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Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:

  1. Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
  2. Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?


At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”

 

 

To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.

Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.

 

6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries

These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:

Query What does it mean?
“best practice seo”  Searches for this exact phrase within “”
mobile -phone  Inclusion of – means searches for the word mobile but nothing following after phone
seo ~glossary  Brings up a glossary of information regarding that word
define:seo  Definition of that word or phrase
OR / |  Returns search queries with one of the given terms
related:  Helps list web pages related to the URL

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms.  In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday’s big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

  • “Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Agent 007

Recently I’ve written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly “hate Klout”. Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.

Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it’s quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

That’s why some people hate Klout:  they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.

What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people’s influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn’t a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.

Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it’s also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.

Last week I setup a Facebook poll to ask people what they considered to be the most significant change in search during 2011. This has received a great response, so here are the results so far (you can still take part on the SEOptimise fan page):

Google announced a new tool this week – Verbatim, which is essentially a fast way to find results which exactly match your search queries.

This tool replaces the use of the + key in searches when you want to force it to include certain words in the results it brings up. According to Google, this is because:

users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.

In addition to this, one surmises that the move is not entirely unrelated to the domination of the + character by Google+ and +1.

Last week Google released yet another algorithm update, and although it wasn’t Panda 2.6 or Panda 2.5.2, it has affected up to 35% of searches. The newly-named ‘freshness update’ is built on the Caffeine update that was launched last year, allowing Google to provide the very latest content.

Google’s Amit Singhal states that

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.”

This seems to be a very timely release, especially in the UK, with lots of hot topics currently trending on the web and on social media, including Frankie Cocozza being kicked off the X Factor, the England poppy fiasco and Carlos Tevez leaving Manchester. With all these topics trending across the web, the freshness update has provided us with the very latest information on the subject from the last day, hour or even minute. There has been a lot of information around about the freshness update and here is Google’s official announcement.

Launching a social network is to some extent a bit of a chicken and egg scenario these days, as you need people to encourage the businesses to get involved, but businesses can also attract more people.

This morning Google launched the metaphorical egg in their social network chicken and egg scenario – they launched ‘Google+ Pages’ as a means for businesses to join Google+. The question now is:  if businesses join Google+, will it encourage more people to join and utilise the network?

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