Today the Google Webmaster Team used Google Moderator links to a great set of Google questions as voted by webmasters today with good responses from the Google Webmaster Central team.

Example questions:

“What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?”

“Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?”

“Can you explain how the use of sub-domains helps / hurts a sites ranking?”

“Will Webmaster Tools ever give us an option to “disassociate” from sites that link to us? This feature exists in Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but not Webmaster Tools.”

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The Google Suggest feature, long a part of Google labs has behavior that will feel familiar to most readers of my blog. But for the remaining millions of casual users, which Michael Jensen refers to as the “Grandma Factor“, we may see some changes in search behavior. Now, a rumor once again has emerged that we’ll soon see it on the default Google search page in the USA.

As PPC marketers we will want to remain aware of the phrases that are suggested for our “money terms” and bid accordingly. Phrase match and Exact Match will start to become more important in many cases as Suggest “structures” the queries.

According to onestat, the 10 most used numbers of word phrases compared to October 2007 in search engines on the web are here…

#Words	I predict after Suggest	June 2008	October 2007
1	less	15.52%	15.22%
2	less	33.65%	31.91%
3	much more	26.27%	27.02%
4	much more	13.81%	14.75%
5	much more	6.13%	6.49%
6	more	2.61%	2.68%
7	more	1.14%	1.12%
8	more	0.51%	0.48%
9	more	0.24%	0.22%
10	more	0.12%	0.11%

I think that Google Suggest will shift these numbers quite a bit, and with it, the need to react as search marketers.

A few other thoughts.

1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines - without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without search suggest offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
2. Google Suggest Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position. For example, typing “ipod case” into Google with Suggest shows the first suggested feature as “ipod cases at Wal-Mart” - grabbing people and then offering up the organic page free from PPC ads that use “Wal-Mart” in their keywords.
3. Google Suggest Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
4. Google Suggest SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your tradename is offered in Google suggest results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
5. Google Suggest Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google suggest constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
6. Google Suggest Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google suggest can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
8. Hijacking Google Suggest May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google suggest so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.

I think that this will have a measurable impact on how people search - possibly forever.

Lee Odden hit a nerve with his last post.

“The [seo] challenge comes from a combination of:

• The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to
• Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

…. “Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

One undercurrent effect here is that there is a shift in responsibility for the success of a site from the SEO (with his bag of tricks, magic levers and dials) to the site owner (producing relevant, domain specific content worthy of links.) It also may spell a major shift in the role of SEO to content producer for some companies, and not a lot of SEOs will be able to deliver on this.

I’ve seen, time and time again, that getting a company to assign (talented) resources to the production of content is very difficult. Either because of laziness or lack of long-term mindset, there is a rift that develops between the consulting SEO’s recommendations and the company’s willingness or ability.

So, the clients nod at the ‘you’ll need to produce quality content‘ task discussion, when time comes, nothing gets done. Either they will avoid the task altogether or they’ll assign “an intern” or someone that’s already doing 3 jobs to the work… and the output hardly counts as link worthy.

That rift causes huge levels of stress and can be interpreted as a lack of ability on the SEO’s part. Saying “but you’re producing crap content” hardly mends the issue. It will be the responsibility of the skilled SEO to not only identify and recommend the content production, but also in educating clients on the value of this activity.

Image: Mikel Ortega

I’ve been asked lately for some examples of link bait headlines. Well, a quick scan of WebMD’s “most popular” stories should give you a good hint about the types of headlines and articles that work. People ‘voted’ these up honestly, without an agenda… and there are insights here…

Web MD Most Popular Stories

1. 41 Ways to Flatten Your Belly
2. 6 Sex Mistakes Men Make
3. 9 Tips for Flat Abs
4. Sex Myths vs. the Facts
5. 11 Supplements to Boost Your Libido
6. Signs of Sun-Damaged Skin
7. 7 Slimming Tips From the Skinniest State
8. 5 Weight Gain Shockers
9. 25 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married
10. Salmonella Outbreak: Tomatoes Safe to Eat

As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

I spent some time and produced this article regarding Adobe Acrobat SEO.

Some of the concepts covered

• Make sure the filenames are SEO friendly
• Update your Meta Data
• Check the password protection
• Add a specialty introduction page to help search engines
• Use reading order tags

Enjoy!