The value of scoring the top spot in Google local results was brought to light by a new eye tracking and click tracking study from Mediative. The study also revealed that social content can be instrumental in boosting the rankings further down the page. Also, the “Google's Golden Triangle” exists in the way searchers use and scan Google’s local results. The Golden triangle formula is not applicable in the case when lower ranked sites have more content that the higher ranked ones!
Google rolled out a freshness update in its Caffeine algorithm, that impacted 35% of the searches made. Now, SearchMetrics has compiled a list of the biggest losers and winners post the update. Most sites that have benefited from the update are major brands and a variety of news sites. News sites is not a surprise as the update was aimed at rewarding fresh content, the fresher the better.
Google really likes to shake things up. The search engine has now updated its Caffeine algorithm to show more recent search results when time centric events and information are searched, like developing news stories and product reviews.
Google's road to local has just been altered, and the local search stakes have been raised by the search engine in Google Places. These changes in the local results SERPs on Google search was announced by Google recently.
This one is a big news- Google is now indexing AJAX and JavaScript content. This means that the text from comments on Facebook pages will now show up in Google search results.
What Is The Big News?
HowToGoMo.com- This is a new site launched by Google. The purpose of the site is to act as a mobile website training and testing ground. Webmasters can key in their sites to see how mobile friendly their sites are, and see their sites exactly as users see them on their smartphones.
Google has just moved its street level mapping from outdoors to indoors, and that too inside shops and businesses. Using the cameras from the street view project, Google will now take street-level photos of commercial establishments and places by taking street view indoors.
What Has Happened?
Google Webmaster Tools has launched a new message alert that will inform the webmasters whenever a particular URL is seen by Google as a duplicate of another domain's URL, and consequently doesn’t appear in search results.
How Google Identifies Duplicate Content:
Google recently introduced the Webmaster Tools alert feature and also threw light on the way, Google identifies duplicate content cluster and then selects a canonical version of the cluster to display as a part of search results.
Google has improved the look of authorship in its search results. That is the results that use the rel=author markup have been changed slightly. Post a few weeks of tests, the new markup is being displayed in Google’s search results.
As Google explains, “We introduced a simple way for content creators to set up authorship using just their email address, which displays their name and picture on the Google search results page alongside content they wrote. In addition, we’ve added a few improvements to the author information you see in the search results, so you can find out more about the authors behind the articles and engage with them directly.”
"We don’t consider SEO to be spam," – this is the Google view as presented by Matt Cutts. Matt is the head of Google's anti spam squad.
And now the Google's new definition of SEO- "SEO is a valid way to help people find what they’re looking for via search engines."
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