User-opinions in local results

With the continued development of the Universal-Search-Integrations, naturally the amount of results from the local search in the Google-SERPs grows, too. Called either “Google Maps“ , “Local Yellowpages“ or something else by Google, depending on how they feel about it at any given time, this integration is a map with 7 results from the searchqueries surroundings (as can be seen to the right). For this posting, I took a closer look at how the user-opinions make their way into Googles local search. To do this, I took the arround 1 million keywords from the SISTRIX Toolbox and checked them for the local search integration: I got 779.466 hits and once I took out all the double entries, I was left with 263.019 unique its. Let's break it down into 5 different classes of how many user-generated-opinions there were:


About three-fourth of all the entries that were found did not have any user opinions associated witht hem, about another 7 percent only had one to five opinions. If we assume that Google will tend to rather show entries that have user-generated-opinions, then the number of entries without user-opinions should be decisively larger when compared to the sum of all addresses. When we look at the breakdown for those keywords that have the most traffic, then it seems that our assumption was correct.


The category with at least 50 user-opinions increased manifold and now nearly takes up 10% of the entries. Another interesting aspect is the source of these user-generated-opinions. The users are not entering them into Google themselves, but Google is scraping this information from the Internet – sometimes with an agreement, sometimes without. Here we have the top-15 sources of user-generated-opinions:


All in all, i was able to find 599 domains from which opinions were being integrated. It seems that, at the moment, Google is not ranking them but is just showing the five most recent ones on the details-page. Toolbox-customers can download the list with all 599 domains here.

Can the SEO-Sector regulate itself?

It is hard to miss: searchengineoptimization is booming. This becomes apparent not only because regulars-tables and conferences get more and more attendees every year and finding a job-posting for an inhouse-SEO position is not a novelty anymore either. It becomes especially apparent when you look at the rapid increase of contractors in this field. I get the feeling that not a day goes by, without a new SEO-agency being founded. In principle this is a good thing, though is also a side-effect associated with it that shows up more and more: somewhere, the quality of service gets left by the roadside.

The final straw that led me to write this post was an article by Randolf. He was told that Senkrecht IT, an SEO-firm in Cologne (there seems to be a hive there somewhere) was using one of his websites as a reference – and that wihtout ever having done any work for 3gstore.de. You could shrug it off as a one-time deal but this is sadly not the case: you have cellphone-vendors that say they are Google, agencies that have a “Head of SEO” who has supposedly done decades worth of successful SEO – but of whom no one in the sector has ever heard of and obscure series of events that tour through Germany, where the lecturers have to pay money to shower the unsuspecting public with their advertisements.

I have finally realized that the times, in which the majority of the actors in the sector were there because they had fun at dealing with this subject, are over. Today it's about making money – and seeing how everyone in Germany already owns two cellphones and the used-car-market not being what it used to be, SEO is the chance to do so. Personally, I think that the SEO-sector stands at a crossroads at the moment: either the market will manage to regulate itself and gets rid of the bad seeds, or we will get to the point where even the numerous reputable agencies will have a hard time getting a propper part of the advertisement-budget-pie.

In my opinion, there are two big levers: educated customers and transparency. Those customers that have a simple understanding of how searchengines and future-oriented SEO-methods work are not going to buy snakeoil over the phone and will also be able to asses the work a contractor does for them. Over the last year, Google has done a lot educational pieces that are a step towards this goal and it might also be quite helpful to have guidelines that the sector comes up with, which outline what customers should expect from reputable contractors. And then there is transparency: While SEM itemizes every click, most SEO-contracts usually ask a lump-sum for „something“. We offer software that makes it possible for customers to check and monitor the SEO-performance independently but I also think that the discussion over a improved certification for SEO-agencies that is going on between Philipp and Stefan (W&V) are exciting and should be supported. Next weeks Campixx will also have a discussion on this topic and I am excited to see where that goes.

Longtail Heroes

The Longtail, which is the part of search that, by itself, does not get searched for much but which, summed up, will still lead to some significant incoming traffic, is one of the hardest to grasp indicators in SEO-projects. At the end of last year, the SISTRIX Toolbox added a Longtail-database with more than 10 million monthly updated keywords, which puts me in a position to do some exciting analysis on this subject.

We start out with a list of the 50 domains that have the strongest presence in the Longtail. This list is sorted by the amount of keywords that each domain ranks for in the top-100 SERPs. The second row shows the amount of top-10 rankings as well the relationship of these to the top-100 as a percentage. The last row shows the domains position in the SISTRIX Sichtbarkeitsindex as well as any changes that show up when comparing the Longtail to the VisibilityIndex.

#	Domain	Keywords	Keywords Top-10		Visibility
1	wikipedia.org	4.095.198	2.032.948	(49,6%)	1
2	ebay.de	3.635.851	834.923	(23,0%)	3	+1
3	amazon.de	3.153.430	1.022.398	(32,4%)	2	-1
4	ciao.de	3.133.501	776.356	(24,8%)	4
5	blogspot.com	2.986.038	269.775	(9,0%)	57	+52
6	yahoo.com	2.707.498	337.509	(12,5%)	10	+4
7	youtube.com	2.491.556	239.993	(9,6%)	13	+6
8	yasni.de	2.117.345	245.766	(11,6%)	46	+38
9	mister-wong.de	2.105.566	265.353	(12,6%)	5	-4
10	gutefrage.net	1.976.237	423.593	(21,4%)	8	-2
11	cylex.de	1.847.061	490.283	(26,5%)	30	+19
12	ebay.at	1.812.132	122.638	(6,8%)	82	+70
13	dooyoo.de	1.800.685	420.931	(23,4%)	11	-2
14	wordpress.com	1.696.246	123.242	(7,3%)	159	+145
15	google.de	1.677.025	277.772	(16,6%)	6	-9
16	chip.de	1.653.773	624.493	(37,8%)	9	-7
17	wer-weiss-was.de	1.649.845	375.186	(22,7%)	19	+2
18	ebay.ch	1.615.758	87.970	(5,4%)	110	+92
19	qype.com	1.516.074	407.255	(26,9%)	66	+47
20	preisroboter.de	1.425.190	388.298	(27,2%)	17	-3
21	123people.de	1.387.572	214.017	(15,4%)	34	+13
22	hotfrog.de	1.258.969	240.375	(19,1%)	29	+7
23	yatego.com	1.249.758	334.447	(26,8%)	18	-5
24	shopping.com	1.248.120	209.997	(16,8%)	43	+19
25	myspace.com	1.133.657	213.038	(18,8%)	42	+17
26	welt.de	1.114.160	131.942	(11,8%)	26
27	focus.de	1.082.560	171.174	(15,8%)	12	-15
28	idealo.de	1.076.260	423.339	(39,3%)	7	-21
29	heise.de	1.063.215	226.784	(21,3%)	31	+2
30	wapedia.mobi	1.045.872	78.999	(7,6%)	550	+520
31	sueddeutsche.de	1.022.969	119.964	(11,7%)	24	-7
32	filestube.com	1.000.753	121.478	(12,1%)	308	+276
33	netzwelt.de	985.289	254.276	(25,8%)	36	+3
34	quoka.de	964.070	155.993	(16,2%)	44	+10
35	wikio.de	944.819	116.631	(12,3%)	111	+76
36	preisvergleich.de	933.573	83.621	(9,0%)	236	+200
37	spiegel.de	929.092	126.870	(13,7%)	14	-23
38	meinestadt.de	902.981	204.810	(22,7%)	16	-22
39	amazon.com	901.884	122.222	(13,6%)	228	+189
40	cosmiq.de	900.858	144.637	(16,1%)	122	+82
41	produkte24.com	898.355	123.011	(13,7%)	52	+11
42	facebook.com	896.242	122.136	(13,6%)	58	+16
43	twenga.de	877.736	108.207	(12,3%)	86	+43
44	gulli.com	866.159	171.423	(19,8%)	147	+103
45	google.com	848.578	55.969	(6,6%)	56	+11
46	dhd24.com	838.217	139.301	(16,6%)	35	-11
47	yopi.de	823.524	133.465	(16,2%)	64	+17
48	oneview.de	813.825	90.911	(11,2%)	45	-3
49	t-online.de	807.078	84.055	(10,4%)	41	-8
50	uni-protokolle.de	780.548	127.699	(16,4%)	179	+129

Especially interesting, as far as I am concerned, are those cases in which there are large differences between the Lontail and the VisibilityIndex rankings. Yasni.de for example gained nearly 40 ranks – which shows strong evidence that the site may not show up for contested keywords but seems to be doing well with the (name)-longtail. Then there are those domains like wordpress.com or qype.com, which profit largely from their extensive userbase. This also shows up in that the losers are usually those domains that have no user-generated-content and are therefore limited to specific content and data.

PS: While sorting the data I made a dumb mistake, which led to 30 minutes of incorrect data being shown online. This above table is now correct :-)

IndexWatch 02/2010

February is done for and the SEO-Conference-Marathon is just arround the corner: last Friday already saw the SEMSEO and PubCon in Hannover (SEO.at has in-depth coverage of this event) and this month we have both the Campixx in Berlin and the SMX in Munich. So to make sure that there is enough to talk about, here the current IndexWatch-numbers from February 2010. Traditionally, we start out with last months winners in the Google-index:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	flix.de	+4.839%
2	yigg.de	+1.643%
3	e-hoi.de	+1.427%
4	stestuj.de	+578%
5	supernature-forum.de	+534%
6	unterkunft.de	+478%
7	camp-firefox.de	+253%
8	semags.de	+192%
9	ran.de	+185%
10	vimeo.com	+164%
11	kreditinform.de	+142%
12	wallpaper-area.to	+139%
13	gesundheitsfrage.net	+134%
14	maedchen.de	+131%
15	cosmopolitan.de	+126%

Even though it looks like Yigg.de managed to get out of the penalty-box, they are still ranking noticeably worse than at the start of the year. Interesting to see if the domain can manage to return to their old (traffic)-numbers, even though I don't quite believe they can. In the same period, a number of other domains got released from their penalties. The one on e-hoi.de managed to last from mid-2009 until now – quite a substantial period, although they returned to where they were before rankingwise. It would be exciting to manage to find a connection between this and the rather large TV-Ad-campaign that they recently launched.

It seems that ran.de has discovered the SEO-basics in the last few weeks to month, seeing how they are using the strong domain to rank well for many competitive and trafficstrong keywords: the site managed to get into the top-10 for such keywords as sport, bundesliga or soccer, for example. Kreditinform.de, which had a rather inconspicuously constant ranking, has started to charge ahead and managed to more than double their Google-SERP visibility in the last few weeks. It will be interesting to see how this will play out – they are not treading on a field thats light on competition and new backlinks can sometimes prove to have a boomerang effect. Maedchen.de seems to have broadened their range of topics: this can work, but does not have to.

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	go-windows.de	-99%
2	b2b-trade.de	-98%
3	dashandyforum.de	-92%
4	aol.co.uk	-91%
5	joinr.de	-91%
6	spreadshirt.net	-90%
7	traveljungle.de	-89%
8	appsundco.de	-89%
9	coupons4u.de	-85%
10	bundesaerztekammer.de	-85%
11	airhour.de	-80%
12	1asport.de	-79%
13	heine.de	-77%
14	thomascook-reisen.de	-76%
15	multimania.de	-73%

Seeing how Google is not increasing the amount of organic results on the first page, when some go up, others have to go down: which brings us to the losers. I am not sure what exactly go-windows.de did, but it lead to an exemplary penalty.

Spreadshirt tried their hand at a domain-change from spreadshirt.net to spreadshirt.de and are demonstrating what can go wrong. Since they did not copy the whole domain 1:1 to its new location and redirect it with 301 redirects, they still have a large part of their linkjuice still lingering on their old domain. If we look at the visibility-curves for both domains, it becomes apparent that 1 plus 1 is, in this case, not 2 but more something like 1,1.

Thomascook-reisen.de is a prime example that, even though Google has, on more than one occasion, reassured users that duplicate content does not pose a problem, it can still manage to become one. Besides the correct “www.” hostname, they also have the “www5” to “www8” hostnames show up in the SERPs – all of them with identical content, which led to none of them ranking decently anymore. It begs the question whether they should have done a clean on-page-optimization before they started to get backlinks.

The SERPs in SERPs Problem

The last few days have seen an old but nonetheless polarizing subject return to the forefront of the US-SEO-Scene: SERPs in SERPs, which are searchresults and scraped content that gets indexed by Google. And seeing how Jason Calacanis, operator of Mahalo.com who is constantly railing at SEOs, is in the crosshairs, just adds fuel to the fire.

Technically, this topic was dealt with by Google in the Quality Guidelines a long time ago, which state:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines

But as with so many things, different viewpoints and details make this such an interesting topic. Mahalo.com is calling itself “Human Search Engine” and aggregates informations from the web for a number of topics. The problem is that they – against their announcement – are not only doing this by hand, but are creating numerous pages with automatically scraped content. That should put it right in the domain of the afore mentioned guideline – sadly, Mahalo does not comply with the guideline and Google does not seem to see enough of a reason to intervene.

The situation is a little different as far as Germany is concerned, where Google is usually rather quick at intervening in such methods by cutting off their “SERP-love” for those projects: a few weeks ago, two prominent examples came up in the form of chip.de and netzwelt.de. The subdomains that contained the searchresults were not found anymore, while the rest of the pages were still ranking well.

This makes an assessment rather difficult: if you manage to balance your concept of creating semi- or fully-automated pages on the fine line that Google will still tolerate, then this can be an interesting way of grabbing a lot of traffic. Though if you overdo it or are not able to adapt the project to changing conditions, then it will be over soon – and there is no guarantee, that the main-domain will not come out of this ordeal without a scratch.

IndexWatch 01/2010

The first month of the year has already past, which makes it time for the monthly IndexWatch. Every month for the past two years, I have listed the winners and losers in Google's index based on the SISTRIX Visibilityindex. As usual, I will start out with the winning side:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	njobs.de	+1.414%
2	multimania.de	+913%
3	quelle.de	+458%
4	billiger.de	+276%
5	cluburlaub.de	+274%
6	photocase.com	+198%
7	klatsch-tratsch.de	+154%
8	b2b-trade.de	+135%
9	indeed.de	+122%
10	fruehbucherrabatt.net	+118%
11	11880.com	+116%
12	verkehrsmittelvergleich.de	+100%
13	musik-base.de	+81%
14	webhelp.de	+80%
15	hsv.de	+78%

Quelle.de is slowly regaining visibility, which had gone down considerably in the last few month, after they nearly shut down all of their webservices over the course of their bankruptcy proceeding. And while it is still going to be a long while before the domain regains its former strength, they are moving in the right direction. Interesting on this note is that, for a while, Google thought that the domain “apanda.de” was a legitimate successor of “quelle.de”, which became apparent when Google returned the domain for a search for "quelle”. Personally, I could not say whether this was a mistake in Google's algorithm or if something else went down, but it would still be interesting to know the reasons for this.

Another domain that once again surfaced after a prolonged dive is Musik-Base.de. Long ago build by a SEO-veteran, the site has gone through a few owners as well as different uses over the last few years, which seemed to have gotten rid of its Google-Love. Recent news suggest that the site has changed back into the hands of its creator and I wish Frank the best in making it successful again.

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	tomsgutscheine.de	-100%
2	arzt-preisvergleich.de	-98%
3	yigg.de	-97%
4	lm-boerse.com	-96%
5	pricerunner.de	-95%
6	deals.de	-93%
7	photocase.de	-89%
8	apanda.de	-88%
9	mediaonline.de	-85%
10	wunschauto24.com	-85%
11	hasenchat.de	-82%
12	freeware-archiv.de	-74%
13	promarkt.de	-73%
14	cosmopolitan.de	-70%
15	9live.de	-66%

This months losers also have some interesting cases among them: Yigg.de should be the loser thats know best, especially for those in the SEO-scene. The domain did not get it's mojo back after the botched relaunch in mid-2008 and has, for the past three weeks, also managed to get a full blown penaltyput on its site. While we can only speculate on the reasons, I can vaguely remember that Yigg.de sold optimized landingpages on its site for a while.

Cosmopolitan.de managed to massively lose good rankings within the last two weeks. The following are but an example: horoskope (horoscopes) from 5 down to 36, kurzhaarschnitte (short hairstyles) from 5 to 58 or styling from 5 to 89. These are only three of thousands. Though this could not be due to the number of indexed pages: they have increased rather than decreased.

Universal Search: Status Quo

In my last posting, I asked which topics you were interested in. I want to say thank you for the many replies and suggestions – some of them will need some preparation time, while others can be answered rather quickly thanks to the data available to us. One of the these, is the development or rather the status quo of the universal-search-integrations within the Google SERPs. Seeing how my last post on this subject dates back nearly a year, it is time for an update.

We will start by taking a look at the amount of SERPs with universal-search-elements, dating back to the end of 2008:


We can see how the amount has been increasing continuously and has now reached nearly 50% of all searchqueries – if, in addition, you consider how much visibility these boxes will usually get, then you will notice that there will be no way around optimizing content for the different vertical searches. Next, we have an evaluation of the different types of universal-search-integrations:


If we compare this to the beginning of last year, you will notice that the Google image search is now far more integrated. Back then, only about 10% of the universal search boxes were image related, while now, nearly 40 (!) percent of universal-search-integrations hold results from Google Images. To get a better understanding of this jump, here the progress over time of each of the different integrations, again beginning at the end of 2008:


It is clear, that the jump happened at the end of June, the beginning of Juli and that Google has kept including images at this high rate ever since. The amount of videos, maps and news shown has also gone up, while the Google shopping-search has keep at about the same level. The Google-blogsearch-integration on the other hand, has lost some ground. The overall percentages here are a little higher, since there are many keywords for which more than one integration is being shown. The following chart shows the top-10 domains that show up in the image-boxes:


Wordpress.com, which hosts the popular blogsoftware leads the way, followed by Wikimedia.org, which is the Wikipedia's multimedia-service. This diagram shows how Wordpress gained traction alongside the general jump of image-search-integrations, though since then, it has continuously kept on getting stronger:


To show this more vividly, here is a chart with some of the keywords, for which the universal-search-integrations contain pictures from Wordpress.com:


It is not hard to spot how it is not only for the lightly contested longtail (which is also in the mix) but numerous extremely traffic-strong and competitive keywords, for which the Wordpress.com-bloggers have “weaseled” their way onto the first page. So, those of you who are planning on being featured in the image-search, should try to – additionally to your own domain – post the pictures on a Wordpress.com-blog and work on making them accessible by Google. General tips on optimizing for the vertical search can be had from Martin and Andre and there will also be sessions on this topic at the upcoming Campixx.

What are you interested in?

This month has seen rather few blogposts. This was not only due to the fact that I was on vacation but also because I did not come across any topic that just desperately compelled me to write about it. I am starting to suspect that my own aspirations, to which new articles have to adhere to, might be set a little too lofty, which would mean that (maybe) some interesting topics did not get the posting they deserved.

All this is supposed to change next month and you are able to help me succeed. Just leave a short comment with the subjects that you are interested in and would like me to write about or evaluate. Please feel free to also posts “beginner-level subjects” - I often notice that those basics that I learned years ago, have changed over time and that it is quite helpful to visit them again.

Google will (probably) pull out of China

There was a huge media-echo this morning, when Google announced that they are not going to censor their Chinese searchresults anymore. A Google blogposting explained that this noticeable change in direction was triggered by an attack on Google's infrastructure: GMail-accounts belonging to human-rights activists were broken into. It is obvious that after this announcement, that Google does not have much of a future in China anymore.

Three or four years ago, I could have sworn that their motive was clear: Don't be Evil. A company like Google would not have been able to operate under these conditions without loosing their identity. Now, my first thought was: this sounds more like an excuse to pull out of China (Google with less than 20% marketshare, Baidu 70% marketshare) while saving face and getting some PR.

IndexWatch: Losers of 2009

After the Winners in the German Googleindex for 2009, we now get to the list of those who are the biggest losers of 2009, according to the SISTRIX Visibilityindex. Just as with the winning list, I will try to note trends that become apparent in the list and give a short explanation of possible causes.

Domainmoves- and Closures
Besides a few moves – like the move from premiere.de to sky.de or download.com to download.cnet.com, for example – this list contains a remarkable amount of domains that took a majority of their content offline. A few of them have already warranted their own posting in this blog over the last year: a part of Internet-history got carried to its grave when Geocities.com, one of the first and largest online freehosters, closed its doors. The Meyers.de dictionary, as well as the majority of the Brockhaus disappeared from the index. The last few weeks has seen the move from the question and answer subdomain (“iq.lycos.de”) to a new domain, which means that Lycos.de has become nearly invisible in the index since the mainpage content (“www.lycos.de”) was moved to a new domain before.

Yellow Pages
The large amount of yellow-pages, phone-directories and similar projects on this list is surely another noticeable trend. Besides such rather obvious Google Penalties like those for flix.de or lokal.ws for example, I am intrigued by the development of dialo.de: founded in 2006, purchased already by a phone-book-publishing-house in 2007, the site has continuously lost ground. It seems that they have completely sunk to insignificance in 2009. Not only is their presence within Google nearly impossible to measure, even traffic-indicators like Alexa and Google Trends are unable to detect any life on the domain. It is unknown if they have prematurely capitulated to the Google Yellow-Page-integration via Universal Search or if they were unable to conceive a way to get users to visit the page. I would not be surprised if the remaining sites in this sector will have a hard year ahead of them – Google does not only want to be a searchengine, but wants to neutralize as many stopovers between searchquery and searchresult. And phone- as well as yellow-pages belong to these stopover, too.

It is rather uncommon for a domain to show up in this list two years in a row: vanityfair.de managed to do this though. After losing many interesting rankings in 2008, they managed to make another noticeable step backwards around mid-2009 – maybe it would be better to close down the page altogether. Kijiji had to transfer a large chunk of their content on to the kleinanzeigen.ebay.de subdomain – a decision that has not really paid off from a SEO-point-of-view, but let's see how this will unfold. CMA.de (“Bestes vom Bauern”) was successful in having nearly all of their content disappear from the index: after the domain could be found in the top-10 for a number of food-related keywords (“lammfleisch”, “rezepte”, “gulasch”) at the end of last year, it seems that a relaunch made the site only show up for queries for “CMA” - but this should not be a problem anymore after the decision to close its doors.