Legal Search Marketing Blog

More Google Legal Woes: Buzz Lawsuit and EU Regulation

POOR GOOGLE.....

Google, being the gigantic company that it is, has become the target of legal action and regulatory concern. Just this week, we learned that Italy found Google execs guilty in the case of a controversial video. There's the Google Books lawsuit and in the past Google faced scrutiny for an ad deal with Yahoo! (which they pre-emptively canceled) and its relations with Apple (Eric Schmidt later quit the board).

There are a couple of new legal woes on the Google front. First, a class action lawsuit has been brought with regards to Buzz, Google's new social media effort. As you may remember, Gmail users were none too thrilled when Buzz automatically showed up in their email program and automatically updated their network. Google has reversed course on the automation, but it wasn't in time to stop the suit.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has received antitrust complaints about Google from three companies: UK price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and - irony of ironies - Microsoft's Ciao by Bing. Oh, and Foundem is partly funded by Microsoft, as well.

Google says the complaints from Foundem and ejustice.fr are basically that Google demotes their ranking because they're vertical search engines and competitors to Google. If that's really the the case, that would be like saying Target doesn't give preference to a third party toilet paper company because they want to promote their own toilet paper. Target certainly has the right to promote their own toilet paper over another company's.

Last but not least, late breaking today is the EU concern about Google regarding Street View photos. For privacy reasons, Google will blur portions of their Street View photos. But they keep a coy of the unblurred photo. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party of the European Commission has informed Google that keeping unblurred photos for more than a year is not ok.

These legal and regulatory issues won't be going away anytime soon. In some areas, the problem is just the lack of a legitimate competitor. In other areas, Google is testing the boundaries of data collection. I'm sure it's quite tempting for a company of Google's size to push the envelope but the market and regulatory agencies will act as de facto checks and balances as long as they do.

Google Gains at Everyone Else's Expense in Nielsen's December 2009 Rankings

Google and AOL are up while Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com are down from November in Nielsen's December 2009 search rankings. But let's face it, AOL is fueled by Google, so pretty much all of the gains belong to Google.

 

NOV. 2009 STATS:

The bottom line is that as always Google gets the lions share of the traffic.  Yet both Yahoo and Bing get a fair share of traffic and can't be totally overlooked.   Yet if want to promote your site, Google is the key, both organically and using their pay per click Adwords program.

source

Google Considering China Pullout in the Wake of Suspected Government Hacking

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.

Bing Recommends Submitting to Digg & Yahoo Buzz for Indexing Boost

Here is the weird Bing comment for the day. Brett Yount, the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, told webmasters to submit their site to Digg or Yahoo Buzz to help get their pages indexed.

A Bing Forums thread has Brett saying, and I quote:

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Of course this makes sense. Get a link from a popular site and a search engine will find that link and hopefully index your site/pages afterwards. But I just find it weird that a search representative would specifically name Digg and/or Buzz. I mean, why not mention something else or just talk about the concept in general. Brett could have said, to get your pages indexed quicker, make sure to get links from sites we crawl on a frequent basis.

This is strange for him to say that but a good tip for everyone.

Source: SEO Roundtable

Top Search Engines by Volume of Searches

Google has a market share of 73.32%, followed by Yahoo with 15.78%. Ask.com has 3.93%, MSN Search 3.52% and Live Search 2.11%.

Google is obviously still dominating here and Yahoo is doing a little better then they used to. Plus now MSN is now BING.com and they are doing a very aggressive marketing campaign and Im sure they will be moving up in these results soon.  Its key to have your web site optimized mainly for Google but you should also make sure it comes up at Yahoo and Bing. 

Search Queries Are Getting Longer: Hitwise Report

More than half of all search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words or longer. That’s according to Hitwise data (PDF) released today:

 

As the chart shows, 1- and 2-word queries are becoming less common, while 4-, 5-, and all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks ago.

The takeaway point here is that the so-called long tail of search continues to get longer. As searchers get more sophisticated in how they use Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc., it opens up more opportunities for webmasters and marketers to create content and/or ads that captures these longer search queries.

Also in the same Hitwise announcement: Google’s search share held steady at 72% in January. Yahoo also held steady at 17.8%. MSN/Live Search saw a slight drop from the month before, while Ask saw a slight increase.

source

This makes a lot of sense and is exactly what I am seeing in my legal site stat reports. Thats why its key to not focus that much on one single keyword or keyphrase, especially if it has a lot of competition. Your better off building new pages and content around a variety of keywords that you discover doing keyword research, in order to capture the most long tail keyword searches.  This is confusing and that's why your best off to just hire me!

 

Moving Your Law Site to a New Webhost

At some point you may need to move your legal website to a new web host.  Sometimes you might just find a new webhost, sometimes you might be moving your site to a new web designer or maybe your current webhost either goes out of business or just provides horrible hosting service. 

In order to succesfully move your domain name to a new webhost, you must first have control of the domain name. This means you need to be the registered owner of the domain name and you must have login access to wherever the domain name was bought.  To switch to a new webhost, you must be able to change the DNS settings of the domain name.   

So the first thing to do is have the new webhost setup in advance. Then you need to transfer all the site files to the new webserver so they are in place. Then if you have existing email accounts, its a good idea to setup the email accounts with the new webhost in advance and have the new settings ready to enter into any of your machines that have email for that domain name.

We just helped a Chicago Lawyer move their main website from an older more expensive web host to a more reliable less expensive host.  Then we are in the process of helping an Ohio Law Firm with moving three sites that they have with an existing company and not only setting up new webhosting, but we are also creating new legal websites for Ohio Tax Lawyers, Ohio Family Attorneys & Ohio Bankruptcy Law.

If you need any assistace or have any questions about moving your law firms website to a new webhost, please contact us.

Google/Yahoo Deal; Why Regulators Will Scrutinize Perception Not Just Implementation

When asked about the potential for an antitrust challenge Schmidt told the New York Times: “We would anticipate structuring a deal to address antitrust concerns.”

The big question isn’t really whether a deal between Yahoo and Google is anticompetitive. Nope, the real question is whether regulators are fearful that Google has become too dominant, when it comes to the search engine industry.

After all, if were merely a case of "is this specific deal anticompetitive" Google could point to similar deals in other industries. As the NYT notes…

The printer industry, they say, is a perfect example. Canon supplies printer engines to about 80 percent of the laser printer market, including its rival Hewlett-Packard. They point to many others, including Whirlpool’s making appliances for Sears, AT&T’s licensing its mobile network to Virgin Atlantic and other small carriers, Toyota’s selling hybrid engines to General Motors and Microsoft’s tailoring its Office software for Apple computers.

Viewed that way, an advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo is not a threat. Both companies retain their brand and ownership, with searchers free to make a choice as to which search engine to use.

However, there’s a lot of questions being raised about Google’s dominance. Questions that Microsoft is all too familiar

Search Engine Marketing Definitions

Many lawyers I talk with are confused by the many different search engine terms and abreviations, most don't know what SEO or PPC mean and below are some of the more important definitions to know in search engine marketing.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search (PPC).

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they've entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher's query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

Usually the results on the left side of the page are the organic results and the results on the right side of the page are usually paid or sponsored ads.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine's index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot."

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

The title tag is one of the most important elements to SEO and most law firm sites will not have unique title tags and instead will have no title tag or a one word title that doesnt even match the page.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the searcher's location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Most Keyword Searches Done Contain Two Words

The largest portion of searches contain two words finds Amsterdam-based research firm OneStat.

Internet users who type two words for on a search engine query account for 31.9 percent of searches worldwide. Three-word phrases are used for 27 percent of searches. A single word accounts for 15.2 percent of queries, and four words are used for 14.8 percent of searches.

"Search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo can drive a lot of traffic to a Web site," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat. "It is important that a Webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they have to use."

Instances with five (6.5 percent); six (2.7 percent); seven (1.1 percent); eight (0.5 percent); nine (0.2 percent); and 10 (0.1 percent) words are used in fewer searches.

OneStat.com collects data through its Web analytics services. Numbers are averages. Research is based on a daily sample of two million Web visitors from 100 countries.

This is no real surprise, searchers are getting smarter and will use a variety of keywords to locate your site.  Thats why its important to optimize your legal web site for more then just general keywords like New York Lawyer or Chicago Attorney. If someone is looking for a real estate lawyer in New York City, they will probably type New York Real Estate Lawyer. Same thing if they are looking for a DUI lawyer in Riverside country California, they might type Riverside CA Dui lawyers.