Search News For Business Owners: 5 Search Articles in 5 Minutes

by Kathleen Fealy on November 8, 2011

When reading my daily, sometimes weekly, search news, I appreciate the many bloggers who post great articles, updates, etc. to help me stay current. Usually I retweet these, but they deserve a longer shelf life.

Below are some of the links that should help businesses keep up-to-date on news in search. I added recaps and highlights for quick viewing. Topics include news on Google’s new freshness update, Google+ adding more features, including new business pages, a site to help military veterans find work, an article on the effectiveness of website’s daily deals and because traveling can be such a headache at times – travel tools for the tech-saavy.

I plan to make this an ongoing effort, so please let me know what type of information you are most interested in or found the most helpful.

Search News That Should Interest Businesses – Nov. 8, 2011:

Google Search Algorithm Change for Freshness To Impact 35% of Searches
- Search Engine Land

Quick recap and highlights:

  • Larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of the searches conducted.
  • Areas most effected: Recent events or hot topics; regularly recurring events; frequent updates (i.e. best rated 2012 cars).

Notable quotes from article:

Google: Freshness is one component, but we also look at the content of the result, including topicality and quality. Postscript: Google now tells us [Search Engine Land] that one of the freshness factors — the way they determine if content is fresh or not — is the time when they first crawled a page. So if you publish a page, and then change that page, it doesn’t suddenly become “fresh.”

Up Close With Creating & Managing Google+ Pages - Search Engine Land

Recap: Step-by-step guide for building your business’ Google+ page.

Google Direct Connect Hooks Search and Google+ Pages Together- Mashable

Article highlight: Google’s Direct Connect will make it easy for users (translation – potential and current customers) to find brands on Google+ using Google Search. Type “+” in Google Search, followed by the brand or business they want to follow. It’s being tested currently with a small group of companies.

Google Creates Job Search Engine for US Military Veterans - ReadWriteWeb Land

Direct link for employers wishing to participate in program

Do Merchant Get New Customers From Daily Deals? - Forbes

Notable quotes from article:

About 47% of flash sale subscribers and 36% of daily deal subscribers have never bought one, Forrester [Research] found.

Another interesting fit about “breakage,” or deals that are not redeemed: About 43% of people who have purchased a daily deal have at least once not redeemed the deal before it expired.

11 Essential Tools for the Tech-Savvy Traveler
- Mashable

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