September 13, 2010

On the campaign trail in 2004, Senator John Forbes Fitzgerald Kennedy Heinz Kerry (who served in Viet Nam) posited "whom among us doesn't like NASCAR?"

Whom indeed.

Well, whom among the internet marketing crowd doesn't have a Google slap or other horror story to share regarding their adventures in SEO/SEM? I've personally witnessed both justified and unjustified organic and AdWords Google slaps over the past 2 years.

In November 2008, one site dropped from organic positions 1-3 on page 1 to page 14 overnight, only to inexplicably pop back to #1 after 7 days. I didn't touch the site in the ensuing week, despite seeing 13 pages of completely irrelevant pages above me. In January 2009, a colleague who spends $10k/mo in AdWords saw all his 8000 keys collectively drop to Quality Score 1. 3 Days later, Google called to say "we don't know why THEY SYSTEM KILLED ALL YOUR KEYS, but we've manually reactivated them all. Sorry."

ADVENTURES IN GOOGLE PRODUCT SEARCH

We've been submitting product feeds to Froogle then Google Base then Google Merchant Center / Product Search since 2002. It's pretty simple... when you're hot you're hot, and when you're not you're not. Google's price comparison service can be a boon by sending qualified shoppers who, in our experience, can buy up to 60% more often than organic searchers. I guess if you're interested enough in a product to compare prices, you're a buyer.

Google Product Search results for "iPhone 4"

Google Product Search allows you to submit an XML feed containing all your products along with photos, descriptions, prices, shipping costs, etc. If you've never tried it, I strongly suggest that you do. But the downside is that if you are (possibly inevitably) "disallowed" by the system it can be difficult to get any feedback from the Google Team re: the reasons why. You can stumble around for weeks, modifying and resubmitting your feed. In our experience, once you're "disallowed" there's no way back in without completing a Request For Reconsideration. However, in our experience the Google Product Search Team is very helpful if you've got a legitimate site and feed.

ENTER BING SHOPPING

On July 1, 2010 Bing Shopping officially took the reins from Bing Cashback. Now a tab-delimited .txt feed file can be submitted, making you one of the few and proud initial participating merchants.

Bing Shopping results for "iPhone 4"

What's the big deal? Doesn't Bing only command 30% of worldwide search traffic since their deal with Yahoo? Yes... but what happens when and if 500 million Facebook users are presented with Bing as their default search engine? Our hope is.... dollars dollars dollars. All signs seem to be pointing to a much beefier integration of Bing into the ubiquitous Facebook Search tool.

In many of our clients' markets, they are the only participant in Bing Shopping. That's cool enough when you're talking a 30% search share. What about if the scales are tipped closer to 50/50?

Realistically, Bing has 1 chance to make a good impression if Facebook funnels their 1/2 Billion fanatical users to Mr. Gates' engine. Merchants everywhere hope for the best.