All posts in google

 

 

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?

I had a thought earlier today, funnily enough whist interviewing copywriters, which led me to think:  how important is the quality of writing as a ranking factor following the Panda update?

Obviously the Panda update has had a negative impact to websites which have low-quality content – but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal, does higher quality written content now have more of a positive impact to search rankings?

Well I thought I’d do a few tests with Google’s reading level search filter to compare the differences between how content ranks which is either basic, intermediate or advanced.

How is the reading-level split between Google SERPs?

Today myself and Daniel Bianchini gave a presentation at a4uexpo London 2011 on how to survive Google’s panda algorithm update.

In case you missed it, we’ve posted both sets of slides online here:

The 4 Hour Affiliate Week – Kevin Gibbons, A4UExpo London 2011
A4 u panda-slap-db

If you have any questions on this please let us know in the comments.

*

​Google is now not the only monopolist on many search markets including the UK, but the mega-corporation is overtaking new markets, crushing the competition with more or less ruthless tactics.

Some SEO industry pundits such as Aaron Wall already advise you to prepare for a time after SEO when Google will finally keep most clicks for itself.

The tendency is already there, as some search engine result pages (SERPs) are already dominated by ads and Google-owned paid services.

I like the way a Google Panda victim has put it:

“Google Panda is the result of many years of struggle, with Google trying to eliminate go-between services like news aggregators and specialised search engines,” explains Chappaz. “Why? Because Google’s revenues for the broad search platform are slowing down. Google needs to eat in its own ecosystem to keep its revenues flowing.​

What can you do about Google entering your market and making everybody go out of business quickly?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →