Google have recently announced changes to the Google search that will change the way in which a lot of companies rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The reason for this is to improve the results for searchers when they are looking for a product or service; such as a local restaurant or company. Google local has been in use for a long time, but only normally appears when you add a geographic location or place name to the search string. The image above shows the results for the keyphrase Manchester SEO, which brings up the first 10 SEO companies that are listed in the Google business directory. Ranking within these listings is independent of standard search results, so even if you are ranked number #1 for this term, you won’t appear in the local listings unless you have worked on it specifically.
Google has now rolled out a worldwide plan to present the user with these results regardless of whether a location is entered as part of the keyphrase string or not. It determines your location from your IP address (which captures a reasonably broad location) but you also have the option to specify more specifically using some manual options. This is now making it very important to rank well within Google Local search, as these listings appear before the organic search results.
To find out more information, you can view the original post on the Google blog: Google local blog post
While performing a weekly check to see how Elevator ranked for certain keywords, including manchester seo and manchester seo company, I noticed an increase in organic searches from Yahoo. On further investigation, I noticed that Elevator SEO was now on the first page in Yahoo for some of the optimised keywords, but that the traffic from Google was still relatively low compared to the traffic we were getting from Google which wasn’t ranking as highly.
After a bit of research I found out the latest search engine market share for April 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google is by the far the market leader with 81.39% of the total market share. Yahoo was in second place with 9.93%, which is a huge difference. This explains why less traffic originates from Yahoo despite better performance in keyword rankings.
The data also shows approximately a 4-5% increase in Market Share for Google (approx a 6.5% overall increase) since April 2008, and a 2-3% decrease for Yahoo (approximately 16% overall decrease). This perhaps illustrates the sustained growth of Google, and the importance of ranking well within as Google over other search engines.
During the first couple of weeks in March there have been many sites seemingly affected by a Google Page Rank update. Unfortuntely, most webmasters are complaining after seeing their Page Rank drop quite drammatically i.e. from 5/10 to 0/10. There is normally some fluctuation that occurs during the update of the Page Rank algorithm, which is commonly known as the Google Dance. However, changes aren’t normally as extreme as they appear to have been this month.
There is a lot of uncertainty around the update to the algorithm after Google announced that it is only updating 3-4 times a year now as opposed to the monthly change. A lot of webmasters are claiming that this recent change is due to a glitch with the Google Page Rank tool bar, but others think that a new element has been added into the algorithm. Most of the sites heavily affected are blog and news sites, which have all dropped to a Page Rank of 0. SEO experts think that this could be related to the introduction of an age-deflation factor, where news and blog items over a certain age lose their importance.
Personally we do not think that a Page Rank update her happened just yet, although everybody is waiting to see what happens when the first update occurs.
It seems not even Google are impervious to the recession as they have started tightening their grip on their free Apps. Google’s income growth has slowed considerably, and this is another method of trying to increase revenue following the 100 job cuts and the recent demise of some popular Google products such as Google video and Google Notebook.
Basically there are over a million businesses that use the free version of Google Apps that supports advertising. Google is now reducing the functionality of these accounts, such as lowering the number of user accounts allowed to almost force users into purchasing the premium versions of the applications.
When Google Apps was first launched in 2006, it was completely free. The description of the suite was:
A service available at no cost to organisations of all shapes and sizes
Since then, Google brought out a premier version early in 2007 with additional extras such as additional storage space as the selling point. Eventually the future of Google Apps is that it will become a premium service.
When discussing this with my colleagues, the initial reaction was that they would stop using Google Apps and just use i.e. Microsoft. However, the beauty of Google Apps is the collabarative element that allows multiple users to work from the same document. As Google further tightens it’s grip, perhaps we will look onto other free online applications?
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the appearance of Adwords links appearing in Google Image Search Engine Results pages. For example, we entered the key phase ‘Audi R8′ into the Google image search and we were presented with adverts for Audi dealerships as well as the image results (see image above).
Personally I thought this was unusual. When I use the Google image search I’m often just looking for a particular photograph or image that I can use for design work. When I entered the term for Audi R8 I wanted a nice image of the car that I could manipulate, and I have no intention of buying one in the near future! So are these adverts completely wasted on me? Is this the case for everyone that’s searching Google images?
The sponsored links that appear are in the four line advert format, and there are three adverts in total that are side by side at the top of the page, just above the organic search results. Google has apparently been testing this for a number of months now, and it seems that more and people are now seeing the results. There may be a special criteria that needs to be fulfilled before your advert appears in the image results, and I’m interested in finding out more about it. If it’s not advantageous for your advert to be displayed in Google images, it could effect your PPC quality score if your advert makes a lot of page impressions but has few clicks.
