When you download the Google Toolbar and select the “enhanced features” option you are giving consent for Google to monitor and log all the web pages you visit. That’s always been fairly clear but apparently Google is being a bit more sneaky – the toolbar will continue to track your visitors even after you disable it.
Pretty clever way for Google to get data.
Another story this morning shows graphically how Google is reducing the share of money they give to AdSense publishers. Not a good day for Google.
Google is one of the most trusted services in the world and when it tells me that my spellings are wrong I normally blindly accept the correction like most of the UK population. The problem is that Google is a US company and they have a different way of spelling lots of words.
Google is clearly going for some kind of record with product launches this quarter. Today we see them extending support for the rel=canonical tag across two different domains as well as adding sentiment analysis to reviews in Google Local.
I don’t see any situations where a cross domain rel=canonical tag would be the right thing to use but here is what Google has to say: Read more >>
The SEO industry has always been hard to follow but the last few months/years have seen unprecedented changes to the results being displayed. Ever since universal search catapulted videos and local business listings in front of searchers there has been too many different mediums for most people to understand.
During the last 70 days Google has launched no less than 38 new search products from social search to real time search and each one has a different algorithm and requires different optimisation techniques.
According to The Telegraph & Marissa Mayer the next big breakout area for Google is going to be language.
“Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites,” she says. “And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”
Right now if you type a search query into Google in English, the servers crawl only English-language sites and deliver only English-language results. But this will change and Google are working on it.
While the SEO community have been chattering away about page load times as a ranking factor in 2010, Google have quiely released new much needed Labs functionality into Webmaster Tools enhancing site performance reporting.
Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and check out the Labs link in the left hand navigation – you’ll find the site performance tools in there.
So, what does the tool look like?
Note from Patrick – this is what it says about Blogstorm:
On average, pages in your site take 7.3 seconds to load (updated on Nov 30, 2009). This is slower than 86% of sites.
The Labs tool reports on overall site performance (visible in the chart above) with a summary of individual URL performance. Like the Page Speed plugin, the Labs tool makes basic recommendations to webmasters on improvements they might make. Read more >>
Over the last few months Google has been really pushing local search in the UK (with plans to push it even more) and we are finding Local Business Results increasingly creeping into generic keywords such as mobile phones.
Today I thought it would be interesting to take the “mobile phones” search results and see what percentage of the page each element takes up. The results are below and you can click on the screenshot to see a full size version of the whole page.
The top 10 organic results now only account for 21% of the page with local listings taking up 9.3% – almost the same as the Adwords ads which take up 14.3%. Just under 50% of the page is either white space or navigation links.
Google has announced this morning that for certain queries they will be showing site hierarchies in the search results rather than URL’s string. On first inspection I don’t like the system because in all the examples Google has provided the keyword rich product URL is removed and replaced with a more generic category level keyword.
For example this nice URL “/spidersapien/” (in bold)
In a video interview for Web Pro News Matt Cutts has given a clear hint that page load speed will be a part of Googles algorithm next year. Page speed is already part of the AdWords quality score algorithm but until now it’s not directly been part of the main search algorithm.
We’ve always seen the effects of very slow hosting with poor crawl rates and a lack of deep indexing but Google has traditionally not been giving a boost to faster sites.
Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.
I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’
Video available below, the page speed part is 2 minutes 35 seconds in.
Over the last 6 months Google has been striding forwards with using click data for natural search and over the weekend we had confirmation that it’s being used for Google News stories as well. This makes total sense but it’s nice to hear it officially.
Josh Cohen is the Senior Business Product Manager for Google News and he was recently interviewed by Eric Enge about various Google News issues including the row with people like Rupert Murdoch.
The whole interview is a must read but the ranking section is copied below: Read more >>
We already know that Rupert Murdoch is planning to launch a paid content strategy sometime next year but in a recent Sky News interview he went one step further and said that they would be blocking Google from indexing content from their websites.
Some papers might do well by charging for content but surely charging for content and blocking Google is a step too far. How would people find the content to buy in the first place without search engines?
Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”
