If you are creating or updating web pages then you want Google to index your URLs as quickly as possible. While many of us publish our pages and then check anxiously whether or not they have been indexed, a faster way to submit URLs has been brought under the spotlight. By using Webmaster Tools you can fetch a URL as a Googlebot and then, if the fetch is successful, you will have the option to submit the URL to be indexed. After you submit the URL to Google it should be crawled within a day and will be considered for inclusion in the index.

Time and time again, the online community has watched Google try and fail to break into the world of social media. Buzz turned out to be more of a drone, Wave crashed seriously short of the social shore and Orkut just couldn’t cut it on the international networking stage. Give the folks at Google their due though, they never gave up – and with the advent of Google Plus, it seems they may have finally got it right.

The Google Plus concept has turned out to be wildly popular; in fact, within a mere 2 weeks of its launch, the service reached 10 million users, and a week later, there were 20 million Googlers looking to join the Circles, Hangouts and Huddles of Google Plus.

The latest development from Google is melting hearts as it encourages Internet users to answer the question: What Do You Love?

Google’s latest offering takes the form of a universal, amalgamated search tool titled What Do You Love? Visitors to the www.wdyl.com site type in one of their favourite interests, and WDYL returns several streams of content related to the topic. The content is drawn from Google’s entire spectrum of search tools, including Google Image Search, Google Maps, Google News, Google Trends, Google Books and YouTube. In this way, users are presented with a comprehensive, all-encompassing results page presenting them with a variety of ways to explore their favourite topics further online.

Google’s unofficial business motto is “Don’t be evil”, but some competitors are unconvinced. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has launched a probe into the search company’s business practices following accusations of anti-competitive behaviour, and the European Commission has begun a similar investigation. Any SEO agency knows that Google is the search engine of choice for two-thirds of the world’s Internet users, and of course one can’t expect to rise to the top without making a few enemies along the way. Particularly in cases where a business dominates the market the way Google does, competitors (such as Microsoft) are bound to cry foul. But the question remains: are the probes and lawsuits facing Google the result of genuine concerns, or simply frustrated competitors jumping on the bandwagon to blame Google for dismal ranking results?

Google recently announced that they are supporting author markup – code which enables content site to identify the author of content both on the site and across the internet. What does this mean for the web and for SEO? While we do not have any solid information on how the author tag will affect SEO and Google marketing, there are some theories about the implications thereof. But first let’s discuss the rel attribute further.

The author tag uses the rel attribute, so to insert this on your site you would simply as rel”author” to your author’s hyperlink on the article page. To put this visually you would have:

Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/Name Surname”</a>.

This code will alert the search engines to the fact that the linked person is an author of this linking page. The rel=”author” link must link to an author page on the same site as the aforementioned content page. While the URLs used for the content page that features the author tag and the author page may on occasion not be the same, this doesn’t matter because Google’s algorithms will determine whether or not the two pages are from the same parent domain.

So while http://www.forexample.com; http://forexample.com and http://news.forexample.com are all different host names, the Google algorithms will identify them as being part of the same parent domain.

To put this more simply a content page is any piece of content to which an author can be attributed. An author page is about a specific author and must be on the same domain as the content page. While the URLs needn’t be identical, should each of these pages feature the author markup text, the search engines will identify that it is the same author on each of these pages. These pages could also be linked to a profile page on another site, which could in turn link to other pages that have been published by the same author, using an additional relationship tag, rel=”me”, so that the author can be identified and recognised across all of these pages. Currently this feature only works in conjunction with a public Google Profile.



Now you may start to question why Google would want to identify the author of various pages of content, how this can affect SERP rankings and what this will mean for search marketing specialists. By identifying the author through the author markup text, the search engines can identify the quality of the content that is published. If the author churns out pages of uninteresting, uninformative and poorly optimised content then he is likely to be given less authority as an author, and therefore for his content to have less authority.

Consider Twitter which applies an internal quality score to its profiles. While the profile may have a huge number of followers, this does not necessarily mean that it will have a high quality score. In fact, fewer followers with higher levels of authority who retweet your tweets will be more likely to result in a higher authority. The higher authority a profile has the more likely that Google will bring up their tweets in realtime search results – another example of how it is giving credit to the author tag.

Likewise, should you add the author tags to the mix and suddenly a website depends on a lot more than just its own reputation. If the author is linked to a number of other pages with a good reputation then this will give your content page more authority. This could lead to websites having to trade on its authors to provide sufficient valuable links in order to rank well in the SERPs. Authors could capitalize very nicely on this provided they develop authority and a good reputation. However, some websites may include author markup language that links to an author with a good reputation purely to boost search rankings, which means authors will need to worry about infringement in a whole new way. On the other hand, this could also result in a massive increase in guest blogging with authors who have authority being employed to write to manipulate rankings. What were originally paid links could become paid author signals.

The author tag will help the search engines to better identify the authority of the page, and it will also help differentiate between the original author of a piece of content and those who have simply copied and pasted content into another website, thereby creating duplicate content.

Earlier this month, the 2011 SMX Advanced conference got underway in Seattle, and Day 1 ended with a much-anticipated question and answer session between Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s search quality boss Matt Cutts. Unsurprisingly, the agenda was largely dominated by that now-notorious bear, the Google Panda. In fact, Sullivan began the interview by revealing a large toy panda bear seated at centre-stage; a clear message to search marketing agency owners that panda-monium won’t be dying down anytime soon!

Since the introduction of the Panda update (also dubbed the Farmer algorithm), the fur has really been flying, with many site owners complaining that they have been unfairly penalised for duplicate content and are now being outranked by low-quality scraper sites – the very sites Google hoped to strip of their authority. According to Cutts, the issue is being addressed with more changes and improvements to the algorithm, and his answer has effectively set the search industry abuzz with speculation about Panda 2.2; the roll-out is expected to occur any day now, and some online sources are even speculating that Panda 2.2 is already here. Regardless, most site owners have only one question on their minds; how does a site recover once it’s been pinned under the paw of Panda?

“It’s not just what you talk about that’s important, it’s also who’s talking about you.”

Social Signals and the influence on search are no longer theoretical. Both Bing and Google factor social signals into their ranking algorithms for “regular” search results. Who you are socially, your authority, the authority of those who talk about you (or your company) all play a role. However, how much influence does and will social signals have on SEO? While some are raving about how the industry will change others think that the tail is wagging the dog.

Personally I think that although social search might still seem relatively small in retrospect to other factors of SEO or just a trend because it is fairly new, it should not be underestimated. Therefore it is necessary to add it to the equation and your overall strategy because you don’t want to be the one who is left behind when it picks up speed.

Following a bout of negative feedback concerning Google’s ability to filter out low-quality search results from content farms and identify it as spam, the iconic search engine has declared war on sites that exist purely for the purpose of generating links. By now, any SEO consultant will have heard of the “farmer algorithm”, Google’s latest update designed to reduce spam in search results. Of course, the burning question is, how will the search industry be affected?

According to Danny Sullivan, writing for SearchEngineLand, Google expects the change to impact approximately 12% of US search results, and eventually plans to roll out the algorithm update globally. And while most industry insiders have been picturing the wilting of metaphorical crops, Google won’t officially state that the changes are aimed at content farms. In fact, while industry news sources have dubbed it the “farmer” algorithm, Google refers to it as the “Panda”, named after one of the project’s key developers.