There is no doubt that Google continues to make changes in its search algorithm to return more and more accurate results. This is evident by the latest change – the ‘Top Search Queries’ feature has been updated so that it lives up to the expectations of its users.

With this update Google has given a new definition to the “average position” term as used in Google Webmaster Tool’s search query reports and Google Analytics SEO reports. Previously Google reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query, but now Google will average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

Confused? Don’t worry, we were too. Luckily Google has provided an example to explain the situation better:

Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

With this change Google expects that this new method of calculation will more accurately match the expectations of how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.

What will this update mean to webmasters?
Your data in the Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization reports will be calculated using the new method and you will see a change in

• Your Top Search Queries data reports
• Your SEO reports

However your data will not be affected historically since this change in calculation method is based on the principle that ‘the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, corresponding to the same or improved search ranking.’

Average Position in Google Webmaster Tools :

Average Position in Google Analytics :

If you’re still a little confused, check out the Google Webmaster Blog and Google Analytics Blog for more info.

Over the past week many webmasters have noticed a sudden change in their rankings & traffic levels giving rise to speculations that Google might have done a date refresh.

Google has now confirmed this speculations saying that Panda 3.2 was released just last week, however it is simply a data refresh of the algorithm with no additional signals or algorithmic changes.

Why this update?

After receiving several complaints from users who found it difficult to find the actual content on a website after they clicked on a result, Google thought it was time for a minor update that got sites with relevant content in the first fold of the web page and push down sites that dedicate a large fraction of the page to ads. With this Panda update, such sites may now not rank as high as they did previously.

As told by Google:

We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.

The Panda updates first started in February 24th 2011, when the ‘Farmer Update’, an algorithm designed to penalize the content and link farms was rolled out . The next major Panda updates came in the last week of September (Panda 2.5) and November 2011 (Panda 3.1).

Since then, “Panda Update” is a phrase webmasters do not like hearing as it always creates unrest in the SEO world. This update came after a long time since the Panda 3.1 update back in November 2011 after which Google gave a respite to webmasters over the holidays with an announcement of no Panda updates scheduled during holidays.

History of Panda updates is as follows:

• Panda Update 1.0: 24th Feb 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: 11th April 2011
• Panda Update 2.1: 10th May 2011
• Panda Update 2.2: 16th June 2011
• Panda Update 2.3: 23rd July 2011
• Panda Update 2.4: 12th August 2011
• Panda Update 2.5: 28th September 2011
• Panda Update 3.0: 19th October 2011
• Panda Update 3.1: 18th November 2011

So if you have noticed a drop in your ranking and traffic, then you now know why. I wonder when Panda is going to strike next!

A couple of weeks ago, Google launched “Search Plus Your World”, a new feature that displays social information alongside regular data in Google’s search results. The goal of SPYW is to further personalise search results to deliver the most relevant data for you, which is some cases may come from your personal network.

Shortly after the announcement, Twitter and Facebook raised concerns about the new feature, claiming that Google will favour their own Google+ pages and profiles in the top results. To demonstrate this point, the two came together to build FocusOnTheUser.org, a site that allows you to modify Google search results to remove the SPYW emphasis on Google+ results.

Below is a video which demonstrates how the bookmarklet works,

In case you didn’t watch the video, the demonstration outlines a number of queries where Google displays Google+ profiles alongside regular search results. In order to determine if these Google+ profiles are the most relevant social result, the tool runs a Google query for the person’s name and returns the top social results for the query instead of the “hardcoded” Google+ result.

For example, below is an example of how the tool modifies search results for “music”,

As you can see, Google+ profiles are replaced with higher ranked results from Twitter, Myspace and Facebook.

Following the release of this tool, Google has copped criticism that they’ve abandoned their “don’t be evil” mantra and have started focusing on promoting their own products and services.

Earlier this week, search engine land interviewed Google search Chief Amit Singal, who addressed some of the concerns raised above. Here is his answer from the interview,

Q: But what about the Don’t Be Evil tool launched this week, showing that you can create People & Pages results that do go beyond Google+ content.

This is where I’m saying most people are jumping to a conclusion based on the first two weeks of the product. We’re designing a product which it will work for all individuals. It will have identities as a fundamental ingredient of search and relationships as another fundamental ingredient of search.

All this debate is centered around these very popular people out there, and what you could have done for them, and what makes the most sense. But when you’re developing a product, you don’t want to develop it for one segment of the population.

I’ve not seen the debate that I have a [personal] friend named Ben Smith, and when I try to search for him, I get bad results. If you actually build a product only for popular people, then it undermines what we are trying to do. You can’t build a product that behaves differently for one class of people then differently for the real relationships that matter for you.

I feel like this point has not been emphasized enough. People have gotten stuck on these very popular names, and no one has been focused on the cool part of the product where you can find people you care about.

At the end of the day, Google has to manage a very careful balancing act between their Google+ social network and their search results. Let’s hope they get it right.

As always, let us know what you think of the issue via the comments below.

Edit: As predicted, Facebook did file for an IPO on Wednesday 1st February. It is expected that the company will be valued somewhere between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Eight years back when Mark Zuckerberg made the significant decision of launching his social networking website, little did he know that the decision was going to pay off in such a big way.

According to several leading news reports, Facebook may be filing for a long-awaited IPO as early as today (Wednesday 1st February 2012 – remember that date, it could well go down in history!).

The New York Times and CNBC report that Facebook is aiming to generate $5 billion worth revenue in its initial offering making it the largest global IPO ever offered by an internet based company. If this happens Facebook will leave behind Google’s (GOOG) $1.9 billion debut which is currently the largest U.S. Internet IPO.

The markets have responded with a sign of hope to this news since its announcement and there are high expectations that the Facebook IPO could make way for an influx of trading tech stocks at cheap values.

Market analysts predict that the social network will be worth $75 billion and $100 billion once it starts trading, however the actual figures will be available only after Facebook starts trading for a couple of months after filing for its first round of regulatory paperwork. So until then we are left to only speculate what Facebook’s future revenue and profitability could really be.

There is no doubt that the Facebook IPO is a hot property that many investors are already eying; if successful it will certainly build more confidence for investors in the dot-com and technology business. Facebook has long been a the support system for many small and independent app makers and gaming platforms like Zynga so needless to say a lot rides on Facebook filing for a successful IPO.

This news would explain why Facebook rolled out the Timeline profile template integrated with some 60 apps, at lightening speed over the last few weeks, because once Facebook is done with filing its S-1 paperwork, it will be forced to enter a “quiet period” — without product announcements, interviews or any other public statements.

Do you think Facebook is worth $100 billion?

When Bing passed Yahoo! to become the 2nd ranked search engine in the U.S last month it seems the company also got the confidence to shed its “decision engine” label and re-launch as an ad platform with a new tagline ‘Bing is for Doing’.

The main aim for this change is the hope that it will get people to give up Googl-ing and move to Bing for ‘doing’.

Bing has been using the “Bing and Determine” motto since its debuted back in 2009 and feels its time to move forward. As told by Sean Carver, Bing’s Director for Advertising; the revamped search engine will be a platform for doing things while aiming for the 18-34age group crowds of workers.

Microsoft’s online ad revenue was up 13% in the most recent quarter, mainly because of search and I guess this is reason enough to go ahead with the changes. The new Bing ads promoting the change dares the emotional you to do something inspirational. The first ad debuted last weekend on FOX during the NFL NFC Championship Game and puts the emphasis on verbs: doing, winning, falling, healing, living, and, well, snowboarding. Here is the video:

The theme underlying these ad campaigns is ‘evolve from decisions to doing’ and with these promotional videos Microsoft will illustrate how decisions enable people to go beyond searching to doing and will highlight people doing interesting things.

Till now Bing has highlighted the decisions people make, but with this new campaign you can look forward to not only get trustworthy results, but also doing some other interesting things on Bing.

Will this ad help Bing in its battle against Google? I don’t think so, but what do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Continuing its efforts to keep its search results more quality-oriented, Google recently announced a significant algorithmic change.

The change looks at the layout and amount of content on a webpage, if the ads above the fold are excessive, your site can be penalized and downgraded in the search results.

As Matt Cutts wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog post.

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

This new algorithmic update will penalize sites with little or no visible content above-the-fold or sites that have deliberately pushed relevant content underneath large blocks of ads.

While placing ads above-the-fold is quite a common practice for many websites; these ads are a good source of money for many online publishers as long as they do it within acceptable limits.

Users will not see much of a change on the front end as Google estimates that less than 1% of the searches globally will be affected by this algorithmic update. Actually, the chances of typical users noticing a reordering of results on the search page will be only 1 in 100.

For webmasters who have recently updated their page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as Google re-crawls and processes a sufficient number pages from your site to assess the changes made.

The length of time it will take for Google to reassess your pages will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Put simply, if you have stuffed too many ads into the area above  the fold on your webpages , you are going to feel the wrath of Google’s algorithm penalty.

If you believe that your website has been a victim of the page layout algorithm change, its time you review how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or perhaps difficult to be reached by users.

A warning to all Google users: the Internet giant is doing away with their 70 different privacy policies across Google properties and replacing them with one main privacy policy that will be much easier for users to read and comprehend.

With this change Google plans to track users across its multiple products and features, so that a simple and intuitive user experience can be created for all Google users. This new all in one policy will cover Gmail, YouTube, Google+, search and almost all of the other Google products . For example, if you spent the last hour searching for information about the New England Patriots, the next time you visit YouTube, there’s a good chance you will get recommendations for videos featuring Tom Brady. In addition, Google will be able to use the extra data to customize suggested search queries, display more relevant ads (i.e. Super Bowl tickets), and alter the search results to match your intent.

The change, which combines 70 privacy documents into one, will go into effect on March 1st and it’s mandatory for all Google users; there is no option for you to opt-out of it. However Google assures that users’ privacy preferences are unchanged.

What does this change mean for Google users? Google says that the change is quite minimal expect that it will be tracking your activities on its various properties only to return more personalized and relevant search results, however privacy advocates have other opinions.

This announcement has not been well received by those who are opposed to the idea of Google collecting large amounts of personal data from user activity across its multiple properties. To combat this Google is making sure to inform all their users, well in advance about this change by sending out a personalized email to all Gmail users.

Google however, justifies its decision saying that shorter, simpler privacy policies – and one policy covering many different products -  is now fairly standard practice across the web. Also Google has assures its users that they are not going to sell out or share personal information externally without your permission. Phew!

If you “really” want to view more details on the policy, the overview is here.

In the end all this means is better information for advertisers for more targeted ad delivery – a marketer’s dream and Google’s as well.

Addressing the concerns of many webmasters who find that Google sometimes show alternative titles in the organic search results, Google’s Pierre Far has given an explanation.

While we all know that Google often changes the snippet or description of a site in the search results, what many of us don’t know is that Google will often change the Title without notice.

Pierre explains that apart from the many signals used, Google still considers the tag as the primary source of a title for your page and then decides which title to show to users. But it often so happens that webmasters use the same title tag for all or some pages on their website which might not be the best one to be shown for all keywords relevant to the site.

Google has some algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for users to recognize relevant pages in your website. After doing some testing Google found that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate of a webpage that is beneficial for both the searchers and webmasters. And that is the main reason why webmasters see an alternative title for their web pages.

Apart from this Google also tries to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more ‘to the point’ and descriptive alternative titles so that searchers can get a quick indication of what the webpage is actually about. On other occasions, Google has also found irrelevant titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title that might be leaving the searchers confused. For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about.

Pierre further explained that Google has always advised webmasters to create unique page titles and meta descriptions for the snippets as these two elements are the first thing a potential customer views in the SERP’s and then decides whether or not to click and enter the website.

To help webmasters who are still facing problems in writing better titles and meta-descriptions, Google has updated their Help Center article on this topic.

According to ComScore’s latest qSearch analysis report, Google continues to lead the search market with 65.9% of search queries in December conducted in the US search marketplace. However, in a surprising change of events, Microsoft (Bing) climbed up to the second place with 15.1% pushing Yahoo! down to the third spot.

December 2011 saw 68.1% of searches come from organic search results on Google (vs. 67.6% in November) while 26.5% of searches were powered by Bing (vs. 26.7% in November).

U.S. Explicit Core Search
Out of the 18.2 billion+ explicit core searches conducted in December, Google continued to dominate the search market shares with 12 billion, followed by Microsoft with 2.7 billion and Yahoo!  in third place with 2.6 billion. Ask Network accounted for 531 million searches and AOL 287 million searches last month.

U.S. Total Core Search
For the total core searches conducted in the U.S. alone, Google contributed a total of 66.1 %  (a 0.4% increase from the Nov’11 reports), followed by Yahoo! with 16.2 % and Microsoft with 13.8 %. Ask Network and AOL Inc. made it to the top 5 with 2.6 % and 1.4% of the total search queries conducted.

Although a significant change on the charts, Microsoft doesn’t really have much to celebrate since it powers both the Yahoo and Bing searches, therefore this growth comes at the expense of Yahoo. If you recall, Yahoo! agreed to give away its searches to Microsoft (under the partnership agreement) in order to save money.

The question now is whether or not can Bing keep their small lead from December? If this lead is a result of the Yahoo partnership, then yes we can expect Bing to continue growing but if not, then we are probably set to see the two companies swap positions many times through this year.

In what came as shocking news to the entire web community, Yahoo! co-founder, Jerry Yang, has officially resigned from Yahoo!

He will no longer be on the board of directors at Yahoo! Inc, Yahoo Japan Corporation and Alibaba Group Holding Limited.

Why Yang is leaving? In his departing letter Yang said:

My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.

Wall Street experts say that although Yang’s exit is classified as a resignation in reality this is a force-out and the actual reason for Yang’s exit was his refusal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft Corp back in May 2008. This left many shareholders disgruntled and a move which forced him to step down from his post as the acting CEO to the ‘interim CEO’ in January 2009.

Needless to say, many Yahoo share holders have welcomed this news and the Yahoo shares rose more than 3.5% to $15.99 shortly after the announcement of Yang’s resignation.

While he was apparently popular among employees, Yang was thought of as “an obstructionist, stubbornly convinced that Yahoo should continue on as a stand-alone company” that alienated him for the company’s shareholders.

Yang will be succeeded by Yahoo!’s current (2 week old) CEO Scott Thompson and is the company’s new ray of hope of getting it out of its current difficult times.

Accepting his new position Thompson praised Yang’s contributions to the company:

I am grateful for the warm welcome and support Jerry provided me during my early days here. Jerry leaves behind a legacy of innovation and customer focus for this iconic brand, having shaped our culture by fostering a spirit of innovation that began 17 years ago and continues to grow even stronger today. Jerry has great confidence in the future of Yahoo!, and I share his confidence in the enormous potential of Yahoo! in the days ahead.

It’s not know what Yang has planned for the future, but if the 17 years success of Yahoo! is any indication, I’m sure it will be something great.