Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google changed a lot of things last week. A lot of the changes and launches of new applications happily coincided with the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle, probably because it’s such a great venue for announcements.

Google has come out with adaptations and add-ons to its G-mail services in the form of G-mail Labs, which provides user developed tools and gadgets for a variety of functions.

Quick Links lets you bookmark any page view right in G-mail, while Superstars is a more complex flagging system that lets you assign importance with different colored stars and graphics.

Old Snakey somehow made the cut; a version of the Snake game that runs inside G-mail, and many other applications await the whim of the users as they will decide what stays and what goes.

My personal fave? E-mail addict, which allows you to lock yourself out of your own e-mail account for 15 minutes. A pretty cool idea, but what I really need is 30 days to break my dependency!

Google’s launched their merchant search at the start of the month, and followed hard on its heels with the implementation of site search last week as well. Finally they rolled out the No-Follow Google Help Center at SMX Advanced, where Matt Cutts was available to discuss it and other SEO topics.

In the end however, it is the mere changing of a single word in one of Google’s quality guidelines that grabbed webmasters attention. The guideline formerly read:

“Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as ‘cloaking.’”

This had lead to confusion, and a rumor that all SEO was about to be banned forever. As Matt pointed out, however, there are areas where you have to help the search engine do its job. As long as you keep your nose clean, you should be fine - Google isn’t looking to bust honest optimizers, but to flush out the shady ones.

Sometimes you need to structure things for search engine access that your customers might never need to see. Cutts assured us that Google does realize that, and stated that the word ‘primarily’ has been added to the guideline.

All in all, it’s been a big week for the search giant, and there is going to be more in the days ahead. Google announces beta tests at a higher rate than either of its competitors, and not all of them are feasible, but it will be interesting to see what comes next!