What’s less clear is just how much Google weights the anchor text in it’s algorithm compared to other search engines. Ordinarily it would be difficult to test this – you’d need to find a huge range of varied sites, all linked to with a common phrase. Luckily, Hacker News is a good example – if you use the phrase “Show HN” (as people often link to their new startup/project using that phrase).

Here’s what Duck Duck Go displays for the query “Show HN”:

While it (brilliantly) has a !bang syntax for searching HNSearch.com, it’s regular results show pretty much what you’d expect – sites that use “Show HN” in the title tag of the page and within the text of the page, along with something like hn-show.com which features the keywords within it’s domain name.

And here’s what Blekko shows:

Blekko is relatively similar, in that it promotes sites that use the word “Show” in the title tag and on the page a lot (maybe not as much with “HN” though).

Here’s Bing’s results:

Bing, weirdly, doesn’t have any results from Hacker News in it’s top 10 – the first result is from FriendFeed. After that, it very heavily focuses on the keyword being in the domain name or in the title tag & on-page text.

And finally, here’s Google’s results:

Other than the first result from HackerNews, not a single listing features the text “Show HN” in either the title, domain or on-page text. They’re ranking for the phrase, despite not mentioning it anywhere on the page, because some of the links pointing to them include the phrase “Show HN”.

Keep in mind, this may be an edge case – typical on-page weightings might be dialled up for search terms that are more heavily searched for.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a flaw in Google’s results at all – I much prefer Google’s results in this edge case than to the other search engines. I just wanted to highlight how Google appears to weight anchor text very heavily – much more so than the others.

Google’s Love Affair with Anchor Text is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I’m not going to explain it all in too much detail because I think those two articles cover it quite well, but as a quick summary:

1. Google suspected Bing of using some of Google’s data in Bing’s results
2. Google set up a test to prove this – by allowing pages to rank for “synthetic queries” (Googlewhacks), using IE8 with the Bing bar installed to search for and then visit those pages, and then found Bing returning around 9% of those results a few weeks later
3. Bing very strongly denied “copying” Google’s results once accused

Bing’s description of what’s happening appears to be around the use of “clickstream data” – it sounds like the Bing toolbar (and IE with suggested sites) looks at which pages you’re on and which pages you visit afterwards. This isn’t restricted to Google – this is, apparently, for all pages on the Internet.

There’s arguments from people saying that Google is right to find this unacceptable, and others saying that Bing is in the right.

I was actually quite surprised by the number of people siding with Bing over this, there’s something about Bing using it’s browser to collect user data from competitors that doesn’t sit quite right with me. Regardless, I was surprised by some of the things that Bing said to defend itself.

Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers

– Yusuf Mehdi, Bing.

What Bing is complaining about here, is that Google engineers chose to adjust Google’s results for specific terms, searched in Google for those keywords and then clicked on those listings. In Google. That’s not an “attack”, nor is it a “trick” and it’s definitely not “click-fraud”.

Bing also mentions that the clickstream data that they’re using is one of 1,000 signals used to determine where a site should rank, and that the honeypot keywords that Google used were noticeable because they were outliers – and as such they only really had the clickstream data to go on.

How much of the clickstream data, is actually data from Google?

But this is what I don’t fully understand – the clickstream data itself. Bing says that the clickstream data isn’t just for Google – it’s for all sites on the web. But of course, Google – their biggest competitor – is the second most visited site on the Internet from the US, so it’s fair to say that a very hefty chunk of that clickstream data actually contains data from people searching on Google.

What happens when the clickstream data is scaled?

The other thing I don’t understand is what happens when you scale that clickstream data. We’ve only seen what happens when it’s used on 100 invented terms from Google’s honeypot test, where around 9% of those queries then appeared to affect Bing’s results. Bing implies that this isn’t a lot, and that the effect is much smaller when it’s scaled – but I’m not so sure. I’d actually be quite surprised if, when this was scaled to something the size of the Bing toolbar’s userbase, there wasn’t a very noticeable impact on Bing’s results. This is one of those things that cannot really be proved – we have to take Bing’s word for it.

Is Bing morally right to take Google’s user data?

During the Farsight video, the Bing rep mentioned that they were only using publicly available clickstream data – but of course, that data isn’t publicly available. The data is coming from a toolbar, and the conditions are, let’s face it, buried away somewhere in a EULA which nobody in their right mind ever reads. These users have legally opted in to sharing that data, but I don’t think they’re aware of it.

Regardless of that, though – Bing is taking data from Google users, who are searching on Google and allowing it to influence Bing’s search results. It may be legal, but it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it.

Flickr image from reway2007.

Bing’s Google Argument Makes No Sense is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

If anyone knows what this device is – please, please put me out of my misery and let me know in the comments.

Flickr photo from Leo Reynolds

Does Google Have A Secret Tablet? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

So, for example, I’d prefer to use something like:

http://sharkseo.com/uk/blog-post.html

http://sharkseo.com/fr/blog-post.html

http://sharkseo.com/de/blog-post.html

You can find out more about some of the ways to geo-target your site here.

I realised though that quite a few people aren’t sure how to actually geo-target a subfolder in Google Webmaster Tools – it’s very easy once you know how it’s done.

Once you’ve added your main site (e.g. domain.com) and verified it in Webmaster Tools, simply register a new site in the same account – but set the new site as domain.com/uk (or whichever your root subfolder is named). You can use that account to geo-target to the UK – the option is in ‘settings’ in the left-hand panel. You can repeat the same process for as many folders as you want to geo-target.

This is also the same method in which you can geo-target subdomains – simply add the subdomain as a new site in GWT.

Flickr image from shastadaisy.

How to Geo-target Subfolders in Google Webmaster Tools is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

It’s very difficult to say with any certainty what’s happening here, but the big shuffles remind me a lot of the Vince update from last year – the theory I had for that was that (amongst other things) Google was shuffling the listings around to check how well each result performs when put in a different position. Does Site A get more clicks than Site B when in position #1? Or #5? Does Site B have fewer people returning to the SERP shortly after clicking on it? (Visitors returning to the SERP soon after clicking the link could be a sign that the result didn’t help them for that query).

Either way, it looks like the shuffling we saw after Vince has just become more aggressive, with wilder and more frequent fluctuations.

While it’s never a normal SERP at the best of times, the results for ‘car insurance’ are a good example of the shuffling results, with changes happening several times a day. I often find the lower positions of page 1 to be quite interesting, as I have a theory that Google often tries to keep the top positions a bit more stable so that the user experience isn’t too disjointed.

I asked on Twitter recently to find what search listings people were seeing in positions 8, 9 & 10 of for ‘car insurance’ and found that there were at least 3 different SERPs that people were seeing – just for those bottom 3 positions. Asking Twitter the same question the next day showed, again, 3 variants of the SERP – all different from the day before. (Everyone that helped me out on Twitter – thanks very much).

This implies that Google, if they’re testing things like click-through rates and satisfaction rates, are likely to be testing several variants of SERPs across different data centres, presumably to help shorten the time it takes for them to find the perfect 10 results to answer the user’s query.

I’m still in the process of testing this in a bit more detail, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. If you’ve noticed any SERPs that have started to shuffle massively (I’m adopting the name serpquake from now on), particularly in the last few weeks or so, it’d be great if you could leave a comment.

Flickr image from Ralphunden.

What’s Causing Google To Shuffle? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I was lucky enough to be in a bucket test, and was greeted with this homepage when on Google.com. Notice the huge logo, massive search box and, for the first time ever, a complete lack of an I’m Feeling Lucky button.

I suppose it makes sense to not have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button when you can always see what the first result is as soon as you start typing, but it’s still pretty strange not having it there.

The screenshot above shows me starting a search, and it shows Google already displaying results, even though I’ve not hit “Search” and I’ve not necessarily finished typing. It keeps updating as I type:

When I first saw Rob’s video about how it worked, I thought it was pretty cool, but didn’t really think it would be all that useful – and that maybe it was just a bit gimmicky. Having spent some time using it, though, I can see just how incredibly useful it is.

Using it for long tail queries surprised me because it was genuinely, remarkably useful.

From finding out the best way to deal with mysql/php queries and finding the right excel formulas, it was just astonishingly, brilliantly useful – it saved me time and led to me finding the right results much faster.

The difference to the way I found sites through short-tail terms didn’t really change, but with longtail terms it made my searching much easier and much quicker. If Google roll out the change to everyone, then I could see how it would fit in with their idea of trying to make the web faster. I think it’s a very good thing.

Google’s Streaming Search: Is It Useful? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

It’s kind of hard to prove that they actually do that in search results when the tilde isn’t there though – you can get a bit of a better idea that they’re doing it when it produces incorrect search results though.

At the moment, if you search Google for Nintendo Entertainment System Data you get electionstudies.org ranking in first and second place.

The reason is because Google has associated the query “Nintendo Entertainment System data” with the term “NES”, which it has then matched up with the American National Election Studies site, because of it also thinks that that is related to the term “NES”. It’s kind of true, both terms are related to “NES” – they’re just not related to each other which is why the search result doesn’t work.

You can see the same effect with the search Game Boy Advance Association which brings up other sites that are related to the acronym “GBA”, including the Girls Basketball Association and the Gay Business Association.

There’s a great example of the same thing when you search for British Home Stores society, bringing back completely unrelated results like the British Horse Society, the British Hypertension Society and the Belgian Hematological Society.

Of course, all of these terms are unlikely to be searched very often, I’m not suggesting that Google’s search results are broken because of it – it’s just interesting to see how Google connects different keywords from time to time. Basically, what’s happening (it would seem) is that Google is connecting together two terms that aren’t really related, usually acronyms, because they’re all connected to one main term. That sounds a bit complex when it isn’t really – so I’ll explain what I mean with a crudely drawn image. The term “Nintendo Entertainment System” is correctly connected to “NES”. “National Election Studies” is correctly connected also to the keyword “NES”, but it looks like Google has connected the terms “Nintendo Entertainment System” to “National Election Studies” incorrectly because of that.

While it’s obviously not worked on the results mentioned in this post, it’s probably produced better results overall – and it’s interesting to see that Bing and Yahoo don’t return results like this when you search for these terms. Maybe they’re not connecting terms together like Google is?

Flickr image from DizDau.

Print me.
Don’t print me.

Is Google Connecting The Wrong Keywords? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

It looks like Google is starting to roll out updates to the Google UK design now. The US redesign has been seen here and there in the wild, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it for Google.co.uk. The new design (for US results at least) makes local listings more important, as they fill up more of the screen – you can read more about Google’s new design here.

New Google Design For UK is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?