We had an interesting discussion over here yesterday. The question was: does Google use keyword, behavioral, and/or aggregate data from Google Analytics as part of its algorithms? There were two sides to the argument:

1. Yes, it provides a 360 degree view of the search experience which it can then use to improve the final search experience (and make more money).
2. No, it would violate privacy and would generally be wrong and there is no need to use that data for the company’s gain.

After some research into the Google Analytics Terms of Service, we discovered that using that data would not be a violation.

6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

We cannot confirm whether or not the data is actually part of their algorithms, but it would be extremely hard to believe that Google, a company that’s primary purpose is to store, organize, and rank data, keeps each of its products in their own little bubble. So how could this data be used to enhance search results?

1. Google can better understand user behavior at an industry and keyword level (average time on site, average time for conversions, total conversions, etc) and set benchmarks
2. Understanding behavior past the search engine, they can better predict relevancy factors (Quality Score, overall positioning), click fraud and ways to maximize revenue

So assuming your site is well optimized for both search engines and conversions (because Google Analytics or not, Google knows a crappy site when it sees one) the ultimate question is could running Google Analytics give you an extra boost?

We don’t full understand how all these variables impact your SEM, but we believe they are all pieces of the puzzle.

By now you’ve of heard the long tail theory. Wikipedia defines it as following; “The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.” This theory has far reaching implications beyond marketing. However, for the sake of this post, let’s focus on SEO.

Traditionally, this has been applied to keyword research and optimization. Meaning, there was no need to exert too much energy optimizing for VERY competitive keywords. Instead, optimize the entire site, whether it’s a online catalog or content play. And if you do so, the total number of clicks from these “less competitive” keywords will equal or exceed the total number of clicks from the VERY competitive keywords. Ok, so what does Compete.com contribution?

According to a recent post, Compete suggests that, “[T]he top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month.” Breaking this out by engine, Compete says, “70% of search queries in September were performed by 20% of Google searchers. For Yahoo! the concentration increased to 73% and for MSN/Live searchers 75% of the queries were performed by the top 20%.” Meaning, that most of the search query volume at the major search engines is driven by a relatively small number of search engine users: power searchers. What interesting about this notion is how marketers are spending their online dollars.

Search Engine Land has some great tips on avoiding common blogging SEO mistakes. As this isn’t a full blown post, I didn’t think it deserved to be part 3 of the ‘Marketing Your Blog’ series.

You can check out the article here, and a follow up opinion of the article here.

The SEO Title Tag plugin mentioned in the article is part of ‘Marketing Your Blog Part 1′. Feel free to check it out along with some other great plugins.

While looking through Yahoo’s index of one of our clients, I noticed something strange.

Yahoo has picked up links that are ONLY used for our Google AdWords’ or Business.com campaigns. This suggests one of three things:

1. Yahoo spiders and indexes Google’s search results
2. Yahoo spiders and indexes adSense ads on Google’s content network
3. Both #1 and #2

So what implications does this have? Well for one, it could potentially skew tracking for the AdWords campaigns if there was traffic being sent to these URLs. It also artificially inflates Yahoo’s page count (which may or may not be such a bad thing). It appears Yahoo isn’t intelligent enough to recognize what it has picked up and that the extra parameters do not yield unique pages.

So how do you go about removing these URLs from Yahoo’s index? You can delete them by clicking the ‘Delete URL’/Path’ link. Yahoo only allows you to delete up to 25 deletes per site. MovingExplorer.com has 141 variation of the index.php with tracking parameters. They have also seemed to use Google AdWords’ ad Title as the page title for of the URLs.

It appears everyone loves and uses Google. Even Yahoo. Does anyone know of a way to prevent this from happening?

Check out comments on this posting on Sphinn. Feel free to Sphinn it too…

Yahoo announced today some much needed feature updates to their PPC platform. Yahoo now lets you copy and move keywords from one ad group to another. As to why it took so long for such a simple but required function to be implemented will still remain a mystery to everyone.

In addition to the move and copy, they have also steamlined the keyword selection process and updated the help section with some best practices guide.

Yahoo is getting there, slowly but surely. Keep taking pages out of Google’s book…