In the Google Inside Search blog, Google’s Amit Sighal published a post titled Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February that told us about many changes to how Google ranks pages, including the following:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We [...]…

Over the weekend I reworked Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry’s publisher & authorship Rich Snippets. Previously I had only had the rel=author snippet on the home page but based on other examples that were showing in Local I added the rel=publisher rich snippet to the home page only and left the rel=author snippet on the home page and every other page. I had previously added review rich snippets on both the review and home pages…

Google is rolling out the Venice update this week and has buried the information in a long list of 40 algorithm changes. In reality Venice is a really major change to how they show results and one that probably took a huge amount of work.

Basically if you search for “plumbers” the organic results will now show you organic results related to your location rather than just general results for that keyword…

I love local search. In many ways, it’s similar to Google’s Web Search, but with its own unique features. In addition to Googlebot, Local search has street view cars. In addition to looking at links, local search also looks for mentions of businesses that appear with location-based information. Instead of robots.txt files, local search [...]…

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Don’t miss Branded3 tomorrow at the TFM&A event in London, where CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Head of Search Tim Grice and Search Expert Matthew Jackson will be available to offer insights and tips for your campaigns.

You can find them in the VIP area where they’ll be on-hand to talk about any SEO, social media or other digital requirements you may have.

Tim will be taking to the stage twice during the event at Earls Court 2 tomorrow, to deliver some expert talks…

If Google had launched in the early 90s, it might have come out with technology that could be used to search some of the electronic databases of the day, prior to the World Wide Web, such as Lexis or Dialog. It would have developed ways to visualize results from those systems in useful ways, [...]…

Today we’re making it easier for you to hone in on that perfect image or explore your topic visually with an update to related search links. Related search links have been around for awhile—they’re the row of blue links running across the top of your image search results—but today we’re making them more visual to help you find exactly what you’re looking for or just have fun exploring.

For example, when planning a trip to Greece, I may not know what places are worth a visit, so I search for [greece] on Image Search…

Brian Wallace runs NowSourcing, an infographics-specialist consulting shop . They recently redesigned and Brian was kind enough to tell me why and what the process was!

Q – Tell us what your goals were.
BW – To create a classy custom feel to showcase our infographic design and social media services. The old site showed the typical internet marketing services you’d expect, but we wanted a more visual feel as well…

Branded3’s expert SEO and social media specialists will be attending the TFM&A event in London next Tuesday to offer insights and tips on your campaigns and strategies.

If you head over to the VIP area in Earls Court 2, you’ll find the Branded3 specialists (with a cup of coffee in their hands) available to discuss any search, social media or other digital requirements you may have…

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Google has been busy over the past couple of years acquiring a good number of small startups, including some that may help or have helped contribute features to Google Plus, such as Fridge, Tweet counting SocialGrapple, people sorting Katango, the team behind JustSpotted, social ranking PostRank, and social movie recommendation service fflick.

Google [...]…

Dennis Goedegebuure, VP of Internet Marketing at Geeknet Inc., is an all-around SEO superdude. His current chief professional responsibility is to drive massive traffic to a variety of sites with fabulous names the likes of Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Prior to Geeknet, Dennis was on the eBay team for nearly a decade, donning various online marketing hats, ultimately crowned Director Global SEO…

Does the Google Places “Report a Problem” Work to Remove Spam? In the past reporting, spam via this mechanism has been roughly akin to peeing in the ocean… satisfying but hardly ever changing the salinity let alone warming the ocean around your feet. I am curious whether, along with other improvements in service level, “Report a Problem” is now a functional solution for dealing with spam in your marketplace…

Over the past two days a raft of posters noted in the forums that their listings were now showing the dreaded “We Currently Do Support This Location”. For most of these listings the fix of “poking the listing” with an edit/submit in the dashboard did not return the listing to the index. Google posted this note in the forums and attempted to consolidate the many postings into this post…

I’ll be honest, this is post is somewhat of a “boast”. But since “boast” rhymes with “Yoast”, I think it’s allowed. Recently we did a website review for “How do you say that Word?”. The review contained instructions to make a section of the site accessible to spiders. Results? 10x the traffic.

The Site & The Problem

The site has a very simple concept: it explains how to pronounce certain words in several languages…

Google was granted a patent today on Blog Search, and how the search engine might filter blog posts out of blog search based upon a number of factors. The patent was originally filed in 2006, and it’s the first patent filing I’ve seen from Google that uses the term “splog.” The screenshot from the [...]…

“Recommended by 4 out of 5 people that recommend things.” Says so right in his Twitter bio. That should be all you need to know about Todd Friesen, right? Well, let’s dig a bit deeper. Who is Todd Friesen? He’s an SEO strategist, consultant, and straight up pioneer, kicking it in cyberspace for well over a decade. He’s a familiar face at mainstream online marketing conferences and known in the far reaches of the Interwebz by one truly enigmatic alias, Oilman…

Mathew Hunt  of Small Business Coach pointed out that, starting last night, the meta description snippet associated with Blended results is missing in action. They came and went in my results this morning and are now gone again. Obviously things are flakey and who knows where they will end up. I have also noted the reemergence of more the blended 7 results instead of the four that have been common over the past few weeks…

Since Google announced in July that there would be Google Plus business pages there have been speculation that Google would integrate Plus and Places. We saw some early Plus Plus Places (a mouthful..) integration in November  but now Google appears to be testing P+P (or is it ++P) integration using the rel=author tag as the glue between the two.

Over the weekend I found these author images in blended Places search results for lawyers in DUI Lawyers Phoenix and Criminal Defense lawyer Orlando…

In Australia, Google uses the Australian Yellow Pages as the exclusive primary data source for Places and it is so noted on every page of business listings in the Maps results.

Yet this story from the forums of being able to buy your way into a multitude of Places listings by purchasing locations with the Australia YP rang true. While I have not verified all of the facts independently I have heard reports elsewhere of being able to create a large number of Places entries via the Yellowpages…

Having first struggled with rick snippet markup for reviews and having recently struggled with implementing rel=”author” markup on several sites I was pleased to see AJ Kohn’s new Rich Snippets Testing Tool Bookmarklet.

With the tool I was able to check several sites very quickly, find minor problems and get the rel=”author” tag working properly. It makes a somewhat confusing task go more quickly by tightly integrating any webpage with Google’s Rich Snippet tool…

According to Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, if you look at Google Trends for trends related to “full moon” or “ice cream”, you’ll see that Google searches for those terms imitate actual physical trends in the world. With a very large number of queries performed for those terms, searches for “full moon” peak [...]…

Lookadoo. Does a groovier last name exist?  Studies* show that four out of five marketers don’t believe it’s a real surname at first- convinced instead it’s some cutting-edge, clever brand alias thought up by a Mad-Men-tastic team on the top floor of a swank skyscraper.  She once explained to me at a networking event in Vegas “Lookadoo’s” pretty righteous cultural origins (thereby convincing me of its authenticity), but I’m ashamed to say I sort of forgot the details…

We’re up, we’re down. We’re not sure where we are.

Reader & TC Jim Jaggers alerted me to the fact that Google has changed the  Google Places PO Box guidelines once again. In this new reading PO Boxes are definitely out. Suite numbers and box numbers are in. The new prohibition against moving the pin (a wide spread spam tactic to get a location in the city center without changing the address) is still in affect…

Two months ago, we announced our plans to roll out a new design for the Google bar. Our goal was to create a beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. Based on your feedback, we realized there were some elements of the new bar that we could improve, and with that in mind, we’re introducing an updated version that we believe will provide a better experience.

The new design retains many of the feature changes we made in November that proved popular, including a unified search box and Google+ sharing and notifications across Google…

Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device…

It appears that Google has again increased the search radius for a large number of “search phrase + city” searches

Since the spring of last year, Google has been reducing the radius for displaying results on many local searches. Effectively this meant that businesses outside  the smaller radius would no longer show a pinned result. I had investigated this problem in searches as varied as “Jewerly Buffalo NY”, “Personal Injury Attorney Anchorage”, “Bankruptcy Attorney Charlotte”, “New Orleans Divorce” and “DC Accident Attorney” amongst others…

Google has once again updated (props to Nyagoslav for first highlighting the change) their Google Places Quality Guideline in regards to the use of PO Boxes in the address field. Once proscribed, they are not again allowed in the second address field only.

Google first added the prohibition on the use of PO Boxes in 2009 after widespread abuses of the feature to create additional locations…

If you’ve spent any serious time on the search marketing conference circuit, you’re no doubt familiar with Heather Lloyd-Martin. Maybe you saw a flash of her signature red hair when you poked your head in the Speakers’ Room, or watched as she dazzled crowds, trading hats from lively moderator to panelist to presenter (averaging 327 words per minute)… or perhaps you even hung out and talked shop together at some fabulous networking event…