Google will be changing their current Privacy Policies and Terms of Service!

Google announced that they will be changing their current Privacy Policies and Google Terms of Service. These changes will assist Google to link their users across all Google products like Gmail, youtube, Google+ and so on. Google has indicated that the changes will be reflected in just over a month.

Google says they still have over 70 privacy documents spread across various Google products, making it complicated for users. Google too finds this completely out of sync compared to their vision of integrating various Google products. To get rid of the confusion surrounding the privacy documents, Google now will be consolidating almost 60 privacy policies into one main Privacy policy, leaving a handful policies untouched because of legal and other reasons. These changes will be reflected across all Google platforms by March 1st 2012.

Updated Terms of Service and Private Policy is made available, to realize what is being changed here's the current Google Terms of Service.

 

Google will penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads!

Google has announced that it will penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads.

The change — called the “page layout algorithm” — takes direct aim at any site with pages where content is buried under tons of ads.

Google’s posted on its Inside Search blog yesterday that “We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.”

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Google also posted the same information to its Google Webmaster Central blog. Sites using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads are not impacted by this. It only applies to static ads in fixed positions on pages themselves, Google mentioned.

Google rolling out handful of updates for Adwords!

Google says, they will soon offer ad group level impression share metrics for the search and display networks.

Advertisers will be able to use this data to better identify high performing ad groups that aren’t capturing the majority of available impressions.

Additionally, Google is also planning an algorithm update to provide more accurate campaign impression share metrics. Changes will include: refined campaign-level stats and once-a-day updates.

These changes will start rolling out globally on January 30.

Moreover, in a separate announcement, Google announced that it has rolled out two improvements to Automated Rules in AdWords: an increase to the rule limit to 100 (from 10) and the ability to undo changes made by a rule.

New help forum platform will be coming soon for Google Adwords!

Official Google AdWords Community Forum recently mentioned that a new help forum platform will be coming soon.

This is a very welcome event as the old platform ‘Pistachio’ was limited in features, did not allow for much in customization for individual Google help forums, and did not deliver the best platform for helping advertisers.

We don’t fully know what we are to expect from this new platform but sure it will be a vast improvement for Forum visitors as well as those of us who spend time in the forum regularly helping advertisers. AdWords Help Experts will be sure to make a formal announcement when the new forum is live. We will cover the features on the new platform so everyone can check it out!

Now ‘Search Plus Your World’ with Google!

Google yesterday added a new dimension to its existing search engine by introducing, Search plus Your World. This feature will integrate personal results, mainly from Google+, into SERPs. This essentially means that information like People, Pages and Profiles will now be seen on the result pages.

Users now have a choice about the kind of search they are interested in. Google has a personalization toggle icon at the top right hand side of the search page, the user now has a choice of including the relevant posts and pictures of his friends on Google+ or an option of drilling down unnecessary information by viewing normal result page.

Sitelinks is one thing Google has been working on for some time!

Google has made quite a few improvements to search in the month of December 2011, and they brought out a latest monthly recap about these search tweaks. The most interesting takeaway of the entire line up of 30 odd improvements is the project codenamed “Megasitelinks,” by Google.

This is an algorithmic improvement for choosing sitelinks, and that too localized sitelinks being chosen by the search engine. This is what Google says about it, “We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting. ”

It seems that sitelinks is one thing Google has been working on for some time. Sitelinks now include Google+ data along with showing up on home pages and inner pages.

Google Adwords migration: "Optimize For Conversions" will start from February 2012!

Google announced in December 2011 that starting in February 2012, they will be migrating Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC campaigns to "Optimize for conversions".

Google said this will lead to a 5% increase in conversions, on average of all advertisers who switch. Google added:

“To ensure that your campaign settings are also in line with your conversion goals, we plan to migrate existing campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC with "Optimize for clicks" ad rotation to "Optimize for conversions" ad rotation.”

 

If you do not want to be migrated, tell Google by January 31st by using this form.

Here is a video with more details on this tool:

 

Google Adwords now include Offers!

Recently, Google integrated Google+ into AdWords . Now they have launched another ad extension beta for promoting offers/coupons for brick-and-mortar or online stores – Offer Extensions. This new feature allows you to attach coupons, discounts, rebates and more to your ads – integrating Google Offers into AdWords.

As expected, these extensions are reserved for high-quality ads that display above the search results. They will be shown to both desktop and mobile users with full internet browsers.

Now, users have a more direct path to conversion and advertisers have a great, new opportunity to promote their product or service.

'Schemer'- Google's New Project & Activity Finder!

Google’s latest launch is an activity and content-sharing tool- 'Schemer' . The project is in beta testing phase, and is aimed at helping people find exciting things to do in the real world. So, once you are in, you will be able to create or find 'schemes' for activities or adventures.

Google took the domain name in November and the project has made its entry presently in the invite-only beta phase. A visit to the site tells you that it is an activity site focused on real tasks and adventures.

Google has launched Googlebot-Mobile for Smartphone!

Google has launched Googlebot-Mobile to crawl websites providing content designed for smartphones. This new bot crawls with a smartphone user-agent along with other feature phone user-agents. Google announced the new bot as a move to increase their coverage of smartphone content. Now smartphone users can get ready for a better search experience.

Apart from this, Google has also launched a new feature to utilize these signals- Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages. Google said, “When we discover a URL in our search results that redirects smartphone users to another URL serving smartphone-optimized content, we change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the final destination URL. This removes the extra latency the redirect introduces leading to a saving of 0.5-1 seconds on average when visiting landing page for such search results.”