Here’s a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?

One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team’s impact.

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As most were involved actively with SEO are aware, an update to the Google Panda Algorithm was implemented on September 28th and again on October 5th. This appears to be part of ongoing revisions to the Panda algorithm that continue to cause wild fluctuations in many websites rankings. Confirmed on September 30th, Google’s new Panda 2.5 arrived. It is still unclear if Panda 2.5 had been reversed or updated.

DaniWeb, who has taken extreme measures to recover from the previous Panda updates, states that the site was hit hard again by this latest iteration of Panda. DaniWeb stated that traffic to the site dropped by as much as 50% on October 5th, which was the release of a previous update to the algorithm.

Search Metrics has stated that 10 of 30 sites being hit saw an 80-90% recovery in visibility, but also stated that many others saw little to no improvement at all.

In a post from Search Engine Watch, Simon Heseltine wrote a post asking "Was the Google Panda 2.5 Panic Warranted?" I have to respond with an emphatic, “yes.” Google continues to erode confidence in property by continually pulling the rug out from under its multitude of users. Many sites have still not recovered from the original Panda update at the beginning of the year, despite following all the best SEO and content practices and completing site overhauls.

As is usual with major updates to the Google Algorithm, there is much speculation over the full scope or impact of the update. This time is no different. With conflicting reports from Search Metrics and sites like DaniWeb it is difficult to know who is correct. The more likely reality is that they are both right. Even though there appears to be an abundance of information discussing tactics for recovering from Panda and despite the valiant efforts of site owners to recover, many continue to be hit hard, while others seem to weather the updates quite well.

More transparency from Google could help to quell the debates and to restore a measure of confidence in the search-engine giant. Releasing timely information regarding algorithm updates would save an enormous amount of frustration for their users. It is exceedingly difficult to apply a bandage if you cannot see where you are hemorrhaging from. Google is even getting pressure from Danny Sullivan to be more transparent with the Panda updates. This may or may not have prompted Matt Cutts to release a "weather report" regarding Panda:

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

Nielsen's Social Media Report

Nielsen’s Social Media Report

You may have heard recently that the Nielsen Corporation, the same folks who publish Television ratings, would soon be providing social media reports for Facebook.  Well Nielsen wants to take the whole social media pie by releasing a report on Monday that looks at the big picture.  Marketers hold on to your pants, this is likely to include analytics, insight for audience measurement, and so much more.

Nielsen’s Social Media Report | A Sneak Peek

We’re not sure how NYTime’s MediaDecoder blog already had a chance to look at Nielson’s highly anticipated social media report, but we’re not complaining and we’d like to share that with you.  As social media is becoming a huge factor in consumer’s lives, you’d be a fool not to pay attention to these revealing statistics and facts found in “State of the Media: The Social Media Report.”

“Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to the report, compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail.

That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.

“Social media is becoming increasingly mainstream,” said Radha Subramanyam, senior vice president for media and advertising insights and analytics at Nielsen in New York.

As a result, “there’s a need for companies to engage even more strategically in the space” than they already do, she added.

The social media brand that Americans spend the most time with, the report finds, is Facebook, by an enormous margin. During May, when the report was compiled, Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on facebook.com from computers at home and work. (That was up 6 percent from 50.6 billion minutes in May 2010.)

“We’ve been seeing that for a while,” Ms. Subramanyam said of the dominance of Facebook in the social media realm. The reason is simple, she added: “It’s an incredibly fun way to spend time.”

Behind Facebook during May was Blogger, at 723.8 million minutes; Tumblr, at 623.5 million minutes; Twitter, at 565.2 million minutes; and LinkedIn, at 325.7 million minutes.

Facebook reaches 70 percent of active Internet users in the United States, the report says, and of the visitors to Facebook, 62 percent were female.”

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/report-details-rise-of-social-media/

It was also revolved that women watch more videos on social media sites then men, so this is something that you marketers should keep in mind when creating your YouTube Channel content.

Nielsen’s Social Media Report | What To Expect

So now that you have some very generalized statistics from Nielsen’s social media report, we wanted to share with you what you may be able to expect in Monday’s report and some things that probably won’t be included.

Nielsen is most likely going to include some demographical statistics for the major social media sites, which depending on your industry may help reveal what social media sites you should focus more attention on.  We’d also expect Nielsen to take a look at what kinds of posts are the most effective and the half-life of interactions on the major social media sites.

Its almost guaranteed that you won’t see any analytics or stats for Google+as it is still invite only, but I’m sure Nielsen will dig there nose in there as soon as they can.  I’m sure it will come soon after Google+ opens up its social media platform to businesses.

If you enjoyed reading “What’s Revealed in Nielsen’s Social Media Report?” check out more social media news and updates right here at BlackBoxSocialMedia.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

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SEO Book.com

Facebook may have 750 million users, but the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report indicates that United States users are not happy. Facebook is the lowest scoring site of all the companies listed in the report with a 66 percent customer satisfaction rating, according to the survey conducted last month. The survey measures social media, portals and search engines.

What is interesting is that Google + had not been formally introduced yet. With so many Facebook customers saying they are unsatisfied with the site, the outlook for Google’s attempt to reach social media users has brightened. In a press release issued by ForeSee Results, which conducted the survey, the president and CEO remarked on the results. 

“We don’t know yet how Google+ will fare, but what we do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI and Facebook is one of the lowest,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. “An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience.”

Surprisingly, the social media site ranked the highest in customer satisfaction was Wikipedia, with a 78 percent satisfaction rate. YouTube was the next closest with 74 percent. MySpace, one of the pioneers in social media, was not even included in the survey because there were not enough users to sample.

The news was not all good for Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is continuing to grow and users seem to like it. Bing’s satisfaction rating was 82 percent, just one point behind Google at 83 percent. Bing still doesn’t have the large numbers that Google has but it does make up about 17 percent of the search engine market, according to the report.

The survey does not represent everyone but it is a good indicator of the state of social media and the search engines. It will be interesting to see how Google + ranks when the next survey is conducted and how it will rank against Facebook.

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HigherVisibility

Yesterday on the Official Google Blog, Matt Braithwaite posted an article about transparency reports, including some very frank details about Google’s dealings with removal requests and user data requests.

Google, in their typical style of blowing us away with information, has given users multiple ways to view the information, broken down by country, date range, and request types. The detail goes right down to traffic by time and location, allowing users to actually visualize things like the Egyptian protests.

It is also very interesting to see the compliance of requests, showing an understanding of internet awareness and rights. Most countries had a rather high success rate in petitioning Google to remove information, South Korea managed 32, 152 requests with a sterling 100% success rate.

India however was at the opposite end of the spectrum with a %22 rate of compliance to their removal requests.

The only place I wasn’t impressed by the level of detail was the geographical sources of the removal requests.

I wasn’t expecting to get street address details, but it would have been great to see what areas the complaints originate from vs. a country level map.

Unless Saskatchewan is really where all the complaints from Canada came from?

Still this is a new level of transparency for Google:

• First time revealing compliance % for requests
• More information on request sources
• Breakdown of user, local, federal, police, government, etc.
• Notification of effected users by request
• Clear metric of Government influence on search results

Amazingly there’s still a rally cry for the FTC investigations into Google.
While I support honesty and thoroughly unbiased policing, I do have to wonder what anyone expects to learn that previous investigations hasn’t turned up. Especially when looking at a company as transparent as Google.

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

The Panda Farmer update has not hit the UK yet but when it does the effect it will have on everyday websites could be huge. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk.

We’ve been analysing quite few sites by looking at their Google Organic non-brand traffic from the US via the Custom Report below (click here to use) and there are some very worrying signs.

The image below is via SEObooks Panda preparation post – we have seen much bigger drops using the method above for certain sites.

What we have been doing is taking all the search traffic from the before and after the update (which was on 24th Feb) and looking to see which keywords and pages have dropped the most. To do this you need to download the data for the 4 weeks before and then compare to the 4 weeks after using the magic of vlookup in Excel. This gives you a view on your biggest problem pages.

One interesting thing we found is that the update is definitely not sitewide – there are a number of sites we looked at where the update had only hit pages of a certain type. For example ecommerce sites where the category pages were fine but product pages were hit hard.

Since this algorithm is US only we can easily compare the results before and after – simply search for the keyword on google.com and then add the &gl=us paramter to the end – click here and then here to see an example for “how to paint a wine glass”. Note that to get a fair test you need to use queries where Google is unlikely to favour UK sites.

Problems for ecommerce sites

So the first line of this post mentioned ecommerce sites. This update is going to cause major issues for anybody that has a large site with product descriptions that are duplicated across lots of other sites. If you have a few of these it’s not an issue to rewrite them but a lot of big ecommerce sites have 10,000+ products and to rewrite those is going to be a major headache.

When the update hit the US bloggers and the press were mainly quite pleased about the update as nobody likes the idea of content farms ranking. When the update hits the UK, where there are very few content farms, a lot of legitimate ecommerce sites are going to suddenly find themselves labelled as a content farm with 50% of Google Organic traffic disappearing overnight.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Panda Update: Ecommerce sites at risk & an Analytics report to show how it’s hitting your US traffic today

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Blogstorm