Bing Launches Linked Pages, Promises Better People Search Results

Microsoft Bing announced a new feature named Linked Pages. The purpose is to make the search results for you and your friends more personalized as well as richer.

If I am friends with you and you do a search in Bing for [barry schwartz] you will see the following search result at the top:

Linked Pages lets you tell Bing which pages in the search results are specifically about your friend. The example Microsoft gave was the common name John Smith, but it also works with less common names such as Barry Schwartz. If you follow search, you are probably more interested in seeing information about me than maybe the famous psychologist or Cofounder of Calvin Klein.

Bing allows me to “link” search results to my person profile so that I can associate myWikipedia page, my LinkedIn profile, my company profile, my blogs and so forth with this search result. This would make searching for your friends more relevant for you and obviously help Bing get some more structured data about web pages on the internet and how they related to your Facebook and other social profiles on the internet.

How To Set It Up:

(1) Login to Linked Pages with your Facebook account.

(2) Then grant Bing permission to post to Facebook on the following screen.

(3) Then Bing will show you a search query for your name, go through the results (or refine the query) and click “link to me”.

(4) If you accidentally link the wrong page, don’t worry, you can unlink the page as well.

(5) You can even link search results to other people, like your friends. Just search for a friend and link pages about them.

Here is a video demo on this feature:

Make a Good Search Impression

Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed

Google has confirmed reports of a Panda update with us. Thye company told us they have done a data refresh of the Google Panda algorithm about a week ago, and added that there were no additional signals or algorithm changes. This was only a data refresh.

I saw reports over the past week or so of webmasters commenting about their rankings. Most were complaining that they lost rankings, but some said sites that were originally hit by Panda regained their traffic levels pre-Panda. This would explain the data refresh, where Google ran the algorithm and updated the sites that should or should not have been touched by Panda.

Google Panda 3.2

Google said this happened about a week or so, so I would place this Google Panda 3.2 update as happening on January 18, 2012.

Why 3.2 and not 2.x? Well, I spoke with a Googler back in late November, they expressed that one of the 2.x updates we labeled as a “minor” update, should have likely been named as a major update and thus labelled a 3.0 update. I personally believe that was an October Panda update, that we did not cover here, but I do not have confirmation on that. In fact, Google does not number their updates, so it is hard to nail down.

The 3.1 update was likely the the minor update from November and now this being a basic “data refresh,” we’d label this as a minor update as well, and call this the 3.2 update.

There was a long gap between this update and the update from November because Google promised us no Panda updates during holidays.

Why The Wikipedia/Google Search Results Study Is Flawed

Many SEOs have been chatting this week about a recent study by Intelligent Positioning (first reported by Search Engine Watch) that showed Wikipedia ranks on Google UK for 99 percent of searches.

Yikes, right?

Wikipedia — more specifically, Google’s apparent love of Wikipedia — has long been a sore spot in the SEO industry, so seeing a statistic like that is a big pile of salt in the wounds at this point.

But it’s really not a statistic to get worked up about because, in my opinion, the study itself was flawed.

Study Methodology

As Intelligent Position explains, the company used a couple random noun generators to come up with a list of 1,000 nouns — words like “ashtray” and “volcano,” “snowflake” and “melody.” It then did 1,000 unique searches on Google UK and charted if and where Wikipedia showed up in the first page of results.

The results? Wikipedia was on page one for 99 percent of those searches, was the top-ranked result for 56 percent and was in the first five results for 96 percent of those noun searches.

Over on eConsultancy today, Kevin Gibbons makes the point that this shouldn’t be too surprising because Wikipedia does a lot of things right where SEO is concerned: usually very rich/deep content, highly targeted web pages, strong domain authority, loads of inbound links and more.

I don’t argue at all with those points, but I’d add something that seems just as obvious to me: the study only used one-word nouns. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia — in large part, it’s a repository of information about nouns.

With all of that solid SEO in its favor, chances are great that searches for things like “tortoise,” “asphalt” and “liquid” are going to have Wikipedia very high in Google’s results. The Wikipedia page about tortoises is nothing short of amazing. Ditto the pages about asphalt and liquid.

A Suggestion For Different Methodology

Most search queries are longer than one word nouns. Chitika recently pegged queries at between 4.07 and 4.81 words on average, depending on the search engine. A couple months ago, Hitwise reported that 27 percent of searches that produced clicks were one word — leaving 73 percent of searches not represented in this study.

What I’d love to see someone do is this: Do a thousand searches (or more) that represent actual search engine behavior. Make 27 percent of those random searches be a single word (like “tortoise” or “liquid”); make 24 percent be two words (like “buy laptop” or “ankle pain”); make 19 percent be three words (like “u2 song lyrics” or “funny Valentine’s cards”), and so forth up to seven or eight words.

And then, using a variety of search terms that mimics actual search behavior, show how often Wikipedia appears in the first page of results. I’m pretty sure it’ll still be very high, but it won’t be 99 percent of the results.

The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!

The single biggest mistake web analysts make is working without purpose.

We work very hard. We torture SiteCatalyst. We send out a lot of data. Then we resend it again and again. And yet our work results in very little impact on the business in terms of action taken by company leaders.

Why this sad state? Almost always we dive into the ocean of data first. Sadder still, we don’t ask questions later. We never ask questions.

No questions. No tie to what’s important. No impact from the data.

Result? Our work lacks purpose. It is that simple.

My normal recommendation to address this supremely corrosive issue is to encourage each company to go through the process of creating a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model . It is a fantastic five step process that forces the engagement of key stake holders to produce a blueprint of why digital exists in a company, and what it is trying to accomplish.

No touching Google Analytics. No going to web analytics conferences. No tweeting for help.

Just doing the four things, in five steps above, will deliver what we lack… purpose.

1. Why should you come to work?

2. What should the focus of your work be?

3. What level of performance indicates success or failure?

4. What dimensions, if analyzed, will deliver juicy business insights?

Unfortunately a very tiny fraction of companies, or Analysts, want to put in this lifesaving effort up front.

If you fall in the “Analyst unwilling to do the hard work” category, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

If you fall into the “Analyst really wanting to do the hard work but does not have the connection to Superiors, or other teams, and looking for any way out to identify business purpose” category. I have a very very simple approach for you to follow. You are going to love it.

But there are two prerequisites: 1. You are going to have to throw away the shackles, and think like a business owner. Even if you work in a multi-headed hydra called “global corporation.” 2. Have the courage to move beyond the office politics/bickering, move from waiting for a savior to tell you what the purpose should be to investing some time in figuring it out yourself.

If you meet the prerequisites, and have a pinch of business savvy, we are together going to change the world!

My recommendation calls for you to take a structured approach and answer five questions. The insightful answers will help you create your own understanding of the purpose of the digital existence. You’ll end up creating something very close to the DMMM above.

The result will be an astonishingly high level of focus for your digital analytics work (even on day one) and hyper-relevant insights to the business. That, in turn will simply blow people’s mind (relevant insights always do), creating love for you. And love like that is hard to come by. (Conveniently that type of love also translates into a sweet raise.

Perhaps I’ve over-promised. But I’m just so excited about this process and its power to make our professional lives better.

Ready?

In my experience the best teaching happens with real world examples, rather than spouting theory. Hence, I’m going to use Credit Karma as an example to illustrate the process. I don’t know anyone at Credit Karma. I’m not an expert in the credit score reporting business. So I’ll be just as blind as you might be walking into any business and going through this exercise.

Here are the five questions (plus one special bonus in the end) I/you have to answer to get a very good sense of the business to bring astonishing relevancy to our data analysis:

#1. Why does the site exist?

This is the holy grail. But here’s the trick: We are not looking for just the obvious answers. We want to identify as close to 100% of the purpose for which the site exists, how it makes money/gets leads/raises donations (as the case may be).

In the case of Credit Karma my first job is to identify what the Macro Conversion is. The single biggest reason for the site’s existence.

Luckily except in the case of the most incompetent websites, this is easy to find. In our case it is right there staring us in the face on the home page: Free Daily Credit Card Monitoring!

Just to be sure, since I don’t know them at all, I might poke around a few pages to make sure. But usually it is pretty clear.

And in this case the cool thing is that they give you one score, the TransUnion one, for free. No credit cards required to sign up! My favorite report is the Credit Report Card. Great visualizations and really great data. Sign up today! [Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with nor do I know anyone at Credit Karma.]

OK, back to being the business owner.

The next thing to answer this question, and ensure that I’m not a newbie Analyst who will only focus on 2% of the business success, I have to figure out the Micro Conversions.

To do this you’ll go to the main sections of the website. You’ll look for other calls to action. “Sign up for the mailing list.” “Order our catalog.” “Download the trial version.” Et al.

After 10 minutes of browsing, I found all these valuable Micro Conversions:

Some are pretty straight-forward. Affiliate links (Take Offer, Compare Rates) that link to other sites from which Credit Karma makes commissions. Advertising on the site is a Micro Conversion (the SavvyMoney ad above with the link Manage Your Debt). The Write A Review call to action (the more reviews there are on credit cards, the more valuable the site is for comparison shoppers the more people will come and do business with them). In the same vein, completed Compare Credit Card offers is an important Micro Conversion (and a sign of deeper engagement with the site). Finally, the links to connection on social platforms are Micro Conversions as well.

Now you have a fantastic understanding of the business objective (make money via credit reporting) and the Goals (a combination of Macro + Micro Conversions).

And, I can’t stress this enough, you are not just looking at 2% of business success, you are looking at 100%.

Bonus: Identifying Macro and Micro Conversions also gives you a list of Ecommerce Tracking to set up on the site, and Goals to set up in the Admin interface. You’ll also note small thinks like outbound link tracking (using Events) to set up for social actions and ensuring all affiliate links are tagged with our company’s tracking parameters.

Don’t open Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics yet! We have more work to do…

#2. What parts of the website should you focus on first?

One of the biggest problems we have with digital analytics is that we have waaaaaay too much data. And because the reports only show the top ten rows, we might not easily be able to see what matters.

Hence it is very important to figure out where to focus your analysis first. My method for doing that is to browse around the site and answer this question:

~ What content on the website is directly tied to driving Macro and Micro Conversions?

~ What sections of the website might be most valuable to the visitors?

~ What content areas seem very expensive to create (hence more important to measure if they are adding any value!)?

~ What cross-sells and up-sells do you see being pimped across the site?

~ What does the top nav and left/right nav groupings tell you about priorities?

You can quickly see how those simple questions help you understand what data might be the object of your analytical horsepower.

Another 10 or 15 minutes of exploring various links and pages yields the answers I’m looking for.

For me, as a lay person and not a credit score industry veteran, the most important section would be /learning. The more the website visitors are aware of how important credit scores are, the more likely they are to sign up.

This was a bit hidden but the second most important piece of content would be the Credit Simulator (/preview/simulator). I can go play with the simulation and be informed (scared, actually) of the implications of taking credit and become a more qualified lead for Credit Karma.

The other sections I found valuable, using the framework outlined in the questions above, were: /help/howitworks (no one would sign up without looking at this page, we have to A/B and MVT test this to the max), /tools (this creates a great affinity for the brand, even if people don’t sign up) and of course /creditcards (if they don’t sign up, let’s at least get an affiliate click .

You can quickly see how you’ve got a short list of things to do in the Content section of Google Analytics. The filters to apply to those reports, to understand which KPIs would be most important as you value this content.

Rather than letting the data take you somewhere randomly, let this approach put you in the drivers seat and then you take data for a ride to a specific destination. That is what being successful is all about.

Awesome, right?

#3. How smart is their digital marketing strategy?

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know how deeply fond I am of the Acquisition, Behavior, Outcomes framework. We covered Outcomes with the first question and behavior with the second. Now it’s time for acquisition.

What I try to probe, without talking to anyone at the company, is how savvy the company is in digital marketing. I’m also trying to figure out all the places they might be doing advertising. I want to know if they have even a simplistic understanding of how to rock social media.

Here’s my process for doing that…

~ Visit www.google.com (or Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia etc). Run a bunch of search queries with the intent of looking for the company’s products and services. I’ll do at least five or so brand-related queries (“credit karma reviews”), and at least ten to fifteen non-brand/long tail queries (“free credit scores,” “best credit score website,” “credit score reporting scams,” etc.).

I make a note of: 1. Organic search rankings (rank, page titles, snippets). 2. Paid search ads (title, creatives, urls shown). 3. Competition (who comes up first consistently, ppc and organic). 4. Search Plus Your World results.

~ Visit sites like (in this specific case) Yahoo! News/Finance to see if I get display ads when I read articles or stories about credit cards, credit scores etc. Do the same with some of the top sites I can think of related to the industry (brokerage sites, financially savvy consumer sites, etc). Finally, checkout at least a couple of blogs relevant to the topic.

I’m trying to see if I bump into my company’s ads (display, text, any other type). It will be a great reflection of how well thought out their acquisition strategy is, or how sub-optimal it is.

~ No business, B2C or B2B or here2there, can exist without a robust YouTube strategy. So off to YouTube to do some relevant searches to see what videos show up.

Do I see any promoted videos in the results (to control the message)? Do I discover a brand channel by the company (to create a deeper connection with customers)? How lame or awesome are their videos (you want to teach and pimp both at the same time)?

~ Social is all the rage these days and I do believe that every business of every type should have a social presence that is the epitome of conversational marketing. So visiting their Twitter/Facebook/Google+ pages is critical.

Do they have a social presence? How many followers/likes do they have in comparison to their competitors? Do they reply to questions, or just shout? Do they pimp offers or try to make people’s lives better? Is there any consistency in their contribution?

One special thing I’m also checking is if they have the +1 button on their website. Search Plus Your World and the social graph has become quite important. People search now, see their friends/social graph liking/endorsing brands and pages. Those often catch the eye of the searcher more easily, sometimes, than paid or organic results.

All this goes into creating starting points for what I’ll do when I get into the web analytics tool. Will I analyze Search first or Campaigns? Will I focus more on referring sources or social traffic first? Will I measure the value of YouTube first or Display ads?

Additionally the above investigation also gives me a set of insights I can deliver to my CxOs. Channels where they should exist but don’t. Things they might be doing badly in Social or YouTube or wherever. Missed opportunities in Organic search or SPYW. Things like that. And these recommendations will come from my own digital marketing sophistication (earning respect from my Senior Leaders).

Bonus: In the digital marketing savvy section I’ve also started to pull out my Samsung Galaxy Tab and Nexus S to preview the mobile and tablet experience of the company. If it stinks that tells me a lot (remember the year of mobile was 2010!). I’ll also run a couple of quick searches on Google or Yandex or Baidu to see how the landing pages look on my mobile phone and tablet.

Super Bonus: Only for the most passionate amongst you… run a quick query in the iTunes App Store and the Android Market to see if the business exists there in the form of an application. If yes, download it. Play with it. Download some competitor offerings.

Most companies that are on the bleeding edge of digital marketing savvy are leveraging Google, Yahoo!, Email Marketing, Blog ads, Social channels AND mobile experiences AND mobile applications. The analysis above, will bring remarkable brilliance when you dive into the data. You’ll take your company from bad to good in terms of acquisition-savvy, or from good to great.

#4. How well are they doing in context of their competition?

It is almost criminal to dive into doing any analysis of a company’s website data without first getting a little bit of context about their competitive performance. Context after all is king .

Here one simple example of how it can be helpful. You log into CoreMetrics and you see a line traffic going up or down. Is that good or bad? You don’t know. No one at the company will talk to you. Why not jump on to a free competitive intelligence tool and figure out the answer for yourself?

I’ll usually start with looking at the company’s data in www.compete.com (if they are US-based with primarily US-based traffic) or Google Trends for Websites . And in five seconds I’ll end up with a graph that looks like this:

The above data is from Compete. I’ve included not just the data for Credit Karma, but also for two relevant competitors, freescore.com and myfico.com.

Initially I was wow-ed by the spike in the blue line (Credit Karma), that is quite spectacular. But then I see that it might be an industry thing, as the competitor spiked as well. Good context.

While at Compete I can also dig into a whole bunch of metrics like Visits, PageViews, udience segmentation, and so much more.

Now, I better understand visitor acquisition.

Time to understand a bit more about the visitors themselves. My BFF? Google/DoubleClick AdPlanner , perhaps the largest source of demographic and psychographic data out there.

The above data is for freescore.com. I can also quickly run queries for Credit Karma (and others) and compare and contrast the demographic profiles of people who visit the website. Are our competitors particularly stronger in some Educational categories or Incomes compared to us? What are our areas of strength?

While in AdPlanner I also highly recommend looking at “Sites also visited,” a fantastic way to understand who a site’s real competitors are. What are the clusters of options when people consider a credit report? This is also a great place to get ideas for websites you can show ads on, exchange links, etc.

The last stop of my journey is Google Insights for Search , your direct source for all Google organic search data from across the world. Here I particularly like to look at a metric I call “share of search.” How often are people looking for the generic query for the industry, for me (/my company) and for my direct competitors?

Think of it as unaided brand recall …

Just look at that massive spike in queries for Credit Karma at the end of Dec! What the heck happened there? Great question. What where the related keywords people searched for? Check the Google Analytics reports. Was this traffic any good? Check the Google Analytics metrics. Are we going to dominate the world and crush our competitors? Time will tell!

The purpose of competitive intelligence analysis is to understand your place in the world, to highlight from an industry/ecosystem perspective what your strengths and areas of opportunity are, and to collect a list of questions like the ones immediately above for analysis in your web analytics tools.

Is that not simply orgasmic?

#5. What is the fastest possible way I can have a impact on the business?

One final thing.

I look for a low hanging fruit to fix/analyze. Something I can quickly analyze, find insights for and get fixed to show the value of data (and my employment at the company).

Here are some examples of things I consciously look for:

~ Any obviously important links that might be broken (404) or misdirected.

~ Horribly constructed landing pages for the top organic/paid keywords.

~ Something absolutely important missing from the site’s information architecture.

~ A missed opportunity for promoting a micro conversion more prominently. (Why is the Credit Score Emulator so hidden, and not on the home page of Credit Karma?)

~ Overpimping of social icons when there has never been a social post (or all posts are sub-optimal).

~ No “related items” after a product is added to cart. (Aw, come on! Has Amazon taught us nothing?)

~ 17 display ads on every single page on the website. (Why, oh why must we inflict torture?)

And other such things. Depending on the website you are analyzing, and your web-savvy/UX expertise, you might find other things. But the criteria to apply is that you are looking for big, obvious broken things that can mostly likely be fixed quickly and for which the impact can be quickly measured.

You are trying to find something with a clear purpose to show the power of actions taken through data.

One of my most beloved low hanging fruit for lead gen/ecommerce websites is to identify and improve the checkout abandonment rate .

That would be measuring the efficiency of this process for Credit Karma:

For a lead gen/ecommerce website there is no faster way to improve the bottom line. The potential customer has already discovered us. They’ve survived our website. They’ve gone from consideration to purchase. Now, all that remains for us to make money is to get them through these three simple pages. Let’s make sure we do that! 100% of the time! (I love being aggressive in this case.)

This is directly tied to business purpose. It is absolutely focused on something important (getting the macro conversion). It is small (3 pages), and it is very well defined. And it is easily measureable (hello my dear funnel analysis, I’ve missed you!).

That is how an Analyst achieves glory. Through data. Powered by a clear purpose.

So five simple questions that help you focus on the end-to-end view of the business (Acquisition, Behavior, Outcome) without ever touching the data (except CI) and help you create your own Digital Marketing Measurement Model.

What I love more than anything else is that it forces you to become the Marketer for the couple hours you’ll spend on it. It forces you to think like a business owner for that time. It forces you to pull out any UI/UX chops you have.

It is rare that Analysts get to flex those muscles. It is important, though because I don’t know of a single Digital Analyst who has become great without flexing those muscles.

And now, my dear, you are ready to log into your web analytics tool!

But before you do that, I have one last parting gift for you…

Special Bonus: #6. Any technical notes I can make for the future (analytics or coding)?

As I’m clicking around I also like to make note of these things:

~ Randomly view source to see if the javascript tag for the web analytics tool is there. You just want to spot check if the tool is there (for GA just do View Page Source and Ctrl F and ga.js).

I do not encourage you to do to this until much, much later, but you can use a web analytics site audit tool for more thorough checking. But don’t do it now. Don’t get sucked into technical implementation hell just yet.

~ Things that might hinder SEO.

For example: Link text – is it descriptive? URL structures – are they clean (as on Credit Karma) or a jumble of technical gibberish (as on www.aeropostale.com )? Exit links – are they wrapped in javascript (can’t be read by search bots) or clean? How clean is the link structure? These and other such small things are both a task list and a sign of how savvy the company is when it comes to SEO.

~ When I click on various external ads (search, display, YouTube), I also take a quick peek at the URL window to check for campaign tracking parameters. So important to have them.

~ Make note of windows that pop up. If they are links to the company’s blog or their ecommerce/travel reservation/lead gen platform, is it on the same domain or a different domain?

Latter means tracking challenges, technical nightmares.

~ If they have an internal site search engine, and in this day and age it is criminal not to, then I do a quick search and see if my query shows up in the url stem. For example, on this blog it would look like this: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/?s=segmentation

This would be awesome. The “s.” It means we can configure it in Analytics in two seconds (no IT begging involved) and start doing amazing internal site search analysis .

If the parameter does not exist… well, then IT begging will be mandatory.

Remember. You are not a technical implementer or a javascript tagger – two valuable roles. You are an Analyst. Your primary objective should be data analysis and finding insights. So the first five questions and the answers you’ll find are your focus area. The sixth is a gift you can give the javascript tagger/technical implementer in your company.

That’s it. My humble attempt at sharing with you everything I know about avoiding the single biggest mistake Digital Analysts/Marketers make: Execute their jobs without a clear business purpose.

If any of the above makes you feel that I hold data secondary and understanding what data is in service of first then I’ve succeed in my mission with this post.

As always, it’s your turn now.

What are the approaches you use to identify business purpose? Do you dive into the data first, and still find insights without doing the above mentioned five investigations? Is there a strategy outlined above that you feel works better than others? What are your favorite low hanging fruits to fix for a digital business?

Selling More Shoes with Multi-Channel Funnels

Shoes of Prey, an online retailer that sells custom-made shoes globally, have made significant improvements in their online conversion rates thanks to insights gleaned from their Multi-Channel Funnels reports. Through taking action based on these insights they were able to increase their conversion rate by 40%, increase same-day purchases by 20%, and better understand how to manage their social media strategy.

Head on to the APAC Conversion Room blog to learn how Shoes of Prey achieved these results and more.
Part 1: Thanks to the Top Conversions Paths report, Shoes of Prey were able to understand the sequence of channel interactions that led to conversions, and take action to reduce the number of interactions before a purchase is made.

Part 2: The Time Lag report helped them realise how long it typically took visitors to make a purchase from the time they first visited the site. Using this insight, Shoes of Prey were able to put into place marketing initiatives to help reduce the time to purchase.

Part 3: The Assisted Conversions report aided Shoes of Prey in understanding how influential their various marketing channels were either earlier in the sales funnel or as a direct response mechanism. They now have a better understanding of what role social media plays in influencing sales and can now manage their campaigns better.

Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem

Perhaps Google may finally have to figure out a “fix” for Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem,” now that an anti-Romney site is making it appear that anyone can rank any protest page for any politician’s name. Bing has the same problem, but no one ever seems to care about that.

Spreading Romney

I was pretty surprised to discover the “Spreading Romney” site appearing in the top results on Google and Bing in a search for “romney” that I did today. I don’t recall seeing it recently, so it appears to be a new gain.

Here it is on Google, as the ninth regular listing:

I’ve also seen it as high as fourth position, also in sixth and sometimes Romney’s official site doesn’t even appear. Ninth seems to be the most consistent position for it.

The searches I’ve done were logged out of Google, using the “incognito” mode in Google Chrome, so that I appeared as a fresh searcher that Google had no history for. I also tested this on two separate computers.

Here it is on Bing, in the eight regular position:

The site is a single page which offers an alternative definition for “romney,” as shown below:

“To defecate in terror,” reads the definition, with the word “terror” as a link to a Huffington Postsummary of news about Romney’s putting his dog in a rooftop carrier for a 12-hour drive to Canada in 1983 that’s been making the rounds again to haunt him.

The dog, as the journalist at the Boston Globe who originally found the story in 2007 explains, apparently didn’t enjoy the ride and ended up having diarrhea that trickled down the car while Romney was driving.

Unlike the Spreading Santorum site, Spreading Romney doesn’t lead to an associated blog with lots of information about Romney. Rather, there’s a link saying “Indianapolis Web Design,” which leads to a design firm that that may have produced the page and is hoping for attention. I’m checking on this. The page also links to Spreading Santorum.

Amazing Rise With So Few Links

It’s pretty impressive rise to the top of Google and Bing, for a site that appears to have started around January 12. Less than a month, and it’s in the top results for Google and Bing. How did that happen?

One way to know would be to see the people linking to the site. Here’s what Google reports:

Wow. Not one person seems to link to this site, and yet it makes it so high in Google. It’s pretty much the same at Bing:

Only two links gets you to the top of Bing, it appears.

In reality, neither search engine is reporting what’s really going on. If you want to understand more about why they deliberately withhold this type of linking data, and why that’s bad for those trying to investigate these types of situations, see my post from earlier this year: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Maybe a third-party tool can help. I turned to the Open Site Explorer, which shows links to sites based on its own data from “crawling” the web. It turns out, this site seems to be so new that OSE has no information. Majestic Site Explorer did better, telling me the site had 219 links to it from 67 unique websites:

Majestic sent me a full report of all the sites it found linking to Spreading Romney. It seems to be a relative handful of small sites of various types.

The Linking Campaign

Here’s one of those links:

That’s on this page at Democratic Underground, where the discussion is opened by someone saying “Google Bomb away” with a link to Spreading Romney and the word “Romney” as part of the link. The discussion goes on to encourage others to link in exactly this way. The page has nine links like this, in all.

Fark has a similar link, though it’s not really instructions on “bombing” in the way that happens at Democratic Underground. Some Tumblr pages link. A link on Digg. One from the “True Blue Liberal” blog.

Spreading Romney Gets Rachel Maddow Attention

Exploring further, the site certainly seemed to get a boost when Rachel Maddow mentioned it on her show shortly after the site appears to have been created, on January 12:

Insensitivity, gaffes dog Romney

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It’s Not A Google Bomb, But….

As I said, it’s pretty amazing that this site has shot up in the rankings so quickly. It’s outranking long-standing sites such as:

• The American Romney Breeders Association (Romney is a type of sheep)
• The Committed To Romney site (which seems to be a pro-Romney site with substantial content stretching back to 2005)
• The Dogs Against Romney site (apparently dating back to 2007, with 25,000 associated Facebook fans)

For this site to leap-frog over those and others, it creates all the same issues that Google initially encountered with real Google bombs, the impression that anyone can fire off a linking campaign and make it into the top results for anything.

Google eventually fixed the Google Bomb problem in 2007. The people who assume that Spreading Santorum is ranking because of a Google bomb — or that Spreading Romney is also a Google bomb — don’t technically understand what a Google Bomb is. Maddow is one of these people, by the way.

A Google bomb involves linking to a page with certain words to try and make it rank for those words, even if the page itself doesn’t mention the words. When people wanted to Google bomb President George W. Bush’s biography into the top results for a search on “miserable failure,” they linked to his bio with those words. That made it relevant for them, and it ranked.

The Google bomb “fix” effectively said that if a page doesn’t contain the words that people are trying to bomb  for, then the page won’t rank for those words. That’s why, after the fix, Bushbriefly ranked again for “failure” after the White House used that word on his page.

Neither the anti-Santorum nor the anti-Romney pages are Google bombs because they use the words “santorum” and “romney” on them.

Google Bombs Redefined

Still, the pages are viewed by some as Google bombs in the non-technical sense of appearing to be some type of practical joke that has been played, some out-of-line manipulation of Google’s search results, something that perhaps makes those results irrelevant. And the Romney site ranking so well, so quickly, certainly suggests this is the case.

There’s a strong argument that the Spreading Santorum site has earned its place in the results for a search on “santorum” because it’s a protest site that began way back June 2003. That site has been out there longer than Rick Santorum has maintained his own official site. When Santorum left the US Senate, he doesn’t appear to have maintained his own web site. His campaign site is relatively recently, to my knowledge, as are his social media profiles. He joined Twitter in July 2009.

Substance Vs. Pranks

The Spreading Santorum site also has an associated blog that’s regularly updated with criticisms about Santorum based on news stories and recent events. There’s substance to it, rather than it just being a joke, as some perceive.

The Romney site touches on a serious issue, the treatment of animals, but there’s nothing further behind it. It has no historic legacy. It feels more like a successful joke on Romney than some type of political opposition.

The latter will rub off on the former, I’d say. Both will be seen as equal, and both will be seen as if Google is just letting anyone — in particular liberals — do what they want with its search results.

Certainly Google should take a harder look at why its algorithm rewarded a site with so little substance to it, especially as Google’s “Panda Update” is especially supposed to penalize “thin” sites. Spreading Romney is arguably a “thin” site that’s getting past that filter (perhaps because it’s so new that it hasn’t yet been caught by it). The Spreading Santorum site might need to consolidate its blog into the main spreadingsantorum.com domain to avoid “thin” problems, too.

It’s Also A Bing Bing

Of course, everything about the perception that people can just “bomb” Google results to make political statements is equally applicable to Bing. But it’s rare to see anyone criticize Bing over this.

By the way, for those wondering, there isn’t yet any type of similar protest sites that seems to have made it into the first two pages of results on either Google or Bing for searches on Paul, Gingrich or Obama.

More From The Site Creator

Postscript: I’ve heard back from Jack Shepler, who created the site, who told me:

I’m not associated with any campaigns. I made it to be funny, and to make a point, and I believe it did just that.

and:

I can tell you that so far the site has received 44,492 pageviews, according to analytics. I don’t have plans at this time to expand on the site, but who knows what will happen if he gets the Republican nomination.

and:

The site launched January 10. A friend said it was on page 2 on January 14. It hit page 1 on January 16. Within a couple days it was up the 4th result, where it stayed for a while. I double checked the page 1 results with a couple friends on the internet to be sure.

Survey: People Largely Negative About Google’s Personalized Search Results

Last month, market research tool provider Ask Your Target Market surveyed 400 US adults about their attitudes toward personalized search on Google. The results were reported today in eMarketer’s email newsletter. We went back to the source to check out the survey and discovered that the majority of respondents expressed ambivalence or outright dissatisfaction about Google’s new more personalized search results.

The first question asked was about the primary search engine used by respondents.

Primary search engine:

Source: AYTM, n=400 (1/12)

Then the survey explored respondents’ attitudes toward search personalization and Google+ participation.

Do you like the idea of personalizing search results based on past searches and info from your social networking sites?

Source: AYTM, n=400 (1/12)

A minority said yes (15.5 percent) they liked search personalization. But a clear majority were ambivalent or hostile to the idea (84.5 percent). Within that majority 45 percent said they did not want search results personalized at all. Of the three types of responses the “nos” were the dominant category.

There were two other survey questions fielded by AYTM about Google+:

• Do you use Google+?
• Would you be more likely to use Google+ if you knew you would get more tailored search results?

To the first question (Do you use it?) 19.3 percent responded “yes,” and another 20.3 percent said they had accounts that were not really used. The other 60.4 percent said they did not have Google+ accounts or said that they didn’t know what it was.

In terms of whether more people would use Google+ if they knew it helped personalize their results, 7.5 percent said “yes” they would be more likely to use it. However 44.4 percent said “no” and 48.1 percent said “maybe.”

It’s important to point out that this is just one survey and it’s not clear how representative the survey population was of the entire US adult population. It’s also important to observe that people often react negatively to change. However these results, if they can be generalized, represent a pretty strong negative reaction to the new direction Google is headed.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan:

 I wanted to add that with a further follow-up, it probably would have been incredibly easy to turn the 45% who said “No, I think everyone should see the same results” into a much smaller number.

For example, if the question had been: “When searching for football, do you think Americans and Europeans should see the exact same results?,” that probably would have given respondents reason to think further about the advantages to personalization.

Of course, the personalization in that case tend to be geographically-based (Americans would be more likely to see NFL information; Europeans about local soccer teams). But there are other examples where past history and social connections can help. That’s one reason why Bing, just like Google, uses both factors.

My experience has been that no one seems positive about any company wanting to personalize things for them when you ask. I always put the blame on this to Amazon, because of that one purchase you make that Amazon assumes means you are completely interested in that product forever going forward.

In addition, I don’t think people like the idea that any company could somehow “figure them out” and somehow assume it could personalize things for them.

But emotion aside, personalization can help (and can hurt), and it’s all about getting the balance right. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in more to read a post from Google last year about why it does personalization, as well as “The Filter Bubble” from Eli Pariser, which takes a critical look at personalization in general. Also see SMX East Keynote: A Conversation With Eli Pariser.