The New Google Home Page

Google has simplified their home page getting rid of the ugly black menu strip that used to sit at the top of the screen and replaced it with a more attractive slimmed down version.

What does this redesign mean for search and SEO?  The tabs Google left on the homepage are the Google+ (renamed +You), Gmail and Images search.  Behind the apps icon are a second +You tab, a search tab, Youtube, Maps, Google Play, News, Gmail, Drive and Calendar.  +You has ten of millions fewer users than the other Google products, yet it is the first tab on the redesign.  This shows the importance Google is putting on +You and competing with FaceBook for a share of the social marketplace.

Google feels threatened by Facebook and as Google looks into the future it see social as a major area of growth and competition.  This redesign further emphasizes the importance of +You in SEO.

Two Good Sites

Here is a great article on analytical tools to track website traffic. Google Analytics is good but they hold some information back and so the numbers don't always add up.  I also don't like that I cannot go to the page from where the visitor came from.  Here is the article:  Analytical Tools.  One promising tool is this one:  http://piwik.org/

Here is a cool site that claims all a companies social profiles:  http://piwik.org/

New website designs - Hit or Miss?

Like all fashion website design changes over time.  This design is one of the newer looks out there:   http://stopbadpatents.internetassociation.org/

Here is another site in which the design is cool but the navigation is just frustrating.  http://fortydaysofdating.com/

Visitors often find sites like this difficult to navigate.  For this to be adopted widely Internet users will have to come across this type of design frequently to start to understand the navigation tools.

My recommendation is to stay away from this design for now.  Either website with navigation on the sides of the site will become prevalent or it will go away.  I am guessing it will go away.

The Importance of Links

For about two years the SEO community has been talking about the growing importance of factors other than links, and the decreasing importance of links.  This sounds good, and it lines up with how Google would like search to work i.e. making it harder to game the rankings.

However, after watching Google's SEO spokesman, Matt Cutts, talk about Panda 2.0 and how lots of sites are going to be penalized for having "unnatural" link patterns it is clear that links are really important.  If they weren't Google would not have spent a year developing an algorithm to penalize players that don't play the game the way they want it to be played.

My take away is that links are really important and will continue to be important for a long time.  What the link profile looks like, and how the links need to be set up is definitely changing, but the importance of links is not changing.

Google Panda Update 2.0

Matt Cutts at Google recently released a video talking about updates Google is going to make through this summer.  The update is named Panda 2.0 and more website will be affected by this update than the first Panda update.  11% of sites were affected by the first update so this will be large.  Essentially the update will penalize companies that buy links, or have what Google terms "Unnatural Linking Pattern."

Here is my take away from the Google Post:

Build Sites that people:

-Bookmark, come back to again and again

-High quality content

-Time people stay on the site

-How many pages on the site people visit

Paid linking

               Should not flow page rank

               Should be a disclosure that it is advertising

That's it. 

New Google Maps

Google has a new Google Maps coming out.  Here is a link to get an invitation to check it out.  New Google Maps Invite

Paid Advertising on Google and Bing

Some of you may have seen Bing's ads accusing Google of having only paid results on Google's Shopping Page.  I think Bing has a point, but on many of Bing's pages it is not always clear what is paid advertising and what is a search result.

The take away from this is that ad Google and Bing desire more revenue paid results over time will push aside natural search results.