Tag Archives: ecommerce

In-Depth Article Pages May Be Killing An eCommerce Site On Google

Posted on June 20, 2012 by

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the possibility that good quality article pages are detrimental to an eCommerce site, and how it might have been impacted by Panda. Continue reading →

Building Blocks of Digital Attribution: How to get started with Google’s attribution tools

Posted on June 8, 2012 by NewSunSEO

(Cross-posted from the Analytics Blog ) What are the key steps to getting started with marketing attribution? Are you ready to move beyond the “last click” attribution model? How can you use Google’s tools to better understand your customer’s journey and calculate the impact of your digital marketing channels? To help answer these questions, we’ve put together a series of webinars on attribution: Attribution Insights from Google and Econsultancy (4/26/2012) – watch recording here Building Blocks of Digital Attribution (5/24/2012) – watch recording here Search Attribution: AdWords Search Funnels (6/20/2012) – register here Cross-Channel Attribution: Multi-Channel Funnels – registration details coming soon Next Steps with Attribution – registration details coming soon If you didn’t have a chance to catch last week’s webinar on Building Blocks of Digital Attribution, it’s a great place to start your attribution journey — you can watch the recording above. During the webinar, Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution and Multi-Channel Measurement, discussed how to lay the foundation for digital attribution. First and foremost, it’s important to get your organization ready. In our work with customers and our recent attribution research, we’ve discovered that many companies try to pursue attribution before their culture or their data is ready. In the webinar, Bill describes the steps and the potential pitfalls to make sure your company is heading in the right direction. Continue reading →

Connecting shoppers and great stores online

Posted on June 7, 2012 by NewSunSEO

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog Online shopping is great for many reasons, but most of all it’s a convenient and fast way to turn your intent to buy that new pair of running shoes, for example, into an actual purchase. But shoppers tell us they’re often nervous about buying from online stores they don’t know. We created the free Google Trusted Stores program to help solve this problem. When shoppers see the Google Trusted Store badge, they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase. Continue reading →

Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros – SMX Advanced 2012

Posted on June 6, 2012 by NewSunSEO

Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros – SMX Advanced 2012 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips . What’s this techy session about? Here’s the description on the agenda: Using the pagination tag with optional parameters, sort orders, and filters. Are there still reasons to use robots.txt or noindex? Can a canonical tag really replace a 301? How do you keep your IIS=based site from infinite redirect loops when you canonicalize default page names? And what about rel=alternate href=lang? We’ll go through the issues step by step so you can clear up the clutter on your site, maximize crawling and indexing, and eliminate duplicate content risks Continue reading →

Hardcore SEO and Social Power Tools – SMX Advanced 2012

Posted on June 5, 2012 by NewSunSEO

Hardcore SEO and Social Power Tools – SMX Advanced 2012 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips . Those following SMX Advanced along at home can check out #smx #14C on Twitter. There are going to be a lot of tools here. Many are explained in a sentence. Continue reading →

Building a better shopping experience

Posted on May 31, 2012 by NewSunSEO

(Cross-posted from the Google Commerce blog ) Truly great search is all about turning intentions into actions, lightning fast. In the early days of Google, users would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and they’d move on happy. Today people want more. When searching for great local restaurants, people want places to eat right there on the results page, not another click or two away. It’s the same with hotels, flight options, directions and shopping. Continue reading →

The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages

Posted on April 27, 2012 by

Huge Update Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries , the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the “commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money” category. Based on the number of complaints online about it ( there is even a petition! ) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update. Spam vs OOP Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization . However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer. A day after declaring that the name didn’t have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update Continue reading →

Updates to Google Merchant Center Terms of Service

Posted on March 29, 2012 by NewSunSEO

(Cross-posted from the Google Commerce blog ) Back in January, we announced our new Google Terms of Service to provide a more consistent experience for users across Google’s products. Starting today, March 29, Google Merchant Center will be covered by the new Google Terms of Service along with a short set of additional terms and conditions specific to Merchant Center. While the substance in the additional Merchant Center terms and conditions remains unchanged from the previous version, the new additional terms and conditions are shorter and reworded to be easier to understand. We encourage you to take the time to review the new Google Terms of Service along with the additional Merchant Center terms and conditions . Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Senior Product Manager, Google Merchant Center team Continue reading →

Interview of Jonah Stein

Posted on March 16, 2012 by

I was recently chatting with Jonah Stein about Panda & we decided it probably made sense to do a full on interview. You mentioned that you had a couple customers that were hit by Panda. What sort of impact did that have on those websites? Both of these sites saw an immediate hit of about 35% of google traffic. Ranking dropped 3-7 spots. The traffic hit was across the board, especially in the case of GreatSchools, who saw all content types hit (school profile pages, editorial content, UGC) GreatSchools was hit on the 4-9 (panda 2.0) update and called out in the Sistrix analysis. How hard has GreatSchools been hit? Sistrix data suggested that GreatSchools was loosing about 56% of Google traffic. The real answer is that organic Google-referred traffic to the site fell 30% on April 11 (week over week) and overall site entries are down 16%. Total page views are down 13%. Continue reading →

Branding & The Cycle

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

Since it took me a few hours to put together my SMX presentation I figured it was worth sharing that information on the blog as well. This post will discuss examples of how Google has dialed up their brand bias over time & points to where Google may be headed in the future. Note that I don’t have anything against them promoting brands, I just think it is dishonest to claim they are not. Against All Odds When analyzing Google’s big-brand bias the question is not “do some small sites manage to succeed against all odds” but… What are the trends? What are the biases? Quotable Quotes Eric Schmidt once stated that “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired.” We have a fear of the unknown. Thus that which we have already experienced is seen as less risky than something new & different. This is a big part of why & how cumulative advantage works – it lowers perceived risk. Continue reading →