You may optimize your Google authorship image to increase your very own CTRs!

After the introduction and relative success of application rich snippets, Google is now placing the authorship rich snippet with author images being flashed next to the articles credited to them all over the SERPs.

What Google has done, is that it has linked the authorship image to author's Google+ profile. So, whenever a search is made that shows up an article credited to the Google+ user, then the SERPs will fetch the profile picture of that particular user and place it as a thumbnail image on the left hand side of article description.

Though Google has previously mentioned that "you'll need a Google+ profile with a good, recognizable headshot as your profile photo", they haven't forced it yet. It is unclear still if Google will stick to their “headshot” demand or not, since the changes have worked well for some, we can expect Google to come out with a statement soon after all “need” is not a strong enough word. Until they do, you may optimize your Google authorship image to increase your very own CTRs.

 

Google: small arrow showing on the left side of the sitelinks!

Having changed the overall look and layout of sitelinks a number of times over last few years, Google is now rolling out a new change to the existing one-line sitelinks appearing under a search result.

As confirmed by a Google spokesperson, this change is currently being rolled out and will be reflected everywhere within a week. The change is only minor with a small arrow showing on the left side of the sitelinks.

Google has revealed Super Bowl 46 search trends!

One day after the Giants defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl 46, Google has revealed what the Americans were searching for on their computers, tablets and mobile phones. Madonna has topped the list of top trending searches leaving behind Patriots or Giants.

Google has brought out this information in an infographic outlining the search trends during the game. The top trending searches on Google during the game were:

• Madonna 
• Halftime show 
• Patriots 
• Tom Brady 
• Giants

Here is the infographic revealing all that people searched:

Google is the leading source of traffic for 23 of the top 30 websites!

According to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney in a document released yesterday to clients, that Google is the leading source of traffic for 23 of the top 30 websites. This might not be a surprise to anyone.

Based on underlying comScore data, the report analyzes visits to the top five websites in several verticals: Media, Retail, Travel, Auto, Finance and Health. It doesn’t discuss the impact or relative position of Facebook at all, possibly because Facebook is not yet a public company.

Mahaney points out that Google’s retention of the position of top traffic referrer is an accomplishment in a marketplace that is so “fluid” and intensely competitive.

How Google picks title in SERP!

There are often complaints in the forum that Google is not showing your title tags in the search results properly.

Recently, Google wrote a blog post named Better page titles in search results where, Pierre Far, explains why Google may pick a different title tag.

In a Google+ post he gives the short version:

• Our algorithms generate thee alternative titles so that your page is no longer constrained with having just the one title for all the different queries your page ranks for. This has the nice side effect of making the result look more relevant to our searchers and...
• On average, the alternative titles increase the clickthrough rate on the results, i.e. more traffic for you.
• The <title> tag is still a primary source for titles we show so all our advice about make them concise and useful and enticing still very much apply. Keep an eye on the HTML Suggestions page in the Diagnostics section in Webmaster Tools for title suggestions.

For a more detailed, please see the Google Help document on this topic.

Google said that "usually" invalid clicks come from AdSense publishers!

Google AdWords representative, Laura, said in a Google AdWords Help thread that the main reason there are "invalid clicks" on ads is due to publishers.

Yes - Google said that "usually" invalid clicks come from AdSense publishers. Either the publishers are:

(1) Clicking on their own ads or;

(2) Telling their friends and users to click on their ads.

Google's Laura said:

“I don't think there's any connection between AdWords suspensions and AdSense ones. AdSense "invalid clicks" suspensions are usually just that: publishers clicking on their own ads or encouraging their visitors to do so. If you think you didn't violate that policy, contact AdWords support.”

So usually those invalid clicks are AdSense publishers fault.

Social media cheat sheet !

Businesses of all sizes are now using social media. If you are still teetering on the edge of the social sea with no idea how to swim in it, let this highly informative ‘Cheat Sheet’ from Flowtown help you.

Google limited to process up to 500KB robots.txt files!

Google's John Mueller has stated that Google is limited to only processing up to 500KB of their robots.txt files.

John made a statement on his Google+ page that read, “#102 of the things to keep in mind when working on a big website: If you have a giant robots.txt file, remember that Googlebot will only read the first 500kb. If your robots.txt is longer, it can result in a line being truncated in an unwanted way. The simple solution is to limit your robots.txt files to a reasonable size .”

If your robot.txt file is super heavy and goes beyond 500 KB, then not only will it result in Googlebot ignoring anything that follows the limit but it will also auto truncate the file, which may affect your website's health in Google search.

AdWords Big Rewards for Laptop MD+!

Alexandre Mouravskiy, the chief marketing officer of NY firm Laptop MD+,  a company fixes a variety of electronics, changed the firm’s approach using to Google’s AdWords and saw a big improvement. They spend a little more than $100,000 annually and says that money comes back three or four times over in the form of new business.

Mouravskiy tells Crain’s New York Business in a Q&A that AdWords has great research tools, as it reveals the exact phrases customers use when searching for services and what they prefer for purchasing decisions.  He says that if they have new ideas to try out, they get good data back right away, and that’s it’s also good for branding. Even if customers don’t click on the ads, he says they still see the name, possibly hundreds of times a month.

 

Google: Spam Links to 404 Pages Won’t Hurt your overall site's rankings!

Google's John Mueller in a Google Webmaster Help thread said that if you have bad or spam links pointing to 404 pages, it should have no negative impact on your overall site's rankings.

John said not only should it not happen, he has never seen it happen. He said:

“To be clear, I have never seen a case where bad links pointing to URLs that return 404 have ever caused a website any noticeable problem in web-search. 404s are a part of the internet, they're expected to be seen when a non-existent URL is crawled, there's no reason that I can think of where it would make sense to count 404s against a site.”