Search, plus Your World: a sad day for tech, but not for the reason you think
On Tuesday, Google announced Search, plus Your World.
The deep integration of Google+ results into its search results is perhaps the strongest reminder yet of the fact that Google is competing head on with publishers and other companies. Publishers and companies that hope to achieve top rankings in the company's search results.
Google may penalize ads, but what about its ads?
Google's efforts to improve its SERPs are no secret. From Panda to Freshness, Google's strategy can be summed up briefly: filter out the junk, promote quality and relevance.
When it comes to the former, Google may be considering an interesting approach: penalize pages that it believes have too many ads.
Google 'Sources': a publisher's worst nightmare?
Google may be the world's largest, most widely-used search engine, but that's not all it is. Over the years, through both homegrown projects and acquisitions, the search behemoth has become a bona fide publisher in its own right.
Not surprisingly, this has created tensions between Google and some of the publishers that rely on its SERPs which drive traffic to their websites.
If Google is a publisher, many argue, how can it play fair when it comes to those SERPs?
Google tries to keep SERPS from going stale with Freshness update
Google may be the world's most widely-used search engine, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Indeed, the past several years have seen a growing number of complaints from users and experts alike relating to the quality of Google search results.
More recently, it appears that Google has focused much of its efforts to improve on weeding out spam and the low-quality content made famous by content farms.
But a new update that the company revealed yesterday shows that Google isn't just focusing on minimizing the amount and prominence of cruddy content in its index.
Google gets the Microsoft treatment on Capitol Hill
Little more than a decade ago, Microsoft was public enemy number one. After the United States Justice Department filed suit, a judge ruled that the world's largest software maker was a monopoly and must be broken up.
That ruling was overturned, and in 2001, the company settled with the Department of Justice.
Today, Microsoft is still one of the world's largest software makers, and Internet Explorer, the product that was the focus of so much of the government's action against the company, is still the world's most widely-used internet browser.
The company, however, has been humbled in markets like search and mobile, which were nascent in 2001. The implication: try as hard as they might, big technology companies can't use their size to guarantee success.
Bing makes search more personal with Adaptive Search
For Microsoft, Google's overwhelming dominance of search has not deterred the Redmond software giant from trying to compete in the market.
In fact, if anything, it's only given Microsoft a greater incentive to try to recapture a market it probably believes it should have owned.
After years of failure, it's hard to argue that Microsoft has finally made some headway in the search wars with Bing. At the same time, of course, this doesn't mean that Bing will ever compete toe-to-toe with Google, or that Bing will ever become a profitable investment.
Google's sitelinks changes: the experts' view
Google has announced that it has expanded the number of sitelinks shown on search results pages, something you'll see on a search for most brands.
I've been asking some of our SEO guest bloggers about how the changes will affect websites, and how they can adapt to and take advantage of them...
Report reveals Google's organic CTR
Just how important is being on the first page of a Google search result page? Just how valuable is owning the top spot?
Following recent updates Google has made to its algorithm, Optify, a marketing software vendor, decided to create a new CTR curve based on data it has collected on behalf of a subset of its B2B and B2C clients.
Content as an appreciating asset
Content may be king. At least that's what many companies in the business of producing content think for obvious reasons.
Take Demand Media, for instance. It's so confident that its content is an appreciating asset that will produce value over a long period of time that it amortizes the costs of producing content over five years.
Google adds user feedback signal to algorithm
In the past several months, Google has undertaken a major effort to improve the quality of its index.
From cracking down on high-profile retailers using black hat and grey hat SEO techniques to algorithm updates designed to weed out low-quality content farms, there can be little doubt that Google is serious about changing perceptions about its dedication to quality SERPs.
And Google's effort continues. Yesterday, the search giant announced that it rolled out its "high-quality sites algorithm" globally to all English-speaking users. It also announced that it's incorporating feedback provided by users into its algorithm.
