Internet Marketing Blog » Search Engines

Google homepage background image – Bing style #fail

mercurythread — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:18:48 +0000

So the Google homepage was lauded because it was hugley usable. Removed all superfluous nonsense to allow users to complete what they wanted to do at Google which was search. The white background made Google simple to understand. So I read on Twitter about some horrendous image thing kicking in over at Google; “Google’s turned into Bing” was the first exultation I was greeted with when I entered the office.

I hate it. It’s a serious #fail – it’s not as bad as the whole debacle between Google and China (I just linked to the Wikipedia I feel defiled but I’m in a hurry here) but it’s annoyed me.

bingoogle - Google Background Image

Huge arrows on PPC sitelinks in Google

mercurythread — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:25:47 +0000

I’m really starting to hate the PPC testing at Google – they call it usability improvements. There again I can’t blame ‘em for trying to improve the profitability of their products. Today I was searching for a few brands to see about getting some new life insurance. And I see the following when I search google.co.uk for “Sun Life Direct”:

Sun Life Direct PPC ad with arrows on the sitelinks

Huge blue arrows next to the site links – all that is missing is a couple of large neon signs which say “CLICK HERE” in blinking text to attract even more attention. Yesterday the background colour of the top PPC ads (yellow above) had changed to pink on my machine and green on another computer! I thought I was going colour blind -apparently not.

OK back to follow CTR improvements on PPC sitelinks for a while and determine if this increases the value of these for clients.

Tenders, eastenders and the chameleon search is still awful

mercurythread — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:11:42 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks there has been discussions going on around the way that Google.co.uk result sets are being formed to do with “search engine optimisation” and “search engine optimization”. Two of the better posts come from Sean @ Hobo and Andrew Girdwood from BMM (yes they’re dofollow links to competing sites – I am in a good mood today). But for me the more interesting Google problems still remain in their textual analysis resulting in Chameleon search. Specifically to do with tenders – where I have a client that’s enduring a nightmare in terms of CTR from natural results on this term as a result of this intrusion into the SERPs.

Chameleon search – my complaints

So anyway you’ll have seen chameleon results messing up SERPs all over the place – and the ideas a good one. The idea being that if you make a mistype Google will see that you typed a query that is not misspent but due to the volume related to a similarly formed query it’ll place a ‘did you mean…’ response in the middle of the result set. So basically Google understands that “tenders” is a real word, that if a user has searched on it that you may mean that you want the result set for “tenders” but as the search volume for words similar to this, namely EastEnders in this case, they’ll insert a horrible nasty set of results in the middle of the result set – pushing who was at fourth down to eighth and so on. Nasty.

Optimisation versus Optimization and back to all that Jazz

Anyway to bring this all around and whine about Googles textual analysis a bit further for a while its been removing the did you mean if you search with geographic modifiers. So if you search for “search engine optimisation Scotland” or “search engine optimisation UK” you will see that the results remove the offending ‘z’ which has infuriated a number of folks.

And I’ve just noticed after writing this that the problems in Google appear to be sorted as regards the ’s’ and ‘z’ spellings isn’t it always the way. You write a wee blog post and the issue you mention is no longer an issue as someone has fixed it. Having said that my query for tenders is still returning a result set that is rubbish.

What the Yell are you upto!

mercurythread — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:29:19 +0000

There are some days when I start to hate the ways of the online world, and Colin (who’s used to work with me over the Equator SEO company and is now working for himself over at Boyd Digital) just posted about the hassles and pains he’s been having with Yell. Basically wasting his time with phone calls and not delivering on what they initially promised by a significant margin.

I can’t say I’m overly surprised as I had the same issues a couple of years ago (excluding the PPC hassles he seems to be accruing) – but yell stealing his brand as his research appears to show is taking the whole thing too far. Has anyone else had similar issues with Yell?

Another example of Google Local being rubbish

mercurythread — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:16:55 +0000

It is to Google eternal disservice that the local results for queries delivers such utter rubbish within its result set – too much rubbish. People who are not helping me get to useful data filling up the entire system or trying to get affiliate commissions just wasting what can be a really useful service.
I’ve just been looking for a “hotel in ascot”, fancied a wee trip down to watch some horses and the result set for the ‘one box’ component is awful.

De Vere Venues Sunningdale Park and Maxdonald Berystede – going to a government site. Whats wrong with the hoteliers site. And is the other Sunningdale Park listed with marker “B” not the same hotel
“This is berkshire” does not seem the right website to feature the Ramada Plaza – why doesn’t the link go to the hotel (which is also listed in the further result set)

My general gripe is that the results are not showing the people who own the businesses do not feature even for their own hotels – the results are spammed. The results may not be useless – as the pages you end up on contain information. But they are certainly not useful.

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to hack through Google Local and see what if anything can be done to these sorts of rubbish results to make them better.

Intelligence (Beta) option in Google Analytics

mercurythread — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:01:06 +0000

I’ve just logged into Google Analytics, and found a new option just below the dashboard option listed as Intelligence Beta. Can’t find anything about it on the Google Blog

It would appear to allow the functionality to set trigger points for the website in relation to the traditional Google Analytics metrics and dimensions. It looks like it could be useful for setting indicators on pages when things are working as part of tests etc – has a change altered the bounce rate by a certain degree etc. Could also be useful for inputting monthly revenue targets and ask it to email out when a channel reaches target, or when conversion falls (useful if you’re testing a new booking engine on a website) etc.

Am away to test mes about with this for a bit and will post back any findings etc.

Google Logo Changes

mercurythread — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:21:26 +0000

Every day you go to Google they seem to have a new logo. Its getting to be a bit dull now – it was fun to see a changed logo every so often but now its just silly. I cant remember the last time I actually saw the good old fashioned Google Logo.
That said todays logo made me chuckle:

Reminded me of the whole ‘miserable failure‘ link bomb stuff as a result of the link between the Hungry Caterpillar and Dubya.

Online Google Analytics Training

mercurythread — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:17:12 +0000

Just got an email from PPC Andy about this Google offering online training in Google Analytics. I’m trying to pencil in time over the next few weeks to run through some of the stuff they’ve got listed – I really like messing about with the custom reporting modules just now but it looks like there is far more I could be doing with these.

Click here to go to the Google Analytics training at the Google Conversion University.

Google.com – Any Time, Any Language, Any File

mercurythread — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:23:44 +0000

I’m not on google.com very often – most of my clients work in google.co.uk as their main traffic driver (as they’re in the UK) but today I was running some tests in google.com and I started to get different lopoking result sets:

WTF is Google Doing

So the bit in red is the part where I could refine my result set by Any Tim, Any Language and Any File. By changing these variables you get different results within the new limits – its like the advanced search parameters you can select anyway.

The request URL also changed as for once I acturally hit the google search button rather than using a toolbar:

Thought I’d post as it looked like an intersting little change over at Google.

You, Me, Carpark, NOW…

mercurythread — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:21:12 +0000

Always liked the ring of that phrase. Far better than ‘Hi, how are you?’. Anyway have been running about the web trying to work out WTF Google has been upto recently – results are so screwey its half cock up (think Chris Iwelumo against Norway) and half comedy show (Homer Simpson’s been left in charge of the big set of Google buttons and smoking crack).

That’s an aside I just thought I’d post a cool image that I found over @ crackunit (nice blog – you should read his description of ‘digital planning‘).

If the answer is no – then I guess you must be doing PPC for a living – poor souls…