Google giving up on Wave, Knol and Friend Connect

Google keeps whittling down its projects, narrowing the focus of the company's efforts behind Chief Executive Larry Page's push to put "more wood behind fewer arrows."

The latest trimming will eliminate seven Google products: Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears, Search Timeline, Wave, Knol and the ambitious project Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

"We're in the process of shutting a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward," Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of operations, said in a company blog post.  "Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience."

Here's the rundown on each discontinued product from Hölzle's post:

Search Engines Come Together for a Richer Web - Introducing Schema.org

Today we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites.

At Google, we’ve supported structured markup for a couple years now. We introduced rich snippets in 2009 to better represent search results describing people or containing reviews. We’ve since expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including products, events, recipes, and more.

Example of a rich snippet: a search result enhanced by structured markup. In this case, the rich snippet contains a picture, reviews, and cook time for the recipe.

Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

Easier URL Removals for Site Owners

We recently made a change to the Remove URL tool in Webmaster Tools to eliminate the requirement that the webpage's URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google's search results. Because you've already verified ownership of the site, we can eliminate this requirement to make it easier for you, as the site owner, to remove unwanted pages (e.g. pages accidentally made public) from Google's search results.

Removals persist for at least 90 days
When a page’s URL is requested for removal, the request is temporary and persists for at least 90 days. We may continue to crawl the page during the 90-day period but we will not display it in the search results. You can still revoke the removal request at any time during those 90 days. After the 90-day period, the page can reappear in our search results, assuming you haven’t made any other changes that could impact the page’s availability.

Google's High-quality Sites Algorithm Goes Global, Incorporates User Feedback

Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help people
find more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.

Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

FaceBook SEO - How Social Media has Changed SEO

Social media websites have spread like wildfire over the past couple of years. Today, so many people spend more time on Facebook, Twitter or some other social network than any other website. Aside from connecting people, social networks also provide advertising opportunities. Take Facebook, for example. What do you do when you come across a website with half a billion active users? Develop Facebook Web promotion strategies and use the website as a marketing tool, of course. It's not surprising to find so many businesses utilizing Facebook Web promotion these days.

In fact, lots of businesses have an FB page as their second homepage. So, the challenge here is how to use social media SEO to your business' advantage.

Social Media SEO
 
It's not so hard to advertise via Facebook Web promotion. FB and other social networks allow you to post ads, updates, pictures and videos in a snap. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), on the other hand, there is some doubt whether Facebook SEO is really effective. For one, this particular social media site uses the “nofollow” tag. This means that your backlinks from Facebook...

Video Sitemaps & mRSS vs. Facebook Share & RDFa

What are the benefits of submitting feeds like Video Sitemaps and mRSS vs. the benefits of Facebook Share and RDFa? Is one better than the other? Let’s start the discussion.

Functionality of feeds vs. on-page markup

Google accepts information from both video feeds, such as Video Sitemaps and mRSS, as well as on-page markup, such as Facebook Share and RDFa. We recommend that you use both!

If you have limited resources, however, here’s a chart explaining the pros and cons of each method. The key differentiators include:

Why SEO Doesn’t Matter Anymore and What You Should Do Instead

Search engine optimization used to be the holy grail of getting more traffic. Placing high in search engine rankings for prime keywords related to your niche could send thousands of visitors to your site on a regular basis. But more and more, search engine traffic isn’t as important to most websites. They’re finding their traffic from other places.

What do you think is the reason for this? Here in this post we trying to explain why search engine optimization doesn’t matter anymore and what are the alternatives for getting more and more traffic.

7 Reasons SEO Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Social media is a big part of the blame for this situation. People can now ask their friends or complete strangers for recommendations on virtually anything, and get human-filtered results within minutes through Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking sites. Internet users are also becoming more savvy and can cut through search results to find the best content, regardless of optimal placement for the best keywords.

Even in cases where search engines still send significant traffic to a site, search engines are becoming so much more intelligent that it’s getting harder and harder to get good placement unless you’re providing the best content.
Read on fore more information about what’s making search engine optimization less important, what you should do about it, and even when it still is important.

1. Facebook

More often than not, people aren’t using search engines to discover new content online. Instead, they’re turning to their friends. And with its new “Like” button appearing all over the web, Facebook is becoming an ever-more-important source of finding content online.

Rather than using Google or Yahoo! to find information on a topic, users are asking their Facebook friends and groups about whatever information they need. People also trust this information more, as it’s coming from people they know, rather than just being returned in what often seems like a random pattern.

According to a latest research it’s been indicated that Facebook has currently More than 500 Million active users. If Facebook were a physical nation than this would make them the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.

Google Stared Even Better Indexing of SWF Content

We often get questions from webmasters about how we index content designed for Flash Player, so we wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our latest progress.

About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content. Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities. This work has allowed us to index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, from Flash buttons and menus to self-contained Flash technology based websites. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Google Introduced Instant Previews

Google introduced Instant Previews, a new search feature that helps people find information faster by showing a visual preview of each result. Traditionally, elements of the search results like the title, URL, and snippet—the text description in each result—help people determine which results are best for them. Instant Previews achieves the same goal with a visual representation of each page and where the relevant content is, instead of a text description. For our webmaster community, this presents an opportunity to reveal the design of your site and why your page is relevant for a particular query. We'd like to offer some thoughts on how to take advantage of the feature.


First of all, it's important to understand what the new feature does. When someone clicks on the magnifying glass on any result, a zoomed-out snapshot of the underlying page appears to the right of the results. Orange highlights indicate where highly relevant content on the page is, and text call outs show search terms in context.

Here’s the Instant Preview for the Google Webmaster Forum.
These elements let people know what to expect if they click on that result, and why it's relevant for their query. Our testing shows that the feature really does help with picking the right result—using Instant Previews makes searchers 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Google SEO Starter Guide Updated

Update on October 3, 2010: We have fixed the issue causing the highlighted text to be obscured on Linux PDF readers.

About two years ago we published our first SEO Starter Guide, which we have since translated into 40 languages. Today, we’re very happy to share with you the new version of the guide with more content and examples.

Here’s what’s new:

• Glossary to define terms throughout the guide
• More example images to help you understand the content
• Ways to optimize your site for mobile devices
• Clearer wording for better readability

You may remember getting to see what Googlebot looks like in our “First date with Googlebot” post. In this version of the SEO Starter Guide, Googlebot is back to provide you with some more SEO tips.

You can download the new version here [PDF].

Social Media Marketing - The Myths

The original Internet changed the way we work and live, and the way we interact with one another. The coming of Web 2.0 promises to be just as revolutionary, and just as important to businesspeople around the world.

When the original Internet came along, businesses like eBay and Amazon.com were quick to see the power of the online world, and those early adopters went on to become some of the most successful net residents. The same is sure to happen with the world of social media, and companies are already lining up to take advantage of this unique marketplace.

Unfortunately, myths and misinformation about the social media landscape and its business potential abound. Falling for one of these common myths could hurt your business, even as you are tying to build an online presence in the Web 2.0 world.

Let's take a look at ten of the most common social media myths in the business world:

1. Social media is easy - your 10 year old cousin can start a website, but that does not mean building a social media presence is easy. Take the time to think out your social media strategy before you get started - your business is riding on it.

2. Social media is free - it is true that there is no charge to join most social media networks, but there are costs involved in establishing your business presence on those sites. How you look is important, so look for people who can help you establish a great presence from day one.

3. Social media provides instant results - we have all heard the stories of the overnight YouTube sensations, or the new blog or website that makes a big splash. But those stories are the exception, not the rule. It takes time for social media to start working, and it pays to be patient.

Webmaster Tools - Links to Your Site Updated

The "Links to your site" feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you'll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site.


Who links the most
Clicking the “More >>” link under the “Who links the most” section will take you to a new view that shows a listing of all the domains that link to your site. Each domain in the list can be expanded to display a sample of pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.


The "More >>" link under each specific domain lists all the pages linked to by that domain. At the top of the page there is a

Google Makes Reputation Management Easier for Local Businesses

Google is now letting businesses respond to reviews posted on their Place Pages in Google Maps. This should be huge for reputation management, particularly as Google continues to place increased emphasis on these pages.

"Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more," says John Maguire of the Google Place Page team. "Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it's sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers."

Increase your Website Traffic - SEO Basics

Here is a simple list of SEO tips

and tactics to help get more traffic and links to your website with some very simple and easy to follow steps.

Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.

Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:

The order of these does NOT matter and will not affect how your site ranks or gets traffic if you decide to do these in a different order as to how I have listed them nor will missing any of these out affect your rankings or traffic. Remember though, the more work you put in the more traffic you will get as you submit to more sites by using these different SEO tactics for link and traffic building

.

Sitemaps: One File, Many Content Types

Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code

Quality Links to your Site

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content -- something that lets your expertise shine...

Google's Local Business Center: A Major Update 'Google Places'

If you have a brick and mortar store, and rely on walk-in traffic for your survival, you may be wondering what the Internet can do for your business. Believe it or not, a lot - and you don't even need a website.

In the "old days", the bulk of businesses relied on the Yellow Pages to get the phone ringing. The majority of marketing dollars were spent getting listed in this ten pound paperweight. With the popularity of the Net, less people let "their fingers do the walking" when they need something, and more are letting their mouse do the talking.

Online search has gone mainstream when it comes to searching for local businesses. Google states that 73% of searches are done for local content. Another study by BIA/Kelsey and Constat report that 97% of consumers use online resources when doing research for products/services in their local area.

Google Videos best practices

We'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt
Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:

• Playpage
• Content and player
• Thumbnail

More information about robots.txt.

URL Removal Explained, Part IV: Tracking your Requests & What Not to Remove

In this final installation in our URL removal series, let's talk about following up on your removal requests, as well as when not to use Google's URL removal tool. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the previous posts in this series:
Part I: Removing URLs & directories
Part II: Removing & updating cached content
Part III: Removing content you don't own
Companion post: Managing what information is available about you online

Understanding the status of your requests

Once you've submitted a removal request, it will appear in your list of requests. You can check the status of your requests at any time to see whether the content has been removed, or whether the request is still or pending or was denied.



If a request was denied, you should see a "Learn more" link next to it explaining why that particular request was denied. Since different types of removals have different requirements, the reason why a particular request was denied can vary. The "Learn more" link should help you figure out what you need to change in order to make your request successful. For example, you may need to

Rich snippets go international

As part of our efforts to make search results more useful to our users around the world, we’re announcing the international availability of rich snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.

For example, we recently launched rich snippets for recipes which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for:

We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know