Title: Traffic to Web-only retailers increases on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

The holiday shopping season is officially upon us and for some online retailers, prospects may be rosier than expected thanks to heavy promotional activity to encourage spending (unfortunately also erode profit margins). On Thanksgiving, which has been the heaviest day of traffic to online retailers over the past 4 years, experienced an 11 percent decline in the market share of visits as compared to last year. The websites of brick & mortar retailers took a harder hit with a 16% decline as compared to last year, while traffic to web-only retailers was up 11%.

For Black Friday, traffic to the Retail 500 was down 5% year-over-year, with the brick & mortar players also down 10%. Web-only retailers also fared better with a 10% increase over last year, where Black Friday was the peak traffic day of the holiday season (followed by Cyber Monday, suggesting today may also prove fruitful).

We have watched traffic decline across the majority of product categories over the past 12 weeks with the exceptions of Classifieds, Grocery & Alcohol, and Health & Beauty. Last week traffic increased slightly for the Books and Sports & Fitness categories, while the traffic for holiday mainstays like Apparel was flat & Appliances & Electronics was still down.

We have watched traffic decline across the majority of product categories over the past 12 weeks with the exceptions of Classifieds, Grocery & Alcohol, and Health & Beauty. Last week traffic increased slightly for the Books and Sports & Fitness categories, while the traffic for holiday mainstays like Apparel was flat & Appliances & Electronics was still down.

Source: Hitwise Weblogs

Few more articles:

Traffic to the Hitwise 100 Retail Index, composed of the top 100 retail websites, received 5.07% of all US visits on Nov. 26 (Cyber Monday) - an increase of 26% compared with last year’s Cyber Monday, which received 4.02% of visits, Hitwise reported.

“Traffic to the electronics and videogames categories experienced the strongest growth as shoppers searched for products such as GPS navigation systems and Nintendo Wii consoles,” said Heather Dougherty, director of research, Hitwise.

Top Cyber Monday Retail Websites

For the third year in a row, Amazon.com was the most visited retail website on Cyber Monday, receiving 10% of visits among the top 100 retail websites, Hitwise said. Walmart.com and Target.com were second and third, respectively, followed by BestBuy.com and CircuitCity.com.

Traffic to comparison-shopping websites also increased significantly - 47% - from last year, hitwise said.

Online Holiday Shopping Update

Visits to the Hitwise US Retail 100 Index websites were up 43% for the week ended Nov. 24 versus the previous week (ended Nov. 17). US traffic is up 15% compared to the same week last year (Nov. 25, 2006).

Walmart.com took over the top spot as most visited website within the Index last week, receiving 11% of US visits. Amazon.com received the second-most visits with 9%.

CircuitCity.com was again the biggest gainer for the week, as its website traffic increased 94% compared with the previous week.

The Nintendo Wii and iPod were again the most popular product search terms sending visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites for the week ending Nov. 24. The terms “wii,” “nintendo wii” and “ipod” were the top three product searches.

The Microsoft Zune made its debut among the top 10 searches this past week, coming as the fifth most-searched for product.

source:MarketingCharts - Cyber Monday Traffic Increases 26%, Amazon Again Top Retail Site

So what is this “Search Based Keyword tool” all about?

Well here’s Google reply:

The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.

Based on your URLs, the Search-based Keyword Tool displays a list of relevant user queries that have occurred on Google.com (and on other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk) with some frequency over the past year; these suggestions can be found under the Keywords tab, in the new keywords related to (site) section. In the Keywords related to your search section, you can see a broad list of keyword ideas that are also relevant, but aren’t necessarily based on your site.

The keywords are also organized by category. Click any category to expand and view its subcategories. If applicable, you’ll also see the keywords organized by brand names.

Important note: We can’t guarantee that these keyword suggestions will improve your campaign performance. Additionally, we reserve the right to disapprove any keywords you add to your campaigns. You’re responsible for the keywords you select and for ensuring that your use of the keywords doesn’t violate any applicable laws or our Terms of Service.

Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you don’t even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right audience for your AdWords campaigns. That’s where the Search-based Keyword Tool (beta) comes in. With this new tool you can get a better sense of what your potential customers are searching for and which keywords you should advertise on.

Here’s the scoop: you know that the Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website’s content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns.

This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The tool is also useful if you don’t currently advertise on AdWords. For example, a shoe store could discover which footwear styles users are searching for, or a digital camera blog could decide which cameras to review by looking at which camera models attract the most queries.

The Search-based Keyword Tool is now available to all advertisers in the US and UK. We’ll be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future. We’ll also continue to develop the tool based on your feedback. Try it out at http://www.google.com/sktool, and let us know what you think.

Source: AdWords 

So Enjoy and do add in your view after checking this amazing new tool from Google.

Here’s the link to the Search based Keyword Tool

So guys and gals now you don’t have to create a new login in Yahoo or Hotmail to chat with your friends and loved ones, you can now send mail while watch and talking to your friends via Gmail.

Check out more about this update, from this Google Blog post below:

Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail - From viewing videos on YouTube to screening family events, people love being able to watch something exactly as it happened. And as webcams have become popular, more and more of us are realizing that video is the next best thing to an in-person conversation. Today we’re introducing Gmail voice and video chat, which lets you have free voice and video conversations right from within Gmail.

Video chatting from Gmail is as easy as sending an instant message. With our team spread out across Google offices in Sweden and the U.S., it’s been really handy in helping us work together. Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat.

Gmail voice and video chat will be rolled out globally over the next day or so for Macs and PCs. The first time you use this feature, you’ll be prompted to download and install a small plugin. To get started, visit http://www.gmail.com/videochat or click on the “Options” menu in a Gmail chat window and choose “Add voice/video chat.” Find out more on our Gmail Blog.

Google Blog - Posted by Serge Lachapelle, Product Manager, Stockholm

I am just thinking what will happen to SEO Chat and Webmasterworld if Google start these forums for SEO’s as well.

This is the latest post by Google:

New Google Help Forums - For the last few years, the Google Help Forums have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion about Google or its products. We’ve been taking stock of what you have to say, and we’ve been impressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who really understand our products and are willing to share their knowledge. It’s because of experts like the orkuteers, Google Apps Power Posters, Webmaster Help Bionic Posters and many others that the forums are a great place for getting quality answers, reporting bugs, offering product suggestions and sharing tips and tricks.

To make it even easier to get you the right answers to your questions as quickly as possible and to spot the most helpful commenters, we are converting our forums to a new system designed to help, encourage and reward everyone who visits.

Some of the features include:

• Improved search results, including posts from current and new forums
• The ability to designate especially helpful forum members as “Top Contributors”
• A reputation and ranking system
• The ability for users, Top Contributors and Googlers to mark questions as answered
• Easier access to Help Center content
• Expanded user profiles that highlight your forum activity

A few products — AdWords, AdSense, Android Market, Google Apps, Google Chrome and most of our Polish products — have already switched to this system. Over the next several months, we’ll convert more product Help Forums, initially in English and then in other languages.

If you have a question, bug report, suggestion, or just want to mix and mingle, we welcome you to “stop by” our forums. Googlers will check in from time to time to answer questions, listen to feedback, and highlight great responses and the people who provided them.

Posted by Katina Johnson, Google Help Team - Read more about the launch here

Qustion-1: “Recently Aaron Wall said in a post that if a bad neighbor website links to us then that will decrease our Trustrank. If that is true, then one can pay the bad neighbor websites to link to its competitor to bring it down. Is it true?”

Question from - Sandeep Bali, Mumbai, India

Matt Cutts: We try very hard to make it hard for one competitor to hurt another competitor. (We don’t claim that it’s impossible, because for example someone could steal your domain, either by identity theft or by hacking into a domain, and then do bad things on the domain.) But we try hard to keep one competitor from hurting another competitor in our ranking.

Just as a side note, there are a couple definitions of TrustRank:
- It was a paper that was written by researchers at Yahoo.
- In 2005, Google applied for a trademark for the term “TrustRank” for an anti-phishing filter.

I’m not great at trademark searching, but it looks like Google abandoned the TrustRank trademark earlier in 2008 and now someone in New Zealand appears to have filed for TrustRank as a trademark. But we don’t use the term “TrustRank” at Google to refer to anything.

Qusetion-2:“Will Google ever learn to detect paid and other junk links (per your guidelines) without you making webmasters use nofollow? Thank you for your work, Matt.”

Matt Cutts: We definitely have worked to improve our paid-link and junk link detection algorithms. In our most recent PageRank update (9/27/2008) for example, there are some differences in PageRank because we’ve improved how we treat links, for example.

The “nofollow” attribute on links is a granular way that site owners can provide more information to search engines about their links, but search engines absolutely continues to innovate on how we weigh links as well. Thanks for the question!

Question-3:“How about adding a link “Report this as spam” under each listing on Google serps (like Sphinn)? The link redirect to the form of reporting spam. Google human editors might take care of filtering the spam reports first, if WebSpam team is busy”

Question by - Harith, Denmark

Matt Cutts: Personally, I love the idea of a “Report as spam” link on our search results.

At the same time, our search results pages are shown hundreds of millions of times each day, so a feature needs to be useful to a pretty large fraction of people. I’m not sure how many people would use a “Report this as spam” button.

I do like the idea of a Greasemonkey script or Firefox extension to add a “Report spam” link to the search results. Clicking on the link could send the user to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and rewrite the DOM on the page to automatically fill in most parts of the form. Anyone who is savvy enough to install a plug-in/script is probably the right demographic to report spam anyway. Anyone want to write that extension or Greasemonkey script?

Question-4: “Have you considered appointing a European Matt Cutts like deputy who would be accessible for meetings, conferences, workshops etc? You can’t be everywhere at once, and it’d be great to be able to meet and talk shop with some Google folk”

Question by - Nass, London, UK

Matt Cutts: I think people give me too much credit, when in actuality there are a ton of people that do communication. Just in Europe, there are great people like John Mueller, Pedro Dias, Alvar Lopez, Juliane Stiller, Kaspar Szymanski, and Luisella Mazza. I feel for all the people I can’t mention, because these are just a tiny slice of the many people that answer questions on the web, attend conferences, do interviews, tape videos, and post on the official webmaster blog (including in German and Spanish as dedicated blogs, and several other country-level blogs).

If you are still skeptical, just check out http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-year-of-monitored-european.html to see some of the folks in Europe who are listening and participating online. Many of these people have journeyed to search conferences to listen or to speak as well.

Question-5: “What is the purpose of Google moderator?”

Question by - Carloslorenzo, Barcelona, Spain

Matt Cutts: Initially we used Dory (an internal version of Google moderator) for company meetings. Instead of whatever random question would be asked by the first person to walk up to a microphone, now anyone at any Google office could submit a question and the interesting questions could percolate up because several people would vote for them.

I think that Google moderator can be great for meetings to prioritize questions. It’s a 20% project, but it still can be pretty handy.

Question-6:“When are you going to actually read the spam reports?
Your website, asks webmasters to be responsible and report spam, i’ve done that since Google launched the form. Some i’ve done once a week. hidden text, duplicate pages, duplicate websites? thnx”

Question by - paisley, dallas

Matt Cutts: paisley, we absolutely do read spam reports and act on a lot of them. Sometimes (e.g. for hidden text), we might remove a site and then reinclude the site if they take the hidden text off their page. There are other actions that we take that might not be immediately visible either. But we definitely do read a lot of spam reports and love to get spam leads from the reports and take action on them.

If you can, it’s much better to use the spam report form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en because that form is authenticated with a Google Account instead of being an unauthenticated web form. The spam reports to our authenticated form do receive a higher priority in our system.

Question-7: “If a site links out to other sites, does it help him to become more relevant in a niche? Do you use a term equivalent to “topical niche” at all, when it comes to ranking?”

Matt Cutts: We don’t use the exact phrase “topical niche,” but certainly we are aware of different niches and industries around the web. Different industries (and even different languages) have different linking patterns. I would recommend linking out to other sites that are useful to your visitors. If a visitor doesn’t feel trapped and thinks that a site is providing good, impartial advice or an overview of an topic, that visitor is more likely to link to your site and tell friends about your site.

Question-8: “Does Googlebot have preference the following url structures?
long-haired-dogs.html
longhaireddogs.html
long_haired_dogs.html”

Question by - JasonBartholme, Loves Park, IL

Matt Cutts: I would recommend
long-haired-dogs.html
long_haired_dogs.html
longhaireddogs.html

In that order. If your site is already live on the web, it’s probably not worth going back to change from one method to another, but if you’re just starting a new site, I’d probably choose the urls in that order of preference. I can only speak for Google; you’ll need to run your own tests to see what works best with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.

Question-9: “In GWT can you introduce an ‘accept or deny’ option for IBL’s so webmasters can elect ones they want. This will allow webmasters to break any association between e.g. “nasty validmirs porno” and “aunty bettys tea and biscuit” sites.”

Question by - jeff hall, plymouth uk

Matt Cutts: We’ve talked about offering this feature in Google’s free webmaster tools. We already try very hard to keep a website from being able to harm a competitor’s ranking. The advantage of letting webmasters disavow some in-bound links is that the webmaster knows they’ve told Google “this link has nothing to do with me–please don’t count it.” The disadvantage is that if a site has a large number of links, looking through all those backlinks would be a considerable amount of work. Right now we don’t have a feature like this planned, but if we do release something like that, we’ll be sure to mention it to people on our webmaster blog.

And there were many more.. the experience of going through that was real fun.. hope you have find some of your answers here

Whenever I look at iGoogle the only thing which I use to feel happy about was that hey, I can have necessary information as a snippet right on one page and that makes things so convenient, as I am up to date on my information while just being on one browser or tab.

But as they say “Human is the only living being who cannot leave demanding more than what he receives”, so here we were after few months I started thinking that hey my iGoogle is cool but you know what I don’t want to leave this page to read the entire article or post which I can see in the snippet. I want to stay on my select iGoogle theme page and check my emails, news, weather or blog feeds. I kept this thought in mind as I know these Google guys must be working on these tools and we might get an update sooner or later.

As expected Google have introduced an all new iGoogle interface with a canvas look gadgets so that you can stay on your Google homepage and explore your gadgets as well.

iGoogle introduce the canvas view feature to the users, Canvas view allows developers to deliver richer content, games, and UI to users on iGoogle as well as the opportunity to monetize.

Here is what Google have to say about this:

Give your gadgets some space

This week we launched a set of new features to all iGoogle users in the U.S. These features were designed to make it more powerful and bring more information to the homepage.

At the heart of this release is a feature we call “canvas view,” which gives you the option to maximize your gadgets into full-screen mode. To use the Gmail gadget as an example, previously, you could only get a quick snippet of your Gmail messages on iGoogle. Now you can maximize Gmail to fully read and reply to your messages.

Comics. Games. Feeds. Photos. All of these get better when you give them some space. And to give you fast, one-click access to maximize your gadgets, we’ve introduced a new left-navigation model. This is a good way to navigate to these new, richer applications, and it makes space for more features you’ll see in the coming months.

We invite you to take a tour of all the new features, and hope you’ll give us a chance to show you why we’re excited about the evolution of iGoogle.

Also look at the iGoogle tour I am really excited to see such a feature; you guys also explore and let me know your views.

iGoogle Tour

Well, our example use to be this:

“If you give the credits to the feeds provider and add your own touch in the article (i.e. images, videos, links, etc.) than you will be providing more information to the user and you will not be penalized by Google anyhow for the feeds”.

Well… that was our reply and here is what Google have cleared again in their Google Blog post about Duplicate Content Penalty.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first

OK. so now here the general question asked is, if Google finds links with duplicate content of some extent how they rank the pages on SERP (Search Engine Ranking Positions), here’s the answer:

Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URL s that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy. You can find details in this blog post, which states:

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URL’s into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URL’s in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

In most cases Google does a good job of handling this type of duplication. However, you may also want to consider content that’s being duplicated across domains. In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users.

So the thing which we need to understand is that Google’s objective is to provide relevant information to the user and get ranked on search engines for better user experience. So if you want your site to be up in rankings, go ahead and add some relevant information for the users, so that search engines can find you useful for their customers.

At the end I will paste the Google Summary

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
• You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control. Here are some good places to start.

So keep writing and adding good and relevant content and always remember “Content is King”