As Bruce Clay explained to WebProNews, the changes Panda brought were significant to the search industry. However, overall, he thinks the quality of Google’s search results have improved. That said, Clay told us that we likely haven’t seen the end of Panda and that it has the potential to get bigger and meaner.

Social media and local search also played important roles in search over the year. Although the advent of Google+ is obviously noteworthy, Clay said that it would become more integrated with search over time, especially in regards to local search.

Going forward, he believes that SEO will become much harder. In addition, he said that SEO, social, conversion rate optimization, PPC, and other search marketing elements will, instead of being separate areas of expertise, will all fall under the broad title of Internet marketing. In other words, SEOs will also have be experts in social media and vice versa.

How have the search events of 2011 impacted you and your business? Let us know.

Forrester told WebProNews that people should be concerned with producing quality content because good content attracts both people and search engines. The people that like this content will amplify it, thus allowing the search engines to give the publisher authority.

Social media comes into the equation because it provides information to the engines, which gives them the ability to return more relevant results. Since most people refer to friends or family for advice before they make a purchase, integrating social into search results helps users make decisions faster.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

In a study that InboundWriter conducted over the summer, Jay Baer of Convince and Convert actually saw a 33 percent increase in traffic to blog posts that were written using the tool as opposed to the 30 days before the posts were rewritten.

The app is also available as a WordPress plugin.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Truant runs a different type of business that falls into the category of a “Third Tribe” business, a term that Sonia Simone of Copyblogger coined. He doesn’t believe that a certain set of standards make a business successful and encourages others to think in this same way. Do you agree?

WebProNews is partnering with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. BlogWorld takes place November 3-5 in Los Angeles. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Dani Horowitz, who runs the site, told us that her US traffic was cut in half as a result of the Panda Update. After looking closely at the situation, she believes that her site was hit because so many other sites syndicate her site’s content. In other words, these sites were hit because they were classified as content farms, but DaniWeb felt the impact as well since its backlinks lost value from these sites.

Fortunately, Horowitz is seeing some improvements to her site. She said she went into complete SEO and programmer mode which involved updating the entire url structure, removing tag clouds, using noindex and nofollow meta tags, making social buttons more obvious, and more. Although DaniWeb is not back to the point it was prior to Panda’s roll out, it is continuing to see positive progress.

At SXSW, WebProNews spoke with Stefan Weitz, a director with Bing, about this growth and what the search engine was doing to leverage it. According to him, the search industry is not a “zero-sum game.”

“For us to win, somebody else doesn’t have to lose,” he said.

In other words, he believes that all the search engines can expand on one idea and take it in new, and multiple, directions. Competition is tight, but as a result, it produces more new concepts and experiences. Bing, for example, has recently introduced several new projects. The search engine partnered with DealMap in order to bring great deals from popular sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial to users.

Bing has also launched Project Emporia that puts a new approach on personalization. The project is powered by its Matchbox technology and enables the engine to build profiles that offer better recommendations to users.

Weitz told us that Bing would continue to pursue these areas, along with social search, mobile search, and more, in order to provide a simpler and better user experience.

With all of its developments, do you think Bing will continue to gain Google’s market share?

WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson spoke with Rod Nicolson, VP User Experience Design & Workflow, PR Newswire about Google’s latest algorithm update.

Nicolson says the update effects up to 12 percent of sites and it may be a while before everyone can fully interpret what the algorithm change means.

PR Newswire has seen an impact because of the Google Panda update. Nicolson says PR Newswire has been hit with collateral damage in Google’s war against content farms. The algorithm update has not had a massive effect on PR Newswire but it has been larger than expected.

Nicolson says there is no way that PR Newswire could “ ever, ever” be considered a content farm. He does not see any reason why PR Newswire would be included in a drop in rankings.

PR Newswire has been in contact with Google about the algorithm update and reminded them who they are.

To avoid the situation in the future Nicolson says PR Newswire is doing what every “SEO on the planet is doing, and looking very closely at everything being published and the data about the farmer update.”

It all began when Danny Sullivan published an article exposing a Google experiment in which it tested Bing. According to Michael Gray of Atlas Web Service, the test, essentially, showed that Bing used the data from Google’s toolbar to duplicate its search results, a move that Google considers “copying.”

Gray went on to explain to WebProNews that the accusation of click fraud is “a little far-reaching.” Although the technology was the same, it didn’t cost Bing any money since there weren’t any PPC campaigns involved. He said that if Google did suspect that Bing was copying them, this method was the only way it would have found out the truth.

So, who’s right, and who’s wrong? Gray believes that both companies are in the wrong to an extent. Based on his analysis, Microsoft was wrong to take the data from the toolbar and use it in their ranking algorithm without testing it further.

Google’s wrongdoing, on the other hand, stems from past events. As he explains, Ask introduced universal search long before Google did, and Yahoo introduced Yahoo Instant long before Google released its version of it. In addition, Gray points out that Google seems to make product announcements at other people’s press events and play it off as a coincidence. Although Google, typically, says that it has been working on these products for long periods of time, some people interpret their actions in each of these scenarios differently.

The timing of this latest turn of events seemed to be somewhat of a coincidence as well since Sullivan’s article was published just before both companies were set to take the stage at the Farsight Summit.

“Google’s playing hardball and they’re a serious, competitive company; they like to hold onto their market share, and they’re not taking things laying down,” he said.

As for the lesson for marketers in all this, Gray said that marketers need to expand their efforts beyond SEO to include other areas, such as social media.

He also pointed out that this situation is “good news for Bing” because it means that Google considers them as a viable competitor.

How do you think this saga will play out, and how will it impact the search industry?

Google, however, has over 200 ranking signals that it has also publicly stated. Kasteler believes this number is probably closer to 1,000 signals. As a result, he doesn’t think that people should make such a big deal about site speed.

“The fact that it will affect you is highly unlikely,” he said.

Kasteler goes on to explain to WebProNews that Google still places relevance above all other factors. In other words, if you do have a fast site, it doesn’t always mean that you will rank above your competitors.

“You can have the fastest site in all the world, faster than all your competitors, but you still need to be relevant,” he added.

To summarize his thoughts, speed will not impact your site’s ranking if you do not have relevant content. Speed is an important factor but only after the relevance criteria is met. For example, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft all conducted studies on pages that loaded quickly against pages that didn’t load quickly. They found a 7-12 percent increase in conversions on the pages that loaded faster. Mozilla, specifically, found a 15.4 percent increase on pages that were only one second faster.

Kasteler believes that because speed impacts conversions and usability, it is more important than SEO.

“Having a fast site is way more important than SEO,” he said.

So, by having relevant content and fast site, everyone wins.

First of all, he points out that visual clutter is a problem. Flash and animations draw people’s attention but not to the point of conversion. Ash calls the graphic designers behind these creations “frustrated art school drop-outs.” Animations also present a problem since they often take a long time to load.

Another “deadly sin” that marketers make is giving their visitors too many choices. When there are links to a business’s partners, affiliates, and more, it does nothing but confuse the visitor. Instead of overwhelming people with these choices, Ash suggests putting just 2-4 options on a landing page.

Thirdly, one size doesn’t fit all with landing pages. Unfortunately, some businesses market through different channels but send all the traffic to the same landing page. This methodology doesn’t work because people are coming from different traffic sources and need landing pages that match their original intent or keywords.

“The best practice is really to have as many landing pages as you need with specific themes or background thought processes that the visitor might have,” Ash said.

A fourth “deadly sin” is when marketers put too much text on the landing page. In this age of technology, people have an even smaller attention span than they had before. For this reason, marketers need to keep it short, simple, and to the point. If they do need to add more information, they should put it in other links.

The last problem that Ash discusses is the sin of asking for too much information. As he explains, marketers often get greedy and try to get names, email addresses, and more for future use. However, he believes that marketers should only ask for the information that is necessary to complete the current transaction. According to him, users are more likely to spread word-of-mouth and influence by their own free will. He also said that if they are pleased with what they received, the chances are greater for them to visit again and even possibly give more information willingly.

For more on landing pages and how they can lead to conversions, check out Tim Ash’s Conversion Conference.

For starters, he discussed the battle among the search engines. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered in a joint search effort, Yahoo claims it is applying a different algorithm to Bing’s index, which would mean different search results for Yahoo users. Even if this is the case, Clay believes that users will continually shift toward Bing.

Ask is no longer a player in the search space, but Blekko is in. However, Clay does not believe that it will emerge as a strong competitor for Google or Bing.

Moving on to Google, the search veteran predicted that Google would become a local search engine in 2 years. Local is definitely on the rise, especially since more money can be made in it. For example, local regions can bid on national terms such as shoes. By doing this, they have the potential to increase their ROI. If this happens, they are more likely to spend more money on their PPC campaigns, which means more money for Google in the long run.

“You either play in the local space… or you’re not going to get clicks even if you’re #1,” Clay points out.

He also talks about Google News and how he believes that it will be as big as local is now. He even predicted that Google News would be a viable competitor to major news outlets such as CNN and Fox News.

“I don’t believe we’re going to get into a situation where Google’s going to pass on an opportunity to control the flow of news,” he said.

Getting into social media, Clay made the statement that likes are the new links. Because social is becoming such a big part of search, he believes that likes, referrals, and recommendations will be factored into the ranking algorithm that search engines use. If this happens, you can expect to see new forms of spam.

Only time will tell if these predictions will come about, but the one thing that is certain is that it’s going to be a very interesting time in the search industry.

As he explains to WebProNews, when companies base their global strategy on their Web analytics, they are making a big mistake. In these cases, companies look at their analytics and think that they should target the countries that they are getting the most traffic from. Another common mistake with Web analytics is when companies assume that the amount of traffic from a country matches the amount of conversions.

After doing international SEO for 8 years, Bonfils believes that neither of these approaches are very effective.

“There are a lot more components to identifying the markets that you want to go in other than just Web analytics,” he said.

These components include keyword research data, identifying local competitors in the market, technical issues, and ecommerce-related items. Bonfils suggests plugging these factors into a spreadsheet to determine which market is really the best option for your company.

He also points out that simply translating keywords and other search data do not produce accurate results. Every country has its own vernacular, which is often misinterpreted in translation.

Although an international search strategy has many challenges, there are also many global opportunities for businesses. Bonfils recalls that approximately 75 percent of all of Google’s traffic is from outside of North America, which means international programs are expanding rapidly.

Because of the large growth in global search, SEM International is teaming up with the SMX conference series to have one day based solely on international search. For more information on this, check out upcoming SMX shows.

Rich Skrenta and the team at Blekko developed the search engine with the goal of eliminating spam in search. In addition, they launched the Spam Clock to help raise awareness of the growing problem. He told WebProNews that the amount of spam was “proliferating.”

“There are about 100 billion urls on the Web today, and we think that the majority are actually spam,” he said.

In talking about the impact of spam on the Internet, Skrenta pointed out that, today, most urls are not created by people. Instead, machines create them, which means the costs associated are slim to none. As a result, he said, “We’ve seen an erosion of quality on certain verticals.”

He compares the problems of today to email spam and said that the Web needs to apply a filtering model to remove it.

Interestingly, the clock’s release has sparked a great deal of discussion in the tech community regarding spam and its impact on the Web and search. Here are a few of the stories that have resulted:

Spam Clock Tallies Junk on the Internet

Blekko Launches Spam Clock To Keep Pressure On Google

Spam Clock Illustrates the Problem of Link Relevancy for Google, Bing, and Other Search Engines

Although some of the reports of late have attacked Google, Skrenta said that the search giant is not completely responsible for the problem. The real issue is that, as the Web grows, it gets worse. For this reason, he believes that Google’s approach of using algorithms to detect the bad content is losing its effectiveness. The rise of content farms has added to this issue and makes the search results inaccurate.

Skrenta and Blekko think it is easier to identify the good content and separate it into verticals such as health and finance. He said that they want to create thousands of categories in order to “clean up the entirety of the query stream.”

One reason for this is Blekko’s recent introduction of the Spam Clock, which tracks the number of new spam pages created since January 1.  As you might remember, Blekko is the search engine that launched last November with the intent of eliminating spam with its slashtag technology. It released the Spam Clock earlier this month in hopes of raising awareness about the growing dangers of spam.

WebProNews spoke with Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko, who told us that there are entities that are producing hundreds of thousands of spam pages simply because they can attract search traffic and make money.

“What we’re finding with the Web is that the amount of spam is just proliferating… It’s gotten to the point where the amount of good content on the Web is a small fraction of the total,” he said.

As this information has surfaced, many reports have come out that indicate how much of a problem spam is for Google. Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, who also wrote about the issue, told WPN that Web spam is actually part of a much greater problem that involves society’s reliance on Google for search.

He explained that Google uses a comprehensive model for search that factors in the user’s keywords, intent, personalization, and more, which he believes is “too difficult a task.”

“Where we get, I think, tighter relevance, is in curated results, is in directories, is in finding that one step down where someone has made the universe smaller,” he said.

Goodman went on to say that if Google were truly an “unbiased participant in this effort to reach a relevant stage,” it would do a better job of incorporating the tools that do curate and mediate content.

So, as spam continues to grow, what impact will it have on the future of the Web? Is it taking over the Web and taking Google out on its way? Or, do search engines need to adjust their search model?