Google. News. Bing. Seen your Google Profile lately? It just got a slick update. By now you’ve customized your Facebook profile to your liking, surely.
But did you know that you probably have a Google Profile, as well? Many don’t, and those that do tend to not pay them much attention. With a refresh to the design and editing of Google’s Profiles, the company looks to change that. Google Changes Google News Design Based On Complaints. Google News Testing More Social Features With “Most Shared” Box. Google Operating System noticed Google News added a new box to the side bar named “Most shared.”
The most shared box must be using social sharing features to see the most shared stories via Google Reader, Twitter, Gmail, Google Buzz and maybe even Facebook? You can sort the most shared box by Past 24 hours, Past Week or Past Month. Twitter Announces Fully-Functional Embedded Tweets. Until now, there has been no quick and simple way to embed a functional Tweet in a blog post.
That is, most of us bloggers simply took a quick screenshot, uploaded the image and used that, meaning that users were left looking at the picture of functionality without any of the benefits - they couldn't follow, retweet, reply or favorite a thing. Today, Twitter has released a new set of developer tools that will make it easier for bloggers and others alike to embed fully-functional Tweets on the Web, with WordPress leading the pack. Google to make more changes to improve search results. By Mike Swift mswift@mercurynews.com Posted: 03/15/2011 03:01:39 PM PDT0 Comments|Updated: 3 years ago AUSTIN, Texas -- Tens of thousands of websites felt the impact last month when Google revamped its search engine to reward original, high-quality content, but the company isn't done, with a leading search engineer saying Google is working on further changes that will go beyond just "tweaking" the recent changes.
"We've not only launched this change, but we're looking forward through the rest of the year at other changes we can make to try to improve search quality," Google principal engineer Matt Cutts said in an interview with the Mercury News at the South By Southwest Interactive conference. "There is definitely still room for improvement in the space of low-quality content -- or in trying to reward higher-quality content. " StumbleUpon Launches a New Ad Discovery Platform #SEWatch. Google Showing “Total Links” & Yahoo Fixes Site Explorer, Plus More SEO Topics. In the past week, several SEO related topics are in need of summarizing.
Here is a list of quick SEO takes in bullet format, for you busy SEOs and SEMs: Google Webmaster Tools has added “total links” to the revamped link reports.Yahoo seems to have fixed the broken site explorer linkage data. Google has fixed the blogspot indexing bug and now can index new blogspot blog posts.Google Webmaster Tool’s fetch as Googlebot is 404ing for some webmastersGoogle sometimes is using your heading tags for snippets as opposed to your title tagsSEOs are noticing major ranking changes since Thursday of last week. I believe that recaps some of the more recent SEO discussions from over the weekend that deserve your attention.
Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer. Twitter Testing Users ‘You Both Follow’ Feature. According to a Tweet just posted by Twitter engineer Nick Kallen, the microblogging network has just enabled a new “You both follow” feature.
The feature, which is only being tested for 10 percent of users, allows you to see any common people that you and another user both follow. Here’s a screenshot of what the feature looks like. The “You both follow” feature is pretty much what it sounds like. When you click on a contact it will show you the common people you both follow on the right sidebar of the page, just above the “following” tab. It’s actually surprising the feature hasn’t been turned on sooner, considering how useful it is in showing your social connections between other Twitter users. “You both follow” is similar in theory to Facebook’s friends in common feature, which has been around for some time now. How Google Figures Out Page Date.
In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.
First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below: Twitter rolls out new “social context” features. The Two Really Useful Features Twitter Added Without Telling Anyone - Science and Tech. Twitter became substantially more useful over the past couple of months, courtesy of two small changes to the way the service's real-time search works.
Neither tweak was announced, which is a shame because they might be the best things the service has done since it gained traction a few years ago. First, now, when you search for something like "Inception" or "Elena Kagan," the top three search results are calculated by the number of retweets that comment has received. Functionally, this means that the funniest, most relevant, or interesting tweets get surfaced.
(See above.) Before, the real time search function used to bring up just the most recent tweets, which were often random or boring. Second, because of the character limitations on Twitter, nearly everyone uses URL shorteners to post links. Like Facebook, Twitter Starts Using Algorithms To Bulk Up Social Graph. Last month, we noted that Twitter was testing a “You both follow” feature, showing users you and another user both follow.
That’s interesting, but not particularly useful. Today, they’ve begun to roll out a new “Suggestions for You” feature which looks at who you follow, and who the people you follow follow, and suggests new people for you to follow. Yes, just like Facebook does. This is very useful. Cliqset Cleans Up Streams, Integrates Twitter. Cliqset completed a significant upgrade to its social sharing website Wednesday.
The site now fully integrates Twitter, and it has refined its aggregation system so you get a much more streamlined, easy-to-digest view of your friends’ activities across multiple social sites. There are literally dozens of changes, both visible and behind-the-scenes, in the new Cliqset. We’ve been testing out the new version (the company is half-jokingly calling it “Cliqset 2.0″) since midday Tuesday, and we’ve found the site has been given a significant boost that makes its aggregation features both more usable and more useful.
The changes should be appearing for everyone on Cliqset sometime Wednesday morning. Cliqset is a social network in itself, complete with followers, status updates and media sharing. Twitter Promoted Tweets Are Live. Twitter to Launch Twitter Business Center [SCREENSHOTS] We have confirmed with Twitter that beta testing of its new business features, dubbed the "Twitter Business Center," has begun. According to the company, "only a handful of accounts have these features presently," but it will expand on a gradual basis to more accounts. One of the biggest additions is the ability for businesses to accept direct messages on the service, even from people they don't follow. We were able to grab exclusive information and screenshots of the Twitter Business Center thanks to our friend Dave Peck, a social media strategist at LSF Interactive/blogger at New Media Chatter.
Here is an overview of some of the new features that businesses can expect to enjoy in the near future: Starting Up with Twitter Business Center. Twitter "Accept" Bug Reveals Most Popular Users. If the "accept" bug we encountered this week taught us anything about Twitter, it showed us who users are most desperate to have follow them back. As a refresher, yesterday's bug allowed users to tweet, for example, "accept mashable. " This would then make the account @mashable automatically follow the user who sent out that tweet. While many users saw that they were suddenly following a few new accounts, certain well-known Twitter users were bombarded with hundreds of new follows. The new guard of Twitter celebrities as revealed by the bug is pop culture heavy. Although Bill Gates and Barack Obama made the cut, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber scored much higher for follower-happy users.
But the woman who ruled them all was Oprah, who garnered the most attention in the form of forced follows during the bug's short lifespan. HOW TO: Embed a Tweet.