A lot has been happening this year regarding the major search engines and internet marketing. Google launched the Panda aka “Farmer” update that affected many websites attempting to increase their organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While these changes did not directly affect Broadvox (we actually saw organic PageRank boost), Panda did affect quite a few of our partners, VAR’s, and even some of our competitors. Sites influenced by Google’s update saw varying punishments ranging from temporary lower search engine results, temporary bans from the results pages, or in some harsher cases permanent bans of domains by Google. If you have seen substantial drops in web traffic or leads over the last 3 months, I highly recommend auditing your search traffic to insure you were not affected by the major changes Google has incorporated into their search algorithm. Additionally, Google offers free valuable resources to monitor search data including Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster tools. Both of these cloud applications provide daily granular traffic information that can be used for BI and marketing purposes.
While the Panda Update is a substantial shift in the way Google plans to process their future search engine results, it has recently taken the backseat to two major changes to their social strategy. At the end of March, Google announced the Google+1 Button. This new feature had immediate impact on both social and organic marketing because it allows users to directly affect how the search engine results are affected within their network of contacts. In a nutshell, if you have a Google account that is signed in, you will now see a +1 button after every search result displayed. If you click that button you have shown Google your affinity for that link. If a colleague does a search that would garner a result you have +1’ed, that result would get an automatic boost by Google to assist your colleague in finding the most valuable information for that search. While this new feature doesn’t bolster +1’ed items to the top spot within the results, it does provide some lift.
As you can tell, there is definitely a lot of change in the atmosphere and it can be difficult to stay ahead of it. On Friday I will go into more detail on Social and Paid Search changes.