Google releases ‘Google Plus One’ button

By Matthew Kinlin

Google has recently released a new social tool called ‘Google Plus One’.

The tab is presented as a ‘+1’ button and works in a very similar way to the Facebook ‘Like’ button. In the words of Google, the button is a way of saying: ‘you should check this out’ to other people.

By clicking the ‘+1’ button, you give your recommendation to a web page. There is an option to keep the your ‘+1’ recommendations as a private record of your web highlights, or you can have them as public and recommend pages to your friends and the rest of the internet.

However unlike Facebook, the Google ‘+1’ tab has one vital additional app: Google-enabled search.

Google has placed the ‘+1’ button in two places: on the Google search listings next to each search result and at the top of individual web pages. Content providers have been encouraged by Google to add the ‘+1’ option to their web pages.

To use the tool, the user is required to have a Google account. Once the user is logged into their account, the ‘+1’ options for search results and web pages will be made visible.

It seems likely that Google will collate feedback to sort out good content from bad. Social data will probably be used to indicate popular, useful sources of data and these will be integrated with Google search.

In other words, they rise straight to the top of Google’s search page.

PageRank: how ugly is your SME website?

By Jackie Yeadon

Beauty is only skin deep, right?

Google updated its PageRank this week, so webmasters and SEOs will no doubt have been checking where they stand and where their clients are ranking.

It’s not like Miss World or Mr Universe, where only the top three positions win and everyone else is forgotten; or even the Beautiful People dating website that shunted 30,000 people off its database after a virus had allowed them membership normally elected by the consensus of its existing, gorgeous subscribers; PageRank doesn’t set websites against each other, but gives an assessment of the authority of their site, not a beauty competition but a beauty consultation.

Google’s search ranking, which PageRank has a small influence on, sets its own standard of attractiveness – meaning, if it fancies redheads, we must all dye our hair; similarly, if Google’s algorithm lusts after the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll, we must all emulate the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll.

Smaller search platforms attract traffic too

By Jackie Yeadon
 
Search engines going after some of Google’s share were successful in May, according to figures from Experian Hitwise.

Its recent Search Engine and Social Analysis showed that Google and Yahoo! both lost market share in terms of searches in May 2011, while Bing, Ask and others made “significant gains”.

NetMovers seminar review: search engine penalties

By Jackie Yeadon and Tariq Ahmed

There is no substitute for the seasoned SEO agency. While knowledge is power and content is king, experience is a honed blade.

Adrac’s Tariq Ahmed, one of our natural search boffins, recently delivered a presentation to City financiers about search penalties. This group of business people have an interest in how the internet can affect investments, for good and bad.

One of the examples that Tariq used was that of property portal NetMovers. By the mid-noughties, thanks to excellent optimisation and link building, the property portal was enjoying page one success with a regular fourth position slot just beneath the big sector names like RightMove.

How to focus terms for precision natural search results

By Jackie Yeadon

This week, Manchester SEO blogged a concise post which looked forward to the SEO landscape after Google announced its personalised search function.

Now, I work alongside our natural search and PPC/CPC experts, who feed into the process of keywording websites and landing pages by showing me what works for their clients and what does not. Their advice is sometimes surprising – the terms that people actually search for, as opposed to what my journalistic experience tells me should work.

Edits, cloning keywords and split-tests in AdWords

By Andrew Burnett

Every search professional interested in Google scrutinises the small things. It has become apparent over the years that Google tests potential changes and new services on select groups without drawing much attention to it; the ensuing “what’s going on here?” on forums and in chat rooms blows the whistle. Sometimes the new feature or whatever-it-is stays, sometimes it simply vanishes.

Over the past couple of weeks Adrac Ltd has noticed a tweak to Google AdWords. A small number of our older accounts have not had a feature added, but curtailed. Our AdWords managers have asked on Google help forums if anyone else has noticed this and what they think is happening: there have been no responses, meaning that either nobody else is having this issue or nobody know what is going on.

It’s all to do with keyword matching. If you’re a PPC/CPC manager you’ll understand totally; if you have no idea, I’ll put the following in simple terms for you.

Google takes customers Places with Maps transit test

By Jackie Yeadon

Google has yet again come up with an ingenious idea: now you can track the progress of your bus as you get ready for work; at last, you will know how fast to run down the road to catch it, and if you’ll have time to finish your toast first!

Basically, Google Maps may soon be able to display information about your bus. How handy does that sound? Still, I can’t help wondering what this has to do with search. The Google model generally tries to point more things back to its search business so I’m guessing there’ll definitely, eventually, be a tie in with this particular offering.

Google jiggles Serp layout

By Ehsan Rahmatulla

Yesterday (June 6th) Google made a slight alteration to the way in which it displays search results, by moving the URL up so it sits just beneath the website title tag.





Not everyone can see this yet: Google tends to roll its changes out incrementally – for example, a colleague’s browser is still displaying the link as being right at the bottom of each listing, while I am happily viewing the new layout.

What does this all mean? It may be the search engine’s way to freshen up the page, or an experiment to see if people prefer this layout: this is the company, don’t forget, which tested dozens of different shades of blue on users to gauge which hue would encourage them to click through more than all the rest.

Other small changes include the disappearance of the Cached link and the Similar Pages options. Will we miss these? It might be a case of you need it most when it’s been thrown out!

Schema: efficient tagging for accurate search results

By Jackie Yeadon


Webmasters can get more help from search engines with the launch of a new collaborative initiative, schema.org.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! have joined together to create Schema. In long-hand, it is a “common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages”.

To ordinary people this means that Schema, a project led by the major search engines, will improve the information search engines process by getting webmasters to sharpen up their tagging.

Get your own Google-powered e-commerce website

By Jackie Yeadon

Huge volumes of data pose problems that can only be solved by a powerful navigation (or search) tool. On the world wide web, big data is managed by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on; on a micro level, searches within a large e-commerce website can be a real headache – for businesses and customers.

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