Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts Delivered To Your Inbox

Google announced that they will be rolling out the capability for users to have popular topics from Google Trends and Hot Searches delivered via email.

This new feature will work in a very similar way to how Google Alerts currently works. You will be able to subscribe to a meticulous topic and receive a notification if there is an increase in search volume around that topic.

Currently, Google allows you to give to to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.

You will also be able to subscribe to notifications about trending topics by location. For example, if you want to stay up to date about trends and trendy searches in your local area, you can set up an email notification to tell you about the “hottest” Hot Searches in the location of your option and get occasional emails about major local trends.

To set up an email subscription, simply visit the Subscriptions section within Google Trends and click on Add subscription.

From there, select the topic and country of your option and indicate how often you would like to receive notifications. Then click the Subscribe button.

That’s all it takes to go on your finger on the pulse of trending topics and popular search terms. This is an extremely useful feature for all the busy professionals out there who don’t have time to manually sift through blogs and websites every day to stay current. Now the information can be sent directly to you.

Google announced today they will be rolling out the skill for users to have popular topics from Google Trends and Hot Searches delivered via email.

This new feature will work in a very similar way to how Google Alerts now works. You will be able to subscribe to a exacting topic and receive a notification if there is an increase in search volume around that topic.

Currently, Google allows you to subscribe to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.

You will also be able to subscribe to notifications about trending topics by location. For example, if you want to stay up to date about trends and popular searches in your local area, you can set up an email notification to tell you about the “hottest” Hot Searches in the location of your choice and get irregular emails about major local trends.

To set up an email subscription, simply visit the Subscriptions section within Google Trends and click on Add subscription.

From there, select the topic and country of your choice and specify how often you would like to receive notifications. Then click the Subscribe button.

That’s all it takes to keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics and accepted search terms. This is an very useful feature for all the busy professionals out there who don’t have time to physically sift through blogs and websites every day to stay current. Now the information can be sent directly to you.

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Google Will Reward Secure Websites With Better Search Rankings

 Is Google allowing for giving websites that use strong encryption special placement in its search results?

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has hinted at this, having spoken about about such a move. Cutts was talking at the SMX West conference in San Jose, California, when the topic of website hacking came up and he talked about Google's response to it.

He said that pleasing secure websites would save Google time whenever a fresh security panic sweeps the Internet, according to Time magazine.

"We don't have the time to maybe hold your hand and walk you through and show you exactly where it happened," Cutts said.

Cutts has also spoken in private about this, the Wall Street Journal reported. Google has remained mute on the topic.

No one is expecting the change to happen anytime soon, however Google is throwing resources at Heartbleed, which is a much more instant issue,

Google is one of the few outfits that had prior knowledge of the OpenSSL vulnerability, and now, almost a week later, it is still reacting to it.

In an update to its Online Security blog it suggested that some of its users should establish new encryption keys right away.

"In light of new research on extracting keys using the Heartbleed bug, we are recommending that Google Compute Engine (GCE) customers create new keys for any affected SSL services. Google Search Appliance (GSA) customers should also consider creating new keys after patching their GSA," it wrote yesterday.

"Engineers are working on a patch for the GSA, and the Google Enterprise carry Portal will be updated with the patch as soon as it is available."

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Instructions to Ensure Your SEO Strategy chains Your Brand

 SEO isn't just about ranking for keywords. Many people fall into a keyword obsession channel and seem to disregard that while keywords are significant, SEO at its core is about indexation, crawlability, and creating a site that is successfully traversed by heaving search bots.

Many people also often forget how, when done successfully, SEO supports their brand. How your brand is displayed in search, as well as the many other online properties where you have a presence, is usually forgotten in the race toward powerful rankings for desired non-branded keywords. Don't get me wrong, I love to see non-branded organic visibility rise, but we can't forget "The Brand."

In order to give the brand its fair share of SEO awareness, here are seven areas you should focus that will give some love to your company.

1. Sitelinks

Do a search for your brand name. Confidently you rank number one. If not, you've got more on your plate to worry about.

If you already rank number one, six sitelinks are likely showing under your main natural listings, like this:

Are these the pages that you most want new visitors to journey into? Are these the best six pathways into your site that talk to the brand and your message?

If not, you need to visit the sitelinks section and demote the worthless links. They will disappear and Google will try again with an internal link offering. Continue to tweak this until you get the preferred display.

2. Logo Schema

Give Google and Bing formatted code in the language they want to read it: schema. By using brand logo schema you are doing a more whole job of conveying your brand image to search engines. I expect that in the future you will see small brand logos show up next to organic listings for brand searches.

3. Brand Image Alt Tagging

Whenever you join in other online areas, advertise, etc. your brand logo company imagery should contain branded text within the alt attribute. Given the fact that brand searches may present image worldwide results, you want nothing but your brand to dominate in this section. The same applies for image search.

4. Google+ and the Knowledge Graph

Many people don't want to give Google+ the time of day. We know that contribution is believed to give a visibility bonus in Google's search results.

Google+ is also a advantage to visibility for branded searches, if Google is syncing the relationship between your brand and your established Google+ page and your brand appears in the Knowledge Graph for first page brand results. Another plus of this assignment is that your recent posts in Google+ are presented in results, giving a little news flair to your branded results.

5. Publisher Tagging

I declare above the syncing between site and Google+ and your site. The publisher tag placed across site source code helps you go the extra mile in reinforcing the connection between Google+ and the site.

6. Local Listing Management

Employ local listing management solutions to each brand accurateness in local listings as well as the jillion local citations you may have out on the web.

7. The Rest of the Results

We've enclosed quite a bit of what is on the first page of brand results. But beyond the top listings, other domains are going to rank for your brand. These could be local directory listings, social properties, PR, or possible bad press.

You can use a tool such as Knowem.com to find all the social outlets you don't have a presence. Start creating as many online profiles as you can and nurturing them. This can help you take your SERP brand ownership into the second page.

We have attractive much covered the search results, but what about popular partial brand searches?

Use Google's autocomplete and type in your brand. What are the usually searched additional brand-related queries? Let's take what we did in the aforementioned steps, wash, rinse, and repeat in these other popular search results.

Conclusion

Many of the areas mentioned in this post are more house-cleaning than anything. With a little branded elbow grease and ongoing monitoring you can take those paying attention in your brand – and keep them interested.

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Choose The Present Events For Link Building

Attracting a lot of awareness with your website is one of the best ways to build links. Giving your website a lively role in present events is a lot more efficient than creating the media attention from scratch. Here's how to arrange your website for future events so you can draw links with your prompt response.

Pick Up on accessible Attention

There are many forms of attention and attention has become a commodity itself. Getting attention has a pair of fixed recipes and some of those have a very predictable outcome. Getting attention from out of nowhere is always hard, but when you link your message to something that previously receives a lot of attention it becomes much easier.

Once a hot topic emerges, everybody wants their piece of the action. If you're one of the first to react or one of the first creative responses, you can have your share, too.

Because timing is everything, you need to come prepared to be on time. That's why you need to plan in front for future events and most of those are predictable.

By focusing on events bound to happen but without a fixed date, you can outsmart the competition. Prepare an early response to one of the following examples.

•    Each year has its great weather and natural disasters somewhere on the globe. Charity initiatives with a lot of media awareness are sure to follow.

•    Scandals in politics or concerning celebrities happen each month. Funny responses get a lot of attention.

•    Elections come in many forms and at least once every four years they get an great amount on attention.

•    Celebrated people die. An ode to their work gets media attention. Eulogies are often pre-written, so why shouldn't you prepare?

•    Movie premieres, electronics introductions, game launches, new albums, and concert tours all call for a lot of attention and some of them are bound to get it. Help them with a message that boosts both your popularities and they might even cooperate.

Getting Attention With Your Message

Now that your message is well-timed during the attention peak of the selected topic, it needs to get traction. This is the first boost of attention required to get people talking about your message.

Famous people, events, organizations, accepted websites, and media labels have attention and they want to keep it as long as possible. It is in their best interest to cooperate in activities that give their existing attention an additional boost and astoundingly often you can do a joint promotion when it is sure to catch attention. Using this as a podium (the traction) for your message makes it go viral.

From concentration to Links

An active role is needed for a website you control. It doesn't need to be your normal website and something with a nonprofit feel to it will often work better. Everybody will be alert to your goals to want all this media attention, so any form of direct sales should be avoided.

From my experience there is only one big danger to all of this. Everybody wants their piece of the action once you've created a new hot-topic. Make sure all that concentration keeps focused on your website for as long as possible.

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Tips To Get More Followers on Instagram

Here are 5 guidelines to get more Instagram followers:

 1.    The more you post, the more followers you get.

 2.    Use additional apps to make the posts more interesting and beautiful to the followers, for example Over, PicLab, ABM.

 3.    Find what’s trendy on Facebook and Twitter and then take photos related to these topics.

 4.    Be a part of your community – comment on other people’s Instagram photos. That’s leaving to cause a deeper relationship with your followers as well as attract new ones.

5.    Doesn’t overuse the hashtags or you risk to become irritating.

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Guest Blogs crack

 The last couple of weeks have given rise to a lot of cussing and discussing, about penalties levied against sites on both ends of the guest-blog field. Both logic and emotions have run high, as people try to sort out what the fresh "acceptable" is, in Google's vision.

Stick a Fork in it

Matt Cutts' blog post in January raised a few eyebrows, as he made a point of saying "So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy."

At first, his post was titled "The decay and fall of guest blogging", but as the comments on the post started heating up, he went back and edited the title, adding "for SEO" at the end, then softened his carriage a little in the comments.

Cutting Deeply

Google has decided that the rude use of guest blogging needs to stop, and typically, they're giving the nod to the inevitable inclusion of innocent or marginal cases amongst the casualties. As usual, a general outcry has been raised, but if past history is any indication, there isn't likely to be any softening of their stance.

Avoiding the Axe

But guest blogging hasn't suddenly become a totally unlawful practice – it just requires a great deal of caution, now that Google is paying more attention. So I thought I'd share some things to watch out for and some ways to mitigate the risks.

1. The Ultra-Safe Approach

If you're a publisher, stricken by fear, doubt and doubt, you could simply add a nofollow attribute to any external links in a guest post, as well as links in the author bio. That will protect you from any accusations of link-scheming.

2. The Moderated Approach

If you're unwilling to nofollow all outbound links from the post, then you actually should check out the end site and page carefully. If there's any possibility that Google could see that site in a poor light, then linking to it isn't a good idea. Bear in mind, too, that the fact that the site may look noisy clean today won't protect you from a possible backlash if they get in problem a year or two down the road.

3. The Devil May Care Approach

We've already seen what this comes near is doing for a lot of folks... and it's only going to get worse. But if you have a stubborn streak or if you just don't care about suddenly fading from the top 100 or so SERPs, knock yourself out.

The Damage

The extent of penalization can vary. A manual penalty may be partial or sitewide, and can be tied to either abnormal outbound links or inbound links, depending upon which end of the food chain you're on.

Outbound Link Penalty

As a publisher, unless you simply don't care, because you get no traffic from Google, you'll need to clean up your act and submit a reconsideration request. If you have a lot of posts on your blog, this can be a tedious task.

Inbound Link Penalty

As a guest blogger on several sites, if your posts are linking back to your site, you may get an inbound link penalty. We haven't seen a lot of these yet, tied to the recent guest blogging purge, so I can't say if they're giving any fractional penalties or only sitewide.

Some Rules of Thumb

Here are a few things that should help keep you safe from a guest blogging-related penalty. Some of these may seem extreme, but with all the doubt that exists about what Google sees as acceptable, I'm proposing a safe approach.

•    Only accept guest posts from people you know are authentic, will give your readers with real value, and aren't guest posting all over the 'net like a lawn sprinkler.

•    Be very serious of any site you link out to from the body of a post. If in doubt, nofollow.

•    Unless you're 100 percent sure that Google will see your guest poster as a believable authority for that topic on your blog, either nofollow the links from the author bio or only link to their Google+ profile.

•    Quality and relevance are more significant than ever. Don't accept any guest posts just to fill a slot in your calendar. Every post you put on your blog should be high excellence... that means well-written, relevant, and of real interest to your readers. If you lower that bar, be prepared for Google to lower the boom.

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Matt Cutts’s explanation about how Google Tests Its Algorithms

Have you ever been interested about how Google decides which algorithm is better than another, when they're pushing out one of the many tweaks they do weekly? How do they judge which tweak really produces better results and which produces lots of good results? Or does the spam team just wave a nerve bat over the server before beating a big red button and hope for the best?

Google's Matt Cutts spills the beans on how the search team actually does it in a webmaster help video, which asks what metrics Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration of the ranking algorithm is delivering better excellence results to users than another.

While Cutts starts off saying that he could geek out on this topic for fairly some time, and I'm sure many of us would love to attend to him does just that, he said he will try and hold back for the sake of video length.

"Whenever an engineer is evaluating a new search quality change, and they want to know whether it's an development, one thing that's useful is we have hundreds of excellence raters who have previously rated URLs as good or bad, spam, all these sorts of dissimilar things.
"So when you make a change, you can see the flux, you can see what moves up and what moves down, and you can look at example searches where the results tainted a lot for example," he said. "And you can say OK, given the changed search results, take the URLs that moved up, were those URLs typically higher rated than the URLs that moved down by the search quality raters?"

While Google tries to keep the details of their quality rater guidelines secret, they inescapably end up getting leaked. The most recent version became known in November and detailed precisely what quality raters are looking for when they rate search results.
"Sometimes since these are recomputed numbers, as far as the ratings, we've already got a stored data bank of all those ratings from all the raters that we have, at times you'll have question marks or empty areas where things haven't been rated," he said. 

"So you can also send that out to the raters, get the results either side-by-side, or you can look at the character URLs, and they say in a side-by-side this set of search results is better, or this set is better or they might say this URL is good in this URL is spam, and you use all of that to assess whether you're making good development."

While it is good that Google pushes these kinds of things that the excellence raters to see what they notice, it doesn't always catch everything. There definitely been times when new tweaks to break something, such as what we saw with entertainment sites that significantly declined in the rankings in February, the quality raters don't always catch.

"If you make it further along, and you're getting close to trying to launch something, often you'll launch what is called a live experiment where you really take two different algorithms, say the old algorithm and the new algorithm, and you take results that would be generated by one and then the other and then you might interleave them. And then if there are more clicks on the newer set of search results, then you tend to say you know what, this new set of search results generated by this algorithm power be a little bit better than this other algorithm.

This is interesting how he is describing interleaving the two sets of search results, as normally we hear about either full pushes, or pushes to a small percent of users. However this could be a live experiment limited strictly to Google employees and quality raters.

He does say that from within Google, the web spam team is metrics can look quite different from the rest of Google, simply because they like to click on spam and see what's ranking, why it is ranking, and to better figure out how to get rid of it.
 

"Sometimes our metrics look a little bit worse in web spam because people click on the spam, and we're like we got less spam, and it looks like people don't like the algorithm as much," he said. "So you have to take all those ratings with little bit of a grain of salt, because nothing replaces your judgment, and the judgment of the quality launch committee."

The quality launch committee is actually not that well known, but it is simply a group of the search quality engineers that receives reports and has meetings regarding search quality, something which Matt has mentioned at least once in previous webmaster help videos.
He continues by talking a little bit about what exactly the quality raters are looking for when they're doing their ratings.

"People can rate things as relevant on a scale, they can rate things as spam, they can even rate the quality of the page, which it sort of does it matter based on the query, but how reputable the page is itself," Cutts said. "And then we have metrics that blend all of that together and when we're done we say okay in general we think that the results got a little bit better, and here the kinds of ways they got better or worse. 

We can even slice and dice and look at different countries or different languages, that sorts of stuff. So in web spam we're not that surprised if users continue to click on the spam, because we can recognize the spam, we have expert raters on those kinds of topics. And we pay special attention to special countries where we know there's more spam and so we can see the sorts of reactions we get there."
Even continues and talks a bit about how every so often they go through and update the quality rating guidelines, something we've seen updated multiple times over the years.

"So we've got it down to a pretty good system," Cutts said. "Every so often we have to revive a process and look at how to improve it, but for the most part things up relatively well in terms of assessing what are the big changes, once you see those big changes it gives you ideas to go back and improve and make things better, and by the time we get to launch committee, normally everybody has a pretty good idea about whether it works and what the strengths and weaknesses of a particular algorithm are.

So if you had visions of Matt Cutts sitting in his office with a big red button on his desk to unleash some new algorithm without any feedback or oversight, you are probably disappointed. There is actually a lot that goes on with testing algorithms, particularly the large ones, and they do get put through the ringer before they go live to remain, to ensure that Google is serving up better search results than the previous algorithm.

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