It is well known now that Google changed its search algorithm significantly last month.

The way Google searches and indexes your website is pretty important as the number one search site – if you’re not ‘found’ on Google your business loses out.

The change mainly affects sites who copy / reproduce content from other sites (commonly called farming) and do not add value to browsing readers.

What can you do?

1. Produce unique content.  Write or re-write your material.  If you resell for others, add depth to descriptions with your own review / opinion to differentiate your site.
2. Continue to write good copy in titles, metatags, HTML layout
3. Make it easy for human readers rather than trying to second-guess bot readers
4. Don’t waste your time working with ‘farmer’ website owners.  One of our clients set up relationships with sites who were sending traffic using automated link farming – their importance will probably drop after this roll-out
5. Do check your site analytics and see whether you have been affected.
6. Review your SEO and steer tactics away from those not favoured by Google.

SEO experts take a look at the SEOMOZ view.

A custom report for Google Analytics from Andy Beard.

If you have e-commerce clients they should read the analysis on Practical ECommerce.

Web masters read the technical issues on SearchEngineLand.

Related articles

• Google’s Farmer Update and Its Effect on Independent Publishers (xfep.com)
• Google Analytics Version 5 (seroundtable.com)

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Nick Burcher has done a good job comparing different search engines results f or the phrase "Michael Jackson Died". 

The one that comes up best is Hakia (pity you didn't put that at the top of your list, Nick give it some more publicity).

Hakia bills itself as a 'semantic search' engine that understands more about what the user is looking for. The Hakia results served up for 'Michael Jackson Died' are definitely more relevant than the other search engines referenced above. Hakia note the existence of Michael Jackson the writer, but seperate this off into a top section with the label 'would you consider this answer?' Impressive.

I also like his skill at tracking down the source of some of the confusion – Wikipedia who, since 2007, has had the exact phrase in an article referencing the 'other' Michael Jackson.  

Indeed Wikirank shows that visits to the profile of Michael Jackson the writer increased by 31,995% on June 25th. This 'other Michael Jackson' Wikipedia profile was visited 83,134 times on 25th June – even though it has nothing to do with the King Of Pop. 

However, the real answer to the search string could be provided by "real-time" search.  The Online Marketing blog summarises this in the context of the Iran + Electrion search string.  This is a small holy grail that has been on the cards for a while. Take a read of OneRiot's nice summary (although it is a rather a strong sales pitch for his work).

But the 'rumours' of the internet activity spikes causing Google news to think it was under attack by malware are more entertaining…. and Alan Patrick has a good graph summarising the reasons for the 'attack' – this really made me smile!

And of course this has clear implications for your own company / brand / name.  Check yourself out on all the search engines Nick lists for obvious search phrases and see which one 'finds' you.  If not, back to the SEO drawing board to refine the natural search phrases.

Thanks for a great insight, Nick and starting my researches into this great topic. 

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Image via Wikipedia

I have a regular Google alert search set up for myself and my clients for key words (my name and key brands).  This chucks a weekly email to me with a summary of metnions.  

Today I read this one from a link in Samepoint.com  In a search for my surname it came up with my Grandfrather, my Great Uncle and lots of me!

So I read about the site.  It describes itself as a 'conversational search engine".  Neat idea.  I have written before (and here) about conversations being increasingly important for online business development. It claims to count negative and positive words in each post logged.

Here's what they say about themselves.

SamePoint.com is presently tracking millions of conversations, taking place across in more than tens of thousands blogs and social media sites. User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint.com converts these discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. As an aggregator, we are able to serve as the nexus where these conversations meet, providing a common point, or samepoint, of all discussions on a specific topic.

And so I'm going to run a few  searches myself. "Heinz" was too wide-ranging but "Heinz Baked Beans " came up well with mentions on Maholo and blogs. David Clulow also turned up Linked in entries, and Trip Advisor (!). 

1. I did one which found a few Wikipedia pages, a Digg review page and lots of blog mentions including a Facebook group dedicated to that brand.
2. its predictive text search is good completing words for me.
3. You have to do the assessment yourself about what the 'conversation' is saying
4. But I've yet to find a negatively rated page. 
5. Compare the David Clulow search on samepoint with the one on Google which has links to Plebble and Ciao review sites… quite a range of difference references.
6. The list of key words that it finds in each entry is helpful.  I used it to compare with the ones I'd used to tag certain posts
7. And the Trends page is nice – is you are looking for a story, this could be a very good resource.
8. But the best bit is the ability to create your own RSS feeds based on search terms relevant to you.  This is FAB,  Far better than Google Alerts, IMO.,

And so, on balance, it seems to be building up its search database but probably worth book marking so that you can check your status from time to time. 

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