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Google Local Business Center Adds Detailed Statistics

6/1/2009 by 11 Comments

Sometime last week Google introduced a fascinating new feature into one of the Local Business Center accounts I manage for a client.  I haven’t seen anything written about this among the Local blogger community, or on the Google blogs, so this appears to be a bit of a stealth feature that Google is testing quietly.

The following links showed up in this GLBC account (and notably not in any others I use) around the middle of last week:

GLBC Report Links

Clicking on one of the “View Report” links leads to a detailed set of statistics. To keep the identify of my client private, I’ve sanitized the report and broken it into several pieces. The first, and possibly most interesting, piece is the Activity report, which shows “Impressions” and “Actions” for this particular listing graphed over time:

glbc-report-activtytotals1

You can float over the data points in the chart and get a small information “bubble” displayed on the chart showing you the date and the data value for the point. You can adjust the time scale — either using the pre-defined past 7-day or past 30-day window, or using your own custom date range.

Google on-page help defines impressions as follows: “We add 1 to your total count of impressions each time your business listing is shown as a local search result on Google or Google Maps”. So impressions count both 1, 3, and 10-packs shown as part of Universal Search Results, as well as searches performed on maps.google.com.

Actions include:

  • Clicks for More Info
  • Clicks for Driving Directions
  • Clicks through to the Web Site

Overall, Google is providing several major improvements to the very simple clicks and impressions data it has provided in the past: historical trending, and a breakout of the kind of clicks/actions taken by users.   I’m particularly pleased with the historical trending, as this should allow one to carefully monitor the performance of listings over time based on optimization efforts, seasonality changes, market changes, etc.

We can also begin to understand actions taken from click-throughs at a much finer level of granularity.  Clearly clicks through to the web site are very desirable, but we can also begin to understand our geographic market by looking at the volume and distribution of requests for driving directions.

Indeed, Google is providing a wealth of useful information in the bottom section of the report, labeled “Where driving directions requests come from”, but we’ll get back to that in a moment.

Visually, the next two sections of the report (again, I’ve broken this up for formatting and discussion, but all of these sections appear on a single integrated web page for each location in the GLBC), appearing just below the Activity and Totals section, contain information about keywords driving impressions and the driving directions section.  These sections are shown below:

glbc-report-queriesdriving

In language similar to the top queries report found in Google Webmaster Tools, Google defines “Top search queries” as: “The top Google search queries for which your business listing appeared, along with the number of times users saw your business listing in the search results for those queries.”. In the screen shot above, I’ve sanitized the search queries, but envision this as a list of 10 keyword phrases.  Next to each phrase is the number of impressions that phrase drew in local queries (i.e., impressions, as defined above), along with a horizontal bar proportional to this value. This, of course, is quite valuable keyword intelligence.

Finally, below that, is yet more business intelligence in the section titled “Where driving directions requests come from”. Here, you can see what appear to be a count, aggregated by zip code, of the location of users requesting directions. In a nice bit of Google Maps eye candy, the city/zip phrase in the ranked list turns out to be a link that, when clicked on, causes the map to pan and display the region containing the zip code. Further, when you float your mouse over the map marker with the count number displayed for that zip code on the map, Google visually highlights the zip code. Altogether, this is a stunning little bit of wizardry that would actually seem pretty useful for visualizing your geographic market.

In addition to the statistical data, the report page includes a nice pane displaying most all of your data – much like the main data entry page in the “Add new listing” (or “Edit”) panel of the GLBC. I’ve omitted this pane as, with one exception, there’s nothing new here and since it has so much of my client’s identifiable data it was difficult to sanitize. However, there was one intriguing tidbit worth pointing out. Above the info pane on the right, the following indicator appeared on my listings:

businfo-86percent

Note the “86% complete” indicator. I’m a little unsure how this is being calculated. For this particular listing, the only GLBC data we haven’t provided is a “Mobile phone”, “Fax” and “TTY/TDD” phone number. We’ve included everything else, including photos, videos, hours of operation, categories, and “Additional Details” (i.e., custom attributes). I’m pretty curious whether Google is asserting that the lack of the 3 phone numbers above is what constitutes my “14% missing data”, or if there’s something else I’m missing (unrealized opportunities?!?!). Guess I can test this and report back.

Well, there’s lots more analysis and discussion of the various data elements of the report, but in the interest of getting this out, and getting a bit more insight into the mystery of “how widespread is the ‘preview’ of this feature?”, I’m going to go ahead and close out for today. I’d love to get peoples’ comments and questions, and if my client’s account is, indeed, a rarity at the moment, I’d be glad to provide more observations and feedback on what I’m seeing.

Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, SEO

Drupal and Search Engine Optimization

9/26/2007 by 18 Comments

Drupal is known for being a very SEO friendly content management system (CMS). The way it assembles its pages is crawler friendly. This makes it a popular choice for people looking to build dynamic web sites. However, there are a number of potential SEO problems with Drupal as well. These need to be dealt with to ensure that you get optimal results.

The very fact that Drupal is such a dynamic system is a factor that leads to some of its SEO problems. The content is stored in a database and retrieved at runtime. Almost all information is stored as a “node”, a basic, unstructured unit of content. Often, each “node” is associated with groups of keywords, known as “taxonomies”, and Drupal makes it easy to retrieve and sort information by these taxonomies. Since all content can be retrieved dynamically, Drupal generates generic URLs for the content, such as www.example.com/?q=node/3 or www.example.com/node/3.

These “internal” URLs are always present in Drupal, even though Drupal provides features that allow you to hide them, and instead present much friendlier URLs, known as aliases, to web site users. There are multiple optional modules that may affect the generation of pages and the naming of URLs, and there are many modules that remain aware of the internal naming conventions, even when user-friendly URLs are being used. As a result Drupal may expose both the internal URLs and the user-friendly URLs to users and web crawlers.

As a result of these kinds of architectural issues, many Drupal sites end up exposing content to the web via multiple URLs. When this happens, the multiple URLs can be crawled by the search engines, creating duplicate content problems. Here are some examples of duplicate content issues, and some other problems that can arise in drupal.

1.Problem: duplicate content from aliases

Example: www.example.com/node/5 and www.example.com/content/how-to-surf, both pointing at the same physical document.

Solution: use robots.txt to disallow URLs that include “/node/” For example, you can include the following lines in robots.txt:Disallow: /node

Disallow: /*/node/Considerations: Note that this assumes that all URLs are available via friendly aliases. This should be the case if you’re using the pathauto module.>[?

2. Problem: Drupal’s default robots.txt has errors.

Example: the default robots.txt uses “Disallow: /search”. This disallows only a page ending with /search, but not all of the Drupal internal search results pages, which is desired.

Solution: update the robots.txt to read:Disallow: /search/

3. Problem: Pathauto can create many extra pages on the site if configured incorrectly.

Example: If you turn on “Create index aliases”, and you have a hiearchical alias (e.g., a page with a path containing a slash, such as music/concert/beethoven) Drupal automatically generates index pages that contain all pages in each category — for example all music, and all concerts.

Solution : Do not check the “Create index alias” check box in the Pathauto module.

4. Problem: Incorrect setting of the Pathauto “Update action”, in a production environment, can cause URLs of published pages, which may already be indexed by the search engines, to change.

Solution: In development mode (before exposing the site to the search engines), use “Create a new alias, replacing the old one” to regenerate URLs whenever necessary (for example, if your Pathauto rules change). In production, once the site is exposed, set this to “Do nothing, leaving the old alias intact”.

5. Problem: Some modules, such as Forums and Views, create sortable lists that can generate multiple URLs with duplicate content.

Solution: If you use such a module, be sure to exclude the sorted variations using the following robots.txt rule:Disallow: /*sort=

6. Problem: The Forward module creates a link to a URL, on each page, that allows the page to be forwarded to a friend. You can easily end up with hundreds or thousands of such low quality pages that are essentially boilerplates.

Solution: If you use this module, be sure to exclude the forward pages using the following robots.txt rule:

Disallow: /forward/

These problems can crop up on many Drupal systems, and all Drupal users should review their sites for these issues. Drupal may also have other issues, depending on the site and the degree of customization. For example, on several sites, we’ve seen Drupal generate complex CSS hierarchies that end up building hidden text into the pages. While search engines try to detect hidden text scenarios that are not a result of bad intent, this is a risk you don’t need. As long as you recognize what the issues are, they can be dealt with, and Drupal can be a great choice as a content management system. Most content management systems present even greater challenges to SEO.

Filed Under: Duplicate Content, SEO, Site Architecture

Can Google Drop You from Your Own Custom Search Engine?

11/3/2006 by 4 Comments

Has your mother created a Google Custom Search Engine yet?

Yes, I’m being facetious. But I want to make a point. Custom Search Engines are drop-dead easy to create. According to Google’s new Custom Search Blog, “tens of thousands of people have already started contributing”. The volume of posts on the Google Co-op Group, which I monitor and contribute to daily (handle = “greyhound”) is high and growing. The program looks like it’s off to a roaring start. But amid all this success, lies a hidden problem that is baffling many new CSE users. We’ll call it the “Supplemental Results Syndrome”, and if it bites you, it can be fatal to your CSE.

The ease of creating CSEs belies the tremendously powerful framework upon which they sit. Because they’re so easy, many people who might have stayed away from advanced search engine technology are flocking to it. And herewith the problem: when you’re literally building your own search engine, there are going to be some things that are a little bit harder than filling out forms.

Today, I want to describe the problem that smacks sufferers of Supplemental Results Syndrome (SrS) right in the face, and how you can diagnose it. (Over the next few days, we’ll provide some recommendations about how to cure this devastating web site illness). To SrS sufferers, Custom Search Engines are broken. “Why don’t I see my site when I do a search on my custom search engine?”, they cry. “I can see it when I search at google.com, but not in my own search engine!” Why not? The answer is simple and complex. The simple answer is that their site is locked up in Google’s supplemental index and… drum roll… Google Custom Search Engines do not include results from the supplemental index.

Let’s talk more about the supplemental index. Before CSEs, the supplemental index was transparent to most people. Do a search on some unique term that turns up a page on your site, and there — in glorious color for all to behold — is your page nestled in the Search Engine Results Page. But look closer at those results. If the words “Supplemental Result” appears next to your URL, then I’m sorry to say it, but this page is afflicted, and it ain’t gonna make it into anyone’s CSE, no way, no how.

Sadly, many low traffic, niche web sites — run by some of the very people who are so attracted to CSEs in the first place — have much or all of their site in the supplemental index. Why? Reasons vary, but far and away the biggest cause of SrS is lack of quality inbound links. Put simply, Google maintains two indexes: the “main” index, where all the big boys live, and where you definitely want to be, is link party central. If you’re in the main index, it’s because you’ve got lots of inbound links, you’ve probably got some PageRank, and life is good. If you’re in the supplemental index, you’re a world wide web wallflower. (Sticking with the high school dance analogy) not enough people know you (link to you), and you aren’t one of Google’s favorite dance partners (you’re not showing up in a lot of searches, so you’re not getting the level of search engine driven traffic that you want).

We’ll wrap up today’s post by showing you the definitive diagnostic test for SrS. Go to google.com and search on “site:yourdomain.com” (no quotes). Examine the results. If many/most of your pages display “Supplemental Result” next to the URL, you’re an SrS sufferer, and we need to prescribe some Search Engine Optimization medicine to make your site well. Remember, if you’ve got SrS, CSEs are not the cure — they will only frustrate you. The good news is that once you discover you have SrS, perhaps by accident when you built your first baffling CSE, you’ve taken the first step towards recovery (that is, knowing you have a problem!). And when you get your web site all healthy, you can build a CSE that even your mother will be proud of.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts that will take you through the steps needed to cure SrS once and for all.

Filed Under: Custom Search Engines, SEO