Wednesday 21 March 2012

Google changes for 2012

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Conquest UK SEO News

Google is talking a lot about SEO these days. In a recent webmaster discussion at SXSW, Google's Matt Cutts spoke about some changes Google is working on that would seem to make SEO matter less, in that sites with good, quality content that don't do a lot of SEO could potentially rank just as well, or better than a bigger site with a bigger SEO budget and a lot of SEO tactics implemented. The whole thing appears to be more about Google getting better at not helping sites just because they employ a lot of grey hat/borderline black hat tactics. Google has always tried to do this, but based on what Cutts said, it sounds like they're about to get better at it.

Changes to Google's algorithm have the ability to make or break businesses. Google is sending out the signal that you should worry less about the current SEO trends, and more about producing great content, and that they're "leveling the playing field" for sites that don't pay as much attention to SEO. Obviously great content is a positive, but at the same time, Google is showing us each month all of the changes it is making, and all the while, providing tips about how to do certain SEO things better. Is Google sending mixed signals? Just how much should webmasters worry about optimization? Share your thoughts in the comments.




 

Google Changes To Come
"Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization."



"This is not anything new from Google. They've always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think that's the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that it's the very best result."

There has been a lot of discussion about it in the SEO community, and there will no doubt be plenty around SES New York this week. Some of the talk has been blown out of proportion,

"Lots of big brands don't know the first thing about SEO. I think (total guess on my part) the sites that will be negatively impacted are those that focus on algorithms and build content/sites based on the things what they think the algorithms are looking for. The kind of sites where someone didn't say 'I want this page to rank http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giffor query X. How can this page best answer what the searcher is asking about X' but instead said 'I want this page to rank for query X. How many times should I repeat X in my title, heading, content on the page, internal links…"

"I think it's still useful (and not negative) to make sure the words that searchers are using are on the page, but some sites go well beyond this and get so caught up in what they think the algorithms are doing that they forget to make sure the content is useful,"


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Friday 16 April 2010

Google vs Bing

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Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. "For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets," explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing's offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this.


This story isn't about recipes though. It's about the major search engines' quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while now, but in reality, it hasn't even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve. Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing.


Where are You Getting the More Relevant Results? Let us know.


Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for "matt cutts" on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google's results left a bit to be desired. It wasn't that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page, and Matt's Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person's name (It was in the first few on Yahoo's results).


Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they've got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they've released. I couldn't remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for "latest bing features". Given Bing's philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called "The Latest News from Bing" from November of 2009.


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