Google Analytics Reports from International Space Station

Real Time Active Visitors Location

The Active Visitors are from International Space Station - Control Room as reported by Google Analytics real time location.

Google Analytics on 1st April 2012 played Piano and Sitar in Google Analytics 

Other Google #AprilFoolsDay for 2013

1. Hunt for Treasure on Google Maps

2. Google Nose

Hunt for Treasure in Nepal on Google Maps Now

Start treasure hunting in Nepal today on Google Maps.

Start Treasure Hunt in Google Maps Nepal

Google Maps Nepal - Treasure Hunt

Explore Treasure - Video

Google is always on very good spirit on April 1st.
Check out GoogleNose - another product from Google.

Google Nose (1st April 2013)

Today's date: 1st April, 2013 and so we get the best product from the Google. This is Google Nose Beta,  "Search for smells".

Do not keyword stuff with phone numbers ?

Does Google take action on sites that do keyword stuffing with phone numbers?

Search, Plus Your World result in Australia

Is Google testing "Search, Plus Your World" results in Australia? "Search, Plus Your World" is a personalised search result and is available to people who are logged into their Google account and searching in English in Google.com.

Currently showing personal results & Hide personal results

There was a new toggle in the upper right and with image icons. One with a tool tip as "currently showing personal results" and the other with "Hide personal results". With a single click, you can show and hide personal results.

click to Enlarge Photo, search plus your world

From, http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; 
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, 
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. 

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.

Updates on Reviews in Google+ Local Pages

Google has updated its spam detection algorithm, as announced by a Googler, Dasha in the Google Product Forums

"To protect both business owners and customers from spam reviews, we have systems in place that may remove individual reviews." as posted in the product forum.

From the forum,

For reviewers:

• Make sure you’ve taken a look at our review content guidelines.
• Sometimes you may want to review multiple locations of the same business, such as your favorite fast food chain. Just remember to tailor each review to the specific location. Others will want to know what sets that location apart - be it the super friendly drive thru person, or maybe the unexpectedly awesome lake views.
• Don’t write reviews for your current employer. We don’t allow reviews from current owners or employees.
• Spam bots use URLs to redirect to other sites or potentially spread malware. We won’t show reviews with links, so, don’t put URLs in the text of your reviews

For business owners:

• Be wary of an SEO or reputation management service that promises to generate reviews for your business. We’ve seen companies make up fake glowing testimonies -- and we’ll take them down.
• We don’t take down negative reviews for simply being negative for anyone, regardless of any other relationships with Google. Instead, we encourage you to utilize the owner response functionality to respond to the review and address the user’s concerns.
• If a third party claims that they know how to remove reviews from Google, don’t believe them. Google does not work with any third party reputation management companies and we certainly don’t remove reviews unless they violate our guidelines.
• Don’t set up a computer or tablet device in your place of business for customers to leave reviews on site. Consider sending a reminder e-mail so customers can review on their own time.
• Remember, we don’t allow you to give customers free gifts or discounts for leaving reviews.

For SEOs:

• If a business accepts paper comment cards it might be tempting to collect them and “digitize” them by posting the reviews on Google+ Local. We ask that all reviews come from first hand experience and do not allow posting reviews on behalf of others.

For everyone:

• If you see a review that violates our policy guidelines, you can report the review to us by clicking on the gray flag icon next to the review in question. You’ll be taken to a form where you can tell us why you’re flagging that review. Please note that we won’t follow up with you individually, but we do review every piece of content that is flagged.

from, Google Product Forums

Data Highlighter in Google Webmaster Tools

More from, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2692911

Edits are verified - Google+ Local Page

Any edits in your Google+ Local Page are verified before publishing.

All changes to your listing may be subject to review to ensure they follow the quality guidelines for listings as well as the Google+ content policy.

from: https://support.google.com/business/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721845&p=appearance_time


Any edits made to the listing are reviewed and

• Some edits may go live shortly

• Some edits may be pending review

• Some edits may be rejected or modified

from: https://support.google.com/business/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2734686&p=edits_unaccepted 

Google+ Page Profile Photo in search

Provide a profile photo of your business for your Google+ Page. Your business profile photo appears in Google search results such as in local search.

Sometimes Google search even provides Street View for your business.

More Links for Google Author in Search

Google provides three more links (related) to read more from the same author to the user. These three more links for the author are displayed in the search if user hits back button (browser back button) after reading article/post from the same author (spent a bit time in previous article/post).

More from : http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-hidden-benefit-of-authorship-134526

Updated Specific Quality Webmaster Guidelines

Updated Webmaster Guidelines with more about the irrelevant keywords, rich snippets, monitoring site for hacking, removing hacked content, removing user generated spam.
Specific quality guidelines outline following techniques to avoid [ the updated and previous ].

updated 10/02/2012	updated 09/18/2012
Automatically generated content	Avoid hidden text or hidden links
Participating in link schemes	Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects
Cloaking	Don't send automated queries to Google
Sneaky redirects	Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords
Hidden text or links	Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
Doorway pages	Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
Scraped content	Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content
Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value	If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first
Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
Abusing rich snippets markup
Sending automated queries to Google
Engage in good practices like the following: Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

from
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines

Google has updated its Webmaster Guidelines [updated 10/02/2012]. They have provided this updated guideline to find, index and crawl your website. Violations of Google guidelines results in low quality of SERPs or sometimes removal from the SERPs.

More:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/google-webmaster-guidelines-updated.html

Low quality exact match domains - Google Updates

Google updates their algo again and this time Google reduces search results for "exact match" domains with low quality.

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

Google Webmaster specific quality guidelines

Google has provided specific quality guidelines in its Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines help your website get crawled and indexed.

- Do not use hidden text or link.
- Avoid cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Do not send automated queries to Google.
- Not to load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Avoid duplicate content.
- Do not create pages with malicious programs
- No doorway pages to cheat search bots.
- Provide a value/reason for your customers to visit your site if your site uses affiliate program.

Resource:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Google Authorship in Search

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

Google displays author information in the Google search results and if you want to display your authorship information for the content you create in the Google search results,
- you will need to create your Google+ profile and then verify authorship of your content, i.e link your Google+ Profile with the content you create.

Google provides following two methods to link your Google+ profile with the content you create. [ learn more ]
1.  Using verified email address to link to your content. i.e verify your email address (author@example.com) on the same domain as your content.
2. Build authorship by linking your content to your Google+ Profile.
- from your webpage, create a link to your Google+ profile. i.e <a href="[profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a>
- Edit your Google+ Profile, and add your website link in the "Contributor to" Section.

You can use structured data testing tool to check what author data Google has extracted.

More:
https://plus.google.com/authorship 
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

Listing Being Reviewed in Google Places

Pending - being reviewed

The business listing is Pending and is being reviewed in the Google Places dashboard. The Google system automatically marks any business listing as pending and is placed in a queue to be manually reviewed by their team.

Why is my listing being reviewed?

Your listing contains a term or other behavior that we monitor, so it has been automatically earmarked by our system for further review. This is a temporary state and is expected behavior for terms that require manual judgment

More: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174542

Google is rolling out Panda Updates

Panda refresh is rolling out—expect some flux over the next few days. Fewer than 0.7% of queries noticeably affected: goo.gl/woSU3
— A Googler (@google) September 18, 2012

Panda Updates history, http://searchengineland.com/panda-update-3-92-rolling-out-or-is-it-panda-4-0-time-133607

Header Photo in Twitter

You can now upload header photo in twitter, @abeen

More from http://blog.twitter.com/2012/09/because-you-have-more-to-show.html?m=1

Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. Upload an all-new header photo on mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Android or twitter.com, and the same image will appear whenever anyone views your profile on the web or these apps. You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.

Google updates algo - Matt tweets

Just fyi, we rolled out a small algo change this week that improves the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 14, 2012

We currently do not support the location in Google Places

Received the PIN, verified and this is what we see if we try to "See your listing on Google" in the dashboard. Yes, Google still has not solved this "We currently do not support the location" issue.
This is a newly created business listing and needs to have citations as well.