With all the noise in Pubcon around the recent Google Updates including Caffeine, Google Instant & Local, Matt Cutts came out quite easy in his speach in Pubcon.

He says Google updating the algorithm this frequently to make search experience speedier, like with the caffeine update Google could give out 50% fresher results.

A good piece of information for all the PPC folks who are a bit confused as to what will count as an impression on Google Instant:

- User hits search or enter buttons

- User selects a query from auto-complete

- User clicks on a link

- User stops typing and results are displayed for 3+ seconds

In case user stops typing (the forth point in the list above), in analytics the search query will be shown as coming from the complete keyword. For example, if the user was searching for “Mosaic Services” and they stop at  ”Mos”, analytics data will display this hit under “Mosaic” keyword.

With Google instant, it becomes more important to use Google Snippets to beautify your listing as it’s even harder to get a click on your keyword now even if you do get an impression.

Matt also pointed the “location” option in the left panel that has recently featured in Google search. It’s a great tool to check what results someone out of your geographic area will see. Great stuff with the results going IP based (the merger of local and universal results).

Another upgrade that will help in universal search optimization is the acceptance of a single sitemap file for multiple file types (so no need of a separate image/video/text sitemap)

Upcoming Trends:

- Mobile

- Local

- Social

- Variety (video/image/text)

- HTML5

Watch this space for more updates on Pubcon.

Spam reporting has been embedded in the new version of Chrome to allow for easier spam reporting.

The first Pubcon session took off really well with a good turnout. The session was detailed enough for retail audience and had some good pointers for professionals in this area. I particularly liked what Andy Beal had to say and his presentation slides. It was interesting to know that Rhea Dry Sdale, COO Outspoken Media, saved the term “SEO” from being trademarked!

Also good to know that no one likes Google Instant!

Here are a few quick takeaways for those who don’t want to go through the huge literatures available:

-  Make an early decision to invest in your reputation management, instead of waiting for a crisis. At times it’s impossible to get a specific negative post out of the results if you didn’t plan things in advance.

- The easiest way to go about the most basic online brand management would be to host your authorized pages on all free user generated content channels like Facebook/Wordpress etc.

- When investing in Blogs for reputation management, create them on a sub-domain orbetter still a new domain instead of a sub folder. You want to cover more and more of the available real estate on the first page results and creating a sub directory blog will not help that.

- With Goolgle’s real time search results update (2009), managing the social media has become an intrinsic part of online brand management.

- Nice one… you can check Google suggested results using this query - http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=”your keyword”

- Focus on reviews on your local search results, with latest update (local results have been integrated in the universal search for all those who were sleeping) they are anyway all over.

- There are many different things to track for your online reputation, the easiest way is to keep an eye on your analytics and look at any sudden inflow through a channel where you never promoted your site. Top things to track as per Andy Beal:

1. Google Alerts, subscribe to them

2. Blog posts, use tools like icerocket.com & keotag.com

3. You analytics data

4. Google search results

- No tool gives 100% relevant data, do a manual audit too.

- If you didn’t monitor and manage your reputation online on time and you got your first negative comment, should you panic? Well you can… base your reaction to the comment on the following factors:

1. In fluence of the poster

2. Tone of the content

3. Follow-ups on the post

4.  Viral effect

- For a wholistic reputation management approach, have a clear social media policy and educate your staff about it. Just giving your social media management to HR wouldn’t work. Any employee of the company can invite negative comments about it.

- The best approach would be to have your staff direct happy customers to your social media profiles and share positive comments, that’s the most natural way of building a positive online reputation that can be hard to break through with a few negative comments.

That’s about it. With reputation management climbing its way up the corporate priority, it’s important to start out early.

Mosaic is participating in Pubcon, Las Vegas as a conference attendee as well as an exhibitor.

Me and my colleagues will keep you posted on our view of the conference and significant events there. Look forward to some good knowledge sharing around reputation management apart from SEO and SMO.

We will share some of the fun moments too with the post conference party photographs.

Watch this space!