With the new changes to Google’s algorythm this month, the game keeps twisting. Matt Cutts, one of Google’s leading engineers has released a list of 10 things that have been updated. A lot of it won’t really be of interest to most people but the 4 things below are worth commiting to memory.

Ranking Changes

Four of the changes are relating to how the search results are actually ranked:

• Better “Official” Page Detection & Boosting: “We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.”
• Image Search Loses A Ranking Signal: “We decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.”
• Better Date-Based Search Results: “We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.”
• Fresher Results: “As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.”

http://searchengineland.com/writing-html-title-tags-humans-google-bing-59384

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

The page views have spoken! Below we have gathered SEO Boy’s and PPC Hero’s most visited, and hopefully most valuable articles from May. Whether you’re a new or long-time subscriber, you may have missed these insightful and helpful SEO and PPC management tips. Enjoy!

SEO Boy Greatest Hits:

Amy is movin’ on up with her post about Mobile SEO!  Learn how to optimize your mobile site for the best search experience on the go.  Amy walks through how to write the best Meta Data, choose the right keywords and how to format your URL to make the most of a mobile site.  Want to push for your company to optimize its mobile site?  Amy includes a list of benefits of Mobile SEO to show to the boss and get started!  Don’t worry if you haven’t decided to start your mobile landing pages yet either – we can help you out on there too.  Read Amy’s mobile SEO post on PPC Hero to help your mobile get a move on!

My post, Content Farms Just Added A Panda to their Menagerie, comes in for a win in the month of May.  When Google sent out “Panda,” one of the major benefits of the update was that it would eliminate the content farms.  Unfortunately, this was not the case and other legitimate sites suffered.  Once you recover from the Panda update, you should optimize your site to help surpass the content farms in rankings.  Read this article to find out if your site is implementing the five right tactics to increase your ranking and visibility!

PPC Hero Greatest Hits:

Dave makes his PPC Hero debut and scores big with his analysis of Quality Score Across AdWords & AdCenter.  This post explores ways to better understand QS as it relates to keywords in the two PPC systems.  Google has used QS for ranking keyword relevance for some time now. Dave explains the “known factors” in the elusive Google algorithm and how raising your keyword’s QS will help lower your CPC and increase your ad position.  Bing has recently released their version of QS, which has a much different approach than Google’s.  AdCenter QS is designed to represent how competitive your keywords are in the market place.  While both Google and Bing are not giving up all of their secrets, Dave helps reveal quality tips to help move your keywords towards a healthy score to grow your account.

Vlog it up!  Jessica R. shows us the ropes of PPC Management for Large Accounts with a little help from her Hanapin Marketing friends.  Jessica discusses how to organize the account structure to include products, services and different demographics; keyword duplication; and competition between ad groups.  How do you deal with vast amounts of data and making huge changes as well as day-to-day maintenance of a large account like a pro?  It’s all covered here in video form for your viewing pleasure along with a written transcript.  Give your large (and small) accounts a tune up by implementing our expert tips!

SEO Boy is calling it a day! He’s abandoning his hero responsibilities a little early, but luckily PPC Hero is still on duty!

One of the things I like most about working with the Internet is that everything is constantly changing. However, I had just become comfortable with creating custom reports in Google Analytics when they released a new beta version this past March. I was a bit hesitant to make the transition, but when I discovered many new and useful updates had been made to the custom reports section. Below are the top 5 updates you need to know.

1. Custom Reports Tab

The first, and most obvious, change to custom reports is the location. Custom reports how has its own tab across the top of the page.

When you click on the Custom Reports tab you’ll be taken to the overview page. When you create and save reports this is where they will be stored. To create a new report, just click on the New Custom Report button at the top of the page.

You’ll also notice at the bottom of the page there that you can migrate any reports you made in the old version of Analytics to the new one. Note that when you migrate your reports they will not be available in the old version anymore.

2. Custom Report Filter

The most helpful update in my opinion is the custom report filter. In the old version any report you created applied to all the data in your account. Now, you can tell Analytics which data you want to include.

When you click on the drop down arrow on the filter box, a list opens up of all the dimensions. You can choose to exclude or include and dimension that meets the criteria you set.

For example, let’s say I only want to include data in my report that comes from Google or Bing. I can set a filter to include just these two sources in my report.

3. Report Tabs

There has been a small, but much welcomed tweak in how the custom report tabs work. In the old version of analytics you could create multiple tabs within your report, but you had to include the same dimension across each report tab. With the new version of Analytics you can now report on any dimension, on any tab in the report so you can have all the data you need in one place.

4. Report Types

There are two report types you can choose from when creating a custom report, Explorer and Flat Table. The Explorer report type is similar to the report layout in the old version of Analytics. You select your metrics, and then drill down into the metrics based on the dimensions you choose.

The flat table report allows you to analyze two dimensions side-by-side. You can also select up to 25 different metrics to include in the report.

The difference is you don’t have to drill down into one dimension to see the other. For example, if you wanted to compare the performance of a keyword by source you would need to click on the keyword to view the source performance. With the flat table report you can view the performance data for each keyword in each source all on one page.

5. Sharing Reports

The final update is in how custom reports are shared. In the new version of Analytics note that when you share a custom report the link will reflect the state of the report when you first created it. This means if you create a report and share it with a coworker, then go back in and edit the report a week later the link you shared will not include the edits.

Even though I’m still adjusting to the new Google Analytics, I have found all of these updates to be very helpful in creating custom reports. If any of you have comments or questions about the new Google Analytics custom reports please share them below!

It looks like Google AdWords is up to their usual testing tricks, yet again! This time, users are reporting a change in ad extensions showing in the UK’s Google search engine. This change seems to add a line of text for ads with a staffing agenda (see the following screenshot).

This additional line of text appears to be showing the number of job placements available on the landing page that ad leads to, as well as the company web address or name. As I said before, this is being tested on the UK version of Google and with that, I had no luck getting similar results to show in the US version. Yet another note of interest: users have reported that ads with specific references to the number of jobs available in their first two lines of text are not being served with this extra extension.

So, you ask, what does this change in advertising have to do with my SEO efforts? The answer: quite a bit. If you’re running a staffing website or company that is relying solely on organic search results to steer traffic towards your site, these more specific ad texts could grab user attention before they even reach the SERPs, taking you out of the game. If this new ad extension makes it’s way to full roll-out status, search engine marketers may need to take a step back and see what’s happening, as I suspect we could see some decline in traffic and visits to those sites relying on SEO entirely.

What do you think? In the recruitment field or not, do you see yourself changing up your plans when it comes to landing page content or instituting a PPC plan to complement your SEO efforts? What else do you see as possible advantages or drawbacks to the new ad extension? Share your thoughts and ideas below in the comments section!

For further information about this topic, check out the following links:

• Google AdWords Job Ad Extensions?-Top SEO News
• Google Testing Job Numbers in PPC Ads-Periscopix

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more news updates from SEO Boy!