Google Instant Preview

The big G has launched the new Instant Preview feature a week or so ago.  Basically it gives you a small screenshot of search result with the search term highlighted within the image for your viewing pleasure.

Although quite a nifty little feature, there's a few questions being raised from an SEO point of view.

Firstly, if searchers can preview your page before deciding to click through, does this impact on the number of visits that you'd normally receive?  We're assuming that normally a person would click on the link, then quickly scan your site before deciding to bounce away if they haven't found what they're looking for.

Now they're essentially making up their mind about the result based on a partial screen cap of your site.

Secondly, by displaying the tiny screen cap, will searchers be more likely to be making up their mind on whether to visit your site based on its design?  Will it be a case of design over relevance?  Following that train of thought, will site owners now be more likely to try to optimise their site for Page Preview display?

Should we be spending our time browsing search results or browsing the actual result pages?  Is Google now trying to own the entire search experience?

Food for thought...

Google Wave Wipes out

Funny how things go - a year ago Google Wave was being touted as the next big... something in collaboration, instant messaging, twitter and pretty much everything else you could think of.

Well I, like many others, always doubted exactly what it actually was and what practical use it had.  Some found it useful as a collaboration tool but it seems that a bunch of Aussie comedians and a group of Google employees does not a market make.

So it's no real surprise that it was announced yesterday by the Google VP of Operations (and Google Fellow no-less??!!) that Wave is to go the way of the dodo.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

Sorta good to see that even the big boys can admit that not everything they touch turns to gold.

Where is spam originating? - Google Postini

Google Postini has a great feature that shows you in real time where spam messages are being born.  Each red dot on this map shows where spam messages are originating in real time. Saturated areas show high concentrations of malicious IPs. 

The surprising thing is that countries with spam legislation in place like the USA and Australia (where penalties are in the hundreds of thousands and up to the millions for repeat offenders) are still generating spam.  But the most surprising aspect is the fact that France, Spain, Brazil and the UK are still major spam sources.

And here I was thinking that China, Russia and India were the main offenders...

Google Caffeine

Given that Google has today announced it's new enhancements to it's search algorithm, which are aimed at giving search results up to 70 percent fresher than the current batch, I thought it a good idea to look at what the main changes are.


The following points are some that I've collated from various sources around the traps discussing this right now.

Fast Indexing
With the introduction of Google Caffeine, there will be no more “sandbox”. The indexing time frame is down to about 15 minutes now if you have a dynamic sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools. This means that unique, steady content will take even more precedence in search engine rankings.

Load Time
Matt Cutts stated in November 2009 that many engineers in Google are making the argument that the “load time” of a web page be included in the algorithm of Google. So, we know that they have been working on this. Make sure that your images and all page elements are optimised and that your sites load fast. Nobody wants to lose ranks because of this.

Flash Sites
Based on the information above, this is bad news for Flash sites because they take forever to load. Do not expect to rank high with full flash sites.

Paid Links and Age of Link
No more buying links to push ranks up in a short period of time! Google says that the age of links matter and stable links will get you up in the SERPs. So, if you plan on buying links, make sure you keep them for at least 8-12 months. That can be a bit costly, we still recommend building naturally occurring links.

Analytics Data
As controversial as this is, Google might use the analytics data of webmasters in their algorithm due to the fact that it provides a huge amount of information about user interaction of a web site. 

Keywords
The new Google seems to rely a lot more on keyword strings to bring better, more relevant results.  This makes the SEO's jobs a little more difficult.

In essence, it seems to mean that many SEO related businesses - and those that are still involved in search arbitrage, may have to re-evaluate how they go about doing whatever it is they do...  The improvements are definitely more geared towards the user experience rather than making life easier for the marketer.

How it should be i think :)

For more, check out Mashable's detailed test of the new algorithm.

See all evil

Web Seer is a funky little app that compares Google results for two search terms and shows where they overlap.

Hours of fun, here's one to get you started :)

The Internet Vs Television

buzz-sted!

Sometimes people don't quite appreciate a surprise as much as you might think.

I think this was the case with Google when they decided to Buzz us gmail users recently.

Seems the community decided that getting auto subscribed with no user input, plus making it difficult to change settings and figure out what is public or not, was a bit too, um, surprising?

So Google has decided to backtrack and fix a couple of settings to be more obvious. Perhaps something they should have done in the first place?!

Wondering how much of this negative feedback was via Buzz itself?...

Buzz?

Google Buzz - Google's answer to twitter?

All this Wave, Gmail, Buzz stuff coming out of the same place is really starting to get confusing.

Am I alone in thinking that they seem to just be pushing out stuff without really much though to how it all fits together and, more importantly, how people are going to use it?