Google's new update will deliver fresher content that's more relevant to searchers
When you’re looking for fruit in the grocery store, fresher is always better.
And you definitely want your food fresh the next time you sit down at a restaurant. Now you’ll get fresher, more relevant content when you enter your next search for scores, recent news and hot topics in Google too with the new Google update.
Google is basing their latest update, announced Thursday Nov. 3, on the premise that when you search for something that’s relevant today, you won’t get results for something from the 90s, 80s or even earlier. Google’s update to its basic search algorithm will land up-to-date results on top instead of stale, old content you really weren’t searching for.
The recent changes are expected to impact about 35% of searches on Google.
“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” Google posted on its official blog Nov. 3.
Google said recent changes with the latest Google update will mostly affect searches on recent events or hot topics, regularly occurring events and frequent updates. For example, when you search for scores or information on new jobs available, you’ll get the latest information instead of scores or new jobs from even last week or last month.
Now, the changes aren’t expected to make a difference too many searches. Google said searches such as “fast tomato sauce” recipe certainly will deliver results that may be a few months or even a few years ago.
Many experts look at the dramatic impact of social media on why Google is making the changes with the recent Google update. Recent, fresh information is more available on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter than ever before about friends and family and even celebrities, athletes and others people are interested in liking or following.
And with the latest Google update, you get the latest information with your search.
Since the launch of the Google +1 button, many SEO’s and business owners have had the question, will the Google +1 button have any effect on my SE rankings? In order to best investigate that question, it is important to look at the idea behind the +1 button.
Failed Attempts
Google has had many failed attempts at getting involved in the social media scene (Google Lively, Google Friend Connect, Google Wave, and Google Buzz, to name a few). Each time Google released a social media platform, it failed to appeal to the majority of internet users, while things like Facebook and Twitter powered on, gaining more and more popularity.
However, Google seems to be in the game with the new +1 button. As of July, Google +1 is the second most used website plugin to the Facebook “like” button, even over twitter!
What is Google +1?
Very similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, Google +1 allows users to make a kind of “vote” for a website, alerting other users that they liked the website. It is very easy to add the +1 button to a site, simply visit Google here for directions on how to install the button.
While similar to a “like” button, the +1 button has many differences to a Facebook like that website owners need to be aware of.
Effects on SERPs
First, when you click the +1 button on a website, your vote data is shared with people on your Gmail or Google Talk contact lists. This means that when one of your contacts who has had data shared searches for a keyword where you have voted for a page, that page may show up higher on their search results as a kind of recommended site.
Your own search results will be personalized as a result of clicking +1 on a website. Google has also indicated that the +1 votes may indirectly affect Quality Score rankings for PPC campaigns in the near future. This means that having the +1 button on a landing page for PPC ads will be a must.
For now, anybody you are not connected to through Gmail or Gtalk will not be affected by your votes, other than them being able to see the aggregate number of +1 votes on a site. But this may change in the future.
It has become clear that Google is very interested in using social data to help them improve their search results. Since this data is sent directly to Google, it stands to reason that a site with more +1 votes will, over time, rank higher in the SERPs than a site with no +1 votes.
Please leave comments below, and let us know if your rankings have been affected at all yet by the +1 button.
For most businesses, web images have been kind of a way to spruce up the old website. They haven’t really been too necessary to be found on Google, as long as you had good content to back your site up with. All that, however, may be changing.
At its ‘Inside Search’ event in June, Google announced the release of “Google Search by Image”, a new way of providing search results. Instead of typing in a search query, or using keywords, users can simply drag an image into the search box, or paste an image URL, and Google will pull up any related site with a similar image on it.
How Does it Work?
This nifty bit of technology uses a combination of shape and color recognition algorithms to find pages with visually similar images, and returns those pages to you in your search results. Google has expressly stated that it does not use facial recognition technology for searches involving people, but that it exclusively relies upon its new shape and color algorithms.
The search is very easy to use. Simply visit http://images.google.com/ and click the little camera button in the search box, and you can upload images from your computer, drag images into the search box, or paste an image URL into the search box, and watch Google go to work for you.
This is particularly handy for tourists who want to know what a building is, or people visiting a museum wanting to know more about a particular piece, but how is it going to affect businesses?
Effects On Businesses
First off, it is going to be more important than ever to make sure you are posting images of your products on your site. You want to make sure if someone is searching for your product using the image, your site is coming up in Google’s Search by Image results. If you do not have a similar image on your site, your site will not show up in the search results at all!
Here is an example of an image search results page that I got by pasting just an image of an iphone 4:
As you can see at the bottom of the iphone 4 results, Google only returns pages that have similar images posted. If you sell iphone 4′s, you better have a picture of one on your site or your clients will end up on somebody else’s site. If you have a unique building or brick-and-mortar store, get a picture of it on your site.
Not only will this new tool be useful for places and objects, it can also be used very effectively in searching for pictures of people. This is going to make it vitally important to be careful how you use your pictures online. If an employer searches for an image of you on Google, what is going to be returned? If your clients search for you, will there be a list of professional blog posts, or just a bunch of comments on fail blog?
Search by Image is, like all of Google’s products, only going to be refined with time. Some pictures are much easier to identify right now for Google than others. But one thing we are sure of is that images are now more important than ever to have on your website.
Here at Website Breakthrough we have just one new years resolution. It stems from our driving desire to figure out Google’s ranking algorithm completely (or get as close as possible without getting sued). Put simply, our resolution for 2011 is to try as many new seo services, methods, tricks, tactics, and strategies as possible. No doubt we will fall on our face a few times, but before every great discovery come a few disappointments. We’re gearing up and getting ready and hope you are too.
In 2010 we feel we did admirably, but this year we aim to do even better. If you were following along last year you may remember our spout with RankPay, the friends we made at affiliate summit east, our deep delve into local search, and the thrill of finding out new ways to build links. 2011 is sure to bring even more.
If you are still thinking about your marketing resolutions for 2011 we hope you include website breakthrough. We would thoroughly enjoy your company along the way. We would also appreciate you sharing any insights you might have.
The best part about the web is how fast it moves and what better way to spend a year than leading the sprint. We wish you success and prosperity in the new year.
With a name like “Speed SEO” the new desktop application from Xynet Software is garnering some serious attention. The real question is perhaps “what does it have besides its name?” The answer: a lot more than we originally thought.
The market has been flooded lately with software targeted at SEO professionals mostly because search marketing has continued to blow up along side the Internet marketplace in general. If you really want to understand the recent surge in attention to SEO just take a look at current Google Adwords CPC rates. We did some research for a national insurance company recently and found that they were going to pay upwards of $40 a click for some of the Insurance terms they needed to target if they chose to do so using Adwords. We told them to save their money and let us do some SEO.
The competitiveness of SEO has also risen alongside everything else on the web, but for those who have been in the game as long as we have SEO is still the best option (given you have the right tools). This is where things like SEO software come in. Like it or not, even a team of twelve of the best data entry specialists money can buy is not enough in most cases to build links with the big boys. Truly competitive SEO requires the use of tools once regarded as outrageous and overkill. It also requires a sound understanding of things like proxy servers, pinging limits, contextual spinning and human caffeine limits (slightly joking). In short SEO is more complicated than it has ever been.
We found Speed SEO to be truly helpful in the most important way. Building decent links, and doing so quickly. We don’t want to repeat what is already posted directly on their homepage, so we’ll just give you a brief overview and then send you there. Speed SEO lets you create site profiles and key terms for each. It then goes on to build links for you in safe manner thus increasing your search ranking quickly and efficiently. We highly recommend checking them out and would love to hear any feedback you have. Go to The Official Site
Web indexing has come a long way since its birth, but the most rapid change has occurred recently with the global need for instant news and content relevant to the moment. Sites like Digg and Twitter are complete products of this. They emerged out of a mess of content attempting to display information on trending topics in real time. Their usefulness is directly a result of their ability to perform this. The demand for content sorted and displayed according to “the now.” Will only become more widespread. We saw it happen with the demand for location based search results and it is happening again with real time news.
What does this mean for those of us who feed our families by ranking websites? It means now more than ever we should be on our game. One thing you should be doing every single day is watching the trend sites like Digg, and Twitter. See what people are saying within your industry. Read the brand new articles pertaining to your content online. Look for emerging nuances, themes, and terms that could start to trend within search results.
Yahoo recently published an article saying that the hit song “Like a G6″ by hip hop band Far East Movement had produced a surge in search results related to finding out what a G6 was. The truth is a G6 doesn’t exist. G4 personal jets have become a major status symbol in Holywood and when coming up with lyrics for their song the band decided to use the term G6 because by their thinking, if a G6 existed it would be the only thing cooler than a G4.
Those who recognized this strange but major search trend immediately enjoyed traffic as a result of carefully catering content to those looking to find out what the heck a G6 was.
So next time you’re sitting up late at night thinking about how to blow up your sites with unique visitors…. remember the G6.
Social bookmarking has long been an important part of SEO. It provides a way for SEO professionals to get content indexed almost immediately. It can also be a means of some fast, cheap back links. It’s true bookmarking does not require a 90th percentile IQ, but there are right and wrong ways to build an effective bookmarking web. So how do you maximize the positive effects of bookmarking? Allow us to make a few suggestions.
When deciding how to include bookmarking as part of your link building campaign, don’t make the most common mistake of all: blasting the page you actually want ranked with bookmarks. Say your site includes a category page that you would like to improve rankings for. Rather than simply submitting that URL to every bookmarking site you can think of try the following. Write a few blog articles that contain one back link each and post them on some blogs with decent page rank (4 or 5 if possible). Then submit the back link location URLs to social bookmarking sites at a steady pace of about ten a day each for 5-7 days. Then repeat the process. Bookmarking each of the URLs where your new back links are located will force search engines to follow them over and over again in a short period of time. It will amplify the effect of those quality, followed links giving you a much better results for your effort.
One scenario where you may want to heavily submit your URL to bookmarking sites: only when the URL is brand new and unindexed. Bookmarking can help you get a page indexed very quickly and with some decent authority right out of the gate. What you don’t want to do is spam social bookmarking sites with links to an old URL. This will not improve your rank and will only look like what it is: a desperate spamming rampage. Social bookmarking can be a fantastic tool if used correctly, but if you don’t know what you are doing you may just be getting yourself lost in a sea of happy icons and strange domains.
The Kelsey Group, a research firm out of Chantilly, VA, recently released new research statistics concerning mobile device usage. Their Mobile Local Media Forecast, back-dating two years and projecting three (2008-2013), estimates a 130.5% growth rate for local mobile search and an 81.2% growth rate for overall mobile advertising.
Local search advertising is expected to go from from $20 million to $1.28 billion over the same few years.
For us the most important part of the whole projection is that the largest area of mobile usage growth is local. Social media usage on mobile devices will certainly grow and so will things like mobile banking etc., but the explosion of mobile traffic will be centered around things like looking up addresses or phone numbers online, seeing what is nearby, or city specific searches.
Now we just have a few questions for you: Is your website mobile friendly? And how much do you focus on local search? If The Kelsey Group is right, sales via mobile devices and local search could shortly be the new internet.
Probably the most important thing you can do to grab traffic as the worldwide mobile frenzy continues is be relevant for terms people will search on their mobile devices. This means SEO specifically with mobile in mind. Take a good look at your site and try to think about what local and mobile centered keywords you can target. It helps to think about the perspective of the mobile user. They generally want information faster than someone sitting at a PC and their search terms may be more concise and specific. They also have the limitations that come along with a miniature screen and a baby-sized processor. If at all possible you may want to consider creating a very simple mobile version of your site that you can direct mobile users to. One service that may be worth checking out is http://sem.keynote.com/keynote/ they offer software that will simulate mobile experience so you can test your site out and see how it looks on a variety of different handsets.
Taking a few steps now could mean giant returns later, and actually according to The Kelsey Group, later might not be so late after all.
Reference: http://www.kelseygroup.com/visitorsearch/view-MLM-Summary.asp?DocID=2049
Website content is one of the big 3 when it comes to search engine optimization. The search engines love websites that have alot of unique content on them.
What I mean by unique content is the copy on the site needs to be original to your website only. Many website owners try to build content on their websites by going out and getting articles that have been written that are free for distribution.
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Every web site owner needs to architecturally structure their site(s) in order to get Google and the other search engines to recognize their main keywords.
In other words, you want to structure your site in such a way that Google not only “sees” your keywords, but actually considers your site the “authority site” on a particular subject matter.
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