Google

Panda update that was fairly significant but not reported by Google. Barry Schwartz blogged about it and noted a lot of chat on various forums. Where you impacted by this Google update? Discuss by providing details about why you think you were impacted below in the comment box.

This email provides an update on a recent Google change that is likely to get some press. This update has been expected for several weeks and is intended to improve website’s rankings that have good content but not very many backlinks. Why it will get press? By most accounts the update has not been a good one. Several high profile sites disappeared from the rankings including Kleenex.com and digg.com. We suspect that Google will tone down their changes to improve their search results. What it has impacted? Across the 150,000 keywords that we track on a weekly basis we have seen a 3% improvement in rankings. This is about the same as most weeks. Thus, most clients have not seen a major impact. However, this change along with several other over the last few weeks has impacted local results. This…
Read More ›

Semantic search is used by all search engines to help categorize search results and display the most relevant and related information. However, the magnitude of its use will increase dramatically. Google announced that in the coming months it intends to integrate semantic search results into standard universal blended results. Blended universal results include shopping, flight times (beta because of anti trust issues), weather, movie times, images, videos, etc. When Google releases its next semantic search update it will include answers to questions similar to Bing. These include data on people, places (buildings, towns, stadiums, parks, golf courses), companies, addresses, and other elements that have verifiable definitive number data. What is semantic search? Simplifying here is Fruition’s definition of semantic search: “Semantic search is disambiguating identical search terms and phrases that can have different meanings.” What semantic search will do to…
Read More ›

In a surprising move last week Google removed reviews from popular sharing sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor from its Google Places pages, leaving only reviews written by Google users. Links to the most common review sites are still in place below the Google-sourced reviews, but the controversial scraped excerpts are gone. Now that Google is promoting only its users’ reviews, a shiny new red call to action button has been added to encourage people to add their two cents. The area asking users to “Upload a Photo” is also considerably more prominent. What this means for businesses who rely on Google Places for traffic, exposure and visitors is that the number of reviews associated with their page may have just plummeted. Restaurants, home improvement stores, and other local businesses have come to rely heavily on their Places pages for local…
Read More ›

Although, it was not a big secret that Google had been working on some sort of Facebook Like button rival, last week Google started to roll it out. It is called the +1 button (“plus one”), and even if it hasn’t rolled out publicly to everyone—yet—this is your first chance to jump on a little button that could significantly boost your SEO and site traffic. First of all, just a few short months ago, Google and Bing announced that they were taking into account links shared on Twitter and Facebook to determine page rank. Since then, Facebook Like buttons and Twitter share buttons have become standard practice for good SEO. Now Google has realized the benefit of such a button and has created its own—but it is slightly different. Although many see +1 as a rival to the Facebook Like…
Read More ›

Social networking is probably the most revolutionary thing to happen to the internet since the invention of the internet. But one of the most interesting things about it is that it has largely grown up outside the influence of search engines. That is, until recently, most social networks were either completely closed off to search engines or were simply ignored by them. That’s a shame, considering that millions of links are shared daily through social media. That’s means your website was probably missing out on all the SEO love from the links being passed around social media. Thankfully, these things change, and search engines catch up. One of the ideas passing through the SEO services community right now is the way that social media can affect SEO. As mentioned before, networks like Twitter and Facebook have been fairly closed off…
Read More ›

The most recent Google algorithm change hit on Feb 13th. It involved devaluing links on forums and member sites. This most recent algorithm change was probably in the works for some time but I’m sure it was pushed by the NY Times article.