This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed . Safety, security and privacy are important parts of the search equation for us at Google, particularly as we continue to bring you the best possible search experience on the web. Security in particular can be an important part to your interaction with the Google search box, so we’re always looking for ways to make changes and enhancements to that interaction secure. Especially as we all spend more time online, the importance of security has taken center stage. So in addition to this week’s secure search enhancement, you can read our latest news and insights at our Online Security Blog . More secure searches Years ago we added Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs, as part of our effort to advance the safety and security of our products for you. Now you have a new choice to search more securely using https://www.google.com . When you use this https address, an encrypted session is established between your browser and Google that uses an SSL connection. Just like on an online banking page, the “https” confirms that you are using a more secure connection that will help protect your search terms and your search results from being intercepted by a third party. For more information on this security enhancement, read our announcement . Example of encrypted search: [ flowers ] Whether you’re planning a trip by train or scouring the real-time web, this week’s roundup also includes two search enhancements that should greatly improve the richness of yor search results — no matter what you’re looking for. Images in real-time search updates Ten blue links on a search results page can provide you with a lot of really helpful information, but sometimes you’re searching for content that is richer than a textual web page. For instance, what are people saying about Lady Gaga’s latest garb? Until now, it’s been hard to get this kind of rich visual detail that’s really fresh. So this week we began rolling out a feature for images in real-time search. When searching for the latest content across the real-time web, you’ll be able to quickly see the images people are talking about right now (based on URLs of those images in their public updates.) To view this new feature, click on “Updates” in the lefthand panel when you complete a search. Then click on “Updates with images.” Example search: [ pac-man doodle ] Transit search enhanced Often when we search, it’s to get from point A to point B, such as when the best route is by train. Then it’s important to know the specific details of the train station near you, like which lines it serves. Now you can easily get this information in the lefthand panel on Google Maps by searching for the transit station. The lines are colored and grouped by transit type to make it easier to find the line you’re looking for. For rail trains, you can see the departure time directly. For other types of transit like subways, buses and commuter trains, you can click on the line name to get the next departure time of each direction—all without having to leave the current page. Example search: [ Broadway-Lafayette St Station ] Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next week for more search news. Search on! Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

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This week in search 5/30/10

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer Seminars for Success are a great way to get in-depth, hands-on training on two products that can help you maximize your marketing and website ROI. Seminars are available coast-to-coast all summer long. Starting in June, we have three sets of seminars being held in New York, Phoenix, and Chicago. Here’s a look at what you’ll learn by attending a seminar with one of our Google Analytics Certified Partners (GACP) . Google Analytics – Introduction & User Training Whether you’re just getting started or have been involved with Google Analytics for a while, if you’re looking for a thorough training in all of the reports Google Analytics provides, this is the course for you. First, you’ll get a detailed background in the web analytics industry. Then you’ll go through a detailed examination of all of the reports Google Analytics has to offer, with real-world examples of how they can help you. You’ll also learn how to segment your site’s users, spot key trends, and of course, how to take your web analytics data and use it to your advantage. Google Analytics – Advanced Analysis Techniques If you’re already familiar with the basics of Google Analytics and are looking to become more sophisticated in your analysis, this course will show you how to do just that. Whether your business goals are user engagement, lead generation, or e-commerce, you’ll benefit from learning how to use the most advanced analysis features of Google Analytics, like Intelligence and Advanced Segmentation. Google Analytics – Implementation & Advanced Topics For those who are comfortable with Google Analytics but want to dive deeper into the technical side of GA, this advanced technical implementation course is for you. This training is tailored a bit more toward the tech-savvy, but is extremely valuable to anyone who wants to learn what Google Analytics can do when taken beyond the “plain vanilla” implementation. You’ll go “under the hood” of Google Analytics and learn about filter configuration and setup, opportunities for advanced, custom implementations, as well as the newest beta features that are rolling out. Website Optimizer Once you’ve nailed down your Google Analytics implementation, you’re ready to start taking action on your data by testing your website. This interactive training in Google Website Optimizer teaches you how to test your site to improve your users’ experience and your business’s bottom line. Attendees will receive a strong background in landing page testing and testing best practices, many real-world case studies, and an optional, hands-on lab experience in starting both A/B and Multivariate tests. New York, NY: Register Here June 8: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training June 9: Google Analytics Advanced Analysis Techniques June 10: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics Phoenix, AZ: Register Here June 9: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training June 10: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics June 11: Google Website Optimizer Chicago, IL: Register Here June 23: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training June 24: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics June 25: Google Website Optimizer If these dates don’t work for you, see the complete Seminars for Success schedule . Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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School’s out, but the learning never stops

Yesterday someone emailed me this quote “People that pay for things never complain. It’s the guy you give something to that you can’t please.” ~Will Rogers and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage. But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value. What a lot of SEO professionals don’t realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them: what areas your business is focused on what keywords are important to you what links you are buying how much you think you will make from the marketing That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can’t be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm… xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site…well they must be making some good money off it - lets clone it. The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn’t stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result. A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops! Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a “thanks for the data, fool” perspective.

Excerpt from:
The Hidden Risk of Trusting Link Building Networks

Yesterday someone emailed me this quote “People that pay for things never complain. It’s the guy you give something to that you can’t please.” ~Will Rogers and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage. But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value. What a lot of SEO professionals don’t realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them: what areas your business is focused on what keywords are important to you what links you are buying how much you think you will make from the marketing That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can’t be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm… xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site…well they must be making some good money off it - lets clone it. The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn’t stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result. A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops! Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a “thanks for the data, fool” perspective.

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The Hidden Risk of Trusting Link Building Networks

Last week, we opened sign-ups for Google Wave to everyone as part of Google Labs and made it available for all Google Apps domains. Here is the quick (seven minute) update on the state of the product from this year’s Google IO conference: Today, it’s been a full year since the Wave team first got on stage at the Moscone Center and demoed a new vision for communication and collaboration to a crowd of developers. In a guest article on the Huffington Post last week, Lars described innovation and working on Google Wave as a rollercoaster—and this year has certainly been a fascinating ride. For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure and the challenge of explaining why this new technology is useful . Unlike some other products that I have also been lucky enough to work on, Wave is not a more advanced approach to a known application like webmail or the browser. It’s actually a new category, which can be kind of hard to wrap your head around. I work in Wave every day, and we have identified a number of clear use cases for getting things done in groups at businesses and at schools . But people also ask me how I use Wave outside of work to understand how they should start using it themselves. As it turns out, the ways I use Wave aren’t revolutionary or groundbreaking—I communicate about everyday things, but it is these incredibly ordinary and important communications that are transformed in unexpected ways when you use Wave. I wave with my family—with my mom, who is across the country, and with my sister who is a graduate student. We’re all on different schedules and very rarely all online at the same time. In one wave, we decided what to wear for a friend’s wedding—adding suggestions for each other with links and pictures, updating the wave as we had side conversations and made decisions. My mom and I chatted about my dress choice when we were both online, and then my sister was easily able to catch up later, adding her ideas. It kept all three of us up to speed in one place, rather than having several phone conversations, emails and chats. Sharing these small personal projects in a wave removes the little bits of friction to make the discussions more dynamic and productive. From talking to other people who use Google Wave, I know I’m not alone. I’ve been struck by the really personal nature of communicating and working together in Wave, and the emotional response people have to their first uniquely wavey experience, what we call the “Wave a-ha moment.” For many people it’s the live typing that does it; for others it’s the first time they create an in-line reply, embed a YouTube video or edit someone else’s text. You really do have to try it to believe it, though—so if you checked out Google Wave six months ago and found yourself at a bit of a loss, take another look. The product is much faster and more stable and we have templates and tutorials to help you get started. Next time you find yourself taking notes while you are on the phone, do it in a wave and add your colleagues, or pull a couple friends or family members onto a wave for a small project… like going to the movies. So head to wave.google.com and sign in. You can get more updates on our blog and even share your stories (ordinary or otherwise) with wave.stories@googlewave.com. Wave on! Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave

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Happy 1st birthday, Google Wave!

Last week, we opened sign-ups for Google Wave to everyone as part of Google Labs and made it available for all Google Apps domains. Here is the quick (seven minute) update on the state of the product from this year’s Google IO conference: Today, it’s been a full year since the Wave team first got on stage at the Moscone Center and demoed a new vision for communication and collaboration to a crowd of developers. In a guest article on the Huffington Post last week, Lars described innovation and working on Google Wave as a rollercoaster—and this year has certainly been a fascinating ride. For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure and the challenge of explaining why this new technology is useful . Unlike some other products that I have also been lucky enough to work on, Wave is not a more advanced approach to a known application like webmail or the browser. It’s actually a new category, which can be kind of hard to wrap your head around. I work in Wave every day, and we have identified a number of clear use cases for getting things done in groups at businesses and at schools . But people also ask me how I use Wave outside of work to understand how they should start using it themselves. As it turns out, the ways I use Wave aren’t revolutionary or groundbreaking—I communicate about everyday things, but it is these incredibly ordinary and important communications that are transformed in unexpected ways when you use Wave. I wave with my family—with my mom, who is across the country, and with my sister who is a graduate student. We’re all on different schedules and very rarely all online at the same time. In one wave, we decided what to wear for a friend’s wedding—adding suggestions for each other with links and pictures, updating the wave as we had side conversations and made decisions. My mom and I chatted about my dress choice when we were both online, and then my sister was easily able to catch up later, adding her ideas. It kept all three of us up to speed in one place, rather than having several phone conversations, emails and chats. Sharing these small personal projects in a wave removes the little bits of friction to make the discussions more dynamic and productive. From talking to other people who use Google Wave, I know I’m not alone. I’ve been struck by the really personal nature of communicating and working together in Wave, and the emotional response people have to their first uniquely wavey experience, what we call the “Wave a-ha moment.” For many people it’s the live typing that does it; for others it’s the first time they create an in-line reply, embed a YouTube video or edit someone else’s text. You really do have to try it to believe it, though—so if you checked out Google Wave six months ago and found yourself at a bit of a loss, take another look. The product is much faster and more stable and we have templates and tutorials to help you get started. Next time you find yourself taking notes while you are on the phone, do it in a wave and add your colleagues, or pull a couple friends or family members onto a wave for a small project… like going to the movies. So head to wave.google.com and sign in. You can get more updates on our blog and even share your stories (ordinary or otherwise) with wave.stories@googlewave.com. Wave on! Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave

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Happy 1st birthday, Google Wave!

by Manoj Jasra Last week I caught up with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google (on the Webmaster Tools team). Maile will be keynoting SES Toronto in a couple of weeks with a presentation titled: Inside Google Webmaster Central. I was able to get a sneak peak on some of the topics from that upcoming session in my chat with Maile - read more about it below: [Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position? [Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once. We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites. In our improved Search queries , you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan. Features like Search queries’ replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets. [Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite? [Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate

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Insight Into Webmaster Tools - A Chat with Google’s Maile Ohye

by Manoj Jasra Last week I caught up with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google (on the Webmaster Tools team). Maile will be keynoting SES Toronto in a couple of weeks with a presentation titled: Inside Google Webmaster Central. I was able to get a sneak peak on some of the topics from that upcoming session in my chat with Maile - read more about it below: [Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position? [Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once. We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites. In our improved Search queries , you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan. Features like Search queries’ replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets. [Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite? [Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate

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Insight Into Webmaster Tools - A Chat with Google’s Maile Ohye

Now that big media practices keyword stuffing , engage in link selling , are invested in SEO start ups , and are selling SEO services perhaps they won’t publish ill-informed pablum when writing about SEO. Don’t hold your breath waiting on that, but… Now that newspapers are looking to sell SEO services, Google is rumored to be out and about asking them to remove links : We understand that newspapers are currently being contacted by Google and being asked to remove links (especially those placed after the articles have been written – ie comment links and links that are placed for payment in articles weeks or months after it had gone live). As a company, we have been aware that placing links in articles once they have picked up PR is not an uncommon practice in the industry, and we also knew that it would probably come to no good which is why we stayed well away. However, we do have some legitimate links on these sites that were placed as part of a press release or an interview and these are slowly being removed through no fault of our own. So much for all the hard work eh? Google is warning newspapers from linking out and is warning webmasters not to do guest posts . It turns out that any and every link is a bad link in their warped mental model of the web. The random surfer must be quite inebriated. And lost. As Google controls more traffic and the value of a #1 ranking increases Google continues to filter filter filter the web graph . The good news is that as Google’s view of reality is increasingly warped & their guidelines reflect reality less and less they create a greater opportunity for some competing company to come along and build something better. And for any professional SEO who reads between the lines there is value in Google misleading the rest of the herd. About a decade ago Sergey Brin stated they didn’t believe in spam . A decade later they don’t believe in the media and don’t believe in links. What happened?

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Google Still Busy Killing Off the Link Graph, One Link at a Time

A new book by a stellar team is now available for you to take your usage of Google Analytics to the next level. It’s called Performance Marketing with Google Analytics , by Sebastian Tonkin (former Googler), Caleb Whitmore of Analytics Pros and Justin Cutroni from WebShare (both Google Analytics Certified Partners ). Here’s what Sebastian told us about it when we asked him how this book was different from others: Sebastian: “Google Analytics can save you money! Use it to figure out what works with your online marketing, invest in that, and throw out the rest. This is the focus of our new title on Google Analytics geared toward business people and online marketers with an eye toward the bottom line.” Avinash Kaushik pitched in with a Forward, writing: “The key to real and magnificent success is not the ability to purchase a tool… but rather the ability to ensure a clean implementation and bring to it a mental model that will rock this world. This book is focused, page after detailed page, on doing just that.” See how real-world businesses use Google Analytics to drive online strategy and improve ROI on a daily basis. Follow step-by-step examples and learn how to: Track and optimize social media, SEO, email and offline campaigns. Maximize ROI on your marketing spend. Build a strong team to support Google Analytics inside your organization. Get more from your Adwords campaign. Use the web to understand what customers want. Create customer loyalty on your site. Use feedback from users to guide online strategy. Win share from competitors. Caleb went further into depth on the contents: “This book tackles the delicate challenge of teaching how to think as well as what to do. The first section focuses on the philosophical, managerial and organizational aspects of succesfully utilizing web analytics technologies to drive greater marketing performance. The second section covers the end-to-end of how to plan, install, configure, and use Google Analytics to its fullest capability. The final sections then covers application of the concepts and capabilities from the first sections to specific marketing disciplines - site optimization, display and sponsored search ads, organic search engine optimization, offline, email marketing, and more. The end result: learn how to think, get guidance on setting up Google Analytics correctly, and then discover practical steps to drive higher performance from all aspects of marketing.” Thanks guys, and great work. Grab a copy on Amazon or find out more on the book’s companion site, www.analyticsformarketers.com . Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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New Google Analytics Book Released