Google's recent decision to remove the ads from the right-hand side of the search results' pages has raised a few eyebrows among the search community. Google maintains that its main consideration is to improve the user experience and relevance of the results page and, at first glance, it would seem that this change is one that actually isn't driven by increasing profits. How could they possibly benefit from shrinking the advertising space from 11 potential clicks to six? Well, firstly, Google isn't doing away with all the ads on the right hand side. The official announcement said: "Ads that have previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below them." We can assume that Google will judge the impact on paid traffic for each keyword, much in the same way that it has assessed the need for a Top three ad box in the first place. If total paid search click-throughs fall drastically for high-volume terms, you can bet your daily budget that the side...

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Google started serving up a new (massive) version of organic site links. Site links are the extra links that you can see beneath search listings in Google SERPs and they're there to provide shortcuts that help people quickly find the information that they're looking for. Site links in one form or another are now commonplace in both paid and natural search results. So far, these 'jumbo' site links are only appearing against branded searches, where Google is pretty certain that the searcher is looking for that site. Whether you're a brand owner, interested in protecting high converting brand traffic, or a reseller that relies on traffic from your product brand terms, it's important to take notice of this change, which has the potential to significantly impact your traffic from natural and paid search. Are they relevant or are they the ones that you want? The first thing to check is whether you're lucky enough to have the new site links enabled. If you are...

Read the rest of this entry »