Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

Google recently released their new product, Google Buzz.  Buzz can be compared to other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Here is a video that shows what Buzz is capable of doing.

So what does this mean from a search and marketing perspective for businesses?  Well, most will treat it similar to Facebook and Twitter where they will be sending out business information and updates to consumers.  They will be able to follow their customers and competitors alike, just like in other social media sites.

But it can open up other possibilities that those other sites might not be capable of doing.  The quickness of responses from other people in your network would be much higher than that of Facebook, even though they are both in real time.   Google Buzz is based on Gmail, and if people get involved with Buzz on the business side, they would never leave their email all day, considering that anything posted on Buzz would show up in your inbox if it is important.  Facebook is more of a check and leave type social media.  People there go on every once in a while to check updates, etc, and then leave.

On the search side of things, Buzz may offer more than what can be shown on other media sites.  Buzz updates could be integrated with social search, which can be very important for the business uses of social media.  When a customer does a Google search, and they are connected to a business that is part of their social circle, anything relevant from the business will be shown up near the top of their search results.

It would be interesting to see if this feature would extend outside the first degree of contacts in the customer’s social circle.  For example, if a customer’s friend did the same search, would they see the same results due to the business being two degrees of separation away?  This could open up many possibilities and would make connections in Buzz that much more important for businesses.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talks about how Google will rank links coming from Facebook and Twitter.

In the latter part of 2009 both Google and Microsoft struck deals with Twitter almost simultaneously. This gave both search engines the ability to have real-time results for search queries. Microsoft hit the ground running with the deal and immediately released their version of real-time search also announcing that users with more followers will have their tweets ranked higher and those who essentially retweet will have those tweets ranked lower. Google, on the other hand, took its time to release its version of real-time search.

Google integrated real-time search with its traditional SERPs with its sources being a number of social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter of course. Sticking to tradition, Google did not release how they will rank tweets initially. However, in a recent interview with Amit Singhal, who led the development for real-time search for Google, with MIT’s Technology Review reviled one part of Google’s ranking algorithm for tweets.

From what Singhal said in the interview, Google will rank tweets in the same way it ranks web pages. It is, in essence, Google’s PageRank algorithm rewritten for Twitter; replace links with followers and you got its “TweetRank” algorithm. Singhal said that tweets will be ranked based not only on how many followers you have, but also “how reputable those followers are.”

The common practice of using hashtags in tweets may be a bad thing for those trying to rank their tweets. Hashtags are commonly a sign of low quality tweets and will become a part of Google’s spam control strategy. This may, in fact, cause a significant reduction in the usage of hashtags by Twitter users.

Being Google, they did not tell us everything about how they will rank tweets. Keep in mind that Twitter is Google’s only source for real-time search; Facebook, MySpace, and other social network, as well as blogs, will play a big role in real-time search. Though they have not released any official information, it is probable that Google will rank things like Facebook posts in the same way it will for Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Bing, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization

Google to Rank Tweets by http://thewebsquad.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/01/14/google-to-rank-tweets/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.technologyreview.com.

A lot of people in business go by the old saying “First impressions are everything”, however, with Google and the other search engines this is completely opposite. With the search engines they base their results on the last time they crawled the web in order to provide the most up to date results to searchers. However, the search engines do not crawl equally, in fact they are very biased on who they crawl and when. In order to get crawled and indexed often you have to earn Google’s trust.

Today, search engines are looking for the latest and greatest to display in its SERPs. This means that classic link building techniques are going to be less effective than they have been in the past. Google is going to start looking for the best, most up to date content to display to its users so site age will come into effect but so will site trust. This keeps brand new start ups from dominating the first page, but also keeps stagnate, out of date sites from clogging up the works as well. This is where the Google cache comes in. The cache is a carbon copy of how your site looked the last time Google visited it, and it will tell you when that was exactly. Google, like any other company, does not like to waste time and resources so it crawls sites only when they need to.

If you have a static website the last crawl date is not that big of deal because you site is not any different now than it was then. If you have a blog or a blog on your main website, then this cache date should be very important to you because it tells you two things. First, it tells you what content Google has indexed for your site, and, second, it tells you how much Google trusts your site. You can figure out your trust rank with Google and other search engines based on how quickly they index and cache your site after publishing new content; the quicker they crawl your site, they better your trust ranking with that search engine. To improve this ranking all you have to do is publish quality, unique content. When you do this Google sees that every time they visit your site it has changed, and will, in a sense, bookmark it for quick indexing every time you publish something. Like everything with search engines (except maybe PPC), this will not happen overnight.

Tech Tags:
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Google

How to ‘Cache’ Google’s Eye by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

2010 began with some controversy over a decision by Google to remove local listings that usually appear on top of the organic results for SEO and web designer queries. Many SEOs and web designers alike are bashing Google for making this move saying that it is unfair and favors larger firms. They feel that their hard and honest work has been wasted just because Google does not look kindly upon SEOs.

Some believe the move to fake local results created by large national firms and outsourcing firms in India. However, this is not the first time Google has made a big move to combat spam. Previously, they stopped reading Meta keywords to combat with keyword stuffing along with discontinuing the use of PageRank (at least for the publics’ use) to combat with paid link exchanges.

Some SEOs are actually praising Google for the move stating that map results are largely abused by nation and foreign firms. Others are also saying that since web design and SEO is a national and global industry by nature local results are irrelevant. They also say that the

"web design Las Vegas" vs "web design in Las Vegas"

companies at the top of the listings deserve to be there because they are the best and have the most amounts of clients linking to them.

However, there is a small glint of hope for small firms. SEOs have found (almost immediately after the update took place) that if you type “web design in Las Vegas” rather than “web design Las Vegas” local results appear. This gives smaller, local firms a fighting chance. The only problem is that most searchers have become accustomed to getting local results without having to add “in”, therefore, the keyphrase with the additional word receives considerably less traffic.

The industry was already expecting changes for 2010 starting with Caffeine, but this one definitely took us by surprise. Google shows no signs of changing the listings back to normal anytime soon so we have to assume that this is a permanent move and just deal with it no matter how much we like to complain. Now the question is what will Google change next?

No Local Listings for SEOs and Web Designers? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Technorati Tags
Google, SEO, Google Maps