Bad news. Good news?

Every August or September, Google seem to enjoy shaking everything around a little.*

In the last few weeks there has been a significant change to their organic search results algorithm – which basically means that a single domain can be returned multiple times for a keyword search on the first page. Malcolm Coles wrote about this last week.

And then at the top of the search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you speak in acronyms), there will be an equally severe adjustment in their paid search policy. Basically, Google used to protect brands by forbidding advertisers to use trademarked terms within their ad copies. Not anymore. From 14 September, resellers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to use brand terms (iPhone, Easyjet, Nike and so on) in their adverts, pushing up their quality score, bringing down CPCs (costs per click) and generally making the whole thing much more competitive. There is a Net Media Planet blog on this (disclaimer – I work there) – if you want a little more detail.

Treated separately, both of these stories are interesting, newsworthy and will have consequences for advertisers and site traffic. Taken together, they add up to something of a little more.

Control of their trademarks gone, brands will lose out to resellers in the paid search listings. But if they do see their amount of paid search traffic drop, though, they will have the opportunity to claw it back by dominating the organic results. Google have taken with one hand and given back with the other.

Some thoughts:

• Paid search on profitable keywords/brands will become much more competitive and brands might well see sales impacted
• SEO Managers working for big brands will have the opportunity to dominate the first page of the organic search results for important keywords
• The user search experience might be affected. I suspect Google anticipate that the paid search results will compensate for the lack of variety further down the page. Will it?

So, these are a few of the changes to look forward to in the next few months. I’m sure that SEO’s will already be finding ways around these changes (they always do).

And, in the meantime, here’s a video about what might be coming next. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

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* Of course, Google is always changing, fiddling, tweaking and rattling about their algorithms. At certain times, though, their changes are more significant. See this article on their recent Mayday Change, and another on the famous Florida Update, back in the day.

Image Credit: Hans S on Flickr

As the South African World Cup draws towards its end, I thought that it would be useful to have a look at what Google Trends has made of the competition.

The Players

It’s a simple process. I’ve just pulled out the names of five players – Robert Green, David Villa, Lionel Messi, Arjen Robben and Diego Forlan – who I feel have had (for one reason or another)  notable tournaments. And this is what Google Trends comes out with:

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It all started off with a big spike for Robert Green after the USA game – testimony to the awfulness of his error and, quite probably, the fact that people knew little about him. They had to type his name into Google to find out more.

The most hyped player, Lionel Messi, has had consistent attention all the way until Argentina’s exit the other day. David Villa’s popularity has rocketed up in the past week with his cluster of goals, as has the Uruguayan, Diego Forlan’s. Villa’s spike after his goal against Paraguay just about beat Robert Green’s earlier on in total number of global searches.

It’s interesting to note that, in comparison, barely anyone has been interested in Arjen Robben, the best Dutch player – despite the fact that he has scored two goals in four games and been an important part of a team that might win the whole competition.

The Coaches

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Here’s the same exercise performed for a handful of manager/coaches: Vicente del Bosque, Diego Maradona, Fabio Capello, Raymond Domenech and Bert Van Marwijk.

It’s plain to see that Maradona is the most high profile coach on this list – followed by Fabio Capello, who has about two thirds of the global interest. Raymond Domenech, who presided over the French shambles, briefly rivalled the two of them in interest but has now slipped off into obscurity while – interestingly enough – no one seems to be too interested in searching for information about the coaches of either of the finalists – Vicente del Bosque of Spain and Bert Van Marwijk of Holland.

So. If we consider Google Trends to be reflective of general interest in a topic, then, these graphs suggest that it is far better to let the players and coaches get on with it – with less of the microscopic scrutiny – rather than whipping ourselves up in the usual frenzy.

As if.

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Here are the Google Trends results for players and the Google Trends results for coaches – in case you’d like to try some different ones.

Image credit: Eustaquio Santimano on Flickr

2005: social media?

About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:

Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]

Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.

There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.

For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.

• You Tube

Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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• Google

In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.

You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.

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• Blogger

In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.

In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.

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• WordPress

WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’

Indeed.

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• Facebook

Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.

Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.

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• The BBC

Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.

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• The Guardian

And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’

From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.

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• Flickr

Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:

‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.

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• And in 2006 … Twitter

Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of  just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.

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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr

Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine

Thanks to @matthewncube for pointing this one out to me. Three people are bidding on the UK adwords platform for keywords related with today’s budget. Nice to see the Conseravtives in the digital bed with Anne Summers. Full picture here.