Manual URL submissions have been the laughing stock of the SEO world for a long time. URL submission services are often seen as scams because a well built website with enough incoming links shouldn’t need URL submissions to find their way to the search engine indexes. However the possibility to manually add URLs is still available in Google, Bing and Yahoo!
Surprisingly Google just announced they will add new ways of submitting new pages and updated pages to Google’s index. (more…)
Last week Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reported on a study done by Searchmetrics about which types of universal search – results from specific vertical searches such as videos and images, shown in addition to normal web page results – appear most often in Google’s American SERPs.
Now Searchmetrics has sent State of Search similar data for UK search results, and it appears the trends follows that of Google.com closely. First of all, what jumps out is that universal results are a part of the vast majority of SERPs. Less than 30% of Google’s results pages do not have a universal element to them. (more…)
Google has been experimenting a lot with the lay out of the search interface. Last friday they introduced a new search interface for tablets. This new interface differs from the desktop interface in many ways, but one important difference is that the AdWords advertisement will only be shown at the top and the bottom of the SERPs. In the landscape mode there will be a maximum two ads at the top and three at the bottom, in the portrait mode there will be a maximum three ads at the top as well as at the bottom. Side ads will be disappearing completely. (more…)
Update: Google just officially announced this interface as the new search interface for tablets.
Google keeps testing new search interfaces. This time we ran into a more rigorous change of interface discovered by Amit Agarwal.
This new search interface is much cleaner with more white spaces. The sidebar has moved to the top as well as the filters. The Next Web argues that the interface probably occurred on a tablet, but Amit doesn’t mention this.
However this speculation can be taken very seriously. (more…)
Google loves data. And data has become much more important to Google in the past few years. Where Google used to be able to get data from the websites and rank them based on that data, in the past few years another important factor has come along: social.
In the past, if one person thought a website was good they would link to it from their own website. Google would pick that up and consider the link as a ‘recommendation’ for the website. That has now changed. The recommendations are no longer ‘just’ done via a link on a website. Most recommendations now come from social networks. Actual people sharing. And a lot more than before too. There are tons of links going around every day. (more…)
When there wasn’t a Google Plus yet we all were talking about SEO, remember that? And the most talked about topic at that time was the Panda Update. What happened? How can we fix it, how can we prevent it from hitting us? It all seems like ages ago. Some even suggested that Google+ was all about taking our eyes away from Panda. Just to give you a reminder of what the Panda Update was. (more…)
It seems that everyone who’s even remotely interested in search and social media has jumped on the Google+ bandwagon. This has lead to a rather explosive growth of Google’s social network, with the 20 million users mark expected to be hit this weekend:
Google and cooking, is that a combination you would expect? Maybe not at first, but if you think again there is a connection. You can find a lot of recipes on Google for starters, but there is more. Google has a history with health, even though Google Health will be terminated in 2012. And lets not forget the cafeteria on the Google Plex. So its not such a strange idea to invite Jamie Oliver to Google and let him talk about cooking, health and more.
I’ve said this from the beginning: Google Plus needs the connection with search to succeed. And Bill Slawski already said it: posts and comments will start appearing in the Google Result Pages (SERPS). And they are.
Some posts are now showing up in the SERPS. They are not ‘ranking like crazy’ yet and they are far from perfect and it is not every post, but they are there. Should we start optimizing? (more…)
The ultimate big thing in Google Plus for many was… the circles. Many couldn’t believe Facebook hadn’t thought of this (they did, they have groups you can make, just not that obvious). But how useful are they really? This infographic gives you an overview of 21 Google Plus Circles which are actually useful… right? (more…)
Could it be that in the future all our websites are on the first page of Google? Even though it is millions of sites per search? It could very well be so if we look at the latest Google tests. Infinite scrolling might be the next change Google is up to.
Everything happens for a reason. That also means every Google test is there for a reason. And every design change. The black bar was an example of something which was there for a reason: Google is using it to highlight Google Plus. When Plus came Google also came with a redesign. In that redesign we could see a grey bar showing up on top of the search results, with the search bar in it. That is there for a reason too. (more…)
Stay up to date with the latest articles