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Feb. 28, 2007 at 11:59pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan
February 2007: Search Engine Land's Most Popular Stories
Below are Search Engine Land's 10 most popular stories from February 2007:
1) Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools - For years, Google's link: command has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings -- which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site.
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2) Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates - A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years.
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3) Netvibes: Will Google Remain 'The Start Page For The Internet'? - Google has been dubbed the "start page for the Internet." But a "post-search" future may indeed be coming. I don't mean to imply that search will ever be obsolete; it won't. What I mean to suggest is that reliance on search and time spent with search may diminish as RSS feeds and other structured content delivery mechanisms are adopted by users. Enter Netvibes.
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4) Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason - Jason Calacanis is riled up about SEO today, telling the world that "90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman" and still confused over why the "SEO folks" were mad at him when he said "SEO is bull" during our keynote conversation at SES Chicago last December. I love Jason. I really do -- he says what he thinks, with passion and clearly deeply cares about things. And I've enjoyed some of the arguments we've had via instant messaging on this topic recently. But Jason -- and a lot of other people -- need some more education about the myths and misperceptions of SEO. So let this open letter do both.
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5) Google Ramps Up Personalized Search - Google is stepping up the push into personalized search results. A new change announced today should cause many more people to take up the service. In turn, the growth of personalized search should have a dramatic impact on search marketers as the days of "same results, all around" eventually come to an end. For searchers, the change means needing to be more careful about when you sign-up to use a Google service, if you're concerned about having your search history recorded.
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6) 3 Ranking Survival Tips For Google's New Personalized Results - Personalized search at Google is now the default and none too easy to escape from either through opt-out. This means that every search result you click, every link you bookmark, every RSS feed you subscribe to using Google services can be used to improve your personal search results. For search marketers, it means new skills and techniques are needed to achieve search visibility.
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7) Diggers Can't Handle The Truth (About SEO) - It's been a busy day, with me trying to provide some more balance and education about search engine optimization in today's "Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason" article. About two hours ago, I noticed it drew the attention of those on Digg. It jumped to the Tech News popular page, in fact. And about 30 minutes after that, it was gone. Gone? Flagged as spam by some, which seems to be a euphemism for some on Digg to mean "I just don't like a story that I didn't bother to read." Let's see some of the ignorance and absurdity, shall we?
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8) Google AdWords Quality Score Has Major Bug - There is a bug that makes good performing ads prices spike through the roof with Google AdWords. Many are seeing high quality ads and keywords hit with incredibly high CPC prices overnight. Google replied to several advertisers telling them they are aware of the "temporary issue" and "they are working to resolve it as soon as possible."
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9) Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites - Impressive. Scanning the latest top web sites rankings from comScore for January 2007 , Wikipedia sites are highlighted for just entering the top ten most visited. OK, technically -- they're in the top ten for having the most unique visitors. In December 2006, Wikipedia sites were ranked 13th of all US web properties, with 39 million unique visitors.
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10) Google Customized Search Engines to Harness The Wisdom of Experts? - Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came out yesterday at the US Patent Office...
To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.
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