Tag search: Google
Update 14/11/12: Well, as I predicted (not that I’m gloating or anything …) it appears as though Comet has lost a lot of visibility this week for its terms.
Since my original post, Comet has been moving about which pages are displaying, originally a splash page on another domain was being used to inform users of the situation. Currently, a subdomain on comet.co.uk is being used to display legal notices.
Comet no longer ranks in the top 200 for washing machines, cookers or dishwasher where it did rank p1 before. It could well be that some of the rankings have transferred to the new subdomain which search metrics hasn’t picked up at the moment, but unfortunately Google is already losing trust in the domain.
We’ll keep an eye on the situation so keep coming back for regular updates.
Scepticism has been coursing through the veins of SEOs everywhere since the inception of Google’s spam-beating disavow tool.
There was, needless to say, controversy aplenty upon its launch, with the most prominent question unsurprisingly being: does it actually work?
In our experience, we’d insist that ‘yes’ is the answer. The disavow tool is a great way to aid recovery from a penalty. It is not, of course, the only road to recovery but, as long as it is used wisely along with a few other simple procedures, a penalty-ridden website will be back on the straight and narrow in no time. If you want to know how to use the tool read Patrick’s post here.
Amazon has unveiled its new colour tablet, the Kindle Fire, which hits the market at less than half the price of the iPad; automatically creating a huge fuss over the future of Apple’s popular tablet.
But whilst the inevitable comparisons are being made, it’s worth noting that the Kindle Fire shouldn’t be seen as a competitor for the iPad, but rather as an addition.
It has a simple, easy-to-use interface which makes it a perfect device for reading books, surfing the web, getting email, and of course, shopping at Amazon.
With a 7-inch IPS colour touch screen and 8GB of internal memory, the Kindle Fire combines the essential elements of a tablet computer, with a colour e-reader.
A while ago I blogged about the way that Google loves to make changes and tweaks to its algorithm and the style and layout of their search results, in a constant quest to improve results for users. It can be quite interesting to see what sort of changes Google is making and to try and work out how this might affect our clients. Although not all changes get a permanent place in the Google results, some do stick, so we need to understand how they might have an impact.
One of the interesting things I saw on Techmeme this morning was the news that Google is to retire the Blogger and Picasa brands in a bigger Google+ push which will happen for the public release in around six weeks time.
Though it’s not uncommon for Google to rebrand the products it has bought, it doesn’t usually happen this long after the product was acquired (2003 for Blogger and 2004 for Picasa), or for products as popular as these.
Well, for a feature that was meant to roll out quietly; it’s made a pretty noisy entrance. Yes, if you haven’t already heard about it, Google+ has been unveiled. And whether it takes off or falls flat, the initial interest has been quite astounding.
Google+ began to roll out to select users on Tuesday, and has become the latest ‘must-try’ feature. Another attempt by the search giant to tap into the social market; Google+ focuses on making online sharing more like real-life interaction. So, what can you expect to find on Google+?
The Semantic Web is a new technology/specification that attempts to read into the meaning of content on the web, providing more useful and relevant search results, and creating a specific content model which fits your business needs.
Google, Bing and Yahoo are already beginning to support the Semantic Web in their applications, most notably the Search Indexes. Using vocabularies such as schema.org; search engines index your website, looking for Semantic tags which allows them to understand the meaning of the content on the web page.
When it comes to web design; usability and visual design are two areas that are heavily dependent on each other. They affect each other dramatically, and each requires an understanding of how people will interpret the message you want to communicate, and what experience the user will have.
Finding the correct balance between these two disciplines is essential to developing a good user experience. However this isn’t such an easy task when you consider their juxtaposing nature.
At their Inside Search event in San Francisco yesterday, Google introduced several innovative additions to their web search for mobile devices and desktop computers, with instant results being the core objective.
Features already available on smartphones such as voice search and image search, will now be available on desktops; and local searches on the smartphone will be made more useful, relevant, and faster.
We know the importance of keeping up with all the latest SEO developments here at Branded3, because it’s one of those things where if you don’t move with the times, you get left behind. We’re constantly experimenting with new techniques and ways in which we can help our clients achieve better results and gain more traffic share.
As such, each year we pay close attention when one of the biggest SEO resources in the world; SEOmoz; ask all of their friends, followers, and subscribers to contribute to their ‘ranking factors.’ These ‘ranking factors’ are effectively a straw poll of some of the best SEO’s in the world (including our very own Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice – who have been asked for input this year) on what factors they believe are the most important reasons why websites might rank highly in the search results. And this year we’ve seen some pretty interesting results…
Here at Branded3, we track thousands of keywords for our clients on a daily basis and we regularly see Google making many changes, not only to the algorithm that produces the search results, but also to the search results themselves.
We find that Google will tweak results, alter portions of their algorithm, and change the look and feel of the results pages to try and make the user experience as good as possible. In that way, you as users continue to return to them and use their search engine in preference over the other available options.
An early-stage version of Google Chrome’s Canary build includes the ability to hide the URL bar, providing an extra 30 pixels of room to browse, but consequently leaving the user vulnerable to phishing attacks.
Luckily, it’s not a default feature so users have the option between keeping the URL bar, and removing it. But how important is the URL bar to users? And would they really notice if it was gone?
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