Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

One of the basic fundamentals of building a SEO friendly website was the belief that static URLs are always better than dynamic URLs when it comes to search engine crawlers. However, last night the Google Webmaster Central Blog put together a in-depth analysis and comparison of both URL structures with the bottom-line conclusion that dynamic URLs are not bad for SEO…when done correctly.

The Google Blog post covers the following topics:

• What is a statis URL
• What is a dynamic URL
• Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static
• When can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
• Dynamic and Static URLs myths and facts
• FAQ

I don’t feel that the post offered any ground breaking secrets or insights, most of it was common sense, however what the post did do is erase any doubt and / or questions webmasters might have had when it came to building SEO friendly URL structure. Just another examples of how Google is becoming more transparent with the inner workings of search.

You can read the full blog post here: Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs

A couple months ago Google launched their “Google Elections Video Search” gadget on iGoogle. This gadget took NPR type video content (clearly spoken words) from YouTube’s politicians channels and transcribed it into indexable form via speech-to-text technology. This week Google took this technology and made it more accessible to the public by launching GAudi (Google Audio Indexing) within Google Labs.

GAudi is still in the experimental phase but it offers a glimpse as to what is to come for video search and the possibilities this brings for Video SEO. Speech-to-text offers video content publishers the opportunity to blow out video landing pages with relevant and keyword rich content. For example: take an episode of Mad Men that is being shown on AMCTV.com – using a speech-to-text technology (when transcripts are not available) would provide that page with a significant amount  of relevant content that is indexable by search engine spiders. Logic can also be applied to this content to make the text automatically added to the meta data as well. The opportunity to drive organic search engine traffic through these types of Video SEO methods is enormous.

An interesting point in all the GAudio talks is that GOOG-411, Google’s directory assistance service, is the technology that made the Google Audio Indexing possible or a least better. Back in late 2007, when GOOG-411 launched, Google said that it would be using the acquired service to improve speech-to-text technology…guess that worked out for them.

The “Official Google Blog” put up a post yesterday titled “Search evaluation at Google” that gives some really interesting insight into how Google goes about improving search result quality and user-experience. Below are some points I found to be interesting, but I highly recommend reading the entire post.

Google’s evaluation methods:

• “Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.”
  
• “Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.”

Anyone remotely involved in SEO or digital marketing should always take advantage of any information / insight Google opens to the public.

Not so long ago the Google let the world know of an upcoming AdWords Quality Score adjustment / improvement. Well, today the announcements came out that those changes are going to go live over the next couple days. This change will impact ALL AdWords accounts, so if you do anything in Paid Search you should take notice.

Why is AdWords Quality Score important? Google uses the Quality Score to determine the order of the ads that show up for a search query. The AdWords Quality Score improvements include:

• Better Quality Score accuracy: New quality score calculations will take into consideration the accounts history, click-through rate of all ads & keywords and to a lesser extent landing page quality.

• All keywords are labeled as active: Previously keywords with a low quality score were listed as “inactive for search” and would not be shown on Google.com. Now those keywords will be listed as active and be evaluated for any relevant search query - even though they would continue to produce low-volume impressions.

• First Page Big Estimates: Within the AdWords account the “first page bid estimates” will replace “minimum bids”. “For queries without many advertisers competing for placement, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you’ll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page. Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages — as long as your keyword is relevant to our users.“

So why is Google making these changes? Plain and simple Google AdWords is working on improving the quality and relevancy of ads shown throughout their AdWords network…therefore improving the overall search experience. For more information on Google AdWords Quality Score changes check out the Google AdWords Blog.

I have been a huge fan of Hulu ever since they launched in private beta and continue to view them as the trend setter when it comes to all aspects of online video. Last night I was online watching full episodes of my favorite shows on Hulu.com, something I do on a regular basis, and saw something that I have not seen before - not just on Hulu, but anywhere else online. Before an episode of The Simpsons started a screen came up giving me the choice of how to view this video in regards to advertisements (see screenshot below). I could either watch the full movie trailer of “Ghost Town” and then have no commercial interruptions or watch the video with normal commercial breaks. This is an absolutely brilliant move by Hulu to not only increase the value of their ad placements but also engage the user on a whole different level.

When it comes to professionally produced long-form content it is a widely accepted practice to force ads however the website sees fit. This after all is premium content so commercial breaks, overlay ads, or any other form of content monetization is viewed as a necessary evil. However, by giving the user the option Hulu is creating a automatic engagement with the website beyond watching videos….choice, regardless of what it ecompasses, is a powerful thing.