WebProWorld
Getting you site’s content crawled by Google News is not the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Google has a number of guidelines that can help you get your content in. Furthermore, today, on the Google News Blog, Abe Epton of the News Online Operations Team posted 8 tips to help Google News better crawl your site. These are:
1. Keep the article body clean
It’s tough to keep things quiet these days, especially with all that Twittering. Unnamed engineers drowning their overhead redundancy woes over the weekend passed on the news—with documentation—to a Berkeley grad student Bay Area executive that Google was trying to keep engineer layoffs out of the press.
In the session "Up Close with Google Maps & Local" the panel focused on factors that influence what appears and how it is ranked.
There is an interesting thread going on at the WebmasterWorld forum looking at whether or not Google favors forums in search results. Matt Cutts tells me that he can neither confirm nor deny this. The thread is started by someone with the handle "bouncybunny," who posts:
Once it was directories, then blogs, now forums… maybe.
I have no empirical evidence for this, but it seems to me that Google is increasingly returning results from forum posts…
Google’s recently announced Latitude service has sparked a bit of concern among privacy advocates and the generally paranoid. I spoke with a Google Spokesperson about this.
Google Latitude is a feature in Google Maps for mobile and iGoogle that allows you to share your location with your family and friends in real time.
Google introduced a beta version of Google Sync today. This allows Google users to sync their Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events to their iPhones or Windows Mobile devices (with Google’s own Android, all the data is automatically synced).
What captures a user’s attention on their screen can play a large part in whether or not they click through to a search engine result. Naturally, that makes finding out where eyeballs go on a SERP vital to their overall search experience, and hence, vital to Google’s strategy.
Google of course obtains this knowledge through extensive eye tracking research. The company has a post up today revealing some findings from their latest efforts in this area.
Trojan Horse: GoGap via Flickr
Google has introduced an imagery partner program where people can submit imagery for Google Earth if they feel they have a better version of a shot that Google currently has.
U.S. search advertising spending was relatively flat for most of the year and declined by 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.
Breaking it down by search engine, Google grabbed 76 percent of search spending in Q4. Spending on Google Search and its syndicated networks dipped 4 percent year-over-year (YOY).
Despite that, Google gained 2 percent market share from Google Content, which saw a robust 63 percent YOY growth in 2008 due to its improved targeting and monetization efforts across the AdSense network.
