Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category

It seems that Google have become victims of their own success of late, in that they feel they need to do things because they can!

When Google started, it had a simple interface, you typed what you wanted, and you got a nice simple set of results. We then had the google directory, and then came Froogle, image search and many other ‘alternative’ methods of searching (which is fine).

Of late though the Search Results Page of Google looks like something a party goer threw up after a drinking session of the ‘most colourful cocktails’ section of the menu at the office party!

IT IS A MESSS, and this mess just got messier. With (what I would refer to as) their new Consolidated Realtime Additional Presentation Fomat (C.R.A.P. for short)

At the top we have  PGA tour, below that we have news result, then below that we have a bunch of what can only be described as CRAP!

LMAO that Gatorade dropped tiger woods

“RT XXXXX Gatorade first sponsor to drop tiger woods”

“You know what? I also had an affair with tiger woods, THERE”

There is a scroll down box that is filled with ‘real time’ search results. You know what? If I wanted to read pathetic childish crap, then i would subscribe to pathetic childish Twitter accounts, I really don’t need to get it shoved at me from Google.

What Google HAVE managed to achieve in a single stroke is to attract MORE spammers to the twitter service that is already full to the brim of spammers!

Imagine what would happen if the ‘hot topic’ was a product, we would get mountains of results, tweets, news, more news, shopping feeds etc and what we REALLY want is below the fold.

Sorry Google but this for me is a step too far. I know it is panto season, and I know that you were going to perform Mother Goose, but I understand that it had to be cancelled as someone in product development killed the Goose that was laying the golden eggs!

Anyone who has been around the web for a while will have seen the rise in Web2.0 style sites with user generated content. This concept is a superb arrangement for all parties as the site owner gets free content, and the writer gets a platform to air their views. Everything in the garden is rosy, until the big old spammer arrives with his dirty tricks.

If it wasn’t for Akismet and my manual editing of comments here on this blog, many of my readers would have bigger appendages ‘down below’ shiny new watches(shiny for a while), a cupboard full of triangular blue pills, and would be corresponding with a 5′4 blonde beauty from Russia who is really 44 years of age and called Malcolm and living in Hull. Oh and they would also be planning on moving to Russia to live with Malcolm (AKA the blonde beauty) as soon as they get their money from the Nigerian dead oil minister deal and their Internet Lottery winnings (best £5000 they ever spent).

OK back to the real world. Google have just published a beginners post dealing with spam, but as ever there are a couple of Easter eggs in the content. Read the rest of this entry »

So there you have it, I am not a hamburger, I am a high quality translator! Or at least Google is now.

Announced on their blog is a new high speed ‘translate as you type service, along with some other changes to the google translate service.

The service actually had 3 services introduced (more in the above link), although I have to ask, how many people actually use it? Other than to learn how to swear at people in their own language

Close on the heels of the Google announcement that the keywords meta dat is no longer used in the rankign algortithm, Yahoo! have come out and said pretty mucht he same. This is something us seasoned webmarketers have been saying for a long time, but despite this, there are ‘SEO’s ‘ out there who are still pedalling KW meta optimisation.

 The admission came at an Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York this week. When asked about Support for the meta keywords tag, moderator Danny Sullivan stated that only Yahoo provided support of the tag, which prompted  Cris Pierry, (Senior Director of Search at Yahoo), to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

So there you have it the tag is dead, so move along please…. nothing to see here !

This is something that is coming up more and more often these days. In fact this blog comes up highly for some of those phrases since I published the Google adwords telephone numbers in may 2008. One thing to note here is that now you need to have your adwords account ref (top right of the screen inside adwords) to get through. Methinks they are filtering who they speak to and who has to go the long route!

Anyhow, if you need help, then try the telephone path, if not, here is a real good place to start for adwords help in some areas there will be a yellow ‘chat box’ on the screen,  if it is there, then use it.

Next is the long route path adwords support page or go to this form select whatever your query is about, scroll down to the bottom and select ‘email adwords support.

People in the UK can email adwords-uk@google.com

I am sure that I am not the only SEO who’s inbox and PM box on forums has been full of ‘My site has gone from the rankings’ type messages during the last few weeks. This is always the case when Google ’stir their secret sauce’.  This latest incarnation appears of have had far more wide ranging impact that they might have envisaged, Possibly this is the only problem with having such a wide ranging interconnected algorthim.

One of the big changes has been the ’slackening’ or perhaps lowering of the bar on non UK specific domains appearing in the UK SERPS. Read the rest of this entry »

The big buzz around the SEO world is Google Caffiene! Is it new, is it different, is it better is it worse, is it knee jerk reaction to Microhoo Bing .  On the webmaster central blog, Google  Software Engineer Sitaram Iyer and Senior Software Engineer Matt (I love cats I do ) Cutts wrote  :-

” For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions ”

Read the rest of this entry »

So here they go again, first it was search advertising, then it was printed, then it was billboards, then it was a browser, now they have made the logical step, and announced on the official google blog that they will be releasing an operating system to work hand in hand with Chrome browser, but aimed at notebooks.

To me this shows that Google are seriously attacking Microsoft etc at the next gen of online growth, the notebook.

So is this a good thing? A bad thing? or a nothing?

Time will tell, but personally I have no problem with it. I search using google, I mail using google I am happy to run a google operating system on a notebook that is not likely to have many apps on it.

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Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of things going on with Google at the moment.

1. Google earth street view has launched in the UK. 

2. Google mail (GMail.com) went down again for the second time this month

3. Google keyword tool went nuts, showing all sorts of results due to a ‘glitch’

4. I have seen more instances of Google confusing dropping index pages.

So onto the detail Read the rest of this entry »