Tag Archive for: Barry Schwartz

You See Up To A Dozen Experiments Every Time You Use Google

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Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, spoke during a Google Tech Talk on October 22, 2012, and he shared some interesting information about what you see every time you use Google, as Barry Schwartz reported for Search Engine Land.

“Any time you access Google, you probably are in a dozen or more experiments.” Google is always working to improve and refine how they record data. Google releases about 500 updates to search per year, and about another 500 on the ad side. To establish what changes are needed and what works best, they run these experiments, which come to about 5,000 different experiments in a year,

The video of the entire talk is below, and the relevant information starts around the 26 minute mark.

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Majestic SEO Link Reports Now Updated Almost Hourly

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Majestic SEO are now updating their linkage data to be as recent as within hours or minutes. Majestic SEO is an advanced SEO third party reporting service, and in the the past you had to wait up to 24 hours for link reports to update.

Now, Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land reports Majestic is pushing updates out nearly hourly, allowing webmasters to see new links to their content more quickly.

This service is only available on the main site explorer reporting engine, but they hope to get it to the API and other reports soon.

 

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Google Webmaster Tools and Backlinks

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Google Webmaster Tools has always been a way to see some backlinks to your pages on a site you control. They’ve recently made a change to give you a “link download option” where you can download a full list of backlinks to your site and include a column for dates each link was discovered.

This way you can check and see how old your oldest links are as well as what links have surfaced recently.

To find this option, go to your site inside Webmaster Tools, click on Traffic->Links to Your Site. Then from there choose “More >>” under either “Who links the most” or under “Your most linked content”. On the following page you have three options:

  1. Download this table
  2. Download more sample links
  3. Download latest links
The new option is the third in this list. This is where you can get a full list of all the sites Google has listed that link to you, plus the date this was discovered.

You can see pictures and other details at Search Engine Roundtable.

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Even Google Can Get Penalized

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Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had).  This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9).  That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed?  They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget.  This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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Power of Suggestion on Google’s Search Line

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Google’s been doing live suggestions for a while now.  But did you know you can actually use wild cards on the search line?  No asterisk required, but you can simply add one character to a word to find any similar words that are searched for.  So looking for “tree”, you could add an ‘a’ to make it “atree”, and Google will potentially show you “apple tree” as a suggestion.

It’s quite powerful and easy to do.  To see some screen shots of how this works, check out this post on Search Engine Land.

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DNS Support From Google

Google is about keeping things fast.  And when there are things on the web slowing them down, they want to just keep it up and going.  If it isn’t being taken care of, then it looks like they’ll step in and do it themselves.

In this case, it’s DNS – the domain name system servers are apparently not fast enough for them, so they’re setting up their own.  Barry Schwartz has more details over at Search Engine Land, on what Google’s plans are for this.

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