I’m not sure if this observation is a bug in Google or intentional but a recent local review I made has replaced my author image and has triggered stars for my name.
I first noticed the result on my iPhone on which you can see the stars above the description but also with a smaller thumbnail of my author image:
I thought that a bit strange, so I also tested on a desktop too and got the same results (also same on tablet):
Now the particular restaurant was good (although not great) and the stars look ok but what if I had rated the place a much lower score? This would have then triggered a low star rating in Google for people searching my name, which could be misinterpreted as I’m not trustworthy or of low value – which I like to think I am not.
If this is intentional I’m not really sure what value this adds, perhaps if they include a phrase like “latest review” that might clear the confusion up.
Another morning, another search results hijack appears to surface. Car insurance is one of the most competitive search terms to try and rank for in the UK and it often takes years to establish yourself at the top. However this morning when searching in Google for Car Insurance a result that was only 1 hour old appears to rank in number 3 position.
Now in the past Google has tested including news results into top positions for competitive terms but having worked on a car insurance client for a few years I was unfamiliar with this particular site, so I looked a bit closer. Here is the page that ranks number 3 in the UK for the term car insurance:
Looks trustworthy huh..
The content on the site is very small, there’s nothing I could find that indicates hidden text or mass on-page spamming. Looking at the categories on the site it’s obvious this site is used to spam multiple categories/verticals as it’s all unrelated:
What’s worrying to me on this result is that for the last 3 years I’ve not seen this happen on a keyword of this magnitude, so something new must be being used by the spammers or there’s a new hole in Google’s ever changing algorithm.
The site is 5 years old and the is a fairly low number of low quality links but nothing out of the blue – I’ll have a look further into this but if anyone has any insights please comment and let me know!
**Update – Google dealt with the spam within a matter of hours, but given the search volume for that phrase these guys probably made quite a bit of cash.
Back in August this year I conducted an analysis looking at 10 of the top brands on Google+. I carried out the study for a number of reasons but primarily to help answer a question that had been grating on me – why do some brands appear to do so well on Google+ when others seem to struggle?
Some of my findings included:
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50% of the top 10 brands had a daily follower increase of over 5,000 people
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The other 50% of the top brands had less than 1000 new followers each day
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About 75% of the brands posted more than 5 times a day with decent quality content
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The top performing brand, Cadbury, had an average of 68 comments per post, with the rest averaging at 20, so quite engaging
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Only 50% of the top brands actually promoted Google+ on their websites
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H&M and Burberry were the only 2 brands which had over 5,000 new followers each day but had no on-site promotion
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Out of the top 3 brands the number of comments that appeared to be fake looked like this: Cadbury = 1%, Pepsi = 20%, ASOS = 60%
Afterwards my general feeling was that some brands were doing things properly and some were cheating, it’s as simple as that. The results were certainly nothing new if you look at some of the fans and followers of big brands on Twitter and facebook, it’s just part of the way some companies operate.
So, what’s changed 3 months on?
Looking at the number of Google+ followers in August and the number of new followers over the 3 month period, it shows some interesting insights. While the likes of Cadbury, H&M and Burberry have appeared to remain quite consistent – Glamour Magazine and Samsung USA have slowed right down. In fact, over the last 3 months Samsung USA has only had 552 new followers and Glamour Magazine with just over 22,000. The most new followers come from Burberry and H&M with over 500k new followers in just 3 months.
I’ve looked at both sites (Samsung USA and Glamour Magazine) and nothing has changed since my last analysis in terms of promoting G+, so looking on http://socialstatistics.com you can see that there was a sudden drop in followers for Samsung USA, this has been steadily happening since mid-September.
For Glamour Magazine it’s quite similar; up to August 2012 they were averaging around 5,000 new followers a day and then all of a sudden this too dropped to a much lower number. As well as this, in the start of October they began to follow other people/pages, which they had not done before:
Make of it what you will, but something looks out of place for these two brands.
Next on the comparison was the post frequency – essentially I’ve graded each brand a score out of 10 based on the number of times they each post content, those that post content regularly get a higher score:
Sony was the only brand that has improved the amount of content they’re posting (although it’s still fairly infrequent). I found it quite surprising that most brands had actually slowed the number of posts down.
The last metric I revisited was looking at the post quality of each brand – this again was just a personal scoring out of ten. The maximum point generated would mean that a brand has been posting high quality content such as images, videos, competitions and unique content specifically for Google+.
What’s good to see here is that the majority of the brands in this analysis have upped their game when it comes to Google+ content. Glamour Magazine and Burberry were the only two brands which seem to have dropped the quality ball slightly. I believe more brands are realizing that you cannot just post web content on Google+ and expect to proposer – more brands are creating unique content specifically designed for Google+ (with logos often appearing in imagery and videos). It makes sense to me as most people will have Twitter and facebook already, so why would they want a third location of the same style?
I will keep an eye on these brands and revisit in another 3 months.