You’ve spilled coffee on your keyboard. The a, e, i, o, u, and r keys have stopped working. Now try to search Google for the nearest computer repair shop. The pain of typing on this broken keyboard is similar to what many people searching in non-English languages feel when trying to type today. Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible.Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google…

This is the second post in our Small Business series about entrepreneurship and the various Google tools you can use to establish and improve your business presence on the Internet. Here, you’ll learn how Google Places (formerly called the Local Business Center) can help you attract and be discovered by customers in your area for free. -Ed.As a local business owner, one of the things that sets you apart is your ability to make personal connections with your customers because of your passion for what you do…

One of the great things about the web is choice. There’s a website out there for nearly everything, and sometimes there are many sites all dedicated to a single topic. But how can you find all the sites that are related to the subject that interests you? This week, we launched a search feature that helps you easily find new websites that are similar to the ones with which you’re already familiar…

Earth Day may have just passed, but the Google Earth team loves it too much to let it go. So we’ve found our own special way to celebrate Earth Day (a little late) by making an announcement that we’ve been working toward for a long time: Earth view in Google Maps.When we first launched Google Earth back in 2005, it revolutionized the world of digital mapping. In the years since, Earth has been getting faster and lighter while adding large amounts of imagery, more ambitious features and an ever-expanding roster of platforms, including support for Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android and even the 2011 Audi A8!Web browsers haven’t exactly been standing still either…

Though our rocket program to help commuters to our Moon office is still a long way off, we’ve always jumped at the chance to bring the wonders of outer space a little closer to Earth. On Saturday, our Hubble telescope doodle celebrated 20 years of one of the most productive and celebrated science instruments since Galileo first made a telescopic survey of the heavens 400 years ago.Hubble’s razor-sharp vision has revealed previously hidden aspects of the cosmos with unparalleled intimacy and clarity, and you can see some of the best examples for yourself on our Hubble 20th birthday page…

In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below:

Initially, Google only looked at the date that was near the H1/Title of the page and, if it found something, it used that as the date in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is answer to a question from Curedream:

Is there really any value in getting links from the Yahoo directory

I’m going to move that up a bit and tackle directories in general.  In my opinion, yes, there is value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all. The trick is figuring out which ones matter most.

IMHO there are four directories that every website should try to be listed in: Yahoo, Business…

Today the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks…

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Rich Snippets for recipesRich Snippets are the brief annotations you see beneath search results that summarize what’s on a webpage. In addition to Rich Snippets for reviews, people, video and events, this week we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for recipes…

We spend a lot of time thinking about search results, but we also spend a lot of time thinking about search queries. Today we’re announcing three enhancements to help you input your searches more quickly and easily: more localized Google Suggest, improved spell correction for names and auto-correction for 31 languages.Feel at home with Google SuggestLast year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions…

(I’m traveling, but lots of good stuff from the recent SMX West search conference is now live — plus some new stuff — so I wanted to talk about it.)

At the SMX West search conference I did an Ignite talk about Google’s SEO audit that it did on itself. This was part of a global week of Ignite talks. An Ignite talk has 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of five minutes…

Today, April 15, is the due date for federal tax returns in the U.S. Now that everyone’s submitted their taxes in on time (we hope!) we wanted to take a look back at the last few months and tell the story of this year’s tax season through Google search.Spoiler alert — we’re starting our tax season search story at the end. As the filing deadline has approached over the last few days and weeks, we’ve seen a flurry of search interest about taxes and tax related topics…

This morning we announced a replay feature in real-time search that helps you search the public archive of updates from Twitter. Now, we have more Twitter news from today’s Chirp Conference. We’ve just released a new experimental service in Google Labs called Google Follow Finder to help you expand your Twitter network. With Google Follow Finder, simply enter your Twitter account name and you’ll see a list of people you might be interested in following…

Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local…

Hi Everyone
Anita Campbell will be interviewing me on her Small Business Radio program in ~ 1 hour & 15 minutes, at 1:30 PM Eastern.

…

(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.)

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc…

Today’s post is a question from Max Capener, who wants to know what’s the best way to handle old sites that you buy?

Ok so that’s a question that has a lot of different aspects, and I’ll try to go over a few of them. First, let’s talk about why you bought the website. Was it the competition? Were you looking to re-purpose/redirect some link equity? Or is it just a good domain name? If it’s the competition, you have few options you can leave it in place and try and secure two spots in the SERP’s…

Today, scientists announced a new hominid fossil discovery in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. The discovery is one of the most significant palaeoanthropological discoveries in recent times, revealing at least two partial hominid skeletons in remarkable condition, dating to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years. We are especially excited because Google Earth played a role in its discovery…

Last year, we launched Ocean in Google Earth, expanding the scope of Earth to include 3D maps of the world’s oceans and videos, photos and narrative from the world’s leading scientists and media sources to bring them to life. We worked with more than 100 partners to begin to fill in the “blue” part of the planet, adding hundreds of placemarks in more than 20 ocean layers. Since then, we’ve added hundreds of new posts to the Ocean layer with the help of Sylvia Earle’s Mission Blue Foundation and dozens of committed individuals around the world…

Today’s post is a question from Jason who asks the following question:

Are all links really the same? If a link statistically according to SEOMOZ or other tools, PR, trust, rank, etc, are the same, are they really the same in the eyes of Google?

The easy answer is no. The explanation is bit more involved. Any tool or service that is not put out by Google  is going to fall somewhere between a really good approximation and an educated guess because, at the very least, Google has access to a lot of information…

If you have been in the SEO field for any serious length of time you have probably come across (and benefited from) some of Tedster’s work - either directly, or indirectly from others who have repackaged his contributions as their own. He is perhaps a bit modest, but there are few people in the industry as universally well respected as he is. I have been meaning to interview him for a while now, and he is going to be speaking at Pubcon South on April 14th in Dallas, so I figured now was as good a time as any

How long have you been an SEO, and how did you get into the field?

I started building websites in 1995 and the word SEO hadn’t been invented…

The first-ever Google Model Your Town Competition has entered the public voting phase. It’s now up to you to help decide which of the five finalist towns should be the overall winner. Cast your vote before May 1.

• Barranco (Lima, Peru)
• Braunschweig (Niedersachsen, Germany)
• Donostia - San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa, Spain)
• Dursley (Gloucestershire, United Kingdom)
• West Palm Beach (Florida, United States)

These five teams used Google SketchUp and Google Building Maker to create beautifully detailed 3D models of their communities — and now they’re viewable in Google Earth by everyone in the world…

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”  Matthew 19:24

The Devils
So a while ago, someone named Derek Powazek severely criticized SEO and its practioners.  He started his post by saying: “Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls…

Good copywriting does more than just explain the details of a website’s products or services. Copywriting that sells has to come off as more than informative. It needs to speak to a person on an emotional level, giving them hope while getting the point across fast. It also needs to compel a person to take action.

The biggest weakness of the average website today is its copywriting…

Sometime when you write a blog you need some ideas of what people want to hear you talk about or questions they want to have answered, and that’s what this post is about. Got a topic you want  applyto have covered here’s your chance. Got a question you need answered step u to p to the plate. Drop your thoughts in the comment box below and I’ll try answer them. Topics or subjects that will have wider appeal will have a greater shot at being answered than topics that aply only to your website … unless of course it’s really interesting…

It’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest SEO tactics. Add thousands (or even millions of pages) and corporate hoops to jump though, and that is the hell an enterprise SEO point person deals with every day. Educating key decision makers, overcoming budget issues and keeping everyone on the same page were all challenges addressed at the Enterprise Level SEO session at Search Engine Strategies New York…

In a performance-driven world where clear-cut metrics can be a marketer’s best friend, the fear of anything less can seem too discouraging for words no matter how valuable it truly is. This SES New York session (which was awesome) on the State of Search track was SEO Performance Marketing: Paid Search is Accountable So Why Not SEO?…

Why not indeed… moderator John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive and speakers Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor, Inc…

Here’s some more stuff you should know about.

- I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.

- Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal (Added: the address if you want to send a Paypal donation is rhea_drysdale [at] yahoo [dot] com)…

[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.]

Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders. The two assertions that used my comments as material were “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’” and “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow…

Today’s post is another answer to a question–this time from Nathan Schubert, who wants to know what you should do with old links from directories and websites that still drive traffic if you’ve changed the content on your website.
OK. First off, you never want to have links to your site removed, even if it’s from a really bad website.  Truth be told, there are some things you need to watch out for, but (generally speaking) it’s really pretty hard for someone to screw you up by linking to you (I said hard–but not impossible)…