Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

Give Your YouTube Channel Some Love, Style It!

youtube_logo

I come across a lot of YouTube channels from companies who have made excellent videos but have not given any thought to the way their channel looks to the rest of the world. This is something which is actually quite simple to do and makes a channel looks far more professional than with the default gray background and the ‘John Doe’ picture.

It seems as if companies not always realise that people actually visit their channels via YouTube.com or their videos embedded throughout the web. While some companies take the trouble to upload an profile picture they don’t do anything else, some don’t even have a profile picture (the John Doe one), although the options are limited you can make your own channel look good :-) . (more…)

Thanksgiving Day 2012 logo from Google

google_thanksgiving_2010

Today only on the American homepage of Google the company placed a special doodle to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. It’s a quite large logo this time but static, last year Google placed an animated turkey on the homepage. As a visitor you could decorate the turkey (see image on the right) and share the result with friends via a link or on Google+, this was the first time Google used a doodle to promote Google+. Google kept the turkey for 48 hours on the homepage and a copy can be found on this page along with all the other logos used since 1998. (more…)

Beware of Personalised Search! Information Dystopia and Online ‘Filter Bubbles’

The Effect of the Filter Bubble

Last year Eli Pariser spoke at TED, covering a topic that we’re all becoming increasingly affected by while navigating the web. Eli introduced his theory on the online ‘filter bubble’, explaining that through the continuous quest to ‘personalise’ search results, our online environments are becoming less and less diverse.

Hi everyone, I am Ned and this is my first (proper) post on State of Search. I’ve become fairly annoyed lately with many of the websites I visit regularly and spend a lot of time on, like: Amazon, Facebook and Google (after all, I am an SEO), that are becoming incredibly ‘samey’ places to hang out and discover information online. So much of the content that I see every day is either something I’ve already seen or, worse, nothing to do with what I was looking for in the first place! This is one of the effects that Eli refers to when talking about online ‘filter bubbles’. (more…)

Transition Rank as Propaganda

Dictionary Series - Politics: propaganda

A couple of months ago the SEO world stirred when the incomparable Bill Slawski wrote about the ‘transition rank‘ patent. In essence, this Google patent outlined how a webpage’s rank could be randomised to thwart any attempts by ‘spammers’ to manipulate its ranking, thus confusing the spammer’s efforts.

This patent received widespread attention in the SEO blogosphere. And it has had a profound result on the mentality of the SEO industry. (more…)

Matt Cutts on How Google Considers Site-Wide Backlinks

With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates fresh in mind a lot of people are focussed at knowing how Google thinks about links, so if Matt Cutts starts talking about site-wide backlinks, we will listen. In this webmaster video Cutts answers the question “How does Google consider site-wide backlinks? Are sitewide backlinks considered good or bad by Google? Or do they just count as 1 link from the whole domain?”

Back to the Future. SEO, Email Marketing & Personalized SERPs

google-firled-trial

Almost one month ago I received in my inbox an email from Google related to the Gmail Search Field Trial. This is a Google experiment presenting results from Gmail and Google Drive when you do a search in the Google search engine.

Google started the beta phase of at the end of August, with this update adding new features, like presenting results from your calendar and from your docs in Drive. (more…)

Rel=’Publisher’ for Brand-Savvy Marketers

relpublisher_benholbrook

I’ve been banging on about Rel=Author and Rich Snippets for a while now. Partly because I like the idea of associating content with people, and partly because I think it’s a good insight into Google’s future plans.

It totally makes sense, to me at least, that the worlds of SEO and Social Media should be run in unison – complementing each other. Rel=Publisher, however, often gets left by the wayside; I view it as Rel=Author’s ugly twin, the one that no-one really talks about, or wants to get to know. But I’m going to tell you why you should! (more…)

Google Blocked in China

Great Wall of China

It seems as if Google has been blocked in China at the moment. The news came from The Next Web who talked to a Googlespokesperson, who confirmed the blockade. The Chinese government has apparently blocked Google.com but also other services from Google like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Analytics.

A Google spokesperson told The Next Web “We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

It seems as if this blockade is not so much against Google but more because of the current political situation in China where in Beijing currently the Party Congress chooses a new president. It seems as if this is more about preventing the Chinese people from searching for things concerning that or from using Google products to work together. (more…)

Mitt Romney Transition Website Found and Caught by Google

romney-intro

Nothing stays hidden anymore in this digital era. If it isn’t someone blogging about you or putting your picture up on Facebook, it’s you yourself who misplaces a direct message on Twitter or who forgets to take something down.

Mitt Romney, who lost the US elections to Barack Obama this week, has experienced this a few times already in the short period of time he has been running for President of the United States. There was the ‘unfortunate’ coincidence where a search for “completely wrong” triggered images from Romney and now the people who built the transition website that should go online when he was elected accidentally put the site live, and as you know he was not elected… On top of that Google’s caught it. (more…)

Google Moves Search Options and ‘Cleans’ Results Page

top-navigation

It has been buzzing around the search community for a while, but now it’s official, Google has (again) made changes to how the search results are presented. The long awaited change is mostly focussed on the navigation which moves from the left side to the top.

With the new design elements Google wants to give the search results “a bit more breathing room” and more focus on the actual answers people are looking for, which basically means Knowledge Graph gets more attention. (more…)

Where Does Google’s 100 Million $ Per Day Come From?

Google makes 100 million dollars per day on search advertising, at least, that is what Wordstream tells us. That is a lot of money which goes into the pockets of Google. Where does that money come from? Which industries make Google the most money?

This infographic from Wordstream shows us where the money is coming from: Finance, Travel and jobs play a big role. (more…)

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