Archive for the ‘Search News’ Category

So, as expected, Google announced last week that they would now be using site speed in their search ranking algorithms.  It is therefore important that we take the speed of our site into consideratation… you can do this by checking your labs section in Webmaster Tools.

But how important is this new algorithm?  Some people are already panicking about the speed of their site but before you get all worked up about it remember, Google has thousands of algorithms and speed is just one of those and not a high factor one.  Sure, if your site needs speeding up then sort the issues, for your users sake.  But don’t panick and think your rankings are going to plummet because you site speed is slightly below par.

In Google’s words…

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.”

So don’t set all stations to red alert just yet… relax my friends, relax.

According to Online Intelligence company Hitwise, last week saw Facebook become the most visited website of the week ahead of Google in the US.  Facebook also managed this on a few days over the Christmas and New Year period, as well as one weekend in early March.  Quite an achievement and makes you realise just how big Facebook is and how much it is still growing.  Facebook and Google’s visits in the US last week accounted for 14% of all visits… quite a chunk for these two internet giants.

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This week my colleague received a mailed which appeared to be from Google.  However, he noticed the from address was @google-help.com which he found a bit odd, so he checked it and it is a parked domain being used in this case for phishing it seems.  If you receive a mail like this, delete it!

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