Kind of fun. This computer has probably queried Google at least 1000 times today… keep getting prompted to prove I’m a human visitor. Checking for saturation of .EU top level domains in France only searches on Google.FR and just got this form. Finally found a use for all those French classes.
Interesting thing I saw today. I knew about a video beta in Google PPC, but I only just saw it today in the form of watching a trailer. I saw this ad for the Babies Movie (I’ve sat through the preview twice now and it looks insufferable). When I expanded the box it started playing right away. I also think it’s interesting that they’re sending people to the fan page on Facebook. But it makes a lot of sense to me. If you get people to be fans, you can continue that conversation with them (and then as an agency, I can target people who like it – for my own clients).
The goal of search engines such as Google is to serve up relevant results for any given query, regardless of merit. As a search engine marketing firm, we get exposed to a lot of real doozies that makes us think, “how is this relevant?” “who are these people that searched on this?” or just “WTF?!”
Below the staff of Nina Hale Inc has gathered some of the funniest or weirdest search queries that we stumbled across while working on client accounts.
Thanks to Tami Esslinger on the NHI staff for compiling these from the staff.
Come back every few months for more weird or funny searches we’ve seen.
The popular sandwich shop near my house has been freaky slow lately– half-hour waits and the drivers seem to get lost even though I live on the same street and only three blocks away. Go figure.
Google, on the other hand, is insanely fast– picking up new sites and ranking them in as little as 10 hours. We helped a web developer launch a new client site yesterday on a brand new, just registered domain at 4:30PM CDT. We added the domain to the usual Google, Yahoo! and Bing URL submission forms, set up Google Webmasters Tools with a sitemap XML feed. This morning when we got to work– there was the site, ranking in Google number one for their brand. A quick check of the Google Webmasters Site Crawl report indeed confirmed it: Googlebot visited and indexed one page.
Yahoo! was just as fast if not faster as they’ve indexed a total of three pages from the new site over night, BUT they missed the homepage and rank the "privacy policy" page at number two for the brand– not ideal.
So far, nothing on Bing.
Google continues to send QR bar-coded window stickers to U.S. businesses who are already signed up in the local business center, and meet other requirements such as number of searches for directions and other information.
Once the business is registered, they can add coupons, images, videos, descriptions, links, hours and more. Customers with smart phones then scan the sticker (try the one above to get to Nina Hale, Inc), read or write reviews, view the coupons or mark it as a favorite place to visit later.
This is a great way for small businesses to interact with their customers, and is a smart way to bring more people into the Google advertising funnel.
At this point there is no way to request inclusion in this Google Beta, but you can join the action by getting your own QR (quick response) code here and put it on your blog, site, or email.
Just when you thought you had gotten used to recent changes at Google Local Business Center & maps, they throw a little bomb at you.
What you see below is an example of this bomb—a sponsored site creeping into what was formerly a space reserved for organic map results only.
Their intentions are clear—to draw in the $29 billion pool of small businesses that may feel overwhelmed and overbid in today’s online landscape by offering a $25/month enhanced listing that shows up with organic search results. People with a local business account can choose and alternate between seven ways to promote their enhanced listing: photos, videos, link to site, coupons, directions, menu and reservations.
The problem has always been how to tap into such a wide base of small businesses that historically doesn’t spend much money in online advertising while making it profitable. A problem companies like Dex and Yellow Pages continue to struggle with.
Google began cracking this shell last year by offering a way to measure the results of the Local Business Center, making it really easy for small businesses to see how many people are getting directions to their store, printing a coupon, or clicking through.
Right now this is only available in Houston and San Jose, but expect that this will grow as Google continues on its quest: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Click here to read the original New York Times article.