Schema.org and Google's +1 Strawman Deathmatch

Button versus Standards for Blogger Attention

On launch, the +1 button got the larger share of attention, while the Schema.org project kicked off in relative obscurity. Which is a shame, because it isn’t often that the two major search engines (and Yahoo!) agree on something, sitemaps being the last time. That they have all agreed on a standard for organising information that they will all follow is significant in itself. It is also interesting that their markup has been promoted ahead of WC3′s microdata standards.

Historically each search engine has developed their own markups to create a more semantic search experience, such as Yahoo!’s now defunct Searchmonkey and Google’s microformats. Other services like Google Base and their Maps product also produced the same user experience, by making it easier to organise information in a meaningful way in the results page.

Richer Content in the Search Results

Google is now:

…able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

Google Flights

And Bing is talking about how:

Consumers benefit from this effort by experiencing much richer search experiences (see example below) across a much broader set of publishers.

Bing Film Times

The Search Engine as a Portal

As well as making the content on a site easier to categorise, microformat projects like Schema.org will probably also continue the trend towards a more portal-like search experience. With publishers providing more content to be displayed within the search results themselves and search engines facilitating this trend through supporting it in both organic and paid listings, mobile and otherwise, the Search Engine Results Page is as much a destination as content discovery aid.

In Australia, we expect to transition Yahoo!7′s organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the page) to Microsoft during January 2011.

The change in their paid listings is coming later in the year:

The transition of your paid search account to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011.

For months now both Yahoo! and Microsoft’s blogs have been discussing the change and how to switch over for the USA and Canada. In those markets, the deadline for transitioning from Yahoo! to Microsoft Adcenter was today.

Here in Australia, we should be able to expect the same level of information during the transition period, as outlined in today’s email:

Approximately three months prior to the transition of your paid search account, we will begin sharing more detailed information with you, to help you prepare for the changes to come. Until then, please continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as usual.

There will be one important difference between the switch in the states and here in Australia; Microsoft Adcenter is not active locally. To date Bing’s paid listings have been driven by Yahoo! Search Marketing. Personally I expect to see Microsoft Adcenter introduced into Australia well before the changeover date, to allow Yahoo!’s current Search Engine Marketing customers to migrate their campaigns across.

Other than a change of interface, there will not be any real change in how the SEM marketplace operates in Australia. Unlike in other markets, where they have gone from three to two SEM products, Australia has only had Yahoo! Search Marketing and Adwords. This deal does mean the final end to the SEM product that Overture (Previously Goto) spawned, and that, at least, is significant.

1. Artificially inflating the value of traffic and impressions from brand-focused campaigns by
   • removing direct response metrics from campaign management or
   • believing it is something it is not
2. A word I made up

In the late 1990s the Internet was going through its first real bubble thanks to a combination of optimistic venture capital and a high perceived value of impressions. At the time, companies like Yahoo! benefited from this immensely as advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. Even at an inflated price, banner impressions were still cheap compared to TV or other broadcast media and no distinction was made in the mind of the advertisers.

Over ten years later large portal sites no longer dominate the web. Search and social media have taken their place (though Portal sites and Search Engines are not all that different), but advertising for branding online is still a factor.

Advertising for branding is different to direct response campaigns. The metrics for measuring return on investment (ROI) are different for each type of campaign. Competition between direct response and branding ads in the same query space will favour the campaign with larger margins and cheaper goals. Direct response campaigns for low margin sales based on hard ROI targets don’t usually have these.

There are a number of ways that a branding campaign will differ to a direct response campaign in a way that can raise the cost of traffic, and these include (but are not limited to):

• CPM campaigns versus CPC
• Conversion value not limited to a single sale
• Pricing based on costs of broadcast media
• Completed goal action is simpler than a sale

Like most media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and online display advertising benefit by providing products to maximise return on advertising inventory.

Networks like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made changes and acquisitions to cater for brand advertising. These include, though are not limited to, YouTube display advertising, display networks like Adsense and advertising tools such as the option to advertise above the fold on sites using Adsense.

The real question is how much and for what. Friends and acquaintances need personal information to maintain relationships; Facebook requires it for access to their platform. An email address is standard currency for admittance into most social websites and Google uses location, search history and much more to provide a more meaningful search tool and more relevant ads.

Google’s newest product, Google Instant, also relies on this user data. The live blog of the launch event posted on Readwriteweb.com hinted at past user searches being used to generate SERPs as the user enters their query for very real performance benefits.

How does Google scale this? Optimizations: prioritizes searches that are the most likely. Checks if users is doing searches on another server. Results cached.

Where this deal breaks down is if the information is used in a way the user was not expecting. Entering an email address to post a comment is no big deal, but if it is then used to distribute spam, there is a problem. This surprise and betrayal of expectations is a large part of why Facebook’s users reacted badly to most of the site’s changes, and the same again with Google Buzz. The other issue is a lack of universal agreed value.

One degree from evil

It is the fluid nature of these transactions that has created campaigns and conversations like these. One of the more interesting exchanges was between this defense of Google and this subsequent rebuttal.

Users will always exchange their private information for benefits. How much they are willing to give up will vary from person to person. One thing is consistent though: expectations for how the information will be used need to be set, managed and met, or they might find that what you have is just not worth the price.

Slash the web

What makes Blekko unique in an industry dominated by a giant and littered with the corpses of both startups and mature brands is user driven search segmentation, through something called slashtags.

Slashtags limit a search to a preselected group of sites or APIs, determine how the results are sorted, the information displayed ( /rank is the prime example ) and much more. Slashtags can be private or public, and are transparent in what they do to the search results. There are a number of broad catagories that slashtags fall into: User, Built-in and Topic. Built-in slashtags include tools such as /date (listing by date), /noporn (remove porn), and /weather (five day weather forecasts for a location) and a number of other tools, filters and third party APIs like /twitter.

User generated slashtags can be made to search within a specific group of sites and other slashtags. User created slashtags can be ether private or public. Public slashtags can be seen and used by other users.

Why things rank

If you want to know what influences the rankings of a particular query, Blekko will tell you. There is a built-in slashtag, /rank, which lists ranking criteria and weighting available in their search. Known in and outbound links are also available on any domain within the search engine.

When you consider their founding principles, this is not too extraordinary.

1. Search shall be open
2. Search results shall involve people
3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
4. Web data shall be readily available
5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
6. Advanced search shall be accessible
7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
9. Spam does not belong in search results
10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated

I suspect that the Blekko SEO and link tools will become as popular as Yahoo! Site Explorer used to be for SEO analysis. The fact that Blekko is no more likely to replicate how Google crawls the web and what content and links it finds than Yahoo! was won’t dull their enthusiasm.

Why Blekko?

Blekko is far more transparent in what influences which sites appear in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google is providing a more personalised search experience, and most users are not in a position to judge why something ranks and how much their own behaviour has influenced its position.

Slashtags will probably be the killer app for Blekko. Creating specific sharable groupings of sites for searching has a lot of applications for managing information and removing content farms from a SERP when they are not wanted. Adding an element of human curation to search is very cool and deserves at least one more follow up post.

Bing has announced some new features in search this week. Explained in the Bing Gets a Fresh Look post, content themed on Auto, Finance and Entertainment information was used to demonstrate “great new decision-making tools in [these] areas”. Similar to the enhanced Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) served by Google and Bing, these new tools take search closer to portals in their content consumption model.

In many ways SERPs are becoming more like portal content pages. Search goes beyond an ordered directory of URLs and descriptions. Content including maps, scanned books, images, video, news, blogs, product listings, and social media material is indexed and increasingly being presented in the main SERP as a part of an enhanced search result.

Indexing Entertainment Media

The Internet is an important source of entertainment, either supporting content available through other channels or material native to the web. As said by Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi in his “A New Entertainment Experience For Bing” post:

“In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.”

Entertainment information, from song lyrics to game trailers to film reviews, matters to the user, and can take many different forms. The challenge is in organising it in a human friendly way, similar to what has already started to happen with geographic information and maps. The search engine can programmatically add more content in locations under their control in a theoretically infinitely scalable fashion.

Search in the Music Business

Google is also in the entertainment business. Beyond their search properties and YouTube, Google’s acquisition of Simplifymedia during May hints strongly at Google directly entering the music business. It is likely that Google would add their product to the search experience in the same way as Google Commerce feeds (formerly Google Base) are added to the index or through applications in Chrome or Android.

Lady Gaga on Bing

Lady Gaga on Yahoo! Music

Search is starting to provide a portal-like experience. As the search experience becomes richer, more personalised and more aware of the location of the user, it gets closer to providing the experience sites like Yahoo! do, but with finer levels of customisation through queries. Pages like Yahoo! Music may soon be eclipsed by pages like Bing Entertainment or the current Bing Lady Gaga SERP. In the end it will be how the consumer prefers to consume and seek out content that will determine this. It is passive consumption versus searching with intent.

From what has been said, up to Yahoo!’s latest post on the matter, Yahoo! is going to stop being a search engine and simply focus on providing enriched data. In their words:

1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.

2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.

3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.

Yahoo! seems to see itself as a portal, and is operating as if a portal can be distinct from a search engine. However, Google and Bing have taken a different approach, and have demonstrated that a search engine can become a portal. The inclusion of many Google properties, such as Maps, Base and so on, onto their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) has been discussed at length for years now. Bing has also chosen to follow a similar path, and have developed a suite of additional products of their own. Both Google and Microsoft also have email products that include social functionality in Google Buzz and Windows Live. It is interesting that while a portal site is moving away from search, search is moving towards becoming portals.

Yahoo! SERP for Vancouver

Google SERP for Vancouver

Bing SERP for Vancouver

A lot of what Yahoo! has discussed that they can bring to the Internet as a part of their portal business is already provided as a part of the Google and Bing search experience, or as a part of their additional properties. Where we are with search in terms of the richness of data that can be sorted and surfaced in search, each SERP is essentially a portal site. Depending on the term, photos, news, blogs, social commentary and maps can all be presented on the SERP as an algorithmically generated themed portal page. In getting out of search Yahoo! is limiting itself to competing with Bing and Google purely on content that they have the rights to, their existing user-base and presentation of information.

Is this enough? Both Google and Bing are creating more and more properties. Both Google and Bing have been developing more inventory requiring very little ongoing maintenance and have been rolling them into their main SERPs. With the inclusion of more user generated content such as social media updates and personalised search from Google, and Flickr content in Bing Maps and an apparent focus on travel indicated in their PR, how much value can Yahoo! provide as just a portal?

With the option of now adding additional links and other content to an AdWords listing, the look of some AdWords ads is closer to that of organic search. If I were to have a tinfoil hat moment, I might go so far as to say this could potentially lead to the effective monetarisation of organic SERPs returned for branded terms.

NIB Search Engine Result Page

There is one thing that has driven this renaissance of the text ad by Google, and that is the fact that disruptive advertising can work. AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft’s adCenter have worked because with all the tracking available the advertiser can prove that the money spent has a return, without falling back on nebulous metrics such as branding. With SEM, disruptive advertising does work, provided it is relevant enough.

One product of effective performance measurement is the emphasis on terms that denote an information search close to the point of purchase. The most competitive terms are those that indicate a pre-purchase search. With the exception of a few groups of generic terms, this mindset has left the research and discovery keywords in most markets ignored and possibly undervalued.

Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing

The merging of two Pay Per Click market places will increase internal competition. With more participants in the market and a reduction in available inventory, the cost of traffic will increase. Account management will be more efficient with this consolidation, and the volume of available traffic will increase too.

However, we won’t see this locally, as bidding for Australian traffic through Bing and Yahoo! is done via Yahoo! Search Marketing (Formally Overture, formally Goto, etc). What we will get instead, based on information to date, is an eventual change in the platform we use.

Why People will care more about rank in Bing

With Microsoft powering Yahoo!’s search results a good rank in Bing will mean even more traffic. Most decisions on how to allocate SEO resources are influenced by reported search queries and Google’s domminance within this metric. As a result, a lot of SEO activity online is focused on building for Google. It is seen as the only engine worth building for, as it will return the most for the investment of resources. With a ranking in Bing about to appear for more queries, and the deal generating more awareness, this may drive more interest and activity.

Still more to come

There has been a lot written, and some very in-depth, on this deal over the last week. There are going to be even more blog posts and press releases to follow. The fate of Yahoo!’s other search products has not been revealed yet, and there are other areas that still need to be clarified. One thing that can be taken for granted now is that a lot of people are going to be auditing the size of their brand and industry’s query space, and the rankings of their sites in Bing.

Where the clicks come from

Yahoo Search marketing and Google Adwords both offer a number of sources of traffic:

Search: Placement on their own (Yahoo/Google) Search Result Page (Yahoo ads will display on Bing.com.au as well within Australia)
Search Network: Placement on SERPs generated from their directory by external sites (Google)
Content Network: Sites serving ads as determined by keywords the page content matches
Placements: Only in Google – selecting specific sites to place ads on.

Search is the best source

Depending on how much transparency you want, there are a number of different keyword match options available from both Yahoo and Google. With Google, keywords can be set up for exact, phrase (keywords used in a phrase, in order) and broad match (whatever Google feels like). With Yahoo there is standard (the terms and minor variants) and advanced (whatever Yahoo feels like, including phrase and broad like matches).

Selecting Keywords, the summary of the summary

This part can be fun, as the entire process hinges on your or your team’s ability to think of the product or service in the same way as the market. There are a number of different ways to approach this process. At this point it is a return to basic marketing theory, or as I like to think of it, actually getting some use out of my degree.

The concept of the Sales Funnel is actually rather important to structuring your campaign and selecting the keywords. In this insanely simplified version, first the customer identifies the problem. This part of the process is most often expressed in general research and specific query terms relating to the general subject. The structure of the queries themselves will vary depending on how familiar with search and the Internet in general the user is. Next they research potential solutions. Research, location and cost terms broadly match this phase. In the final pre-purchase phase, specific terms are often used such as brand terms and product descriptions.Depending on the type of product and the company, an SEM campaign can target any one, combination or all of these phases.

Keyword Quality Score

The Quality Score in Google and the Quality Index in Yahoo determine how much you pay for position. Quality Score is applied by keyword, and Quality Index is applied by ad. Otherwise both operate in a broadly similar fashion. These scores are determined by a combination of ad and keyword relevance and click through rate (CTR). If your ad matches the keywords and you have a good CTR you will get a better position for the price you pay per click. This is fairly easy to game. Separate good match keywords from general ones by adgroups, write relevant copy and watch the score go up and cost per thousand (CPM) come down.

Building landing pages

Make sure you build a landing page. If you can, build a couple. Seriously, go nuts. Try as many different ideas as you can afford within the time available. Match the pages to the keywords and the specific group targeted by the campaign and adgroup.

Reported Average Position

Average Position is a metric presented in both Google and Yahoo that deserves a special mention. It is mostly useless. It is a measure of the number of impressions the ads received per position displayed in. When you consider the number of variations of distribution of position that a decent campaign can generate you can see that there is not much that can be taken away from it. Its only use is as a loose indication of increased competition when observed in conjunction with shifts in cost, impressions and assuming a consistent Quality Score. A much better run down can be found on The Search Agents blog.

In Brief

There is a lot more to be said about SEM, but this is only a very quick overview. My intent was to quickly cover Yahoo and Google on setting up keywords, building landing pages and writing relevant ads, and monitoring levels of competition.