Search Sense

As mentioned in Joe’s previous blog post, Google last week announced changes to its pay-per-click trademark policy which for the first time will allow any company to buy keywords associated with a rival’s brand name.

We’ve had a great deal of interest from our clients and industry journalists, who are keen to understand the implications and effect of Google’s plans to allow any company to bid on competitor brand names.

So we asked Paul Doleman, our CTO and Head of Paid Search, to give his advice and opinion on:

• What has happened and why
• Google’s motivation behind the policy change
• How it might affect the market and businesses
• The likely impact to brand owners

Find out what Paul has to say…(advise using your headphones)

The policy comes into effect in May, ahead of which the debate will no doubt continue. For example, Travolution discussed the impact to travel brands in an article posted yesterday.

Google have just announced changes to their trademark policy in UK & Ireland that will bring it in line with US & Canada. This basically means that from 5th May, Google will no longer stop advertisers bidding on the registered trademarks of their competitors. All keywords suspended in your account due to trademark violation will be activated on that day. Any trademark complaints received by today will be processed in the usual way but any received after today will only be processed for ad copy and not keywords. As far as I am aware, Google will still stop people using your trademarks in Ads, provided you have registered the trademark properly. The official Google blurb can be found here

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US

Personally, I think this has been on the cards for a long time and have sensed a big shift in Adwords account managers attitude towards trademarks throughout last year. Although this change it makes the job of the Paid Search agency harder, I think it’s fair enough and I am quite pleased that Google are recognising that it’s not necessarily their job to enforce trademark policy. In the travel sector, I think this could work to an advertiser’s advantage quite well, as there are many hotel chains with high search volume featured travel operators’ sites that one simply couldn’t bid on before. In finance, I think it will be less advantageous, as cheap, good-converting brand traffic will suddenly be open to competition by aggregators who will push bid prices up. In retail, I think both scenarios will be relevant, as retailers tend to promote their own brand as well as sell other high-profile brands. However, a lot of retailers will already have had permission to bid on their best selling products’ brand terms so it may lean towards the less advantageous end.

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

Technopedia has a round up of the top marketing articles of 2007. With over 250 articles, this is an extremely comprehensive and useful resource. There are articles covering all the various online marketing services we offer such as SEO, paid search, social media, web development, and content.

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.

It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.

Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.

Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?

The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.

Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…

The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.