This means that you can no longer rely on Google as your only search engine. (You shouldn’t anyway, of course). Rome has started burning.

Danny Sullivan, renowned Search Engine Land Editor, has a well written article with annotated screenshots of his initial research. See what you think and let us know if you think Google’s “Search Plus Your World” or SPYW, spys deep enough into Twitter or Facebook. Or whether it spys too deep everywhere.

If you want to feel refreshed in your journey…or merely need a jump start to get going, spend the two and a half minutes to watch this clip. If you don’t have time, there’s a message half way through that could forever change your life, time-wise. Kudo’s go out to the first person commenting how to find more time to do what you love!

Do you even know if your site has been affected? And if it is, do you understand why?

Google has made this major adjustment to force “more recent” content as the highest results. While this makes sense for searching on many news, gossip, financial and political topics, it could reek havoc on a great product-oriented website.

Once again, Google has upped the difficulty. You need to understand what “recent” means in your industry and for the type of site you have designed.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, though, to work out what qualifies as ‘recent’, according to Google fellow Amit Singhal in the official Google blog post on this new change.

I have been telling friends for years that a marketing degree should start with “Marketing 101: How to Describe It in 100 Words.” It would be a weekly course and every week the student would have to describe the same item, but in fewer and fewer words. The final would be a Google Adwords Ad…here is it’s format:
25 Characters
35 Characters
25 Characters

That’s less than 100 Characters, including spaces. And in that 100 characters you have to grab a person’s attention, differentiate yourself and entice them to click on your Ad among all others.

Most firms we begin helping have a tough time saying what they do in a paragraph.

One of the SEM mentors I follow posted this video, which I think sums all this up in two spoken sentences and one written one.

Can you describe your company in seven words or less? Give it a shot, you may be surprised at the results!

Most business owners I know would pick the word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend every time. Nothing helps move a sale to closure better than a friend recommending the company or product.

Facebook has definitely been gaining Advertisers mostly due to this belief. They believe that Facebook’s ability to tie together social friends and target demographics with more ‘personal information’ will provide better conversion metrics. In other words, higher sales for same or less Ad expenditures.

One of my clients recently received a letter from the Google Adwords team providing information about Google’s upcoming “Google +1″ implementation. Google is adding an ability for users to promote Ads, indirectly promoting the company, brand or product within the Ad. Even more importantly, Google will begin showing these personal promotions in Ads shown alongside of search results. In other words, if I were to search for “remote control toys”, it is possible that I will see a Google Adword Ad on my Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that mentions a real person I know within my known online social networks has previously ‘approved’ or ‘liked’ that Ad, company, or product. Google hasn’t gone so far as to copy the word “like”; instead they are using “+1″, which I think is not as effective as Facebook’s Like button, but the end result could still have similar impact.

I’m including Google’s letter in two parts. Part one is the intro and an example of how an Ad looks today:

And the second part of the letter shows how the Ad could mention a friend has ‘approved’ or ‘likes’ this Hotel:

Why is this a big deal, so much so as to call it a Game Changer?

Google Adwords has had huge impacts across all areas of advertising from print to broadcast to online. With this one change, Google has enabled their Ads to be displayed with personal recommendations, a quick online “word of mouth” approval, which will undoubtably increase clicks and conversions. More sales for same or less money will drive more advertising dollars. Which will increase Ads, which will increase the amount of word-of-mouth exposure, which will convert more Ads. And it goes on and on.

If you already have Ads running on Adwords, be prepared to solicit friends and fans to “push that PlusOne button” and help promote your word-of-mouth. If you aren’t yet running any Ads via Google Adwords, you definitely need to consider doing so.

While we promote Google Adwords to many of our small business clients, there are various aspects that are real disadvantages to them. The overall complexity and several default settings are definitely an issue for SMB and independents without some type of Search Engine Marking (SEM) resource.

Well, Google is trying an Adwords experiment that may indeed be another major problem for small businesses. There are apparently two types of displays being tested, one that just says “Clicks”. The other one says “clicks from this advertiser”. In this image, notice the difference between the two almost identical Ads for the same basic product/brand:

Showing “Clicks for this Advertiser” in the Ad will create a very unfair advantage for large brands, big Ad budgets and National Ad agencies.

Notice that the top Ad has 156,000 previous clicks and the one below it has 59,000,000. Which would you click?

We’ve been very successful pitching SMB Ads against major brands with deep pockets. We rely on niche targets, whether time spots, longer tail keywords, more refined and selective demographics or sites. If successful, our Ad typically shows higher than the wider casting net of the big check books.

Think of it another way. A big budget allows for less granular keyword bids, less related Ad text to keywords they are bidding on and finally, paying a bit higher due to a lower quality score. If we are able to place our SMB Ad alongside the more generic text from one of their Ads, we stand a better chance of getting the click due to our more relevant copy and keywords.

Unless that other Ad has 59,000,000 clicks displayed and we only have 156,000.

The real shame? All 156,000 of our visitors could have bought a product, while 200,000 of those other clickers could have bounced away from that site’s competing product immediately without buying anything. If that Advertiser’s 58,800,000 of those clicks are for Ads that send them to another page, not that related to our client’s product, then they won’t even be penalized much. And the users that might have clicked and bought, will instead gravitate towards the Ad with more clicks due to the Lemming Effect.

This also means longer running Ads and Advertisers could have better click through rate (CTR) advantage.

Now it appears two other SEO Best Practices may hurt your site’s search ranking results, at least Google’s results anyway.

Joining “important keywords should be used on inbound links” are these two common SEO techniques:

1) Don’t Waste Page Titles on your Brand Names, use Keywords instead

2) Keeping page content specific to one subject

It now appears, after Google’s Panda and Mayday updates, that both of these techniques will no longer help you and may indeed hurt you, dropping your rank on Google’s search pages.

Here’s an in-depth article that will detail these two important changes, as well as discuss the common anchor text on inbound links practice. It’s called, “Breaking 3 Old SEO Habits“.

Unless you monitor your results using best practices you won’t know what changed, when it changed and how it affected your ability to show up on the first page of search results.  Almost every client we start with, either thinks their results are fine (they usually weren’t) or think they’re terrible (they weren’t always) because they don’t really understand how to go about searching and what words to use. And how to check it consistently time after time.

For instance, a CEO of a Trash Can manufacturer might use “waste can” when searching for his product and be happy it showed up. Maybe all their content used “waste” and was indexed accordingly. Or, worse yet, maybe the CEO was signed in and using Google’s “personalized search results” feature that is set by default. Once the CEO is shown the majority of normal searches (in the US) use the word  ”trash” and not “waste”, he would be a bit disappointed. He would likely be even more disappointed with their results once the “personalized ” feature was disabled.

Why remind folks of this aspect? There are lots of benefits and lots of reasons why you really should consider learning finding a professional to help you in this area. You can spend hours every week reading what other experts are testing, what new methods are most effective and what techniques might now be getting you in trouble. Or just spend a few hours one week researching a professional.

A new article talking about the biggest three changes last year prompted me to post this article. Did you hear about Google’s Panda change? Did your site’s search results drop? You might be very interested in the following article from Duncan Heath at SearchEnginePeople.com about the big difference in Google’s latest search change, called Panda.

Improving and keeping your search engine results are one of those areas as well. And for some months now, it appears that Google has drastically changed a top ten “SEO Commandment” I call “standardizing keyword use with inbound link anchor text”. This commandment from now on needs to add “NOT” in it. The updated commandment and the explanation are as follows:

Thou Shall NOT use the same Anchor Text Keywords within all inbound Links 

During most of 2011, Google has focused on trying to reduce the “black hat” SEO sites that are merely content farms housing shallow information that is seldom what a searcher is seeking. One item they continue to analysis AND penalize involves paid links. Their house cleaning consists of punishing violators who are obviously paying for links on a site that isn’t relevant and shouldn’t be sending traffic to the violator’s site.

Small business owners are easy, constant targets for the “we can guarantee your company will show up on Google’s first search page”. One of the often used methods is to sell a service that will increase the amount of incoming links.

FOR YEARS, SEO experts have know that using your most important keywords CONSISTENTLY in the link on the other site increased the importance of showing your site when someone searched on those exact words. This recommendation has been considered a White Hat Best Practice since its inception.

Now that same behavior could get you penalized. Just like JC Penny and Overstock.com (for slightly different link building schemes). Google has determined that if too many of the links on other sites that are pointing to your site use the same exact text in their link, you are probably paying for them.

We would recommend that you build up an expanded list of your most important keywords. If you have the opportunity to request what anchor text to use on another site, keep track. Use Google Webmaster Tools to periodically check natural growth in inbound links. Make sure to include product and company brand names in the links now to further change the links from being all the same.

Google assumes “natural links” would not always use the same words. And if they suspect you are buying those links, they’ll silently penalize you from being displayed on their search results.

Yes, this will happen even if you have only been following Best Practices or Used an professional SEO expert in the past. By the way, this is also the reason you shouldn’t think of SEO as a one time task.

It seems we just posted about JC Penny being penalized by Google for black hat link buying conducted by an outsourced SEO firm that violates Google’s long standing position on this method. Shame on that SEO Firm, but we also think JC Penny shows a serious lack of judgement and understanding about the importance of their Web site.

Our respected friends over at SearchEngineWatch.com has posted another in-depth article about Overstocks’s Paid Links at Universities and Colleges.  In some ways, this seems an unfair penalty. The gist of their violation stems from asking the sites to embed links to related Overstock.com product pages, such as “gift baskets” in exchange for offering a 10% discount to their students.

Why was this a violation? OverStock wasn’t penalized because they had a link on a college site saying something like:

“10% discount on gift baskets for all XYZ College students”

While they DID have those links, which are fine, OverStock asked the colleges to go a bit deeper into their site. For instance, there could be an FAQ section for new parents that states “Loneliness is the biggest reason for first year drop outs. Consider sending your child a gift basket near special occasions.” In this case, the link “gift basket” would take a parent to OverStock’s gift basket product page.

Once Google detected this similarity across lots of universities and colleges, they pitched OverStock into the Penalty Box. Another reason why businesses should consider having an SEO in-house expert or outsource they can trust.