A roundup of some of the most interesting Google updates and industry news for October 2011.

1. Industry Updates
Industry Update
October 2011

2. Industry Updates
Google Moving to HTTPs for Logged in Users & It’s Impact
• Google is no longer passing on the keyword information for logged in users of google.com.
• This change has not been well received, particularly in the SEO industry. It will mean website
owners have less information about where some of their organic search traffic comes from.
• Privacy concerns are cited as reasons for the change, a motive questioned by many in the
digital marketing industry since the keyword data is still available for paid search results.
• Looking through Guava’s UK client’s analytics packages, across a variety of sectors, sizes of
websites and locations, it looks as if the impact so far is, at best, negligible. The largest
impact was just 0.4% of keywords.
• Comparing our results with other fellow Google Analytics Certified Partners in the US, some
are reporting the average percentage of searches currently coming in from logged in users at
about 1.5%
• Read Mark Edmondson’s post on e-consultancy: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8193-the-
impact-of-google-moving-to-https-for-logged-in-users-not-a-lot

3. Industry Updates
Jumbo Sitelink Update
• In a recent Google engineer Hangout on
Google Plus, one of the engineers confirmed
that the new jumbo sitelinks are based entirely
on search data (which is also how BING does
it).
• The old style sitelinks were based heavily on
site architecture.
• Jumbo sitelinks are now consistently
displaying in a 6 pack format rather than the
initial 12 pack (which Google dropped after a
couple of weeks)

4. Industry Updates
Google Releases more Guidance regarding Cross Domain
Canonical Tags
• When the representative URL is selected from a group with different sites the selection is
called a cross-domain URL selection.
• New Webmaster Tools messages will attempt to notify webmasters when Google’s algorithms
select an external URL instead of one from their website. Common causes of cross-domain
URL selection can include;
• Duplicate content: When multiple domains are used either by mistake or to geographically
target content. Webmasters should use 301s or canonical tags to resolve this.
• Incorrect canonicalization: Incorrect usage of canonicalization to external URLs can mean
Google’s algorithms select the external URLs in search results
• Misconfigured servers: If two unrelated web servers return identical soft 404 pages Google
may fail to detect as error pages. Google may incorrectly select the a.com URL as the
canonical of the b.com URL."
• Malicious website attacks: Some attacks on websites introduce code that can cause
undesired canonicalization.

5. Industry Updates
Google & Bing Handle Canonicals differently
• Duane Forrester from Bing
– "rel=canonical ... was never intended to appear across large numbers of pages...To be
clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t help us trust the
signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few
others on your website.”
– “A lot of websites have rel=canonicals in place as placeholders within their page code.
Its best to leave them blank rather than point them at themselves. Pointing a
rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us “this page is a copy of itself.
Please pass any value from itself to itself.” No need for that. We do understand that
doing work at scale requires some compromises, as it’s not easy to implement anything
on a large site page by page. In such cases, leave the rel=canonical blank until needed.”
• Matt Cutts (via webmaster video)
– “We built in support to make sure that that doesn’t cause any sort of problem. So I can’t
speak for other search engines, but it’s definitely a very common case. Imagine if you
had to check every single URL and then do a self check to see whether you were on that
URL. If you were then you couldn’t have a rel=canonical tag. That would be a lot of work
to generate all those tags. So for our part, we said you know what? Go ahead and you
can put a rel canonical on every single page on your site if you want to. And then if it
points back to itself, that’s no problem at all. We handle that just fine.”

6. Industry Updates
Google shuts down older services like Buzz and Code search.
• In their “fall sweep” post, Google announced that they were shutting down some of their
older services
• These included;
– Google Buzz : Google are set to shutdown Google Buzz and the Buzz API in a few
weeks and focus instead on Google+
– Code Search: which was designed to help people search for open source code across
the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
– Jaiku: a product Google acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut
down on January 15, 2012.
– iGoogle Social Features. With their new focus on Google+, many of iGoogle's social
features will be discontinued on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle
applications, will stay as they are.
– The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to
our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on
January 15, 2012.

7. Industry Updates
Googlebot makes POST requests via AJAX
• Thumbtack.com have recently reported that they have observed Google executing POST
requests
• Googlebot is constantly evolving and getting better at handling web forms, even submit ting
GET forms and executing simple JavaScript.
• http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/googlebot-makes-post-requests-via-ajax/

8. Industry Updates
Google and Citizens Advice Bureau promote safety
• Google has released advice for staying more
secure on the web and an overview of some of
the security tools that Google offers.
– http://www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow
• Information was created in partnership with the
Citizen’s Advice Bureau.
• It also has a lot of information about how Google
uses everyone’s data as well.
– http://www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow/data-
on-google/
•