Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 |
Google releases a “new toy” with Hot Trends. While keeping up with what is hot with Google search terms is not really part of SEO, it is fun to see what the collective search world is focusing on.
And today we’re introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What’s on our collective mind as we search for information? What’s interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you’ll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.
For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.
Also stated by Google: With the release of Hot Trends, we’re retiring the weekly Zeitgeist list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too.
Too bad for Zeitgeist but at least it is continuing forward, just not on a weekly basis.
Being a big fan of The Office I was tickled to see that on May 17th Creed’s Thoughts was hot.
You can read the full blog post: What’s Hot Today
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb, Search Engines | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 17th, 2007 |
Wow, Google is already the known leader in the search engine market and they are now moving ahead of the competition even further with Universal Search. Can anything stop them? You may have noticed some search results showing a lot more than just text results, well that is universal search kicking in. You can see the search for Darth Vader as an example of the new look.
Reading this snipped bit of text from the blog post on the Googleblog certainly seems exciting.
Although it’s just a beginning, this first pass of universal search focuses on video, news, local and books. Now you’ll be able to get more information Google knows about directly from within the search results. You won’t have to know about specialized areas of content. If you’re looking for the [atkins southwestern pork fajitas] recipe, we can now link you right to that page in the book. Or if, like me, you’ve been busy these past few days and have not caught up with your Tivo, don’t type [sopranos] into Google, because our news result will be a giant spoiler. The search for [rachmaninoff concerto 3] includes a video of Vladimir Horowitz performing this piece (scroll down to see it), and [Animator vs. Animation 2] is pretty cool as well. (And as Johanna notes: I was delighted to see that when querying for my son’s name a video showed up too.)
How this bodes for the search engine optimization industry remains to be seen, but helping site that deserve to be found in the search results will always be a good thing. I feel this can only help the better sites rise to the top and everyone should be in favor of that.
You can read the entire post about Google’s Universal Search. You can also find more when reading Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Search Engines | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 |
More news that Google will soon be taking over the world.
Call 800-GOOG-411
Use the new Google Voice Local Search experiment to connect to local businesses anywhere in the U.S. from your phone, for free. Just dial the toll-free number 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and speak the name of a business (”Giovanni’s Pizzeria”) or its category (”pizza”).
You can choose to connect to the business directly over phone or, if you are calling from your mobile phone, you can also say “text message” and we’ll send you the business’s details by SMS. Google won’t charge you for a thing, but note that regular phone charges may apply based on your phone service provider.
http://labs.google.com/goog411
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 |
Not really an SEO post, but cool nontheless. Here is a new feature from the “mouth” of Google:
A new Google Maps feature lets you easily create maps with placemarks that incorporate your text comments, photos, and videos from YouTube and Google Video. It’s a great way of sharing your stories on a map, whether it’s stops you enjoyed on a recent vacation or the best places to grab a quick bite to eat in your city. To get started, just click the “My Maps” tab on the left-hand side of the Google Maps homepage.
You can take a look at the maps other people have created (there’s even one of the Googleplex), and then get started making your own by clicking “Create new map.” If you make your map public, we will make it searchable for other folks who use Google Maps.
http://maps.google.com
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 |
As of April 11th there is no longer a need to manually submit your sitemap to search engines. Last fall, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) agreed on a sitemaps format. You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap file resides.
Include the following line in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt has been used to instruct the search engines how to crawl your site - where not to go on your site. This latest sitemaps implementation of robots.txt will now tell the spiders where to go when indexing your site..
Sitemaps are important, especially for new sites, will help improve your website visibility in search results.
What is a xml sitemap?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Yahoo Search | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 16th, 2007 |
Get to know Google. What would an SEO Consultant’s life be like without Google? An interesting question but one we are likely never to have to answer. Google is the new Microsoft and will affect our lives forever more in ways we don’t even realize yet. Don’t believe me? Do you think Google just does web search? Think again.
I’ve listed many services that Google offers and I’m sure you may be a bit surprised at how many different pies the search giant’s thumb is actuall in. The list is growing so please contribute if you know of any I may have missed. I have bolded the Google services I view important for SEO purposes. (more…)
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 |
Google can seem like a entity which can’t be pinned down, much like the Internet itself. But, believe it or not it has many locations and a headquarters. I found two phone numbers so I’m not sure which one you call to ask for a #1 listing for your site’s search term. Better call them both when to ask. 
Google Company Information
Contact Address
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Contact Phone
1-650-318-0200
1-650-253-0000
Contact Fax
1-650-253-0001
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 |
Google has posted about a new webmaster tool. It will allow webmasters to view backlink information which will show who links to your site, which pages are getting the links as well as both internal and external. This will certainly be helpful for webmasters and I applaud Google for allowing us insight, but I’m still bothered by this statement made by Google: “(Note that this may not be 100% of the external links to this page.)”
Oh, well. Better than nothing and a step in the right direction.
I believe Google wants cooperative partnerships with webmasters and ethical SEO companies and this is at least a nice gesture toward that goal. Time will tell, but the future looks a little brighter.
As of Feb. 6, 2007 the Link tab was not yet showing in my Webmaster Tools, we’ll assume it will show up soon.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Link Building, SEO Tools | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 2nd, 2007 |
Since Google and the other search engines are a big part of my life, my wife would say too big of a part, I try weird searches every now and then. Today I did a search for the term “search” (without quotes) and then clicked the I’m Feeling Lucky button.
Very interesting what site that Google takes you to. Care to take a guess before giving it a try? It ain’t Google.
I wonder if Google is trying to tell us something? I guess this proves that the search results are truly not manipulated.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), Out on a Limb | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 29th, 2007 |
Before you read this post you may wonder what is (or was) Googlebombing? Technically, a “Googlebomb” refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure, meaningless or insulting search query by pointing large amounts of links to the site with the term in the anchor text link.
So does this mean George Bush is no longer a miserable failure, according to Google it does. An amusing story for clients has now bit the dust. Googlebombing no longer works which means massive amounts of links to a page without the term linking to it on the page are no longer going to be ranked for said term. Cases in point, if you searched for the term miserable failure you were given George Bush’s bio page as the number one search result. Try it now and you will see search results talking about George Bush and fact his page used to be number one for the term miserable failure.
So finally Google has corrected a long outstanding “bug” in their search algorithm. Good for them and good for all of those ranking for term miserable failure.
Google also states this has been done without any outside or hand manipulations so it would appear a page must now have the term on it before it can rank for that term.
In other words, the anchor text in links is not longer sufficient to rank for these terms. It must be found in conjunction with on-page usage.
Read all the details in a post by Matt Cutts on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, January 19th, 2007 |
All web sites should use the META description tag. If you have too many pages to add it to, at least put it on your home page and any core pages that bring in search result traffic. Google will use the META description you place on your site if the user searched for a keyword that exists in the META description. Google is giving us some measure of control.
How best to use this you may ask? You need to think like a radio advertising writer. What can you say in one brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. A little sensationalism never hurt.
A brand message can help or you can put your phone number in the META description. Think out of the box; how about a offer a discount or advertise a sale. Be careful though, if you put a sale message and when the sale ends your message might still display until Google updates your site listing. You don’t want your text in the search results still announcing a sale that is over. Ultimately you should tell searchers your unique selling proposition.
Remember that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
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