Today Google revealed its new search engine algorithm, Google Caffeine. This new version of Google is being trialled online.

This new version doesn’t make any changes to the Google results page presentation. Based on the Google Webmaster official blog, the new algorithm is faster, able to crawl more, and takes in consideration the reputation of the website in question.

After few tries with different queries, the new search engine is definitely faster (0.20s instead of 0.40s) but for a normal user I cannot see the difference (0.2s is difficult to notice). The result is very similar to the ‘old’ Google, it was very hard to see any change. Most of the changes are on the universal search or on the new crawled pages which used to rank high.

From a users point of view this new algorithm is not a revolution, from a technical point of view this is maybe the beginning of a new era as it is the first time that the notion of reputation is part of an algorithm.

I think that a lot of websites which don’t respect Google rules are penalised (link buying, black hat techniques…)

Now let’s see if Google is going to add some major changes to its Google caffeine.

Yesterday was a big day in the search engine world as Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a ten year partnership deal. To be brief about the, Bing is going to be the search engine for Yahoo! and Yahoo will focus on its portal.

Bing Yahoo! - Deal

What does this deal means for SEO?

Firstly, the Yahoo search engine will disappear pretty soon. So you will not have to worry anymore about the Yahoo ranking report. You should start checking where your ranking on Bing is and take it more seriously because with this deal we can expect a bigger market share for Bing search engine (probably 15 to 20% in Europe, 30% for the US). Good news for reports

If Bing is bigger that also means that our company or your SEO agency should update and create new Bing recommendations and not only focus on Google. Now you should understand Bing and how it is working.

After more than five years of SEO recommendations focused only on Google, the rules will be a little bit different now. SEO recommendations should now include Google and Bing best practices and try to see what Google and Bing have in common as well as their differences.

The good thing about it is that Bing and Google are probably very similar and your SEO strategy should not really change.

Bing has some new challenges, for example the pop-up that opens when you have your mouse on the result. This will need to be covered to make sure it is attractive to the user.

In a way, by having one less search engine more SEO work should be created, because we will no longer focusing on one search engine.

Once again, Gocompare, the UK comparison website, has been penalised by Google.

GoCompare Logo

This is the second time that Google has penalised Gocompare.com. This time for the main keywords (brand and generic) the penalty is going 50 positions down on the Google search result.

Gocompare Google result page

There is, for the moment, no official comment from Google UK regarding this subject.

The penalty is for an aggressive link building strategy from GoCompare. Rumour is that Gocompare was sending emails to an impressive number of blogs, websites, forums et.c… in order to increase the number of back links in exchange for services or money.

Nobody knows for sure what happened, but one thing is sure, Gocompare did not learn from past mistakes.

Gocompare was trying to beat the number of competitors online (e.g. comparethemarket.com, supermarket.com, confused.com). It is a very difficult SEO market with an important Search budget.

Lets see how long the penalty will last this time. But for sure, it is a good way to create some buzz

In order to promote the show Yellowstone, BBC Two uses its Youtube channel.

They have posted the extraordinary video of the incredible fox who dives in the snow!

Great success, the video is one of the top favourites on Youtube this week (Most Discussed This Month). Very good, when you know that Susan Boyle and other Britain have talent videos are taking possession of Youtube UK.

Fox Snow Dive - Youtube

It is not new for the BBC to post a video but it is one of the first times the have had such a successful video on Youtube.

But like most of the time with people who don’t know the fine details of SEO, the video is far from optimised. For example, the link on the video links to the BBC home page and not on the specific page about Yellowstone. A good video not so well exploited.

Yellowstone BBC 2

We also can note that the page for the Yellowstone is not optimised…at least the video is doing well on the Google results page.

Google result page - Yellowstone

Oparla is the name of the new British search engine which gives you money for your search.

The principle is pretty simple, you need to register, execute a search and every day Oparla picks a winner. One thousand pounds is the prize! Good idea, but who is going to use this search engine over and over only for the chance of winning a prize?

So let see what this ‘new’ search engine can do. First, Oparla looks pretty much like Google before the search, simple with a clear call to action (only one button ‘search’)

Oparla

The Oparla result page on the default view is very different from the classic Google/Yahoo appearance. It is a list of the results with three columns, title, summary and URL. To be honest this list of websites doesn’t look very pretty, but at least the search result page is pretty quick to load.  At anytime you can switch to the classic view.

Oparla

The results of the search are pretty good for a ‘small’ search engine although occasionally the search engine doesn’t  find the most relevant result (e.g.: selected the LinkedIn directory page instead of my actual profile page when I entered my name).

In conclusion, this search engine who (can) give you money is a pretty good marketing idea but after few days I am not sure that it will be enough to keep people using Oparla. Also, I didn’t see any major benefit compared to Yahoo or Google. To be honest with you, I really don’t believe that this search engine will do well… Anyway the official launch is the 14th of April.

Good luck Oparla