Apple's Siri Is Next To Google In Mobile Search

Fivesight Research released a study on “US Consumer Search Preferences Smartphone & Desktop: Q1 2017,” that states that Siri is the most used mobile “search engine” of choice after Google. The study was based on a survey of 800 US adults split roughly evenly between iOS and Android users.

Google has been the most used mobile search engine since years. This year it holds an 84 percent aggregate share among respondents. Among Android users, Google’s search share was 90 percent. Among iPhone owners Google had a 78 percent share. After Google, however, Siri was named by more respondents as their “primary search engine” than Bing or Yahoo. (However, this doesn’t reflect query volume, just identification as the primary engine of choice.)

Fivesight Research provided a comparative study given below, that reveals that Siri had a larger share of mobile search than Bing or Yahoo.

Siri was the primary search engine of 13 percent of iPhone owners. This finding is significant because it suggests the long-term, potentially disruptive impact of voice and virtual assistants on traditional “query in a box” results. It’s important to point out, however, that these responses reflect self-reported data and many not line up one-to-one with behavior.

Siri was also the most widely adopted virtual personal assistant among the available choices, used by a higher number of iOS users than “Google Now” was by Android users. Google Assistant wasn’t one of the available choices on the survey.

A very large percentage of respondents (72 percent) said they were using virtual assistants to “supplement” more traditional mobile search.

The survey also found that Chrome was the dominant mobile browser, with a 48 percent share, followed by Safari, with 37 percent. Roughly 14 percent of iPhone owners used Chrome as their primary browser. However, Android owners reported a higher level of non-Google browser use, with 11 percent choosing a Microsoft browser and another 10 percent using “other.”

The Evolution Of Google SERPs [Infographic]

The days of 10 blue links are over, and Google's search result pages seem to be evolving on a daily basis. We often see new SERP features in isolation, so I had an idea—what if I put all of them (or, at least, all of the big ones), on one mega-SERP?

The following is a visual guide to the state of Google. Google rolls out several changes each year to its SERPs. In this infographic, we look at the year-by-year evolution of Google’s search engine results page and highlight the most important changes every year since the time when it was just a research project at Stanford. You would’ve probably noticed these changes through the years, but may have never realized how they affect your business.

Source: e-intelligence

How To Download A Copy Of Your Past Google Searches

Now it is very easy to download all of your saved search history for Google searches. It gives you access to your data whenever required. You can keep a local data search base in your system.

Follow the below steps to copy your past searches data :

1. Open your Web & App Activity page.
2. Click the Options icon   on top right corner and then > Download.
3. Click Create Archive.
4. Once the download is over, an email confirmation with a link to the data will be sent to your email address.

Please make a note here that if you download all your past searches then it will not be deleted from your Web & App Activity page. If you want to delete your searches and browsing activity then click here.

Where is your downloaded data saved?

once you complete downloading your past searches, a copy of your history will be saved securely to the Takeout folder in Google Drive. 

If you want to download the files to your computer, please follow the below steps :

1. Visit drive.google.com.
2. Select the file you'd like to download. In case you are selecting multiple files then hold down Shift or Ctrl (Command on a Mac) while clicking on multiple files.
3. Right click on the files and select Download.

Depending on the amount of data you’re downloading, you may be have more than one file in your Takeout folder with your history in it.

Security Measures :

Below security measures should be taken care :

• Never download your past searches on public computers as this can be misused by anyone.
• Always protect your account and sensitive data with 2-Step Verification. This will restrict others to keep out of your account even if they have your password.

Google Displays Lyrics In The SERPs

Google has updated its search engine recently. This will include song lyrics as well. Suppose you are searching by a song name with the word "lyrics" it will show the entire lyrics. As of now the service is available for U.S. English users.

If you can’t remember the words to a song you like, you can simply plug in the song’s title to Google Search and the song in its entirety will appear right in search without having to click on any additional links.

A Google+ post by Glenn Gabe showed how it works.

“The hammer has fallen. Google now displaying lyrics in the SERPs,” he posted along with evidence of the new feature: a screenshot of Google listing the lyrics for a popular Kings of Leon song.

But there are searches for both new and classic song lyrics coming up blank. Instead it shows the links to corresponding YouTube videos and third-party lyric sites. So it is observed that Google is not scraping the songs from top lyrics websites but, rather, is trying to obtain the lyrics properly by paying licensing fees.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the release of the lyrics search feature to Tech Crunch saying that “There’s a feeling you get when you turn to a song and you know that the words have two meanings. Well it’s whispered that now if you go search the tune, maybe Google will lead you to reason. Ooh, it makes you wonder…”

Google Removes Authorship From Search Results

Google's webmaster trends analyst John Mueller expressed the "difficult decision" in a Google+ post. This post reveals that Google will stop showing authorship in search results. Google's authorship support page shows "Authorship markup is no longer supported in Web search," and encourages bloggers and webmasters to look into rich snippets to improve their search results.

According to John Mueller, while checking removing authorship as a test; it did not generally appear to reduce site traffic or increase ad clicks.

Mueller adds "We've gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we've tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we've also observed that this information isn't as useful to our users as we'd hoped, and can even distract from those results."

He also cheered up for webmasters for their efforts to improve their websites. He says Google Search users will continue to see Google+ posts from friends and the pages that are relevant within the main results and on the right-hand side. As per him, "authorship change doesn't impact these social features."

Lets see the effects of the authorship removal from Google SERPs.

How To Build Backlinks - Dos & Don'ts

Most of the bloggers want more backlinks to their blogs because all of them want to attract huge number  of regular visitors and subscribers. This is one of the best SEO practices as gradually those blogs will get more and more traffic. It increases your blog's page ranking in search engines making your blog more visible and quick searchable on SERPs. There are various organic or natural ways to build backlinks. But while building links, you need to take care of some guidelines.

Please follow the DOs and DON'Ts for building backlinks:

DOs :

1. Article Submission :

Regularly submit your article to the article directories like - Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, ArticleCity.com, Amazines.com, ArticleTrader.com etc. By submitting to these higher PR sites you can ensure your quality of writing as well as getting more readers for your blog.

2. Visiting Blogs With Same Niche :

Always visit blogs which follow same niche and cover similar topics. These articles will add aditional value to your knowledge base which can be expressed in your own way.

3. Comment On Related Blogs :

While reading other blogs' posts, you may comment on them ensuring inreaction with other fellow bloggers and take a view or idea from those comments and replies and later on you can make use of it. make sure that you are not doing any SPAMMING business here. Make your comment box available for people so that you can also interact with them and making sure to get a returning visitor to your site.

4. Web 2.0 Usage :

You may use such Web 2.0 websites like Hubpages, Squidoo to get large number of viewers as these sites are already having indexed pages with higher page ranking in SERPs and have large number of viewers and connections with different websites of similar niche.

5. Guest Posting :

Select some good sites within your niche and start posting as a guest author.  It will make you known to other blog's viewers and in this way you can promote your blog too.

6. Forum, Q&A Community Engagement :

Start writing on a forum and take participation in Q&A online communities. This will increase your understanding on the topics and will clear your views ensuring leaving your blog link there in relavant and related topic.

7. Blog Carnival Participations :

Participate in the blog carnivals which have targeted audience and  there is a scope for you to get few percentage of that massive audience to your blog.

8. Upload Videos :

If your blog niche comes under technology and you provide how-to guides. Start making your own how-to guides' videos also so that people who will watch the videos on online video websites like Youtube, will come to your blog too.

9.  Offer Giveaway :

This is one of the best techniques to bring traffic to your blog. Organize Giveaway Contest/Quiz very often ensuring the visitors are taking part on the Giveaway contest and quiz.

10.  Quality and Unique Content :

Obviously this is the most vital rule in the field of blogging. Until & unless you write quality and unique content, you won't get visitors. Readers will be attracted to the posts which are unique and original which will be having good quality and full information.  You can go for a good catchy domain name and start blogging.

Unfortunately, the above things are not taken care by the pre-bloggers, newbies who want their blog be a hit one over night. Nowadays the search engine crawlers are very accurate and can catch false links. They treat the links as spams and may ban your site. Therefore, we have drafted some not to do thing below :

DON'Ts : 

1. Buying Backlinks : 

Don't buy backlinks and get your site linked. There are a lot of software for backlinks builder available over net but stay away of them.

2. Link Exchange Communities :  

In SERPs, links found via link exchange communities will be considered as fake and will not encourage your blog for good page ranks.

3. Article Submission Service : 

Good article submission service will help your blog to grow fast by increasing readers and subscribers but if it submits to cheap and junk directories? Don's make sense. So, be selective before you submit article.

4. Compromising With Quality :

Bloggers do think that it is necessary to post everyday without fail. Yes, it is a good practice that you write at least one article every day but it doesn't mean that you should look for quantities rather than quality. Posting degraded quality contents will reduce the number of viewers.

5. Spamming : 

Engaging with online communities doesn't mean that you write anything irrelevant to the topic itself. This useless comments and links will not bring any visitors to your site. Search engines consider these links as spams.

We have discussed about the DOs and DON'Ts while you build backlinks ensuring a good SEO practice on your blogs/websites for better ranking in SERPs.

5 Tips To Increase Google Search Rankings [Infographic]

Over the years, search engines had dramatically changed and enhanced their search rankings criteria. It now places much more emphasis on how valuable your information is to your readers. And rightly so too.

Search engine optimization and is the art of applying effort to make a website more search engine friendly, so that it will increase its appearance on a search engine’s organic search results. Lets find out in the below inforgaphic.

Source : 100Webhosting.com

Understanding Of Google Search And SEO [Infographic]

A lot of the people got trained on SEO and search engines have little or no previous knowledge about search technology other than their own personal experience of using Google to find information online.

Of particular interest to those working in SEO is likely to be the overall positive attitude towards sites that rank prominently in organic SERPS compared to those that appear as sponsored listings, even where there exists little or no understanding of what makes a page rank prominently on Google. Here is a nice infographic explains the Google search and SEO.

Source : SeoTrainingLondon

Google Announced Hummingbird Update

On it's 15th birthday, Google moved all their searches to Secure Search. The reason behind this is that Google will now show all organic traffic in your  analytics tool originating from the keyword. So Google has rolled out a vital update to their algorithm and announced this modification as Hummingbird Update.

What is Hummingbird Update?

Hummingbird Update is an upgrade to Google algorithm which processes and analyzes more complex queries. In 2010, Google update Caffeine was aimed at crawling and indexing but Hummingbird is meant for improvement matching for relevance.

In an event recently took place, Google SVP of Search Amit Singhal talked about the new things happening nowadays  on Google. Here are some highlights from Q&A sessions which were addressed by Amit Singhal himself. Forbes.com has documented some Q&A on their site. Find below some highlights of them.

Q: How big a change is Hummingbird? 

it’s as big as the change to the last algorithm, known as Caffeine. It happened about a month ago.

Q: How specifically is Hummingbird better?

It’s essentially to better answer the much more complex queries people are making. It impacts all kinds of queries, but far more effective on long, complex questions that we are getting many more of now. 

Q: Examples? 

Hard to be specific, but essentially, with more complex queries, the algorithm can better understand concepts vs. words as well as relationships between concepts.

Q: How is this different in nature from Caffeine? 

This is clearly more focused on ranking sites better for relevance, while Caffeine was more focused on better indexing and crawling of sites.

Hummingbird For Search Visibility :

Google already explained as it will impact up to 90% of SERPs. This update is meant to rank content better with respect to relevance, and to match in a broader population of queries, we are optimistic that it will improve the quality of the SERPs.

Considering the lack of visibility into keywords (Secure Search), we can come to a decision that Google is finally forcing our hands with the move to semantic search and SERPs based on user intent as opposed to keyword matching as a whole.

People who practise and take advantage of content marketing, especially those that include authorship markup and other semantic markup, are already ahead of the game in the Hummingbird time.

This is just a beginning; so we can expect much more analysis coming out in the days ahead. Share your experience and add comments below. If you find additional information that people would like, you can add those resources or links in the comment section.

How To Get Higher PageRank In Google

Have you ever thought that billions of posts are published daily over the net and how many of the websites get higher rank in SERPs? Actual answer is very few. PageRank (PR) comes in numbers which can be less or more but one thing is sure that we can easily make difference in numbers by following some regular SEO activities.

Why Not Getting Higher Rank ?

This is a common question from a large number of bloggers who posts regularly with rich content but don't get noticed in Google SERPs with higher PageRank.

There is no specific answer to this question because a lot of things are involved to rank higher : like - unique content, regular posts, proper page design and loading on browsers, regular SEO jobs on blogs and some more.  

We have tried our best to figure out some of the reasons. Here we go :

1. Googlebot Crawling :

Google' algorithm "Googlebot" or Google spiders don't search for the links what all bloggers post or don't roam the web. They request web servers to provide specified pages, then they scan them for hyperlinks, which in turn will lead them to the new documents that they fetch in the same way. In short Googlebot crawls for the links.

2. Google Indexing :

Even after crawling, we can't search the pages because they are not properly indexed. It totally depends on the keywords that we use for the articles. Google builds indexes for the articles with specific keyword. If you use the keyword "technology" in some of your blog posts, then Google will index them under "technology" keyword.

3. Google Ranks Articles :

It depends on the relevancy of the articles posted and Google rank them accordingly. 

If you search with the string "android tablets", it will show in search engine result pages (SERPs) by following two steps :

a) It will find the "android tablets" related pages.

b) It will rank them with relevant topic.

How Relevancy Is Ranked By Google ?

The most asked question for website owners is "why is my not ranking high on SERPs? " Normally it is found that  Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. 

How Do You Know The Website Relevancy ?

 It basically depends on the concept that how well you optimize the page itself that will determine whether and how highly it’ll show up in Google search results. Usage of keywords, meta tags, description help to optimize it.

What to Do In This Situation ?

1. Focus On Niche :

Readers for your blog and Google would love you if you stay on the niche on which you write. Suppose your niche / topic is "technology" then don't write articles on topic "traveling". Keep focussing on your niche "technology" only. Google ranks web pages only and not the websites.

2.  On-Page Optimization :

It is the process by which you can inform Google that what your page contains. If you update the title, meta tags and description of the web page then it will be easier for Google bot to list the pages in SERPs accordingly. 

Use specific keywords, tags and description for the pages you are publishing over net so that Google bot can find your pages relevant to the search made by viewers.

Improving Web page Factors :

Here we would like to suggest some on-page factors which can be useful for getting higher ranks in Google SERPs :

1. SEO Optimization : 

You have to work on the SEO factors to get more engaged with Google SERPs. You can explore the page's SEO opportunities like page title, description, post related info, keywords, tags etc.

2. SEO Tools :

You can use the SEO tools because Google keeps changing its algorithms very often. If you use the SEO tools then no need checking recent Google algorithm changes as your SEO tools will be doing it for you.

3. SEO Outsourcing :

It would be a costly option but again time saving. If you want to focus more on content writing rather than SEO optimization then hire some company to do it for you.

4. Leave it to Google :

Once you have done with your SEO optimization practices then leave it to Google where your pages would be crawled in an organic way with increasing your ranking on SERPs.

Top 10 SEO Tips For Bloggers

A lot of articles are there which help us to do a better SEO job for your website ensuring that your website will be available to search engines and easy to find it.

Tim Resnick of (SEO) Moz, has suggested 10 SEO tips for bloggers as follows :

1. Stay Tuned On SEO Job:

If you get success from your blog then you should stick with the SEO opportunities and working on them.

2. Don't Press "Enter" : 

Always use Google Suggests to auto fill keywords and check what comes on the dropdown list. For example, if you type "Ice". You may find Ice Age then Ice Cream etc. Don't press Enter. Its better to use Soovle.com to find out the automatic suggestions on all search engines in one page.

3. Don't Make Duplicate : 

Google doesn't like duplicate contents and they can penalize you. To avoid this so you can search for your post's duplicates. You can either take your post's first sentence and put it in Google or you can use copyspace.com to find duplicates.

4. Follow @twitter :

Building links in good circles with the help of established connection will definitely help your blog to grow. So try to follow the right people in social media connection. Share your links with great influencers.

5. Timing For Tweet : 

You can tweet at the time when your followers are on twitter. But how? There is a tool from MOZ, bufferapp.com which helps to analze and find the online twitter people.

6. Find Keyword :

Keywords are one of the best source of traffic to your blog. use google Webmaster Tool to work with keywords.

7. Rich Snippets :

To know your blog better, Google has to have microdata for your blog. You can use Rich Snippets for this.

8. Generate Sitemap :

For all bloggers, it is compulsory to submit the sitemap which help your blog pages to be indexed in google and other search engines. Go through the guidelines.

9. Authorship : 

If you have good content in your blog with your photo, then it will be helpful for your blog's faster visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Use Google Authorship.

10. Get Google+ Circled :

Get your blogs circulated via Google Plus circles then you will get more engagement.

The above SEO tips are mostly useful for your blog's visibility on SERPs. Now here is the presentation of Tim Resnick.

How To Use 301 Redirects & Canonical Attributes

When should you use 301 redirects on your website? When is the rel=canonical attribute the better solution? Sometimes it becomes necessary to redirect pages in a website or blog. This article will help you understand the two main techniques for setting redirection of a page on your website.

There are basically two approaches which can be used to practice this :

i) 301 redirect and 

ii) rel="canonical" attribute

These redirection methods are used to manage duplicate contents issue without losing page ranking and viewers will be same.

Difference between 301 And Canonical

These two options have been around since years and sometimes it creates really confusion regarding when and how to use it in search engines. Google has provided clear guidelines on using redirection options. Lets know how do they interact with other search engines and Google :

301: Page is no longer available and move to a new page permanently. Unavailable page can be removed from search engine index and new page can be indexed.

Canonical : Page has  similar versions of content but only one preferred page should be indexed while other versions will be available for viewers.

Now lets discuss in details.

301 Redirects :  

Matt Cutts from Google said, you'll lose "just a tiny little bit, not very much at all" which "doesn't change over time". 301 redirects explain viewers and search engines that original page is no longer available 

and new page is having all the relevant and latest information. 301 is complete and permanent redirection of page.

Issues with 301 :

At the time of implementing 301 redirects, we face some issues like following.

1.  Without the access from server side, you can not use 301 redirects either it is HTTP status code or FTP access.

2. It takes time to attribute your new page as it depends on hoe many times your original page is crawled by search engines.

3.  Most of the bloggers and website owner use 301 to point all the pages of original website to pages of new website. It could result in high bounce rate and accordingly losing viewers. But again this 301 

redirection is the only permanent solution for page redirection.

Usage of 301 :

• When you moving or replacing a page permanently.
• Domain name changed or moved to other one.
• While relevant content is there but getting message of expired contents and 404 pages.

Canonical Attribute :

Canonical attribute, the rel="canonical" attribute doesn't send the users directly to the new and relevant page. Instead of that it tells search engines that the preferred relevant page is there and can be visited.

You may have web pages with similar content and obviously search engines treat these contents as duplicate which is a danger zone for any website and can be banned in near future.  In this kind of situation we use rel="canonical".

If you have more than one web page for same product, the content would same. Say, you have two web pages and  one is listed when you search by product name and other is listed when you search by price. 

In this case, you have two different URLs and Google or other search engines will list both of the pages. But by using rel="canonical" on the product name page you can declare that price page is the preferred page which can be viewed by the users. 

There is chances to lose PageRank while using canonical redirects. Matt Cutts has also said "there's really not a whole lot of difference" between the 301 and the rel="canonical". The 301 and the canonical will lose "just a tiny little bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.

Issues with Canonical :

Compared to 301 redirects, re="canonical" has some limitations like :

1. In some SEPRs, you may still get the duplicate pages occasionally.

2. It is sometimes misused when implemented on pages which is not having large percentage of same content as canonical page. The rel="canonical" should not be used unless the number of duplicate contents is more.

3. In case of pages with multiple related content like having a single topic continued in different pages which use different unique URLs. Here the problem is it shows the very first page in SERPs ignoring the other relevant and informative pages.

Usage of rel="canonical" :

• If 301 redirects method is taking time
• There are two or more duplicate contents in SERPs but you want all of them visible
• When single page is having dynamic multiple URLs
• When you want two similar website live considering cross-domain.

Google treat both the method similarly but in best practice obviously 301 redirects method will be preferred.

How To Configure Google SERPs

Google Search Engine is an elephant in the room, when it comes to providing data we are generally searching for. Just switch to Google.com and search whatever you are searching for. But, if you are a learner like me, who like to search and learn new things all day long, then you would be pretty much annoyed with search results not opening in the new window by default. But here’s a simple tweak using which users can configure their Google SERPs to open in new Windows every time.

Lets find out how to configure Google SERPs quickly :

1. First of all, login to your Google Accounts and move over to Google.com.

2. Click on the wrench icon to the top right, , choose Search Settings from the drop down menu.

3. Scroll a bit, there you’ll find the option, Where results open.

Just check it. Click on Save button to save your preferences.

And voila, you are done configuring your search results to open in new tab every time.

Testing time, whether you are signed out or signed in, from now onwards your Google search results in open in new Window every time. Try it.

And that’s the simple tutorial to open Google SERPs results in new Window every time. Facing any issues, ping me.