So what’s changed in the search results? (click on the image to expand)

• You can see there are new pins being displayed in the organic search results
• The appearance of the local results have now changed and take up even more of the organic landscape
• The Map has changed shape
• When you hover over locations on the map the pin lights up in the search results (see below)

If you’re logged in you can expand the local listing which then pushes PPC ad’s right down and displays everything on one page – pretty smooth looking (click on the image to expand):

Previously video listings from YouTube had looked like the screen shot below:

However this is what I’ve started to see:

This is something that i’ve seen for a long time but for generic terms I’ve not seen videos displayed this way – potential Google test?

When I typed in my blog name “seounique” in Google I saw underneath the 6 extended sitelinks an extra site result. This extra site listing rotated per different search;

A different result on the same query:

I built a site targeting the keywords “Tinto Brass Films” – Tinto Brass is an Italian film Director who makes adult movies (not porn) – think 70′s style arty films. I’ve got a number of other movie affiliate sites and have a particular model that I know works for affiliate sales and Google Adsense – that’s why I chose the keyword/theme.

Progress was made as expected whereby I was in the top 3 in Google for my target keyword, however one day, out of the blue the homepage dropped from Google. I tried everything to get the homepage re-ranking but had little success, I even put the question out to the Twitter community. The website was in a strange position whereby it would randomly rank (at #3) for a day or two every month or so and then bury itself into the depths of Google the rest of the time.

The behaviour of the site had all the tale tale signs of a penalty but I’d done nothing wrong, in fact I’d checked just about everything twice to make sure. You can see in the image below the visits over about 1 year (click to enlarge):

The green line would have been roughly the expected traffic level from the rankings of the site, the red line is the actual average performance.

Then about a month ago the website was back in Google ranking very strongly and delivering the kind of levels of visitors I would expect. One thing I noticed which was different on the site was that Google Adsense was no longer showing on the site. I first thought I’d changed the code by mistake during one of my many on-site tweaks, however after installing the code a number of times across the whole site it just wasn’t showing. I looked for advice from Google as to why my Adsense ads were not showing up and realised it was because of the content I had could be considered as “porn” therefore it wouldn’t work.

There is no adult content on the site although “technically” I am selling adult movies which could constitute as breaching Google Adsense’s acceptance.

Anyway it looks to me that for the 9 months where Adsense WAS showing on the site but it WASN’T ranking for the target keyword Google obviously hadn’t categorised the site properly – or at least didn’t know what to do with it. There must be a filter that Google uses which detects through content whether or not a site has “adult” content, nothing new there – however it seems clear to me that on this instance Google had trouble trying to figure it out.

If anyone has had a similar experience I’d love to hear it!

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.

The homepage is much smaller than before, it does look crisper I do admit.

Once you perform a search you’ll see the following (click to enlarge):

Yesterday Google released their new iPhone browser layout which coincided with the dark grey bar at the top of Google on desktops. For a while now people had noticed URLs being displayed above listing descriptions, this appears to be now live although I’m not 100% if I’m just getting a test from a data center. The left toolbar has now been changed too, everything is now grey/red which is more “serious” looking in my opinion.

One of the areas I work in is Car Insurance, notoriously difficult to do well in “ethically” and full of paid link profiles like you wouldn’t believe and a super costly scale. Those that also work in this sector will have noticed that there are always those sites that are seen as “authorities” and very rarely move rankings and then there are those that come from no-where and suddenly take all the glory.

One such site is a company called Hastings Direct – now I’m not saying “these guys buy links” however if you look at a recent track of rankings for the keyword “car insurance” versus 2 stable brands such as confused.com and comparethemarket you’ll notice what it might look like:

The 2 faint lines are those of the other brands and the orange line is that of Hastings Direct, they actually moved to #2 in Google for about a week before moving to mid page 2 today. This increase and decrease “could” be for a number of other SEO reasons but if anyone was to do a quick 2 minute analysis of their backlinks you’d probably make up your mind quickly on this. I also considered this might be due to increased performance by those around this site and in turn push a few down so I did another comparison for “Cheap Car Insurance” versus the same 2 brands:

Again in the chart above you can see they’ve been significantly moved to a much lower position, this is the same for a number of other keywords. This movement  is actually quite common in highly competitive industries such as car, home and travel insurance, websites will move from mid second page into a very high position and eventually get moved back down.

It goes to show to some degree that buying links for the keyword car insurance is not a worthwhile long term solution for SEO as well as holding a great deal of risk for those that do carry it out – Google turns a blind eye many times to big brands that buy links – potentially this is the start of something new?

Hearing this made me think of one of my affiliate websites I had setup a few months ago and a problem I had encountered. The website has 100% unique content, affiliate products from TradeDoubler and a premium CSS template to make it look a little fancy with minimal effort. Now the website in question is an exact match domain and I was specifically targeting a keyword group with around1-2k monthly visitors, using just unique content and a few directory links I’ve found this method to work extremely well in the past.

The Problem

I’d used this particular premium CSS template 2/3 times before for other very similar products but had customised ever so slightly (i.e. different colurs + logo). The problem however was that although my other affiliate sites ranked in the top 3 continually for the target keywords this particular site was not. In fact it was bouncing in and out from position 4 to position 93 – bit strange..

I’d not bought any links for the site in question so I knew that things were all “white” externally so thought there must be something within the site causing one of these automatic penalties. Looking at the code I noticed 2 H1 tags, one being highlighted below as an image:

The other H1 was just highlighted in a standard way – this was the only element I could think Google would pick up on as potentially “Stuffing” or something similarly nagitive. I proceeded to remove the text in the code and waited, anticipating a return to index in a high position.

As predicted a few days after I’d removed the second H1 tag the site moved from position 90+ into the top 5 . Bear in mind I’d changed absolutely nothing else at this point and just to proove it was the H1 tag causing a problem I added it back, then removed (see second arrow). As well as rankings increasing to a position I thought it should be at the traffic also duplicated the rankings:

Although this is only one site and I’d like to test more it seems quite certain that either having 2 H1 tags triggers an automatic Google penalty or the method of using <h1 id=”logo”><span></span></h1> is not liked by Google.

Some might argue that it’s just common good SEO practice to have only 1 H1 tag but if this test is anything to go by it culd be more costly than you first think!

If anyone else has any more data on this I’d be interested to hear?

There are a few techniques which I see still work very well in manipulating rankings which perhaps avoid automated detection by Google. Hopefully by highlighting them here people will know what to look out for when looking at ways to get ahead of competitors that pay for paid links. These methods are by no means new or groundbreaking but can sometimes get missed when looking for paid links:

Paid links within CSS style banners

This is something that I’ve seen systematically work time and time again for competitors over a multitude of industries (although most common in finance and travel verticals). The process would usually work by providing a piece of code to the site selling a link(s) – this code consists of a CSS style, made up of colour, boarders, widths and fonts, then at the location of the “banner” the <div> calls the CSS class making it look like a normal banner. In reality the text in the visual banner is search engine readable as are any links too. So to many (and seemingly search engines) this goes usually un-noticed.

Drop Down Boxes with Paid Links

I’ve seen this become more popular within the last few months. Works on the same princible as the CSS banners but instead of appearing visually like a banner it looks like a harmless drop down box. Again the coding is unique to the drop down box so doesn’t interfere with any existing site style sheets. The links dont look external and again seem to go unnoticed.

Blogroll Paid Links

A couple of years ago I talked about how and if Google would ever discount blogroll links as so many blogs sell links in these locations. I guess the answer is no (for now), but it’s the easiest location for bloggers to sell links and it’s a genuine area of a blog that would usually contain external links so to Google it probably appears “normal”. This happens most effectively on blogs that link out to relevant websites in their blogrolls - even for manual paid link reviewers there’s no way to distinguish paid and natural links here.

Personally I feel that blogrolls are part of blogging and help people share genuine resources and useful related websites, just on occasions this is used for paid links.

(NB – I do not sell blogroll links on this site, I’m just using an example of a blogroll)

1. Google Webmaster Central on YouTube – Google and more importantly Matt Cutt’s help answer questions focused around search which helps clear up a lot hearsay and new developments.
2. Twitter – If you don’t know what Twitter is please venture out of your cave at least once and give it a try. More important know it’s been confirmed social signals contribute to organic search rankings. Very useful for finding business contacts and having SEO news delivered to your screen (depending who you follow obviously).
3. SEO Dojo Training – I’ve been a long term fan of Dave Harry and his blog, SEO Dojo training is a great commnity and I massivly suggest you join in. Lot’s of testing, sharing and training for even the most experienced SEO’s.
4. SEOMoz – Great SEO blog and community for beginers up to experienced SEO’s. Rand Fishkin has done a great job of cementing himself in the industry, new developments and discoveries are often discussed with data to backup theories.
5. Open Site Exporer – Essential link analysis tool for all SEO’s. Find out where your competitors get their links from and discover the value of each link.
6. SEOBook – Essential reading on a regular basis for any SEO and some of the free downloadable tools are great to use.
7. Yammer – Knowledge share will be as important as ever, Yammer lets you create mini communities like Twitter to help share news/links and updates – great for agencies and internal departments that might want to keep persnoal and business life separate!
8. Search Engine Land – A hub of all activity search related, of course you can use Sphinn too which is their sister site which still delivers great SEO articles.
9. Google Insights – If you want to know trends of particular search phrases or websites this is a great place to find free data. Take the results with a pinch of salt but generally Google’s providing good insights here plus if you’re stuck for keyword ideas there’s some relevant suggestions.
10. SEOUnique – An SEO blog written by me that you are reading now (and hopefully you’re enjoying) meant for beginners and those interested in a few SEO theories and tests. 
11. Search Engine Roundtable – Another blog/community website which I’ve been using for years, often very quick to announce new SEO developments so definitly one for the RSS.
12. Majestic SEO – Another link analysis tool and a rather good one too. It’s been around for a while and although sometimes the links aren’t updated frequently enough it has a great admin area and reporting layout.
13. Hitwise – More important for the advanced SEO’s out there, Hitwise provides industry insights at an incredibly granular level. Costs and absolute fortune but they do release bits of free information and data through their blog, well worth bookmarking.
14. LinkedIn - Really important business social site, think of it as a place to map out your career path and past work experiences. A lot of headhunters for agencies and client side jobs in SEO, not only that but you can take part in group discussions and help answer questions which help increase your business profile.
15. Search Engine People – I’ve been a big fan of this blog for many years and can tell you Jeff Quipp is an extremely interesting SEO and blogger. Great search blog posts can be found here!

I’m sure there are many other sites that SEO’s should know for 2011, if you have any suggestions please let me know and I’ll build up a bigger list.