Just noticed that Google is testing a version of SERP without the number of results and page load time. I only see that version when logged in using my Google account. The total number of results was never a reliable number and it has fluctuated a lot for some of the websites we have worked on. I believe the the traffic numbers for keywords from Adwords and other tools are much more reliable to determine competition than the total results number. Does an average user care about the total results? Will it effect how non-power users use Google? What do you think?

See secreenshots below.

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You run a small business. You sell products or services on a relatively small scale e-commerce website. You experience periods of growth in sales and revenue. Then you hit a wall and the revenue chart flatlines.

You’ve reached a critical juncture in the life of your business.

The solution: Ramp up your SEO efforts.

Search engines can bring you more customers who are looking for the products or services you offer. However, optimizing an e-commerce website with minimal resources can be daunting and challenging.

As an entrepeneur running an e-commerce website, you may have asked yourself the following questions at one time or another:

• I understand SEO provides value; how much does it actually help drive traffic, sales, and revenue?
• I have optimized my website but it doesn’t seem bring in any additional sales. Why?
• When is the ideal time to start optimizing my website?
• Do I try to optimize my website myself, or do I hire a professional SEO consultant to do it?
• There is so much information out there. Where do I begin?
• How well is my website optimized relative to my competitors’ websites?
• Are there any tools that can automate SEO for my website?
• How can I compete against companies like Amazon and Walmart on the Internet?
• What are the three things I can do on my website immediately which will provide me with immediate results?

Our speaker, Gaurav Sharma will address these issues, and more, in this webinar.

Gaurav is the founder and CEO of ThinkMantra.com. He has years of experience managing SEO and web analytics responsibilities for various Bay Area venture-backed companies. He founded ThinkMantra.com to help small businesses and startups acquire customers and gain marketshare via SEO.

ThinkMantra.com provides purely white hat SEO services to help small businesses to grow their customer base using organic search primarily on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Here are the webinar details:

DATE: MARCH 3rd
TIME: 7 PM PST

Signup: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/463494232

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Web buzzed yesterday with talk about Google Buzz. A lot of people I know have already got Google Buzz. If you haven’t, check out this write up by RWW.

Google Buzz has a feature called ‘image viewer’. In the demo it was showed that the image viewer fetches image from external sources Picasa and Flickr and display the images in full size within Google Buzz. I with others was concerned that Google might be pulling off images from ANY webpage instead of just Picasa and Flickr. This would not help websites with a lot of images as Google will ’steal’ their traffic. I tested this with a few different websites and found that this is not the case with websites other than Picasa and Flickr.

Another thing I noticed that there are 2 ways to add links to GBuzz. One of the way is better than the other because it provides leverage with the anchor text. Surprisingly I did not see ‘nofollow’ attribute on Google profiles for the links shared using Google Buzz. I haven’t looked deep into it but if it is true, it will be helpful with SEO. Checkout the video below for a demo of how to add the link.

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Google is in the air this morning! People talking about what tag to use for the event.

10:03: Event hasn’t started yet. I spotted Vic Gundotra (VP Engineering) in the room about 20 minutes ago, but he is gone now.

10:09: The event hasn’t started yet. There are 27 slides in the presentation. Starting in a few minutes, waiting for a “few people who are still stuck in traffic.”

10:14: Started – Bradley Horowitz up on stage.

10:17: Talking about real time and sharing and to manage attention better (hint – Twitter)

10:18: Getting to Yahoo’s history and the early search engines. There was no relevance. Then came Google!

10:19: When you have 500 or 5000 friends to manage the content. TMI (Too Much Information). The social network per user will grow. This has become a large scale relevance problem.

10:20: Launched Google Buzz!

10:22: 5 features

1) Auto following

2) Rich, fast sharing experience

3) Public and private sharing

4) Inbox integration

5) Just the good stuff (filtered content + content discovery)

10:26: Demoing Google Buzz, has a cool photo viewing and embeded videos.

10:27: Link sharing is copied from Facebook. Also supports gmail shortcuts.

10:28: You can use existing Gmail groups for private sharing. Todd Jackson mentions that it was difficult to use on “other websites”

10:29: Coments come in real-time in the inbox. Best Buzz gets to your inbox. They also have ‘@’ replies in the comments.

10:32: Demoing Recommended Buzz. If a lot of your friends liking or commenting it, Google will recommend it. You can say ‘Not Interested’ and recommendation engine will learn over time.

10:35: Vic Gundatra going to talk about Google Buzz in mobile.

10:36: Talking about location as a signal.

10:38: Google has mapped lat-long with locations.

10:39: Google.com brand new mobile homepage. There is a buzz icon on top right. It finds your location (like foursquare)

10:40: Buzz app will be availabe on buzz.google.com. Google Buzz will be mashed up with Google Map. There is a tab “Near By”. Google will find the most interesting buzz around you.

10:45: Google Maps app has buzz layer. You can post buzz using Google map app. There are white conversation bubbles in the maps app showing nearby buzzes which are geo tagged.

10:50: Google Buzz will be part of google apps, but not in V1. Buzz will start launching in 9.5 minutes. I will have screenshots as soon as possible. For rest of the world, it will be launched in next few days.

10:52: Sergey Brin on stage with Vic Gundutra, Todd Jackson and Bradley Horowitz.

10:53: There are privacy settings built into the Buzz. There are possibilities to integrate with Wave.

10:54: The system will be very open, it will support pubhubsubbub as of today. They will launch more APIs in coming months.

10:56: Sergey talking about Orkut’s success in the geographies it is popular.

11:00: You can connect external websites-services to pull in data into Buzz. You can’t yet post to twitter, but they plan to add the feature.

11:03:  Buzz will use gmail’s spam filters and google.com’s scoring algorithms to score buzzes.

11:04: Google Buzz is launched at buzz.google.com. My account hasn’t got the access yet.

Google Buzz

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It is widely known fact that Google’s new Caffeine update is ready to go live. Matt Cutts announced at PubCon that they will launch it after the holidays season in US. He confirmed that caffeine can be accessed using 209.85.225.103 (50% of the requests).

From what we have gathered, it seems like it is live in India. At least the data centers our team members have checked.

Over the weekend, I noticed that emails from Google Alerts increased 5 folds for the keywords I have set alerts. I have subscribed to these alerts for a few years now and generally get 2-3 emails a per day per alert. Yesterday I received about 12 emails per alert. This leads me to believe that Google has switched the backend for alerts from current Google to Caffeine update. Caffeine has bigger index for all the websites we have looked at. This may just be a temporary bump as Caffeine is “catching up” with sending alerts for pages which current Google has not been able to find yet. Has anyone else noticed this?

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A lot of people don’t know that Google has been executing Javascript in the HTML pages and including the output in their index. We found this a few months back. We noticed a website with Javascript drop down menus and no static links at all had most of their pages indexed by Google.

What does it change for SEO and webmasters?

1. Links in Javascript are counted as “regular” links – Links which are displayed on your webpages after Javascript execution will be included by Google as part of your link graph. This is a good thing because you can use Javascript to add links to improve user experience. Bad thing about this is that all your outbound links will also be treated as “regular” links. You will have to make sure that you point it to Google and other search engines that they need to exclude the internal and outbound links which you prefer. As Matt Cutts explains that you can either nofollow or exclude the link or js file using robots.txt. See video for more detail.




2. Duplicate Content Issues – We have seen multi level drop down menus and option boxes causing Google to crawl and index duplicate content following URL patterns based on the GET strings. One of the advanced optimization technique used by SEOs for work flows is to add static links on the pages to next steps, but use a drop down menu for a better customer experience. For instance the URLs for steps may look like /step1.html -> /step2.html -> /step3.html. However, its counterpart form might generate URLs like /step1.html?v=widget1 -> /step2.html?v=widget1&x=widget2 -> /step3.html?v=widget1&x=widget2&y=submit. 
   
   These would certainly create multiple URLs for the same content. Solutions to these may involve adding optional parameters in Google Webmaster Tools (only for Google) or perhaps using POST instead of GET.
3. Obfuscation may not work – A lot of website owners use Javascript to obfuscate email addresses, phone numbers or even product prices in certain cases. This will get Google index and serve (display) the obfuscated content in Google results. Matt Cutts recommends not using Javascript to obfuscate emails (or other things). He mentions that using robots.txt to disallow the js file is the last thing you should try to obfuscate. Checkout his video:

Note: Even though Google and other search engines have advanced to read links in JS, your internal (or external) links can not be entirely replaced by Javascript yet.

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After launching the regional tags, Google announced yet another update to the SERPs. They changed how images are displayed in the universal search by making the first image bigger than the rest of the images and adding two rows of images instead of just 1. The change only applies to universal search and not image search. Google claims to show the bigger picture only when they are certain about the image result.

What do you think will be impact on the CTR from universal search to the page where image is hosted? Will it increase or decrease? Will other pictures in the universal search get lower CTR? We will start testing this today. Would love to hear if someone is already testing it.

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We just noticed that Google is showing breadcrumbs in SERPs for a lot more pages now. Google was showing the “smart links” which intelligently parse the website’s hierarchy and displays it with deep links in SERPs. This is something similar to “site links” but can be controlled by SEOs and website owners to certain extent. Google started testing this sometime ago, but I haven’t seen them on a live search before. This is very interesting and opens up a lot of possibilities for SEOs.

Breadcrumbs on Google SERPs is a screencast I created for those who are not able to find the breadcrumbs.

Update 1: Some of our client website have these too. The breadcrumbs are not generated for any and every page, but the page which get considerable amount of traffic from Google and have been in index for a while.

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Last week I went to lunch with a friend to a nice Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Mercedes Restaurant. It was easy to find on Google and had great reviews. But I noticed that the word Mercedes in the title of the homepage was regular type face in Google search result pages instead of being bold. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was actually misspelled as Mercdes. After looking at the source of their website, I found an H1 tag on the page which was misspelled the same way as the title. As a side note, the H1 tag is for some reason not visible on the page.

Both the title and the H1 tag are important elements of SEO and creating brand awareness. To make things worse, they have both of these tags used globally for each page on the website. Google and other search engines help them by assuming (based on Click Through Rate, I guess) that their website is what people are looking for when they search for mercedes restaurant San Francisco.

This was one of the several examples where website owners don’t pay attention to detail on the copy for the website and are solely dependent on the search engines to find a connection between the misspelled keywords and the actual website.

If you have a small website with 10-20 pages, you should follow these steps:

1. Run an automated spell checker like this on your website.
2. Tool will help you, but you will have to manually go through the results.
3. Specifically check Title and Meta Description (they are visible on viewing the source of the page).
4. Go to the main search engines and search for your brand name/main keyword and make sure that the results show your website as you intend to.

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Ever wondered what are the highest paid keyword on Google and how much would it cost? Laurie Sullivan recently wrote an article on MediaPost with some interesting stats on PPC rates for the 3 major search engines.

Highest priced keywords:

• On Google was “Mesothelioma” for $99.44 per click
• On Yahoo was “Mesothelioma” for $60.68 per click
• On Bing was “auto insurance comparison” for $55.20 per click

You can read the original article here.

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