I recently found a neat feature in the Google news search results. They display in the header of the news section quotes by specific people or companies.
This is very cool for tracking what politician said what and when. Kudos to Google for helping us sort out who is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Just be careful it’s not any Google Employees.
Interesting discovery today, found buying guides listed in the Google shopping search results today. Going to spend some time figuring out how and why this website is getting displayed here 
It is certainly not based upon the quality information being provided by this website. The website appears to be an ad-sense website exclusively.
I mentioned in my earlier post about the view now button, this directly links you to the Google Coupon. So Google can charge you for the coupon and then make you pay for it to appear in search.
Google is at it again, Google is getting close to having the entire 1st page above the fold of search results becoming paid.
Has anyone explained to Google that it is their natural search results that is the reason they dominate search? At the rate they are going the entire 1st page will be paid results. Actually, they are getting close. If they have 3 Adwords ads in the top frame all with site links and add in this new View Offer button then have Maps, Shopping and Local Listings. The first natural result will be page 2.
Get out your wallets, if you do not pay Google you get no visitors.
Just noticed something new in Google webmaster tools called “Google instant preview” it appears to be something they have tied to the fetch as Googlebot. It appears to be somewhat flawed, and does not crawl or display flash (makes our website look bad). Although it is yet another way to keep an eye on your website for errors and crawl-ability. I think this is fairly heavily tied to the “load time” of your website, as it appears to only provide Googlebot with a limited amount of time to grab a snap-shot of your website.
It showed us as having 26 errors on this page, seems like a lot considering our website is fairly tight (not as tight as our clients websites).
One last interesting note, our page actually appears rock solid in the Google Search Preview, yet not in this instant preview….hmmmm…..
It has been brought to my attention that most people in the world do not realize that Google Chrome and Google Android operating systems are not Google Operating systems. They are both simply based upon Linux. I was surprised today speaking a fairly tech savvy person whom has no clue.
Most Linux users know that anything built on top of the Linux Operating system by its rules needs to be open source, therefore Google Chrome and Google Android operating systems are open source.
The good thing about these being open source is the speed of development and community contributions to the advancement of the operating system. But I do not believe there is a huge user base of top coders seeking to help Google perfect their mobile operating system. Instead what we have is a lot of people quickly developing applications to sell for Google Android mobile devices.
The bad thing about these being open source is the speed of development and community contributions to the advancement of the operating system. As stated above few users are interested in helping Google, they are instead trying to quickly development applications to run on android devices. Now the Android market place, unlike Apple or Blackberry, is now riddled with lots of half baked applications that were not carefully developed and when used or installed with other half baked applications is rendering Android devices useless. I have heard from many an Android user that off the shelf it is quite a good mobile operating system, but once you start adding applications to your device, it slows drastically and often just completely locks up, and can no longer be used unless you revert back to the factory settings.
My rant of the day is that I’m struggling to understand why Google is not either penalizing website sites that do not provide a mobile version of their website, or rewarding websites that do?
This weekend I found myself annoyed yet again with Google’s search results while searching on my phone. I am really tired of surfing the web from my mobile device only to be presented with 10 of the slowest loading, fat bellied, ad riddled authority websites on earth. I want to see mobile friendly results when searching on my mobile and find what I need FAST. Waiting for these bloated outdated sites to load delivers an awful user experience, and that’s what Google is supposed to be making their number one priority. Even within Google News results, you find these traditional ad heavy websites are the ones that often appear. It’s maddening, sluggish, and I end up giving up before I find what I was searching for.
We know Googlebot can decipher the difference between a mobile website and a traditional website. I realize that in the beginning, the mobile search results will suffer, as many websites have not been provided the encouragement to create a mobile website. But I think the time has come. If you would like to see mobile search results on your desktop, all you need to do is to go to http://www.google.com/m and you can see what the search results look like on a mobile device.
Google, we all appreciate your efforts to take over the world, with your Android OS, Chrome OS, Chrome Browser, Google Radio among the many other market segments your actively jumping into with both feet. I think you need to circle the wagons here and make sure your core business is tidy before you keep going into new markets. You never know someone may be cooking up a mobile browser (like http://www.skyfire.com/) or better yet a mobile search engine in the background.
Why isn’t Google delivering mobile friendly results?
Cindy Krum discussed mobile search results here at SEOMoz, the talk about Google having two separate indexes for mobile and traditional search. She makes the point about how bad the results are when Google only provides mobile results. But I am not sure the results are any better when provided with several really big slow websites that take forever to load, and are nearly impossible to navigate or find what you were looking for.
Whether Google needs to maintain a separate index or have a difference in the algorithm is debatable, but I think this should be changed sooner rather than later. Once mobile websites are rewarded in mobile search, obviously more companies would get their sites mobile friendly. Google does need not exclude non mobile results, but possibly just tweak their mobile algorithm; doing something as simple as say for any query, run trhough the top 20-30 results which are traditionally fairy relevant, and if any of these results have a mobile website, show these website higher. No rocket science required, just a little common sense.
It is unusual that Google is not rewarding the online businesses that have embraced mobile search and even providing a great mobile website with the appropriate search engine optimization for mobile search. I really thought by May 2011, Google’s mobile search would have come further than this.
Google announced the launch of Google Shopping in four new countries this week: Australia, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Google Shopping is a comparison shopping engine delivering product results already in US and many other countries. Google includes products delivered to them via data feed.
Product results in US are shown directly on page one of standard search, with images, pricing, and customer ratings. This high visibility can be a large traffic force for any ecommerce business. But thus far the shopping results in the new countries are not displaying in the main results. The user must click the Shopping tab on the left to use the retail search engine, but we expect in due time Google will integrate products into page one as they have elsewhere.
This is basically free traffic and advertising, so any business shipping to these countries needs to take some action. If you already provide your data feed to Google, you just need to create a new feed and choose that country from the drop down. If you are not set up with Google Shopping yet in any country, visit the Merchant Center to open an account and set up your product feed.
With our strong presence in the Australian market, we are most excited to see this launch! We have been prepping our clients for this and ready to get them included immediately.
Also note that this makes it more important to use the hreview microformat for your customer reviews as we discussed last week.
If there is a key to getting good reviews from customers and clients it is the commitment to providing excellent service and quality products. Put this in place and you build a solid foundation that will take care of reviews and testimonials.
But, in this online world, how do you make sure that others will find these reviews and that your business will benefit from them? You have to make sure your users and visitors understand that reviews must be in the correct format and submitted in the proper manner.
That said, you – the business owner – must be responsible for getting the process in place so that reviewing your services and products is as easy as, well, as telling others about the experience. The customer shouldn’t have to be a “techie” and he or she shouldn’t have to wade through half a dozen steps to get that review ready for others to read.
So what does that mean?
In the current online world it means finding out what Google is doing and what Google is not doing. Here’s the answer: Google supports specific microformats. If you want your reviews to get into the Google ocean you will have to get them into the correct format.
How does that happen? Well, it doesn’t just happen.
First of all, determine that you are indeed a viable ecommerce site that could benefit from client/customer reviews. Of course you are! In addition, this particular path is relevant for businesses listed with Google Places. Then you must make sure that the business name, business address and business telephone number are on your pages – in the correct hCard format!!
What is hCard? Here’s the layperson’s definition (if there really is one) from Wikipedia: “hCard is a microformat for publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations and places in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS or arbitrary XML.”
For nearly two years, Google has been using hCard, hReview and hProduct microformats for their search results. More recently, the company is using these microformats for local search results. As we see it, having this code in place will allow businesses to instruct customers to go to the business Web site to give a review, rather than sending them to Google Maps so they can search for the business, find the listing, choose a review link, log in etc. etc. etc.
Going Places
Use the correct format and Google will recognize the review and put it on your Places page. Think of it as user-generated content that goes directly to the place where it will do the most good. Once you set up the instructions – in the correct format – the reviews will be where they should be. Now, it isn’t necessary to rely on so-called authority sites. The information can be drawn from our business Web sites.
We understand that Google presents this in two distinct ways: individual reviews and aggregate reviews. The first is used to format pages that will display a single review. If you plan to use a page for a number of reviews or for summaries of several reviews you should use the aggregate method.
Here’s how Google explains it: “You can mark up either individual reviews (for example, an editor’s review of a product), or aggregate review information—for example, the average rating for a local business or the total number of user reviews submitted.”
If the page will have an editor’s review or an expert review that should stand as individual content but also has a collection of user reviews you should simply choose a format. Again, we understand that Google will work this way: “Use the individual Review format to mark up the editor’s review OR you can use the Review-aggregate format to summarize the set of user reviews. If a page contains both types of markup, Google will use the Review-aggregate markup for display.”
When you start to use this process to enhance your business presence make sure you and your Web site folks understand the concept of properties, as defined by Google for this purpose. The online behemoth explains that reviews “contain a number of different properties which you can label using microdata, microformats or RDFa markup.”
A good example presented at: Google Microformats
Interesting discovery today, a search on www.google.com.au showed some different looking serps. I noticed Google has moved the location of the URL to the upper left hand side just below the title tag of the website before the description tag.
It used to be below the description tag on the lower left hand side.
It is quite interesting how different the SERP look by simply moving the placement of the URL. Not exactly sure why they would be making this move, but it is clear that having sitelinks, becomes more important that ever.
It appears about a year ago people at Webmasterworld had seen this within adwords. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4142468.htm
