According to a recent Google blog post, more gadgets offered by Google are to be cut. The blog post, written by Yossi Matias, a senior engineering director states that the total number of Google features which have been removed since autumn last year has reached almost 60.
Among the features to be withdrawn are spreadsheet gadgets, Places directory on Android and Google News Badges. Matias said:
“Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users’ lives. This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact.
So today we’re winding down a bunch more features- bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our ‘spring’ clean last fall.”
Some of the changes could have an impact on the SEO of businesses globally, including cities in the UK like Liverpool. AdSense for Feeds is another victim of Google’s ‘spring clean’, starting early October and closed down entirely by 3rd December 2012. Storage for Drive and Picasa will be merged, so users will receive five gigabytes of free data. However, users who pay for more storage will have the free data included in their paid allocation. Gadgets for Google Spreadsheets have been removed as they are already included in the existing apps for Google. The Android app Places directory is being removed and replaced by Google Maps.
The changes which have taken place since autumn last year could have affected the search engine optimisation of a number of businesses. The changes could have resulted in some SEO jobs becoming more complex.
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