Oh, Those 2008 LiveSearch Search Trends
Search trends can be enlightening, funny, or downright scary. While fanning through my RSS reader this morning I came across a blog post at Live Search that gives some insight into search trends for 2007 and 2008. It seems that Americans really love turkey (and have serious love-hate relationships with their spouses). This paragraph from the blog post had me laughing: Last year people in the U.S. were learning to cook turkeys and to brine them. To argue with their spouses (maybe about whether to cook or brine the turkey) and to improve their marriages (probably after getting too worked up about the turkey). They wanted to learn how to make money and how to save it, how to lose weight both in general CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do The Search Engines Favor The Popular And “Rich”?
It's no secret that Google built the popular web. Link popularity is the name of the game and has been for some time. The question is, does Google's link popularity algorithms reward those with a lot of links already with even more links while those who are struggling to survive get fewer? A very interesting article written in 2004 about that very subject says "Yes." But I think there is some reason to suspect that the article inherently correct in its assumptions. Nevertheless, it appears to be true that the search engines do favor big (and older) websites above smaller and newer ones. So is that the same and saying that they favor the link rich to the link poor? Honestly, I think they CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Noresults Pages: Google Wants Your Help
A while back Matt Cutts over at Google had asked for feedback on what his web spam team could be doing better. A lot of people responded and it seems that the biggest complaint was noresults pages. So Matt is asking for your help again. In his blog post Matt tells you specifically how to report noresults pages that you receive. But he doesn't really tell you why other than it's a "bad user experience." If you're looking for something a little more than that, here are some reasons why noresults pages are so bad and why you might want to report them Google: Many review sites, sites that specialize in product reviews, are very well optimized for the word "review" CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The New Browser War
If you remember the browser war of the 1990s (before the search engine optimization even existed :o) between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator then you know how vicious it got. And you also know who won. Well, I think we are now entering the next browser war. Call it Browser War 2.0. Here are the players IE8 Mozilla Firefox Flock Google Chrome So far, the major players are Firefox and IE. Most people are using Internet Explorer, but there is a growing interest in Firefox and the more familiar people become with browsing the web and building web business the more popular Firefox becomes. Firefox is used by the development community in large measure because of its open source nature and ability to adapt to development application environments. The social CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is SEO Spam Worse Than Social Spam?
Proponents of the new Web or those who like to push social media as replacing search engine optimization like to point out that SEO is so easily gamed. And social media isn't? Let's be fair (and frank). Anywhere there are humans there are people who are doing something wrong. But you'll likely find others are trying to do it right. That's the way it's always been. Is SEO more easily gamed than social media? No. It is gamed a little differently and it frustrates searchers when they search for information at their favorite search engine only to be faced with spam. I understand. But I really don't think search engine optimization spam is any worse than social spam. Do you? When it comes right down to it, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Matt Cutts To The Quick: What Should Google Do About Webspam?
Matt Cutts is asking what the Google webspam team should focus on. He's getting quite a few responses to the question and you'd think there'd be more thought put into some of them. For instance, here's the second comment on the blog thread: I think a paid link reporting firefox plugin would be helpful. Right click on the suspect link, select report and report - the plugin could then pass you extra detail like the location on the page, etc, and might save your team time and encourage more reports. Perhaps this commenter isn't aware that Google isn't responsible for creating Firefox plugins. Or maybe they expect Googlers to stop what they are doing and start creating them. Come on, how about a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Slipped In A PageRank Update On New Year’s Eve
If you were tied up or hung over on New Year's Eve and weren't watching your toolbar (we weren't) then you might not have noticed that Google updated its toolbar PageRank. Matt Cutts actually Twittered it. If you've got questions about how Google figures its PageRank, Matt's the guy to ask. It's rather complicated and he's actually on the record for saying he doesn't understand every little nuance either. In a cool little Q&A format, Matt Cutts answers some of those niggling questions we all have about PageRank and its importance. I like one user's attitude: viggen says: “Do i need to know that? What does it tell me when i know it? Why would i care? Meaning, what purpose has the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Simplifies Sitemap Submission Process
If you have a large website with a lot of pages that need to be indexed by the search engines then you should submit a sitemap to each of the search engines to ensure that your pages are crawled and indexed. Google has recently updated the way it allows webmasters to submit sitemaps and it should prove easy to do so. Google Webmaster Central outlines the different types of sitemaps you can submit and offers great definitions of those. In summary, I'll list them here: XML RSS or ATOM TXT Video XML mRSS XML for Google Code Search XML for mobile XML for geo-data XML for news The great thing about Google is you can submit as many different types of sitemaps as your website supports. The best way to submit them is through CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Would We Do Without Google?
Marketing Pilgrim published a blog post yesterday titled "Is Google Evil?" It was essentially a debate over whether Google's virtues outweigh its vices. In the end, it was decided a draw. But I wonder, even had the vices outweighed the virtues, what would we do without Google? Google's motto to “organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible” is perhaps the one defining characteristic that we can rely on. The fact that we can debate whether Google lives up to its other motto - "do no evil" - means that we cannot really rely on them to be virtuous. But we can rely on them to organize the world's information, and they've done that fairly well. At least, they've done it better than CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Was Your Website Penalized Or Subject To
A Natural Ranking Wave?
The Google Cache has a great blog post on reasons sites and web pages get banned from the search engines and other search engine optimization related penalties you might encounter. The blog post also talks about what you should do if each penalty happens to you. But are you sure you were penalized? We often hear website owners complain that they've been penalized when in fact they've just suffered from a natural decline in search rankings. It happens every day. On any given day you may rank higher or lower for a specific search term. Each page fluctuates daily. In fact, several times throughout the day. You could be on page 1 now and fifteen minutes later fall to page 2. There's nothing to be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Audio Indexing – Is It Time To Check Your Videos?
A little while ago we wrote about video transcripts and submitting them to Google. It seem that Google have gone one step further and started doing the job themselves. Google Labs are testing Google Audio Indexing. At present it is only political videos stored on YouTube that are being indexed, however the results are impressive. Google labs are indexing the content and providing a search function based on keywords. Rather than listen to the whole political statement, you can enter a search term and have the broadcast jump to the location of that keyword. If this leaves Google Labs and becomes mainstream, all video content will be indexed, not by what you tell the search engines, but from what they can hear within the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Love Them, Hate Them, It’s Their Party
Whether you love them, hate them or simply couldn't care less, it is Google's birthday and you do have to hand it to them; like Microsoft and Apple, they all started with humble beginnings and have all grown into juggernauts. The other similarity is that they all had the right product at the right time. As a search engine, Google's birth and future were problematic. They struck the right chord and today and lead everyone else. There are many parallels with the other two computer giants…Google and Mircosoft. When desktops first appeared, they were all either Apple Macs or IBM compatible. Now we talk about Apple and Microsoft compatible. With Google, we don't suggest you do a computer search; we tell people to 'Google it'; never 'Yahoo! CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Firefox Can Be A Useful SEO Tool With The Right Add-ons
Firefox is becoming one of the most popular browsers in use and every year it seems to drag more and more Internet Explorer users onside. One of the strengths of Firefox is the number of add-ons you can download and install. SEO tools haven't gone unnoticed and there are many add-ons written for this area. Finding the best Search Engine Optimization tools can be a little daunting as there are so many. If you have upgraded to Firefox 3.0 then the choice is a little easier as many of the add-ons haven't been updated yet. Some of the more useful SEO tools include: KGen: KGen (Keyword Generator) is an extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web page. This can be quite CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can You Train The Search Engines?
Search engines crawl the web reading pages, indexing them then following links to the next page where it goes through the same process. Along the way it tries to assess the appropriate connections between the search phrases entered by users and the content - it does this using what we call keywords and keyword phrases. Can you train the search engines to read and index your pages in certain ways? The best way to answer this question is to look at the on page search engine optimization processes to see what, if any, effect they have on a search engine and your ability to 'train' them. Content: writing good quality keyword optimized content is important when it comes to any relationship with a search engine. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Will Cuil Change The Direction Of Search Engine Optimization?
Google is the dominant search engine and has been for many years. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the recent release of Cuil. The founders certainly have the credentials to develop a top search engine. There are two former employees of Google along with Tom Costello from IBM and Louis Monier, a founder of Altavista. Will they challenge Google and if so, will we need to rethink our search engine optimization strategies? Cuil is different in four areas; web index, algorithm, results display and privacy. Privacy is possibly the one big selling point for Cuil given Google's appetite for knowing what everyone is doing, where they are spending their money and how long they stay on various sites. The results display is different. Three CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
Nick Stamoulis - SEO Bio.
Tel. - 877-295-0620
nick@brickmarketing.com
Connect with Nick Stamoulis
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
