SEO Blog

Google have long since mooted the idea of adding a real-time element to their search – as highlighted by our May 22 post Is Real-Time Search Really the Future for Google? However, it now appears Bing have beaten them to the punch.

The Bing Community blog yesterday announced the first tentative steps of real-time interaction. Initially this will include the posts of the most followed and influential Twitter account users; however, it appears that plans are already afoot for further developments.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly slammed state intrusion determining how civilians use the Internet. In the report by The Telegraph, Schmidt claims that “if they don’t listen to us it is at their peril” – very ominous indeed; which serves as a thinly veiled attack on governments throughout the world, most notably Iran and China, who have decided to step in and filter what can be searched for.

The importance of the Internet in the creation and subsequent proliferation of news has come into focus in recent weeks. Ordinarily secretive states with little or no foreign journalistic contact, have had their barriers smudged by increasing numbers of videos and messages from within their own populous. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been right at the cutting edge of this distribution; a process that has invariably also involved the world’s most popular search engine, Google.
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Bit.ly have published a new tool this week which allows you to segment bit.ly social media traffic within Google Analytics.

The tool can be found here – bit.ly Google Analytics campaign Campaign Tool. You will be required to download a copy of the tool by choosing ‘File > Create a copy’

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A new service has come to light further linking Google AdWords with Google Analytics and meaning that you can now import your Analytics Goals into your AdWords Account.

Goals are the primary measurement of a desired action on a website including:
•    Page views
•    Contact requests
•    Email registrations
•    Making a purchase
•    Adding product to shopping cart

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As the world’s attention continues to be drawn by the civil unrest in Iran, two of the Internet’s giants have stepped in to help those voices be heard and understood. Almost simultaneously, Facebook and Google have launched Persian services to accommodate this growing need for communication.

Within their Translate service, Google have added Persian (still showing as an Alpha, so developments may need to be made); allowing messages to and from the troubled Gulf state to be understood with greater ease. Of course, there are millions of people who speak Persian, so this will have a long-term benefit; however, the timing of this addition is probably far from coincidental.

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Bing continues to confound its critics and rivals with impressive statistical data just a couple of weeks after it was first launched. In the latest statistics provided by comScore, it has seen a 3% rise in both searcher penetration and share of search result pages, to leave it at 16.7% and 12.1% respectively for the week ending 12/06/2009.

It will certainly be interesting to keep an eye on the rise of Bing and where it eventually levels off. Google of course remain well out in front, but rivals like Yahoo and Ask may well be looking like also-rans if they’re unable to gain back some momentum from the marauding Microsoft Bing.

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The need for keeping content fresh and relevant is instilled in all SEO professionals. Regular moderation is required in order to ensure that everything on your site is as it’s supposed to be, just as we highlighted in an earlier post titled Craigslist & Facebook Highlight the Need for Standards in Content.

Unfortunately, this is a point that has been further highlighted by Richard Baxter. In a piece written for SEOgadget, he discusses how his Google rankings took a nosedive. What was the reason for this capitulation? Simple, inappropriate comments on his blog posts.

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As mentioned recently in our post entitled Facebook Overtakes MySpace in US Social Networking Superiority, MySpace have bucked the trend of resurgent social media sites and have actually seen widespread drops in membership and visitor numbers.

Whilst they still maintain a solid second position, the plight of the once runaway leader has never been more graphically illustrated than with today’s announcement that they will be laying off 30% of their staff.

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Just as with the Google Define: functionality, the calculator is extremely simple to use and remarkably effective tool. Like many of the search quirks found on Google, the calculator is accessible just by using the conventional search bar to perform your maths for you.

It can work out some reasonably complex problems too, so don’t be afraid to test it. Whether you put in the calculation numerically or textually, Google will almost instantaneously provide you with an accurate answer.

So if you’re forever misplacing your calculator and need a quick sum working out, look no further than Google. It’s quick, it’s accessible and it’s easy to use.

Google Webmaster Tools now allows site owners to notify Google if you’ve changed domains. This “change of address” tool will update the search index for 180 days by which point your new domain should have been crawled and indexed.

Moving Domain

The standard rules apply though, i.e. should still use a 301 permanent redirect for your old site to new domain. See Google’s own guidelines for moving an old to new domain.

Matt Cutts and the Webspam Team at Google have been hard at work in recent weeks. Invariably most of their ‘major’ announcements have coincided with news proliferating from other sources that is either detrimental towards Google, or positive about their rivals, notably Bing.

Late on yesterday evening, Matt Cutts posted a new blog article concerning the ongoing PageRank Sculpting controversy. In this, he essentially suggests that the nofollow rule is largely redundant apart from those sites that you really wouldn’t vouch for. Cutts suggests that building quality links and providing a website that is of a high enough standard to encourage users to link back, is the way forward.

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Local search plays a big part in online business, so recent updates to Google Local Business Centre will be welcomed by most companies with an online presence.

This free service has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses throughout the world, providing an extra search dynamic to their SEO structure. When consumers search for a service and a location, just as I have below with ‘Florists in Portsmouth’, they will ordinarily receive the standard results along with a local map and a breakdown of the outlets in that area; which is where the Local Business Centre comes in.
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Welcome to part two of our look at the socialisation of media and the movement away from traditional formats. Click on the following link for part one of Changing Media Landscape: The Rise of Social Media.

In the last few weeks alone we have continued to see just how social media is becoming a source of real-time news and interactivity. Politics have stirred up a number of stories, from the MPs expenses scandal to the humbling election defeats for Labour – particularly at the hands of the BNP. Earlier in the week a story emerged from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which revealed that politician Mir-Hossein Mousavi was using Facebook and other social media sites to communicate with young voters.
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This is the first in a series of articles on the various applications that Google currently provide. We all know about Google Earth, Mail and of course Search, but there are many more tools that some users may not be quite so aware of; which will hopefully shed some light on in the coming weeks.

The first of these is the extremely simple, yet incredibly useful Google ‘Define:’. When using the site, whether in your toolbar or the main Google search screen, simply type in ‘define:’ followed by a word – for example ‘define: incredulity’. Once you’ve filled in the search, you should get an answer that looks something like the graphic below.

Whilst it may not be the most complex of procedures, this feature is an incredibly invaluable resource, particularly for a quick reference. It’ll provide answers from a number of sources ordinarily, with a small definition accompanying the URL of the site who provided the information.

Define: is certainly one of those tools that make Google such a useful one-stop referencing site. It’s also one that other search engines will need to better if they are to make a real dent in Google’s domination of the current market.

Barely a day goes by currently without someone talking about the new Microsoft Bing search engine. Some of it positive, a good deal of it negative. But the word of mouth campaign that appears to be happening is seemingly getting under the skin of a few of the rival execs.

Yahoo executive Carol Bartz hasn’t pulled any punches in her damning criticism of Microsoft and Bing itself. She had this to say about Statcounter’s results that found Bing had overtaken Yahoo last week (as we reported in the post Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo! in First Week) “They didn’t beat us by much. It was one day. I think it’s gosh maybe it was in Omaha some place; It was some small area.”

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Google continue to haemorrhage key staff at an alarming rate. Today Business Insider announced that Google Adwords Operations Chief Grady Burnett is to jump ship and move to Facebook to head up their advertising arm.

Burnett’s departure is one of many high profile cases over the past few months, which have included David Rosenblatt, Tim Armstrong (CEO of AOL) and the suitably named Larry Brilliant, who was in charge of Google’s philanthropic section and now works for Skoll in a similar role. So maybe all isn’t as peaceful as it seems on the good ship Google. That said, ambition and skill set poaching are probably more accountable than any real underlying issue.

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WebProNews, courtesy of statistics provided by Statcounter, today announced that Microsoft Bing has leapfrogged Yahoo as the number two search engine.

As reported earlier in the week in ‘The Birth of the ‘Decision Engine’: Microsoft Bing Goes Live’, Bing isn’t a Google-killer, not yet at any rate. The primary objective was instead to oust the current incumbents of the second most popular search engine spot; something they appear to have done with remarkable ease and swiftness.

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Google have finally unveiled Squared, their intelligent spreadsheet style search results. As reported last month in the blog article ‘Google Reveals Fresh Innovations at Searchology’, Google Squared is just one of many new features to have been incorporated over the past month or so.

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Once again the researchers at Hitwise have been hard at work pulling in statistics from all over the Internet to give us a better understanding of online usage. This time they’ve revealed the Top 100 student websites in the UK, giving us all a clear insight into the online behaviour of young adults across the country.

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The emergence of Microsoft’s new search engine a couple of days earlier than scheduled has taken a few people by surprise. Unfortunately, one of the biggest surprises is that Bing really isn’t the earth-shattering Google-topping platform that we were waiting for.

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To many, Twitter may still seem like the new kid on the block, a quick upstart that is having its five minutes of fame before fading back into obscurity. But it says a lot for their clout, that the innovative real-time search capability they’ve developed has had Google scrambling for a retort.

As reported across many other channels, including WebProNews this morning, Google are having to seriously rethink their search strategy in order to counteract its social media adversary. But is real-time search really worth all the hassle? How many people will actually use such a thing if it was implemented?

There’s no doubting that Google don’t want to get left behind on this issue. Twitter has been gaining a huge following right across the globe, and their numbers as swelling by the day. So if Google wants to maintain its ownership of the search crown, it can’t have another company out innovate it.

Real-time information is usually made up of tiny snippets of information. They’re often produced in conversation or as tweets, with users simply relaying what they see, witness or feel. It can be something as earth shattering as a natural disaster or as simple as a sports result, there’s no finite rule. Traditional news and search outlets tend to take time to create reports and index them fully; this loses some of the immediacy of an event. In real-time, you can find out something in a matter of seconds.

There’s no doubt that this can become an extremely useful resource. But there is also the potential for rumours and subterfuge to take over, particularly in unmoderated forums such as Twitter. If enough people club together to suggest that something earth shattering has happened, then news could immediately spiral out of control.

Recently it was Patrick Swayze’s death that was wrongly reported, wrongly in so far as he is very much still alive. Whilst amongst fans and family this could be potentially distressing, there is obviously the potential for even bigger hoaxes to be played out, particularly if Google join the fold.

Real-time certainly would be a welcome addition, and one that I think Google must and will ultimately make. But there will always be a certain amount of cynicism surrounding the validity of statements, purely as they won’t always come from ‘reputable’ sources. It’s a fine line, but it would certainly could bring search as a whole in to a whole new level of development.

If you’ve got any thoughts on real-time search and whether or not it would be a positive thing for Google to incorporate, let us know, comments are always welcome.

Not for the first time, and probably not the last, at around 10:45 this morning Google.com went down. Understandably that represents something of an issue for many people, not least search specialists.

Once again though, the Twitter tweets lit up with concerned Google users almost instantaneously enquiring about the issue.

Google Down Announced on Twitter

This not only highlights the fallibility of the world’s most popular search engine, but also the increasing diversity with which the world shares information and news. Fortunately Google remained down for only 15 minutes, although the consternation was evident – at least amongst Twitter users – and was doubtless fuelled by those who use it as their go-to source for information and statistics.

Search itself doesn’t stand still. When something happens to the leading source, be it an ecommerce, business or search site, there are almost always alternatives available. Those desperate to find content online still have the option to use Ask, MSN, Yahoo (as highlighted by one of the Twitterati on the above example, albeit slightly tongue in cheek) or any of the smaller search engines out there.

This, perhaps more than anything else, highlights the need to have a variety of sources when it comes to information gathering. Over reliance on one source can leave you high and dry, particularly in the turbulent world of the Internet.

Once again the Searchology forum has provided Google with an opportunity to show off their latest search engine developments. And once again, they haven’t disappointed.

This year, four key announcements were made regarding improved search functionality; which, Google will be hoping, should ward off perennial rivals Yahoo and MSN, along with potential newcomers Wolfram Alpha (when it’s eventually released) and Twitter, following the major overhaul of Twitter Search.

During the Searchology announcement, made chiefly by Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer, a number of improved search functions were revealed that should push search engine usability to a whole new level.

Google Announces New Search Options

The first improvement is one that you can use right now, with the inclusion of Search Options. These additional search criteria allow you to view results in an entirely new way. Sites can now be listed in a number of different views, with varying information on screen and even in chronological order. So rather than simply getting your standard page of highly optimised searches, you may prefer to see related reviews or forums, achieving a more quality-based user-friendly search result.

New Google Search Options

There are plenty of new gadgets to play around with too, as indicated in the various images. You can access archived information through the convenient Timeline option and marvel at the Wonder Wheel, which charts related searches and companies in an eye-catching graphic.

Google Timeline Search

Rich Snippets Add New Search Dimension

The next big announcement, particularly where Webmasters are concerned, was with regards to Google’s Rich Snippets search component. Google provide a very detailed article introducing Rich Snippets on their Webmasters blog; but to give a brief overview, this innovation will essentially allow embedded site information and data to form part of the search result. Useful details such as product rankings will be able to form a part of the smart search option; giving users the chance to view a much improved set of results and Webmasters the opportunity to further optimise sections of their sites.

Innovative Google SkyMap & Squared Features

Another innovation came in the form of Google SkyMap. Which, as the name suggests, will allow users to identify the stars they’re currently looking at whilst also guiding mobile devices towards the right coordinates for viewing a selected star or constellation? This one could have far more useful future functions in the future, due to the intelligent GPS technology it uses, but at the moment it’s just a quirky way of enjoying your stargazing a little more.

Last, but by no means least, there’s Google Squared. Still in development, this application will add a whole new intelligent element to the standard search. It effectively works by analysing your search and grouping together related entities and providing statistical data for each. For example, ‘Sports Cars’ might well return a Ferrari, Aston Martin and a Lamborghini; it would then tell you things like weight, engine sizes and costs. You can then add further squares, just as you might with a spreadsheet to accommodate other related searches and categories, in this case possibly Porsche and MPG might be an example of either.

This search technology will undoubtedly provide new challenges for Search Marketers and Webmasters everywhere. However, it should ensure that algorithmically-based searches keep developing and providing Internet users with the best service possible. It’s now down to the competition to react and show their own trump card so as not to let Google walk away with complete search engine supremacy.

Integrating technologies and sharing information for a common purpose is by no means a new thing in the business world. However, Google and Apple appear to have taken things a little too far with both companies now the subject of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation.

The FTC anti-trust suit relates to directors Eric Schmidt and Arthur Levinson sitting on the board of both Google and Apple, contravening the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1941. This essentially means that the two are accused of having a common link which may be detrimental to competition, most notably Microsoft. If the two main competitors to Microsoft’s computing dominance are found to be in cahoots, they could very well find themselves in some pretty deep water; but this is certainly one news story that will rumble on for some time to come.

Search specialists Google haven’t been without controversy in recent months, particularly in the UK with their Street View application drawing criticism for invasion of privacy. Whilst this anti-trust case clearly a little more serious (for the company at least), their continued superiority over Internet search engine usage and marketing is unlikely to be greatly affected, whatever the outcome.

Google have recently announced the roll out of one line sitelinks.

Sitelinks have been around for quite sometime but, until now, have only ever appeared below the first search result for a given term. With the development of the new style – a single row – Google can now start showing sitelinks for multiple results.

Below is an example of a one link sitelink, albeit this is only showing for the first result:

Google One Line Sitelink Example

There can be a maximum of four sitelinks per listing and these will show just above the page URL. For website owners, Google hope this will result in more traffic and for searchers, they should gain quicker access to areas of a site that they may not have discovered.