A roundup of some of the most interesting Google updates and industry news for November 2011.

1. Industry Updates
Industry Update
November 2011

2. Industry Updates
Google+ Pages
• Google has finally launched pages which offers
local businesses and brands the chance to set up
dedicated pages.
• At first, whoever creates the page initially will also
be the page administrator. No one else will be able
to admin that page after them.Nor can that page be
transferred to someone else.
• Unlike Facebook, there aren‟t “vanity” URLs yet
available that use a business name rather than a
long string of number.
• You also have the ability to choose whether you
want to act as yourself or the business page, when
on Google Plus.
• To create a page, login with your Google+ account
and visit plus.google.com/pages/create.

3. Industry Updates
Google+ Direct Connect
• Google+ Direct Connect lets you quickly navigate to a Google+ page when using Google
Search.
• For example, if you searched for the query '+youtube' or '+pepsi,' you will be immediately taken
to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page.
• In order to be eligible for Google+ Direct Connect, you must first connect your websiteby going
to your Google+ page, and going to the “connect your website” page
• In order to make your business or organization "plussable", you can check out the Google+
Direct Connect page in the company's support site.

4. Industry Updates
Google‟s Freshness Update
• This change basically prioritises „recent‟ and „timely‟
stories and is based off of Google‟s Caffeine
infrastructure.
• This change is evident on a lot of head terms
(i.e.football) and will also have more of a noticeable
effect on QDF keywords.
• “…change noticeably impacts 6 - 10% of
searches, depending on the language and domain
you're searching on.”
• This change however doesn‟t appear to have had the http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011
same impact as Panda despite initial claims from /11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-
Google that it was impacting 35% of search queries. search.html
• RSS feeds (using last modified element) and plenty of
fresh content look to be some of the best ways to get
the most from this update.

5. Industry Updates
Google+ Ripples „What‟s Hot‟ Feature
• Google have added another new feature to their
Google+ platform called “What‟s Hot” which shows
popular content that is trending across Google+.
• Google has also included something called Ripples
with allows you to see how content is being shared
across Google+
• Ripples are shown via an interactive diagram that
shows how a Google+ post spreads as it‟s shared by
users.
• To see this in action, find a public post that interests
you, and select “View Ripples.” From there you can
replay its activity, zoom in on certain events, identify
top contributors etc
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-
popular-posts-eye-catching.html

6. Industry Updates
Google Indexing Facebook Comments
• Labnol.org reported that Facebook Comments are now being crawled (and ranked) in
Google‟s SERPs
• Facebook Comments can be displayed in a few different formats, XFBML (Xtended FaceBook
Markup Language) and HTML5.
• However if you would like to give your comments the best chance to rank, go with the XFBML
implementation as that type is what has been shown to rank.
• http://searchengineland.com/many-facebook-comments-now-being-indexed-by-google-99399

7. Industry Updates
Google Creates “GoMo” Portal To Help You Mobilize
• Google has now formally launched a mobile site
development portal dubbed HowToGoMo.
• It provides education, case studies and best practice
guidelines for both SME‟s and large organisations.
• GoMo also features an emulator where you can see how
your site looks on a smartphone.

8. Industry Updates
Google evolves it's ability to crawl web forms
• Google have announced that that Googlebot can perform POST requests on web forms.
• “We generally advise to use GET for fetching resources a page needs, and this is by far our
preferred method of crawling…Googlebot may now perform POST requests when we believe
it‟s safe and appropriate.”
• Google only previously submitted GET queries on web based forms
• Google also talked about not blocking content behind HTML forms or external JS assets via
robots.txt unless webmasters deliberately wanted to block Googlebot.
• Read more: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-
surfacing-more-of.html

9. Industry Updates
Google Announces PPC ads on bottom of results pages
• “Starting today, ads that have previously shown to
the side of the results may in some cases appear
below them. We dynamically optimize each search
page, including its ads, to provide the best
experience for our users.”
• This move marks yet another intrusion on organic
listings for more competitive search queries
• Read more:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-ad-
placements-on-search.html