13 New Languages Added In Google Voice Search – 17th August 2012 Voice Search helps people to get search results from mobile devices quickly and easily. Google is rolling out 13 new languages for the Android voice search platform. With 29 languages that are already available, Android voice search will support 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of: Basque Bulgarian Catalan European Portuguese Finnish Galician Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Romanian Serbian Slovak Swedish A full list of available language can be found here. This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. One of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people using Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes. If your language is available now, why not give it a go? If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Let us know you thoughts by tweeting #SL56 @SearchLately. – Blair Liu More details: http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=170820 http://officialandroid.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/voice-search-arrives-in-13new-languages.html
The Effect of SSL Encryption – A POV – 13th August 2012 In response to - “Media agencies report surge in SEO traffic hit by further SSL encryption” (Source: nma.co.uk)
How much of a concern is the increase in “not provided” keywords and why? SSL encryption poses a significant challenge for all search-based channels, but it is SEO teams who will feel the majority of the impact. As the number of ‘not provided’ keywords increases, this will clearly make SEO more difficult to manage and optimise and, as data is at the heart of search, it will also become less transparent. This means that SEO will become more expensive whilst it simultaneously becomes harder to justify investment in the channel. Dynamic landing pages that pre-populate the content using search query parameters will also be affected, although this is likely to be minimised by paid for data and organic searches coming from other search engines which are not encrypting keyword level data for those logged in users. What difference has the move by Mozilla to encrypt natural searches by default had to the overall problem (since Google rolled out SSL in the UK)? As Firefox accounts for around 20% of market share, we assumed that their introduction of encrypted browsing by default in their July update would have a significant impact on the overall levels of SSL encryption. These assumptions were proved correct, with our data across a range of industry verticals showing a 68% increase in the rate of SSL encryption for Firefox users, and an 18% uplift overall from June to July. Chrome, Firefox and IE (which is also planning to introduce encrypted browsing as part of its next release) account for a huge proportion of the overall user base. Therefore, should any of them make encrypted search ‘opt-out’, we can safely assume that we would see further leaps in nonspecified searches. Do you think the problem will escalate once it spreads to mobile? As mobile device penetration continues to expand and account for an increasing percentage of overall searches, encrypted browsing will undoubtedly become an even bigger challenge for marketers. As with the major browsers, we would expect an increasingly deep pool of ‘unknown’ queries should encrypted search become ‘opt-out’ on mobile. What do advertisers need to be thinking about to adapt to the changes?
If advertisers wish to continue to enjoy the full benefits of search, they need to adapt now. Whilst there is no simple (or, indeed, ideal) solution, marketers should employ a combination of tools to minimise the impact of encrypted search. For example, they could use data from before encryption took place, their PPC data and data from other engines to give some indication of how traffic is coming to their site. They can also pull data from the Webmaster tool to inform their optimisation decision, although this only provides the top 1,000 keywords and so the long-tail will be more difficult to monitor. Let us know you thoughts by tweeting #SL56 @SearchLately. – Oscar Romero More details: http://www.nma.co.uk/news/media-agencies-report-surge-in-seo-traffic-hitby-further-ssl-encryption/4003235.article (Subscription Required)
Google Adopts "Less is More" Approach For Search Results - 20th August 2012 Things move fast in the world of Google and one essential part of SEO is to anticipate and adapt to the latest changes. One of the more recent developments that has been noted is that in some cases the first page of search results displays a leaner 7 results layout, rather than the traditional 10 results format.
According to some tests, the change seems to have affected only 20% of search engine results pages.
The question now is why only some pages are affected. One explanation might be that Google is applying the new layout for results that include listings with sitelinks.
E.g. Amazon sitelinks
Sitelinks usually appear when the query matches the domain name, which is often the case when users search for a specific brand (for example "Amazon"). So, thanks to the new leaner 7 result layout brand websites have an even greater opportunity than ever before to “push down� negative content from the first page of results. Here for example is how things have changed for Honda since last week:
Here’s another example, for Amazon:
According to Google this change has been made to improve the quality of search results to benefit users: "We’re continuing to work out the best ways to show multiple results from a single site when it’s clear users are interested in that site. Separately, we’re also experimenting with varying the number of results per page, as we do periodically. Overall our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given query as quickly as possible, whether it’s a wide variety of sources or navigation deep into a particular source. There’s always room for improvement, so we’re going to keep working on getting the mix right." Let us know you thoughts by tweeting #SL56 @SearchLately. – Laura Cogo More details: http://searchengineland.com/7-new-10-google-showing-fewer-results131006 http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serp-crowding-shrinkage-its-not-yourimagination
Related Sources
support.google.com officialandroid.blogspot.co. uk www.nma.co.uk searchengineland.com www.seomoz.org
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Publisher
Nirmal Samarasinghe
Contributors
Blair Liu Oscar Romero Laura Cogo