Eric Enge

Cool New Quality Score Metrics from AdCenter

11/15/2011 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Ping Jen is a Product Manager on the Microsoft Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Team. He has a passion for driving improvements into adCenter which helps advertisers optimize their campaigns and increase their competitiveness in the marketplace. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2009, Ping was a Business Administrator at University of Cincinnati Department of Neurosurgery. Ping is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and holds a MBA degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Briefing with Ping Jen

Ping Jen and I connected for a call last week and reviewed some of the current developments with Microsoft adCenter. Today’s post will review the main items we talked about and what they mean for adCenter advertisers.

New Quality Score Data Provided

1. Historic Quality Score History: adCenter now allows you to monitor the Quality Score of a keyword over time. One reason this is important is that the most common question that the adCenter team gets is: “What does it mean if we see our Quality Score drop on keywords when we have not made any changes recently in that campaign?”

Great question! What it means is that your competition has been doing optimization work that is causing their click through rate to go up. As a result, your Quality Score is dropping because your CTR no longer compares as well to theirs as it did before.

Historical Quality Score (HQS) allows you to see the trends on a keyword by keyword basis over time. This can provide some great insights into marketplace dynamics. It can also help you understand what keywords the marketplace sees as the most important.

To see HQS you need to request a report. You will need to request a keyword report in daily mode as this is the only:

Creating a Historical Quality Score Report

Once this is done, click on the link to change the columns and layout and then select the four “historic” columns as shown at the bottom of the following screen shot:

Then, when ready, you can look at the report itself. This particular example shows a scenario where the competition for the keyword got a lot more intense on 11/3 and 11/4:

Once you see something like this you can begin to investigate what the market dynamics are that caused that to happen. For example, the 3rd and 4th of November of this year were a Thursday and a Friday. Perhaps your competitor has learned that the last two days of the work week are the highest converting days related to this keyword. If that is the case, you can adapt your strategy as well.

2. Aggregated Quality Score: adCenter is also now showing advertisers an Aggregated Quality Score (AQS) at the Ad Group level. This is more than a curiosity. AQS will be a very significant factor in setting the Quality Score for new keywords that you add to the same Ad Group. Other factors such as keyword and landing page relevance still apply, but AQS will provide you with a sense as to what to expect.

To see AQS you will need to request an Ad Group performance report in daily mode as shown here:

Creating an Aggegrated Quality Score Report

Then you will need to go in and add the historic quality score column to your report as shown here:

This will allow you to see the AQS for the Ad Group over time as shown here:

This is similar to what we did with HQS at the keyword level, but now let’s look at the AQS across a number of different Ad Groups at once:

Now comes the fun part. First of all, you see two Ad Groups with an AQS of 2, and one with a 3. However, the number of impressions is pretty low. The biggest opportunity for increasing overall performance may come from optimizing the Ad Group showing an AQS of 5, since it has the most impressions of all the Ad Groups shown. Great stuff!

3. How can I tell if my broad match keywords are well optimized?: This is not really a new feature, but it is the 2nd most popular question asked of the adCenter team. One of the basic ways to do evaluate your broad match keywords is to measure whether or not you are getting conversions for your broad match keywords, and good ROI. But, you can also compare the Quality Score of your broad match keywords with the Quality Score of the same keyword in exact match mode to help you with this evaluation.

For example, if your exact match form of the keyword has an 8 out of 10 score and your broad match variation is at 2, 3, or 4, you have an opportunity to greatly improve your results for that phrase. This is true even if the phrase passes the ROI test I just suggested. On the other hand if the exact match word have a Quality Score of 8 and your broad match variation scores a 6, it is probably already pretty well optimized.

Summary

adCenter Quality Score provides some great insights that advertisers can use to enhance the performance of their campaigns. The adCenter team is continuing to work on developing new tools to improve the ROI for adCenter customers, so watch for more developments from them in the near future.

Filed Under: Microsoft, PPC, Search Engine Marketing

How Google Does Personalization with Jack Menzel

11/1/2011 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

Jack Menzel is a Product Management Director for Google Search. Jack leads the teams developing new technologies used for personalization, question answering, web page summarization, and image search. Prior to joining Google Jack worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft. Jack holds a MS in Computer Science from the University of Washington as well as an BS in Computer Science and Mathematical Economics from Brown University.

Key Points

One of the hot areas in search is personalization. Google recognizes that personalization is a way to offer people better search results. How this works has a big impact on SEO, and I had the opportunity arise to speak with Jack Menzel and jumped at it. Here are some of the key points from the discussion:

People confuse context with personalization, and these are different things. Context includes factors such as language, location, and time of year.
(Jack:) “A lot of people assume personalization is amazingly pervasive”. In fact only small changes are made to a results page based on personalization. Google recognizes for diverse query results.
Past query history is used for personalization. If you search for “rome”, and then “hotels”, some of the results will be for hotels in Rome.
Past click through history is a factor. If you show a clear preference for one site by clicking on it in the results, then it may be moved up in the results for you.
The recommendations of friends are used in personalization.
Google will look at your friend’s profile to see what networks they have included there, and then see what they recommend on those sites.
(Jack): “When people are signed out, their search results are personalized based on past search information linked to their browser for up to 180 days using an anonymous cookie”.
Appending &pws=0 to the end of a URL does work, but it only removes personalization, it does not remove context (language, location, time of year).
There are ways to turn off all personalized results. Google’s position is that user’s own their data. However, context will still be taken into account.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Sometimes people confuse the notion of context with personalization, right?

If I respond to your query in your language that is really about context, not personalization.

Jack Menzel: That’s right. Sometimes results that are really a result of context get misinterpreted by people as personalization. If I respond to your query in your language that is really about context, not personalization. Personalization is more about recognizing that I like Dominion the card game and you really like Dominion the power company, and someone else really likes a videogame called Dominion. Imagine you turned off personalization, and suddenly Google was responding to all of your queries in the wrong language, you would be like “oh come on”.

Eric Enge: Another example would be that you are in the US and Halloween is in the near future.

Jack Menzel: Correct, right before thanksgiving there are a lot of searches about turkeys, and it often means people want turkey recipes.

Eric Enge: What are some of the other kinds of things that fit into the definition of context?

Jack Menzel: Let’s use a conversation based example. If we are both in Mountain View and I am talking to you about catching a bus, I don’t have to remind you that I am talking about bus in Mountain View, as opposed to one in Austin, Texas.

We take into account geography, language, and seasonality to a certain extent.

We take into account geography, language, and seasonality to a certain extent. The context of the previous queries is kind of on the borderline of what is personal and what isn’t.

Eric Enge: For example, if a person’s previous query was “Rome”, and then they search on “hotel”, there is going to be a tendency to show hotels in Rome.

Search results 3 to 5 for “hotels” when the prior search was for “rome”

A lot of people assume that personalization is still amazingly pervasive.

Jack Menzel: Your example may work, but I would have to check to make sure. A lot of people assume that personalization is still amazingly pervasive. We believe we are able to do some really useful things with personalization, but we may not get all of these things exactly right.

Eric Enge: What are some good examples of personalization that you think are handled well at this point?

We refer to this as “pattern” analysis, and it is based on recognizing preferences.

Jack Menzel: My interest in the card game Dominion is an example of this. I really don’t care about the power company at all. We refer to this as “pattern” analysis, and it is based on recognizing preferences. That’s an example of understanding the kind of topics that I am more interested in. Also, I do a lot of web programming, so when I talk about vectors, it will mean something very different than when a doctor talks about vectors.

Search results for “dominion” for someone with no related search history

We recognize patterns very well. If I keep going to visit my favorite scrabble dictionary over and over again I will see that the site that I tend to prefer will end up being boosted in the ranking because it makes it easier and faster for me. Pattern recognition is important because there is so much ambiguity in language.

Eric Enge: Jaguar, is my favorite example because you have the guitar, the operating system, the animal, and the football team. I would probably get the football team a lot, because I am a football fan.

Jack Menzel: Right, exactly. If you tend to gravitate towards football sites as opposed to operating system sites then you would end up getting that.

Eric Enge: How about social data?

We leverage social data pretty well. If your friend likes a restaurant, they can indicate it in a way that we (Google) can see that (such as a +1).

Jack Menzel: We leverage social data pretty well. If your friend likes a restaurant, they can indicate it in a way that we (Google) can see that (such as a +1). When you’re searching for a restaurant and you’re signed in, we may well boost that restaurant’s site in the rankings for you as well. We will also annotate the results, so that you can clearly see that this is content from your friend.

Search results for “reconsideration requests” with personalization on and off

Eric Enge: How do you determine what social properties people are on?

Jack Menzel: We look at people’s profiles and see what social profiles they have included in there, and we can then see what they share on those sites, provided that the information is public.

Eric Enge: If it’s not connected through your profile and your friend’s profiles then you are not going to use it to personalize results.

Jack Menzel: That’s correct.

Eric Enge: Do you need to be logged in to get personalized results?

We do a certain amount of personalization for people who are not logged in.

Jack Menzel: Being logged in is the best way to get personalized results. We do a certain amount of personalization for people who are not logged in.

Eric Enge: Is that cookie based?

Jack Menzel: Yes, we do some cookie-based personalization, which applies to search sequences where the subsequent searches feel more like a conversation. If you take that away from people it tends to be kind of frustrating. And so, there are certain parts of personalization that we still do.

Eric Enge: What kinds of personalization do you still do when people are logged out?

Jack Menzel: When people are signed out, their search results are personalized based on past search information linked to their browser for up to 180 days using an anonymous cookie. But if you’re signed out, we have much less data to personalize your results with than if you’re signed in.

Eric Enge: For example, you wouldn’t be able to use the social information.

Jack Menzel: That’s right. We have no idea about any of the social information. We only have a very limited knowledge of what your previous actions may have been, but we try to save you from having to repeat every detail in every query. But, it’s not as personalized as a signed in version.

Eric Enge: There aren’t any issues in this approach with shared IP addresses, because you are dealing either with people who are logged in or have a cookie.

Jack Menzel: That’s right. However, you can still run into the problem of shared computers where things get a little muddled. For example, if you are at an internet café and you are just doing a couple of searches to find out where the newest movie can be found. In general though, we don’t tend to have problems at the IP level because the system is based on cookies or being logged in.

Eric Enge: In the case of my machine at home, my 16-year-old daughter can come in and do some searches on it. That’s pretty hard to disambiguate I suspect.

Jack Menzel: That is very hard to do.

Eric Enge: In that environment if she does log me out and log herself in, is there a cookie involved at that point or does it just immediately switch to personalizing for her?

Jack Menzel: Yes. It doesn’t have much do with your cookie. It’s completely associated with your sign in.

Eric Enge: Does appending &pws=0 to the end of a search result URL still turn off personalization as it used to?

Procedure for turning off personalization with &pws=0

It (&pws=0) turns off “personalization”. However it isn’t really useful because people assume that it then will show them what everyone else sees. That simply isn’t the case.

Jack Menzel: Yes it does work. It turns off “personalization”. However it isn’t really useful because people assume that it then will show them what everyone else sees. That simply isn’t the case. There are a whole lot of contextual factors that make everyone’s results most relevant to them. This takes most of the wind out the sails of these types of analysis.

If personalization is turned off, we will still take a lot of context into account, including things such as location, language, and time of year. Of course, you can also get rid of context most of the time by getting more specific about your query. For example, if you live in the US but want to learn about the UK tax code, you would search on something like “UK tax code” to make that clear. Or you can conduct the search at www.google.co.uk instead too.

Eric Enge: When you use search history I assume you need to accumulate a certain enough data to achieve significance involved?

Jack Menzel: Yes, of course. We don’t want you to have done one query out of curiosity, and then suddenly decide that you are really into macramé. We are looking for a meaningful pattern.

Eric Enge: The other area that I think people get concerned about is the potential the loss of serendipity, but it’s not like you remap the entire results page around this.

Jack Menzel: It does make me kind of sad that when we talk about serendipity and search engines that we don’t point out the fact that search engines are the most amazing tool when it comes to discovering new things.

We have lowered the barrier and made it possible to research anything you could possibly imagine in the time it takes for you to type a query and hit enter. A fraction of a second later you’ve got some of the best results in the world for you to dig through. It makes it so easy. If we personalize the results page to the extent that we were only showing results tailored for you, that would be a bug for us. We would never want to do that.

So when we personalize a page the changes are pretty small, and we want to leave the other results untouched by personalization.

We try to give people the most usable page, but on the other hand we also try to give people the most relevant page to them. So when we personalize a page the changes are pretty small, and we want to leave the other results untouched by personalization. Using your interest in football as an example, even though you love football, some of the time you may actually want information on the animal, the guitar, or the OS instead.

Eric Enge: There is this long standing notion that’s been out there called query deserves diversity.

Jack Menzel: That’s right.

Eric Enge: This is obviously something that Google has known for quite some time because it’s many years since I first heard about query deserves diversity. Since you are trying to get as close to satisfying a 100% of the people 100% of the time over-personalizing would fail to do that.

Jack Menzel: That’s right. We really do want to show people a good representation of what the most relevant results would be, and people like that.

Eric Enge: Can you also discuss your approach to transparency and control?

Our position is that this is your data and you have control over your data.

Jack Menzel: We think is really important in any conversation about personalization. Our position is that this is your data and you have control over your data. You do have control over your web history, and you have control over how your browser manages cookies. We take the privacy of people’s data, and how we manage data, and how people have control over that data really seriously.

At the feature-level we try to make it very transparent to people what it is we are doing. We really are trying our best to be the industry leaders in how people have control over the data.

Eric Enge: Are there any aspects of personalization that people can’t turn off?

Jack Menzel: There are ways to turn all aspects of personalization off. If you do want to really not have your queries tracked between, or if you don’t want to have your content tailored to you in any way, shape, or form, you can set your browser to not accept cookies, and then we think you are a brand new person every time. Also, bear in mind that we will still take into account context, such as the right language for your results, your location, and the time of year.

Eric Enge: Thanks Jack!

Other Recent Interviews

Google’s Peter Norvig, October 17, 2011
Google’s Mayuresh Saoji, October 10, 2011
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, September 29, 2011
Bing’s Ping Jen, September 28, 2011
Bing’s Duane Forrester, September 6, 2011
Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Google, interviews, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Search Algorithms with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig

10/17/2011 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Peter Norvig is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. At Google Inc he was Director of Search Quality, responsible for the core web search algorithms from 2002-2005, and has been Director of Research from 2005 on.

Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence.

Introduction

As you will see in the transcript below, this discussion focused on the use of artificial intelligence algorithms in search. Peter outlines for us the approach used by Google on a number of interesting search problems, and how they view search problems in general. This is fascinating reading for those of you who want to get a deeper understanding of how search is evolving and the technological approaches that are driving it. The types of things that are detailed in this interview include:

The basic approach used to build Google Translate
The process Google uses to test and implement algorithm updates
How voice driven search works
The methodology being used for image recognition
How Google views speed in search
How Google views the goals of search overall

Some of the particularly interesting tidbits include:

Teaching automated translation systems vocabularly and grammar rules is not a viable approach. There are too many exceptions, and language changes and evolved rapidly. Google Translate uses a data driven approach of finding millions of real world translations on the web and learning from them.
Chrome will auto translate foreign language websites for you on the fly (if you want it to).
Google tests tens of thousands of algorithm changes per year, and make one to two actual changes every day
Test is layered, starting with a panel of users comparing current and proposed results, perhaps a spin through the usability lab at Google, and finally with a live test with a small subset of actual Google users.
Google Voice Search relies on 230 billion real world search queries to learn all the different ways that people articulate given words. So people no longer need to train their speech recognition for their own voice, as Google has enough real world examples to make that step unecessary.
Google Image search allows you to drag and drop images onto the search box, and it will try to figure out what it is for you. I show a screen shot of an example of this for you below. I LOVE that feature!
Google is obsessed with speed. As Peter says “you want the answer before you’re done thinking of the question”. Expressed from a productivity perspective, if you don’t have the answer that soon your flow of thought will be interrupted.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you outline at a layman’s level the basic approach that was used to allow Google engineers a translation system that handles 58 languages?

Peter Norvig: Sure — Google Translate uses a data-driven, machine learning approach to do automatic translation between languages. We learn from human examples of translation.

To explain what I mean by “data driven,” first I should explain how older machine translation systems worked. Programmers of those systems tried to teach the system vocabulary and grammar rules, like “This is a noun, this is a verb, and here’s how they fit together or conjugate in these two languages.”

Language is so fluid that programmers can’t keep up with the millions of words in all these languages and the billions or trillions of possible combinations, and how they change over time.

But it turns out that approach didn’t really work well. There were two problems. First, the formalisms for writing rules were absolute: this sentence is grammatical, and this other sentence is ungrammatical. But language has shades of gray, not just absolutes. Second, it is true that languages have rules, but it turned out that the rules don’t cover enough — language is more complicated and full of exceptions than people assumed, and is changing all the time. New words like “LOL” or “pwn” or “iPad” appear. Old words combine in unique ways — you can’t know what a “debt ceiling” is just by knowing what “debt” and “ceiling” are. Even core grammatical rules are uncertain — is “they” okay to use as a gender-neutral pronoun? What is the grammatical structure of “the harder they come, the harder they fall,” and what else can you say with that structure? Language is so fluid that programmers can’t keep up with the millions of words in all these languages and the billions or trillions of possible combinations, and how they change over time. And there are too many languages to keep rewriting the rules for how each language translates into each of the other languages.

So the new approach is a data-driven approach. Recognizing that we’ll need lots of examples of how to handle exceptions, we make the leap of saying: what if we could learn everything — the exceptions and the rules — from examples? We program our computers to look on the web for millions of examples of real-world translations, and crunch all that data to find patterns for which phrases translate into which other phrases. We use machine learning to look for recurring patterns — “this phrase in French always seems to translate into this phrase in English, but only when it’s near this word.” It’s analogous to the way you can look over a Chinese menu with English translations — if you see the same character keeps recurring for chicken dishes, you can guess pretty confidently that that character translates to “chicken.”

The basic idea is simple, but the details are complicated. We do some deep work on statistics and machine learning algorithms to be able to make the best use of our examples, and we were able to turn this technology into a world-leading consumer product. Google Research is a great place to come work if you want to tackle these kinds of problems in artificial intelligence.

If you visit a website in Thai or French or Urdu, Chrome will detect it and ask if you want to translate it into your native language.

We’re really pushing to have Translate available as a layer across lots of other products. You can always just go to translate.google.com, but it’s also built into our browser, Chrome. If you visit a website in Thai or French or Urdu, Chrome will detect it and ask if you want to translate it into your native language. It’ll automatically translate the whole page, and keep translating as you click on links. So you’re basically browsing the web in this other language. It’s very Star Trek.

There’s also a cool mobile app you should try — Google Translate for mobile is on Android and iPhone, and it does speech-to-text so you can speak and get translations.

Eric Enge: How does Google manage the process of testing and qualifying algorithm updates?

Peter Norvig: Here’s how it works. Our engineers come up with some insight or technique and implement a change to the search ranking algorithm . They hope this will improve search results, but at this point it’s just a hypothesis. So how do we know if it’s a good change? First we have a panel of real users spread around the world try out the change, comparing it side by side against our unchanged algorithm. This is a blind test — they don’t know which is which. They rate the results, and from that we get a rough sense of whether the change is better than the original. If it isn’t, we go back to the drawing board. But if it looks good, we might next take it into our usability lab — a physical room where we can invite people in to try it out in person and give us more detailed feedback. Or we might run it live for a small percentage of actual Google users, and see whether the change is improving things for them. If all those experiments have positive results, we eventually roll out the change for everyone.

We test tens of thousands of hypotheses each year, and make maybe one or two actual changes to the search algorithm per day. That’s a lot of ideas, and a lot of changes. It means the Google you’re using this year is improved quite a bit from the Google of last year, and the Google you’re using now is radically different from anything you used ten years ago.

If you define A.I. as providing a course of action in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, based on learning from examples, that’s what our search algorithm is all about.

I’d say the resulting technology — Google Search as a whole — is a form of A.I. If you define A.I. as providing a course of action in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, based on learning from examples, that’s what our search algorithm is all about.

The search engine has to understand what’s out on the web in text and other forms like images, books, videos, and rapidly changing content like news, and how it all fits together. Then it has to try to infer what the user is looking for, sometimes from no more than a keystroke or two. And then it has to weigh hundreds of factors against each other — hundreds of signals, like the links between content, the correlations among phrases, the location of the search, and so on — and provide the user information that’s relevant to their query, with some degree of confidence for each piece. And finally it has to present that information in a coherent, useful way. And it has to be done potentially for each keystroke, since Google results update instantly now.

Every time people ask a question, you need this machine to automatically and instantly provide an answer that helps them out. It’s a deep A.I. problem, and I think we’re doing a good job at it today, but we’ve got lots of room to grow too. Search is far from solved, and we have plenty of room for experts in A.I., statistics, and other fields to jump on board and help us develop the next Google, and the Google after that.

Eric Enge: Voice driven search seems like a very interesting problem to me. Even if you are dealing with only one language you have a vast array of dialects, accents, pronunciations, and ways of phrasing things.

This used to be addressed by having the user “train the system” to their manner of speaking. Are we are the point where we are past that now? What are the basic methods (in layman’s terms) being used to make this possible? Will this expand to automatically transcribing videos?

Peter Norvig: Speech recognition is actually quite analogous to machine translation. In translation we learn from past examples of (English, Foreign) pairs how to translate a new sentence we haven’t seen before; in speech we learn from past examples of (Soundwave, Text) pairs how to find the text in a new soundwave.

So instead of relying on one person talking for a long time to train the system, we rely on lots of people saying lots of things to train the system. So in effect, our users are training the system en masse.

Like you say, in old systems you’d have to sit there and train the thing for an hour before it would recognize your words. We wanted to build something anyone could pick up and just immediately start talking to, and have it understand them right away. So instead of relying on one person talking for a long time to train the system, we rely on lots of people saying lots of things to train the system. So in effect, our users are training the system en masse.

I can explain a little more how it actually works. There are three parts to our speech model. First, there’s the acoustic model, which maps out all the possible ways soundwaves can form phonemes, like “ah” or “mm” or “buh.” It’s tricky because acoustics vary a lot by what kind of mic you’re using, what background noise there is, how you’re holding the device, the gender and age of the speaker, and even what sounds come before or after the one you’re making. And like you say, there are lots of versions because accents and dialects vary so much. But with enough examples of speech, we can model what are the most likely ways of forming phonemes.

Then phonemes come together in our lexical model, which is basically a dictionary of how all the words in a language are pronounced. That also takes care of a lot of differences in accents — the model knows that there are multiple ways to pronounce things, and knows which are more or less likely. “Feb-yoo-ary” and “Feb-roo-ary” will both give you “February,” because the model sees both spoken a lot.

Finally, the words are strung together into a language model, which tells you which words are most likely to come after another word. There might be a soundwave that sounds like either “city” or “silly”, but if it follows the words “New York…” then the language model would tell us that “city” is more likely. We have a lot of text to train the system on — for Voice Search, where you speak your search to Google, we train this model on around 230 billion words from real-world search queries.

It’s all anonymized, of course — we don’t keep any training examples that could be tied to an individual speaker; it is all combined into our big model. We do give you the choice to opt in to have us learn from your own voice over time. You can turn this on, and the model will start to learn how your voice varies from our baseline model — say, if you have a strong accent, or a really deep voice. The model works well even without having to train it yourself, but you have the option to make it even better.

You can try this out on an Android phone or on the Google Search app on iPhone or Blackberry. On Android you can search, of course, but you can also compose emails by voice, or for that matter speak into any app where you’d use the keyboard — we added it into the Android keyboard so you can speak pretty much anywhere you might type. It’s also on Google on the desktop if you use Chrome.

Eric Enge: How about the problem of image recognition? For example, can we train a computer to recognize an image of the Taj Majal?

Peter Norvig: Yes. We do this on mobile phones and now on desktop Google Search too. You can actually use it to see where old vacation photos were taken — ones you scanned from back before digital cameras geo-tagged photos. If you took a photo of some cool-looking bridge you don’t recognize, and you can drag and drop the image onto the Google Search box, and there’s a pretty good chance it’ll recognize the bridge, tell you what it is, and give you all kinds of relevant information on it.

As with speech and translation, image recognition is data-driven and relies on machine learning algorithms across lots of examples. Luckily for us, the web has lots and lots of images of things, and most of them have captions that identify them. The more popular, the more images, so the better a chance we have at our algorithms being able to recognize it.

Here’s how image recognition works in a nutshell. It starts with identifying points of interest in an image — the points, lines, and patterns that provide sharp contrasts or really stick out from a bland, featureless background. It’s similar in some ways to how the human eye picks out edges and points by keying off the places where there’s sharp contrast.

Then it looks at how these points are related to each other — the geometry of the whole set of points. You could picture it as looking like a constellation of stars, even though really it’s a more sophisticated mathematical model of these points of interest and how they relate.

Now it compares that model to all the other models in a huge database. Those other models come from images it has already analyzed from around the web. It looks for a matching model, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect match. In fact, it’s important that it be a bit flexible, so it doesn’t matter if it’s turned around, or shrunken, or twisted a bit. The Taj Mahal still has the basic geometry of the Taj Mahal even if you photograph it from a little bit of a different angle or photograph it lower in the frame. When Google recognizes that it matches that model best, it guesses it’s probably the Taj Mahal.

There’s something profound here about asking a “question” that’s actually just an image. We’ve moved beyond every query being a string of text. Now you can just present Google an image and expect relevant information.

There’s something profound here about asking a “question” that’s actually just an image. We’ve moved beyond every query being a string of text. Now you can just present Google an image and expect relevant information. So it puts even more burden on the search engine to know what that’s supposed to mean. What’s the best answer to a question when the question is an image? We present some information we think is relevant today, but what exactly the interaction should be here is still ripe for research.

Eric Enge: For some of these tasks we currently must rely on batch processing instead of real time processing (e.g. the way that the Panda algorithm currently operates). How long before the processing power increases to the point where the Panda algorithm can be done in real time?

Peter Norvig: I wouldn’t separate out that one update from the rest of the Search algorithm that way; it was really just one improvement among many that we’ve made in the past year or so. But the question is certainly relevant to our Search algorithm overall.

Broadly speaking, you can think of the growth of the web and the growth of the computing power needed to instantly index it as a kind of arms race.

Broadly speaking, you can think of the growth of the web and the growth of the computing power needed to instantly index it as a kind of arms race. The web keeps growing. There’s a misperception that the web has become established or matured, but in fact the growth curve is a nice smooth exponential that hasn’t shown signs of slowing down yet. We’re still in the middle of the information explosion.

So we keep up with it a few ways. It helps that processors and disks keep getting cheaper. Even new categories of technology, like solid-state disks, have helped. We’re also getting smarter about delineating which content needs to be updated instantly, and which can be updated more slowly — again, we learn how to do this from examples. A lot of the smarts you see in Google Instant, and the predictive input suggestions that keeps guessing what word you might type next, are about anticipating what information is most likely to be needed, and queuing that up so it’s ready to go.

Google Code Articles of Speeding Up the Web

We’re really obsessed with speed at Google. Speed is a crucial feature of any information-intensive product. You never want your tools to slow you down or interrupt your flow of thought. There’s a cool feature we launched a little while ago called Instant Pages which takes Google Instant a step further: instead of just predicting what words you might type, and pre-loading the search results, if Google is really confident that the first result is the right one, it’ll start loading it in the background. So often by the time you click that result, it’s already loaded up — so the website appears to load instantly. It’s like a magic trick when it works well.

Eric Enge: Can you expound a little bit on the types of problems that AI can work on solving in the area of search over the next 5 years?

So you want the answer almost before you’re done thinking of the question. We think we can offer that now most of the time.

Peter Norvig: We’ll work more on speed. It used to be that a few seconds was really fast to learn what the height of the Eiffel Tower was — that’s a heck of a lot faster than a trip to the library to look it up in a reference book in the back shelves. But now even a few seconds feels slow, because again, it interrupts your flow of thought. So you want the answer almost before you’re done thinking of the question. We think we can offer that now most of the time.

But eventually this will stop being such a back-and-forth question-and-answer routine, and start just being a steady flow of relevant information. It should be right there when you need it, presented so it’s useful without being overwhelming. It’s going to take a lot of engineering and a really fine artistic touch to make that work the way we envision it.

And of course this gets to a deeper A.I. problem: not just understanding information and queries, but really understanding what the user needs and will find useful at a given moment, and serving it up in a way that’s perfectly digestible. It’s not just about human-computer interaction or information retrieval. It’s about how people learn and attain knowledge. We’re trying to move beyond just presenting information, and really focus on increasing people’s knowledge of the world. So Google needs to be “smart” in the sense of really understanding the user’s needs in order to help them build up their knowledge of the world.

Eric Enge: Thanks Peter!

Other Recent Interviews

Google’s Mayuresh Saoji, October 10, 2011
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, September 29, 2011
Bing’s Ping Jen, September 28, 2011
Bing’s Duane Forrester, September 6, 2011
Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Google, interviews, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Starting Up with Google Product Search, with Google’s Mayuresh Saoji

10/11/2011 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Mayuresh Saoji is a Senior Product Manager on the Google Commerce team. In this role, Mayuresh is responsible for leading efforts on Merchant Center, Content API and broad Google Product Search Policy issues. Previously, Mayuresh was a Product Manager on the Google Chrome team, and also lead the Distribution efforts for products like ChromeOS, Google Toolbar, iGoogle and Chrome browser. Prior to Google, Mayuresh was a Product Manager at Microsoft where he worked on Go-to-Market for Sharepoint 2007. Mayuresh holds a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Bombay, India and an MBA from the Kellogg graduate school of Management.

Key Points

Google product search offers a rich array of opportunities for publishers to place their products in front of shoppers (there is a bulleted list of the opportunities right at the start of the interview). Mayuresh does a great job of spelling out the way to get started with Google Commerce in this interview. If you sell physical products this interview can act as a guide on how to get started and how to prioritize your efforts from an optimization perspective. Here are the key points:

You must sell physical products online to participate.
One opportunity is to place Google Commerce Search on your site. This provides visitors a way to search your product catalog using Google’s search technology. It is a paid product.
The first step is to create a Merchant Center account.
The second step is to verify that you are the owner of the website.
The next step is to provide a data feed of all your products.
Implement a test feed before going live, as this will allow you to find and remove errors upfront.
The most important optimization step is good quality data. This is worth a lot of effort, as Google will lose faith in feeds that show errors.
Make absolutely sure that the pricing data is accurate.
Plan on having a ISBN code, UPC code, or EAN code (Europe) for all your products.
Have images for all of your products. (Mayuresh): “it’s to your benfit to send uys good images for every product”.
Update your feed (Mayruesh): “at least as often as your website is updated”.
The Content API is useful for large feeds where it may be desirable to make partial updates (e.g. change only the price for 200 products). However, you need programming expertise to use it.
(Mayuresh): “Product reviews are important, and they provide a good signal to users about products”.

Interview transcript

Eric Enge: What are the benefits of participating in product search?

Mayuresh Saoji: Any merchant that sells physical products online is a good candidate for participating in Google product search. Participating in product search provides you with a forum for sending structured data on your products to Google. It allows merchants to show more rich data in many formats:

On Google.com
Google Shopping
Google Product Search
Product Ads and Product Extensions
Google Shopper in Mobile Search

If they are Google Commerce Search customers, which is a paid product, then that same data is leveraged to power the search and discovery experience on their e-commerce website or mobile application.

The end goal is to drive a lot of qualified traffic to publishers, and that’s the best reason for doing this.

Eric Enge: Basically, it is like a Custom Search Engine, but for products?

Google Commerce Search (GCS) is an e-commerce search solution designed specifically with online and multi-channel retailers in mind.

Mayuresh Saoji: It has some general similarities, but Google Commerce Search (GCS) is an e-commerce search solution designed specifically with online and multi-channel retailers in mind. GCS has several advanced features besides product recommendations to help retailers improve their conversion rates.

Eric Enge: Great, what’s the best way for someone to get started?

Mayuresh Saoji: First you create a Merchant Center account. This is where you tell us about your business, your store, and provide us with your URL. The second step is to verify that you are the owner of your website. This is still part of the signup flow, and once that’s done then now you have a valid Merchant Center account. That’s one part of the story.

The other part of the story is to start submitting your data to us. Google has published a product feed specification, and you need to adhere to that specification, and then you can submit data in one of a number of formats to us. You can submit it as a tab delimited (TSV) file, a flat file, XML file, or via the Content API. Many of our larger retailers use the Content API, and that allows them to easily submit hundreds of thousands of items (and much more), and also makes it easy to make very quick changes to specific attributes of those items.

I’d also recommend creating a Test Feed file first and submitting test data.

I’d also recommend creating a Test Feed file first and submitting test data. This functionality can be found under the “Data Feed” tab in the Merchant Center (click on “New Test Data Feed”). The test feed is not indexed and displayed on Product Search, so it’s a perfectly safe environment. We also have great error reporting for the test feed, which will allow merchants to understand errors, iterate and quickly get a functional feed up and running.

Once you are done testing you can actually submit the data and we will ingest it, index it, and then show it on Google Product Search and some of these other properties.

So to summarize: Create your account, verify your website, create and submit a Test Feed, work out all the kinks, and then submit the actual data feed to us.

The Google Merchant Center is the hub for these interactions: It’s where you provide us information about your business, it’s where you submit your product data feed. It is also the place where you can go to see the status of your data, to see if there are any errors with your submission. We also provide you with reporting on clicks, etc. so you can see how your product listings are performing.

Eric Enge: I assume you need programming expertise to use the Content API?

Mayuresh Saoji: Yes. You do need programming experience because you have to make HTTP calls with the right parameters. Most of our merchants submit data to us in an XML file or a flat file today. The content API is used by some of our largest merchants, who have that in-house IT expertise, It’s also used by merchants who need to change their data quickly, and frequently

Eric Enge: What determines the order in which you show products?

Make sure you adhere to the feed spec and make sure you fix problems as we report them in the Merchant Center.

Mayuresh Saoji: There are some things that you can control, and the biggest thing is to give us good quality data. Make sure you adhere to the feed spec and make sure you fix problems as we report them in the Merchant Center. In the Merchant Center there is a data quality tab. For instance, if you submit 10,000 items and 300 of them don’t have images the Merchant Center will tell you that.

It gives you very concrete and specific feedback on the types of errors, and in many instances also provides actionable feedback on what you can do to fix those errors. Note that submitting a feed is sometimes an iterative process. You may have some errors at first, but the Test Feed can make it easy to figure out problems and get it right quickly, so I highly recommend using that tool from the Merchant Center

Eric Enge: What are the best ways to optimize your feed?

Mayuresh Saoji: There are a few best practices to keep in mind. Whenever possible, each product should have a unique ID (there are rare exceptions for custom or one-off products). This is an important attribute that we look at, for matching products on the backend. This could be a UPC code, it could be an ISBN number for a book, or an EAN code if you are in Europe. Fundamentally it’s the unique fingerprint for each product.

Make sure that your price and availability information is accurate.

Make sure that your price and availability information is accurate. For price, you should separate out tax and shipping. If you tell us an item costs $12.99 make sure that it is actually $12.99 on your website and not $13.99. A mismatch in price is a bad experience for the user, moreover, the clicks you get are not going to convert to a sale on your site because you have a different price advertised. This generally leads to a bad taste in the mouth for everyone.

We provide you with a mechanism for giving us the base price, giving us the tax, and giving us the shipping separately, and we also show those separately on the search results page.

The other key thing would be images. In a nutshell, good quality images provide clear information to the consumer. So, it’s to your benefit to send us good images for every product that you sell. Note that each visually distinct variant does need its own image.

We also recently introduced some new attributes for better categorization of your items. Make sure that you send us that category code, and this is especially important for things like apparel and accessories like shoes, and jewelry.

I would summarize this by saying the top things merchants would care about would be unique IDs, price, availability, tax and shipping, and images. In addition, for Apparel and variants of products, there are some very specific requirements that are extremely important … you should read our feed spec for more details

Eric Enge: Would items with different colors still need a separate UPC code or EAN code?

Mayuresh Saoji: In many cases they do have a separate UPC code or an EAN code, and in some cases they don’t. It depends on the product actually.

Q: How often should the feed be updated? A: At least as often as your website is updated.

Eric Enge: How often should the feed be updated?

Mayuresh Saoji: At least as often as your website is updated. It’s important to keep the data fresh. Keeping your data fresh is very important. Many merchants set this up such that they have an automated process which will just go into the backend and send us a new feed every night. Some people send it to us multiple times a day because that’s how often their website varies. For some products, pricing can vary, and more importantly availability can vary from hour-to-hour.

Many people use the Content API for these kinds of scenarios because unlike the feed spec, the Content API allows you to make very, very quick changes and incremental changes to price and availability for specific products without reloading the whole feed.

Eric Enge: The Content API gives you a lot less latency in terms of turning that around.

Mayuresh Saoji: Absolutely. It also gives you a lot more control in being able to change certain specific attributes for certain specific products.

Eric Enge: What are the advantages of the Content API?

… with the content API you can submit only the parameters that are changing (in this instance, Price) for each of those fifty products.

Mayuresh Saoji: With a flat file feed you have to give us all the attributes for every item you send. If you submit a thousand items total in your feed, and subsequently you need to update the price for fifty of them, you can submit a flat file with only those fifty items. However, you’ll need to submit each and every attribute for each of those fifty items. And then it will overwrite the whole thing, but with the content API you can submit only the parameters that are changing (in this instance, Price) for each of those fifty products.

Eric Enge: What role do product reviews play?

Mayuresh Saoji: Product reviews are important, and they provide a good signal to users about products, so this is something that merchants should encourage their shoppers to do and should provide this information.

Eric Enge: Can you talk a bit about the changes you announced on September 2nd and the changes to the product search feed specification you announced in July?

Mayuresh Saoji: We want to get to a richer, more visual shopping experience, and we want to ensure that shoppers are getting the rich and detailed information they are looking for. I think this has benefits for everyone. It’s good for our merchants, because we can deliver more valuable, more qualified traffic to them.

In order to support this goal, we needed to get better (and higher quality) data from merchants. This was the impetus behind the new feed spec requirements we announced in July 2011.

For instance, we’ve required that merchants submit a high-quality image for all of their products. We’ve given merchants the ability to have alternate views of those products as well (although alternate views are not a required attribute).
We’ve gotten much stricter and more prescriptive about availability and how to define it.
We added the Google product category attribute, which allows us to better categorize and classify products using a standardized taxonomy. It also allows us to make sure we apply the right set of rules for certain products.

There were also a bunch of requirements around apparel that we had announced. There is this concept of variance in apparel. Typically the variant attributes are colors, size, material, and pattern. We’ve specified those things. One big change we’ve made is we’ve asked merchants to submit one distinct item per variant. So, if you have a shirt sold in three colors and two sizes, you would need to send us six separate items. That’s a high-level of the changes that we’ve made to the spec.

Regarding the updates to the Google product search page we announced in September, the goal here was to help shoppers find new stuff. Again, it’s all about that richer experience. Our merchants have a better showcase for their products. It’s like walking into the mall and touching and feeling something. You want to get as close to that as possible

We wanted to make it easier for our users to browse and discover new products, be aware of trends, etc. If you look at the new product search homepage you will see many interesting changes. We’ve got more of a curated feel to the page now. We show popular products, we showcase new trends, we may show relevant Google offers. It’s very fashion-focused and apparel-focused at this point.

It provides a more visual way to shop for dresses. We simplified the UI and removed much of the text around the images. We’ve increased the size of each image; we’ve emphasized the visual aspects of apparel shopping. People often shop by color or genre or size or silhouette of a dress, and we’ve taken those things into account.

In addition, from each product page you can see visually similar products. Shoppers will have the ability to view similar items, and there is the serendipity that takes over and allows them to very quickly browse, and meander, and discover. The goal for us was to help shoppers browse and discover new products and new trends in a fun and visually appealing environment.

Eric Enge: Thanks Mayuresh!

Other Recent Interviews

Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, September 29, 2011
Bing’s Ping Jen, September 28, 2011
Bing’s Duane Forrester, September 6, 2011
Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Google, interviews, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Real Time Quality Score Defined, with Google’s Frederick Vallaeys

9/29/2011 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

photo of Frederick Vallaeys Frederick Vallaeys is a Product Evangelist for Google AdWords. In this role, he helps advertisers learn which Google products can best solve their marketing needs. He also represents the needs of advertisers with the engineering and product management teams. His main product focus is on ads quality and bulk tools like the AdWords Editor and the AdWords API.

Prior to Google, Frederick was an engineer at Sapient and a part-time wedding photographer who found new customers through AdWords. He joined Google in 2002 to help bring AdWords to the Dutch and Belgian markets. He earned his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2000.

Key Points

Hoo boy! I went through this interview to try and extract the most important points made, and I will do the best I can here. However, if you are a serious AdWords professional, I’d suggest you read the entire interview from end to end.

The main thing you will get from this interview is that the Quality Score you see in your Google AdWords account differs significantly from the Real Time Quality Score that Google uses to determine how your ad ranks. There is definitely a strong correlation, so Quality Score is a useful metric, but an understanding of Real Time Quality Score can give you an extra edge in understanding what it is you need to do to make your optimization efforts as successful as possible.

Quality Score is the number you see in your Google AdWords account. It is a number between 1 and 10, where 1 is a horrible score, and 10 is an awesome score. Some key points about Quality Score are:

It is mostly based on historical clickthrough rates of the keyword and ad text.
Additional factors include landing page quality and load time of the page, but these are secondary factors.
Quality Score (QS) is based on data from exact match only. Even if you bid on a broad match keyword, such as “cruises”, only exact matches with the keyword are used to determine the QS.
The published number is the aggregate for all instances of that keyword in your account.
When you first add keywords into an new account, Google will show the system wide average for that keyword as your Quality Score.
If you have an existing account, and you add a new keyword, than the account history is a factor in the default Quality Score.

Real Time Quality Score is the number used by Google to help determine your ad rank. It has a lot in common with QS, but is calculated in real time and takes into account many additional factors. Some key points about Real Time Quality Score (RTQS) include:

Specific query performance is taking in to account. For example, if you bid on “tennis shoes” and someone searches on “discount tennis shoes”, but you sell only expensive tennis shoes, chances are that the resulting user interactions will end up in a low RTQS for this particular query.
RTQS is personalized to the user based on query history. For example, a recent search on “Rome” followed by a search on “hotels” is more likely to show adds for hotels in Rome.
RTQS personalization is session based. Once the session cookie is deleted the query history used for personalization is lost.
Other personalization factors include location and time of day.
The +1 button does not factor into RTQS … yet. However, it can impact QS and RTQS by increasing Clickthrough rate.
+1 is associated with the URL, regardless of whether or not it is clicked on in the ad, organic results, or on the web page.
Site links drive CTR increases ranking from 17% to 30% and can also result in more qualified customers (higher conversion).
CTR expectations are normalized by position. So if the number 1 position usually gets a 30% CTR and you are getting 20% that is a negative.
RTQS is determined at the keyword-ad level. There are no ad group or campaign components to RTQS.

That’s it for the summary points. However, in the body of the interview there is much more, including Frederick’s recommended process for optimizing your QS and RTQS, lots of examples, and why bidding your keywords high when you first launch them is a smart thing to do.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell me how Quality Score is used?

Frederick Vallaeys: The Quality Score is Google’s way of ensuring that we show the most relevant ads to our users, and we deliver high quality leads to advertisers buying the clicks from us. The Quality Score obviously factors into the ad rank together with the advertiser’s bid.

It helps determine which advertiser has the highest position on that page. The Quality Score that you see in the account is determined by a number of factors and is mostly based on the historical click through rates of the keyword and the ad text.

The Quality Score is only based on data from results on exact match.

The Quality Score is only based on data from results on exact match. That means the keyword the user types in has to be exactly the same as the keyword chosen by the advertiser. There has to be an exact match between those two regardless of which match type the advertiser selected. Also, we only use data from google.com, not display network traffic or traffic from our search partners.

That’s the data that builds up the Quality Score. We also have additional factors such as landing page quality and load time of the page, but those are secondary factors. The biggest thing we look at is the historical click through rates of the ad text with the keywords inside of the account.

Eric Enge: That’s specific to what we see published in AdWords, is that correct?

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. What you see published in AdWords is going to be a number between one and ten. A Quality Score of one out of ten is a terrible Quality Score, and a score of ten is a fantastic Quality Score. What you have to keep in mind is that the number we publish is the aggregate for that specific keyword. It reflects all the data we have on that keyword for your account.

The key point here is that this is an average, and an average is never great which is why we also calculate a Real Time Quality Score internally.

The key point here is that this is an average, and an average is never great which is why we also calculate a Real Time Quality Score internally. The average you see in the accounts is good for figuring out where you have an issue.

As an advertiser, if I have to prioritize which keywords to optimize, this is a good indication. Any Quality Score below a seven is a place where you might want to start looking. The lower that number the bigger an issue you have.

Eric Enge: When you open up a new account, and there isn’t any click through rate history, I’ve seen situations where the Quality Score is quite low but the numbers come up as the account ages.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. What typically happens when you start up a new account, or you put a new keyword for the first time into an existing account, is we take a system-wide average based on advertisers who have run on that keyword in the past. What often happens is that the keyword may be fairly broad and may not be the best performing keyword system-wide.

As your account ages and you start getting impressions and clicks on that keyword, we can build a specific picture of how you, an advertiser with those specific ad texts, will do on that keyword. If you are a good advertiser that knows how to write a compelling ad text for all the keywords, your Quality Score will certainly increase at that point and become much better. It also becomes your own Quality Score as opposed to that starting point system-wide average.

Eric Enge: Can keywords with a bad history have a negative impact on another keyword’s quality score?

If an account has a set of keywords that in aggregate have a low QS, this can have a negative impact. Zero impression keywords do NOT matter because those contribute no CTR data.

Frederick Vallaeys: In the absence of specific data about how a keyword performs with a specific ad, we rely on system wide data and account-level data. If an account has a set of keywords that in aggregate have a low QS, this can have a negative impact. Zero impression keywords do NOT matter because those contribute no CTR data.

Keywords with few impressions and few clicks could in aggregate have a large number of impressions with a low CTR and this could hurt the account. Keep in mind though that even if there is a negative impact on the account, this won’t matter as soon as we have enough data about how a keyword performs with a specific ad because we’d use that specific data for QS rather than the less specific account level data.

Real Time Quality Score

Eric Enge: Let’s say we have a keyword such as “tennis shoes.” How is Real Time Quality Score, both displayed and calculated?

Tennis Shoes

Frederick Vallaeys: Many people will type in “tennis shoes” but others may type in variations of that keyword such as “discount tennis shoes” or “Nike tennis shoes.” If you had that keyword in the broad match then your ad would have been eligible to show on these different variations.

For the Real Time Quality Score we calculate at the exact moment a user did the search and take into account what these variations are. If you sell expensive tennis shoes, and someone did a query for discount tennis shoes, we would show your ad and maybe that ad had an eight out of ten Quality Score. It’s a mismatch to what that specific user was looking for because they weren’t looking for expensive tennis shoes. In that case it would not be the best ad to show.

The real time system allows us, based on the additional data for this specific situation, to know this ad is not the best ad for that case, and to give preference to some of the other ads.

We think it’s a real positive for advertisers, because in the past we would aggregate and you would get clicks that maybe weren’t from the most qualified potential customers because we were looking at averages. Now we can look at how they formulate the query and how that impacts their likeliness of being interested in this advertiser’s ads.

Instead of a eight out of ten, the Real Time Quality Score might be a five out of ten telling us this ad is not a great ad for this query. This will affect the ad rank and, in some cases, the ad doesn’t show.

In the “tennis shoes” situation, when someone types in “discount tennis shoes” we are looking beyond exact match and you have a separate Real Time Quality Score calculated for the performance of the query “discount tennis shoes” against that keyword, that ad and that landing page. We could look at some interesting cases that would match really ambiguous keywords which are difficult to bid on.

If you as an advertiser pick that relatively generic keyword, we can find a subset of queries that do well for what it is you are selling.

For another example, consider the keyword “jobs.” You could be looking for Steve Jobs or you could be looking for jobs in San Francisco. How do we know? If you as an advertiser pick that relatively generic keyword, we can find a subset of queries that do well for what it is you are selling, whether it’s a blog about Steve Jobs’ company or whether it’s a blog or website for finding a job in San Francisco. Many years back, the AdWords system wasn’t quite as specific with its Quality Score. What it would do in these ambiguous cases is not run the advertiser’s ads because we would say, “okay, on average this is a pretty bad keyword, it doesn’t perform that well.” We would lose sight of the specific queries in which it actually did do well.

With the more sophisticated system we have today, if there is a small subset of queries that work well for you, we can find those and often show you in quite a high position even though all the other queries for that same keyword might not have done well for you.

Cruise Ship Another example I like to use is “discount cruises.” If someone looks for discount cruises, it’s not ambiguous in terms of what they are looking for, but it could be ambiguous in terms of the destination they are looking for.

There are companies that offer Alaskan cruises and companies that offer Caribbean cruises. Generally, people are more interested in the Caribbean or warm weather cruises. With that generic keyword “discount cruises” you might do well on most queries because most people want to buy your Caribbean cruise.

In those few instances where someone is looking for an Alaskan cruise, it would be a poor decision to show your ad because you don’t sell that cruise. If we had gone on the average, we would have shown the ad because most people look for Caribbean cruises.

This provides a better user experience because users aren’t seeing an ad for Caribbean cruises just because it happens to have a high overall Quality Score.

With the real time system we see that the user typed in the word “Alaskan” in addition to “discount cruises.” This is probably not the best time to show the ad, and it prevents the advertiser from showing an ad that’s unlikely to lead to a sale. This provides a better user experience because users aren’t seeing an ad for Caribbean cruises just because it happens to have a high overall Quality Score.

Personalization and selection of Ads

Eric Enge: In the scenario above, where the user provides more information based on adding a qualifying word to the query. For discount Alaskan cruises you don’t show the Florida or Caribbean cruises ad. Could you look at the user’s past query history and see that they recently read blogs about Alaska or things of that kind? Is there anything like that in play at this point?

There is a personalization factor in place. This works by looking at previous queries the user has done … when we talk about personalization it’s actually on an anonymous basis.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes. There is a personalization factor in place. This works by looking at previous queries the user has done. A good example of this is a user came to Google, did a search for Rome, and the next search they did was for hotels. What Google knows is that they probably were thinking about hotels in Rome as opposed to hotels anywhere. Rather than show generic ads for hotels, we can look back at that session data and show more relevant ads based on that. That’s the extent of what we can do at this point.

I would like to note that when we talk about personalization it’s actually on a anonymous basis. It means we know what a certain cookie is doing, but we don’t know what a certain person is doing. We know that cookie ID 1234 searched for Rome before they searched for hotels, but we don’t know that the cookie is Frederick Vallaeys.

Eric Enge: You obviously have to avoid the privacy concerns. Does the cookie that allowed you to do this survive across its sessions?

Frederick Vallaeys: No. We found that’s usually not a great thing to do because the correlations you start seeing actually go down quite a bit. Also, we don’t always combine the previous searches to the current searches because if there is a clear shift in topic that the user is searching for then it doesn’t make sense to look at that previous data.

Eric Enge: This personalization that we spoke about is a factor in Real Time Quality Score?

Frederick Vallaeys: The other mechanics we look at are the location of the searcher and the time and day. There are a number of other factors we don’t disclose, but we do evaluate many factors that could potentially have some impact. We look at CTR, and if there a strong correlation between this factor and CTR, that’s a factor we could continue to use. Location and time are two good examples that do matter.

Eric Enge: If it’s November and somebody in Massachusetts typed in “discount cruises” are you more likely to show a Florida cruises ad than an Alaska cruises ad?

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. We might give preference to an ad on Florida and Caribbean cruises for people from a cold location.

Eric Enge: Correspondingly, if you have someone in California typing that, you might actually show a Hawaii cruise ad rather than a Caribbean cruise ad.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly.

Eric Enge: What are some of the correlations for time of day?

there have been a number of studies in the travel industry that show in the morning people tend to research hotels they may stay at. At lunch they talk to their spouses to get approval to book a certain hotel. In the afternoon they may be more likely to book that hotel.

Frederick Vallaeys: You can think about differences in behavior even if they were searching for the same thing at different times of day. For example, there have been a number of studies in the travel industry that show in the morning people tend to research hotels they may stay at. At lunch they talk to their spouses to get approval to book a certain hotel. In the afternoon they may be more likely to book that hotel.

So, if we find a query in the morning for a certain type of item, we might give preference to more research-oriented ads, and in the afternoon we may focus on more transaction oriented ads. That’s difficult so the system depends on having enough statistically significant data to make those decisions.

Eric Enge: Right, because you don’t know if they went and talked to their spouse, but you do know they tended to click on review-oriented ads as opposed to book-it-now oriented ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly.

The role that the +1 button plays into the Quality Score

Eric Enge: What about the +1 button that you now see appearing on ads. Is that something you factor into a Quality Score at this point?

Frederick Vallaeys: It doesn’t factor into the ranking yet. However, what we typically see whenever a new ad format or a new feature of an ad is introduced, such as the +1 button, is that it sometimes increases click through rates. If the click through rate increases, that leads to a better Quality Score so there is definitely an indirect factor by having strong +1 recommendations and endorsements that more people could click on your ad.

+1 is essentially bringing social to the moment of relevance.

+1 is essentially bringing social to the moment of relevance. If a user sees that five of his buddies have booked the same vacation or done business with the same cruise line that’s a pretty strong endorsement and that user is more likely to also click on the ad, check it out, and buy from them. If you as an advertiser can build that following of +1 clicks and get people to endorse you that should be positive for you. If that seems to be a useful thing to use in terms of Quality Score, we absolutely could start thinking about integrating that.

Eric Enge: Are people clicking on those +1 buttons in the ads in any volume? I could see +1′ing a great article, but I’m not sure what the proclivity would be of people to +1 an ad.

Frederick Vallaeys: That raises another good point which is if you are using +1 as a publisher, an advertiser, or a business the +1 actually is associated to a certain URL. So, even if you don’t have a +1 next to your ad, but you get people to +1 your website, that all feeds into the same pool of data.

Later on when somebody searches and sees your ad, those recommendations will show up even if those +1′s were done from your website or the organic results. It’s a whole ecosystem that persists across all the different touch points you might have with that customer, whether it be through Google or through your own website.

As far as the volume of how many people have done this, I can’t talk about that. It’s still early stages for this, but we are pleased with the way people are using it at this point.

The power of using the new ad extensions

Eric Enge: One of our clients is using the seller rating ad extensions. That’s kind of a corollary, this whole business of including reviews and ratings into the whole process.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. I think it fits into the bigger picture of new ad formats you see on Google, and it stems from the fact that we realize that sometimes the picture is worth a thousand words, and the ad doesn’t have to be purely text.

You can also answer with a map. If it’s a local search you can enhance with product prices and images if it was a product search. If it was a search for a new movie then it might make sense to show the trailer right there. Positive seller ratings and reviews are a good thing to surface because it helps build trust and brings in those clicks that an advertiser was looking for.

We’ve seen site links drive increases in CTR anywhere between 17% to 30%.

A specific example to look at is site links, which is probably the easiest of the new ad formats to implement because it’s literally going into your campaign and putting in up to ten links associated to each of your campaigns. We’ve seen these drive increases in CTR anywhere between 17% (search) to 30% (mobile). These are fantastic increases in CTR simply by showing more information that’s useful to users.

Eric Enge: Similar to the +1 button, it’s something the eye notices and attracts a little bit of mind space.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. We want to be careful because people are drawn to new things, but we need to make sure that those new things are not just drawing clicks because they are different, but because they are actually useful. We are careful in terms of launching these new features and testing them and making sure there is actual user benefit in them.

On the flipside, when the user sees more it typically also means they are better qualified by the time they make the click and come to you as an advertiser, so you are more likely to convert that customer. A great example of this is again in the travel space.

Let’s say someone is looking for a destination and you have a travel site with car rentals, hotels, flights, and vacation packages. In the past you would have taken that user to your generic page where they could have done all four of those things. But, if you now show four site links to each of those different areas of your site, you’ve done two things.

You’ve told that user “hey, by the way you might not have realized it, but we also do car rentals.” The second thing is the user goes directly to that page for the thing they were looking for. Now you can take them to a page where, instead of cluttering it with the things they weren’t looking for, you actually put special offers and pitch the product they were looking for.

In the case of car rentals you show them what discounts are available in the space that you might have otherwise had to use to say “hey, you can also book flights here” which they weren’t looking to do at the time. It’s a positive thing for both the user and the advertiser.

Eric Enge: I saw what Apple did with site links. They show their current hot offers. It’s a very, very smart way to use that feature.

Quality Score and Position Normalization

Clickthrough Rate Eric Enge: Coming back to Quality Score and the click through rates. I assume you have some way of adjusting expectations based on positions, because obviously one would expect the first ad to get the most clicks. To put a strawman concept out there, if we thought the first ad was going to get 30% of the page search clicks, and the second was going to get 15% and so forth then if the first ad gets 25% and the second ad gets 20% then that starts to be a sign that the second ad is the better ad. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Position normalization says that we have different expectations for CTR for the different ad positions.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes, you are spot on with that. We call it Position Normalization, and it’s exactly as you described. Having a certain CTR, say 25%, could be a really good thing if we were expecting you to get 15% in the position that you were in. Your Quality Score could go up. Many advertisers look at the CTR in their accounts and try to judge everything on that. However, it’s important to look at both the CTR number as well as the Quality Score number in your account.

Eric Enge: You want to look at them together as it’s a relative thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. You look at them in combination, and the more important thing to look at in your account is the return on investments you’ve received from those ads. The Quality Score is a number we put in there to help you figure out where it is you could perform better and possibly decrease your cost and increase your position by having more relevance. If that is driving ROI, then that’s the only thing that matters to advertisers.

Eric Enge: You don’t want to lose sight of the end goal. The Quality Score is basically a tool to help you better get to that goal. The point you just made about the Position Normalization, is that you get to look at all the things together. I need to look at it in a holistic fashion so it can tell me where the opportunities are.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly, and a simple technique is to look at which of your keywords have a sub-bar Quality Score; and that could be any number. That could be the lowest ones in your accounts or it could be literally at a one level or a two level. Then you can look at your search query report.

From that you start seeing these different variations, and now you can start figuring out why is it that it wasn’t performing well at the aggregate level, and then how can I make my account more specific by building out new ad groups for these different search queries that we are also triggering.

Typically, when you do that, you increase your relevance because you are now taking more specific keywords and building ad text specifically for those which help you boost up your click through rate.

Tips for optimizing your AdWords account

Eric Enge: If you are a publisher that wants to do optimization on your account, what are the steps you recommend publishers should go through?

Frederick Vallaeys: I recommend that you look holistically at your accounts. Sort it on a keyword basis from lowest to highest Quality Score and apply some filter so you are not looking at anything that doesn’t have a lot of impressions yet.

Look at which ones have the highest volume and not a great Quality Score.

I would say a thousand impressions and up. That’s the baseline where you would start looking at it, and then do a secondary sort on that. Look at which ones have the highest volume and not a great Quality Score. Go after the high volume first even if it’s not necessarily the absolute lowest Quality Score, but it’s still in that bucket where the Quality Score is not quite where you want it to be, and start optimizing on those.

Then try to figure out if you could write better ad text for that keyword as it stands now or do you need to break that keyword into more specific variations, build new ad groups around that to create ad text that’s more compelling and maybe lead it to a landing page that’s also more specific.

Eric Enge: Is there an ad group or campaign level component to Quality Score?

Frederick Vallaeys: The QS is at a keyword-ad level. So the way you structure ad groups plays a large role in determining QS. However there is no ad group or campaign QS component. I.e. if you took the same keyword and ad and moved it to a different ad group or campaign, the quality score would remain the same.

Eric Enge: We did talk about Position Normalization earlier, but is there an argument in some situations for bidding higher? To drive history faster, or do things to try to help the Quality Score go up?

I think you hit the nail on the head with the statement that it (bidding higher) helps you build history faster in some cases.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think you hit the nail on the head with the statement that it helps you build history faster in some cases. Keep in mind when you bid higher it usually means you are going to get a higher position on the page.

In those higher positions if you go from being on page two to page one, that’s going to have a huge impact on how quickly you accrue impressions. It’s those impressions that will give Google the confidence to make a Quality Score judgment that’s specific to your account as opposed to the system-wide averages.

If you, as an advertiser, are doing much better than the system-wide average then it would benefit you to prove to us as quickly as you can because that will then decrease your costs in the long run.

It’s about building that volume, but not about anything else because there is Position Normalization. Bidding up to a higher position and getting that higher CTR isn’t a guarantee of getting a better Quality Score in the long run.

Eric Enge: Right, because presumably the Position Normalization is adjusted on a keyword basis. Position normalization for market expectations on one keyword might be different than the expectations on another keyword.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right.

Eric Enge: That eliminates any possibility that you could fool the Position Normalization algorithm with the bids. The only thing you gain is that you can accelerate the development of your own history.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly.

How the real time math helps advertisers

Eric Enge: In summary, the Quality Score we see in AdWords is actually a very valuable proxy basically for the real numbers because you can’t possibly handle the data for the real numbers as a human.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. That brings up another good point. One thing I like to harp on is that Google has a lot of data, and we are very good at using that data to give the best results to advertisers. Conversion optimizer is actually a good example of this.

To the point that you just made, we at Google collect data on a query-by-query basis, can have an expectation of how that’s going to perform. The problem is that even if you had that as an advertiser, there would be no way for you to bid in real time based on those factors.

That’s where Google can actually do a good job for those advertisers, and that’s where conversion optimizer comes into play. That’s using all of Google’s power of crunching numbers to make sure that you are meeting your ROI targets, and let us handle all the heavy lifting of determining the right CPC.

Eric Enge: Thanks Fred!

Other Recent Interviews

Bing’s Ping Jen, September 28, 2011
Bing’s Duane Forrester, September 6, 2011
Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Google, interviews, PPC

adCenter Quality Score Defined, with Bing’s Ping Jen

9/19/2011 by Eric Enge 1 Comment

photo of Ping Jen Ping Jen is a Product Manager on the Microsoft Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Team. He has a passion for driving improvements into adCenter which helps advertisers optimize their campaigns and increase their competitiveness in the marketplace. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2009, Ping was a Business Administrator at University of Cincinnati Department of Neurosurgery. Ping is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and holds a MBA degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Key Interview Points

One of the things I learned when I was out at SMX Advanced in June was that the Quality Score that you see in the search engine PPC services (both adCenter and AdWords) was that the Quality Score you see displayed in your account is not the same as what is used by the engines in ranking your ad. For that reason I asked Ping Jen of the adCenter team to join me for an interview. Below we talk through exactly how Quality Score works in adCenter. Here are the key points from the interview:

Original content, content relevance to the ad, location, and layout are all factors in landing page relevance.
Advertisers whose pages are deemed to be harmful will get banned from the adCenter marketplace.
(Ping Jen) “Our philosophy is that we want our advertisers to have high ROI, and one of the ways we do that is by requiring them to have higher quality landing page user experiences and relevance. To help advertisers, we provide feedback through the Landing Page User Experience subscore and Landing Page Relevance subscore.”
(Ping Jen) “If you have some outliers within an ad group or campaign, determine why. Should I use this keyword? Does it belong to this ad group or campaign because usually KWs that share an ad group are tied to the same landing page? In some cases, it may be time to move those keywords to another ad group because they don’t fit into this landing page.”
(Ping Jen) “Before clicking your ads, search users will look at the content of your ads. Immediately, they can see if they are relevant to what they are looking for. We follow the same logic to validate your ad copy relevance.”
(Ping Jen) “badly spelled ad copy immediately reduces the confidence a user will have with the ad and they will shy away from it.”
(Ping Jen) “Placement is still determined by relevance, the landing page experience, the historical CTR and the advertiser’s price.”
(Ping Jen) “We have always been upfront that adCenter Quality Score is not directly tied into a rank score.”
(Ping Jen) “How do you know your KW performance against others bidding on the same term? We tell you with the keyword relevance sub score.”
Rank score, which is the term adCenter uses for the actual method used to determine ranking, is calculated on a marketplace by marketplace basis. This is done because the needs of each marketplace are different.
(Ping Jen) “Ads must comply with the adCenter Relevance and Quality guidelines. Then the ad’s competitiveness in KW relevance, landing page relevance and their bids will decide their ranks.”

Landing Page Quality and Relevance with adCenter

Eric Enge: Can you give us an overview of how Quality Score operates in adCenter?

Ping Jen: Our Quality Score is a strong signal of campaign quality and performance. The reason we introduced the adCenter Quality Score was to help our advertisers enhance campaign performance and raise the visibility of improvement opportunities.

We consider campaign quality an important factor and we want to showcase the best experiences in the marketplace and continue to grow the traffic volume and increase market share.

Eric Enge: How do you measure that landing page user experience? What factors are involved?

Ping Jen: If you Bing “adCenter relevance and quality guidelines”, you will find that adCenter has published very specific requirements for landing page and user experience. We measure the Landing Page User Experience and then validate whether advertisers have followed the guidelines and show the results through the Landing Page User Experience subscore.

Eric Enge: In the landing page guidelines you recommend analyzing the content and the user’s interaction with the content to make sure there is value.

Ping Jen: Yes, besides original content, content relevance location and layout is also very important.

Eric Enge: Your guidelines warn against too much advertising on the page, SEO manipulation, and doorway pages. You can break these guidelines into two categories.

One category is pages that are overtly harmful; for example, pop ups, parked sites and automatic software downloads. The second category includes guidelines that point towards an evaluation of the quality of the user experience when they click on an ad and arrive at the page.

Ping Jen: For the first category, we will prevent them from our marketplace if they create a harmful experience. For the second category, if everything else is equal we want to promote the content that provides the best user experience.

Eric Enge: At the SMX Advanced panel you and I attended recently, either Frederick Vallaeys of Google or Craig Danuloff indicated that landing page evaluation was not much of a factor in the Google Quality Score algorithm. I am not asking you to comment on Google’s approaches, I simply want to bring up the fact that adCenter’s approach appears to be different than the Google approach.

Ping Jen: Our philosophy is that we want our advertisers to have high ROI, and one of the ways we do that is by requiring them to have higher quality landing page user experiences and relevance. To help advertisers, we provide feedback through the Landing Page User Experience subscore and Landing Page Relevance subscore.

Eric Enge: It’s the key differentiating point in terms of driving a higher ROI.

Ping Jen: Correct, through Quality Score, adCenter aims to help advertisers improve their landing pages relevance and show ads accordingly. Initially the traffic volume may not be at its full potential but the traffic that comes to our advertisers is good traffic. In time advertisers will be able to achieve both quality and quantity goals by leveraging Quality Score.

Eric Enge: Can you tell us more about landing page relevance?

Ping Jen: Yes, adCenter has devoted a lot of resources to analyze landing page relevance and shares the findings through landing page relevance subscore. We want to help advertisers align their landing pages content with user intent. When a search query such as “golf” comes in, adCenter analyzes what golf means, which may be different context for different people.

For example, golf could be an event, sporting goods, a clothing line, or a golfer like Tiger Woods. The searcher might be looking for a golf vacation or information on the Volkswagen car. We can analyze these possible user intents from the search query side and validate the landing page to see whether you have enough information on your landing site to engage user intent for all possibilities.

Eric Enge: If an advertiser has an ad for golf and the keywords aren’t clear, you can look at their page and understand whether they are right for a golf clothing line or golf course query and perhaps target when their ads show. If it’s too vague, you can lower their Quality Score because a generic word like golf would be used by people for many purposes and, if they only match one of those, they will only fit a percentage of those users.

Ping Jen: We will list all the possible intents behind the term golf and then assess your landing page to validate whether it has enough related information to engage any of these possible intents. That’s the basics behind our landing page relevance check. adCenter has invested a lot of resources enhancing this feature so I strongly encourage people to take a deeper look at their Landing Page Relevance subscore. They can use this sub score as a strong signal to say “hey, do I have good information on my landing page to convert a search user for this term?”

Eric Enge: If someone has a poor landing page relevance score they have work to do, right? However, there are many reasons why their score could be poor. Are there tools you can suggest that would help them break this down and figure out what aspect is causing their landing page sub score to be low?

Ping Jen: First, look at the whole picture. At the campaign and ad group levels, do you have a good landing page relevance or not? If you can say this ad group or campaign is pretty solid, that’s the first step. If the answer is no, you need to reconsider your KW selections and how they are tied to landing pages.

Second step, look closely at the details. If you have some outliers within an ad group or campaign, determine why. Should I use this keyword? Does it belong to this ad group or campaign because usually KWs that share an ad group are tied to the same landing page? In some cases, it may be time to move those keywords to another ad group because they don’t fit into this landing page.

Role of Ad Copy in adCenter Quality Score

Eric Enge: What about the role of an ad copy on your overall score?

Ping Jen: We check the relevance of your ad copy as well.

Eric Enge: What are some of the aspects you look at inside the ad?

Ping Jen: There are simple ways to identify whether your ad copy can engage with user intent. Before clicking your ads, search users will look at the content of your ads. Immediately, they can see if they are relevant to what they are looking for. We follow the same logic to validate your ad copy relevance.

Eric Enge: I see one of the things you focus on includes correct grammar.

Ping Jen: Absolutely, badly spelled ad copy immediately reduces the confidence a user will have with the ad copy and they will shy away from it.

Eric Enge: Many people type in search phrases which are misspelled. One popular technique is to show the user’s keywords back to them exactly as they typed it. Is that something you recommend?

Ping Jen: No, we identify possible misspellings and what could be the correct term first. We then ask the search users if this is what they are looking for, and then show ads based upon search user’s choice.

Eric Enge: I’d like to talk more about the golf scenario. Let’s say you have someone who promotes golf vacations. A user types in the generic keyword “golf” and the golf vacation company wants to bid on it. A popular technique in your ad tells them they entered golf but your ad is about golf vacations so you screen out the people who were looking to buy golf clubs. Do you encourage this approach?

Ping Jen: Absolutely. Ad copy is advertisers’ first line of defense to low-value traffic. Having the search user help filter out unwanted traffic is a good technique that we recommend.

jaguar Eric Enge: A more dramatic example is when someone enters the search phrase “jaguar.” As you know, this is an animal, a football team, an operating system and a guitar. No one is going to cover all these situations so how do you handle this scenario?

Ping Jen: First we identify what the possible user intents are behind it. We assess advertiser’s landing pages to see whether those pages match up with any of possible intents.

Eric Enge: So would you show the most popular meaning when people type in jaguar, which might be the animal?

Ping Jen: No, we don’t try to alter the ad placement on this basis. Placement is still determined by relevance, the landing page experience, the historical CTR and the advertiser’s price.

Quality Score and Ad Position

Eric Enge: In terms of how the Quality Score is used, is it used to help determine the position of an ad or only whoever the ad shows or not? At SMX Advanced Craig Danuloff told us that Google Quality Score is not the Quality Score they use to generate rank score.

We have always been upfront that adCenter Quality Score is not directly tied into a rank score.

Ping Jen: That’s correct. That was news to a lot of people. However, there are good reasons why it’s almost impossible to have the displayed Quality Score determine the ranking of the ad. We have always been upfront that adCenter Quality Score is not directly tied into a rank score.

Eric Enge: So are you saying the Quality Score you display is a hint.

Ping Jen: It’s an indicator of how competitive your keyword is in our marketplace.

Eric Enge: If you do things to improve the Quality Score you see inside of adCenter, then you will probably be moving in the right direction?

Ping Jen: It’s not probably; you are definitely going in the right direction to make your KW/ad copy more competitive and enhance your landing page relevance and user experience.

Eric Enge: But it’s not a one-to-one with what is actually used in the algorithm.

Ping Jen: That’s correct, but it is a very strong indicator.

Click Through Rates and the Keyword Sub Score

Eric Enge: Do the click through rates play a large role in the algorithm?

Ping Jen: When we decide adCenter Quality Score, we also consider the advertiser’s expectation. They look at their CTR as a strong indicator of how their ad performed so we respect that notion and make sure adCenter Quality Score is moving consistently with their CTR performance.

Eric Enge: So the rank score is derived from a combination of factors including keyword relevance, ad copy, landing page, click through rate and, finally, the bid price.

Ping Jen: Correct. Hopefully you can help me and adCenter to drive this message home to the heart and mind of every advertiser. The message is very straightforward. Landing page user experience and landing page relevance is the cornerstone of the search alliance marketplace. We want to make sure you meet our requirements and grow together with our marketplace.

After you enter our marketplace, you have to compete with others looking for the same traffic. How do you know your KW performance against others bidding on the same term? We tell you with the keyword relevance sub score.

You have three different results, poor, no problem, and good. With the search term “jaguar”, the CTR average is 10% so if you are about 10.2 or 9.8 you are average. If you are below the marketplace average for this term you are poor. If you are better than the market average you are good.

Sub Score It is a useful tool to gauge your performance. Occasionally, people come to us and say I have a CTR of 5% so why are my ads not showing, or why isn’t it in the number 1 position? The answer is the CTR average for your keyword is 10%. Some people come to us and say I only have 0.8% so why do I have a high quality score? I tell them it is because they are doing better than the 0.2% average and have “No Problem” on landing page relevance and landing page user experience.

Eric Enge: Right, because you calculate the average performance based on each marketplace?

Ping Jen: Each specific term. There is a lot of nuance behind our Quality Score when compared with Google. This is a major difference.

How positioning works in adCenter

Eric Enge: If we were to write down on a piece of paper which ads show first, which ads show second, and how that is calculated, what would that look like?

Ping Jen: Ads must comply with the adCenter Relevance and Quality guidelines. Then the ad’s competitiveness in KW relevance, landing page relevance and their bids will decide their ranks.

Eric Enge: Is there anything else you would like to add?

The adCenter Quality Score is a channel we use to communicate to the advertisers they can monitor for improvement opportunities.

Ping Jen: I want to make sure people understand that the adCenter Quality Score is a channel we use to proactively communicate to the advertiser. For example, your ads are losing strength compared to your competitors or due to a new policy you suddenly see your user experience drop down to poor.

I encourage all the adCenter users to closely monitor their quality score and provide feedback to us on how we can fine tune the signals.

Eric Enge: Thanks Ping this was very helpful and we appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.

Other Recent Interviews

Duane Forrester, September 7, 2011
Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: interviews, Microsoft, PPC

How Bing Uses CTR in Ranking, and more with Duane Forrester

9/7/2011 by Eric Enge 16 Comments

photo of Duane Forrester Duane Forrester is a Sr. Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program. Previously, he was an in-house SEM running the SEO program for MSN. He’s also the founding co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee, was formerly on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is the author of two books: How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers.

Duane was a moderator at www.searchengineforums.com and maintains his own blog at www.theonlinemarketingguy.com. He has also written for www.searchengineland.com and www.searchenginewatch.com over the years.

Key Interview Points

Let me start you with the big ones up front. This interview had two startling parts to it. These were:

The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor. This was amazing stuff. Basically, Bing is willing to test any page by indexing it. In fact you can pretty much directly inject any URL you want into their search results using the Submit URL feature of Bing Webmaster Tools. Then they will test it, and if the click interaction data is bad, out (or down) you go.
The ranking of the priorities for publishers in Duane’s eyes. #1 Content #2 Social Media #3 Links. Links were rated as the third most important area. Third.

This was fascinating stuff. Of course, each search engine is different, and they each test different things. But this is a very different headset than what we are used to in the world of SEO. Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

(Duane): “You need to remember that the search engine sees everything across the web on every layer and as a whole, all at the same time. So, when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality.”
(Duane): “The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher. That’s the core reason why a search engine exists”. To help put this comment in perspective, I find it useful to think about the search engine’s goal as being to provide the searcher with the fastest possible answer to their question. This is an incredibly important mindset to establish in your mind as you work on your Internet marketing strategy.
(Duane): “If we are actually finding your pages, but we are not keeping thme in the index, there is a reason for that”.
(Duane): “Search engines are evolving and things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content … It’s a dramatic cost savings for us”.
(Duane): “Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”.
(Duane): “Millions of movements per hour are happening across Bing”.
Bing Webmaster Tools offers a crawl scheduling type feature where you can indicate times of days whern you prefer that Bingbot does its crawl.
Bing does not use page performance as a ranking factor. This is because a page with a 4 second load that has all the content someone wants may well be a better experience than a page with 1 second load time that does not answer the question as well.
Bing’s Webmaster Tools inbound links feature shows a reasonable representation of links with a focus on those that matter most to your site.
(Duane): “We have our internal metric that folks may or may not be familiar with. It’s called Static Rank and this is where we judge the value of a particular URL as we perceive it”.
Take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Tools data to see the Average Impression Position for the search phrases that are delivering traffic to your site. If the reported position is decreasing (moving up in the search results) this is an indication that the trust in the page is growing.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Duane, you are now running the Bing Webmaster program at Microsoft but you were formerly a SEO. How has that transition been?

Peak under the hood Duane Forrester: It’s like being a kid in a candy store. What every SEO wants is a peek under the hood. When I started, I was told to come down to the garage and we will show you what we are doing now, and what we are planning for the future.

Eric Enge: What perspective would you share with SEOs who are still on the outside?

Duane Forrester: People need to wrap their heads around the fact that things are changing. If they say, “I will tweak my title tag and put a H1 tag in there and I’ll be fine”, they will be left behind. This is why we are investing so heavily in Webmaster Tools.

It’s a way for us to reach out directly to people who control websites and give them all kinds of data that we are willing to share it with them, but they need to take action. Those who adapt will be the ones who survive long-term.

You need to remember that the search engine sees everything across the web on every layer and as a whole, all at the same time. So, when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality. It could be as simple as I went to site ABC.com and absolutely loved it as a notation in a Facebook post.

Folks need to take a world view of things and not only focus on the minutiae and details. These tools can help people understand when they need to go back to the drawing board and say, “how do I improve my user-experience? What do I need to invest in?”

eBay My perennial example is it’s the eBay school of selling. When you want to sell something on eBay, you don’t simply post a single photo of the item. You take a dozen pictures from different angles. You take photos of the box it came in, photos of the paperwork and its stationery, photos of it in action, and you write a detailed description. You put all of this out there because, in order to sell the product, if the person can’t lay their hands on it the next best thing is to describe it in detail.

When you look at the user experience, you need to look at it as if I put the piece of content on the internet, is it an authority piece of content, is it something that will wow the user when they click on that search result and come to me? They will realize they found their home, they found the answer they need, they can get their task completed, and they can complete whatever it is they set out to do.

Eric Enge: Right, it is a holistic view of the situation

Duane Forrester: Yes, it’s a holistic view of the situation and, at the same time, the view needs to be user-centric.

Eric Enge: You mentioned earlier that people who focus exclusively on optimizing their titles and H1 tags will get left behind. The discussion you just walked us through draws that out a bit more.

If I could offer my paraphrase for this, the first step is to forget the search engine and create a kick-ass user experience. Then create a site that the search engine can read. Next, promote your stuff effectively so the signals are emitted to make people aware of it. The signals are emitted and you get that mentioned in Facebook, you get that write up in the San Francisco Chronicle, etc. That’s sort of a holistic view of the whole thing.

Duane Forrester: Yes, you are bang on with that.

Bing Webmaster Tools – a conduit of information for the webmaster

Eric Enge: What are the goals of Bing Webmaster Tools?

Duane Forrester: First and foremost, the tools are a space where we have a conversation with the owner of the website. The goal is to give them something of value that will help them create a better product. The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher. That’s the core reason why a search engine exists.

Sometimes we provide a cool new feature that wows people but often, the value comes through small things, such as helping the Webmaster understand that we cannot access a particular piece of content, but if they take the block off robot.txt, then we can get in there.

One main goal is to make sure people understand how we are viewing their websites. This is a critical component because Bing is highly centralized around the idea of quality content and a quality user experience overall.

We need to make sure we share as much of this data as possible whether it’s your average impression or your average click location.

If we are actually finding your pages, but we are not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.

We hope to educate the site owner so they understand where they need to make changes on their website to ensure the search engine is finding all their content. If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that. If we have 17 million other results that are better, there is no need for us to keep 17 million and one if we know we are never going to use it. That’s an indication that the website has some work to do around the idea of quality.

Eric Enge: So, it’s a tool whose design is to allow publishers to improve their sites and give them a better chance of being one of the best results for search queries. What would you say you have done, and are thinking about doing, to guide people towards the holistic view you outlined earlier?

Duane Forrester: One of our main areas of focus within Bing Webmaster Tools is making sure we expose all of the correct data. We ask ourselves, “If I am a small business owner, I need to come in here and get something done. What is it I need to get done?” We back that up and then say, “From the search engine’s perspective, what do I need you to get done and how do I guide you in that regard?”

A large area we continue to invest in is help documentation. Its understanding the most frequently encountered issues and creating documents that clearly explain how to take an action within that. The tools themselves are designed to make sure that core pieces of information are being shared with you.

Sitemaps and the Index Explorer Tool

Eric Enge: What can we use within Bing Webmaster Tools to see how Bing views our sites?

Duane Forrester: Recently, we rolled out expanded support for Sitemaps. You can provide a regular sitemap.xml, or you can give us RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 to 1.3 feed or plain text files. This provides users with more ways to tell us about the pages on their site.

RSS is going to become a desired way for us to find content.

Search engines are evolving and things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content. Imagine if we can ingest your RSS feed and every time you post up it comes directly to us. It’s a dramatic cost savings for us.

These things are very important to an engine. These are areas where we look for efficiencies as they save us crawl time.

It also allows us to get much closer to publication time because Bingbot can’t be everywhere at the same time. By sourcing these feeds as a location for finding content, when the feed pings and says I have something fresh, we get it instantaneously. That’s a big step forward.

The Index Explorer will show you a top-down view of the actual structure of your website in our index, it’s a really cool, useful feature within the toolset.

Another core area we are focused on is making sure people understand what the structure of their website looks like in our index. We have a specific tool that enables people to see everything that’s in the index. It’s called Index Explorer. It will show you, from a top-down view, the actual structure we see.

If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we don’t trust the Sitemap.

As a webmaster you can export all this data, compare it against your own Sitemaps, and see if there are any gaps in there. Maybe your newest content was never in there. Why is that? Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap.

When it comes to feeds, it’s more straightforward. If there are gaps, you need to check that the feed is working properly. Are we actually finding that content, or do you have a redirect setup that moves people over to another place. That’s not the kind of the thing we want to see happening from the user’s perspective.

Inserting a URL directly into Bing’s index

Submit URLs Eric Enge: The tool to insert a URL looks handy.

Duane Forrester: It is a really powerful tool. It inserts the URL directly into our index. There are limitations placed on it to protect against spam such as how many and the frequency.

Eric Enge: 10 a day, 50 a month, right?

Duane Forrester: Exactly. It is a fantastic tool because if you have your latest and greatest, and you want to make sure it hits the Bing index, go in there and insert it via this tool. When we crawl content or ingest it from a sitemap, it passes through layers of filtrating where we do quality control on it, see what it looks like, rate it, and then put it into the full index. We then see how it populates and how the users interact with it.

If you use this tool to inject a site or a URL, it goes directly into the index and shows up almost instantly inside the SERPs.

If you use this tool to inject a site or a URL, it goes directly into the index and shows up almost instantly inside the SERPs. You are then at the mercy of user experience to tell us if it is good content. This is a new URL so there is no history, there are no links pointed to it, we have no other signals but we are willing to give it a try and it goes in the index.

If the users love it, it stays. If the users don’t like it, it gets dropped. This is a way to determine if the users feel this was a quality result.

Eric Enge: How do you decide if it’s a quality result? I’ll give you a scenario. Someone puts a URL in there and the first 10 users go to it and, as far as you know, they view only one page on the site.

Duane Forrester: We are looking to see if we show your result in a #1, does it get a click and does the user come back to us within a reasonable timeframe or do they come back almost instantly?

Do they come back and click on #2, and what’s their action with #2? Did they seem to be more pleased with #2 based on a number of factors or was it the same scenario as #1? Then, did they click on anything else?

We are watching the user’s behavior to understand which result we showed them seemed to be the most relevant in their opinion, and their opinion is voiced by their actions.

We are watching the user’s behavior to understand which result we showed them seemed to be the most relevant in their opinion, and their opinion is voiced by their actions.

Eric Enge: So, the primary data point is interaction with the SERPs. Either they don’t click on it or they click on it and are back in a second.

Duane Forrester: There is more to it than that. Remember, we parse against roughly a thousand parameters in our algorithm so we are also looking at things such as the overall trust of the website, the age of the website, the general tone of the website, the general sentiment about the website. These things play a role.

You can imagine CNN publishes a new blog post and that’s probably more trustworthy than DuaneForrester.com.

www.theonlinemarketingguy.com There are many other factors that come into play. To simplify it, if we show your result and no one clicks on it then obviously they are not happy about it for a reason.

Eric Enge: Yes, absolutely.

Duane Forrester: This is really simple. It is your URL, your description or your title. That’s all that’s shown so something in there is not grabbing their attention and not compelling them to check your page out by clicking on you.

Not all content is kept in Bing’s index

Eric Enge: You mentioned earlier that Bing doesn’t index all the content it crawls. Would you expand more on that?

Duane Forrester: Our goal is not to crawl the entire internet end-to-end every week. That’s not something we want to do. We want to find the best content out there. We crawl the internet from end-to-end, over and over again to try to find that good content.

Eric Enge: And recognize how it changes and evolves?

Duane Forrester: Exactly. That doesn’t mean we keep it all because, and this may be a shock to you and your readers, there is some garbage on the internet. I know you heard it here first; there is garbage on the internet.

Eric Enge: I’d like to articulate that because it is an interesting concept. If you find content, whether it’s through submit URL by crawling or from someone’s sitemap, and you see the users’ experience with those pages is not a good, then you drop it?

Duane Forrester: Let’s define drop it. It could be that your ranking drops back to the second or third page. We know, based on the history on your website, that you have a slow cadence of building out your content set, so it will probably improve over the next few months.

If we know you will be a better result, we won’t drop you out of the index. We simply move that result back and wait for it to become a better item. Over time, as we check back and see changes happening, we try it again in a high ranking spot and see how people respond to it.

Millions of movements an hour are happening across Bing.

These changes, these movements, happen every day and every second against every query. Millions of movements an hour are happening across Bing. It is designed to help us understand if it is a good result for a user. Did they interact with it in a way that indicates they are happy with that result, that it wowed them?

That’s why we keep coming back to the user-experience and wowing your visitors because that’s what you are trying to do. If you partner with us, by giving us good content that wows people when we use it as a search result, we are going to love you for that. If you give us dreck we are not going to show it and are not going to keep it in our index because keeping that in our index is a hard cost to us.

Every site should submit a Sitemap

Eric Enge: Let’s go back to Sitemaps again. As we discussed earlier, you have a way to indicate what your Sitemaps are and see what Bing is finding in the Webmaster Tools.

What about sites that don’t have Sitemaps? Is that a major disadvantage for them if it’s a small site with a lot of trust and authority? Or, could absolutely everybody do a Sitemap?

Duane Forrester: We recommend everyone do a Sitemap. It helps us because there is a protocol built around it, and we adhere to the protocol. We look for your Robots.txt in the first instance, and, in the second instance, we look for your XML Sitemap. If you don’t have those, then it’s more of a problem for us than it is for you. We will crawl the website, we will go through the navigation as best we can, we will find your content, and we will ingest it that way.

Sometimes we may find ourselves up against navigational elements that we can’t get through, or an encoded link that essentially gives us a blank wrapper that we can’t see inside so we can’t see the link.

If we can’t see what’s inside the technology on the URL, it becomes a very dicey proposition for us to take that URL and start returning it as a search result. In most instances it won’t be a problem, but in some instances there may be bad content such as content no one should see, content that’s inappropriate, or content that’s not relevant.

Eric Enge: Or, you have to trust it less.

Duane Forrester: That’s exactly what it comes down to. In some cases, people will employ navigational elements that we cannot crawl through. If we can’t crawl through it then we can’t find the URL which means we can’t find the rest of your content.

Eric Enge: If you have a case where the site is too hard to crawl, and given what you know about it, how much you trust it and how much authority you associate with it, perhaps you will crawl it less? If they had given you a Sitemap, would you crawl it more?

Duane Forrester: I understand where you are coming from, and the short answer is no not really. We are voracious about looking for new content. That is the life blood for search, the freshest content available. The beauty of all of this being crawler based is that they just keep going.

We invest a lot of time in managing our ability to crawl at a certain pace and not melt people’s servers. We have to carefully police and make sure we are not harming people in our efforts to get their content.

Eric Enge: In the Webmaster Tools, you offer the ability to throttle the crawl, not just at the site level, but by time of the day as well.

Duane Forrester: That’s huge. The ability to say, “Look, I have a bandwidth cap now. I am thinking with my small business hat on”. I pay for bandwidth every month and if I go over that cap it’s like my power meter. I don’t get charged for what I use, I get charged for being in a new band. My costs jump up exponentially in some cases, because I hit that cap and I went through it.

If you are the business owner, you want to protect against that. It’s something I wish existed years ago for all engines because you need a way to manage those costs. In most cases, people will leave it on the default setting and let us figure it out for them, and that’s okay. We will try to minimize the amount of time we spend there and maximize the amount of content we discover.

We sometimes hit servers that are shared servers, and if that server is running slowly, we back away. You can also easily opt to change the settings to follow a preferred pattern based on your own needs. Have Bingbot crawl faster at night and slower during the day, making your bandwidth available to customers instead of crawlers. This control is entirely in your hands.

If you set something up on a free blogging system, you give up a lot of control and place yourself into a neighborhood where there is homogeneity, and you have to accept what comes along. Yesterday someone commented on the Bing Webmaster Blog that there is no way to put in a Sitemap on those open blogging environments.

When I walked through their website they have a lot of good content, they are focused on a good topic, and they produce good, unique content. Unfortunately, they are using a free blogging hosted service and it doesn’t allow them access to implement Webmaster Tools. They don’t understand how to migrate out on their own.

There are many good ideas that end up dormant because they don’t understand how they should start off, what they should invest in, and the areas they need to think of for future growth. That’s something I hope to write about in the coming year on the Bing Webmaster Blog.

Performance and the User Experience

Eric Enge: We talked about how webmasters can protect themselves from the crawling performance hit, but performance also can be a user-experience issue as well, right?

Duane Forrester: Yes. We look at it and say, “If we show up and we think it’s slow what does that mean to a human being?” When the industry started to note that page load times matter everybody started to freak out and ask, “What is a good page load time? How fast should I be?”

If the user is happy with the 3-second load time then saving a tenth of a second is largely irrelevant.

We saw websites strip features out because they said it made it too slow. They ended up with these slim-down user-experiences that were hyper quick. The problem is when you measure something at a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second, you make gains by stripping things out. Essentially, this is done by removing features. The issue then becomes, if the user is happy with the 3-second load time then saving a tenth of a second is largely irrelevant.

Eric Enge: Plus you are taking off the content they were looking for.

Duane Forrester: Exactly, and it’s critical that people understand when we talk about content they have to open their minds. We are not simply talking about written words and text on a page. We are talking about videos, pictures, audio, apps they may have, calculators. We are talking about all these things which are the reason someone may come to your website.

For example, you start peeling those features back because you feel there is not much value in that calculator as not many people have used it, and it adds half a second of load time. Moving it off of that page on to its own standalone page is not the best user-experience. Leave it in place. If you load it in ten seconds, a half second isn’t going to change your world. You have bigger issues than the half second load time that function is causing.

Run Eric Enge: From the holistic perspective, you can optimize on any individual factor, in this case we are talking about page performance. At the end of the day the issue that matters, and most likely the signal that matters to the search engines, is what user-experience signals are emitted based on what happens on the page. If there is a 4-second load time on a page with all the content they want, versus a half-second load time and they don’t find what they want, the 4-second load time is the better experience.

Duane Forrester: I feel like I am repeating myself because I constantly talk about it at conferences and seminars and everything I do. I talk about user-experience and wowing the user, about quality, and unique content. These are the filters everyone needs to judge their work against.

The nuts and bolts of SEO – title tags, meta descriptions, H1s – are the technical aspects and important to get right. At this stage of the game, we have to assume you are going to get those pieces right. What does the next generation SEO look like, what is important? It’s not a laundry-list of technical items. It is social media, link building and content.

If you look at every decision you make through the lenses of quality and user-experience, you are going to end up with a much better product.

If you take that approach now and look at quality and user-experience, and if every decision you make is through those lenses, you will end up with a much better product.

Going with the fastest load time is probably not the best-user experience because it essentially means you have nothing on your page. Putting everything up on your webpage and then saying, “You tell me what you want” isn’t that useful either.

Users are not there to be wowed by how many services you offer, they are there to find the one service they need. When I look online for a bank loan calculator, I don’t want to go to a page that tells me to go to another page, which then tells me here is a list of the calculators we offer. No, I want the actual calculator.

Backlink Functionality in Webmaster Tools

Eric Enge: Let’s talk about the backlinks functionality in Webmaster Tools? I did a quick check and used stonetemple.com. It’s interesting because the range of backlinks shown by different tools vary. For example, Bing Webmaster Tools tells me it gets 6,926 back links, Yahoo Site Explorer says 14,195. Google Webmaster Tools shows 68,285.

You can get SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO from the folks in England, and they all give different counts. Obviously, for tools like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO that probably has something to do with their crawling infrastructure as compared to a search engine. Even among a search engines, it varies greatly.

One thing that is clear is that this relates to what you choose to show. As an example, Stone Temple has approximately 4,400 pages on Web Pro News that links to it. I gather there are things you choose not to show. Perhaps one of those things is a huge number of links from one domain. You might show a sampling. Would you talk about what you are showing and what you are not showing?

Duane Forrester: What we are trying to do is give a reasonable representation of what these links look like. We don’t have a problem sharing multiple links coming from within a domain. Two pages within one domain running over to one or two pages within another domain, or your domain, is not a big deal for us to show.

There are probably many links we are not seeing simply because the pages those links exist on aren’t quality pages. I see this on my own websites all the time.

I join some affiliate program and every instance of that affiliate program generates a link back to me. Their job is to replicate as many pages as possible. Each one of those is a unique product so it makes sense on their end; however, I end up with a thousand links pointed at me, essentially pages that don’t provide any value.

If there are links pointing at you that are not providing value, they don’t show up in here. We do a bit of filtering up front. Some of this is also driven by our index size. Our index is growing by billions of URLs per day, but that’s not to say that it has every URL from the internet out there.

I think the real value in the data these tools provide is links and link management. Being able to export this data and work with it in a spreadsheet is a god send.

Eric Enge: I think part of what you are indicating in the case of stonetemple.com is that there are 6,900 important links that the site has.

Duane Forrester: Yes, as viewed by us.

Eric Enge: Without arguing about the thousand or so at the bottom of that pile, which may or may not be better than the ones you didn’t bother to show, certainly the great majority of them are the best links the site has.

Duane Forrester: Right. As we continue to grow, we are constantly adding billions of URLs. If you want an indication of how well that index growth is moving, take a look at the improvements in relevancy over the last 2 years for Bing. Relevancy has improved to the point where it is simply amazing. Our ability to understand exactly what a regular searcher is looking for and bring back the right result is fantastic.

Eric Enge: Is there a way from the backlinks to understand which ones are the most important?

Duane Forrester: We don’t really show any data. We have our internal metric that folks may or may not be familiar with. It’s called Static Rank and this is where we judge the value of a particular URL as we perceive it. That data is not shown here but it’s something we continually have discussions about internally. Right now, we are opting not to show that.

That’s why it’s handy to be able to export this. You can parse through this and get rid of duplicates from URLs or domain and narrow it down to the single domain. You can then take a look through what the anchor text is telling you and plan how to reach out to people, how you make your changes, how you make your pitch, what you suggest to them. In terms of how these things are ordered, they are ordered how we found them. It’s very straightforward from our end. We put them in there, and off you go.

Social Media

Eric Enge: Do you have plans to start showing social media data?

Duane Forrester: We have a good understanding of how social influences search and you can obviously see within Bing the integrations of social data into search. Ultimately, what it comes down to is can the data we have access to be applied in this particular area? That’s partly to do with policy, partly to do with partnerships, and partly to do with desire.

We would have to talk to partners to find out if we can share the social data. Then we would need to consider the privacy issues. There are many different layers we have to go through before we get to the stage where we can say you have this many Likes this week.

Eric Enge: Social media has become an important input to search.

Yes, in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order.

Duane Forrester: Yes, in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order. Think of it as a three-piece pie. At some point, social could be more important than content, but that assumes you have excellent content in place.

If you don’t have excellent content, all the social in the world will not save you.

Underneath this, your technical SEO has to be solid. We assume you have a well-optimized product, a platform that we can actually get through to find the content.

One of my biggest fears for the industry is that many people are new to this topic and are skipping the “crawl and walk” phases and moving directly to the “run flat out” phase. They are going straight into social media, they are going straight into hardcore optimization, they are going to all of these things and, there is no depth of content. They are not offering anything new to the conversation and there is not enough that differentiates them.

Then they end up in a failure position because they missed some major building blocks along the way. Content, social and links are all important and they are tied in with each other.

Eric Enge: You have my vote for including social data within Webmaster Tools.

We are always open to getting feedback on features that people think are important.

Duane Forrester: We are always open to getting feedback on features that people think are important. We have a dedicated discussion forum within the Bing Webmaster forum specific for future ideas. Anyone can come in and provide their input.

I read the forums every day or so. If people have good ideas I will respond back to them and say, “Thanks, I think that’s a great idea. I am going to capture it and it will go into our planning cycle.”

A nugget about average impression

Eric Enge: Can you talk about the average impression data you provide?

Duane Forrester: The average impression position is where we tell you this is the average location we showed you in and the average click comes as a result of that. Most times these numbers will be closely tied to each other. Sometimes you will notice there is a gap. That gap means when we tried you at the higher position, number 1, you got clicks. When we tried you at number 3, you got fewer clicks. What’s important is that average impression position, though. Let’s say you got an average impression position of 30, so you are at the top of the 4th page, right?

Eric Enge: Yes.

Duane Forrester: And you watch that for a few weeks, and then it becomes 21, then it becomes 16, then it becomes 12. Understanding the mathematics behind the concept of average, we are obviously showing you in a range that has you averaging that position. This means we are showing you higher at times and lower other times.

Eric Enge: Right, you are experimenting with placements for the content.

If your average impression position increases; we are increasing our trust in this result.

Bing Stats Duane Forrester: That’s what we are doing. As that number continues to increase, if you show the average click position, correlating a similar increase, you start to get an idea that we are increasing our trust in this result and in you for this query. We are not going to move you higher if we don’t think you are worth being higher.

If you start going backwards, it is an indication of one or two things. You’ve changed something on your end, which calls into question the value. In many cases that is not the case because you didn’t alter anything on the webpage. It could be that your competition is outpacing you and effectively pushing you down. So that movement of average impression position is a loose interpretation of how much we love and trust you.

Eric Enge: That makes sense. It can give people a measurement of when they need to take action at one level, if they are moving down for example, or when they have an opportunity they might want to focus more attention and capitalize on it.

Duane Forrester: Exactly, between this and a good analytics package, you are able to make a decision on what has the biggest impact for you.

Eric Enge: Awesome. Thanks Duane!

Duane Forrester: Thanks for taking the time to pull this interview together, Eric. It’s always great to chat with folks across the industry. And if readers have feedback for us, please reach out. We listen and respond, whether it’s online or in person at the conferences. If you’re not running the Bing Webmaster Tools today, get crackin’! I can’t imagine an SEO out there who wants LESS relevant data to make decisions around.

Other Recent Interviews

Danny Sullivan, August 8, 2011
Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: interviews, Microsoft, SEO

Danny Sullivan on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Social and Search

8/8/2011 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Published: August 8, 2011

Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for 15 years. Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.

Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.

Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land, which covers search marketing and search engine news. He produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, writes a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google+ and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

Key Interview Points

In this interview with Danny, we delve deeply into Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Social signals in search, and the value of a holistic approach to Internet marketing. There was just too much in this one for me to summarize everything in the key interview points below, so consider these a bit of a teaser for the good stuff you will find within this discussion. As always, many of the key points listed here are summaries of the conversation rather than quotes.

Google+ offers really good support for threaded discussions.
(Danny) “It’s disappointing that there is no way to allow the Hangout to be open for public viewing and no ability to record, maybe these things will come.”
Google Buzz was crippled by automatically incorporating Gmail contacts. Google+ did not make this mistake.
(Danny) “It’s easy to get lost in Google+, Twitter is more efficient with your time.”
(Danny) “One of the exhausting things on Google+ is it’s easy to get lost reading through comments to see what people are saying and how they are reacting.”
(Danny) “… even though the links themselves might be no-follow, they may still calculate they were a shared link and that might be giving you a signal.”
(Danny) “Absolutely, I think it (Google+) has a chance of being significant in terms of Bing significant or in terms of being much closer to a rival. It’s similar to what’s going on with Bing and Google.”
When you see a picture of a person to the right of a SERP, it is a result of the rel=author tag.
(Danny) “I am finding (Google+) Circles to be exhausting. I created all these circles, and there is the decision: what Circle do I put them in?”
(Danny) “When I look at the numbers, I find Bing seems to be gaining from Yahoo more than anything else.”
(Danny) “Potentially, Google+ is a threat to Twitter, but there is a lot to be said for Twitter’s simplicity.”
(Danny) “Many people say there is an exact formula to what you should do on Twitter but there is no one right formula.”
(Danny) “The brands get excited about the customer service role (for Twitter), but I think they ought to be handling customer service through their regular channels so people don’t feel they have to yell out on Twitter.”
(Danny) “Search has his cousin called discovery … (and) social is very strong at providing that.”

Overall impressions of Google+

Eric Enge: Other than the horrible name Google+, which you are on record stating your thoughts about, what do you think?

Most impressive is the amount of commenting a post can generate in Google+.

Danny Sullivan: I’ve been impressed with a lot of it. Most impressive is the amount of commenting a post can generate. It’s somewhat phenomenal that you can put something out and suddenly five, ten, twenty people jump in on it.

Compared to Twitter, you make a remark and you may get two or three tweets. Sometimes it might catch fire but it’s not consolidated in one place. Google+ generates a lot of activity and I wonder what will happen if more people get involved.

Eric Enge: I agree with you that the threading is much better. I think that’s a big plus.

Danny Sullivan: I think the commenting has been useful to see. For example, I have a large collection of people that I follow and joke that it is like going from middle school to high school. You recognize many of your friends but there are many new people that you haven’t seen before.

If you start over with the social network, you may get exposed to people that you hadn’t thought of before and you hadn’t connected with. It is a time consuming and painful process doing that over again.

Eric Enge: What about the Hangouts, have you done anything with that?

It’s disappointing that there is no way to allow the Hangout to be open for public viewing and no ability to record, maybe these things will come.

Danny Sullivan: I jumped into one when I saw Bradley Horowitz on. It was interesting because he said a couple of things that were news without having to schedule an interview. They get busy quickly so you have to move fast.

One of the disappointing things is that they don’t allow you to let the Hangout be open for other people to view. Also, there is no ability to record. I think both would be useful. Maybe these things will come.

Eric Enge: Obviously, it’s the first thing out of the gate. Now the question is, “are they going to follow-up on it?” This was missing from some of the other social initiatives put out there by Google.

Danny Sullivan: When you compare it to Buzz, there are a few crippling things that hit Buzz. First, Buzz rolled out in a way that made people feel it violated their privacy.

Eric Enge: Right, by automatically incorporating Gmail contacts.

Danny Sullivan: Yes, exactly. You had this thing thrust upon you, which you didn’t necessarily ask for, and that gave it a bad taste from the beginning. Then they allowed the ability to pull an RSS feed in fairly quickly. That may have been a mistake because I piped in my Twitter feed and a number of people said “whatever I am doing on Twitter, or another service, I could just pipe it into here.”

This turned Buzz into what FriendFeed was. It was nice if you wanted to see what everybody is saying, or you had friends across different social services. It didn’t necessarily inspire people to think “I should be doing original content here,” and it never seemed to take off.

They don’t have the RSS import now, so if you want to post on Google+ you have to go there and come up with something that you want to put there. It’s driving you back to the site each time.

Eric Enge: Are you thinking of the audiences differently? What do you post to Google+ versus Twitter?

It’s easy to get lost in Google+, Twitter is more efficient with your time.

Danny Sullivan: A little bit. I will post more “+” things to Google+ than to Twitter because it makes sense when to go there. On Twitter I might express a small gripe, such as my computer crashed, because that is more of a Twitter type thing. I’ve shared some things across both, but Google+ made it easier for me to share multiple pictures because of the way the Android App works. You can do it with Twitter but it’s harder and it depends on which app you are using. Some allow multiple pictures, some don’t.

There is a concern that some people may follow you in both places, and you don’t want them to see the same stuff. I am not worried about it and actually started posting out onto Facebook more than usual this week because I thought I should be doing stuff there. However, I wonder if I am going to have time.

One of the exhausting things on Google+ is it’s easy to get lost reading through comments to see what people are saying and how they are reacting. I feel Twitter is much more efficient because with one click I can see if anybody has sent me a reply. Even though Google has notifications that work well, it’s still easy to get locked into reading a discussion about what everybody is saying. This is useful in a many ways but also very time consuming.

(Note: After Danny and I had this discussion, he wrote a post calling Google out for the way it has handled brands on Google+).

Google+ as a ranking signal

Eric Enge: What about Google+ as a ranking signal?

Danny Sullivan: I think they are using +1 for social search, but they haven’t said they’ve integrated it as a general ranking signal. I certainly think that will come.

It’s getting very confusing about what they use or what they say they don’t use. That’s why I wrote the article “What social signals do Bing and Google really count” last December. (Note: Since we did this interview we have gotten first confirmation that Google+ is influencing Google rankings).

I was trying to get them to be very clear about what they did. They said “well, we are using some limited things here, we are using some limited things there,” and we discovered for the first time that your Twitter links actually were follow links. They weren’t no-follow because they got a fire hose of data from Twitter via the API. Therefore, all those links actually carry credit because the fire hose didn’t have no-follow attached to it. Who knew?

Even though the Twitter links themselves might be no-follow, they may still calculate that they were a shared link and that might be giving you a signal.

Now the Google – Twitter fire hose deal has ended. So, supposedly, all those links on Twitter don’t count anymore, but Google told me recently we can still count up all the links and try to figure out how much something is being shared. So, potentially, if one of their ranking signals is how much something is being shared then, even though the links themselves might be no-follow, they may still calculate they were a shared link and that might be giving you a signal.

On the one hand, it’s maddening if you are trying to figure it out. On the flip side, I think it’s foolish to get that specific about it. When we did our Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors, one of the things I put on there was social as a factor.

You can get lost trying to decide whether or not you think that is Facebook share counting or not share counting and does this tweet count. The best way to look at it is ask yourself, “what are the major social networks, are you active on them and do you have a good reputation on them.”

Even if it doesn’t help you with search down the line, it’s probably a good traffic generator to do. That’s what link building was all about. Link building was an activity you did independently of search, and then the search engines began valuing links.

Even if that link you got never paid off for you in terms of search credit, it potentially paid off for you in terms of traffic. So, sometimes I think we can get too involved around search when we should be looking at the bigger picture.

Eric Enge: I think the search engine is trying to use as many signals as they can to get good quality data. Part of it is to make it more obscure, to make it harder for people to spend so much time figuring out exactly how it works so it can be gamed, and get people to focus on producing good stuff and promoting it.

Think of all the energy that goes into whether the tweet is close to this word or not, and the impact of that. All the energy you put into that could probably have gotten your link tweeted twenty more times.

Does Google+ have a chance?

Eric Enge: John Batelle recently put out a post that said he thinks Google+ is a legitimate threat to Facebook, but Facebook is still the one to beat, which is obviously true. Do you think Google+ has a chance? Not on beating Facebook necessarily, but of being significant?

Danny Sullivan: Absolutely, I think it has a chance of being significant in terms of Bing significant or in terms of being much closer to a rival. It’s similar to what’s going on with Bing and Google.

Bing has a significant search engine that people should consider and it has a lot to offer. However, it is far from being the market leader. It continues to play catch up and is well behind Google. It may never become the #1 choice simply because many people like Google.

With the Google-Facebook situation, a lot of people are happy with what they have on Facebook. They don’t particularly think Facebook needs to change, their friends are there and they are having their set. I think it’s a tough challenge for Google to try to unseat it. However, I think it has a chance to build itself up as a strong alternative.

The rel=author tag

Eric Enge: What is driving the pictures of people showing up in the Google SERPs, over on the right?

Danny Sullivan: That’s the Google rel=author tag that was rolled out. This is where you’ve identified yourself as an author. It’s a beta program, and I don’t think it’s happening automatically for everyone. I know they put me into it so when you search you see my face staring out of you because I’ve got my author tag setup. That should be pictures of people who are authors.

Social Networks are here to stay

Eric Enge: Data came out in May indicating a decline for Facebook in the US and Canada and getting beyond 50% penetration was an obstacle. I look at my high school kids, and all the high school kids I know, and the penetration is a 100%.

Every kid has Facebook accounts that they use for their basic mode of communication. Do you think this little perturbation of dropping briefly is something that’s going to disappear overtime?

Danny Sullivan: Social networks are a digital expansion of ourselves. If you look at search, it is a digital way for us to do what we always did, which was ask questions, just more efficiently. I think social is the same kind of thing. It has digitized us. It has allowed us to connect.

We are not going to put that genie back in the bottle. Personally, I love that I can connect with people I don’t know and am friends with them. People have had bulletin boards for ages so I don’t think that’s going to go away.

Eric Enge: How far do you think this penetration will go? I argue the penetration is vectoring towards 100%, or very close, over a period of decades.

Danny Sullivan: I don’t know that you ever get to 100% of anything, but I could see us having 90% or more people. The penetration is high, if you want to count email as a social network. It’s odd that we don’t think more about email. People kind of despise it, but if I was going to do a civil war documentary reading emails from soldiers, you probably would find it very touching.

Eric Enge: We’ve got email but kids don’t use email, unless they are forced to.

Danny Sullivan: Zuckerberg said when it came to Facebook messages they don’t need email. They have other ways of keeping in touch. I would argue that what they are doing is still email.

Someone might say, “I am giving up email for a month and won’t miss it.” If you still communicate with people through direct messages, Facebook messages, and Google+, you didn’t necessarily give up email the way you thought you would.

You’ve given up traditional email but not given up the concept of communicating with people digitally. It’s changing, and we may not have traditional email accounts. People will have other ways of connecting.

What will Facebook’s reaction be to Google+?

Eric Enge: Do you think Facebook will adapt Google+ features, like a better way to do Groups or Hangout?

Danny Sullivan: Last week Zuckerberg basically said not to expect any changes quickly, and he tried to downplay it. He said when it came to Lists, only 5% of the people or Groups actually made use of them at Facebook. He doesn’t think that’s something many people want to use.

I think he is probably right. I wrote an article yesterday on how I am finding Circles to be exhausting. I created all these Circles, and there is the decision: what circle do I put them in?

I will end up with what I already have which is a small group of things that are for my family, maybe a group of things that are for real friends, and then everything else. It will be interesting to see what numbers we get from Google in terms of how much private sharing is going on.

Eric Enge: In Google’s introductory video for circles, they highlighted the indecision aspect. You see them dragging a face of a prospect around; Acquaintance? Friend? I am not sure how well having you spend more time making a decision will do as a feature.

When I first saw circles I didn’t think that’s the killer product.

Danny Sullivan: I am curious to see how it goes, but when I first saw circles I didn’t think that’s the killer product. I think some people will find it appealing that Google+ may allow them to reset or restart their social network. When I started with Facebook I accepted everybody as a friend. Now it’s not worth the time to drop a thousand people because I might want to share something more personal on Facebook.

It is much easier for me to say everything I do on Facebook is public. Other people may not feel the same way. They may want a venue to share privately, so maybe Google+ will resonate with them.

As for Hangouts, Facebook said people tend to do one-on-one communication. It is difficult for me to tell how much Hangout will turn into a compelling reason to be using Google+. Young kids may think it’s cool. If all their friends are going to be there, and they hang out with them on a regular basis, then it becomes much more compelling.

That could be the thing that brings people over from Facebook. If that happens, I think Facebook would quickly ramp up and come out with its own feature It’s much easier to list all the things Facebook has that Google+ doesn’t have including Like buttons, that let you Like things into your stream, brands that do not have to pretend not to be brands or hope that you don’t kill them.

The Bing-Facebook deal

Eric Enge: Do you think the Bing-Facebook deal is a significant advantage for Bing? Is it something that can help them make progress?

Danny Sullivan: Potentially. The big advantage they have is automatically personalizing your results. If those personal results are better, and your friends are showing up on it, you may like it more. That’s something Google can’t do. Even though they ramped it up big in the last two months, it hasn’t been that dramatic of a change.

Eric Enge: In Compete I saw numbers that said Bing has 14% and Yahoo has 16%, but website stats I look at do not show the cumulative total of Bing and Yahoo near 30%.

When I look at the numbers, I find Bing seems to be gaining from Yahoo more than anything else.

Danny Sullivan: When I look at the numbers, I find Bing seems to be gaining from Yahoo more than anything else. This is what I expected when Yahoo got out of the search game, which they won’t say they got out of search but to me they did.

Does Google+ Threaten Twitter?

Eric Enge: It seems to me that the Google+ stream is more of a threat to Twitter then to Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Potentially. For me it’s sitting in the middle ground. On Google+ I can write a bit longer post if I want to. I also find it a little easier to share some photos. One of the things I find remarkable is that I check in on Google+. This is something I would never do on Twitter because it doesn’t allow you to check in. Nonetheless, when I see people check in using Foresquare and send it to Twitter, I get annoyed because it feels unnatural.

Google+ encourages me to check in as part of the native settings, and I enjoy doing it. No one has complained about it. It’s been the opposite with people commenting their interest, so I’ve made an effort to share something and check in.

Potentially, Google+ is a threat to Twitter, but there is a lot to be said for Twitter’s simplicity.

Potentially, Google+ is a threat to Twitter, but there is a lot to be said for Twitter’s simplicity. The little short bursts make it easy to digest. It makes it easy to dive in and dive out without having to spend a huge amount of time. This is perhaps a disadvantage for Twitter in trying to make money, but it is a much bigger advantage if you are relatively short on time. It is something Twitter needs to pay attention to, but it’s difficult for them to change because they would have to change the core part of what Twitter is.

Eric Enge: It took me a while to understand that the compelling feature of Twitter was the ability to communicate with a relative lack of commitment to the communication. Twitter allows us to throw something out there, a simple brief comment, and then move on.

Danny Sullivan: Right.

Eric Enge: It seems a large percentage of Twitter messages are personal. I looked at seventeen of your posts and twelve of them were of a personal nature. People are showing more about themselves and seeming more human. It plays a role in building trust and relationships. Google+ for example, is much centered on topical communications. Of course, that could change over time.

Danny Sullivan: It’s really hard to pin down. What I find predominantly being shared in my stream on Google+ is stuff about Google+. It’s easy then for me to conclude people only talk about Google+.

Recently, there has been more of a mixture, and people are trying to deliberately come up with other stuff. I don’t know if people necessarily know what it is they should be doing on Google+.

Eric Enge: Does this personal approach on Twitter, in your opinion, have much to offer in terms of building trust between a company and their audience?

There is no exact formula to what you should do on Twitter.

Danny Sullivan: Many people say there is an exact formula to what you should do on Twitter but there is no one right formula. SEOMoz does a lot of engagement, and we do virtually no engagement on Search Engine Land. Yet, our follower accounts are about the same.

We viewed our accounts as a way for people to keep up with what we are publishing on the site and that seemed to work for people. They had more of a focus on a customer service role, and that seemed to work for them.

The brands get excited about the customer service role, but I think they ought to be handling customer service through their regular channels so people don’t feel they have to yell out on Twitter.

Eric Enge: I guess the problem is if you hadn’t screwed it up with them in the first place then they wouldn’t need it.

Danny Sullivan: Exactly. Maybe it does work as a final alert or a safety valve. Ultimately, how you act on Twitter will be how you think you should act and what feedback your followers give you about how you should act. I don’t think you have to put a lot of personal stuff because you are a brand. I think that’s an essential thing for me personally, but it might not work for some brands.

Search and Social

Eric Enge: Let’s talk a little more about the integration of search and social. I interviewed Stefan Weitz and he saw search becoming an integrating dashboard for certain types of queries. For example, if you search for a “romantic dinner Austin”, you would certainly see what restaurants your friends liked. In the future you might see who is there right now and if they’ve checked in, and you could book a reservation right there in search results.

Search has his cousin called discovery and social is very strong at providing that.

Danny Sullivan: I think it’s a mixture of things. I think search has his cousin called discovery, which is showing you things that you didn’t necessarily know you wanted or needed, but you are happy to have come across. I think social is very strong at providing that.

You tap into Facebook and find an interesting news article which never occurred to you to search. That’s something search doesn’t do well because search is an on-demand activity. That’s why it makes sense for Google to play in the social space, so they can tap into this discovery process.

In social, your friends can get signals that potentially improve your search results in an age when links are becoming less and less important. Social shares from people you know. They are the new link building and are a more trusted signal.

It is easier to get people to do it because people share things more freely. There are signals that can be tapped into that are important for search to continue to improve, but, in terms of being a dashboard, I don’t know if it overtakes everything. I think it continues to be another signal that’s used, but not necessarily the secret key to magically improving everything.

Eric Enge: So, at a high level, we could think of the search interface remaining the on-demand interface, as opposed to a discovery-oriented interface.

Danny Sullivan: Two things: first, when a pipe breaks in your house do you go onto Facebook and ask friends who you should call or do you go to Google and search for a plumber? You search for a plumber. It’s an on demand need.

On the other hand, you need a dentist, it’s not an emergency, and you need a good recommendation. Tapping into your friends is very powerful. How the search engines figure out a way to integrate that is a next big step.

I see people do the “Anyone knows” searches on Facebook and Twitter. They are looking for recommendations. Finding a way to integrate your search for a dentist on Google, and also making it clear to your social network that you are looking for help, is perhaps the holy grail.

At the SMX Advanced show, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talked about their latest study which Facebook Shares were highly correlated with Google Rankings.

Eric Enge: But not causation.

Danny Sullivan: Not causation, but they are highly correlated. He diligently said he was not saying that a lot of Facebook Shares means you will rank well on Google but, rather, that there was an interesting connection that seemed to be occurring.

Independently of that, I think it’s a good idea to get a lot of Shares on Facebook. Facebook is a huge area and getting Facebook Shares means traffic. So, why wouldn’t you want that regardless of the search engines?

Of course, at the end of the same day at SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts said “well, it’s an interesting correlation, but we don’t use the Share data.”

Takeaways

Eric Enge: There are many people who, if they saw a strong correlation between Shared data and rankings, would artificially create and manipulate things so they get more Shares without necessarily thinking ,”oh well, why don’t I go behave in a way that causes people to want to Share my stuff.”

This more holistic approach is surprisingly effective. The approach I focus on is trying to publish good sites and promote them effectively.

Danny Sullivan: It works really, really well. The first time I saw a doorway page, which was around 1998, I didn’t really get it. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone will try to build content without actually having a content site. There are people who will chase for the algorithm and not have a content site behind it.

Without trying to pass judgment on it, that’s just not me. It’s not the audience I am trying to help. My assumption is if you want to do well in search engines in the long term it is good to have a good content site. That is what they seem to reward.

That brings me back to the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors that we put together. I wanted to list these different factors that people should pay attention to. I wanted to do it in a way that they didn’t get lost in the forest. I did not want them to climb up one specific tree in that forest because it’s more important. I want them to be socially active. That seems to be a useful thing if you want to do well in search engines.

If you know what you are doing, then getting to more specifics can be helpful. There are too many people who don’t know what they are doing when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, and those kinds of specifics lose them and set them down the wrong trails.

You can see self-evidently that social media channels generate traffic.

It’s the same thing when it comes to social. They argue whether or not this Facebook Share is going to count versus a LinkedIn share versus a Twitter share, and if there is a no-follow or if there is not a no-follow. You can see that social media channels generate traffic. If that is traffic that’s converting for you then you should be social.

You can also see that the search engines are experimenting with how to use social signals. Even if you don’t know exactly how they are doing it, it behooves you to be active socially because chances are it’s going to increase some of those signals, and you are going to be giving out the right ones.

Eric Enge: If something is tweeted a million times, whether the link is followed or no-followed, a search engine is going to take notice. In the interview I did with Vanessa Fox, I ended up calling it A holistic view of Panda because we have a lot of this kind of discussion in there.

Danny Sullivan: There is a lack of holistic thinking out there. Maybe that will change. The reality is it’s not going to change anytime soon.

Eric Enge: Thanks Danny!

Other Recent Interviews

Bruce Clay, August 1, 2011
Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Danny Sullivan, Google, interviews, Microsoft, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO, Social Web

Social and Search Integration with Bruce Clay

8/1/2011 by Eric Enge 1 Comment

Published: August 1, 2011

Bruce, currently president of Bruce Clay, Inc; has operated as an executive with several high-technology businesses, and comes from a long career as a technical executive with leading Silicon Valley firms, and since 1996 in the Internet Business Consulting arena. Bruce holds a BS in Math and Computer Science and also has his MBA from Pepperdine University, has had many articles published, has been a speaker at over 100 sessions including Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld, ad:Tech, Search Marketing Expo Advanced, and many more, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, PC Week, Wired Magazine, Smart Money, several books, and many other publications. He has also been featured on many podcasts and WebmasterRadio shows, as well as appearing on the NHK TV special “Google’s Deep Impact”. He has personally authored many advanced search engine optimization tools that are available from his company web sites. He has also co-authored the latest Search Engine Optimization All-in-One for Dummies, which is now available for order on Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and Borders.com.

Social’s impact on SEO

Eric Enge: Let’s start with a broad question. What are your thoughts on how SEO and social will play together?

Bruce Clay: Social has a broad interpretation based on who you are. To consumers and individuals social is Facebook, and to businesses social is LinkedIn. Overlaying that is the Twitter phenomenon.

When you start thinking about how they interact with SEO, those and other features have totally transformed the concept of SEO and how it fits into Internet marketing. In the beginning there was SEO and pay-per-click and that was Internet marketing.

Now, everyone is starting to think about redesigning their sites, especially for the social signals and the personalization components Google has brought to the market. Analytics has become more about conversion rate optimization rather than just traffic. So, it really is Internet market optimization and not simply SEO anymore.

Social is different from SEO, but yet it impacts SEO.

There is an overlap. Social is different from SEO, but it impacts SEO and vice versa. I don’t think any of the main six disciplines of Internet marketing are going to be islands anymore. We are going to see social permeate almost everything we think about.

There is a nice video called Social Media Revolution 3 based on the Socialnomics book by Eric Qualman. It includes statistics such as if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest country on the planet. Also, if you look at the followers of the top five people on the web, they have more followers than Chile and many other countries.

Social involvement requires you to pay attention to it on a regular basis. I started using social as a news feed because many of my friends are my colleagues, and they post interesting articles which help my research.

I would imagine in certain societies of the world, social will be almost everything because it’s on a mobile device.

With all these social media platforms, you have to ask, “what is the saturation for college students, people under the age of 18?” They don’t watch TV anymore. We are in a period of speed and ease of finding things that we have never seen before. I think it’s only going to accelerate. Every company has to embrace social right now because two years from now will be too late.

I think in a couple of years, it will be almost impossible to establish a brand.

Search and print media will not help you build a brand the way they did before. If television is the only way you build a brand, you are building a brand for a shrinking audience. We have to understand social is here to stay and we have to embrace it. I think in a couple of years, it will be almost impossible to establish a brand.

There are still things to work out. I don’t know if people are going to respond to Twitter having ads. Also, there are privacy and spam issues. However, at the end of the day, I think half the traffic to a website will be social and half of it will be search marketing.

Eric Enge: Half and half?

Bruce Clay: Yes, when I pay attention to my own behavior I see it shifting. In the past I would open my computer, boot it up, check my email, open a browser and go to various sites to gather news, read, and do research. Now I open my computer and go to Facebook. Of course I check my email but, while it’s downloading, I go to Facebook and may not get back to my email for an hour.

I spend more time doing social research and following the industry than going to a site like Search Engine Land and reading their articles.

I have more confidence in my friends than in spammers. When one of my colleagues says this is a good site, I am more willing to go to that site and stay on it. That’s going to have an impact on SEO because if I trust it and like it I will link to it. People will engage in conversations about it, people will Tweet about it which will lead to a lot of traffic. I think between the traffic and the awareness, it’s good for SEO. Social is here to stay and it’s going to be a big influence.

Eric Enge: There are a few points I want to highlight. First, Twitter has become my RSS feed reader. I find a lot of content I check out from my Twitter stream is from people I know. This tells me what to focus on. I now do that instead of using Google Reader.

The other interesting aspect you mentioned that interacts with SEO is when you see something recommended by your friend you are more likely to go read it and it may also increase your likelihood to link to it.

Bruce Clay: I think the endorsement is even stronger because this is a friend who went out of their way to tell other people about it which strengthens my willingness to link to it.

The Outlook for Facebook

Eric Enge: What’s your perception of the threat Facebook poses to Google?

Bruce Clay: I think Facebook is a problem for Google, and it’s one of the reasons both the +1 buttons and Google+ were created. However, I am not sure if Google+ will upset Facebook. I think Facebook is stable at this point, and Google had no choice but to invent its own social network. Yet, people will be reluctant to trust Google with their personal and friend type data. People gripe about how every two weeks there is a new format or a new bug in the Facebook world, but I don’t see people leaving it.

Some games are leaving due to the bureaucracy of the Facebook world, but people are still on Facebook. I think Facebook has a phenomenal influence on how people do things and how people communicate.

Eric Enge: In May, a Facebook spokespeople commented that the number of Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada dropped and once you reach approximately 50% penetration growth slows or even stops. This suggests if you have 50% penetration with Facebook, there is 50% who aren’t on Facebook.

Those people may be doing other things from a social perspective, certainly, they may be texting. Do you think looking forward we are going to have a situation where you have a lot of people using social, but it’s not everybody so we still have to deal with those other folks?

Facebook has become embedded into the way you connect socially.

Bruce Clay: No, I think people who are not on Facebook are people who do not depend on a computer connection for their day-to-day life and text and email is all they need. They don’t have a website, they don’t care about going to websites, they don’t need to do a lot of research, they are happy to watch television.

The fact that the number of Facebook users dropped indicates there are more social media options now. Is everybody on Skype? No. Does everybody like the idea of a free phone call? Yes. Are there other options? Sure. People flirt around and they try this and they try that.

I think one of the reasons Facebook had a drop is their policy against gaming sites. Many of the games that were the most popular within the Facebook world went off to their own servers. People don’t have to use Facebook anymore to play the games they learned about on Facebook.

I know when I am sitting in my house, all our phones are pinging constantly, and it’s us simply sending messages to each other, but this demonstrates that there are a lot of people socially connected and they are active in the space.

I think Facebook is no longer a fad and is past a MySpace style splash. Facebook has become embedded into the way you connect socially.

Google searches are also dropping and people are switching to Facebook. There are other people looking at the second largest search property, YouTube. These people may not need Facebook, and YouTube serves their entertainment needs. For the academics, there is Wikipedia. There are 2.2 million pages on Wikipedia, and it would take 123 years to read.

Google+ and the +1 buttons

Eric Enge: What about Google+? Is it something you think has a chance of succeeding?

Bruce Clay: I think the obstacle is that people will be reluctant to login and share their information with Google. I don’t like that I have to login when I click the +1 button. It isn’t about whether I liked the page, it’s about the fact that I don’t want to give away my data. I think that’s going to be the barrier to Google.

We placed the +1 button on our website and there has not been a lot of participation with it. People aren’t going to want to tell Google who they are and what they are looking at because they think that only serves Google.

Eric Enge: Of course, you have to do that with Facebook, you have to be logged in.

Bruce Clay: Yes, but Facebook is not Google. Facebook doesn’t have twenty other businesses that can use your data. If I choose to leave Facebook the only one who has my data is Facebook. With Google, everybody has my data, or at least Google can continue to use my data because I gave it to them. Google is much bigger than Facebook when it comes to potential use of information about me, at least that’s the perception.

Eric Enge: Google did promote this notion of better privacy as a differentiation. Do you think there is still a problem with privacy because Google has so many different businesses that can use the data?

Bruce Clay: I want to state that I love Google, and they have done more good than harm. However, fear, uncertainly and doubt are the biggest problems Google faces when getting into social. I don’t think that same level of fear exists in Facebook.

I think Google has the potential to do really great things in the social space; however, I want it to be easier to use and I want to enter it in a fearless fashion instead of a concerned fashion.

Bing’s collaboration with Facebook

Eric Enge: Does Bing plus Facebook have enough behind it to steal some market share? Recently, I interviewed Stefan Weitz from Bing and we talked a lot about Bing’s integration of Facebook data into their search engine.

Stefan painted a vision of doing different and interesting levels of integration. For example, if you were looking for a restaurant in Austin, you could enter this in your search query and it would tell you which of your friends liked the restaurant and, down the road, it might tell you where they are now and offer to book a reservation from the search results.

Essentially, search becomes an aggregating point for these different services and allows you to go to one place and get the whole job done right there. That’s the picture Stefan painted for me. What do you think about this direction Bing is taking with Facebook? Is it enough to increase their market share?

Likes are the new links, a true testimonial.

Bruce Clay: Yes, I think it is a possibility. You have heard me speak in conferences where I said Likes are the new links.

If a friend gives me a testimonial statement, I will consider it to be more valuable than someone who went out and bought some links and, therefore, ranks for things. It’s more trustworthy and personal. I know what their likes are, I respect their likes, and they say they like it.

It’s a true testimonial where links are not. If I have never been there and somebody says “hey, if you really want Thai food this is the best place in the city” and two or three of my friends say that I am all over it. So, I think it’s going to be a significant contributor to a way people make decisions online. Until Google figures it out with their own Google+, I think Bing has an advantage.

There are the micro formats that Google is publishing and the expert sites like Yelp and Edmunds; however, I don’t think any of them can stand up to a recommendation from people I know. I think Bing is smart to pursue this. Google will also need to pursue it.

Eric Enge: Yes, I agree. I actually published an article recently on the PubCon blog called: “BingBook is a threat”.

Bruce Clay: Remember Netscape?

Eric Enge: I do.

Bruce Clay: Netscape had 72% market share and was unseated by IE that grew to almost 80% market share, but that is now down to 40% or so due to inroads by Firefox. Now there is Chrome which may put a damper on Bing’s aspirations (note: Chrome is edging up 20% market share).

Google+ will become more accepted because Chrome is going to give Google the ability to establish their own reputation. If people start using Chrome, the login process won’t be such a barrier. I think Google has enough influence and no matter what Bing does it isn’t going to jump by 5%. It’s going to keep it rather dampened because it’s hard to overcome the Google engine.

Eric Enge: People have the comfort of Google being where they search.

Bruce Clay: When I do surveys and ask people where they search, they are searching at Google. Then I ask how many people search at Bing and it’s approximately 5% of the audience. I think more of the world is using Bing. I think they may be easily swayed by the social interaction which could give Bing a fighting chance.

I don’t think Bing is going away, but I think it’s going to float around 14% for a long time. Google’s focus is local. It will dominate the local results area quickly and switch to social as a major part of it. A year later, they will switch from social to news because whoever controls news controls the people. With the combination of social and news, Google has a formidable chance of domination, and Bing will have a bit of a problem. Today, Bing isn’t my go-to engine, and I don’t know if the testimonials will push me over that tipping point.

Eric Enge: You mentioned Chrome. I recently saw data that said it was up to 21% market share?

Bruce Clay: Wouldn’t that be something, to see yet another change. The bigger and more important a platform is, like a browser, the more fickle people are. They want service. They want it to do what they want and they want it done before they even know it’s what they want to do. They want the browser to open fast and go to pages fast. People are becoming less willing to wait.

That’s one of the reasons texting and Twitter works so well. People don’t want to wait and they don’t want to hunt. They want to find, they want the data to come to them in a language they understand, they want it short and concise, and not a thousand words of content.

The way we expect to interact with our world is changing

Eric Enge: What else would you like to add about changing user behavior? Will the role of the browser diminish?

Bruce Clay: Many universities have stopped assigning email addresses to students because text is the way people communicate and socially it is the way people meet. An environment that allows me to communicate from any device, from wherever I am, and send and receive messages directly to people who I have established contact points with, is going to change the behavior of people using browsers.

If I can solve most of my need for information without having to go to a browser and run a search and stay there, I will. You could go into a store and say “hey, everybody which of these two products do you think is the best,” and get answers in minutes. That’s not something you are going to do on a browser.

The kid now does not even watch television anymore because it’s not interactive.

I watched a keynote presenter in Toronto that was talking about her 2-year old son. He knew how to play Angry Birds on an iPad, how to change from screen to screen by moving the finger around, and how to click on the icon to play the game. He walked up to the plasma television and tried to change the screen by sliding his finger on the front of the plasma and got frustrated because it wouldn’t do it. He doesn’t watch television anymore because it’s not interactive.

If we take that to the next level, in five years from now the audience we are dealing with is going to be dependent on that interaction. Websites that are not engaging will be left behind by sites that are engaging. Companies that don’t monitor, adhere, and respond on service level requests in minutes will be considered old-style companies and will be left behind.

Local drycleaners, plumbers, CPAs, and lawyers are either going to respond in minutes to an inquiry that is online or potential customers are going to go elsewhere.

I think this changes the perception of Internet marketing. It impacts the concept of where did the traffic come from, what is their persona, what is their community, what is their intent, and how do I service them.

These factors rewrite everything, and how we rewrite SEO and our pay-per-click ads, and how we engage on ad networks that are social-based within Facebook. Companies that haven’t recently or aren’t currently in a redesign effort of their website will be left behind.

Eric Enge: The way people expect to interact is changing. As you eluded to earlier, you have a need for immediacy and very high levels of interactions. If companies don’t get that, they will be seen as old and behind the times and will not fit in.

Bruce Clay: I think that’s the way the world is going.

Eric Enge: We also have Android. I recently saw data that said Android was now the #1 phone OS in the U.S.

Bruce Clay: I think we are going to see the desktop and mobile operating systems start to merge and see desktops with touch screen monitors where you can slide things.

I think we are going to see the Windows pad, or at least the Chrome pad, come on strong because it’s evolutionary not revolutionary. I think Apple will keep a share, but I think Android will drive many of the applications in the desktop interfaces. Android is big.

Eric Enge: Thanks Bruce!

Other Recent Interviews

Google’s Tiffany Oberoi, July 27, 2011
Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Matt Mickiewicz, January 8, 2011
ex-Googler Adam Lewis, October 10, 2010
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
InfoGroup’s Pankaj Mathur, April 5, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: interviews, SEO, Social Web

New Clarity on Reconsideration Requests from Tiffany Oberoi

7/27/2011 by Eric Enge 21 Comments

photo of Tiffany Oberoi Tiffany is a software engineer on the Google’s Search Quality team. She joined Google in 2006 and focuses on webspam issues and webmaster communication. Prior to joining Google she worked as a software engineer at Computer Associates and a high school math/engineering teacher in Harlem, New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

Key Interview Points

I am going to keep the key points summary short in today’s interview. Tiffany’s responses bring new clarity to the reconsideration request process. Here is what Matt Cutts Tweeted about the interview:

Read on and enjoy!

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Thanks for taking the time to address our questions!

Tiffany Oberoi: Sure! I know that reconsideration requests can be stressful. We want to do our best to clear up any misconceptions about the process.

Eric Enge: The reconsideration request process is an incredibly important tool for those whose sites have been impacted by a penalty.

Let’s start by understanding a bit better the types of penalties. The most extreme penalty is a banning of a site from the index. I usually think of this as something you can recognize by search on the site brand name or domain name and not getting the site to show in the results, or where a site: query shows no results. If you can tell me, are there other types of manual penalties that may be assessed?

Tiffany Oberoi: We do have a few different manual actions that we can take, depending on the type of spam violation. We would tend to handle a good site with one bad element differently from egregious webspam. For example, a site with obvious blackhat techniques might be removed completely from our index, while a site with less severe violations of our quality guidelines might just be demoted. Instead of doing a brand name search, I’d suggest a site: query on the domain as a sure way to tell if the site is in our index. But remember that there can be many other reasons for a site not being indexed, so not showing up isn’t an indication of a webspam issue.

Eric Enge: The other major type of penalty is an algorithmic penalty. The algorithms make some determination of a problem behavior and adjust the rankings in some fashion. Is that a reasonable short description?

We try to take an algorithmic approach to tackling spam whenever possible

Tiffany Oberoi: Spam algorithms are essentially computer programs that engineers have written to classify webspam. We try to take an algorithmic approach to tackling spam whenever possible because it’s more scalable to let our computers scour the Internet, fighting spam for us! Our rankings can automatically adjust based on what the algorithms find, so we can also react to new spam faster.

And just to be clear, we don’t really think of spam algorithms as “penalties” — Google’s rankings are the result of many algorithms working together to deliver the most relevant results for a particular query and spam algorithms are just a part of that system. In general, when we talk about “penalties” or, more precisely, “manual spam actions”, we are referring to cases where our manual spam team stepped in and took action on a site.

Eric Enge: Do reconsideration requests have any value in the case of algorithmic penalties? Or are they only valid for manual penalties?

Reconsideration Request

If a site is affected by an algorithmic change, submitting a reconsideration request will not have an impact

Tiffany Oberoi: If a site is affected by an algorithmic change, submitting a reconsideration request will not have an impact. However, webmasters don’t generally know if it’s an algorithmic or manual action, so the most important thing is to clean up the spam violation and submit a reconsideration request to be sure. As we crawl and reindex the web, our spam classifiers reevaluate sites that have changed. Typically, some time after a spam site has been cleaned up, an algorithm will reprocess the site (even without a reconsideration request) and it would no longer be flagged as spam.

Eric Enge: As a related question, is a reconsideration request helpful after addressing possible panda issues?

Tiffany Oberoi: Panda is an algorithmic ranking change targeted at promoting high quality sites over low quality sites. Because reconsideration requests will not change the way an algorithm sees your site, a reconsideration request won’t help in this case. We recommend focusing your efforts on improving your site so that it will be classified as high quality in the next Panda update. Amit Singhal had some great tips for how to improve your site in this post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

Eric Enge: Does it ever happen that a reconsideration request get accepted, but then the same penalty gets applied again (perhaps after a subsequent crawl)?

Tiffany Oberoi: This is definitely possible if the bad behavior comes back. For example, we see sites getting hacked repeatedly. The webmaster cleans up the hacked pages, but doesn’t close the security hole. They might even submit a successful reconsideration request, but if the security hole is still open it is likely to be exploited again.

Eric Enge: Is there a potential downside to making a reconsideration request for sites when they are not entirely sure if they’ve been penalized? In other words other issues are discovered in the process?

Tiffany Oberoi: While in theory it’s possible that spam could be uncovered while processing a reconsideration request, that’s not the goal. The people reviewing a reconsideration request are first and foremost interested in whether the violation of our quality guidelines has been fixed. I wouldn’t let this stop you from submitting a request if you think there is a chance that your site had a violation. But before submitting a reconsideration request, I do recommend a detailed review to make sure your site does not violate any of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Eric Enge: What would you recommend the structure of a reconsideration request look like? In other words, what major issues should it address? Are there things to avoid?

Tiffany Oberoi: Here are a few tips:

1. Be specific. Carefully review Google’s webmaster guidelines and tell us what issues you found on your site and how you fixed them.

2. Avoid hiding information. This is the time to address the issues head on. For example, a reconsideration request that says, “My sites adheres to the guidelines.” is not as useful as one that says, “I had some hidden text at the bottom of my homepage, but I have removed it now.” The second example makes it clear what the initial problem was and what has changed. The more detail you can provide, the better. It helps us assess the situation more fully.

3. We want to be assured that we aren’t going to see these spammy techniques again. It’s helpful if you can include details about steps you’ve taken to prevent it from happening again, policy changes, etc. The people who review these requests want to be confident that the spam techniques have been removed and are not likely to return.

4. Don’t mention how much you spend on ads. The team that handles reconsideration requests only cares about search quality. It’s irrelevant and doesn’t help your case to mention buying ads or being a partner or customer of other products.

5. We get a lot of reconsideration requests from webmasters that are not even affected by a spam issue, so my other advice is to explore other possible issues as well. For example, check Webmaster Tools for crawl errors. Make sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking Googlebot from accessing your site. Here’s an article with a detailed discussion of other possible ranking problems.

Eric Enge: Should the person submitting the request expect to get a response? Does Google ever provide explicit feedback on the problem(s) found?

… we are currently running an experiment to provide more specific information about the outcome of the request.

Tiffany Oberoi: We generally send a message to Webmaster Tools after the request is received and again after the request has been processed. In the past we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from webmasters who want to know what happened after we processed the request. We listened to that feedback and we are currently running an experiment to provide more specific information about the outcome of the request.

For example, in some cases we can communicate back to the webmaster that we were able to revoke a manual action based on their reconsideration request. Or sometimes we let them know that their site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but it helps webmasters diagnose what’s going on if they know that there actually is a spam issue.

In the majority of cases, we’re able to let the webmaster know that they aren’t affected by any manual spam action at all. This allows the webmaster to focus their attention on other areas instead of submitting multiple reconsideration requests and wondering why they aren’t seeing results.

Eric Enge: If the person submitting the request does not hear anything and nothing changes, should they resubmit?

We do send a confirmation after we receive your request, so as long as you got that message then your request is in the queue to be reviewed.

Tiffany Oberoi: You generally don’t need to resubmit. It can take us days to weeks to process requests, and then more time for changes to go into effect, especially if we need to recrawl and reprocess your site. We do send a confirmation after we receive your request, so as long as you got that message then your request is in the queue to be reviewed.

I don’t recommend sending multiple reconsideration requests in a very short period of time or submitting reconsideration requests for tons of sites all at once rather than one site at a time. We can take that as a sign of bad faith. But if you haven’t received a follow up message saying that your request has been processed after 2-3 months, it would be reasonable to submit another request at that point.

Over time, the reconsideration request process has improved substantially. We’ve made a lot of progress on making our assessments and the entire reconsideration review process more transparent. I’m excited that most webmasters can find out whether their site has been affected by a manual action, and that they’ll know the outcome of the reconsideration review.

Other Recent Interviews

Mona Elesseily, July 18, 2011
Vanessa Fox, July 12, 2011
Jim Sterne, July 5, 2011
Stephan Spencer, June 20, 2011
SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Matt Mickiewicz, January 8, 2011
ex-Googler Adam Lewis, October 10, 2010
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
InfoGroup’s Pankaj Mathur, April 5, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: Google, interviews, SEO

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