Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm, has come up with an intriguing post, where he theorized that Google is in the process of changing its algorithms, due to which it has reduced the importance of anchor text to a bare minimum.

According to Patrick, “Quite a number of the queries we track have altered recently and websites that previously ranked have dropped down by a number of places. This doesn’t appear to be a penalty - just an alteration in the algorithm. The common characteristic all the sites have is that their rankings were based very heavily on anchor text rather than on-site optimization. The changes don’t seem to have affected major commercial queries yet but they are visible when you search for particular peoples names.”

Google, via the Official Google Blog has announced the introduction of a new search related feature known as, “Google Suggest”. This new feature is designed to significantly simplify a user’s search experience by providing search suggestions as the query is typed in.

According to Google, “We’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.”

The top search engine, Google has been rated as ‘Unsatisfactory’ by the Better Business Bureaus (BBB) recently, as the customers are not getting satisfactory response to their complaints. Though, Google is not accredited to BBB, it has a record on the BBB files that says, Google has overlooked a number of concerns of its customers. However, Google has been able to take care of many of the concerns, still it needs to focus on its myriad of responsibilities towards its users.

In yet another round of search engine rankings, ComScore has released the ‘U.S. Search Engine Rankings for June 2008′. The latest results show that Google is still steaming ahead of the competition, but there has been slight improvements in the figures of Microsoft and Yahoo! as well. However, the figure for the raw searches for Google, have sky rocketed according to the latest figures, with record a record high of 11.5 billion searches.

For the month of June 2008, all across America, an astounding 11.5 billion searches were conducted in just 30 days and yet again Google was on top of the table with a major chunk of the search ration, a whopping 61.5%. Yahoo! recorded 20.9% searches, a slight jump from the figure of 20.6% in May 2008. Microsoft posted a gain amounting to almost 1% with a figure of 9.2%, where its figure for May was 8.5%.

Noel of Search Engine Herald has put up a post about a topic, that is sort of a taboo in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This topic is called ‘Keyword Mining’. Now, every website has it very own web statistics, that enable the Webmasters to understand operational critical factors about their websites such as, the number of visitors, visiting frequency and other details as well.

All Webmasters have an option of keeping their web statistics private and thus inaccessible to the public in general. However, most of the Webmasters do not bother to use the privacy option and in many cases, some of the Webmasters have been absolutely ignorant about the existence of such an option in their analytical tools. At present, Google is the King of Search and practically indexes every page on the Internet. Many a times, with the pages that are being indexed, these website statistics also get indexed by Google and are displayed in the search results for the whole world to see.

Google has announced, the release of a new feature for Google AdWords. This new feature would be comprised of an advertiser’s Keyword & Placement Targeted campaigns, combined together, thus giving the advertiser a unique opportunity to combine these separate campaigns into a single online campaign.

According to Google, “Starting today, you can target keywords and placements together in the same ad group. By doing so, you combine the benefits of contextual targeting with placement targeting: use keywords to show your ads only on contextually relevant pages, then use placements to set specific bids for, or restrict your targeting to, sites you value differently from the rest of the content network.”

Paid Keyword Tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery have been around for some time and are regarded as some of the most widely used and recommend Keyword Research Tools. However, since the introduction of Search Volume Numbers in Google AdWords Keyword Tool, it seems that Google is about to throw the other keyword tools (especially the paid ones) out of business and might render them altogether useless.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool with ‘ Search Volume Numbers’ indicator:

Google has begun to tighten the leash on the websites that try to get around the Google Webmaster Guidelines. In a latest post at Search Engine Roundtable, it has been reported that Google has admitted that, it has penalized Newsday.com, a premier news website for “selling links that pass PageRank.” This move has been made in the wake of violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, as stated by Google.

Recently, a post was put up at the Google Groups, discussing this very situation and Google’s immediate response was this:

“Thanks for your post. I’m glad you’re posting here in the Webmaster Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/

Google has finally added a new display metric known as ‘Approximate Search Count’ to the Google AdWords keyword tool. This feature will be displayed alongside the color graphs, that till now was the only means that served as an indicator of the data in the keywords tool. Now, when you perform a search on the keywords tool, your results will be displayed with ‘Approx Search Volume’ and ‘Approx Avg Search Volume’ as data indicators along with the color graphs.

Over at the Webmaster World, there is a highly informative post put up by one of the members, that tells us about the importance of ‘Punctuations’ in the keywords for the Google Search Results. Below is the post that has most certainly gathered a lot of appreciation from other members of the Webmaster World.

Post:

“Various punctuation characters have a noticeable impact on search results - mostly from a searcher perspective. As a webmaster, you may find that your users include punctuation in some keywords, and so it can be of use to know what the effect on the results they see is. And besides, knowing how to search Google is one step towards understanding how Google works. This is a spot check of the current handling of punctuation by Google.