Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Rich snippets appearing in Google are now supported in three versions or languages; formerly, Google offered microformats and RDFa support, and has now added support for microdata, which is a part of the HTML5 specification.

In May of last year, Google first announced rich snippets on their Custom Search blog, with a lot of restrictions:

At this time, Rich Snippets attribute information for Custom Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. We’re looking to make this easier for you in the future. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and PageMap attributes may not be indexed from all webpages… If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

This meant that XHTML verification was highly important.

Now more options are open. From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets… By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.

Here’s an example:

The blog goes on to exoll the simplictity of the system, and to warn that rich snippets are not guaranteed, but requests for inclusion can be submitted:

Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.

It is still a good idea to get an XHTML validation service to check your site and ensure that you get all the perks you can!

Google has done it again – streamlined yet another sector of tehir offerings to make them more accessible. According to the Google Blog:

Today, we’re making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.

The Apps include:

• Zoho CRM (a business management solution for organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management.

• Concur Breeze, designed to help small businesses easily handle expense reporting, reducingb wasted man-hours and increasing productivity

• TripIt, a  travel plans organizer that works with all travel bookers and takes organization to the next level

• FreshBooks, the online billing and bookkeeping app that lets you send, track and collect payments quickly.

• Intuit Online Payroll, the easy payroll solution integrated smoothly with Google Apps:

According to TechMeme,

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud.  More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

With the Google Apps Marketplace to help streamline y0our business, and a solid SEO firm to handle your website content and linking needs, you can build your online business into a power to be reckoned with.

Reports show that hundreds of sites have issues getting indexed by Google. If you have crawling and indexing issues, you may have trouble ranking for you competitive and non-competitive terms.  Sometime you may need a little help solving Google indexing issues to increase your keyword ranking position. When you solve these problems, you can take full advantage of long tail keywords.First, however, you have to figure out what your starting point is by pulling some data.

Figure out how many submitted and indexed pages you have using Google Webmaster Central. You will have to submit a sitemap to get this data (in fact, if you’re having indexing problems, check this first. An XML sitemap is usually best for Google.) If you don’t have a sitemap, you can still do a site:domain.com query in Google and see the number of pages listed initially. Then run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings you have, and follow up by enlisting the aid of a crawling program to pull page list from the site. The larger the site, the more problems you will probably come across.

Examine each URL and cross match them to the list of indexed pages, taking note of any that are not indexed.Once you know what is not indexed, rty to navigate naturally to these pages through your site to see if you have unlinked pages or ones with broken connections, or any other issues. Some problems you might find include:

A robots.txt file excluding that page/folder. This can happen during testing, if you forget to  by remove that restriction in your robots.txt file afterward.

Several URLs containing excluded parameters. If parameters contain duplicate content, you can make Google ignore it – but you should leave one copy live!  Check site configuration, settings, Parameter Handling in  your webmaster tools account to see if you accidentally excluded anything.

Duplicate content causing Google to stop indexing. Duplicate content is in many cases inevitable; you just have to tell Google which page you want read by using robots.txt and parameter handling to ‘hide’ them and let bots only get into the page you want them to index easily.

Low numbers of inboud links going to lower pages. If you neglect your deep pages, they may end up unindexed.  Especially if no link to new pages exists on an indexed/cached page, or only have a graphical or button link, you may need to add some regular links – preferably inbound ones- too up juice. Flash can also cause indexing problems. Good websites should always have indexable and contextual navigation links.

Figuring out and fixing your indexing issues should be a top priority, and don’t be ashamed to ask for some help. A Google Indexing Service can help ensure that all your pages are properly indexed.

What would happen if Google disappeared from China? In the wake of the hack originating in China and the subsequent threats by Google to leave China if uncensored results were not allowed, people started wondering what life would be like in a country without Google.

A survey of 784 scientists revealed that scientific research in China could be drastically affected if Google became inaccessible. According to Nature News:

…more than three-quarters said they use Google as the primary search engine for their research.

More than 80% use the search engine to find academic papers; close to 60% use it to get information about scientific discoveries or other scientists’ research programmes; and one-third use it to find science-policy and funding news. They also rely heavily on other Google products: more than half use Google Scholar, for example, and Google’s mapping and e-mail applications are also popular.

According to Nature, non scientists are perfectly happy with Baidu, and don’t care of Google goes missing – but scientists say that such a loss would be crippling:

Indeed, 84% of the scientists who responded to Nature’s survey say that losing Google would “somewhat or significantly” hamper their research; 78% say that international collaborations would be affected to the same degree. Scientists in the 25–34-year age range were most likely to say that losing Google would “significantly” — rather than “somewhat” — hamper their research.

The furor around Google and China has died down slightly in light of other, more recent events, but the Wall Street Journal reports:

Google and Chinese officials will resume talks about whether the US firm can deliver unfiltered Internet search results in the world’s most populous country…

It was unclear whether any progress was being made in the talks, or whether Google would be forced to follow through on its January threat to shut down its Chinese-language search engine google.cn rather than bow to government censors.

Google launched the ultimatum over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

International markets made up $3.5 billion, or 52% of Google’s revenue, in the last calendar quarter of 2009. However, their international presence is not without its detractors. According to BusinessWeek.com:

The European Union said it is examining complaints from companies that accuse Google of demoting links to their sites in search results. The same day, a court in Italy found Google managers and a former employee of the Mountain View (Calif.)-based company responsible for privacy violations caused by a user-submitted video on YouTube. The flare-ups in Europe come just six weeks after Google threatened to shutter some Chinese operations after a cyber attack on its users was linked to the country.

Google is consistently under fire in Germany; China and the US based search giant had a knock down drag out over an hacking incident, and Google fights for a foothold in lesser countries. In Italy, display of a child with Downs Syndrome led to the trial and conviction in absentia of three Google execs – a matter that Google addressed on the Google blog:

… we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

The EU wants Google to delete unblurred Street View images from its database after 6 months instead of 12 – Google demurred:

“The need to retain the unblurred images is legitimate and justified — to ensure the quality and accuracy of our maps, to improve our ability to rectify mistakes in blurring, as well as to use the data we have collected to build better maps products for our users,” Peter Fleischer, a Google lawyer in charge of privacy issues, said in an e-mailed statement. “We have publicly committed to a retention period of 12 months from the date on which images are published on Street View, and this is the period which we will continue to meet globally.”

Overall, Google keeps making European countries mad – but it doesn’t seem to affect their bottom line.