With the recent announcement of Google shutting down their iGoogle service, I needed to find a way to move all my RSS feeds into Google Reader. With both of them being Google products I was almost certain it would be a simple process. If you’ve tried this before you’ve probably already discovered that this isn’t so simple! I’ve therefore made this guide to help you knock over those hurdlers and get your feeds imported before the November 1, 2013 deadline!

Step 1 – Exporting from iGoogle

• Login to your iGoogle account
• Click the settings button (the big cog towards the top right of your iGoogle dashboard)
• Scroll down to the bottom “Export / Import” section and click the “preview” link.
  • You are now presented with some XML code.

Step 2 – Converting from XML (iGoogle) to OPML (Google Reader)

• Right click inside the page that just popped up (after you clicked “preview”) and choose “View Source”. Hit CTRL+A and then CTRL+C to copy all the data
• Use the box below to convert your feed from XML to OPL. Simply click inside the top box and hit CTRL+V, then click “Convert to OPML”

• Once you’ve completed the above step, you’ll see some new code in the bottom box. Click inside here and CTRL+A then CTRL+C again.
• Open a new text document (notepad works best) and hit CTRL+V. Save this file as igoogle-feeds.xml

Step 3 – Importing into Google Reader

• Now that you have your new OPML file, we just need to import into Google Reader. Head over to google.com/reader and go to the settings option
• Once inside, click on the Import/Export button
• It will ask to “Select an OPML file”. Click Choose File and select your newly created igoogle-feeds.xml file
• Click upload

Once you get to this step the rest is easy! Just click “upload”!

Done! You will now be presented with a sort of summary screen that allows you to rename and regroup feeds into different folders as you see fit. Most of them will correspond to how they were in iGoogle but best to check. Once you’re done, you can head back to Google Reader and see all your feeds!

With Google+ being released for some time now (launched mid-2011), Google search results have changed forever by showing author information in particular, the faces of authors of items of content for search queries. I’ve used myself as an example below:

Don’t I look pretty?

At first only available to the US, these rich search snippets are now available globally and are quite easy to setup. This feature gives authors the ability to distinguish and validate web content they have written within Google search results essentially being able to associate a “face to a name” on content they’ve created. In this blog post, I will detail how exactly to do it as well as talk about some advantages

Benefits

• Dramatically increases CTR (click-through-rate) of your website in the search results which could result in more traffic + sales for your business!
• Allows you to “claim” your work and solidify your authority within your industry essentially serperating yourself from duplicate content (yay!)
• Connects readers and authors
• Promotes your Google+ profile to allow people to much more easily connect with you
• Builds credibility for yourself as an author
• Makes you feel good!

Setting it all Up!

• Option 1: Link your content to your Google+ profile via email
• Option 2: Linking your content and Google+ profile together via HTML

Whilst the first option may be easier for some people, the second option creates better exposure as it forces you to link your site to your Google+ profile and vice versa which is why I always recommend it. It’s also what we’re going to do here:

Linking your website and Google+ Profile

1. You need to link to your Google+ profile from your website, like this:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/100444082801433837344?rel=author">Matthew</a>

Replace the random string of numbers with your Google+ id (it can be found by visiting your Google+ profile page as shown in the screenshot below) and my name with yours!

Your Google+ ID is that random string of numbers after plus.google.com!

2.  You need to add a link back from your Google+ profile to the above site you just updated.

1. Edit the contributor to section of your Google+ profile
2. Add a custom link and enter your website URL
3. Click save

Success! Note my image is showing up as well as a “Verified” message.

Authorship and SEO (Authorank)

Whilst there is currently no direct link of having authorship setup and an SEO benefit, it is quite an obvious benefit to both users and Google in understanding content better. Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) and Othar Hansson (Principal Engineer at Google) both hint at it becoming a possibility in the video below.

“We’re excited to think about how to we can use Authorship to improve rankings. If you think about it, if you have a scraper vs someone who has really got a lot of credibility, I love the idea of seeing the scraper not ranking and the real person rank” – Matt Cutts

“Just having an author photo next to results, will have a huge psychological effect on users. Even if they don’t click on it, they know that that’s an article where they can find the auhor and interactive with them and find out more about them.” – Othar Hansson

My feeling is this will change the game completely as this markup gets more traction and HTML5 becomes standard we’ll see many more authors in the SERPs (amongst other rich snippets) and content will become even more important. There are several articles out there talking about AuthorRank already and I think it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a ranking factor in the ever growing set of metrics that Google looks for when ranking a site.

In conclusion, to stay ahead of the game (or even stay in it at all) it is imperative that you setup Google Plus Authorship for yourself and your business as soon as possible! You should also make an effort to engage with other Google+ users by sharing content and “+1″ing things, making Google aware of your social accounts by pointing to them in your Google+ profile, and most importantly create great content and share it – everywhere!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts/feedback/comments on this post as well as the direction of Google+/Authortship in general. Don’t be shy!

A colleague in the office today informed me that there is a new Google “Easter-Egg” game creating buzz on the internet that when triggered allows users to play a mini Starcraft type game with the Google interface. Originally released last week, the game gives more than just search results for their users!

To play the game, simply go to Google and type “zerg rush” (or click here). You’ll need a HTML5 supported browser (such as Google’s own Chrome) for it to work. What you’ll see is dozens of the letter “O” appearing on your screen start to attack your search results! Users earn points by clicking on the letters to stop them and awarded a count for each kill! There is also a nifty “APM” or “Actions Per Minute” counter to keep track of how fast you are clicking! For added social media fun, Google allows you to post your score on Google+ and share with your friends!

For anyone that’s ever played Starcraft (an award-winning PC strategy game originally released over 14 years ago in 1998), you’ll know how annoying those little zerglings can be and this Google game is even more annoying! From what I’ve seen it’s near-impossible to beat! The below is what happens when you lose!

This is what happens when you don't click fast enough to keep those pesky critters away!

Google has always been famous for their constant logo changes known as “Doodles” (you can see their archive here) and since seeing HTML5 take off, they’ve also added interactive elements on their search results to keep things interesting (the now-famous “Zipper” from last week fro example).  Being in SEO, I spend much of my time in Google and these creative ways of allowing users to interact and create buzz about Google are fantastic as searching can get quite tedious at times! These interactions definitely freshen things up – keep up the good work Google!

How have you found the game? What’s your highest score? What APM can you achieve? Let me know in the comments below!

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to present at the Strategic Entrepreneur Summit in Sydney alongside Siimon Reynolds and Brian Sher as well as an array of other speakers including:

• Matt Rockman – the founder of Seek.com.au
• Roberto Boschiroli – My colleague and good friend and also one hell of a Pay Per Click/Google Adwords Expert
• Brian Sher – marketing and start up business growth expert
• Wendy Haung – also my colleague and a social media expert
• Ari Galper – Australia’s #1 expert on trust base selling
• Andrew Roberts – our Fortune Institute performance coach
• Ben Dexter – Web and CRM specialist

The seminar ran for two days and covered many areas to help individuals and businesses grow both offline and online. Covering aspects from hiring, to creating a vision, unique selling points, time management, internet marketing and more.

The 2-Day Strategic Entrepreneur Summit

I presented for 45minutes to a crowd of 400-450 small business owners on the foundation principles of SEO which covered the following points:

• What is Search Engine Optimisation?
• How do Search Engines Work?
• How does Google improve their Results?
• Principles of SEO – C.L.A.P
• Content
• Types
• Structure
• Ongoing Discussion
• Social Sharing
• Strategy
• Links
• Strategy
• Social Links
• Age
• Pages
• Strategy
• Analytics and Measurement
• Summary

I’ve included a copy of my slides in an embeded “Slideshare” format, which due to the limits of their technology, does not inlclude videos. For this reason, I’ve included links to the videos below:

• How Search Works (Slide 6)
• How Google Makes Improvements to its Search Algorithm (Slide 9)

It was a great experience and one of my favourite events I’ve participated in. I got a lot of positive feedback and more importantly, helped a lot of people with their understanding of search engine optimisation, how it works and how to implement it effectively.

I hope you’ve enjoyed it too and I look forward to seeing you at other events where I’m speaking!

Happy new year! Welcome to 2012. This year so far has been AMAZING for me and I wish the same for you!

As my first post of the year, I’ve decided to put together a list of the top blogs that I frequent that are published by Google themselves. Anyone who follows them religiously knows how great they are (as well as how frequent they are updated!) so this list is designed to help you stay on top of them. I’ve tried to focus the list around Online Marketing (SEO/SEM) side of things as many of these blogs contain info to help with search engine optimisation/marketing strategies and implementation. I’ve also included blogs about related industries such as small business, commerce and retail information. I suggest adding them to your RSS readers possibly under a “Google” tab and visiting them each morning before you start your day to see what’s happening over at Google!

• Australia Blog
  • News and notes from Google down under
• Conversion Room
  • The place to visit for tips on tracking and improving conversions online
• Google Analytics Blog
  • The latest news, tips and resources straight from the Google Analytics team
• Google Commerce Blog
  • The official source for the latest on shopping, retailing and payments technology
• Google LatLong Blog
  • News and notes by the Google Earth and Maps team
• Google Mobile Blog
  • News and views from the Google Mobile team
• Google News Blog
  • The official blog from the team at Google News
• Google Places Community Blog
  • Home base for the Places community
• Google Retail Blog
  • Your one-stop shop for Google retail advertising acumen
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
  • Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
• Google+ Platform Blog
  • Official source of information about the Google+ platform
• Inside AdSense
  • A look inside Google AdSense
• Inside AdWords
  • Google’s official blog for news, information and tips on AdWords
• Inside Search Blog
  • The official Google Search blog
• Official Google Blog
  • Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
• Small Business Blog
  • Tools and tips for small to medium-sized businesses
• Testing Blog
  • If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying hard enough
• Think With Google Blog
  • Tips, Tools & Insights for planning marketing campaigns

The full list of official Google Blogs are available in their online directory here. If you have time, I strongly suggest you browse through the list and see if there is anything of interest that could assist you in your business or simply your pursuit of greater knowledge!

With the release of Google+ a few months ago, Google introduced a new layout design that showed a consistent black navigation bar across the top of their services which made it easier to navigate between gmail, docs, calendar etc. The way in which it was designed also made it very easy to use and pretty to look at.

Today when arriving home, I noticed they’ve revamped their design once again with a more graphical/operating system kind of feel.

The Google Layout as of 01-12-2011

With HTML5 becoming more prominent across the web and connection speeds increasing, Google is taking advantage and making their prodcuts and services much “prettier” to look at. When hovering over the top-left Google logo, you are presented with the options shown above. When clicking “more”, you are presented with the options below.

New Google Layout/Design from a Search Result

Google even gives you a nice message informing you of the changes and entices you to have a “play” with it (as seen in the featured post image at the top of the page)

“Welcome to the new way to navigate Google. Roll over the logo to have a look”

Having played around with it for 5 minutes or so, the interface is now back to the way it was with the black navigation bar. I’m assuming I landed on a testing server and not sure how many have seen this however I’m quite excited to see this change implemented permanently as it definitely makes the search experience that little more enjoyable and is a well-deserved update of the worlds most popular search engine. My only recommendation thus far is to reduce the height of it – it’s pretty thick and can get in the way if you don’t have a massive screen resolution!

EDIT: Looks like it’s an official release! Watch the video below:

You can also find more information about the design here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/next-stage-in-our-redesign.html

Rest peacefully buddy - you were a good friend for a long time!

Many savvy SEO’s and webmasters have known for a while now that Yahoo Site Explorer would not be around for much longer. With the Bing/Yahoo merger happening last year, Yahoo announced they would no longer be focusing on search and using Bing to power everything search-related – Yahoo Site Explorer being one of the services left over that Bing hadn’t taken over yet. With no specific date of when the service would be turned off, many of us looked to other ways to track/measure links to be better prepared for D-day. Services such as SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, and MajesticSEO are amongst the most popular that we are almost “forced” to use now that Yahoo’s services will be turned off.

In their announcement last week, Yahoo made this statement:

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.

At the time of writing this post, it is ~7pm on Sunday the 20th of November in the US and therefore the service is still working for me here in Australia – I’m keen to check it out later tonight to see what happens when I visit the old site explorer site! The most exciting part for me will be checking out the new Bing Webmaster Tools to see what sections of the Yahoo Site Explorer have been implemented and what new features will exist. I am of the opinion that Bing Webmaster Tools is a very under-rated service with lots of great data to help webmasters improve their website so have high hopes for the new tools to get more exposure, use and credit that it deserves!

If you’re going to miss Yahoo Site Explorer or ever found it useful, please leave a comment below and pay your respects! It’s helped me out COUNTLESS times with it’s simple interface and powerful tools but it’s time to let you go YSE. Thank you for all the years and may you rest in peace!

UPDATE 23/11/2011 – Checked out YSE last night and got this message when visiting http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Yahoo Site Explorer - Official GONE!

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!.

Please check the following blog articles for more information

• Microsoft Webmaster Tools to support Yahoo! Site Explorer Community
• Site Explorer transition to Bing Webmaster Tools

We’d also like to recommend Sitemaps a useful mechanism to inform search engines about pages on their sites.

You can stay current with the latest news and information by visiting the Yahoo! Search blog site

R.I.P. Yahoo Site Explorer

2005 – 2011

A couple of days ago, Matt Cutts announced on the “Inside Search” Google blog, a list of ten recent algorithm changes that had been made to the search engine over the past few weeks. Matt Cutts has said:

“We’re always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500 changes we make to search in a given year. In that spirit, here’s a list of ten improvements from the past couple weeks”

The list can be seen below:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
• Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent 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.
• Refining official page detection: 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.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: 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.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Matt Cutts also stated that no site owner should go “wildly tuning” their website to work with these changes but to continue creating websites that adhere to the Google guidelines.

Takeaways:

• These algorithm changes are only a small number of the Google Algorithm changes made this year
• Page content is more important than that in the header or menu
• Page titles are more important, boilerplate links with dupe anchor text are not as relevant and therefore given less weight
• Extension of rich snippets in search results on the rise – expect to see more of these.
• An image hosted on multiple websites is no longer a ranking factor
• Fresher and more recent content gets a bonus (35% of searches)
• Official pages get a bonus (brands, products etc) and will now rank higher

In summary, it reigns true more than ever that we should be writing content for users and just like journalists, writing that content as soon as the news breaks!

You can read the full article here:
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

For those who pay attention, many have noticed that Google’s PageRank has once again updated with changes being seen across the web. It seems to have happened at the end of last month as I can’t seem to find any pages on my own sites being effected that were created in November. Most of the web properties that I own have either gone up or remained the same, suggesting that the update was quite dramatic.

It was only about a month ago that Google changed their lookup URL which left webmasters stressing needlessly for hours wondering what happened to their PageRank.

This is the 4th PageRank update for 2011 with the first being seen in June, the second late June/early July, the 3rd in August and the 4th today. Google still claims that PR is no longer heavily weighted in the ranking algorithm, however it remains an important metric to monitor in the world of SEO.

What changes have you noticed? PR? Rankings? Let me know!

Back in March, Google released information on how to “Make your AJAX Applications Crawlable” which showed a step-by-step method on how to make your AJAX/JS search engine friendly. The latest news comes this morning as Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that the latest Googlebot update, allows Google’s famous search bot to execute and crawl dynamic AJAX/JavaScript comments on websites.

Matt Cutts Twitter Announcement on Googlebot - Now with AJAX/JS reading powers!

Such exciting news to learn this morning as previously Google (for whatever reason) has struggled to do this over the years. Comments such as those from Facebook and others that are dynamically loaded by AJAX or JavScript (such as DISQUS comments) can now be executed, crawled and indexed by Google – exciting times!

Whilst it is doubtful that the links produced in these comments will give any significant value to the website they’re linking to, it is still a big leap forward for the search engine giant and a necessity now with how rapidly the internet is changing and going more “social”. It will allow more information to be shown in the index and faster.

While there isn’t too much information at this stage detailing how this is actually possible, there is speculation and different write-ups surfacing around the internet with claims that Googlebot is based on Google Chrome and therefore has the same crawling abilities as the browser – scary.