Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Google Search Engine’ Category

Many in the West reacted negatively when Google kowtowed to the
Chinese government's demands to censor its Chinese search engine Google.cn. At the time Google said that it would monitor conditions in the country and make adjustments in policy as necessary.

Looks like that time has come.

Agents who may have been working on behalf of the the Chinese
government have apparently attempted a coordinated hacking attack
against Google and over a dozen other major corporations. In Google's
case it seems like the purpose was to access email accounts of
suspected anti-government activists.

In light of this situation Google has chosen to stop self-censoring
its search engine results, and may very well have to shut down it's
China operations.

Read the official Google press release here.

Google has indeed removed the PageRank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools.

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was
removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t
focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling
webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So
Google removed it from Webmaster Tools.

This is a good thing and a lot of people do seem to focus on the sites pagerank score but its been obvious for awhile that the pagerank score is misleading and not that important.  Your better off worrying about your sites content and the number of links you have from other well establish legal related sites.

Expectations were high for Google’s Q3 given some of the positive
reports coming out about clicks and search volumes from third parties
such as Efficient Frontier and comScore. Even though Google performed
solidly (almost $6 billion in a still-bad economy) there may be some
disappointment on Wall Street (apparently not). Google’s Eric Schmidt
said “The worst of the recession is behind us.” He added, “We’re very
pleased with the third quarter.”

Most metrics were flat. Here are the earnings release and associated highlights:

Google reported revenues of $5.94 billion for the
quarter ended September 30, 2009, an increase of 7% compared to the
third quarter of 2008. Google reports its revenues, consistent with
GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs
(TAC). In the third quarter of 2009, TAC totaled $1.56 billion, or 27%
of advertising revenues . . .

• GAAP operating income in the third quarter of 2009 was $2.07
  billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of
  $1.65 billion, or 30% of revenues, in the third quarter of 2008.
  Non-GAAP operating income in the third quarter of 2009 was $2.39
  billion, or 40% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income
  of $2.02 billion, or 37% of revenues, in the third quarter of 2008.

• GAAP net income in the third quarter of 2009 was $1.64 billion,
  compared to $1.29 billion in the third quarter of 2008. Non-GAAP net
  income in the third quarter of 2009 was $1.88 billion, compared to
  $1.56 billion in the third quarter of 2008 . . .

Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned
sites generated revenues of $3.96 billion, or 67% of total revenues, in
the third quarter of 2009. This represents an 8% increase over third
quarter 2008 revenues of $3.67 billion.

Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites
generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.80 billion, or 30%
of total revenues, in the third quarter of 2009. This represents a 7%
increase from third quarter 2008 network revenues of $1.68 billion.

Read more….

Google continues to dominate even in a horrible economy, this is one solid company.

The official Google blog posted about the new website translator gadget which once installed allows your site to be translated instantly in any of 51 languages.

*****************

How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50
languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around
the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online
and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of
years to make even a small dent.

Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget
powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's
content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if
their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different
than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically
translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language
is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will
appear.

Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist
of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of
professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation
Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the
contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play
an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid
growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is
greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with
translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.

source: Google Blog

For those wondering about the basics of Google, here is some good information From the Google Webmaster help section.

When
you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you're almost
instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How
does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order
of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as
looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you
exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search,
our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search
results to be returned ("served") to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of
pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called
Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an
algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl,
how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs,
generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap
data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites
it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to
crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted
and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and
we keep the search side of our business separate from our
revenue-generating AdWords service.

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile
a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each
page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags
and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can
process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot
process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for
matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant
to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which
is the PageRank
for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page
based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each
link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's
PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the
user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that
negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those
that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's
important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site
correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.

Google's Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com
search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically
generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these
suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site
ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined
that its content is more relevant to the user's query.

Yesterday comScore reported
search numbers for August. What they show is growth in overall search
volume, including at Google sites (except YouTube). Google has 2.5
times the search volume as Yahoo and Microsoft combined. But
Microsoft’s Bing also grew its share of the overall US search market
from 8.9 percent in July to 9.3 percent in August. Here are the charts:

In the “expanded view” of search, what stands out are the following:

• Search volume declines at eBay, AOL and MySpace
• Growth at Bing/Microsoft and dramatic growth at Facebook (20 percent vs. July)

Bing is for real and moving up the charts but they are still a small player compared to Google. Facebook made a 20% jump which is pretty big.

Google is telling the world what every seasoned webmaster and search marketer should already know: The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada. And while Google often needs to be somewhat ambiguous when talking about how it ranks pages, the message in today’s blog post is perfectly clear:

    “Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

Google’s blog post also talks about an imagined clash between two web site owners, Bob and Alice, over Bob’s use of Alice’s business name in his keywords tag and copying of other words from her keywords tag. Although Google doesn’t mention actual companies and doesn’t reference a specific lawsuit, the video that accompanies the blog post does mention lawsuits that involve the keywords tag and Google’s search rankings. About the keywords meta tag, Matt Cutts says:

    “It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our rankings even the least little bit.”

This is old news and most people know that just putting the keywords in the keyword meta tag has no effect at all, at least at Google.   I guess this confirms it!   Yet really the keyword meta tag hasnt been used for like 5 years or more and never really was that big of a factor anyway.  The Title of each page though is very important, as is having solid unique content on all pages and many links from other websites pointing to your site using the keywords in the anchor text that you want to be ranked on.

VIDEO OF MATT CUTS TALKING ABOUT KEYWORD META TAG

Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team has posted a video (along with a presentation on the Webmaster Central Blog) covering duplicate content and multiple site issues that webmasters continue to face when trying to rank well in Google. 

Greg begins by clearing up a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. This is not the case. That's not to say that duplicate content can't have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself is not penalizing you for it.

Greg stresses that duplicate content is simply a factor on a "by query" basis.  "What's actually happening, is that we're looking at the query that the user's doing, and we're saying that we want diversity in the results we're going to show a user," says Grothaus. He says those who think their content is being omitted because it is duplicate, will likely find that if they adjust their query to more specifically reflect the missing piece, they may just find that it shows up in results after all.

Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not created to be deceptive. There are of course exceptions, which are considered spam. Grothaus says even spam sites aren't being penalized for having duplicate content though. They're being penalized for being spam. Just like some spammers use bold tags, he says. They don't penalize people just for using them. And they don't penalize people just for having duplicate content.

Duplicate Content:

    * example.com/
    * example.com/?
    * example.com/index.html
    * example.com/Home.aspx
    * www.example.com/
    * www.example.com/?
    * www.example.com/index.html
    * www.example.com/Home.aspx

The above list from Grothaus's presentation shows examples of URLs that are different, but show the same content. Google will recognize that they're the same, and will try to pick the right one, (although sometimes they pick the wrong one). Greg says Webmasters are the best people to know which one is best, so it helps to only use one.

You will not be penalized for using more than one, but there are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings. For one, your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL. Greg says that user-unfriendly URLs in search results may offset branding efforts and decrease usability as well. Plus, with multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.

***

I really don't think this brings anything that new to the duplicate content question. It certainly doesn't 'bust' any myths.  I mean the bottom line is that if you use duplicate content, you won't get ranked for multiple pages or sites.  Google is basically saying here that your not going to get banned but its not going to help your overall cause.  It's always a good idea to use unique content on different pages and if you have more then one site, you should not use the same content you used on the main site.   You will never have multiple domains coming up for same set of content, it must be unique.
 

With the release of the new Google search feature of "Show Options", this is going to make certain things even more valuable, such as having videos on your site. Not only having videos on your site but having videos that are optimized for the video search engines such as You Tube or Google Video.

Below is an image of a search of "Ohio tax lawyers" at Google and then notice the Show Options link below the search box…….

Once that is clicked, a new section opens on the left side of the screen with additional options to sort the search results. The first option is to sort the search results by Videos…

Once the user clicks on Videos, this means the search results will change on the right side of the screen to the top 10 results of videos…..

So now its obvious here that just having the top organic position is not enough. You also need to have videos that are promoting your firm coming up at video sites such as Youtube. You also need a blog and to produce content on a weekly basis, but thats a whole different post!

Video SEO is a smart thing to do as a lawyer, right now it doesnt seem like theres a ton of competition, so get in now!

Google's Searchology event was today, and one of the highlights of the event was Marissa Mayer introducing some
changes to Google's search results. This is called "Search Options,"
and allows users to get different results in a number of ways.

When you perform a search on Google, you will see a link under the
search box that says "show options." If you click this, it will bring up a
left-side navigation menu allowing you to see results for video,
forums, and reviews, and view them from "any time," "recent results,"
"the past 24 hours," "the past week," and the "past year." 

This is all really big and they should just make this the default search because most people won't even recognize that option.  Yet it offers a number of different ways to search and this makes it more important then ever to make sure your site is optimized and your doing everything that needs to be done including blogging, video SEO and social media marketing.

There is also the option to switch between standard view, related
searches, the "wonder wheel," and a timeline. The wonder wheel is
particularly interesting. It gives you different links related to your
query.

WONDER WHEEL – "CHICAGO LAWYERS"

This then brings up different searches and if you click on them, the search results on the right side change, very cool!

If you click on any of the other links on the left side starting with videos, different results come up.  So right off the bat its obvious that having a video come up would be a really good thing.  This means for one you have to have video and then like a website, you must make sure its optimized and submitted to the video sites, among other things. 

Then the fact that people can choose to see results from the last 24 hours says you better create some content on a regular basis and if you do, your going to be rewarded with a good listing at Google. 

All of the different searches bring up pretty much different results. So its more important then ever to get your site into proper optimization shape and consider creating a blog and creating new content related to what your firm does. Consider creating a video that promotes your law firm  Create listings at all the social media sites. It's all really important if you want your site to be found by the many people that are searching the Internet.