Facebook as a Marketing Tool, Algorithm Changes from Google, Panda Updates, and Additions to Bing Webmaster Tools

Facebook as a Marketing Tool, Algorithm Changes from Google, Panda Updates, and Additions to Bing Webmaster Tools:

In our blogosphere recap we examine four blog posts from last week that discussed most important marketing tools, Google’s changes to search algorithms, tests on Google Panda update and steps Bing’s additions to Bing Webmaster Tools. Below are some of the highlights from these articles:

• Sixty percent of businesses named their website a “very important” or “somewhat important” tool in their web marketing strategies.
• Google’s search algorithm change impacts 35% of searches.
• Panda doesn’t affect a single page in multiple degrees. Pages are either affected or not.
• Bing announces their next major set of additions to Bing Webmaster Tools, with the goals of sharing more data with site owners, giving site owners more useful tools and increasing transparency in data to site owners.

Sixty Percent of Businesses Name Websites Most Important Marketing Tool

Brafton News | Staff | 10-31-11

Sixty percent of businesses included in a recent survey named their website a “very important” or “somewhat important” tool in their web marketing strategies. Infogroup polled a sample of companies with 100 or fewer employees in its research, and 57 percent will likely keep marketing budgets at their current levels but may adjust the areas of focus, with web marketing taking precedence. While web marketing campaigns are largely diverse and integrate many different channels, the website provides a hub for businesses to direct prospects back to.

Key Takeaways:

• 20 percent of businesses using social media marketing named Facebook as the most important channel.
• 24 percent of businesses pointed to Facebook as at least “somewhat important” to their marketing strategy.
• Budgets dedicated to website marketing exceed $12 billion this year.

Google Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches; Twitter Firehose Remains Off

Search Engine Land | Barry Schwartz | 11-3-11

Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news is that besides the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. Fresher results can make for more relevant results, which is why Google moved over to the caffeine infrastructure last year. That was only an infrastructure change, to make sure Google can index, crawl and return results faster. It’s not new for Google to do a boost of fresh content. “Query Deserved Freshness” is a content ranking factor that dates back to 2007. The Caffeine update of last year made it possible, Google said, to gather content even faster, which in turn could potentially be ranked better

Key Takeaways:

• 35% of searches are impacted. That is larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of searches conducted.
• The types of searches impacted include recent events or hot topics, regularly recurring events and frequent updates.
• According to Google the way they determine if content is fresh or not is the time when they first crawled a page. Therefore re-publishing a page doesn’t count as suddenly becoming “fresh.”

Panda DNA: Algorithm Tests on the Google Panda Update

Search Engine Watch | Peter van der Graaf | 11-3-11

Recent algorithm tests have been made on Google’s Panda updates. Before tests were conducted, they collected as many Panda examples as possible. What the affected sites seemed to have in common had everything to do with thin content. The questions they set out to answer were: can you be affected by Panda in various degrees? What affects the amount of thin content that is condones? What is the best way to recover from Panda?

Key Takeaways:

• They concluded that Panda doesn’t affect a single page in multiple degrees. Pages are either affected or not. The scale in which multiple pages are affected does however grow when sections of a website start to misbehave as well.
• The scale in which pages are of a low quality is definitely a factor, but the tests were unable to pinpoint a percentage high quality versus low quality pages. On some domains just 20 low quality pages in a section with 100 medium/normal quality pages caused all pages to drop in ranking, but in most cases the amount of low quality pages needed to exceed the quality ones by tenfold.
• Unfortunately only 50 domains were tested; therefore to get a ruling on a “best way” to recover from Panda they needed a larger reference with hundreds of sites.

Bing Webmaster Tools Adds More Data, More Controls

Search Engine Watch | Thom Craver | 11-4-11

In June, Bing released what they had codenamed their Honey Badger update to Webmaster tools. A few months later, Bing integrated Yahoo! Site Explorer data into Webmaster tools. This week, Bing released their next major set of additions to Bing Webmaster Tools. Their goals are threefold: share more data with site owners, give site owners more useful tools and increase transparency in data to site owners.

Key Takeaways:

• Errors and other information in the Crawl Details information now include all inbound link information and also includes information about malware.
• Bing has added URL normalization suggestions. URL normalization allows you to tell Bing which URLs in your site have query parameters. Bing also increased the number of parameters you can define from 25 to 50.
• Bing will be expanding email alerts for issues your site may have like malware alerts. You can also choose to get email alerts for various crawl settings.

Facebook as a Marketing Tool, Algorithm Changes from Google, Panda Updates, and Additions to Bing Webmaster Tools is a post from: B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify