Google’s Matt Cutts went on record about keyword stuffing!!

Matt Cutts from Google went on record on those sites that rank well for all those random phone numbers, the ones that simply list thousands of phone numbers on a single page. He said it is spam, keyword stuffing and is against Google's guidelines.

Matt Cutts said:

“I wanted to clarify a quick point: when people search for a phone number and land on a page like the one below, it's not really useful and a bad user experience. Also, we do consider it to be keyword stuffing to put so many phone numbers on a page.

There are a few websites that provide value-add for some phone numbers, e.g. sites that let people discuss a specific phone number that keeps calling them over and over. But if a site stuffs a large number of numbers on its pages without substantial value-add, that can violate our guidelines, not to mention annoy users.”

“These pages have always been considered violations of our guidelines as keyword stuffing. I just wanted to be especially clear so that we could point to explicit guidance we'd given.”

How prepare are you for Google’s new algorithm change to target overly SEO'ed sites?

Recently there are a huge number of complaints in the Google Webmaster Help forums with people complaining that their sites no longer rank in Google.

A lot of them thought this is the "over optimization" penalty which, Google's head of web spam, Matt Cutts announced about a month ago that, Google is going to release a new algorithm to target overly SEO'ed sites to "level the playing field" for the rest of the web.

But Matt Cutts posted on Google+ that it is related to a "classifier for parked domains" which went haywire. Google fixed the issue, Matt said:

“I saw a recent post where several sites were asking about their search rankings. The short explanation is that it turns out that our classifier for parked domains was reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty. As a result, we classified some sites as parked when they weren't.

I apologize for this; it looks like the issue is fixed now, and we'll look into how to prevent this from happening again.”

Now that there are strong indications, all speculative and rumored, but strong nevertheless, that Google is rolling out the algorithm update or at least testing it. It’s better to prepare for the change to take affect.

 

New matching behavior in Google Adwords!

Many AdWords advertisers have developed keyword lists that include things like misspellings, plurals, and other variations on a keyword or phrase. Now, Google will do all this automatically — as it does with organic results — with exact and phrase matching, though advertisers will be able to opt out.

The new behavior will take into account five different variations in language:

• Misspellings (“waterprof sunblock” instead of “waterproof sunblock”)
• Singular/plural forms (“beach balls” and “beach ball”)
• Stemming (“single serve” and “single serving”)
• Accents (“hotel” and “hôtel”)
• Abbreviations (“Dr.” versus “Doctor”)
• Acronyms (“NYC” versus “New York City”)

The company says up to 7% of search queries include misspellings, and the longer the query, the more likely it is to contain some misspelling.

Google has been testing the new functionality with a few advertisers and says it has seen an average of a 3% rise in search clicks, at comparable CPCs, though the company notes performance will vary by advertiser.

The new interface (in the campaign settings tab, under Advanced settings select Keyword matching options) will be rolled out in the web interface to all advertisers over the next couple of weeks, and it will appear in the next version of the API released later this month.

By default, matches will “Include plurals, misspellings and other close variants,” but advertisers can opt out if they’d like finer control of their keywords.

Google updated rich snippets and rich snippets testing tool!

Google just made two updates to rich snippets. The first one is product rich snippets which is now available on a global scale (earlier they were only supported in a limited set of locales). This means that users from across the globe can now see the information snippet about your product and services available on your website.

The search engine giant has also given a facelift to the rich snippets testing tool and it now supports HTML input. This has been done by repeated requests from webmasters that they desired to test their HTML source without the need of publishing it to a web page. But with the new rich snippets testing tool, this has been made possible.

Google pays huge importance to snippets in search results. Rich snippets can influence local search listings. Recently, the search giant came up with application rich snippets to evaluate search result relevance so that users searching for various applications can judge the search result relevance in a better way. Another recent addition was concert snippets in search results so that users now searching for bands or artists can see a snippet about upcoming concert tour dates below the search results.

 

Google revenues topped $10 billion for the second quarter in a row!!

Google revenues topped $10 billion for the second quarter in a row, coming in only slightly higher than their Q4 2011 $10.58 billion. The Q1 2012 $10.65 billion in revenue is a new record and reflects a 24 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

In their pre-earnings call press release, Google also announced that their board has unanimously approved a stock dividend proposal “designed to preserve the corporate structure that has allowed Google to remain focused on the long term.”

Expert speak with the Google+ Help Desk Hangout On Air!!

Have any query regarding Google Maps or Google Places, then tune into expert speak with the Google+ Help Desk Hangout On Air. This was announced on the Google Places Help forums where you can find answers to all your Google Maps and Google Places in a video posted by the Google experts. 

 

 

Google has give a facelift to its social platform Google+ !!

Google has now given a facelift to its ambitious social platform Google+. The new Google+ was introduced on April 11 and the new design aims at a ‘seamless social experience’.

The main feature highlights are: 

• A customizable side bar
• There are ‘conversation cards’ now. This is the new format of your discussion stream and facilitates a better view of an ongoing conversation.
• Want to know what’s is going on in a conversation, head to the "activity drawer" of the ‘conversation cards’
• Your timeline will have full bleed photos.
• Hangouts have additional features like rotating billboard of cool Hangouts

As Google has been quoted, “Today's Google+ update extends beyond navigation, the stream and hangouts. For instance: there's a new Explore page that shows what's interesting and trending across the network. And a new profile with much bigger photos. And a new chat list that puts your friends front and center. And a whole lot more.”

AdWords Community Top Contributors Program!!

Few can deny the utility of learning directly from experts, it creates a mentor menthe relationship that no amount of theory can replace. Google is hoping to capture this spirit with their new AdWords Community Top Contributors Program. Not only do they want to reward advanced users for passing their knowledge on to others, but they hope it will encourage the flow of expertise to continue.

Google picked their top contributors from a list of users who have gone above and beyond to help others and awarded them a special top contributor badge and invited them to an AdWords summit in Mountain Vista, California. It was an opportunity for them to meet and share feedback with AdWords product developers, Google executives, and product managers.

Here’s the list of this years top contributors:
* Theresa Zook
* Pete Bardo
* Jon Gritton
* Lakatos Bela
* Kim Clinkunbroomer
* Richard Ball
* Calin Sandici

Here’s what Google lists as benefits to becoming a top AdWords contributor:
* A profile on our AdWords Top Contributors page.
* Access to private forums with Google team members.
* Inclusion in the Trusted Testers program to test out cool new features before anyone else.
* Product updates directly from the AdWords team.
* Hangouts with AdWords Community Leads

Google’s image search ads !!

If you’re relatively new to PPC advertising, Google’s image search ads may have flown under your radar. Image search ads are ads that include both text and an inline image, appearing only on Google image search results pages. Don’t confuse these with image ads, which are graphical ads that show on Google’s Display Network.

This type of ad can be very effective for branding purposes for products that people would be likely to search for by image. Furthermore, as you can see above, image search ads are served in an excellent location on image search results pages.

To create an image search ad, head into AdWords, and once you’re in your desired campaign and ad group, go to the Ads tab. Click the “New Ad” button, and select “Display ad builder” from the drop down menu. I know this is slightly confusing as I mentioned not confusing these with Display Image Ads, but for whatever reason this is where Google houses the image search ad template.

Once in the Display Ad Builder, choose “Image Search” in the left navigation, under “Media and Channels.”

You’ll create your text ad in the same format as you would any other text ad in Google (headline, two description lines, display and destination URLs), and you’ll select an image to display inline with your ad.

Google will let you select an image from your computer, a previously uploaded image, an image from their stock image gallery, or an image from your website. If you choose to upload an image from your website, you simply enter in your URL, certify that you have permission to use these images, and then Google will pull all images from the page/URL you entered.

Unlike ads on Google’s Display Network, you can track your image search ads performance at the keyword level. And, lastly, just make sure the campaign housing your image search ads is opted into Google’s Search Network.

 

Adwords and Youtube!!

For the vast majority who knows the world of internet is not uncommon to know that Google gets a lot of billionaire’s revenue from advertising on search engines and websites, but also raises revenue through other means, such as YouTube.

YouTube has done a great job in incorporating their interface with AdWords in creating promoted Videos to show up on search results on their site, similar to what Google and Bing currently does.

A study by Break Media finds that viewers not only remember seeing these ads, but more importantly recall the subject or theme, 47% saying they remembered the brand or product advertised with the ad shown either before, during or following their featured video.

However Google has recently partnered with YouTube to create an integrated approach called AdWords For Video, which allows the user a new way to create a video campaign within AdWords.  

According to techcrunch, youtube has reached 500 million Promoted Videos ie promotional videos, a figure that does really high and that, according to its administrators, youtube can be profitable soon.

It is very likely also shortly youtube video ads are also available in any search and also in any website or blog, meaning that come to be an integral part of Adsense as an advertising option more Editor’s Choice .