Posts on State of Search about ‘News’

Google Authorship Profiles: No Verification Needed?

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Google and authority. It clearly is going to play a larger role in the search result pages in the coming months. Where your average search page used to be ‘just 10 blue links’ and Universal Search already brought images and videos to the search results pages, the rel=author is bringing the authority to the result pages.

To help webmasters get the profiles of their authors visible in the search results Google created what is called the “rel=author tag” which allows webmasters to tell Google who is the author of the page.

For the author snippet and image to show up the “rel=author tag” should be implemented properly. It however now seems that Google can figure all that out themselves. A guest poster got linked to a post without verification.  (more…)

Google Adds Explanations To The Knowledge Graph

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Google added a nice little feature to the Knowledge Graph, at this moment still only available in the English versions of the search engine. As you know the search engine will show a Knowledge Graph panel at the right when this is relevant to the given search query.  The small feature was added to the ‘People also search for’ section of the panel. For example when you search for the movie ‘Gone with the wind’ Google will show information about the movie at the right with under ‘People also search for’ related queries from other users.

Now you can also see how the search queries in this section are actually connected to your own query by hovering over the thumbnail or the query, you will then see the explanation. (more…)

Google Disavow Tool, For Everyone Who Did Something Wrong

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“Finally” and “About time” were amongst the remarks of many reactions yesterday when Google officially announced their “disavow links” tool at Pubcon. The tool is a way to let as a site owner Google know which links pointing at your site you think should be ignored by Google.

The tool was already expected by many SEOs because Google had been testing it out amongst several SEOs in the past few weeks and Bing already launched its own tool back in June. The tool can be seen as a direct response to Penguin updates: sites with a lot of bad links need to clean up their act. With this tool Google makes that a bit easier. But not just for the site owners, for themselves as well. (more…)

Winsor McCay Google Doodle: Little Nemo in Google-land

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Maybe you remember that Google earlier this year made a special doodle to honour Gideon Sundback, who invented the zipper. The doodle (video here) used the complete homepage of the search engine something Google doesn’t do very often, before that the last time Google did this was Christmas last year and another great doodle from last year taking over the complete homepage was to honour the first publication of Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem. (more…)

Mitt Romney Victim of Google Bomb?

A few years ago we saw something what is called “a Google Bomb” when a search for ‘miserable failure’ showed George Bush’ presidential whitehouse.gov page as the first result.

Now his potential successor at Republican President of the United States, has a similar problem. Type in “completely wrong” in Google Images and the result is a page full of… Mitt Romney.

(more…)

What Happened with the “Shared by” Thumbnails in the SERPS?

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A few years ago Google for the first time introduced images in to the search results. And not just images, images of people you personally knew. Personalised search had been around for a while (in 2009 it became default) and Google then still had the deal with Twitter which allowed them to see which of your friend had tweeted about a specific article.

When the deal with Twitter went bust Google had nothing left but their Google+-1s and whether or not something was shared on that platform. Thus the images were now not of tweets but of Google Shares. When Google extended their personalised results with Search Plus Your World last year the images were even expanded to the top of the search results page showing some of the faces of the people who were responsible for the personalised results. Now those images seem to have disappeared. (more…)

Author Filtering in Search Results

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An interesting find yesterday by Andre Alpar on his AKM3 blog (in German) of which I’m not sure its very new (looks new), but it is very handy for sure. Andre found that when clicking the ‘more by author’ link, which now shows up for most results which have the author rich snippet with the image in it, you will not just get the results from that specific author, the author name is also visible inside the search bar.

Andre also found that Google is giving each author a “People ID”, a special number next to the name which can be found within the search url as well. This is the Google+ number you get when you sign up. This makes it a lot easier to search for articles from specific authors, both on their own sites as outside of those sites. It again is another way which can help pinpoint who you should target and who you shouldn’t target. It can help you find the right author to write about your business, a new PR Tool! (more…)

YouTube InVideo Programming To Promote Your Own Channel

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YouTube added a new feature called InVideo Programming for all users and companies who uploaded videos to the video website.  InVideo Programming  lets you easily promote your own channel and a specific video across al your own videos to get extra subscribers and viewers. The new feature can be found by clicking own your own username at the top and then select Settings in the menu. At the left then choose InVideo Programming under Channel settings. (more…)

View Movie Trailers In Search Results Google

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Google has recently added movie trailers to the English version of the search engine. For some time now you can search for movies playing in your own area by for example doing a search like ‘Movies London’. You will then get a list of movies playing in London, behind every movie you can see the duration, the genre and the language it is in. To see more you can click on the link ‘Show more films‘ and by clicking on a title you will see when and where you can go to view the movie.

With the latest update you can also see trailers from the movies. After doing the above search you will also get a button behind every movie to see the trailer directly on the page with the search results. Clicking the button will open a light box with the video coming from YouTube en below the actors, the director and a short synopsis. At the top you can +1 the trailer and share it on G+. (more…)

Google Wallet For Web Content

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Earlier this week Google announced a new feature for pay service Google Wallet called “Google Wallet for web content“. The announcement was published on the Google Commerce blog and the Google Merchant Blog but was later pulled offline probably because someone decided that it was too early to publish.

But of course it was already to late because these articles tend to stay in for example Google Reader even if they are non-existing anymore. Even though now a few days later the blog post is still not published  in the meantime Google did launch a website for Google Wallet for web content.

The new experimental feature is a pay wall to let publishers sell individual pages of a website, for prices ranging from 25 cents to 99 cents. After a user has paid for the article with his Google Wallet account he will have unlimited access to the content, Google even provides an archive service to help users provide perpetual access, even if the original web site ceases to exist. Publishers can offer users a preview of the content so that they can get a glimpse of what they will get after they have paid, this preview is also meant for search engines. Besides this preview of the content publishers can place ads to get an ad impression even if a user doesn’t buy the content. (more…)

LinkDAQ: Show Your Trading Skills with Links

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This weekend Dom Hodgson, amongst others well known for organising Thinkvisibility, and who is currently doing a special don’t tweet the bride, decided to do his own personal ‘hack day weekend’ and create something special. What came out of the weekend is a new game to play for SEOs: LinkDAQ.

What it basically is, is a trading game, buying and selling stocks. But instead of using ‘real stocks’ LinkDAQ lets you trade links. (more…)

Google Launches Tagmanager: The What and Why

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Yesterday Google launched a new (free) tool: Google Tag Manager. The tool allows you to manage the tags on your site. Within a Google interface you can add and update tags.

The tool will make the life of a webmaster easier, but it could also create some ‘funny faces’ since Google is getting into the playing field of some paid tools and people might expect the wrong things. (more…)

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