Google’s Amit Singhal has come out and talked about what kind of things Google looks for in a quality website, and what specific signals indicate high quality vs. low quality that they try to build their algorithm around. He also discusses the Panda update, and why some sites might have had their rankings hurt by it.
The new version of Google Analytics is currently in beta, where Ecreative Internet Marketing has been playing with it for some time now. Google just announced a new feature for the new analytics: site speed reports. Learn how quickly your site is loading, and compare load times across different pages, and for users with different browsers and geographical regions.
Google has just implemented the requirement for unique product identifiers for products in the Google shopping feed. Based on Google’s comments, it appears that the main focus of this requirement is to make it easier for Google to know when two offerings are actually the same product, and then to display the lowest price. Unfortunately, this sounds like not just an easy system to game, but possibly one that encourages deceptive e-retailing practices.
Optify has released new research of over a million click-throughs in an attempt to predict what percentage of people click on the first result of Google, vs the second, third, etc. We’ve seen research like this before dating back to 2006, but this is certainly the most recent research, and with the changing face of Google results — with social, images, and media as well as geo-targeted search — it’s always good to see recent research. Interestingly, the Optify study shows the lowest click through percentage for the number one Google position of any study to date.
Google has released an update to their Panda algorithm, this time affecting an estimated 2% of search queries and slamming Ehow’s rankings. This update takes into account user information from the Google Chrome browser feature that lets users block garbage sites from their search results. And apparently a lot of users thought that Ehow was a garbage site.
