It is no secret that Google is growing from strength to strength, not only improving its own search engine but also investing in video (YouTube), blogging (Blogger), browsers (Chrome), mobile phones (Android) and so much more.

In an editorial piece, The New York Times makes the argument that Google - in a position to place its fingers in many pies and look after its own invested interests - could potentially manipulate its own search results to its advantage, showing its own interests above those of the competition.

Whether Google decides to play completely fair or help itself is a contentious issue. Revealing its algorithm will force Google to do the former and play fair. This piece offers some possible solutions:

"Some early suggestions for how to accomplish [a fair editorial policy] include having Google explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides its tweaks. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at those tweaks."

It is true that revealing elements of Google's secretive algorithm would clear this. For example, if YouTube were to rank higher than other video-sharing websites, it would be noticeable whether the ranking appears naturally or forced by Google.

However, there could be other wider implications of revealing the algorithm. Google's success so far is because its algorithm is a secret. Even so, as Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan points out in his take on the New York Times piece:

"Google constantly speaks at search marketing and other events to answer questions about how they list sites and how to improve coverage... Google is constantly giving interviews about its algorithm..."

Although the algorithm is a secret, Google helps webmasters, not by telling them outright what the algorithm is, but by telling them how they can help themselves with regards to how the algorithm operates, and why it displays the search results it does.

After all, what if everyone knew the algorithm? Google's Marissa Mayer explains (originally printed in the Financial Times but reproduced on Google's Public Policy Blog):

"If search engines were forced to disclose their algorithms and not just the signals they use, or worse, if they had to use a standardised algorithm, spammers would certainly use that knowledge to game the system, making the results suspect ."

We are reminded of an incident last year when a Google search for "ugg boots" displayed seven spam/fraud websites within the first page (top ten) results. In this instance, the websites used suspect, black hat SEO techniques to get to the top of Google for that keyword. Surely revealing the algorithm would only encourage such practices - both good and bad; white hat, black hat and everything in between - affecting the quality of the search engine results shown, and in turn damaging Google's reputation as (mostly) showing the most natural, "neutral" results. Otherwise, Google would have to invest much more heavily in moderating the results and weeding out those websites manipulating the algorithm, which is likely to be a larger number if the way Google operates is disclosed.

All of this is without even considering governmental intervention, as mentioned in the second half of the above quote from the New York Times piece. Some of the bigger sceptics on the WebmasterWorld forum have expressed their fears that, amongst other things, the government may suggest changes to the algorithm from which they themselves could benefit.

Whatever the outcome, although Danny Sullivan believes the First Amendment and the fact that Yahoo survived a similar incident will save Google from such a fate, it will be interesting to see what - if anything - transpires, whether such action would be seen as a necessity as Google continues to grow and dominate the search engine world as well as other industries.

One of the most common questions we are asked by our clients is “What kind of clicks can I expect when I am in position 1?” Another is “How many more clicks will I get at the top of the page, compared to the bottom?” Valid questions when choosing to employ an SEO firm and ones we’ve struggled to answer, until now.

We’ve spent some time this month and put our heads together to conduct a little research that we hope goes someway to answering these questions. As you surely know, page 1 on Google is the much revered promised land of Search Engine Optimisation, but did you know that by battling your way to the first position, your site could enjoy three times the traffic that a competitor in 3rd place receives?

We compared Click Through Rates for a dozen of our retained SEO clients by looking at their Google Adwords data, their Google Analytics data and our ranking tracking software. We compared traffic levels against where they were in the search results month on month for each keyword and the results averaged out as:

As you can see, there are drastic differences between the click through rates you can expect if your site shows at top of the Google rankings on page 1, or if you are somewhere in mid-table or towards the bottom of the page. Our research shows that if your organisation finds itself as rank 1, you can expect just over 51% of all people searching on that term to visit your website. This then falls quite dramatically...

Position 1 = 51.4%
Position 2 = 27.4%
Position 3 = 16.8%
Position 4 = 12.7%
Position 5 = 10.8%
Position 6 = 8.3%
Position 7 = 6.6%
Position 8 = 6.2%
Position 9 = 5.3%
Position 10 = 4.8%

Interestingly, the difference between the listings ‘below the fold’ (i.e. the lower half of the page that you often have to scroll down to) is quite small. Perhaps people click the first listing impulsively but when they get down to the second half of the page, take the time to read through the lower listings?

If you are carrying out SEO work or want to appear at the top of the search engines then hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect. Compare these figures with the search volumes found on the Google keyword suggestion tool and you will have an idea of the visitor levels your site will receive.

Please bear in mind that whilst we ran this for a dozen sites, that’s still quite a small number and if we had the time or resources then we would have done more. Also, the figures varied quite widely depending on the market and the type of keywords involved.

Your CTR will obviously depend on how compelling your listing is in the search results, so spend time to ensure keywords are included within your page titles, meta descriptions and the URL (if possible), as these are the three things that users see in the search results. Also try and include words that will enhance CTR, such as “free trial”, “low cost”, “high quality” or whatever works for your target market.

On the official Google blog there is a new announcement that the Beta version of an encrypted Google search is ready for use by general web users.

In a nutshell, by visiting https://www.google.com (rather than http://www.google.com) an encrypted connection is put in place which means third parties are not able to see the search terms you use and search results you view.

Immediate differences between the standard and more secure versions of Google are highlighted in the blog post: “The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators: Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.”

The article also states “Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.”

This has been implemented after Google suffered recent criticism over data security when it collected information from open Wi-Fi connections. How the general public will react to encrypted Google search and how large the uptake will be is anyone's guess, though it is easy to see, even within a day of release, that this will make life more challenging for website owners and search engine marketers.

Early tests show that in the website analytics data, the referrer field isn’t complete when vistors come from the https version of Google. This means that the more people use encrypted search, the less you know about where they came from and the keywords used to bring them to your site.

Over the past few weeks, Google has been softly launching a test program which allows businesses in two US cities to purchase 'enhanced listings' in the local results (the map that appears at the top of the search results).

By taking an enhanced listing, a business owner agrees to give Google just $25 a month and in return, their business appears in the search results with a “View Website” link next to their name. At present, with there only being a handful of businesses that are testing the system, these listings stand out so will likely get a good click through rate.

The internet marketing community is debating whether this is a good thing or not. Whilst many people feel that Google is selling far too much of its real estate and is devaluing the natural search results, others feel that this is a good opportunity for smaller, local businesses to advertise on the search engine.

By offering this service at such a low monthly cost, Google should be able to convert a lot of one-man-bands that either could not afford Pay Per Click advertising or did not understand how the system works. There are hundreds or thousands of these businesses in each city, so the amount of extra revenue for Google could be considerable.

How the general public will react to this is uncertain. Up until now, adverts have been clearly defined above and to the right of the search results, separated from the natural listings. People tend to trust the natural listings as non-commercial and websites appearing due to merit. Even though the enhanced local listings will display the word ‘sponsored’ next to them, mixing them up with normal results is likely to confuse and even anger users.

There is no news yet when this will be rolled out across the rest of the US and then the UK, though with recent amount of changes that Google has introduced to its search results, it probably won’t be far off.

A few days ago, Google announced that they would be launching their new social media service: Google Buzz. It’s currently being rolled out across the world, with some users still waiting to receive full access to the service, while others have already been able to try it out.

How does it differ to other social media platforms?

Google has worked hard to differentiate Buzz from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which it does in a few different ways:

1. Integration with email

Google has integrated its successful email feature Gmail into Buzz, giving it an advantage over even the most popular social media platforms, whose email functions – if they have them – tend to be poor. Google is confident that Buzz users will see the advantage of not having to log into both a social media platform and separate email account.

2. Fast, full screen photo presentation

Buzz offers a photo viewing feature, which allows its users to view large, high quality photos that fill the screen and can be scrolled through at a high speed.

3. Buzz places high emphasis on location

Google believes that location is an important indicator of how relevant information is to you. Buzz can work out your location and is even able to ascertain the name of the building you are in.

4. Only shows posts which will interest you

Google has used it extensive knowledge of algorithms to create Buzz and shows this off by claiming that it will filter out posts that are not of interest to you – even if they are by your contacts – and vice versa: interesting posts by people you don’t already know. Then, depending on which tidbits you choose to approve or hide, its algorithm will attempt to gear more relevant and interesting results your way, personalised to your tastes.

Can it rival Facebook and Twitter?

What’s interesting is Buzz’s integration of other social media platforms, including Flickr and Twitter, but not with Facebook. Perhaps a deal is in the pipeline between the two, but until then it almost suggests that Google is content to live in harmony with Twitter (after all, Google recently paid $25m to index Twitter’s content), but with Buzz containing similar features to Facebook, it seems like Buzz’s main intention is to topple the current social media king.

It’s no secret that Facebook is currently dominating the social media market, with an official blog post on the site recently reporting that it had reached over 400 million users. While a completely fresh and unknown social media platform may struggle to compete with such a giant already in place, Google’s advantage is in its brand, which is already popular and established in almost every other aspect of the Internet - if anyone is going to compete with Facebook and Twitter, it’s going to be Google.

What should businesses do?

It’s too soon to tell whether Google’s new venture will take the world by storm or end up as a failed attempt, but at the very least, it’s certainly worth taking a look at and registering a profile, even if simply to get to grips with the interface and reserve your company name. For those who already have a Gmail account, getting started is easy, with current contacts automatically becoming friends/followers and therefore eliminating the registration process - not every social media site can claim to start off with millions of users raring to go.

A court of appeal in Paris has ruled against the search engine giant Google, in a case brought to it by the Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance (CNFDI). The long-distance learning institution filed the defamation suit last year when the Google “suggestion” feature linked the institution with the word “scam”.

The “suggestion” feature was implemented to make searching easier for users of Google, by offering the most common search queries based upon popular past searches. When a user typed “CNFDI” into Google.fr, the first result that showed in the “suggestion” drop-down was “CNFDI arnaque”, which translates as “CNFDI scam”.

The French court originally agreed with Google’s claim that these search terms are generated automatically, by an algorithm that is based on user search behaviour. However, after months of decreased interest in CNFDI and a drop in revenue, the court sided with the institution and told Google to remove the word.

Google hasn’t been having a great time in Europe lately. Last year a Dutch website was sued by a BMW dealer that is was showing as “bankrupt”, due to the Google algorithm linking the two together. Last month the French government suggested that Google be taxed every time a user clicks on one of their ads and last week a German minister accused Google of being too powerful and a “giant monopoly” that should either become more transparent or face legal action.

A new article on Business Week, here, details how Twitter has managed to get both Google and Microsoft to pay them for the right to include tweets in their search results.

The article states that "In exchange for making short blogs, known as tweets, searchable on Google, Twitter will receive about $15 million…adding that the Microsoft partnership is worth about $10 million. "The deals were huge…With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in."

This is pretty big news as it's the first time that either of these major search engines has paid to index a website and is especially surprising given recent activity in the web world. Last week, Google was successfully sued in French courts for copyright violations, thanks to the books it has scanned and lets people search through the Google Books engine. The company is also currently in a war with Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp for indexing their news articles which get placed within Google News.

Writers and journalists around the globe must be scratching their heads, wondering why search engines are willing to pay millions for random tweets, yet their own content gets included regardless.

Twitter must be over the moon as this marks the end to a very successful year. Since starting up in 2006, Twitter has become one of the most popular and respected websites on the internet, growing at a phenomenal pace during 2009. Even so, the site still wasn't making any money. Whilst this deal doesn't make the micro-blog that profitable (it barely covers the estimated annual running costs), it does show that the vast amount of information held on the website is valuable and if the site keeps growing, selling content could become a very lucrative revenue stream.

The argument over whether news sites should offer subscription-based paid for content or continue giving away free news stories reached the point of no return earlier this month when Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, took a public swing at Google, saying that his company will be removing its content from the search engine “within months”.

Murdoch has made his feelings regarding paid-for content clear for a while, believing that people get far too much for free. This time, however, is the first time he has made the argument so public and so personal. Referring to news aggregation websites as “plagiarists” and “content kleptomaniacs” that “steal our stories”, Murdoch threatened to sue websites, including the BBC, for the way they use News Corp content and believes that he can get the law courts to start issuing online gagging orders.

One prominent site in the News Corp family, The Wall Street Journal, already has a subscription model in place which allows non-subscribers to only read the first paragraph of an article. However, if web users access it through the Google search engine, they can read the story in its entirety.

Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer at News Corp, said the Murdochs’ intentions were to block Google from accessing his websites and believed that other media websites would soon follow suit. “We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online,” said Mr Miller. “I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”

He also believes that British newspapers owned by News Corporation, including The Sun and The Times would be able to survive without the search engine driving traffic to their websites.

Murdoch must have a very robust revenue model planned for his sites as Google currently sends a tremendous amount of web users to them, something which could soon stop. According to a Google spokesperson: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute”. Is this something that Murdoch has overlooked? It is highly unlikely, but he must think that the appeal of his news sites has the ability to survive and prosper without Google.

Shortly before the arguments started, a YouGov survey was commissioned and asked the general public and media experts alike who they consider more influential, Murdoch or Google. With nearly two thirds of the votes, the 78 year old media mogul enjoyed a landslide victory. There is no doubt in the public mind that Rupert Murdoch is a very powerful man, but are people wrong to write off Google as the underdog?

Behind the uber-cool offices and perception of a bunch of geeks having a very good time without hurting anybody (“You can make money without doing evil” is on the Google corporate policy list, as is “You can be serious without a suit”) lies a business that is very good at getting exactly what it wants.

Since it was started, just 11 years ago, the company now generates many billions of dollars a year and has expanded its reach from providing a simple internet search system to a near online monopoly. When Google wanted to offer advertising directly to businesses it launched the Adwords system, which is now one of the most popular ways to promote a website and brought the search engine $21bn in revenue last year. When the company wanted to take on the world of video it bought and nurtured YouTube, a site where hundreds of millions of videos are now watched every single day. And when it set its sights on offering people a free email service, it soon saw itself in the top three providers with tens of millions of users.

There is a pattern here. It is one of a business that has shown great imagination and flexibility and has enjoyed unprecedented success in almost everything it attempts – and that’s before you look at the monetary value of these projects. Speaking in the US at a search engine conference recently, Bob Brisco of Internet Brands Inc. stated that the worth of all publicly and privately traded internet companies is around $350 billion. This figure is important for two reasons. Firstly, it is greater than the value of all other media companies in the world, showing that internet property is now more valuable than offline business and secondly, of that $350 billion, Google owns half. As such, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Murdoch may have met his match.

Another market that Google entered and soon started dominating is that of online news. With the popular Google News service, the search engine trawls through online newspapers and blogs from across the globe, taking stories and grouping them for searchers to view in one place. Even though Google does not create any news content itself, its site is now one of the most popular news brands in the world. Adverts are placed next to other peoples news content, bringing healthy revenue to the search engine, without it having to write a word. Murdoch has seen this and has his eyes set on bringing some of that money to News Corp.

Disallowing a search engine from viewing web pages is technically a simple process and one that Murdoch could have implemented a long time ago if he had wanted to. Making this argument public and using it as a rally cry to other media websites shows that there is a much larger objective in Murdoch’s mind. Is he planning to scare Google into paying for the right to index his news content? It makes sense. He previously got Google to pay for the right to exclusively index Myspace, a News Corp property. Many website owners are speculating that the goal may be to strike a deal with another search engine, most likely Bing, where it will instead have sole access to the articles.

Whatever his agenda, Murdoch needs to play this one carefully. If he starts making unreasonable demands or helps one of Google’s competitors to begin eating up market share, then it may decide to fight back by creating news content of its own. If this happens, and considering its record to date,  Google will probably become one of the industry leaders within a very short time and Murdoch may have played a major part in helping to create his greatest rival.

(This article was writen for and first published on Waleshome.org, here).

Last week saw PubCon, an SEO and online marketing conference in Las Vegas. Each year thousands of professional web developers and marketers meet up to hear about the latest changes in the world of search engines and PubCon 2009 offered a lot of information for them all to think over.

One of the most prominent speakers at the event was Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google. Whenever Cutts speaks, search engine marketers listen, as there are very valuable insights into the ways Google works and the possible changes in how they rank websites.

Even though Liberty was not in attendance, we have kept an eye on what was discussed and have chosen to highlight a few of the points which were discussed as potential future rankings factors.

1. A website that loads quickly = good

The time it takes your web pages to load could have an effect on how Google ranks your site. Cutts said that while a site with slow pages won't necessarily drop in the rankings, one which acts quickly could rise. This is good news for businesses that invest in quality websites and hosting. This is an SEO factor that you have complete control over and if you give users a better experience, then Google could recognise this by rewarding your site a more prominent position in the search results.

2. Repeating keywords in footer links = bad

Cutts was asked to review specific websites and on one there were many keyword rich internal links which he viewed negatively. Many of these links were from the footer and to deep pages within the site. If you have a website where you have stuffed keywords into the anchor text of your footer then this may be something you want to re-address.

3. Blocking the Internet Archive = bad

Sites that block the home of the Wayback Machine can be viewed as waving a spam flag at Google. Many websites choose not to let the Internet Archive index their site, something that Cutts believes is the type of behaviour associates with spammy websites. You may want to check to see if your site is blocking archive.org and if you have no legitimate reason for this, get the block removed.

Whilst neither of these two negative factors is enough to get your site Google slapped, it’s always sensible to follow best-practice guidelines as it may only take a few of these spam indicators to push your site from one that is ranking well to one that is never seen in the search results again.

On that topic, another comment was made, regarding domains that have been banned from the search results – that it may be easier to write it off and start again. It looks like Google engineers may not be able/want to sift through websites that have been penalised, looking through on-page SEO and link quality, so re-inclusion requests may go unanswered. If you have been involved in black-hat practices then you might have more luck starting a new domain and trying again with a little less trickery.

This morning Google revealed that the new, faster search engine it has been working on, codenamed ‘Caffeine’, is almost ready to roll out.

The message on the web page where the Caffeine test system was live until a few hours ago reads:

"We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given."

If you didn’t have a chance to play around with the Caffeine system then here are the main things we found:

1. The system has been created to include more real-time results and search results pay more attention to social media sites than the existing Google system.

2. The look and feel hasn’t changed. Behind the scenes is where changes have been made, to speed up indexing and increase the relevance of search results.

3. The database which Google pulls on for search results is larger. Many more web pages have been indexed, so competition is greater for many keywords.

At Liberty, we have been testing the system quite extensively and can’t wait for it to be released. Many of the search results we monitor show a higher quality of website and pleasingly for a search engine marketing firm, many of our client’s websites are displayed a lot higher for many keywords than ever before.