Industry Updates

Industry UpdateNovember 2011

Industry Updates

• Google has finally launched pages which offers local businesses and brands the chance to set up dedicated pages.

• At first, whoever creates the page initially will also be the page administrator. No one else will be able to admin that page after them.Nor can that page be transferred to someone else.

• Unlike Facebook, there aren’t “vanity” URLs yet available that use a business name rather than a long string of number.

• You also have the ability to choose whether you want to act as yourself or the business page, when on Google Plus.

• To create a page, login with your Google+ account and visit plus.google.com/pages/create.

Google+ Pages

Industry Updates

• Google+ Direct Connect lets you quickly navigate to a Google+ page when using Google Search.

• For example, if you searched for the query '+youtube' or '+pepsi,' you will be immediately taken to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page.

• In order to be eligible for Google+ Direct Connect, you must first connect your websiteby going to your Google+ page, and going to the “connect your website” page

• In order to make your business or organization "plussable", you can check out the Google+ Direct Connect page in the company's support site.

Google+ Direct Connect

Industry Updates

• This change basically prioritises ‘recent’ and ‘timely’ stories and is based off of Google’s Caffeine infrastructure.

• This change is evident on a lot of head terms (i.e.football) and will also have more of a noticeable effect on QDF keywords.

• “…change noticeably impacts 6 - 10% of searches, depending on the language and domain you're searching on.”

• This change however doesn’t appear to have had the same impact as Panda despite initial claims from Google that it was impacting 35% of search queries.

• RSS feeds (using last modified element) and plenty of fresh content look to be some of the best ways to get the most from this update.

Google’s Freshness Update

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

Industry Updates

• Google have added another new feature to their Google+ platform called “What’s Hot” which shows popular content that is trending across Google+.

• Google has also included something called Ripples with allows you to see how content is being shared across Google+

• Ripples are shown via an interactive diagram that shows how a Google+ post spreads as it’s shared by users.

• To see this in action, find a public post that interests you, and select “View Ripples.” From there you can replay its activity, zoom in on certain events, identify top contributors etc

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-popular-posts-eye-catching.html

Google+ Ripples ‘What’s Hot’ Feature

Industry Updates

• Labnol.org reported that Facebook Comments are now being crawled (and ranked) in Google’s SERPs

• Facebook Comments can be displayed in a few different formats, XFBML (Xtended FaceBook Markup Language) and HTML5.

• However if you would like to give your comments the best chance to rank, go with the XFBML implementation as that type is what has been shown to rank.

• http://searchengineland.com/many-facebook-comments-now-being-indexed-by-google-99399

Google Indexing Facebook Comments

Industry Updates

• Google has now formally launched a mobile site development portal dubbed HowToGoMo.

• It provides education, case studies and best practice guidelines for both SME’s and large organisations.

• GoMo also features an emulator where you can see how your site looks on a smartphone.

Google Creates “GoMo” Portal To Help You Mobilize

Industry Updates

• Google have announced that that Googlebot can perform POST requests on web forms.

• “We generally advise to use GET for fetching resources a page needs, and this is by far our preferred method of crawling…Googlebot may now perform POST requests when we believe it’s safe and appropriate.”

• Google only previously submitted GET queries on web based forms

• Google also talked about not blocking content behind HTML forms or external JS assets via robots.txt unless webmasters deliberately wanted to block Googlebot.

• Read more: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-surfacing-more-of.html

Google evolves it's ability to crawl web forms

Industry Updates

• “Starting today, ads that have previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below them. We dynamically optimize each search page, including its ads, to provide the best experience for our users.”

• This move marks yet another intrusion on organic listings for more competitive search queries

• Read more: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-ad-placements-on-search.html

Google Announces PPC ads on bottom of results pages