Over the years we’ve had many many Search Marketing clients, all with different ideas, different businesses, some are new to marketing their website, others have come from other companies, disgruntled at how they have been treated. Usually they tell us that they were promised a number 1 ranking in Google for the term they asked for, we never do this. Its not that we are not confident in what we can do with marketing your website. It’s just that there is a 3rd party involved here, not us, not you. It’s Google.
Yesterday Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. Posted this video.
Entitled
How can I explain to clients that rankings can’t be guaranteed?
We have been banging this drum for years, and are happy that someone from Google has come out with this video.
Something amazing happened last week in the internet world. The unstoppable force, met the immovable object. And finally, somebody has toppled the giant that is Google, In America anyway.
Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.
Even though Google has a higher percentage share of the market in the UK than it does in the US. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before Facebook becomes more visited than Google in the UK. All the teenagers in our family seem to live on the website, checking it 20, 30 times a day. And as smartphones become more affordable and the kids all start using iphones, the usage is going to skyrocket as they will be quite literally plugged into facebook all day long, and annoying this bitter old mid 30′s bloke with the constant updates, application invites, event attending and general nonsense.
The other day Google added another way it displays sitelinks for some searches.
On a Google search for the keyword if you look beneath the main search result,we see links to various areas of the web site. This would help a searcher in two ways: they can get a better understanding of what the site is about before they visit, and they can take a shortcut from Google to the topic that interests them.
Now Google are changing the goalposts again and providing breadcrumbs as well, this is instead of the green link you see underneath the usual result, Quite why they are doing this is anyones guess.
It doesn’t seem as helpful to me.
From Google themselves
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you’re headed. Today we’re rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days.
Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google’s Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, “www.google.com/corporate/execs.html,” shows that the page is located in a page about “execs,” under “corporate,” which is on the “google.com” site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.
Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information. For example, consider this result from ProductWiki for the query [spidersapien reviews]:
The URL of this result is “www.productwiki.com/spidersapien,” which doesn’t provide much additional information about the site or this result. Now take a look at the result with the new site hierarchy display:
The new text provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki site has information about many different products, organized in different categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien is a robot toy. In addition, each phrase in the green line is actually a link. For example, clicking on “Toys & Games” takes you to ProductWiki’s listing page for all toys, and clicking on “Robots” takes you to a list of their robot toys. This way if you realize that you’re interested in a more general category than this specific product (there are a lot of cool robot toys out there) you can easily access information on broader topics.
The host and domain for the site (in this case www.productwiki.com) will always be shown, so you always know what website you’re going to before you click. There’s not always enough room to show the complete hierarchy, so sometimes we use ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels, like in this result for [how to make granola]:
The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.
When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content. We’re always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site hierarchies, that does both!
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Google has updated the PageRank of websites for the first time in 2008. And first time they immediately showed to one person that their must or could be a bug in their PageRank system. For most people this PageRank went smooth but for others it didn’t go exactly as expected.
For one particular webmaster it was like a new years gift from Internet god. Google updated his website PageRank to PR10. This must have been a bug because this was a fairly new site that wasn’t even over 2 years of age. http://www.youtubeforums.com webmaster , “TimeIsMoneyâ€?, didn’t even know what had happened. Although after a bit of research it seemed that at the moment that the PageRank update was going, his site was redirected to Google.com. Due to a bug Google gave his website immediately a PR10.
This leads to the theory that if you create a website yourself, and you redirect it to another website that has got a different PageRank that the PageRank will be carried on onto your website?
This can be confirmed if you look at the following image:
You can see for the result yourself when you paste the following link in your adres bar:
Since this happened already in 2004 when a “brilliant programmed fooled Googleâ€?, this must be a serious programming error in the Reverse Algorithms that they use.
According to this latest PR-update it’s obvious that Google has not yet fixed this serious bug. I found somewhere on the internet how people are able to do this but I’m not posting this here, you can search for yourself as it’s not hard to find. I doubt that the method that those authors mention will really work?
Over the last year I have really noticed an increase in the time it takes Google to index pages, specifically articles and blog posts. Pages being indexed used to take days and then hours and now I am noticing minutes. This is without being logged into my Google Account.
Earlier this year I got the chance to attend Google’s Searchology where they announced the integration of Universal Search results and later that afternoon I sat at the same table as Larry Page where he elaborated that Google would eventually like to be indexing instantaneously. Larry’s vision was to index content as a user was writing his/her blog post/article. It often feels like that’s how fast Google is beginning to index content, see the examples below:
In this first example, my post on Omniture’s eVar size was indexed in Google in about 20 minutes.
Below is a post on Mobile Analytics which was literally indexed in less than 10 minutes after being posted on Blogger.
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This just goes to show the advantages of building a reputable, white hat website because not only is your content simply online, now within minutes your content is ready to be the answer for hundreds/thousands of people’s queries.
The folks over at Download Squad have stumbled across persuasive evidence that Google is adding IMAP support to Gmail. While the option to use IMAP has not showed up in my Gmail account yet (or any other bloggers’ for that matter), they point to this Google help center page, which confirms the speculation. We’ve been tracking new Gmail features for some time; IMAP was the final piece of the puzzle.
IMAP support has been the primary reason I have personally held back from using Gmail for my primary email account. If you don’t know about IMAP, it allows you to manage your email account from different computers and clients without having to worry about replication issues. For example, if you delete an email message in Thunderbird, that message will no longer show up when you use a webmail interface. If you were to use POP – the primary alternative to IMAP – then you would have to manually delete the message from both places because a copy of each message would be downloaded to Thunderbird. Therefore, IMAP provides a much more synchronized solution whereas POP fails to realize that you want to deal with your email once for all points of access.
We’ll have to see how Google plans to monetize Gmail with IMAP, since enabling IMAP means that people like me will almost never bother to use the webmail interface, and therefore never see Google advertisements. Maybe they are betting that most people will simply not use IMAP, or maybe they have other advertising tricks up there sleeves. Perhaps it’s too early to speculate until we actually see this feature enabled for everyone.
RESTON, VA, October 10, 2007 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity, based on data from its qSearch 2.0 service. comScore qSearch 2.0 offers the first panoramic worldwide view of online search activity, providing granular, in-depth analysis of the search universe reported from the top 50 worldwide Internet properties where search activity is observed. The study found that more than 750 million people age 15 and older – or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.
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Search Activity across Worldwide Regions
The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70).
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“comScore’s ability to look at search on a global, regional and country level provides unparalleled insight into the evolving search landscape that was not available previously,â€? said Bob Ivins,executive vice president of International Markets at comScore. “With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale.â€?
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Worldwide Search by Region
August 2007
Total World Age 15+, Home and Work Locations*
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
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Top Worldwide Search Properties
Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.
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Top 10 Search Properties Worldwide*
August 2007
Total World Age 15+, Home and Work Locations**
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
* Search properties based on top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed.ÂÂ
** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
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Continued Mr. Ivins, “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.â€?
Common feedback we hear from webmasters is that you want us to improve the freshness of the data in Webmaster Tools. Understood. We’ve increased the update frequency for your verified sites’ data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site. If your content doesn’t change very often, or if you’re not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools.
Please continue to post your Suggestions & feature requests in the Webmaster Help Group. It’s one of our most important sources of feedback from the webmaster community. We seriously take it seriously.
As Creativesuit are based near Manchester, a lot of our business comes from our organic results on Google. When I started here as Online marketing manager, my main task was to get us as a company up in the higher end of the rankings for the term Manchester web design .
We have had good results for optimising this phrase and are now on the front page of Google for the term, usually lying at 8 or 9 depending on how the gods at Google are feeling.
Then yesterday I noticed something very Bizarre.
Have a look at this screengrab
As you can see, there we are Creativesuit sitting at Number 9, also note Pecdesigns who are above us.
Now lets look at the next page.
And there we are again. As are Pecdesigns.
How very weird indeed. Not that we are complaining, and it will probably be removed as soon as I put this blog post out, but I’d like to keep the number 9 rather than the number 12 if thats ok Mr Google.
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Over the years we’ve had many many Search Marketing clients, all with different ideas, different businesses, some are new to marketing their website, others have come from other companies, disgruntled at how they have been treated. Usually they tell us that they were promised a number 1 ranking in Google for the term they asked [...]
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Something amazing happened last week in the internet world. The unstoppable force, met the immovable object. And finally, somebody has toppled the giant that is Google, In America anyway.
 
The folks over at Download Squad 
We’ve increased the update frequency for your 
