Its the time of the year when we are looking back. Back on 2011. And when you are Google you look at what people searched for and… where you made your money. This infographic shows how the ads at Google properties did. Lots of numbers who all say the same: Google is doing good. But where does most come from? Well mobile plays some part in it… (more…)
Over the weekend there was an interesting post up on SEOmoz which chronicled Rand Fishkin’s discussion with SEO Book’s Aaron Wall about outing web spammers. It’s definitely worth a read and will provide some background information for this blog post.
Basically Rand is in favour of pointing out what he believes are bad SEO practices, specifically web spam, and Aaron is against it. Some other SEOs contributed to the debate, as well as a follow-up discussion I had with Rand and others on Saturday. (more…)
Do you remember that several years ago people would decorate their blogs and websites with all sorts of moving stuff, especially around Christmas? And it wasn’t just the personal websites which got that decoration, business sites as well. That seems to have drift over in the past few years. But Google is now bringing that back.
A special ‘easter egg’ which Google developed now lets it snow inside Google’s SERPS. Do a search for let it snow on Google.com and your screen will be filled with snow flakes. And not just that, the screen also gets a frozen look, meaning the search results slowly disappear. (more…)
A truly beautiful video made by Google based on Zeitgeist 2011. No words, just click full screen and watch.
We know that Google is pushing Google+ like no other. We also know that they are more and more focussed on person. Which means that on one side personalized search is playing a bigger role and on the other side they want to know more about us, to give us that personalized feeling. On top of that they all want us to use Google+.
Now that people search is something which search engines would dive on we already predicted a few years back. Back then we thought a specific profile page would show up at the top of the results, a page you could manage. I even adviced Bing to make such a page. But Google has beaten them on it. Google+ now is that page. Today I saw something which gets very close to what I predicted a few years ago. And the center of it all is Google+. (more…)
We all know Google is big. No, make that huge. But how huge are they? Sometimes numbers can say more than words, and if you put those numbers into an infographic we are back to images saying more than words.
Even though we know Google is huge, some of these numbers are still mind blowing. $29,3 billion in revenue in 2010, 97% of that coming from advertising $2,5 billion comes from mobile and did you realize we are spending 200 minutes per visitor a month on Googles sites? (more…)
In the past few years Marissa Mayer returned to Paris each year to talk on stage of LeWeb to Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. Now Arrington has left TechCrunch but still is one of the big faces at a conference like LeWeb. This year however he didn’t interview, one of his ‘peers’, Crunchfund’s MG Siegler asked the questions, which helped the interview to be honest.
Mayer talked about several topics, from Google+ and Check-deals to her own role at Google, which has been less prominent the past year. Mayer also talked about Google+, calling it a “pleasant surprise”. (more…)
Eric Schmidt can always be woken up to make a remark which might just go around the world. So when he took the stage at LeWeb 2011 last week our ears were wide open. And we were not disappointed.
Next to a lot of ‘commercial’ talk from Schmidt there were a few lines which drew the attention. For example he stated:
“The social signal, the people you ‘hang with’ is actually a ranking signal”. (more…)
Last week YouTube announced not only a new design for YouTube, but also a new feature which will replace the old “YouTube Insights”: YouTube Analytics.
With YouTube Analytics YouTube aims at getting video creators more involved. With video becoming more important not only because YouTube is the second largest search engine out there, but also because videos show up in Universal Search, it is a welcome feature. After all, more insights in your statistics can help you make better videos, which get more views and thus a better visibility on the web. And it can drive traffic to your website.
Time to take a closer look at the new YouTube Analytics. (more…)
Last year Facebook rolled out a feature which gave many people the creeps. From that point on you could get a suggestion from Facebook if you had put up a picture with a friend in it. The suggestion was that you would tag that friend. The creepy part was that Facebook already had recognized the friend and had the tag ready to go.
It lead to some pretty big discussions left and right about whether or not Facebook should do this. Especially the fact that it was an opt-out feature was important here. At that time Google already mentioned they too knew how to do face-recognition, but they were hesitant to use it, because of privacy issues.
Google has now waited an appropriate amount of time since the Facebook discussions and has decided to go and use the technology. But in a ‘good’ way. (more…)
Whenever Eric Schmidt talks we always keep our ears open, because the former CEO of Google will either say something extremely clever or something extremely controversial. So when he sat down for an interview with Gwen Ifill at the Washington Ideas Forum in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 2011, we kept our ears open. Did we hear or miss something…? Well, you be the judge first, is there something he said which is controversial? Let us know…
Google uses many signals in ranking. Sometimes the rankingfactor “trust” is mentioned. But what is meant by that? Matt Cutts decided to explain. There is no ‘trustrank’, but they are looking at how believable the reputation of a page is. Google uses a lot of different words for that.
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