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…)
We have covered already quite a bit on author rank this week. First there were the e-mails Google is sending out to authors and earlier today Jeroen wrote a great extensive post on the importance of Authorship. That could be enough for one week, but we didn’t want to hold this back from you.
Google has confirmed to Searchengineland that it is now not just showing the authorship markup and showing the ‘more post by’ link, but it is also showing three extra posts from the author when a user comes back to the search results, provided it seems as if they really liked the post they were just reading. (more…)
Facebook is not in the best place at the moment. After the failed IPO people are watching the Social Media giant with suspicion. And on more than one level. There is the money part and there is the privacy part. And in both these areas Facebook now seems to be testing the patience and loyalty of the users.
The recent launch of Facebook Offers should be giving the network more financial leeway but instead is giving a lot of users annoyance. On top of that Facebook was ‘accused’ of putting private messages on public timelines and at the same time rumours of Facebook working with a controversial data company raise fear of what will happen to privacy matters. (more…)
The Authorship markups from Google have been around for a while now, Here at State of Search the authors have one as well, which means that if posts do well in the rankings you might see the author’s image in front of the result. A nice feature.
Since a couple of days Google seems to be sending out e-mails to those who have implemented or changed their authorship profile, welcoming them to Google Authorship. (more…)
Despite being dropped by Apple earlier in the year, and yesterdays news that Amazon may drop Google Maps in favour of their own solution, Google Maps are still going strong and seemingly adding updates every week!
This month Google Maps have added voice activated searches, turn-by-turn navigation for traffic conditions, half a gigameter of biking navigation in 12 countries in Google Maps for Android, more than a million public transport and transit stops, and despite news that infographics links may be discounted in the future, Google have themselves produced an infographic to show us that they know what we did this summer…
As an avid Map Geek/obsessive, I am always happy to share with you the new features in Google Maps! Happy travelling people!
Google yesterday launched a new addition to Google Maps as part of the Google Business Photos service. When using Google Maps in certain areas worldwide (yes, not only US) you can now find businesses and actually take a look inside them.
Google improved the functionalities to look inside in a 360-degree panoramic which allows you for example to see a holiday house from the inside before you decide to book it, not a bad idea in many cases.
To use the functionality you go to Google Maps, find the business and drag the orange Pegman on the left hand side of your screen onto an orange circle on the map. (more…)
For a while we have been seeing domination in certain SERPS from a single domain. Searchengineland wrote about this problem last month. In their example a single domain was dominating the SERP for “christopher jagmin plates”. It had been bugging me because a single domain can’t the 10 most relevant results for a single query in my mind.
On Friday Matt Cutts tweeted that there was a small algo change last week that will improve the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned. This seems to have fixed the US SERPS but is it yet to roll out to the UK from what I can see thus far.
Google has placed a new Easter Egg in the search engine which is based on the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. The purpose of the game is that every player has to link an actor in a maximum of six steps to Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon, known for films like Apollo 13, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, Mystic River and X-Men First Class.
The higher the number how farther away the actor is removed from Kevin Bacon, actors who worked directly with Bacon will get a Bacon number of 1. The game itself is based on the theory Six degrees of separation which states that everyone on earth through a network can be connected to each other in six different steps. With the game in Google you can check in how many steps an actor is linked to Kevin Bacon. (more…)
Bing seems to be on a small war path with Google. Earlier this week we already highlighted some of its social search strategy, but Bing has a broader challenge: Google. Microsoft has been actively promoting their search engine in different ways, along the way ‘attacking’ Google directly. And that while Bing is already gaining a little ground on Google in market share in the US last August.
While Comscore numbers show a small increase of Bing shares in the US and a small decline for Google, Bing is actively working on their visibility by doing a ‘Bingiton’, a TV campaign, by changing the name of Microsoft Advertising and by trying to lure away Google Adwords customers. All actions are not just aimed at showing how good Bing is though, they are also very much ‘against’ Google. (more…)
A remarkable ruling in The Netherlands today where a judge decided that one of the most popular websites in the country which linked to content which was ‘leaked’ is guilty of breach of copyright as well as breach of privacy. The ruling could potentially have a big impact on online journalism.
The website GeenStijl.nl, which is a controversial, but very popular site in the Netherlands, last year placed a link to photo’s of a Dutch celebrity of a photoshoot for the Dutch version of Playboy. The photos were according to GeenStijl leaked by someone inside the offices of the publisher, which makes the ruling even more remarkable. (more…)
It has been a discussion for ages: will Facebook ever go into search. And if they do, will they be the long awaited Google killer? Can they beat Google at their own game?
Many didn’t even expect Facebook to go into search anymore, after all, why didn’t they do it before? Yesterday at the TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg told the audience in his first interview since the failed IPO “At some point, we’ll do it”. (more…)
Two years ago Google introduced “Google Instant”, which was an extended version of Google Suggest. Now not just the suggestions showed up, the page actually changes when typing in your search query, making that some people might decide to stop typing and pick a result which seems to be to their liking.
These suggestions ‘help’ people make their choices. But not all choices are good choices, according to Google at least. Which means the search engine banned specific sentences or searches from showing up in Google Instant. For words with for example sexual intent, that makes sense, you can for example search for the word “porn”, but there will be no suggestions there. If you want to see results on that term you first need to hit ‘enter’ to see the results.
Google now has banned another term: Torrentsite The Pirate Bay is taken out. On the other hand a much discussed term might be returning: bisexual. (more…)
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