Net66: Google Launches New Redesigns Maps App to Boost Local Search

Yelp and Tripadviser dominate a lot of the local search listings. If you’re looking for a nice local restaurant with good reviews, the websites above are probably the most prevalent out there in regards to reviews.

That’s something Google wants to stop. Not because they’re doing a bad job, in fact the opposite. Yelp & TripAdvisor are doing great and Google wants a slice of that pie.

They’re aiming to make their maps app so useable that rather than load up Yelp or TripAdvisor for the latest reviews of the local restaurants, you open up maps and search that way.

Check out the new look below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts Extends Leave

Everyone who has had some involvement with SEO in the last 10 years should know Matt Cutts. He’s been the face of Google’s web spam team for years now and often offers sage like advice for SEOs.

Back in July he announced that he was going on leave for “a few months” and that is should last through October. Well October came and went over the weekend and with it a small note added to the original blog post that Matt Cutts used to announce his leave.

The note read:

Added: When I went on leave, I wanted to see how webspam would go without me. I’ve been talking to people on both the algorithmic and manual webspam teams during my leave, and they’ve been doing a top-notch job. So I’m planning on extending my leave into 2015.

Normally this wouldn’t be a particularly large deal, but such is Matt Cutts’ position of power and reverence in the SEO world that this has conjured up a lot of questions, including some who question whether he will come back at all.

The reasoning behind that sort of thinking is that Matt acts as a focal point for Google. This focal point can be used for good, such as congratulating the Webspam team for a job well done taking down lots of spam or finding and destroying a link network. But it can also act as a focal point for all the rage and angst of Webmasters who are affected by algorithm updates / ranking fluctuations or just general conspiracy theories.

As such, taking away Matt Cutts face could also take away a lot of the vitriol that Google receives. Personally, I think Matt is too much of an asset to lose. They could simply replace his regular answering webmasters’ questions with some of their Google Hangouts. This way there is no one person that webmasters can attack for the perceived injustice of bad rankings.

Do you think Matt Cutts will return to Google?

Net66: Google Launches New Mobile Usability Platform

Google today launched a new tool that helps Webmasters diagnose and fix issues with the mobile versions of their websites.

The blog post that announced this feature was written by John Mueller, who has been very vocal since Matt Cutts took his annual leave.

The tool takes a look at your website from the eyes of a mobile device and then lets webmasters know what could be causing problems. Take a look at the example report below:

example-report

Looks fairly useful. In this post they’ve also added a link to their web fundamentals page. A page that will help people code a beautiful and mobile friendly website.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Honours French Artist Niki de Saint Phalle

As we all know, Google LOVES doodles. In fact they have a whole section of their website dedicated to storing them.

Today it’s the turn of Niki de Saint Phalle to receive the honour. Niki was a famous French artist who has a number of very popular scupltures, paintings and films.

The Doodle you can see below shows a few of Niki’s trademark “Nanas”, colourful female figures that became synonymous with her work.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Honours Dr. Salk with Google Doodle

Google Doodles have again announced their admiration for a person by honouring them with a doodle on their homepage.

This time it is the turn of Dr. Salk. The man who created the first vaccine for Polio. Take a look at the Doodle below:

What’s interesting about Dr. Salk is that he never patented the vaccine. Meaning that anyone else who could replicate it and potentially patent it themselves. Earning thousands or potentially millions of dollars/pounds from it.

When asked why he didn’t patent the vaccine, Dr. Salk responded simply “Would you patent the sun?”.

Net66 SEO: Google Penguin 3.0 Launched Last Week, still rolling out now!

People in the SEO world are very aware of the Penguin algorithm. The reason being that this was the algorithm that, when updated initially, caused the most uproar we’ve seen from any algorithm update previously.

Back in October we informed you that Penguin 3.0 was set to be released within 2014. The weeks passed and on Friday, Google finally announced that they had released the latest version of their link analysing algo.

The last couple of times Google updated this algorithm there was fury from all sides of the SEO world. This time however, it seems that Penguin 3.0 is a softer version of 2.0 and 2.1. It’s either that or after the earlier versions Webmasters finally got round to doing some housekeeping on their links.

When the algorithm was released on Friday there wasn’t much detail really released with it. Usually when google announces a fresh algorithm they give a bit more info with it. Such as how many queries will be impacted, which languages will be affected etc etc.

That data didn’t really emerge until today with Google’s giving the following summary:

> All versions of Google around the world will be affected by the updates
> The whole of the algorithm hasn’t been released yet and will take a few weeks for it to be complete.
> Less than 1% of English language queries will be affected but all other languages could be more or less.
> Google have confirmed that the implication of the new algorithm began on Friday.
> The update has been specifically termed a “refresh” by Google engineers.
> Main losers will be websites with bad link profiles.
> Main winners will be websites with good link profiles and profiles that have been cleaned up since the last update of Penguin.

So what do you think of the new algorithm?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Celebrates Life of Christopher Wren with St Pauls Cathedral Google Doodle

Google loves a good Doodle and we’ve been treated to a great one today. It celebrates the life and work of Christopher Wren, who was an architect at the time of the Great London Fire.

After the fire was finally out there was a lot of restoration work to be done. Christopher Wren oversaw a lot of this and was in charge or the construction of 52 churches across the City.

His most famous work of course is St Paul’s Cathedral, which is depicted in the Doodle first as a pile of rubble, wood and smoke. The doodle then shows the rebuilding of the Cathedral to completion, and then gives it an aged effect, as if on parchment, with the signature of Wren himself over it.

Check out the images below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Founder Eric Schmidt Launches Gives Huge Speech on Google and Innovation

The Google Europe Blog have very kindly transcribed the whole of a speech Eric Schmidt (founder of Google) gave when in Berlin today.

Here are a few choice Quotes:

On Innovation:

When Karl Benz invented the petrol car, he didn’t just create an engine with three wheels (it really was three wheels to start with!) … he created an entire industry. It was the same with Tim Berners-Lee. He didn’t just build the world’s first website, he paved the way for the World Wide Web.

On the Progress of Google:

Maps now feel like such an integral part of search that most users probably can’t imagine Google without them. It’s the same with many of our changes. Your search just gets better and better over time. Google “Berlin weather” and you’ll no longer get ten blue links that you need to dig through. Instead, you’ll get the weather forecast for the next few days at the top result, saving you time and effort. Or Google “bratwurst” … and at the top will be images, nutrition facts, and a web page with a recipe.

There really are some great quotes so read the blog post if you’ve got some spare time.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 – Google Adds More Mobile Friendly Notices in Listings – Uses Words!

Yesterday I wrote that Google were testing a way to let users know whether a website was mobile friendly or not by adding a little icon next to the website listing in the results. Check out the icon for a mobile friendly site below:

And the icon for the non search friendly results:

But not happy with the icons, they want to see how users react to text displaying the fact sites are mobile friendly. Check out the image below:

Which one do you prefer?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Testing Out Icons for Mobile Friendly / None-Mobile Friendly in Mobile Search

You’ve probably experienced it before. You’ve loaded up a website on your phone looking forward to a nice little browse. Unfortunately the website you want to browse isn’t particularly mobile friendly.

Well now, Google is testing having icons directly in mobile search results that help tell you whether the website you want to visit is or isn’t mobile friendly. Check the images below:

What do you think of these updated icons?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Nokia Launches New Mapping Software on Google’s Android Operating System.

You can be coaxed into forgetting about about Nokia as a Smartphone. It’s very iOS Vs Android, and Galaxy Vs iPhones out there. But Nokia do have a solid range of smartphones on their own. Or at least they did, having sold their hardware and handset division to Microsoft.

When the deal was made though Nokia kept their mapping service, aptly named Here Maps. Since the divergence of the hardware and phones division, that’s put enough space between Nokia and Microsoft for Google to now allow Nokia to release it’s Here Maps App on the Android operating system.

Take a look at some of the screenshots below:

It’s no Google maps, but it’s solid and it works. It’s only available on the Samsung Galaxy range of Smartphones at the minute but expect rollout onto more devices later.

Blog Post by Greg McVey.

Net66: Has Google Officially Killed Off Toolbar Page Rank?

PageRank has long been something to talk about and was at one point important. These days however it seems that Google’s Toolbar page rank is just another statistic that doesn’t really mean anything. This is probably why Goole will be killing it off.

OK, not actually killing it off and removing all support for it etc, but in a recent Webmaster video John Mueller did say that they wouldn’t be updating it going forward.

Last year we heard straight from Matt Cutts’ mouth not to expect another pagerank update that year. However a few months later, a technician was working on something in the pagerank software place (i’ve no idea how else to describe it) and whilst there, decided to push a Toolbar Pagerank update. Which caught everyone by surprise.

Now though, this isn’t a “we’re not updating it for a while” it is a ” We probably won’t update it ever again”. If so, what does this mean for SEOs? Not much really. With Google shifting their focus to high authority sites, there will be something completely new used to decide this and it looks like Google isn’t giving the game away. Check out John Mueller in the video below:

So although PR Toolbar might have gone the way of the dodo, there’s nothing to suggest we won’t see something similar rolled out at some point.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Celebrates Thor Heyerdahl with Google Doodle!

Google often celebrates people’s lives, specific dates, holidays etc with a Google Doodle. Today, they celebrate the author Thor Heyerdahl. In case you didn’t know, he is the author of The Kon-Tiki expedition. And if you’re unaware of what that is, it’s basically a recounting of his expedition across the Pacific Ocean on a raft.

Take a look at the Doodle below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Explain How They Decide The Optimum Frequency for Crawling Your Site

As we all know, there’s a huge invisible, intangible creature roaming the web reading everything out there! But the Google spider really isn’t that bad. All it’s doing is reading your website, jotting down the key points and then storing this information somewhere else. In fact, the Google spider is somewhat like a librarian.

For this purpose, part of SEO is to make sure your website is as easy to read for Google’s spider as it is for a human to read your site. For example your site could look amazing to the user, but the code used to write the beautiful landscape of words and pictures dedicated to your services could be as muddled and confusing as one of Dan Brown’s books.

Another one of the main points for optimising your site for the crawler is making sure that your site can be read as frequently as possible. Because you want to update that site a lot with fresh, valuable and quality content.

Two main factors of this, as confirmed by Gary Illyes (Googles Webmaster Trends analyst), are the following:

HTTP Status Codes

There are a range of different HTTP Codes. The most common is 404 (Page Not Found). But there’s also 301s, 302s, 200s and a lot more. Google can handle these codes quite well, but when it starts to get http codes in the 500 range, this could spell trouble.

The 500 range indicates that there’s something wrong with the server. As such, Google won’t want to risk any further harm to your website so will stop crawling you for a while, giving your website time to recover/get fixed.

If you do have 500 error codes, make sure you get them fixed right away and then “fetch” your website in webmaster tools to make sure that Google can now read your website again.

Connect Time

As above, when Google detects a slow connection to your web server it will assume the worst. That your website is experiencing issues and any further connections to the site will cause further issues to your server and then break it.

Due to this assumption, it will again limit the number of crawls that it will run on your website.

So, all in all, if you want Google to read your site correctly and frequently clean up your 500 error codes and make sure that your server is in tip top condition.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Competitors Launch Website Claiming Google Hurts the Internet

Google’s competitors have today launched a new website explaining how Google is hurting the internet.

The group of companies is called Focus On The User. Aptly named as what this group of companies suggest Google is doing is promoting their own services before using competitors websites.

The group of companies include names such as: Consumer Groups like HolidayCheck, which include Fight for the Future and Consumer Watchdog.

Take a look at the video they’ve released showing how Google hurts the internet:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey