Google has today rolled out the Panda algorithm internationally in all languages apart from Chinese, Japanese,and Korean.
For most languages, this change impacts typically 6-9% of queries to a degree that a user might notice. This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected almost 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount.
On 24th February 2011 Google was busy with two things; rolling out the Panda update and filing a patent entitled Methods and Apparatus for Employing Usage Statistics in Document Retrieval.
This patent covers methods which could solve one of Googles biggest problems – the fact that older pages with lots of links are outranking newer & more relevant pages which have fewer links just because they are new.
As long as Google relies on traditional links they are always going to struggle to be up to date and relevant.
The patent details how documents could be ranked based on factors such as:
It’s quite clear that a document that is getting lots of attention and visits from users in the UK should rank higher in the UK search results than a document that is getting very little attention.
Methods and apparatus consistent with the invention employ usage information to aid in organizing documents. Based purely on raw visit frequency, the documents may be organized into the following order: 610 (40 visits), 620 (30 visits), and 630 (4 visits). If these raw visit frequency numbers are refined to filter automated agents and to assign double weight to visits from Germany, the documents may be organized in the following order: 620 (effectively 40 visits, since the 10 from Germany count double), 610 (effectively 25 visits after filtering the 15 visits from automated agents), and 630 (effectively 4 visits).
It’s interesting that this patent has surfaced a the same time as we see Google+ getting wider adoption and also as we learn that Google is timestamping every single click from Google+ in order to track both the frequency and count of all outbound clicks.
According to Hitwise data Google has now reached 92% market share based on the June figures.
Bing and Yahoo are showing no sign of making any inroads into Googles market share and with the launch of Google+ and the positive feedback it’s getting Bing and Yahoo stand to lose even more market share over the next 12 months.
Blogstorm has had a bit of a redesign and you can look forward to a few more posts in the future. We are also revamping the crawl rate tracker in the next week so look out for that.
The lack of posts recently has been due to me getting married and Branded3 being super busy with new & existing clients since April.
Most of you will have heard the story about how the FBI has shut down several of the largest online poker websites as part of a money laundering investigation. This is clearly big news as these sites are no longer able to trade until this investigation is complete.
The actual story is very very complicated and beyond the scope of this article for me to explain but the result is very interesting from an SEO perspective. A search for “online poker” in Google.com shows the first 3 results are to dead sites – there is no way that the Google algorithm will allow them to stay at the top for very long. When a site has some downtime or a temporary change that renders it “unoptimised” then Google normally keeps the rankings for a week or so. I’m expecting these sites to disappear over the next few days.
Since the Panda / Farmer update hit the UK earlier this week most people with a website have been monitoring visitor numbers very closely for changes. A lot of people were well prepared for the update having seen their US traffic drop on 25th February but it’s still a big shock to lose 50% of your non-brand SEO traffic overnight.
Rank tracking companies such as Sistrix and Search Metrics have performed some analysis of rankings with the big losers aggregated in league tables on their blogs. This data is a bit misleading as so much of the drop was in the long tail and rankings don’t do a very good job of monitoring trends for the extreme long tail. Read more →
Late last night Google rolled out the Panda / Farmer update in the UK and confirmed the update on their official blog.
The latest update goes further than the original with 14% of queries now affected rather than 12%. They are also taking user data for blocked sites into account which wasn’t directly the case before.
We are seeing big changes for a lot of “how to” queries that we track. Ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com are losing quite a lot of ground but are still ranking in the top 10 for a lot of queries. Interestingly Blogspot blogs and answers.google.com seem to be doing very well from this update, perhaps they are deemed higher quality than other user generated sites?
There is very little data to analyse so far but I will post again over the next few days.
Google has announced the +1 button which allows users to vote for specific search results, AdWords ads and (in a few months) pages on your website. The button is a vote to say you like the page, think it’s cool and would want to recommend it to your friends.
The key about this button is that your friends only see the recommendations when they are searching for the same thing you were searching for. This is in sharp contrast to Twitter and Facebook where you have to send the link when you are interested in it rather than when your friend is looking for the same thing. For news and current topical results Twitter & Facebook sharing is great, for ecommerce sites and non-topical content it doesn’t really work as well.
Read more →
This is perhaps the most audacious thing Google has done but it seems they have bought the financial comparison site Beatthatquote.com for £37.7m
Update: within 24 hours of the acquisition beatthatquote.com no longer ranks on Google when you search for “beatthatquote”. Still no announcement from Google on the matter.
BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.
Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.
We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.
I have no idea how Google can hope to get this past regulators. This is going to cause a lot of controversy.
Good news of course for the company involved!
If Google was going to do a product search style comparison engine they might cut out the middlemen and aggregate deals directly from big financial institutions. However with this move they are buying one of the middlemen sites. Perhaps Beatthatquote.com had some good software and Google wanted that? Will be interesting to see how finance & insurance price comparison sites like Go Compare and Money Supermarket fare over the next couple of years once Google does something in this space.
My personal opinion is that Google should steer well clear of doing things like this. If they want to build their own services such as shopping or financial comparisons I can understand but surely any site they own has to be removed from the index in a sector like this?
Via money.co.uk
The system behind Demand Media is an automated topic suggestion tool which finds keywords & topics and compares them to metrics such as search volume, competitiveness and likely profitability of running ads on the pages. Topics that reach a certain threshold of profitability are queued in the system and writers choose and publish content accordingly.
In view of the negative view Google has of content farms it might surprise you to hear that Google has applied for a patent doing much the same thing. Google has been working killing content farms for over 12 months and it’s worth revisiting a patent released in Feb 2010 now that we have seen the initial effects of the Panda algorithm.
The patent basically covers a system for identifying search queries which have low quality content and then asking either publishers or the people searching for that topic to create some better content themselves. The system takes into account the volume of searches when looking at the quality of the content so for bigger keywords the content would need to be better in order for Google to not need to suggest somebody else writes something.
There are loads of potential ways Google could implement this sort of system:
Rather than explain all this myself, below are some key quotes and diagrams from the patent, I’ve highlighted the important bits.
Last week Google announced a major update which affects around 11.8% of all search queries on Google.com. The update was intended to reduce rankings for low-quality sites commonly known as content farms.
As yet the update has yet to hit the UK however as most of the larger content farm type sites are US based it’s probably not going to have as big an impact over here.
Whilst this update is affecting 11.8% of all queries it’s not actually affecting very many sites. The algorithm is being applied at a domain level rather than a specific page level and the sites affected are so large that even a few hundred sites suffering could cause 11.8% of all queries to be altered.
I will come to our conclusions about how this algorithm works later on but first we need to understand why Google would need an extra algorithm to combat these type of sites. Traditionally Google would use a combination of link data and on-site optimisation to judge rankings but for content farms this is impossible for a number of reasons. Read more →
RT @TheDrum: Provocative Powwownow London Underground campaign evokes feminist response from commuters http://t.co/9wFAqSBA
@patrickaltoft / about 2 days agoRT @competwition: Uber chic unique jewelry & #fashion accessories site, @Boticca, is giving 1lucky devil $300/€240/£200 to 2spend onsite ...
@patrickaltoft / about 2 days agoRT @rishil: If you want learn about Press Releases and how to work them for SEO - read this>>> http://t.co/yt764fv6
@patrickaltoft / about 3 days ago@MarriottGolfUK If you want to run a competition to get followers you should try our http://t.co/urrpvJh1 site to do the giveaway
@patrickaltoft / about 3 days ago
