Search Engines
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 23, 2010
Just in case you didn’t know, Yahoo! Search recently started displaying “Powered by Bing” below the search results in the footer section of the search engine results page. While this probably isn’t news to you, I just wanted to let you know I’ve been tracking the organic search rankings for several websites and even though I have found some small discrepancies within the search results, I imagine it’s more of a datacenter difference rather than a Bing vs Yahoo! thing.
Yahoo! Powered by Bing
According to comScore the Yahoo!-Bing merger should increase Bing’s search market share to just over 30% now.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 18, 2010
I read a blog post last night that left me a little bit concerned, and I literally woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this – What if there were no Organic Search Results? Will “Google Search” eventually turn into one gigantic pay for position web directory? After all, they’ve been pushing the organic search results further and further down, while continuing to try and monetize every result on the page.
On 8-12-10 Google performed an experiment with the it’s SERP in certain areas that appeared to have removed the traditional organic search results altogether and replaced them with what appeared to be results primarily from the Google Maps page. Apparently they clarified it was map results mixed in with the Organic search results, but it still left me thinking: what if Google eliminates the traditional organic search results for local searches and completely replaces them with the polluted review-spam filled Google Maps listing currently available?
Would that be good or bad for businesses? What about search marketers? And most importantly, would it be good for the end user?
Please share your comments below because I would really love to hear your thoughts.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 4, 2010
Includes a brief historical outline of some of the major web directories, PPC companies and organic search engines including Yahoo! directory, Looksmart, DMOZ, Goto, Overture, Inkatomi, Webcrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot, Ask, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google.
This amazing search engine history infographic is courtesy of PPCblog.com
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on March 19, 2010
It looks as if Google is really cracking down on blogs selling links ads. For instance, a little while back I noticed several popular city-blogs in my area which lost Google PageRank on most of their pages except the home page and maybe one or two others that I missed. These are well-respected blogs in their community. The thing all of these blogs have in common is that they have DoFollow links in the sidebar and throughout the site where advertisers are linked to through either a text link or a banner link.
Two example blogs are the West Seattle Blog and the B-Town Blog, which used to have Google PageRank visible throughout their sites, but now show a PageRank of zero on nearly every page except the home page. I haven’t paid close enough attention to say for sure whether those websites have actually been penalized in any way other than not showing PageRank in the toolbar, but I bet they aren’t very happy about it and it definitely doesn’t look too good.
Part of me thinks it is great that Google is cracking down on them because I feel like most bloggers or businesses outside of the SEO industry can get away with selling frowned-upon type services, or manipulating the search results for their own websites as long as they play ignorant. Whereas someone who acknowledges themselves as an SEO is likely have their every action scrutinized. It would be nice to have a more even playing field. But on the other hand, it is obvious most of the major websites with bigger pockets are still free to do what they want. Which furthers my conclusion Google is getting even worse about showing favoritism towards the already wealthy major brands. Thus making it even more difficult for most of us to compete with them.
I know of several of these brands, or brand-backed investor websites that can get away with just about anything, and I’m sure Google does too. But, I’m not sure I want to start outing anyone specifically just yet, on this blog. It’s not going to help me any, and will probably only hurt my reputation and my business going forward. So instead of telling you who’s getting away with what, I think my time is better spent sharing what has worked for me, and what I watch out for. In this case it appears the smaller guy really has to go by the book, whereas the brands don’t really have to fear being penalized for the same things. Which is notable – by recognizing how you fit into these categories can be a total game changer regarding how you’re allowed to practice SEO and operate your website, without fear of being penalized by the search engines.
Do you think it is good that Google is cracking only down on these “smaller” websites and blogs? Have you seen this with any of the larger brands too, or do you think Google is playing brand favoritism?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on October 22, 2009
Yesterday, Google announced they have reached a deal with Twitter to include Twitter updates in search results.
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data”.
If you have been sitting on the fence in regards to using Twitter, I recommend you start to explore it now. Something I’ll be doing a lot more of myself.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on October 1, 2009
Finally Google makes it easier to verify your site by using the file verification method within Google Webmaster Tools.
Just this afternoon they announced this change as well as a few others regarding their website verification process:
Previously, if your website returned an HTTP status code other than 404 for non-existent URLs, you would be unable to use the file verification method…..We’ve simplified the file verification process to eliminate the checks for non-existent URLs.
I’m glad they finally did this. I thought it was odd I was able to verify many of my sites just fine using Yahoo! and Bing’s file verification methods, but not with Google’s. It was actually rather annoying having to use the meta verification method every time, then later having to go remove it. This will make it a little easier to verify and manage my own, as well as many client websites in the future.
Now you can simply download the HTML file they provide and upload it to your site without modification. They’ll check the file, and if the contents are correct, that’s it, you’re done!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 10, 2009
So you’ve created your first website and you want to know the quickest way to get it listed in the Google search results. Well never fear, getting your new website listed is easy!
The simplest way to get listed in Google’s index is by adding a link from another website to yours. Yes, it’s really that simple, even Google says so. So how do you going about doing that?
Here are 5 quick and easy ways to get your website listed:
- Add a link to it from your profile page on networks such as LinkedIn.com or Biznik.com
- Add a link to it from your personal or business blog
- Ask a friend to put a link on one of their web pages pointing back to your new website
- Create and submit an ad on Craigslist.org or Backpage.com with a link pointing back to your website
- Submit a free press release regarding your new site and include a link pointing back to it
Yes, this is the simplest and easiest way to get listed in Google! In some cases Google will index your website within a couple of days, but it can take several weeks to months depending on how often the Googlebot crawls the web pages linking back to your site. So the more links you get pointing to your website, the more likely you’ll be indexed quickly.
Just getting listed doesn’t necessarily mean you will also show up at the top of the search results though. One factor Google uses to determine who to list at the top is by the quantity and quality of links pointing back to a web page, so getting more links will also help with your website’s rankings as well as getting it listed with the other search engines such as Yahoo!, and Bing.
A couple of other ways to get listed is by submitting a sitemap to Google for the advanced techie types, or by submitting it directly to Google and the other major search engines.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 10, 2009
On Google’s Official Webmaster Blog today, there was an announcement of the “secret project” a large team of Googlers have been working on over the last several months. They would like Webmasters to help test their next generation infrastrucure of Google web search.
There really aren’t many noticeable differences between the new infrastructure and the live Google search at first glance, however after trying a few searches you will indeed see different results returned.
The Google team is asking for your feedback on this new infrastructure, especially for individual searches queries made leaving your dissatisfied with the results. You can find the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom of the query results page. Some of the features aren’t working, however they would still like any feedback you may have. Don’t forget to include the project word caffeine somewhere in the form’s text box.
If you don’t like the current Google search, then now’s your chance to be heard and help build the next generation in web search!
Btw, this is also a great way to get a head-start on your SEO!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 7, 2009
I’ve had a draft post sitting here regarding WolframAlpha for several months now, and thought I’d better share it with you before it’s really old news.
I really like where they are going with WolframAlpha.com, as a web reference. Although the name and Internet address are terrible in regards to SEO. Previsously, before I saved a link to the web site, I had to search all over the web every time I wanted to look something up because I could never remember the name. We can only home they will come up with something easier to remember, type, and spell, in the long run.
This “computational search engine” gives us useful, easy to read statistics, and graphs that help answer specific questions such as: how far is the moon.
Hopefully you can see in the above image – it gives us: the current distance from earth, and the average distance from earth; among many other great stats.
Unfortunately, there were several search queries I made where no data was found. Information I would have expected to find specifically on this site. I’m sure information is being added to the database daily. Let’s just see if they come up with an more memorable name.
