Some Search-food for thought

First of all I want to apologize for not writing here since a last month. I’ve just been incredibly busy and didn’t find a lot of time to blog (besides some Dutch writings).

I kept up with the Search news though and thought I’d share some highlights here. At least that makes me feel a little less bad about not writing here that long
So here we go:

SEO: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft unite on “Canonical Tag” to reduce duplicate content

The big news in SEO-land of course was the announcement of the canonical tag support by the 3 major search engines.

This tag lets you point out on a page level which URL is the ‘canonical’ or original version, when there are more identical or duplicate URL’s.

My advice
Please note that this doesn’t just solve the duplicate content issue! Before using the canonical tag, please first check if you can resolve a duplicate content issue with:

1) the site architecture
2) possibilities for a 301 permanent redirect
3) exclusion of duplicate pages with Robots.txt or meta robots

Also have a look at Google’s Matt Cutts explaining the canonical tag and some plugins for Wordpress, Drupal and Magento by Joost de Valk.

Behavior: eye tracking study by Google

Of course we have seen several third party eye tracking studies over the years which tell us how searchers interact with search engine result pages.

But I find it really interesting that Google released results of their own eye tracking study.

Blended (Universal) Search results not always relevant
The study especially shows how searchers interact with Universal Search results (I prefer the term ‘Blended Search’ though).

When for example an image or video isn’t relevant, the eye tracking study shows that this Blended Search result isn’t to much of an distraction. This short video illustrates the speed at which people scan through search engine results:

Blended Search click through rates
Next to the Google study comScore reports that click through rates for Blended Search results are generally lower than text based search results.

An explanation for this could be that the intention of a blended search result page is to deliver the desired information directly without requiring an additional click.

Talking about searcher behavior, people are using more words in search queries still.

Web analytics: stop bouncing

On the official Google blog Avinash Kaushik, Google’s web analytics evangelist, wrote a basic but good post about bounce rates. On his blog he goes deeper into several interesting bounce rate questions and issues.

SEO: Toolbar, Long tail & Process

It’s out there for a month now, but if you haven’t checked it out, definitely install Aaron Wall’s amazing SEO Toolbar for Firefox. He also wrote a couple of other interesting posts, among others why you should target long tail keywords first.

It is not shocking to hear that SEO is a continuous process, not a project. But it can’t hurt to say it again, especially when it is written very well and in dept like SearchEngineJournal has done.

Web analytics: tracking Google Universal Search & SearchWiki with Google Analytics

Continuing the web analytics stuff you should definitely check out these awesome articles:

- How to track Universal Search traffic with Google Analytics
- How to track Google SearchWiki with Google Analytics

So, this is what I think you should know what happened in the search industry last month. Ow, and by the way, eMarketer reported we surpassed the 1 billion internet users worldwide. Wow.

What did you find interesting last month?