The never-ending chicken-and-egg issue of gaining ground in Google results is about to take another abrupt turn. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the company is working on a new set of tweaks to the fabled “GoogleBot” that will penalize sites that over-optimize for prime Google results.

Search Engine Land’sBarry Schwartzreports that Cutts let the impending tweaks slip out while speaking at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The goal, said Cutts, is to “level the playing field” between sites that focus on excessive optimization to achieve strong Google results versus sites that hit Google naturally through strong, relevant content.

“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now,” Cutts said.

Cutts added that the optimizations could hit anytime between the next few weeks to a month from now. Google hasn’t gone on record with any additional details as to what its optimizations might include – fair, since additional details about how the GoogleBot will rank sites could invariably assist those looking to re-game the rankings for their benefit. It’s also unclear as to how Google plans to “penalize” sits that over-optimize, or even if there’s going to be a way for website operators to determine whether they fall below this threshold or not.

More at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp

Yesterday, Google rolled out yet another new feature for Google+ that lets you start a conversation directly from search results - and contribute to a topical Google+ stream.

In a post on Google+ (of course), associate product manager Alex Unger said that if you search for a keyword of phrase like basketball from within Google+, you can then create a post directly from the results shown.

He added that all you need to do is look for the share box, and you’ll see an opportunity to “join the discussion” about whatever you’ve searched for.

This means that when you post from the search results page, it automatically includes a link back to the original search stream. This way others can join the active conversation as it unfolds.”

This is yet another move to position Google+ as a central hub – as well as more closely connecting search and social functions.

Up until the announcement of this new feature, you could only comment on an existing post or share an item when searching for something on Google+.

This now removes one step in the search and share process, which makes it easier to start a conversation and keeps people in the Google loop.

More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8733-google-lets-you-start-a-conversation-directly-from-search-results

Michael Martinez posted a thread at High Rankings Forums basically confirming earlier reports that Google will see and pass value of a link within an iframe.

…

He is extremely confident about his test that Google can crawl iFramed pages and follow the links within them.

More at: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-iframe-link-14558.html

Key differences to take note of in 2011 from 2009 are:

• Introduction of page level social factors (is your content shareable & good enough for people to want to share?)
• The overall value of external links has shrunk (though new fields have been added which may skew data)
• Domain level brand metrics are introduced as a key factor’

Dave Chaffey is conducting a survey over on Smart Insights to see what you think SMO is.

The Fives rules of SMO

If you want to improve SMO I recommend Rohit’s 2010 5 NEW Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO), where he defines these guidelines which I interpret as:

Make sure you follow the

It doesn’t take much to send a story viral on Twitter, but a recent quirk in the URL system at The Independent saw a flurry of humorous web links scattered across the Twittersphere. 

I was first alerted to the incident when one of our leading techies at dotCommerce, Stuart Gill, sent me a link that was doing the rounds on Twitter, seemingly exposing an entertaining URL on a story about Kate Middleton’s head in The Independent.

Namely:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html 

While it initially looks as though a sub-editor at the paper has been neglectful, this is actually an example of a little URL rewriting feature that is common to lots of content management systems.

As long as you have the numbers at the end, you can put anything into the URL and it will still work normally.

For example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/why-we-are-cancelling-our-Guardian-subscription-2269573.html

More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7445-using-rewriteable-urls-to-help-user-experience-and-seo

But as a user however, I’m just not sure I’m into it.

For starters, I hate the name. It’s hard to integrate into daily lingo and I think it will be some time before it is adapted as universal. In addition, I don’t like the look of the button. It’s ugly and clunky and makes Google look lame compared to how slick the Facebook Like button integrates.

It’s also difficult to wrap my brain around the idea that I’m sharing this information with my network of friends. What friends? My Google friends? I hardly consider my gmail contact list my friend list. Sorry, but my friends are on Facebook.

So is this the next big thing for Google or is it just the next Google Buzz?

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google%e2%80%99s-1-is-no-facebook-%e2%80%9clike%e2%80%9d/29155/#ixzz1JJhkg5KY

Organic +1′s Will Also Show Up in Ads

What’s also interesting is that users don’t need to specifically endorse ads for their pluses appear on ads. Google’s Oestlien said that there’s a common infrastructure for social search/+1 on both the organic and paid sides. As a result user pluses in organic SERPs or on publisher sites away from Google will impact their appearance in paid search ads.

Here’s a concrete example: say I’m looking for places to stay in Lake Tahoe California for a family ski vacation. I visit a Marriott hotel site as part of my research and decide I like the hotel (so to speak). I then decide to click the +1 button on that Marriott page. If Marriott later incorporates the same URL in its paid search ad for Tahoe vacations my +1 will appear on that ad together with my name and avatar.

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To digress for a moment, there are three consumer experiences around +1:

1. No Google account or not signed in
2. Google account, signed in, but no Google Profile
3. Google Profile holder

Those with Google Profiles can “plus” things; everyone else cannot. The next level down, Google account holders who are signed in will see all the +1′s and personalized “recommendations” even though they cannot add their own pluses without a Google Profile. It will look very much like Social Search does today. Finally, those not signed in or without a Google account will see aggregated +1 data but no personalized information: e.g., 10 users +1′d this (page or ad).

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Google Profile Adoption Challenge

Because publishers and webmasters will quickly realize the potential AdWords and organic benefits of +1 they will adopt the button. The bigger challenge for Google is on the consumer side.

Facebook had a massive installed base of users before the “Like” button was rolled out. Google will need to create that base as it rolls +1 out by getting people to sign up for Google Profiles.

Pluses will be counted as one of the signals that Google eventually uses to determine organic rankings. It’s less clear whether pluses will impact ads quality and paid rankings.