how this works, but in short, Google reports on the top 1,000 queries per day. For reports that span multiple days, such as the example above, impression and click data is only included if the query was in the top 1,000 for each day. This can result in misleading totals, since the impressions and clicks aren’t totals for the entire data range, but only totals from the days in that range that the query was in the top 1,000. Confusing? Totally understandable.

Let’s look at the example above. I’ve filtered the Top Queries report to only show queries that include [track santa claus] for a 31 day period and the report shows:

• 16 queries
• 170,000 impressions
• 3,000 clicks

Does this mean the site got traffic for only 16 queries that contain the words [track santa claus]? No, it means that only 16 queries made it into the top 1,000 at least one day during the date range. Based on that foundation, you might assume that those 16 queries resulted in 170,000 impressions for the site and brought in 3,000 clicks for the 31 day period. But that assumption would be wrong. (This is where things can really start to get confusing.)

The Search Queries report only reports data (at all) for those days that a query is in the top 1,000. And the totals are the sum of the counts on those days only — not the entire date range. This level of detail has always been available (sort of) by way of the dots on the charts. Looking more closely at our [track santa claus] example, notice that several days in the chart don’t have dots.

The days without dots are the days that the query (or set of queries) didn’t make the top 1,000 and therefore have no data reported. Until now, the only way to make some sense of the data was to count the dots to better understand the summary data. Now, when you download the chart data, you can much more easily understand what the visualization represents:

With the CSV, it’s much more apparent that although the specified date range is 12/18/11 – 1/17/12, the totals are for 11 days, not 31. These queries were in the top 1,000 on 12/27, but not on the 28th or 29th. Does this mean that on the 28th, the impressions and clicks were lower than on the 27th? Maybe. Or it could mean that impressions and clicks stayed the same but another query spiked in volume and bumped it from the top 1,000.

User Interface Improvements

One nice change is the ability to view more data on a page. Most pages, including the dashboard page listing all sites in the account, now include an option for the number of rows to show.

You can now view up to 500 rows at once, which makes overall account management and data viewing much easier.

I had initially thought that more link data might be available as well, but after talking with Google, I realize that the user interface improvements have simply made the link reports more easily visible.

In particular, the detailed chart data available for download provides a significant improvement as it brings a much more accurate understanding of what the data actually is. Watch for my more detailed post on the search query data shortly.

“When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites.”

They note that when they choose a representative URL from a different domain, they call this “cross-domain URL selection”.

In cases where multiple URLs contain the same content (for instance, due to infrastructure configuration, optional parameters, syndication, or internationalization), many options exist for site owners to indicate to Google which version is canonical.

However, in some cases, the site owner doesn’t use these options to specify a preferred version or Google may select a different version than the site owner specifies.

This new feature alerts site owners  when their “algorithms select an external URL instead of one from their website”. They say common reasons for this include:

• Site owner-specified – if you’ve moved your domain or have implemented the rel=canonical attribute to indicate that a page on another domain is canonical, then this alert is simply confirmation that Google is indexing as you’ve specified.
• Regional sites – if you have the same content on multiple regional sites (for instance, the same English content on a .com (for US), a .co.uk, and a .com.au), Google may cluster pages with identical content across sites and use relevance signals to determine which to display per query.
• Incorrect canonicalization – in this case, a page may inadvertently use the rel=canonical attribute to specify a page on a different domain as canonical.
• Misconfigured server – a hosting misconfiguration (this in particular happens sometimes with shared hosting) may cause a two different domains to display the same content)
• Hacked site – sites are sometimes hacked to point to other domains.
• Scraped content – the blog says that “in rare situations”, Google may select a URL from a site that has scraped your content.

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related changes on at least October 3rd and October 13th. In several  cases, I saw sites with Google organic traffic declines on 9/27, recovery on 10/3, and decline again on 10/13.

I talked to Google to find out more about the flux and what site owners could expect. Google confirmed the flux but didn’t provide any other detail other that what they’ve said in the past. The crux is that:

• Some Panda updates are due to new signals being incorporated into the overall Panda algorithms
• Some Panda updates are recalculation of how sites perform within the Panda algorithms, based on updated data about the sites since the last recalculation
• The only difference with this update vs. the previous ones is that there will be (and have been) several updates (presumably of both types) within days or weeks of each other

Panda 2.5 then is a series of Panda algorithm and site recalculation updates over a period of several weeks. September 27th, October 3rd, and October 13th have been confirmed by Google, but it appears that there may have been several other updates (of either Panda algorithm changes or site recalculations) as well during this period.

If you’ve noticed traffic declines from Google organic referrals since September 27th, remember that Panda is a site-wide assessment (so even high quality pages will be impacted)  and key recovery strategies are around:

• Creating valuable content (so the page is the best answer to the query on the web)
• Consolidating approximate duplication (if lots of pages on the site about the same topic)
• Getting rid of exact duplication (syndication, manufacturer feeds and other measures that result in the exact text appearing on multiple sites)
• Improving usability (such as ensuring a valuable and engaging user experience, providing easy and useful navigation, not obscuring the content with an overwhelming amount of ads)
• Working on engagement (building a site that people want to stay on, link to, return to, share, and otherwise show happiness towards)

But stats can be misleading and a new Pew Internet & American Life Project and Knight Foundation study sheds some light on what’s actually going on. Typically, these studies ask questions such as “how to do you get local news”? But for this report, researchers asked “what sources do you rely on” for 16 specific subjects. They found that while it is the case that local TV is popular for news, Americans rely on it primarily for weather, breaking news, and traffic. But when looking for answers to other local issues, Americans are likely to turn to other sources.

The study also found that “for the 79% of Americans who are online, as well as Americans ages 18-39, the internet ranks as a top source of information for most of the local subjects studied in the survey.” In this context, “internet” refers to search engines, non-newspaper websites, and social networking sites. Reliance on the web properties of newspapers was categorized with “newspapers” and usage of a local TV station web site was categorized with “local TV”.

Other interesting findings include:

• Word of mouth is the second most likely way we get local information (after local TV). 55% of us get local news via word of mouth at least once a week. (This percentage actually seems surprisingly low to me. Do only 55% of us talk to people? I just found out from a cashier this morning that Obama was in town. That’s local news, right?)
• Near half of us get at least some local information from mobile devices.
• 64% rely on at least three media sources weekly for local news.
• Weather is the most popular local news topic (89% look for it), but only 5% use a mobile app for weather information.
• 41% consider local news “participatory” as they interact via methods such as social media.
• 17% of American adults get local news from social networking sites.
• For those under 40, the internet is the most likely source for 12 of the 16 topics queried. For those over 40, the internet is the most likely source for only 2 topics of the 16 (local businesses and restaurants).
• The websites of traditional local news platforms do not register at major levels on most of the subjects probed in the survey.

 The Importance of Local Newspapers

69% surveyed felt that the end of the local newspaper would have little or no impact on their ability to get local information. But at the same time, newspapers were found to be the top (or tied for top) source for 11 of the 16 topics asked about.

Younger age groups were less reliant on newspapers and less concerned about their potential demise. The study found that “among adults under age 40, the internet is already the top source for local political information and news — 26% of adults in this age group name the internet as their top source for this topic, while 19% name local TV news.”

How the Internet Fits In

Many of the stats in the study focus on Americans a whole (both those with internet access and those without). When looking just at the 79% of Americans with internet access, things look significantly different. For this group, the internet is either the first or second most important news source for 15 of the 16 topics (TV and newspapers trumped the internet for local crime news).

 For breaking news though, the study found an outlier:

“Interestingly, even as the web has gained traction, there is one major area where it still lags well behind—breaking news. Here, local television news (which includes local TV websites but is driven almost entirely by broadcasts) still well outpace online sources. Among all adults, 55% say they rely on local TV for breaking news, compared with 16% who say they rely on the internet and 14% who rely on newspapers.”

I do find that interesting as the internet can provide breaking news the instant it happens and the instant someone wants to know about it, whereas to get breaking news via TV, one must wait for the scheduled time of the news to begin. It makes a bit more sense when considering that “internet” in this context doesn’t include the web sites of TV stations and newspapers. In addition, if many of those polled think of breaking news as the news of the day that they don’t know to look for, then these numbers make sense.

For local businesses though, it’s all about the internet. The study found that:

“The two local topics for which the internet already takes the clearest lead, even when including adults with no access to the web, are restaurants and local businesses… In the past, reviews of restaurants and sometimes local businesses were provided by traditional news organizations – especially newspapers. At times, other companies provided guides that critiqued locale fare. Now, information services like Yelp, which offers citizen reviews and restaurant information, or Craigslist.com, which carries local classifieds, are mainstays of this information in many communities. Those services might have been developed by traditional news companies but were not and the audience has gravitated to the new platforms. The newer online services are also helped by the fact that their material is permanently searchable and therefore more comprehensively available to would-be patrons in ways that traditional newspapers and broadcasts are not.”

The internet and newspapers are tied for the most likely way Americans find real estate information.

This level of detail about how we access all kinds of local information is certainly useful for both journalists and businesses and reminds us that word of mouth (both in person and online) will continue to be key.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com, used under license.)

The attribute works a similar way as other link rel attributes:

• The tag should be placed in the <head> section of the source code on the page
• The syntax is <link rel=”standout” href=”URL”>

For example:

<link rel="standout" 
href="http://searchengineland.com/my-awesome-article>

When marking your own content as standout, you place this tag on that page and indicate the canonical URL. You can also recognize excellent source content from another publication that was a resource in writing your story. In this latter case, you would point to the URL of the source as the href value. You can point to content on any domain. Unlike the seven-article limit per week on flagging your own content as standout, there’s no limit on the number of times you can cite other content.

In other words, you can point to your own domain up to seven times a week (any more than that and Google News will start to ignore this tag) but can point to other domains as many times as you’d like. Citing other sources is different from using the original-source and syndication-source tags. Those tags tell Google what version of the story should get credit; this tag tells Google which story is the “standout” version.

Google News already recently introduced Editors’ Picks, and it’s unclear how these two feature will work together, although a news organization has to be approved for Editors’ picks, whereas any publisher can use the standout tag.

The discussion was fast and furious and we dove into the various pagination issues that content owners encounter. Maile took the feedback to Google and they got to work on some options. The goal? To present some new solutions at SMX East at a panel set up just to talk through pagination issues. Today, be impressed with my multitasking skills as I write this article that describes these new solutions while I moderate the session!

Google has done two things: evolved how they detect and cluster components of a series with a view all page and launched new rel attributes to enable content owners to specify components of a paginated series. They describe both in blog posts today.

New Handling of View All Pages

Google has been evolving their detection of a series of component pages and the corresponding view all page. When you have a view all page and paginated URLs with a detectable pattern, Google clusters those together and consolidates the PageRank value and indexing relevance. Basically, all of the paginated URLs are seen as components in a series that rolls up to the view all page. In most cases, Google has found that the best experience for searchers is to rank the view all page in search results. (You can help this process along by using the rel=”canonical” attribute to point all pages to the view all version.)

If You Don’t Want The View All Page To Rank Instead of Paginated URLs

If you don’t want the view all version of your page shown and instead want individual paginated URLs to rank, you can block the view all version with robots.txt or meta noindex. You can also use the all new rel=”next”/rel=”prev” attributes, so read on!

New Pagination Options

If you don’t have a view all page, or you don’t want the view all page to be what appears in search results, you can use the new attributes rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to cluster all of the component pages into a single series. All of the indexing properties for all components in the series are consolidated and the most relevant page in the series will rank for each query. (Yay!)

You can use these attributes for article pagination, product lists, and any other types of pagination your site might have. The first page of the series has only a rel=”next” attribute and the last page of the series has only a rel=”prev” attribute, and all other pages have both.  You can still use the rel=”canonical” attribute on all pages in conjunction.

Typically, in this setup, as Google sees all of these component pages as series, the first page of the series will rank, but there may be times when another page is more relevant and will rank instead. In either case, the indexing signals (such as incoming links) are consolidated and shared by the series.

Make sure that the value of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” match the URL (even if it’s non-canonical) as the rel/next values in the series have to match up (you likely will need to dynamically write the values based on the display URL).

There are lots of intricacies to consider here, and I’m working on an in-depth article that runs through everything that came up in the session, so if you have questions, post them here and I’ll add them in!

Blocking Content From Google News

Seem confusing? On the one hand, it’s not at all.

If you want Google to index your content in both web search and News (if you are a Google News publisher), then you don’t need to do anything. Google will keep crawling as it always has, but if you look at your server logs, you’ll only see entries for Googlebot rather than entries for both Googlebot and Googlebot-News.

If you want to keep your content out of Google News, you can keeping using the Disallow directive in robots.txt (or meta robots tag) to block Googlebot-News. Even though Google will now crawl as Googlebot rather than Googlebot-News, they’ll still respect the Googleb0t-News robots.txt directive.

You can no longer, however, disallow Googlebot and allow Googlebot-News as you can for other specialized Googlebots, although you could before this change.

Gathering Data About How Your Site Is Crawled

On the other hand, this change makes things a lot more confusing if you’re using data to understand how your site is crawled and make improvements.

For instance, if you notice that your news articles aren’t being indexed in Google News and you check the news-specific crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools and don’t see any problems, you can no longer check your server logs to see if those articles are being crawled for the news index. You can see if the pages are being crawled generally, but this less granular insight makes it tougher to troubleshoot problems.

In this example, you may be generating a news-specific Sitemap and that generation process may be missing specific URLs. You used to be able to review your server logs, see that Googlebot-News was crawling particular URLs but not others, and then check to see if the URLs that hadn’t been crawled were in the Sitemap. Now, all the server logs will tell you is whether Google is crawling the URLs at all. If they are being crawled for web search but not News, that detail is now lost.

You lose granular insight for web search as well. If you are tracking down why particular pages on your site aren’t indexed, you could previously review your server logs to see if they were being crawled, but now it will appear as though they are, even if they are only being crawled for Google News.

You can still get News-specific and web-specific crawl errors from Google webmaster tools, so some insight is still available. In terms of granularity, Google tells me that the Google webmaster tools URLs restricted by robots.txt report includes only the pages blocked from web search and not URLs blocked from Google News.

However, It doesn’t sound like you can currently see a list of URLs Google tried to crawl but didn’t due to Googlebot-News being blocked, and unfortunately the robots.txt analysis tool in Google webmaster tools doesn’t let you test URLs blocked in Google News separately from web search. So it would be tough to determine if you were accidentally blocking URLs from indexing in Google News.

This change seems like a bit of a step backward to me. When Google News was first launched, Googlebot crawled for both web search and News and news publishers asked for a news-specific bot. Certainly, the most important reason for this is the ability to block and allow content from Google News separately from web search, and that functionality remains. However, the granular insight available was useful as well, and it’s unfortunate that will now be lost.

Their post notes that for non-English indices,  this change impacts 6-9% of queries (vs. the 12% the original US English launch). This launch also includes a few minor changes to the English version of Panda, but shouldn’t have a substantial impact.

In their post, they say:

For many months, we’ve been focused on trying to return high-quality sites to users. Earlier this year, we rolled out our “Panda” change for searches in English around the world. Today we’re continuing that effort by rolling out our algorithmic search improvements in different languages. Our scientific evaluation data show that this change improves our search quality across the board, and the response to Panda from users has been very positive.

I talked to Google about the change and they reiterated that searchers overwhelmingly have found the Panda-based changes to improve their search results and that those impacted should evaluate their sites objectively for quality and unique value.

This year, Google has focused on identifying sites with a large number of low quality pages as part of their overall goal of providing the best possible search experience. The Panda updates have been evolutions of algorithms that increasingly detect this and lower those sites in search rankings. I often describe it as somewhat like the Adwords quality score, which uses a number of factors to assign an overall score to a site. Since we’re talking about algorithms with many inputs, there’s no one thing that can cause a site to lose rankings due to Panda. Rather it’s an accumulation of factors.

Imagine you’re eating an ice cream sundae. The ice cream is delicious and creamy. It’s covered in the best hot fudge sauce you’ve ever eaten. The whipped cream is freshly made from scratch. On top is an OK-tasting cherry. How do you feel about the sundae overall? Pretty good? Excellent even?

Now, imagine another ice cream sundae. It’s made with that blech tasting cardboard-and-ice style ice cream. The hot fudge is missing entirely. And the whipped cream is that scary fake stuff from a can. The cherry, however, is quite good. How do you feel about this sundae?

The maker of the second sundae might ask why it is you’ve put down your spoon and are edging back to the sundae #1. But the cherry is better! He might say. A Rainier cherry from Washington state! How can you like the other sundae better when it has such a sub-par cherry? Mine has all of the same  parts as that sundae! Well, except the hot fudge!

Google is taste-testing ice cream sundaes and offering searchers the ones that are the best holistically. I mean, they’re not literally eating ice cream. (Actually, they are, but not as part of this metaphor.) I’m just saying you can’t look for one specific thing to fix and you can’t compare one specific thing on your site to that same thing on another site. There are too many moving parts.

The History of Panda

This post covers all of the Panda updates leading up to this one. That post also recaps the articles we’ve published here with advice and impact. The last update was about three weeks ago and was fairly minor.

Advice If Your Site Has Lost Ranking

Panda seems to be focused primarily on unique value and user experience. I gave a long interview to Eric Enge about this not too long ago. If your site has lost search traffic due to Panda, take an objective look (or better yet, have someone else take an objective look) and ask:

• How does the content quality compare to other pages on the web about the same topic? Is the page the most valuable and useful content about the topic?
• Do multiple pages on the site answer the same problem/focus on the same basic task? It’s one thing to have separate pages on “best chocolate cake recipe” and “best pumpkin pie recipe” and quite another to have separate pages on “best chocolate cake recipe” and “ideal chocolate cake recipe”.
• Is the content primarily syndicated or aggregated from other sources? If most of the content isn’t original, Google’s algorithms might give the site a lower “quality score” (in quotes because I totally made that up that way of looking at Panda — I’m not saying Google internally is using the concept of a quality score) to better ensure that the original version ranks.
• If the content is unique, does it completely cover the topic in a credible, useful way or is it shallow and barely scratch the surface?
• Does the user interface design and navigation make engagement easy or are things cluttered and make it difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for?
• Are the site design and goals user-focused or revenue-focused? It’s absolutely fine (and generally necessary if you’re running a business!) to ensure that your site makes money. But if the goals you keep in mind when designing the pages don’t take into account how well the visitor can get what they need (an answer to their question, ability to accomplish their task easily) and only are based on getting what you want from users (ad views or clicks, for instance), the user experience of your pages might not be ideal.

Since Panda is based on an overall ice cream sundae score, you likely won’t see rankings improvements right away once you make changes. Google periodically recalculates these scores (just like they periodically launch a new version of Panda with improved signals), so after you make changes, you’ ll have to wait for Google to recrawl the site so they can take note of the changes (you can check the cache dates of your indexed pages to see if Google has recrawled them) and then you’ ll have to wait for one of Google’s periodic scoring recalculations (which so far seem to coincide with Panda algorithm updates).

Some site owners who have made substantial changes based on the bullets above have seen positive results (I’ve worked with some of them and seen the analytics myself), but a recovery isn’t likely overnight.