Most people have probably heard about the May Day update which has either dramatically increased or decreased traffic depending who you talk to. Initially the talk was all about how sites had lost traffic but there are now a number of people coming out to say that traffic has had a big increase.

We’re seeing either no change or a dramatic increase in long tail visitors since the update.

The update seems to have been quite straightforward, Google has increased the emphasis on quality and is giving smaller sites a chance. Large sites with thin content and a lot of trust no longer get a free ride just because they have a keyword match.

I’m heading off to Sweden today for the EPiServer Partner Summit so don’t have much time to write – however I strongly suggest you read this post about the update to find out what’s going on and how you can benefit.

Ever since the famous AOL data leak of 2006 people have been endlessly quoting the same old figures when asked for amount of clicks a particular ranking gets.

Recently the data has become a lot more accurate thanks to the release of click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study by the Chitika ad network.

From the AOL data we can see that first place gets 42% of traffic, compared to just 11.9% for second place. That seems too high to me.

Read more >>

The original PageRank model used a random surfer model and assumed that people moved randomly throughout the web. Crucially every link on a page had an equal chance of being clicked as all the others.

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.

The problem with this is that all links are not equal – some are much more important than others. In 2004 Google created the Reasonable Surfer Model which attempts to algorithmically determine which links are more important than others.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with higher probability than others. Read more >>

Google is increasingly starting to personalise search results for users and they even have a feature called Starred Results which allows users to make a note of their favourite sites for a particular search result.

We assume that when you “favourite” a site by clicking on the star it gives that site a boost in your personalised results but what isn’t clear is whether it gives the site a boost for every search user.

I would like to do an experiment and need your help in doing this so if you could follow the steps below that would be fantastic.

• Make sure you are logged in to your Google account
• Search for “search engine optimisation” on Google.co.uk
• Click the star on the right hand site of the result for Blogstorm (shown in the screenshot below)

I will report back on the results in a week or so.

Thanks for your help.

This week Google released a very exciting new feature in Webmaster Tools – the ability to see impression data and click through data for your most popular keywords. On the face of it this is excellent information however the implications of what Google is actually telling us are pretty unprecedented in terms of how the SEO industry reports on results.

Let’s look at the actual data to start with, the report tells me the top keywords along with data for the number of impressions that my search listings have received and the number of people who actually click through to my page. A number of people have pointed out that the figures don’t match Google Analytics but I think we just have to accept that any two systems using different tracking methods are going to give different results.

Read more >>

For those of you interested in the rollout of the Caffeine update here is the latest word from MC.

This came in a comment on a post detailing some good link-building tips, Google style.

I covered it on my SMX panel but for some reason Lisa didn’t mention it in the live-blog coverage. You might check this link: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5186826 I think I talked about it some there too. The short answer is that Caffeine is still live at only one datacenter. Things are on track though, and we expect to roll out Caffeine to all data centers in the coming months.

The fact it’s not launched yet is strange but I suppose they need to get these things right. Google can launch new products before they are ready all the time when they are just gimmicks but they can’t launch a new search infrastructure until they are sure it will work.

For those of you into paid links and blog/guestbook spamming this is probably going to be bad news – Google has apparently got a new linkspam algorithm and they are actively seeking reports to test it with.

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam. Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field in the form).

Now we’ve all heard about Google trying to crack down on paid links before but they have failed for a number of reasons. The main reason is that a lot of sites with top rankings have thousands of paid links. Other people see these links, assume that they must be working and then go out and replicate them. There are some clever people who understand that these links might not actually be helping but most people don’t know how to really test whether a link is passing weight.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this one. Perhaps this new algorithm is going to be part of the caffeine update which we are still waiting for.

This is great news for agencies – Google Webmaster Tools now has an easy way for clients to give access to their data without having to upload a meta tag or an html file.

All you need to do is enter the email address you want to give access to and as long as they have a Google account they can get access straight away.

Small changes that make our life a lot easier. Now all we need is a similar system for the Local Business Center and I will be happy.

For the last couple of years we have been badgering Google to start emailing webmasters to tell them that their site has been hacked and now the feature is finally live – no more having to use Google Alerts!

The system reports on hacking and abused user generated content as well as comment spam amongst other things. The only drawback is that you have to set up the email forwarding feature otherwise you won’t get a notification – why can’t Google just use your registered email address? Read more >>