DISC Inc

Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America Analyst Weblog  « Retailers Turn to Social Media in Face of Downturn | Paid Search Traffic Share Down 26% May 13, 2009 Hitwise data indicate that the share of search traffic coming from paid listings is decreasing at the expense of organic traffic. In the four weeks to May 9, 2009, 7.25% of search engine traffic to All Categories of websites was from paid clicks. This compares to 9.84% in the same four week period in 2008 - representing a 26% decline in the share of paid clicks. This trend is apparent across 16 of the 17 Hitwise parent categories (i.e. Automotive, Food and Beverage, Health and Medical, etc). The only category that didn't see a decline in paid traffic was Education, which received 1.45% of search visits from paid clicks compared to 1.39% last year. The following chart shows the share of search traffic coming from paid clicks over the past year to All Categories, Retail 500 (a custom category of 500 leading retailers), Insurance and Travel Agencies. The share of paid clicks to Insurance websites was down 22% for the year, Retail 500 down 20% and Travel Agencies down 25%. The steady and consistent decline across categories indicates that this is not an isolated or seasonal variance.

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When you must prioritize, here are a few techniques you can use to make sure you've truly covered the most important pages: Go into your Web analytics tool and identify the top pages receiving traffic. Go into Google Webmaster Tools and get a list of your external links, so you can identify all pages that have received external links. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to identify the top pages listed there. Site Explorer tends to list the most important pages first. Next, make sure that the search engines find your 301 redirects. While it's common advice to update your sitemap to the new site on day one, consider leaving the old site's sitemap in place for a period of time, to help the search engines see the 301 redirects (hat tip to Stephan Spencer for this idea). How long should you leave it that way? That depends primarily on the size of your site and the number of pages that the search engines crawl on a daily basis. At a minimum, make sure that the prioritized pages list we developed above has been thoroughly crawled.

This week at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Cutts joined the discussion around nofollow during the duplicate content session. According to Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone: A debate broke out mid-session when Matt Cutts got involved about whether or not nofollow is still effective. Of course, as soon as it got hot, all search representatives got very tight lipped about who said what and what they really meant. As far as I could, Matt Cutts did NOT say that they ignore nofollow, but he DID hint that it is less effective today than it used to be. Later, Cutts addressed the issue again in his You&A keynote. When asked about PageRank sculpting, Cutts said that it will still work, but not as well. Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts. Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has some visual aids to help describe the process. This change mainly affects those SEOs that have tried to optimize their pages using the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. It's safe to say that most site owners have no idea what PageRank sculpting is, which is probable a good thing, since it can quite easily be done wrong and cause more problems than it solves.

In fact, the Mobile Marketing Association is anticipating a 26 percent jump in mobile marketing spending this year. Remember, this is a year where overall spending on advertising is expected to be either flat or declining. I think the association is dead-on accurate with its projection, thanks to massive evolution in both services and the hardware itself. New Services for Mobile If you ever want to predict the near future for technology, look at what young coders are getting excited about. Years ago, search was the cool thing to get into. Before that, it was Java apps, and before that it was operating systems. Right now, the best programmers want to try mobile applications, particularly for the iPhone, but also for Google's Android operating system.