Google has notified people that they have just developed a new information, data, picture, music and information sharing tool, called WAVE.

This is to be an open source system for communication. Google is selling this on the open source nature of the new platform with open API, and encouraging API development from the community.

This clearly appears to be Google’s stab at twitter/facebook, throwing their hat in the ring for real time search arena.

The You Tube intro can be here: http://wave.google.com/

This is something I have noticed over the last few months, yet sort of passed over without giving it much thought. Recently I have stumbled across this as a link included within the search results for multiple popular search queries in the top 10 results within Google.

Here is Googles description:

We want our users to feel safe when they search the web, and we’re continuously working to identify dangerous sites and increase protection for our users. This warning message appears with search results we’ve identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer:

If you click the title of the result, you’ll be shown the following warning rather than being taken immediately to the webpage in question:

You can choose to continue to the site at your own risk. However, please be aware that malicious software is often installed without your knowledge or permission when you visit these sites, and can include programs that delete data on your computer, steal personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers, or alter your search results. For more information on these types of sites, please visit StopBadware.org

If one of these sites downloads malicious software onto your computer, please read our additional information about reporting these sites and removing the software from your system.

This info can be found here

My question is why on earth would Google even include these websites in their search results? I understand Google is very concerned with the quality of their search results, yet they include these sites in the top results for various search queries?

This leaves me very perplexed, cloaking and link buying is bad, and can cause your website to be given a serious penalty or removed completely from it’s search index, as this is seen as a bad user experience for a Google search user. Yet purposefully attempting to  harm a searchers computer, stealing passwords, credit cards and personal information, this does not cause you to get a penalty, instead Google will give the site owner a warning in the form of a notification next to their website and time to correct the problem.

One would think, upon discovery of this type of software, Google would place such sites in the Google sandbox until the problem is fixed, and a reconsideration request is filed.

At Google’s Searchology event, they announced and previewed some new features. Already live in action are some advanced search options that I think really improve user experience.

Perform any search and choose on the left “Show Options”.  Now a user can sort by type: Videos, Forums, Reviews.  You can also add Image previews to the right, which take 2 images from the site and display them, giving you a preview before you click. You can expand your text snippet for more info. And finally a time filter, to show recent results.

User Perspective:

This can narrow down a search from a completely useful angle.  If I want to hear what people are saying about the Pittsburgh Steelers, I can see just forums.  Since many people use the internet to research products and companies, the Reviews tab is also useful.

I wish it was default in place, as I doubt most average users will notice or utilize it.

I know it’s new, but I see this as quite undeveloped, and would like to see the following tabs:

1. Shopping or purchase: When I know I want to buy something, I don’t want to see a wikipedia result, or a blog post.  From an SEO perspective, this will help increase shopping traffic when ecommerce sites have difficulty outranking informational sites.

2. Informational or Resource or Educational tab: Researching and learning is one of the largest ways we use the net, and cluttered results when trying to obtain facts are very annoying. Non commercial, encyclopedic, informational type results sorted would be useful.

3. May as well move the Images tab here, since Videos is present. and may as well move Blogs and News here too, for a cleaner logical experience.

SEO Perspective:

Assuming enough people use this feature to generate traffic, sites would want to be sure to have a results page for every type. A review page or reviews section, a video, a forum. These are likely in place with well optimized sites, so this should not affect results.  The wording on a reviews page would be important, using relevant ‘review’ type words so Google will know your page has a review.  Same thing for video titles of course and forum headings.

Clicks will be more targeted, which in general is a good thing. However, some traffic could suffer by a more focused search, you would lose the distractable searchers. Much traffic is generated by the searcher that is looking for one thing, say wants to read reviews of the BMW M6, so searches just “BMW M6″, and your car dealership comes up in search results and they forget they were just reading, click on your site and look at all your cars.

Then of course the time element, not sure what criteria is using but I assume a visit by Googlebot that found new content. So sites with fresh content, blog entries, user guides updated, should already be prepared for this.

In general, as with most updates, a well optimized site, one optimized for users and search, will thrive with these changes as long as you are aware of them and tweak accordingly.

I appears that right on schedual Google has released their latest toolbar update. Thye typically release this every quarter, and they really waited until the last possible day to release this update as the last one was done on January 1st 2009.

I hope everyone gets what they wanted to Christmas this year

I thought I’d share this interesting article by an associate of ours, Ryan Kane:Many of you likely saw Super Bowl XLIII on February 1. This game was notable for more than its heart-pounding competitiveness and nail-biting finish. This most recent Super Bowl marked one of the clearest partnerships yet between traditional media and the online world, marking a greater acceptance and mainstreaming of online brands.

Buying prominence through high-profile Super Bowl ads is nothing new, and online companies were especially eager to do so before the burst of the dot com bubble. One memorable Buy.com ad simply showed the white text “Buy.com” against a black background for 30 seconds. Pets.com launched its public image with a $1.2 million dollar ad during the 2000 Super Bowl, an ad which had the highest recall level of any ad during that event (though the company imploded not long afterward). Since 2005, GoDaddy.com has been a mainstay of Super Bowl advertising, with its recognizable GoDaddy girls and tongue-in-cheek humor. And Monster.com is no stranger to the game, having advertised in traditional venues for years.

But what was impressive this year was the sheer number of online brands showing up at this traditional venue, both established and upstart companies. In addition to commercials from GoDaddy (two of them) and Monster, we saw Etrade.com, Teleflora.com, Careerbuilder.com, Cash4Gold.com, Priceline.com, Cars.com, Overstock.com, and Hulu.com. In total, one-fifth of the commercials airing during the Super Bowl showcased predominately online companies.

One big player this year was upstart Hulu, an NBC-sponsored venture that has gained considerable traction since its introduction last spring. Hulu’s NBC affiliation enabled it to not only buy ad time during the event, but also to receive periodic mentions by announcers that all of the Super Bowl ads would be viewable on Hulu.com during and after the game. Creating yet another source of revenue, Hulu shows ads before the actual Super Bowl ads themselves.

What does this all mean? Well, the number of Super Bowl ads featuring online companies is not up radically from last year, only incrementally (from 8 to 11). And there is some argument in the advertising community as to whether companies that pay the premiums required to advertise during the Super Bowl always recoup that investment. But if this is a real indication of the merging of online and traditional media, it shouldn’t be surprising. Far from the Buy.com and Pets.com ads of the bubble era, consumers no longer view dot coms as a niche category but as full-fledged businesses on par with the companies like GE, FedEx, Pepsi and Frito-Lay that normally advertise during the Super Bowl.

The interactivity provided by Hulu this year was limited to viewing and commenting on Super Bowl ads, but it is merely the start of a new approach to broadcasting live events. Hulu and CNN.com were two of the more prominent organizations to broadcast the January presidential inauguration live online, with CNN partnering with Facebook to allow live comments and interactivity. There’s no reason to say this won’t become more and more common with live events, including the Super Bowl. For online advertisers, it emphasizes the importance of keeping track of these developments to capitalize on them. The myriad of advertising venues that will come out of this expansion of traditional media online is sure to provide new fodder for an ever-expanding online advertising industry.

Not only is our nation’s weakening economy to blame for a record number of home foreclosures, declining retail sales, and a massive loss of jobs, but the impact of this downright bad economy has even started affecting the World Wide Web, as well. Online retailers are now reporting losses, and some are even closing down their sites for good. What this means for those who are trying to make a name for their own website through internet marketing is clear; you’ll need to utilize proper SEO (search engine optimization) techniques in order to survive in the 21st century. It’s time to take it seriously, if you haven’t already.

When the internet first hit the common households worldwide, the only thing that a webmaster had to do in order to get their webpage noticed was to submit the address and name of their site to the major search engines – their engineers would take care of the rest. As internet technology advanced and as more and more websites were created, this process was simply no longer a viable means for search engines to index web pages.

Then it took a rudimentary understanding of SEO to get your site to rank: keywords in content, and a good title tag and your site would rise again. But as more site owners and SEOs get savvy, and search engines algorithms tweaked and smarter, it now takes a professional. It’s a full time job just keeping up with the ever changing techniques.

Successful companies will adapt with the times, stay one step ahead, and make smart moves. Our clients are thriving still, even as the economy tightens. It is so very rewarding to hear from our clients that their traffic is increasing, and to watch them rise in search, when so many businesses are suffering. We are seeing a surge in interest in SEO, which we attribute to smart companies getting lean and mean.

We are still seeing the new brand focused results in a couple of verticals.  What is still a mystery is how Google is determining that these brands should be in the top 10.  In our laptop example, Apple ranking in the top 10, yet the Apple site does not even have the word “laptop” in their homepage anywhere, or in their title tag.  We see this on other sites and other verticals.  So even if Google is weighting their sites higher based on higher value links regardless of anchor text, or based on the fact that they are a publicly traded company, or traffic, or whatever other factor—HOW DOES THE GOOGLEBOT KNOW THIS SITE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH LAPTOPS?

This very well may be a manual manipulation of results, which also doesn’t make sense since several big brand names are missing from the results still.

These new results, if they stick, mean that large established brands do not have to do SEO, do not have to follow Google’s ever complicated rules about new fresh content, about minimizing flash, about proper tags, about duplicate content. They do not have to spend any money or time on SEO like the rest of the world.  It is frustrating enough for webmasters that they cannot simply make a useful site for their business, they must hire an SEO who knows what is right/wrong, or spend hours a week keeping up with the guidelines.  Now companies that are not even their direct competitors will outrank them without doing any SEO at all.

And the user is show results that they may not have even been looking for.

As we dig deeper into the changes John discussed in the previous post, we are seeing them appear randomly as does happen when a roll-out is coming or being tested.

Several issues to ponder and analyze:

First, why the change? Google’s goal is to produce useful results, and by making this change, google is assuming that that when a user searches the term “laptops”, they should see a list of the manufacturers of these items, the largest companies.  It could be that Apple and Dell and HP were not optimizing their sites according to Google’s complex rules, maybe suffering from duplicate content issues or a plethora of other issues that keeping them from ranking higher. So Google is giving them an artificial boost because they decided they should show up in the top 10? On one hand, this is logical, as I debate with John that the masses do expect to see Yellow Page type results, with the most popular well known companies up top. However several manufacturers are not making an appearance, where is Sony and Lenovo?

But why is Google assuming that a search for a generic term is a search for the large producers of that item, not sellers or researchers or reviewers.  When someone searches for laptops, they very well may want the manufacturers, or they may be shopping, or they may be trying to learn about laptops. With a broad term, could be anything, and if they do not see the results they want, they will get more specific on subsequent searches. For this reason, the broadest term, laptops, should still be a mix of the most relevant sites, from sellers to reviewers to government pages, encouraging the user to employ a more specific term.

More importantly, how is this being done? Is it manual or algorithmic? Which weighting factor changed to show these dramatic result changes? We have a couple theories. Although there is some buzz about site traffic factoring in to the algo, this is most likely a longshot as it is a self fulfilling prophecy, as higher ranked sites get more traffic. It is possible that Google is devaluing the anchor text of inbound links.

And even more importantly, how would this change the face of search? Although initially there would be an uproar and traffic issue from sites previously in the top 10, like the laptop sellers above who are now on page 2, a searcher that is actually shopping for a laptop in theory should perform a 2nd more specific search. However the problem is that Apple and Dell are also retailers of their own product, so this artificial manipulation shows favoritism in a way.  Google has now determined that Dell is a more important result for a laptop shopper than a site that sells many other brands, possibly for less.  A shopper sees only the manufacturers of the item, and does not see the plethora of very large laptop sellers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out, if it will be vertical specific, if users will be happy or unhappy with this change, and how SEOs will adapt.

I started noticing some changes in search results on my blackberry about 1 week ago, seeing totally different search engine results on my mobile search queries then that on my laptop. I assumed that Google was toying with mobile search results based upon the fact that they were mobile searches. Guess what, I was wrong…

Yesterday morning around 11am I noticed these completely different search results on my laptop. I guess Google was using mobile search as a test bed for some serious changes to their algorithm.

Google’s old search results (have basically been like this for about 4-5 months) for the query “laptops”: (click image for larger)

The new results, click image for larger:

The new results look like the yellow pages, we search for laptops and we see Dell, Toshiba, HP. These results look nearly identical to the PPC results, could it be they are influenced by the Pay Per click results?

Google is definitely determining the results differently, possibly hand auditing the search results for major search queries? Giving some added value to manufacturers? Possibly devaluing the anchor text of incoming links? Unclear, but we have noticed this in multiple verticals; it is widespread, Google now placing household names in the top spots. I personally don’t want to see the same results as Yellow Pages.
In addition does Google not realize that by gifting Dell, Lenovo, HP the top spots in natural search results that these guys are going to figure out that they can therefore reduce their spending on PPC? The BIG boys do not look for an ROI on PPC, they use it for branding not profitability.  So when they see Google helping them with their branding for free, the cost per click should drop swiftly.
Man, Google the leaders of the new world, have taken us back to 1985….Geez we all may as simply go to http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Hardware/Systems/
Bring back DMOZ, let some person determine what we want to see…
Regardless, SEO Moves is quickly researching and testing everything possible to figure out what Google has done with these changes, we will have the answers shortly and our customers worldwide will be right back in the driver’s seats.

I just recently noticed Google starting to turn back the clock a little on multiple pages listed in search engine results. In the recent past if a domain had two URL’s showing in the top 10 or 20 results for a particular search query Google would typically merge these results(creating what Google calls sitelinks) pairing the weaker URL with the stronger URL. I have recently noticed that Google has begun to separate these domains within the results, offering the opportunity for websites to have 2 positions within the search engine results (for instance being number 2 and number 8).

I am not sure how this will change users behaviors yet, but in some instances it could benefit the website owner, offering a perceived very dominant position within the results moving the user to possibly after clicking on the initial result an bouncing revisiting the same website using the second listing, based upon the apparent authority Google places on a website or domain.

I think that having listings paired as Google has done in the past offered the opportunity for a user to look past the second listing (the merged one) and move on to the next result. I believe with these different results, it will offer a website a second opportunity to grab the user. I believe this is good for both users and webmasters.

I am not exactly sure why Google would tweak this, but apparently Google has their reasons.