Category Archives: Search Engine News

According to Amit Singhal, head of Google’s search efforts, the secret (or not-so-secret) way to rank on Google is good content and in his words: “you don’t need to worry about anything else.” These words of wisdom came from Singhal’s presentation at SXSW a few days ago as he covered the topics of mobile search and his love for Star Trek. (Both of which are equally epic in scope).

Using good content to rank well for SEO is a no-brainer, but not worrying about “anything else” is a bit disconcerting. A multidimensional approach always trumps a singular one. Strength in numbers, right? Would you ignore your sites’ architecture to create one page of brilliant content? Probably not. As valuable as good, unique content is for improving SEO results we must keep these details in perspective.

Be mindful of the power and value of community building, both for readership value and link building. In other words, show some TLC to your content and work on maximizing quality links to support your body of work. Creating a community in which your content exists helps readers and Google validate the legitimacy of what you are saying. For readers, your presence in a community of thought leaders indicates that you are a respected source of reputable knowledge (depending on the quality of your links) within a larger community. For Google bots, associating your content within a network of interrelated information ultimately provides a higher value of data for indexing SERP results. When you have both readers and Google validating your work, you cannot be wrong. This can be further complemented by the use of social media like Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. Social media provides venues in which to engage a wider audience that might not otherwise be searching for your content, but might be friends/colleagues/acquaintances of your readers. Opening, inviting, and cultivating relationships with a broader group of people can only bring more and more visibility to your insights.

Google recently launched its new and improved image search. Prior to the new image search, the user would need to click on the photo’s thumbnail and redirect to the site where the image came from in order to see the larger image. Now instead of clicking on the photo and visiting its website, users can select the image from the thumbnails and it will bring up the larger version of the image automatically without the need to travel to the source.

Google’s new image search makes it easier to quickly search through multiple images, however the change has publishers worried; will this mean fewer website visits? Google announced that it added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on and the domain name is now clickable. This means there are four clickable links to the source page instead of just two. Google also went on to say that in tests, they have seen an increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting websites.

Check out what the new image search looks like here:

Google is celebrating Halloween with an interactive haunted house doodle on the homepage of the site. Clicking on the different doors of the haunted house reveals ghosts, monsters and ghouls and even clicking on the house’s surroundings bring other creatures to life.

The haunted house doodle isn’t Google’s only way of spookifying Google.com; Halloween is taking over the search results too! When users search for a horror movie and year, bats appear on the page along with the search results. Putting your cursor over the bats makes them fly away. See for yourself: Go to Google.com and click on the different doors of the haunted house. Then search for “Halloween 1978” or “The Shining 1980” and check out the bats hanging upside-down on the right. Happy Halloween!