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Aug. 31, 2007 at 11:59pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan
August 2007: Search Engine Land's Most Popular Stories
Below are Search Engine Land's 10 most popular stories from August 2007:
1) Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly - A reader tipped me off to this. Search for raccoon, and Google Universal Search puts some pictures up at the top of the page: See it? Third one over? I didn't know a dog and a raccoon could, well...
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2) The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles - Suppose your company, boss or political candidate discovers that their Wikipedia article is wrong, or has subtle inaccuracies that nonetheless paint them in an unfavorable light? Most people unfamiliar with how Wikipedia works consider only two solutions: edit the article or sit on their hands. Unfortunately, neither approach typically results in the optimal outcome: a factually accurate profile containing trustworthy information. Search marketers and reputation management professionals should know that there are legitimate ways to correct errors in Wikipedia. Knowing the right way to fix things is even more important now that Wikipedia results frequently appear in the top listings of Google search results. The good news is that Wikipedia actually offers a broad range of options for correcting inaccurate or negative entries, and even better, all are easy to use and take little time to implement.
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3) How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks - Still wondering why you submit an article on Digg or Reddit and it goes nowhere? The key, as with most things in life, is who you know. But as with links, clients or affiliates: you want quality over quantity. You want people who are active and have strong profiles. So how do you go about building your network? Here are eleven ways to get started.
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4) Twelve SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Since I'm speaking this week at Search Engine Strategies on the topic of SEO through Blogs and Feeds, it seems fitting that this issue of "100% Organic" be related to blog optimization. Even the top SEOs make mistakes with their blogs (and yes, I make some of them too). What are they? Here's my list:
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5) The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines - I'm having a bad day. Aside from my desktop crashing, we get another spate of "let's blame SEO" to start my morning off. Robert Scoble uses that theme as a launching pad for a series of videos on how Facebook potentially could be a killer search engine -- regardless of the fact he seems to have no clue that "social graph" or social networking mixing has been tried and abandoned with search. Having watched his videos, which have sparked much discussion, I'll do some debunking, some educating for those who want more history of what's been done in the area, plus I'll swing around to that New York Times article today that ascribes super-ranking powers to SEO. Plus, I'll use the F-word along the way. I said it was a bad day.
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6) Want That Top Ad Position On Google? The Rules Are About To Change - In the upcoming weeks, Google will be releasing an updated algorithm to determine the ads that are displayed in the top ad spot, above the organic search results. The updated algorithm will continue to use the quality and cost-per-click (CPC) figure but will be slightly tweaked for that top ad position. Instead of using the actual CPC, Google will use the advertiser's maximum CPC in the overall equation. In addition, Google will be applying a stricter threshold on the quality component for the top ad positions.
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7) Search In The Year 2010 - If I ever had to build a search engine, or more precisely, the interface of a search engine, this would be the team I would want to bring together. When I came up with the idea of looking forward three years and speculating on what the search results page may look like in 2010, these are the names that immediately came to mind: Jakob Nielsen, the Web’s best-known usability guru; Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of user experience and interface design; Michael Ferguson, one of the architects of Ask’s unique user experience; Larry Cornett, the VP of search experience at Yahoo!; Justin Osmer, Product Manager for Microsoft Live search; Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land and always thoughtful industry observer; Greg Sterling, another industry analyst who always has interesting insights, particularly in the local and mobile world; Danny Sullivan, the Go To Guy of search.
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8) Top Ten Organic SEO Myths - SEO myths get crazier every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because it's often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction. For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that's not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.
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9) Google Sky: Search The Stars With Google Earth Sky - Google Earth has released a new version that allows you to look up at the sky and see the galaxy. The feature is described more here. The new feature will let you virtually look up at the sky, from any location and zoom in and fly around to other locations. The images come from Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.
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10) Geolocation: Core To The Local Space And Key To Click-Fraud Detection - Geolocation is bandied about quite a bit when discussing aspects of online marketing with location-specific components, but many are blurry as to how it works and how it's being used, so I thought it'd be helpful to outline the basics of it, and to highlight some of the recent developments brought via the expansion of wifi and mobile device use that have improved its precision. With all the enthusiasm surrounding the use of geolocation tech, few people really speak to the questions of accuracy with the technology as well— a point that is odd, considering just how integral the technology is to the highly-publicized concerns surrounding the reliability of fraud detection in the paid search marketing industry.
To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.
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