Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL: What’s Up With The Future?
The current news, the top news that everyone is talking about is two-fold. Yahoo! and Microsoft are close to a deal And Google sold its AOL shares You can see the news for yourself. But these two little tidbits beg the question, what's up with the future? Specifically, here's what mean. No. 1 first: Yahoo! and Microsoft If Yahoo! and Microsoft team up against Google, will it be a rival worth our attention? Google, of course, will still dominate, but Yahoo! and Microsoft together on the same team may actually create a more competitive atmosphere, which I think most of us would welcome. Would that mean more market share for the the underdogs. Will that mean less share for Google? So far, not many people have left Google for Bing, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Real Time Search Is Here
We've (you've) been asking for it for a year now. Real-time search. Finally, it's here. And from the most unlikely sources. Bing has included real-time Twitter searches on a limited basis. You type in the @ name of someone you want to find on Twitter and that person's Twitter stream shows up at the top of the search results (truthfully, only two tweets - but there's a link to see more tweets, which catapults you to that individual's Twitter stream on Twitter). The interesting thing is that Bing also identifies other areas on the Web that pertain to that individual and bring up relevant search results for that person. I particularly like that second feature because if you are looking for someone with a common name (ie CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Site Architecture Issues Affect Your Traffic?
Google recently wrote a post on its Webmaster Central Blog addressing site architecture and traffic. Specifically, items addressed include: Duplicate content Affiliate programs Hacking and malicious malware Robots.txt And rel="canonical" URL attributes This may come as a surprise to you, but affiliate program content and duplicate content do not necessarily cause a drop in traffic. But you have to understand where Google is coming from here. They are primarily concerned with attempts to manipulate rankings and if you use duplicate content to do that, well, then you might see a drop in rankings. That could be have an associative affect on your traffic. But if you have two pages with the same content on them then you shouldn't see any penalties or drops in rankings or traffic. You CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Change Your SEO Strategy For Bing?
Chris Crum is da man! His article about Bing and SEO provides some great insight into how Microsoft's new search engine has, and will, affect search engine optimization. The question is, should webmasters change their SEO strategy? My take? If your doing well with your optimization efforts right now, Bing doesn't change anything. Still, you've got read Chris's article. Here are a few highlights. With Bing, it's not about getting to the top of the SERP. It's about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. That's a brilliant statement. Personally, I like the categories on the search page because it's an intuitive and a recognized way to narrow down a search query. Thanks to the popularity of blogging, people are already familiar CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Google Measures Bounce Rate By Keyword Phrase
Google has always been interested in bounce rates, primarily to let webmasters know how readers are responding to the content on their pages. But what Google Analytics reports as your bounce rate is not entirely accurate. Every page on your website is optimized for a number of keywords, not just one. Some of those are intentional and some are not. Just in the last 6 months or so Google has been tinkering with the way that it displays SERP snippets. In some cases the snippet is taken from your meta description, most often when the search query used matches your primary keyword for the page. But when a search query is for another keyword phrase the snippet is often quite different. Google will then use CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Bing Positioning Itself To Corner The Market On Corporate Networks?
An interesting blog post on the Bing blog yesterday has some pretty interesting things to say about video search in particular and search technology in general. First, Bing's approach to indexing videos is unique and very well. I like the Smart Motion Previews feature and if you haven't played around with it I'd recommend that you conduct a couple of videos searches and preview the videos. The downside is that the videos run in thumbnail so you don't get a lot of detail, but the upside is it's a unique approach to allowing searchers an opportunity to preview a video before deciding to click the link and watch it. That's a very helpful feature and if Bing can assure searchers that clicking the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Did Google Kill PageRank Sculpting?
An off-the-cuff remark by Matt Cutts at the SMX Advanced conference has some SEOs and webmasters up in arms. Is PageRank sculpting dead or is it alive and well? As you'll see from reading Rand Fishkin's post on the subject, he thinks it was a Google diversionary tactic that is going nowhere. Is Google just trying to, paraphrasing an unnamed celebrity SEO as quoted by Rand, dissuade new webmasters from attempting to sculpt their own PageRank? It's possible. But there is a third possibility that neither Rand nor the doomsayers have mentioned. Maybe this new algorithm change is in the planning stage and not yet implemented and Matt Cutts just opened his mouth too soon. Perhaps that is CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Bada-Bing! Bada-Bing!
MSN Live's new search face Bing finally announced its launch and it seems to be the big buzz this week. My initial impression was that it looked a lot like MSN Live. Not much changed. But upon conducting a few searches I've noticed that there actually is quite a big change. The results seem to be far superior than they have been in the past. That makes me wonder if Microsoft's relationship with Powerset is the driving force behind the new changes or if there more to it than mere search technology. Personally, I believe Microsoft realized it was losing the PR war. I think they realized it was time to rebrand their search engine or forever be relegated to third place. Of course, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Bing to Impact Current SEO Strategies?
Microsoft are reported to be releasing their new version of 'Live Search' and are to brand it 'Bing'. Known throughout the industry as 'Kumo', this updated search engine is purported to be 'better than Google' - we will soon see. There are also reports that Microsoft has an $80-$100 million advertising campaign ready to launch that will promote Bing as one of the best search engines around. The main reason that new search engines fail is in the area of branding. Let's face it - when the word 'Google' changes from being a noun to a verb, and you get sayings such as 'go Google it', you know the brand has stuck. You rarely hear anyone suggest you 'go Yahoo it' - the question is, will CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Did You Know Google Ignores Your Description?
Google has several ways of choosing what snippet it will use in search results. Quite often it will take your Meta Tag Description and use it verbatim. There are times when Google will use descriptions from DMOZ, BOTW, or other Web directories. This happens often when a webmaster doesn't have a Description, but there are times when Google decides that the description in a directory is better. Recently, I discovered that Google is using text from a web page to use as a SERP snippet even if there is already a well-written and optimized Description. The question is, when does Google decide to use your Description and when does it decide to use text from your web page? I think Google probably has its algorithm set CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The History Of Four Ranking Factors
Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz continues to offer insightful commentary. He's got a graph that he's put together showing what he thinks are some of the most important ranking factors the search engines use to rank websites. I agree with it for the most part, but there is one aspect of it that I slightly disagree with. First, before I go into that I'd like to show you the graph: I do believe that Rand is right on with the trust/authority of host domain. And he's pretty much right on with the importance of anchor text. That metric saw its hey-day in the years before the Vince update. I also agree with the rapid decline in link juice. What is a little bit CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google’s New Search Toy
Google announced a few days ago that it's got new technology it's implementing into search results that offers related search terms. I think this is kind of cool and I wonder how long it will be before Google actually implements it into the search results completely. In other words, instead of offering searchers related search queries at the bottom of the SERPs, when will Google actually offer pages from those related search queries into the actual search results that appear. For instance, if I search for "love", the first two search results are for The Love Calculator and the Wikipedia entry on love. At the bottom of the page is a list of related search queries, just in case I didn't really know what CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Ignore Yahoo!, MSN Live, Or Ask For That Matter?
I'm amazed at how many people get so fixated on seeking high search engine optimization Google rankings that they completely forget about Yahoo!, MSN Live, or Ask.com. Or even one of the thousands of other smaller search engines. I've seen healthy traffic come from places like Dogpile or some obscure search engine that I'd never heard of and didn't exist (and have often wondered how I got listed there in the first place). Don't get me wrong, Google will likely be your main source of traffic (if you do your SEO right). But there's no rational reason to not attempt to get listed and ranked everywhere you can. You can still pick up a good 20% increase in search traffic just by CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Content Be Removed From Search Results?
Matt Cutts wrote on his blog that he gets asked a lot if he, or Google, can have a web page removed from the search results. The surprising answer is yes, a web page can be removed from Google's search results - if it breaks a law or violates Google's spam policies. Otherwise, no. Not likely to happen. But what if someone is using their website to defame you? Well, you first have to prove that the person is in fact defaming you. That means you have to have a court order that says a person's communication meets the legal definition of defamation. If you can get that then the court will tell the website owner that he or she has to remove the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
MSN Live Image Search Beats Google
I found something that MSN Live beats Google at. It's Image Search. If you'll watch this video by Stefan Weitz of the MSN Live Search team, you'll see the cool features offered by MSN Live on its Image Search feature. Stefan isn't Matt Cutts and there are some weaknesses in the video presentation, but it does do a decent job of highlighting some of the cool features of MSN Live's Image Search, such as: Search by image size Aspect Ratio Image Style (photograph or illustration) Color or black and white Face shots, head and shoulder, or other image effects I think this is getting closer to the way that searching for images should be done. I would like to see one other feature added - CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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