home james SEO & PPC Monthly Digest

The second installment of our new series of blog posts from home james - the most important stories in search and SEO for the last month, all in one easy to digest post. This month - August 2009.

Google rolls out Vince update

Over the past few months we have seen fluctuations in Google UK SERPS following the latest 'Vince' update. 'Vince' is a tweak to Google’s results that seems to favour sites with trust, authority, reputation and PageRank. Several established UK brands have benefited from improved Google rankings following the 'Vince' update.

Google Caffeine - faster, more accurate, more comprehensive search results

In the latest round of the search engine wars Google has announced 'Caffeine' - a major update to its search architecture. Google engineers have rewritten parts of the search engine's infrastructure so that Google 'Caffeine' is faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than the current Google search setup. 'Caffeine' is described as an 'under the hood' update; it is not a change to the external Google user interface that you see. Google Caffeine is not currently live but is being tested & made ready for launch in the coming months.

Bing Sees Modest Search Gains In July

Microsoft's Bing managed to makes slight gains in July while Google and Yahoo saw very small declines in search, according to comScore. Google led the U.S. search market in July with 64.7 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo (19.3%), and Bing (8.9%). Ask grabbed 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL with 3.1 percent.

Twitter Finally Giving Users Retweet Feature

Twitter announced that it intends to add a retweet option to its service as well as the API. Retweeting has basically become a huge part of the Twitter culture, but it is not a function that is readily available on Twitter itself. Adding a retweet feature should make the whole process easier.