Natural Search Blog


Will Google Keep Minority Report from Happening? Eric Schmidt’s Chat with Danny Sullivan

This morning at the Search Engine Strategies Conference 2006 in San Jose, Danny Sullivan interviewed the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in the conference’s main keynote session. Others such as the Search Engine Roundtable have reported on most of the content of that session, but one little thing Danny mentioned particularly grabbed my attention. Read on, and I’ll elaborate….

A Conversation with Eric Schmidt of Google

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Sneak Peek: Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search

Phew – After 7 long months slogging away, we will finally officially release the long awaited white paper “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search” next week Monday (Aug 7th) at SES San Jose and the Etail Philadelphia show.

One is always a little cautious about postulating grand theories into the wide world. But after studying over 1 million unique unbranded keywords across 25 major retailer search programs, we couldn’t resist – referring to the concept we outline as “Page Yield Theory.” This is an underpinning notion that the “long tail” of unbranded search keyword traffic is inextricably linked to the website’s number of uniquely indexable site pages. To those of us who subscribe to the “every-page-should-sing-its-own-song” philosophy, that seems like an obvious statement.

Yet the challenge behind it, and the impetus for the research, arose from the fact that many (unoptimized) well-branded multichannel retailers have 10’s/100’s of thousands of unique and indexed website pages. However most of their natural search traffic (usually over 90%) comes from searches related to their own company name. How could such strong brands and massive websites produce such little traffic for generic terms, terms other than the company name?

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Attending the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose?

I’ll be attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose next week. Drop me a line if you’d like to meet me during the conference!

There are a handful of sessions I’m interested in sitting in on, and I’m looking forward to having dinner one night with some of my old friends from college who work in Silicon Valley.

Some of you may be interested to know that Stephan Spencer is scheduled to appear on a panel on Blog & Feed Search SEO, though I’m thinking I’ll have to miss that in order to attend the simultaneous session on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issue. Sorry, Stephan! 😉

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