SEOBook has a very nice set of infographics which they publish regularly. This one is all about how Google killed the long tail with stuff like Google Instant, localization, updates like Mayday and Panda, verticals, scrapers and the ‘not provided’ keywords.
Are they right? (more…)
The year is almost over and the new year is approaching rapidly. That new year, 2012, might not start off as well for Google as hoped. Google can expect a more than 400 pages counting document from the European Commission (EC) with objections and allegations of abuse of dominance.
Based on a complaint which goes a few years back from search engines Foundem, eJustice and Ciao!, the EU started investigating Google about a month ago. Their complaints now apparently have lead to a document of accusations against Google.
Google knows the accusations are serious because Eric Schmidt has been sent out to travel to Europe to pay a “courtesy visit” to the European Commissioner Almunia this week. (more…)
Google has decided it wants to share more often the changes it makes to improve the search quality of their SERPS, which means algorithms and SERPS. Last month we already mentioned several changes. Google now feels we should be updated each month. That’s why they will be giving a monthly update on their blog.
This month they again made clear they have improved their search. Another ten changes, some more important than others. The most important ones? More autocomplete predictions, fresher and more complete blog search results and original content. (more…)
Google has released a video following up on their video about improvements to search. They now look at the “evolution of search”. To be honest, its much more about the Evolution of Google than the evolution of search, but its still a very interesting video to watch.
It was a shock when it first showed up above the search results. And then it started to show up above all Google products: the black navigation bar.
This navigation bar gives direct access to search, images, Google+ and all other Google products. It also shows your settings options and how many alerts you have from Google+. That black bar however is about to disappear again. (more…)
As I’ve said many times before on the radioshow Google+ has potential. I just don’t understand the way they roll out things. Some elements are surprising and maybe an add on (hangouts?) while they lacked other obvious elements like search (!) and business pages.
Step by step Google is playing catch up on those features. One of those things might also be the fact that you cannot update Google+ from anywhere but Google+. But that is about to change, making Google+ yet a tiny bit more important. But again Google doesn’t do it full swing. (more…)
Google is changing. Not just strategic, not just algorithmic, but also in the way they present their search results. The changes in the SERPs started small but the last months they became increasingly radical. The way users can/should use the SERPs are subject to a level of change we haven’t seen in a long time. Somehow Google is trying to change the function of the SERPs. A short analysis of the recent changes. (more…)
Google is constantly on the move. We could fill our blog entirely with Google news and changes if we wanted. Small ones, big ones, useless ones and important changes. Google itself this week decided to tell us about then changes they made to their algorithms.
The common denominator in most of the changes is meta information and especially snippets. Google seems to be pushing meta information like snippets in their algorithm to be better able to differentiate the different results. (more…)
AllThingsD organizes several conferences world wide in which the format is simple: get the important people on stage and interview them. It is a format which works, because you get a lot of information from the specific people.
At the latest AsiaD conference Bradley Horowitz took the stage with Peter Kafka to talk about Google+. Horowitz explains and talks freely about the product.
A Few weeks back one of my employees, Ciaran, said to me “Have you heard? Google is going to hold back keyword data in Analytics?” My reply? “Ha! That’s ridiculous, they would never do that. That would be shooting themselves in the foot”. Ciaran, I owe you an apology. Although they are not really shooting themselves in the foot, more like sawing of their foot and leaving it in a box with a grenade.
Saying I’m outraged is an understatement, but I’m probably more shocked that there is not more noise in the internet marketing industry (especially SEO) than it is. People wake up, Google is lobotomising us! (more…)
Google has always been struggling to find out where content has originally been written. In his latest of his famous Webmastervideos Matt Cutts now explains some of the signals Google uses to figure that out. There is a part which you can help Google on yourself, for example by ‘pinging’ the search engines, but Google also looks at some ‘simpler’ elements. Like Pagerank: a higher Pagerank often indicates the source lies there.
Then off course there is rel-canonical which is a huge indicator, but other elements like rel=author also play a big role. Cutts ends with explaining that there are a lot of signals, but that ‘even’ Google messes up sometimes.
(more…)
There is no limit to Google+. The number of users is growing rapidly, updates are now spreading more quickly and finally we have business pages, so now business pages are popping up rapidly. Everything is big when it comes to Google+, even the discussion whether or not it will succeed. Opinions differ, but in general you can say that the expectations are that Google+ will succeed, even if you aren’t using it now. After all, sooner or later you are going to end up using it… right…?
Stay up to date with the latest articles