Last week, Google announced its most recent algorithm update. And although the search giant regularly makes small tweaks to the way they present search results, this one affects 35% percent of searches.1 While Google’s previous updates have focused on attacking low-quality sites, this one centers on the timeliness of online content. For topics that frequently […]
Search Engines
What Google Can’t Find: An Intro to the Deep Web
Due to its intuitive single search box and ever-improving algorithms, it’s easy to rely 100% on Google (or another search engine) when it comes to finding information online. You simply type in a few words to instantly view the webpages that have been identified as the most relevant to that search. The beauty of Google […]
Google Universal Search: What Is It? … And Is It Fair?
Universal Search is actually something Google unveiled way back in May 2007, and it’s become so ingrained in their user experience that you’re actually most likely using it every day without even realizing it. It simply refers to Google’s practice of including a mix of results from their different search engines, including images, videos, maps […]
How SEO Turned Social and Why Social Search is Big News
Search engine optimization has traditionally had few, if any, social components. It was a world where mediocre content coupled with masses of backlinks was a surefire path to the top of the search engines. Webmasters who cleverly interlinked their content and made hundreds of directory submissions, forum signatures and reciprocal or three way link exchanges […]
Getting Blog Visitors From Google Maps and the Growing Impact of Local Search
Update: Late in June 2011, Google pulled third-party reviews from its Places pages in order to emphasize reviews from Google users. They did keep a small link to other sites around the web with reviews, however, so traffic generation is still possible. As I was checking the analytics for my sites the other day, I […]
Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Update: Can a Computer Judge “Quality?”
Google recently made a major change in its algorithms in order to improve the quality of search results. It affects about 12% of searches, making it much more significant than its frequent smaller tweaks. It’s a timely development for people who are claiming that Google is losing the war against spam. Google’s Amit Singhal and […]