Google made a minor change to its interface on Wednesday which is notable only because, well, it is Google. What did they do? Well they stretched the home page search box and increased the size of the font for the search box. Not much to report really but the Wall Street Journal decided it was worthy of a remark when they posted the story along with several “snarky” remarks from fellow search engine writers who were very underwhelmed by the whole update.

The one, tiny take away from this? The WSJ article noted that Softpedia’s Lucian Parfeni thinks the changes could have something to do with the increase in searches on smaller screens due to the rise in netbook usage. I think he is right on the money there and I will add that Google could be catering to the aging baby boomer population (cough… Eric Schmidt… cough) that is bound to be finding the larger text a bit more comfortable

On Friday the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Apple signed a lucrative deal in China with China Unicom to sell (what I call) a censored version of the iPhone (it has WiFi removed for “security reasons”). The deal will herald an impressive increase in Apple’s phone share but what should not be missed is that Android somehow flew under the radar despite signing a similar deal with China Mobile; a company with 3 times the subscribers of China Unicom! Something tells me that Android is going to take a way larger piece of the mobile pie than its competitors thought… silly competitors. They should know that since Google is involved it is going to do well – more likely than not.

From a personal perspective I have the Gphone (HTC Dream – one of a few Android phone styles) and I love it; the benefits of many free apps and excellent integration with Google makes it very appealing to me. From that perspective also consider that the success of Android will inherently improve Google’s foothold on search which means great things for any who have top search engine rankings on Google.

BONUS: for those that don’t like being told what they can or cannot do with their phone you might appreciate Android’s success because it is an open source OS which is very unlike the iPhone’s totalitarian OS.

Anyone, even someone 100% immersed in online social media is likely to have moments where they just feel so overwhelmed they need to sit down and shut down their mind for a while. I can’t say I am even dedicating half of my time to online social media and I constantly find myself overpowered by:

• the speed at which new startups are launching,
• the new web marketing tactics emerging on a daily basis,
• the information that is shared and is largely untapped,
• my own ideas for new social tools that I could never find the time to launch… but still distract me,
• the potential for the future of many of the social communities/tools I use on a daily basis,
• etc…

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comScore’s latest intelligence shows that “teens” between 12 and 24 have dramatically increased their use of the popular microblogging tool Twitter and the kids between 2 and 11 are increasing as well (age 2?!  comScore is thorough! ). Although the demographics they chose were odd I think it is still valuable info to see that market segment growing. It is especially interesting to think of how the emergence of that demographic could improve number of breaking news stories that happen on Twitter. After all, it is safe to say that most people of that age group don’t let their messaging devices out of their reach 24/7.

Last week I wrote a story called “How a Google Penalty Can Make Your Site Stronger” and since then I have received a lot of inquiries about how to identify if a site has been penalized. Instead of answering every email individually, which I could never find the time to do, I figured I had better create a quick list of the most obvious indicators of a Google penalty which I could refer people to and build on when I have more time.

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In today’s daily chart from the Silicon Insider we get to see how well the top search properties are doing on PCs in contrast to Mobile. It probably won’t come as much of a surprise that Google has the lead in Mobile just as it does on PCs. It was interesting to note, however, that Yahoo is farther behind Google on Mobile than on PCs despite its highly touted mobile portal and tools.

It seems Google’s Caffeine update includes some significant alterations in their local search organic ranking algorithm.

I whipped up this screenshot side-by-side comparison for you to see the differences between the Caffeine Sandbox on the term “Vancouver car sales” and the current live Google results for the same term. Please note that if you click on the image you will be taken to a MUCH larger version without the mark-up so you can see the results more clearly. Read more…

On Monday Google did something out of character by announcing a pre-release viewing of a major update to their algorithm they nicknamed Caffeine:

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

The sandbox URL for the new update is http://www2.sandbox.google.com – Check it out and see if you notice any difference with your rankings. Please post any interesting findings as a comment on this article. Read more…

Over the past 12 years consulting on web marketing  I have answered countless questions but one question I receive often stands out from all; how to remove a Google penalty. The following is an example of a question I received in the past from a person named Patrick:

PLEASE HELP! For the last 8 years we were #1 for a ton of search terms but then my site got penalized by Google because we had overused some keywords. We fixed the issue months ago but my top rankings are all still over the place. Sometimes we get back into the top 10 and we all breathe a sigh of relief, then just a few hours later we are on page 5. What is going on and how can I correct this? We are beyond frustrated!

First, Some Research

In order to answer Patrick’s question I needed to find out a couple of things about his website to make my answer more accurate:

• His site has excellent content right now and when I looked at past versions of the site I see the content was still great but definitely had keyword stuffing problems.

  Key finding: his site is really well done so I can see why it had top rankings before.

• I took a look at competitors found in the top 10 under several keyword searches that were obviously main targets for his website. After reviewing the backlinks (definition) for each competitor’s sites I could see they were all very well entrenched but their content was not up to par with Patrick’s site. I reviewed Patrick’s backlinks and was surprised to find that he had very few.  Key finding:his competitors have a lot of backlinks than Patrick’s site does.

  An SEO Tool Note: I use Yahoo Site Explorer for cursory examination of backlinks for my clients and their competitors. For more in-depth research I use OptiLink by Winrose Software (that is an affiliate link) which provides excellent statistics that are very useful for analyzing the quality of backlinks among other things. Here are more recommended web marketing tools.

• I checked the server headers for their home page and other key pages to make sure nothing was outwardly wrong with their server configuration; everything was fine.
• I took some time to surf through Patrick’s website and discovered that not all of the keyword stuffing had been removed.

  Key Finding: Google may still feel his site deserves a penalty because it is not 100% clean.

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This morning Yahoo gave up the ghost on search and signed a 10 year deal adopting Microsoft’s Bing search platform as its primary search technology. In the agreement, Microsoft will be the leading search provider for all of Yahoo’s search properties (over 100 sites) while Yahoo focuses on surviving… err I meant, “allowing Yahoo to focus on what we do best, and that is to be the center of peoples’ lives online” (Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz).

The following is Carol Bartz’s speech (note: this link and image on this page opens a windows media file) with several key sections bolded for your convenience: Read more…