Search marketers are familiar with signals. One of the truisms is the logic: if no one links to your site, it can’t be considered important, therefore why should it appear in the search results? The more quality links referencing your website or web pages, the better.
A lot of signals or factors behind links can affect the quality, relevance, and value of these citations. Perhaps there’s another signal to consider: Author.
If you’re interested in learning more, earlier today Search Engine Watch published an article I submitted on the topic of Author Authority. The idea came to me while reading a recent patent which was issued and assigned to Google. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback!
It’s been almost seven months since I last provided insight into the search engine market shares based on click through activity. After holding relatively steady for months, this latest update shows Bing has grown by 2.0%. Perhaps most interestingly, it’s no longer growing at the expense of Yahoo, which was previously the case.
Here’s the raw numbers:
Google
Yahoo
Bing
Other
September 7
78.68%
11.51%
6.80%
3.01%
September 14
78.35%
11.13%
6.50%
4.02%
September 21
77.43%
11.35%
7.11%
4.11%
September 28
77.65%
10.80%
7.27%
4.28%
October 4
77.78%
10.66%
7.23%
4.33%
October 12
77.78%
10.66%
7.21%
4.35%
October 18
77.89%
10.65%
7.29%
4.17%
October 25
77.83%
10.56%
7.56%
4.05%
November 1
77.75%
10.46%
7.66%
4.12%
November 8
77.96%
10.21%
7.75%
4.08%
November 15
77.60%
10.39%
7.59%
4.42%
November 22
77.59%
10.41%
7.67%
4.37%
December 22
78.43%
9.73%
7.86%
3.97%
Month of June 2010
75.93%
9.94%
9.82%
3.83%
Eightfold Logic collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.
It’s interesting how when you ask the right question, you get more questions. We ran a poll on mobile phone experience yesterday, and it generated a solid response, which is still going. I asked a few people about other questions they would like to see asked. Cindy Krum, who’s an expert in mobile marketing wants to discuss:
Thanks for the question Cindy - let’s see how the results turn out!
I’ve received quite a bit of email about the post showing how Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS powered phones are surging, but Google’s seem to drive more people online. I’m not ignoring Nokia’s offerings, nor do I dismiss the Palm systems, Microsoft mobile etc. In fact, I think Microsoft’s next version of mobile OS could be great!
The point is, each of the phones have definitely addressed different marketplaces. Google and Apple’s offerings definitely appear to be targeting the same groups, and at least from the perspective of enticing people to surf the web, Google seems to be doing a better job.
I’ve had a few people email me that they use apps on the iPhone to fetch info, and perhaps this accounts for the difference in numbers. Unfortunately, since most of the top apps are available for both platforms, this is unlikely to be a factor. As a side note, Apple’s App Store blows away Google’s.
So, tell us, which phone’s OS / Browser combination do you think offers the best web browsing User Experience? Remember, you don’t need to own one to vote for it. This has nothing to with best of email, call quality, etc.
To end 2009 we’ve updated and added to Enquisite’s Suite of search marketing tools and products. In fact, there are three major enhancements available to you today, plus a new product in pre-release:
The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
A Fresh New Look for a New Year
Feature Enhancement: Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
A really cool new product in pre-release
The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
We’ve added a new Enquisite Performance Dashboard to provide you with an at-a-glance overview of all your website’s critical search activity metrics as well as a summary of the performance data for each of your campaigns.
Marketers keep saying that 2010 is the year of the Dashboard, and if the prognosticators are correct, we’re kicking it off right with the first phase of a vital new report to help you understand what facets of your online marketing campaigns are driving your success.
By starting your day with a quick glance at your dashboard, you’ll be able to see trends in your search activity on a site-by-site basis, and know which campaigns you need to focus on for improvement and which ones you can refine to further enhance the performance of your business.
We recognize that everyone always wants slightly different information on their own dashboard, or to be able to pull information from one application into something else. We’ve got API’s for you!
A Fresh New Look for a New Year
When you next log into the Enquisite Performance Suite, you’ll immediately notice a dramatic improvement in the load speed, and look and feel of the platform. We are constantly listenening to your feedback on how to make the application easier to use, and have incorporated these suggestions into the new user interface. Among the many improvements of the new design, the new taskbar will greatly simplify the process of building and managing your campaigns. The overall navigation of the application has been streamlined to make the application easier to use and to improve your overall experience with it. Of course, none of that matters if the application doesn’t get faster too.
Enquisite is the fastest real-time analytics application on the market. Search marketers want to spend most of their time improving SEO and PPC campaigns, not analyzing and reporting. You need insights to act quickly. Enquisite is the only real-time search intelligence and decision support application on the market. With Enquisite, you don’t need to spend 80% of your time figuring out what to do, you can spend that time making a difference to the bottom line of your business!
Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
In our last release, Enquisite provided you with the ability to export segments created in Enquisite Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign. In the current release we enhanced this feature, giving you more options to where you export segment data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign.
This feature is found within the “Longtail” section of Enquisite Optimizer, which allows you to segment actual search referral traffic in real-time. Within the Longtail, you can partition actual search referral data on the fly by a variety of dimensions, including geographic location, referring search engine, actions, and conversions. Once you have created a segment of search referral traffic, Optimizer allows you to find the specific keyword phrases of searches from users of that segment that led them to your website. The feature now allows you to take these keywords that you discover and directly import them into either a new campaign or an existing campaign within Enquisite Campaign.
With this new feature, you can now quickly and easily take your analysis of past search referral data in Enquisite Optimizer and use it to better craft your future organic search-based campaigns within Enquisite Campaign.
A really cool new product in pre-release
As you are aware, Enquisite is a company founded on innovation. The very first beta product iteration back in 2005 included our patent-pending technology to extract, and report on keyword referral data based on the position the keyword was listed to browsers in the search engine results. That reporting was a break-through for search marketers hoping to report value more accurately to their clients, and also making it possible to be more sophisticated in optimization strategies. Now, with Google’s Personalized Search updates, that technology is more valuable than ever to search marketers.
That was our very first beta version. We’ve now got many very distinct patents-pending, some of which are incorporated into our Auditor, Optimizer and Campaign products. We’ve never sat still, and have continued to innovate to drive value for our clients.
This brings us to our latest product which we plan to release in Q1 of 2010. In the short term, this initial phase of the product will be available to partners as we ramp up. It’s a very cool, simple to use application which addresses the links pillar of SEO in a novel and fundamental manner. This product doesn’t compete with analysis apps like SEOmoz’s Linkscape. In fact, we’ll be incorporating some of SEOmoz’s data into ours to help your analysis: it offers search marketers something completely different, and incredibly valuable.
If links, and link-building are important to you, (yes they’re important for everybody), then you’ll need this product, or you’ll quickly be left in the dust by your competitors.
We’ll be announcing more around this new product as it approaches release in the New Year. If you want to be part of the pre-release as we move forward, let me know, and we’ll add you to the list as soon as possible.
Surprisingly, I haven’t posted a search engine market share report in 30 days. We did post lots of other interesting data in the interim however. This week, we’re getting back to the evolving search engine landscape. Of course, not a lot overall has changed since our last look at the data.
Google continues to own almost 80% of the actual click through market share. We recognize that our numbers are different from some other reports. The core difference is our reports reflect click through activity, as opposed to general activity. As demonstrated in the post “how long is normal,” while most search lookup activity is on one word queries, click throughs occur most often on three-word searches. The same holds true for the various engines. A lot of people apparently run searches on Bing / Yahoo, but they refine their searches prior to clicking through. Hence, Google shows a much higher market share when we examine just click through activity.
As it relates to the change in activity over the last month, Bing continues to show strong forward momentum, and Yahoo continues to fade away. Sad, really. Google’s decline which started in June appears to have stabilized at a dominating ~78.4% market share. If we look at areas outside the US, Google’s share is even higher.
For convenience, this graph shows the change in Yahoo / Bing / and other non-google shares since May 2009. If you want to look at the raw data that for back you can view it on the prior blog post about search engine market shares. The data table is getting so long however that we’ll just show the last 4 months from here on out. I’m using an “all-time” chart to show the trends though.
The raw data for those who prefer the numbers:
Google
Yahoo
Bing
Other
September 7
78.68%
11.51%
6.80%
3.01%
September 14
78.35%
11.13%
6.50%
4.02%
September 21
77.43%
11.35%
7.11%
4.11%
September 28
77.65%
10.80%
7.27%
4.28%
October 4
77.78%
10.66%
7.23%
4.33%
October 12
77.78%
10.66%
7.21%
4.35%
October 18
77.89%
10.65%
7.29%
4.17%
October 25
77.83%
10.56%
7.56%
4.05%
November 1
77.75%
10.46%
7.66%
4.12%
November 8
77.96%
10.21%
7.75%
4.08%
November 15
77.60%
10.39%
7.59%
4.42%
November 22
77.59%
10.41%
7.67%
4.37%
December 22
78.43%
9.73%
7.86%
3.97%
Enquisite collects data from a network of thousands of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.
Ongoing trends continue to bear out in the browser share numbers. It will be interesting to observe what happens in November and December with the Android numbers due to the Droid phone releases at Verizon (VZ). With their incredible reach, we might be able to observe the trends relating to number of phones that are activated reflected shortly in Android browser market share.
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
October 2009
MSIE (all)
67.59%
66.75%
66.61%
64.65%
Firefox
19.09%
21.99%
21.13%
21.70%
Chrome
1.83%
2.27%
2.38%
2.28%
iPhone
0.45%
0.59%
0.58%
0.66%
Android
0.04%
0.04%
0.04%
0.05%
About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors - a very significant sample size. The data reported solely reflects our data.
Should You Consider “Author Authority”?
August 6th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky
Search marketers are familiar with signals. One of the truisms is the logic: if no one links to your site, it can’t be considered important, therefore why should it appear in the search results? The more quality links referencing your website or web pages, the better.
A lot of signals or factors behind links can affect the quality, relevance, and value of these citations. Perhaps there’s another signal to consider: Author.
If you’re interested in learning more, earlier today Search Engine Watch published an article I submitted on the topic of Author Authority. The idea came to me while reading a recent patent which was issued and assigned to Google. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback!
Thanks!
Richard / @rzwicky
Tags: authority, authority score, GOOG, Google, linking strategies, links, marketer, Marketing, patent, Search Engines, SEO Link Building, social marketing
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