Search Engine Marketing blog by ivantage.co.uk

Search Box within Google Search Results - teleportation

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Trimmer) — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:31:00 +0000

In early March Google started showing a search box within search results pages (SERPS) often in response to major brand searches, e.g:

NASA
Argos
FT
Times
Telegraph
Guardian

The official Google announcement clearly felt it was another improvement for user experience. Others are more skeptical, claiming it will cause users to spend more time on Google whilst being exposed to competitive ads and less time searching on the branded site they first searched for.

We expect most large sites to obtain this search box over the coming months as the Google algorithm adds it and we expect it to be enabled or disabled in Webmaster tools under Sitelinks.

Recommendations Regarding Google Trademark Policy Change

noreply@blogger.com (Sharron Lonsdale) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:10:00 +0000

Google have recently made the following announcement regarding changes to their Trademark complaint procedure.

“From May 5, 2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed under our revised procedure.”

To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.
Why have Google made this change?

Google say they are making this change so that advertisers are able to use keywords that are most relevant to their business and to give users the opportunity to determine which ads they find most relevant.

This will also allow Google to boost revenue by forcing brand owners to compete for their trademark term, but on the other hand it makes sense that Suppliers of branded goods should be allowed to bid on the trademark term as they are legitimately trying to sell these products.

What does this mean in terms of Google Adwords Adverts?

Competitors still cannot create adverts that directly include trademark terms
Competitors can now bid on trademark terms to trigger their adverts
These trademarked terms can be dynamically included in the advert text

Our guidance to clients is as follows.

If you are not currently already bidding on your trademark term, initially do nothing, especially if you are already at number one organically for your trademark term. If organic sales from your trademark term show a decline or if you lose ranking position, then bid on the brand. We do not recommend adopting a panic approach.

If you are already bidding on your trademark term, then you should closely monitor the results when the trademark rules are changed and make sure that your ad stands out as being more authoritative than others.

So how can you convey the message that you are the trademark owner in your ads? The use of the words “official site” in your Ad Text is one approach, but it takes up valuable space if you want to say more about the product. Another approach is to use the symbol ® within the text, this says a lot!

If you do need to bid on your brand, then as long as you are bidding a comparable price to your competitors, you should expect your ad to appear at the top of the list, given Google’s policy for Ad positioning, Ad Rank = CPC bid x Quality Score.

Monitor changes to average costs per click (CPC) and resulting positions on your trademark terms. If you see any changes to CPC or the return on investment (ROI) of your trademark terms you may need to adjust your maximum CPC accordingly.

If you actively sell products that are trademarked terms, it is now legitimate to bid on these terms to attract visitors and sales, and we would recommend doing so. Therefore if, for example, you sell Nike trainers, you can now advertise these products by bidding on the term Nike.

We do not recommend that you bid on your competitor brand names, as this will cause issues and most likely lead to a bidding war. For example, if you are an Audi car dealership you should not bid on BMW terms.

We do recommend monitoring for unauthorised bidding on your own brand name and taking the issue up with the competitor concerned if this arises.

Make sure that you have a clearly defined affiliate policy. You don’t want to compete with your affiliates for your trademark term and pay commission on sales as well, so make sure that your agreement clearly defines what trademark terms they are authorised to use.

Root pages of .com’s hosted outside the US exhibiting problems on Google

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Trimmer) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:55:00 +0000

On Jan 8 2007 Adam Lasnik of Google acknowledge a problem that Google has been having with root pages of .com’s that are hosted outside the US. Matt Cutts also of Google, also acknowledge the problem and described how it manifests itself (paragraph 8). In summary though, if you search "site:yourdomain.com" on Google.co.uk you will most likely get the root home page back in the search engine results page. However, try "site:yourdomain.com" on Google.co.uk with the radio button checked "pages from the UK" the root page is generally filtered out. This causes ranking issues if your home pages ranks for important keywords such as your brand on generic USP keyword. However, our belief is that the proportion of people using "pages from the UK" is small so traffic should no be greatly affected.

Our advice is to sit tight until EOP 17th of Jan. If problems still persists a comment on Matt Cutt's blog or at the Google Group thread would be advisable.

Web 2.0 evolves

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Trimmer) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:24:00 +0000

So Time magazine voted "You" as person of the year:

The article

The gist of the article and award being that social networking is beginning to shape social history. Here's an extract
"The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution."

Interestingly, I think, Time Person of the Year has included :

"Previous winners have often sparked controversy - including Adolf Hitler in 1938 and, in 1979, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini."

It supports all we are being told by such people as Chris Anderson in his book "The Long Tail" which he orignally supposed in his Wired article in October 2004.