Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose
Search Engine Marketing Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
Bill Slawski, seobythesea.com
Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
David Bailey, Engineer, Google
Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Quite likely the busiest session of the day to the fullest house. One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues. The implications and transformation for universal search are still evolving, but they are clearly changing the landscape. One other thing that became clear from this event was that Ask is becoming a serious contender in this marketplace.
Greg Jarboe –
Universal search is the biggest event since “Florida” update. 70% of what I used to know is now obsolete. The patterns are not yet clear in personalization.
News results ranked #4 if you searched for the term iPhone on June 29
In the #8 position, was a Youtube video. We don’t know if it was done on purpose.
July 17, Rupert Murdoch – news with image – brings up a whole new reputation management – be prepared to optimize images.
Early chapters of Henry Potter were leaked, the blog results are on page one of results
Investor relations now is moving to the front page of Countrywide. Few companies have complete control of their brands now on Google.
Unflattering images of Hillary Clinton and that vast right wing conspiracy is building links to unflattering results.
Blogs on Hurricane Dean already on front page. Images will likely come next.
All of the rules have been rewritten – how do I research this? Focus on the upper left links. News seems to be on the top left all the time. Search remains #1 way journalist find information about a company.
Newsknife and Google News Report – be checking this. Your PR people aren’t ready for that yet. If you are not giving a jpg file in a release, start now.
Google News right now doesn’t do video news. Likely to create that.
Social mapping tools can help identify most influential bloggers. In certain categories they show up.
A couple of years ago there was vertical creep session here at SES – I now rank for that term. Not a good thing.
You can’t afford to ignore Universal Search Today
Google is making specialized or vertical content more visible through Universal Search
Sherwwod Stranieri, Catalyst Online
This throws a lot of curves into the theme. Ask 3D and Google cut new paths.
Conventional web pages that once rank well are going to move around maybe down. Other things will move updates.
Number of videos is significant in the Youtube world. Are the search engines using comments as an indicator?
We are looking at it as search marketers. Showed client example.
How to look at it: Google PR, Y! Page links, keyword phrases in tags.
Videos ranking correspond well with views, comments, etc.
Bill Slawski
Why does news, images and video show up there.
I’m not sure I see this all as a revolutionary concept. How do we get out content into our results.
Showed examples of screen prints from each engine for the word spider.
Showed the Google patent, oddly looks quite different than Google’s universal search does now.
Google acquired several Infoseek patents.
Discussed Onebox and log file data.
Ranking in Vertical databases – how do you rank for that vertical?
User behavior – key value pairs, be certain definition and being defined. Questions and Answers work the same way. Html formatting may play a role.
Enhancing the user experiences.
David Bailey – Google
Technical lead for the vertical search.
What are our goals?
Make google.com the search box of first resort.
Display special features for special results
Keep it fast. Keep it simple. Above all, keep it relevant.
Showed example: origami crane
This will continually improve and extend to more result types.
It’s still about the web.
But: think about creating quality content in other forms. Expect similar SEO guidelines to apply.
Create quality content, describe it well and we’ll see what happens.
Tim Mayer, VP Product Management
We are transitioning to a better optimized user experience
Freshness and user intent became relevancy issues.
News, local and other verticals – the possibilities are infinite. Federation plays a role.
Some implantation examples:
Music Artist Shortcut
Movie Shortcut
Hotel Shortcut Inline
Consumer Electronics Shortcut
As we go forward, it’s going t be more about the intent of the searchers.
Eric Collier, Director of Product Management
“We are the scrappy innovator of search.”
Ask.com 3D: SERP Design
We moved the content up top and removed the top links.
Large jumps in user satisfaction seen in both the site analytics and surveys
Increase in vertical channel usage
Starting to see a reduction of multiple query sessions around the same keyword term.
Expect to see a larger percentage of SERPs with blended results
User location will play a larger roles in SERPs
Expect to see fewer web results in SERPs
Blogs, Images and Video results will take online reputation into account when ranking
Pay attention to other search drivers
Other coverage of this important session:
Bonus coverage:
Lee Odden interviews Tim Mayer