Following on from my post about breadcrumbs in the serps, I again noticed another test Google is running in the serps. This time it is pulling information from Google Scholar such as “Author” and “Cited By” in the meta description. You can see it showing in the second result in the following example:

This was also spotted by Ray “Catfish” Comstock and Benj Arriola on their blog post PDF’s Author Metadata in Google Search Results . It certainly is an interesting time in Google with lots of tests running over the summer months!

Popularity: 12% [?]

This isn’t exactly new, it’s been out since July but it is such an interesting new google tool I had to write about it. Google Wonder Wheel is a new visual representation tool which allows you to research related keywords using a flash interface in the serps. An example screen shot is below:

google-wonder-wheel

It allows you to drill down further into related keywords which is an excellent tool for performing keyword research.

google-wonder-wheel1

How Do I Access Google Wonder Wheel

To access Wonder Wheel do the following:

1. Perform a typical search in google
2. Click on “Show Options” at the top of the page
3. Click on “Wonder Wheel” in the left side bar that has appeared

Popularity: 9% [?]

I came across an interesting result whilst using Google this week. The result listed breadcrumb data before the meta description in the results. I was lucky enough to see it on two related searches and obtained screenshots shown below:

The 2nd result:

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see it since when performing searches but after a little further research it turns out I haven’t been the only person to see strange things in the serps regarding breadcrumbs. Rob Hammond also came across some strange results which utilised breadcrumbs in the url structure of the search results. Screenshot below:

As for the seo implications of this, it’s too early to tell as its obviously just a test but it does show that google can read and understand breadcrumbs. Has anybody else seen anything like this in the serps?

Popularity: 18% [?]

So google have decided to launch a new and improved version of their search engine. Today they launched their developer preview of it titled “Caffeine”. So whats it all about? Well the new search engine ( which can be tested at www2.sandbox.google.com ) is apparently a lot faster than the old engine. According to Matt Cutts most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference. Below are some quick Q&A posted on his site:

Q: How do I check out the Caffeine update?
A: If you search on http://www2.sandbox.google.com you can get a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.

Q: It doesn’t look any different to me?
A: The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

Q: Is this Caffeine Update because of Company X or Y is doing Z?
A: Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.

Q: The url http://www2.sandbox.google.com doesn’t seem to work for mobile phones? I can only test on google.com, not google.co.uk?
A: That’s right. For now this is a only a preview, so we didn’t hook up a mobile version or an international version at this point. You’ll have to search on google.com to see the results right now.

Q: How do I give Google feedback?
A: If you want to give us feedback on how the search results are different, look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link and type your feedback in the text box. Make sure to include the word caffeine somewhere in the feedback.

Q: Is there a way to give feedback in person?
A: Yes! If you want to give me feedback in person, I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies San Jose this week. I’m doing a site review panel on Thursday, or just walk up and say hello!

So How Does it Do When Measured Against the old Search Engine?

As usual Google lives up to expectations. The following are how it faired under the following tests:

Speed:

It’s almost twice as fast

Compare that to the original Google search:

Index Size:

The index size seems to have vastly increased.

Compare that to the original:

So why don’t you try Caffeine out for yourself!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I read a lot of blogs, I have to, just to keep up with trends in the industry! There’s a well known saying, “Knowledge is Power!” and it certainly rings true regarding internet marketing and search engine optimisation. The big search engines are constantly updating their algorithums and keeping up with every update or new patent is time consuming for anyone. Thats why I rely on other peoples blogs to keep me informed.

One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

• 6,526,440 Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity (Google, Inc.)

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

1. Initial Query
2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.

Popularity: 5% [?]