The email reads as follows:

Starting in the first months of 2011, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics category may appear on the UK and German versions of Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the Electronics category, please start including at least two of the following three unique product identifiers: MPN, Brand, and EAN.

These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items.

For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=160161

Clearly your product rankings are going to suffer if you don’t follow their suggestion, so if you don’t already put these identifiers into your Merchant Centre feed, now is the time to sort it out!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Selling Electronics Using Google Merchant Centre? New Guidelines

The Mercury Listing gets you this little lot:

• List your business in the top section of an UNLIMITED number of product/service headings
• Create as many new categories for your company as you require
• Include a flash animated colour picture of your products or logo on your entry
• Encourage buyers with an UNLIMITED number of words of information about your company
• Include as many deep links and linked images to your website as you require
• Email Link for any enquiries
• Modify at any time during the year

Clearly this is pretty handy for SEO, and you can see how it’s being used by some companies here and here. I have found Applegate to be quite handy for several of my clients, although I’m not guaranteeing it is the right thing for everybody – depends very much if you have the kind of business suited to that directory (primarily business-to-business), although the SEO benefit of lots of keyword-rich deep links to your site from a PageRank 6 domain can’t be denied for any type of website.

The cost? Usually £595 +VAT, but with the 30% discount, £416.50 +VAT. Note that you can’t get this online – you will have to call Sam on 01271 852 000 and quote reference IanLockwoodSR2.

Please feel free to Tweet, email and generally spread this discount code to anyone you think would benefit, it isn’t dependent on knowing me personally!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Applegate Directory 30% Discount

In a somewhat odd step, considering they have their own Local Business Centre in the States, Bing has outsourced the provision of local listing data to a company called 118 Information. Clicking the “get started” link on www.bingforbusiness.com takes you to a special page on their site, where you must search for your business by phone number/post code and if it isn’t listed, you can add your details and get a call within the next working day. I strongly suspect this will involve an element of sales, not least as the website professes to provide data for all these:

One other thing I noticed is that for some reason, the submission form is very broken in my browser – no tabbing, use of cursor keys or even delete! Way to go on the accessibility front…

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Bing Launches UK Local Listings, But Outsourced

This forum has been developed for decision makers in International & Export Companies to help them use the Internet to reach overseas markets, expand their business and drive profit.

The event starts at 8.30am and lasts until midday (slightly earlier actually, to allow time for networking). The cost is £55 inc. VAT and the itinerary is:

9.00 Andrew Schlich, AST Language Services – Successful Communication with your Overseas Customers
9.20 Anja Nelskamp, Metafocus – Why Languange and Culture Matters
9.35 Ian Lockwood, Internet Consultant – The Importance of Ongoing Online Promotion
10.05 Alan Clements, Metafocus – Why You Need a Global Internet Marketing Strategy
10.50 Panel Q&A – Joined by Thomas Schaal (International Trade Advisor for the UKTI)

As you can see, my slot isn’t strictly international-focused, but it is relevant to all online marketing. If you have any interest in marketing outside of the UK, I strongly recommend attending – Metafocus have developed a real reputation for specialist knowledge of international online marketing.

You can book online here.

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Driving Global Trade Through Internet Marketing

Without repeating the article, it boils down to sites like eHow (now owned by Demand Media) creating low quality content very quickly, which because it is hosted on an authority domain, easily gets into search results for “long tail” phrases where there is less competition. The money comes from the contextual advertising wrapped around this cheap (often inaccurate) content. Advertising that is not unlikely to be AdSense. Owned by Google. Hmm.

This is now being taken to the next level with “backfill” content on other authority domains, such as USA Today cited in the article, who will get a share of the ad revenue by hosting pages of eHow content on their website. So, you could easily end up in a situation where such cheap content becomes the de-facto monetisation mechanism for authority media sites and hey presto, the quality of search results for many phrases and subjects becomes littered with frankly useless “information”.

This matters, not just because it affects the quality of your search results as a user, but because as a small business owner, you will be increasingly squeezed out of the place you can most easily compete in organic search – the long tail. Aaron makes the point that this paid content on authority domains is just as bad as paid links, as far as messing with Google’s algorithm goes. The issue, of course, is that unlike paid links, Google is likely to be making money itself from the content farms via AdSense, so it has a disincentive to do anything about it.

Ultimately, failure to take action could be the death knell for Google – if its search results become populated with poor quality pages, people will turn to other sources, most likely those which can combine algorithmic search with user rating, where human beings are essentially filtering out the rubbish through their comments and ratings. That’ll be social media then… You can see why Google is trying to leverage social media into its search experience, but at the moment it’s a long way from applying social aspects to search quality (indeed, it has so far only succeeded in annoying a lot of people by including irrelevant Twitter comments into search results).

It will be very interesting to see how Google responds and whether search result quality really starts to drop…

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Paid Content: Google Spam Hell Approaches

The full programme hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m sure it will be packed with useful search marketing info and they have a strong “no sales pitches” policy.

Let me know if you’re going!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

15% Off SMX Advanced London: May 17-18

You may remember from my earlier post on the canonical tag, that it is a way of telling the search engines the “master” address of a page, when multiple addresses for the same content might exist. Why would you have multiple addresses (URLs) for a page, you might wonder? Well, how about a product list on an e-commerce website with options for ordering the products alphabetically, by price or by manufacturer? It’s likely that the URL will be different in some way for each version of the list, even though its contents are actually the same. That means that a search engine will index all three versions (or possibly six if you have reverse-order options too).

Why the problem? Well, you probably want visitors to see that list in a certain order the first time they visit, let’s say ordered by price, cheapest first. If Google has all six versions of that page in its database, what’s to say it won’t link to your price: descending (i.e. most expensive first) list from its search results? That might make you look expensive and put off potential buyers.

The other issue is link juice – with multiple addresses for the same page, you might have some links to one URL, some to another, all essentially to the same page but for Google, they are different pages. That means the link juice is being split between those different versions of the page. So, using the rel=canonical tag, you can tell Google what the master version of the page is and that therefore, all link juice should be applied to that version and that’s the one that should appear in search results.

This is what it looks like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/category/product-page">

It goes in the <head> section of each version of the page, so in the product list example, your page would contain the above code regardless of what version is being displayed at the time. This would probably be done automatically by your content management system, so that when a different category of products is being displayed, the canonical tag references the correct category/product list, because it’s likely the same page template is used for all categories.

In effect, the canonical tag works like a 301 redirect, but without you having to mess around with server settings. What changed in December is that now, you can make cross-domain (i.e. cross-website) canonical tags, when before, you could only use it within one domain. So, even those of you with problematic servers (for example, you’re on shared Windows hosting without access to IIS Admin), you can now create “301″-style redirects, avoiding duplicate content issues.

As noted by Rand, there is no problem having the canonical tag in the “master” page.

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Solving Website Structural Problems With The Canonical Tag

With a lot of hoo-hah about blocking Google from news sites, led by Rupert Murdoch (draw your own conclusions about that one…), Google have announced a change of their First Click Free policy, so that webmasters can block users from Google after five visits per day.

For those with paid-for content, this is probably good news, but you can’t help feeling that the site owners need Google more than Google needs them…

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Changes to Google’s First Click Free Policy

The other tool reports any Malware found on your site, but I’m happy to report I can’t give you a screenshot from one of my sites for that!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

New Google Webmaster Tools Labs Features

The software itself has been working since January, but I haven’t had the time to put the marketing and support elements together – until now. You can see for yourself at the new website here: www.keywordexaminer.com

In a nutshell, the tool is a huge timesaver when conducting keyword research for organic SEO. It lets you search Google AdWords keyword data, just as you would with their external keyword tool, so that you can identify search phrases that people are actually using. It then runs up to three searches per keyword to see how competitive it’s likely to be if you optimised your page for that keyword, using exact match (“in quotes” searches), intitle (the exact phrase in the title tag) and allinanchor (the exact phrase in link text pointing to a page).

In this way, you can quickly tell whether a phrase is likely to be easy or difficult to optimise for, identifying the “low hanging fruit” as you go. To do this manually takes hours of cutting, pasting and searching, but Keyword Examiner automates the whole process once you’ve selected the keywords you’re interested in. You can even import WordTracker data if you want extra information (requires a WordTracker subscription).

I won’t explain further, you can read about it in detail on the website. If you think you can send some subscribers my way, there’s also a great affiliate programme that pays 40% lifetime commission.

I’d love to hear whether you like the product and from those who subscribe, what you get up to using it.

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Keyword Examiner keyword research tool launched at last!