Google had planned to add a full page background picture, one that changes daily, to highlight their latest ‘customisable’ options.  This also seemed another step for Google to look even more like Bing.  The Googlers backlash started from minute one with angry Twitter users opposing the change.  Google reacted a few hours later and the familiar plain white homepage was returned.

Marissa Mayer, Google Search Vice President said, “”We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it, in the form of a link on our home page,” Marissa continued “Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our home page.”

For those of you, which includes me that actually LIKED the change you don’t need to worry.  Look for the ‘Change background image’ link in the bottom left of the screen.  You will need to be signed in to see this; also, if you’re in iGoogle you will need to revert back to classic view.

There are 4 different options to choose from.

‘From my computer’ is pretty obvious with the ability to upload your own image as long as it is larger than the 800×600 pixel minimum.

‘My Picasa Web photos’ simply allows you to use the images you have uploaded to the Google Web Album, assuming they are big enough to use.

‘Public gallery’ is again fairly straight forward with a range of optimized images from Google.  They range from an Umbrella to your usually cityscape\Forest scenes.  The sort of thing you see on wall art in high street stores.  My favourite is the smiley post-it-note on a plain wall.  It’s fun and unobtrusive and can cheer you up.

The last section ‘editor’s picks’ is not too much different to the previous section but whoever the ‘editor’ is must really love colour.  They are pretty crazy.  There is a lovely rainbow over a forest and also a really quaint looking aerial English Countryside scene.  You can also choose from a few plain colour backgrounds.

Of course, you can always just use the search function until you find one that suits your style.

Picnik was originally started back in 2005 and has been a great alternative for those not wanting to invest in Photoshop and with two million US visitors monthly wanting to edit their photos and with the easy integration into social networks via Facebook or MySpace it is no wonder that Google saw its potential.

In a statement on Picnik’s blog “Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.”

Google have stated that there have no immediate plans to change anything and that the service will continue to support existing partners although Yahoo’s Flickr might have different thoughts…

If you haven’t tried Picnik then I suggest you take some photos and upload them and see what you can create.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture.

Let’s look at the points Rand raises first.

Content and Accessibility will Remain Important

I am confident Rand is right about this one. Controlling quality ocntent and managing site accessability is one of the most important roles in SEO, increasingly websites are become very large and complex and it takes a lot of time, planning and expierence to correctly structure sites and keep them accessible to everyone (and bots).

As new trends develop site maintenance will become a larger task and things such as semantic tagging (not LSI) more advanced sitemaps and robots control will be important.

Content will remain an important part of SEO but I expect we will begin to see a more vaired base of content being important. The changes in the last year alone with Google now indexing Flash and Java has shown SEO’s we don’t just have plain text to play with. This technology will only become more capable and accurate meaning web technologies like Flash much more accepted by SEO.

As Rand mentions this has to be an important part of SEO as it’s an imoprtant part of internet marketing in general and the future of the web.

Social Graph Metrics

Rand moves on to discuss social graph metrics and the potential impact it will have on search. Again I agree with Rand on this one on the basic point that it will be something search giants are interested in but the overall effect on queries and results will be small.

The value in presenting people with “super personalised” results is minimal and just like in Rand’s example you are not always going to want to see the thing people around you are talking about top of the SERPs. Rand is also correct in the fact the system is too easy to game, if SE relied solely on community interaction to predict what people want in the SERPs quality would plummet for both them and the communiteis themselves.

I personally see this evolving more as a supplementary search option, similar to “images” or “video” a section almost themed “what my peers think” is a possibility. I’m not sure how this will be presented but i’m confident it will not encrouch into the main algorythm.

User Metrics

User Metrics is more of a complicated point. There are a lot of theories stating these already have an impact on ranking. Rand suggests that they will be incorporated into SEO and ranking algorithms more in the future.

I think while this makes sense and it is likely Google will use Analytics data to influence rankings it will never be a major factor for one reason, not everyone use analytics.

It would be impossible for Google to sort out all the websites into ranked order if only 30-40% are giving the the data they need. It would also mean that “having analytics” would give you a statistical advantage or disadvantage in the SERPS (depending on your site and how they work it) and therefore people would have alternative motives to using it.

User metrics can be valuable however and I think that in the long run you may at least start to get WMT feedback on issues that can harm site rankings.

Verticalis

The major point Rand ends on is the concept of verticals developing in the SEO world or at least becoming much more prominent.

This is something a lot of people in our office have been discussing recently, we are increasingly seeing people waver away from Google on long tail industry specific searches and move to websites that are almost guaranteed to answer their query.

This means that businesses are now wanting to appear in new searches, not just Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this new trend developing it easy to see that it will become competitive however I am sceptical at how much some of these sites can actually have optimisation done for them. Many work on exact matching or showing the oldest/newest entries and you can’t actually do much about the way it brings results back.

Of course manipulating titles and putting the right “tags” will have positive effects but each site is it’s own ball game and it could become very hectic very fast.

There is also Googles reaction to consider. They are not going to let all those searches go without a fight and with there increased range of search projects (such as books, base, etc) will be challenging people for these customers.

Conclusion

SEO is going through a lot of changes at the moment, we can expect the next year to be a very interesting time for everyone in the search marketing industry but the practice is far from dead and is actually growing way beyond the “search engine” barrier to become just “search”.

That’s because I usually have a phone with an MP3 player, why would I buy another? Well I needed a new phone and after all the hype I decided to go headfirst into the world of Apple and choose the iPhone 3GS.

As you have guessed this is a review post however the difference is that I am presenting it from two unique angles, firstly my view of the product as someone who typically would never spend £500 on a phone and secondly from the SEM professionals point of view.

Top 5 Things My Anti-Apple Side Likes About the iPhone

App Prices are great, most good apps are free and even the games and apps that do cost are generally worth it. Well done Apple for vetting entries and well done developers for making them worth downloading.

Battery Life is better than I expect. Maybe it’s because I have 3GS or maybe it’s because I turned no essential service off but it easy lasts a day and I had heard stories of 8 hour lifespan and worse.

Keyboard is nowhere near as hard to get used to as I expected. Sure for the first 60 seconds I was pressing things I didn’t mean too and taking half an hour to send an SMS but I have adapted to the interface very quickly. That’s when you know it has been designed well.

Gaming is fantastic on the iPhone. It’s like a cross between a PSP and a DS, that’s the good sides of each too, great graphic and sound on addictive, small but great games. Crystal Defenders Vanguard, Field Runners and Tap Tap Revenge are my current favourites.

Build Quality is what surprised me most, because it’s amazing. The iPhone is solid. I had tinkered with them before but you always hold you own things differently to others. Yes it’s kind of heavy and big but it still fits in my pocket and it feels like it’s worth that bit extra. When I pick up my old phone it now feels cheap, really cheap.

Top 5 Things about the iPhone as an SEM

E-Mails are pretty much an essential part of being an SEM, now I can access them on the move without having to pay £2 per MB downloaded. Yay.

Twitter Apps are amazing, now I can keep up to date with all the latest SEM news (and my mates of course) without being near any other form of tech. Great for knowing everything that changed while you were out of the office!

WordPress App is pretty cool, I can update blogs, send pictures etc from my little iPhone. Obviously it’s not as easy as from a keyboard but when you are on the move it’s a real useful app to have.

Google App is ace too, check my rankings from a different perspective, find what I’m looking for news wise, pretty much the whole package converted for easy use on the iPhone. I hear the docs stuff is good too but I don’t use them.

Notes are really useful. Voice Memos are pretty much the same thing but equally as useful. In the hustle and bustle of everyday office work these can be so useful to keep you on top of stuff. I know that even my old phone has this functionality but the iPhone makes it so much easier and more fun.

So there you go, I’m converted. OK so I won’t be rushing out and buying a MacBook Air quite yet but I have taken a big step and no matter how much it costs, I really like my iPhone, lets just hope o2 can deliver some semi-decent service.

This post from Matt Cutts kind of starting everything off and there has been quite a lot of discussion on the blogsphere since then, as well as in Matts Comments.

In summary Matt revealed that Google changed it policy and handling of the Nofollow tag over a year ago but never bothered to update webmaster.

What does this mean, well essentially many Webmasters believed they were controlling PR by Nofollowing selected links in their site, they were “sculpturing” PR by making sure it didn’t go out to bad pages or worthless internal pages. It turns out that they weren’t.

Understandably some webmaster were upset, some SEM companies were too, after all people have been preaching the PR Sculpting angle as “guaranteed rankings” for months.  SEM’s who work with reliable strategies were probably more concerned about the wider issue of sites, specifically blogs now “leaking” PR. Cutts’ did address this issue but many bloggers have hit this one themselves.

Both SEOMoz and HuoMah had posts about potential tactics and both raise interesting ideas but in my own opinion it shouldn’t be something you’re worried about.

Yes, maybe PR will leak from the site a little, yes maybe Google should have let people know soon but as many good SEO’s acknowledge, Google owes us nothing; they are a company and can keep whatever secrets about their internal process they like.

So what action do you actually need to take? My advice is nothing; the critical thing to remember is that it has been like this for a year already, unless you PR score has been consistently falling across that time I wouldn’t even think twice about changing your site.

Futureproofing is a different matter, some great ideas include collapsing unimportant apges into one (i.e. Contact, Ts & Cs and About), managing navigation and footer links as efficiently as possible and making sure you have external PR flowing into some of the deeper pages of your site.

The matter is very much still in the air so keep your eyes peeled for another update soon!

We all know creating sitemaps is an essential part of any webmasters jobs these days but as time goes on they become more and more important. Aside from just supporting them Google made a series of changes last week (here’s their post) to give you even more reason to use them.

The most important update is that Google now support a much bigger sitemap than before, the previous 1,000 child limit has been raised to 50,000. That means size is no longer an excuse for not submitting!

A few smaller updates have rolled out including more accurate URL counting, additional support for XSD schemas and increased speed on sitemap processing. Hopefully this is going to be useful since I have genuinely waited days for Google to even notice my sitemap before.

Wondering how to create a sitemap on your site? Well it’s pretty easily actually you get some software to do it!

My recommended choice is the script available at XML-Sitemaps. It works well, is easy to install and well worth the low asking price. If you have a small site you don’t have to pay anything at all as they have a free tool for sites less than 500 pages.

Not hooked on web based apps? The GSiteCrawler is available for free and does a pretty good job of making sitemaps too.

Once you have followed the instructions for your chosen software all you need to do is upload the file and submit inside Google WMT/Yahoo/Bing and easy peasy all 3 major players have your sitemap ready to crawl. If you don’t already have them here are the places to submit sitemaps to;

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bing

If you are not sure why this is such a big change let me explain. When adverts are displayed in the list of suggestions presented to a user they will likely take you straight through to the landing page of the advert, thus eliminating the need to visit the Google search results page. It is on this search results page that paid adverts have traditionally been displayed, providing the user with a number of choices as to where they go next to find the information they are looking for. If they don’t see a search results page then they won’t see our adverts – and if they don’t see our adverts then we are not going to make a sale! So in order to ensure that we don’t lose ad impressions we must do everything we can to get our adverts, and those of our clients, amongst the first to be displayed by the Google Suggest function.

As such I believe we need to keep a close eye on this development and make sure that we turn it to our advantage, but I don’t necessarily think that this is a good move by Google! Surely the whole point of using a Search Engine is to see a collection of results which are relevant to the search that you have made – but by encouraging you to simply click on an advert from a list of suggested search terms Google are reducing your option to choose which search result is most relevant to you. Also, by reducing the amount of information that you see before clicking on a link which takes you directly to a website (I am assuming that ad-text won’t be visible in the suggestions) will undoubtedly lead to a rise in the number of bounces and click-throughs from people who aren’t really looking for what you have to offer. In the short term I imagine that this will increase the revenue that Google generates from its paid adverts, but in the long run surely the negatives of users getting fed up of landing on irrelevant sites, and the advertisers reconsidering their PPC spend as conversions rates drop will outweigh this boost in revenue?

Ultimately though I guess we will just have to wait and see what impact this change has on paid search, after all Google has made changes before and they are rarely wrong so I will reserve judgement at the moment.

In the meantime I’ll continue to look out for these new advert suggestions and report back when I spot one.

Wolfram Alpha markets itself as being the “first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systemative knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  This alone sounds exciting and something that you should definately visit and try for yourself.  Stephen Wolfram the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research market Wolfram Alpha as a “knowledge engine” which returns results which include mathematic, engineering, physics and much more.

I have been using Wolfram Alpha for a couple of days and I have been impressed by its functions and that it is very different to what other search engines are currently offering.  Visit Wolfram Alpha and see its capabilities yourself, try searching for different words including finding information about where you live  and it will return a wide variety of data including statistics, fractions, the humidity and elevation.

Microsoft have bought to the table Bing which is also not marketing itself as a search engine but a “decision engine”.  To get a better understanding of how Microsoft have changed what they offered in Live to what they now offer with Bing visit Decision Engine where you can see the extra functionality they have integrated.  I have also been playing with this on and off for the last few days and although I am glad that Microsoft have moved forward with their search engine I just don’t think it compares or competes with Google.  Microsoft aren’t standing up and claiming this is able to compete with Google but it is trying to give Yahoo something to think about.

Bing offers similar search parameters to what Google returns with images, videos and news which I like.  I also like the fluid design layout which is a little more intuitive than Live.

There aim is to provide more relevant search results and less wasteful clicking, which I have to say it is faster, I am not sure they can claim more relevant search results from what I searched but I will keep checking back.

I enjoyed using Alpha Wolfram and will be using it in the future as a “knowledge engine” but as for my normal day to day searching I think I will stick to Google.

You may have already notice but the faceless giant that is Microsoft this week rebranded it’s mediocre search brand to “Bing“.

Microsoft have gone to pretty big lengths to promote their new baby, they have totally redirect Live.com (very brave) and are using the branding on their MSN network pages. They have also been running a big promotion drive including press releases, promotional gear and have a reported $80-100 million dollar budget for taking on current search giant, Google.

TV commercials have even been rolled out, which, to be 100% make no sense at all. Check it out.

My first impression was, “what the hell is that Ad talking about?” I still don’t even have an answer…

There is no doubt Microsoft are serious though, so lets put that terrible TV spot behind us and look at the actual site.

Bing.com has a fairly simply layout, no insta-ads, a top navigation and a “random” picture background that has waterfalls or lighthouses to calm you down.  The search results themselves share a lot with the previous “Live” search but despite what people are saying there are differences.

The depth of the search results is nice, even if the actual pages turned back are sometimes dubious. It makes use of search suggest and related terms and seems to theme these based on your location. The tech is obviously still new to Microsoft as I have seen a few bugs (I don’t live in Stockholm guys).

Paid ads are unobtrusive but generally the page looks like Google.

Their “unique” feature comes in the form of a little hover bar that expands with additional website information if you stop still for a few seconds near it. Quite useful as it tries to full out phone numbers, emails and basic information about a site but again is still bugged and in its infancy.

It’s defiantly a step forward though and finally some ingenuity from Microsoft’s search team.

The image and video search functions are nothing new, they include colour and size filters but Google have had these for a while, it also has a nice hover on them too but it can be a little slow. Video hover actually plays the clip, nice technology but I am not sure how useful it would be.

All in all it’s getting a lot of unfair criticism but at the same time it’s simply not that great, it doesn’t really do anything spectacular and the results seem very hit and miss, the public seem to have received it well however with reports that the launch was successful.

We will be keeping tabs on Bings evolution but I will always be searching for this one question.

“Why oh why did you choose “Bing” over “Kumo”?

Today I’m going to cover something that’s asked about a lot but is, in actual fact, quite easy to do. It’s the subject of redirects.

First things first though. What is a redirect and why would you want one?

Well “redirect” can refer to a few things but in this case we are referring to a server side redirect and specifically one controlled by htaccess on linux based servers.

Windows based server control redirects with IIS and while they can be easy too we will cover that in another tutorial.

A redirect is essentially a command that makes an end user or client go to somewhere other than the place they first requested, this can be for a huge range of reasons such as older pages, broken pages, site moves or more but essentially it lets you control a users behaviour.

Many designers redirect with the head command meta refresh however this is not SEO friendly, all the methods shown here will help users and spiders access your site.

The main reason people need to redirect is when they move something. If the page you move is indexed by a search engine (like Google) you should always redirect it. This is because Google will go looking for this page and if they get bounced to a 404 page, or worse a poorly done 404 page, then it could have negative implications for your site.

To check if the page you’re moving/removing is in the index use the search syntax site:www.mysite.com/movedpage.html. Putting that in Google/Yahoo/MSN will let you know if the page is there or not.

Controlling redirects on a Linux server is done by a file called .htaccess, note it does not have a name like “robots.txt” its just “.htaccess” this is called a dot file and can cause a problem for some OS’s but don’t worry you can call it what you want and rename it with your FTP client once it’s uploaded. The htaccess file should be placed in the root, alongside your index file. It can be placed elsewhere but it makes things a little more complex.

To make/edit a htaccess file use notepad or your OS’s equivalent, and simply open a new file, The first thing you will need to do is turn the redirect engine on, use the code;

##Rewrite Engine on code - MUST BE ACTIVE##
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

In this file “#” are for comments.

Next you need to determine the type of redirect you want; generally you will only use two types, 301 and 302. The choice is simple, a temporary redirect is a 302, search engines will follow it but not take much note, use it when a page is down for maintenance or a section being renewed.

A 301 redirect is permanent, search engines ten to follow them and replace the old index page with the new one and most importantly, transfer all the old important things such as links and page rank to the newer version.

OK so you have you old page, your new page and you know you want a 301 redirect, what next?

A simple line of code in the htaccess is all you need.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.mysite.com/newpage.html

That’s all you need, simple! You just need to put a new line for each redirect and test them once you upload the file. Just change the number to 301 if you only want a temporary redirect.

You can do loads more with htaccess and I will be exploring some more of the options in future posts but here are a few more snippets of code to help you along.

Redirecting a Subdirectory

##Redirect a subdirectory to temporary page##
RedirectMatch 302 ^/articles(.*)$ http://www.example.com/temporary-page.php

Redirect an Entire Site (Be careful with this one!)
##Redirect My Whole Site##
Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com

Redirect Whole Site to Maintenance Page
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/downtime\.html$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /downtime.html [R=307,L]