Alright, here we have it—the past year’s top 10 most Google’d celebrities. Whether gifted with real talent or just really good at creating controversies, these (mostly) pretty people have an allure about them that keeps us interested. In descending order—with some ties—here are the stars that need to give their search engine marketing team a raise.

Google Global Monthly Searches

1. Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga – 151,000,000
2. Beyonce, Miley Cyrus – 68,000,000
3. Taylor Swift – 45,500,000
4. Britney Spears – 37,200,000
5. Madonna, Chris Brown – 30,400,000
6. Kanye West – 20,400,000
7. Angelina Jolie, Adam Lambert, Paris Hilton – 11,100,000
8. Kelly Clarkson, Lindsay Lohan – 9,140,000
9. Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Alba – 6,120,000
10. Brad Pitt – 5,000,000

Bet you could have guessed that—I mean of course the death of the King of Pop Michael Jackson would rank first, and who can resist the shock value of Lady Gaga’s latest stunt? It seems clear why Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Angelina Jolie made the list with their never-ending “Team Aniston” vs.” Team Jolie” feud. And of course everyone wants to know what the heck is going on with Lindsay Lohan—is she in jail? Out of jail? Did she really give the big “F*** you” in court? Clearly there are issues we just can’t resist knowing about.

Then there’s Kanye West, infamous for the stunt he pulled with Taylor Swift. No one will ever know whether the incident was staged or not, but regardless of its authenticity, it made for some great TV. Madonna—enough said, but surprising that she’s still in the top ten (top five actually) most Google’d celebrities. She either has some quality search engine optimization going on, or she’s just really really popular and will continue to be for quite awhile (I vote for the latter).

So we’ve made it to the top, with ties for 1st and 2nd place. But Beyonce and Miley Cyrus at number two? There’s no denying that Beyonce has talent, but Miley Cyrus? I guess we’ll see when she makes it through this “I’m not a little girl anymore” phase. Then again, sprouting out of Disney gives you a bit of a following, especially when lap dance videos clash with your “innocent little girl” character.

Speaking of characters, it is absolutely no surprise that Lady Gaga is the number one most Google’d celebrity alive. She’s always in the headlines, and I have to admit that her music is quite catchy. So this begs the question: is she just weird or is her unusual and flat out bizarre appearance pure marketing genius?

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New Message Center notifications for detecting an increase in Crawl Errors

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 02:58 PM PDT

Webmaster Level: All (Credits from Google Webmaster Blog)

When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we’re now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.

A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:
  

google message center notifications

We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don’t want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.

If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

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Google Confirms Their New Policy of Quality Over Relevancy
Finally after days of letting the webmasters squirm Google confirmed that the algorithm update had an effect on the long tail traffic. Google decided to change the ranking factors of both relevance and quality. Matt Cutts is quoted saying…

“This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

In the past, if your site had lots of pages of lower quality but high relevance then they would have previously ranked well in Google for those long tail keyword phrases. But now Google has made that relevancy less important in favor of the higher quality pages. E-commerce sites were more likely to see their item description pages with few individual incoming links and less unique content suddenly drop out of sight.

The first thing to do is use your Google Analytics to check late April and early May to see if you suffered any noticeable drops in traffic due to the May Day update. If you’re seeing specific long tail keyword queries drop in rank take the time to search for them on Google.

You may have been better ranked earlier because of relevance, but now Google sees these pages as higher quality and it’s your job to find out why. For the pages that were bringing in significant traffic the way to turn this around is to build incoming links and do what you can to make these pages higher quality. 

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