Posts by Bas van den Beld

Bas van den Beld is a speaker, trainer and online marketing strategist. Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. -- You can hire Bas to speak, train or consult. -- More articles and bio from Bas van den Beld

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Matt Cutts Going to the Roots: How does Google search work?

The webmastertools video Matt Cutts makes are not interesting for everyone. Usually the SEO’s already know the things he is talking about. For marketers who are relatively new to search however the video’s can be helpful for understanding the basics.

This week Matt Cutts again released a, what SEOs would call, “101″-video. In this video he answers a quite extensive question: how does Google’s ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases. (more…)

“Zip Open” Google Today in Honor of Gideon Sundback

We usually don’t pay that much attention to the Google Doodles here on State of Search. There is nothing much to learn from them after all . But in some cases you have to make an exception because they are simply that brilliant. Today is one of those days.

Google today is celebrating the the birthday of the zip’s inventor Gideon Sundback. If you go to Google you can ‘zip open’ the Google homepage which will then show results for the search on Gideon Sundback. You can let the zipper run down the centre of the page with your mouse. Once you let go the page opens. (more…)

Exclusive Interview Amit Singhal: “People often confuse context with personalization”

For some Larry Page or Sergey Brin might be the big mind when it comes to Google. Others believe its Matt Cutts who holds all the knowledge. But ask any Googler who has the most influence on what actually happens with the search engine Google and most probably 99% of them will answer: Amit Singhal.

Amit Singhal is the Senior VP at Google, a “Google Fellow”, and the head of Google’s core ranking team. There are not many issues with Google Search which do not go past him. Amit Singhal and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. The video from the Search Quality Meeting which we showed before and is also placed at the end of this post shows just that: it is Singhal who makes the decisions and it is Singhal who knows the most. Anyone who looks at leaderships will also notice that the way Singhal leads the meeting is like a natural leader.

In a few weeks time Singhal will make a rare appearance on the stage of a major search conference. And even rarer: that appearance will not be in the US, but in Europe: at SMX London 2012. We talked to Danny Sullivan about that show earlier and now we have the exclusive chance to talk to Amit Singhal who was kind enough to answer some of our burning questions. We tried to ask him questions on different topics: Search Plus Your World, the Panda Update, Google and Europe and some of the privacy issues Google is running into. Enjoy! (more…)

Looking At UK SEO Agencies: Or Should We Say “Digital Marketing Agency”?

When it comes to SEO industries one of the leading countries without a doubt is the UK. There are many high level agencies in the UK and the developments are going very rapidly there.

Whether or not the UK industry is much better or worse than other countries is hard to say, not just because it is difficult to look at specific agencies, but also because the environment can be different in each country.

Still, you can try and look to the UK by looking at the numbers. Numbers that show that the UK SEO industry is not just focussing on SEO anymore, but also heavily involved in Social Media and Web Analytics for example. Or that most agencies have a blog. And that the good old fashioned “SEO Agency” seems to be replaced, as a name that is, by “Digital Marketing Agency”. This infographic sums it up. (more…)

WordPress: A Global Phenomenon

State of Search runs on WordPress. As do 72.4 million other websites. That is 53.8% of all sites using a content management system. These are quite impressive numbers. But there are a few more impressive stats when it comes to WordPress.

Joost de Valk (Yoast) decided to make a plugin out of the statistics he could collect about the tool on which he has made several very successful plugins. That infographic results in a very impressive list of facts about this CMS, truly a phenomenon: WordPress FTW! (more…)

Saw A Rank Drop This Week? It Could Be Google’s Fault Says Matt Cutts

If you keep a close eye on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ when it comes to developments around Google and SEO you might have noticed this week that there was a lot of talk about rankings and updates. People were suggesting there was another Panda Update coming up or even taking place at that specific moment or that this was the effect of the “over optimization” penalties that have been discussed a lot lately.

They came to that conclusion based on the sudden drop in rankings they saw for their websites. The “Is there a Panda Update going on?” type of tweets therefore were quite massive the past few days. It turns out that there was no Panda Update, no ”over optimization” Update or anything in that matter. It turns out Google made a mistake: some sites were marked as parked when they were not. (more…)

State of Search radioshow – episode 89: What Changed in SEO and Facebook-Bing

In a show which had a lot of different elements in them Bas and Roy talked about WordPress, about Macbooks, how presentations should be build up and what actually has changed in SEO in the past few years. Finally the potential Facebook- Bing deal where Facebook might give Microsoft shares in return for Bing was dicussed.

You can listen to the show below. (more…)

Friday Talk: Atmosphere 2011 Keynote: The Next Questions, Vint Cerf

With the Google Project Glass dominating the news when it comes to Google in the past week it is clear that Google is not just focussing on search anymore, but that they are mainly a technology company now. And if you talk Google and Technology you have to talk about Vint Cerf.

In this Friday Talk Cerf (VP & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google) discusses the changing world of technology today. It’s a talk from the “Atmosphere 2011” Google conference from November last year in which “the cloud” was the central topic. (more…)