Google claims less than 1% of sites will be affected by this change to their ranking algorithm, but I think the further reaching affect of this change is that sites that have difficulty with up time will suffer even more.

In my experience sites that have to deal with a lot of real time data such as travel sites and ticket sites often suffer unexpected down time or have pages become unavailable unexpectedly and take a long time for custom 404s to return. The new speed component could potentially really affect these types of sites. While real time data is in demand, I think real time data also just became that much more risky to use from an SEO perspective.

These types of changes by Google are going to force many sites dealing with real time data to become better at caching and to potentially build in short delays in the data to protect themselves from having a significant number of incidents.

Google provides a nice list of tools that you can use to gauge site speed and some of them also provide useful types on areas for improvement so that webmasters can actually identify and fix problems.

While I don’t think most sites should consider a redesign just to address this change by Google, I think moving forward, when it comes time to adopt new technologies and create new functionality for existing websites site speed is going to be a component that is going to have to remain in the forefront of developers minds.

For really slow sites, sites that were considering a redesign, and or sites that are testing new cumbersome technologies this could be the perfect impetus to take the plunge and either make drastic adjustments or start over.

Finally everyone should take the time to read what Matt Cutts has to say about the latest set of changes.

Article written by Roderick Ioerger

And hey, if you ever need a business attorney in Nevada, I highly recommend John Rutlegde and Rutledge Law Center LTD.  They don’t take on a lot of clients (which I like), so they are incredibly responsive, thorough, and consistent in providing sound legal advice.  And I’m not saying that because we redesigned their web site, I’m saying it because they’re one of Silverback’s most valued business partners.

According to Free SEO News
“It looks as if the 7 day delay might be related to two different website types: websites that use server scripts that return different pages to different user agents and websites that contain little or no unique content.

The 7 day delay for blogs that display the content both on the blog index page and the blog posting page is not a penalty but a Google feature that prevents duplicate results.”

My own thinking is that not only are many blogs just repurposing content that has already been reported, but that also these same blogs are failing to add their own unique analysis to the content making them less relevant right now (Google has placed great value on information that is immediately relevant). As the blog posts are eventually getting indexed by Google, clearly the content is not being classified as spam, but it still appears to be less than uniquely valuable.

And apparently it isn’t just me thinking this way.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book has similar thoughts about the quality of the content and the reasons that so many people may be turning to blogs to generate links. To paraphrase Aaron’s thinking, Google is aware that because relevancy is still key to the value of a link many companies have taken to purchasing links from content farms or creating their own content farms. The content farms that are being created tend to fail to deliver any truly unique content but rather repurpose parts of articles that have already been published and fail to bring any value to a potential audience.

In short much of the unique content being produced on blogs today has value, especially when link building is factored into the equation and I think many folks who for years had republished content are losing the immediate impact of not only the traffic they may have been receiving but also the value of the links on those slow to be indexed pages.

Post written by Roderick Ioerger

Matt Cutts on Internet Directories

Also in unrelated Directory News… Business.com apparently has field for Chapter 11 backruptcy protection.  I was sorry to hear that as I like the service.  Keyword here is Chapter 11 though… so hopefully they’lll come out clean and healthy on the other end.

Dave Swanson (Chairman and CEO of R.H. Donnelley) released a letter addressing the situation.  I have a feeling that things will turn out just fine.  I know we’ll continue to support them.

Cutting to the chase… in the past 3 months we have been working on the design and development of the web site. There is still alot of work to be done as we will be adding more product lines to the site and there is still plenty of SEO work to be done, but we decided to launch the site anyway to synch with some of the offline marketing initiatives that CandleStyle has started to execute.

The site is programmed in PHP and built on the Magento Commerce platform. The design (both online and off) was created in house as were all of the product images (we’re particularly proud of these… way to go Joel!).

We came across a couple of great resources we came across as we were researching SEO modules for Magento. Magento SEO by Yoast (love that guy) and BlueAcorn put together a post building on Yoast’s more basic overview. We’ll put together a more detailed post in the future on all the modules we’ve tried and used, but the two links above are sufficient for starters.

In the weeks and months to come, we will be chronicling this project throughout each step as we implement more advanced SEO, Social Media and other online marketing strategies. Obviously, a special thanks to CandleStyle.com is in order for providing us with this unprecedented opportunity to provide our readers and those who share our passion for online marketing with an insiders look into the day-to-day happenings of a professional online marketing firm starting an ecommerce web project from scratch.

At Google I/O 2009, Google has demonstrated an amazing new tool for anyone that wants to collaborate with people on the web. This tool is poised to replace many offline and online tools that currently exist. In order to truly understand the power of Google Wave, you need to watch this video and see the current uses of their technology. When you begin to understand exactly how Google Wave can be utilized you will also need to consider that this is only the beginning of what it is capable of. When developers get their hands on this technology and start developing extensions to this framework as well as the applications that can be created that will integrate this technology, the possibilities will only begin to be understood.

Google Wave may be the perfect example of the natural next step in Web 2.0, the integration of user generated content from various sources into one easy to use interface. We will see what happens and if developers create the applications that change the way we communicate with each other but my money is on Google and this great technology.

There was an article on Marketing Pilgrim today that discussed the results of a survey conducted to determine the effect of sales on Social Media Marketing. The survey results are heavily leaning towards an underwhelming conversion rate from this form of marketing. Nevertheless, this isn’t a perfect case study on Social Marketing and you need to read between the lines when taking these results into consideration.

Many of the people involved in this study believed that information they have seen on social networks didn’t influence their purchasing decision. On the surface, I would agree with them because most information you see on social networks isn’t shown to you when you are in the process of making a buying decision. The real power of Social Media Marketing is the brand building and the longevity of the content a company adds to a social community. A statement made by a company and picked up by someone you Follow on Twitter can impact a purchase you make at a later point but you wouldn’t necessarily correlate that with your buying decision. There may also be content that was created on a social network that gets displayed in the results of your Google search that may influence your decision to purchase a product but you also may not realize that the information is even coming from Social Media Marketing.

The lesson to be learned here is that marketing doesn’t always correlate easily to direct sales. We have become too dependent on measuring your ROI from Internet Marketing. Marketers need to understand and respect the long term value of building a brand through the web and just because you don’t see instant revenue from a marketing campaign doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be effective.

Is the search engine marketing industry ready for the real-time web? Sadly, not many search engine marketers are ready to embark on the challenge that faces them. They certainly should have taken notice of the changes Google made to promote the real-time web at Searchology. Google unveiled functionality that makes it easier to show the most recent results of your respective search. Although this feature won’t be utilized by most, strategies need to be addressed to take full advantage of this real estate. Twitter has also announced a new algorithm based search that will follow the links posted by users on the popular micro-blogging platform.

We are still only in the beginning stages of the real-time web and the presentation of search on Google and Twitter will inevitably evolve into something much different than we are seeing today. We certainly have to prepare for real-time search being a much more prominent feature that users will want to utilize regularly. Consequently, what can we do to prepare for real-time search?

The first thing that needs to be addressed is your social media strategy. Social Media Marketing is naturally synergistic with real-time search and the reason it’s existence is entering the mainstream. You can review my previous post about formulating a strategy with 5 simple methods of social marketing. Content created through social media platforms will be a key component of the results displayed in real-time search.

Regular updating of website content will be a necessity as well. Updating your content was always important because your website would be crawled more frequently. With real-time search, the quality of the regularly updated content will be very important. The content needs to be relevant to the Keywords that are being searched and there needs to be a clear call to action for promotional purposes. The best way to offer this content to the search engines is in the form of a corporate micro-blog. Just like implementing a Blog on your website, a micro-blog would be setup to display quick messages to your users/clients. A micro-blog is better for real-time search because it is difficult and costly to regularly update a normal Blog in order to have results being displayed within a 24 hour timeframe. You could also use the Twitter API to display your Tweets on your website. Although, I wouldn’t recommend this because of potential duplicate content issues that may arise. With e-commerce websites, creating a micro-blog with special offers and special pricing would be a great strategy for real-time search. The important part of this strategy is the architecture of your website and the regularly updated content. A new page of content needs to be created in order for it to be displayed in real-time search results. Blogs and micro-blogs will usually create a new page for each post of content.

Universal search will also play a major role in the real-time web. Video and audio podcasts, news and pictures will have a better chance to rank well in real-time search because there will be less relevant content to choose from when displaying results that may not be more than 24 hours old. A relevant picture that was recently updated on your website could be the reason a product is sold. The content you create for Universal Search will need to be customized to fit your business objectives.

I am sure there are many other creative ways people will find to take advantage of real-time search as it progresses. Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts and ideas on how the real-time web will affect search engine marketing and the tactics we should utilize as search engine marketers.

I recently ran into Backtype when doing some social marketing research. Their service allows you to keep track of the conversations that you find interesting or relevant to your business. You can follow individuals and their comments on Blogs, keywords that can identify discussions that you would like to get involved with and branded keywords such as your name and your company name for obvious reasons. Another useful feature it provides is the ability to claim your comments and provide a profile where someone can view all of your conversations and potentially follow you.

The most important aspect of this tool is the value of joining existing conversations on the web. Blog comments can be some of the most valuable aspects of the Blog post. The insight that you can get from reading comments can be invaluable when you’re trying to get the complete understanding of the topic in the Blog post. Blog posts are valuable but they are biased and sometimes inaccurate. If the Blog post actually gains readership and comments, inevitably the criticism will follow and that will show the true value of the Blog post.

I recently wrote about the importance of commenting on Blogs for Social Marketing and Link Building, which is also a great reason to utilize Backtype.