Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘SERP Analysis’ Category

Google have kicked off the new year with a major improvement, they’re applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new “answer-highlighting” feature to search results.

According to Google, “most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don’t follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that humans still have to do a fair amount of work to process and understand information on the web.”

Google Squared is one of Google’s early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. Google’s been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, attempting to provide the user with better search results with their new feature called “answer highlighting.”

According to Google, answer highlighting helps users get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to their question right in the search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers such as when did Tony Blair become prime minister,  If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

The following example highlights this new feature in the past, the search for [empire state height], the result used to look like this:

With today’s changes, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This is a major development on Google’s part and goes to show the level of effort being placed on maintaining its lead as the search leader especially with Bing’s push to become the “decision engine”

What will this mean to site owners?  the news is not good I’m afraid.  If search users are able to find the answers to their questions on the Google results pages (SERPS) then there will be no need to click through to the final destination.

Let’s wait and see.

Google recently announced it’s top secret project codenamed “Caffeine”.  This project seems to have been a few years in the making and meant to capitalise on the growing interest in “real time search” and the “semantic web”.

I have yet to see any major changes in Google’s search results due to Caffeine but maybe this is because it has yet to be launched in the UK.

The test bed for Caffeine is the US market.  Actually, in Google’s official announcement, they provided a link to the DC hosting the “new and improved” search results.

What are the implication of Caffeine to webmaster around the world?  More specifically, how will Google’s new algorithm impact SEO efforts.  Here are my thoughts:

1) Now more than ever, Brand presence in social media has become increasingly important as Google Caffeine will place more efforts on social media noise among other factors.

2) Google Caffeine boasts a larger and more comprehensive  index of results.  This means that webmasters need to ensure (now more than ever) that their websites are as accessible and spider friendly as possible.  Load time of web pages in now becoming increasingly important in ranking results.  Don’t skimp on your hosting!

3) The semantic web is fast closing in on us.  Google Caffeine has an improved element of semantics in it’s algorythm.  What does this mean?  Well if you’re writing a page about dogs and “man’s best friend”  for example is not included, this could hinder your ranking efforts.  Web copy needs to take this into account.

4) Following on from point 3 above, information architecture is playing an increasingly important role in rankings.  The idea behind information architecture is to build a website where the information contained within is structured and marked-up in such a way as to portray a sense of authority to search engines.  This factor in itself has always played an important role in search rankings however Caffeine’s launch will make this even more of a critical ranking factor!

We are yet to see the full implications of Caffeine but one thing’s for certain, the days of traditional SEO methods are numbered!

In a move hardly surprising to SEOs Google has officially announced two new “improvements” in its search results;  “longer search result  descriptions” (snippets)  and “an expanded list of useful related searches”.

Longer Description Snippet  

If you conduct a search for wolverine movie review you’ll notice that the description snippet under the blue title tag contains two lines and cuts off at around 150 characters. 

If you amend the search to include Hugh Jackman, you’ll notice that the description snippet has increased to 3 lines to provide users with more info from the page within the snippet.

Expanded related searches

The example Google gives for this is a search for the keyword principles of physics. The related links at the bottom of the results include angular momentum and big bang, all semantically related to the keyword physics.

These improvements by Google are meant to provide users with a better search experience in finding what their looking for but how will that affect click through rates? 

The general consensus is that it would decrease them as users will eventually be able to find what they’re looking for without actually going to the site!

QDF is a term used to describe the thought process behind Google’s results for certain search queries’ ”deserving” of fresh and regularly updated content.

QDF is Google’s way of ensuring that its users get the most up to date results for certain search queries such as a breaking news event, a major new product launch a topic that always seems to be in the news or a famous celebrity who’s recently been in the news.

In all the QDF results above, Google has tailored its algorithm to serve not only traditional search results but also News, Video, images, and more recently, in the Gaza example, Twitter search results! 

In one of his weekly White Board Fridays, Rand Fishkin described QDF in Layman’s terms and gave a great example of how to leverage it for SEO for a brand new product launch (the launch of Dell Adamo is the example he gives).  Enjoy!

vimeo Direkt

This debate was first kicked off by Aaron Wall and has been floating around in webamaster forums for a while now.  The debate still lingers on with no absolute answer. 

In response to this question, Matt Cutts, Google spokesman says…

“Inside of Google, we don’t really think about brands, we think about words such as trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality.”

“If somebody comes to google and types X we want to return high quality information about X. Sometimes that’s a brand search sometimes that’s an informational search somethimes its navigational sometimes it’s transactional.”

“Yes Google has made a change in our rankings. It’s one of 3(00) or 400 changes we make every year.  I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change.  We refere to it as the Vince change (the person who’s working on it within the Googleplex.”

Watch the Matt Cutts clip for more on Google’s official position about favouring Brands in the natural search results…  

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