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I have seen this a couple of times over the past few weeks, but only today finally managed to capture a screen shot… Tweet Google are testing a new feature which shows a preview of the full page content when hovering over the link. It also highlights (using an orange box) the section on the page where...

There can be little argument that Facebook is the global leader when it comes to owning the social graph of online interpersonal connections.  It’s also no secret that Bing now uses Facebook ‘like’ data as a ranking factor for search results .  However Google has had some disputes with Facebook...

Matt Cutts recently presented some valuable information about detecting the ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ user agent string, to identify the Google mobile crawler.  If you have a mobile version of your website, it’s worth taking a look at this clip which lasts less than 3 minutes…

Shopping comparison sites have for a long time been a popular method of finding the cheapest price online.  In a recent video, Matt Cutts from Google discusses how the rating scores from multiple price comparison websites across the web are actually used as an SEO ranking factor. Tweet So negative...

This mini series of posts focuses on methods of finding information online without typing a single search phrases in to Bing, Google or any other search engine.  Part 1 focussed on check in services and part 2 discussed social voting mechanisms .  Tweet In this post I will highlight search...

Tweet I was just on the phone to my colleague Bob O’Brien from Seattle, who manages the search strategy for windows.microsoft.com.  We noticed that a recently published page had been assigned ‘site links’ by Google, however they were NOT particularly useful.. The site links titles were all cut off...

I was recently interviewed by the guys at http://mstalk.in to discuss Search Engine Optimization and social media, with an emphasis on the discoverability efforts we go through for support.microsoft.com.  The audio podcast is available on demand (approx 25 minutes long)… MSTalk.in Episode 14: SEO...

  Here are 5 search related topics which I have found interesting over the past week.  Please re-tweet any which you feel worth sharing… More signs that facebook is moving in to locations services SOON! http://tinyurl.com/2ws9bdt [ re-tweet ] Location based marketing is getting big! Dominoes...

Yesterday Google released an update which adds a left navigation bar to search results designed to allow users to quickly slice and dice search results. This video explains more… ";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/searchblog/WindowsLiveWriter...

The ‘Similar’ functionality on Google provides an easy way for your customers to research your competitor’s websites. Can your site be found easily when searching for your competitors brand keywords? Last week, Google announced an enhancement of their ‘similar sites’ functionality. For a while now...

This week I was pleased to run a side session at the MVP Summit on Search Engine Optimisation. One of the topics I covered was SEO tools, as part of which I various tools which are available for analysing websites and extracting data to understand how the crawlers see individual pages or sections of...

Are you still just publishing content to the web? Or are you injecting content in to the social sphere? For a long time, the only websites which have been easily discoverable in search engines have been those which are optimised and well linked to, particularly for competitive search terms. This also...

For a while now Google have offered personalised search which provides a custom ordering of search results based on your previous search behaviour. If you clicked on a particular site lots in the past and were signed in to Google.com, Google would remember the action and rank that site higher for you...

Google Sidewiki was launched a few months ago as a tool for Google toolbar users to comment on websites they visit and read comments from other users. Whilst the volume of comments submitted on Google Sidewiki is not particularly ground breaking so far, the concept of allowing everyone to read every...

This regular post will provide you with the latest news highlights from the SEO industry, with a emphasis on news stories related to corporate search engine optimization. I manage enterprise level SEO, and I found these stories interesting and relevant to my work, so if you are also interested in...

Google recently announced an interesting new addition to the Google Toolbar, the Google Sidewiki . The Sidewiki allows you to comment on websites you are viewing, and read comments from other users. . . You must install the Google toolbar to use the Sidewiki, which may alienate some people,...