Share In December of 2009 I read an extremely interesting piece on the Telegraph website by Technology and Digital Media Correspondent, Emma Barnett. The piece was a write-up of insights into the future of search, from Google’s Marissa Mayer. It was the title of the article that hooked me into the piece. Marissa Mayer: An omnivorous Google is coming. As a search engine professional and former Yahoo! I do enjoy the juxtaposition of “Google” with any word that begins “omni” and the Orwellian tint to prophesy that it brings. Mayers’ insights include multi-lingual query translations on the fly, ring-fenced serving of social data according to user-to-object privacy settings and intuitive search. Barnett states “She [Mayer] wants Google to be capable [...]

Share I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around with Google instant, and watching all the activity on Twitter. It’s always amusing to watch the “SEO is dead” brigade find a new drum to bang. But getting into the office this morning meant that actions had to start being taken, and my process is the same as it always is when Google launches something new, so I thought I would share it with you: Inform Your Clients While you may be well aware of what is happening, your clients won’t, and they won’t necessarily see the impact that a change like this could have for them. Let them know that they might see a drop in traffic, [...]

Share At SES Toronto I was one of three panellists talking about SEO from a decade ago to now.  I tackled the past while my fellow panellists tackled the present and future.  As always, I had so much more I wanted to say and thus this blog post. I asserted that nothing has changed and yet everything really has.  At its core, the math for calculating relevance remains very much the same but layer upon layer of sophistication has been added turning the Google ranking formula a complex creature which is likely an engineering feat of mad genius.  I feel that Google engineers are extremely intelligent in their ability to conceive of, and execute the calculations surrounding, ways and methods [...]

Share So I woke up this morning, wondering what to write about for SEO chicks this week, and wouldn’t ya know Google has launched yet another thing that no-one needs. Perfect, this post will practically write itself! The first I knew of Google starred results, was seeing the Search engine land post on the subject, so I did a quick check, and found that I still had search wiki, in fact as of writing this post, I still haven’t been moved over to the new system, and from what I’m hearing, I kind of hope that I get left out of the update all together. @Seobegincom has been keeping me updated on his initial experiences of stared results for much [...]

Share The insertion of a link from Google search suggest list in the search box directly to a website has been on then off then on again and quickly off again. I took a screen shot and lost it but one day in early November while being lazy and going to Google to get to Webmaster Tools, I noted when I got as far as “Webm” I was offered a direct link to “Web MD” in the search suggest box.  This was switched off before the end of the day I believe and life went on as normal though I was surprised the normally US-only site was coming up.  I later learned Boots had partnered with Web MD so that [...]