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Bing Announces Adaptive Search – Getting to Know You!

Bing announced this past week that they are implementing a new search results formula called adaptive search. In layman’s terms this means personalized search results. We’ve been seeing these type of results on Google.com for a while, but now Bing has publicly announced that it is going via the way of personalized results as well.

This is great news for searchers as it means that Bing watches what you search for over time and works to provide the most relevant results when you use Bing.com.

“The more you search, the more Bing can learn,” said the Bing team in a blog. “And (Bing can) use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.”

For website owners this means more difficulty in placing organically and pushes more businesses into paid search advertising for placement on Bing.com. With Bing.com results now being delivered with a tight integration with Facebook, it is important to keep an eye on what Bing.com is doing.

You may want to consider paid search advertising on Bing at this point or at a point in the future as it becomes more difficult for searchers to find you or to get top placement. As a Microsoft adCenter Accredited Professional, we can help you get started on Bing when you are ready.

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Facebook’s New Look Coming September 30th

On September 22nd, Facebook announced a broad sweeping change to personal profile. Here’s what your profile will look like on September 30th at the new roll out.

The new look for Facebook personal profiles.
The new look for Facebook personal profiles.

It is cool looking, isn’t it? The new profile photo is a thumbnail of you and then a cover photo of your choice. The rest of the profile is very graphic and video oriented as well as offering a timeline of your life in status updates and photos. It is almost a resume of your life. You can only see the new look if you are a Facebook Developer at this point, but on September 30th all profiles will share this same new look. For some of us, this gives us a jump on fixing up our personal profiles ahead of the changeover.

For Facebook Business Pages, Facebook has not said just how much will change, but I would imagine that the cover will also be a big feature. Some of the things we do know is that these items are going away for Business Pages:

  • The ability to send out email updates to all fans with one click. This important feature for Business Pages will disappear after September 30th.
  • The ability to feed your blog to your notes page. This feature disappears for both business and personal pages on September 30th as well.
  • Users will not need to “like” your page anymore to interact with your business content. The value of a “like” will be significantly changed.

It appears that Facebook is really pushing to move Business Pages into Facebook stories or product/service pay per click advertising to get the exposure they need.

As a result of these changes, look for new Facebook Services on our website as we understand what will work for businesses and Facebook.

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Have You Spent Time With Google Insights?

With the world of organic search optimization having changed significantly and few really good keyword research tools for website placement on the Web, Google Insights has become a very important tool as you consider making changes on your website. Personally, I use the Google AdWords keyword tool hand in hand with the Google Insights tool. What the Google Insights tool helps me to understand is if a keyword phrase I am thinking of using for optimization on a website or for creating a new content page for a client is worth the expense and trouble.

Here’s an example, I have a client in California who wants to do a page on their website for climate controlled warehouse space. I used the AdWords keyword tool to find phrase variations that are popular for clicks in the United States. Then I used the Google Insights tool to review which of those phrases were important and in what locations since 2004. The information has helped the client access how much they want to push this service.

As it turns out climate control keyword phrases are not important to his local or state customers but for the East Coast and Southern markets it is. If he does not have clients in these eastern and southern areas, it may not be worth the time and trouble to do a new service on his website nor promote the service on AdWords. In fact based on the information, he may not move to a new warehouse with climate controlled space.

That’s how powerful Google Insights can be to a business which is developing a new strategy or service. If you want to check out the tool yourself, visit Google Insights now. I think you’ll find the tool useful and very interesting.

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Google Allows You To Block Websites

Just this past week Google enabled a new feature that you will see in the search results underneath the website you clicked, did not find what you wanted, and want to now block from your personal search results. The link just to the right of the “cached” page link will read “Block all example.com results”. When you click this link Google will not show results in the future from this domain in your personal search results.

What is extremely interesting to me is that now Google will incorporate these “block this” votes in their organic algorithm. Google’s whole focus is on improving search quality for readers. The “block  this” votes are recorded in your personal search history settings. Here’s exactly what Google says on this important new ranking topic.

“You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

If you’ve made a mistake and blocked a site by accident and want to see the search listings again, you will need to login to your Google account and make the changes from there on your new blocked sites page. For the full information as well as screen shots, visit the Google Webmaster blog.