Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

What is Adword’s ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated

Quality Score is Google’s dynamic formula that assigns a score to each of your PPC keywords to determine where your sponsored ad appears in the reults pages. Quality score is calculated using a multitude of metrics  to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.

About Quality Score

Quality also determines your keywords’ minimum bid. In a nutshell…

the higher the Quality Score, the better the ad position and the lower the minimum bid

Quality Score is Google’s way of ensuring that only the most relevant ads appear on Google’s search results pages and the Google Network.

Components of Adword’s Quality score formula:

• The keyword’s historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered

• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

• The quality of your landing page

• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account

• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group

Google recently announced changes to improve the way quality score is calculated in a nutshell…

• Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

• Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’

• ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account

Anyone who’s been on websites such as Twitter will tell you that the information you get on there is hardly information at all. 

Twitter’s basic premise relies on the fact that many people around the world post little soundbytes about what they’re doing and they use devices beyond their computer to do this.  To update their accounts Twitter users can use SMS, PDAs Blackberrys.

Since it is no hidden secret that Google loves Twitter (because of its fresh content) SEO’s have gotten in on the act by also creating profiles and dropping the odd link or two to their client’s websites.

To optimise for twitter follow the steps below…

1. Create an Account

2. Invite your friends

3. Start Twitting (regular posts about your life and activities)

4. Don’t post any links unless they’re really interesting otherwise you’ll lose credibility!

5. If you have a WordPress blog, add the Twitter Plugin that allows your vistors to keep track of your Twits.

Copy Cat sites are trying to capitalise on the twitter craze by specialising in niches such as book and movies reviews.  One such site is Blippr.  I’ve not used it myself but plan to do so soon.

It seems that Google could have banned the keyword visibility tool Web Position Gold (owned by WebTrends) from automatically querying its database for natural and paid search positions.  The block seems to have occured on August 1st 2008.

Google specifically states on the webmaster guidelines section of its website that tools of this sort are not allowed and it specifically singles out WebPosition Gold.

Moreover, with the advent of “Personalised Search”, the results from these tools were beggining to display a fairly inacuurate picture.

For companies who want to prove results to their clients, I’ve discussed a few in this blog post about SEO KPIS. 

Here are a few of the discussions about Google’s ban of Web Position Gold:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3716136.htm

http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/58243-webposition-google-block.html

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=133156

Scott GoodYear, a representative from WebPosition Gold has joined these discussions and confirmed that there is no official ban on the software but that Google has tweaked its HTML code which casued the previous scraping template to return no results.

This could very well be the case and I personally applaud Scott’s efforts to keep clients aware of the situation.  However I hope that this doesn’t take too long!

Google announced the release of Google insights for Search which provides more insight into  search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches.

The tool also allows for comparison of search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

This is a great tool to use to give an added dimension to your keyword research!

Over the past few months, two new search engines have been creeping their way into the limelight;  Cuil and Wikia Search.

Quil (pron: Cool) was started by ex-Google engineers who now claim they have an index larger than that of Google’s.  While Wikia Search (brainchild of Wiki founder Jimmy Wales) harnesses the power of the masses to build the largest human edited search engine)

I used both engines over the past few weeks and while both offer new features, I don’t think Google will lose sleep over either of them, here’s why…

Cuil:  The results are presented in blocks of text including a picture scrapped from the site they’re displaying.  The results page is too confusing as it provides too much information and looks more like a spammy affiliates page than a search engine results page.

Wikia Search: Better results display but the results themselves need much improvement.  More importantly, since users can edit and review results, the database is very much open to spamming.

Having said the above, its still good to see others trying to improve on what  Google currently offers in terms of search.