Omar Kattan » SERP Analysis

Eye Tracking Study: Users Ignore Real Time Results

Omar Kattan — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:51:30 +0000

A new eye tracking study shows that Google users are ignoring real time search results including tweets found in the search pages. There are no firm rules on when or where real time results appear in Google but the followi... Read more..

Google’s “MayDay” Update

Omar Kattan — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:08:18 +0000

In May Google updated it's algorithm in major way. The change happened around the 1st of May and therefore has been dubbed the May Day algo change by members of WebmasterWorld. In the video below Matt Cutts expl... Read more..

Google Adds “Answer Highlighting” to Search Results

Omar Kattan — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:31:27 +0000

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... Read more..

Google Caffeine – The SEO Implications

Omar Kattan — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:26:58 +0000
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 Caf... Read more..

Google Announces Longer Description Snippets

Omar Kattan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:01:35 +0000

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... Read more..

QDF: Query Desreves Freshness

Omar Kattan — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:34:02 +0000
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... Read more..

Is Google Favouring Brands in SERPS?

Omar Kattan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:04:29 +0000

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 wan... Read more..

The “Search Intent” Influence on Search Results

Omar Kattan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:26:31 +0000

Search engines factor "search intent" into their algorithms in an effort to feed back the best possible results to their users' search queries.

It's absolutely crucial to understand this concept when deciding which keywords to target for which sites, especially if you're trying to manage the expectations of a client who's hired you to optimise their site for generic keywords in the natural search results.

Let me explain what I mean by "search intent", in a nutshell, its what search engine users intended to find when they typed in... Read more..