Eric Enge

Rel=Author Defined with Google’s Sagar Kamdar

4/11/2012 by Eric Enge 10 Comments

Key Points from Interview with Sagar Kamdar

This interview transcript is from the March 13th, 2012 conversation I had with Sagar Kamdar, who heads up the authorship program at Google. This provided some simple, straightforward clarity on how it works, and some of the various scenarios for implementation. Here are some of the key points from the interview:

Google sees the authorship program as a way to connect authors and readers who are a fan of their work.
The original 3 link method is still supported. This is documented in detail in the main interview, along with a graphic image of how it works.
They came up with the 2 newest methods because people were having trouble executing the 3 link method, in some cases because it was too confusing.
The 2 link method only requires that the content on the site link to the author’s Google profile with a ?rel=author parameter, and the Google profile lists the site in the “Contributor To” section of the profile. This is documented in detail in the main interview, along with a graphic image of how it works.
The email method only requires that your email address be verified and use the domain name of the site where the article is published, and that the email be included in the attribution for the article. This is documented in detail in the main interview, along with a graphic image of how it works.
The email method was created because some authors do not have the ability to add a link as specified in the 2 link method.
It is OK to put sites in the Contributor To section (provided you contribute to them) even if you don’t get rel=author links back.
The Authorship Request functionality has been retired, though there is a simple form there now for verifying an email for the Email method.
Anyone who properly implements rel=author is eligible for participation. It only requires that you have a high quality photo in your Google profile.
When you first show up depends primarily on crawling and indexing time. This may take days or weeks depending on your site.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you provide us an overview of your background and your role at Google?

Sagar Kamdar: Sure, I am a product manager on the search team. I have been at Google for about four years, spent most of my time on search, spent my time on a variety of projects like real-time search, and webmaster tools. Actually, my first project was external evangelism with search engine specialists and most recently I have been focused on authorship and some of our social search efforts that you have seen out in the wild.

Eric Enge: There has been this longstanding problem of people who are the original author of content not necessarily being the first to show up for their content, and I think that it is really great that we are starting to have a method by which authors are identified. Can you provide some thoughts on what the authorship program is all about?

The main thing that we are trying to address is the faceless nature of the web.

Sagar Kamdar: The main thing that we are trying to address is the faceless nature of the web. For many years people have been clicking on content not knowing who created it, and not knowing who commented on it. What we are seeing is that users really want to know who created that bit of content. Users know who their favorite authors are, and we’re trying to make it easy for them to communicate with those author(s).

We want to make it easy for authors to get setup and then for searchers to be able to find the content they create. So if they search for “iPad” and they like David Pogue, they are more likely to see what David Pogue has written about the iPad. Authors benefit as well because they get attributed to their content and also they can engage with the users in a way they haven’t before.

Eric Enge: I think it is particularly interesting when you look at it because many well-known authors are published on many different sites.

Now we have this feature where users can say show me all content by Ben Parr, for example.

Sagar Kamdar: It is actually one of the coolest features we have for authors. We have all these people that are publishing on five or six different publications and their own blog and users can’t keep track of all that content. Now we have this feature where users can say show me all content by Ben Parr, for example.

Editor: This is how it looks in Google’s search results:

Editor: Here is the Author Page for Ben Parr on Google:

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO, Social Web

The Future of Search and Social Integration, Interview With Andrew Shuman

4/5/2012 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

photo of Andrew Shuman

Key Points from Interview with Andrew Shuman

I had a fascinating chat with Andrew Shuman about the adCenter UI and the integration of search and social media. He provided a lot of great insights on what some of the opportunities are, and some of the challenges as well. Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

re: search and social integration: “There is also a very interesting scale problem there. As with traditional search, we have to query a massive numbers of servers, but then we also have to take my social graph and overlay that on the search results, modify them, and return this all in milliseconds.”
“You also have the case where all the people in Seattle seem to be Liking this document. That’s less about me (as a searcher) specifically. Some of those micro populations become very interesting.”
re: the deeper meaning behind a particular search query: “I am not just searching for a restaurant, but I am planning a whole night, and what those things mean for a user, how we can bring together the data in a related fashion.”
“A restaurant is related to movie theatres that are nearby, right. This creates a new kind of linkage between objects that goes beyond the link graph or the social graph.”
“It would be really nice that as you just get to restaurant intent, the related intents are there in part of the experience so that as I mouse over or hover over or whatever we come up with it’s probably just another tab then.”
“Related searches is something where we think we can really experiment a lot more with the placement. For some searches it may make sense to be more aggressive in the UI with that, as it may be more common for the user to perform follow on searches.”
“You also have to differentiate a person who does the same search frequently, such as they like to search on Bellevue restaurants a lot. Perhaps the third result is always the restaurant they go to.”
re: the strength of social as a signal: “It’s an interesting challenge though, because the more generic signals across the whole web are a much stronger signal. You have billions of clicks versus a hundred friends on Facebook – there is a different science involved in that.”
re: how varied people’s intents are: “… not everyone comes to Bing with a specific task in mind, sometimes they are in an exploration mode …”

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you provide a little background on yourself?

Andrew Shuman: I’ve been in Microsoft about nineteen years. I started in Outlook as a developer, and also spent some time with the MSN team. But, now I am at Bing, and it’s been by far my favorite job in Microsoft.

It’s a pretty unique place where you get to work with so many people of varied background in terms of linguistics, and statistics, and math, as well as computer science and that’s fairly fascinating. But then, the problems faced are so rich when you think about the fact that you can type in a three word search query, and we will show you several results.

But, from a user interface point of view and an application point of view, we are so far away from the joy of a traditional library where you get a sense of the volume of data around you and a sense of where you are within the system.

To help with that, we are constantly looking at different UI models; things like speech and touch that help create the feeling.

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of integrating social data and search?

… just because a friend of mine liked a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make it more relevant to me.

Andrew Shuman: One of the interesting areas I was thinking about a little bit this morning is the challenges of tying together the social signal with the other signals, and that it is a very interesting scale problem for us. It obviously is a very different signal to the relevance engine and to the user just because a friend of mine liked a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make it more relevant to me.

Filed Under: Microsoft, PPC

adCenter’s Mantra: ROI on Time Spent, Interview With Rathna Sharad

3/27/2012 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

photo of Rathna Sharad

Key Points from Interview with Rathna Sharad

The first person I met with during my week at Microsoft in January was Rathna Sharad. This was a great start because she set the tone for all of the interviews I did. In the discussion below you will see key insights into the thinking behind the overall adCenter strategy. Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

“The Web UI is good for a couple thousand keywords, maybe even up to ten thousand keywords in an account.”
“If you have tens of thousands of keywords, the adCenter Desktop Tool works very well.”
“Anyone that has hundreds of thousands of keywords, or more, is a great candidate for the API.”
adCenter strices to make all the same features available in the Web UI, the desktop tool, and via tha API.
adCenter keeps old version of the API alive for 6 to 9 months to allow people using it time to update their tools, but they do need to make the switchover.
Rathna indicates that there are no known latency issues with the API, but they recently did a desktop tool release to make that more efficient with very large campaigns.
Filtering functionality was added to the Web UI in late 2011. You can filter on any of the columns in the reports.
The adCenter team is working on features to make recommendations to advertisers based on their goals.
“Our marketplace is different; our consumers are different, the way they interact within the ecosystem is different.”
“What it (Microsoft Advertising Intelligence or MAI) does at a high level is really provide insights into the monetization aspect, which is adCenter, as well as the forecasting aspect which is based on historical performance. For example, here is what we think you should be bidding for mainline, sidebar, first page placement, those types of recommendations.”
One of the key capabilities in MAI is the keyword estimation capability, which shows traffic you can expect.
adCenter provides information on share of voice (aka impression share), including why it is your share is currently being limited.
The two major points of focus for adCenter are Return on Time Spent and industry standardization (parity with Adwords) to make it easier for advertisers to spend incremental ad budgets with adCenter.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Rathna Sharad: My role currently is director of product management for demand. Essentially that I oversee the web UI, API, adCenter Desktop and the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool. I’ve been with Microsoft for almost six years now, and I’ve been working on search for that duration. The first two and a half years I was on the engineering side, so actually I’ve been through a lot of the products.

The latter half of the six years I’ve been on the product management team. Ultimately, I play a role in redefining our product strategy and the roadmap for advertisers. Prior to Microsoft I worked on transportation and supply chain solutions for UPS and freight forwarding companies.

The way I have my team organized is around the different areas that advertisers interact with. One of the product managers on my team is responsible for campaign management and the Web UI. We also have product managers that look after the adCenter Desktop tool as well as the Microsoft advertising intelligence tool which is basically around forecasting and prediction in terms of traffic and volumes, and also been in traffic estimation for specific keywords.

I also have people that take care of billing, and customer management, and agency management, capabilities within the platform. And, finally we have reporting, so essentially all of the recommendation engine as well as the reports generation if you will through the tools.

Eric Enge: Can you tell me a little bit about why people would choose the Web UI or the adCenter Desktop tool or the API?

Rathna Sharad: One factor is the size of their campaigns. The Web UI is good for a couple thousand keywords, maybe even up to ten thousand keywords in an account. Anything more than that, it gets a little tricky to navigate through it and find what you are looking for in a short amount of time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ppc services

Author Authority and Social Media with Bing’s Paul Yiu

3/12/2012 by Eric Enge 3 Comments

photo of Paul Yiu

Key Points from Interview with Paul Yiu

Tons of discussion in here about how social media can impact search results. While the author authority discussion is near the end I am going to highlight it first here (Twitter was the specific social network discussed), because there is a LOT of confirmation of how author authority works:

Bing does look at the number of followers you have.
They also look at the number of people you follow. If you follow 200 people and 8,000 follow you this might indicate more authority than if you follow 9,000 people and 8,000 follow you.
“We can actually analyze the follow graph and tell if you are trying to game the system.”
Relevance of the followers is used as a signal: “who you are connected to says something about you. You don’t want to get into the wrong crowd; It’s not good if you hang out with the bad group at the high school.”
The relevance of who you follow also matters.
You don’t hurt your Twitter stream by talking about irrelevant stuff. What matters more is what happens to your relevant stuff.
Retweeting patterns are tracked and used as a signal – especially for your relevant tweets.
The relevance of the re-tweeters matters too.
There are many iterations if signals that oculd be tracked, but as you get deeper and deeper into it the strength of the signal diminishes, so a limited number of factors (such as those above) are considered.

Here are some of the other key points from the interview:

(re: social media): “The behind the scenes signals are pretty useful for us, as search engines always need to find fresh content, and it’s always hard to rank fresh content.”
“We are trying to merge a little bit of the search and browsing intent into one, and have your friends help you navigate the web a little bit better. In a way we are bringing the office water cooler to the search engine.” (the emphasis is mine).
(regarding using “wisdom of the crowd” to move content higher in the results): “… people tend to like gossipy things, such as who got pregnant or was in a scandal, or something like that, so it tends to work in those cases, but not so much in the case of navigational searches …”
“If the content doesn’t earn its spot its placement gets modified” (confirming again that Bing uses CTR which was done for the first time in this interview with Duane Forrester.
As of February 22, 2012 users could associate articles of interest with people they know (the “subject” person). The subject can then use Facebook to decide if they want that article associated with them or not. If they let it be associated that article will now be highlighted in the search results for friends of the subject.
Social media can provide some useful enhancements to search, but currently is not in danger of reshaping the structure of search (my paraphrase of a conversation below).
Bing currently does not analyze Facebook updates to collect information that could be used to personalize search results. For one thing, there are serious privacy concerns with this.
“The typical network on Twitter has characteristics that are hard for people to emulate artificially. These (artifical networks) are unnatural, and when we see networks like this you can tell these people are trying to sell teeth whitening or whatever.”
“… when you say stuff where people tend to re-tweet you it behaves bit like a link.”
The level of effort to make a social media action affects the signal strength. For example, a Like is very little effort, and a Share requires a bit more effort.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you start off with an overview of Bing and social to date?

Paul Yiu: Over two years ago we went down this path of integrating Twitter into search. Much of what we’ve done with Twitter is actually really interesting even though you may not visibly see everything. Here is what the UI looks like.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Power Adwords Tools with Google’s Frederick Vallaeys

1/25/2012 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

Key Points from Interview with Frederick Vallaeys

ValueTrack is the AdWords feature that allows advertisers to tag their URLs with parameters. The resulting URL can then be used within the advertiser’s own tracking systems.
Too many advertisers settle for global level reporting and do not look further. Even if your top level metrics are OK, you can still get great gains in overall campaign performance by digging into more detailed reports.
Segmentation is the biggest power reporting feature that is not used by many advertisers.
Types of segmentation can include times of day, days of week, device type, social signals, and more.
(Fred): “… no matter from which channel the +1 comes in, it all aggregates at the URL level.”
(Fred): “In the social segmentation, you can actually see what the impact is of having each of these different variations.”
You can run multiple segments via the downloadable reports or the API.
(Fred): “… at the end of 2011, half of American consumers had a Smartphone in their pocket.”
Google has a site at howtogomo.com that you can use to see how your site renders on a mobile device.
(Fred): “Google Analytics offers multichannel funnels, and what these allow you to do is see what touch points people have with your online campaigns before a conversion happens.”
(Fred): “One tool that we have is the AdWords Campaign Experiments. That’s a great way for an advertiser to explore how to improve their ROI. They can send 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever percentage they want of their traffic to that experiment.”
(Fred): These (new ad formats) were a big thing for us in 2011, and will continue to be a big thing in 2012.
The Bid Simulator tool will show you what to expect for different types of increases (or decreases) in bids.
The Ad Preview Tool allows you to see whether or not your ads are running. It also allows you to test geotargeting in areas other than your current location, or various types of mobile devices.
Top of Page bid estimates show you what your bid would have to be to show up in the space above the organic results.
Impression share is a way to see what percentage of the time your ads are running. Tuning your campaign to increase impression share can be one of the best ways to get additional traffic.
Google Analytics is planning to expand its social reporting to include more than just the data from Google owned properties – i.e. data such as Facebook Likes.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell me some great power reporting features in the AdWords interface that people rarely use?

Frederick Vallaeys: When you look at AdWords, there are three high-level types of reports that we make available for our customers. You can go into the campaign management interface and pull reports right there in your campaigns. Then, we also have Google Analytics which goes a little bit deeper into some of the data, for example, with real-time reports, social reports and cross-channel reports that look at how ALL your campaigns are contributing to your success and your ROI. The third one is making reporting available for people who prefer using APIs or building their own reporting systems using our URL tagging feature, ValueTrack.

That is a way for us to attach some additional information to each click that comes to your website so that your own reporting software can capture that and then process it. If you look specifically at what is available in the AdWords interface, it’s really gotten very sophisticated in terms of segmentation. And, I think one of the biggest mistakes that advertisers make is they look at their reports at too high a level.

There are probably all of these micro-segments within your campaign where things are performing fantastically well …

There are probably all of these micro-segments within your campaign where things are performing fantastically well, but you don’t know it because you looked at things are an aggregated level. On the flip side you also have elements of your campaign that just aren’t working well. Examples of segments that you could be looking at are the specific time of the day, and the specific day of the week. You may for some reason find people just aren’t buying your product at certain times of day or days of the week.