What’s Google Got In Store for 2014? Part One

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Getting or keeping search placement on Google is a fulltime job! In a wonderful and insightful review of what Google has in store for 2014 by Dr. Peter Myers for the Moz Blog in an article titled “Future SERP: a Glimpse at Google 2014” you’ll learn what he thinks Google has in store. I have to say I think that this is one of the very best articles I have read about what Google is doing.

Here are a few tidbits from the article interspersed with my own insights .

1. Google is focused on mobile. With smartphone use way up, Google’s got to find a way to monetize mobile to continue to build profits. As the mobile user reacts with search differently on their device than when using a desktop, Google is doing strong testing to identify what works and is relevant to mobile users. Expect to see the things that are being tested in mobile move to the desktop arena in the near future. For clients, this means location specificity in your content and on your website pages is very important as are location extension use in Google AdWords. Having a mobile responsive designed website is also becoming important.

2. Google is expanding the Knowledge Graph using more informational topical content from authoritative website in their organic search results to answer search questions. Questions about topics cover about 10% of all Google searches. This allows for wonderful opportunity for your own content to place in Google when you write a blog post or have content on your website that helps to education or answer a question.

3. Google is testing new ad formats that blur the line between organic and paid ads. If you’ve searched recently with your smartphone, you’ve seen some of these new formats. Some are colored the same as the organic results with a small goldenrod colored ad box in front, others are interspersed within the actual organic results. No longer are ads on mobile necessarily at the top of bottom of the page.  It is very important to know that this testing is mainly happening on mobile right now, but will move to the desktop when vetted. One of the big reasons for interspersing ads into the organic results, especially for mobile, is that there are only two ad slots using the old format for mobile – but there are more advertisers!

Visit our post on Wednesday November 20th for part two in this series.

Google Rolls Out the +1 Button

This past week Google released access to the +1 Button. If you have not added it to your website or blog yet, here’s a link to the code generator. If you don’t know, Google has said that +1 button votes will be used to raise your position in organic results. Here’s what Google specifically says about that issue:

“Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For  example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search
quality. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

That’s pretty big news! If you want to read all the FAQs here is a link to the help section on Google. Right now you have to sign u in Google Labs to have the +1 results be shown in your own personal Google.com search results. What is great is that you can +1 something right from Google.com or if the website has the +1 button installed, you can +1 it right from their website page.

We are encouraging all of our clients to get the +1 on their website and blog. We’ve only run into one problem with installation. In only one case it appears that there is an onLoad issue with other scripts that are showing on the page, but that is just one website out of several we’ve installed so far.