SEO Rocks

Google has announced a change to its page layout algorithm in a change that instantly made me think Google were being very hypocritical. The new layout will affect pages that have little content but lots of advertising above the fold when a page loads.

I instantly thought of me using my netbook, or the millions of people now using 10″ tables or smaller, the amount of times a google search has been assessed with only PPC on show and loading youtube with ridiculously large adverts across the top.

When you read into it more however, this is not what Google is gunning for, Google are penalising website that make it hard to find the content on the website, if the page loads and the content isn’t visible with a scroll or makes it hard to access content then they are dropping.

Google has said that 1% of searches are effected, initially a small percentage, but this is still a large amount of searches. Thinking more about it, it dawned on me that it’s mainly file sharing websites that use this trick. The download links are generally at the bottom of the page, they have a timer on them to use, the links are always smaller than the adverts, adverts generally dominate the top of the page.

This seems a little coincidental that on the day Megaupload is taken down by the Americans, Google directly affect the rankings of most other popular file sharing websites.

I did try to fight this idea with myself by thinking all they are going to do is improve the page layout of these websites to make it easier to download from them. I don’t think this could be the case, most of these websites will have enormous running costs which are being paid for by advertising in prominent pages on the website. If the download link becomes clear, then massive amounts of revenue will be lost on these websites and who knows if they will be able to sustain operation. I dont believe enough people would pay for the service to cover the loss in advertising revenue.

I did try to perform a few searches to screenshot for this blog post, but i couldn’t even find the websites im talking about in a search, all i got presented with at the end of the search as this.

This morning i have been seeing some strange looking search results in Google.fr, They made me think back to Patrick Alofts blog post about site previews in the search results.

This seems to be something similar except it doesn’t seem to work!! I am using Firefox, this is only appearing on Google.FR, i have not updated or installed any plugins since yesterday when i last viewed Google.FR, I DO have JavaScript enabled and i am NOT logged in.

Hovering over a search result adds a blue border around the result and there seems to be a magnifying glass icon, These results are slightly different from the reports on Blogstorm, however, Google is deffinately testing something again.

When i click on the magnifying glass nothing happens, i have checked i have got JavaScrip turned on which it is.

The screenshots are not as impressive as seeing the full site preview but something is being tested on Google.fr today

Technorati Claim String: TSY6NAYM3HQS

Google has started to put location information into its search results in the green bar next to your URL.

I have only noticed today that it has happened but after a little searching i found that it was announced on the Google Central blog on the 1st December.

If you have search results that are .com, .info or any other TLD that doesn’t identify location then Google has started to add the location of the website to the results. I can however only find one working example of this and it seems that the only way to get this to work is to set the Geo Targeting in Google Webmaster Tools. continue reading »