Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past 5 months or so, you’ve probably heard of/been affected by the update codenamed “Panda”.

It all started at the end of February when Google started giving users the ability to “flag” poor sites with a Chrome browser extension.  They did this as a way to begin beta-testing a new update.  They wanted to see if the algorithm they developed found the same sites to be poor as regular users.  They found their algo was quite accurate.  Then, in April, using that user data and other indicators, they began rolling out the new algorithm which affected about 12% of the world’s websites.

Since those updates, Panda, as it has been named, has been refined a couple times, with the most recent change happening in Mid-June.  At that time, some sites have seen improvements however most webmasters are still reporting that they haven’t recovered since the first updates.

Some sites I’ve been working with have seen recovery, but not until changes were made.  This article explains how I came to my conclusions.

Continue reading “Google’s Panda Update Months Later – What’s Changed?” »

Unless you have been living under a rock these past few months you have no doubt noticed that google has moved in a local direction for many searches – especially those with a local qualifier. What Google has done is incorporate “Places” into search results – attempting to help people find businesses in their area that provide the product or service they are searching for.

For example, if you search for “pizza” plus your local area you will get a list of pizza places around you.  If you do this search on your mobile device you’ll even get them sorted by geography, with the search giant utilizing your location to help refine your results.  As you can see, a places listing can be quite beneficial to a merchant.

Continue reading “Google Places – Should I Claim my Place?” »

You read right – Google Instant is now available for  Google Canada users.

What is Google Instant?

It is a way for Google to return search results instantly as you type.

But I don’t see results as I type

that’s ok – it isn’t available to everyone at once.  With features like this, sometimes Google rolls them out to a small group for testing then to a larger group as their testing comes to an end.  They do this for many reasons.  First, to see how users take to it.  Second, to see if there are refinements they can make to results, and third of course is to ensure that they don’t crash their own systems because of heavy usage.

How do I know if I have Google Instant turned on?
Continue reading “Google Instant – Now Available in Canada!” »

Recently, Google announced a “groundbreaking” change to the way it serves search results. Essentially from this day forward, Google was going to serve results from all their properties which may match a search query, and not just results from it’s search index.
In other words, a search for a Canon digital camera may not only return results from the main search index, but also shopping results, news results, and video results (among others).
In fact, Google has been doing this for some time, however they explain that the results will become more noticeable as time goes on.
But Google isn’t the only one jumping into the “Universal search” field. Ask has been doing this for some time, and recently Yahoo updated it’s search results with similar universal results.
So who is most effective at this new type of search?

Continue reading “Universal Search – Is Google The Best At It?” »