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Apple, YouTube, Yahoo, Twitter: Winners Across Europe In Google Panda Update

Panda

Searchmetrics has been publishing Google Panda updates on winners and losers across Europe for the past week. On its Web site, marketers can find information on companies in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, France, and Germany.

The Google Panda algorithm aims to improve the quality of search results.

The SEO company Searchmetrics determined winners and losers across Europe based on changes during the previous week in its organic performance index. A drop in visibility does not necessarily amount to a drop in traffic because direct traffic, social traffic and super long-tail traffic is not factored into the statistics, Marcus Tober wrote in a blog post.

On April 12, Google rolled out the Panda algorithm update globally. The blog post explains that for most languages, this change impacts typically between 6% and 9% of queries where users might notice. This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected nearly 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount. Google launched the change for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Although headquartered in Germany, the company also supports retail stores in the United States. On Tuesday, Crate & Barrel reported selecting Searchmetrics as their search engine optimization (SEO) tool, supporting competitive analysis and the ability to scale campaigns up or down.

Crate & Barrel has come a long way in adopting technology that drives online advertising and sales. Several years ago, while in the South Coast Plaza store in Costa Mesa, Calif., the salesperson would not allow me to purchase on the first floor of the store something I found shelved on the second floor. Yep. The sales staff could not ring up items from the second floor on the first. Nor could they ring up items from the first floor on the second. Merchandise on the physical store floors was tied to two different inventory systems. How crazy is that?

I can't tell where the company stands when it comes to integrating inventory systems, but I can point to a free iPad app that enables consumers to browse through an electronic Crate & Barrel catalog from Google Catalogs that launched last week.

Earlier this month, Searchmetrics released a study revealing how marketers could improve their visibility in Google searches by making video and images part of their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

The company analyzed universal search content such as image, news, video, blog and maps and found that video was displayed most often. In fact, video results appeared in more than 60% of all searches where universal search results are included in the top 100 listings. More than 30% of images fell in line next, followed by shopping at nearly 20%, and news at less than 10%.

Video and images have the greatest visibility in Google searches. Searchmetrics suggests increasing the volume of both types of content, and then optimizing it for search engines on the brand's site and on third-party sites such as YouTube and Flickr. The Searchmetrics study was based on an analysis of the top 100 search engine results displayed by Google for a database of approximately 28 million search terms over a period of four months, between February and May 2011.

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