It appears that yesterday, April 24th, saw the first launch of Google’s recently announced Over Optimization Penalty.  The news scared a lot of SEOs and started a flood of whining on forums.  You can always tell who has a bit of a guilty conscience when Google starts talking about an update focused on eliminating spam.  Luckily, when we first heard about it we went nuts collecting pre-change information for future analysis.  Since the first launch of an update is usually the most severe we are going to start reviewing our data to see what sites moved and try to get a decent idea of what this change is about.  We collected data on both our clients and the sites that they compete with.  So far it seems our clients are ranking better than they did before as the spammers get taken out.  <knock on wood>  We’ll see how this shakes out.  Remember, don’t knee-jerk react to an algo update.  Let it shake out and then come up with a calm, clear plan of action.

Check out this list of winners and losers.  Pretty interesting.

There’s no other way to put it.  That’s what they’re going to do.  In an never-ending push to increase the visibility and traffic of Google’s own properties, they will once again push down organic results to drive more traffic to their “junk.”  It’s not the first time we’ve seen this happen, and it won’t be the last. (Google testing less than 10 organic results, Google rearranges results to highlight places, and more that I haven’t blogged about)  In my current disillusioned state of mind, my mental picture of future search results shows page one dominated completely by Google’s own properties and PPC ads.  Sigh… I hope my outlook is bleaker than what will come.

This change is just the most recent onslaught of Google on the free organic results.  I have noticed several changes over the years which pushed organic results to lower-prominence positioning.  Today I saw an old screenshot of my site’s positioning and I really noticed the difference.  Over time you get used to one little change at a time and before you know it, there is a drastic difference.  The image below compares the old results to the new results and it’s really quite amazing.  What used to fit six organic results now only fits three.

What used to house six results now only holds three. The rest of the space is taken up by whitespace and Google properties. Click the picture to see the real impact.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article it was announced that Google is going to implement some changes to the results pretty soon that will present “facts” and “answers” to questions, presumably at the top of the results.  I suspect it’s a way of trying to stem the tide of people leaving the Google search results and going to websites that actually have answers. (Isn’t that what a search engine is for???)  Google doesn’t want you to leave – they want you to spend more time on their site click their ads more.  The fewer clicks they “give away” to organic results, the better for their bottom line.

The WSJ article says:

Under the shift, people who search for “Lake Tahoe” will see key “attributes” that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for “Lake Tahoe” today would get only links to the lake’s visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.  For a more complex question such as, “What are the 10 largest lakes in California?” Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.

Note the part I bolded above.  I wonder how many sites will see their traffic slashed because Google presumably knows the answers which they provide.  As webmasters, we’ve been feeding the beast and now it might really bite us.  If you’ve got a tourism site, you might want to reconsider your line of work.

It’s estimated that Google’s eventual switch to semantic search will impact up to 20% of all searches conducted.  Twenty percent.  Considering Google takes around 12 billion queries from the US per month, the change impacts 2,400,000,000 searches each month, and 28,800,000,000 searches per year.  Those folks won’t see the results as we see them today, and the sites listed in those results won’t get nearly as much traffic.

I found this information on the 15th but have been mulling it over since then trying to get my mind around the impact.

Hang on people.  Things are changing faster than any time before in my 15 years of experience as an SEO.

Google has put up a total of $1,000,000 as a bounty for people who can identify and exploit holes in their Chrome browser.  The hacking competition will be called Pwnium and run sepeartely to the already popular Pwn2own hacking contest that covers a broader range of software.  Google will pay $20,000 to any participant who can exploit hackable bugs in Windows, Flash, or a device driver, which are security problems that would affect users of all browsers. For hacks that identify exploits specific to Chrome, Google will pay $40,000 each, and for those that exploit only bugs in Chrome, the company will shell out $60,000, up to its million dollar limit.  They are running the contest for two reasons; one to build up publicity because the browser is so hard to crack, and to proactively seek out exploits that they can fix before they become a problem.  Google says that their browser is already so secure that nobody has been able to hack it since it’s debut in 2009.  We’ll see if a little month can take some of the shine off of Chrome.

Google has a new layer of information to add to their maps feature that shows areas with public alerts.  The notifications are for floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, wind advisories, winter weather advisories, heat advisories, and pretty much anything else you can think of.  It’s a pretty neat feature available at http://www.google.org/publicalerts

Google Public Alerts - Click for a larger view

This morning I made a post about Google’s upcoming privacy policy changes.  Google found it and cached it within 30 seconds of posting.  That’s incredible when you think of how many websites and pages they have to keep up with!  Check out the screenshots below that show WordPress’ timestamp on my entry, a screenshot of when I chatted the link to someone so they could read it, and a screenshot of Google’s cache time.

Wordpress Post Time

I usually chat my new blog posts to my friends and employees. This image shows when I chatted the link to someone using Google chat.

This shows that there was about 30 seconds from the time my post was published to the time it was indexed

Google announced yesterday that they are going to change their privacy policies and consolidate more than 60 of them into one document.  Cool, right?  Well, the change comes with a new “benefit” for Google users – that they will track you across multiple services.  Google will follow you across search, Google+, YouTube, gmail, and any other property they own including Android phones.  That’s right, if you have an Android phone you’re required to sign in with a Google account.  Oh, the best part, you cannot opt out.  If you use any of their services, you have to be spied on.  Don’t get me wrong, Google was always collecting data about you and your online behavior, but now they have more ability to stitch that information into a comprehensive profile.  For example, they plan on sending you a notification that you might be late for a scheduled meeting based on your current location, your calendar appointment, and the current traffic conditions on the route from your location to your meeting.  Neat, but very creepy if unsolicited.  Don’t even get me started on what this means for their ability to advertise to you.  Scary.

Not only will Google become more intrusive into their users lives, it also means big things to SEOs because of an an even bigger loss of referrer data in analytics.  Google Analytics used to report on all the keywords that people used to find your site in Google’s search engine.  This is very important to measure the importance and ROI of your organic campaign.  They recently changed analytics to “protect” Google users data by removing referrer information for any logged in user.  (Protect, or hoard the data?)  That means that anytime a Google user is logged in they do not send keyword data to analytics and people like me have no idea what they searched to find our sites.  When Google requires more people to be logged in, more organic keyword information will be lost and being an SEO will become even more difficult.

Guess what data isn’t impacted… Adwords.  That’s right.  If you pay for advertisements on Google, you get your referrer data.  Free = no data.  Paid = data.  I think I see a trend here and I don’t like it.  They are trying to choke us out in favor of making a few more bucks.  I wonder how long until there are no “free” organic results on the first page at all.  I can see it now – a list of paid advertisements on the first page which are disguised so well that people don’t notice and all organic results pushed to page two.  Google has already pushed the number four organic listing “below the fold” for many users (depending on screen size) by expanding the blank space at the top of the page.  Basically they added 40px worth of blank space that pushed off an organic result so paid ads were more prominent.  This is even worse for queries that have local relevance and Google Maps results push organic all the way off the page.

I also wonder what this change means to websites that currently embed things from Google products like YouTube, Google Custom Search, Analytics, Adsense, etc.  If a user has to be logged in to access any Google service, won’t that mean that these embedded services won’t work for people who aren’t logged in?

I don’t like Larry Page’s Google.  It’s getting evil.

You now have no excuse for not knowing the names of the punctuation marks on your keyboard because Google will now deliver results for them!  Until now Google just ignored the queries, but not anymore!  I played around with queries for all the punctuation on my keyboard, and it seems that the only thing Google wouldn’t respond to was the asterisk (because it’s a wildcard).  In my tests  most of the number one results are Wikipedia definitions for the symbol.  I found the first result for the : symbol to be particularly amusing which you can see below.  Go to Google and work through the symbols on your keyboard and see what happens.

Google results for a query for the ":" symbol

I’ve long been aware that Google looks at the layout of web pages to identify sections that might be advertising, ROS links, static content, dynamic content, etc.  They’ve used the information they found in those sections to either give “extra” credit to the content in the sections, or ignore the content all together.  Google announced, via Matt Cutts, on the 19th that they are going to start “demoting” pages that don’t “have a lot of content above the fold.”  According to Google, this change won’t affect sites that have a normal amount of ads above the fold, just sites that stuff the top part of their site with advertisements.  I always cringe a little when an algorithm is used to interpret website designs.

Google say that if you decide to update your page layout, the layout algorithm will automatically reflect your changes the next time they index your website. Unfortunately, it can take weeks for Google in index large websites.

Google used this opportunity to promote their Browser Size Tool which allows you to check your site in several different resolutions.  When you enter your URL your site is brought up with an overlay that shows what percentage of people can see the content.  For example, in the screenshot below, 90% of the people that visit my site can see about 50% of the page.  Not bad.  It will be interesting to see where Google decides the cutoff is for websites that have “too many” ads.

SEOMike site in Google's browser size tool

A very interesting little nugget at the bottom of Matt’s blog post said that Google plans on rolling out over 500 improvements for search this year. 500 is a lot. It’s going to be an interesting year

Today I spotted an adwords extension that allows a user to sign up for a newsletter straight from an adwords ad in the search results.  If you’re logged in to your Google account your email address is pre-populated into the email address box.  I did some digging and found that Google has been experimenting with this feature since the 29th of December.  I have quite a few clients that could benefit from this feature and I’ll be signing them up as soon as the option becomes available in their adwords accounts.

A new Adwords Extension lets you try to get people to sign up for your newsletter from your PPC ad.

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land posted an article about how Google is violating it’s own rules about sponsored posts, link buying, and content spam to promote Google Chrome.  I find it amazing that Google would sanction these efforts considering the well documented brand bias in their search results.  Google places their products and listings where users “expect” to find them anyway, so why would they need a pay per post campaign?  Apparently they are trying to create more social buzz to get more people to adopt Chrome as their browser.

Google is paying for blog posts which link back to Google Chrome’s download page via a text link and a video link.  The blog posts are generally poor quality and the videos don’t have a lot to do with Google Chrome.  Google is sponsoring posts that link back to their Chrome download page without nofollow tags (clear violations) and the blog posts they are sponsoring have very little to do with the subject.  Both the content and the video are very low quality which should anger the Panda.

How did this happen?  Google is paying a company called Unruly to promote Chrome on social networks and one tactic of Unruly is to run vast pay-per-post link spam campaigns.  Google for Google, they can throw Unruly under the bus and go on their merry way.

What will Matt Cutts do?  We’ll see, but my guess is he’ll do what he’s told.  If it were you or me, we’d be banned for a year.

The full article is definitely worth a read.