Love them or hate them Google have been the number one search engine for years, they have become a brand in themselves and a huge household name.

With the current real time phenomenom, which is completley overated in my opinion in terms of search, Google have been getting into a panic because they think that if they do not stay on top of things they are going to lose out on valuable market share. So how have the search giants responded to this?

• Social Search
• Real Time Search
• Google Wave
• Tons of other products and services

We know that Google do a lot of lab testing, but to see things such as real time search be fed into the main index, sometimes even above the organic listings is absolutley mad! These real time results are in no way relevant to what I am looking for and it just looks like a whole lot of spam.

What really is real time? Why are Google in such a panic? If you are looking for a product or a service, real time results are not what you want to see, what you want to see is trusted sites that give you what you are looking for.

So you ask yourself why has real time communication grown so much? Well, it hasnt… What has happened is that more people are now online than ever before and these people just want to talk to each other, most users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter just want to talk to people and view their pictures etc.

Real time communication has been around since the dawn of the internet, does anyone not remember the old MSN Chat?

Now this was genuine real time communication, where you could talk about all of the lastest and greatest happenings on TV/news etc. MSN Chat was hugely popular/successful and well ahead of its time in my opinion. The best thing was that it was moderated by the community, the community got to decide who entered their rooms and room creators were awarded with gold hammers to moderate the room. (This was infact how I first got into SEO, optimising the chat rooms to appear on the first page of the category).

MSN Chat was a real time community like no other.. So why then did it end up shutting down? One of two reasons really:

• Rooms were getting spammed constantly by advertisers
• Because it was extremeley busy, a big reason for MSN chat shutting down was that it provided another opportunity for pedophiles to have access to underage prey through the chat rooms.

So now if we take a look a Twitter as example, have any of these problems been addressed? No!

Twitter are bombarded with spam after spam and because it relies on users there will ALWAYS be spam. I mean even http://twitter.com/twitblacklist shut down, simply because it was getting so bad and this was in July 2008.  This is why Facebook can avoid this merely because its you talking to people you know.

Real time communication has still got the same interest it always has had, the only reason more and more people are using these services is because there is now a heck of a lot more people online.

But do we need real time spam (which will always be there) among us when we search? No we do not, all people want Google to deliver is trusted sites, in the end this is what people are looking for when they perform a search on Google. By all means use sites such as Twitter to see posts or pages which are being talked about, but including nonsense, spammy and irrelevant personal conversations in the main index is not a good idea. Past experience and internet history has always shown that when you give users full power things start to slide.. Just look at the redundant MSN Chat and MySpace more recently.

Google go back to your roots and display highly relevant results of pages online, use busy social sites as a ranking factor but do not include conversations in the results.

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It looks as thought Google are applying a fresh new image to their site. As you can see from the screenshots below I think it looks a lot better. The image, video, news, maps, are now readily avaliable on the left bar by default. The sidebar also includes a list of similar search queries and an option to filter the results based on the date Google sniffed out the website.

There is still no timeframe as to when and if this will be implemented, but there is a way to see the new design thanks to blogoscope .Paste the following into the address bar of your browser when you are on Google.com and hit return

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

What do you think of it?

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There is so much hoo ha about Twitter killing Google and Twitter being the future search tool. Every single article that you read about Twitter is that they do things in real time, real time discussions and buzz, which is something that Google’s results do not really do and do not really cater for at the moment.

Google has responded with so many different methods, the most recent being feeding in Twitter results into the SERPs and having the option to bring in results that were updated in the last hour. But in my personal opinion twitter is a social site like any other site. There are some downsides to the service in my opinion, which are as follows.

Information
Information and news is all very well and good being in real time, but what if someone wants to find old archived information or read older stories, can they do that? No they simply cannot, because it’s all in real time and sites are actually never crawled and indexed, it is going to be very hard.

Products
Now this in my opinion is the main killer for Twitter and it’s something that Google are doing wrong too. Google are now trying to bring in more real time results and results which are current that people have just posted or talked about. Every non tech person (the mass user) I know uses either EBay, Google or Amazon to buy something, with Google probably being the first choice. They do this because one, it’s easy just type into the search and away you go. Two it’s relevant, Google have never let me down when I want to buy something, they deliver the most trusted sites to me. Now what could these product searches do instead? Search on Twitter and get conversations? No thanks, or create an account and ask your 0 followers to help you out? Or I know, grow your network communicate with people you do not know and ask them, but why? Why would anyone do that? People have busy lives and they do not have enough time to constantly update their tweets. What easier solution then to go to Google and type in what you are looking for, does it have to be real time. No, not at all, trusted products from trusted sites which have built that trust with hard work and clever advertising.

Now do not get me wrong twitter has a place in the market for news and stories, but Google is so much more than that, maybe they are beating Google on the news front and if Google want to jump on that bandwagon and fill their SERPs with real time STORIES then fine, maybe it would be a better way for them to earn revenue. I mean what a clever idea to fill the SERPs with ever changing info and letting the businesses (products), battle it out on the PPC side of things. But I can tell you they are going to lose a lot of users if they do as Google is not just an information engine. Twitter is a social site just like any other that we need to use in conjunction not against. MSN Messenger does exactly the same job for me but better, I talk to people I know in real time and can ask them anything I want. I do not think Twitter can ever overtake Google, but can be a useful tool to use if you have the time, which a lot of non tech people do not. I mean was MySpace not a Google killer? Was Digg Not? Wolfram Alpha, Cuil? Stumble? Twitter is a great real time news and information addition to Google; all this makes Google a better search engine.

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I don’t usually post news stories as I try to make the blog different and unique, I mean why post something that everyone else is posting, with exactly the same stance. But I feel that the Caffeine update that Google have recently announced is well worth a blog post.

Here is a caption from the official announcement

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Read the full post by Google Here

The Google caffeine update clarifies exactly what I have been saying and thinking for the last few weeks, you can refer to the recent blog post http://www.seotops.com/google-are-now-bringing-in-more-real-time-results_1096/
I like to post about things that I see and notice happening in the search industry from experience and testing. So let’s get down to discussing the Caffeine update. So what does this mean to search positions? The future of search? And so many more unanswered questions?

Well from what I have seen although Google say that they are testing the new infrastructure on www2.sandbox.google.com and some people stating it will not affect the results. I have been seeing this is the current SERPs for some weeks now. Basically what I am seeing is results constantly changing, updated content is getting a fresh boost for major terms a lot more now query deserves freshness, part of the faster indexing and crawling capabilities. I.E. new blog posts go straight into the Top 10 for competitive terms and gradually drop out. Results are no longer stable and personally from a searchers point of view it’s a good thing. The reason I say this is because the internet has expanded so much, whereas we used to have a strict Top 10 with all the best sites, there are now so many more sites online and simply not enough room to show ever decent authority site in the Top 10.

We all know that users do not navigate to page 2-3-4 etc, so what Google can now do is constantly refresh the Top 10 with the authority and power sites, so users get to see much more great sites as well as newly created content for what they are searching for. This is basically a response to Twitter and a right back at you to Bing.

But from what I am seeing, although Google seem to be bringing in real time results and constantly refreshing the SERPs, the Top 4 positions seem to be still be stable. Again the reason for Google doing this is because they have to please all searchers, although moving into real time is all very well and good, a lot of people still want consistency and a huge amount of users click on the Top 4 results, so they have to stick. I mean if you go and search for something find a great site at the top, you want that site to appear there next time.
So where does this leave SEO? Personally I think it’s good for the SEO sector. I mean even the most competitive terms do not get that much traffic from positions 8-9 and 10. So the constant refresh will allow Google to deliver a constant flow of great results and allow all sites to get coverage numerous times a day, stable positions for competitive terms will be a thing of the past, unless of course you are a good SEO or employ a good SEO to push you into the Top 4.

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The current popularity of Twitter and the fact that Twitter are trying to turn them selves into a real time search engine has made Google stand up and react.

Although we all know that fresh unique content was always essential to build power and authority on your site and also give your new post a freshness boost, there has been a slight tweak in the algo from what I am seeing over the last few days to give further power to fresh posts from authority and powerful sites.

What seems to be happening is that when a new post is created it gets indexed and then placed into a Top 10 position for some highly competitive terms, this ten over the next few days drops off on to page two, three and then eventually disappears from the SERPs.

It seems as though Google have increased the algothirm to bring in fresh results a lot more. Again this is great for that extra little bit of exposure.

A great example of this is the term “SEO”. Firstly it was Dave Naylor’s post about geo targeting which came straight into the Top 10 and then slowly faded out as the post aged and then the Search engine journal post which hit the first page and then slowly started shifting out.

I have also seen this occur on numerous other search terms

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Since the brand update was released by Google there has been numerous SEOs asking “How they infact determine a brand”. There have been a huge amount of suggestions by various big name SEOs and other industry experts such as the following:

1) Looking at analytics data

2) Looking at offline activity

3) People searching for the brand domain

While all these may play a major part, I have been undecisive at why brands actually deserve to be ranking for highly competitive words if they are not making the effort until now. After checking and analysing most of the current results, it actually could be a great update for the search industry. The reason I say this is as follows.

For so long Google have been giving so much power to links and anchor text and although they still do, this brand update could in my opinion be introducing “brand citation” a lot more. Lets think of it this way,  to have a brand, you have to have a lot of buzz surrounding that thing. As an example lets take Ford who have recently got a major boost in all of their positions. How many citations of ford do you think there are around the whole internet? Would the majority of people actually talking about Ford link back to them? A high percentage would not, lets just say someone wrote a blog post or a news story such as the BBC and it read as follows.

“Ford have released a new model of the highly succesful Mondeo car, this new car is set to introduce a new era of driving”.

Now thinking about it a huge amount of sites would actually do something like this, then if on the other hand you had Mr Smiths car related site called mrsmithautos.com as an example, that has great content and a great structure but has actually gone out and got himself lots of great backlinks with perfect targetted anchor text, in Googles eyes this is a lot less natural then people actually talking about his site. And in most occasions Mr Smiths site will not have any REAL citations such as “mrsmithautos are releasing a new innovative approach to selling cars online”.

But with the ford sentence above, Google have the processing power to analyse and understand all the content around the Brand, so they know that in high probability that the person is talking about the Brand ford and the site gets a boost for the keywords around it. Again as Matt Cutts indicated the higher the PR and relevancy of the site referencing the brand name, the more power will be passed through.

Its the same if you look at another brand Autotrader, there are a huge amount of people that write personal blog posts such as “I just purchased a great second hand BMW for Autotrader, it only cost me £1000″. Just because that term is not linked why should Autotrader not get any benefits from it? We all know that with the rise in popularity of social media sites such as Twitter a vast amount of people are going to be citing brands.

In my opinion Google from what it seems could be actually analysing content and references a lot more, its the perfect solution ifyou have a brand people are going to talk about it in general sentence not just link to it and this is what Google may now well be analysing and it could be the reason as to why some of the results are slightly out of shape as they further tweak the algo to get this right.

Just my two cents, to create a brand you need to have something good to offer and great content so people discuss your site a lot more.

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I decided just to let a few people know about the current state of PageRank,I still know that for a lot of reasons such as the rate of crawl and the depth of crawl pagerank is essential to some people.

I am seeing a vast amount of people on forums still stating that pagerank is updated every three months or so. This is outdated information and is something that is misguiding a lot of people.

From what I can tell Google is now continuously rolling out Pagerank updates, I have seen new sites get pagerank within a few weeks of working on them. We always used to know that Google have always been constantly updating their inner Pagerank status on a daily basis and now that is what seems to be displayed to us. There is no more long periods of pagerank inactivity.

Hope this helps clear up a few matters

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Lately we are seeing more and more evidence that Google maybe loosing its grip on the search field. One of the main reasons for saying this is because we are seeing huge problems in the UK results at the moment.

Basically a huge volume of USA based sites are being filtered through and its something that actually looks veryworrying. Google or Matt Cutts have yet to say anything about what has happened, but I can assure you that its something UK searchers do not want to see especially for product related terms.

As an example if someone searched for “Buy computer games” or another product related term they do not want to see results that are USA based, it just doesn’t make sense.

Next if we then look at Google Trends

For almost every product related search you will notice that we are seeing a gradual decrease in volumes. This shows that users are just not searching like they used too. But another interesting fact is that if you search for brand names on Google trends such as “Ebay” or “Amazon” you will notice a great rise in overall volumes.

Which potentially shows that a lot of people could be losing trust in Google over the past few years. I mean why shouldnt they? Google’s popularity grew because they were the best they had the best possible results for someone making a search. Looking at the UK results in their current state looks pretty shocking and to be honest I have not seen results that bad from Google for years.

Dont get me wrong I love Google like most people, but it just seems as though they are taking their eye off the ball a little, and what a bad time for this to happen, because as we know Bing has recently launched and personally their results are looking a lot better.

I would really like to get some answers on the state of the UK results and the reasons behind it? Matt Cutts?

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There seems to be a lot of activity occurring with Google lately, for the past few weeks I have seen organic listings being shuffled around constantly. A lot of people have enquired as to what seems to be happening, people have been noticing that the inner pages on their sites are no longer ranking like they used too.

It seems as though from my point of view that Google are devaluing the power of domain ranking. What I mean by this is that for so long sites that have had a powerful homepage have been also getting inner pages ranked for their keyterms without the individual page actually having any authority whatsoever.

An example of this is the Web 2.0 sites that a lot of people have been targeting such as Squidoo, Tumblr and Ezine, people having been creating pages on these powerful domains and have seen the pages get relatively high rankings. But it seems as though with Google’s latest update this could be a thing of the past as they now seem to be looking more at the individual strength of each and every page instead of the domain that the page it is on. Google have always stated they rank pages and not sites, but this has not been the case until now.

As we all know Google did bring in a new “Brand Ranking” factor which gives more authority towards brands, I feel this and the Mayinner update are going to work hand in hand, as sites such as Amazon are not going to feel the change, but smaller sites which have built up only their homepages as the power horse could now see a huge drop in inner page rankings.

Mind you this is just an observation, let me know if you have noticed anything similar?

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Ok Iwas looking to start a new personal project with car insurance affiliation, to my surprise car-insurance.co.uk was avaliable at Godaddy I went through and it let me check out… Hey there must be something wrong here as I then checked carinsurance.co.uk and again got that. Finally I searched for the big one Google.co.uk ad OMG it was avaliable so I snapped it up. Idont know if this is a problem that Godaddy are having with IE8 but I have three established domains that I have paid for, I hope I get a refund

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