About 50 new ranking factors will be added to their algorithm, but many of them are based on video and other Universal Search options.

This hasn't been implemented as of yet according to technical seo testing, but if you have not done so, I would recommend that you start looking into how to incorporate video in your site to take advantage of this, or you will miss on the opportunities of this new algo update.

From Google engineers, “everyone is basically at zero right now because hardly anyone is really doing video” The takeaway here is that so when they finally do roll out this update, there won’t be any dramatic changes in the SERPs, so don't expect them, due to the fact that the new criteria here is “zero”, keeping things balanced for the most part.

So, the final questions here: Are you leveraging video on your site? If not, what are you waiting for? If yes, how are you optimizing it?

We have verified the numbers once again for many of our testing sites. And we noticed an update up to 4 levels deep on internal pages.

Google has been busy with these updates lately (last one was just 2 months ago). Are we seeing a swift from the quarterly updates?

What do you think? What are you seeing on your sites?

First of all, this technical data is based on CTR percentages from organic traffic, and not from paid search. This is not your average "market share" report. if you want to find out the paid search numbers for your market the start PPC testing on your site. This is something you should do anyway to start any SEO work with clients or your own site.


So... What search engine rules the organic market and why? Google of course! With its combined web properties and foreign indexes is has 80% of the market. What about Yahoo? Sharing the leftover 20% with Msn and the rest. But here is the issue: What does it matter if a search engine has rest of the market share if their organic listings are lowered by PPC listings that no one ever sees them? That has been the focus of both Yahoo and Msn.

Our recommendation is that you continue to concentrate 100% on Google for your SEO with a generic aim on Yahoo and Msn. There just is not enough share to get a positive ROI anywhere else. It is not worth it to optimize for any other engine but Google for the North American market.

What are the numbers on your site? What does your web analytic tell you about the market share of the search engines referring traffic to your site?

In its quest to improve the user interface, Google has added this new feature to the algorithm that is responsible for the titles and snippets of result pages.

It does now highlight stems and some synonyms of the original query term. This is a good thing for the user, and Google is all about testing improvements to the user experience, hearing feedback, making adjustments, or quietly removing what doesn't work.

Synonym matching is something we have been waiting to be implemented for a while now, since its roots go back to 2003. According to the Google team "is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system"

We welcome this additions. As anything else, Google counts on receiving user feedback to keep improving this area. What do you think? What else could be helpful to you when doing a query besides terms or spelling suggestions, stem versions, and synonyms matching?

As most site owners should have noticed by now, there has been an update going on with Google's Toolbar PR since last Thursday. After verifying results for a week in our technical SEO lab, it seems to have stabilized by now, and as some others have previously pointed, there is nothing to worry about with this one.

What I mean is that even if the PR value has decreased for your site, your rankings should be steady if you have been following the webmaster guidelines. This update mostly has to do with spamindexing (or depending on how you look at it, de-indexing).

Average PR for most testing sites dropped 0.3 points overall, but is a 40% drop if taking off 0-2 PR domains out of the calculations. Still rankings are unchanged, which confirms another "cleanup" type update.

Matt Cutts confirms on his blog: "I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites." So these "penalties" which are being shown right now should be lifted by the time Search Engine Strategies hits in late August.

How have your site withstand the latest update? How many points has it dropped, if any? What about your rankings?

We get asked quite often... If we only got to choose 2 elements to optimize on-page, what those would be?
Well, wishing the answer was more technical than this, the fact remains that we would pick the Title tag and the meta Description.

Title tag - The most important one. This is what the searcher will click on to arrive at your site. And it is were all starts in terms of converting that visitor into a customer, member, affiliate, supporter, or whatever you want your site to accomplish. It should satisfy both your visitor and search engines in terms of relevancy. Therefore it needs to be "clickable". Target terms should be considered in terms of co-occurrence, prominence, and proximity. We recommend to include your target terms once in it, at the beginning (prominence) following with a call to action (click through). The last issues are length and separators. If your title exceeds 67 characters, it could be trimmed out in the SERPs, which not only does look bad, but also wouldn't allow the searcher to see your entire message. Separators help increase visual relevancy of your terms.

Description meta - You need to optimize this. It should "describe" the Title tag further, detailing any additional information that would further increase the chances of being chosen as the most relevant and appealing search result. It should also include the target terms at the beginning, but branding terms are not necessary, instead focus more on why this would be a better listing to click on that your competitor's. Then you have achieved its goal.

What about your own titles and descriptions? What have you found to be effective?

Nothing big happened, but there were a lot of small updates
across the index, in what I could call a "cleanup" type of update.

Just as it was 6-8 month ago, PR is back for a lot of web directories.
This is important for the ones that do pass link value from their listing.

The most remarkable thing is that after losing thousands of links,
many sites still have their PageRank intact. Link Quality, anyone?

If you have been seen a flux in Google Toolbar PR, it is an update, they are doing an "incremental" PageRank toolbar update. It started some days ago, and it is not fully completed yet. This is a minor update compared to the big one back in November.

Because of this, it has low impact for most sites. Have you seen any changes on the Google toolbar? Would you mind to share?

New update from Yahoo for crawling, indexing and rankings. Lots of sites experiencing the update as of this morning.

The last update was about a month ago. Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the new update saying:

"Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

As announced, some major re-indexing is reported on many sites. So far, this update is giving more weight to older or established sites and larger sites. Even more so than Google currently does.

Have you noticed any Yahoo crawling changes on your site's activity or in your rankings?

After months without a "visible" update, with data collected about 30 days ago, all Google datacenters show a new PageRank update.

This update has no direct impact on rankings, since the information on the PR Toolbar is outdated, about 3 months, and supposed to be updated every quarter. The PageRank of the sites linking to your site may have changed, therefore affecting your own. One not well understood aspect of PageRank is it scoring. For example, a PR 6 is a numeric score rounded from a value anywhere between 5.6 and 6.9 in the PageRank scale.

Coming back to the fact that this PR update did not affect rankings, an example site was downgraded from a PR7 to a PR4. Both rankings and traffic remain constant. So besides a PR downgrade, that may impact future link building efforts, nothing has changed.

A lot of new sites went from PR0 to PR1 as usual between updates. Also, there was an increase in the numbers of PR2 sites. Most PR3 sites stayed at that level. Some PR4 sites lost 1 or 2 points, and PR5, 6 and 7 sites lost points as well.

But the way to approach link building the natural, proper way remains despite all these adjustments. And still can be done legally without triggering PageRank downgrades like the ones we are seen.

Did you experienced similar results? Do you have examples? We would like to know, so just leave your feedback via comments.