Google Panda Update Confirmed

The reports of a Panda update by Google has been confirmed and it may rolled out anytime this week. Google has also told that there won’t be any algorithm changes and the update is just a data refresh of Google Panda algorithm.

A lot of webmasters have commented about the loss in rankings and many sites regained their traffic to Pre Panda level.

Google Panda 3.2

A lot of people may ask why 3.2 and not 2.x?One of the Googler told that “one of the 2.x updates was labeled as “minor” update and should have likely named as major update”. The updates are not numbered by Google so it is not easy to keep track of the updates.

The current “data fresh” update is just a minor update so this update is referred as 3.2 update. The last update was done during November and there was a long gap between two updates because Google said there would not be any updates during holidays.

Tags: panda 3.2, panda update

Average Search Position Metric Recalculated by Google

There has been changes made on how Google calculates average position metric.In an attempt to provide more accuracy to the rankings,the way of calculating average position in Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries and Google Analytics has undergone some changes.

This is a sample Google has put forward to understand about the changes it has made to average ranking position of pages in a site.

“Let’s say Adam searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Richard also searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Adam’s search and 5 for Richard’s search), for an Average Position of 4.” There won’t be any changes made to historical data.

Tags: analytics, search metrics

Google Launches One Privacy Policy for All

A new master privacy policy and terms of service was announced by Google in it’s official blog.The users will be notified about the new changes in the coming days.The new terms of service and privacy policy will take effect on March 1.

Instead of 70 privacy documents,Google has created one privacy document to govern all it’s products.Google can pull information from one service and deliver it to you through other Google product you use.

Individual search has become more customized and this has brought a wonderful opportunity for the advertisers to reach their targeted audience.

Check out this video on Google’s Privacy Policy Update

These new changes from Google aslo helps them to make more revenue. It will result in better search results and ads. Google made sure that it will never sell user information and it still promotes data liberation. Google received a fare share of criticism for the changes in in it’s privacy policy in previous years.

Tags: google privacy policy

Punctuation Marks and Symbols in Google Search Results

Another update from Google on it’s search results and now you can see results for punctuation marks and symbols.Searching for the symbol equivalent of a percent sign,comma,carat and more symbols will return search results but the results are not exactly relevant.

Wikipedia page ranks as the top link for for the following punctuation marks.

• ^ (caret)
• ( ) { } [ ] (bracket) – parentheses, brackets and curly brackets are all combined into the same search result
• ~ (tilde)
• | (vertical bar)
• “ (quotation marks)
• < (less-than sign) > (greater-than sign)
• $ (dollar sign)
• . (full stop/period)
• , (comma)
• : (colon) – however, the colon that is a piece of the large intestine currently outranks the punctuation mark of the same name
• ; (semicolon)
• # (number sign)
• % (percent sign)
• @ (at sign)

These punctuation marks in Yahoo and Bing diplays “No results found” to the user.

Tags: Rankings, serp

Ability to Block Search Results Will Return

When Search Plus Your World was launched by Google a few days back it also marked the exit of ability to block web sites from search results. Google says the feature will return back but the timing was not disclosed.

How Blocking Worked

Previously the results contain a “Block All” link that appeared below them. Selecting this option will not display pages in the search results of the site you blocked. This option no longer appears.

Return of Blocking Will Take “Some Time”

The feature has been dropped earlier this week and Google told they are working on a fix.Search Plus Your World is still in the process of being rolled out. It’s only a short term problem and and it might take some time.

Response to Relevancy Complaints

The blocking site feature was released last February that allowed users to block sites only if they used Google Chrome. A lot of criticisms were made on Google that their relevancy had decreased to a great extent. Google have also addressed regarding this issue in their official blog.The ability to block sites, along with Google’s Panda Update, were part of that response.

Tags: search plus your world

Twitter criticizes Google On the Update

Google has received criticism from Twitter on it’s major search update that was unveiled on Tuesday. Twitter claimed that it’s totally “bad” for web users as the update has made it harder for the users to find information.

The recent update Search Plus Your World allows Google to show results in SERP from it’s social networking platform in order to offer a personalized search experience for the users.

Twitter in a statement told that latest enhancements will not help the search engine giant when it comes to providing real time personalized information within its search results.

The statement said “Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant (search) results,” .”We’re concerned that, as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Alex Macgillivray tweeted that ” the update from Google is a bad day for internet”.Both Google and Twitter are battling for dominance in the social market which is currently headed by Facebook.

Tags: Twitter

Search Plus Your World launched by Google

Come 2012 and Google has introduced quite a lot of features thats going to bring clarity to many features they have made over the past few months.These changes include the creation of their own social media network and implementation of SSL search. Over the next few days in Google.com you will be witnessing their new change called “Search Plus Your World”.

The new feature will bring results from Google+ in the search results at the click of a button.The results include People,Pages and Profiles that are fully integrated into search results.

When personalization icon is clicked for a search query it pulls out posts and pictures from their friends circle into their search results.Already in the search results Google + posts have began to outperform the original content. The new icon personalizes the search results to those within the user’s network that includes even the content shared privately.

The results does not show anything related to Facebook or Twiiter and this helps Google+ to promote their social network.Regarding this Amit Singhal said “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Check out this video to know more about Search, plus Your World

Schemer Project and Activity Finder launched by Google

Content sharing tool has been introduced by Google which helps about finding new things in the real world.The new project allows the visitors to share,create and track progress for goals, activities and adventures.

Google has launched the project on a invite only basis and it would be a real world activity sharing site. Check this introduction part in Schemer Google+ page.

Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a friend’s movie recommendations, or just finding new activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make the most of your day.

Even though a invite is needed,Google provided links will get you into Schemer.Search for the activities based on keywords, interest,location or category.Check out recent and popular posts.

You can mark the schemes you have done,track the schemes and even share your plans.Within a few clicks you can able create,label and describe the scheme of your own

You can also hare the content via Google + or through mail.You can also connect with other schemers via Google +

Tags: schemer

Graphing Capabilities added to Google Search Results

Google search bar has now turned into a graphing calculator. When a mathematical function has been entered on Google,the search result will now contain an interactive graph of the of the function that is entered into the search bar.

Everything from a single geometric function such as sin(x) and wild set of equations can be entered in the search bar. More than one equation can be graphed at once.

It also allows the searcher to pan around on, zoom in , zoom out and gets point-by-point information from the graph.Both mathematical symbols and standard language are accepted. According to Google blog “Google graph technology is capable of mapping out of trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions”.

Google has been working on many different things that really pulls people in.High school students would love this new feature from Google to solve their mathematical questions. What do you think of this new feature from Google?

44 percent of Advertising Market owned by Google

In the last five years,the Internet ad market of the of Google have risen almost 10 percent from 44.1 percent in 2010 making it the leader of online advertising. In the global search market Google has been dominating with 85 percent and their competitors(Yahoo,Microsoft and AOL) have slipped nearly to 13.8 percent according to the survey from ZenithOptimedia.

Market share of Portals

Their acquisitions DoubleClick and YouTube had also played important role in Google’s market share. From 0.6 percent in 2006 and 3.1 percent in 2010, market share of Facebook has also grown considerably and they will surpass Microsoft by the end of the year.

Atleast till the end of year 2014 there will be sustained growth in global ad spend predicted by ZenithOptiMedia. They have also predicted that between the years 2011 and 2014, 58 percentage of ad revenue will come from emerging markets such as China,Russia and Indonesia.

Paid Search accounts for almost half of the adspend in the internet advertising segment at 15.7 percent a year and move to mobile where costs are lower will have some impact on the growth. Display will continue to trail the paid search by 2014,taking 22.6 and 25.6 respectively.

10 developing markets will contribute to 48 percent of global ad expenditure over the next three years with Brazil,Russia, India an China contributing 33 percent. For the total ad spend, China and Brazil are the only two developing countries in the list.