While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

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Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Apparently in the last few days, Caffeine went live on all data centers.  

According to Matt, in the past Google used to roll out large updates using a “Google Dance” whereby datacenters updated gradually.   In 2003 Google introduced an incremental indexing system in which they crawled 10% of the web every night which was pushed out to all datacenters nightly.   This update system was known as Fritz.

The new crawl algorithm is now known as Caffeine.   With the new update, pages crawled are immediately added to the index and will instantly appear in the SERPs.

According to Matt – the results are 50% fresher and Caffeine enables Google to scale up their index in a massive way.

Evidence?

There’s an interesting article over at the onreact blog discussing potential Google algorithm changes which not only de-value exact matches in anchor links, but actually hurt your position in the SERPS.

The article describes how some blog posts which were initially ranking well, completely disappeared from the SERPS when exact match anchor links were pointed at them.

To add to the evidence, apparently the posts re-appeared in the SERPS after the links were removed.

Exact Match?

But what is classed as an “exact match anchor link” – and why may Google be using them to filter the SERPS.

The article describes exact matches as fairly generic – high value phrases, an example of which is "SEO Company UK”.   

Anchor text has been becoming increasingly popular over the last couple of years as a way of improving SERP positioning.   More and more spammy backlinks are implementing exact key phrase patterns for anchor text, so this may be why Google are taking notice.

Blackhat?

This leaves a worrying question though : can your competitors damage your position in the SERPS by “exact matching” links to your site?

Google have always been aware of the potential for Blackhat SEO’s to use the ranking algorithms against competitors, so I don’t believe it’s that straightforward.   

I expect Google must be using other factors such as link patterns, source addresses, anchor text distribution, page content etc before taking the step of removing a page from the SERPS.

Stop Using Exact Matches?

I don’t think this is evidence enough that we should stop using exact match anchor links, however the links should continue to be natural in both growth and context.    For example, exact matches can be used when the content pointed to – is indeed a match of the anchor text context.   And if the link comes from a page with related content – this will also be proof to Google that the link should be counted as good.

I’m sure additional research will be done on this and there will be other blog posts discussing the findings.   It’ll be interesting to see what correlations are found when more people start looking into these findings.

For now I’ll keep linking where linking makes sense to the user and the content..

In the video, Google’s Matt Cutts runs through several site reviews with the help of Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox.

The new look allows you to easily filter result by type, such as News, Images etc.  

They’ve also implemented some small colour palette changes to improve the interface.

The following video gives an overview of the interface changes, and uses an example search of “solar power” to show how to filter results with the new side menu.

Google have announced that they have professional photographers ready in 30 major cities across the US, Australia and Japan.   They also state that they’ll be rolling out to other countries soon.

The photographers will take panoramic shots within the business premises which will then be uploaded to Streetview.

Google adds that the idea isn’t new – because businesses have had the opportunity to upload their own photographs before.

You can see which cities are covered and further details of the roll-out in the Google Announcement.

View Larger Map

Well I’ve just searched Google for a solution – knowing that they also use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for indexing PDF Files.

It turns out that Google are developing an open source OCR platform based on an engine called Tesseract which was developed by HP Labs between 1985 and 1995.

FreeOCR is a free windows GUI which uses the Tesseract engine – and I have to say it works pretty well!

The announced came via a webmaster central blog post by Armit Singhal and Matt Cutts.

In the post they explain that the change to the algorithm was made a few weeks back and they don’t expect it to affect many sites (fewer than 1% of queries).

The reason given for the change is to improve the user experience and also reduce operating costs.

Check out our post over at SEOMoz for advice on how to improve your site speed for SEO.

Did you know you can now see what Google thinks your interests are?

Try this : Google Preferences

You may be surprised!

Google have announced today that they’re planning a browser opt-out for users to block being tracked by Google Analytics. Unfortunately they didn’t really give much away, such as how they’re going to promote this, so it’s difficult to see what impact this may have on statistics.

If the opt out becomes widespread it will definitely harm the value of implementing Analytics.   Maybe log based analytics will become more prominent?

Here’s the announcement from Google.