Topic: JavaScript

URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including […]

Google AJAX Search Results = Death To Search Term Tracking?

Buzz has been growing over the past 4-5 days about what appears to be a new Google search results test that, if widely implemented, might spell doom for SEO rank checking software and some other tools. Many are concerned that it could kill web analytics software, too, but that may not be the case. Google […]

Search Engine Land’s New Look

Search Engine Land turned two years old this month. In that time, our content has blossomed. We run nearly 20 columns on search marketing issues, routinely post multiple brief items per day about breaking search news along with regular long, in-depth analysis or “How To” stories. Our old design didn’t serve to present this content […]

Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?

Your web site’s bounce rate may be a significant factor in your search engine rankings. If the bounce rate on your site is high, you could end up with lower rankings in the search engines. Correspondingly, lower bounce rates may actually offer meaningful ranking boosts. (Don’t know what a bounce rate is? Hang on—definitions below.) […]

Searching Yahoo’s Hack Day 2008

Yahoo hosted Hack Day this weekend, the Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal blog has four blog posts on the event: The hackers are back “6 PM Food, Beer & Games” Talkin’ about Girl Talk Highlights from Open Hack Day The event looked incredibly fun! I just wanted to highlight the demo’s that took place that involved search. […]

Waiting For Google Chrome To Launch

Obviously the big story of yesterday and today in the technology world is the impending launch of Google’s open-source browser Chrome. It will likely be available for download here later today. (TechCrunch and Google Blogoscoped have a few screenshots.) There are dozens and dozens of stories on Techmeme.

The Long Road To The Debate Over “White Hat Cloaking”

I really hate arguments over cloaking. Like really hate them. But Rand Fishkin recently did a chart outlining the degrees of "safeness" to cloaking that in turn riled up Google’s Matt Cutts in comments there. No doubt others at search engines also dislike the idea that any cloaking is "white hat." So I wanted to […]

Google Adds Positive Attributes To Look For When Hiring An SEO

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that they have updated the content of the What’s an SEO page to provide examples of how SEOs can help your site. Previously, the page mainly focused on scams and things to watch out for from SEOs. Now, Google added some of the benefits of search engine optimization and […]

Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content

Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to […]

SEO

How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly

For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s a […]

Linking Prowess For In-House Teams

Linking is still de rigueur when optimizing for Google and all major engines. Linking strategies have run the gauntlet, from simple link exchange requests to buying links. For a good review of current best practices in linking tactics, I refer you to The Link Spiel by Debra Mastaler and “11 Experts on Link Development Speak […]

Lee Odden Interviews Google’s Adam Lasnik

Lee Odden posted a ten-minute interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik. Adam is well-known for being one of the many Googlers who work on Webmaster communication. In this interview, Lee asked Adam questions on: Google compliant Flash and JavaScript capabilities Duplicate content issues and if there are penalties Using the nofollow to “sculpt PageRank” Best way […]

Google Docs Releases New Presentation Features

The Google Docs blog has announced new features for the Google Docs suite of tools. You can now create subfolders to more easily organize your documents and can rename documents and folders from the toolbar (previously, you could only do this from the File menu). The toolbar has also been spiffed up. In addition, Google […]

SEO

Search Year 2007: Search News, In Review

Each month, I compile Search Month — a recap of all the stories that have happened relating to search, categorized by topic. I thought it would be fun to take all the Search Months over the past year and produce this edition of Search Year 2007. It was far more work than I imagined, but […]

Links & SEO: The Huge Link Value Factors Survey

Wiep Knol has surveyed 17 well-known and respected SEOs in the industry all about links. His survey asked questions exclusively about links and the value they had on search rankings. There were about 40 factors included in this survey. You can find the full survey results over here, but if you prefer to download a […]

iGoogle Gets New Themes; Google China Gets New Home Page

Google has added five new themes to iGoogle. Google Blogoscoped and Google Operating System both have posts on the new themes, which include a Solar System theme, an Autumn theme, a Hong Kong theme, a JR The Monster theme, and an Aja Tiger theme. Google China is also testing out a new home page according […]

OpenSocial: Led By Google, Social Networks Band To Take On Facebook

As expected, the much-discussed Google social play turns out to be an alliance with other companies to open up social networks and their data to developers. TechCrunch and the New York Times both have early news of an expected announcement tomorrow on how Google, along with partners like Ning, Linked In, Friendster, and others, will […]

I Have The New Version Of Gmail, Do You?

The Gmail Blog has announced they have been making structural changes to the Gmail code base to make Gmail iterate faster and share components with other Google applications such as Google Groups, Page Creator, and Contact Manager. How do you know if you have the new Gmail? If you login to Gmail and look at […]

Sorting Out The Mobile Search & SEO Mess

One of the biggest challenges of being a mobile SEO is comparing keyword results across the many different search engines. While the goal of all the mobile engines is the same, their approaches vary considerably. Many traditional SEOs will simply target Google and hope for the best in the other engines, but there is a […]

Google Gears Brings Offline Web Applications To Life

Today at Google Developer Day 2007, Google released Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser extension that will help developers create offline web applications in the open source framework. Gears is powered by JavaScript APIs enabling data storage, application caching, and multi-threading technologies for offline browsing and application use. Google Reader is the first online […]

SEO

Loki 2.0 And The ‘Geo-Web’

In another Where 2.0 related announcement — they just keep coming this morning — Skyhook Wireless has released toolbar/platform Loki 2.0. Loki is kind of like the Firefox of local search. Once downloaded, it determines your location through wifi triangulation and removes the need to enter location when performing a local search.

SEO

Search Friendly CMS Does Not Equal Search Optimized One

Having a supposedly “search engine friendly” website isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it can be quite a disappointment. That’s because it’s not the same thing as being “search engine optimized.” I’ve seen the words “search engine friendly” bandied about quite a lot, particularly to market and sell blog platforms, shopping carts, […]

Can You Spot The Paid Link?

In Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? last week, I wrote about Google’s second major war against paid links that’s now underway. Today, I came across two examples that illustrate why this is such a difficult war for it to fight. How do you spot the paid link hidden among […]

Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?

The Paid Links Economy from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped is a nice, thoughtful follow-up to last week’s paid links debate that erupted after Google’s Matt Cutts featured a new way to report paid links. There’s plenty of the history of link buying and assorted comments, though Philipp’s article doesn’t really leave you with any […]