Anyone turning to Google to look into the cervical cancer jab is unlikely to be reassured. Although these results are generated algorithmically, Google's results are anti-jab. There is very little in the way of balance in the results, with a mixture of old and new scare stories, and only a couple of positive stories.

Google has updated its sprite again - the one image it uses to display all its graphics (to understand what a sprite is, see my post on July's sprite update). The only change is the addition of a large and a small version of what looks like a video play button.

Google is (sometimes) showing multiple threads for forum sites when they appear in the results.

I've been trying to get people I work with to stop filling out meta keywords fields for ages, with varying degrees of success.

Google has come out and said this: "Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking? In a word, no."

Rather than bookmarking Google Analytics, for some reason I type a random letter in the Google toolbar, and navigate to my Google account. Anyway, as a result I thought it would be interesting to list the top sites that Google returns for single-letter searches. At the bottom are links to other people who have done something similar in the past outside the UK.

The Mirror has removed some of the links to MoneyExtra that I recently warned looked like paid-for links added for SEO reasons (which would put them in breach of Google's guidelines).

Of the 11 pages I pointed out: 5 contained links to the MoneyExtra credit card page - 4 have had the MoneyExtra links removed ...

Interesting post by Martin Belam on advertisers telling people to search for the phrase "Where can I find the UKs cheapest cars" (link is to his blog).

However, the Mirror wants to beware how its links look. Let's take a look at a few pages - stories which share these characteristics:

* All contain exactly three links to a MoneyExtra page.
* All three links use different anchor text.
* The text happens to be competitive search terms.
* And MoneyExtra isn't mentioned in the article itself.

There are several ways you can use Google to find out what terms people are searching for, and how popular those search terms are.

I've used them to check search terms related to The X Factor (ITV's talent show) - and I reckon Google Insights is better than the Google Adwords Keywords tool.

Google's logo over the weekend showed one of its Os being abducted by aliens, triggering an SEO scrap among UK newspapers, which the Telegraph won.

Google seems to have redesigned the header section of its results page, removing the links to other types of search (web, images, news, blogs etc) and removing the ability to sign in.

There were a few tweets today hinting at a conspiracy theory around Google news and Cash4gold. I think we can probably relax - there is no cover up.

Instead of lambasting the BBC for the "chilling" effect of its online activities, and blaming the problems of online news sites on the BBC "dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market", News Corp chief James Murdoch should thank the BBC for all the traffic it sends his way.

The BBC is responsible for about 870,000 visitors a month to Times Online and 1.1 million to thesun.co.uk (see methodology, below).

thelondonpaper is closing - with a reported pre-tax loss of £12.9m in the last financial year on £14.1m turnover. Maybe if they'd sorted out their SEO strategy, they'd have got more website visitors and sold more adverts?

The issue around US maps appearing a part of the individual results for UK sites continues ... matt Cutts has written a post. But here's another oddity - the same site with two different wrong locations.

Adding a related-posts plugin can reduce your bounce rate by around 3% if my site is anything to go by.
In the two months before I installed the Yet Another Related Posts plugin my bounce rate was 84.3%. In the two months since then, my bounce rate has averaged 81.6% - a drop of 3.25%.

There have been several complaints lately about irrelevant US examples filling up the results in Google UK. Now Google's started adding maps of the USA to UK-based companies. Here are two examples - both with a .com domain. This suggests to me that Matt Cutts has completely missed his point in his video explaining .com sites in the UK results.

Search for cottage hire birmingham, and Google shows you a map of bethlehem in pennsylvania. Huh?

So why am I blogging about it? I wanted to try embedding a Google Insights graph - and this one for UK searches for Big Brother shows how interest has slumped over the last 5 years.

Google's made its adwords move around when you resize your browser window. I can't say I like the change. But it also means that, by shrinking your browser window enough, you can make only adverts appear.