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!

When Google added Instant Previews to user search results, there were questions as to how and when the images were created:

Google have now added an additional feature to the popular Webmaster Tools (under Labs) to help website owners find issues which may be affecting the preview image generated by Google.

The tool gives you the option to specify any web page on your site and then generates a preview on the spot.   It compares the preview to the actual site side by side:

As you can see above, there are some small discrepancies (some borders/menu elements are missing), however this appears to be fairly random?  

Repeatedly hitting the compare button gives different results – possibly indicating a bandwidth issue when downloading pictures?   Maybe because so many webmasters are hitting the new tool at the moment!

Below the comparison, the tool provides a list of errors encountered when processing the site.    In the above example, the missing bitmaps are listed as “fetch failure”, which is odd as the images download fine for normal browsers.

This also raises the question – if the image on the left of the actual site is also generated in real time for the comparison – how come it succeeds to download all the pictures, whereas the instant preview doesn’t?

Google states that the image preview is generated using a WebKit engine which doesn’t support flash or Silverlight which may account for differences between the real site and the preview.

Check out the Google webmaster central blog for the official Google announcement.

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

Just saw this video on www.gizmodo.com and thought I’d share it.    If you’ve ever been frustrated watching someone new to computers you’ll relate to this…

I’ve been seeing this feature appearing in a lot of results recently.   When searching for a group of keywords, when you reach the destination page there is an overlay such as the one below:

I’ve only noticed this recently and it doesn’t appear on all destination pages?

Clicking on the “Jump to text >>” link takes you direct to the most relevant place on the page for the search query.

It appears that this is a feature of the IE Google Toolbar, however it must’ve been automatically enabled as it’s not something I chose to switch on?  

Now, I’m not complaining as I often find this useful to quickly find the information I’m looking for, however other users don’t like this feature as can be seen in this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5e7f4946c1b363d4&hl=en

If you want to disable the “Quick Scroll” try the following:

1) Click on the wrench icon in the toolbar

2) on the Tools tab, deselect “Quick Scroll”

3) Click Save

Google have recently announced that they’re promoting a new open source image format known as “WebP”.

Speed

Google’s main drive for pushing this new format, is because it uses their open source VP8 encoding technology to shrink images to use hypothetically 40% less space than a JPEG.

Over the last year we’ve seen several moves by Google to convince webmasters to speed up the web, however this has to be their most ambitious yet.    To gain traction, they’ll need support from all the latest browsers, and also from graphic design tools.

Advantages for Googlebot

As well as the known SEO advantages of speed on the web, there is another small feature of WebP which could be aimed at improving Google’s Search Algorithm.    The WebP format is designed to include meta-data about the image.   This could mean that images using this format are easier for the Googlebot to interpret – giving it a greater understanding of the scope of the page.   Instead of looking at HTML title tags, Googlebot could look inside the image to determine the context of the image.

Further Resources

Google WebP Blog Announcement

Google WebP Project

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

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

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Google’s Matt Cutts is giving a keynote at SMX and is discussing the roll out of the Caffeine update.

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..