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Google has unveiled a number of changes made to search, whilst also announcing that it will be creating a monthly post for its Inside Search blog – to sum up any changes to algorithms made during the month – according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Ten changes in total have been made; here is a short, summarised breakdown of the most important of these changes:
- “Related query results refinements”: This change will mean that searches in which synonyms and other related terms conflict, with other words in the query, will see some results excluded.
- “More comprehensive indexing”: Google has improved its ability to locate long-tail documents; this means that ensuring that long-tail optimisation is implemented vitally important.
- “Image result freshness”: Now means that Google is more capable of finding the latest images – which can be important for breaking news stories.
- “Fresher and more complete blog search results”: This change will make the content published on blogs more likely to appear on an SERP (search engine results page) – thanks to an improved indexing system.
With many in SEO reliant on knowing the latest changes to search algorithms, Google’s move to sum up any alterations on a monthly basis – on the Inside Search blog – could prove to be extremely useful.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
OK, we knew it was kicking in, hence this week’s focus on the ‘new’ Google algorithm. Yesterday, Youtube’s new look was the focus because video is part of the all-important algorithm.
Today’s post should have been about QDF (Query Demands Freshness) in regards to news, blog posts, tweets etc, but there has been a new announcement which demands attention.
Before we get to that announcement, perhaps we should talk about the ‘new’ algorithm. There are those for whom, once upon a time, the acquisition of Goto, or Hotbot’s latest colour scheme, made IRC buzz. SEO was about hiding terms such as “Pamela Anderson” in your metas and making the keyword rich text the same colour as the bgcolor. Oh you may scoff now at such immature antics, but some of us remember when it worked. For a while, in about 1994/5. It is not often you see such tactics proposed these days, but there are many tactics from 1-2 years ago that would seem pointless now to the IM cognoscenti.
So, “new” has become a very subjective term in SEO and Internet Marketing – more “How new are you?” There are apps and techniques and on-page or even offline optimisation strategies which for many SMEs are complete wizardry. Let’s face it, there are still business people who don’t know what Twitter is! So, we are using new this week to mean – climb out of your PPC and basic SEO box, look at some of your options, understand what drives your audience to you in 2011, and then do it. If you don’t know what Google+ is, and you don’t have a Facebook profile, or you have never tweeted, blogged, answered a post in a forum, or set up an RSS feed to track your competitors – this is ALL going to be new. It might be an idea to start there first….and then return to find out what else you are missing.
Google + is suddenly appearing in the SERPs. (You need to be careful not to confuse +1 with G+). What we are talking about is that G+ status updates (stream/what’s news/posts etc) and Add to Circles have been spotted out in the wild. At present, it seems to be only on Direct Connect accounts, but that is a fairly typical Google strategy – target early adopters and reward those who at least give the betas a run for their money.
Now the Google devs are actually approachable on G+, the instant and valuable feedback that these beta tests garner for Google are well worth the pain of getting 153 comments to a throwaway comment about a new album a dev is listening to on Google Music. (Did you know that had also launched this week?! We’ll show you the workaround shortly for UK people).
The point is though that Google is playing a fast catch up to other social networks. It may not be a quick game. In fact, it is looking increasingly like a long one i.e not instant gratification, as many have come to expect of the online world. However, Google is joining up its dots and adding new functionality, removing dead wood (including the decent version of Reader, but we won’t go into that), and listening far harder, or so it would seem, to its users than a) has been the norm previously and b) its competitors.
So, today’s task is to look at your G+ page/profile, discover if you have actually spotted the SEO factors that Google is taking into account for its algo, and making sure that your page has half a chance to join the firehose that will be the re-introduction of real time search, but from G+ primarily and not Twitter, as it used to be.
And if you think that ignoring all those people who added you to circles over the last 10 days is still an option, or that applying for Direct Connect might be a waste of time…..think again. Your G+ status update might bring your company page to a first page position that your traditionally SEOd website has little to no chance reaching in a competitive world. *THAT* is the new algorithm!
After a significant number of requests by users, search engine giant Google has announced the addition of a tool that will allow users to search exactly for what they’re looking for, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch (SEW).
The Verbatim tool can be found under “More search tools” on the SERP (search engine results page).
Once clicked, users will discover that Verbatim will ensure that their search results:
- Include all terms made in the original search
- Match the exact spelling included in the search
- Use the same tense, verb form and plural vs singular forms.
Without this setting turned on, users will find that the results produced are auto-corrected, personalised, suggested or related.
A popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives, Google has stated that they will be “applying similar ideas directly to algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy when our query broadening search improvements triggers.”
SEW have suggested that this will allow Google to get a more concise idea of when their suggestions and corrections are required.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
In a bid to become more transparent about the recent changes that it has made to its search algorithms, Google has spoken about nine of the most recent changes that it’s made, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
The majority of these confirmed changes (six) apply to English-speaking markets. Although not revealing all the details behind each of the alterations – which could affect SEO strategies – Google has announced that the changes include:
Results for date-specific queries will be organised to meet that range – This will mean that whenever a user specifies a date range for the results provided by their search, Google will now ensure that the results are ordered appropriately by date.
Snippets will now feature more page content – Snippets of text featured on the SERP (search engine results page) normally feature more menu and header text; with Google’s algorithm change, more text will be pulled from page content instead.
Official page detection has been improved – Websites that are official will be located more effectively, and will also receive greater promotion.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Firefox 8, which is now available for download, includes a Twitter search tool built into the browser inside a drop down menu for search.
This may seem a minor upgrade in a new browser version which also isn’t a major upgrade, but for Twitter users the search facilities within Twitter have long been a subject of discussion and ire. Applications have sprung up across the entire cyberworld to try to redeem Twitter’s major failing – searching #hashtags, @usernames and Tweet histories. In fact, there are so many of them that inputting “Search twitter app” into Google may keep you busy for several weeks or more trying them all out.
Being able to search Twitter is a canny move on Firefox’s part after Google dropped real time search from its engine just prior to launching Google+ earlier this summer. Whilst others have stepped in to add functionality by different apps, building it into the browser was an obvious move, and Firefox the most likely opponent in the browser wars to capitalise on Google’s elimination of the feature.
For journalists, news junkies, and the Twitterati, this simple drop down choice may see yet further users running multiple browsers at once simply to get to the information they need when they require it. It is likely that Google will re-introduce a replacement for real time search sooner rather than later following Firefox 8’s release; however, one wonders how Twitter feel about letting Google play again after removing the facility, seemingly with little to no warning.
The removal of third party add-ons and a new feature that checks your existing add-ons for compatability when updating means that you may find that some of the addons and plug ins you had become reliant on are no longer available in Firefox 8 until they are compliant. Whilst this is not a bad thing per se, it is likely that many of us will simply find alternatives for tools we had been using in order to get back to our previous capabilities as quickly as possible. One of the add-ons disabled is Google Toolbar for Firefox so it will be interesting to see how quickly this is brought up to date!
(Much of the SEOmoz toolbar etc also seems to need updating, and I for one will seriously miss that until it is back, so if you use these sort of tools regularly, you might want to hold off the update for a few days/weeks until everyone catches up. Greasemonkey etc all seem fine though….).
Interestingly, whilst doing the upgrade, the first windows that opened after the details of which add ons would be disabled and enabled, were a series of crash reports. Which doesn’t bode exactly well! I shall report back once resolved…..
The full options available in Firefox 8 can be found on the Mozilla blog, and if you are a (website) developer, you will be interested in this list of all the new attributes etc that Firefox 8 supports.
US search habits have shown that the new Yahoo!/Bing search collaboration is – slowly – helping it gain ground on Google.
In a year, the new combined search site has gained around a four per cent market share of US searches – largely at the expense of Google.
But the slow change means Google may not have to fret too much just yet.
The latest Experian Hitwise report claims Bing searches accounted for around 28.99% of all US search enquiries last month, up from 28.05% the previous month.
It’s now been 12 months since Yahoo! and Bing combined their search systems in an attempt to gain ground on Google – which has a huge share of all global searches.
Hitwise claims that, back in August 2010 when Yahoo! and Bing first merged their search, Google had a 71.59% market share. That has since dropped to about 65%.
Microsoft, which runs Bing, had previously said it didn’t expect to eat away at Google’s lion share immediately.
Instead, the company said it would keep “working and working” to chip away at Google’s dominance.
The fact Google has dropped six percentage points, whilst Bing/Yahoo has gained four per cent, shows that the strategy is working, albeit at a slow pace.
It’s interesting news for search engine optimisation, as strategies will need to be tailored to maximise result listings for both search engines as Bing/Yahoo! eat into Google’s market.
If Bing/Yahoo! can up their current pace, however, then Google’s stranglehold on search will eventually weaken in the US. There would appear to still be a long way to go before that happens, though.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
Google News has undergone a recent SEO change, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
The service will now utilise the commonly-used Googlebot, rather than using its own dedicated crawler, to inspect newly published content.
While the change isn’t anything to drastic, – with the basic elements of web crawling staying the same – Google’s official Webmaster blog has indicated that there will be some minor alterations.
Googlebot will perform the same task, in the same way, as the former crawl system – Rob D Young writes: “A negative ‘Googlebot-News’ entry in the robots.txt file will still halt just the news crawling, sitemaps will still be crawled, and all analytics for actual visitors will remain the same.”
More noticeable changes will become clear when examining site logs; now users will only be able to view the Googlebot user-agent – making it much more difficult to be aware of whether your website is being indexed and featured on the Google News feed.
As expected with this type of change, all guidelines traditionally implemented for Googlebot will apply for news content too – this will mean that pages will not be fully indexed if they require a payment for access.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
With its success in southeast Asia continuing to grow, Google is set to launch a new office in Thailand, according to a report published by The Nation.
The office, to be located in Bangkok, will be the country’s first.
It is thought that Google will use the move to try to increase the amount spent by digital marketers in Thailand – currently at 0.3 per cent – to a figure more in line with the online advertising revenues spent by the likes of the US – where online advertising spending is at much higher 30 to 50 per cent.
Ariya Banomyong has been appointed as manager for Google’s Thai operations; and has stated that he aims to get more products offered to local businesses.
Talking about other aims, he added: “A priority job is to educate the Thai market, including agencies, business partners and corporate customers, on how to go online successfully and what they will then find by way of products and services that Google can bring them continued success online.”
Of all of the nations in Southeast Asia, Thailand sees the highest number of searches conducted per day – 55 million.
The announcement will no doubt provide a boost to the region’s search engine marketing industry.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
With the Bing/Yahoo! Search Alliance well underway, the Microsoft-operated search engine has moved to remind people of some of the SEO basics everyone should be aware of when optimizing their site.
In the post, entitled ‘18 things you need to know about SEO’, Bing clarifies some of the aspects users can change in order to see their site rank higher on the search engine.
Here are just a few of those things site users can employ to add to current SEO strategies:
Bing has also warned users of the things that, if employed, will see their ranking gradually dissipate; including:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
July provided interesting results for SEO, with the popularity of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, growing during the month, according Experian Hitwise research cited in a report published by the Independent.
For the period of June to July, Microsoft’s share of the search market increased by 0.96 per cent – which accounts for 3.84 per cent of all UK searches conducted for the month.
However, unsurprisingly, Google still retained the major share of the market with 91.04 per cent of all UK searches being conducted through the search engine for July – while the monthly rate fell by 0.98 per cent.
The major loser in the results posted on August 8 was Yahoo!, who have once again been leapfrogged by Bing as the second most popular search engine in the UK search market – although Yahoo! and Bing have now combined their search engine power in the face of Google’s search dominance, which may go some way toward explaining those statistics.
Searches conducted by Ask sites rounded off the results, with a 1.44 per cent share for July – representing a 0.06 per cent fall from figures posted for the same period in 2010.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
