It has been an interesting day for the adherents of Search Engine Marketing Theory.
Over at SEOMoz we have a detailed analysis of the increasing influence of Facebook and Twitter on Google’s Search Ranking. While over at Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan provides an in-depth analysis of Yahoo!’s Search Revenue Disaster.
Putting aside the question of “is correlation an indicator of causation” SEOMoz examines the correlation between Link Metrics and Social Signals and discovered – hardly surprisingly - that a correlation does exist between Social and Search.
I say not surprisingly because if the success of Google’s original search algorithm was based on crawling and counting “shared” hyper links then search has always been social.
We also discovered today that Yahoo!’s search business hasn’t been as profitable since it made the switch from its in-house search technologies to Microsoft’s Bing.
In that post he provides a link through to the Morningstar transcript of the presentation of the results by the Yahoo! Executive Team and it is here that you’ll find this interesting admission by CFO, Tim Morse…
“Specifically as users experience fresher and more relevant results on Yahoo! search pages powered by Microsoft, they clicked more on the organic results and less on the paid results lowering RPS. This accounted for the majority of the revenue difference relative to our expectations. We also noted a search page view decline as users found what they needed faster, and therefore clicked through to the next page of search results less often, lowering volume.” – Tim Morse, CFO Yahoo!
Which brings me to something that has long puzzled me about Search Engine Marketing: The Google Paradox.
The Google Paradox is simply this: How does a search engine profit from providing better “organic” search results when the commercial objective – dare I say imperative – of Search Engine Marketing is to get the searcher to click on the sponsored links?
As far as I could see if you were in the business to make money then you would either serve up sponsored results that are significantly better than organic results or serve up organic results that point towards web pages that display your sponsored ”Search” Advertising (i.e. Text, Display or Video advertising embedded on the “answering” page). Either way the monetization model would trend towards a mediocre search experience for the audience simply becuase the engine would be gamed towards monetization rather than “Truth” and/or “Accuracy”.
Put more simply the theoretical business model of search has never been about being a better search engine. It must be about providing a variety of sign posts to content that you have a vested interest in sharing. Otherwise where is the earn in providing a ”free” search engine?
Posted on April 21, 2011
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