Google Panda 2.5: Losers Include Today Show, The Next Web; Winners Include YouTube, Fox News

Searchmetrics has a pretty good track record of figuring out who lost after one of Google’s Panda Updates. Among the latest victims of this week’s Panda Update 2.5, some unexpected surprises: popular tech blog The Next Web, blog aggregator Technorati, and NBC’s The Today Show. Winners include Google’s own YouTube, along with Fox News and several other mainstream news sites.

Apparently, that patented SEO process that Business Wire just announced isn’t much help to the company. It was listed among the victims, along with PR Newswire.

About The Losers

The names are from a report that Searchmetrics has just released.

It’s worth noting that that Searchmetrics doesn’t really know the degree any of these sites has actually been harmed by the Panda update. The company computes a “visibility” score for a wide-range of keywords. The companies named above, along with others, have lost visibility for those terms.

It could be despite this, these companies have gained visibility for terms that aren’t checked. It could also be that the terms they’ve lost visibility for weren’t sending important traffic that converted into sales or ad revenue.

Those caveats aside, it’s been pretty common that after Searchmetrics has issued one of its winners / loser reports, some of the sites have stepped up to confirm the assessments.

Here’s the full losers list:

For Every Loser, There’s A Winner

There’s also a winners list. Once again, Google’s own YouTube site is winner. It tops the latest list, something that’s sure to raise controversy in a climate when Google’s facing criticism that its search results favor itself. Google’s Android.com is also in the top winners list. So is Google-partner AOL.com.

A site that won’t be gossiping over the news is Perez Hilton, among the winners. And while magazine Motor Trend took a hit, magazine US Weekly rose. Other big winners were mainstream news sites like the Washington Post, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal.

While YouTube was the top winner, TV.com from CBS Interactive was in the number two spot. In fact, on a percentage basis, it did better than YouTube.

Also notable on the winners list is HubPages, which was hit hard by previous Panda updates but claimed to have recovered back in July.

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Google+ Gains Nearly 10 Million Users In First 2 Days Of Being Open To The Public

A Google+ post by Paul Allen, founder of ancestry.com and a self-proclaimed “unofficial Google+ statistician, shows significant growth of Google’s social network since opening to the public. These growth rates were only first seen during the first few weeks of field testing when the user numbers were very low. In terms of the current growth spurt Allen states:

“it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding — 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already.”

His previous Google+ users estimate was 28.7 Million users on September 9th a number that has increased to 43.3 million current users. He also stated that “most of the growth coming in the last 2 days.”

So what does this mean? Google+ may be cementing themselves as a credible social network, but the mass exodus from Facebook just isn’t happening. Facebook is still the powerhouse network with 800 million+ users and all of the layout complaints aren’t adding up to astounding departure numbers … yet.

Other notable Google+ timeline stats are:

• Over 1 million mark (1.7 million) – 7/4
• 4.5 million user mark – 7/10/11
• 10 million user mark – 7/12/11

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Twitter Renews Deal With Bing; Google Deal Remains MIA

Twitter and Bing announced that they have extended their deal that allows Bing to tap into Twitter’s information in a cutesy exchange on Twitter itself. As for Google, which Twitter’s been on the outs with since July, Twitter says there’s no similar happy news to report.

Dear Twitter, I Love You! Kisses, Bing

Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner compiled the exchange using the awesome Storify service, as you’ll find

It’s perhaps the first press release via Twitter conversation that I know of.

Details? You Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Details!

But how about details? How long is the deal for? Is Microsoft paying $30 million for it, as AllThingsD
here:

reported to be rumored earlier this year?

A Microsoft spokesperson told me simply:

I can confirm that Bing is extending its collaboration with Twitter. We are not disclosing terms of the deal.

Interestingly, when I last asked Microsoft about its deal with Twitter back in July, I was told:

We won’t disclose the terms of the deal, but it’s a long term arrangement that we’re pleased with, and plan to keep in place as long as it’s delivering benefit for people who use Bing.

With the two companies announcing a renewal, that suggests it wasn’t as “long term” as Microsoft had said. AllThingsD pegged it as expiring around the end of the year; it was announced in October 2009, so a two-year October 2011 expiration date certainly made sense.

Google Who?

Meanwhile, what about Google? There’s a little slam against Google in that conversation above:

@bing Totally! Search w/o Twitter = old news. You & @MSN are amazing at using Tweets to make search better & help people stay in the know.

Ouch! Google without Twitter equals old news. I asked Penner if there was news on the Google front. “Nope.”

That, along with the tweet exchange, makes me think that Twitter and Google are more apart on renewing than ever. I have asked Google for an update, but I haven’t gotten a reply yet.

Google Surviving Life Without Twitter

Of course, Google’s largely come through not having Google Realtime Search with few issues. The company has told me plenty of journalists sorely miss the tool, which was mainly powered by Twitter’s information. But ordinary users seem not to have noticed.

During the recent East Coast earthquake, I also did a spot check shortly after the news to see if the lack of tweets in Google’s search results had an impact. A little, but I was still finding pretty fresh information.

Overall, the staring game between the two companies seems likely to continue. I think Google is a lot better with Twitter information. Indeed, given that Google did a huge press event around the launch of Google Realtime Search, now acting like it’s not so important seems pretty odd. Unless, it turns out, it’s not — and the launch was simply hype.

At the very least, you’d expect Google at this point to relaunch Google Realtime Search with content from Google+ as a replacement. Not being able to search through content on Google’s own social network, from a company that specializes in search, is pretty absurd.

Google Realtime Search wasn’t just Twitter search, and the ability to use Google to search through content on other social networks got axed when Google closed it. So bring it back, even if it comes back without Twitter — and get moving on that Google+ search feature.

Twitter’s Where On Bing?

As for Bing, search without Twitter isn’t old news. It’s old, old news. Bing’s had a deal with Twitter since October 2009, and that deal hasn’t really seemed to do much to attract visitors over to Bing.

Indeed, unlike Google’s implementation, you can be hard-pressed to find tweets being visible. For example, in a search on “twitter” at Bing, I don’t see today’s conversation between Bing and Twitter appearing at all:

I do get ordinary news results near the bottom of the page, but I don’t get any actual tweets. Nor do a I get a link to Bing Social Search – the primary way to find tweets on Bing — via the Bing menu at the top of the page. In contrast, when Google offered Google Realtime Search, this type of link was prominent.

Congrats, Topsy

Overall, the real winner in this remains Topsy. If you’re trying to find tweets beyond a day or more, Topsy is your best resource, even over Bing. For more on that, and the backstory of the Twitter-Google deal not being renewed, see my stories below:

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Why QR Codes Could Disrupt Your SEO URL Strategy

EO has greatly influenced web information architecture over the years, particularly with respect to URL structure. I think we’d all agree, it has long been considered gospel to “optimize” URLs at the category (or product-levels) by including at least a sprinkling of keywords, as a ranking signal and to make URLs more human readable and clickable.

However, mobile’s disruption of marketing knows no bounds. This common SEO practice can also be a liability when it comes to mobile barcode marketing - where URL size and branding matter, but keywords do not. In this two-part series, I’ll make a case for QR, illustrate how QR is expanding our idea of URL optimization, and explore options to address the problem.

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Official: The Google Wonder Wheel Is Gone

A Google spokesperson has informed Search Engine Land that the Google Wonder Wheel feature has been taken offline.

The spokesperson said that the search tool was removed due to the “initial stage” of the Google site redesign announced earlier this week.

The Google Wonder Wheel along with a number of other search refinements were formally introduced at the 2009 Searchology event but actually became available as part of a test a couple of months earlier.

Wonder Wheel was used by SEOs, SEMs, and advertisers as a way to visually identify relationships between a search term(s) and related searches using the Google database. As you moved from one set of terms to another results would change.

It could help this user group discover related keywords and ideas to explore for possible purchase as AdWords or for further exploration.

Another group of users who also used Wonder Wheel for keyword discovery and to spot relationships and new concepts were educators, librarians, and students.

For example, a librarian might use it to help a user find new words to search with not only with but also using other databases. A teacher or student might use Wonder Wheel to identify ideas for a research project.

Will Wonder Wheel be back and available soon? Google didn’t provide a timeline or commit one way or another if it will or will not be available in the future.

A quick review of the Google Help Forums shows that at other times Wonder Wheel was inaccessible to users for various amounts of time.

So, stay tuned for updates.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago we wrote about Google taking several verticals offline. We learned then that Google failed to let users know about the change but then quickly admitted to the error and publicly apologized.

As we said then and will say again now, taking a service offline is up to the company. Users are free to go elsewhere or share their opinions with Google. What we hope for is simply for the company to let users know what’s going on versus waiting around, speculating, and wasting time.

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Report: Bing To Power Baidu English Results

China’s dominant search engine Baidu is trying to expand its reach beyond Chinese-language speakers. Reuters is reporting that Baidu and Microsoft have done a deal that will offer Bing powered English-language results for the Chinese search engine.

It’s not clear whether this is limited to China or will be used in other markets where English is spoken. We’ve asked Microsoft for some additional color and perspective.

Baidu controls roughly 80 percent of the search market in China, according to several sources. Google is second with approximately 19 percent.

A Bloomberg report suggests the Baidu-Bing partnership is limited to providing English results to domestic Chinese users. If so those results will likely face the same censorship rules that Google rebelled against early last year.

We’ll update this post if Microsoft gets back to us.

Postscript: A Microsoft spokesperson offered the following general statement and confirmation of the deal:

Baidu and Microsoft have announced that Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine, will provide English search results to Baidu users in China.

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As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline

Yesterday, we reported that Google Realtime Search had mysteriously disappeared. Today comes the reason why: Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results has expired, taking with it much of the content that was in the service with it.

Google sent us this explanation:

Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.

While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Google also stressed that went Google Realtime Search relaunches — something it says will happen but with no set time frame — it will include content from a variety of sources and not just be solely devoted to Google+ material. The company said:

Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.

Google Realtime Search had carried content from a variety of services beyond Twitter, including Facebook fan page updates. When we last wrote about the service in April, when it added Quora and Gowalla content, this was the full source list:

• Twitter tweets
• Google News links
• Google Blog Search links
• Newly created web pages
• Freshly updated web pages
• FriendFeed updates
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates
• Google Buzz posts
• MySpace updates
• Facebook fan page updates
• Quora
• Gowolla
• Plixi
• Me2day
• Twitgoo

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