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…)
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…)
With an ever changing landscape, SEO in 2012 has seen a significant shift in dynamics. We have seen the rise of content marketing and inbound marketing agencies, the decreasing influence of affiliates on the organic search landscape.
As such there are a number of things that we can no longer take for granted. (more…)
Happy Halloween! In several countries Google will run a neat and scary interactive doodle for Halloween on the homepage. Last year Google recorded a video outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View for the Halloween doodle, this year it’s a Haunted House. As you can see in the video below the doodle consists of several effects, clicking on the doors of the haunted house brings up some scary monsters and in the trash can at the left there’s even a black cat. The skeleton next to the door with number 13 is also animated just like the black spider and the black bird.
A working copy but also all the doodles Google placed for Halloween since 1999 plus all the logos from YouTube and Orkut can be found here. Like said above last year Google recorded a video for Halloween and in 2010 Google made a doodle with Scooby Doo. In 2009 Google went just as far by editing the Robots.txt with some special Halloween lines next to the animated logo that year. The logo from 2008 is also special because that one had a Triforce Easter Egg in it which was later removed.
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 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…)
On 1st October, Russian search engine Yandex announced the launch of its new web browser, Yandex.browser. Based on the Chromium open source technology (used to build Google’s Chrome among others), the cloud-based browser is very similar in look and feel to what we’ve seen before but incorporates many of Yandex’s already popular products and services, and of course its own search engine.
The decision to launch a browser has undoubtedly been driven by search, and the potential advantage Google was gaining over Yandex in the Russian search space as a result of Chrome. StatCounter data shows Chrome as the most popular browser in the country, with approximately 33% share and with Google as its default search engine, it’s no surprise that Google has begun, slowly, to eat away at Yandex’s majority hold on the market. And the search giant is serious about succeeding in Russia, one of the few markets where it trails a local competitor, having even run an offline marketing campaign there to promote Chrome but it is a still long way off beating Yandex, which stills holds roughly 60% share. (more…)
“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…)
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…)
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.
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…)
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…)
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