At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results…

The WSJ reports that as soon as next week Google will begin selling music in the search results:
Google Inc. will soon let users buy songs or listen to them for free, right on its main results page, as part of a broader push to enhance the offerings on the leading search engine, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The music offerings, from four online music services, are to be packaged in what Google calls a “one box” at the top of a results page, similar to the site’s presentation of weather and financial results…

Google Insights For Search

What does it take to rank in Facebook’s newly enhanced internal search engine, which now spans the entire user base? This post offers results from aimClear’s study of Facebook search and offers SEO tips & tricks for getting keyword queries ranked in FB’s organic SERPs.

We also examine opportunities for savvy marketers to best exploit Facebook’s expanded social graph search to immediate advantage and share what we learned about ranking factors…

With Street View on Google Maps, you can take a virtual drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or see the bustle of Times Square from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country’s most interesting and fun places aren’t accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?I first started thinking about this question around two years ago…

Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google’s hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update:

Matthew [said] the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time…

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)A few years ago I couldn’t wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah, but more importantly, so that I could take my husband’s name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.After a few years of working here, though, I’ve learned that you don’t have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results…

(Cross-posted on the Google Lat Long Blog)Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it’s accurate, that it stays current and that it’s useful to everyone who might want to use it?One of the best ways to get a big project done — and done well — is to open it up to the world…

If you’ve been involved in SEO for a while chances are you’ve heard the term google whacking. For those of you that haven’t basically it was coming up with a search term for a real word that had exactly one result. Due to the way Google does things now it’s nearly impossible, and hardly any fun to try and find one anymore. However with bing it’s entirely possible, and in some cases it looks intentional…

Steve Balmer on Search Innovation

In the above interview Steve Balmer states that search innovation has slowed down over the past 5 years compared to the 5 years prior. While committing to pouring billions of Dollars into the search market, Steve Balmer does not think that search has kept up its rate of innovation. But this perception is actually a fib. A lie. One that Steve must tell himself AND the media in order to try to gain press coverage for Bing and justify what will amount to a very expensive competition in the search marketplace…

Today we’re launching a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information you can find with Google Squared, as well as new tools to sort and export the data.As we explained when we first launched Squared in Labs this summer, the product takes on a difficult technical challenge. It’s a first step towards automatically extracting useful facts from all over the web and presenting them in meaningful way…

The following is a guest post by Ari Ozick, a member of our SEO Community who frequently shares great insights.

The above graph is based on an intensive questionnaire of over 2500 world class SEOs, including freelancers, in-house corporate types and SEO entrepreneurs. In the questionnaire, I asked one simple question – what is the most profitable activity in your business…

How are your referral stats looking? Noticed more traffic from Bing lately?

According to a Nielsen report last month, Bing is growing faster than any other search engine. It was reported Bing had 10.7% of the total search market, up 2% from the month before. Yesterdays report from Hitwise suggests Bing has since dropped to around 8.96 percent.

So, somewhere around 8-10% perhaps…

We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want:

This answers a couple questions such as:
- Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?
- How do I make that url disappear from Google?

I hope the video helps if you have questions.

…

A few weeks ago we had a visitor at the Googleplex: Rob Hof, the Silicon Valley bureau chief at BusinessWeek. Rob talked to a bunch of Googlers and sat in on one of our weekly quality-leads meetings. The resulting story is out now. The first part of the story covers some of the challenges facing Google, but the second part gets into more detail than we normally get into.

What’s even more interesting is that BusinessWeek put up transcripts of some of the interviews…

[I wrote this in January 2008 but never posted it. I think people might still want to read this, so I'm posting it now.]

In an election year, everybody gets a little more sensitive about politics, so I wanted a write a pre-emptive post in case anyone accuses Google of political bias in our search results sometime this year.

This is my personal opinion, but in my way of looking at the world, search quality > politics…

[A couple things to note: 1. This is a purely personal blog post--like other blogs posts I do, I haven't run it by anyone else at Google. 2. I'm writing it quickly because I have a lot of work to do. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it.]

This morning I saw an article in the New York Times with the headline Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking:

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley…

Are You Employing Leverage?

A few months back I had a chat with ShoeMoney and we talked about a lot of marketing stuff. He always speaks of the importance of being able to leverage success to build other related projects. It is typically worth far more money to be a lead player with projects that build off of each other than it is to be a #10 player in many different markets trying to build disconnected brands that can’t feed off each other…

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious - where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing - the page - and partly from computer science - the domain…

I was browsing around Wikipedia and couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of some of Wikipedia’s editors, or wonder how Google can love thieves like these…

Wikipedia editors can’t spell, yet they want us to make a better ‘choise’ of words.

So let me get this straight. The content was garbage, but you still thought it was good to plagiarize it? That’s like watching Bruno and thinking he’s a role model! And of course, while you’re plagiarizing, you may as well link around to the rest of the crap content you stole and repurposed on the Wiki…

If you have the budget resources the best time to hire an SEO is before you start your website projects. However, most people new to the web lack the cashflow needed to buy quality SEO services. Further if they don’t understand the complexities of the market and get bombarded with cheap (and low to no value) SEO package offers from web hosts, registrars, and email spammers they may think SEO should be cheap and easy, causing them to buy garbage - and become distrusting of the concept of SEO…

Today’s post deals with a much more harmless form of SEO Outting, accidental outting and invalidating testing. To teach this lesson I’m going to use a story …

Let’s assume for a minute your at a ball game or party and your friend comes back from the bathroom, and you notice their zipper is down. Because they are your friend you want to help them out, so in a normal voice you point at their crotch and say “excuse me but your zipper is down” … kudo’s to you for being a good friend right?

Well not really, because while your intentions may have been knoble, your execution had the opposite effect, as you just embarrassed your friend unnecessarily in public…

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.

To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be…

Online Marketing is Complex

One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex…

When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

The first step you need to take is to make sure you are publishing a full feed. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as publishing a full feed will actually encourage more people to scrape your feed, but that’s exactly what you want to happen…

Remember how the news media wanted Google to come riding to the rescue and save them, and their failing business model?

Well, Google might have found a way.

This should be of huge interest to anyone who produces content on the web.

IF

…it comes off.

Micropayments

Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year. Micropayments, as the name implies, are small payments - a cent or even a fraction of a cent - and the idea is that micropayments can be used to pay for accessing web content…

Think Visibility by sk8geek

So I’m starting to wake up from Think Visibility, after flying back yesterday to dive straight into a family party. I can honestly say it was very cool, my presentation went quite well I think, judging by the average of the reactions. Julian’s presentation after mine was very interesting as it was the first time I ever heard someone who actually works at a newspaper in Europe talk smartly about SEO…

…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I.

Your Site Is Hacked!

I’d been busting my butt on a project for a few months now and we were slowly been getting results. I’d just recruited a new person to work on the project, and I find out – from this new person no less – that the site was looking odd…

I check it out, and see that it’s been hacked and defaced…

IIf you could tell the web 2.0/read-write/blogging/crowd-sourcing crowd one thing about search marketing, what would it be?

In a recent talk, given to bloggers, by Google Engineer Matt Cutts, Matt posed the question:

“What Do SEOs know that bloggers might not know?”

Matt goes on to talk about the merits of keyword research in terms of topic selection, and how understanding this concept can bring you a great deal of traffic…

Recently a well known SEO blogger mentioned that they didn’t understand why real professional SEOs advocate variation between page titles and on-page headings. This blog post is a free SEO consult for that person

Hopefully it clears the public SEO space of some misinformation.

Are You Missing Keywords?

People search for literally billions of unique search queries each month…

Does brand matter? That seems to be a question Google wants to challenge. Eric Schmidt offers quotes like “brands are how you sort out the cesspool”. Google’s search algorithms this year have put more weight on domain authority (which is often associated with brands).

But while Google is telling everyone else to build a brand, Google might be looking to compete head on with brands in many large verticals…