Google PageRank Factors – What Are They Now?
Most SEO consultants pay little to the importance of Google PageRank these days and its relevance to ranking a website naturally in the search engines. However, the data used to determine Google PageRank can often be an indication of what direction your overall search engine optimization strategy should take. Search Engine Roundtable has picked up on a thread from Webmaster World on the Changes Made To Google PageRank. The observations that they make in this post are interesting and the points made are thought provoking for sure. The Webmaster World forum is still arguing many of the points. Looking at the points that were raised are: 1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the Google PageRank vote CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Two New Search Developments You Can Benefit From
Both Google and Live Search have added developments to their news Search Engine Optimization and search related tools that marketers can benefit from. First, Google: To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results. Nice feature. So how can marketers use this feature to help searchers find them more easily? Easy. Submit a press release with a quote from a top executive of your company to any of several press release distribution websites. Any news agencies that pick up your press release could run it the way it is or call for an interview. Either way, you're getting your company's name and your executive's name in the news. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is A Custom Search Engine Worth Your Time?
Do you have your own customized search engine? Should you? A customized search engine can do three things for your website: It can allow your site visitors to find what they are looking for on your website more easily It can be used as a marketing tool since you can opt to have your custom search engine be listed in the public search engines index It can assist your site visitors in finding the information they are looking elsewhere if your website doesn't have they are looking for A custom search engine can benefit your site visitors in a number of ways. If you have a large website, or if you have several websites with similar themes, then you can help your site visitors find what they are looking for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Google Outpaces Yahoo! And MSN Live
Look at the latest stats and Google owns more than 60% of the search market - almost 70%, in fact. Yahoo! has a whopping 20-something percent on any given day. The top three - Google, Yahoo!,and MSN Live - together get 95% of the search business. But Google is so far ahead of the other two that it seems they will never catch up. Why? A little history says it all. In the late 1990s there were plenty of search engines that were competing for the business and all of them were pretty close to even in terms of search market, except that Alta Vista had a little bit of a lead. Google owners Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented a robot program that they called CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Future Of Search and Search Engine Optimization
With all the talk about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, Yahoo acquiring somebody else, AOL wanting a piece of Yahoo pie, and Google sniffing the behind it can't get, you might be wondering what to make of all this noise. I know I am. There does appear to be some shuffling going on. Just within Yahoo itself, there is some asset maneuvering - acquisitions, resettings, layoffs, etc. Microsoft is looking to make a big move. Some say they will get Yahoo and others say they will buy more Facebook. Some say they just want something and will get whatever they want. Meanwhile, Google continues to dominate. I think the cold, hard truth is the future is hard to predict. Next to impossible. But if I were to gather up CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Matt Cutts Explains Google Images, How Search Engines Work
I like Matt Cutts. Sometimes. Recently, he addressed an issue regarding Google Images and took the opportunity to explain, once again, how search engines work. I have a few thoughts of my own. Recently I was on an email thread and the images team wanted to address a misconception. Google Images doesn’t have a dedicated blog right now, so I offered some space on my blog if someone wanted to do a guest post. Perhaps Google Images needs its own blog now. Every now and then a story surfaces that Google has ‘censored’ images or web pages and removed them from our site without saying a word to anyone. I just want to say that I don't work for Google and Google doesn't give me CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Maps’ New Search Feature
Google Maps now has a new search feature. When you land on the Google Maps page you'll see the usual set up, but if you look to the right of the search button there's a link. It says "Show search options" and a drop down box appears. Click on it and it says "Hide search options." In the drop down box you'll see four options: Everything Location Businesses User-Generated Content These are interesting choices. A search for York County, Pa. (history buffs will know this is where the U.S. Constitution was signed) under "Everything" will bring up several choices as wide and varied as you can imagine: harley davidson giant memorial hospital york hospital yorktowne hotel bae sheetz marcello's wellspan manor care These choices appear as links. Click a link and you're taken to a page that shows all the locations CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Google Broke?
It was incredible. A comment on a blog post about search engine rankings said something like this: (paraphrase) Google is broke. They spent too much time trying to make themselves the best search engine and employed a strategy of secrecy about what their algorithm entailed. That killed them. When you're done picking yourself up off the floor, consider this: That is not an unpopular opinion. It's true. This anti-Google bias is all over the place. For some reason, some SEOs have decided that Google is broke because the search engine sets its own rules. Secrecy and excellence killed it. Funny, huh? I paraphrased the quote to save face with the blogger on whose blog the quote appears and with the commentator as well. No need to embarrass any CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should Yahoo! Go Social?
Early bird Aaron Wall started the day telling Yahoo! how to run its business. He actually made some pretty suggestions on ways that Yahoo! can improve its brand and take back some of that market share it has lost to Google over the years. But one point stood out to me - in fact, it stepped up and kicked me right between the legs. Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality. I can't help but think what an explosive buzz that would create to allow searchers to comment on search results. There have already been search engines, or CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Which Toolbar Is The Best?
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz wrote an excellent post this morning reviewing 12 browser toolbars. He details the benefits and features of each toolbar and measures their useful to the actual user as well as the SEO or Internet marketing professional. The 12 toolbars he reviewed his post include: Google Toolbar Yahoo Toolbar MSN Live Toolbar Ask.com Toolbar AOL Toolbar Alexa Toolbar Compete.com Toolbar Netcraft Toolbar StumbleUpon Toolbar Firefox Toolbar Microsoft Developer Toolbar I agree with Rand's analysis for most of these tools, but I disagree heartily with one of them. In fact, I only had two really strong reactions to two of his reviews. One was positive and the other was negative. The Toolbar That Makes Stumbling Fun The positive reaction was to StumbleUpon. This is one of the few toolbars that is useful to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Has Updated PageRank Again
It's been three months since the last PageRank update and already Google has started exporting PageRank information. I've seen a few sites with increases in PageRank, but I haven't seen changes in all of them so they may not be done yet. But keep your eyes on the PageRank of your websites and blogs because it may very well be coming. Of course, PageRanks can go down or up so if you notice a decline in PageRank then you might want to do some investigating to find out why you went down. If you are selling links or it even appears as if you are selling links then you might want to do something about that. One website owner I know had a page - a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Preventing Search Engines From Crawling Your Web Pages
Matt Cutts has a good video today on Google Webmaster Central explaining how to prevent certain pages on your website from being crawled by the search engines. You really need to be familiar with four methods of preventing the spiders from crawling your pages: htaccess noindex nofollow robots.txt password protect Your htaccess file is a ticket to solving a lot of your search engine problems. Not all of them, but some of them. It's a file on your server that gives instructions to browsers and search engine spiders, telling them how to read your web pages. One common usage of this file is to use it to redirect old web pages to new web pages. Frequently, webmasters will update their information and when doing so will change the URL CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
New Google Experiment Allows Users To Vote
I found this on TechCrunch today. If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see. This is actually a good idea, but I could find no record, either at TechCrunch, on Google's own website, or at Marketing Pilgrim, which also ran a story on the topic, of how to sign up for this experiment. I like Google Labs because you can test out new features that Google is experimenting with. One feature I really like is the Google Suggest feature, which provides keyword suggestions when you start typing keywords into the Google search box. That's CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Products Vertical Search Proves Google Is Far From Being Anti-Commerce
It looks like Google is changing its priorities. This is evidenced by the placement of "Products" on its menu bar at the time of the search page and the movement of "Videos" to the drop down menu where the other, less important links are. I think there are two primary reasons why Google would make this change. First, since purchasing YouTube, Google Video is not really necessarily. Many of us in the Internet marketing realm have wondered why the search engine doesn't just roll Google Video into the more popular YouTube product and merge the two into one. No need to promote video services when the majority of video uploaders head to YouTube anyway. The second reason I think Google made this change is even more significant. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Stop Words Can Make Or Break A Search Query
For some time now the search engines have discounted what they call "stop words." These are words like "the," "and," "a," and "an," which do not have any real significance for most searches. For instance, if I am searching the mating habits of wild Australian kangaroos then I might search for the phrase: the mating habits of wild Australian kangaroos The search engines see this: mating habits wild Australian kangaroos This is the way the search engine view your search query because the words "the" and "of" add no particular meaning to them regarding your search query. Therefore, they are called "stop words" and the search engine merely ignore them when crawling. The spiders stop crawling at those words and proceed beyond them. But this is inadequate as a hard CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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