News and analysis on Google itself: search updates, new features and what they mean for your business.
News and analysis on Google itself: search updates, new features and what they mean for your business.
Google shapes how South Africans find everything, so when Google changes, businesses feel it. This category tracks the company itself: algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin and the core updates, changes to the search results page, local search and Google Business Profile, YouTube, Gmail and the many products in between.
We have followed Google closely for over twenty years, from the early days of guaranteed first page rankings to mobile first indexing, HTTPS deadlines and AI driven search. That history matters, because updates that look new are often the same ideas returning in a new form.
Read these articles to understand what each change means in practice, what is worth reacting to, and what is safe to ignore.
Articles in Google
Google Local Reviews Going Missing
Complaints on Google’s blog have spiked recently, concerning the unexplained disappearance of reviews on certain Business Pages in Google+ Local. The disappearances are apparently…
Gmail By SMS
Google began offering their browser based e-mail service, Gmail, in 2007 and although its market share is still relatively small compared to its competitors (7% by the last…
Worry Less About Penguins and More About Your Customers
Since the release of Google’s two latest algorithms Panda and, more recently, Penguin, many have speculated that all forms of SEO are gradually coming into their cross-hairs. It…
The War on Free Clicks by Google
A recent study by SEO Software company, WordStream has revealed some interesting results of Google’s recent intense focus on web spam and the effectiveness of pay-per-click…
New Firefox Version to Encrypt Search Terms
It’s been publicised by Mozilla (operator of Firefox) as a great leap forward in web privacy practices. The latest update to their browser included a feature that made all search…
Matt Cutts Interview With Eric Enge
In a recent interview between Eric Enge and Matt Cutts, head of the Search Quality Team at Google, they explored some of the recent concerns SEO practitioners have had since…
Google Search By Image Gets Updated
The new image search interface was launched last year along with Google Voice Search for Android, and was very well received. It gave people the option to search for a topic based…
Inaccuracies in the Google Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph was an exciting project: a search engine that no longer just exposed you to the information of internet but could actually summarise certain topics for you and…
Google Updates Their Algorithm Panda
With the very recent announcement of Google's new Penguin algorithm in late April of this year, many have have forgotten about their Panda algorithm. We reported on previous…
The New Google Localised Search
Google's Venice update in February of year this brought with it over forty changes to its search and indexing parameters. Of all the changes, one of the most exciting for…
Google Panda Update 3.8
We wrote about the introduction of Google's algorithm Panda in February of last year. The learning algorithm focuses on artificial intelligence by filtering out entire sites,…
Google Businesses View
At the beginning of this year Google expanded on their Street View service that they introduced in 2007 to include interior views of businesses in those areas, giving people the…