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Traditionally social media rivals, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have grouped together to create a new tool, aimed at drawing users’ attention to the “biased” results provided as part of Google’s Search Plus Your World, according to an article published by the Telegraph.
Entitled “Don’t be evil” (a nod to one of the search engine giant’s early mottos), the browser add-on is currently only compatible with Firefox.
The tool has been created to prevent Google searches returning content that’s been ‘ranked up’ by Google from its own social network, Google+.
A recent change has seen Google searches return Google+ content at the top of search results – a change previously announced as part of Search Plus Your World – at the expense of results from Twitter and Facebook.
Google has explained how the new update – which could affect SEO – worked.
A post published by Google read: “Starting today, if you search for a topic like (music) or (baseball), you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page.”
The search engine giant has yet to respond to the launch of ‘Don’t be evil’ – which is currently only available in America. However, Google did previously say it had tried to strike a deal with both Twitter and Facebook to include their results in a prominent position – but wrangles over cost and privacy scuppered such a move.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
Ah, this old chestnut! PageRank used to be one of the sacred mantras you would hear SEOs chanting. Your PR was of huge import and anyone with a PR of 5 or above felt they had the right to look down upon you. Some people lost sleep whenever their PR dropped, or if they had tried everything and still had a PR of zero.
PageRank came into being to help Google assess pages for authority, backlinks etc. It is never quite clear if the mystery surrounding how PR was calculated was solved, but over the years, PR slid down the ranks in algorithmic importance.
Until, on Oct 14th, 2009, Google finally said very clearly and in a manner that was not up for further debate, that SEOs could all sleep soundly again and PageRank, just as they had been trying to tell anyone who would listen for quite some time, was really, really not important. In fact, it had been removed from Google webmaster tools.
So, when anyone tells you to look for sites with a high PR, or to spend time trying to increase/gain PR, you will know better!
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It looks as though load time will be taken into account as a ranking factor in the next few months.
Slow page loads, eg content that buffers as your hosting company struggles to serve the pages, bloated code and so on, could all now affect your ranking in the search engines.
It has taken a long time for this to actually be mooted as “close to implementation” but it is a really obvious ranking factor. Users do not want pages served up as top results that take a long time to load. They want instant gratification.
This should come as a heads up to many. Website designers who do not strip unnecessary items out of code or who program inefficiently; hosting companies who do not have enough bandwidth available for their customers; traffic analysts who fail to equate high bounce rates with slow pages and advise their clients accordingly; and others.
Take a long hard look at your site. Try it on different connections, not just the fat pipe in your office – don’t try to be an imaginary user, go and be a real one. Visit the library or cybercafe and see how long your site takes to load. You could even consider digging out that old dial up modem and see how it works for all those who still live in a non-broadband world.
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The latest top 30 rankings from TopSEOS for August 2009 has been released.
Two UK companies, WebLinx Ltd and High Position Ltd continue to feature in the international list, which is good news for our search industry. The UK top SEO rankings show little change at the top; however there are three new entrants in the ranking list.
There is a rigorous evaluation of companies applying for a ranking, including speaking to at least three clients, and consideration of both on and off page optimisation, as well as keywords analysis and reporting methods.
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Why spend hours going through the Google rankings looking for your position, or that of your competitors, when you can automate the process and receive the results by email?
RankReport is a great free tool that will let you monitor your rankings weekly or daily if you are obsessed by the SERPs, and will then email the results. Saves you a job!
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There is still no truly conclusive evidence about how bounce rates affect your search engine rankings, but let’s assume they do for a moment…
If a visitor comes to your site, views one page, and then leaves, this is viewed as a ‘bounce’. If, for instance, your site is slashdotted, Dugg or stumbledupon, and the link is to a single page of relevance to the visitor, they will likely read it and vanish back to where they came from. You could therefore be hit with an awful lot of bounces in an hour or day.
If those bounces affect your search engine rankings, the failure to engage those quick visitors could have a noticeable effect on the SERPs. Not only that but you also need to be asking yourself why those fleeting visitors did just bounce straight out of your site? After all, that is surely a missed opportunity to capture some new subscribers to your newsletter, show special offers that may have led to sales or leads, offer related relevant content to a new audience, and so on.
If bounce rates don’t matter to rankings, then all well and good from an SEO/SEM point of view. But even if if they don’t matter to rankings, then you still need to work on how you keep people on your site by making your site sticky, adding valuable content, keeping visitors churning around your site rather than just hitting the back button or closing the tab. After all, it is those site visitors who will potentially buy from you, not the search engines!
So, are you thinking today about how you prevent people from leaving your site after viewing only one page and therefore reduce your bounce rate? And do you actually know which areas of your site are generating the most bounces right now?
Web analytics that show real time results are vital in assessing the bounce rate on your site, and helping you to deal with it. And if it turns out that bounce rates do affect your SERPs then surely it is better to have started dealing with the problem sooner rather than later?
