Google Updates

Google Webmaster Updates To Start 2014

As one door closes another opens, or something like that. Google, it seems, isn’t all about withholding data as most speculated after the full-force shutdown of free range organic keywords, aka the evil [not provided]. How can I, an organic search marketer say such a thing? Well, in their overarching generosity, Google announced today that they were introducing deeper keyword data points in Google Webmaster Tools, retroactive to December 31, 2013. Mobile Changes and Updates The Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) update centers around mobile, as the change was implemented to support Google’s focus on moving webmasters to maximize users’ online experience through quality mobile websites. In two announcement posts on the official Google blog by Maile Ohye, the Developer Programs Tech Lead, first shares a simple guide for making mobile-friendly sites search friendly through the incorporation of canonicals, defined user agents headers (HTTP Vary: User-Agent), and verifying ownership of mobile sites in GWMT to receive valuable feedback. For many, the mobile element may be a moot point because of the growth and support of responsive website design. With responsive websites, the browser and/or width of the viewable area, say a tablet browser, determines the stylesheet used for the website; changing the look and feel of the website without changing to a mobile sub-domain or folder. Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Details and More In the second post, John Mueller of Google Switzerland shares the big news, finer details are now available in webmaster tools! With the loss of keyword data in Google Analytics, many wondered what was next for organic. Many moved to using page analytics with GWMT to isolate keywords that fall into [not provided]. This finer detail change allows for a simpler, more impactful examination of page information surrounding clickthroughs from search, search queries, and exact numbers related to organic traffic. An alert is displayed concerning the update in GWMT: Although the post states the updates are retroactive to 12/31/2013, all history available in your updated GWMT shows exact numbers (exact numbers according to GWMT, of course). Some in the marketing industry and other webmasters are reserving excitement to see how accurate these number actually are. @randfish skepsis seems well-founded: at first glance devations between GWMT data and GA data is around 45% for our client sites. — Barry Adams (@badams) January 7, 2014 But, I suppose beggars can’t be choosers, right?! The Wrapper Enjoy it! Even if the data isn’t as exact as some believe it may be inaccurate, it is a starting point for strategy. The data from GWMT is and has always been focused on helping webmasters maximize their website’s visibility. This change is a move in a good direction. I would rather data that is slightly off than the rounded to the nearest thousand that was the standard...

Reduction Of Authorship Snippets

Authorship in 2012 was a big deal. It offered a way of connecting specific authors of content with verified profiles in Google’s system. This week, Matt Cutts, head of search spam at Google, confirmed that the team was implementing a 15% reduction in rich snippets on search result pages (SERPs). This change was initially announced at this year’s PubCon, but is only now being seen and experienced by webmasters. What does this actually mean? At it’s height, search results would display rich snippets next to nearly half of the results, where appropriate. This reduction means that there will be less faces in the SERPs but authorship still exist. According to Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts confirmed full implementation this week. The reduction does not seem to be directed at any given audience, although some snippet users saw a loss of authorship altogether; with some recovering. The Wrapper There isn’t a need to head for the hills as it relates to authorship and publishership; both are still relevant to organic search and a necessary part to making the most of Google+. This change is more in regards to the user-facing side of...

Custom and Vanity URLs on Google+

You may have recently received a notice from Google that your Google+ Page or Profile qualified for a custom URL and the great people of Google had already reserved one for you. Congratulations! Welcome to the awesome sauce club! After the flood of endorphins subside and the crowds roar becomes a low hymn, settle down and let’s look at the marketing strategy behind this move; from your perspective and Google’s. Vanity URL versus Custom URL Yes, there is a difference. The custom URL that Google may have reserved and offered you is just a customized redirect/rewrite for your ID on the Google+ platform. Vanity URLs are those that are specific to a brand and offer a verified endorsement. For example, ChocolateSEO now has a custom URL but the old ID is still attached and often displayed for our page on Plus. With a vanity URL, like Mashable, you will find they have a verified symbol next to their name. This is only possible with vanity URLs. Local +Pages receive a symbol too, but this is associated with the address, not the Google+ URL. Hovering on the shield for a vanity URL denotes the brand name has been verified. On Local +Pages, it displays “Verified Business.” Google Custom URLs and the Fine Print Looking at the email you may have received offers no insight into the “terms and conditions” or “stipulations” of your new found fortune. Dear ChocolateSEO You’re now eligible for a unique Google+ custom URL that lets you easily point folks to your page (no more long URLs!). Here’s what we’ve reserved for you: google.com/+Chocolateseo Promote this on: your website, emails or other media. Click the Get URL button below to get started. Get URL Sincerely, The Google+ Team You received this email because you’re a manager of ChocolateSEO. View the list of managers. Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA However, with a little digging you can find out more about this new custom URL option. We first stumbled across the new guidelines for custom URLs, https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2676340. On this page, we find out that there are really only three stipulations (four if you count having an account in good standing): Ten or more followers Account must be at least 30 days old Must have a profile/page picture That’s it! If you meet those requirements, but didn’t get the email above, you can setup a custom URL yourself. From the dashboard, select edit this page. In the administration, click the ‘Links’ option. You will find your customization option here. From the email above, you will see that they reserved Chocolateseo. We capitalize the ‘SEO’ in the name. You can edit this if you’ve accepted the customized URL but you cannot change it completely once it is accepted. You can also setup custom URLs for your profiles on Google+ as well. Free Now, Pay Later? Further investigation uncovers that this custom URL option is currently free, but may be a paid one at some point in the near or distant future. Jon Henshaw of Sitening/Raven Tools shared this information and a link related to the terms and conditions of Google+ custom URLs: http://www.google.com/+/policy/tos-custom-url.html. On the page it says, Custom URLs are free for now, but we may start charging a fee for them. However, we will tell you before we start charging and give you the choice to stop participating first. What does that mean? That means if you do what the email tells you to: add the custom URL to your site, your business cards, your link building and outreach programs, etc., you could be...

Everywhere I look, I see #Hashtags… Google Offers Hashtag Searches

While not fully implemented, some are seeing this new functionality. When a search is done using a hashtag, such as the one performed below (#notprovided): The hashtag search makes a lot of sense as Google continues to expand the usefulness and requirement of Google+. Along with the increased use of secure search throughout Google properties, Google has made it mandatory to have an authenticated Google+ account to comment and interact with YouTube videos. This new search function can be done using the regular search field but the result page changes. In place of the Knowledge Graph, the results for hashtags includes an active stream of results from Google+ by default. Below the live stream there are options to perform the same search on Twitter and Facebook. Search for hashtags on Twitter and Facebook from Google?!?! Yes! That is a thing, but not so much as Google has indexed the content on these ‘competitor’ web platforms. When you select the links for either Twitter or Facebook, you are whisked away to the native search on these locations. From the #notprovided example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23notprovided https://www.facebook.com/login.php?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhashtag%2Fnotprovided The Facebook link requires you to be logged in to use the Graph Search. The Wrapper The fact that Facebook requires you to be logged in, offers it’s own search combined with the initial [not provided] push in 2011, the writing was on the wall that Google would move to make all searches SSL. A flurry of activity is coming out of the Google camp, some of it is great for marketers, some of it isn’t. But most of it is great for...

SEO IS [Officially] DEAD: [not provided] at 100%

Okay, it isn’t really dead, but every SEO has used the headline once, right?! This will be the only time I do. Evolution takes many forms and affects many different facets; animals, environments, styles, and technology all evolve. Google is a business, you may have heard me say it a time or two, and as such—they evolve as well. Since October of 2011, [not provided] has been the thorn and bane of every self-respecting SEO. Well, Google has decided to do their best Dark Knight Bane impression by breaking the backs of many businesses and optimization specialists by imposing SSL protocol for all organic search. This change effectively makes all searches [not provided]. Yeah, SEO is dead. Dead in the way we knew it. BUT (there is always a ‘but’) it is not dead in every sense of the word. As with any evolutionary change, there will be the loss of many weaker forms of SEO. Individuals and agencies that focused solely on ranking and keywords may be at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the need to optimize remains. This update is a change in the way Google’s search platform works. It does not change the why or how the search currently works. Google is a business and is really free to make changes as they see fit. We can argue about ethics and their old policy of “Do no Evil,” but in the end, they are in it for the money. That isn’t a bad thing. They employ a lot of people and have cultivated thousands of businesses by their very existence. We, SEOs, may not agree or approve of the things they do with their systems, but in the end we are just players in a larger game. That being the case, what happens now? What do we do next, with the loss of one of the most important optimization elements? Keep working. Good SEO isn’t about monitoring ranking. It isn’t about optimizing for robots and algorithms. It’s about creating a great web experience for everyone involved. A good SEO knows this, HAS known this, and for the majority of their career or through the work of an agency, focused on this; optimizing web assets and developing strategies that help put good content in front of the right people, for the right reasons. The organic search data was just a great way to find out what was working and what wasn’t. It never made SEO work or defined SEO. SEO has evolved itself. As an SEO, I have often avoided several things; calling myself an SEO was one of them. SEOs got a bad rap due to some in our industry doing shady things (black hat and unethical practices) and from the fact that we didn’t explain ourselves well enough. So people believed we were snake oil salesmen and women. I often refer to myself as an Internet Marketing Specialist or Search Engine Specialist. My job, my career, my work all center around the world of Internet content. I, and the web consulting network that composes C.SEO, is not singularly focused on just ‘SEO’ but search as a part of a greater whole. SEO is not a standalone function, but a component of marketing. A car is only as powerful as it’s engine but as useful as a brick without wheels. I am not an SEO, I and many others are Internet Marketing strategist, technologist, scientist, and a number of other ‘-ist.’ Why Google, WHY?! So, why did Google do this? There is no official word on the matter as of yet. Normally there are announcements, tweets, or some sort...

Google Webmaster Change: Data for 360 versus 90 Days

Push hard enough and even Google will move. Or so I’d like to think. I say that thanks to an article featured in Search Engine Land. SEL covered a situation in which many publishers and webmasters have been at arms with Google over the [not provided] situation. Marketing Land coined the initiation of [not provided] as “Dark Google.” If you are unfamiliar with [not provided], where have you been?! Two years ago Google started withholding data from webmasters related to secure searches. This hidden data on average makes up 30-50% of web traffic for sites we have access to. This means a big chunk of data is not shared with us. There are ways to make correlations between what is reported in Google Webmaster Tools against the [not provided] segment of Google Analytics, but the crux was always that Google Adwords users were privy to more data. Essentially, Google was saying, ‘we don’t pay for user data, but you will.’ Granted, users of the search service receive the usefulness of the index in return for data gathered on them as they interact, but there has always been a question of fairness across all Google properties. As well as concerns with fairness of how much value Google garners from collecting data. With the announcement of Google Webmaster Tools data in the top query section being available for the next year, versus only 90 days, it appears user pressure has proven successful. The Wrapper This is a great opportunity for webmasters to have relevant, quality data to improve the websites under their care. Having a longer view of the changes edits on websites has against the users Google is showing web pages for can only make the relationship between websites and the key phrases they show for all the more qualified. As a results everyone wins; Google produces even better results, the users get the best answers to their questions (in a perfect world :0) ) and website’s get better...