Around a week ago, Google unveiled the next stage of their personal search integration: ‘Search Plus Your World’.

Basically, before I go into details concerning the feather ruffling said announcement has made, let’s take a quick look at what this new initiative involves.

1. Google + Photos & Posts in Search

Now, when you’re signed into your Google + profile Google will begin to push Google plus photos and posts from your friends directly into your search results. Personally, I can’t think of anything more annoying; if I wanted to search Google + I would go on Google + but there you have it, it’s done.

1. Profiles in Search

Following the update, Google now also pushes Google + profiles into search results. On their blog, they state that they’ll only suggest ‘people you’re close to or might be interested in following’. You might find this useful if you’re logged into a business account as an SEO or marketer, but do you want networking suggestions when you’re simply doing some online shopping? Again, it’s unclear why this has been integrated into web search and not left in the ‘Suggestions’ area of Google + where most people will happily go to find it.

1. Pages

Finally, Google is also integrating Google + pages into the normal web search results. The idea is that if you’re searching on a topic you might be interested in joining groups and pages related to that topic. While this might be the case, again there’s an argument for keeping such things separate. If I wanted to join a social media group on knitting I’d search Facebook or Google + directly for knitting groups.

And this is the major problem that I forsee with these changes. The reason many of us use Google web search is because we want to find just that: web pages. Most modern day internet users are savvy enough to know where to go to find social media groups or profiles and simply want old fashioned web pages returned for their regular searches.

Arguably, it was Google’s fresh and simple design which contributed to its early successes, not over complication. With the introduction of these Google + features into search, I fear we’re one step closer to over population in the search. We already have rampant adds, shopping and image results, reviews, +1 histories and much more crammed into one page and I wonder if Google is moving toward creating a restaurant menu which simply has far too many dishes on it to choose from.

Google have shown time and again that they’re committed to returning the most useful and relevant results for users, which is an admirable goal. But arguably, by cramming the SERPs with data from all kinds of streams (images, social media posts, news, product items etc) Google is making the SERPs less relevant, as at least 90% of the results returned will be the wrong stream for which the searcher is looking. For example, if I’m looking for new shoes, neither images of shows, a site about shoes, or a group about shows is going to interest me.

So this brings me to my final point. The Search Plus Your World announcement has sparked even more calls for Google to be investigated for its conduct regarding competitors. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention that the search giant was integrating Facebook or Twitter profiles into its search results did I? That’s because they’re not, and this is the major problem. Many argue that Google are unfairly favouring Google + with this update and are therefore abusing their market dominance.

Time will tell, but in the meantime, whether you’re a fan of the changes or not, it’s worth noting that, as an SEO consultant, the success or failure of these changes is important. If they succeed in making Google search more popular, then more people are going to be signing up for Google + profiles, and more than this, more people are going to be searching whilst signed into their profiles. This means that the keyword data that many SEO companies rely upon will continue to decline, as the ‘not set’ section of Google analytics grows.

If this new personalised search is less successful and is perceived as annoying by users, we might expect to see more data on keyword traffic to our sites, as people sign out in order to have more of a simple and traditional search experience.

As the SEO department work away like little elves to get everything finished in time for the festive break, we thought it would be nice to take a moment to look back at how we have all celebrated Christmas in our own special SEO style.

Ssshhh…It’s Secret Santa!

Everybody loves a nice treat at Christmas, so Chris organised our very own SEO secret Santa. Although we didn’t have a Christmas tree to leave our gifts under like the web guys, by Wednesday afternoon we did have a festive filing cabinet covered in packages of all shapes and sizes.

Memorable gifts included a cracking Cliff Richard Calendar for Sukh, and a surprising amount of Justin Bieber merchandise for the content team. Chris loved his festively-shaped chocolate treat, and Kieran will be a force to be reckoned with in 2012 thanks to his new spud gun. Our love of a good tea break was also evident, with mugs aplenty – including a fancy self-stirring one for Tony, and a handy heater for Oli’s cuppa. Oh, and we can’t forget to mention Ravi’s incredible mini loudspeaker, which is sure to come in handy when a Friday quiz gets a little out of hand.

All in all, secret SEO Santa was a huge success, and it was nice to get a little treat to unwrap before the big day itself.

Christmas Challenges

The competitiveness of the SEO department has only increased over the festive period, beginning with a Christmas tree decorating challenge featuring Kieran, Pip and Brad. Kieran’s creation took the crown thanks to its festive star made from a post-it and innovative use of curly polystyrene as snow. He said modestly of his victory, “The best man won”.

The SEO quiz is the highlight of everyone’s week, and a Christmas theme began to appear quite early on this year. Hannah and Jenny’s round of anagrams proved popular, particularly with the content writers, whilst Viv and Brad’s challenge to name every one of Santa’s reindeer proved too difficult for most. We can only hope that the upcoming ultimate SEO quiz holds more of the same festive fun and games!

Festive Farewells

Our last working Friday of the year saw us say goodbye to two good friends and colleagues. Hannah left us to jet off Down Under to continue spreading the SEO message in the sunshine, and we all wish her well on her Australian adventure.

It was time for Michael to return to Oz too, and we hope he enjoyed his time at Creare – if not the great British weather. We wish them both a very merry Christmas, and we are obviously not at all jealous at the thought of them eating their festive turkey on the beach!

Meanwhile, self-appointed SEO DJ Chris has continued to share his unique song choices with the office throughout Christmas (slowly driving his neighbours to despair), whilst the content team got into the festive mood with a spot of Michael Bublé on repeat.

Speaking of Christmas songs, we are all eagerly awaiting the Christmas party where we can pull some SEO shapes on the dance floor and raise a toast (or two) to another fantastic year of success. Turn off your computer, put on your most sparkly, festive outfit, and let’s all enjoy Christmas in true Creare style.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!

So the latest twist and/or turn in the rel=author saga has arrived in the form of authorship information integrated into webmaster tools.

According to the official webmaster blog, Google rolled out this new feature in response to requests from online authors. Basically, the tool, which is located in the labs section of webmaster tools, allows webmasters to view basic data about how their authorship linked content is doing in the SERPs. The data that is available is as follows:

1. The URL of the page in question.
2. The impressions that page has had.
3.  The % change in impressions.
4. The clicks received.
5. The % change in clicks.
6. The click through rate as a %.
7. The percentage change of your CTR.
8. The average position of your page.
9. The percentage change of your average position.

While this new element is unlikely to change the face of SEO, there are useful applications for this data. For example, the ability to see the average position of your content could save a lot of time spent checking rankings and calculated averages and percentages, allowing you to more easily monitor your long tail campaign.

The tool will also allow you to monitor the success of your blog and it’s authorship markup over time. In theory, as you build up more respect and authority as an author, your impressions and clicks should grow in number, as should your CTR.

Finally, on the subject of CTR, I can feel an experiment coming on. The inclusion of ‘author stats’ into Webmaster tools now allows you to experiment with different article titles, meta data and author photos in order to attempt to improve CTR.

The resulting info gathered could help you in your wider SEO campaigns, helping you to craft the perfect listing which is more likely to attract clicks and visitors.

Another fortnight closer to Christmas and it seems to have come early for the SEO department as there has been a continued influx of success and early presents to round off another great year at Creare.  Read on to find out why we all have a reason to celebrate over the festive period and make the most of a well-deserved break.

Testimonials

Kicking things off in the regular fashion, the SEO team has received even more testimonials from happy clients who will be kept smiling over their Christmas dinners.

Firstly, Ravi’s SEO gifts to Associated Garage Doors were repaid with a glowing 4 star review which read, “My SEO Ravi has understood all that we are after in our website and maintained it to a very high standard”.

Next, Carly has continued to impress her clients, gaining another 2 testimonials – the first being from Arden Self Storage:

“We are not up to speed with computer media here so having people we can talk to and are prepared to put up with daft questions is a great help to us. The web site and Facebook page is just how we wanted it to look may be better if I was honest.

Wishing you all a Happy Christmas from Arden Self Storage”

If that wasn’t good enough, her second came from Advanced Preservations and read:

“It has been a pleasure working with Carly. Not only has she helped promote visitors to our site by writing about our key works, she has also helped establish our business through the trade associations that we belong to, most impressive her work promoting us through the PCA… I look forward to Carly’s monthly phone calls as she inspires me to pay attention to our marketing, which has proved to be a massive bonus in the long term”.

Christmas Number 1

The fight for page one and the best rankings on Google can be as fierce as the annual struggle to top the charts on Christmas Day. The SEO team has pulled out all the stops to ensure clients are climbing up the rankings.

Ashley Mason has done just that as Stonehills have made it onto the first page of Google for their keywords ‘holiday homes’ and ‘holiday apartments’ on a national basis – a major achievement and one that’ll have many booking up for their New Year’s getaways.

Ashley also managed to save 2 warning clients from a precarious 15th position in Creare Ranking to bring them right up to 9th – himself and his team of Kieran, Andrew and Hannah all now placing within the top 10 consultants in the SEO department!

Top-Tweeting Blogs

There’s been more success in content team at the tail end of 2011 too; with Hayley’s guest blog Enjoy Success in Every Season with SEO on dailyseotip.com having gained a whopping 41 Tweets and 12 LinkedIn Shares since it was posted on the 5th December.

The great guest blogging continued in the team as Richard Paul took some time out from being really cool and awesome (unbiased opinion) to write a guest blog entitled Beliebing in your SEO Campaign, which looked at how Justin Bieber of all people can help a company’s SEO and reached 35 Tweets and 7 LinkedIn Shares on searchenginepeople.com.

A Creare Christmas Welcome

And finally, we would like to say a big festive welcome to Rosie who has joined the stage team and quickly fitted right in to Creare life.

We look forward to her continued success in the New Year along with that of the entire SEO team – our New Year’s resolution being to keep doing what we’re doing and carry on striving for the best in all things SEO throughout 2012.

Just how important is Google + in terms of SEO and search results? Should we be going through and +1ing all of our sites and clients’ sites in order to improve their rankings. In light of a seemingly insignificant change made to Google’s results pages last week, I thought I’d consider this question for a moment.

On Friday many in the SEO industry noticed that Google had removed the +1 button from its search results. Where previously you could see the button next to every listing, you now had to hover over said listing to even see the button. Only when you hover over the button itself did it reveal itself in colour.

Your response to this might be: who cares? Well, when you consider that in marketing and advertising ‘out of sight’ is very much ‘out of mind’ you begin to puzzle at this latest move from Google. Why go from having your social media platform’s button on 10 listings on the page to having it on none at all? Surely this will diminish the online presence of Google + and work contrary to Google’s well laid plans to challenge Facebook and Twitter for social supremacy?

You could argue that having the button appear when you roll over a listing has more impact as it draws your eye which might be true, but I still feel that this will lead to fewer listings being +1ed.

If Google are content to reduce the impetus on Google +, then it suggests that their intentions to include it as a major ranking signal are less fierce than first thought. Google has of course stated that the amount of +1s is already a ranking signal, but this latest move suggests that’s all it will ever be.

Even if Google aren’t intentionally reducing their focus on the +1 ranking signal, by hiding it from the SERPs their arguably still doing this. Less visibility means fewer clicks and fewer clicks will inevitably inhibit the growth of the social media platform, and without a healthy and well used platform there’s absolutely no use in Google using +1s as a ranking signal, let alone a major factor.

Finally, to throw an additional spanner into the works, Google also announced last week that they were inviting social media platforms and similar networks to work with them to create improved social analytics for users. You can’t help but view the search engine as a cautious player in the online community, moving one chess pieces to distract their opponent from others. What does this mean for social signals in search? Is Google looking to create a social analytics platform which it can use itself and integrate into the ranking algorithm?

I think that although these changes and announcements are an indication of Google’s intentions, we can’t know for sure until we wait to see what happens. In the meantime, I think integrating social buttons into your website, engaging with your customers via social media and maintaining a rounded online presence will all be enough to help your site when it comes to social signals and SEO, at least for now.