The role of Google raters
Posted by megan on December, 5th 2011
When you think of Google and how it ranks websites for keywords, you tend to think of high tech computerised systems that judge websites on their quality, relevance and authenticity. This of course is something that does happen, however Google do employ actual human beings, known as ‘Google Search Quality Raters’, to check websites that are ranking highly for specific popular keywords. These raters are employed by external companies and must study information and take a two part exam before being accepted. They have a set of guidelines to follow to ensure they ... (Read more)
What’s the deal with Google Sitelinks?
Posted by admin on August, 31st 2011If you use Google a lot for searching the internet, you may have noticed some changes in recent weeks.
When you search for a brand e.g. “Graham and Green”, you will see that the majority of the first page of Google has changed. This is because Google have recently made some changes to how they display search results for large or popular websites by adding sitelinks.
So what exactly are Google sitelinks and how do they work? In the simplest of terms, Google crawls your website and finds shortcuts to the pages that it thinks users will find the most ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle Plus – Our First Thoughts
Posted by admin on July, 1st 2011
Today Real Web SEO gained access to Google+ and we couldn’t be more excited!
Google+ (also known as Google Plus) is a well thought out mix of the best features from Facebook with instant messaging and video chat similar to Skype. Here’s our initial reaction to Google Plus asking the question, will it be third time lucky for Google?
Once you have access to Google+ one of the first things you should do is to organise your contacts in to different groups called Circles:
Third time lucky? Google tries to go social – again
Posted by admin on June, 30th 2011
Circles, sparks and hangouts… no, we’re not talking about a visit to the circus, we are talking about Google’s latest attempt at breaking into the lucrative social media market.
After two failed forays into the world of social media, Google announced it’s latest project this week – Google +: https://plus.google.com/
Billed as a more human way of sharing information online, Google + aims to tighten up the way we socialise online with different groups and make our sharing more selective.
Google+ is a lot like Twitter and Facebook in that ... (Read more)
Read moreSEO Myth – “Google Favours W3C Validiated Web Pages”
Posted by admin on April, 19th 2011
Does Google favour web pages with perfect HTML code or will it happily accept one with coding (syntax) or validation errors? Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts (shown in this video on this topic) has said for many years that demoting webpages which don’t validate to the W3C standard is not something Google will ever consider.
Some web developers and so-called “SEO experts” will argue that compliant code will work in every web browser and take less time for a web spider to crawl and take the data/content out. Therefore all ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle’s “Best Guess”
Posted by admin on March, 23rd 2011Google very quietly launched a new little feature in the SERPs recently, the search engine now gives its ‘Best Guess” at any commonly agreed information.
Look at the example below for a Google search on a upcoming computer game called “Duke Nukem Forever”:
Searching the game’s name plus the words “release date” sparks off the new guessing feature, I recommend you give it a try for computer games, movies and albums.
Most upcoming releases don’t yet show in Google’s search results and ones that do are mentioned from only reputable sources such as magazine ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle “Farmer” Update – What To Look Out For
Posted by admin on March, 4th 2011
There’s been a lot of big news from Google recently with some deeply impacting changes to their top-secret ranking algorithm. The biggest one for years came out recently which has been dubbed the “farmer” update.
Google update their complex algorithm on an almost daily basis to improve their search results, trying to eliminate spam and bad information. Every now and then a major change comes out which knocks down a significant number of clearly spammy websites; this update on the other hand affected a significant number of established websites such as EzineArticles.com and ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle PageRank (PR) Update!
Posted by admin on January, 20th 2011
At last, Google have updated their PageRank score on web-pages across the whole of the internet!
The last Google Toolbar PageRank update was way back on the 2nd of April 2010 and it’s been a huge wait this time around with 2009 having 5 updates and 2010 having only one.
You can quickly tell the worth of a website by looking at it’s PR, a PR higher than 4 shows that a website has achieved some very quality links over it’s lifetime and will be full of unique content. A ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle Fix Search Engine Results!
Posted by admin on January, 4th 2011Google have (for the first time) fixed their own search engine results.
Before anyone sues don’t panic… Google have teamed up with the Samaritans and other charities to help people in need. If anyone is looking for ways to commit suicide for example they’ll notice the number to call the Samaritans who are especially trained to deal with anyone in a highly emotional state. See below the image when you search for the word “suicide”:
Google’s original stance on charities was for them to use PPC advertising and “ethical” SEO techniques to ... (Read more)
Read moreGoogle Search Promotes Local Listings
Posted by admin on October, 29th 2010Google have drastically changed the way local search results are displayed on it’s search results listings.
Local listing are now brought out of the mini map and are now added to the main search results. See the image below for an example with the local keyword “restaurant nottingham”:
The mini map has been moved to the right hand side which covers the advertising as you scroll downwards. Intrestingly the data used for these new local listings comes from a combination of the homepage meta and the information stored in the local listing as ... (Read more)
Read more