Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

All these changes are tangible success of social media. In terms of SEO, companies should socialize, use social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and keep an eye on what others tweet about themselves. I believe there is no better tool on the web that Twitter to monitor the real-time reputation of a company. Both Google and Bing index tweets and updates so it’s our job to explain our clients the importance of each comment and the consequences they might bring. Keep yourselves open to changes….

Last week, I read Michael Arrington’s interesting interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on TechCrunch regarding the future of search. The questions were simple and cool. The answers were inspiring. I just can’t wait to read the rest of the interview.

So, what people on internet business would ask or tell to Eric Schmidt regarding Google and internet if they are given a chance to do so. If you have questions or anything to say, write them down here now.  I will bring all comments together and maybe we might get the answers of our common interview later.

First question is coming from me: What do you think about the future of SEO?

Come on, say your word.

According to comScore, 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009 globally.

Google sites had 58 percent increase compared to last year and ranked as the leaders within search engines in global search market with 76.7 billion searches conducted and 67.5 percent market share. Google sites are followed by Yahoo sites with 8.9 billion searches and 7.8 percent market share. Yahoo had just 2 percent increase compared to last year and closely followed by Chinese search engine Baidu sites with 8 billion searches 7.0 percent share. Microsoft sites ranked forth worldwide with a 41 percent increase compared to last years data which seems promising for next year.

The overall July 2009 data represents a 41-percent increase versus July 2008 in global search market that is a positive indicator for future search marketing opportunities and e-business.

Since Matt Cutts from Google throw a bombshell in SMX advanced meeting in 3th of June about Page Rank Sculpting, every search marketing blog is discussing the same issue. Is it really like “nofollow” attribute no longer passes more juice to followed links or not and what changes shall SEO’s do in that case? First of all lets have a look at what page rank sculpting is all about.

What is page rank sculpting?

Every page has a page rank value, that is a numerical weighting that it passes in to the links allocated in it. Page Rank sculpting occurs when we use “nofollow” attribute in unimportant links to prevent passing page rank values so that we pass that left over weight in to followed links to increase the page rank of those links.

According to Google’s change, regardless of  “nofollow” attribute, Google determines the Page Rank  it passes along  links according to the number of links on a web page. That is using “nofollow” no longer generates more page rank for the followed links. Here are some of Matt Cutts goodies:

“At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time.”

“Yes, I would agree that Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. But that’s no reason to make PageRank a complete black box; if I can help provide people with a more accurate mental model, overall I think that’s a good thing. For example, from your proposed paragraph I would strike the “The number of links doesn’t matter” sentence because most of the time the number of links do matter, and I’d prefer that people know that. I would agree with the rest of your paragraph explanation.”

“I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results.”

“Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.”

What to do next?

So what if you want to have links on your page but want Google not to count them when determining the page rank flow values? SEOmoz has a useful post on this topic so it is worth to have a look at and get some ideas such as using iframes for comments section in your blogs.

I don’t count my self as an expert in SEO yet but from the very beginning of my search marketing journey, there is one thing I learned which is creating a good search experience and unique content in your website is the king and it is better to avoid complicated practices if your website is already performing good.

Do you think so?

Google unveiled Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in Google I/O conference last week. Since I was not there I searched on the internet and found out what Google Wave is all about. First of all, it is something we all need to wait and experience to understand how much difference it can make in our business and daily communication needs. It seems to be a combination of email, instant messaging and micro-blogging all under the same interface. There are some terminologies which we all will become familiar with as we use Google Wave. Ok, lets have a look at it.

Above is a screenshot of how Google Wave looks like. On the left, there is your Google Wave folders and your Google contact list with images of your contacts. There is Google wave inbox in the middle of screen where you can click on any wave to open a pane for that wave on the right side of the screen. There users can see everything about that wave, respond to waves, add more people just by simply dragging pictures of people in their contact list in to the wave,  rewind back and see how that wave evolved over time, change the contents in a wave or see the changes made by other users in a wave.

People on a wave can send messages in the real-time where participants see other people’s keyboard clicks letter by letter. You can use the “Draft” mode if you don’t want people to see your words until you send them.You can also private message to someone within a wave. Your message will be kept in the content flow of the wave but that message will be displayed only to you and your private contact.

Another exciting feature of wave is that people can share images by just dragging the image in to the waves. They can also share Google Maps which can be editted, games, event invitations etc.

“Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.”

And we come to the point that mostly interests me. Waves can be used across websites on the net as they can be embedded on any blog or website. The Google Wave Embed API allows us to aggregate conversations on third party websites, anywhere in the web in our website. Visitors will be able to see waves and they can join in and participate to the waves from websites. Those messages will directly be published in the original wave. This can be a great online marketing and communication tool to promote products, get valuable straight feedback from the clients, enable real-time communication, and extend our networks.

Google wave is open-sourced and it will evolve by the help of developers over time and will be a product created by it’s own users.  Developers can build their own apps just like Facebook and iGoogle within waves which will bring new advertising opportunities as well.

Google wave will be available later this year. You can sign up for Google Wave updates and be informed about when it is coming a live.

Here is a long official video of Google wave.  Enjoy it.

Google launched new search options at it’s Searchology event held at its Mountain View headquarters to improve search experience of users.

New Google Search Options are giving an advanced search experience with easy to use of navigation. From now on, users will be able to refine their search results deeper according to time, relevance, reviews, timeline and many more.

I especially find it very useful to refine search results only for the last 24 hours which gives fresh content for your topic and I agree with Google’s product manager Kavi Goel that this is a  “step toward making the whole internet smarter.”

Google search option Wonder Wheel

Another fantastic feature is Wonder Wheel. When you make a search, it puts your keyword in to the center of the wheel and gives you related search terms. You go deeper and deeper as you click on related terms covering your main search term.

New search features gives an insight to SEO’s for the future strategies. Similar to blended search, new search options welcomes proactive and committing websites in the new search universe.

How do you think new search features will affect SEO practices?

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