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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
