I don’t know about you, but I find it very entertaining to watch how the Internet continues to evolve. It truly boggles the mind when you realize just how fast technology is advancing. This new Google update is a welcome change since I feel it can only increase the quality of the search results. Not everybody agrees of course.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.[Read more]
What are your personal feelings regarding this new update to Google’s algorithm update? Please leave a comment.
It’s quite annoying, as a webmaster, not being able to see all of the keywords people used to find your website. We use this data simply to make our sites better for the visitor by helping us to tailor new content making it more relevant to them! This essentially helps Google in the long run, and yet they decide they want to start hiding a good chunk of this data.
“On Tuesday, October 18th, Google announced they’d be hiding search referral data for logged-in Google searchers. When questioned by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, Google provided the following estimate on the impact to search referral data:
‘Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com’
Tragically, it appears that Cutts was either misinformed or gave misleading information, as ‘(not provided)’ became a major referrer for many websites, climbing into double digits in early November. Now, that percentage has risen even higher, into the 20%+ range on many sites. Hubspot’s Brian Whalley reported that the average website using their analytics lost 11.36% of keyword referral data and 423 sites lost more than 20% (15 unlucky souls lost 50%+, which seems almost crazy).
In an attempt to better quantify the impact, we ran a small survey last week, asking fellow marketers to supply information about the impact to their sites.
My feelings toward Google tend to fall in line, more and more, every day with Ian Lurie’s:
“Dear Google: With your announcement yesterday, you’ve become the enemy.
My company is a Google Analytics Partner. We promote the heck out of Google Analytics, Adwords and your products. I’ve worked hard to emphasize to my clients that you’re not Evil, or Good. You’re just doing your job. We’ve kept our clients within your terms of service, and basically behaved ourselves.
But now you’re going to hide a sizable chunk of referring organic keyword data. That’s information I need to justify your value to my clients: Once you shut down organic search data from ‘signed in’ users, I lose any accurate picture of traffic generated by…” [Read more]
How much keyword data have you lost on your websites? How do you personally feel about this? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Ever wonder if there was an easy way to make Google recognize you as the author of articles and blog posts you’ve written? Well, wonder no more. It’s time to become familiar with Authorship Markups and learn how to markup your content the easy way.
“.. after doing a lot of research and countless trial and errors, I finally was able to verify my authorship markup with Google. Lucky for you, if you have not done it already, I will show you exactly what I did to make this work, the easy way. By easy, I mean, no coding or editing any of your CSS or anything like that. Obviously, there are other ways to do it, but trust me, I got very frustrated yesterday, and what I will share with you today, seems to be the easiest way to get it done. So, this is a two part process, the first being to establish your own authorship markup and the second to configure WordPress to allow inclusion of the rel=”me” and set links for your contributors or authors in their bio. Let’s get started..” [Read more]
Just as I’ve predicted for a few years now, the search engines are going social. For those of us who have a Google+ account you’ve probably noticed the little “+1″ button next to each listing in the search results. Which naturally makes us wonder how much this will effect the rank for listings that get a lot of “+1″ ticks.
It’s time for everybody to stop writing content that appeals to the search engines first, and start writing for people! Check out my FREE video showing you how I got 2,800+ visitors in 1 day by writing content that appeals to people first!
“The SEO Effect Google +1 Experiment whitepaper, concludes that the Google +1 button saw a 20% increase in rankings which led to a corresponding lift in Clickthrough rate (CTR). Whilst in my opinion, right now, the test on rankings is too fuzzy in it’s implementation and was not competitive enough a target phrase to say anything truly groundbreaking about the impact on rankings, the real merits of the study are in the impact of trust factors on CTR. The SEO Effects findings broadly match up with Verisign’s findings that their “secured by Verisign seal” caused a lift of 18% on CTR. It seems likely that this is the message Google will most likely push about +1 swell. Google have never liked talking about how to improve rankings per se, so will instead push the concept that +1 will improve clickthrough rates in organic listings, which is merit enough for webmasters to adopt it.
With that in mind, it seems fairly safe to hypothesize that integrations with Google Webmaster Tools will show how +1 increased CTR on URLs in organic searches, whilst AdWords will show CTR increases where ads are displayed to users with a +1. This latter integration will naturally provide incentive to advertisers and webmasters as higher CTR means lower cost-per-click (CPC).
Therefore, I guess a Google Analytics integration will work on accounts that have integrated Google AdWords data, but may also show a new event similar to webmaster tools. It would be cool to see if +1 data in Google Analytics can be mapped against visitor loyalty and recency statistics. It would also be nice to see if incoming search traffic can be mapped to users who only saw it as a +1 listing.
“Regardless of what we might see in terms of tools integrations, the key takeaway from the SEO effect analysis, for me, is that it really is logical to expect a rankings increase from +1′d results.
“Even though Google has never officially said that it tracks CTR in organic search listings, experienced SEOs know that does seem to be a correlation. Equally in a fairly roundabout way Google has recently acknowledged that user data is playing more of a role in organizing results, something many have suspected is going on for years.
“Either way, if a +1 increases clicks, it naturally follows that sites will see a boost in search position (even if they don’t show up as +1′d to non-logged in users) aswell as the automatic boost from appearing in social circle results.
SEOmoz has released a new version of the Search Ranking Factors survey. My eyes start to glaze over when going over this material, I can’t lie.
Look, time is precious. Would you rather spend your time analyzing SEO to death like they do in this report or would you rather just focus on publishing great content like I outline in my strategy here and spend your time on areas of your business that you have more control over? I’m not saying you shouldn’t make your meta tags, and url’s search engine friendly, but I don’t understand this mentality that says you need to analyze this stuff to death.
Am I alone here on this? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
