Not too long ago a document was making the rounds of the Internet that appeared to be the newest official Google Quality Guidelines document.  This document, most people hoped, would hold the secrets to ranking well within Google.

Now, you might wonder how this can happen.  After all, Google is especially secretive about what it takes to rank well within their site so how could it possibly be that the document used by Google Raters made it’s way online?  Was it a fake?  A distraction?  Something conjured up by a savvy online marketer to gain exposure?  Sounds very conspiracy-theorist doesn’t it?

Well, it’s actually not as exciting as one might think.  The fact is, Google hires folks from all around the world to do work for them and help them detect whether or not a particular web site should be ranked where it is based upon a variety of factors.  These people that Google hires, receive a document that tells them what specifically to look for and how to determine the merits of a site.  Due to the vast numbers of people who do this work, it’s not unheard of for one of these documents to make its way online.

The document (which has since been taken down online at the request of Google), contained an area that talked about spam; and how to determine what should be flagged as spam and what should not.

Whenever one of Quality Raters took a look at a website, it is their job to mark a site as:

• Spam
• Not Spam
• Maybe Spam

Pretty basic right?

The criteria for marking a web page as spam should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been in the industry for even as little as a few months.  It’s really very basic knowledge, but just to clear up any confusion, here are the definite “no-no’s” when it comes to your own site (and which you can also read here:  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3).

• Don’t use cloaking;
• Don’t use hidden text;
• Don’t use framed pages;
• Don’t keyword-stuff your URL’s;
• Don’t use JavaScript Redirects
• Etc.

Again, pretty common sense stuff.

But, what you don’t see here is that according to this document, Google Raters are to mark pages without any useful content and designed only to make money, as spam.

There’s no doubt that you’ve come across these pages yourself.  These are the ones that have domains parked on them and where there is nothing more than a listing of ads; pages that are chock full of ads that have very little unique content on them, etc.

And yes, it should be noted that even if a site is attempting to generate income using AdSense ads (Google’s own product), that this will likely be marked as spam as well.

As a matter of fact, the blatant abuse of this has likely prompted Google to recently announce at PubCon that they (Google) will be taking a look at content that is immediately above the fold on a web page.  The assumptions are that Google will begin to penalize those sites that show ad-related content above the fold; above the fold meaning the content you can see on a web page without needing to scroll down.

Which brings me back to the whole point of the title of this post.  Does it make a difference in where you rank if you aren’t trying to sell anything?

Well, yes, and no.  We don’t know how sites are going to be affected by this new rule of having ads above the fold, but it is unlikely that major retailers who say, show products at the top of their pages in response to a specific product query, will not be penalized.

On the other hand, if a site is nothing more than a few bits and pieces of content yet chock-full of ads, especially ads above the fold, then it can be assumed that you would be penalized.   We’ll all just have to wait and see how it plays out but for now, if you’re one of the ones who has advertising listed above the useful content on your site, it would be advised to move those ads to a different location.

This past Wednesday Google announced Product Listing Ads.  And rather tell you what they are, let me show you.

This first image is your typical search results page with the ads and organic listings highlighted.  This search was for “snow boots”.

Google Product Ads Example 1

This second image is another search results page but this time, this one has the Google Product Listing ads included within it.  This search was for “bed in a bag”.

Google Product Listing Ads Example 2

Notice the difference?

The new Google Product Listing ads now allow advertisers to show images next to their advertisements.

This new feature is open to those AdWords advertisers who have products in the Google Merchant Center (formerly Google Base) which was rolled out at the end of September 2009.

Unlike traditional AdWords advertisements where you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you only pay whenever someone actually purchases a product from your site.

Additionally, again unlike AdWords, you don’t have to worry about keywords or any additional advertising text.  If a user searches on a keyword phrase that is relevant to a product that you offer and that product is listed in the Google Merchant Center, Google will show the most relevant products for that user along with the image, price and the product name.  As Google states:

“Product Listing Ads makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory on Google.com.”

It’s currently only available to certain advertisers and is still in beta.

What I find interesting is that not too long ago, some AdSense publishers realized that if you put images next to AdSense ads on your website those AdSense ads received more clicks.  This seemed to work very well for a lot of publishers until Google caught onto what was happening and made it “illegal”.

Ironically enough, they’re doing the same exact thing on their search results pages; one can only assume that it actually worked very well and so much so that Google has decided to incorporate the same strategy into their own websites.

All that said, what does this mean to you?

1. Once Google rolls this out to the public in general, it will be interesting to see if these images also show up in your AdSense ads on your website.  If they do and your website refers to say, “bed in a bag”, and Google shows ads in AdSense that also advertise “beds in a bag”, you’ll have to make some decisions as to whether or not you want competitors ads showing up on your site for the same or similar products.  I could see a lot of websites opting out of AdSense for this reason.
2. If you do have products in the Google Merchant Center, because Google will know what converts to a sale and what doesn’t, they’ll now have access to your sales data.
3. If these images begin to show at the top of the page where current AdWords text ads show, this will push down the organic search results; and in some cases “below the fold”.  Which means that web searchers will have to scroll down to view the organic search results.

The bottom line is, if you have a product and it’s listed in the Merchant Center, this could mean higher profits for you.

On the flip side, if you’re simply trying to get your website seen in the organic search results for a product search, you might have to rethink your optimization strategy.

I’ll be posting the show here if you want to listen in.

Transcription of the Webcast is below

Links I talked about in the webcast

Twitter

Follow Me on Twitter

Get the Twitter Book for Free

Visit YouTube EDU

YouTube

Official AdSense Blog

Wordtracker

Detecting Commercial Intention

WebReader

The Google search used in the example

Matt Cutts talks about Universal Search

******* TRANSCRIPTION *******

The first thing I want to talk about today is some SEO news that you might find interesting.

One of those things is that YouTube has now added a Twitter button. If you haven’t noticed, Twitter is absolutely everywhere today and if you’re not using it for your business, you’re missing the boat. It’s free to sign up and you can do that at Twitter.com. If you’d like you can follow me there too my Twitter name is KristineWirth.

Sometimes I am just shocked, literally and I don’t know why really but when you hear of big names using Twitter it really stands up and makes you take notice. For example, yesterday I was watching the NASCAR Sprint Cup race on Fox and heard the announcers saying that you could now follow them on Twitter at NASCARonFox. That really shocked me. Not exactly sure why but you can bet it was impressive, especially when you heard D.W. (Darrell Waltrip for those of you who are not NASCAR fans) talk about making Tweets. Not what you expect to hear during a NASCAR race when it’s all about restrictor plates, brake calipers and lugnuts. I was impressed. Can you tell I’m just a bit of a tomboy? Maybe that’s why I’m in such a male-dominated business?

But back to the YouTube Twitter thing. If you visit any video on YouTube, you’ll notice that next to the spot to put the video on MySpace and Facebook is now a spot to Tweet the video at Twitter. Tweets are the posts you make at Twitter. This link is now located right there at YouTube under the video window.

When you click on the link it takes you to your Twitter account (of course) and automatically adds the link to the video into your Twitter window. Just another way to keep the ever-growing Twitter population interested.

Now, this is great for those of you who market online simply because you can obviously post a quick Tweet to one of your own videos at YouTube. Just remember, no one likes to be marketed to all the time so don’t forget to tweet other videos too even those funny ones that you don’t think are “professional” – everyone can use a good laugh now and again.

I’ve released a free book that you can download called “Twitter – What it Is, How to Use It and How Not to Be a TwitterTwit” which you can get for free at BoneheadSEO.com. I’ll have a link for you on the Bonehead Blog at boneheadseo.com/blog.

While on the topic of YouTube, you might be interested to know that they’ve also rolled out a few new improvements last week. They’ve added an upload progress bar. This has been a much-requested feature at YouTube and what this will do for you is allow you to see how far along your video upload is.

They’ve also rolled out YouTube EDU which is an “educational hub”. Essentially the way YouTube phrases it is that it was sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all of the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. You can check out more about YouTube EDU at www.youtube.com/edu.

personally I’d love to see more dedicated channels to topics. Maybe we’ll see this in the future.

And just one more thing before I get off of the topic of YouTube. The other day I was watching a video and noticed a little lightbulb just at the top of the page just above the video. Now I don’t know if this was part of a Google test, if this was something new that I just completely missed all together (although I don’t believe so because I don’t see it there any longer). But if it was a part of a test, just know that it allows you to “turn out the lights” while viewing a YouTube video. If you click on this lightbulb, it turns the entire page black except for the video itself.

Now, as an online marketer, I hate this. Not only can you not see the additional videos that you might be interested in if it’s in “lights out” mode but the viewer can’t see your URL (or web address) in your description box (which by the way you should be adding), but they literally can’t see anything on that page but the video itself.

Oh, and of course there’s the ads at the bottom of the video that Google has now been including. Which obviously are still visible in “lights out” mode because they’re embedded within the video itself.

On that topic, here’s another juicy tip for you. In the past you might have been told (maybe even by me) to be sure you brand those videos with a logo, URL or watermark at the bottom of the video screen. Ideally a URL so that the viewer knew exactly where to go. But now those URLs are obstructed by ads (this is especially irritating if you’re watching a video that is translated at the bottom of the page). Sure, you can click them off but sometimes they come back! I’ve had it happen. So when you create your video for YouTube, place your URL at the top of the page (or your logo, your watermark, whatever it is that you use).

Now, all that said, it was just announced last week that Google is doing away with their AdSense video units feature. This allowed you to show YouTube content on your web pages that contained AdSense ads. This evidently has not been working out as well as Google had hoped and is being retired at the end of April. I couldn’t quite gather from their blog post at http://adsense.blogspot.com whether or not this also meant the ads in the YouTube videos themselves at YouTube (my guess is no, they’ll still stay there) but it is being nixed for AdSense publishers.

On the bright side of things, since you now know that the largest search engine available today is getting rid of ads within videos, it might be a good time to rethink any other third-party ads you may be running within your own videos because this is one very large case-study that is flat-out telling you it doesn’t make much money.

So there you have it, some news (and two tips on YouTube.) Time to move on…

Wordtracker, a keyword research tool (one of the best in my opinion) is coming out with a brand new version very soon. You’ll now be able to take a look at a keywords metrics such as the frequency with which the keyword was searched on, how competitive it is and what the commercial viability of that keyword is (which is VERY exciting in my opinion.)

All three of these metrics will allow you to find those keywords that are profitable, not just simply easier to rank well for.

Additionally, they’ll also be using “allinanchor” as their website count instead of the default Google exact match which the tool uses now. Why this is important is because before, (well, currently at least until the new tool is put into production), whenever you researched competitors within Wordtracker, Wordtracker based this information on an exact match of the phrase. This means that they’d only search for the keyword in quotes which gives you an indication as to how competitive a keyword really is. However, it appears as though now, Wordtracker will be providing you with information that tells you how many incoming links appear per keyword for the internet as a whole. Allinanchor means all of the keyword phrase within anchor text, or in other words the clickable link.

To clarify that even further, let’s say that one of the keyword phrases you were considering using was “dog hair dye”. Instead of simply searching for that phrase within Google and using that phrase in quotes to help determine the number of competitors there are, you now will be able to see how often that phrase of “dog hair dye” is used in a clickable link over the entire Internet.

Personally I can’t wait to update the Bonehead SEO course members about this information when it comes available.

And finally, the commercial intent portion is truly exciting. Microsoft has provided this information for a while now for free but since it will now be incorporated into Wordtracker’s tool, you can essentially get all of the best information for keywords in one spot. This tool allows you to see at a glance if the use of a keyword has commercial viability – that is, if someone who uses this keyword is likely to purchase a product or not.

This tool is also available for free at Microsoft’s AdCenter labs. And I’ll have a link to this tool as well as other information I talk about throughout this broadcast at the Bonehead SEO Blog.

http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/

Hmmmm…what else, what else?

Oh yeah! Here’s a great tool for many of you who already have a website up and running and are on the lookout for a new way to make the content of your site more interesting. I actually heard about this from Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. It’s called WebReader and it speech enables your website or blog. What this means is that you add a button to your webpage and when a site visitor clicks on that button, it will read the entire page of content or only the content you specify. This is a great alternative to recording your own audio which you then upload to your site which can get very time-consuming and have a bit of a learning curve especially if you’ve never done anything like that before.

the only downside is that it’s a computer-style voice however, it does have a bit of a personality to it. It’s much better than the reader you would find in say Adobe Reader for example. If you’ve never used the Adobe reader function you should try it out sometime. It’s meant to be useful but sometimes is downright funny to listen to.

WebREader is not free but is very cost-effective. So if you’re interested, visit http://webreader.readspeaker.com and again I’ll have a link for you on the Bonehead Blog.

But, I won’t leave you hanging about the Adobe reader function either. Simply open up any PDF you have on your computer, click “View” and then click “Read Out Loud”. You’ll see (or rather hear) what I mean.

And finally in the “Google news you might not care about unless you live in China”, the Chinese government has lifted its block it imposed on YouTube. In case you missed the story, there was a YouTube video released that purportedly showed Chinese security officers beating handcuffed Tibetans. China said that the video was a fake but instead of taking proactive measures, it just flat out decided to ban all of China from even visiting YouTube all together. They have since lifted the ban.

And that’s a brief recap of things going on in the Internet world this past week.

So let’s get down to our main topic of interest and that’s Universal Search.

Back in early to mid 2007 Google introduced Universal Search. It’s a barely-noticeable set of links that sit at the very top left of a Google search results page. Essentially what it allows you to do is view other kinds of related information based on the search you just did within Google.

For example, if you search on the phrase “espresso” in Google you’ll get your search results page that contains links to various websites, videos, shopping spots for espresso, etc. But at the top of the page are a set of links labeled “Images, Maps, News, Video, Gmail, and “more”. “More” containing shopping, groups, books, scholar, finance, blogs, YouTube, calendar, photos, documents, reader, sites, and “even more”.

What these links are allowing you to do is a “vertical search”. Let me explain.

When you search in simply Google.com for a term you are searching “horizontally” that is, across a wide array and spectrum of various kinds of content. If you remember from the example we just gave the initial search results page returned links to websites, videos and places where you could shop for espresso.

However, when you do a “vertical” search by clicking one of the links within Google’s universal search at the top of the page, you are narrowing down your search to only find “videos” for example on espresso. You can also choose to only find “news” for espresso or “images’ of espresso. In other words, vertical searches allow you to focus on only one kind of content, video, news, blogs or books instead of getting the whole gamut of results.

Now you might be wondering why this is important to you the website owner. Well, it’s because of an interview of Google Engineer Matt Cutts done by WebProNews in December of 2008. And again, I’ll have this information up for you at the Bonehead Blog.

Essentially Matt tells us that Universal search will become more important as we move through 2009 and beyond. He also hints at Universal search being incorporated into the regular search results at Google.

Which brings me back to the initial search results we saw initially when we did a search for espresso in Google. Google didn’t just return links to web pages for us, no, it gave us not only links to websites but videos as well as places to shop for espresso. Both of which used to be tightly contained within the Universal search links at the top of the page.

So not only are these new additions to search taking up spots where typical websites would normally reside, they’re also a heck of a lot more eye-catching than just a single link.

The good news is that the actual number of web pages links on the initial search results page remain at 10, they are now pushed down a bit “below the fold” or in other words in a spot where you have to scroll down in order to view them.

And this is just one example. There are multiple different examples of Universal Search being incorporated into typical search results pages (just like Matt said they would be). When we view the espresso search results we’re only seeing video and shopping resources added to the listings. In some cases in addition to videos and shopping resources you’ll also have blogs that are related, news that is related and even images that are related to your search. The images are typically placed prominently at the top of the page.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it’s a great opportunity for you. Most of your competitors will still be focusing on getting that first page listing for their website. Not their video, not their images, not their blog but simply for their website. And if you take a quick look at any search results page that shows images or videos, you’ll immediately notice that these are what draws the eye. Not the links.

This should say to you that you should be using images on all of your web pages and using the same keywords that you’re using on your web page that you want to rank well for in the image. While always using images within any web page or blog post is important for visual appeal, it’s especially important for those searches that instantly return images at the top of the page in Google.

For example, if you do a search for your keyword in Google, say “prom hairstyles”, you’ll instantly see that images show at the top of the search results page.

The same is true of video.

In the espresso example, there are at least two videos that initially show up when you do a Google search. If you’re able to and you have the know-how to create a video around the keyword you’re using, I highly suggest that you do so. It’s always a good idea to have multiple different kinds of videos available for your topic that your website visitors as well as visitors within large video sharing sites can watch.

Plus, if you’ll notice, both of these videos on our espresso page are around 3 minutes or less in length. This seems to be a typical standard within Google so when you create your videos, keep them short and use the keywords you’re gunning for within the title of the video itself.

I’ll have more information about video marketing in upcoming episodes.

So that’s it for today’s installment of the Bonehead SEO BlogTalkRadio webcast.

If you’re interested in the entire BoneheadSEO course and wish to purchase it yourself, visit http://www.BoneheadSEO.com/cb/ and you’ll see some proof of results there as well.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our webcast by clicking the orange RSS feed icon to the right and feel free to share this via Twitter with your friends by clicking the “Tweet This” button.

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4. An AdSense experiment that created an unethical but legal $10,000 a month.
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   If you’re wondering how to make money with Google’s AdSense program, this site offers up tips on how to do just that. Especially if you want to stay away from those ads that won’t earn you much money.
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7. The different Google AdSense ad styles and what they actually look like.
8. Some Google AdSense publishers make innocent yet violating mistakes when using AdSense on their websites; innocent mistakes that could get your site banned all together. This site pulls together those violations and helps you understand if you’re making the same mistakes.
9. 18 AdSense-Optimized WordPress themes that you can start using immediately.
10. A popular SEO blogger tells you how he uses arbitrage with AdSense to make the most out of his AdSense income.
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