Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

Google Shows Us The Search Quality Meeting

Search-Quality-Meeting

One of the most named points of criticism towards Google is their openness. In the past when you had a Googler at an event you were sure he or she was not going to say a word more than necessary.

In the past year or so this has changed. Google is much more focussed on openness. It might be triggered by the infringements they have gotten where especially the US government has complained about Google being to ‘vague’ or it might have been triggered by the fact that Google for many has become the ‘big and dangerous’ company and they want their brand image to go back to the ‘tech boys’ it was before.

Fact is they are a lot more open, or at least they seem to be. On conferences Googlers seem more open, Google is now giving us monthly updates on their changes, and this week they post a video of their Search Quality Meeting. An 8 minute video showing us the meeting it is all about, or as Amit Singhal says: “This meeting is the heart of what we do, what we approve, how we run search.” (more…)

Restricted Users In Google Webmaster Tools

webmastertools

I think most of us use Google Webmaster Tools to get extra information about websites and to add different kind of sitemaps. For some years now it’s possible to add extra users to a specific website in Webmaster Tools so that they can see the collected data to, edit settings, etc. At first it was a big hazzle to add new uers but since the beginning of March 2010 this is easy to do by just adding somebodies email address. (more…)

Amit Singhal: “The idea is to make search more intuitive”

Amit-Singhal

One of the ‘big names’ at Google at the moment is Amit Singhal. Singhal, who will be keynote at SMX London in a few months, is SVP of Search and has a big influence on where Google is heading.

Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang spoke with Amit Singhal about the future of search. An interesting talk which you can see below. He talked about mobile, how search should evolve and he also addressed some of the criticism which has been out lately concerning privacy issues and new products like SPYW. (more…)

Google Showing G+ Conversations and shared Videos in Personalized Search

discussion-in-serps

Google is on the move again making minor adjustments to the SERPS. Usually that means within reasonable amount of time we will be seeing more bigger changes at Google, so it is time to keep our eyes open again.

Yesterday we spotted that Google is now offering you the possibility to thank your Google+ friends who +1-ed an item so it would show up in your search results. Today we can highlight another three changes to how Google displays personalized results in the SERPS. (more…)

Latest Venice Update: Locals Win, Global Amazon, Live and Apple lose

venice-boats

Google’s Panda Update now seems to be a monthly refresh of the Google Index, changing the search landscape constantly. It means that every month sites can either get more or less visibility.

For an SEO this can be frustrating. One month they are the winners, next month the losers. You can hardly make any predictions anymore, except for that your site needs to be ‘Panda proof’ all the time: you need the unique content and you need the value in the site.

Next to the Panda update there is the Venice update, which is focussed on improving local results in the SERPS. Sometimes things happen which you wouldn’t predict but are actually quite obvious. What was thought to be the last Panda Update showed some suprising stats in the UK for example. Searchmetrics calculated who ‘won’ and ‘lost’ in visibility. The biggest winners (Twitter, YouTube and the BBC) were not surprising. The biggest losers were: Amazon.com, Live.com and Apple.com. There is a logical explanation for that however: its the Venice Update. (more…)

Google Lets You Say Thank You To Those Who Shared

Thank-your-peers

Here’s another interesting small change I just spotted in the search results. We are now all familiar with the “your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1′d this” texts below the search results. It shows us who of our friends, or to be more specific who from our social circles, have shared, or +1ed a specific search result. It is part of personalized search and it will trigger most of the searchers to click on a result quicker than they would if there was just a title, link and description.

Now Google seems to have taken another step to make things more personal and to ‘push’ Google+ at the same time. Next to a ”your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1′d this” text it now says “Thank them”. And you can “thank them” on Google+ off course. (more…)

Google Giving Anti-Spam Tips To Free Web Hosting Services

free-hosting

Google is constantly trying to get a grip on spam, both on the organic as on the paid side of search. They have entire spam teams dedicated to finding and getting rid of those trying to falsely manipulate not just the results, but also the users.

One of the main areas in which spammers are active is free web hosting. Many spammers try to get cheap and easy ways to create hundreds of sites all aimed at spam. That means that those who think they have a nice site for cheap money might just be part of a network which is not considered to be ‘clean’ by Google. Potentially that could hurt also the ‘innocent’ ones.

Google therefore is now trying to protect these users and is giving hints and tips to those free or low cost web hosting services to make sure spammers will not abuse them. (more…)

SSL Search Goes Global, Will SPYW Follow?

Not-Provided

Last October Google set the SEO World on fire when they started to encrypt searches, using SSL. Searching from https://www.google.com (note the “s”) will mean some search queries are encrypted.

That meant that SEOs were getting a lot less referral data than before. In your Analytics you can now find several referrals to “not provided”. Until recently that was just for searches coming from Google.com. Now Google is rolling this out to the entire world. (more…)

Europeans Looking at Google’s Privacy Policy

privacyplease

It is March 1st today, which means that Google’s new privacy policy officially is “on”. Just a month ago the new policy was announced.

It now seems as if Google might run into a wall when it comes to European regulations. France’s regulator this week said the new policies might violate the European Union’s data protection rules.

The regulator has sent Google a letter in which they told Google that there will be a European-wide investigation of the policy. Google can expect some questions soon. (more…)

Google Adds Upcoming Concerts To Search Results

google_concert_information

Google has added more concert information to the search results. When you search for a specific artist, information about upcoming concerts can be shown right under the official website of the artist you were looking for. Google only shows this information if an upcoming event will take place in your area, otherwise the information won’t appear.

In the screenshot below you can see the information directly below the Black Keys (an American rock band) website. The first concert will take place on Friday, May 4 in the Oracle Arena in Oakland. Below the location there are links to websites where you can find more information and buy tickets. By clicking the little ‘plus’ icon you can show more upcoming concerts in your area from, in this case the Black Keys. (more…)

Google+ Badges For Personal Profiles

google_plus_badge

Last year when Google introduced Google+ Pages Google also introduced badges. Badges can be easily generated and embedded on a website to show you are a member and to get people to ‘follow’ you. As a company this gives you a way to offer your visitors a quick way to let them add your page to their circles.

Until now the badge was only suited for companies and brands but now Google has made a new badge specifically for personal profiles. So if you have a personal website and, of course a Google+ profile, you can embed a badge now so that visitors of your website or blog can add you to their circles. (more…)

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