The Search Blog

A clever way of getting more likes

2011-05-05T15:35:00Z

Facebook ‘likes’ are becoming more and more important as a ranking factor for search engines. Just saw this clever method from Lufthansa for getting more people to ‘like’ their brand/site…

Clever idea!

I wonder if it would be considered as ‘buying links’ by Google.

Google testing new full page preview

2011-04-08T08:29:51Z

I have seen this a couple of times over the past few weeks, but only today finally managed to capture a screen shot…

Google are testing a new feature which shows a preview of the full page content when hovering over the link. It also highlights (using an orange box) the section on the page where the string which was searched for appears. Nice feature… (click to see full size image)

Bing is used to change the past (time travel)

2011-04-04T11:58:38Z

If you have seen the trailer for the new ‘Source Code’ time travel movie, you may have noticed that Jake Gyllenhaal uses Bing.com for a mobile internet search whilst trying to change the past…

Here is the full trailer…

+1: Google’s version of Facebook ‘likes’

2011-03-31T10:55:07Z

There can be little argument that Facebook is the global leader when it comes to owning the social graph of online interpersonal connections. It’s also no secret that Bing now uses Facebook ‘like’ data as a ranking factor for search results. However Google has had some disputes with Facebook, and for one reason or another – do not currently use Facebook ‘likes’ as a ranking factor.

In fact, Google have in the past made it clear that they want to build their own social graph and use that to improve search results. The announcement made by Google yesterday may well be a real boost for building their own social graph, and a blow for the Facebook ‘Like’ button (which has been around for about 1 year now).

What is +1?

Fundamentally it is a similar concept to the now familiar Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons. It enables users to easily, with 1 click (assuming they are signed in with a Google account) vote their support for a particular webpage.

For now, the button is only available for SOME users and only within the Google search results list…

Voting for a particular page can be done with a single click on the +1 icon next to the page title.

Users will then be shown pages which have been voted up by their social network (based on a Google account connected to others by Gmail, Google Reader and other services)…

Eventually Google +1 will also be available to add on to websites (as the Facebook ‘like’ and Twitter ‘tweet’ buttons are today)…

This video provides a nice summary of +1…

So what?

Facebook and Twitter buttons are already widely adopted, so will people bother to add another (Google ‘+1’) button to their sites?

In short – YES. At least I believe so.

Google have actually been quite clever here. They have used their greatest asset (search) and targeted a desire of every single website manager in the world (to increase traffic from Google).

Yes it’s true that +1 is ANOTHER voting button on top of the already widely adopted implementations from Twitter, Facebook and others. Yes it’s true that for website users to use the +1 button they will need to sign up for ANOTHER account, on top of their Facebook and Twitter accounts. But Google +1 does offer something unique which website owners do not get with the Facebook and Twitter buttons…

From launch, it is clear that use of the +1 button will enhance Google search results by highlighting pages which have been voted by a users social network. However, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Google will at some point start to use those votes as ranking signals as well. +1 votes will most likely become a necessary factor for website managers to monitor for improving their Google referrals (as Facebook ‘likes’ are becoming for Bing.com referrals today).

In fact, perhaps +1 will at some point replace PageRank?! Even if it doesn’t I suspect that the ‘fear’ of it will prompt many site owners to adopt the Google +1 button as soon as they can.

A great example of how Quora enabled a valuable and open discussion

2011-02-03T21:28:51Z

A recent post on Quora provides a good open discussion about the best SEO tools available on the web.

Whilst the content of the post itself is extremely useful for SEO, that was not actually what got me excited. What I loved about this post was the way that someone was able to ask a random question about products from three different companies, and within just 1 day have it answered by the founders of each of those companies!

I also very much respected Rand’s first answer which provided incredibly open customer feedback information (good and bad) about his own products.

Rand and SEOMOZ create a great set of products, show open respect for their ‘competitors’ and are seemingly completely open and constructively critical about their own work on a regular basis. In a word of Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogs with open comment boxes, etc… this type of relationship with the online community makes a lot of sense to me.

Whilst I have a lot of respect for the skills sales people have, I can’t say that I respect the tendency many have for avoiding discussions about negative customer feedback, or worst the habit of criticizing competitor products just purely because they are competition. I think that Rand and many other successful people in the evolving world of online communities would agree with me.

Rand knows his company makes great products
Rand knows that his respectful and honest reply in the Quora post would result in equally respectful and honest replies
Rand knows that deliberately avoiding a mention of negative product feedback would simply result in someone else mentioning it in the replies
Rand knows that criticizing a competitor (even in a politically correct way) will simple result in retaliation from the competitor, their affiliates or just someone who didn’t like the tone of Rand’s message

Gone are the days when the only ‘customer testimonials’ are those which a company has chosen to publish on it’s site. Gone are the days when the only way of getting your complaint heard was to threaten with some kind of publicity stunt.

Oh and by the way, the only was I discovered this post was because Quora knows I am interested in SEO, so it made me aware of the discussion in my news feed. So GONE are the days where someone who wants to start a discussion has to proactively go out and find people who are interested in participating!

Quora is just on example of how online communication and reputation has changed/is changing. If you haven’t already, get on top of it now. I will be paying a lot more attention to the site after this experience.

Just in case you are still wondering whether the SEO post is worth your attention, here are the tools it mentions and compares…

SEOMOZ
Raven SEO
Hubspot
In less detail…
- SEO Book
- Buzzstream
- Ontolo

Check it out

Useful info from Google if you have a mobile site

2011-01-24T21:04:34Z

Matt Cutts recently presented some valuable information about detecting the ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ user agent string, to identify the Google mobile crawler. If you have a mobile version of your website, it’s worth taking a look at this clip which lasts less than 3 minutes…

Seller rating scores will impact your SEO

2011-01-19T22:05:25Z

Shopping comparison sites have for a long time been a popular method of finding the cheapest price online. In a recent video, Matt Cutts from Google discusses how the rating scores from multiple price comparison websites across the web are actually used as an SEO ranking factor.

So negative reviews from your customers on comparison sites could be directly impacting your search referrals from Google.

The full video is available to watch here…

Search engines treat meta refresh the same as 301 redirects

2010-11-30T15:22:55Z

SEOMOZ recently published a good post for testing your level of expertise on SEO. Whilst I am pleased to say I got the majority of the answers correct, there was one fact in the follow up post which was news to me! I would like to share this in case this is also a surprise for others.

Meta tag refreshes can be used to ‘redirect’ users from one page to another. The code is placed in the head section of a page and looks something like this…

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=http://support.microsoft.com/newpage.html">

This example code will wait 5 seconds, and then redirect the user to http://support.microsoft.com/newpage.html. The delay time can be used to display a notification to the user informing them that they are being redirected.

Whilst I had previously thought that these types of redirects were not as effective as 301 redirects for informing search engines that a page has moved, it turns out that as long as the delay time is low (0 or a few seconds), then the redirect code is considered the same as a server side 301 redirect code (i.e. the link juice will be passed to the new URL). Longer delays may not be considered the same.

This is valuable news for anyone who…

Has difficulties creating server side redirects for their content
Would like to make it clear to users that they are being redirected (by displayed a short message first)

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Do not religiously follow the ‘3 click rule’. But also think about SEO

2010-11-22T21:38:13Z

How many clicks does it take your users to complete their tasks? How many give up before they complete? I have been at Microsoft for a good number of years now and have heard ‘the 3 click rule’ quoted on numerous occasions. Recent evidence suggests users are happy to go beyond 3 clicks. However before updating your sites and sending your users through many levels of links to reach their goal, also consider the flat site requirements for good SEO…

A big thanks to Court Crawford, our gifted User Experience Lead at Microsoft for inspiring this post.

The 3 click rule…

…is simple…
Never require your users to go through more than 3 clicks to complete a task
The theory being that on average most users will give up after 3 clicks (presumably closing the browser, navigating to another site or simply walking away from the computer).

But is this really still true today? In the current online world of dynamic HTML 5 powered websites, Flash/Silverlight plugins, endless ‘Related content’ paths and rich media engaging web experiences, users expect to be guided through a website to complete their task, using multi-step processes which customise content and options as selections are made.

In fact, this post from uie.com suggest that the 3 click rule is simply a myth (not sure if this has always been the case, or rather a reflection of evolving typical web behaviour). Their research actually suggests that hardly anyone gives up after 3 clicks…

And that a larger number of clicks does not negatively effect user satisfaction…

Please view the full post for a full write up of the research

Replacing it with the 1 click rule…

This post on Grundyhome.com provides the ‘1 click rule’ as an alternative…

Every click or interaction should take the user closer to their goal while eliminating as much of the non-destination as possible.

and the corollary:

Avoid any interaction that eliminates the user’s intended goal.

So keeping the user ‘on side’ by making it clear how the requested action benefits their intended goal, removes any need to limit the inputs and effort required to complete a task. So long as the user knows where they are going, and as long as they are reassured of how each step gets them closer, they will stay on the path.

But don’t forget the SEO impact

But no matter how well designed your website is for your users to meet the 1 click rule, you also need to consider the SEO impact when considering the click depth of your site.

As mentioned in a recent blog post inspired by SEOMOZ, it is important to flatten your site structure effectively to ensure that important pages are 1 click away from high ranking pages (e.g. your homepage), and that other pages are 2, 3, 4, etc.. clicks away depending on the importance of the pages and the size of your site.

As per the ‘1 click rule’, having lots of goal focussing steps for your users is a good thing. Having 23 (as an example) pages for a user workflow indexed by search engines is probably NOT a good thing! A smart website design will ensure that the search engine entry pages for user tasks are optimised and close (in terms of clicks) to the homepage. The lower level pages which the users click through to complete a task, can use a solution such as the canonical tag, or on-page code (Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, HTML 5, etc…) to provide the users with a rich, interactive and multi click experience, whilst still ensuring that only a single strong ranking page is indexed by search engines.

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Awesome Expert SEO advice from the Distilled ProSEO seminar

2010-10-25T18:07:51Z

Lots of great nuggets of information coming out of the Distilled ProSEO conference again this year. Here are a few of my favourites tweets and links from day 1 (Monday 25th October). Some EXTREMELY valuable and up to date information in the links below…

Twitter SEO list featuring #PROSEO presenters and attendees from LAST year and THIS year
Paper.li for #proseo – daily updated newspaper featuring links shared by tweeters at the seminar
Live blogging from @searchpanda on….
- Advanced link building techniques
- How to avoid the Twitter link graph cannibalisation

Top Tweets…

matt_seo Matthew Taylor
Just because you won't rank for a keyword don't leave it off your facetted navigation - it will hit your usability. #proseo
ChrisMdotcom Chris Moore
#proseo the average number of links per page has dropped loads since 2007, but number of tweets/shares/likes has gone up!
KlikkiScott Scott Roemermann
super tip: use keyword research to find people looking for embeddable content (people who will link to you). #proseo
linkaufbau VOLM Saša Ebach
#proseo look at techmeme leaderboard http://www.techmeme.com/lb in one day 60 of the ppl on the list linked back
matt_seo Matthew Taylor
Turn your tweets into content. Summarise top tweets on x. People will link in. #proseo
jaamit Jaamit Durrani
a post on "10 most beautiful train stations in europe" got picked up by the dutch train companies who were proud - corp ego hook
jaamit Jaamit Durrani
mostly it doesnt make sense to 301 linkbait content to a more commercial page. they keep getting links/traffic over a long period

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Bing to integrate with Facebook for personalized search results [VIDEO]

2010-10-13T21:11:14Z

Exciting News! Today Microsoft announced that Bing will partner with Facebook to deliver personalised search results based on your social network. (see video below)

So rather than seeing just anyone’s reviews of the movie or holiday destination you are searching for, you will see the information that YOUR social network has been sharing about your search topic.

As a business, it’s becoming more and more important to ensure that your customers are sharing links to and discussing your business in their social networks, so that their friends will see the information within their personalized search results on Bing.com.

See short video…

Or a long demonstration from Satya Nadella…

facebookinnovations on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Klout.com now also considers Facebook for influencer scores

2010-10-13T20:46:38Z

Klout.com is a relatively new site which calculates a ‘Klout’ score to represent someone’s level of influence on social networks.

Tweet

The score is calculated using a number of factors such as number of followers and percentage of posts retweeted. Up until now, Twitter has been the only social network which Klout has used to generate scores, however I just got an email from them notifying me that my Facebook account (which I have previously connected to Klout) is also now used to contribute towards my Klout Score…

Facebook and Twitter social networks are very different

This is very interesting, because most people have a completely different network of ‘friends’ on Facebook to what they do on Twitter. The more personally and socially connected nature of Facebook (in relation to Twitter) suggests that there will be a significant number of people who may not have influence on Twitter, but DO have significance influence on Facebook through their 1st, 2nd and even 3rd degree friend connections.

Fast Company recently reported that the amount of links shared on Facebook is WAY higher than Twitter, however the click through rate on Twitter is WAY higher than Facebook...

Whilst users may not be ‘clicking through’ as much from Facebook, I suspect that the ‘like’ rate and ‘view’ rate (for videos/photos) is WAY higher again than Twitter click through rates. How do the two types of influence compare?

Facebook is more social, but is it just as influential as Twitter?

Typically Tweeters follow each other for business, or another shared areas of interest. Facebook on the other hand represents networks mostly formed by social connections.

If I share information about the latest Search Engine Optimisation technique with my Facebook network, most of my ‘friends’ will ignore it, or ask “what the heck I’m talking about?!”. If I tweet the same message, my numerous followers interested in the web will be keen to share it with their respective network of web and search professionals.

This does not mean that I am less influential on Facebook. In fact, I have a large collection of friends who live in my local town on my Facebook friends list, so my links, comments, videos and photos about local businesses and events can be very influential.

So what does Facebook Klout look like?

According to Klout.com, my Facebook profile does not seem to have had a huge effect on my Klout score…

Perhaps this is because it considers my Twitter profile WAY more influential and therefore dwarfing the effect of my Facebook activity. Or perhaps my primarily social activities on Facebook make me only an influencer within my small group of local and work related ‘friends’, so my Facebook Klout really does not pack much of a punch at all.

It is interesting to see how it calculates some of the values based on a combination of the Twitter variables (in green) and Facebook (in blue). Here is the breakdown for my ‘true reach’…

So 70% of my Facebook posts are ‘liked’! That seems pretty good to me! Much better than the 4% retweet rate from Twitter. I guess the question here is what impact is reaching someone who has ‘liked’ my post, compared to having someone click a link I share on Twitter. I quite often ‘like’ my friend’s facebook updates which read ‘Carrie had Sugarpuffs for breakfast’, but it doesn’t mean she influenced me…or does it?

There are also amplification and network variables which measure the likelihood that your content will be acted on, and the influence level of your engaged audience respectively.

What do they need to make it complete? And even then, would I trust it?

Whilst there is a lot of 2 way interactions on Twitter, it is more common for people to ‘broadcast’ information and links, with the intention of getting them shared virally. Facebook has less of a broadcast dynamic, and more of a multidimensional socially connected set of networks encouraging 1:1, 1:many and many:1 relationships focussed around friendships, relationships, hobbies and even a bit of business.

Facebook is without a doubt the number 1 store of social connections on the web, however the professional nature of LinkedIn makes it a valuable data store to indicate how people are connected in business. If Klout could pull in LinkedIn data and effectively merge it with FB and Twitter information, they would seem to have a relatively complete view of social interaction and influence online.

Even if they do pull in data from all three, the secret is still in the sauce. I would love to see the algorithms Klout are using to calculate influence (I didn’t want to use the word ‘klout’ twice in that sentence), and would loved to have been in the discussions where they were trying to figure out how to merge Facebook with Twitter data. In fact, without knowing how they do it, I’m not sure that I completely trust the results! Now there’s a dilemma.

It’s all about topics

Whilst it’s very cool to look at your own analysis and see how Klout classifies you, the question is how useful actually is this data?

Of course knowing that I am influential (or not) on Twitter is not useful to any business unless they know what topics I am influential on. Klout is capable for extracting out topics which relate to each users Klout score, here is mine (seems pretty accurate)…

Right now, they do not have a function built in to the site which allows you to search for a topic and find top influencers. This information is available through their API however, and some companies have already started to use it. E.g. www.liveintent.com which enables publishers to connect with influential audiences identified using data from Klout…

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

How to find things online without searching (Part 3 of 5)

2010-09-22T20:15:03Z

This mini series of posts focuses on methods of finding information online without typing a single search phrases in to Bing, Google or any other search engine. Part 1 focussed on check in services and part 2 discussed social voting mechanisms.

In this post I will highlight search technologies which allow people to search the web using photographs and other visuals…

Image search without keywords

This post series is all about how to find information on the web without typing search words, so I would be cheating if I discussed traditional image search (such as the awesome functionality provided by Bing).

However, one particular piece of technology which can be found in Bing image search does warrant inclusion in this blog post – that of ‘Similar images’, which utilises image recognition technology to find images which are similar to those you have selected. So looking at these image search results for ‘Counting Crows’…

I can see a cool looking photo of the band casually standing around, which I would like to find similar images to…

With one click on ‘similar images’ Bing will intelligently match similar photos (but not necessarily the same) and present a page full of casual looking photos…

Neither Bing or Google let you search using the image as a starting point (yet), however http://www.tineye.com does let you upload a photo, or provide a URL to a photo on the web and then search for similar photos – no search words required! This is a great way to search the web for sites who have used your photographs/diagrams without asking for permission

Facial search – fantastic or scary?

As image/facial recognition advances on the web, the power of image search becomes more and more exciting! (or perhaps worrying). Face.com is a great example of facial recognition working well to automatically scan your facebook photo albums, and those of your friends and automatically tag you and your friends in the photos.

If you haven’t yet tried it, I guarantee you will be impressed with the accuracy!

Philanderers, weekend drunks and secrets agents…beware! Whilst you may be efficient at untagging yourself from embarrassing Facebook photos and checking for undesirable mentions of your name within search results, it’s only a matter of time before every single photo/video of you will be discoverable with a couple of clicks – whether you are tagged in them or not. In fact, I think the technology is already there – perhaps there are privacy issues preventing such a service…I will read more about it when I get the chance.

Barcode scanners

A few weeks ago I was shopping in a local electronics retailer for some travel speakers. After being pestered by the shop assistant who was trying to demo and sell me the set of speakers which would get him most commission, I finally made up my mind and asked him to go and fetch a Logitech speakers for me which were priced at £105.

When he proudly walked back with the package, I pointed my iPhone at the side of the box and ‘scanned’ it using the RedLaser app. This app uses image analysis to detect bar codes using the iPhone camera, and then automatically searches for products online which match the scanned barcode…

As you can see, the product was available much cheaper than £105 online. I show the shop assistant the screen of my phone, which prompted him to “go speak to his manager” and resulted in a discounted price of £80 for the speakers The ‘search’ took just 3 or 4 seconds and I didn’t have to type a single search word.

By the way, this functionality is also available free of charge in the latest Bing iPhone app, however unfortunately that app is not officially launched in the UK (where I am based).

Connecting the pieces together

Of course, recognising a barcode, converting it to a product code and then searching for that product code online is not making use of image search functionality, but instead just relatively simple image recognition followed by a keyword search.

Google Goggles is a first effort to connect the pieces together in a way which allows users to search the web by simply pointing their phone’s camera at an image. This video explains how Google Goggles send images from the phone, runs them through image search processors online and then returns relevant web results…

Using Google Goggles still requires the user to make a ‘search’, even if they do not need to type a keyword. As we move towards the future, we will see technology simply present images, related facts or other pieces of contextual information to users at the point of need. Bing.com maps provides a great example of seamlessly ‘searching’ for and blending Flickr photos on top of street side imagery, using advanced image recognition and manipulation to present contextually relevant and valuable information without the user having to even think about the word ‘search’…

Finally check out this video demo of Bing.com maps and take a few moments to imagine the possibilities of these types of contextually aware, automatic, unobtrusive visual searches which enhance any browsing experience by providing easy and instant access to any relevant data on the web…

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Bing + IE9 = the future of search

2010-09-18T09:17:00Z

This short preview video shows how the soon to be released HTML5 features of Bing, along with the superfast hardware accelerated IE9 rendering produces a truly unique search experience, moving us a giant step away from the traditional 10 blue links we have had for so long…

Exciting Stuff!

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

How to move a website and not break SEO [Infographic]

2010-09-05T12:58:39Z

During our recent Microsoft Value Professionals (MVP) SEO clinics, I was asked about best practices when moving a website.

We have handled a number of situations inside Microsoft where he have had to move a website from one domain to another, or from one subfolder to another. I have created the infographic below to capture the process steps we follow…

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

Flatten your site architecture

2010-08-27T08:21:41Z

Recently we ran some SEO site clinics for our Microsoft Valued Professionals (MVPs), where we discussed numerous search optimization topics for blogs and websites they own or run. One topic which came up was that of having a flat site architecture (i.e. ensuring that your content is as few clicks from the homepage as possible).

For large sites, managing the network of internal links can be a very effective way of prioritising newer, more relevant content, whilst also flowing reasonable amounts of link juice to your old content.

This video from Rand Fishkin provides an excellent summary of why a flat site architecture is important, and how to achieve it effectively…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Flat Site Architecture from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Check your Google site links

2010-08-23T20:43:14Z

I was just on the phone to my colleague Bob O’Brien from Seattle, who manages the search strategy for windows.microsoft.com. We noticed that a recently published page had been assigned ‘site links’ by Google, however they were NOT particularly useful..

The site links titles were all cut off, which removed essential product information about each link. Also, the 4 links were useless without the context of the product selection the page offers…

Google Webmaster tools provides an interface to see which content on the site has site links, and ‘block’ them. Bob logged in, made the changes and sent me a screen shot for my blog …

Google was pretty quick to remove the links…

Have you checked the ‘site links’ Google has assigned to your pages?

All about SEO on support.microsoft.com (Audio interview)

2010-08-22T09:06:35Z

I was recently interviewed by the guys at http://mstalk.in to discuss Search Engine Optimization and social media, with an emphasis on the discoverability efforts we go through for support.microsoft.com.

The audio podcast is available on demand (approx 25 minutes long)…

MSTalk.in Episode 14: SEO with Chris Moore

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

How to find things online without searching (Part 2 of 5)

2010-08-19T21:41:02Z

Following on from part 1 in this mini series, part 2 focuses on how ‘liking’, ‘tweeting’, ‘stumbleupon’ and other social voting mechanisms makes it easy for people to find fresh, personalized, relevant content without having to type a single search word.

Do your customers ‘like’ your content?

When I posted part 1 of this series I added the Facebook like button code which enables people to ‘like’ the post, notify their Facebook friends and see which of their friends also likes it – all with just ONE CLICK!…

What’s great about this button for discoverability of web content is that every time someone clicks on it, their friends are notified within their Facebook newsfeeds…

So by making it easier for visitors to your website to ‘like’ your content, your pages will be displayed as ‘recommended’ to thousands of your customer’s friends – without the need for them having to perform any searches. If you haven’t added the simple Facebook like button code to your website, get it done as soon as possible! Same advice for the recently (last week) launched Twitter ‘tweet’ button.

Of course, it’s not only Facebook which offers users the ability to tag and recommend content, this recent blog post from Mashable shows the most popular social networks for sharing content across the web…

Mobile voting of content

It is also unbelievable (or perhaps dangerously) easy to ‘vote’ for content on mobile devices and share the recommendation virally with a huge number of people across numerous social networks, in just a few taps of the screen. This diagram shows what happens every time I ‘tweet’ a news article from iPhone NetNewsWire RSS news reader…

Personalised Newspapers

The ease of ‘liking’ content has resulted in a huge increase in the number of people sharing content on an increasing amount of diverse topics. This means that there is enough data to produce a personalised feed of news based on connections you have in social networks, or based on a chosen subset of a particular network (which may or not be a part of).

Paper.li is a service which generates a daily newspaper of the latest content based on the links being shared most by your Facebook or Twitter connections. Here is MY daily newspaper based on the people I follow on Twitter (most of which are Search/Social Media related)…

Even though my Twitter feed only contains tweets and links, this site shows the actual content from the links, including headlines, images, videos and summary paragraphs. This is truly a personalised, free, daily newspaper which presents me only with information relevant to my interests, based on what my trusted social network is discussing and sharing.

If are not part of a social network of experts on a particular topic, you can simply generate or read an existing newspaper based on a particular hashtag, or based on another twitter user. Here is the daily newspaper for the #bing hashtag…

Considering that all I entered to generate this, the results are incredibly accurate and relevant! Note the first graphic which is a pie chart showing search engine share between Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

Taking the personalised feed of information one step further is this incredible innovative Flipboard product, which takes full advantage of the iPad interface…

So What?

In conclusion… the variety of web sharing mechanisms is increasing, sharing of all different content types if becoming increasingly easier and automated technologies for consuming content are becoming more sophisticated. If you are not tracking which of your pages are being shared, tweeted, liked or socially voted in some other way – you need to start. I will try to cover social sharing monitoring technologies in a future posts.

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

How to find things online without searching (Part 1 of 5)

2010-08-09T12:56:00Z

Getting traffic to your website nowadays requires a lot more than getting your pages in to the top 3 search results on Bing, Yahoo and Google. An increasing number of ‘searches’ are made without typing a single word, or in some cases without users even knowing. Are customers finding your content without searching? Or do they see your competitors instead?

This mini series will explain 5 different ways your customers are finding information without typing a single search keyword, and without visiting a search engine homepage…

Method 1: Check in services

Foursquare has established itself as a major player in the location based services check in arena. Whilst we are still waiting for Facebook to implement location check ins on your mobile app to make it easier for some of their 500 million active (‘active’ meaning users who have accessed FB in the past 30 days), Foursquare has shown that there is a demand for hyper-local and fresh information about topics from the a hottest curry house in town through to the best place to spot rare animals.

Traditional search engine optimisation has effectively NO relevance when it comes to the information displayed to users checking in. What’s important now is how many people are checking in to your business, how often and what they are saying about it. Rewards your Foursquare ‘mayors’, encourage them to evangelise, monitor what people are saying about your business and give them reason to share ‘tips’ with the network of location services users.

Oh…and keep a close eye on Facebook – when they move in to this market, it is going to be HUGE!

Foursquare is by no means the only player in this market. Gowalla and Scvngr are also notable for their number of users and original spin on the core model respectively.

It’s not all about location

Whilst geo based check ins have been the catalyst for this model, check ins are not limited to locations. GetGlue is just one of the spin off services which allows users to check in to a number of different areas including TV shows they are watching, music they are listening to and books they are reading.

GetGlue will even show you which wine people are checking in to the most!…

It appears that ‘Sutter Home White Zinfandel ‘08’ is a popular wine for people using GetGlue. I can even take a look at who is responsible for the check ins to make decision on whether to trust their judgement or not…

Summary…

The increasing popularity of check in services suggests that rewards and recognition such as badges and kudos, as well the desire to share (or show off) information about current activities, is enough of a driver for people to check in regularly and create a valuable public knowledge bank of information.

The information available within the check in services is WAY more personal, local and fresh than information from the top results in a search engine.

Success for businesses in this market relies on engaging the community, giving people reasons to talk about it and monitoring what is being said about your business and that of your competitors.

Have you offered your Foursquare mayor a free cup of coffee yet?

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

How to implement a drop down correctly for SEO

2010-07-28T13:54:06Z

Whilst drop down boxes are commonly used to present web users with a list of many choices for a destination page to be routed to, if they are not implemented correctly the ‘links’ will not be counted by search engines and no PageRank will be passed.

Example of search engines not ‘seeing’ links…

For example, if you look on this page - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935791 you will see a drop down box which is linking to translations of the English article…

However, Yahoo Site Explorer does not register the English article as linking to the Italian (or any other language) version of the Article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935791/it)…

And neither does Google Webmaster tools…

Which supports the fact that neither search engine are able to interpret the links in the drop down box as real links.

Why do search engines not see these links?

If we look at a simplified version of the code behind the drop down box, this is what we see…

There are in fact no HTML hyperlinks (<a>) pointing to the local versions of the article, but instead there is a Javascript function which redirects to the page based on the selection made by the user.

Whilst this works fine when using the webpage, search engine crawlers are not capable of interpreting the Javascript, so they do not register that the English page is linking to any translated versions listed in the drop down.

A crawlable drop down list

Our site manager and SEO champ Charles Li from China recently found a solution to this problem which allowed us to continue to provide our customers with a drop down list, but in a way that the search engine crawlers would recognise the links and pass PageRank to the destination pages. The modified drop down list can be view on this page - http://support.microsoft.com/fixit…

This list differs from the previous example because it is created using ACTUAL HTML hyperlinks, contained within a DIV tag which is hidden/displayed when the drop down box is clicked on.

Importantly, if Javascript and CSS is not enabled then all of the links will be visible (and CRAWLABLE) on the page. So when a search engine crawler reaches the content, they will see all of the links without having to interpret the Javacsript. PageRank will be passed to the destination pages.

The Result

The first version of this page used a similar format drop down box to the first example shown (a form based javascript function). Neither Google or Yahoo registered the links which were contained in that version of the drop down.

After making the switch to the improved CSS/Javascript drop down, both Google and Yahoo! now register the links, e.g. here are the acknowledged links for the Chinese version of the page…

We also saw a significant increase in the referrals to the affected pages which coincided with this change

Author: Chris Moore is a program manager from Microsoft working on Search Engine Optimisation. Follow him on Twitter

5 great Tweets about search from the past week

2010-07-14T16:37:36Z

Here are 5 search related topics which I have found interesting over the past week. Please re-tweet any which you feel worth sharing…

More signs that facebook is moving in to locations services SOON! http://tinyurl.com/2ws9bdt [re-tweet]
Location based marketing is getting big! Dominoes Pizza and Starbucks are just two examples of companies who have used Foursquare to reach consumers and make money. Facebook’s move to the world of check-ins will undoubtedly sky rocket location enabled user data and present businesses with awesome opportunities to offer contextually relevant local information to users. I would love to own a bar or nightclub right now, so many opportunities! :-)
Bing U.S. Search Share Up 7% In June, Google Down 1% http://tinyurl.com/36ywjyu [re-tweet]
…according to latest comscore data.
Twitter May Let Users Pay for Self-Promotion [RUMOR] http://tinyurl.com/2fwlf52 [re-tweet]
Whilst promoted tweets have started popping up already, the recent rumour that Twitter will offer users the ability to promote themselves (and get more followers) for cash is big news! In the past, individuals wishing to gain Twitter had to establish a reputation, build a network of contacts and tweet content which people want to subscribe to and share. Will that change when individuals can simply pay for followers? It will be interesting to see how that one plays out…
Use microformats to make your events more discoverable on google http://tinyurl.com/39ex2v7 [re-tweet]
Microformat adoption has still got a lot of room to grow, but this post explains the benefits and the ways you can get involved if you can show you have quality content with well marked microformats.
5 interesting things about links inferred from google's latest patent http://tinyurl.com/32lzk2x [re-tweet]
Danny from SearchEngineLand spent a LONG time reading through a patent application by Google and managed to pull out some interesting insights in to how Google’s algorithm probably treats links on a page. Whilst the facts have already been suggested by other sources (such as SEOMOZ), it’s interesting to read through and get SOME level of validation direct from Google.

Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft. Follow him on Twitter

5 SEO features for your Content Management System

2010-07-06T09:05:12Z

Imagine you have just received the keys to a shiny new, custom built, special edition sports car which you have had on order for months. You have the keys in your hand, the car is sitting on your drive way, the sun is shining and you’ve got a free afternoon…what do you do?

1) Leave the car sitting on the drive and spend a few hours reading through the detailed user instruction guide

2) Slam the front door of your house, get in the car and take it for a spin around the neighbourhood?

If you are like 99% of the people I presented to a couple of months ago, you would go for option 2. The lesson? No matter how good your instructions/guidelines are, you cannot guarantee that every use will read them. In fact, I can guarantee that the majority will not!

I delivered a presentation internally at Microsoft about content management systems (CMS) and SEO, here are the top 5 CMS features I recommended to increase the likelihood of content production teams considering SEO whilst using a content management system…

1) Auto title length highlighting

It’s easy to set a rule of having titles less than 65 characters in length, however it is important that users understand why this is necessary when they are creating content (otherwise they will find a reason NOT to conform to it). We are currently developing a concept to show the title text as green to start with, then change to orange as the length approaches 65 characters…

And then red along with a warning message when the 65 character limit is passed…

The hyperlink provides information about why titles should be less than 65 characters, and how that helps the content rank better. A surprisingly high number of users simply don’t realise that the primary purpose for the page title is for search titles! Once they are informed of this, it is difficult for them to find a reason why the title should be longer.

2) Warn about similar/duplicate content

As your site matures, content teams grow and the amount of published content increases it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of previously published pages. When creating a new page it is important to find similar content which may need to be redirected to the new page to avoid duplicate content, or which may remove the need to create the new page completely. Similar/related content is also useful to identify for cross linking opportunities.

Rather than trying to educate users to check for duplicate/similar content each time they create a new page, why not automatically warn them about content directly in the content? This could be achieved at a simplest level be simply using the Bing API to run a site search on your site based on the keywords in the title of the page.

If Bing considers a particular page on your site to be relevant to the keywords in the title of the page you are creating, the chance are that the previously created page is a good candidate for cross linking or redirecting.

3) Allow keywords in URLs

It is very common to see content management systems which generate a URL which looks something like this…

http://www.mysite.com/content.aspx?id=1234

…which does not provide any indication as to the content of the page, and misses an opportunity to increase ranking by getting keywords in to the URL.

Whether you achieve it by allowing your users to enter their own URL for each page created, or by automatically generating the page name based on the page title, make sure that your URLs do not fall in to the trap of being non-descriptive and against SEO recommendations. A great example of a system which generates great SEO friendly URLs is the Wordpress blogging platform. In Wordpress the URLs are generated based on the page title, e.g….

http://www.chrism.com/blog/2010/04/03/inamo-interactive-table-restaurant/

Of course steps need to be taken to ensure that page titles are not duplicated, of which there are two commonly used methods…

Do not allow duplicate page titles (this is good for SEO anyway)
Add a unique identifier to the end of the URL, e.g…
www.mysite.com/how-to-write-urls-01231

4) Auto suggest keywords

Have you noticed the Bing ‘Related Searches’ box shown every time you make a search?…

These searches may or may not contain the original keywords, and are based on Bing’s analysis of common customer intent (based on previous search behaviour). The FIRST thing I love about this is that it provides you with easy access to related search queries which you might want to consider for any given search. The SECOND thing I love is that this data is also available programmatically via the Bing API. I am not (much of) a developer, so I have not yet tried this myself, but I imagine it would not be too difficult to pull in this data and present it to users of a CMS as they type page title (please check to make sure you are not violating the terms of use for the API)…

If you have a large website, it may even be possible to generate this data yourself based on the internal search strings from your own customers. The advantage with this approach is that you could enhance the data with actual customer search volumes so that your CMS users could prioritise some phrases over others…

Getting users to research keywords when creating content is one of the most challenging tasks in my job, however integrated keyword suggestions directly in the the CMS in this way would make it MUCH easier.

5) Content lifecycle management

The only constant in life is change…

During the lifetime of your website, you can be almost certain that there will be a need for content to be moved or removed. Whilst content management systems typically enable certain users to do both, they rarely initiate an essential to inform search engines that a piece of content has been moved to a new location, or to prompt them to remove a page from their index. Here are a couple of process flows to show what your publishing systems need to do in order to effectively move and remove a page for search engines…

Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft. Follow him on Twitter

Web writing guidelines from Yahoo!

2010-06-28T23:11:00Z

Yahoo have create a set of writing guidelines for the web, which are actually quite useful and quick to read (I guess it would be very ironic if they were not!)…

http://styleguide.yahoo.com/

Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft. Follow him on Twitter

Beginners guide to SEO

2010-06-25T00:13:05Z

It’s easy to assume that everyone knows the basics of SEO…titles, headings, PageRank, keyword research, etc… I’m guilty of assuming that everyone I speak to (or everyone who reads my blog) knows the fundamentals already – which often results in a confused stare as I throw terms like ‘link juice’, ‘domain authority’ and ‘QDF – Query Deserves Freshness’ in to conversations.

In an effort to provide a reliable source of the SEO basics, I would like to point you to a recent blog post from SEOMOZ…

Introducing the beginners guide to SEO v2.0

Whilst I have only skimmed the post, I have a lot trust in the quality of SEO information coming from SEOMOZ, so would strongly recommend this post for anyone wanting to understand the basics.