Optimizing for Google Onebox

What is the difference between organic optimization and OneBox optimization? 1000 Miles.

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I got this question last week, and it actually made me stop and think. The difference between optimizing for SERPs and optimizing for OneBox is actually quite a bit, but how do you really put that into words?

First, organic optimization is much more work. You not only need to get your content, title, headings, meta tags, site structure, and page cross-linking done correctly, but you’ve also got to worry about getting IBL’s with the proper anchor text pointed to the right page.

February 26th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | 5 comments

OneBoxer.com weekly recap for Feb 19th - 23rd, 2007

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The weekly oneboxer.com podcast for the following topics:

• Base podcast listings
• Google checkout
• One blog post could cost Yahoo their $20M / the MBL controversy
• Shoemoney’s new “Most Viewed Photo” - are they kidding?
• The OneBoxer.com podcast got listed in iTunes
• The site skin - coming soon
• Podcast advertising - podcasts [at] oneboxer.com
• Comments / Suggestions also to podcasts [at] oneboxer.com

February 24th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | no comments

What is Google getting out of Checkout?

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Obviously, Google Checkout transactions are costing Google money. Regardless of volume, they can’t process credit cards for free. Their initial percentage of ad spend towards processing fees seemed like it’d make sense as a motivation, but when they changed to free transactions for the rest of 2006 and then through 2007, I started to wonder. Especially when they added the $10 incentive.

What is Google really up to?

On my way home from Nebraska People Making Money Online (it was cool - thanks Jeremy), it suddenly struck me.

February 23rd, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | 4 comments

Base Podcasts?

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For those of you that publish podcasts, did you know you can list them in Google Base? You can list each episode individually, giving each one optimized descriptions and a link to the file itself.

I stumbled across this a while back and thought to myself, “Self, will this really work?” I didn’t know if anyone would actually be interested in a podcast that was searching in base or not, so I submitted one of them and decided to see what the results were.

February 22nd, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Non-Product Optimization, podcasts | no comments

Weekly Recap - Feb 6th - 16th

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I missed last week, so this week’s is longer.

Special guest: Robert Garcia (rumblepup).

Links discussed: enefem.com, rumblepup.com, his interview of me.

February 18th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | no comments

What did Google do right when starting Froogle?

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As most of you know, Froogle is what started the products portion of Google Base. Starting something like this from scratch and getting it to catch on isn’t an easy task, so they must have done something right. But what was it that they did right?

For starters, Google used their crawlers to pre-populate their new service. This showed some immediate value to the user, and it wasn’t awful. If you want an example of awful, MSN’s new product service is a good example.

February 14th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | 4 comments

Why would I need to resubmit a feed?

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A question I recently received via instant messaging:

I noticed that Google Base lets you change listing right in the interface. If that’s the case, why would someone need to resend their feed?

While it’s true that you can keep editing products and keep them on the site, I don’t personally have time to edit our 9,000 listings by hand to keep them active. Why did I say KEEP them active? Because of the following statement on base:

February 12th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Beginner, General, podcasts | no comments

How do I track sales through OneBox vs. froogle.google.com?

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While this seems initially like it’ll be a simple task, OneBox ends up being very difficult to really track down the sales from. The same feed, which many times has a parameter of ref=base or xsrc=base, ends up feeding Google Base, Froogle, and OneBox results.

What this means is you can’t totally trust your analytics. They’ll easily find those that arrived at a page with that parameter and track the sales, but they don’t typically break things down the way you’re going to want to here.

February 8th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Analytics, podcasts | 3 comments

How long has feed optimization been around?

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For those of us that have been doing Base feeds since it was only Froogle and were accepted early into the beta, this game has changed a lot. When I first entered the Froogle Beta program, there were a lot of feeds that were just database dumps. Those didn’t do much against what a good feed was doing, and I started optimizing pretty much right away. That would have been 3 - 4 years ago.

February 6th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Strategies, podcasts | no comments

Weekly Podcast - Jan 29th - Feb 2nd 2007 Recap

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A weekly recap and some other news. As you can tell by the length of the file, we rambled about stuff that wasn’t covered earlier in the week.

Phone number listed in the podcast: 509-218-3200

Email for comments / feedback: podcasts [at] oneboxer.com

February 3rd, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | General, podcasts | one comment