Google have introduced the SSL encryption protocol for all of their online search services in a bid to improve users’ security and, no doubt, to improve the reputation of the company and demonstrate their commitment to user safety.

Google started making use of SSL (which stands for Secure Sockets Layer) several years ago in order to protect users’ search sessions and provide a more secure experience for platforms such as Google Docs and their signature email service Gmail. The protocol essentially means that users receive ‘end to end encrypted search’ protection, which stops suspicious third parties from intercepting their search queries. Google has stressed that SSL protection is particularly important for individuals who make use of unsecured internet connections such as WiFi hotspots in cafes and libraries.

In mid-2010, SSL was rolled out as the default setting for all Gmail users, which was a move that was quickly adopted by many other major email service providers due to its popularity. Now all users with a Google Account will be redirected to the https://www.google.com server every time they issue a search. The ‘https’ tells users that all of their queries, as well as the end results page, will now be encrypted. If the searcher is new to Google and doesn’t have a registered account, they can access the secure server manually so as not to miss out.

The only disadvantage identified by Google has been the fact that users may experience a slightly slower search time, as their computer will need to set up a secure connection with the search engine every time they use the SSL search service.

But what does this mean for SEO?

The use of SSL means that webmasters tracking their traffic via organic, natural listings will not get any information about the search query that was used. They will still know that the user found their site via Google, but won’t know which keyword they typed in in the first instance. However, Google have provided a solution for website owners who take the analysis of their site extremely seriously – companies can head over to Google Webmaster Tools and opt to receive a list of the top 1,000 keywords that sent users to their website on a 30 day basis.

It’s worth noting, however, that if the user has been directed to the site after clicking on a PPC ad, the original search query will still be logged by the advertising company to help them analyse where their traffic is coming from – this is and has always been an essential part of the Pay Per Click service offered by Google.

This addition to the case study is a revision on how many people have you in their Circles. The last time I measured this, the SEO Positive profile was added to 25 people, it now stands at 65 which is just over twice as much. For those that have not read the previous additions, here is part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

It would seem that all of the key words, except from SEO, have acquired a sturdy position in the rankings, the term SEO has shot up quite a bit and the increase in Circles must have played a part in this.

I wanted to see the competitor’s profiles and inspect how many people have added them and the list is as follows.

There is clearly a correlation that states the more people that have added you, the higher you will show. This however, is clearly not one of the only factors because second place has twice the amount as position one. It is something that I think has an effect but there are other factors that make a difference.

Google has announced big changes to its infrastructure recently. In an attempt to streamline its output and focus on more useful (and more commercially beneficial) projects, the company has shut down popular side-projects such as Buzz and concentrated on the bigger money-spinners.

One such innovation is that of the Google Wallet. You can check out our previous post to learn a little more about the concept behind the Google Wallet service, but it seems that this idea has been quick to catch on and has won the support of some of America’s largest retailers, including Foot Locker, Toys R Us and, most recently, Macys.

All of these stores have now installed SingleTap terminals, which read your smartphone in the blink of an eye, allowing you to pay quickly and easily. A number of leading chains are also working hard to set up SingleTap equipment in their stores, which indicates that Google is going to take a number of high profile companies under its wing in the next few months.

Google has also managed to launch its Wallet with the rapid introduction of Google Offers, which now includes a ‘Featured Offers’ area that will provide exclusive promotions and discounts. Add to the mix the possibility of organising all of your loyalty cards on your phone and collecting points with a swipe of your hand and you’ve got a functional, practical device that could potentially transform the way we shop for good.

It may take a while for the system to become as widely used as, say, the cheap and PIN mechanism, as the service is currently only available via the Nexus S4G and is still in its early stages of development. Via their official blog, Google has reported that they’re listening closely to customer feedback and are improving the service all the time, recently rearranging the transaction details for their Prepaid Card Feature to improve usability.

We’ll be keeping up to date with the progress of Google Wallet – it’ll be interesting to see how this concept pans out as more and more outlets (and, eventually, phone operators) jump on the bandwagon.

Another update on the ever growing case study, part 1, part 2, part 3 for those who have missed them. – This time I will experiment with Circles. To be more specific, if you have someone added, will they rank higher for their keywords. I will check all positions before with a fresh account and also check with an account that only has the SEO Positive account in their circles.

These results are quite interesting. It seems that having someone in your circles does not help ranking factors. Those who have been keeping up with our previous additions to the case study will have noticed the drop in all positions. This may be because of the name change from SEO Positive to Lewis SEO Positive, I had to change because of Google’s name policy, I also had a look at the competition and they may not be as active as my profile but they do have a lot more people who have added them into their Circles, which could be the cause.

Now I need to test out the ‘friends of friends’ effect on the situation.

Having a friend of a friend that has the profile added does somewhat effect the results. Not extensively since the SEO Positive profile is still at the bottom of the rankings. However it does make a slight difference and for those niches that are slightly less competitive they may make a huge difference.

Conclusion

Whether you’re in someone’s Circles or not (even a mutual friends’ Circle) it doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference, so my advice would be to not spend much time worrying about this factor because chances are it won’t make much of an impact.

As a continuation from yesterday’s Google + article, I think I may have stumbled upon another factor that affects ranking; it is fairly simple and has more benefits than just a higher position.

The new factor is simply adding people. I know this sounds silly but I added everyone for the term SEO and SEO UK, which got me about 250 people in my circles. Now I know this does seem a little spammy, but it isn’t at all. You can follow as many people as you want on Twitter and you can do the same on Google +. It is a worry to have on your profile, “SEO Positive has 250 in their circles and 5 people have SEO Positive in their circles.” But you can hide this information from users so feel free to add as many as you want!

Like I said, I have added all profiles that come up for SEO and SEO UK. Now I will use my account with no history to measure the new found rankings. FYI the previous positions were from the last case study which was before I added anyone into my circles.

From this report we can see that SEO services has shot right up the rankings and is now at the top, SEO is THE most competitive term out there in this industry, but it is good that some movement has been made.

Conclusion

It seems adding relevant users has a positive effect in terms of rankings. Adding a huge list of people can also help with exposure, connection and if there are a lot of users that add you to their circles then it looks good on your profile.

The next thing I will be looking into is content (updates) and to see if they have make a difference. I will be doing one a day and I will record the results in an article next week.

Google + is the social network that just keeps expanding at a rapid rate. the last figure that was released told us that the site currently has a user base of 50 million, which is an astonishing statistic. It must be mentioned that G+’s rival, Facebook, has acquired more than 800 million users in its lifetime. Nevertheless, Google + is rocketing in terms of how active it is becoming. If Plus does become the dominant network, then businesses will be flocking across to join, so I am going to show you how to optimize your business profile so you can show up in high positions for key terms.

I have created a brand new profile for SEO Positive as an example. This profile has only a display picture, the profile contains no content (for example media or posts). I have also checked all of our keywords and we do not rank for any of them. Now I will do some optimization in the appropriate sections and see what difference it makes.

It may also be noteworthy that I have created another brand new profile with absolutely no history to measure the rankings in a completely unbiased way.

Introduction

I started off with the introduction section of the profile, not necessarily keyword stuffing, but I put in what I considered enough and made the box legible and of a proper standard of English. The introduction is as follows:

“SEO Positive is the award winning SEO Company based in the UK. SEO Positive offers ethical SEO Services that are guaranteed to show brilliant results in SEO. For more information on SEO Positive, go to http://www.seopositiveltd.com or follow their blog or even their Twitter profile.”

Now before I added this section we did not rank at all, as soon I had made changes to the profile, the rankings had changed too

Just by adding this one box you can see the SEO Positive profile has shot right up, and although it isn’t ranking for everything, it is ranking for some key terms. Obviously the term “SEO” will be the hardest to rank for but we will add another section and see what happens.

Bragging Rights

In the next section, “bragging rights” I tend to write something similar to the introduction but put in some achievements to make it fit the context of the section. So my submission to bragging rights is “SEO Positive has won multiple awards as an SEO Company, we provide our SEO Services to a wide range of businesses all over the world, including the UK, which is where SEO Positive is based.”

Now that this section has been added, we will look at the difference:

From this evidence, it is safe to say that there are no “bragging rights” here. This section may have some effect but it is clear that it is miniscule and hardly worth the time.

Occupation

Now I am going to try and add the appropriate occupation and see what effect that has: ‘SEO Services’.

Adding the occupation seems to have had a mixed set of results. The bonus is that nothing has fallen but some positions have stayed put. ‘SEO’ has raised and is now on the listings, yet ‘SEO Services’ is holding its ground.

Employment

We now approach the section of Employment. I have added the name of the company (SEO Positive) and for occupation I entered SEO Services. SEO Services is the keyword that the SEO Positive profile is not ranking for; this keyword also fits the context of the field quite well.

The employment section has had a surprising impact. Everything is now ranking, most search terms are rising, ‘SEO company’ fell by 1 rank but this could be due to competitors or other uncontrollable reasons. All in all the completion of the employment section has had a great effect.

Other Names

Education comes next but I want to take the white hat method in optimizing my Google+ profile, so I will leave this blank as it is irrelevant. Then comes the phone number, so I have entered SEO Positive’s office number. The ‘relationship’ and ‘looking for’ are also immaterial so the next field that can be used for SEO will be the ‘other names’ section. I am going to put all keywords in this section.

Adding this other names section seems to have had a negative effect, my thoughts of this decline in positions is because Google has to index all of these changes, which resulted in massive jumps in positions, especially for ‘SEO’ and ‘SEO Services’. Adding the other name would appear to have had a positive effect on ‘SEO Company’ but the 1 position increase doesn’t make up for the rest of the losses.

Nicknames

As the end of optimization approaches, we come to the ‘nicknames’ section. I have set it as ‘SEO Services’ because again, this is a term that hasn’t ranked.

Just adding the nickname section has had a great effect on the rankings, I think it is safe to say that ‘SEO’ and ‘SEO Services’ are going to be very competitive, like in the real Google SERP’s.

Profiles, Links and Contributions

There is only one more thing that can be done in terms of the profile, which is adding other profiles – websites that you contribute to and recommended links. I will add all of these at the same time as it is far too fiddly to do them one by one, also I will link to only SEO Positives’ profiles, the site and all blogs associated.

From these results we can see that no difference had been made by adding links or profiles. It seems that these parts of the profile are purely for the user.

Conclusion

All of these factors have had different levels of impact, but based on the differences that have been displayed, here is a list of each factor and the severity of their importance:

Introduction                                       -                                              *****

Bragging Rights                                 -                                              *

Occupation                                         -                                              **

Employment                                      -                                              ****

Other Names                                     -                                              *

Nicknames                                          -                                              ****

Profiles Links Contributions         -                                              *

So I can conclude that the most important sections of the Google Plus profile are the Introduction, Employment and the Nicknames. However I would not advise leaving the other parts out as it may result in weaker positions; also it lowers how useful your profile will be to users viewing it.

As a revision of all of the positions, I want to check the positions once more as the positions would have had time to settle and we can take all of the optimization efforts and put them together.

If we look back to where we started before we even optimized the profile, SEO Positive has raised a substantial amount. Taking into account that this profile is brand new and has no posts or media, it has acquired great positions. The only way to increase the ranking is to keep the profile active and consciously include the correct keywords in posts. As time goes on we should definitely see an even bigger rise in positions.

Does Google’s ever-expanding empire know no limits? The net giant reached the British high street this week, opening its very first physical ‘store’ on Tottenham Court Road, London.

Set within the PC World/Currys shop, the less than 300-square-feet Chrome Zone offers consumers the chance to try out Google’s newest Chromebook (ie the Series 5 from Samsung) in a user-friendly setting. Google bosses have worked hard to turn their sales space into a friendly, welcoming environment for those interested in the company’s latest technology. The decision to open up shop in the UK has stunned some onlookers, who were surprised that Google didn’t decide to set up their first proper retail project closer to their San Francisco home.

Being able to talk to consumers directly about Google’s products and allowing them the opportunity to play around with the devices has “made a huge difference to their understanding of what the Chromebook is all about”, according to Google’s head of UK marketing, Arvind Desikan. Google was initially concerned that while their Chromebooks were being marketed well by online retailers PC World and Amazon, consumers were unable to try out the system for themselves and had no idea what to expect in terms of usability and functionality.

While Google’s stock is limited to a select few devices at the moment, the company have expressed plans to extend their catalogue of products and are actively experimenting with the idea of setting up shop in a customer-focussed environment. The flagship shop will remain open until Christmas but more outlets are set to be opened worldwide in the coming months, with the next Google store allegedly opening at Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex in early October. This interesting shift towards customer-facing sales may have been influenced by the success of the dedicated stores that have been opened by closest rivals such as Microsoft and Apple.

The big G has finally confirmed it; we have another Panda to deal with. The algorithm has been officially updated, estimated at  500 different updates, and according to Search Engine Land, we are in the age of 2.5.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that no specifics have been released. The type of website, pages or even content have been shared, all that was shared was Googles’ default statement: “We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

According to WebProNews, the update was rolled out on the 28th of September, but there are a handful of other sources that suggest the Panda was released on the 27th. If we take WebProNews’ statement, then the 2.5 update has had the longest gap we have seen since Aprils’ update.

Panda 1.0 – 2011, 24th Feb

7 Weeks

Panda 2.0 – 2011, 11th April

4 Weeks

Panda 2.1 – 2011, 10th May

5 weeks

Panda 2.2 – 2011, 16th June

5 Weeks

Panda 2.3 – 2011, 23rd July

3 Weeks

Panda 2.4 – 2011, 12th August

7 Weeks

Panda 2.5 – 2011, 28th September

Many SEO’s are just catching wind of the update because as we all know, it can take a while for your site to be affected. Alike all of the previous updates, sites have seen a dramatic change. Now is the time for those that have fallen of the face of the earth to recover, and for those who have passed their Panda test, to sit back and enjoy the massive increase of traffic.

No idea why but Google makes me think of that giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters – lumbering along crushing everything in its path with obese feet and the odd groan of pleasure for ambient terror. It doesn’t really make sense, I know, but imaginations don’t have to.

Google is a giant, that’s a fact, and though its competitors are also vast and powerful it’s hard to think of a formidable opponent who could take a decent shot at online dominance. Not even Facebook packs enough punch to knock this traditional search engine off its gargantuan feet. It’s like pitching Papa Smurf against The Hulk; you wouldn’t even see him wobble. To me, this implies that Yahoo, Bing, vertical search engines and other e-commerce sites are merely support acts in an Oscar winning performance that’s got Google in the starring role.

Wow, it sounds like I’m being paid by Google to make immensely exaggerated statements about their size and power in order to psychologically diss the opposition. They aren’t I swear – they probably wouldn’t have liked the marshmallow man example if they were. I’m an internet user and the truth is I trust Google because I always have, and my perception of them is solid. The fact that my mom refers to the internet as “THE Google” pretty much means she thinks Google IS the internet – and I don’t think she’s the only one.

Really, I don’t.

Since its launch in 1998 from a garage in California, the company which aimed to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has done just that. Today they process about 24 petabytes of data every 24 hours (one petabyte is equal to a thousand terabytes) and deal with more than a billion search requests ranging from animal rights or quantum theory to snot balls. It’s not an easy job but someone has to do it. Google’s algorithm ensures we’re not only given the most pertinent information when we surf, but because of rankings, search engine optimisation and other factors, the internet is a place of aspiring and ever progressing creativity and relevance.

There’s also their vast product range, the latest of which is Google Wallet, a concept that allows consumers to pay for things by swiping their Smartphone. When the giant wanted to launch Google Video and it didn’t work so well, they simply caught the scent of another company who had refined the art of online videos – YouTube- and swept them off their feet. Grrr!

It’s not like they haven’t worked hard for it, so instead of questioning whether Google can be stopped, shouldn’t the question be ‘why would anyone want to stop them’? Remember when they used laser beams and an explosion to get rid of the fat, scary marshmallow man? The streets were filled with sticky goo that made a revolting mess everywhere – and a mess is exactly what the internet was before Larry met Sergey and they gave Google life. Now the internet is pretty and I for one like it that way.

Warren Kings is an online content writer and writes various online content covering everything from online surveys,customer surveys and Social Media.

Google + has been around us for quite some time and all of us have already added it to our to-do-list because we cannot run the risk of being targeted by Google. Google has already reiterated the fact that the future of search might be governed by social presence of a website and users’ behavior rather than only links and what is the better way to make people talk about your brand and your company in general than having a great social presence. But the problem is that we, marketers, are already having enough of this social presence. First it was Facebook and its innumerable clones but thankfully all of them doomed to perish. Then came the great Twitter and we had to move on to it though quite reluctantly. We all started twittering on the hope that Google will give us some kind of preference when it comes to ranking but lol. The relationship suddenly strained and we are left with no choice but to maintain our twitter account on the hope that probably Bing might shower her blessing. But so far, as far as the opinions of the experts are concerned, nothing seems happening of that kind.

Google + A Success: Probably not. Think this way, if Google + were a success, Google would not probably promote that thing through search engine. It is a rather shameless promotional campaign, asking people become a member of Google + by using an arrow. People who do not even have any idea of what social network means click onto them and eventually find them enmeshed with the intricacies of Internet or more particularly social networking. However, you have reasons to disagree with me given the fact that Google + has been growing at a rapid pace but the truth is that, people are less active in Google + and some are even scared that Google might sneak into their private space. Privacy has always been a major issue with Google and this is probably the main thing why people are dragging their feet when they are to share something personal in Google +.

Google + For Business: This is hard to believe but this is true. Google is well aware of the fact that unless they force the webmasters into submission and use their new product, the entire effort might go bust like – Google Wave. So, they voluntarily integrate Google + report in Google analytics so that webmasters can have a clear idea of how many people have plused their post or how many retweets a particular article have gained. Unlike Facebook’s whose solely focused on giving people a chance to interact with their friends, Google is definitely treading a different path by trying to educate people about social networking and I fear this is not going to work.

Why It Might Turn Into a Disaster: The thing is that it appears to be very much business like and its interface and its functionalities are all quite predictable, if not similar with facebook. Personally, I had high hopes on Google but when I checked out Google +, it looked like another clone of facebook with little tweaks here and there but they are so crudely done, a novice can even find them out easily.

It lacks Wow effect and what’s more, Google is really finding it hard to make people engaged here and which is why they are promoting it desperately because Google cannot afford to have another failure product in its kitty.

Author bio:

Stephen O’Neill is a passionate writer and he has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.