Honestly, I was a little negative about the idea of ratings extensions when they first started being syndicated. How will we manage the bad feedback? Will the swamp of reviews associated to aggregators ruin small-to-mid level advertisers’ chances to benefit from this extension?

Click here to read his full article on Search Engine Watch.

If you have not heard about Social Search, it is a product that GoogleLabs launched back in Oct-2009. For the past few months, you have had the opportunity to opt in to Social Search. If you have not opted in, oh well. It does not really matter because in a few days Google will begin displaying Social Search results for anyone who is logged into the Google account while they are performing searches on Google. How about that?!

But what exactly is Social Search?

As the internet has grown, our level of connectedness has grown, and today there is an unprecedented number of social networking sites. You probably have an account on a few of them. Personally, I love Facebook and Twitter. It’s just so fun to get real-time updates about my friends, family and colleagues. With social search, we will be able to see results from your social circle in the Google SERPs. That’s where this is heading.

Based on links and content from your Google profile, Google will be able to determine your social circle. And from that social circle, Google will find content to display in a section of the search results. In order to see social search results, follow these tips from Google:

You can create a rich social circle and start seeing social search results by following a few simple steps:

• Add new people to your social circle by adding them to the “Friends”, “Family” or “Coworkers” group in your Google contacts
• Create a Google profile and add links to services where your friends create content
• If you would like to see more content from your Google contacts, encourage them to create a Google profile and add links to their content there

You can find out more about the content for Social Search here. For now, check out this video from Google:

So there you have it: Google Social Search. What do you think about Social Search?

Join the Range team, along with executive speakers from ClearSaleing, Google and Microsoft for an evening of idea-sharing and networking.

Cocktails begin at 6 p.m. with panel discussion and guest Q&A until 8 p.m. Just follow this link to register for Dallas on January 26.

• Update! Dec. 8: 5 new features for Google Analytics
  If you are an analytics junkie, check this out. Google Analytics is supercharged.
• Dec. 7: Google launches real-time search
  Check out the scrolling bar in the SERPs for this result
• Dec. 4: Google announces personalized search results for anyone who uses Google
  Apparently, Google will set a 180-day cookie on your computer and serve you personalized results – whether you are signed in or not! Wow.
• Dec. 3: Google switches to fading homepage
  Cool. I guess.
• Dec. 2: Google releases PageSpeed report in WebmasterCentral
  This feature is actually very helpful, and my clients love it. Also, it finally gives us proof that Google cares about page speed just as much as users do.
• Dec. 1: Google adds supersized images to universal search results
  Rather than one row of images, Google displays a big image on the left and two rows of smaller images.
• Dec. 1: Google adds geography data to search results (in the URL/breadcrumb area)
  I have not seen this one very often, but in the SERPs, it tells you what country the website is hosted in. I think.
• Nov. 30: Google Caffeine goes live on one data center
  And here it is: http://209.85.225.103/. But it only returns Caffeine results about 50% of the time.
• Nov. 23: Google Product Search rolls out 3 new features
  You’ve probably noticed the new “One Boxes,” but here’s a link that should show you what I mean.
• Nov. 18: Google SERPs: Breadcrumbs instead of URLs
  I think these will be an SEO game changer. It gives your search result more chances for a clickthru.
• Nov. 12: At WebCon, Matt Cutts announces site speed will be a new organic ranking factor
  We have always been concerned with this factor for usability, but it looks like it will soon be a ranking factor, too.
• Nov. 10: Matt Cutts says Google Caffeine will go live after the holidays
  I’m glad they chose to wait until after the holiday season. Don’t mess with stuff during the holidays!

Oh and also, today Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, joined Twitter (@ericschmidt). How about that?

In conclusion, Google has been very busy this holiday season. The good news is that every one of these items has an impact on SEO. It looks like 2010 is going to be an awesome year , chock-full of new stuff to do! Thanks, Google!

• DMOZ 2.0 is on the way in 2010. I don’t know who this blog belongs to, but it seems to have a lot of inside information about the forthcoming, upgraded version DMOZ (aka DMOZ 2.0).
• Malcolm Coles has a great write-up on the new Google layout. From the look of things, Local SEO will be crucial for all websites when this layout rolls out to all Google data centers.
• Black Friday boasts $595M in U.S. online holiday spending; Up 11% versus a year ago (via comScore)
• Some 19% of Americans will use their mobile devices for shopping this holiday season, according to a Deloitte survey.
• Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday showed a strong surge in online shopping searches, with searches for “Black Friday” up by more than 20%, year over year.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Barry Schwartz for the update on Caffeine.

SEO Game Changers: Breadcrumbs in the Google SERPs

I did a search in Google for things to do london, and that is the result I saw. I was simply scrolling through the results, and the Yahoo! Travel result jumped out at me. It was the #8 result in the SERPs. To be clear, I knew Google was testing a new feature that added a breadcrumb structure to the URL section of each search result. A lot of people were noticing Google’s tests earlier this year, and the breadcrumbs in these test were taking many forms. However, last week, Google made an official announcement about this new feature being launched. Honestly, I didn’t think much of it until I saw it for myself. (Oh, great. Now I sound like some guy who never believed in UFOs until he saw one for himself. But I digest.)

Because I’m an SEO, I have several questions about this new search results feature from Google:

• What factors cause Google to show breadcrumbs for certain sites?
• Can I do anything on my site(s) to influence Google to create breadcrumbs for my listings in the SERPs?
• Do I want breadcrumbs in my site’s listing in the SERPs?
• Does it help or hurt clickthrough rates?
• Will this feature eventually replace the URLs in all search results?
• Can I track visits from these breadcrumbs?

I must admit that I really like these breadcrumbs in the SERPs. Google refers to the breadcrumbs as an improvement, so I can’t imagine they would hurt clickthrough. Also, with more links in my site’s listing, I will have more opportunities for clicks. That’s always nice! Like Google SiteLinks, these breadcrumbs are obviously driven by the Google algorithms. Right now, we have no direct control of them, but I do believe we can optimize our sites with the SERPs breadcrumb in mind. And that’s why this is an SEO game changer: SEOs will soon be adding this to their list of strategies for SEO campaigns.

In reality, SEO will still be SEO, but this new feature brings into focus the hierarchy of a site and the optimization of internal linking. It also makes me wonder about need for semantic URLs. If my URL is not going to be displayed, does it really matter if it contains several relevant keywords? In fact, if Google displays these breadcrumbs for several listings in the SERPs, does it really matter what my URLs look like at all? Of course it does! We still have to keep doing SEO like we have been doing SEO, but now we have to consider the on-site factors that may be contributing to these breadcrumbs.

Website owners can no longer ignore internal linking strategies or URL structures. Furthermore, all SEOs will need to consider the keywords used for internal linking within their websites. We also need to consider the clickthrough rate of keywords in these breadcrumbs. It’s actually a lot to think about. In my opinion, that’s the main reason that this development changes the SEO game. It forces everyone to consider site architecture, hierarchy and internal linking strategies. It also proves the need for an internal breadcrumb for every website. In the end, there is an opportunity for a higher clickthrough rates with these breadcrumbs, and no one can ignore that!

PS. I would not be a true SEO if I neglected to mention that there is the possibility that Google could mess this up for some sites. Some site owners may not like or agree with the hierarchy breadcrumbs that Google displays in their respective listings. Should there be the opportunity to opt out of this feature in Webmaster Central? I’m sure someone will ask for that. Or someone will be yelling about it on Twitter. [Note: I love the SEOs who get mad at Google for taking too many liberties with other peoples' websites and incomes.]

Update: I have been thinking about this one point from Google’s blog post:

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information…The new text (breadcrumb) provides useful information about the page. [Google]

If we want Google to give you a breadcrumb in the SERPs, should we create ‘bad’ URLs? These ‘bad’ URLs could be too long, too short or too obscure. Would that not increase the chance that Google gives us a breadcrumb in our search listings? Just saying is all…

When will Google remove those old URLs from their index?

Hey Yahoo! Have you even heard of a 301 redirect?

Partial Credit for Bing. They never really indexed our old blog very well anyways.

All 3 top search engines still have a lot of URLs indexed from the previous blog location:

• Google: 127 URLs indexed
• Yahoo: 244 URLs indexed
• MSN Bing: 29 URLs indexed

This is not surprising in the least bit. While all search engines advocate the use of 301 redirects when changing URL structures and/or domains, they don’t seem to remove the old site URLs very quickly. In my experience, it can take a up to 3 months. It really just depends on the number of URLs and other factors. I mean, maybe googlebot is having a rough day or something.

The old Range blog at rangeonlinemedia.com/blog had about 300 URLs. Included in those 300 URLs were post pages, archive pages, tags, author pages and other links on the blog. As mentioned earlier, we created 301 redirects for all URLs. Here is how we redirected those URLs:

• Posts (301 redirected on a 1-to-1 basis to the post URLs on the new blog)
• Archives (301 redirected all archive pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Tags (301 redirected all tag pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Author pages (301 redirected all author pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Images, CSS files, RSS links, etc… (301 redirected all misc file URLs to the http://therangeblog.com/)

I typically advocate 301 redirecting every URL on a 1-to-1 basis to its counterpart URL on a new site. For TheRangeBlog.com, we did that for post pages. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect. Basically, all non-post URLs are 301′d to the homepage of TheRangeBlog.com. It was a time/resource issue. I know, I know. Not perfect, but it’ll have to do. BTW, none of our old blog URLs had any links, so I wasn’t too worried about 301′ing a random tag URL to its counterpart on the new blog. Just sayin’ is all…

Well, that’s about it for now. Stay tuned for more – in the future!

• We removed the placeholder HTML file for the homepage.
• We removed the disallow entry from the robots.txt file.
• We updated the privacy setting in Wordpress to allow search engine access
• We updated our corporate website to reflect the new blog URL.
• We created and uploaded the 301 redirects from all of the old blog URLs to the counterpart URLs on the new blog domain. [Note: We did not write 1-to-1 redirects for every URL. Due to time constraints, we only created 1-to-1 redirects for the 60 or so blog post URLs. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect that 301'd all URLs to the new blog's homepage. Due to our previous blog's lack of links, I caved on this item. In most other cases, I recommend 1-t0-1 redirects when changing URL structure or moving from one domain to another.]
• We built an XML sitemap for the new blog.
• We created/verified Webmaster accounts with Google, Yahoo and Bing. In these accounts, we submitted our XML sitemap location. All sitemaps were accessed within 24 hours of submission.

All of that took place last Tuesday (3-Nov-2009). Today is November 10, 2009. How have the search engines responded? Let’s take a look at our site counts in Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing:

Google Site Count: 8 URLs indexed

Yahoo Site Count: 1 URL Indexed

MSN Bing Site Count: 49 URLs Indexed

Just in case you cannot see the pictures, here are the results:

• Google: 8 URLs indexed
• Yahoo: 1 URL indexed
• MSN: 49 URLs indexed

That’s amazing to me. In my experience with crawling speed and indexing speed, Google typically wins big. But after a week of TheRangeBlog.com being live and active, Bing is clearly winning the race to index our blog. Nice work, Bing! Thanks for taking note of our blog.

I should also note that our blog has almost no inbounds links. Aside from the links from our corporate site and from a few Range Twitter accounts, we have virtually no link authority. Our lack of inbound link love is obviously playing a role in how quickly our site is getting indexed. But worry not – because we are working on links! (And if you are the linking kind, please consider linking to us. I won’t beg, but I would appreciate any link juice. Well, not from bad neighborhoods. Yes, I am an SEO.)

A blog would be a logical place to find information on new styles, trends, and up to date information on shoes. Perhaps you are doing research, looking for a contact, or simply trying to add some reading material to your blog reader.

So how does Google blog search stack up in finding authoritative blogs? Not so good. Apparently, it doesn’t quite know how to define a blog, as the example below shoes shows. Journeys, Converse, and all of the others simply aren’t blogs. 

Google Blog Search Results for Shoes

This is a particularly bad example, but I’ve tried a variety of searches in the past and often gotten poor results. For now, Technorati may still be the best blog search.

With the push for real-time search integration, it will be interesting to see how well search engines do with identifying real-time sources, like Twitter. Considering the length of time blogs have been around, it may be a while before we see great results.