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.”

 

U.S. lawmakers seek Google answers on privacy!

Two US lawmakers have asked Google chief Larry Page to brief congress on changes to the Internet search giant’s privacy policies, citing concerns about collection and sharing of personal data.

Republican Representative Mary Bono Mack and Democratic Representative G.K. Butterfield, the top members of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade made the request in a letter to Page on Friday.

“We applaud the move toward a shorter, simpler, streamlined policy, and believe that easier-to-understand terms of service are in the best interest of consumers, we are concerned, however, with other changes to Google’s privacy policy, particularly with how a user’s data will be collected, combined, archived, and used across services,” they said in the letter, which was released Monday.

“These changes might not otherwise be troubling but for one significant change to your terms of service: Google will not permit users to opt out of this information collection and sharing across platforms and devices,” they said.

The lawmakers asked Page or his “designee” to brief the subcommittee no later than Friday.

Google recently announced an update to Webmaster Tools sitemaps.

According to Google Webmaster central Blog, from now on sitemaps page will also display statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News, thus retiring Video Sitemaps Labs. This new addition will let you know how many items of each type were added and for few content types, the number of indexed items.

You can now test a sitemap for errors taking only a few seconds to complete. But the initial testing may miss the errors which can only be detected only once the URLs are downloaded. Besides this, errors and warnings will now be displayed in groups and errors and warnings from child sitemaps have been aggregated for Sitemap index files, so that you do not have to click through each child Sitemap.

Towards the end the working of the "Delete" button has been changed. It will delete the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, from the accounts of the owners of the website.