July 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from July 2007:

1) Google To Add "Unavailable After" META Tag – Google is releasing a new META tag named "unavailable_after." The "unavailable_after" tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page.

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2) SEO Tips & Tactics From A Wikipedia Insider – I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I specialize in complex investigations. Media professionals and Wikipedia volunteers seldom understand each other. So I’ll illustrate my perspective with an example: let’s have a look at some politicians.

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3) Doing Keyword Research? Here Are Some Resources To Help! – Search term research is one of the fundamental activities for a successful search marketing campaign. You’ve got to know the words people are using if you want to target them properly. To help, I’ve expanded the Search Term Research section of Search Engine Land to list a variety of resources and tools you can consult. The Search Behavior section also has been updated to list places where search engines generally report on search activity, such as popular trends in searching. Both sections also recap articles we’ve covered on these topics. In this article, a bit more about what’s in both sections, along with the sad decline of the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool and some alternatives that have come along in its place.

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4) Compete: Microsoft Gaining Searches; Live Search Club Giveaway Working? – Compete is out with its latest search marketshare report for June 2007, showing that MSN/Windows Live Search has posted a dramatic rise since last month. This appears to be do to the Live Search Club promotion that’s going on. Below, a look at the trend, a history of how giveaways for search have and haven’t worked, as well as some revisiting to past issues with Compete’s figures.

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5) 5 Tactics For Driving Traffic From StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is a hot social discovery site that continues to rapidly increase in popularity. With the increase in popularity comes an increase in the potential traffic that it can drive to your sites. StumbleUpon has always been great at driving traffic and links, but lately I’ve started to notice that it is one of the leading social sites, often times sending more traffic than even Digg.

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6) How To Build An Audience On MySpace – MySpace is a great social media site that marketers can leverage in a number of different ways. One of these is building up a large audience for your profile, which can then be used to drive traffic to your site, interact with consumers, create mind share, and even empower people to brand your company for you. The problem is that most people don’t know how to build a large audience. And unless you’re a well-known, popular brand, chances are that if you build it they won’t come. Here are some things that you can do to build a large relevant audience on MySpace.

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7) Yahoo.com Adds Search Suggestions – The Yahoo Search Blog announced that the search box on Yahoo.com now offers search suggestions as you type. For example, as I started typing "danny s", Yahoo offered suggestions, including "danny sullivan."

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8) Google Search URL Parameters Explained – Appending different parameters to the end of the Google search URL string can often extend the Google search results into something that may be more tailored for your specific search. Joost de Valk created a Google Web search parameters cheat sheet (PDF file) that contains a comprehensive list of many of the different parameters you can add to the Google search URL.

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9) Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist – I chuckled a bit over the buzz Yahoo got when they launched Yahoo Search Suggest earlier this month because I knew something even better was coming: Yahoo Search Assist. Finally, it’s going live and in the wild for lucky people who are selected at random for testing. If all goes well, eventually everyone will get to use this new search refinement feature that I find very compelling. Yahoo Search Assist is smart, in the sense that it shows up when you need it.

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10) Deconstructing Grouped Google Results – My favorite session at SMX Advanced last month was "Give It Up," the session where panelists shared little-known secrets. I’m a little biased, since that was the panel I spoke on. But still, as the last session of the two days, it really ended the conference with a bang. For those of you who didn’t attend, there was a 30 day moratorium on blogging/writing about the session. Today marks the end of that embargo period, so without further ado, here’s the secret:

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.