Earlier this year, Google launched Google+, a social network to take on Facebook.

“People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate,” claimed Google head Larry Page.

The profits were well ahead of market expectations, and shares in the company rose 6% in trading after the market closed.

This is the fourth successive quarter that the company has increased it’s sales income.

Sales revenue rose 33% to £6.48 billion ($9.72 billion) – just shy of having a quarterly turnover of $10 billion.

Mr larry Page said “We had a great quarter,” he said. “Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark.”

Facebook by comparison has around 800 million users.

As well as generating money through advertising based on search, Google also makes the increasinly popular Android mobile phone operating system.

After testing in Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score.

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team.

This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal.

If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was.

The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivising advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding.

Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

From: http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight

Yahoo’s chief executive Carol Bartz has been fired by the search company after only two and a half years in the top job.

Tim Morse, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, will take over from Ms Bartz.

Yahoo has been struggling to increase its market share as it faces increased competition from rivals such as Google and Facebook.

Yahoo shares jumped more than 6% in after hours trading after news of the firing broke- Yahoo’s stock price was up at $13.72, an increase of 81 cents.

Mr Morse will serve as interim chief executive and the board of directors will look for a new CEO, the company said.

Ms Bartz was hired to run Yahoo in early 2009, taking over from co-founder Jerry Yang.

She made significant changes to the management team and cut jobs to save on costs. She also shifted the focus of the traditionally search oriented firm towards more personalised content.

Critics claim that Yahoo has failed to make significant strides in two of the most lucrative segments of the market – search and social networking.

The news first broke on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D website, which quoted an email from Ms Bartz to Yahoo staff. The email has since been reported by other news agencies including Bloomberg and Reuters.

“I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman of the board,” Ms Bartz said in the email to staff.  ”It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”

As news of the sacking spread across the internet, Yahoo released its own press statement in which it confirmed it was undergoing a “leadership reorganisation” and that Ms Bartz would be leaving the company.

Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo’s board, said in the statement: “On behalf of the entire board, I want to thank Carol for her service to Yahoo during a critical time of transition in the company’s history, and against a very challenging macro-economic backdrop.”

Despite being one of the pioneers in the online search business, Yahoo has seen its market share dwindle in recent times. Not only have the users turned to its rivals, advertisers have also been ditching the company.

Analysts said a lack of focus and direction have hurt the company’s image.

Unless a new leader can get many more of us to start talking about and using Yahoo’s services, then the sad, long process of gentle anonymous decline looks set to continue.

You’ve got a wonderful new website- so the world is going to be knocking your door down. Or so you hope.

If your website starts with the word “welcome” congratulations- there are over three billion other websites listed by Google making the same mistake.

Go on- ask yourself how often do you search for “welcome”?

To get online traffic depends on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO has a number of factors:

1. Technical (how well can it be crawled by the search engines)
2. On page (what’s on the page being crawled)
3. Off page (mainly building links)

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value and has greatly improved the quality of web search.

Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Of course Google does not just use links; they use over 200 indicators such as:

• domain name
• meta tags
• alt tags
• directory names
• filenames
• heading tags
• link popularity (how many links back to you there are)
• link text (anchor text indicating the subject of the link)
• page title
• Page Rank

PageRank™ is Google’s patented method to assign a numerical algorithm and weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

In short the whole basis of Google’s success- is that success of website pages breeds success.

If you think that buying links is the key to your future success- hold on!

To find the pitfalls of blindly building links, just have a quick look at Google’s own links building rules .

As the article on paid links makes clear: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRanking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”

So, what you need are good quality links and lots of them.

But what is meant by good quality links?

The seven most important factors for link quality are:

Contextual links. One way is obvious and contextual just means appearing within the natural flow of a page’s text. If the link is reciprocal, Google sometimes discounts some of the value of that link.

High authority websites. Getting one link from the Telelgraph or DMOZ is possible worth more than 10,000 links from your new site. Authority does not
just mean high PageRank- but a site that is also well established as one of the most important sites for a topic.

Relevant / related links. If you have loads of sites that are irrelevant / unrelated to your sites topic you will probably lose out. In natural linking by people, they tend to link to one another within the same topics and industry. Spammers- like addicts don’t care where they get their fix- or link.

Diversity of link sources. Having many links from another site is good but it’s probably better to have one link each from many sites. The former could be spam. The latter is harder to achieve.

Deep links. If you only have links pointing to your homepage and no deep links to other pages in your site then you will probably have less success than with a proportion of deep links.

Different anchor texts -the actual text of the link. For example “Dr Search is an online marketing professional” is something we might be able to place with small variations, but hundreds and thousand of individuals who may link to us will vary the text they use just because they will as they all think slightly differently.

Consistent links growth. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Acquiring 20,000 links on one day unless your marketing goes viral is very unlikely for the vast majority of sites, so any search engine will rightly be suspicious.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, gave his “broad backing” to a review by Professor Ian Hargreaves of copyright law, claiming it would stimulate innovation.

“We are removing the barriers to the intellectual property system to encourage innovation. We need a legal framework that supports consumer use rather than one that sees it as regrettable,” he said.

The changes are expected to pave the way for Google and Amazon to launch “cloud” music storage systems for UK consumers – although there was still some confusion over whether this could run into conflict with European law.

A government spokesman said any conflicts would be dealt with during the consultation period, but Mr Cable said he was “confident” there would not be problems.

The shake-up will also allow anyone to apply data-mining technology to published journals, making it easier for the scientific community to access research.

However, the move was met with hostility by publishers, who see data-mining as a major source of growth.

Richard Mollett, chief executive of the Publishers Association, described the changes as an “unwarranted blunt instrument” that would damage a £1.5 billion industry.

He added that 90pc of research is made available for mining on request, despite claims by research charity the Wellcome Trust that 87 pc is unavailable.

Here’s Optify’s look at Click Through Rates of the top 20 sites’ rankings:
Basically, Optify concludes that moving up to the top spot in Google from second or third could triple visits to your website.

Optify’s study of U.S. Google search engine results pages, conducted in December 2010, analyzed organic keyword visits for B2B and B2C websites. Optify analyzed data from 250 randomly chosen sites and an initial set of 10,000 keywords.

Here are some of Optify’s other findings:

The average CTR on Page 1 of Google was 8.9 percent, but the average CTR on Page 2 was 1.5 percent. Ranking first on Page 2 had a slight benefit over ranking in the last spot on Page 1 (2.6 percent vs. 2.2 percent CTR).

Optify concludes that, because predicting which position your site will appear in Google is basically impossible, your SEO efforts should first focus on getting on Page 1, and then on investing in working your way up to one of the top three spots. Also, ranking beyond Page 2, while good for tracking trends, has almost no business value, Optify noted.

Optify’s study defined head terms as keywords with more than 1,000 monthly Google searches and long tail terms as keywords with less than 100 monthly searches.

Head terms had a higher CTR (32 percent) in the number one position than long tail terms (25 percent). However, long tail terms had a higher overall CTR on Page 1 of Google than head terms (9 percent vs. 4.6 percent).

Optify concluded that you won’t see “huge benefits until you get to the top few positions” with head terms. However, long tail terms can see decent CTR almost anywhere on the first page, though there is less benefit of moving up to higher positions.

Bottom line: let your business goals shape your SEO strategy.

The research was analysed at: Top-Google-Result-Gets-36.4-of-Clicks-Study

According to the report from Hitwise, Bing dominated 30% of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2011. That’s an impressive 5% jump compared from February 2011 results.

Though Google still leads the market share with 64.2%, the search engine actually dropped 3% market share in March.

While these stats are good news for Microsoft, Google should be paying a lot of attention to these results. Its market share has been constantly dropping: from 69.7% in December to 68% in January to 66.7% in February to 64.4% in March.

So what would happen if this trend continued? Check out the chart below. Looks like Bing will take the number one spot by January 2012.
Image Source: Mashable

Why is “search giant” Google seeing a decline in its market share? A WebmasterWorld forum discussion has many theories including the following from Brett Tabke:

Google has so screwed around with their serps this last year, that any alternative dependable and reliable that users can count on is going to gain share. Google has done something I didn’t think possible – they have broken the trust of the end user. While Bing has been busy showing that they are in it for the long haul and staying-the-course with a user experience that people are coming to trust.

I believe the reason for Google’s increase in market share is the fact that they have been playing around a lot with their SERPs over the last year. Such changes could have upset users who are looking for a more dependable and reliable source which Bing has been able to provide.

So while Google still controls two-thirds of the market, I think it should start getting concerned at Bing’s impressive market share growth.

From: http://blog.ineedhits.com/warning-to-google-bing-to-control-search-by-2012

One of the worst hit websites by the “Panda” update was Ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft-owned company that had been leading an EU competition case against Google.
Its web visibility fell by 94% according to analysis by Searchmetrics.

Google often changes the algorithms that determine the results that users sees when they search for something. Such updates are often done to weed out “content farms” – websites that copy material from other sites in order to get hits.

Where a keyword search may previously have returned their site on Google’s first page, afterwards it may be relegated to further down the rankings.

When the update, known as “Panda”, was rolled out on 11 April, Google published a blog post explaining that it was designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites-sites which are low-value add for users.”

Shopping and price comparison sites such as Ciao.co.uk sometimes suffer when Google algorithms change because they carry comments and reviews replicated elsewhere on the internet.

However, experts said that it was unusual to see a legitimate website hit as badly as Ciao.

Ciao.co.uk was involved in initiating an EU investigation into Google in November 2010. Its parent company, Microsoft claims that the Google has used its dominant position to limit rivals’ products.

Searchmetrics analysed Google results in response to a range of keywords, both before and after the Panda update.

Alongside Ciao’s 94% reduction in visibility, it found that hubpages.com fell by 85% and eHow.co.uk dropped 53%.

A Similar analysis by Sistrix found a 81% drop in visibility for Ciao.co.uk, 72% reduction for hubpages.com and an 84% fall for eHow.co.uk.

But it said that there were problems with Wikipedia’s accuracy and clarity on some of the pages.

Wikipedia said it encourages experts to edit the site as they have a lot to contribute.

Cancer Research UK’s website has pages of detail about a range of cancers.

However, using a search engine for the terms “breast cancer” ranks the charity in eighth place on the results page. Wikipedia meanwhile is ranked second- a trend which it repeats across many other keyword search term for cancers.

Wikipedia said it had more than 3.5m page views for cancer-related content in January 2011.

Henry Scowcroft, scientific communications manager for Cancer Research UK, said: “It has been our intention for a long time to be involved in the online discussion outside of our own website.”

“Wikipedia is nearly always at the top of an internet search for cancers. It’s not always that easy to understand and sometimes it can be inaccurate or not completely up to date.”

“We want to increase the accuracy and clarity.”

So far they have created a new entry on the hallmarks of cancer as well as information about screening for human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer.

The charity has not decided how many staff should contribute to the site, or how much time they should spend doing it.

A survey on search behavior conducted by HON for the KHRESMOI EU project What is your ideal search engine?

We would like to inform you that Health On the Net Foundation is currently participating in a European Union project KHRESMOI which aims to develop a search engine for health and medical information search to meet the needs of general population, MDs and radiologists. In this project, the Foundation and the Society of physicians in Vienna aim to better understand the needs of users (citizens and doctors) searching health information on the Internet. Currently a survey addressing the needs of the citizens is available online.

Help us by participating in our general public survey up until the 17th of April!

You can help us to promote this survey, few options are available here.

English version: Not happy with your online health information search results ? Please Participate in our survey. Our goal: 500 responses by the 17th of April 2011.

How do you search for health-related information on the Internet?