The way in which users use the Internet is essential information for internet companies. The company with the largest database is probably Google, thanks to its browser and other services with which they can identify trends and users’ online activity. However, it seems like the company now wants information that they usually can’t get due to their Terms & Privacy guidelines and to do this they are requesting the cooperation of its users.

Google’s intentions are to create a user panel and investigate the way they use the Internet. The company’s goal is to learn from users and to use that information to improve its services. “What we learn will help us improve our products and services and create a better online experience for everyone”.

To participate, users must be over 13, have a Google Account and use the Chrome browser. After accepting the terms and conditions, users must install a specific extension that will allow Google Chrome to know all the sites they visit and what they do on them.

Google would be able to see everything you do in exchange for a $25 Amazon voucher … Would you do it? Let us know what you think in our Twitter Account or leave a comment.

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Google has confirmed that there was no change in policy with regards to the placements of brand keywords search results. Ads still can appear at the top, on the right hand side and at the bottom of the page. That applies to all countries.

Google suspects that the confusion with regards to the placements of the brand keyword searches came from the November updates.  As of November ads that have previously shown to the side of the results started in some cases appear below them. The space on the side is  taken over by maps, local business locations and Google +.

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Tug believes the aim is to directly compete with Facebook’s ad model which targets users specifically based on their interests and the personal details shared on the social network.

Google looks set to offer advertisers direct targeting of ads to audience/ demographics based on this collected knowledge of activity.

Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1st 2012.

“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media Chief Executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out — especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.”

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Starting today for people who enter an English search term into Google.com logged into their Google account, they will see results featuring posts and content from their wider Google+ network alongside worldwide search results. Below is an example of what happened when Neil searched for “Tug” while logged into his Google account.

You can see the top result indicates that there are 400 personal results in his Google+ network. Then the second and third results are personalised with a figurative logo in blue next them to indicate this is the case.

Image searches also fall under this category and the name of the friend who has posted this image appears in the thumbnail link, showing the name of the person who posted the picture to your network.

You can switch between your personal search results integrated with worldwide results and pure worldwide results using two new buttons that appear on the right hand side of the search bar.

This means you can filter out the social feed and opt to use natural Google search at the touch of a button.

Search plus Your World will impact the way Google users search for content online and highlights a sea-change in the importance of social media when considering your SEO strategy.

To talk to Tug about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk

Or follow us on Twitter @tugagency

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Figures out from Google suggest that people are going to be using their mobile phones a lot more this Yuletide for Christmas shopping, inquires, recipes etc. (you name it!) According to Google’s stats 24% of UK consumers use their mobiles for in-store comparison.

An analysis of UK search volumes on desktop versus mobile has found that in November 2011 mobile searches on popular Christmas gifts represented 14.60% of the online total – a jump from 1.83% in 2008 and still growing steadily.

Google’s research also shows a “triple peak opportunity” on mobile. Data from the past two years from the search-giant shows that UK mobile queries for top retail brand terms spike three times in the season of giving.

The first peak pops up around the end of November and the last payday before Christmas. The second is in the final days before the actual holiday itself, and the third happens when the January sales kick off.

This opportunity is growing fast for e-commerce brands and these kinds of search queries demonstrate a 166% year-on-year growth, which is staggering given that estimates are for it to rise, rather than fall!

For more on this and other stuff, follow me on Twitter @benromberg

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But it is Friday – the best day to learn something new and fun. When you see a little, green robot, what is the first thing that comes up your mind? Personally my brain generates two words and connects them together – Android and Google. Once again I did a little research and here are my personal discoveries about this operating system:

• Originally Android wasn’t Google’s product. Android Inc. was founded in October 2003 (Palo Alto, California) by four men – Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White.
• Andy Rubin was the co-founder of Danger (a company specializing in platforms, software, design and services for mobile computing devices), Rich Miner was the co-founder of Wildfire Communications,  Nick Sears once was the VP at T-Mobile and Chris White was head of design and interface development at WebTV. So all four lads had a background on software engineering. At the beginning Android Inc. was operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.
• In August 2005 Google acquired Android Inc. making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Not much was known about Android at the time of the acquisition, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile market with it.
• A lot of you definitely noticed that all Android versions are named after desserts and go in an alphabetical order – Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. I strongly believe that I’m not the only one asking the eternal question “Why?” After browsing around and searching, I came up to this CNN article, where the same question was asked. It appears that Google doesn’t want to explain the reason for these names. A spokesman from Google said to CNN that it is an internal thing and that Google prefer’s to be a little bit inscrutable in the matter. So here we are with The Mystery of Android version names.

1. Question: Which of these (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, Gmail) you use on a daily basis? (multiple answers were available) – No surprise that most of the respondents use Facebook (75%) and in second place it’s Gmail (45%) followed by Twitter (37%). WordPress and Flickr received 2% each – Yes, I use them both, but I didn’t complete the survey. Honest.
2. Question: Do you retweet offers of brands that you follow on Twitter? – 54% said that they do not retweet offers, while 16% said that sometimes they do. Only 2% said that they retweet offers of brands.
3. Question: Do you share offers, stories, music etc. on Facebook? – Now this question’s results surprised me a bit. Only 40% of the respondents said that they share things on Facebook and a whopping 32% said that they don’t share anything on Facebook. Why did this surprise me? To be honest, I was expecting that about 80% to 90% would say “Yes”, as every time I log into Facebook, it’s never empty and a new post comes up every 2 minutes (majority being video, news article, blog post etc. sharing).
4. Question: Which mobile OS you find visually attractive, convenient and quickly manageable? – People were offered 3 options: iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android. 67% voted for Android, 19% voted for iOS and 5% voted for WP7.

Have great weekend all!

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Few imagined when Google launched its search engine back in 2000 that was it was going to be such a massive success! Eleven years later, the whole SEO world trembles every time they announce another change to its algorithm.

Google changes its algorithm very frequently (more than once a day, according to statistics), but usually these are small changes and minor improvements that hardly affect the results. The ones that really matter are the changes that come with a “name”.

The first major change to its algorithm in September 2002 didn’t achieve the results they expected. It is no very clear what Google was trying to do, but for a couple weeks Google’s search results were full of errors and many users were being served 404 error pages results for very competitive keywords. Since then, all changes have been towards real improvement.

One of the key updates to its algorithm was called “Cassandra” back in 2003, which was the one what brought the golden rules of ranking in Google: the importance of linking to other pages and other pages linking to yours, META information and the importance of the navigation structure.  Later that same year “Florida” became the first blow for blackhat SEOs, punishing all the blackhat techniques that were used back then to achieve top results (saturation of meta tags, invisible text, etc).

The next big algorithm change was in 2005 (Jagger), in order to penalize poor quality links. From then to 2010 Google have introduced more updates that have changed the search results page completely: the introduction and integration of pictures, videos and news to its results, Caffeine to give you the “fresher” content and real-time search.

Nevertheless, although these changes also affected SEO techniques, which needed to be updated, the last big change did not arrive until early 2011 with Panda: a change that affects 12% of the results and penalises poor quality content, dropping sites with lots of publicity and rewarding news sites and social networks. It received many critics because in some cases it ranked content aggregators over the pages with original content.

The changes at the beginning of November, aim to improve the freshness and relevance of the results, Which will affect 35% of the results…

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So far industry figures and Google engineers have suggested that the percentage of traffic affected could be anywhere between 5-30%, with Google’s Matt Cutts suggesting that the figure would sit well below 10% while some websites have reported figures closer to 33%.

I believe this is going to vary massively per industry, dependent on the user base, for example if the audience are more tech savvy they might be more likely to have Google+ accounts from which they are likely to be logged in more often than not.  I would expect (not provided) keyword coverage to be alot higher for readers of tech blogs than perhaps food blogs.

I have analysed Google analytics  keyword data across 5 different verticals that I have access to, looking at traffic just from the US to see how this is varying after just two weeks and as expected this differs hugely from site to site and industry to industry.

The following shows the percentage of US organic search traffic coming from (not provided) keywords, in 5 different industries

From my knowledge of the websites used for the 5 industries above the two industries with the largest number of visitors coming by way of (not provided) keywords have the youngest target audience, which again suggests that websites that attract younger more tech-savvy visitors are likely to get less keyword data, than say finance which out of the industries analysed presents the lowest number of searches from users that were logged into google.com.

I will be expanding this analysis across different industries to see how it further varies and I definitely need to look into more websites within the 5 industries above to see if this pattern continues.  What is certain is that the initial predictions of (not provided) keyword data being in just single digit figures is already majorly incorrect for a number of websites/ industries and depending on the uptake of Google+ this could increase at a rapid rate very quickly.

Any questions give me a tweet at @neil_seo

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They first appeared in 1998, as an out-of-office message honouring the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, which Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had gone off to attend.
One of my personal favourites was the Les Paul doodle where users could strum the guitar in an attempt to produce a mini guitar solo… well I did!

The Doodles have continued to get more imaginative, including the Barrel Role tribute to the Nintendo video game Star Fox 64. By typing ‘do a barrel roll’ into the search bar and the results page will spin 360 degrees. The barrel roll is a small showcase for the CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets 3), the latest CSS version used to design web pages.

Two of Google’s most innovative search projects were carried out by Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr Doob… not “the dude” from The Big Lebowski (easily confused). Cabello, who originated from Barcelona, is a wizard in HTML5 which is the new language for structuring and presenting content for the web and something that Google and its Chrome browser have been experimenting with.

A stand out 5 min time zapper is Google Gravity, if you type the phrase into the search bar everything tumbles to the bottom of the screen and can then be flung about with the mouse. Mr Doob was also responsible for creating the Google Sphere which was commissioned by Google and based on his own idea. Google Sphere is most effective when performing an image search and turns your results into a swirling sphere of pictures.

I have added all of the URL’s above, so make some tea and take 10 minutes to enjoy and admire the playful side to Google.

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One issue arises in the fact that although it is very easy to set up a brand page, this also means it is very easy to set up a fake brand page. The biggest hurdle when setting up a fake brand page is you have to agree to Google’s Page’s Terms, which state that only users “with authority over the subject matter” can set up a Google+ Page. If these terms are then breached, Google will or take down your page.

Google has attempted to take steps to prevent this by providing verification badges to confirm authenticity of the page. Jim Prosser, a Google rep – “Verification badges are designed to help our users find what they’re looking for by ensuring that people, brands and businesses that are subject to broad-based impersonation are protected,” he says. “Because of this, it’s intended primarily for global or broadly known brands.” Such badges appear as a check the right of the brand’s name on its Google+ page; if you run your cursor over the check mark, it reads “verified name.”

Google has always previously had a lot to say about fake accounts but their current relaxed approach does not seem to reflect this. Facebook and Twitter have tighter regulations when creating pages and hopefully as Google+ grows the same will be said for them.

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