When Google carried out the brand update on Google.com in March we carried out a study to see where Britains most trusted brands ranked on Google. The idea being that if Google was boosting brands either on purpose or as a side effect of a change in the authority algorithm we would be able to see in the search results.
At the time we concluded that brands were ranking where we would expect based on normal SEO factors but in view of the recent Google.co.uk brand update I thought it would be interesting to see the changes. Read more >>
Back in March Google performed an update which effectively boosted the rankings of big brands in the search results. At the time I commented that the update hadn’t appeared in the UK – until this weekend.
The Google.co.uk results have been moving a lot in the last few weeks but without any real patterns (other than US results appearing for UK specific queries which is probably just an error). Today the results are full of authority websites which seem to be ranking higher than one might expect for competitive keywords. Read more >>
PageRank sculpting was quite a straightforward topic until recently – you just needed to add the nofollow tag to links pointing at “useless” pages such as shopping baskets and login forms and your rankings for long tail keywords magically jumped up.
I’ve heard people talking about 70% traffic increases across large websites purely using this method.
Matt Cutts has tried (and failed, in my opinion) to clarify the issue with a new PageRank sculpting post. The comments are excellent, a mixture of people who don’t understand SEO blindly saying “great post” and the usual knowledgeable people actually questioning things.
Here are some quotes that have me confused. Read more >>
A Dutch website has lost a lawsuit over the words appearing in the snippet of text appearing in Googles search results, despite the fact that Google generated the snippet.
Apparently the snippet gave the incorrect impression that a local car dealer (Zwartepoorte) had gone backrupt despite the fact that the snippet only appeared when you searched for “zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet means bankrupt in Dutch). The offending page has now been taken down. Read more >>
Last week Google made a few announcements at the Google I/O conference and one major one seems to have gone unnoticed.
A lot of people have suspected that Google is crawling JavaScript for some time but due to the random nature of it nobody has done extensive testing to prove either way. Testing this sort of thing is a waste of time because Google has different crawling rules for different sites and whatever is true today probably won’t be true tomorrow. Read more >>
Words can’t easily describe how good Google Wave is, you just have to watch the video below to see for yourself.
Developers in the audience are applauding not just because they know how innovative it is from a users point of view but also because of how far beyond anything else that runs in the browser has ever been before.
Some short sighted people are calling it arrogant because there is no business model or marketing plan,
Google could launch 10 products a year and fail at them all without worrying – all they need is one genuine success every 10 years and they will make more money than most other web companies put together.
Here’s something I’ve not seen before – Google seems to be testing a new feature that displays product images alongside the snippet of a particular search result.
The images in the screenshot below (kindly provided by Glen Allsopp) are aggregated from this category page, resized and lined up alongside the traditional snippet and information.
My guess is that this will have a pretty big effect on the number of clicks that particular search result gets. It will be interesting to see if this test becomes a real feature like the inline sitelinks.
Google is adding some interesting new features to Google Suggest, the drop down box that appears when you start typing a query into the search box.
The first change is that as soon as Google figures out you might be performing a navigational query it will show a URL to click so you don’t need to actually perform a Google search. Read more >>
