On Wednesday night, Google announced they have changed how average positions are calculated in the Top Search Queries report. These changes are effective immediately.
Average position is an SEO truth that seems to struggle to take hold even though it is far more appropriate to today’s personalised search landscape than the old concept of absolute rankings.
Just before this weekend Google pushed out yet another feature to support Google+.
The “Ask on Google+” prompt appears for users who are signed into Google.com, .co.uk and other properties in an “11th position” on page one of the search results. Searchers do need to be logged in order to see the suggestion but they do not need to be experiencing Search plus Your World results.
Last night Google announced a new update to their search algorithm. It will be one of about 500 this year and comes into effect immediately.
The blog post announcing the update does not mention the series of Panda improvements Google has been making in order to combat content farms but the algorithm update is very much of that family. The tweak punishes those webpages who have content that is too difficult to find.
Last week the digital marketing world was rightly focused on CES and Google’s latest evolution: Search plus Your World. I call it Search+ and it was in the headlines for all the right reasons.
However, caught between the importance of Search+ and Google’s embarrassing Kenyan adventures and easy to miss, there was also a humble little post about making better use of page titles.
Digital, and especially social media, has disrupted the media industry. The shift from broadcasting to peer-casting; the amount of user generated content; the new paths in which brand related information reaches consumers; the required speed of response and the multiple new brand touchpoints are only some of the challenge brands and agencies are facing today. Read More
2011 has been heralded as ‘the year of social media’. But can it really offer companies as solid a marketing investment as search?
It is, of course, far too late to suggest that social media is going to be ‘the next big thing’. Social media is very big and very much ‘the thing’ already. But without doubt, the ante has been upped of late, and even the men in suits are taking note. Read More
Blekko: slashtags make search relevant
“So this guy gave me his card and then I totally went and blekkoed him.”
“Oh yeah, and has he been slashtagged?”
Well, that might be what the founders of the latest new search engine, blekko (rhymes with ‘echo’), are hoping will be a comprehensible conversation one day in the not too distant future. (Actually, I doubt anyone’s going to be asking if people have been slashtagged). Read More
Do you use Twitter more to share news and information or to find it?
Clearly more and more people are using it for the latter, and Twitter has responded by improving its search.
The company has pointed out that hopefully we haven’t noticed the upgrade going on over the last few weeks, and that the changes have been made because the size of the job was getting too big for the old system. Read More
Have you ever wondered, you know just for a second or two, just how Google works, how the software behind its search technology that conducts hundreds of simultaneous calculations that require only a fraction of a second? Well wonder no more more. Some algorithmic bright spark created this Google (graphic). Enjoy. Read More
A few weeks ago a rare event happened: Google stopped working. For thousands of UK searchers, the search engine and many related websites went down for a few hours. This prompted me to wonder what a world without Google would be like – so I’m going to find out. So from Thursday, I’m going Google-free.
I’ll be blogging my experiences here, and commenting on Twitter with the tag #lifewithnogoogle.
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