Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Looking at my Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard today I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Probably been there for a while since I’m so focused on the Site info, but anyway there is was: Message Center. I had no messages but I clicked the [?] and the following text was revealed as an explanation:
What is the message center?
The message center provides a way for us to communicate important information to you regarding your Google webmaster tools account and the sites you manage. Our intent is to make it easy for you to receive important information associated with your sites.
To view your messages, sign in to your Google webmaster tools account, and then click the link under Message Center.
So maybe Google is tearing the veil, so to speak, and will begin communicating with Webmasters. We can only hope. Has anyone recieve a message from Google yet? Let us know.
Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, also talks about Google Webmaster Tools in a video, if you don’t know what this post is about. A good explanation is given by Matt Cutts.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
I feel like the guy who wants to talk about a movie he just saw, but came out over a year ago. Sometimes SEO research can put blinders on you and you miss the little or not so little things. I have just used a search engine created by Google called SearchMash. It launched October 2006 and I’m just finding out about it. But, better late than never as it has some nice features and looks to show the same results as Google, but with some nice tricks. It’s AJAX-based and has web page, image, blog and wikipedia search results as options.
They show images, videos, blog and wikipedia results to the right of web page results and they are in expandable menus. When you click on “more web pages” or or more of any search results it will expand the list on the same page, giving you a longer scrollable page instead of a new page. Videos will also play in the same page so you don’t need to leave your results to view it.
SearchMash.com is certainly worth checking out. Who knows, Google may find its best competition is from its own sibling search engine.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Search Engines | 2 Comments »
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Google is indexing more pages now then ever before, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes these pages get sent to the supplemental index instead of the main index. It’s perfectly normal for most sites to have some pages in the supplemental index, but if your main pages (and especially your home page) get sent to the supplemental index you’ll likely not see much traffic from Google any more.
My site’s listed in the supplemental results, what does that mean?
As Google states, “Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index.” Google will always show results from their main index before showing results from the supplemental index. This means that supplemental pages will almost never show up for searches, and will only show up for super specialized searches if few or no results come from the main index. With so many blogs and tag pages out there, even crazy many-word searches will bring back at least a few non-supplemental results.
How did my site get in the supplemental index?
One way pages end up in the supplemental index instead of the main index is a lack of PageRank (PR). This could be because you orphaned the page (no links pointing to it), the page lies too many clicks away from your home page, or your home page itself has a very low PR. If this is the case, you should work on your link building to those important pages of your site and build up their PageRank.
The other way your pages end up in the supplemental index is by having duplicate content on your page. This could be because you used the same manufacturer written product description that dozens of other sites use, you copied content from another website, or your pages have very little content and too much template which is duplicated on all pages. If this is the case, try writing unique content or changing your template so it doesn’t have the same elements on every page.
I changed my pages, what’s next?
Now that you’ve fixed your pages, it can be a long and hard process for getting them out of the supplemental index because the supplemental spider doesn’t come along very often. You should create or edit your Google sitemap XML file and hope that will be enough. If that doesn’t work, try changing the name (URL) of those pages and delete the old file.
Feel free to add your own observations about supplemental results here, we’d love to hear your stories.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Search Engines | 6 Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007
In case you hadn’t heard, a few months back I posted about Google’s 411 service 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411). It’s a free telephone service that helps you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free.
Now Google has upgraded this service with the addition of mapping the locations. If during your call to 800-GOOG-411, just say “map it”, and you’ll get a text message with the details of your search plus a link to a map of your results right on your mobile phone.
Now you can always have a GPS device, well kind of.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Friday, June 1st, 2007
Google will purchase Panoramio, a very cool site with interesting functionality. Not an SEO tool, but a tool for your life if you like taking photos on vacation. Of course since Google is going to buy it, that makes is somewhat SEO-worthy.
Panoramio allows you to locate photos exactly over the place they were taken. You can read more about how this works.
From Google: Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs — and to view those photographs in Google Earth. Other users can search and browse Panoramio photos and suggest edits to the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites.
Your vacation photos will never be the same.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Saturday, May 26th, 2007
Ah, here I am working another Saturday; such is the life of a business owner, especially a business like SEO where the Internet never sleeps. As I was re-reading my sale’s call list from yesterday I looked at a note that I had written concerning a potential client and her overspending on Google’s Adwords. I had related a story to her about click fraud, (BusinessWeek wrote a article about click fraud), that happened to a client of ours and thought I’d share it again with my blog readers.
Her story started like so many other calls I receive.
“I’m spending thousands per month with pay-per-click and I can’t afford to keep doing it. A lot of money is being spent with little return, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Of course running a successful PPC campaign involves many factors. Big Oak SEO does not have any PPC clients as we realize this is its own beast and requires time and skills we don’t want to invest in at this point. I feel it is a conflict of interest, but that discussion is for another day. So let us assume this person could be doing better to increase her return on her ads. Let’s also assume she can only do so much and she will be a victim of click fraud, as will anyone who uses pay-per-click. It is inevitable.
My response to her was simple. With organic rankings you will see more traffic, better conversions and less ad spending. If the SEO campaign is done correctly these three things will always happen. I believe this and have seen it proved over and over. We have a client that was spending $30,000 per month with PPC. They have at least cut this number in half. Some weeks they turn off PPC advertising and haven’t dropped the number of leads or sales because of it. If only for the PPC savings, SEO is a good ROI.
As I related this to her I also mentioned the story about click fraud with an older client. While I can’t prove any specific numbers on click fraud or how it may differ by industry, I can verify that this story is accurate. The client in question went to a very large industry trade show. All of the big name competitors were also in attendance as well as many smaller competitors. The trade show was from Monday to Wednesday. The biggest surprise came when the client returned on Thursday to check his PPC figures. During the the time he and most of his competitors were at the trade show his PPC costs dropped in half.
Of course this could all be coincidence, but I think it speaks to the large problem of click fraud. I’m pleased to say none of our clients rely on PPC and it is because of the organic rankings they enjoy. But it wasn’t always the case and weaning a client from the PPC habit can be difficult, but in the long run everyone is glad they have less reliance on PPC. SEO can help reduce the need for PPC, but sometimes it helps to keep running the PPC campaign, at a reduced expense - here is an artilce on with some helpful tips on how to keep click fraud to a minimum.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | 3 Comments »
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 »
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