SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

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.

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Tags: Think Quarterley

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.

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Tags: Google, Rich Snippets

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

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Tags: Google, Search