Gary Moyle rounds up some of the most interesting Google updates and industry news for January 2012.

Search Plus Your World

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

Google announced that they are transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. Whilst this started with social search and increased integration of Google+ they have now taken this to a game changing level with several new features that will redefine how we interact in Google results.

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Guava Verdict

“I don't think Google is using this as purely a platform for Google+ despite what it currently looks like. From the recent comments by Eric Schmidt we can see that Google is keen to reach out to Facebook and Twitter. It's hard to see how Google can move forward with closer social integration in the short term when platforms like Facebook and Twitter are essentially blocking them (Facebook with their Bing deal and Twitter pulling out of their real time search agreement).

The US media also seem to be picking up on Google+ as a social network and if they latch on to Google+ they way they did with Twitter then this will massively boost the proliferation of Google's social network!”
Gary Moyle, SEO Manager

“This change is one of a series of still continuing updates to Google that have been rolling out since the G+ project started, and whilst some marketers are pegging it to a desperate move to force G+ down user's throats, my opinion is that this has been on the roadmap for the last year or more.

It also represents a change in the way search results may be ranked in the future, since increasingly the messages from Google are that authority of pages will gleaned from people's social profile and what sites they link to, rather than the traditional links from a trusted website domain, that will be used as the SEO signal to help judge the quality of the results it shows in the results.”
Mark Edmondson, Social Media & Analytics Manager

“It will be more important than ever to make sure users have a good experience with your brand and that this is vocalised online. One damning photo of a bad hotel room could be enough to put thousands of people off going there, likewise one perfect sea view will mean the opposite. Rather than requiring two completely independent search strategies I think this will nudge companies further towards a more holistic strategy where everything has to be considered from both a social and traditional perspective.”
Tom Wigley, SEO Manager

Google Forced to Act Over Paid Sponsorship Campaign

Recently Aaron Wall (seobook.com) spotted how a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” brought back over 400 pages written apparently as part of a Google marketing campaign:

The campaign essentially violated Google’s guidelines against paid links and shortly afterwards Google was forced to release a statement via Matt Cutts.

“Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that… In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would.”
Matt Cutts
https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/NAWunDzJSHC

This action met a mixed response within the SEO community with many SEOs worried about the consequences of a single link passing pagerank.

Guava Verdict

“The Chrome team didn't actually/intentionally do anything wrong. All it now confirms is that Google's behaviour is inconsistent and they will take action in response to a media story (originally from Search Engine Land in this case) blowing it out of proportion, even if that story is fundamentally wrong. This shows no degree of fairness, and if anything I think might provide ammunition for other companies who want to sue Google for penalties they claim to have received, because it shows unequivocally that Google will penalise a website for something that website hasn't themselves done.”
Teddie Cowell, SEO Director

“Firstly, I don't believe Google would ever complete a paid sponsorship campaign for the sole purpose of gaining links. They have no need to and it wouldn't make sense for them to market themselves in this way. Of the 200+ sponsored articles that were supposed to have been placed, I was unable to find any links that would pass equity and the general consensus is that there was only one. The defining question is whether the purpose of this campaign was to gain links however with the relatively low number found I think it's fair to speculate it was not the main focus.

This raises massive questions about what actually constitutes a "paid link" and whether you can provide anything of value to a webmaster with the "risk" of an incidental link in return. Google need to be seen as being pro-active in policing themselves against their Terms of Service so I can understand the basic logic behind this decision, however it does seem rash as in the real world it only reinforces and confuses this already convoluted problem.”
Tom Wigley, SEO Manager

An utterly pointless symbolic act. Deranking themselves for [browser] will make not one jot of difference to the amount of downloads chrome gets, and they have further muddied the waters on what digital marketers should or should not be doing by demoting themselves for an "accidental" paid link.

Either they knew they were buying links and demoted themselves for that (indicating Google themselves think it the only way successful digital market - I doubt this), or they were not intending to buy links but now have put the fear of Go(d|ogle) into any marketers who want to try video outreach in case a link it put into a post and they get a -50 penalty.

I don't think any of the above scenarios are correct, so think the demotion of PR and keyword penalty a PR move i.e. symbolic, and actually harms the relevance of the query [browser] making it also pointless.
Mark Edmondson, Social Media & Analytics Manager

buySAFE Sues Google Over “Trusted Stores”

Google is being sued by a company called buySAFE, which offers a safe-shopping service to online retailers and their customers

buySafe is basically accusing Google of;

(1) Patent Infringement
(2) Stealing proprietary business information
(3) Pushing buySafe customers to switch to Google Trusted Stores

Interestingly, the lawsuit also claims that Google is allegedly offering higher search result rankings for those that participate in the Trusted Stores program (Google Trusted Stores). It remains to be seen whether other high profile ‘safe shopping’ services will see this as a potential threat and literally follow suit.

Guava Verdict

“In a world that seems to have gone slightly patent crazy over the last 6 months I'm left wondering whether everything is patentable. It seems to me that guaranteeing a transaction with an online store is not all that different from an ESCROW merchant who acts as a middle-man, or a credit-card provider who will protect your transactions. That said, if a patent exists it exists. The issue at hand also seems to be considerably deeper. Google have certainly acted in a bullish fashion towards many verticals online and if the allegation of them promising customers an advantage in natural search turns out to be true this could be particularly concerning.”
Tom Wigley, SEO Manager

“Obviously the most controversial angle of this is Google allegedly offering high rankings for domains that participate in it’s trusted stores program. Whilst this would potentially represent a valid trust signal in Google’s algorithm it does represent a conflict of interest as it is a Google owned service. It remains to be seen whether this is indeed fact or part of the internal chaos we have seen at Google in recent months."
Gary Moyle, SEO Manager

Growth in SSL Queries

Guava looked at this back in October 2011 for it’s UK client base across a variety of sectors, sizes of websites and locations, and the largest impact was just 0.4% of keywords. After studying a range of retail clients in January this has increased to a range of 0.7 – 1.0% however it could significantly larger for other publishers.

Guava verdict

“On balance now I’m quite looking forward to (not provided) data, since I think in exchange for the keywords we will get the demographic data of users who are logged in to Google via the +1 metrics. And now Google have just updated their privacy policy so that everyone is opted in to sharing their data across Google products, more of that data should seep into GA.”
Mark Edmondson, Social Media & Analytics Manager

“I think we’ll see a steady increase in these figures over the next 12 months largely driven by the adoption of the Google+ social platform. This will give us some insight into the growth of Google+ users in across many verticals which will be fascinating”.
Gary Moyle, SEO Manager

Updated Google Privacy Policy

Google have announced that effective from March 1st, all of Google services will have the same privacy policy, meaning data can be freely shared between Google properties such as Gmail, G+, YouTube and factored into the main Google search results.

Guava verdict

“Terrible concerns; it seems they have just pressed ahead and done it when the law seems to be pushing the other way – the spirit of the EU cookie law is aimed at preventing exactly this, but Google do it all server side and so can’t be touched yet. There are serious anti-trust storm clouds on the horizon for Google and public opinion is in a fragile state with recent bad PR - see the “don’t be evil” bookmarklet designed by Facebook/Twitter/Myspace engineers in response to Search Plus My World”

www.focusontheuser.org/

It uses Googles own results to show how search plus my world would look if Google wasn’t pushing G+ down everyone’s throats."
Mark Edmondson, Social Media & Analytics Manager

Further Tweaks to Google+

Google announced several tweaks to it’s Google+ UI including.

• ‘Fine-grained’ controls

• Users can now fine-tune their stream. A slider at the top will lets you adjust how posts from that circle should be blended into the main stream.
• More attractive and clearer notifications - We now have easy-to-read “sneak previews” that immediately present what’s new and why you might car

• Improvements to Google+ Pages

• You can now delegate up to 50 named managers
• Managers will have a new notification flow so they can see activity that relates to pages
• We’ll now show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle.

• Better Photo Experience

• Viewing a photo in Lightbox has been completely redesigned with improved navigation, enhanced comment legibility and better overall utility.

Guava Verdict

“The impact of the recent changes made to the interface of all Google services seems to have been relatively unreported. In particular the recent simplification of the navigation which unifies all their services. This will dramatically help to keep users within the Google ecosystem. The recent tweaks to Google+ are for two main reasons, firstly to make their social platform a more competitive choice after the backlash of the recently added business pages and more importantly as another step towards the end goal of complete experience uniformity. By unifying the look and feel of each of their services they will create an internet browsing experience that users feel safe within (which ties in with the recent HTTPS changes), only needing to "venture out" when absolutely necessary.”
Tom Wigley, SEO Manager