NEW YORK (Fortune) — Facebook might have a larger audience than the population of Brazil (200 million users vs. 191 million citizens), but the site doesn’t yet have a viable business model. Twitter is wildly popular but it loses money. Could the codgers at software giant Microsoft (a Facebook investor) be the guys who end up figuring out how to make money on social networks?
The company on Wednesday will begin testing a new social-networking platform called Microsoft Vine, and chief strategist Craig Mundie tells Fortune the company is planning on pursuing a subscription-based model instead of trying to support the platform only with advertising. Vine’s other twist: It plans to target public safety officials and concerned citizens seeking emergency information.
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Christopher Bradley Web Design social network marketing
Google improves its ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.
1. Google has increased the snippet length.
Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.
2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results
When you search for a keyword, Google will display related searches at the bottom (and sometimes at the top) of the search results.
For example, if you search for the keyword “principles of physics”, Google will suggest “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” as related terms that could help you find what you need.
3. Google now shows local results based on IP addresses
Search Google for the keyword “pizza” and you’ll see local results in the middle of the search results. These local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.
Christopher Bradley SEO Services, Web Design search engine optimization
Google tries to find a relation between the words that are used to link to your site and the content of your website. If many websites link to your website with the word “tomatoes” then Google’s algorithm will come to the conclusion that your website should be listed in the search results for the keyword “tomatoes”.
The keywords in the links to a website have been so important for Google that people managed to get websites to the top of Google’s search results for very obscure keywords. For example, some people started a scheme in which they asked their friends to link to the official website of George W. Bush with the keyword “miserable failure”.
The result was that George W. Bush’s website was #1 on Google for that keyword. In the meantime, Google has learned to deal with these so-called Google bombs and it’s not as easy to manipulate the results with the links as it has been.
Christopher Bradley Web Design search engine optimization
