google social search

July News Round up for Google

August 1, 2011 by Angela Wilkinson 2 Comments

July’s been a busy month for Google so we’ve rounded up some of the main stories that caught our eye:

The Bank of Google
Google reported impressive Q2 2011 results with revenues up 32% from Q2 2010, search and ads products is the core driver for the company’s revenue (over 96% of their revenue comes from advertising). Reuters reported that Google is starting to test a Google adwords credit card with select US customers. The card which is reported to have no annual fee and a competitive interest rate will allow small and medium-sized businesses to buy search advertising on Google.

Watch your CPC
Boost, (a simplified version of adwords) has also been renamed as Adwords Express, Barry Schwartz has spotted a help thread suggesting that the new advertisers gained by this name change campaign may have a negative effect on your CPC.

Google Places reducing reviews count
Matt McGee reported on Google’s updated place pages. Sites with local business reviews e.g. TripAdvisor had complained that Google had taken their content (reviews) and used it on Google’s own places pages. Google has now removed these reviews resulting in some businesses seeing a decline in their review numbers.

This move doesn’t seem to resolve the overall complaint as Google still appears to place their places pages above those of competitors in search engine results. Although the change makes it harder for researchers checking out citation sources, this article from Rand Fishkin describes the alternate ways for SEO-ers to research local citations.

Google Offers extended
Groupon may not be worrying too much yet but Offers are now available in New York City, Oakland and San Francisco with additional cities about to be added: Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The need for speed
Earlier this summer Google added site speed reporting to Google Analytics. Continuing this focus on speed, a limited number of Webmasters are now being offered Google’s new Page Speed Service for free and it looks as if price deals will be available for a bigger audience after this initial “pilot”. The webmasters will have to sign up and point their site’s DNS entry to Google and the service will fetch the content from servers and then serve it onto viewers. Thom Craver suggests that Google is wanting to become your web content hosting provider, what do you think?

…okay so that’s some of the other stories, now on with those relating to Google Plus!

+1 Button Changes, Google+ Help Center
Want to keep up to date with the latest changes to the +1 button? Enroll in the Google+ Platform Preview and you will be able to test updates before they get launched, the first set of changes feature hover and confirmation bubbles. Also updated is the load speed as Google has began to deploy changes that will make the wee sociable button render up to three times faster. Even better is that webmasters need take no action to gain this update, if you want it faster head over to Google to get the asynchronous code version.

Wanting more help? Frank Reed has spotted that if you click on the gear icon when you are in Google + you’ll see a new Help Center and Mashable reports that in response to user feedback Google has set up a section specifically for Google + feature updates.

Circles benefit SERPs, automated circles and bought +1’s
When you’re logged into Google, content from people you’ve circled ranks higher, Danny Sullivan shows this with his connection to Ford. With +1 annotations being shown in search to signed out users as well, it was only a matter of time before +1 clicks were up for sale and Frank Watson describes the pitch from the website offering this “service”. Meanwhile Sarah Perez reported on a bot which adds people to circles and Google’s response to such automation which could be put to good use by spammers.

Real Names and Brand Names
The reaction to Google+ insisting on real names thunders on and even the UK BBC website ran a feature on the issue raising some valid points for the discussion; including those individuals living in countries where expressing political opinions could have implications on their personal safety. Matthew Ingram looks at both Google and Facebook in his article on the question of identity v. anonymity.

Google+ appears to be allowing some brands to retain their online profile, Ford has been spotted as having a “Test Account” banner. Have you spotted any others? Google+ has said that brands will be allowed on later this year, but Facebook appears to be taking advantage of this by promoting https://www.facebook.com/business it isn’t a new service, but a gathering of existing guides and support materials for businesses wanting to get online with Facebook.

Google+ one month in
With the first month under its wing, Google+ has grown impressively to over 10 million users by the 15th July and was reported as exceeding 20 million towards the end of this month. We’ve included reviews from Mashable’s Ben Par and Search Engine Land Contributor Greg Finn on this month’s activity. Although there has been bugs and controversy including the privacy settings, anonymity vs real names & brands being blocked, we think the new social network’s performance over this month should be recognised as impressive, but this isn’t a short distance race so we won’t be closing our Facebook or Twitter accounts!

Google Real time search update

April 29, 2011 by Brian Kane 1 Comment

Google Real Time Results
Google has been providing real time search results for a while now. These can be accessed by selecting the real time navigation option in the left hand bar which appears after performing a Google search. These real time results are also occasionally blended into the main Google search results in the same way they bring in images, video, new results etc. Obviously the exact mechanism which triggers these result being blended is part of Goggles Algorithm but there is an obvious link with popular events & topics that have lots of social media ‘noise’ associated with them.

google realtime search results

What’s changed with real time search results ?
Up until now these real time results have virtually all came from twitter mainly because of the deal struck between the two companies on data sharing. More recently Google made a significant change and is now bringing in real time results from other sources such as Quora, Gowalla, Facebook & several others. This brings a new dimension to real time results and makes this feature of search a bit more interesting for the end user

Real Time Search Results and Online marketing
So why is this important form an online marketing perspective ? . Initially it’s hard to see how this could have a direct influence on search engine optimization, being just a real-time random snapshot in time of tweets, mentions & comments etc. However when you combine this functionality with Google’s social search which delivers personalized Google results based on your networks (facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc) the possibilities for targeted online marketing become pretty interesting. As an example, consider promoting your own events using multiple social media channels and using the power of social search to deliver real time results to your own networks through Google.

Social Links in Search Engine Optimization
It’s also becoming clear that social media links are becoming a factor in SEO with facebook links, tweets etc all having some influence on search engine rankings. To what extent this is hard to quantify and while the biggest weapon in SEO is still the high authority back link, the weighting of social links is something that all internet marketing professionals should be monitoring very closely. The multi channel, blended approach to marketing on the internet is become increasingly important

Google Social Search Update

March 28, 2011 by Brian Kane 2 Comments

Social gets serious: Google Social Search Update:
Google have recently announced updates to their social search functionality. While social search has been around since 2009 many people are still not aware of exactly what social search is, the impact it can have on the search experience and some of the benefits it can bring to the end user.

So what is social search ?
The power of referral through social networks, blogs and forums is constantly changing the dynamics of the internet. For reasons of familiarity, trust and authenticity more online users are looking to their peers and online network connections for advice & recommendations both from a social, and a business, perspective. Google social search offers a mechanism to incorporate this behaviour into the world’s favourite search engine. Essentially social search offers a personalized search experience which is only available to the individual when they are logged into their Google account

How does Social Search work ?
– The first key point to make is that social search is switched off by default. To enable it you need to edit the ‘Connected Accounts’ section within your main Google Account settings
– You can then connect accounts such as Facebook, Flicker, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter and yelp
– Once you have connected your accounts you should begin to see relevant content that your friends (network connections) share on the web
– Your own online content published through connected accounts like (Facebook & Twitter) becomes easier for your contacts to find when they are searching the web
– You can create a Google public profile to control exactly what you want to share through social search

What are the latest updates on Social Search ?
– The social search results will now be blended into the main search results returned. Social search results were previously only displayed at the bottom of the search results page.
– Google are incorporating links from other connected sources like tweets for example. So you might see tweets from your friends ranking in your search results when you search for something relevant to their tweet.
– Google have also provided more control over how you connect your accounts, allowing you to privately connect accounts to your Google account. This means you can restrict what content becomes publically available to social search and what remains private.

End user benefits of social search
– Effectively social search goes one step further in personalising the user search experience, delivering search results from your trusted friends and online networks as well as the wider internet
– Anyone can now become a publisher and rank on the search engines.!
– By creating a public profile and linking up accounts users now have another mechanism to create authority for themselves on certain subject matters within their networks.

Business benefits of Social Search
– Social networking is becoming ever more important in marketing your business over the internet. As businesses become more active in marketing through trusted networks and engaging in online communications via sites like Facebook and Twitter, Google social search offers the capability to ” join up the dots ” by optimizing this content to rank in the search result when users within their connected networks are searching the web.