Search Engine Optimisation Services

The folks at Google have been busy again, this time revamping their advanced search page. The page has been redesigned with most of the functionality staying the same however some of the search options have been renamed or removed.

The removed tools include the ability to ‘Find pages similar to the page’ and ‘Find pages that link to the page’. 

Although the ‘Find pages that link to the page’ option has been removed, entering the command “link:yourdomain.com” into the Google search bar still works.

It has been coming. We had been informed that Yahoo would be winding down their Site Explorer tool a while ago but the day has finally arrived. Yahoo Site Explorer will close down today.

Yahoo’s announcement on their official blog:

Yahoo Site Explorer was a very useful tool for website owners and SEO professionals to find out link data for websites. It was particularly useful because it was data coming straight from a search engine.

If you were a user of the Yahoo Site Explorer then there’s no need to threat, the Bing Webmaster Tool will have the Site Explorer functionality. Many other third party tools offer link data such as Majestic SEO or SEOmoz.

A couple of days ago, there had been sightings of Google testing out a new “sources” box on the right hand side of the SERP’s. This box gave information about your search without having to click through to the website. Google have also started showing a box full of information in Google’s local search results.

The new results page seems to pull in all the information available in Google Places about your search query and displays it on the right hand side of the page, similar to the “sources” box. What this new box shows depends in your search query? For example, if you were searching for a restaurant, the new results can show a map, a link for directions, pictures, opening hours, reviews and even a menu.

This is a great new feature for user experience but could be harmful to businesses and marketers as users might be able to get the information they were looking for without ever clicking through to the business webpage.

After several months of testing, Google have officially announced that they would begin showing Adwords at the bottom of their search engine results page.

According to Google, the testing has shown that these ads at the bottom of the search results performed better than ads on the side of the page as they fit better with the way a user views the page scanning from top to bottom.

Having ads on the bottom of the page will give marketers more chances to get their ads appear on the first page of results rather than on the second page.