Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable:

Today we’re excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users worldwide. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:

• Broadcast publicly. By checking “Enable Hangouts On Air,” you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
• See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
• Record and re-share. Once you’re off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it’s easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it’s over.

Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we’re rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout…

 

- CBS This Morning: May 8th at 4:20am PT / 7:20am ET	- Cadbury UK: May 11th at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET
- Conan O’Brien: May 8th at 7:30pm PT / 10:30pm ET	- The Nerdist: May 11th at 3:00pm PT / 6:00pm ET
- CNBC: May 10th at 1:15pm PT / 4:15pm ET	- Jamie Oliver on Food Revolution Day: May 19th at 5:00pm PT / 8:00pm ET
- Global Poverty Project: May 10th at 4:00pm PT / 7:00pm ET	- A special series from The New York Times’ Opinion department

… sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.

 

A news van for everyone. KOMU-TV anchor +Sarah Hill invited locals to share live coverage of the recent protests in Montreal; Fox 11 LA anchor +Maria Quiban invites viewers to join her on Good Day LA.	Town halls with today’s leaders. President+Barack Obama, Governor +Mitt Romney, UN Secretary-General +Ban Ki-moon, and many others have connected with citizens via hangout.
Live concerts from your living room.Musical artists like +Suite 709 and +Daria Musk perform live for those inside the hangout, and for everyone else tuning in.	Classes anyone can attend. Chef +Larry Fournillier, Professor +Noah Diffenbaugh, and +FAWN share their cooking, climate change and fashion expertise, respectively, via hangout.
Roundtables about any topic. Photographer +Trey Ratcliff, soccerfootball enthusiast +Sabotage Times and celebrity trend spotter +Young Hollywoodtalk about the issues they find interesting.	Face-to-face meetups with all of your favorites. +David Beckham, the +Miami Hurricanes, +Tyra Banks, the+Indianapolis Colts and +Geek & Sundryhave all enjoyed meet-and-greets with their fans.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll share with the world.

Posted by Chee Chew, Engineering Director

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 2:45 PM

Webmaster level: All

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.