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Journalistopia Danny Sanchez on digital media About Journalistopia ← Older posts New changes to Google News headline display in SERPs Posted on December 31, 2013 by Danny Sanchez It appears Google has been tweaking the display of Google News content in its search engine results pages, occasionally showing a new design for certain keyphrases. But these changes, in no way, neither affect the niche edits on your website nor the websites themselves that you fish off of www.spamzilla.io . On the contrary, these changes and updates that Google has rolled out are purported to be great for seo . The different layout, shown below, features a gray bounding box around the Google News headlines, creating more differentiation from Google’s standard organic results. The box also consistently appears at the top of SERPs. This is an improved position for news content, which frequently had a standard result above it. Additionally, the box features: -A smaller, 14-px font that shows the headline and source publication equally. -A longer character limit that’s approximately 83 characters. -A gray newspaper icon with a “More News” link in lieu of a link at the top of the box containing “News for” plus the search term. -The new design seems to reliably display three headlines, whereas the old display showed different amounts, usually between one and three. It’s unclear what triggers one display versus another, though adding the words “news” or “news about” to a topic more commonly yields the new display. Some keyphrases that currently trigger the new box include “Kobe Bryant news,” “Orlando news,” “Syria news,” “Fort Worth news” and “Dolphins news” (though “Miami Dolphins news” does not trigger the display). NEW DISPLAY: OLD DISPLAY: Posted in search engines | Comments Off on New changes to Google News headline display in SERPs Google poised to bite local publisher classified revenue Posted on October 11, 2013 by Danny Sanchez Leaders at newspaper sites like to set their crosshairs on Craigslist for the evaporation of classified revenue they experienced, but it is actually Google that is poised to take a big bite out of what’s left of that revenue. First, let’s take a look at what Google is already doing today. Google has increasingly altered its design to top its search results pages with proprietary widgets where users can see flight times, hotels and more. For example, this is what Google displays on a search for “flights Miami to New York”: 4k android tv box is coming soon? Suddenly, online travel sites that enjoyed top positioning in Google’s results were relegated to the lower half of the results page. Now, the only way to crack the first page scroll on hotel and flight searches is to pay up either via Google’s widget or via AdWords. On Monday, Google announced a new local shopping portal , which will allow consumers to shop from nearby stores. If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer large enough to be a regular newspaper advertiser, chances are your marketing team is already filling out the form to be included in Google’s new portal. (Image via Google ) Back in March, Google launched a pilot car shopping service in San Francisco without much fanfare outside the automotive industry but with potentially big consequences for how dealers’ advertising budgets are divvied up. A search for “Toyota Camry San Francisco” yields a proprietary widget that generates sponsored leads for local dealerships: Google is also selling concert tickets, car rentals , music, movies, magazines and electronics . If we look into our crystal balls, we don’t have to squint to envision search engines making plays with proprietary services and search page widgets for: -Real estate listings -Apartment and home rentals -Job postings -Boats -Trades and services -Local e-coupons (through its local retailer program and as an offshoot of Google Offers ) -Obituaries (Ok, that one’s a stretch. Or is it?) Google’s incentives for continuing on this course seem twofold: to provide an improved search experience with fewer clicks but also to grab a larger share of advertising dollars that are unavailable via its already lucrative contextual text ad business. As search guru Danny Sullivan recently pointed out , no online commercial activity is safe from Google grabbing a piece of the action, and the search engine has been increasingly aggressive about filling its results pages with sponsored units. Google is best known for being strong in the search and mobile advertising categories, but classifieds and lead generation still account for 6% and 4% respectively of digital advertising revenues, a sum of about $2.14 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s half-year report released yesterday . Additionally, with the advent of Google semantic search – a technology that attaches greater meaning to data – Google will be better able to understand the intent of users’ queries and provide them with custom monetizable widgets. More on this in an upcoming post, but in the meantime, check out David Amerland’s excellent book on Google semantic search . So how can publishers and e-commerce sites independent of Google remain competitive? 1) Provide a superior user experience to what Google provides via a widget. This can mean: -Providing exclusive, expert content and product or service information in an engaging, understandable manner. For examples, see product descriptions on sites such as Woot and Groupon . -Growing a community of users who provide product insight and recommendations. For examples, see the message boards on sites such as Amazon and, again, Woot . -Allowing users to get product information and make transactions in as few clicks as possible. -Providing an attractive layout that quickly maximizes user comprehension. -Focusing intensely on site performance, ensuring the site loads as quickly as possible. -Offering smartphone apps that don’t fall short on features and product offerings. 2) Establish strong brands and market directly to consumers in a way that encourages users to bypass Google and come directly to a site or smartphone app. If users establish brand loyalty to a particular site, that means the next time they go to look for a job, they will instead search for your site or fire up your smartphone job search app rather than try their luck at a Google search such as “advertising jobs.” 3) Wear your customer service on your sleeve. While Google is highly effective at many things, personal contact with users is historically one of its weak spots due to the massive scale of its services. Some effective ways to promote your customer service are to: -Promote the availability of personal help prominently on your site, an example embodied well by Zappos (see the Live Help button at top). -Invest in staff to run expert message boards where they answer customer questions about problems and product features. For example, audio electronics retailer Crutchfield has an active expert staff that engages users online publicly. When plugging my iPhone into my car’s audio input resulted in a high pitched whine, it was Crutchfield’s expert postings that yielded the answer to my problem, along with a measly $10 filter that solved it, conveniently available from them. That’s a challenge for an impersonal search engine to do. -Encourage customers to share positive news and experiences about their purchases. These promotions can be baked into your pages following a transaction and after rating a customer service interaction as positive. 4) Ink exclusive deals with the original providers of goods, services and data. The effectiveness of this tactic is going to come down to hard dollars, as firms figure out how the economics of exclusivity stack one way or the other. Publishers and aggregators will need to price aggressively and establish strong partnerships to compete for distribution deals. By having providers unavailable via the search engine’s services, that would drive users away as they find the offer...