SEO India, SEO Consultant

After weeks of speculation, the Google/Samsung mobile event lived up to its promise and delivered on both the hardware and the software that everyone wanted.

At the Hong Kong event (taking place last night for those of us in the West), the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS was unveiled, as was its flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (previously referred to as the Nexus Prime).

The Galaxy Nexus (seen above), is the new member of the Google phone lineage. It lives up to many of the specs that have been rumored for some time including a 4.65 inch screen, 1GB RAM and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor.

That giant screen is a Super AMOLED true HD experience – running at 1280×720 resolution. By all hands-on accounts, it’s one of the most gorgeous looking screens on the market.

As far as the camera goes, it’s a 5 megapixel device with an instant shutter (like the iPhones 4S). You can shoot 1080p HD video with the Galaxy Nexus.

It’s a thin phone, measuring 8.84mm thick (and 4.29 mm bezel) and has a new, sleek feel as there are no mechanical buttons – everything is built into the touch surface, including the home button. The device comes equipped with NFC capabilities, which not only sets the stage for mobile payments but allows for the Android Beam feature – a way for users to share apps, videos, contacts and more by “bumping” their Nexus with another Nexus. It’s also a 4G phone, as promised.

But one of the biggest draws of the Galaxy Nexus is in the software – the all new Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Google sought to create an OS that would function equally as well of tablets as mobile devices, a Gingerbread-Honeycomb on steroids.

Google announced that it is going to begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com when you search logged into your Google account. http://www.google.com will become https://www.google.com.

“This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao.

There’s a chance that your Google experience will be slower with SSL because the computer your’e using has to establish a secure connection with Google. This is interesting, considering that Google has put so much effort into speeding things up.

It’s worth noting that you can just go to https://www.google.com when you’re signed out, and still use encrypted search.

Naturally, webmasters and SEOs are contemplating the effects this will have on search engine optimization and analytics.

Sites visited from Google’s organic listings will be able to tell that the traffic is coming from Google, but they won’t be able to receive info about each individual query. They will, however, receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to the site for each of the past 30 days in Webmaster Tools.

“This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic,” says Kao. “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” says Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

“We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”

Google is making the encrypted search available on all of its search properties except for Maps.

Google really wants people writing web content to start using authorship markup. Not only are they looking to use it as a ranking signal, but it also pushes the Google Profile, which is essentially the backbone of the Google+ user experience.

Granted, you don’t need to be a Google+ user (at least at this point) to have a Google Profile, and Profiles existed before Google+, but in Google+, the Profile is essentially the equivalent of the Facebook Wall, and authorship markup places them right in search results with nice little clickable graphics.

In a recent article, we looked at a video Google released discussing how to implement authorship markup on your site. They’ve now released another one offering a few quick steps to get it to work when you don’t necessarily control the CMS of the site you’re writing content for. This way, even guest authors can add it.

Google calls it, “a way to make it even easier to annotate your pages and show that there is authorship.”

Here are the basic steps:

1. Find your Google Profile2. Add “?rel=author” on the end of your Google Profile URL

3. Wrap that in an a tag – <a href=”that url here”

4. Google wants you to use something like “+Matt Cutts” as the anchor text.

5. Insert that on your article, and point your Google Profile back to the site

“If I can’t control the attributes, I can still add a link to this special URL,” says Cutts, and it’s really as simple as that.

Google announced today that all Google Apps admins can start taking advantage of some new features the company has introduced. These include delegated administration, multi-domain support and “fine-grained” user policy management.

Delegated administration was revealed in May. The feature essentially lets primary admins offer other users specific admin controls.

Multi-domain support was first announced in June as a new admin control that lets organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from one control panel.

“Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book,” said Google Apps software engineer Will Smit. “It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps.”

In July, Google revealed its new user policy management letting admins segment their users into organizational units and control which apps are enabled or disabled for each group.

“These features have been well-received by the administrator community and we’ve seen healthy adoption among Google Apps for Business customers where these capabilities are helpful,” says Google Apps product manager Muzammil Esmail.

“Now all Google Apps administrators can use advanced control panel features to manage users and customize the security policies for their organizations, regardless of which version of Google Apps they’re using,” Esmail adds.

This week, Google also announced page-level permissions for Google Sites.