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.
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:
Here is the infographic revealing all that people searched:
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.
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:
For a more detailed, please see the Google Help document on this topic.
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.
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.
The Retailers & General Merchandise industry was #2 among the industries that spent the most on Google AdWords in 2011, according to research by SEM software and PPC service firm Wordstream. Finance & Insurance and Travel & Tourism were the #1 and #3 top spenders, respectively Contributed to Google’s $37.9 Billion in 2011 Revenues.
Larry Kim of Wordstream analyzed Google AdWords spending to see which industries and companies spent the most on Google advertising last year. Kim created an infographic listing the results of his research and also published some insights into what he believes his findings mean for the U.S. economy in his report.
In his report, Kim offered an analysis of commonly used keywords and their corresponding cost-per-click, viewable in the infographic.
Based on his research, Kim predicts the U.S. economy “will be OK in 2012.” Let’s hope he’s right, and that business starts hiring, investing and flourishing in 2012.
In an attempt to provide more accuracy on where your site ranks for search queries, Google is changing the way it calculates average position in the Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries and Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization reports.
Heading forward, Google will average “only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in,” whereas previously Google reported the average ranking position of pages on your site that appeared in Google’s search results for a particular query. Google offered this example:
“Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.”
Google usually ignores punctuation and mathematical symbols from a query because it doesn't index them.
Recently, Google has updated its search results for queries involving punctuation marks and symbols. Searching for the symbol equivalent of a period, comma, carat, percent sign and more symbols now will return search results – though they aren't always exactly relevant.
Google started to show results for queries like [.], [,], [:], [;], [#], [%], [@], [^], [)], [~], [|], ["], [<], [$]. When you search for [%], Google shows the results for [percent sign] and that happens irrespective of the interface language, so it's not a synonym generated by Google's algorithms.
