Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Monday, January 29th, 2007 |
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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: 14% [?]
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: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Monday, December 18th, 2006 |
Let your users search for places on a Google Map without leaving your site. The best part is you don’t need to write a single line of JavaScript or HTML. The Map Search Wizard will generate code for you, and all you have to do is copy and paste the code into your page just like AdSense. You can also customize how you want the map to look and the center location. It’s easy, fast, and free. And if you’re interested in doing more with a dynamic Google search box, check out the AJAX Search API
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Thursday, November 16th, 2006 |
google has really done a great job making sitemaps integral for any true SEO company and now it seems as if the other big two are following suit.
You can read more about it from Sitemaps.org, the homepage for this new initiative:
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Will this be widely employed? Check out the big 3 and see: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 |
Zippy was launched in September by the seasoned SEO Dave Naylor, and provides some valuable tools for site optimization.Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.
The basic search functionality for Zippy queries Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and mashes the results together. It then ranks the results among the four.
Zippy is a new meta search engine that queries other major engines and returns results in a format most suited for Webmasters and SEOs. Read more.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), SEO Research, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 |
Post from TMCNET.com. Read the full article.
A coworker noticed that his Google Alerts now contained a new “Google Blogs Alert” within his email this morning. Sure enough, you can see the new Google Blogs Alert. My guess is they’re using their Google Blog Search, which already finds new blog posts and then sends the alerts.
Now the only question is “will Google add blogs to the main Google News”? And would you be for it or against it? After all, there are a lot of poorly written blogs out there and right now the Google News is a useful resource. Perhaps Google can take the Top 10000 blogs out there based on a combination of Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking, etc.
Google Alerts beta page now lists blogs, webs, groups, and comprehensive in the drop-down box.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Blogging, Google, SEO Research, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, November 10th, 2006 |
Nice article about the misunderstood supplemental results Google supplies. Also good advice on how to help your pages escape supplemental hades and find the Google promiseland. Better yet you can also read how to avoid being placed in the supplemental results altogether.
According to Google’s FAQ page, supplemental results are part of Google’s auxiliary index (main results are drawn from the main index) and pages, which appear on the supplemental listing, have "fewer restrictions" than those that appear on the main results page. They further say that the inclusion of sites on the main or supplemental index is purely automated and does not affect page rank at all.
In truth however, pages that appear on the main index will almost always show up first in a search. Supplemental search results will only show up if there are very few or no results at all in the main index. Plenty of older web sites also tend to populate the supplemental results page. Needless to say the supplemental results page is not where you want your site to end up. Ironically several people have emailed Google asking that their sites be included in the supplemental index!
So how does a site end up in the supplemental results page? And more importantly how does one get out or even avoid inclusion in the first place?
Several factors may affect your inclusion in supplemental results but keep in mind it is best to avoid these factors at the outset, as it is easier to stay out of supplemental results than to get out.
One of the most crucial factors to consider is the text content of your web page; whether it is in the title tag, description tag or actual web page content. (more…)
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 23rd, 2006 |
Well, someone (Microsoft) finally made a search engine that throws Google’s logic in the face of everything we know about search engines. Ms. Dewey is uses Live Search (Microsoft’s search engine) to produce search results so I’m inclined to think this is merely a marketing ploy and not a serious attempt and reinventing how we search.
If you go to the siteand take a look you’ll see it requires flash and there is video and slick looking screen. No simple white background and minimal design like Google. It also takes 3 times as long to display results and you can only view a few at a time without scrolling. So why would someone give it a try? Well, it is fun, it is a nice brief diversion and its something different, if only for a day. Oh, did I mention it is hosted by Janina Gavankar. What male internet searcher wouldn’t want an attractive femal interacting with them if even she is only real in cyber space.
I’m sure most people will denounce Ms. Dewey for her long downloads, poor user interface and complication of what should be a very simple procedure. But on the other hand, it was cute (probably too cute for most searchers), made me think about why search works now and it did prompt me to write a blog post about it.
The question now is when will they build a search engine with a female perspective in mind.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), Search Engines | No Comments »
Thursday, July 20th, 2006 |
It turns out that searchers are more than willing to use multiple search engines according to Nielsen/NetRatings. In January 2005 Google reported 71 million unique searchers, 58 percent of which had used another search engine. Yahoo’s percentage was higher - 71 percent.
So how does this affect your search engine optimization efforts? It shows that you cannot afford to only concentrate on the rankings you are receiving in one search engine. Currently the market is dominated by Google, Yahoo and MSN with several other engines sharing a small percentage of traffic. And all these search engines have different methods of drawing their results giving different levels of importance to content, links, page elements, etc.
Monitoring your search results across multiple search engines for multiple keywords gives you a truer picture of how well you are ranked. By not putting all your eggs in one basket you can reach more of your targeted market.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo Search | No Comments »
Monday, July 17th, 2006 |
This is pretty cool. Google is adding support for a new META tag, so that you can tell them NOT to use the description at Open Directory Project (ODP). It’s hard to get old or outdated descriptions updated on ODP. So this is great in those situations.
The way Google descriptions (snippets) are generated that appear under a page in the search results is completely automated. The process uses both the content on a page as well as references to it that appear on other sites.
One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and google has added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.
To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page’s description, use the following:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">
To direct Google specifically from using this information to describe a page, use the following:
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP">
For more information, visit the webmaster help center.
Once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear. Once Google has recrawled your pages and refreshed our index, you should see updated snippets.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Thursday, May 4th, 2006 |
On Page Factors - Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?
So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen
foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common
search engine optimization pitfalls when designing your
site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn’t
when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial
impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a
SEO perspective.
Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking
on Google and other search engines.
Optimizing for the Correct Keywords
Basically ‘Get real’ about what keywords you feel your website
can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly
competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms
will be close to impossible.
Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of
results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and
how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky
then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other
websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this
job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Code Validation
If your html code is not valid, then this could make it very
difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate
your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot
see your content, then your page will obviously have no
relevance. (more…)
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Mistakes, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
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