Category: Google

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Facebook’s Graph Search – Instant Search Only Better Kind Of

This past year Google created Instant Search, you know those suggestions that pop up under what you are typing at Google.com that recommend finishing your query based on other popular searches that Google has seen and recorded. Well you could consider Facebook’s Graph Search like Instant Search for Facebook, but with a twist – it delivers results from friends, friends of friends, and friends of other friends.

It’s kind of cool to have really personalized results from people who you may trust more than a search engine algorithm. You’ve got to enable Graph Search on Facebook first to use it. Once you do, Facebook inserts a search bar on the top left of your Facebook page. Results are personalized based on your friends and if your friends don’t have the answer, the answers come from Bing.

I did a search for best Chinese restaurants in Waldorf and got ratings on two from friends of friends. The page of the restaurant actually even showed images of people eating including children, shared ratings, and the location.

After reading the information I thought I’d better check my Facebook privacy settings as clearly anything you post, images you share, or locations you log, Facebook is now using for their Graph Search results. I am not so sure I want everything I do and say used in a personal search engine. As a result, I blocked many of the things that I allow Facebook to share so you probably won’t see my comments in a Facebook search in the future.

With Facebook Graph Search you are just losing another piece of privacy that can now be used to sell products, encourage shopping or visits to a restaurant, even if you didn’t even know your comments were being used. Kind of scary when you think about it.

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More on the Disavow Link Tool from Google

So you’ve used the Disavow Link Tool to re-mediate your website placement and remove spammy links that have nailed you in the SERPs, so how long do you have to wait to see improvement?

In this interesting article two heavy weights from my industry weigh in with Matt Cutts from Google stating:

“It can definitely take some time, and potentially months. There’s a time delay for data to be baked into the index. Then there can also be the time delay after that for data to be refreshed in various algorithms.”

You’ll want to read the full article and exchange between Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts on this topic at SiteProNews.

The bottom-line is that anything to do with organic placement takes time. Give yourself six months easily to be doing everything right after you have corrected problems to see even a glimmer of results. But be careful about when you first see your site pop up in the results.

I have found once you start to move your site will typically fall in the results after the initial ranking. I like to test placement again four to six weeks out after the site has popped up to see where it will really fall in the index. Sometimes I will see a temporary high placement and then a drop to a regularly maintained level. Use the second ranking to evaluate if you have more work to do at that point.

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Using the Google Tag Manager

If you are managing a large website make sure to check out this new tool from Google.

I am using the Tag Manager on my own website and some of the sites of my clients. I have found it easy to use and allows for the ability to grow as Google changes. I really like the ability to add new code without having to wait for a third party webmaster to get around to scheduling time for the code addition.

The only area of difficulty that I have seen from using Tag Manager, is the confusion some webmasters have on the publishing function. Some will set up the tags properly but forget to publish the Tag Container to the site again.

Make sure to watch the video as it will take you through setting up AdWords conversion tracking as well as Google Analytics code installation. With remarketing becoming popular for many AdWords accounts, having the Tag Manager in place on the website allows you the account manager to set up remarketing by just updating the container from within the Tag Manager control panel.

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New Features For Google AdWords to Check Out

AdWords has introduced some great new features that you may have missed in 2012 and has new ones are already planned for 2013. Here are my top picks of great new features and those I am eagerly anticipating.

1. Google Tag Manager
This feature, although not just for AdWords managers, is a new way to add code including AdWords conversion tracking to your website. Instead of adding code to all your pages or to your headers and footers, you add a script just after the <body> tag and then customize what causes your code to fire and on what pages of your site from within the Tag Manager control panel. This is a huge improvement for management of large websites.

2. Ability to Set AdWords Ads to Rotate
If you have loved doing A/B testing of ad text in AdWords, then you will love that you can now again decide to rotate ads evenly overriding the default optimize setting. Although I don’t use this feature for every account, in some cases this is a must especially when you are in the conversion discovery mode.

3. Sitelinks Galore
Now you can enter in up to 10 sitelinks for your Google AdWords campaigns. I highly recommend making sure that you are using this new feature. Previously, we could only add four links, but now can add up to 10. Make your ads stand out by providing instant access to deep inside your site where meaningful.

4. Search Remarketing
This is a new feature planned for 2013 and so is not available in your account yet as 1-3 are. I am excited about this new feature and will make sure to let you know when it is available. I am not sure how Google will handle search remarketing, but with the success of Display Remarketing, I just know this one will be a must use in each account.