Matt Cutts of google in his video last week announced how the next update would be big and one area it would target/look into was the uk payday loans. See the post here

Well today the search result have been updated (yes the results change all day everyday …)

Only one of the top organic results are the same.. .

Here is a screen shot of the side by side results:

[click image to enlarge]

So has the update started? Was this down to a link network being taken down see http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-seller-bust-16801.html

The one thing I find interesting is that all 9 out 10 results have changed!

The new penguin update 2.0 OR #4 is coming in the next few weeks and Matt Cutts of google’s spam team (search quality) have realised a video yesterday about up and coming updates including the awaited penguin 2.0 or #4

Check out the post over at seroundtable here for more discussion.

Here is the video:

What’s interesting to us here in the UK is the fact Matt has directly mentioned the UK payday loans search results.

Here is the current search results for me when logged in:

[click to enlarge]

Once the update is run I’ll post up another screen shot of who got hit.

All good things have to come to end

Google shopping will no longer be free in the UK and other countries just like in the USA last year…

We all knew this was coming but was hoping the free listing would last a bit longer…

From google:

Every day, people use Google to shop for products. To help shoppers find the products they want to buy, Google Shopping will be transitioning to a new experience in the UK beginning 13 February 2013. In this transition, Google Shopping will become a commercial platform built on Product Listing Ads. We believe this commercial relationship with our merchants will lead to higher quality data on the site and a better shopping experience for users. We expect this improved user experience to bring higher quality traffic to merchants and help them reach new customers.

Just had an email from a client asking if google shopping is down?

And yes it’s currently down in the uk showing:

Some of the search options are temporarily unavailable.

You can repeat the search with standard options, or try again later with all options.

Here is a screen shots when searching for books.. Interesting google has no books… Is it a glitch or a update coming to the UK?

UPDATE:

It’s now 11:07am in the UK and the search is now resolving.. So google shopping UK search was down for just over 1hr today… Expect your traffic to be down by about over the day by about 10-15%… Hopefully it will stay up for the rest of the day.

As always each day I log into my adsense to check out what’s going on across all my sites. I got paid on the 26th as you can see so normally the balance on the account goes to £0.00 in other words all has been paid BUT for whatever reason google is now showing me a negative balance..

I can only assume 1 or more clicks have been discounted at a later date OR that it just a maths error.

Wow.. digg has 404′d the old site for the new design.. Wow.. who has done that? Digg ranks (ranked) for so many search terms which it no longer will..

All of those outbound links are gone now too..

Here is an example: http://digg.com/news/story/Colourful_Adsense_hack_How_cool

According to google digg has 14million pages (of course it has far more indexed)

So some 14million links have just dropped off google’s radar. Yes digg nofollowed most links but it doesn’t matter as 14million is a game changer for many sites.

I’ve been running and playing with google’s adwords product listings for a while now and forever and a day I’ve been working on the google merchant shopping feed (froogle/base).

Back in 2006 I got invited into to google to work with them on google base as I was emailing google base support at least 5 times a week http://www.seohome.co.uk/2006/12/18/went-to-google-today/

Anyway I’ve not had much to moan about base/shopping/merchant centre for a long time until now..

As most of us know google to switching to a “paid” version of google merchant in the fall (autumn) see here for more details about that: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-shopping-paid-15233.html

So a new client I’m working with in the UK has been advised by me to start testing the product ads which I have had great success with for my long term clients.

So.. I logged into merchant centre to check out what products are approved for ads and saw the below warning:

wow what great news.. Google has added a short cut way to enable the product listing on adwords..

Yes the warning mentions feeds targeting the US but I’ve run product ads in the UK for a long time now I thought I’d use this simple short cut to enable a complete listing and learn a new process and offering from google to make it simple!

The process was so simple and showed up as enabled in the merchant centre. I went over to adwords and saw it had created everything for me.. Wow.. 2 clicks and it’s all done..

So I left it to run for a few days before checking out the impressions and results..

Here is the screen shot from the results within the merchant centre:

As you can see NO impressions and no clicks. I raised the cpc bid to see if it was to low.. Nothing.. no imp and clicks..

So google’s merchant centre said all good, all ok… so time to checkout what’s going on with adwords.

I did my normal tick list of billing ok? enabled? eligible? all fine..

Time to drill down into the campaign itself..

Here is the screen shot of the problem:

Google sets up a USA version only.. As this client is only in the UK and only has a UK feed the ads will not show.

Simple to fix of course but interesting that google isn’t checking if you have a US feed and just enabling a void campaign.

Showing both if I’m logged in or not google are showing what it labels as the “latest posts” on the keyword I’d type in.

The image below is a screen shot of when I’m signed in but I also looks the same if not signed in.

I’m sure I’ve read about google testing this but I’m seeing it live now.. I’ve tried to test a few keywords out like “facebook”, “google” and “twitter” and non are triggering the right column.

Anyway here is a screen shot [click image to enlarge]:

 Google does keep giving but it seems only when it comes to the social world and not the search engine world.

This is the only real update from google since taking away(most) our keywords from analytic reports.

So now you can drilldown into the “social referral” as below:

[click image to enlarge]

You can also see the “Assisted Social Conversions” AND the “Last Interaction Social Conversions”.

What are  ”Assisted Social Conversions” AND “Last Interaction Social Conversions”

The Social Overview Report
The Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from social channels. The Social Value graph compares the number and monetary value of all goal completions versus those that resulted from social referrals.
A visit from a social referral may result a conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that generate conversions immediately are labelled as Last Interaction Social Conversions in the graph. If a referral from a social source does not immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included in Assisted Social Conversions.

Here is a live example report:

With all the talk of Penguin update I came across this guy:

Data on the real google Penguin update coming in