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Google has done it again - yesterday, Google changed its approach to Internet search, so that the results are "universal", not just those from Web pages. This means that users also get results from a variety of sources: news sites, blogs, video services and other relevant places.
On Wednesday, Google began showing videos on its main results page along with photos, books and other content previously separated into different categories.
Google’s service is the first that fully blends results into a single list that uses the company’s ranking algorithms to order them appropriately. In addition, the company is introducing new navigation features at the top of every Google page that let users to quickly hop between its different properties. (Seen above.)
As Eric Enge from SearchEngineLand says:
With its universal search, Google is now going to offer results in web search that integrate results from all of their vertical search properties, such as image, video, maps, local, blogs, etc. The video results will include results from third party video sites like Metacafe, and not just from Google's own YouTube and Google Video.
While some of this has been going on for a while, Google is going to be integrating all of these various component search engines so that the most relevant item shows up first. So if the most relevant item is a video, it will be the first result. If the most relevant item is a map, then it will be the first result, and so forth.
He goes on to say:
With this normalized data in hand, Google can receive a user query, poll all the various sources of data they have, look at the results, and rank order them on the fly. What's the reason for all of this investment? Relevance. Being able to do this on the fly allows them to deliver highly relevant queries through a single search box, regardless of whether or not the best result is a map, local results, images, videos, blogs, or whatever. In fact, you may see some mix of these through the results.
That's the keyword - relevance. Find the result that is most relevant to your query.
As always, Google is ahead of other search engines by light years.
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First of all, my apologies for my sporadic posting - spring is here and business has sprung!
However, here is something that my brother sent me two weeks ago that has made me giggle. My bro, who reads stuff like EETimes.com, came across this little gem: Apparently Sony didn't check the sanity of their marketing guys before going ahead with the roll out of a new slasher computer game. At the press party they used bits of a goat from the local abattoir. The louche atmosphere was enhanced by topless chicks feeding grapes to men and a 'bobbing for entrails' game (a warm meat soup designed to look like the real thing).
In its mea culpa, Sony said: "We recognise that the use of a dead goat was in poor taste and fell below the high standards of conduct we set ourselves."
Serio! What on earth were they thinking? I find it amusing that Sony thinks that it was only the goat that was in poor taste, but that's just me.
Lessons to be learned here, kids:
- Dead animals are never a good marketing tool.
- Don't try to use the old, "Hey, man, the goat was already dead!" excuse in your official PR apology.
- Double-check any campaign to see if it could possibly backfire.
- Remember that not all PR is good PR. Because nobody wants this...
Rand Fishkin is one of those SEO dudes that, when he says something, we all take note. And this time he sheds some light on the typical link patterns of external link equity that flows to sites. In other words, how many incoming links you have, and how they are distributed throughout your site. The short equation is this: good content = more inbound links. He also points out that, unfortunately, e-commerce or business focused pages receive very little link love.
He provides some best practices, posted here, which help spread the love around:
- Use Google's Webmaster Central to sort link numbers to your site's page - make a list of everything that gets more than "X" links (in our case, we'd probably use something like 500, but for less-well-linked-to sites, that number might be 10)
- Determine the "valley" pages that need link juice and their relevance to your various "mountain" pages. You don't want to add links that are completely irrelevant and off-topic, and ideally, you'd even want to convert visitors from those link-rich pages into viewers of your link-poor pages.
- Use relevant, accurate anchor text from the "mountains" to the "valleys"
- Double-check with an outsider - do those links still look relevant and valuable to visitors? If not, refine and try again. You want to pass the link-juice, but not at the price of losing usability & potential inbounds to link-rich pages.
As for "link juice" - yes, I have a hard time saying it with a straight face too... it's a term coined by SEM consultant Greg Boser with the meaning of link power, PageRank, link votes etc. - that are obtained from backlinks (aka inbound links).
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