The search engine estimated the alterations to its core algorithm would make a difference to about 35% of searches.

The changes try to make results more relevant and beef up features which Google believes set it apart from rivals.

By contrast, Microsoft’s Bing search engine emphasises their results from social search news.

“Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh,” wrote Google fellow Amit Singhal in a blogpost explaining the changes.

The changes sought to understand whether a searcher wants results “from the last week, day or even minute” said Mr Singhal.

The update is supposed to offer a better guess of how “fresh” the results should be.

For instance, said Mr Singhal, anyone searching for information about the “Occupy Oakland protests” would probably want up to the minute news.

These need to be distinguished from searches for regular events such as sports results or company reports.

Other types of searches could call on older results, he said. Those looking for a recipe to make tomato sauce for pasta quickly would be happy with a page that is a few months or years old.

The update to improve the “freshness” of results builds on the big update made to the underlying infrastructure of Google’s core indexing system in August 2010 known as Caffeine. That change made it easier for Google to keep its index up to date and to add new sources of information.

Writing on the Search Engine Land news site, analyst Danny Sullivan described the changes to google’s search engine results as “huge”. The last big update to the Google algorithm, known as Panda, affected only 12% of searches.

The update could have potential disadvantages, warned Mr Sullivan.

“Rewarding freshness potentially introduces huge decreases in relevancy, new avenues for spamming or getting “light” content in,” said Mr Sullivan.

The Google search engine algorithm changes are announced at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search

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.

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.

A quarter of UK Smartphone users see mobile advertising and nearly two thirds see online video ads according to new research.

In June 2011, 63.1 percent (or nearly 2 out of 3 online video viewers in the UK) were exposed to video ads.

Among the total number of smartphone users in the same time period, 25.4 percent recalled seeing an ad while browsing the Internet or using an application on their devices. In comparison, 95.3 percent of fixed line Internet users were exposed to online display advertising.

Advertising Expands Reach among UK Mobile and Video Populations

Over the past two quarters, mobile advertising has seen a steady increase in reach. 5.4 million UK smartphone subscribers (25 percent overall) recalled having seen ads through a mobile browser or app in the quarter ending June 2011, representing a 28-percent increase from three months prior. In addition, nearly 8 percent of smartphone users recalled seeing ads at least once a week (up 28 percent), and 7.5 percent recalled seeing them almost every day (up 52 percent).

Of the 33.7 million online video viewers in June, 21.2 million (63.1 percent) were exposed to ad videos. While the total number of online video viewers remained constant from quarter-to-quarter, the number of unique viewers exposed to video ads rose 15 percent. Meanwhile, the online display market continued to show a high rate of penetration in the UK, with 40.0 million unique visitors exposed to online display ads in June 2011, accounting for 95.3 percent of the total UK online audience.

15-24 year olds most likely to be exposed to online video ads and smartphone Ads
A demographic analysis of people exposed to online advertising revealed that 15- 24 year olds were the most heavily exposed to online ad videos. Nearly 70 percent of 15-24 year olds were exposed to at least one online ad video in June 2011 – approximately 7 percentage points higher than the total Internet audience.

15-24 year olds were also 10 percent more likely than the average video viewer to be exposed to video ads, while 25-34 year olds have the second highest penetration and were 4 percent more likely than average to be exposed.

*An index of 100 indicates average representation relative to the base audience.

15-24 year olds see an even more pronounced relative skew when it comes to exposure to mobile advertising. In June 2011, 31.6 percent of UK smartphone users age 15-24 recalled having seen ads on an app or browser, the highest penetration among age groups. With an index of 125, 15-24 year olds were 25 percent more likely than the average smartphone user to recall exposure to mobile advertising. Meanwhile, 45-54 year olds and those 55 and older showed a significantly lower likelihood than average of recalling mobile ad exposure.

*An index of 100 indicates average representation relative to the base audience.

The research can be found at: http://www.comscore.com/Mobile_and_Video_Emerge_As_Significant_Online_Ad_Platforms_in_the_UK

All businesses make mistakes – but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.

Identifying enough potential customers who have the requirement for the goods and services on offer, is the primary problem for every business. Having identified the potential customers, the next difficulty is to convert them into customers that pay for their goods and services.

It often costs businesses more than they realise in order to gain a new customer – and considerably more than it does to retain them, so it is surprising how businesses can often take a casual attitude to their customer relations and to retaining customers for their repeat business.

Gaining and retaining customers is a privilege not a right. Customers don’t have to give their business and they are not obliged to remain customers, especially if the marketplace is filled with competing offers for products and services.

Maintaining customers depends largely on how the product or service is delivered.

As a minimum standard customers should always receive their goods and services at the price agreed and delivered in the manner and time expected. This is certainly the case in business to business transactions, where delivery to price and specification have particular importance to companies involved in manufacturing, or where their supplies inventories work on “just in time” deliveries.

From time to time, mistakes will be made – products may fail to meet their specification, deliveries are incorrect or are late, or perhaps there are mistakes in the invoicing.

When a customer complains, the customer is not always right.

But customer complaints need initially to be treated in the first place, as if the customer were right. It is easy for some employees not directly involved with the customer to treat such complaints as a nuisance, but complaints are a valuable source of information about how customers perceive the product and service  for which they are paying.

It is all too easy for  employees not directly in contact with the customer to be unaware of how their actions can alienate both potential and existing customers; for example a delivery not being made on time, a credit level exceeded that prevents delivery, incomplete orders.

When such events occur, provided that customers are informed of the problem at the earliest opportunity and kept informed about progress to its resolution, the harm to customer relations will be minimised.

The worst situation is to not inform the customer of any problem, but allow the customer to find out the hard way, which may create problems for the customer, and breaks the trust of reliability between the customer and supplier.

For managers responsible for getting and retaining business, it is important to ensure that all employees understand that however remote their jobs appear to be from a direct relationship with the customers, their actions can have a significant role in the acquisition, retention or loss of a customer’s business.

Getting customers and retaining their custom is hard work which can easily be undone and negated by others who don’t appreciate the consequences foreseen or unforeseen of their activity or lack of it.

If a customer complains, and there is shown to be a problem, the first action is to admit it to the customer and apologise. It is the job of the manager responsible for getting and retaining business to investigate the complaint, its possible causes, and to provide a swift remedy for the problem. In doing so, managers should consider the following principals:

• Don’t assume that approved business procedures are followed, always check.
• Can procedures and policy it be verified?
• How do you know?

Managers who are responsible for getting and retaining business, must take ultimate responsibility when customers are lost through failings of company staff.

Managers must check that the policies, procedures and results are maintained by their employees, and be ready to help when foreseen and unforeseen problems arise that effect the customers.

All businesses make mistakes, but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.

From: http://businessperformancemaximized.com/it_is_easier_to_lose_business_than_to_get_it

In raw numbers of requests, the United States topped the international table of 26 developed countries, with 4,601, but when population size was taken into account in an analysis by The Telegraph, it was relegated to fifth.

On this per head basis, only Singapore, which has been criticised by Human Rights Watch as an “authoritarian state”, asked for private data more frequently than Britain.

Australia came third, with 345 requests, and France fourth, with 1,021.

Google did not release details of the data requested, but it is likely to have included web search terms, emails and YouTube activity.

In some cases British authorities do not require a warrant or court order to access such data.

“We hope this tool will shine some light on the appropriate scope and authority of government requests to obtain user data around the globe,” Google said.

“Requests may ask for data about a number of different users or just one user. A single request may ask for several types of data but be valid only for one type and not for another; in those cases, we disclose only the information we believe we are legally required to share.”

Google also released figures on how regularly it removes material such as YouTube videos in response to official requests.

British authorites asked Google to remove content 38 times, including one request by the Office of Fair Trading that more than 93,000 adverts linked to fraud were taken offline.

By comparison, in Germany, which has strict laws against Nazi imagery, authorites made 118 content removal requests.

Brazil topped the table with 263 requests.

Matt Cutts- Google’s unofficial spokesperson made the Panda reranking announcement in a question and answer session at the SMX Advanced conference.

Addressing the frequent complaints from webmasters that web content scraping sites still out rank the original content sites, Cutts said that the Google Panda algorithm update (version 2.2) will tackle this issue.

He also said that Google will keep working on the Panda algorithm until they have a robust algorithm that can penalize the content farming and related sites and display better improved search results.

This means that websites that were penalised by the original Panda update could soon look forward to regaining their original rankings or even getting higher rankings in the SERPs.

The differences with Panda update 2.2 lies in its implementation – Cutts said that the algorithm will be manually scanning for those particular websites that are involved in content farming and/or content re-publishing.

While Panda Update 2.1 was only released in early May, it was a minor update and received no fanfare from Google.

The fact that Matt Cutts has mentioned 2.2 at one of the biggest SEO conferences of the year indicates that its probably going to be big (and have quite an impact).

However, to avoid any great impact to your websites ranking, ensure that your site is kept up-to-date with good quality content.

This will reduce the likelihood of any penalty or if you have already been penalized in previous updates then the penalty should soon be lifted after the 2.2 launch.

Google hasn’t given a specific date on the launch of the Panda update 2.2, but as soon as we hear anything more we will be sure to let you know.

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.