The Maine SEO Blog

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Keri Morgret from Search Engine Roundtable for taking the time to live blog many of the SMX West sessions!  Here are a few of my notes from Wednesday, Day 2…

Google’s SearchWiki, Customized, and Personal Search

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)
(Personalized and Customized Search from SMX East)

• For SearchWiki research, Google has actually gone into people’s homes to see what they’re searching for; not only on their computers but on notes around their computer!
• How Google thinks SearchWiki will help people:
  - Bookmarking
  - Improve specific name searches
  - Collect information for a task
  - Look at the RIGHT sites
  - Refinding hard-to-find info
• SearchWiki = explicit tool, Personalized Search = implicit tool (Google does work for user)
• Personalized Search: privacy-sensitive, transparent, show searcher is on and has ability to turn OFF
• Google Preferred Sites – add preferred sites with Google experiments (bases SERPS off of this)
• What does this mean for SEOs?
  Bad news:
  - Hard to collect metrics
  - See how page ranks
  Good news:
  - Easier for people to find you
  - Easier to retain customers who prefer your business
  - Top position no longer means winner takes all!
• From Google, how to deal with these new forms of search: “Make a good website.” (Ingenious.)
• To control personalized search
  - Use search details
  - Disable by appending &pws=0 in URL
  - Log out of your Google account
  - Look for extensions
• Google isn’t PRESENTLY using SearchWiki to change search results
• Not a large percentage of search results are personalized – most are simply due to geographic location
• Both SearchWiki and Personalized Search do NOT have a role with Ads
• There is still an opportunity for newcomers to be found: simply by making your site valuable to users and it will come up
• Get around localized results by changing location, specifying the location you’re looking for
• Right now, SearchWiki is meant for personal use
• Someone leaves a negative SearchWiki comment on your site? Give the comment a thumb’s down and/or flag as inappropriate – feedback is taken into consideration
• As soon as a comment is flagged as inappropriate, it is removed until reviewed
• Personalized results may even happen without your logging in (using IP address)

(more…)

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about Google – attempting to keep up with their never-ending additions to the search world.  Most recently, they’ve launched SearchWiki (as a default setting to their SERP) and a new search-based keyword tool.

SearchWiki

Rich posted a great article yesterday on the flyte blog about SearchWiki.  To summarize, if you’re logged into your Google account, you can literally change your results page – either by removing results entirely or pushing them to the first position(s).  You can also write comments about a result, and see what other people have written.

Currently, SearchWiki does not affect search results; but with millions of people “voting” on websites, I think it’s only a matter of time before Google adds it to their algorithm.  Only problem being…it is incredibly easy to spam.

Search-based keyword tool

This new tool is reminiscent of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.  The comparison is not unlike the similarity between Google Trends and Google Insights.  The data comes from generally the same place, with a few differences in presentation.

The new keyword tool uses your website or blog as a base to search for keywords, in addition to the ones you tell it to search for.  Like the AdWords tool, you see the same categories, plus the suggested bid price for AdWords.  You can save and export your keywords with both tools.

Here are the top ten keywords from Google’s new search-based keyword tool for this blog’s domain, along with the terms “seo” and “search engine optimization”:

You can see the differences in the top ten keywords between the two tools.  The Adwords Keyword Tool pulls this data for the same search query:

All of these tools are great – and can be used in conjunction with one another in order to find the best keyword opportunities.  But, good grief, what will Google come out with next?!?

Nicki Hicks
Does ‘Googlers Anonymous’ already exist?