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

News of Facebook being awarded the patent for news feed technology earlier this week is understandably causing much speculation regarding its possible implications for other social networking giants such as Twitter, Myspace and the brand new Google Buzz. Although at this stage speculation is all it remains to be. So far Facebook have remained schtum regarding whether they’ll be taking action against other social networks infringing on the patent. However, they have released a small general statement:

“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?

Who invented the World Wide Web?

• Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, an Englishman, invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

The Internet

• This is not to be confused with the invention of the internet; the internet was invented in 1969 by the US Department of Defence as a means of communication if they were attacked by Russia, and first records of development date back to the 1950s

FlickR

• 3 Million pictures and videos are uploaded on Flickr everyday

Blog Usage

• Every month it an estimated 350 million people browse the world’s 10s of millions of blogs

Registered website growth

• Between 1995- 2000, 20 million .com sites were registered

Early Growth of the Internet

• In 1994 Web usage was growing at 2300% a year

The Very First E-commerce site

• In 1994 Pizza Hut became the first company to venture into e-commerce, with “Pizza Net”; a service that allowed customers in Santa Cruz, California to order pizzas online. This made the front page headlines of a major US Newspaper’s business section

Court order allowing web-commerce

• In 1994 the injunction previously outlawing web commerce was lifted, paving the way for the likes of Amazon, the world’s first major ecommerce site

Amazon Users

• Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and now has 124 million customers

Source = BBC’s very interesting programme on the internet “Virtual Revolution”

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.

mo.om, is a new eco-friendly luxury 4 star boutique hotel near Milan, Italy. A unique project that is being developed in the Olgiate Olona area.
mo.om represents the ideal solution for the discerning business or leisure traveler, not only for the high-end luxury services offered but for the ingrained philosophy of green-travel. Customers will enjoy a vast array of resort quality services, including an eclectic modern lounge-bar, a fully furnished gym with indoor pool, a spa with Turkish bath, sauna and massage therapy, as well as a first-class restaurant

The site is designed to showcase the Ronda Outdoors range of stainless steel outdoor kitchen units and to create US market reseller interest.

Ronda is an Italian leader in the production of components in stainless steel and aluminium (drawers, doors, sinks, panels, etc.) for bars, the confectionery industry, restaurants and hotels and also for homes, yachts and other sectors.

Since the sixties, Ronda has been the core business of the Ronda Group. It is headquartered in Zanè in the north of the province of Vicenza, in one of the most industrialised areas in north-eastern Italy. Ronda produces innovative elegant products for more interesting, practical and liveable surroundings.

It supports its clients with solutions that not only satisfy but stay one step ahead of their needs. In addition to sturdiness, functionality and maximum quality with ISO 9001 certification, Ronda pays great attention to the design of its products, helping to spread typically Italian style and taste throughout the world.

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?

Today we are at the beginning of a new renaissance, exploring the ways in which customers are behaving in the new world of Web2.0. In the context of this media revolution, life will not be the same for you, or your customers again.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO said, “ The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

This “experiment” as Schmidt referred to, is fundamentally about democratising information. Simply put, it moves the focus of communication from the media to you, the individual. It is not a one-way process anymore. It is an environment in which a dialogue takes place between the brand owner and the customer and between the customers themselves.

This will shift your marketing strategy and implementation in significant ways.

The one-way process

One of the most important objectives of marketing is how to gain the attention of relevant customers and where. These touch points traditionally have been through mainstream media such as television, radio, press, poster, and also through direct marketing. Behind this was a Push/ Pull Strategy, pushing a message onto the target audience, in the hope that they would like the message and Pull (buy) the product.

(Chart 1) This strategy created a process of decision taking that encompassed: awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, and loyalty.

The problem with this is that it is a one-way process. It is not a dialogue.

Creating a dialogue.

Mark Pedowitz, President, ABC Studios said, “Digital Media has levelled the playing field, opening doors to anyone to have immediate and unlimited access to an audience. But content must evolve with the platform”.

With the advent of technology and the use of the Internet, not only has a new media been created but also so has a new process of interaction with the customer.

We now have a dialogue that is both immediate and relevant. The content must be engaging and in many instances subtler than the previous broadcast media approach of pushing the message. As Ezra Pound the poet once said to an aspiring writer, “ Don’t describe the thing, describe the halo of the thing.” Pound knew that by describing the quality of something rather than its features, will engender greater intrigue and involvement. Describing “the thing” closes down the conversation, describing the “halo” opens it up.

This approach underpins sales and finds support in recent research by McKinsey. This study has revealed a new process of engagement and decision-making by the customer.

Source: McKinsey

(Chart 2) It is a circular process with four primary phases: initial consideration; active evaluation, which is the process of researching potential purchases; closure, when customers buy brands; and post purchase, when customers experience them.

At the post purchase point customers are increasingly likely to
discuss their satisfaction or dissatisfaction online. This dialogue will trigger other customers’ future purchasing decisions. What is essential is to have a pro-active online reputation management system in place. We will discuss that in more detail and its effect on how the customer moves from initial interest to after sales satisfaction, or otherwise, later in this whitepaper.

Dialogue along the customer journey

Marketing professionals need to adjust to this new customer journey. It is a journey that is more complex. It is a journey where the marketer can win friends and just as easily lose friends. In many cases the marketing effort must change: from less focus on brand advertising at the initial consideration phase to developing internet properties that help customers gain a better understanding of the brand when they actively evaluate it.

This may mean that a process change is necessary from pushing a brand message onto customers, to providing information, support, and experience of the brand (even if just a virtual one) that engages the customer in a dialogue so that they can make their own decisions.

The importance of the Web 2.0

The Internet is crucial in this new process of dialogue. To exploit Web 2 .0’s benefits requires an open mindset on the part of the marketer, one that moves from media buying to developing properties that attract customers: this shift in mindset encompasses websites that discuss products and services; programmes that encourage customer engagement; and systems that tailor advertising by understanding the customer as an individual with unique tastes, rather than as a statistical grouping.

(Chart 3 ) It isn’t just the customer you need to engage in dialogue. There is a hierarchy of people who engage with the Web.
At the bottom of the involvement pyramid we have Watchers and Sharers. These are the people who are the most active in their involvement of watching on line, reading blogs, and downloading material.

Next are the Commentators who rate products and services, comment on a blog post as well as write in a discussion forum.
An example of this is the advent of Trip Advisor for the traveller, which has underpinned the power of customer opinion.

The Producers write blogs and upload videos while the Curators are special to the company in that they are the guardians of the experience, moderate forums and edit Wikis to ensure their accuracy.

The people at the bottom of the pyramid, the Watchers and Sharers are the most active by volume and the Commentators have a great influence on opinion and influencing purchase.

So why do people share? Well, recent research from Share This Survey concluded that 81% of people share online to help someone who will benefit. 42% said to give back something, such as photographs, jokes, information, and third was to inform others about products or services.

When I first came into advertising and marketing, the giant share of marketing spend was on television. It was megaphone marketing.

Our target audience for brands was not segmented by social groups or income or even psychographics. We had no engagement pyramid. The audience was defined as universe. In other words, everyone, because everyone watched television. In short, the old marketing had Van Gogh’s ear for dialogue.

Integrating the customer into the process.

The available media drove this crude perception of people and their potential motivations. It was pushing a brand statement.

It worked through expensive repetition of a message like rote learning in uninspired educational establishments. It was not inclusive because there was no opportunity to question or engage in feedback.

As Confucius said: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

With the democratisation of media we are able to create a dialogue, shifting the emphasis of seeing the customer as a target to viewing the customer as a partner and collaborator in the marketing process. This is a necessary pre-requisite for sales success.

Take for example, Fiat.  When they launched the new Fiat 500 they created a website that that allowed potential customers to gather around their common interest, cars.

In the initial stages of the brand creation, Fiat embarked on creating applications and functions on the website that enabled the potential customer to create their own car, allowing them to customise different elements.

In addition, the potential customers were invited to join a creative laboratory where they could enter their own design contributions as well as create their own jingle for the website.

Mothers and Mothers-to-be were also invited to make their own contributions and were encouraged to share photographs of their family and newborn babies as well as enter a lottery to win one of the new cars.

By building a sense of involvement and personalisation into the website and the whole creative process, Fiat strengthened the potential customer’s sense of co-authorship among both males and females.

This underpinned making the Fiat 500 the customer’s brand.

Things are evolving…

Five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible.

Steve Rubel Ad Age December 2008

The Internets success is not just down to the immediacy of its information but also the relevance of that information.

Marketers need to help the customer with relevant information.

Take Comcast for example. If you have a cable problem in the US, Comcast use Twitter to ask customers “Can I help”. When customers respond, Comcast send out their Field Support Teams to solve the problem.

Through this process of finding customers to help, Comcast develops an image of pro-activity in customer support, reinforced through relevant interaction with customers.

The Comcast example demonstrates the effectiveness of pro-active engagement by seeking out the customer and ensuring that the brand blends into the context of the website or social media forum. It provides relevance and integrity.

A further example is Hyatt Hotels’ mobile reservation and check-in. Microsoft’s Bing powers Verizon Wireless mobile search. When consumers search for Hyatt and click on the result, they get redirected to Hyatt’s mobile website.

Through Verizon, Hyatt can reach 86 million subscribers and by taking advantage of this subscriber base, Hyatt can get customers to book rooms, check in and out, get travel tips, and access general information whilst on the go using Verizon’s Mobile Web service.

The synergy between search and mobile display resulted in a 350% increase in ad recall and 125% increase in brand recall through the inclusion of mobile search ads.

In this new engagement world, brands need to be mobilised to provide and deliver greater customer involvement through greater immediacy, anticipation of customer needs, quality of product and service, relevance, context, and value.

We are social.

People are social creatures. We, as individuals enjoy discussion, sharing information. We love to share our experiences and not just about the brands we buy or the car we drive or the Hotel we stay at. We also enjoy publishing our thoughts as can be experienced through Facebook, Twitter, and lots more social media sites. Those private thoughts made public can then be seen around the world not just on the social media website but through the long tail of media recognition of what you have to say.

So, Social Media is fast becoming a significant part of the fabric of society. The way to make it work for your brand is to have something meaningful to say and something relevant to offer. People go to a website for a reason not by accident. It is an envelope with an address on it. This can be a great advantage to the marketer. It can also be a nightmare if you fail to create a dialogue with your target audience and are unable to convince your customer and prospect through poor attitude, inadequate product, and poor service.

Social Media Chart Source: Intelligent Positioning Ltd
An example of pro-activity in this are is RS Hotel in New York. The Roger Smith Hotel may be the most media savvy hotel in New York, if not the world: there’s a blog; a Facebook fan page; a You Tube Channel; over 3,000 Twitter followers; a Flickr photostream.

The two young guys behind this family run independent hotel have turned it into a digital force to be reckoned with. They have made sure that the staff are tuned in to new media opportunities that can provide a dialogue with current guests and prospects with the objective of providing a great environment and service.

One example of their pro-activity was when they saw a blog on the Internet from an out of town blogger and responded to his question: “Where do people stay in New York?”

Because the hotel staff was active in the blogosphere they were rewarded with a sale. This connectedness rewarded the Hotel in not just the sale of the hotel room but with further blogs that recounted the experience and promoted the pro-active nature of RS Hotel’s mindset and prompt service.

Social Media Maintenance

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 4) To keep your social media activity current and relevant, like the RS Hotel, you need to have a thorough maintenance programme. If we look at the chart we see how such a programme encompasses monitoring and renewing content across the relevant social media. Done competently, this will help to keep you ahead of your competition.

Whatever your brand is, whether it is a Hotel, a cable service provider, or a car, it is wise to remember that the brand is not yours. It is your customer’s.

A good social media maintenance programme linked to good online reputation management will help to strengthen that bond between the customer and the brand. Online reputation management combines marketing, public relations, and search.
The first objective is to gain visibility for your brand. Research shows that rarely do customers go beyond page two on the search engine rankings. The second objective is to create a positive interactive experience that will lead to sustainable engagement and sales.

To be effective, reputation management should not be passive to the discussions online but to be involved, constantly fuelling positive engagement. Good reputation management seeks to analyse, monitor, and influence your brand’s online presence, always seeking to be a relevant and stimulating part of your customers’ decision-making journey. As a marketer if you don’t like what is happening to your brand online, do something about it. And do it without delay. It is not enough to have proactive reputation management and a well maintained, attractive, website where there is a relevant dialogue and where the key evaluation element of the new decision making process takes place. The challenge is to be seen.

So what are the tools that will enable you to get your site onto page one, as well as tell you where your competitors are on the search engine hierarchy? It is highly likely that your prospects are using search and social media to evaluate potential vendors. The key question that you have to ask yourselves is, “Are we doing enough in those channels to demonstrate our expertise?”

How to generate clicks on your site.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly a significant element in search by expertly examining customers’ online patterns to predict their tastes, desires, and future needs.

Broadly there are two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

Simply put, PPC is bought traffic based on key word auctions: the concept is that marketers bid for their ads to appear on certain keywords, the higher the bid and more relevant your content, the better the chance of getting the top position. This can be expensive.

Whereas, Organic Search is a tool, if expertly used, that will help you to get your site onto page one and keep you there, through site analysis, key word relevance, and content refreshment. Traffic, unlike PPC is free.

(Chart 5) Two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

There is a definite preference exhibited by users for organic results over PPC.  Of the two types of listing it is organic listings that currently generate the most traffic as you can see from Google’s Golden Triangle (Chart 6) but that does not mean that PPC has no place in a well rounded search engine marketing strategy.

PPC can provide a tactical boost to the more strategic organic search. The two are very effective if used together.

It is also worth mentioning that Organic has the additional benefit of producing a better return on investment.

How to measure social media effect.

“The tools we use to create digital content are increasingly powerful but decreasingly expensive. And we can show our work to a potential global audience. There is no analogue in human history for this development.” This is a quote from Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media.

It points to the cost effectiveness of Web2.0 and the social media model. But the return on investment is only high if the tools and the message are executed correctly.

Measuring and managing Customer Lifetime Value is the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the market place.

First you must determine what to measure:

There are three basic elements to measure:

1. Output objectives:

How many people read your blog?

How many people comment?

How many people download your whitepaper?

What is the quality of your discussion?

2. Out-take objectives:

How does the social mediasphere position your brand and people?

What is the perception of your organization?

3. Outcome objectives:

Financial. Traffic. Relationships.
These will lead you to a lifetime value calculation of your customers.

To effect this, it is necessary to invest in software to enable customer data gathering. This data will provide you with the information that will assist you in managing and growing customer value.

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 7) Lifetime Valuation of your customer can be defined simply as : transactional value plus network value. That gives customer value less customer acquisition and retention costs. These values form the basis of the Customer Lifetime Value Equation.

The benefit of retaining and growing customer value over their lifetime is one of the most efficient ways of growing your business.
Remember that happy customers tell others about products and services that they like. Then your company’s potential for greater profit from Lifetime Customer Value is brought into play.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, we are moving towards an age of media democratisation. We have no history of this to help us. The Web’s history is in the future. But what we do know is that we as marketers need to understand the new rules of engagement:
involve the customer as an individual and as a partner in the process of brand development and sustainability.

This will generate greater profit and customer loyalty for your company.

I will leave you with three thoughts from Albert Einstein:

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.

2. From discord, find harmony.

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

For further information about maximizing your customer contact email Garry Titterton on: garry@creative-mindset.com or click onto www.ip-seo.com or www.creative-mindset.com

I’m sure you’re all aware of the tag setup, if not you’ll find an example below:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example-page.html" />
</head>

This informs the search engine robots of the page that is deemed to be the ‘canonical’ one if there are many available. So for example – say you’re signed up to an affiliate programme where they use a tracking parameter like so:

http://www.example.com/example-page.php?affiliate=blueberry

You don’t want to have both the main page and the ‘blueberry’ page indexed, resulting in a canonicalization issue. Therefore if you place the following canonical tag on both pages, the search engine robots are aware that all the link juice will attributed to the page specified in the href attribute:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example-page.php" />
</head>

From tests that have been rolled out to client websites, the tag works a treat for this type of setup. 301 redirects vs. the canonical tag is a separate debate as the canonical tag will never make the 301 redirect process redundant. However, this is for internal pages rather than the new development, which targets external pages. We are still waiting to hear from Bing and Yahoo! on how their platforms will support external version – however it is clear that Bing might not be ready for a few more months yet.

So what benefits can we get from being able to use the canonical tag cross domain. Well for starters, bloggers using Google Blogspot that wish to move to a more ’snazzy’ URL can replicate all of their older posts on their new domain, whilst of course adding the canonical tag with the URL of the post on the new URL. Simple and effective considering there isn’t a way to place server side redirects using this type of platform.

From a downside, there is a of course potential for blackhat SEOs to manipulate the tag. Then we can’t ignore the possibility of cloaking as it is fully possible for a webmaster to make a legitimate informative website that accumulates a vast amount of links and place a canonical tag to either an identical/similar website that is styled differently. However, I do believe that the positives out weigh the negatives here. Blackhat and unethical SEOs will always exist, however as search advances even further, these techniques will become redundant.

I have found a great example of where this tag could be used to compact duplicate content from other webmasters using your content. We all know how great the BBC website is for providing us with upto date relevant content from an authoritative source. As a football fan i’m always keen on finding out the latest news in the Premier League. Looking at the rankings over the past six months for the keyword term ‘Manchester United News’ you will see the inclusion of an identical site to the BBC – http://www.simonbaker.me/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/default.stm. Take a look at the identical keyword density values:

Now have a look at the positioning over time of both URLs:

The dates are from 1st June 2009 to the 20th December 2009 in Google UK. You can see the inclusion of www.simonbaker.me throughout the month of November – however if the BBC had of included the following tag (and of course it was supported at the time!), the website would never have ranked for that keyword term:

<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/default.stm" />
</head>

This of course can work for webmasters who do not have control over server side redirects, or indeed if there were a situation where by website A was the chosen URL, however website B still needed to be accessible to the public without redirecting to website A. To conclude, the use of the tag for SEOs has many benefits when used correctly. The tag isn’t a replacement for a 301 redirect – however, it can make an SEOs life easier if the technical team are happier to setup this tag rather than a number of redirects.

The aim of the test was to try and find out the following things about PDF documents like:

• Do Microsoft Word® headers (normally used into a professional document) make a difference?
• How much does the Keyword Density in the document impact on its ranking?
• How much do the document properties (Title, Author, Comments and Keywords) influence the indexing?

After just one week, Google started to show some tangible results. The other search engines are still looking around; only Ask returns a couple of results, but nothing worthwhile to report.

The scope of this document is to highlight the fluctuation that the different PDF documents  (13 in total) made day-by-day.

Those are the first – most interesting – results I collected during the past couple of weeks for the main document returned by a SERP generated using the URK “seiunamicone”.

These are accompanied by the hidden results (in a drop down menu):

I’ve been monitoring the SERPs for a while, and apart from the first couple of days where it there were constant fluctuations, the results seem to be stabilized.

Proposing a lot of images it would probably have been muddled, however I can assure you that a lot of changes took place and I presume that even more of these changes will occur over the next couple of days.

Just to give you an example outside the above picture – on 3^rd of November the third result was a document called PDF-test-without-headers-KD43.pdf – my test n. 11. It is quite different to determine why this document was ranking at this specific time, which is the reason for why I included a graph collecting the SERPs detail changes.

This is the full graph:

Whilst this is a graph with the documents that just take part on the SERP during the period in which I monitored it.

Let’s analyze it altogether, but first let me remind you of something about the documents generated. I assumed a KWD of the URK “seiunamicone” split between the page (42%) and the document properties (56%) and fake headers when H1 and H2 have been created using pure emphasis instead of Word styles.

The first PDF to be indexed has been a document called Test 7 (PDF-test-without-header2-KD100.pdf). This document contains an H1 made using Word styles, a fake H2 – just emphasized text – with a KD of 100%. Just after some days, this document has been completely refused by Google SERP. Today is in the index but sit nowhere.

A snugly result for test number 5, 28% KD and one header, whilst no index at all for test 3, 10 or 13 for example.

If we would like to analyze only the first three results (first one and it’s aggregate) plus the first result shown when expanding hidden results we got the following picture.

Positive results has been collected for test number 12, always been present in the SERP and now stable on position 1 from about one week, test number 1.1, with some fluctuation, but now stable on position 2, and finally test 11, that apart some daily disappear has always been on position three.

So what makes the difference for these documents?

I almost sure Google is able to interpret the RTF code contained into PDF document (most probably doing a sort of reverse engineering). This sounds like strong assert (and maybe it is, so please take it just as my personal opinion) but it’s the only explanation I was able to find when I answered to the question “Why these?”

Analyzing the SERPs, I saw that after a KD factor, the headers get their own importance, so, if I should answer about the question

What are the predominant factors that influence a PDF indexing into Google?

According to the test result I collected during the past weeks, today I would probably answer with the following bulleted point:

1. Document properties usage. Adding the keyword(s) into the document properties (Title, Subject e Keywords – Comments are ignored. We can even use the Author field, but looks like to be used for different purposes, isn’t it?)
2. Keyword density. A sufficient number of keyword in strategic part of the document – as per HTML pages – results in a better-optimized document, especially when headers are used. But we remember of another important aspect, such as document length and size that after a certain dimension (100k) results in a non-crawled text.
3. Header usage. Inserting keywords into the header 1 (made with Word styles, not emphasizing the text) boost the document and help it for a better indexing. Eventually use an H2 sounds good, but during the tests I noticed that use both of them don’t get any extra advantage.
4. Keyword proximity. Whenever the headers are not used, keyword proximity plays an important role.