HELLOOOO and welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – hard to say what was up last week… but I found it a bit slow for good geeking. Either that or the weather was so nice here I glazed over at the site of my feed reader. Hard to say. I never get dopey when it comes to search patents though and there were more than a few interesting ones on that front last week. We also had the ‘confirmation’ and standard line from Googly on the whole MayDay situation.

Anyway, shall we get into it?

Lead Story

MayDay still in the news

While it isn’t exactly breaking news, it does bear placement at the lead this week. I am sure most folks know that there has been grumbling the last month or so about the ‘MayDay’ update over at Google. Last week we got a little confirmation in the form of;

Once more, there isn’t a whole lot there, here’s what I got –

It happened around April 28th to May 3
It is an algorithmic change
It affects long tail more than head terms
Independent of caffeine
Do you have a quality site?
Add ‘great content’ (sigh)
Build authority

This might be trust related, it could be segment related, temporal elements, named entities, or a combination (or none of them). Some are getting entire sets of client sites hit and others aren’t seeing it at all. It is still hard to say. We’re working it over in the SEO Dojo and shall report anything of interest we find.

On with the readin’…

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents -

Talk of the Town

Understanding Semantic Search and SEO – was a fairly geeky rambling of mine here on Search Engine Journal. It was an area I felt wasn’t really covered enough out there and should be. I hope it generates some new ideas/approaches for you.

Google’s Push To Speed Up Your Web Site – this is certainly one of the more important areas over the last while and worth noting. Eric shares some insights on what he’s been seeing.

Setting The Table For Restaurant SEO: Menus – I always enjoy a good niche or case study, this post certainly delivers. I’d have loved a little more depth, but a good read none-the-less.

10 Ways to Show Value from Your SEO Efforts – for those looking for some new options in reporting for management, this post from Mark Thompson begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting is a good read. Just remember, reporting needs to start from the goals on out. Never create pretty reports just for the sake of doing it.

The Death Of Web Analytics? An Ode To The Threatened Referrer – this one really seemed to go under the radar and is worth going through. There seems to be more and more of these reports and it is potentially problematic.

Is now the time for Google to address their own problem? – An interesting (semi) rant from Peter over on Holistic. Sadly I think he’s fighting an up-hill battle on this one. Us old farts, with a few exceptions, stopped dreaming of search utopia long ago…. hee hee.

Video SEO; the nuts and bolts – Terry (Van Horne) dropped another post on SEO for Video in his ongoing series into Universal Search. As long time readers here know, it’s an area many SEOs aren’t familiar with. I would deffo bookmark this one.

Google TV; it’s all about the data – speaking of video, we have yet another reason to start looking harder at it. This is my post on the Trail about the 5 Google patents on TV targeting. If you haven’t spent the time to get to know Google TV, it’s time you did.

Measuring Indexation Levels in Site Architecture – Richard Baxter had a great post on the never ending issue of getting a true indexation reading. To be honest, this is a tough go and there really are no tools that can help. Remember, even Google states that their ‘site:’ command isn’t really true. Regardless, some great research and instight here worth reading.

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Going Vertical – Videos – Tools – Patents -

Search Geek Central

Tech Stuff

Links Return To Yahoo Site Explorer – SER
Google Studies How Search Behavior Changes When Searchers Are Faced with Difficult Questions – SEO By The Sea
Making jQuery SEO Friendly – Shimon Sandler
How a Search Engine Might Identify Possible Query Suggestions – SEO by the Sea
SEO Will Never, Ever Die – AIM Clear Blog
Google Not Showing Number Of Results & Return Time – SER
Yahoo Redesigns Image and Video Search Pages to Show Trending Results – SEO.com
Psycholinguistics Experiments – the Lousy Linguist

Social Search

Not sure if it’s an indicator, but there was nothing of interest in the world of social search last week. Sorry. No need to fill this space with crap ;0)