Month: February 2011

SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system. Company plans to increase that number to 100 million reviews by the end of 2011.

SearchReviews currently cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites including of course likes such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and etc.
Will SEM and SEO Experts benefit from SearchReviews? Let’s look at some facts below.

SearchReviews appears to have the largest searchable database of strictly review content anywhere.

Main competitors are; Buzzillions and Bazaarvoice. There’s also Google Places, which has an enormous collections of reviews and sources.

SearchReviews launches with apps that are available for both the iPhone and Android devices.

SearchReviews crawls more than thousand websites to obtain review content and aggregates them into its database, supposedly adding about two million reviews every week.
One of the impressive aspects of SearchReviews is that it indexes review content, not just business and product names. So, someone looking for “meatball pizza Vancouver” can find reviews that very specifically mention those words. That provides new opportunities for optimising product reviews.
SearchReviews with some further development should become a valuable source for consumers seeking out review information.

About the Google Expert;

Google Expert is the highly experienced Google Adwords Expert and
SEO Expert delivering ROI driven campaigns for the range of his clients.

Fight for the top positions in the Google’s organic search results can turn nasty for the companies which use unethical black-hat SEO techniques .

In the cut throat retail environment it’s no surprise that some companies are tempted to abuse the system. Securing a position at the top of the first page of Google’s SERPs for any specific business or product related term may mean huge spike in revenue from online sales for the business.

Google takes its search rankings very seriously and when companies violate or abuse the rules, it isn’t long before they suffer the consequences.

In a recent search engine showdown, Google buried several J.C. Penney links in its search rankings after discovering that the company was accused of employing unethical link buying techniques to push their pages higher in SERPs.

According to the investigation performed by the New York Times, J.C. Penny allegedly paid to have thousands of links added to hundreds of websites across the Web in order to dominate rankings for search terms like “black dress,” “bedding,” “area rugs” and other consumer searches.

Paid links to J.C. Penney pages boosted the retailer’s presence on the Internet because Google’s algorithms consider a site more search-worthy if it’s “voted” more popular online by the amount of links pointing to it. But paying for links is a definitive Google no-go zone.

Google has confirmed that the tactics employed by J.CC Penny clearly violate their guidelines and that “corrective action” has been undertaken.

J.C. Penney commented that they were unaware of the unethical paid links pointing to their website and currently works on taking irrelevant links down.

Google Expert indicates that Mobile is the key in present Google’s 2011 market strategy. With core search growth maintaining a 15-20% annual growth, mobile (and converged devices like tablets) bring Google revenue growth over 20% next year. With total net revenues estimates of $27 billion in 2011 and $32 billion in 2012, a $ 10 billion gross revenue estimate for Android would represent a very significant business for Google.
PCs will continue to sell but the centre of gravity has shifted to mobile devices. And Google has smartly — and remarkably — positioned itself in the centre of that new universe. Arguably only Apple stands between Google and global mobile domination. Even on the iPhone most web searches are Google searches. So while the iPhone doesn’t drive as much revenue for Google as Android devices, it still fuels Google’s mobile growth.
What started as a vision of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt looks now more and more like a reality.
Today Google’s mobile ad business is worth roughly $1 billion on an annualized basis. But it’s growing rapidly.
According to a discussion of the forecast in eWeek:
Using Google’s self-stated figure that its mobile ad business was operating at a $1 billion run rate through 2010, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Google generated $850 million in mobile ads for the year. Android, Munster said, accounted for $130 million of this total, good for $5.90 average revenue per user (ARPU). For perspective, Google’s advertising totalled $25.77 ARPU, while its Web search engine accounted for $18.85 a head. . . Looking forward, the analyst said Google could have an average of 133 million Android users by 2012, each generating $9.85 per year on advertising, meaning Android would kick in $1.3 billion to the company’s ad revenues.
Regardless of whether the precise figures are correct it’s clear that mobile has quickly become a material contributor to Google’s bottom line. And it will only continue to grow.

Google has recently announced changes to the format in which top PPC Ads are being displayed.
For some ads the first description line will be moved to the headline and separated by a hyphen.
As a result, some top placement ads will have longer headlines.
Google admits correlation between length of the ad title and higher click through rates and also emphasises a better experience for users by highlighting more information in the ad.
I would expect that we’ll see some nice increase in CTRs on PPC campaign whilst the top organic search results may be slightly cannibalised by the PPC ads imitating the organic search results.
That change will definitely increase revenue for Google.