Google Announces Social Search Features Last Week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google unveiled new social media features that will be making their way into regular search results. There’s a demo in the first 6 minutes of the presentation but in a nutshell: Searches will now provide results from people in your […]
For years a major part of Google’s success was based on its ability to determine the popularity of a particular web page based on the amount of links to the page. This is still a huge factor for search engine ranking. But there’s mounting evidence that links may not be the only way to count […]
Blind Search “Taste” Test Almost everyone has heard of the famous Pepsi Challenge – blind taste tests in which the company consistently scored higher than Coca Cola, and which were a significant part of Pepsi’s marketing at one time. Well this concept has been applied to search engines, specifically showing “naked” search results from Yahoo, […]
A fairly accepted, but advanced, practice within the SEO community called PageRank Sculpting has been undone by Google. I won’t get into all of the details but the important thing to remember is that if your site was making use of PageRank Sculpting (or your SEO experts said they were) then you better find out […]
Google has launched its next version of its Local Business Center (LBC), the place where you can “claim” ownership of your business listing on Google searches (both for the organic listings and the maps listings). Now you can do more than just specify your hours of operation and accepted payment methods. You can now get […]
Let’s talk about Sitemaps. Not the pretty, user-friendly kind like this or that, but the ugly, albeit necessary “XML” kind. If you don’t know what an XML Sitemap is, then you better get someone who does. They’re not too difficult to create but have become increasingly important for getting all of a website’s pages into […]
Last week Google added what it’s calling People Profiles to search results. Now you can create a central identity with relevant contact and other info with Google. This is in addition to other profiles you may already have created on Google services like Blogger, Google Reader or Picasa etc… And in fact this central profile […]
Google very recently implemented a set of updates to how its search engine works. It involves some very advanced technology that detects the relationships between phrases and website pages. As advanced as we may think computers are, they still can’t really understand the meaning behind words entered into a search box, referred to in the […]
Vanessa Fox, the Features Editor over at search engine land, has a great post up about audience analysis as it relates to keyword research. It seems an entire town in France is going to be changing its name because their website doesn’t come up at all when users search on that term. Trouble is, it […]
Google, Yahoo and MSN yesterday unveiled a new way for website’s to specify which pages are your “main” or “original” ones. This goes a long way towards helping prevent the dilution of backlinks to a website. For example, if you work for the Tourism Board of Mars and have the following page on your website, […]