Google Search OneBox Answers Are Getting More Detailed

There are several reports throughout the search community that Google’s OneBox answers or a form of the knowledge graph, are now more aggressive about answering even more complex questions with more detailed responses or answers. When we asked Google about this, a Google spokesperson told us, “we’re always experimenting with different types of answers, but we don’t have more details to share at this point.” Some questions Google attempts to answer now include: [why is the sky blue?] 
 [who ended world war 2?] 
 But some answers might be a bit off or unusual such as: [what are the largest mammals?]   

5 Tactics Super Bowl Advertisers Are Using To Boost Their Paid Search Campaigns

In the weeks leading up to game day, several Super Bowl advertisers have been employing paid search to help ensure their campaigns are found by the legions of users searching for “Super Bowl ads”. While the majority of Super Bowl advertisers still aren’t taking to SEM, those that are have been displaying some interesting tactics that are worth a look.

Here are five trends we’ve noticed from the Super Bowl advertiser ads currently running on Google and the Yahoo Bing Network.

1.YouTube is King

All but one advertiser in the examples below link  to YouTube in their ads on “super bowl” related queries, and even that lone advertiser links to YouTube when advertising on its own hashtag. As BusinessWeek noted, YouTube has become a Super Bowl goldmine for Google. Not only do advertisers drive huge volumes of traffic to the site, but they run ads on YouTube to attract even more viewers to their Super Bowl ads spots on the site.

2. Sitelinks Extend Real Estate For Top Advertiser

Many advertisers are using sitelinks (now part of the Google’s Ad Rank formula), yet Bud Light is also the only advertiser with ads routinely showing all four sitelinks. Bud Light is running multiple ads during the game and is using sitelinks to give users quick access to each ad on YouTube.Bud Light also appears to be the most active advertiser, so far, with paid search ads appearing steadily on Google and the Yahoo Bing Network.

3. Hashtags Come To PPC

Bud Light is incorporating its campaign hashtag #Upforwhatever in its PPC ads. And, Toyota, which had been running ads for its teaser (as shown from Google) below with a link to YouTube, has launched is now promoting the full ad in PPC (shown from Yahoo below). The new ads incorporate the campaign hashtag #Unbornify, which was not used on the teaser.

4. Extending Engagement With Sitelinks To Social Media

A handful of advertisers are also using sitelinks to drive users to their brands’ social media profiles.

In Toyota’s #Unbornify ad shown above the company has added sitelinks to its Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter profiles. While it’s unusual to see so many social networks included in one ad, this approach gives users the option to connect with the brand where they want to (and Toyota has instilled the hashtag in users’ minds no matter where they land).

In addition, all three of Toyota’s social media profiles linked to from the ads have been updated with the Super Bowl ad branding.

Nestle’s Butterfinger brand’s choice of links in its PPC ads also is interesting. It is using two sitelinks, one to the Facebook profile and the other to the teaser ad on YouTube. The main link, however, goes to the landing site for the new Butterfinger Cups product being promoted. Users can watch the teaser on the landing page.Note, the campaign hashtag is #CupTherapy, but is not being used by the brand in the ads or in any of its posts on Facebook.

5. Only Occasional Use of Brand Landing Pages

Most advertisers are driving users to watch their ads on YouTube, the viral measure of record. Yet, in addition to Butterfinger, AXE is another stand out example of advertisers using their own landing pages. In fact, AXE is gives users no other sitelink options in its “Make Love, Not War.” Super Bowl PPC ads.The AXE Peace landing page features a link to the powerful and sweet Super Bowl ad (shown below), but more prominently the landing page features a promotion for the #KissForPeace contest in which consumers are asked to post their kissing pics to Twitter with the hashtag for the chance to have their photo featured on a billboard in Times Square.

The current photo submissions are aggregated on the landing page, powered by digital agency Ideation.

It’s somewhat curious why the hashtag is not being used in the PPC ads as well. However, the brand is buying ads on both the Yahoo Bing Network and Google for “KissForPeace”. In these ads the main link is still the AXE Peace landing page, but they also include sitelinks to both Facebook and, yes, YouTube.

And looking at YouTube, the ad has struck a chord. The 60 second spot went up on January 14 and already has more than 3.1 million views. #KissForPeace has been tweeted nearly 1,500 times according to TweetReach.

http://youtu.be/63b4O_2HCYM

Other advertisers running paid search ads for “super bowl ad” queries include Audi, Volkswagen and Coca-Cola. Each of these advertisers simply link to their ads on YouTube. Volkswagen is at least teasing up its ad’s concept in its ad copy, “Explore what happens with a VW hits 100,000 miles”.

Let us know in the comments below if you spot other advertisers using paid search in interesting ways to promote their Super Bowl ad campaigns.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Try To Build Links Through Article Directories

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a video answer encouraging webmasters not to use article directory web sites with the goal of building links.

The question posed was:

Links from relevant content in article directories — Seen as good or bad? eg. I link my beauty website from a cosmetic surgery article on say, Ezine? Would you do that?

Matt Cutts responded in short said that his personal recommendation is to not upload articles to article directories.

Matt also tweeted his answer to the question, saying “No.”

Google Takes Down Another Link Network, France’s Buzzea

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced onTwitter earlier this morning that Google has taken action on another “link network” named Buzzea.

His tweet read, “Today we’re taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines (Buzzea).”

In addition, Matt added that they are working on a German based link network, “today France; Germany soon,” Mattadded.

This is the latest in a long number of link networks Google has been going after over the course of the past few years.

Buzzea is actually taking offense to have been called a “link network.” In a letter posted on the Buzzea site, Buzzea said in regards to being called a “link network” that they “oppose this assertion since we never stopped wanting to keep the ethical side of sponsored articles focusing on quality and natural links created.”

They did decide to call it quits and in their letter, they wrote:

This marks the end of an adventure for our team but also the end of our collaboration with thousands of publisher sites, agencies and advertisers who have given us their trust.

I suspect in the next week or so, we will see another tweet from Matt Cutts about the German link network they are going after.

For now, those who participated in Buzzea, should expect a notification in Google Webmaster Tools and a ranking reduction. It would make sense to remove those links immediately and stop participating in any link network or something that Google may perceive as a link network.

Study: 34% Of Google Search Results Have Rich Media, 9 Organic Links & 9 Search Ads

Conductor released a study that analyzed the ten blue links at Google showing 34% show rich media, nine organic listings and nine search ads.

34% Of Search Snippets Have Rich Media

The Conductor study showed that there was rich media on the search results page 34% of the time. The breakdown of rich media showed images appear on 28% of search results pages, news 9%, and shopping 1%. You have to keep in mind, rich media in search results is incredibly query-dependent. So, based on the sampling of Conductor’s study, 34% was the number they reached.

88% Of The Search Results Contain 9 Organic Results

88% of SERPs have 9 or more natural search links, with 73% having exactly ten organic results. This shows that while many say the ten blue links are gone, that is, indeed, not the case.

56% Of The Search Results Have 9 Search Ads

Finally, Conductor’s study says 56% of search pages now have 9 or more paid ads. I posted the breakdown of the study below. But, Conductor adds that despite there being so many paid search ads, “eye-tracking studies show that increasingly, searchers are tuning out ads and focusing on organic results.”

An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site

With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t.

The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches to be conducted over SSL, and Bing is currently testing SSL search for those who opt in.

Testing Referrer Data From HTTPS Search To HTTP URL

The default protocol for passing referrer from an HTTPS URL to a non HTTPS URL is to not pass any referrer data at all. Both Yahoo and Bing comply with that, while Google passed google.com as the referrer in this case. How do I know? I tested it by searching Google, Yahoo and Bing for [what is my referrer] and then clicked on the www.whatismyreferer.com listing.

You see the listing in the search engine:

Then if you click on it, the destination page will show your referrer data:

Bing and Yahoo pass no referrer data at all in this case, as it should – due to the HTTPS protocol.

Testing Referrer Data From HTTPS Search To HTTPS URL

The default protocol is for HTTPS URLs to pass referrer data to another HTTPS, because it is being passed from a secure channel to another secure channel. Google doesn’t pass all the referrer data, they pass as much as they do from HTTPS to HTTP, as I cited in the example above. Bing and Yahoo do pass all the referrer data, as they should due to the HTTPS protocol. It passes both the referrer site and the query data.

But there is no way to search for an HTTPS version of a “what is my referrer” site. So I made one. Now you need to search for [what is my secure referrer] andhttps://referer.rustybrick.com/ should show up. As you see, the tool is on an HTTPS page, so referrer data can securely pass from a secure Google, Bing or Yahoo URL but do they? As I write this, Google shows it on the first page, towards the middle of the results. Bing and Yahoo have yet to index it but it will soon.

If you click on that from Google, it shows you that Google is only passing that the click came from Google but strips out any keyword data:

If you click on the search result from the secure Bing search results, you will see the full referrer details, including the referrer source, the query and more:

Why isn’t Google complying? I am not sure. They are encouraging webmasters to migrate their sites to run on SSL in their literature. But I know tons of webmasters that would make the switch overnight if Google would pass query data to them if they went over SSL.

Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing

Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content.

Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google to recognize that these sites are smartphone-optimized.”

The new smartphone user-agent crawler will follow robots.txt, robots meta tag, and HTTP header directives for Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile. This will give webmasters more control, but Google said it should only impact less than 0.001% of URLs.

The new user-agent is launched in 3-4 weeks or so.

The new Googlebot for smartphones user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

The Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones user-agent we will be retiring soon:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)