May 17,
2006
In This Issue:
1. Customer Testimonials - Good and Bad?
2. In the News - Google dropping pages, Yahoo
home page, Google Trends
3. More News Headlines
4. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Customer Testimonials - Good and Bad?
I should call this edition of Net Gains the "recommended
reading" issue, because I've been doing a
lot of reading over the past few days and there's
some great material out there for the business
web site owner / webmaster.
I'll start with Nick Usborne's Excess Voice newsletter,
which on Tuesday tackled the use of customer testimonials
on business web sites. This is something we often
recommend clients do, because reading the experiences
of past customers helps build a visitor's confidence.
But there's a problem: Sometimes the testimonials
you read on a web site don't look authentic, and
when that happens you end up destroying a visitor's
confidence.
Nick makes a unique suggestion that he thinks
will make the customer testimonials more "real"
-- post the positives and the negatives. And,
he says, to be sure to include how you resolved
the negative feedback. Interesting, isn't it?
Excess Voice: Give
Your Testimonials More Credibility
_________________
In The News
Google dropping pages?
Google's BigDaddy overhaul has been live for more
than a month now, and a lot of webmasters are
complaining that Google now has fewer of their
pages indexed in the database. Matt Cutts confirmed
in the last week that Google does now have "different
crawl priorities" because of the BigDaddy
update. And he suggests that it's likely caused
by link patterns -- things such as trading links
with off-topic sites, buying links, etc. You can
read a long post on his blog about the history
of BigDaddy, changes to how sites are crawled,
and the effects of reciprocal linking.
Cutts: Indexing
Timeline
On a related note, Cutts also addressed the "Sandbox"
issue (and many other things) in a recent interview
with Mike Grehan, which is also recommended reading
on Clickz.com.
Clickz.com: Google's
Matt Cutts: The Big Interview
Yahoo's new home page
Yahoo is giving a preview of its new home page,
which is more organized and a bit easier on the
eye than what they have now.
Yahoo Preview
New Google Products
Late last week, Google introduced several new
products/tools -- the only one I've had time to
play with very much is Google Trends. This is
something that might be beneficial to web site
owners and webmasters. It lets you look at search
volume trends over the past couple years. You
can give it one search term, or compare multiple
terms. Suggested use: compare two of the brand
names your company sells to see which is searched
more often, and when. It might be helpful to know,
for example, that a certain brand or product you
sell is searched for more often during the Christmas
holiday season. Trends is a beta tool, and is
lacking any concrete numbers -- you don't see
how many searches were done for the terms you
give it, you just see volume trends in graph form.
Google
Trends
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time
to read. These are just some of the headlines
we've posted to OWTweb.com in recent days.
Web
search sites give new ways to find results
May 15, 2006 - Reuters
Is
'Big Daddy' choking Google?
May 12, 2006 - eWeek
Local
search for smaller markets
May 11, 2006 - ClickZ.com
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
Wrapping it Up
That's all for this week. Hope online business
is treating you well!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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