Firstly, let me point out that I am not a Lost fan, I am still yet to sit through an entire episode and as a result was left bewildered this morning at the fact my colleague felt compelled to wake up at the crack of dawn on 24th May (on a Monday of all days) to watch the globally aired last ever episode at 5am – Then sit on a Lost Forum for another few hours.

After partaking in some universal questioning of his sanity, one thing has become clearer as the day has progressed…- I appear to be part of a minority on this one. If search traffic and trends are to be believed that is.

“Lost Forum” – high impact on Google search

‘Lost forum’ has risen to be the 35^th most popular search term in Google by lunch time on Monday, a phenomenal achievement and indicative of the vast online community this series has created over its 6 seasons:

Google trends data indicating search traffic during the past 24 hours (Pacific Daylight Time) for “Lost Forum”

This huge surge in online activity surrounding the last Lost episode is evident throughout Google  – when using Google Trends earlier a persistent theme was apparent in the Hot Searches from the USA.

Five of the ten results displayed here are centred around the Lost finale, even considerably eclipsing the news of a celebrity death. (that of Brittany Murphy’s husband)

A similar scenario occurs in Google Insights, this time concerning UK data, with searches for ‘Lost finale’ rising by a huge 200% today.

How has Google Performed for Lost?

So has Google delivered on this mass surge in Lost related searches, even after some slightly iffy search results recently? Let’s take a look at the Google UK (The Web) results using the first keyword term examined here, ‘Lost forum’:

Google searches for Lost

It appears Google has served the grieving Lost fans well with a 10 out of 10 for relevancy here in the Serps, though a slight slip with www.officiallost.com returning a rather unattractive ‘This account has been suspended” page. Bad luck to them for the biggest day in their history, and no page is available.

The forum www.4815162342.com appears to have been overcome by the surge in traffic today and as a result in temporarily unavailable, though many other returned results, such as www.losttalk.net and darkufo.blogspot.com, offer threads addressing theories, explanations and general counselling following the finale of Lost.

Overall a good job from Google here (if not so much the returned sites in some cases), allowing a global nation of Lost fans to mourn as one as yet another long-running series goes to the great box set in the sky.

Lost – Long Term positions in Google

P.s. To see who else has been benefitting from this traffic surge results from January 1^st to the present (24/5/10) are illustrated below for the term ‘Lost’:

Article By Kim Shepherd

As Andy posted a while ago in “Has google shot itself in the foot over UK serps?”He mention that the search “Southbank Restaurants” returned not restaurants in London’s south bank as you would imagine, but Melbourne results. This included a map of the Melbourne southbank – even when you did a search in Google UK, UK search only.  So what’s the update on this almost a year on:

No change then. Interestingly Google are still getting money for this from UK sponsored links for Toptable et al. We’ll keep you posted.

If we take a look at one of the ‘key’ search terms that many voters will be using over the course of the day that could potential sway an undecided voter – election 2010:

Hardly ground breaking stuff from any one of the political parties hey? This could have been an opportunity for any one of the parties to target, considering the popularity of the term. However, all four party websites have chosen to ignore this and concentrate on pushing their own party terms – rather than targeting the majority. If we take a look at the term ‘Conservative election’ we can see a pretty strong position for the Tories:

The website has been pretty consistent at the top of Google over the past two months, however if you take a look at Labour, they have only recently ‘peaked’ in April:

This improvement coincided with Gordon Brown releasing information on the General Election on May 6th, however prior to this the Labour Party were not visible for a party specific keyword term. On the other hand The Liberal Democrat Party are a little more erratic than both parties:

The Liberal Democrats have a number of subdomains, including European specific URL and Manifesto URL – which is causing a conflict with the main website. One of the main obvious issues is the constant deleting of pages across the website, rather than 301 redirecting to a useful page. For example, the following URL was being returned at the end of April:

http://www.libdems.org.uk/noidcards/

An interesting piece of data we’ve extracted from our tools is that the Conservative party are actively targeting the ‘Manifesto’ keyword terms of the other two main political parties as highlighted in the chart below:

Moving along to the Newspapers, its clear to see that the top performers online since the Election news came about at the start of April – with the Guardian constantly performing on page one for the keyword term ‘Election 2010′:

Its interesting to see that since the announcement that the Guardian are backing the Liberal Democrats they have occupied top positions within Google UK, whilst Conservative supporters, The Daily Mail, only appear within the SERPs for a negative piece on the party entitled:

General Election 2010: Liberal Democrats and the dirty tricks of the real nasty party | Mail Online

Lastly, looking at the broadcasters, its no surprise to see the BBC on page one for the keyword term ‘Election 2010′, whilst ITV have improved over the past four weeks:

The BBC and ITV have a dedicated section, whilst Channel 4 have an individual article returning in Google’s SERPs. It is clear to see that each political party has ignored the potential to rank highly for a selection of generic keywords terms, focusing on party specific terms – which core voters would search for anyhow. The Guardian and Telegraph perform very well for a number of election keyword terms across the board.

The chart below is the original chart that clearly identifies the surge by a number of authority websites (IMDB), however for a completely irrelevant audience:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with our charts – the image above highlights five URLs for the keyword term Movies from March 16th 2010 to April 19th 2010 in Google UK. As you can clearly see there has been a sharp rise for the Italian, Spanish, French and German URLs in this time period. I even documented on my Twitter account that I’d noticed five IMDB results on page one in Google UK! If we take a look at a more up to date chart, we can see that the URLs have dropped from the top one hundred all together:

It would appear on April 25th something was effectively ‘turned off’ or most probably ‘turned back on’. The main issue appears to be that the Geo filter that Google applies for its country specific search is ‘weakened’ now and again – meaning that websites with authority can rank within Google UK, however the content that some of these websites offer up aren’t relevant to a UK audience. If you don’t believe me or anyone else in the SEO community, why not take a look at the trends over the past six years:

So up to mid 2009, there was a declining trend of seaches using the term ‘UK’ within their search queries, something that you would expect as search engines get better at determining your location. However, since we first reported the major change in Google’s algorithm, which opened up the UK SERPs to non relevant foreign websites the use the keyword ‘UK’ has shot up dramatically. Of course there will be search terms that use the keyword ‘UK’ based upon current events (i.e. ‘UK election’), although I am fairly confident in saying that the rise in ‘UK’ related search terms are due to the irrelevancy of the current crop of results. Matt Cutts stated that ‘you shouldn’t always expect to see only UK results in your queries’ – something I totally agree with but this is a question of relevancy and ‘how useful’ (as Matt has stated) these websites are to a UK audience.

So what are your thoughts on the matter? Are Google actively looking to improve the UK SERPs or is there a hidden agenda behind all of this? You may even believe there is nothing wrong with the UK SERPs, I know our clients do considering all the traffic we help to send their way!

Further reading:
SEO Roundtable – Google UK drops UK country filter?
Matt Cutts – Addresses Google UK SERPs issue
Webmaster World – Discussion on changes in April within Google UK

Political Party Leader searches

Here are the main leaders Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and “The Green Party” in place of leader Caroline Lucas to even things up. I have thrown in Nick Griffin here of the BNP to show the impact his appearance on Question Time had at the end of 2009. Most notably, the BNP leader’s search was greater then than the main party leaders’ has been in the early run up to this election 2010. Just goes to show what a bit of media hype can have on the search results.

Gordon Brown in the lead all year -but for the wrong reasons

Without Nick Griffin on this chart, the Green party had a spike of their own around last Summer, which coincides with the Brighton by-election victory as well as other summer news involving Green issues. Gordon Brown has however generally been ahead all year with plethora of media struggles including the bullying issue etc. But David Cameron and he are now pretty much level pegging in the race to be Internet’s most searched political leader.

Vince Cable and Nick Clegg

Vince Cable wasn’t taken that seriously when he was caretaker leader of the Lib Dems after Menzies Campbell departed. Nick Clegg on the other hand hadn’t fully been accepted by the media and the voters before the campaign started. However in search Vince Cable reflects his resurgence in the media and since his performance on Channel Four news.

Political Party searches on Google

The most important one is which party is getting searched for the most. People will be searching to see particular legislation promises or what policy changes are going to ensue with an election victory. If it was down to PageRank the Tories would win (as Labour has a horrid set of redirects on its homepage at the time of writing). Lib Dems would come a close second. However as if Google Insight search results were a direct reflection of how we are going to vote in a few weeks time, the scores below show pretty much what the polls are showing – that it’s too close to call, and that the Green Party and Lib Dems may surprise us come the 2010 election.

Cheryl Cole thrown in..

To put these searches into perspective, Cheryl Cole has been thrown in. The ex-Mrs Ashley Cole out stripped all the other political leaders in the run up to the 4 week campaign. But how will it progress? Will Wayne Rooney be searched for more than the political leaders? Or will the UK population surprise us all by actually taking an interest in the election?

When was Google founded?

• Google was founded in 1996

Who founded Google?

• Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford College, in California. They set out to find a way of sorting the internet’s then 10million pages in order to make them easily searchable.

How many searches are made on Google every month?

• There are 76 Billion searches made on Google every month, Worldwide

How many searches are made on Google every day?
2.5 Billion Searches are made on Google every day, in 40 different languages

How does Google generate revenue?

• Google Adwords was created in 1998 as a way of generating revenue by using keyword searches to sell relevant ad space to advertisers.

• Google auctions ad space for particular keywords, with the advertiser bidding an amount they are prepared to pay Google ‘per click’ that it generates.

• However, the highest bidder is not necessarily the winner. The winner, is determined by the following formula: P = B x Q (Price = Bid x Quality)

• This is devised in order to arbitrate a balance between quality and relevance

What is Google’s revenue – How much does Google earn?

• In the last quarter of 2009 Google made $200 every second, summing a quarterly total revenue of $6.5 billion

“The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook’s history and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information on the site. We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent.” Mashable

But for how long will they remain humbled, I wonder? Can we really see Facebook simply adopting a stance of contentment; happy with merely stamping their name on the title of News Feed Inventor?! Doubtful.  Or will they, as many suspect, be sueing  all who infringe the technology ?   With the extremely successful launch of Google Buzz only last week- a network that’s been said to merge the most popular features of Facebook and Twitter- is there a chance that Facebook will use the patent as a tool to stand in the path of their newest rival?

The patent in question is awarded to Facebook specifically for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. About being the operative word according to Allfacebook.com, who say this rules out legal action against networks that only use status update feeds, i.e. Twitter.

So this gets Twitter out of the firing line, but what about Google Buzz? The network has already been criticised regarding issues with privacy, namely the fact that it works alongside its user’s Gmail accounts, giving a large number of people free access to private email addresses.  Its this, and it’s timing that highlights a rather uncanny parallel to the “Invasion of Privacy” headlines that were (ironically) doing the rounds when Facebook first introduced us to the even then- contoversial News Feed? Despite it now being a popular feature on most if not all social networking sites, when it first launched in 2006 it was thought by some media experts that,  “If Facebook is broadcasting your every move to your friends, you might be more cautious about using the site.” (Mashable.com)

Interestingly, the sceptics also asked- “Will users poke around less now they have all the updates on one page?”, and, “Perhaps the feeds will entice them to visit more pages, and become addicted to the stream of updates?” Despite our knowing that the latter is very true of today’s social networking culture, the point is, that as little as four years ago we didn’t have the foggiest which way it was all going to go. Until Twitter exploded that is!

We all know that out of all sites people spend the longest on Facebook but where’s it all heading next? Can it get even more popular? What’s going to be the next revelation in social networking technology?  And most importantly how big an impact is Facebook’s rights to the News Feed going to have on the shaping of things to come? Who will it affect the most? And how?

Back in May 2009 Bing’s Webmaster Spokesman told us that:

“We are busy adding upgraded and updated technologies to provide better search results. That’s good news for you!”

At the same time Google (when they weren’t messing around with their Geo-location searches) were working on their Google Real Time Search, which incorporates Twitter and blogging results.

It really is no surprise that Google’s share of the market is so much larger that Bing’s – they are simply much better.

Google Real Time Search

This new addition is superb. Plus it seems to help with Google’s more up to date search results. As I show below.

Google’s search is simply better than Bing

Take a look at these two search results for “Cheryl Cole split”. This was a big news item last week and was being searched by 100,000s of people. A week on and people still crave the latest news.

In Google we have the latest news only a few hours old and targeted direct results for the exact topic I am looking for.

When the event took place last week and Cheryl Cole announced her split with Ashley, the SERPs were changing every few seconds. Not only was the Twitter and blog real-time feed going crazy, but the main pages offered in the SERPs were ever changing.

Bing is not as good as Google

Bing on the other hand is completely slow and offering inappropriate content. Here is the search today, 6 days after the event and still there is irrelevant content in the top positions.

In conclusion Bing really isn’t good enough and offers pretty awful results for a lot of searches. There is no real understanding of the searcher and thus no excitement or enthusiasm of the searcher to get more for his search.Bing is painfully slow at updating its results where as Google has entered a new area of speed searches with relevant quick results being offered a minute after they have been posted.

IMDB is one of the most popular film websites on the Internet and provides movie lovers with in depth information and reviews on Movies and TV Shows. I have been really looking forward to season 6 of Lost on Sky1 and was searching for the popular US TV show – when I came across the following:

Lost canonical issue IMDB

Below is the canonical tag that features in the </head> element of the subdomain:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411008/" />

So what gives? Isn’t Google supposed to be returning the canonical page as highlighted correctly by IMDB?