This week, Google announced two minor updates on their algorithm. These had something to do with the summary of information about the website that surfaced in the search results, otherwise known as “Rich Snippets”. This aims to provide every user around the world the most relevant results in a shortest amount of time.

I. Global Implementation of Product Rich Snippets
As per Google, Product Rich Snippets has now been rolled out globally. Users can now see the preview information available on the websites such as the sample products or services offered by the search result’s site page regardless of where they coming from. Below is the sample Rich Snippets, services offered by our very own Smart Traffic.

Product Rich Snippets are designed to give users the idea of what’s on the website and why it is relevant to their query. Thus, having it visible to users worldwide is quite an achievement for Google.

II. Rich Snippets Testing Tool Now Support HTML input

In order for Google to display these Rich Snippets, markup formats (microformats and RDFa) in the source codes are required. And so to give the site owners and web developers the ability to check their source codes if it will actually work on their websites before having it published on the web page, Rich Snippets Testing Tool has been introduced.

But since the tool has limited capabilities (HTML codes are not accepted) many were not delighted. A lot of concerns have arisen and so Google updated the tool which now supports HTML codes in order for webmasters, site owners and SEOs to enjoy its full benefits.

Within weeks of Facebook making its new Timeline mandatory for all users, Google+ changes its entire user interface and dare I say it looks Timeline-ish?

New Google+ Profile Page Layout

The first thing you’ll surely notice is the new Google Plus menu bar now located on the left-hand side known as the “ribbon”. This feature allows you to easily access your favorite G+ service. Additionally, Google allows you to drag and drop items on the ribbon so that you can place your favorite service on top or if you don’t use a particular service, you can drop it in the “More” box located at the bottom-left of the ribbon.If you will hover some of the applications, a set of quick actions will be presented.

Technically, the ribbon feature is a good move coming from the team however the most intriguing part is this: “We’ve also built the ribbon with the future in mind, giving us an obvious (and clutter-free) space for The Next Big Feature, and The Feature After That. So stay tuned.” Wonder what those next big features would be.

Another significant improvement is the enhanced Profile page. Your profile photo is bigger than before which is now 250 x 250 pixels. You can also customize the layout by choosing either a layout with a large photo in the background (similar to Facebook’s cover photo) or 5 single photos referred to as scrapbook.

Layout Option

A dedicated “Hangouts” page has been created containing an “always-updated” list of invitations from the people in your circles, quick access to every public or On Air hangouts, and a rotating billboard of popular hangouts, tips, and other items.

Separate Hangouts Page

The “What’s Hot” section also got a separate page and includes a “trending” column highlighting popular hash tags and keywords.

Explore Page

It seems like that the most popular features of Google+ have been given a lot more importance in this new design overhaul.

Other changes include the following:
- Full bleed photos and videos.
- A stream of conversation “cards” to easily segment updates from your circles.
- An activity drawer that highlights the community around your post.

Those inclined to doing SEO know how a Google Plus profile and some activity can help a business or a person in terms of branding as well as website rankings. And with these enhancements at hand, this platform offers un-rivalled opportunities for deep engagement and exposure. Check out the official announcement here or if you want to be updated with the latest Google+ updates, subscribe to the #googleplusupdate hash tag.

Recently Google published their highlights of implemented updates from the month of March. Quite a few of these changes where focused on image optimisation. Let’s take a quick recap on what these significant updates are and pick some tips on how to comply with the modified algorithms for image search relevance.

More relevant image search results. [launch codename "Lice"] This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. This makes it more likely that you’ll find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality.

Reasons of Optimising Images for Google Image Search

Visibility – search engine crawlers are like blind men, it can’t read images. The best way to make the images visible to bots is through the use of “Alt” attribute and “Title”. Use these attributes to provide descriptive text for the image. Thus, using a human-readable caption (surrounding text) or relevant information around the image is strongly advisable.

Size Matters –generally speaking, an image is the most eye catching element of a web page. It jumps right out at users before they actually read the whole content or search result. Hence high resolution photos and graphics are recommended. Remember that, while low quality images decrease load time, this will detract from the required visual effect.

However, high quality images do look great but may increase latency. So, for large images we suggest placing a small thumbnail image next to the description, and then link it to a high quality image. Images should be optimally compressed. Take note that properly optimised images will decrease the page load time.

More image optimisation related topics that are worth looking into:

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We’ve made some improvements to simplify our codebase for Images Universal and to better utilize improvements in our general web ranking to also provide better image results.

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We’ve made some improvements to simplify our codebase for Images Universal and to better utilize improvements in our general web ranking to also provide better image results.