High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.

One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It’s being referred to as “Mayday,” and some claim it is costing them money.

Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, “seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.”

“This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with ‘item’ pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them,” says Fox. “For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite.”

She has more to say about it at Search Engine Land, offering some of her own speculation. One reader accuses the change of delivering “a real blow” to his revenue.

This is not the first we’ve heard about “Mayday”. There’s been discussion about it around the SEO community all month, but this is the first we’ve seen it really addressed by Google.

Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can’t rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still nice, but it’s getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.

Until Bing turns into David and slays Goliath, the only search engine game in town is Google. While the other search engines can’t be ignored or forgotten, when it comes to online search, Google will deliver the majority of your quality organic traffic. For webmasters and especially for online marketers, having your website virtually hard-wired to Google is a marketing Must-Do.

We are strictly talking about white hat stuff here. If you’re seeking the opposite color, look elsewhere. As a full-time search engine marketer, I have learned a few things over the 10 years or so I have been working on the web. One of the most significant factors running constantly in the background has been Google. And, the underlying fact is that the more I intertwined my sites and content with Google, the more success I achieved. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the two, making it a little more than ironic that the original name for Google was BackRub.

But this is not exactly rocket science territory here. Google is the biggest entity on the web, especially if you go the free organic traffic route. There are tons of ways to market online which don’t involve Google at all, but for the purposes of this piece, I will be discussing ways any webmaster or marketer can better connect their site and content with Google. Plus, I’ll (if it’s not already obvious) also give you some reasons why this is a smart marketing strategy on your part.

The first technique you must perfect is how to get your new content into Google’s Index within minutes, if not seconds. These days with social media sites this can be easily achieved. It may be as fast as your latest Tweet or Google Buzz. Google News is another easy way to instantly get your content into Google. Press releases are another immediate way to connect your content with Google. So too is something as simple as making a video and posting it on YouTube which is Google Owned.

Note: Google has recently revamped the YouTube system and provided many ways webmasters can view the linking data and stats; great source of information for webmasters and marketers.

Actually Google will index any new site or content fairly quickly these days so you don’t have to worry about it. One method I like best is using a free blog from Blogger/Blogspot [which is also Google owned] and placing links there to be indexed within minutes. To keep track of what content Google is indexing, I usually set up Google Alerts for all my main sites and my main keywords. Whenever a page is indexed in Google related to my sites or keywords, Google sends me an email. Many savvy webmasters use these alerts to find and build link partners since these indexed pages will be thematically related to yours. Using Google Alerts will make it seem like you’re totally welded to Google and Google’s indexing system, every second of the day.

Needless to say, keywords rule the web and Google. You must attach your content to keywords people are using to find stuff on the web and build top 10 rankings for those keywords in the search engines, especially Google. Now if you’re new at this, Google gives you some valuable keyword tools you can use to see how many searches are made each month for a keyword phrase and also gives you some idea of the keyword competition you will be facing. I like using google.com/sktool and also labs.google.com/sets. Besides, you must start your Google courtship off on the right foundation.

In recent years, Google has gone out of its way to help webmasters understand all these simple SEO basics. And as far as I am concerned, one resource every webmaster should be using is Google Webmaster Tools. This is a whole suite of tools and information webmasters can use in correlation with Google. Recently, in Webmaster Tools Google has made available Click-Thru data on its search engine results so that you can find out how many impressions you’re getting for a certain keyword and your click-thru or conversion rate. Some webmasters are questioning the accuracy of these numbers, but it will give you some indication of how well your site and content is doing in Google.

Perhaps, another just as valuable program is Google Analytics, where you’re really giving Google access to all your site’s information. You can use Analytics to measure different links/content on your site to see how well it performs. More importantly you can use it to fine-tune your conversion rates in order to make more sales. I also use it to test-out different graphics, different salescopy, different site layouts… and so on. But a word of caution, don’t just use Analytics. As an online marketer you want many sources of information, so regularly study your traffic logs and raw site data. Even with Google and probably especially with Google, you should always cross-reference any data with other sources on your site and on the web. Lets not get too carried away with this Google worship thing.

I use both Google Adsense and Google Adwords with most of my sites. As an online marketer, I know I can get 10 times more from an affiliate link than from Adsense… but over the years I have found having both types of links on sites doesn’t significantly reduce sales. To explain further, I have tested my pages with and without Adsense, and it doesn’t affect my affiliate sales even though I know I am losing some sales to Adsense. Overall, using Adsense adds to the competitiveness of my pages. If someone is looking for the lowest príce and finds it in a Google ad, they come away happy and will probably visit my site again or sign-up to my newsletter. Besides, Adsense is a very quick way to monetize pages which I don’t have ready affiliate programs for on my sites. In addition, Adsense and Adwords give you valuable feedback on your content’s performance.

There are several other Google programs which I use to further connect with Google such as Google Docs, Google Knol and iGoogle. One must-have program is Google Accounts, which basically connects me with all my different programs within Google. I have found managing all your Google programs is much easier from this one location. I also like using Google Profiles and Google Buzz to get my content quickly into Google and onto the web. As you have probably guessed already, Google does have a lot of programs which webmasters can use to improve their content’s performance. In the process, by using and intertwining your content with all of the Google programs highlighted here, you’re really connecting with Google en masse.

While many marketing experts will say it is foolhardy to marry all your content to just one search engine, I have found over the years that hard-wiring your site to Google really makes your content readily accessible in the most dominant presence on the web. Doing so not only gives your content the attention it deserves, but it can also help further your goals. Actively positioning your site and content firmly within Google’s many different facets can prove beneficial for any webmaster or online marketer. Just get that pre-nup agreement in writing first!

Author: Titus Hoskins

Google recently introduced us to Real Time Search and this has been met with a lot of questions. What Tweets will show up in real time? How will this affect businesses who are, and those who are not, engaging in social media? How will it affect PPC? Where will the searches show up? The biggest question is what impact will this have on small business? Small business owners are met with limited resources and adding any additional hours into their day is nearly impossible. But can a small business ignore real time search?

What is Real Time Search? As per Google

“… new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

In other words, your tweets from Twitter and new blog articles will be appear as “Latest Results.” The latest results are featured in 2 ways.

a. On the search results page below the “News Results” (if there are news results). This appears for very hot topics that are getting a lot of activity.

b. The “Show Options” menu: click on “Latest” under All Results and the live search results will appear.

What Does This Mean for Small Businesses?

1. Customer Experience.

Consumers are much more savvy and they are going online for more information. A quick Google search will provide them possibly more information about your company than you might have thought. A business cannot control what a person tweets about. As we see in the example below, tweets are posted when they mention a topic, business name, a name, etc.

Most tweets, blog entries and company mentions will show up under “Latest” and not on the main search results page. However, if a consumer wants to see more information about you, they have the option at their fingertips.

2. Reputation Management.

Not every business is on Twitter or has a blog, nor do they necessarily belong. However, ignoring your “Latest” news can present a problem. If a consumer is singing your praises, or worse a bad comment is written and you do not respond, you are adding fuel to the fire. That customer has been given a chance to continuously go on and on about your company/brand whereas the praise singer just got deflated with no feedback from you. Failing to monitor your reputation online could result in some missed opportunities or a poor company image that leads to reduced sales.

3. Spam.

Yes there will be spam because spammers are going to jump on this like ants at a summer picnic. While Google will make every attempt to try and control spam, the current algorithm for posting in real time makes that nearly impossible. How will this affect a small business? Spammers could very well keyword stuff tweets to get ahead and push your company lower on the tweets area. This is going to happen. There is no control right now, but the key is to try and stay ahead of them.

4. Search Engine Optimization.

Will real time search improve page rank? This remains to be seen. Will keyword laden tweets that are tweeted over and over from different accounts and push a company to the top of a searched term make a difference? Will this be seen as spam? Keyword laden tweets will give great results for a specific term, especially for those difficult to rank terms, and even if your company is atop of tweets for a short time, you may reap some rewards.

Real time search is not just the posting of tweets. It also posts company mentions from blog articles. So if your company has a blog, you may want to check out your “Latest” results.

In small business branding we have to consider social media marketing as an extension of your brand in the same way that we do traditional advertising. For some businesses, it is a time of uncertainty. As stated earlier, not every business needs to be on Twitter. A “crickets” account is worse than no account at all. But can you still just ignore the social media community?

The good news here is that, if you are able to squeeze in an extra hour as a small business owner, you can go and see what terms are popular in your industry, see what is being said about you, and see if you need to move full steam ahead in 2010. Most smal businesses will need to do so because social media marketing has just started to make a big impact and getting in now will make a world of a difference in a year or so.

Last summer Google announced a new project called “Caffeine”, which was described as a re-write of Google’s web search architecture.

comparing caffeine’s changes to the “Big Daddy Update” of 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites. It appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild.
Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses, The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided a slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).

Google Caffeine Presentation PDF

The Holidays are Over. Is it Caffeine Time?

Last summer Google announced a new project called “Caffeine”, which was described as a re-write of Google’s web search architecture. Around that time, Matt Cutts discussed Caffeine with WebProNews, comparing it to the “Big Daddy Update” of 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites. It appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild.

Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.

Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn’t want a repeat of the Florida update).

The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).

“It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster,” Cutts says of Caffeine.

But enough background. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread where administrator Tedster claimed to have seen Caffeine in action at a number of IP addresses. He wrote:

I’m seeing the Caffeine data-set being served via this set of IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.103, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.99,64.233.169.106

It seems to take 5 IP addresses to build the complete SERP, where in the past it often took only 3.

Schwartz also pointed to another member’s post (Whitenight), who said:

Well, just tripled checked with offices/employees in Texas, Colorado, and Indiana. All 5 “control” keywords/sites showed live Caffeine.

That member’s latest post says that the Caffeine Dataset is also on http://66.102.7.99 and http://66.102.7.104.

We don’t know for sure if this is all really Caffeine in action though. Google hasn’t commented on it, and has not made any announcements regarding Caffeine since what Matt said above. Some people don’t believe this is Caffeine at all. As Schwartz notes, we’ll have to wait for Google to say something.

Still, January is almost over, and Google said it would wait until after the holidays, specifically mentioning the month of January. It’s about time for this to be rolling out to some extent. Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.