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.

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.

Webmasters at the Webmaster World are stunned and experiencing quite dramatic ranking changes in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). According to the threads, these ranking fluctuations have been occurring because of the July 2008 Google SERP Changes.

For example, a highly targeted website with appreciable performance has suddenly lost all traffic. The Webmasters also report that for the month of July this year, the short tail searches are starting to surface but long tail results have vanished into thin air.

Here are some interesting excerpts from Webmaster World:

“Has anyone recovered from June 4th catastrophe?”

According to the Google AdWords API blog, Google has released the Traffic Estimator Service for Google AdWords API. It is one of the most essential tools for the Webmasters, as it helps them by providing estimates (CPC, clicks per day, etc) for the existing and as well as for the new keywords for a new product or service.

According to Googler AdWords API blog, “AdWords API users can access our trove of historical keyword and bid data via the Traffic Estimator Service, which gives detailed estimates of how much traffic a keyword may generate at various CPC values. The service is not only useful for new products or campaigns, but it can also estimate the impact of changing the Max CPC of existing keywords as well.”