A roundup of some of the most interesting SEO and PPC news for February 2012.

1. SEO & PPC
Industry Update
February 2012

2. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Google Page Layout Algorithm Update
Google are now using page layout as a ranking factor.
“If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of
visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real
estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly
going forward.”
Google have stated that this algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches
globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches so most websites shouldn‘t notice any
impact.
Google also state that this algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold
to a normal degree but instead looks to target websites that place ads to an excessive degree or
make it hard to find the actual original content on the page (i.e. spammers).
If webmasters think they may be affected by the update and decide to remove any excessive ad
placement, Google‘s page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as it re-crawls
the website.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-
improvement.html

3. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Guava Verdict on Google Page Layout
Algorithm Update
“Off the back of the Panda update a year ago (Happy Anniversary!) there was a lot of speculation
that ad’s, particularly above the fold, were contributing to part of the update. Nothing was
confirmed at the time however this update does perhaps confirm that it was on, or has been on
the radar for a while.
Tom Wigley
“Google’s additional phasing out of Adsense for domains further highlights the search engine’s
evolving stance on demoting largely ad based (read low-quality) content from its index. The
service winds up on June 27th 2012, so expect and prepare for a bigger algorithm adjustment
post this closure.”
Tom Birmingham
“As they state “noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally”, so they are just targeting the
real poor content websites setup for ads alone, which is great and all in keeping with the ongoing
PANDA updates. It would be interesting to see if they penalise any real high profile websites that
may be abusing the ads to content ratio within the top fold - somehow I don't think so :-)”
Andrew Thomas

4. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Schema.org Markup for Videos
Schema.org has released further markup for videos which is now a joint effort between Google,
Microsoft, Yahoo! and Yandex meaning that webmasters can now focus on one common
standard.
Video content should be defined with an itemscope, an itemtype=‖http://schema.org/VideoObject‖,
along with the name, description, and thumbnailURL properties. You‘ll also need either the
embedURL — the location of the video player — or the contentURL — the location of the video
file.
Google have releases a series of videos on the webmaster EDU microsite below.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/
Further including the Schema Video Object page and Google announcement are below.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-schemaorg-markup-for-
videos.html
http://schema.org/VideoObject

5. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Guava Verdict on Schema.org Markup for
Videos
“Getting video content indexed quickly and efficiently will become increasingly important as more
and more publishers understand the business benefits and embrace the trend in online video
content. Google and other major search engines remain committed to better understanding video
content and we can expect more improvements of this kind in the coming months”.
Gary Moyle
“With the continued alignment of search and social this year it is going to be more important than
ever to make sure that anything shared is owned by you. Unless you have a very good reason,
self hosting video content will be a must. The micro-data markup set out by Schema is the next
step in making sure search engines understand this, so both them and you can utilise this content
fully.
Tom Wigley
“A great opportunity for early adopters to grab more visibility in video and web search results.
Search engines encouraging the development of rich media (which they can understand through
mark up), is only going to be positive for users, in both the search phase and their journeys to
more engaging websites .”
Tom Birmingham

6. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Bing Launches Linked Pages
• Bing launched Linked Pages which
effectively lets signed in users have more
control of how they show up on Bing search
results.
• How To Set It Up:
• (1) Login to Linked Pages with your
Facebook account.
• (2) Then grant Bing permission to post to
Facebook on the following screen.
• (3) Then Bing will show you a search query
for your name, go through the results (or
refine the query) and click ―link to me‖.
• Pages can easily be unlinked aswell
• http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/
search/archive/2012/02/22/make-a-good-
search-impression-with-bing-s-linked-
pages.aspx

7. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
HTML 5 and Meta Data
A few points came through very clearly from Maile Ohye‘s presentation at the Search Engine Strategies
Conference in London recently.
HTML5, HTML5, HTML5
We should be using it for everything.
Meta Data / Schema.org
There are lots of new tags that have been released recently.
We need to be using html 5 and deploying as many of the Schema.org tagging standards as appropriate
within the website.
http://searchengineland.com/google-recommending-new-video-schema-org-markup-112429

8. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
This Month’s Other SEO News
Google+ Badges Improvements – Webmasters can now configure a badge with a
width that fits their website design and choose a version that works better on darker
sites. Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count. Read more.
Top Search Queries Update – From 25th January Google now average only the top
position that a URL from your site appeared in meaning that search query data
should be more meaningful. Read more
Improved Related Searches in Google Image Search – Now when users hover
over the related searches links on the top of the images search results they get a
preview panel pop up with related images. Read more

9. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Publisher (direct connect) brand pages

10. PPC News

11. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
New Enhanced Ad Sitelinks
Sitelinks have now become a necessity for many AdWords advertisers consistently featuring in
top positions in the landscape, and have been proven to increase the overall CTR of an ad.
We have seen many changes made to the appearance and functionality of Google ad sitelinks
over the course of the last year; including increasing the number of sitelinks eligible to show at
any one time to 6, and rolling out Embedded sitelinks which although might have had potential,
seem to have rarely been utilised in ads due to the fuss involved in getting them to appear. The
next development in paid ad sitelinks from Google is ‗enhanced‘ ad sitelinks – these are not only
sitelinks in the original sense (one line of link text) but also feature additional text underneath,
essentially making your sitelinks appear as a multitude of additional ads!

12. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
New Enhanced Ad Sitelinks – Guava Verdict
“This feature will surely be great for further increasing the dominance of consistent top position
advertisers in the SERP. However, remembering that sitelinks can only be implemented at campaign
level, these advertisers will have to make extra sure that any enhanced sitelinks which might
potentially appear are relevant to all of their active ads in that particular campaign, to really make the
most of enhancing not just visibility but relevancy too.”
Sam Vandermark, Senior PPC Executive
“There's no doubt if you show enhanced sitelinks your CTR will go through the roof (Google say a 30%
increase on average), but it’s worth remembering that these will show only in the top positions, above
a minimum quality score threshold, and when you have sitelinks that match closely to other ad copy.
The most obvious example of when these things occur will be on branded searches. So if you have a
competitive branded landscape this is a great way to have a considerably larger share of the results
page than your competitors. If however you already dominate your brand space, be careful the extra
ad space on the page doesn't cannibalise your organic traffic.”
Matt Whelan, PPC Director

13. ‹#› | Copyright Guava Limited
Customise your Standard Reports in Google
Analytics
Google Analytics updates to reporting functions of
late have been increasingly focused on not only being
able to drill down into data further, but also making
customisation of this data much more feasible and
accessible.
Now GA users are able to customise reports while in
the Standard Reporting view, simply by clicking the
new ‗Customize‘ button in the upper navigation bar.
It‘s important to remember that not all Standard
Reports can be customised – this button will only
appear when the feature is available in tabular report
views.
This can be extremely useful for cases where you
happen to be looking through data and want to delve
You could also simply add new metrics to
a little deeper – you can use the ‗customise‘ function
to drilldown into data not usually accessible in your usual Standard Reports to provide
Standard Reports. additional insight into your account
performance.