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Recovering from Google Penguin

On April 24th 2012 many websites suffered a drop in search engine rankings after Google launched the Penguin algorithm update.  Two weeks on Matt Cutts has suggested that those affected by this update should review his videos "When are penalties lifted" and "Does Google take manual action on webspam?" in order to understand how to clean up their websites and if the website in question will automatically return to it's previous positions or whether a re-inclusion request is required.

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Google announces the launch of a new anti-spam algorithm update

Yesterday in a cross-post on the Inside Search and Webmaster Central blogs, Google announced that they are launching a new search algorithm update aimed at combating webspam.

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Project Glass from Google

Google's highly secretive "Google X lab" have released the first video of their new cutting edge goggles.  The video titled "One Day," shows a day in the life of a goggle wearing New Yorker. 

The goggles allow the wearer to check the weather, share photos and chat with friends, listen to music and request directions using Google Maps in augmented reality.

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Google Consumer Survey

The new Google Consumer Survey site allows users to write their own survey questions which are then presented to users on websites around the internet.  Survey makers pay $0.10 per completed survey and the site which hosts the survey receives a small income in a similar way to Googe Adsense.

The person answering the survey may gain access to premium content on websites in return for their responses.  Instead of bombarding surfers with a 40 question survey, the Google Consumer Survey can ask 40 people one question each.  According to Google this improves the response rate from 2% to 40%

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The easy way to find links using Google's own search operators

Most people overlook the easiest way to find the websites which may want to link to you.  Google provides a number of search operators which allow you to filter through all the chaff and find exactly what you are looking for.  Here are a few examples.

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40 more changes to Google search quality

Google have just released a list of 40 search algorithm changes made in February 2012.  Most of them were rolled out earlier in the month but one or two are being rolled out at the beginning of March.

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New viral video for iVan

We've just uploaded a new video for iVan.  iVan provide commercial vehicle insurance as well as policies for individual tradesmen.

Note the Oscar winning acting performances by two of our Fuse employees!

Panda targets low-quality sites

In January Google rolled out a data refresh for Panda and further improvements to their algorithm. 

In a post from last year  (Finding high quality sites in search) Google explains that these types of changes are aimed at improving the rankings of high quality sites and lowering those for sites with poor quality.

In 2012 they have improved how Google Panda interacts with the indexing and ranking systems, integrating it further into their "pipelines.

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Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing in SOPA Protest

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is designed to allow content owners and Governments to block internet access to websites containing unauthorised copyright material by obtaining a court order.

Payment gateways, internet service providers, search engines and advertisers would be forbidden from doing business with overseas websites which have court orders against them.

Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing have all taken their sites offline in protest against the proposed act.

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The 'Reasonable Surfer' patent

In 2010 Google was granted a patent called "Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data" which it had originally applied for in 2004.

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