Posts About ‘SERPS’

Webmaster Tools Metrics That Matter

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Google Webmaster Tools, or Webmaster Central, is to be considered on of the more useful tools in the SEO toolkit that google is providing. Some of its features include showing how Google crawls, indexes and rank your site, the way people find your site in search result and the CTR on the clicks that follow by those result pages. Also you can find out, although limited, who is linking to you and to what pages, receive (email) notifications or alerts when your site contains malware, your WordPress installation needs an update or other issues that have been detected.

Why use Google Webmaster Tools?

So why should you use Webmaster Tools? Some of its features mentioned earlier already indicate why it might be helpful to verify your site and look into it periodically. Let’s go into some of the features that are available and understand how they can be of help to basically any webmaster or SEO. (more…)

UPDATE: Black Navigation Bar here to stay?

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Update on this post (originally called Two new SERP tests: Black Navigation Bar and Urls on top – May 26 2011): More and more people are seeing the black navigation bar we talk about below. It looks like this might be here to stay. Google hasn’t announced anything on it so far, but the number of people seeing the black navigation bar (which looks a lot like the one you see when logged in to WordPress) indicates Google might be already rolling this out. The url above the search results is also seen more often so it seems Google is actually serious with these changes.

The constant testing in the Google SERPS is hardly news anymore. We saw many of them already and last week showed some tests that hadn’t made it. Today we can again show you two tests in the SERPS.

First we see the black navigation bar, second Google seems to be testing with urls above the snippet result instead of below. (more…)

New Google Tests Suggest Change Come Fast

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Again some new Google tests have been found ‘in the wild’. The tests again are focused on the design. This time the changes came from around the globe, not just the US, which suggests they might be more than ‘just’ tests and that we could be seeing these changes go through a lot quicker than you might expect.

The biggest changes to the design in the tests which came out were the drop of the “I’m feeling lucky” button and the grey area on top and on the left in the text from the sidebar and a blue search icon. Some changes have been seen before which also is an indication that Google is getting more serious with this. (more…)

Google SERP Tests That Didn’t Make It

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We all know that Google is testing a lot of things all the time. They usually do this by giving a portion of the users a new feature, function or design to look out. Based on the responses (not the tweets, but how people actually click) they figure out what works and what doesn’t.

We always love to look at the new changes Google is testing out. It gives us an insight into where Google is heading. Now most of the things we spot are indeed changes which are actually being made. Many of the tests which are spotted by many make it. But there are also a lot of changes which don’t make it. This weekend I stumbled on a presentation of a Googler which showed some screens of design tests that didn’t make it. What is interesting about looking at tests that didn’t make it? For one thing, it gives us an idea of how Google is thinking. And you still might see some of the test-changes become actual changes in the future, who knows. (more…)

Google is Testing New Search Result Pages, Opinions on Twitter differ

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Google has been making quit some changes to its SERPS in the past months, most of which we reported on here on State of Search. Only a few days ago we highlighted some tests Google was doing.

And just when the ink is dry Google decides it is time for yet another “test”. This time a little bit bigger then the others though, if we can believe our sources but also those on Twitter, which are with a lot more. Many people are spotting a new way of presenting the search results. The comments differ, but in general people think they are ‘ugly’.

The biggest change we can see from the screenshots going around Twitter (I haven’t spotted this in the wild myself yet) are the not-underlined results which we talked about earlier this week, much more “white” on the page and in some cases a dotted line between the results. (more…)

Google adding other social sources to realtime, social efforts evolve

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When Google first launched realtime search everybody got excited. Finally they picked up on Twitter and showed us real time results. For a short period there was a real hype going around (it even got me a link and quote on the BBC-website). And then it went quiet.

It turned out the realtime results in the middle of a page were mostly ignored by users. Then Google moved the realtime results to a separate page within Google, only showing the ‘real time block’ in special cases. All that time the real time results were mostly results from Twitter and Google’s latests indexed blogs. Now it seems that Google finally is broadening realtime search. A Quora thread and following Techcrunch-post indicate that Google Realtime Search now also shows results from Quora, Gowalla, Me2day, Twitgoo, and possibly others.

The thread-owner, Dan Leveille, noted that if you do a search for “site:quora.com” in the realtime search section you get Quora results from just minutes ago. You get questions, answers and votes. (more…)

Update: Google puts your address in the SERPS, shows it to your social circle

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Update: The address shown in the SERPS is probably shown within your social circle (see below).

Original title: Google puts your address in the SERPS, quick edit your profile and more autocomplete

It is becoming more than a day job to keep track of all the changes Google makes to their SERPS. We therefore sometimes try to update you with the latest developments in the SERPS.

Today again three changes which Google made to the SERPS: you in some cases can edit your Google Profile straight from the SERPS and Google has made some changes to the autocomplete feature, making it also work on word-by-word. Most remarkable however is your address showing up in the SERPS. (more…)

Google giving more shape to social person search: last twitter updates

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It’s the most done search on the web: the ego search. People looking for their own name. But also many people look for other peoples names, like the ones they are going to meet for the first time, either in a meeting or on a date for example.

I’ve stated before that it would be interesting to actually get a page which you can monitor yourself that would show up in the Google results for your own page and with the new and updated Google Profiles Google seems to have done just that. And Google is now taking another step.

The Google Profiles are showing up more and more in the SERPS and it seems that Google has made a change to how they show Twitter results when you search for a name. (more…)

State of Search radioshow – episode 49: Google changes, Yahoo and what is illegal

In this weeks episode Bas and Roy were amongst each other discussing some of the latest developments in the industry. They talked about some changes Google made in the SERPS, how Yahoo is back in business and how an SEO company got sued for being part of a scam. Also Roy got onto his rant chair after reading a post from SEO Books Aaron Wall.

The shownotes are below. (more…)

SERP Change highlight: your Google Reader Subscriptions in SERPS

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We again highlight a few changes in the SERPS. Google is constantly changing them and it’s hard to keep track, so we try to sometimes highlight one or two of them. Today another interesting find again by UK SEO Andrew Girdwood. He noticed that Google is taking another small step with the integration of social into the search results: your own Google Reader subscriptions. This is not a new feature, Google has been doing this for a while, but not many actually see it.

We all now are familiar with the “shared by” messages which indicate that somebody inside your social circle has shared a specific page on one of their social networks. In most cases this is Twitter. We are also all familiar with the “starred results”, the results you either star in the SERPS or save as a Google Bookmarks. These usually show up at the top of the results. (more…)

A look at some SERPS changes by Google: real time updates, number of words and calories

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Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm and to their SERPS, the things we are seeing when we do a search. We discussed a couple of changes last week and now I’d like to shine a light on a few others again.

Today we see several changes and tests appear in the SERPS. Some of them have been there for a while, others are still in test mode and again others are completely new. Let’s look at real time updates, number of words, calories and recipes. (more…)

Google again making (small) changes to SERPS?

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It is not a surprise that Google keeps working on the look of the SERPS. In a year you will be able to see over 400 changes, which means that more than daily there will be something different on a Google SERP page. You just might not notice it. But lucky for us, a lot of SEOs do notice.

Today I’d like to highlight two changes which were spotted in the UK by two UK SEOs, Andrew Girdwood and Matt Sawyer. They spotted some sort of ‘how to’s’ and related searches in different categories. Both yet more elements which are put in Universal search. (more…)

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