Google has rolled out a significant change in their natural search algorithm, announced last Friday.  According to industry bloggers, the new change might be connected to a Google’s patent submitted last May: Query rewriting with entity detection (U.S. Patent 7,536,382).

Historically, a Google keyword search (brand or non brand) would only result in a single subdomain such as ‘www.yourdomain.com’ appearing one or two times within the natural rankings.  But today, the number of ranking opportunities for a single subdomain (and consequently a portfolio of subdomains) has expanded to an unknown limit. Therefore, if a given domain according to Google’s judgment (algorithm) provides multiple results across unique URLs, the domain might rank numerous times. This update shakes up the natural rankings and potential domination strategies for certain types of search queries, those with a “brand plus” combination.

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In late 2009, Yahoo! & Microsoft’s Bing announced a strategic partnership, better known as the Search Alliance, which would effectively consolidate the search landscape by allowing Bing to power both paid and natural search results across the Yahoo! network.  Last week, Yahoo! officially announced that the transition to Bing-powered natural search results was complete for U.S. and Canadian (English only) Yahoo! properties. Other languages and regions will follow in the coming weeks.

This latest report from 360i covers:

• Changes search marketers can expect within the Yahoo! search results page
• New features within Bing’s Webmaster Center interface
• Key recommendations for brands to consider now that the integration has fully taken effect

Read & Download: Impact of Search Alliance on SEO

This week’s roundup has something for everyone – news from each of the Big 3 engines, a big announcement from SCVNGR (hint: it involves Facebook), Time’s list of 50 awesome websites and more. Catch up on all the top stories in our summary below.

Google Expands Its ‘RealTime’ Search of Tweets, Buzzes

On Thursday, search market leader Google made strides in order to make its results more up-to-the-minute. Google Realtime Search (google.com/realtime) displays the latest conversations in a self-refreshing newsfeed as they happen across services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Google Buzz.

When a user searches within Google Realtime, new results appear as they become available. Depending on the topic, these updates can be quite frequent – as the Wall Street Journal reports that people provide more than 70 million updates via Twitter on a single day. Above the results, users can see how the volume of conversations grow or shrink over time. To the right of the results, Google lists “top links” related to the user’s search query.

Google first began incorporating realtime updates back in December 2009, but up until this week those results had been limited to the “Updates” feature within the main search product. Now, these results have been given their own offshoot page.

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If you’ve conducted a simple search within Google lately – which, let’s face it, you probably have – you may have noticed a new and different variety of result type.  This type of result, one that has been labeled as “One Box”, “Snippets” or “Short Answers,” is becoming more persistent within the engine.  And no matter what Google decides to officially name these types of quick results, you can expect to see more of them in the future.

Whether you want to calculate a simple math equation or solve measurement conversions, Google is streamlining your answers. For example, if you have air travel plans, you can search Google for your airline flight status.  If you are interested in music, you can query your favorite music artists or songs. You can also search for new movie showings or times, and dates of birth or death.  Given the volume of these one-off searches, Google is aiming to increase user satisfaction by speeding up its delivery of the basic information we seek.

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In last week’s post about Google Places, we took a high-level look at the platform and what it offers to businesses looking to improve local visibility in Google. In today’s post, we’ll continue to explore Google Places in terms of user interaction, extra features, as well as some limitations it presents for marketers seeking to optimize hundreds or thousands of locations.

First off, let’s take a look at all of the ways consumers can interact with businesses in Google Places.

How users interact with Google Places

It should now seem clear that maintaining local information through Google Places will improve control of a brand’s visibility in Google Search, including:

Web Search (Universal Listings)

These predominant local “universal” listings, often seen through a standard web search, significantly influence the local visibility for brands, aiding direct search traffic to the brand’s website (via the A, B, C links seen below).  Plus, users clicking on the link just below the main hyperlink –perhaps seeking details like user reviews, hours of operation, directions and more — will be sent to a corresponding Google Place page to get the information, in contrast to the brand’s website.

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Image by atomische via Flickr.

For marketers in the digital space, 2009 was a whirlwind year. Twitter took off amid a social surge, Yahoo! and Microsoft partnered up in search and Google gobbled up a litany of companies. During this time we’ve used our blog to cut through the headlines and share insights into what the year’s top stories mean for marketers. Look to Digital Connections for more of this in 2010.

Below you’ll find our most widely-read posts of the year (we’ve recently counted down the top five on Twitter, for those of you who follow us there).

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One way to effectively mix SEO and PPC: Stay ahead of the curve and utilize new innovations that enable you to weave micro-formats and RSS feeds into search listings.

In an iMedia Connection article published today, Mike Dobbs — Group Director, SEO at 360i — outlines 10 tips for combining SEO & paid search in your digital marketing programs. We’ve provided a brief summary below, but you can read the full article over on iMedia’s Web site.

While search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search are often seen as independent processes by digital marketers, the consumer sees a search results page as a single experience, and research shows that paid and natural search do impact eachother. Here’s a look at 10 key force-multipliers that leverage search results pages to maximize the impact of both your PPC and SEO efforts:

1. Follow proven SEO best practices
There are many standard best practices, but avoiding duplicate content is a vital SEO rule for retailers. Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one webpage. Embracing the “canonical tag” is an elegant solution for avoiding duplicate content.

2. Evaluate your paid search campaign structure against your own site architecture
Following your site’s architecture when setting up your campaigns and ad groups can help reveal untapped opportunities for your paid search efforts. Do you have an ad group for each of your product categories and promotions? Walk through your site map and compare it against your PPC campaign to make sure you cover all the bases.

3. Take a holistic approach to PPC bidding and ad creative
Running paid ads that include timely promotions and a call-to-action alongside natural search results for your brand can actually increase overall click-through rates (CTRs) on natural search listings, providing higher ROI across your search efforts.

Results of a SearchIgnite study showed that natural search clicks were 17 percent higher on days when paid search ads were running, garnering more “free” clicks simply by running paid search ads alongside natural search results. In addition, total conversions and revenue on both paid and natural terms dramatically increased on days when paid search ads were running.

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