The beginning of March and the blossom of spring is upon us, which means a lot of changes are imminent, but none may be more significant in the online world than the new ‘ballot screen’ that is soon to be launched by Microsoft.

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For a while now I’ve been talking about the dangers of assuming that one search marketing approach will work across a number of platforms, with mixed results. Unfortunately, some people just don’t want to believe that the approach required to make a success of a PPC campaign on Google is that much different to the approach required to do well on Yahoo, Bing, etc. Some people unfortunately will not be swayed from the notion that search is search and what’s good for the good is good for the gander.

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Earlier in the week I told you all that caffeine probably wouldn’t change too much in the world of SEO, that if you were being ethical and above board with your optimisation then you wouldn’t lose ranking. Don’t worry, I’m not going back on that, you’re not going to tumble off the rankings overnight when Google finally flips the caffeine switch.
However, the Google search algorithm is an incredibly complex thing and if you’re doing complex SEO work then predicting positions can get very complicated, especially when you’re dealing with hypothetical scenarios like Caffeine.

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One of the main changes expected from the Caffeine update will be the importance given to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. in the rankings. This means that keyword-rich Facebook pages or social media blog posts will start to get decent ranking, as well as traditional web pages.

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Google’s universal search update has been an undoubted hit with searchers. Google users have responded incredibly well to the update that indexes video and image results either above the traditional paid and natural search results or in the middle of the search page. However, the position of the results has been hurting Google’s pocket by quite often distracting people from the adwords ads which, lest we forget, is the way Google makes almost all of its money.

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When you have just set an adwords campaign live, the first thing you want to do is type your keywords into Google and check your positions. Nothing wrong with that, right? Surely it’s the best way to track the progress of your campaign?

Well, not really…

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SEOs are well used to a fairly adversarial relationship with Google – fair enough really, we do exist solely to manipulate their carefully worked out system – so it’s always refreshing when they do something that makes our lives easier. A new change to advanced search features, entitled ‘creative commons’ is one of those rare instances.

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If you’ve been paying attention to the tech blogs over the past few days you’ll most probably have heard mention of the brand new application ‘Wave,’ that’s currently in development at Google. What you may still be a little fuzzy on however, is what Wave actually is. If this is the case then don’t worry you’re not alone, many people have the same issue, even Google.

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In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has been taking ever closer looks at Google and, in particular their settlement with publishers and authors over Google’s Book Search. This has once again raised the ever thorny question of whether or not Google is a Monopoly and, if so, what can be done about it?

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Google rightly rates its self as a pretty good place to work, very competitive pay, free lunches and creative freedom when choosing projects has meant that the company has had no worries at all attracting the very cream of the tech sector. For this reason the company grandees don’t much like it when people decide to leave the company. However, their reaction to losing a few (too many in Google’s book) employees to fashionable sites like Twitter recently might be something of an overreaction as well as a little creepy.

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Over the last couple of days a meeting of very influential people has been going on. The attendees have ranged from political figures like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to media grandees like BBC Director General, Mark Thompson and even royalty, like Prince Charles and the princes of both Norway and Spain. But why? To plan some major conspiracy? For the opening of something? No, to hear what Google have to say.

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Adwords is a great system, it’s nicely laid out, logical and user friendly, far more so than some of its competitors. The downside is that people wrongly assume that because the programme is easy to navigate, it will be easy to build a campaign that performs well. Most of the time, this proves to be a costly and expensive assumption.

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In addition to ‘Timeline’ and ‘Similar Images’ Google have also released a resource named Google Labs. It isn’t an innovation in itself, more a way of keeping track of the innovations that are in the Google pipeline. It allows users to check up on the armies of developers at Google and track what they’re up to from day to day.

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Another exciting addition to Google’s search functionality is a neat little function called ‘Timeline.’ Timeline organises information already available on Google News and displays it in an organised fashion, along a physical timeline. It’s the latest offering from Andy Hertzfeld, one of Google’s superstar developers and former member of the original Apple development team.

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