Posts About ‘Google’

How to Keep Control over the New and Improved Exact & Phrase Match in Adwords

Last month, I spoke alongside Brad Geddes in a panel at the SMX Munich about “Large Scale PPC“. One of the subjects in my presentation was the account structure and how to use your structure to keep control over the account. In the near future after the introduction of “improved exact and phrase match options” in Adwords, control will be even more important. How can you use this new feature to your benefits and prevent the account from “slipping” out of your hands?

Not nearly 3 years ago, the maximum number of campaigns an advertiser could build in Adwords was 25 campaigns in a standard account and 50 campaigns in an “enhanced” account. Today, we can build 10.000 campaigns in a standard account. Why did Google increase this amount so rapidly? The answer is clear: today we have so many options and settings on a campaign level, that we just have to build more campaigns than we did a few years ago!

Think about the use of mobile and tablets, the changes in the display network, remarketing and especially all the ad extensions that we can use today. In the last months, Google kept on pimping the sitelinks, increasing the number of sitelinks in some cases from 4 till 6 sitelinks and introducing even enhanced sitelinks, which give you the possibility to cover a bigger part of the search result page. (more…)

“Zip Open” Google Today in Honor of Gideon Sundback

We usually don’t pay that much attention to the Google Doodles here on State of Search. There is nothing much to learn from them after all . But in some cases you have to make an exception because they are simply that brilliant. Today is one of those days.

Google today is celebrating the the birthday of the zip’s inventor Gideon Sundback. If you go to Google you can ‘zip open’ the Google homepage which will then show results for the search on Gideon Sundback. You can let the zipper run down the centre of the page with your mouse. Once you let go the page opens. (more…)

Exclusive Interview Amit Singhal: “People often confuse context with personalization”

For some Larry Page or Sergey Brin might be the big mind when it comes to Google. Others believe its Matt Cutts who holds all the knowledge. But ask any Googler who has the most influence on what actually happens with the search engine Google and most probably 99% of them will answer: Amit Singhal.

Amit Singhal is the Senior VP at Google, a “Google Fellow”, and the head of Google’s core ranking team. There are not many issues with Google Search which do not go past him. Amit Singhal and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. The video from the Search Quality Meeting which we showed before and is also placed at the end of this post shows just that: it is Singhal who makes the decisions and it is Singhal who knows the most. Anyone who looks at leaderships will also notice that the way Singhal leads the meeting is like a natural leader.

In a few weeks time Singhal will make a rare appearance on the stage of a major search conference. And even rarer: that appearance will not be in the US, but in Europe: at SMX London 2012. We talked to Danny Sullivan about that show earlier and now we have the exclusive chance to talk to Amit Singhal who was kind enough to answer some of our burning questions. We tried to ask him questions on different topics: Search Plus Your World, the Panda Update, Google and Europe and some of the privacy issues Google is running into. Enjoy! (more…)

Google Aren’t Just Fighting Spam, They’re Fighting the Perception of Spam

I can’t quite pin-point the date, but Google have changed the way they fight spam. It’s a dramatic shift that can only have come from a change in policy internally. This schism from their own way of thinking is dramatic and perhaps an end of innocence from the Webspam team.

For me the first indication of this shift was when Google started naming their updates again. Vince and Panda (and Caffeine, even though it wasn’t technically a algo change) this was a change from the ever-flux where changes were being made constantly in small iterations, why did they make this change? Perhaps it was just because they were big cohesive changes, or partly it was because Google want to talk more publicly about what they considered good and bad content and they wanted to show that they were taking action.

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Saw A Rank Drop This Week? It Could Be Google’s Fault Says Matt Cutts

If you keep a close eye on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ when it comes to developments around Google and SEO you might have noticed this week that there was a lot of talk about rankings and updates. People were suggesting there was another Panda Update coming up or even taking place at that specific moment or that this was the effect of the “over optimization” penalties that have been discussed a lot lately.

They came to that conclusion based on the sudden drop in rankings they saw for their websites. The “Is there a Panda Update going on?” type of tweets therefore were quite massive the past few days. It turns out that there was no Panda Update, no ”over optimization” Update or anything in that matter. It turns out Google made a mistake: some sites were marked as parked when they were not. (more…)

Google Does Take Manual Action On Webspam

Maybe you already follow the webmaster videos from Googles Matt Cutts in which he answers questions from webmasters. Matt is doing this for several years now and which I think is a good thing. There are a few hundred videos now and he even answered one of my questions once .

In his latest video Matt answers a question from himself. “Does Google take manual action on webspam? Does manual action result in a removal or can it also be a demotion? Are there other situations where Google will remove content from its search results?” (more…)

Google Consumer Surveys Could Be Worthwile To Try

On the 29th of March Google introduced a new product called Consumer Surveys. A new product aimed on both large and small companies who would like to do market research in an easy way in order to make certain decisions. These online surveys can be about everything, for example how many hours users watch TV or which kind of packaging they prefer for a certain product. (more…)

Users Make Good Use of Whitespace Google+ [Fun]

And now for some after-weekend fun . As you must have noticed last week that Google introduced a completely redesigned interface for Google+. Say what you want about the new interface but almost instantly there were a lot of comments about the extra whitespace which shows especially on bigger screens and lead to the trending topics #whitespace en #usesforwhitespace on the social network.

Soon after this Google+ boss Vic Gundotra announced that there are plans for this space but what functionality Google has in mind he wouldn’t say yet (please not ads!).

Many users with bigger screens made fun of the whitespace by showing on pictures what you can do with it. For example, you could put bacon in here but also a new browser window with Facebook seems to fit nicely, or what about a lavalamp. We collected some funny pictures from users below, if you want to see more of these pictures head over to, of course, Google+. (more…)

Friday Talk: Atmosphere 2011 Keynote: The Next Questions, Vint Cerf

With the Google Project Glass dominating the news when it comes to Google in the past week it is clear that Google is not just focussing on search anymore, but that they are mainly a technology company now. And if you talk Google and Technology you have to talk about Vint Cerf.

In this Friday Talk Cerf (VP & Chief Internet Evangelist, Google) discusses the changing world of technology today. It’s a talk from the “Atmosphere 2011” Google conference from November last year in which “the cloud” was the central topic. (more…)