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.

When Panda first launched earlier this year I noticed that some client-pages with good content were getting nailed.  I didn’t notice until I started reading the content that there were lots of typos and misspellings.  I thought “Eureka! I have discovered an elusive Panda ranking signal!”  And I had.   I fixed the problems and the pages popped back up in rankings.  I’ve been spellchecking like crazy ever since.  It makes sense, right?  An algorithm update focused on content quality should have a signal that says content with misspellings is low-quality.  I’ve been quietly plugging away fixing spelling errors and watching the pages increase in ranking.  I haven’t seen much chatter about it anywhere on the SEO forums which is why I didn’t want to say anything.  A Panda ranking signal that nobody is talking about – you can see why I kept quiet.  Well thanks to Mr. Cutts the cat is out of the bag.  Check out the Google Webmaster Help video recently released.  Matt says in the video that spelling on it’s own isn’t one of the signals they use for ranking a site – I doubt it.  Since it does impact pagerank, and pagerank impacts ranking, spelling absolutely does impact rankings… and my clients will agree.

I noticed a thread today on WebmasterWorld talking about the new(ish) drag-and-drop Google Image search function. You can take an image from your computer, drag it to the search box on Google Image Search, and Google will do it’s best to identify the picture you uploaded. It works by identifying color palates and patterns and then matching those to images it “knows” about. Google has struggled for a long time to identify images on the web – simply because images contain so much content but are so challenging for a robot to make sense of.

Back in 2010 I talked about Google launching Boutiques.com. Boutiques.com (a Google property) is a neat site where you can put together an outfit that match your taste and then Google algorithmically builds a wardrobe for you and even lets you buy the items online. Google does this based on an image content recognition algorithm that they acquired from Like.com. Since I knew about this product and the acquisition of the algorithm last year, I wasn’t too surprised with the launch of the new Google Image Search feature.

When I first started playing around with the new feature it was pretty poor. It did a great job of matching color pallets and a wonderful job of identifying popular artwork, buildings, skylines, celebrities, etc. It had a really hard time identifying flowers – which is what I really wanted it to be good at. Today I was dragging in pictures I had taken of flowers to see how well it’s learned over the last month. It’s learned to identify distinct flowers (like stargazer lilies) but it’s still not any good at identifying and matching specific flowers. It gets the colors right, but doesn’t identify the flower by name.

While messing around today I came up with an amusing result. Google Image Search matched a picture of a rose I took with a Professor from UC Riverside! I chuckled a little but then started looking into why it had done it and I was amazed at how well it’d picked out similar shapes contained in the two pictures. However, had Professor Bazhenov been wearing a different shirt and not standing in front of trees I don’t think he would have showed up at all.

Check out the images below to see what I uploaded, what Google returned, and how I think the datapoints on the two pictures match that made Professor Bazhenov seem like a good choice to the robot.

Wild Rose used in Google Image Experiment Google thought Professor Bazhenov from UC Riverside matched my rose.

Data points I think Google used to match the professor and the rose. (click for a larger view)

Keep in mind that every time I upload the image of the rose I get a different set of related images including other people. I find that in itself interesting because Google is all about consistency.  Maybe the results will become more stable as Google “learns.”

A special thanks to Professor Bazhenov for being a good sport. The Professor studies computational neuroscience and other very difficult to pronounce areas of human biology to help make our lives better. Check out his UC Riverside staff profile.

Google has added weather and terrain to Google Maps. The option to display these features are available under the options panel which you can see in the image below. (I absolutely love the terrain view!) You can also see that they’ve added some new icons to the map indicating road construction and even accidents! Check out the images below to see the new features.

This shot shows terrain, weather, and some new traffic icons. (click for a larger view)	Google added some new icons to the map showing where there is roadwork. This image shows details about a lane closure. (click for a larger view)
This image shows something else new; detailed information about accidents. (click for a larger view)	Clicking on one of the conditions icons will pop out forecast information. (click for a larger view)

What a great addition! I’m surprised it took so long!