Goojje is a play on words, sounding like sister while  ‘Google’ in maderin sounds very much like big brother. The creators of Goojje even left a message on their front page roughly translated as “Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister”. Many are interpiting this as a mockery of Google potentially pulling out of China while others believe it is a plea for Google to stay.

Goojje Home- page suspiciously similar to Google

It is very clear that the site has modeled itself off the searching giant from the style of layout to the Google font and colours. There is even a small nod to Baidu with the paw print in its logo.  The search engine returns many of the same results of Google but only ‘clean’ government approved websites. It is well known that the Chinese government has implemented filters on the country’s internet access dubbed as The Great Firewall of China, with any content that is deemed ‘undesirable’ blocked out. This includes many foreign sites such as the BBC news site.

The Google owned Youtube was also reproducted with a Chinese makeover. A variation of Youtube called Youtubecn popped up not long after Goojje showing videos that are usually blocked on the Youtube’s site. Although its slow and often described as glichy, Youtbecn is gaining alot of momentum.

Google refused to make any comment on Goojje or other copycat sites.

Well, Hakia has come up with nobrandsearch.com – a blind test of search engines. It takes results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and it’s own Hakia and delivers them unbranded to see which results people prefer. Search Engine Watch goes into more detail on this and is well worth a read and even a test.

What did you find on nobrandsearch.com? Did you click Google every time?

The snippet performs a couple of functions – it gives you a summary of what the page is about, and it shows you the context within which your query terms might appear on a page. Sometimes the search engine will decide to display the meta description tag if it feels it is most relevant to the search query you have entered. Other times it displays different information from various different places.

Sometimes it will display a snippet of text from your page’s content if it feels something you have written is more related to the search query. But sometimes it will display text not even found on your website. In this case, where is the information coming from?

If the search engine decides that the page is relevant to your search query but the content doesn’t give a good enough summary in relation to the search query it can pull information from various other places that has a better description, including the Yahoo Directory or DMOZ.

If snippets aren’t very informative, in relation to the search query, it may deter people from clicking onto particular websites or they may not click onto the most helpful or relevant websites. Poor quality snippets can lead to a poor searching experience so the search engines are fine-tuned to deliver quality and relevant information for as many websites and searchers as possible.

OK, so you rank in the top 3 for a fantastic keyword that’s searched regularly. You’ve worked hard to get that position and you’re still working to keep it there and push it higher. Yet you aren’t getting half the traffic you’d expect from ranking so high? We’ve been there.

Marketing taps into people’s emotions. Apply that to your SEO and how Google and other search engines interpret your content. While in the search results there isn’t much you have to play with in order to to tap into people’s emotions, there are changes you can make to help attract people to your site and get you those extra clicks.

Offer something interesting and attractive in your meta description or snippet. For many online shops, displaying a price is very effective – particularly if they are competitive prices. This way the user can see you are cheap before they even visit you. If no one else is displaying prices then you’ve pretty much guaranteed that click if you are cheaper than they were expecting.

Use a descriptive URL. I’m not just talking the domain name here. I’m talking your interior pages as well. They should also be named something descriptive that tells the user what they should expect if they visit that page.

Don’t make your description a sales pitch. Keep it short and sweet but also detailed without being too technical to entice those who know exactly what they are after and those who know roughly what they want. Also be honest and don’t over-hype something as this will lead to mis-trust and will likely lose you a click.

You can use Google AdWords to see what kinds of descriptions work better for converting. Although this will require funds, it will allow you to run alternate versions of your description week after week so you can see the combination that converts the best, then apply this to your meta description and title tags.

Don’t use superlatives. These are words that suggest you feature something of a greater degree to that of anything else – words such as top, best, most, greatest or superior. These can often come across as quite pushy and salesy and may force the user to click elsewhere if they aren’t happy with your ‘pitch’.

Is there anything else you can do to increase conversions from the organic results in the search engines?

Of course Google’s tour de force is search, and it is rightly so that they are considered the leaders in the field, being that they really pushed what was considered then, an unprofitable area of the Internet. Search became a major feature of how to use the Internet, and Google have become the kings – how many SEO experts have based their craft around how a site will be seen by Google?

As part of their making search the prime force it is today, Google have also given us more focused searching. After the amount of websites began to reach critical mass, and unscrupulous web designers would stuff the widest range of keywords into their meta tags something had to give and Google took the initiative to sort things out – and still do so. Making searching more accurate and quicker for users, Googles staff are constantly changing their algorithms. What may sometimes cause frustration for anyone trying to get good positions is actually a good thing, if only for the fact that it created an industry of its own, and gave us jobs!

Another of Googles most recognisable and popular creations is their very successful adverts – adwords or adsense, depending on which side of it you use. These adverts have become ubiquitous almost to becoming an essential part of a website and if successful a way of making a site pay for itself. The adwords side can offer an excellent method of market feedback and keyword analysis.

More recently, and very successfully, Google has brought about or acquired a diverse and highly useful box of tools, some aimed at improving our web experience Who do you know who has a gmail account,? Who hasn’t used Google maps to plot their journey. And their webmaster tools have become a must-have for anybody serious about promoting their website, including browser plug-ins designed to assist in working with Google, like the Page rank checker for example. What is most unique about all this, is that the services are provided for free!

Love them or hate them, Google are going to continue to dominate the web for some time to come. They have hit the magic formula and will probably continue to do so for some time to come.

Google has shifted the paid PPC listings on the right hand side of the search results (sponsored results) page closer to the organic results. The same has been noticed by numerous search fanatics who also noted that when the browser’s width is expanded, the ads do not move to the far right of the screen, whereas before they’d be pushed up against the far right of your monitor, well away from the organic results if you’re on widescreen.

For a while this only seemed to be a test and didn’t appear in all browsers or for all people, although it now appears to have bee rolled out completely. This seems to be just another tiny little tweak that Google are so keen to get right by testing and… well, testing. It sounds like quite a simple change to make but I’m sure the reasoning and thought process behind this minor change was extensive, as will be the analysis of its impact.

Have you noticed any change in the way your PPC ads run since the change? Are they more of less effective than before? Are you seeing a higher click-through rate? Even a higher conversion rate? Let us know how this change has affected your campaigns.

These days, DMOZ has dropped significantly in popularity over the years, and is the subject of much criticism by webmasters looking for inclusion. But does the open directory still hold value in terms of SEO?

Many users find an issue with the “for the people” part, and the numbers reflect it. Looking at Compete data, Dmoz traffic has reduced in terms of unique visitors, visits, and page views over the last few years . According to Compete, Dmoz hasn’t had 3 million unique visitors in a month since March 2003. In April of 2009, the numbers showed over a million unique visitors.And over the past year unique visitors have seen significant drops with only 1,123,091 unique hits in July 2009, over 300,000 less unique visitors since July of 2008.

Things aren’t looking great for the ODP fo rthe near future. Their customer service didn’t help. They never emailed you when you made a submission and never let you know when your listing went live or was rejected. For a project that claimed to “care about the community and the experience we provide” their service isn’t massively client oriented. But then, it’s run by volunteers that have a lot of other things to do and received thousands of submissions each month – each. But maybe DMOZ 2.0 will be better?

Google and Dmoz

There have been a lot of questions in the past as to just how Google valued Dmoz links (and whether or not they were de-valuing them). Jean Manco, a UK building historian, and a Dmoz editor since 1999 has a very interesting look at the relationship between Google and Dmoz. She says:

In its endless battle against spam, Google needs every weapon it can lay hands on. Recently Google patented a method of including an element of editorial opinion in its algorithm. Dmoz was specifically mentioned. Yet no one knows better than Google that Dmoz only lists a fraction of the Web. So Google is not about to rely on Dmoz alone for any crucial element of its algorithm. That is a safe bet.

The point is, marketers don’t appear to be looking for Dmoz links at the rate they once were. Many will tell you it’s quite hard to get one anyway. This could be another contributing factor to the decline in interest for Dmoz. Dmoz has been working on a Dmoz 2.0 for sometime, but staff seem unable to respond to requests for comments about this.

Have you managed to get a site listed in the ODP recently? Have you had your site removed? Did you see any benefit to your rankings recently after being listed? Let us know your thoughts.

Keyword stuffing your meta tags – A lot of people seem to have the miss conception that the more keywords you include within your tags the more search results your site will appear on. This most definitely is not the case. If your meta tags are filled with too many keywords ,aka “keyword stuffing”,  your website will either be penalised or your tags will be so diluted that your site wont appear on any search phrases.
The key to writing your tags is to keep things very focused, targeting around 5-7 key terms per page generally works well and results in a far more effective optimisation campaign.

Hidden text – We are seeing more and more people trying to hide text on their website either by making the text so small that it cannot be read by the human eye or trying to disguise it by using the same colour as their background, it seems its thought by some that by entering paragraphs stuffed with keywords that your site will rank better. This is a big no no as most of the search engines spiders look out for hidden text and penalise websites that are seemingly trying to increase their positions in this way.

Web Page Redirects – Sites that are used to redirect visitors to a page that isn’t usually seen by the search engines are usually doing so to no benefit of the visitor and the search engines have picked up on this therefore such redirects can be detected and can land your site with a penalty or ban.

Link farms – Although these make link building a lot easier it seems that such resources are frowned upon by Google so it’s definitely best to avoid these.

Using duplicate content – Always try to avoid using any duplicate content that has been taken from another website, this gets picked up by the search engines and can hinder the performance of your website within the search results.

Overdoing inbound linkage work – It’s very important not to overdo the amount of inbound links you create for your website. Some people believe the more inbound links you have the better and therefore start creating thousands each month, sometimes from websites that have completely no relevance to their own. Creating such an excessive amount of links will  flag up the spam filters within Google and the other search engines, especially if they are built within very short succession to one another. There are a lot of stories out there of websites being banned for using such techniques, plus your optimisation will prove far more effective if you target quality links from trusted websites related to your own sector.

Many SEO experts define the above techniques as Black Hat SEO and using any of them is a very risky business and may have a detrimental effect on your website. Its best to stick to using ethical techniques that may take a little more effort but definitely pay off in the long run. If you’re not sure of the best techniques to use it pays to get an SEO expert on-board.

It comes as no surprise that Bing is advertising on Google AdWords to bring in some extra traffic. Although it did surprise us to hear that Google sees value in Bing’s paid listings program and can be seen advertising in the adCenter to promote their AdWords service.

Maybe this is Google’s way of showing they can afford to make in-your-face gestures by advertising on a direct competitors site, albeit on a small scale. Or maybe it’s a sign that it really is worth looking into Bing PPC. It could be something that will really pay off for you and give you that boost ahead of the competition.

According to Microsoft ads placed in the Microsoft adCenter appear both in the Bing search engine as well as MSN.

Have you used the adCenter? If so, what are your thoughts? Are the conversion rates any better? Are they less expensive? What is your experience with them compared to Google AdWords?

Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:

• link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
• related:url same as “what’s related” on serps.
• site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
• allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.
• inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
• allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.
• intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. “intitle:seoforgoogle google” finds only pages with seoforgoogle in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
• cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.
• info:url will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
• spell: will spell check your query and search for it.
• stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.
• filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. “-filetype:pdf” to remove Adobe PDF files.
• daterange: is supported in Julian date format only. 2452384 is an example of a Julian date.
• maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
• phone: enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same is true for something that looks like an address (include a name and zip code)
• site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.+net” – (tells you how many pages of your site are indexed by google)
• allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
• allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title