Monthly Archives: July 2008

Do YouTube Pages Get Special Treatment in Google Mobile Search?

If you’re doing SEO for mobile sites, you may have noticed recently that Youtube mobile pages are all over the place in Google Mobile search engine results (mobile web). For any kind of query typed, you’ll see one or more Youtube links in the first result page. And very often, these Youtube videos are not relevant at all.

Check out the search results for the query “soulja boy” for example. (or view a screenshot here)

See that? Does Google think that people only want to see videos from their mobile?

I think that it’s a good thing that Google decided to include links to videos in its mobile search results, but having that many links to videos is not relevant at all. If people are looking for mobile web pages, they’ll have to do several clicks to find them, which is not helping the mobile user experience at all.

I hope that Google is aware of this situation and is trying to improve the quality of its mobile search results.

Mobile Web: Bango Offers a Way to Track Unique Visitors

Since I started doing Mobile SEO about 2 years ago, the main problem that I’ve encountered in my duties was that there’s no way to identify unique visitors when it comes to mobile surfing.

Indeed, as opposed to the desktop Web, where cookies or IP addresses (sometimes combined with user agents for better accuracy) are used to identify unique visitors, it’s another story with the mobile Web. Cookies aren’t supported by all phones and IP addresses aren’t unique to each end user, but it’s the one belonging to the WAP gateway used when you surf from your cell phone.

Today, Bango, a leading provider of mobile billing solutions and also of a mobile analytics suite announced today that it is the first company to provide an accurate unique visitor count.

This may sound surprising, but here’s how Bango explains how it works:

For each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors.

Bango is close to many mobile phone carriers so it managed to work something out with them to profile users. But one thing that I’m not sure of is if this feature works with any carrier…I’ll ask this to Bango when I get a chance.

You can try Bango Analytics here.

Local Mobile Search: Google Launches User Reviews

When you just arrive in a new town and are looking for a good restaurant, the only way for most people is to use their cell phone and call a local directory, or use a search engine.

But besides finding a name and a location for the type of restaurant you’re looking for, these services won’t give you more information about the place.

To avoid possible disappointments, it’d be good to have reviews and ratings of the businesses you’ve found via a mobile search engine.

Google has recently enabled users to write reviews of businesses from their mobile phone.

If you go to Google from your cell and search for a business, then click on it, you’ll see a link to write a review about it and also to rate it (1-5 stars).
google mobile search reviews local search

google mobile reviews

This is a really nice feature, it allows people to easily and quickly get reviews about a business and then decide if they want to go there or not.

Via Google Mobile Blog.

Google using offline marketing in China to promote its mobile search engine

Google China is apparently using an offline marketing campaign to recruit new users for its mobile search engine. DWGoogle.cn has posted some photos of outdoor advertisements located in the subway station of Guangzhou.

Google seems to have chosen this area of China because the cost of Internet data is the lowest there, so people are more likely to surf from their mobile phones.

Via China Web 2.0