Anyone in the SEO game is by now reading Matt Cutts’ blog, and well they should. The “real insider Googleplex scoop” is so often what emanates from Matt – and for those of us who don’t get to “that part” of the conferences, it’s really illuminating reading.
I did scratch my head at Matt’s helpful post about how to write queries. “At Google,” he writes, “we use [ and ] to mark the beginning and end of queries.”
Those of us over here in paid search world, of course, think [ and ] refer to an exact match in the AdWords interface.
So let’s say you wanted to discuss the example of how I inserted the phrase algonquin park blueberries into Ad Group #7 – Blueberry Locales. Since in this case I put it as an exact match, I would want people to see the brackets. But adding Matt’s brackets would make this [[algonquin park blueberries]]. Ha ha, OK, maybe it wouldn’t. But I think it illustrates how we all get pretty tunnel-focused in our vision. People on the algorithmic side talk about underscores and hyphens in filenames, people in the paid search world talk about negative keywords and expanded broad matching [(what again?)] like they’re discussing the weather.
Anyway those formatting questions come up a lot more than you’d expect. People who work in publishing realize this, fortunately, and are always around with handy suggestions. “Over here at McGraw-Hill, we decided to use bold to denote any user query or phrase in an AdWords account.” 🙂 Even that’s not perfect because
“algonquin park blueberries” (a phrase match in my AdWords account)
would look exactly the same as
“algonquin park blueberries” (a phrase typed by a user if the user had included the quotation marks).
But at least these would not be confused with [algonquin park blueberries].
I think.
Maybe I’d better get back to Algonquin Park to reflect more on this. Have a good week.
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
