Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke. We are back here again today in Silicon Valley and today joining us Andrew Goodman Page One. Page Zero.

Andrew Goodman: Take a step back.

Brett Tabke: Well, how did you come up with the name Page Zero?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, I mean I think it was one of those placeholder company names when you start up a sole proprietorship and later incorporate it, but part of it was looking at just the whole idea of the media online and the first place you go I guess is page one and since we are analyzing the idea of a portal in our writing we thought take it back a level and discuss where the first page would be I guess would be the page zero. So pretty conviluted logic and I suppose the best place to rank above page one in the search results would be I guess some mystical page zero.

Brett Tabke: Page Zero, Page Zero.

Andrew Goodman: So, you have it.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think we have all got a story or two like that. Most recently some of your work has bee, you put out two books or is it three?

Andrew Goodman: Well, I have a couple of editions of my e-book and one edition of my print book with McGraw Hill, "Winning Results with Google Ad Words".

Brett Tabke: Right.

Andrew Goodman: And Mona Elesseily has a book on Yahoo that we just recently launched.

Brett Tabke: All right recently. First book on Yahoo Panama and I have been reading it here last 24 hours and it is just in depth. I've never seen anybody layout Yahoo quite this way really.

Andrew Goodman: Right. I think it is just one of those things that sits on your desktop if you do this for a living and if you need an answer to a question. If you need inspiration I suppose to try to actually boost those results on something that is not familiar, grab it.

Brett Tabke: Well, it is interesting a lot of good info in there that I had never seen laid down anywhere like we were just talking before we started here on the various tiers of Yahoo service we hear it mentioned here and there, but nobody has ever really told publicly what those levels are what kind of account spend you have to have to and what you are going to get for that support level, so. Um, also recently you were named program chair of Search Engine Strategies, Toronto, congratulations on that one.

Andrew Goodman: Thanks. So you know jumping off having done it for the first time, chairing a show this year in June. I will be doing it again next year so hopefully more growth in North America in general. These conferences and search engines obviously have been mind blowing in terms of numbers. You used to see all those sessions on SEO and the hot topics of the day and you seem to have new hot topics today and some of them are surprising you know social media and stuff like Quality Score on the page search side that no one would have come to two years ago because it didn't exist.

Brett Tabke: Right, back when we were fighting for audiences you know you have 20 people in the room you were feeling good. Now we have 20 people and we wonder what is wrong?

Andrew Goodman: Well, in New York actually Quality Score it had like 1000 people in a big hall. It is such a specialized topic that is really surprising.

Brett Tabke: It is amazing how much money is going into understanding this stuff, you know, education isn't easy. What has been biggest challenge, surprise or benefit being program chair versus being a moderator that you have done for years?

Andrew Goodman: I guess the benefit is more contact with everybody being in the way of lot of proposals, meeting all the people virtually who want to be involved and you know if you are just attending the shows you know maybe 25% of the folks, but the rest you do not come in contact with so that is a huge benefit. I guess in terms of surprise for Toronto you get to learn about some of the background of the business of conferences and of of them is that local at least for that area local drive up, driving distance business is huge. So we always have this idea you know it's a national show and we will you know, have people flying in from Calgary, Vancouver, etc, but the shocker is that you know six million metro area is what you are drawing most of your audience from.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, it is surprising how much of a local show these really are. We find out with ours as well. So lets talk a little bit about Google AdWords is it seems to be your most area of expertise in the search business. Quality Score and the changes that have gone on this last year have had a really profound effect on the entire industry, what is your current take on it?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, I mean we have to I guess look at how it came into existence first and then figure out what my take might be now. They have a couple of great people that were kind of assigned to this product I guess you know the algorithm is a product there is certain priorities they had when they wanted to come up with a new way to rank ads, but you know some of it was not just proactive entirely proactive around let's get a more relevant user experience. I mean that is what they say, but clearly they were the bad guys the bad ads they wanted to get off the page. So user satisfaction going up with the search results is always the number one thing for Google and they do have opinions about what's a rotten ad, but some of that comes from user's complaining or users not clicking obviously, but and then looking not just at clicks, but looking at data that shows people being dissatisfied by leaving the landing page quickly not only does that get factored in, but that actually kind of also created the impetus for designing the program. So what is going on now you know more emphasis on the site quality on landing page quality, but again just really to catch negatives like deceptive offers and arbitrage which is a whole separate topic. The bad kind of arbitrage which would be sending people to low quality sites that are just links, more links, and more ads.

Brett Tabke: One of the things we have been talking a lot with people this week has been about Google Universal and how it mainly has effected the organic results in pushing them down the page in some instances, in other instances really benefiting more well rounded sites that do have images, videos and alternative offerings. How has it effected AdWords though?

Andrew Goodman: You know I have been thinking a lot about this in terms of you know if you look at what we assume about the organic results today a winner site. Let's say you have a large content site with a lot of good pages that are currently ranking well obviously we know that is going to change. We know some of that is going to just be pushed down the page and it is going to be replaced by that multiple you know sources of content and objects on the same queries. For paid search you know that doesn't change. The page search positions stay exactly the same the premium spot on the top and the right hand margin don't move. So that actually means that the paid search program kind of comes through unscathed, and more consistent throughout.

Brett Tabke: You don't think we will see a big change in click-throughs and click-through rates and consequently effecting prices?

Andrew Goodman: You know that is an interesting question that depends on user intent so on informational queries that might be likely to have a video or all these other things it may well be Google is not showing a lot of high ticket ads on those queries anyway. Google I guess according to ComScore, are only showing ads on 56% of their search queries and 75% through Yahoo and Microsoft. So Google is happy to show pages without ads as well so I think again the shift won't be as great as we expect, on the paid side.

Brett Tabke: You were one of the early adaptors of blogging in the space. You got traffic going clear back to 1999 really and it was not, we did not call it a blog back then, but it was essentially a blog back then. Has it helped promote your brand?

Andrew Goodman: Well, it is one of those things any given day doesn't do anything for you promoting your brand, but it is hard to stop once you start and you do have that. I think the following is, you know it is that influence your audience so it is you know people might stumble on it, but in terms of sheer numbers it is not huge but it is all of the folks that are paying attention. So yeah, you know it helps people find you in strange ways online. So having a separate channel. Some of my ex-clients will type in my name and then get that website so not coming to my consulting site, not having my email address saved in their address book they come through the contact form and get back in touch and so you know I guess navigation happens in many strange ways.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. Organics, speaking of organics what is the biggest trend you have seen the last year aside from Universal and Quality Score has effected organic in a lot of ways I think, what is the biggest trend you have seen?

Andrew Goodman: I think the ongoing trend is just Google struggling to keep the junk results out of the index and you know they went through this whole thing of developing a Sandbox concept and most people watching us probably have dealt with you know this idea that new sites will just face a long delay in getting indexed and getting ranked. So the idea of supplemental index now and you know I had a couple of client sites and I do a lot of work with SEO, but you know you have a bunch of pages in supplemental because they are trying to kind of find all the low quality stuff and not index it, you can get caught in that I think. So to me the biggest trend is some of the tricksters and really bad ones I mean duplicate content, scrapers and all those guys are doing okay, they are winning and trusted sites are still often losing or some kind of recent scandal I think it was Dan Thies who wrote up something like proxy stealing or something you can look into it, but trusted sites losing you know losing their place to just bogus tricks to steal their traffic away so what is Google going to do about that? I mean not just that one trick, but in general you know are they going to move towards more of an authentication system like paid inclusion you know does Google webmaster central help and does that if they augment that that they get a history on webmasters they know you and trust you they probably have to be looking into that kind of stuff.

Brett Tabke: That is a lot of information Google has about our sites through webmaster central through Google Analytics through AdWords. Do you think we are giving too much information within across the web across various properties that they own?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, obviously we are and yet now that you know the barn door is open the horses have left there is no way I mean the incentive is not just money in terms of like Google Analytics being free, which is a great product obviously, but by time laziness you know a client wants you to do something and getting a report based on having Google's installed product is easier and always more integrated. So I do not really see us going in the other direction. I do think though for paid search advertisers there is something they can do in terms of I guess exhibiting more caution around Google coming direct to the larger advertiser. The small guy may be that optimization help is really helpful because they do not have the resources, but I think that idea that if you are a big bank Google can help manage your campaign is odd, because you have to win and Google can't make all of the competing companies in the auction win at the same time. So I think work with your agency or work in-house and don't work with Google on buying your traffic.

Brett Tabke: So you have run into the situation where Google has offered to optimize your client's campaigns?

Andrew Goodman: Sure. I am not going to say that I don't appreciate the service. We actually really appreciate a lot of the additional service Google now offers, and small to mid-sized business again probably going to need that help some of the help that is offered, but yeah you know large accounts are very important to Google, but I think they do need to respect the Eco-System. Agencies have always played a role and obviously the ad buyers want often want third party unbiased help in doing that.

Brett Tabke: Alright. We are out of time. Thank you for being with us Andrew. We appreciate it.