what is the new update that google announced?

Registered User Join Date May 2014Posts 52It is called the pigeon update which has been released to refine all the local search results in google and also the map results.

Maybe We Should Break Up With Google

Imagine you had a friend in a relationship with someone who was unreliable, secretive and made big decisions without regard to their well-being. Beyond that, the person in question is insensitive, self-absorbed and sometimes downright cruel.

You'd tell your friend to kick the loser to the curb and find someone who deserves them. You'd tell them they were better off on their own. You'd advise them to focus on making themselves better, instead of being subjugated by a significant other who doesn't appreciate them.

Well, Google is a bad boyfriend. And that's my advice.

Let's be honest, all of us in the making-money-online business have been in a polyamorous courtship with Google for a long time now. Look at the guy next to you in the search results, yup, he's your sister wife.

But like any relationship, if you're looking to the other party to define you, to bring quality to your existence, you're doomed to disappointment. Ranking well in Google should be an extension of the fact that you are the best at what you do.

The expectation of ranking should come as a result of a consistent effort toward being the most competitive, most relevant, most knowledgeable and most trustworthy competitor within your space. Chasing rankings instead of chasing those goals will only lead to a continually punishing, continually unfulfilling dysfunctional relationship with Google.

Love Your Rankings, Whatever They Are

Learn to let go of an obsession with perfect rankings. Try to imagine a world in which you didn't care whether Google thought you were hot.

We all ask ourselves the same questions; Does Google like me? Am I good enough? Am I as pretty as the girl next to me?

Maybe you are, maybe not. But it shouldn't matter whether Google thinks so.

When you look at your site, do you see the value? Real value. Try looking, not as you on the inside, but as an outsider, as an unbiased customer.

What about you means that you deserve to be one of 10 of the best of the best in all the world? There are only 10 spots on the front page, and that's growing fewer and fewer with local, shopping, images, etc.

The diversity of Google's search results pages adds its own opportunities for varied assets done well. Though making videos and getting added to Google News to share great content is a totally different endeavor than making them for the sake of trying to jump on a bandwagon.

Focus more on being ranked because you're the epitome of information in your niche. If you try to do it the other way around, you wind up coming off as inauthentic and it's desperate. It's like the chick macking on the bartender at last call. Don't be that girl.

Confident Sites are Always Attractive

If your business relies too heavily on organic search traffic from Google, maybe it's time to alleviate that dependence. That reliance takes a lot of power away from you and gives it to someone else.

Granted, there's always going to be an inequality of need between websites and search engines, but search engines don't and never have existed for the site-makers. They are and always have been for the site seekers. Sites that are built for the middle man, the search engine, and not for the site seeker are sort of missing the point.

It's one thing to want to have a smartly constructed, crawlable, well-structured, clearly defined website that makes it utterly clear to any crawler where the content is and what it is about. That is just good business. Like basic hygiene, and matching socks.

You also need to be aware of some of the trickier technical missteps, particularly larger websites and ecommerce sites. SEO is an essential undertaking, but it's about so much more than just trying to rank for one or two top phrases.

Caring about smart SEO is one thing, but obsessing over search engine traffic and rankings is another. The same way it's one thing to work out to stay healthy, but it's totally different to work out like a maniac to stay attractive to someone else. We'd call the former friend an "inspiration" and the latter, we'd coach for low self-esteem.

How are we any different Googling the same phrase every day just to make sure we haven't moved down even a spot? Being secure in your own worth means never having to worry if you're good enough.

There Are Other Visitor Fish in the Sea

In spite of how good the relationship can be with Google, when things are going well, it still isn't Google's job to make websites money. So let's consider for a second that we absolve Google of that responsibility. Instead we start to see rankings and traffic as a perk of the relationship, rather than the foundation of it.

If you have a site that is mindful of all of the technical and strategic necessities involved in good SEO, then the rest is just about being yourself and keeping your options open. People use search engines at such a great volume that it's absolutely possible to forget they use other means of web travel too.

There's no guarantee that taking the time to invest in a well-planned, meticulously executed social media campaign is going to get you all of the business a number one ranking will for any given keyword. In fact, it's unlikely. But it could certainly bring you an ROI on the project and it could raise your brand visibility, drive new visitors, turn former one-time visitors into returning customers, affect direct traffic and grow your listening audience for future efforts. And that's not too bad.

Some search queries are always going to be the Quarterback/School President/Debate Team Captain. They will be lusted after by everyone. But maybe try a drama kid, or a band geek, or the yearbook editor because they have something to offer too. And that's coming from a former drama kid, band geek, and yearbook-staffer.

You Can Still Be Friends!

We will never be entirely free of search engines, but that's OK. We love and we hate them for everything they do and don't do. For everything they were and for everything they could be. But maybe, just maybe they're not ready for the same kind of relationship we are.

Maybe we need to give each other some space to figure things out. In the meantime, we can work on ourselves and figure out who we are outside of a co-dependent romance with search engines. We'll always want the traffic and rankings from they can give, but it's time we tried something different, too.

Even though saying goodbye to a relationship of any kind can be hard, when you know it means moving on to something better, sometimes you have to do the hard thing. But don't worry, we'll still hang out with Google, we have a lot of mutual friends.

Google Still Shows Max Mosley S&M Party Pictures, So He Sues Again

Twitter is Blocked in Turkey, Google’s Public DNS Helps Users Regain AccessMarch 24, 2014Popular→ Blogger Fined for Top-Ranked Restaurant ReviewJuly 21, 2014→ Google Still Shows Max Mosley S&M Party Pictures, So He Sues AgainJuly 30, 2014→ Google Has Removed 100,000 Links, Approved More Than Half of 'Right to be Forgotten' RequestsJuly 25, 2014→ Danny Goodwin Leaves Search Engine Watch, Thank You & GoodbyeAugust  1, 2014→ Google Love Grows, Bing Satisfaction Drops Among U.S. Customers

Google Introduces Product Ratings on PLAs

by Jessica Lee,July 30, 2014Comments

Product Listing Ads (PLA) will now feature product ratings, starting in late July, the announcement said: 

We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.

Google Analytics Helps You Filter Spider and Bot Traffic

by Thom Craver,July 31, 2014Comments

Ever wonder how much of your traffic was actual human visitors and how much of your traffic was really scrapers, bots, and other web spiders? Google Analytics will now help you discern just that.

On their official Google

Google 'Forgets' Publisher Articles as EU Takedowns Begin

by Carly Page,July 3, 2014Comments

Google has started taking down search results following Europe's 'right to be forgotten' ruling in May, with both the BBC and The Guardian seeing articles being removed from the search engine.

The BBC and the Guardian reported that pieces have been removed from Google, such as a column by Robert Peston commenting on bankers' woes during the 2007 financial crisis. The Guardian's James Ball said that six of the paper's articles have been removed from Google search.

Ball is calling for publishers to revolt against this, and has asked that media outlets set up Twitter accounts that tweet the links of articles that have been pulled from Google.

Google started removing search results last week, following the European Court of Justice landmark "right to be forgotten" ruling in May.

A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal at the time, "This week we're starting to take action on the removals requests that we've received.

"This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually, and we're working as quickly as possible to get through the queue."

Google didn't sound too pleased about the whole thing, and didn't reveal any further details about the process, which means it's not clear how many requests the firm has received, nor how many it has removed so far. If recent reports are to be believed, takedown requests have topped the 50,000 level.

Bloomberg noted that, as well as articles from the BBC and Guardian, the interrnet search engine has removed a link to a Spanish newspaper that was the target of a court case by Mario Costeja Gonzalez. A Search of Gonzalez's name now shows text at the bottom of the page, which reads, "Some results may have been removed under data-protection law in Europe."

"We're showing this notice in Europe when a user searches for most names, not just pages that have been affected by a removal," Google clarified on its website.

Towards the end of May, Google started offering EU citizens an online tool to fill out if they want a link removed from its search results.

When submitting a request, Google said that users will have to provide at least one kind of photo ID, and stated that links will only be removed if the information is erroneous, misleading or no longer relevant.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

Publisher Guide for Adding Custom Variables in Google Tag Manager

If you're an online publisher using Google Analytics, I'm sure you've heard this before: you need to use custom variables so that you can really segment and measure your audience.

You also most likely are currently working on migrating to Google Tag Manager in order to make your life easier.

So how do you implement them together? What follows is a step-by-step guide for installing publisher-centered custom variables using Google Tag Manager.

I am going to assume, that you already have Google Tag Manager installed in your site and that one of your tags is the asynch GA js. If you don't, read this first.

Google's Justin Cutroni recommends adding seven custom variables for publishers. This article will go in detail and breakdown how to install four of them:

CategoryContent TypePublication DateAuthor

These four custom variables at the most basic level gets you a good idea of your overall site performance. Once you add these data points, you can also get closer to information that other publisher-centered analytics tools such as Parsely track.

Let's jump in!

3 Things You Need to Know Before You BeginThese custom variables should be implemented on the page level. For all the custom variables mentioned above, the value changes as the user goes from one page to the next. For example, a user might read an article by author one and then click on a link that goes to an article by Author 2. This is true for all the custom variables aforementionedYou're going to need a data layer. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The best and only way to have these custom variables on your site is via data layer. If you want to read more about this, here's an article that gives a good explanation of how data layers work.You need the help of your front-end engineer. If you don't know this yet, you will, a good analytics person is always good to his or her front-end engineers.

Ask your front-end engineer to create a data layer that contains the four custom variables we want to add: Content Type, Author, Category, and Published Date. Direct them to the developer documentation on adding data layer for Google Tag Manager. There are two key things to check in the developer implementation:

Make sure that the data layer comes before the Google Tag Manager code (we inserted ours before the /head tag).I like keeping my values in small caps, this eliminates any potential duplicate entries that could be created due to any weird capitalizations.

Check out the way we set up the data layer in one of our sites. The data layer in the source code for that page will look like below.

Influential Twitter Accounts Indexed More in Google [Research]

by Jessica Lee,July 10, 2014Comments

Stone Temple Consulting put out findings of research it conducted on the indexation of tweets in Google. What it found was that indexation was low overall, but that influential Twitter accounts with specific types of tweets tended to be indexed more. 

Between two queries, the company found a total of 6.2 billion Twitter pages indexed in Google, "which is a pretty small number when you consider that there are 500 million tweets per day," Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting said in his post of the findings.

Google Panda: Understanding the Technical Inner Workings

by Ben Goodsell,July 11, 2014Comments

The concept of a search engine is very simple. Database the location of pages and return the most relevant results.

Primitive search engines only understood words on the pages in their database and returned pages that included those searched words. Google essentially came along with the ability to reorder those search results based on how many other pages on the Internet linked to them.

Since then Google and other search engines have improved these foundational ranking factors and developed thousands of ways to reorder search results so only the most relevant are displayed to the user. For example the "freshness" of content or the location of where the search took place.

Panda is just another way Google reorders results based on the quality of a site's content.

Throughout this article we speculate in detail what can be learned from the "Panda Patent". The verbiage used is often vague and sometimes makes it hard to retain meaning, so here's a quick concept breakdown that should help throughout.

Panda refreshes gathered information about links and queries associated with a site.Upon a user search, each result listing (URL / Page) is given an initial score based on relevance to search and page quality.Calculations of #1 and #2 determine if the result listing (URL / Page) is above or below a threshold.Results are reordered by final values.Looking Back and the New "Panda Rank"

Way back in February 2011, Google released a major change in how they order search results. In it they explain:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

They go on to say:

...it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that's exactly what this change does.

Panda looked at the quality of content as it related to a site.

Queries about Google Algorithm

Registered User Join Date Apr 2013Location BangalorePosts 316All SEO web Masters said Google Algorithm only determines the website ranking position on search result depending on website performance,quality etc...But nobody does not tell about how that algorithm looks like...Its a kind of programming language or kind of formulas and anything else or totally different from this...?

Google Censorship Ruling in Canada Has Worldwide Implications

Search engine censorship seems to be a topic that is popping up left and right in countries around the world. This begs us to ask the question: Just how much censorship control should a government have over search engines? One Canadian court ruling would have you believe that global control is the answer.

The latest case involves Equustek Solutions, a Canadian company claiming that a competitor stole their trade secrets and is selling networking devices on Google. Equustek Solutions has requested that Google "remove all search results that link to the rival's more than 300 websites."

While Google had no hand in encouraging use of the rival's product, search results present on Google have proven very useful to the company, as does the advertising they purchase from Google.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled in favor of Equustek Solutions and issued a temporary injunction. Most importantly, the injunction requires that the results of the competing company be removed not only from Google.ca but instances of Google in other countries as well.

Google voluntarily offered to remove the search results from Google.ca but not for other sites like Google.co.uk, Goofle.fr and Google.com. A Google spokesperson drew attention to the fact that the injunction would result in "imposing Canadian law around the world". The judge's response was, "well, we have to keep up with the times."

Other Recent Search Censorship Cases

Over the last few years we've seen an increasing number of instances where Google was ordered to remove less than favorable results, or where countries have blocked content from their citizens.

Earlier this month China blocked Google results related to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

In May, Argentinian model Maria Belen Rodriguez took both Google and Yahoo to court to demand the search engines remove images linking her to pornographic sites.

Also in May, European courts ruled in favor of a Spanish man who brought a case against Google due to search results that contained "embarrassing" financial information – the case that has become widely known as the "right to be forgotten." The courts ruled that Google and other search engines to remove results that "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purpose for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed."

Many argue that these cases are not only censorship issues, but they alter the documentation of history. Gigaom put it best when they wrote:

Google, today, is like a library catalogue of available knowledge; while different countries may choose not to make certain knowledge available, people should be able to know it exists in the first place – and the best way they can do so is through Google.What is the Potential Aftermath?

A case like the one in Canada opens up the floodgates for all sorts of censorship questions and scenarios. Recent rulings provide ample opportunity for people to abuse a process and begin requesting more and more information be removed from search engines.

Law professor Michael Geist wrote:

The implications are enormous since if a Canadian court has the power to limit access to information for the globe, presumably other courts would as well. While the court does not grapple with this possibility, what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database? Or if Iran orders it remove Israeli sites from the database? The possibilities are endless since local rules of freedom of expression often differ from country to country. Yet the B.C. court adopts the view that it can issue an order with global effect.

Where do you see all this search censorship leading?

The Original Search Marketing Event is Back!

Google Updates Shopping Feed Requirements

Google has announced new shopping feed requirements.

Google AdWords ads (both text and image) are created from inventory information that sellers communicate to Google through a feed.

Google's feed specifications, or what Google requires merchants send in the inventory file, is changing to match Google Shopping's recent updates.

Sept. 30 is when Google will start enforcing the new feed format, which is designed to accommodate Google's recent mobile ad format update and Shopping Campaigns (coming in August).

2014 Google Shopping Feed Specifications Update

Google's new feed specifications include updates to mobile links, bundle attributes, availability specification changes, and changes to apparel identifiers.

Mobile Link Attribute: Retailers with mobile landing pages can submit a mobile link attribute through the data feedMerchant Defined Bundles: Allows retailers to identify products that are sold in bundles. Bundles fall under Google's unique product identifiers for the product feed. Note that bundles aren't the same as multipacks.Availability: Google is updating quantity labels to lump all quantity labels in with "in stock" and updating availability to include an "availability" attribute to note when pre-ordered items will be available.Apparel Attributes: Apparel is a notoriously difficult category for Google to categorize. The recent feed update includes details to help retailers share more information using new labels such as "age group" and size attributes "size system" and "size type".Landing Page Content Policy: Google's destination URL policy is getting updated with new background details and implementation guidelines for landing page URL submitting.Image Quality: Google also updated its image recommendations to help retailers submit higher quality product images.

For more details on Google's Feed Specification update, you can view the new specifications and enforcement policy.

The Original Search Marketing Event is Back!

Google Adds One-Click Music App Integration

by Ashley Zeckman,June 20, 2014Comments

If you're like me, you've often found yourself quietly singing the couple words to a song that you heard on the radio. Once you get frustrated that you can't remember the song or the artist, you bring up Google on your phone and enter the few words you remember. From there you'll need to open up whatever music application you use and search for the song.

Thanks to Google, the whole process just became a lot simpler. Starting this week, users can now Google a musician or song, and tap a link to open the music right into a music application on their phone.

Google Kills Google+ Direct Connect Feature

Direct Connect quietly slipped away, Search Engine Land reported.

Here's a reminder of how that functionality worked, from Google:

When it launched in 2011, Direct Connect linked search and social in a whole new way. It isn't clear when it went missing, officially.

A Google spokesperson told SEL: "That particular feature is not a focus for us moving forward."

It also appears the Google