Are you working for/with a non-profit organisation?   If you are, you should take a look into “Google Grants”.

http://www.google.com/grants/

The scheme is designed to provide free advertising to charities through the Google AdWords system and also includes non-commission based Google Checkout.

If you’re accepted into the program, your organisation is entitled to up to $330 “per day” of free advertising!    There are strict rules over the content and target of the adverts, but with a little work, you could be driving a lot of relevant traffic to your organisation.

I’ve worked with www.brunswickstreetmission.org in Halifax to implement this and will be helping them to use the service to increase awareness of the great work they do.

Having played with Google Plus and Circles, one of the features missing is good search function.    You can search for people to follow by name, but that’s about it.

The missing feature is even more surprising given that this is “Google” we’re talking about.   If anyone can do search properly, it’s them!

Did you know however, you can use the standard www.google.com search engine to search through user profiles?

You can use the “site:plus.google.com” operator to return search results from user profiles.

For example – to find profiles of people who’ve lived/are living in Halifax Nova Scotia:

You could even set up a Google alert based on the search to email you when someone nearby signs up for Google+

It’s not just location you can search for – it could be people with similar interest too.

Get searching!

Wondering what today’s Google Doodle is for?   Well it celebrates the birthday of American Sculptor and artist Alexander Calder.

The animation is of one of Alexander’s pieces – a mobile in the traditional colours of the Google logo.

It took me a while to figure out what the logo was for as initially, hovering over the image, or clicking on it didn’t give a clue – unlike previous Doodles.    Strangely, the Doodle seemed to work better in IE which immediately animated the logo, and then revealed a clickable link explaining what the logo was for:

Google have released the first edition of an on-going series of online books called “Think Quarterly”.  

The book is now available to view at www.thinkquarterley.com and should also be released as a downloadable PDF soon, according to their twitter account “@thinkquarterly”.

The first edition which focuses on “data” includes some stunning visualizations such as the one below:

Matt Brittin, Managing Director of Google in the UK describes the first issue as a way to use magical metrics to transform your business:

Head over the www.thinkquarterly.com now for some fascinating and inspirational articles.

As promised, Google have now rolled out Rich Snippets support for recipes in the search results.

Anyone using Google to search for a recipe can now use the filter tool to show only recipe based results.

Google have been crawling and analysing microdata, RDFa and microformats for a while, however this is the first time they’ve given the user the ability to filter on these results.

So as an SEO, what are microformats and how can you use them?

Well, microformats are basically HTML tags which give the search engines context around keywords and content.  

Using these tags, you can tell the search engines more about the content on your page

Now that Google have SERPs dedicated to recipes, using microformats is your opportunity to improve ranking within these results.

So let’s start by having a look at some HTML code for an example recipe:

   1:    <div>

   2:      <h2>Recipe for Disaster</h2>

   3:      <img src="/images/disaster.jpg" />

   4:      By Scotia Systems<br>

   5:      Published 25th February 2011<br>

   6:      A recipe for disaster<br>

   7:      Prep time : 5 min<br>

   8:      Cook time : 20 min<br>

   9:      Calories per serving : 0<br>

  10:    <br>

  11:      Ingredients : <br>

  12:      2 tsp cement<br>

  13: 

  14:      Directions:<br>

  15:      1. Stir vigorously and leave to set<br>    

  16:  </div>

Now when Google crawls this, they’re able to analyse the content and extract keywords, but knowing what the keywords actually mean is incredibly difficult and would require a lot of processing.   You’d need to look at the context of the page in general along with surrounding keywords to make a guess.

Microformats lets you tell Google directly what each part of the recipe relates to.   

Let’s now look at the above code with Microformats applied:

   1:  <div>   

   2:      <span class="item"><h2>Recipe for Disaster</h2></span

   3:   

   4:      <img src="/images/disaster.jpg" class="photo"/>   

   5:      By <span class="author">Scotia Systems</span><br>   

   6:      Published <span class="published">25th February 2011    

   7:      <span class-"summary">A recipe for disaster</span><br   

   8:      Prep time : <span class="preptime">5 min</span><br>   

   9:      Cook time : <span class="cooktime">20 min</span><br>   

  10:      <span class="nutrition">

  11:      Calories per serving : <span class="calories">0</span  

  12:      </span>

  13:      <br>  

  14:      Ingredients : <br>  

  15:      <span class="ingredients">

  16:      <span class="amount">2 tsp</span> 

  17:      <span class="name">cement</span><br>  

  18:      </span>

  19:      

  20:      Directions:<br>  

  21:      <span class="instructions">

  22:      1. Stir vigorously and leave to set<br>      

  23:      </span>

  24:  </div>

Now as Google crawls and analyses this, they can instantly tell what the ingredients are, the how long it takes to prepare etc.    None of the additional information is visible to the end user, just the search crawler bot as you can see below:

Recipe for Disaster

There’s a good post over at Google’s Webmaster Central which goes into more details on the different microformat standards and how you can use them.

Google have also provided a “Rich Snippets Testing Tool” which you can use to see how your code will appear in the search results.

Google’s head of search quality – Matt Cutts, yesterday announced on Twitter that Google had released a new search algorithm change.

The intent of the change is to focus more on providing quality results, pointing to pages with unique, in depth content.    The change will lower the ranking of sites which “scrape” (copy) results from other sites in an attempt to earn revenue through advertising.

It’s unknown what this change actually involves – all we know for now is that it affects approximately 11.8% of search queries.   This is one of the largest Google updates in a while which is going to result in a lot of discussion within the SEO community.

For now, Google have only rolled out the changes in the US.   They’ve stated that changes will roll out worldwide “over time”.    I’m guessing how long this takes will rely on internal and external feedback after reviewing the results in the US.

Interestingly Google have said that the change doesn’t use the new Chrome blocklist extension.   However they have said that they’ve compared the user provided blocklists to those site highlighted by the algorithm change and have found the results comparable.

Let us know if you’ve seen a change in the traffic to your sight since 24th February 2011

View the blog post announcing the algorithm change

For a while now I’ve been using Google’s goo.gl URL shortening service for links I post on Twitter.

However I’ve noticed that in the last few hours, links that I shorten using the service no longer appear in the dashboard?

The links still work (i.e. are redirected to the correct page) however the dashboard stats are unavailable?

Are you seeing the same problem?

(Note : you can still view the stats by adding a “+” to the end of the shortened URL)

Update : there are more reports of the issue here:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-url-shortener/browse_thread/thread/e2ec54a6b341212

http://groups.google.com/group/google-url-shortener/browse_thread/thread/633772c225ad955b#

The NY Times has an interesting article about how J.C. Penney employed an SEO firm to bolster their Google Rank using Black Hat SEO techniques.

The article explains how they generated thousands of paid links to rank for terms such as “casual dresses”.

You can ready the article here : The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

Unfortunately the article also rewards J.C.Penney with followed links:

Google has responded using what the NY Times reports as “manual” intervention which has resulted in JCP dropping from position #1 to #68 in the SERPS.

This manual change is interesting as Google have said in the past that they don’t interfere with the SERPs and that the results are all algorithmically generated.   So did they alter the algorithm, or is there some form of blacklist which is applied to the results?

It’d be interesting to hear a technical explanation from Google’s Matt Cutts on what actions were taken to correct the SERPS to ignore the paid links.

Today’s latest Google Doodle celebrates the 164th Birthday of the American Inventor Thomas Edison.

Born February 11th 1847, Thomas Alva Edison is well known for inventing the electric light bulb however he is also credited with inventing the phonograph and the motion picture camera.

Edison established the first industrial research lab, “Menlo Park” in 1876 and he became known as the “Menlo Park Wizard”.

You can find more information on Thomas Edison on his Wikipedia page

You may think that Christmas seems a long way off, but not if you look at the trends in Google.

A simple search for “Gift Ideas” shows that the rate of searches for those terms starts ramping up in November:

Also, searching for the term “Black Friday” shows an even quicker ramp up in November:

Looking into this further, I decided to focus on the predicted top toys for Christmas 2010.   According to CNN Money:

So let’s take a look at Google Trends for the top 5 mentioned above:

1) Nerf Stampede

2) Loopz

3) Monster High Dolls

4) Lego Harry Potter Hogwarts

5) Singamajigs

My bet is on the Singamajigs – look at the sudden ramp up!   I also suspect there is plenty of misspelling traffic available for this one!