Continue reading »]]> Finally, Google has confirmed an update of Panda 3.2 just recently! According to the company, they have refreshed the algorithm of Google Panda yet once again, about a week back. However, the company insisted that there were no new signals or changes in algorithm. It can be stated here that this is merely a data refresh.

There have been sudden reports of webmasters regarding their rankings over the search engines. While most of these webmasters complained over losing the ranking, there were another group of sites that suddenly regained traffic. Most of these websites that regained traffic were initially hit by the Panda phenomenon. It can be argued here that perhaps, Google performed the data refresh so that they could update which sites should’ve been initially hit and which were basically target of the beta version and were not supposed to lose traffic.

The Panda Update 3.2 comes exact 2 months after the previous one, the Panda Update 3.1, which occurred on November 18, 2011. More news on this latest update will be disclosed very soon by Google.

Continue reading »]]> Yahoo! announced that Scott Thompson will be taking over the role of Chief Executive Officer from January 9, 2012. He will be taking the seat from Tim Morris and will also be given the seat to the Company Board of Directors from the same date. Yahoo!’s new CEO Scott Thompson was previously the President of PayPal, a sister concern of eBay.

It was under PayPal that he showed his mettle as a person who can deliver, by making PayPal’s lead go mammoth in the online payment network. In his reign the company expanded from 50 million users to over a whopping 104 million users in over 190 countries. He was also the mastermind who expanded the merchant partners to over an impressive 8 million worldwide.

Scott Thompson

The revenues also toppled the previous mark, going from $1.8 million to an unassailable $4+ billion.  Other than PayPal, Scott Thompson has worked as the Executive Vice President of Inovant, Chief Information Officer of Barclays Global Investors and has also provided his expertise to Coopers & Lybrand.

The Chairman of Yahoo! is very enthusiastic about having Scott Thompson aboard and believes Scott’s past record is a clear proof of how he can build a solid foundation of the existing assets as well as resources to help Yahoo! reignite the drive growth and innovation. Yahoo! aims to revamp the spark of progress that has been part of this company for so long and Scott Thompson may just be at the driver’s seat of all this.

Continue reading »]]> Google introduces author stats in Webmaster Tools. According to Google blog post now authors can see how many times their content is showing in the search results. In order to get this information the author’s content must be associated with his /her Google profile. This can be done through email verification.

After verification of account, log in to the Google Webmaster Tool and you can see the Author Stats under the Labs panel, located on the left navigation.

Author Stats in WMT

Now the number of impressions and clicks on content can be viewed by the author in Google Webmaster Tools.  Following is  Matt Cutts stats displayed on Google Blog.

Matt Cutts Author Stats

Google says that this is  just experimental and they are continuously improving this feature.

Continue reading »]]> CleverSense is the latest addition in Google acquisitions. Clever Sense is the company which owns “Alfred”; Alfred is an intelligent Mobile Search Engine which is widely used by the mobile lovers. Alfred recommends local restaurants, health Clinics, night Clubs and other local places with in your reach.

By Acquiring Clever Sense, Google now has the opportunity to compete with Apples Siri.  Alfred will be used in Androids in the same way as Siri  in   iphone.

Clever Sense also gained a huge advantage and larger scope after this merger. Google will power the Alfred in local search capabilities.

Clever Sense  co-founder and CEO Babak Pahlavan  wrote on the site :

“When we embarked on our mission to curate the world around us, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked hard to build the Clever Sense Platform to tackle the problem of information overload in the real world. Using that platform, we built Alfred to create a simple, enjoyable, and powerful way to discover new places and help make decisions on the go. It’s exciting to see that our passion turned into something people around the world use regularly to make everyday decisions that are just right for them.

Today, we are excited to join Google and start a new chapter in curating the world around us! Together with the Google team, we will accelerate our efforts toward this shared vision. Google helps local businesses connect with potential customers and its worldwide presence can bring the value of Clever Sense to a much larger audience.

Discovering local information is extremely important to both users and businesses, and the acquisition of Clever Sense will benefit both.

The journey has been nothing short of incredible. Our vision has only become bigger, and our commitment stronger. With Google and Clever Sense working together, our entire team looks forward to building more intelligent, serendipitous and magical services!

We didn’t achieve this success alone. We sincerely want to thank our users, investors, our amazing board and superb advisors. We will be your loyal fans for life.

Smiles,

-Babak Pahlavan

Co-founder and CEO

P.S. Please send all press inquiries to:press@google.com “

So, we have to wait how Google compete with Apple in the area of Mobile Local Search. Clearly this acquisition will paved the way for Google to gain Mobile Market share as Alfred is very well capable of competing Siri.

Continue reading »]]> This article will explain what actually Google Trust is. There are many terms that are used in this regard e.g reputation, trust rank, authority.

There is a misconception about the existence of Google Trust Rank Algorithm. The fact is that there is no specific algorithm for measuring Google Trust Rank.

Google use   “Trust” in a broad spectrum. Trust counts many factors like how much user-friendly your site is, quality of your links, relevancy and many others.

Matt Cutts explains Google Trust

Signals For Google Trust:

According to Matt Cutts there are no specific terms like trust rank or authority rank.  Google build trust with the help of many factors, some of which are listed below.

Page Rank:

Page Rank is one of the main factor with the help of which Google decide how trust worthy the site is?  why page rank is important factor for trust? Let me explain, Page rank depends on the quality and authority of backlinks of your website. If your site has quality back links then your page rank will increase. So if you have good quality back links , it means you have good Page Rank , if you have a good page rank , Google will have more trust on your site, so that is why page rank is a main signal for  Google Trust.

High quality links:

As discussed above that high Quality links are necessary for Good Page Rank, which is a main signal of Google trust. High quality links are those links that are coming from relevant and authority sites. If your site has back links form Page rank 0 or irrelevant sites than these are not high quality back links, in order to get high quality back links you should make your content more compelling and attractive so that people want to link back to you, this is know as link baiting. If you have High quality back links, this will help you in gaining Google trust.

How relevant the information is?

Relevancy is another signal for Google to build trust.  If your content is relevant to the query that user has entered, then this will be a positive signal for Google to rank your site.  If your site is well optimized for your target keywords and you have some thing useful for the users then Google will trust your site.

User point of view:

If a user visits your site even without knowing the query, then finds your site useful and user friendly, this means that your site is reputable and can be trusted.  Basically Google looks at the site in general prospective, if the site has good user experience, then it is eligible for Google Trust or Google Trust Rank (the term used by masses)

To sum up we can say that if your site has good reputation and better user experience, High quality links, then the site is very likely to be trusted by Google. So just concentrate on the quality of your site, make it user friendly, and put attractive and compelling content.

Hope this  helps you in understanding Google Trust, Authority and other similar terms.

Continue reading »]]> Google continues to make its search results better and user friendly. Gone are the days when there are just text results in the SERPs. If you look todays search results you can see combination of images, videos and rich snippets and text results. Universal Search results are showing in Google SERPs.

Going one step further Google now introduces graphical representation of mathematical functions right on the search result pages. Just type your function in the Google and you will get colorful pictorial representation of your function on the search result page.

The figure shows the graph in the search results

So now you don’t have to worry about the graphical representation of your function, just type into Google and get your colorful Graph. This is specially for Math Lovers.

Continue reading »]]> Google announced new markup for multilingual content. Multilingual content refer to different versions of the same site in different languages. Many websites have more than one version of the same content but in different regional languages.  For instance there is a news site that has different versions in different languages i.e.   Primary version in English, French Version, Italian version, Spanish Version.

Each version is to target specific country like France, Spain and Italy etc. e.g.  following is the domain in different versions

1. http://www.exampledomain.com           English Version
2. http://fr.exampledomain.com                 French Version
3. http://es.exampledomain.com                Spanish Version

Rel= “alternative”  hreflang “x”  Tag:

In order to tell Google about different language versions of the website, Google introduces Rel= “alternative”  hreflang “x”  tag.

Suppose you have a website that has three versions i.e. English, French, Spanish.  So you can use the hreflang tag in the following way.

In each version you specify the other two versions of the site through using the Rel= “alternative”  hreflang “x”  tag.

Take the English Version in this version you can specify the Rel= “alternative”  hreflang “x”  tag in two different ways.

1. HTML Head Section:

Add  the following two tags pointing to  French and Spanish versions in the Head section .

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”http://es.exampledomain.com/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”http://fr.exampledomain.com/” />

2.HTTP Header:

For Non Html files you can use the HTTP Header

Link: <http://es.exampledomain.com/>; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”es”

Link: <http://fr.exampledomain.com/>; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”fr”

Note that you have to specify these tags in each one of the versions that are pointing to other two versions of the site. i.e English version contains tag that points to Spanish and French version. Spanish version contains tags that points to English and French Version. French version contains tags that points to English and Spanish Versions.