Google ‘Clears up the Muck’ Spread by Content Farms

Filed under: News, SEO, Search Engines, Updates — Tags: , , , , , , , — Ian Lavelle @ Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Word emanating from the US over the past few days is that Google have made a change to their organic ranking algorithm, which they claim will positively affect 12% of all searches (don’t they always?!). The official Google blog announcement states the change is designed to improve relevancy in their results and “reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. While the general online population should (and do) welcome this change, as always when Google makes major algorithmic tweaks, several sites/webmasters are claiming unjust punishments.
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What made 2010 an interesting SEO year

Filed under: Facebook, Google, News, SEO, Search Engines, Social Media, Twitter, Updates, YouTube — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Chris @ Monday, January 10th, 2011

2010 has been a busy year for search engines, and it is becoming more and more important for them to provide the most relevant results, as the search volumes has been regularly increasing year on year.

Each year, there have been an increasing number of searches, more searchers, and those searchers do more searches themselves, so one thing is for sure: ranking well for key search terms is more important than ever.

Let’s have a look at the top changes search engines brought in 2010, in order for them to provide more relevant results and drive searchers to their site:

#1 Google drinks too much coffee and brings out the “caffeine” update

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Google Place Search – Helping you feel like a local everywhere you go!

Filed under: Google, News, SEO, Search Engines, Small Business SEO, Updates — Tags: , , , , — Outrider Team @ Friday, November 12th, 2010

The last two weeks have been very busy for Google and the online marketing community with the release of Place Search and trials commencing of Boost Ads via Google Places.

Google says “Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!” With the launch of these new features focusing on local information in the organic search results, it can only be a win for local businesses or will it?

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Revised trademark protection policy from Google

Filed under: Google, News, Paid Search, Updates, brand reputation — Jacqui Tourle @ Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Google announced today their trademark protection policy in many countries will be updated to be in line with the policy in place in the US and UK.  In this instance, Google will only investigate trademark protection if a company feels a competitor is being misleading.  So in practice competitors are able to bid on one another’s brand names, but can not include competitive brand names in their ads, or try to ‘trick’ consumers into clicking on their ad instead.

Advertisers have until the 14th September 2010 to lodge their complaints under the existing policy, after which time the new policy will apply.

Australia, New Zealand and most Asian countries are not affected, although each country can have a unique policy.  Click here for a full list of affected countries.

We continue to urge all advertisers to ensure they have applied for proactive trademark protection in their relevant country.



MAYDAY, MAYDAY

Filed under: Algorithm Changes, Google, News, SEO, Search Engines, Updates — Tags: , — Outrider Team @ Friday, May 14th, 2010

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

Google's algorithm change dubbed Mayday 

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Google Caffeine – What You Should Expect for the Beta

Filed under: Google, News, SEO, Updates — Tags: , , , — Outrider Team @ Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Over the last few days it was announced that Google will be making changes to its algorithm; a sizable modification which we may have not seen since the likes of Big Daddy and Jagger’s 1-3 in 2006.

Google has stated:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see.” (more…)



Microsoft, Yahoo merge – a “game changer”

Filed under: News, Search Engines, Updates — Tags: , , , — Ian Lavelle @ Thursday, July 30th, 2009

For those of you too busy to read the news in the past 24 hours, there’s been a pretty major development in the land of the search engines. Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a deal whereby they will be combining their search offerings with the aim of invigorating the challenge to Google.
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Wolfram Alpha Set For Launch

Filed under: News, Search Engines — Tags: , , — Ian Lavelle @ Thursday, May 14th, 2009

With Wolfram Alpha set to launch in the next week, there’s been a lot of hype around the potential impact it may have on the web. Wolfram Alpha is the latest in an array of new search engines, which has been developed by the mathematician Stephen Wolfram. It differs from other search engines in that it’s being billed as a “computational knowledge engine” which presents information it has collected from various sources to the browser, rather than just returning a list of potentially relevant sites.

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Understanding Mobile Keywords

Filed under: Mobile, News, Paid Search, SEO, Updates — Outrider Team @ Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

January saw the introduction of the Google mobile keyword tool which allows AdWords users to access search volume specifically from mobile-device searches.

Essentially this tool is the first to make available effective keyword research for both PPC and SEO mobile campaigns.

At the moment Google does not provide this information to the publically available tool, so you must be logged into an AdWords account to see this information. (Note: you must have a mobile ad within your adgroup to be able to utilise this feature)

Access is as simple as logging into your AdWords account, accessing your mobile ad group and looking for the Keyword Tool link available near the top of the table illustrating campaign data.



Google Q1 Results & Recent Developments

Filed under: News, SEO, Updates — Tags: , , , , — AL Wright @ Friday, April 17th, 2009

It was interesting to see the first quarter revenue announcement that Google published yesterday. Thankfully the analysts seem to see the 3% decrease, from $5.7 billion reported in Q4 of 2008 to $5.51 billion in Q1 of 2009, as slightly better than  expected. Ok, not that interesting but a good indication that the world’s situation might not be quite as bad as all that.

Of real interest, to us Search Marketers anyway, are Google’s announcements on the new referring URL format and one line sitelinks. (more…)



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