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!

Search Options

Search options is the name for the new sidebar expansion that Google have intergrated into search, you can bring it up by pressing the “show options” link just below the Google logo on a search results page.

You get an option filled bar appearing on the right that looks something like the image here.

This bar gives you a wealth of different options to “filter” a search which can be combined to form even narrower requests.

For example you can search for a term (such as baking) and you will get a standard Google Universal search result page. It will include mainly text with the odd blog, news and video in depending on where you’re searching from and what time of day it is.

If you expand the bar you can then specify only videos (just like using the “videos” tab before but in my opinion a better interface). Now we get lots of videos of baking recipe or shows about baking.

An interesting point here is that not all video results are YouTube, for this particular example I see a result from VideoJug, TED and Crackle so it’s great to see Google not taking advantage.

This can then be filtered by additional options such as timeframe and length, fantastic if you’re looking for something only just featured in the news.

They also decided to add a few new “search views” which are as follows;

• Wonder Wheel: a very interesting concept which arguable heralds Google bringing semantic web to the masses. It creates a spider diagram type graph of the search term you have entered and related terms. If you click to a related term this will also expand leaving a map of where you came from.
  It looks fantastic and I think in time will become popular at least among the webmaster community.
• Timeline: This shows timeline based news/blog results back with an indication of search popularity of your term, you can specify the date yourself or let Google choose it’s earliest and latest references.
  I don’t honestly believe this has much value to the everyday searcher but it’s still nice to play around with and see what you can find.
• Related Searches: This option is a simplified version of the wonder wheel that uses a top navigation text box instead of the funky spider diagram. It goes a little more in depth down to the fact it has more room than the wonder wheel to play with.
• Images from the Page: I really like this option as it “spices” up search results by adding images from the websites to the SERPs pages. This could be very useful for marketing and branding if we were given control via WMT over what shows up but I doubt that will happen. Expect some zany SEO theories about how to force an image here to start cropping up soon!
• More Text: This option increases the snippet size to about 3 times the standard and is a really useful tool in certain situations. I don’t think it will be one for everyone but certainly good for research and shopping.
• Rich Snippets: Although relatively small scale at the moment hitting your site up with some specific semantic/RDFa codes will result in an added line to your snippet informing customers of facts such as price and date range or average review score.
  This could be very important for the future of SEO, especially considering SiteLinks are less noticeable now, have a read of the official WMT entry to help you understand how to code for it.

Google Squared

Although not live yet Google Squared looks to be a very fun project. It is basically Googles answer to the awesome Wolfram Alpha project and does a very similar thing.

This is basically coming back with “facts” instead of standard search results. In Matt Cutts’ example using the keyword “small dogs” brought back example breeds and information about them, you can then add additional queries to this to find out more information about the stuff Google brought you back.

Again this is a step forwards for semantic search as well as a whole new level of user search behaviour. Keeps your eyes peeled for this going live!

Brand is going to be more important than ever with these new feature, imagine how powerful it would be to have your brand name on the wonder wheel for a product?  Here’s a few other things I would consider over the next month or two;

• “review” domains are now super charged, we need to buy short tailed ones wherever possible.
• Forums are now more useful for ranking and showing updating content
• Videos are still a priority
• ALT text is more important than ever.
• Daily if not hourly content is becoming the new standard
• Branding for the new search display formats will be important.

Have fun playing with this new functionality and let us know what’s you least and most favourite new feature!

~Craig Out