Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Aiming to make its search results more “developer friendly,” Bing says it has streamlined API, code and non-alphanumeric queries, made software download searches safer and added instant answers to the top of search results for Microsoft-related technology queries.

Using a side-by-side comparison against Google search results for a “c# hashtag example” query, Bing illustrated how code-related searches on Bing now include the actual code near the top of the results:

The search engine says it is also paying attention to queries with non-alphanumeric characters, such as “::(scope), ++(operators), and () (function):

Bing has given special treatment to such technical queries, so that the context is preserved and we show relevant results on top.

In addition, Bing has updated software related searches as well. Using factors like cost, download site, reviews, related products and safety, Bing claims it delivers more relevant and safer software results from reliable sources.

As an example, Bing used a search for Audacity software to show how its entity pane includes a product description with the software’s official logo, cost information, trusted download links and product reviews:

Making sure not to leave its own product out of the loop, Bing also launched instant answers for Microsoft technology related queries.

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6 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet - Whiteboard Friday

From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
 

 

 Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, I'm going to tackle a subject around some of these changes that a lot of us in the marketing and SEO fields thought Google would be making, but weirdly they haven't.
This comes up because I talk to a lot of people in the industry. You know, I've been on the road the last few weeks at a number of conferences -- Boston for SearchLove and SMX Munich, both of which were great events -- and I'm going to be heading to a bunch more soon. People have this idea that Google must be doing these things, must have made these advancements over the years. It turns out, in actuality, they haven't made them. Some of them, there are probably really good reasons behind it, and some of them it might just be because they're really hard to do.
But let's talk through a few of these, and in the comments we can get into some discussion about whether, when, or if they might be doing some of these.

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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Can Improve Our Algorithms For Authorities On Topics

In an interesting video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, Matt answers the question on how Google separates the concept of popularity from authority.

The truth is, he answered that question quickly by saying popularity and authority are two different things. The example he gave was that porn sites are often way more popular than government or organization sites but government sites are often more authoritative than porn sites. So the two concepts are different.

Matt then explained in more detail the concept of being popular within a topic, or maybe being more authoritative within a topic. So by query or class of query, how does Google determine which site is more relevant or authoritative for a query.

Matt said that Google is working on new algorithms to do a better job at that. He said Google showing sites that “actually have some evidence that it should rank for something related to medical queries. And that is something where we can improve the quality of the algorithm even more.”


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SEO Strategy Has Changed, But Has Your Reporting Structure?

As SEOs, we all generate ranking reports for our keywords on a regular basis. Maybe weekly or monthly,  but we all do it at some point. With so many changes in the last few years (or months, even!)  do you really think ranking reports are the only metric to track SEO efforts? I don’t think so, because:

1. Now SEOs have to use lots of keywords variation while doing link acquisition, because exact match anchor keywords can be dangerous.
2. Google moved entirely to secure search and stopped providing keywords data in all Analytics tools
3. Hummingbird update has changed the way it serves results. Now Google understands the user search queries and serves the results based on its understanding, instead of just keywords typed-in.

With these updates, how can a small ranking report of ONLY targeted keywords prove SEO efforts? It cannot. Efforts of SEOs are no longer limited to targeted keywords, so why should we limit our reporting?

Difference between Old Reporting and New Reporting

As a SEO, you put effort into increasing accessibility, content marketing, quality link acquisition, and generating social signals just to get rankings in search engines. But these efforts also help websites get referral traffic (if quality content marketing or link acquisition is done) and increase in brand awareness (if social media strategies are successful). Also, when using diversity of keywords in on-page and off-page optimizations, you also help increase search engine rankings for other (non-targeted) keywords. Are you all reporting these metrics to your clients or bosses? If not, you are undervaluing yourself and your work.
So, how do you make sure you are reporting all of the benefits of your work? The reports I recommend for any SEO Campaign are as follows.

Activities Report

Pretty self explanatory, but often overlooked. This report should include all the activities you completed. For example, what content you marketed and where, what infographics you distributed and where, and any other action you took that resulted in benefits for the client. 

Monthly Activities Reporting

Ranking Report

Ranking Report should not be limited to targeted keywords, but must be on wider scale.

• For Example: If you are targeting “Sport Shoes”, and while optimization you also use different variations like “white sport shoes” and “red sport shoes”, then you should also include them in your ranking report.

Targeted + Variations of Keywords Ranking Reporting

Total Reach Report

This should include direct, referral, and search traffic. Why? Because your efforts may help increase brand awareness, so direct traffic and content and social media marketing referral traffic would increase as well.

Direct + Referrals + Search Engines Traffic Reporting

Endorsements Report

This report should include increases in the total number of backlinks, domain and page authority, increase in social engagement, etc.

Above Graph Shows Number of Links Increased, and Below Graph Shows Number of Facebook Likes Increased

Conversions Tracking Report

For every business, conversion is the ultimate goal. So, this is one of the most important metrics to track and report. It can be based on the number of inquiries, average time on site, decrease in bounce rate, and so forth.

Increase in number of Leads (contact request, quote request, etc.)

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Hiding From That Google Penalty? It May Find You At Your New Home

Did you know that even if you try to run away from your Google penalty, it might end up finding you anyway? In a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, hosted by Google’s John Mueller, John said that even if you move your penalized site to a new domain name and don’t redirect the penalized site, Google may still find it and pass along the bad signals.                                                                

In the video, 23 minutes in, John answers my question about penalties following sites. He said that if the site is extremely similar and you simply move the site from domain A to domain B, that Google may pick up on the site move without you even giving them signals of the move. So even if you do not set up 301 redirects or use the change address tool in Google Webmaster Tools, Google may indeed know that you moved from domain A to domain B and pass along all the signals.

In that case, if a site is penalized, simply moving it to a new domain name might not be enough. You might have to go the extra mile and rebuild the site, content and user interfaces to convince Google it really is a new site.

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Google In-Depth Articles Adds Links To More In-Depth Articles

Google's in-depth articles just got an update. Google announced it on Google+ highlighting two new features.
(1) A link under the 3 in-depth articles to show more in-depth articles
(2) Explore links to other topics and queries that will show more search results that contain in-depth articles.
Here is a picture of a search for [federal reserve] that shows these two features:

Rubén Gómez documented how to search Google' in-depth articles with a URL parameter addition. Specifically adding &ida_m=1 to the end of your search URL.

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Google’s Hummingbird Takes Flight: SEOs Give Insight On Google’s New Algorithm

On the eve of its 15th birthday last week, Google revealed a new search algorithm named Hummingbird. Designed to be more precise and provide faster query results, the algorithm is based on semantic search, focusing on user intent versus individual search terms.

As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan explained in his FAQ: All About the New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm:

Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query – the whole sentence or conversation or meaning – is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

While the official Hummingbird announcement was made last week, most reports show it began rolling out a month ago. Unlike Google’s Penguin and Panda updates to its existing algorithm, Hummingbird is a complete replacement. Google’s search chief Amit Singhal told Danny Sullivan that Hummingbird represents the first time since 2001 a Google algorithm has been so dramatically rewritten.

With more than a month since the new algorithm’s initial release, I asked a collection of SEO practitioners their opinions on Hummingbird now that it has an official name.

“Hummingbird is a definite expansion of Google’s semantic capability evident at the search interface level that reveals, significantly, two things,” said David Amerland, search engine expert and author of Google Semantic Search, “First, Google has increased its ability to deal with complex search queries which means that it also has got better at indexing entities in Web documents. Second, it has got a lot better at relationally linking search queries and Web documents which means that its Knowledge Graph must be considerably enriched.”

Amerland goes on to explain how Google’s move toward semantic search will benefit SEO practices:

From a strategy point of view this opens the horizon for companies and webmasters considerably. From a practical perspective, the need to identify the USP of each business and become authoritative within it is now a key criteria for continued SEO success. The comparison element that has been integrated suggests that semantic mark-up may begin to confer an advantage now when it comes to helping index information in products and services.

He emphasizes the importance of content not being left in isolation, but instead shared across social networks via identified influencers. “This is not something that can or will happen at the drop of a hat,” said Amerland, “It requires time and commitment to building a relationship with influencers and sharing with them content that is of real value to their network.” Quick SEO, according to Amerland, “Is now firmly in the past.”

Christy Belden, vice president of marketing and media at LEAP, agrees that Hummingbird’s focus on semantic search will continue to drive SEO in the right direction. “Google has been talking about semantic language and understanding the meaning behind search for quite some time,” said Belden, “With more users searching via mobile and voice, the Hummingbird update makes a lot of sense.”

Belden confirmed her agency has not witnessed any changes to their client’s search results during the last month Hummingbird has been running. “We don’t anticipate making any dramatic changes in what we are doing,” said Belden, “What we are talking about is how we create quality, engaging, shareable, linkable content. It has become a core piece of our SEO strategy.”

SEO consultant and president of Archology Jenny Halasz commented on Google’s recent decision to make search term data ’100% not provided’ and how it relates to the new Hummingbird algorithm. “It’s becoming less and less about the keyword and more about the intention behind it. We see that with all the recent changes, but especially with Hummingbird,” said Halasz, “There’s no doubt that not having keywords provided will make it a little harder to discover customer intent, but there are a lot of other ways to get clues about that, including actively engaging with your customers on social media and such.”

Halasz believes SEOs have become so keyword focused that they’re putting emphasis on the wrong things, explaining that many are, “Trying to reverse engineer data that really isn’t actionable.” She thinks SEO should be less about keyword data and more about customer engagement.

“People who’ve been doing things like looking at their bounce rate on a page and trying to match the people who bounced to what they searched are missing the forest for the trees in my opinion,” said Halasz, “It’s not the specific keyword they used, it’s what they were looking for on that page. Did the page deliver? Clearly not since they bounced. So what could be better about the page? Or your information architecture overall?”

Trond Lyngbø, a senior SEO strategist and partner at Metronet in Norway,  is excited about Hummingbird and has been forecasting Google’s the algorithm updates since December 2012. “It’s a good thing. Google is trying to find the intent behind the queries, and offer a solution,” said Lyngbø, “I look forward to seeing how it evolves as Google’s Knowledge Graph expands, especially how successful Google will be when it comes to local searches via mobile devices.”

In a post by Lyngbø on SEOnomics.com last December, the SEO insider wrote, “Trust is now king,” explaining, “The primary goals of semantic search is weeding out irrelevant resources from SERPs.”

Even though the post was published ten months before the new search algorithm was announced, Lyngbø’s tips for SEOs are especially relevant in light of the Hummingbird release:

• Businesses must understand and adapt to semantic search and the knowledge graph.

• Positioning yourself to be the provider of answers that people are seeking.

• Identify intent, needs and problems. Provide solutions and answers. Look at queries and what they really need. Give them what the people behind the queries want.

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Announcing the 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors Results

I'm pleased to announce the full results of this year's Local Search Ranking Factors survey were published earlier this morning. (The pie chart below is just a teaser.)
Those of you who attended MozCon a couple weeks ago got a sneak preview of these results, but I'm guessing that few of you had a chance to fully digest them in the 14.2 seconds I spent on the slides in which I presented them. Let's dive in!

If this is the first time you've heard of the Local Search Ranking Factors, most of the background can be found on the results page itself. I'll highlight a couple of changes for this year:

• As I was putting the survey together this year, I thought to myself, "You know, there's really no single 'local algorithm' at Google anymore" — if, indeed, there ever was one. This year is our group's first effort to help readers distinguish between the thematic signals that have more or less prevalence depending on the result type Google is showing (localized organic, pack/carousel, or maps).
• Given that a large chunk of the audience for this survey over the years has been agency owners and agency representatives — at least judging by the emails I've received — I decided to try to cater to this audience a bit more this year. Guessing that most of you have already read previous surveys and understand the basics, I also asked the 35 experts to score the same factors according to what they felt made the most difference in competitive markets. So for those of you who already have the basics covered, pay attention to that second column of results.
• I added personalization as a thematic signal to ask about this year. Frankly, I was surprised it wasn't considered a larger factor on mobile results. Of all the factors on the list, I think this one will be the most interesting to revisit in 2014, as searchers and experts alike become more and more familiar with the new Google Maps.

By and large, the primary factors seem to have stayed largely the same for the past couple of years:

• Proper category associations
• A physical address in the city being searched
• Consistent, high-quality citations from sources that are:
  
  • Authoritative
  • Trustworthy
  • Industry-relevant
• Your NAP information featured clearly on your website
• Your location as a keyword in title tags and headlines
• A smattering of reviews on both Google and third-party sites
• A handful of high-quality inbound links

Though I wanted to give the other 34 experts "the floor" on the survey page itself, I do want to comment about a couple of responses I found particularly interesting:

• Despite Google's massively-hyped integration of its Google Plus and Google Places platforms just over a year ago (a process that is far from complete, by the way), social signals still seem to play a relatively small role in rankings — just 6.3% overall. But the consensus seems to be that the place to begin would be rel=author tag implementation. This was suggested as the #22 priority in competitive markets, versus #34 as a foundational priority, and several experts mentioned it in their comments.
• Perhaps the most surprising factor was that reviews from authority reviewers were rated the #3 competitive difference-maker. If you're in a competitive market, I'd encourage you to pay special attention to Google's City Experts program, and think about checking out this Twitter/Followerwonk strategy I detailed in January.
• As we move into a world where maps are becoming the local search paradigm, it's remarkable to me just how little effect (less than 25%) the primary factors in traditional SEO — on-page optimization and inbound links — are judged to have on rankings.
• Meanwhile, Google continues to emphasize these factors in its localized organic results (judged by the experts to be right around 50%), which should give businesses without a physical location some measure of consolation.
• As far as negative factors go, call-tracking numbers and business name keyword-stuffing continue to be some of the most egregious offenses you can make in local search.

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