Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 13 years 11 months 28 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and each year in the past, he’s been a participant in the “search engine smackdown” at Pubcon.
This year he had the stage all to himself, and I was in the second row for the session as he talked about the current state of Google, and about where they are going in the future, and then I just sat idly by while he took some Q&A from the audience.
As always, Matt covered a lot, and there’s some great coverage of the session at places like Outspoken Media and Search Engine Land, and even an interesting mix of live blogging and chat at Search Engine Roundtable, but I thought I’d write down a few questions that I wish I had asked…
1. Why are certain industries (like ours) being excluded from localization? These industries rarely if ever show any local results, and this dates all the way back to the 7 pack, 10 pack and even earlier
- Web hosting
- Web design
- software programming
- Internet marketing
I suppose there’s an argument to be made that all these services can be done online, but often people really are looking for local help, like a web host in their home town, etc.
The speculation I’ve read is something akin to: “Too many SEO’s were abusing the system, and found it easy to game” or similar reasons, but I find that hard to believe, considering you still allow the locksmith industry to remain localized.
So what’s the deal? Why are our industries being singled out?
2. Why are there still so many inconsistencies from city to city and phrase to phrase in these new merged search results? At Pubcon it was about two weeks into it, and now they’ve been live for a month, yet they’re still a bit wacky.
For example, search “mechanical bull rental in Scottsdale” vs. “mechanical bull rental in Phoenix , and see how differently they appear!
Why should the composition be different? There are likely similar per-capita searches by people wanting some cowboy fun in either city, and just as many service providers, so it makes no sense.
For that particular phrase, Scottsdale is devoid of any localaization, while Phoenix has been completely converted. Other phrases though, such as “event planning” demonstrate that it’s s not a “city by city” thing, but rather “phase by phrase”.
Without getting too technical, how do we explain this sort of absurd inconsistency to a layperson / client who is coming to use for answers?
3. Why is Google Webmaster Tools not consistently sending malware notifications to site owners when malware is found?
In a WMT account with multiple domains, we’ve had to click into the domain before noticing any malware warning stripe, or seeing any notification message at all.
In the past two months I’ve written about it twice, once at SEMpdx and once here, and I’ve sent in messages to Webmaster Tools that have gone unanswered. I’ve Tweeted a bit, and had some folks reply with “Us too! We thought somethign was up…”
Anyway – this seems important….
4. Why did Google take away such a valuable research tool? Marketers the world over are mourning the loss (in the Adwords Keyword tool) of the SIMPLE ability to get approximate impression counts on a batch of phrases that WE paste without the “suggestions”.
While there’s certainly always room for innovation, and the tool has gotten better, sometimes we don’t WANT phrases added, removed, suggested, etc. and we just want the facts as we deem them necessary. Can we PLEASE get it
back?
5. Will you try our SEO Automatic app for Android?
OK, this one is totally self serving, and I admit it, but I think Matt would really be impressed!
I mentioned our SEO Automatic review to Matt at Pubcon 2009, and told him that we had an iPhone SEO review app, but now he has an Android, I think, and we released our instant SEO review for Android this year – Matt, I sure would love to hear your opinion! 😉
Besides these, what other questions might I have asked? What would you have asked?
Those are all valid questions to be posed, and I too would love the answers on that.
One extra question from our side in Bahrain, is why doesn’t google have a localised service at all over here? We can’t even list our business on google maps.