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SEO News: A small water, gangster photos and an award

It was an exciting conference last week in Moscow. I was planning to write a recap, but it seems my Russian isn’t good enough – and there wasn’t all that much SEO stuff anyway. But I do have one very important tip for you from Russia: If you want to do business there, you have to speak Russian and you have to enjoy drinking vodka. (Did you know that the word “vodka” translates to “small water?”)

Marcus and I also shared the exciting experience of giving a presentation with the help of a translator. Unfortunately his maximum capacity for a single translation seemed to lie at one half sentence. It was very tiring to say half a sentence, wait for the translation, continue, wait, talk, wait… That makes it hard to maintain your train of thought. But the presentation was a hit and people stood in line to get their picture taken with Marcus. By the way, you can find more photos on our Facebook page.

   

And now for the SEO news of the week:

  • How far can Google take its personalized searches? There is definitely room for more! Danny Sullivan compiled a summary of what is working so far. I think there is a lot of hidden potential in the words that a person has already entered in past searches, in particular. When you combine various searches from a single session intelligently, you can start getting very good results from one word searches.
  • An interesting short story about gangster photos, shootings and a lawsuit in Australia that Google lost. It was a matter of the content indexing for a photo that Google did not remove. Determining what can and cannot be indexed is a difficult subject and Google often doesn’t know if the content is correct or not. In any event, the poor man not only won the case, but also received a small sum of money from Google after having already played the very same game with Yahoo and having won that case, as well.
  • Coincidence or good timing? Every five years a new Central Committee is elected in China. And it was precisely during this time that nearly all Google services were blocked in China. Here and there. Several Google sites have since been restored, but a bitter aftertaste remains. Especially because the ability to block data allows one to wield great power. What do you think? A coincidence or the well-timed censorship of opinions?
  • An American study shows that 94% of the teachers think that students consider “research” and “Google” to be the same. This is certainly somewhat problematic, since there are other ways of finding information besides “googling.” Like, for example, ummmm, well… You know, none come to mind at the moment 😉
  • One more quick tip on 503 Mistakes by John Müller from Switzerland. He calls himself a webmaster trends analyst and complains on Google+ about the lazy webmasters who do not allow proper status codes to be reported. He says Google even goes so far as to give a site that is temporarily down time to recover. But redirections or false status codes could easily appear as duplicate content. A simple tip for something that could easily be changed.
  • Can you remember? Content farms and, above all, demand media are what were really behind the Panda update. Now the company is reporting better earnings once again thanks to the new Panda strategy and Facebook, in particular.
  • The key term “Google authorship” is definitely an important trend in the SEO business and is sure to be so in the algorithm. Doug Antkowiak wrote a comprehensive introduction on the subject of including all of the “to dos” for Search Engine Journal.
  • Sometimes I wonder if our thinking is too complicated. When you read the “6 eCommerce SEO Tips” at “State of SEO,” the points they make sound relatively banal (“1. Keep an eye on Duplicate Content”). But, hey: We know how hard that actually is…
  • It’s notnews, that will knock your socks off, but it shouldn’t go entirely unnoticed in the virtual world. Anyone can now upload preview images for YouTube and we don’t need to mention that having the right image has a definite impact on the CTR, do we?
  • Local, local, local: There are very few areas in which Google is constantly fiddling around. But Sebastian Socha recently found “related content” in the Maps. If that isn’t going to heat up the discussion on “Google as a comparison portal”…
  • And then there is one thing I am a bit proud of. We won first place for best SEO software at the UK Search Awards for our Searchmetrics Suite. Some may just see it as another award, but we are celebrating every one we win! It’s nice to know that our many months of work are being appreciated. Especially when we get to receive the award in person and in a suit and bow tie.

That’s the SEO news of the week, I hope you found it interesting and relevant. As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback and reading discussions in the comments area! Nothing is more depressing than writing something and not having anyone respond to it. And the statistics tell me that the articles are getting a lot of readers.

So leave a comment, even if it is just a short hello 😉