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.

No related posts.

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?

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

Just noticed that on searching “california sales tax rate” on Google there is a Jump to “California” link to Wikipedia’s Sales Tax in United States page. It seems like Google is using the internal link ‘#’ to have people “jump” to a particular section on the page. However, not all the states have “Jump to” links. New York, Oregon and Hawaii are a few states without the jump to link which I searched for. Nevada did have a jump to link .

Has anyone else seen this for websites other than wikipedia? Like Bing, has Google started indexing links with pound/hash sign? The Jump to links are not present for all the states because Google adds the “jump to” links based on link backs? This should be an interesting mini-project to look into. I will add more details here as I find out more about it.

"Jump to" in wikipedia snippet on serps

Update 1: Blogscoped reports about Jump to links for eBay.

Update 2: Found more examples of Jump to links. This time they are for apple.com

Update 3: Google formally announced the changes.

No related posts.

Yahoo and Microsoft are again in talks and very near to finalizing the deal reports All things D. What does a potential deal between MSFT and YHOO mean for search engine ecosystem and Google? Nothing much at this time. However, the deal can pose a long term threat to Google.

Microsoft is already enjoying early success with bing. Addition of Yahoo’s search technology and team will give them access to services like Search Monkey, BOSS apart from the core Y! technology. A couple more strategic accquisitons (say Twitter) after that or partnering with Facebook (MSFT is an investor) will give them access to real-time data as well.

It’s not that Google will lose all its market share to Microsoft overnight, but they’ll need to be on their toes all the time and keep INNOVATING.

No related posts.