Custom reports for Google Analytics, though second best in my opinion to the advanced segmentation filters in the latest update, provides some rather helpful and great uses for the rabid Google Analytics user. The Google Analytics blog provides some tips about what to use the custom reports for:

• Combining metrics from multiple reports
• Creating relevant drilldowns
• Simplifying reports to share with colleagues

With any new feature (or really with any features) there are going to be limitations so keep in mind how to combine metrics and dimensions. I have run across some of the limitations below:

• You unfortunately cannot directly create a Landing Pages & Visits custom report–Entrances (which is really the same thing), yes. But otherwise, you either have to drilldown by landing page in the traffic sources section (which, honestly, I have some qualms about) or within the custom report put in the other values you want, create the report, and then do the drilldown.
• Just about anything with AdWords data–sadly, the data within Analytics (when its linked) comes from AdWords and not through Google Analytics so it cannot be modified (that is, the click data) in important ways.
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate–I honestly have no clue why this is not in there when the custom report has average value and per visit value, but there you have it.

Nonetheless, there are a variety of useful custom reports that you can create and to throw in some fun, albeit more for data research, I can create the following:

• Ad Slot Position & Keywords (and vice versa)–I now know where my keywords show up in a far more useful manner to see whether the PPC ads being clicked on are coming from what position and which side of Google’s SERPs (Can I please beg someone at Google Analytics to provide the same information for SEO?). I can then see how the positions conversion rates are doing for each keyword. More for data research as AdWords has some of this information already and that PPC cannot change their bids based on top of the SERPs versus the right hand side.
• Keyword Visits & Bounces–If you ever want to see a depressing custom report, look no further than a custom report that removes all keyword visits that did not result in a bounce (or one that has all bounces).
• Browser & Per Visit Value–Should you really care about Mac Safari users? You may find that although they may account for a small version of your site traffic, the amount of revenue they generate per visit may necessitate you creating a website that works for the top browsers & computers.

If you are new to custom reports, be sure to check out the Google Analytics video below:

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A Happy SERPs Holiday provided by Google Search Results!

For you Christmas lovers–search “Christmas”:

Not a fan of Christmas? Me either! Let’s go get some Menorahs:

Still not your cup of tea? Celebrate Kwanzaa?

Non-religious? All-encompassing? Love Seinfeld? Go Festivus!

Okay, I allow myself to be corny once in awhile with these posts…

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Personalization and localization of Google’s Search Results are prompting some in the SEO community and those I have met to jump to the conclusion that the checking of SEO rankings is dead. That there is no longer a purpose of checking SEO rankings as the results from one person to another will vary.

Either they are misinforming people to generate controversy (Aaron Wall calls it pandering) about not checking rankings or they are doing a disservice for themselves and their clients. Listen closely to the response by Matt Cutts in this video interview when asked about whether rankings are dead.

What Matt Cutts actually notes that is that SEO rankings are not as important as before and not the only factor that matters (not that it ever did or should). They are a “security blanket” as he quotes from another person, which, I do agree with and is often focused heavily on by clients.

That said, I also see it as a baseline to keep in mind what is going on in your SEO campaign. Without an idea or averaging of the SEO rankings, one cannot point to a solid cause to an issue in why the traffic has dropped precipitously. If you are not checking your rankings you do not have the ability to rule out the cause of your problems. You also do not know if your SEO work is actually succeeding or if it is due to seasonal issues, other marketing campaigns, a previous SEO work not of your own that was steadily improving already, etc.

Checking your SEO rankings is only the beginning of determining your SEO success, not the be all end all of SEO work. And even though those rankings are becoming more nebulous through personalization and localization, averaging out those positions can statistically bring you accurate information for proper SEO Analytics.

Oh, and if your SEO does not believe in checking rankings, I strongly recommend replacement for someone with a stronger analytical approach (not necessarily referring to myself of course).

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Baidu has recently come to terms with media criticisms over whether Baidu allows its paid results to influence what happens in the organic results. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal covers this in a little bit of detail noting about Baidu’s paid results response:

Last night, in a conference call with analysts, Baidu unveiled its response: A new system that more clearly separates its paid links from ordinary search results.

“We are doing this because we care. It is important to us. We want to be a responsible corporate citizen,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li.

They asserted again that the search company doesn’t exclude Web sites from search results because the companies behind them failed to pay for links. But Baidu executives also said they are speeding up development of the new system, called Phoenix Nest, in part to quell confusion. Under Phoenix Nest, paid ads will appear in a clearly marked section on the right side of the search results page.

Baidu has long argued that its paid links are marked, but yesterday CEO Robin Li said, “We do hear from the press from time to time that some of our users were confused by paid and non-paid content.”

This is nothing new for what search engines have had to deal with as even Google has been accussed in the past for possible monetizing their own organic results based off of their paid results as well or not adequately separating their paid/organic results.

Oftentimes those of us in the online advertising industry take for granted that what we understand about search the average Internet user does as well. In fact, most Internet users do not know all of the paid areas of the search results. Let us take an example of someone interested in looking for “gaming computers:”

You would likely get most people able to answer that there are at least one are of the above results being paid search, but that will hinge on whether the browser’s monitor coloring can differentiate the off-color yellow.

Fewer would realize the results on the right are paid, even with the sponsored links showing up. It is not the fault of a user being an idiot, just that the user does not look for the phrase “Sponsored” as a way to tell what is organic or what is paid. This is entirely different from when you use another color to separate the results as Internet users have gotten used to seeing ads in boxes that are of a different color.

Lastly, I would be surprised if many would name the shopping results as a paid search function from Google Base. These results are certainly not a part of organic search (you can argue if it is a part of paid) even though they will vary in positioning (top, bottom, middle, etc).

The point of all this is to note for the Chinese media with knowledge of the online marketing world, that even in the US for Google, most people still do not know the difference between paid and organic results. The search engines are naturally going to muddy the waters in order to get more people to click on the paid results, so without specifically noting what should be done for all engines, there is little point to complain about the current layout.

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Just seems I cannot blog about anything else as I keep finding more mistakes around the web today. I go to search for some examples for a post about people being confused between organic results and paid results, and instead I find the following results when I search for the phrase “analytics” in Google:

Let’s first ignore the fact that Google Analytics ranks number one in its SERPs with sitelinks as a potential conflict of interest there (that is a whole other topic), but instead focus on the aspect that www.google.com has three sites ranking!

For the uninitiated in SEO, for every given keyword, you are allowed up to two pages ranking per sub-domain (exception are the sitelinks above). So, just how and why is Google ranking three?

It looks like Google is still having problems with differentiating secured and non-secured HTTP pages around the web and incidentally ranking secured pages as a whole other sub-domain (or site). I have had clients previously deal with these issues usually in a negative situation where the secured homepage would rank instead of the non-secured in a lower position.

Yet, here in the case for Google, with such a high PageRank on both “sites,” it is only an additional benefit for them to get around the two sub-domain pages per keyword limit. Not bad considering it’s a one-phrase keyword.

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Believe it or not, you can actually read just about any major news website that has an online subscription fee, for free! No, I am not referring to downloading the User-Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox (which does work sometimes) and pretending to be Googlebot. I mean actually acting as yourself and viewing the page you want to read.

Why is this useful? Let us say a friend sends you a link to a good Washington Post article (those are rare, but known to happen), but you unfortunately did not get to read it until about a month later. When you click on the link, instead of actually seeing the news article that used to be there to everyone, it is now behind a subscription wall that you are being asked to pay for. Very annoying, correct?

How can you read the online news article for free? Well, the beauty of today’s world is that if you know the title of the article, you can search for the exact phrase in Google, click on the link, and actually read the article without the annoying subscription wall. Don’t know the article title? Put the URL in the search box and you will be able to access this for free as well.

Why is this possible? Essentially the news websites want to rank in Google in order to get a lot of visitors and make money off of the advertisements been shown to you. Google, unfortunately for the news websites, “mandates” that if you want organic search traffic, you must let the first click be free. Otherwise, Google will consider the whole website to be spam and not relevant to what searchers want thereby hurting Google’s brand.

What does this mean? If you are running a news website, Google believes that anything content-based should free and viewable to anyone, a very anti-publishing “establishment” view. Put another way, anything and everything that can be shown online is and will be considered “must see for free” (with advertisements of course). It is another way of saying “If I can turn something into 0s and 1s, then it should be free.”

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Prescient article by SEO Black Hat in terms of major authority sites beginning to further contain and suck in all link power for their PageRank:

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

[...]

For massive sites with a tier one level of Google trust, there is virtually no benefit to linking to any external sites without a link condom. That whole “link out to authority sites” mantra of yesteryear’s SEOs does not apply to black holes.

He’s absolutely right in that there is no need to link out when everyone already links to you.

This all interestingly makes the authoritative sites into a whole new class of websites, ones that get to be above the rest of everyone else in terms of Google’s “laws,” but more importantly, ones that become leeches on the “PageRank society” by no longer providing external links to anyone else. Of course, that’s only if you believe that is what is going on and if you believe search engines should rank by link popularity.

But I don’t.

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One of things I wanted to follow up on my post about Google Knol SEO spam is in reference to Aaron Wall’s post about how he was testing Google’s lack of concern over copyright infringement:

One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking. Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!

[...]

Maybe we are being a bit biased and/or are rushing to judgement? Maybe a more scientific effort would compare how Knol content ranks to other content when it is essentially duplicate content? I did not want to mention that I was testing that when I created my SEO Basics Knol, but the content was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com). Even Google shows this directly on the Knol page

Google Knows its Duplicate Content

Assuming for the moment that we are not rushing to judgment, this would suggest Google has a very high tolerance (94%!) for duplicate content. Since my blog is a lowly PR 3 at the time of this post (hopefully will go up in time), just about every time my post is sphunn on Sphinn, the Sphinn post replaces my original article in the SERPs.

Going back to Wall’s Knol page, it even got as high as position 2 for SEO Basics (now in position 11 at the time of this post), all for a duplicate content page, while the original page ranked highly for other keywords due to titling the articles differently.

What this means: Any grayhat SEOs could optimize an article many times over by publishing content everywhere on the web and rank for hundreds of keywords all by changing the headers. Got an article that talks about both Chinese dumplings and potstickers? Use the same article, but change up the keywords in the header so you can get both to rank for the different keywords.

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Google has launched Google Knol officially today (officially beta of course) and in case you don’t know what Google Knol is about:

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Essentially it’s middle ground between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia - with ads for revenue! It’s heavily focused on authors writing the content (the URL strings are author-based first, article title second).

So, how useful could it be for abuse… I mean for SEO? It’s definitely useful, but think twice about the amount of time you will need to spend on it.

The Good

• It is expected that many of these pages will rank quite well for a variety of terms with external backlinks and that Google will be promoting it through very highly ranked Google pages.
• $$$$ - need I say more?
• Brand reputation management for people and corporations
• Long-tail content that can be outsourced

The Bad

• Brand reputation hits on people and corporations
• <meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” /> - So much for getting backlinks to your site with spammy pages (this goes for internal links as well)
• The amount of time to spend writing worthwhile articles may not be worth the investment except in certain markets
• Once you die, Google no longer needs to pay anyone–in the long term that means heavy investment up front, but low maintenance costs over time

And The Ugly

• Wanna knock down prominent Wikipedia pages? Duplicate the content, but change it enough to avoid claims of copying it
• Google corporate-owned SERPs
• Once the site gets large enough, the feasibility of stopping spam may become too great to stop (This is different from Wikipedia due to vigilant non-Wikipedia employee people helping for free)

There’s probably more on each side, but these are the first few ideas that popped into my head. Feel free to comment on any other things that may come up.

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The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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