• Google: Apart from showing the disappointing financial results for Q1, Google changed its algorithm as usual but for once, it made the changes public. First, site links are now widespread on the search engine result pages. The main impact will be that each website has more space and more links in the Search Engine Result Page  (SERP). This would surely lead to a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for websites whose content matches better what internet users look for. Secondly, SERP are now more local and geolocalised. Indeed, Google may use your latest local queries typed in the Google toolbar and responds to queries such as “japanese restaurant” with a map from Google Maps.  This is indeed very interesting because Google goes one step further into personalised results. It also shows that optimising your website into Local Business ads is  a must now more than ever. Finally, on top of offering the geocalised suggest feature and local news feature, which recently expanded to the UK, India and Canada, Google changed its URLs in the SERP. It means that more parameters will be available. Here is the example presented in the Google blog:

Old URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
New URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The difference in parameters is the following:

——- old

http://www.google.com/search

hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new

http://www.google.com/url

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English).

• Mobile Search: Google released its latest Gmail version. This is a pretty good one as it is faster and uses the Gears technology (yep, you can access your mails even when you have no signal). Google Maps is getting closer and closer from Maps Quest. It seems that Google will already be number one for all vertical search features by the time the internet is available on each and every mobile device.
  

  Google Maps gets closer from Mapquest

• SMO and Twitter: It seems that Twitter makes most of the news for the SMO world. To follow the latest news, follow my bookmarks on the topic: Delicious/twitter

Voila! To stay updated on the latest news, you may want to follow me on twitter, or follow my rss, my delicious or all my feeds on friendfeed.

Have a fruitful week!

It seems like Google is trying to promote the web for all those out there who have no websites yet. The target being clearly individuals and Small & Medium Enterprises. It reminds me of the former attempt with the so-called Google Pages which didn’t last for too long. Is this service going to turn internet users into new webmasters? We have reasons to think so:

• This new service brings new features such a site-level navigation and headers which are really easy to use and definitely bring more interest to Google Site.
• Internet users are becoming more internet savvy
• Google gained a good experience through Blogger and added network services such as Google friends that make the whole package
• Google is really willing to do so as it would increase its potential network of Adsense friendly websites.

Meanwhile, I tested for a few seconds and i have to say that:

• It has nothing brilliant compared to websites specialised in it.
• It is a bit hard to understand where to click. I mean, would anybody who never ever created a website understand this:

• It is far from being the first Google’s product outside search and most of them never really succeeded. Does anybody remember the last time you used Picassa or Orkut??

Let me know your thoughts!

The year or 2008 was undoubtly content-oriented. In addition to simply creating content for users, the year witnessed more usage of rich media (optimised images, news, videos, products, etc).   It was also linkbuilding-oriented. We all promoted websites through partnerships and Social Media Optimisation in addition to on-page optimisations. The year 2009 will probably be all the same. Specificaly, you may want to get ready for Audio indexing by optimising the audio content of your videos. Well, we should actually be ready, because audio content will probably be very hard to optimise when Google decides to include it in its universal search. Nevertheless, I want to point out today that there is something new to take into account: local search marketing. Although it’s still in its early phase, advertisers are expected to triple the money they spend in local search marketing within 2 years, according to the Marketing Sherpa latest release.

Local search marketing can be divided into local search, geolocalisation and mobile search. The difference between geolocalisation and local search is about who excludes content based on geographical location. For geolocalisation, advertisers choose to promote content that is in relation with where the targeted internet user lives. The variable is the IP address of the internet user’s computer. Local search is different, in the sense that internet users are the ones deciding to add the name of a location in the query. For instance, I actively search locally when I Google pizza paris. Finally, mobile search comes into play through GPS – most mobile search engines now include GPS tracking and serve results based on your localisation – and the behaviour of users of mobile devices – they intend to search more local stuff surrounding them vs. internet users behind the screen of their pc’s.

I’ll go in depth into each of these 3 elements in the next posts   Happy new year to all of you and do not hesitate to post comments on local search marketing if you feel like it!

• Your visitors can log in through their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts
• They can post comments and rank your articles or posts
• Visitors can share media
• They can make friends among themselves
• They can invite friends through other social networks to visit your site!

It doesn’t impact much on SEO because the widget is composed of a script and nothing actually appears in the source code of your page. It’d be interesting to see if using this service gets you backlinks.  I’d guess that it’s unlikely. But afterall SEO is not the only thing, and there are many other benefits such as:

• People stay longer on your website because they post comments, share media or interact with other Friends
• Your visitors work for you and get you more traffic by inviting friends. This is definitely something more on top of Digg likes and social bookmarking services
• It does not require creating a new account and it can potentially attract any user from any other social service!

If you’re planning to use Friend Connect or currently use it, do not hesitate to leave a comment!

• The introduction of Searchwiki
• The introduction of Friend Connect

Search wiki is definitely a turning point in Google policy. I’m actually surprisedwith the fact that they didn’t launch it earlier

We know that Google has taken benefit from Google Analytics, Google toolbar, Google accounts, Google desktop (etc). It gathers and analyses all data on our use of the internet. The information has been already useful and been actually used for improing its algorithm. For instance, the time I take to look at a search engine result page (SERP) until I find what I need, or the number of clicks I do on it, and the number of times I come back to the SERP, are remembered by Google, and are used to determine the most relevant results.

Many Google employees have been manually checking websites and giving grades on their quality. Just like when I worked as part of the Search Quality Evaluation (SQE) team in Google, the grades that the team gives would be pass on to the Google algorithm. Why so? Because what makes Google such a good company is that everything that is done manually always eventually ends up in the hands of engineers. Engineers create a statistical model and then update the Google algorithm.

Google now goes a step further by asking internet users to work for them   SearchWiki permits internet users to log in with their Google account when they need to change SERP the way they want. Many actions are available: making a URL higher in the SERP, adding a URL or even adding comments. Google states that it won’t change the standard SERPs for users who are not logged in. Well, probably not in the short term. But if  thousands of users make the same change in the SERP for the same query, it will be no doubt that Google would take it into account in standard SERPs.

Now the question is, how this is all gonna impact SEO?

I’d say none because Search Wiki will make SERPs more relevant to internet users’ queries. White hat SEO consultants should therefore keep thinking about added value for internet users, keep doing the good work and should not be bothered at all

Have a good week!

• I like it
• Part of my job is to spend time online looking for new stuff
• I used to work for Google Search Quality Evaluation (SQE) Team and I think I have some valuable things to say on how Google treats the “world information to make it universally accessible”
• I like the sense of community you can find online and how people can help each other so I’ll try to give my thought on things based on my experience

Maybe it’s also time to give a bit more info about me! I’m Emmanuel, a 26 y.o. French man born in Dijon (yes, just like the mustard) and turning 27 on 9th January (so in not too long actually). I tried to study seriously for what I think to be (too) many years, mainly in Economics at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, France and then at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK but also International business & management at USTL, Lille, France where I eventually got a Master.

Being from Polish decent with some German family and a dad who was born in Constantine, Algeria, I’ve always felt a bit uneasy staying in France and not seeing anything else. I guess that’s one of the reasons behind my will of moving to Ireland to work for Google in the Search Quality Team (SQE). That was a lot of work, honest!

working hard for SQE in Google!

I’m of course kidding: I enjoyed working there and I can tell the team there is making a hell of a job (Does anybody still see spam in the Google SERPs? I don’t!) and it has been one of the most enriching experiences for me.  Anyway, I decided to use the info I learned there to become a consultant and help companies in their SEO choices. This is where I saw this ad on NetBooster Agency who was looking for consultants. Bingo! I am now the head of International SEO & R&D and my job is simply to deal with multilingual and international SEO projects and also develop all kinds of new products based on Social Media and web 2.0. NetBooster Agency is composed of young and smart individuals and it’s a pleasure to work for a company whose spirit is to learn everyday in order to improve its service to its clients.

Ok so enough about me. I hope you’ll enjoy this blog and that my posts will help highlights what I think is important on the web. 2 more notes:

• Of course, my posts, comments, ideas or opinions are not necessarily those of the company I’m working for.
• you know how bad the French can be with the Shakespears language so please bear with me. At least you cannot hear my accent (yet)!