Google have been changing their look a lot recently and this is just one of many within the last month, it certainly helps the listings stand out when you look for time sensitive material.

A client might be obsessed with one particular ranking or you might have changed some on-site factor that you’re interested to see the results but if we care, we look.

A few weeks ago I started noticing different results on my iPhone 4 to that of my desktop/laptop – the result were actually quite a lot different, showing sites that usually appeared in positions 7-10 moving up to #2-3. I just assumed that the data used to display Google’s results was being taken from a different location – however later that day the results on my laptop changed to MATCH that of the iPhone 4.

I thought it was a little strange but thought nothing of it, however I saw this happen another 3 times over the course of 2 weeks – coincidence? The image you can see below was taken on my digital camera showing the top 2/3 websites for the keyword “car insurance” – with all personalisation turned off (well at least I tried to switch everything I have access too off) – you can clearly see the results are different (left side iPhone 4 results, right side Laptop results, notice the time 15:42 – click to enlarge):

On the iPhone 4 you can see Elephant and Admiral are #2 and #3 – whereas on the laptop it’s Co-Op and LV at #2 and #3. I then waited and checked the results 2 hours later and as you can see (click to enlarge):

Elephant and Admiral moved up +1 position each, so I waited another hour and eventually the search results in Google match that of the iPhone 4 3 hours earlier (click to enlarge):

Clearly there’s something going on here, potentially the data centers used for mobile devices are updated before those on desktops/laptops or perhaps my iPhone 4 really is magic and therefore very valuable – any offers?

I looked for other results such as Rand Fishkin and Dave Naylor and got the same.

I took a screen grab (see below):

The result happened when I was logged in to Google, searched through Google instant in the UK – let me know if anyone replicates?

I for one enjoyed the streaming session held by Google and found it highly entertaining, the Bob Dylan section was a nice touch. I decided to look at which keywords are displayed by typing one character in the search bar, below is the list of what you will get if you type in each letter:

Results from Google.com

Amazon
Best Buy
Craigslist
Dictionary
Ebay
Facebook
Gmail
Hotmail
Ikea
Jet Blue
Kohls
Lowes
Mapquest
Netflix
Orbitz
Pandora
Quotes
Rei
Sears
Target
Usps
Verizon
Weather
Xbox
Yahoo
Zillow

Results for Google.co.uk

Argos
BBC
Currys
Debenhams
Ebay
Facebook
Google maps
Hotmail
ITV
John Lewis
Klm
Lotto
MSN
Next
O2
Paypal
QVC
Rightmove
Sky
Tesco
Utube
Vigin
Weather
Xbox
Youtube
Zara

I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a few interesting keywords being returned here, it will be interesting to see how often these change to meet trends of the web. For more information on Google Instant and some SEO feedback chack out Matt Cutts take on it.

Once in the area you’re presented with what appears to be a graph that plays like a video illustrating various metrics over time. This is great for comparing progress of specific keywords and goals over time. I’ve taken some additional screen grabs below:

What you’ll notice about is that you can “link to chart” (bravo Google) which you can send to other users who share the same profiles to illustrate results. Ive also included another shot which illustrates the metrics that can be included:

Since twitter has been snowballing in popularity more brands are quickly diving into the “twitter barrel” in hope for some kind of brand value to pour out. Lots of businesses are “doing twitter” just because someone sitting in a nice empty office at a top of a tall building says” it’s what everyone else is doing, why aren’t I?” I won’t get sidetracked and explain what I think a brand should do on twitter but I’ll quickly explain how “MoonFruit” and “Mpora” have influenced twitter in a major way.

Essentially MoonFruit and Mpora are both brands, they both came up with a simple idea to attract people to start tweeting (or posting) about their brand, in particular – their competition give-away. MoonFruit started first giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 7 days straight, the rules and method of deployment were simple – twitter about the brand and include the tag #moonfruit. Everyday a winner would be selected at random from, method unknown, but probably looking through the twitter search engine somehow.   Being the first major contest like this to actually gather pace was probably down to the ease of entering, simply click on a button and you’ve entered, of course as well as notifying all your fellow friends about MoonFruit too.

MoonFruit got very big very quickly and actually topped the twitter trends for a while (even when Michael Jackson had recently died), however before the end of the competition the phrase #moonfruit was apparently removed by twitter or somehow sandboxed. Now although the competition was very popular the chance that they will ever be able to reach the top trends again looks unlikely, but like many I now know of the brand MoonFruit, so kudos.

Now my second case study is for a brand called Mpora who used the same strategy, I of course got hooked like many others by the chance to win, yet again, another Macbook Pro. However Mpora used a much more aggressive approach to the promotion which in my personal opinion has harmed their brand.

So, what did they do? In my eyes they got greedy, they started the competition like MoonFruit but quickly introduced the rule “more tweets gives you more chances to win”. They notified the winners at 5pm UK time every day, for the hours leading up to that point – Mpora would establish themselves in the top 10 most popular trends. However, like many I started getting minute by minute updates from Mpora themselves, pushing just about anything on their site to get as much traffic as possible. Very soon my twitter looked like the screenshot below:

The last thing I want in my twitter feed is for someone or some business to start spamming their services at me. So anyway, why has this harmed the brand? Well I for one got very bored, very quickly of seeing #mpora popping up everywhere – and although judging by traffic estimates from Alexa and Compete their campaign seems to have been a success. I wonder how many other people out there like me who quickly stopped following the brand during the competition and now consider them to be something to avoid in the future – food for thought.

The graph below shows an increase in traffic rankings in alexa while the competition was running:

The graph below clearly shows that the term #mpora was only popular at times near the result of the winners:

So no doubt there will have been some traffic being sent to both these sites but if brands continue to use such tactics to engage potential customers and increase brand visibility only bad things can happen (i.e. spam association).

This site SEOUnique has suffered a reduction in page rank, no doubt to the hackers that sent out over 500 hidden links to viagra sites and other “adult” sites.

If you want to check the true PR value of your site then visit www.digpagerank.com

Have a great new years eve everyone!

One thing we do know is that if a good SEO gets their hands on your website or specific page you will see positive results. What I’ve been doing is benchmarking when the changes take place in Google and whether the changes are positive and negative.

The Google update test

I optimised around 50 pages of a website I own that I initially setup around 3 months ago, the Meta data, page tags and content was not optimised at all. I created a strategy to optimise these pages, the actual content of these products were products i.e. one product per page. I changed the following:

1.    Optimised the meta data
2.    Included keywords and alternative keyword phrases on page
3.    Optimised the images on the page

I had read somewhere that updating large numbers of pages on a website all at once could lead to a possible penalty, although I have never seen this I thought this test would help determine this theory.

I benchmarked data over a six week period on Google, based on individual pages and their targeted keywords, which had been optimised.

Week 1
Around 80% of the pages actually increased rankings in the first week with around 15% remaining the same and only 5% dropping rank

Week 2
In the second week there were some more keyword increases and very few positions dropped – a good week all round.

Week 3
In the third week it was the complete opposite, just over 85% of the keywords dropped below their original ranking with 5% remaining the same and 10% increasing

Week 4
Huge increase of positions, now around 70% of the pages I originally optimised are ranking well above their previous position with many on page 1 or 2. Very few position drops from original positions but there were some.

Week 5
Not much movement between keyword positions but 30% of keywords have improved from week 4, 80% remain the same with around 10% dropping slightly.

Week 6
Final week and only one page has increased from week 5 while 2 pages dropped slightly, the rest remained the same.

Time for some graphs:

The first graph is has been taken as an average from over 40 optimised pages over the period of 6 weeks so visually you can see the update life cycle.

The next graph shows five randomly selected keyword behaviours over the 6 week period

The final graph shows another 10 randomly selected keywords and their position changes

Google’s Page Update Life Cycle

Yep, think that’s what I’m going to call it! Anyway I’m aware that this lifecycle of position changes probably goes on for a bit longer but the data over the 6 week period was the most active. This is something that I’ve seen many times before but have never benchmarked for such a test. It’s also worth mentioning that you do see position changes before Google has re-indexed the optimised page.

So if you go about updating pages of your site don’t worry if they go all over the place for the first month or so, if they have been optimised correctly then you should see some kind of improvement.

Of course I attended to explore the possibilities of widgets and SEO but found myself with a wealth of widget knowledge instead. Some really interesting facts and figures which may surprise a lot of you, but here’s a summary of some data:

•    The number 1 widget in the world (installs) = YouTube
•    The number 1 MySpace comment = “Thanks for the add”
•    Facebook “gifts” application made $30 million last year alone
•    The average widget only lasts 200 page views
•    Every human can only hold 150 meaningful relationships at once, the rest are lightweight
•    Each widget has a maximum lifespan of 6 weeks
•    For every widget install you should expect a maximum of 50 unique visitors

I also copied down some internal Gigya data to show the most common uses for widgets:

Anyway, I learned a lot more than what was written down on this post, but of course you have to hold back something for yourself! Thanks to all the guys that took part and I look forward to the next one!