Although some GeoCities web sites are still online, all three major search engines have removed the domain from their search indices. As of this morning, a site:geocities.com search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing shows that geocities.com is dead and buried. Yahoo announced earlier this year that GeoCities — a free web hosting service that it […]
For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners […]
Is Twitter allowing search engines access to protected tweets or not? Not, Twitter tells me, though the company probably needs to do a bit more to prevent this type of confusion in the future. The LA Times reported yesterday about a “Twitter hole” that it believed allowed Google special access to protected tweets, tweets made […]
Derek Powazek launched an attack on SEO yesterday that really said nothing that others haven’t ranted about before. I’ve responded to many of these attacks over the years in hopes of educating people about mistaken assumptions. I’ve largely given up. But I figured this time I’d give it another go with some personal illustrations I’ve […]
After today’s Google search press briefing, where I raised the issue of some poor quality search results in Google at one point, Sergey Brin asked me to demonstrate a few. My pleasure! Below, what we reviewed and comments from Google’s cofounder. First, I showed him the results for search engine on Google that I joked […]
Now that Google Search Options has added new features, I thought it was a good time to revisit how everything works — and in some cases, doesn’t work. Let’s get up close and personal with all the filtering options! NOTE: See Meet The New Google Look & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column for important […]
The Google News blog announced that they have begun labeling some sites, sites they consider to be a “blog” as blogs in the Google News search results. For example, here is a snap shot of how Google labels this site in Google News. How does Google determine which site is a blog versus a newspaper? […]
Search and online marking firm 360i published findings from a small but structured test of how the “Caffeine” search infrastructure changes could affect results and ranking on Google. As Vanessa Fox wrote when Caffeine went public earlier this month, there apparently would be a number of changes in the ordering and content of results. As […]
72 search engine optimizers from around the world have contributed to SEOmoz’s latest Search Engine Ranking Factors report, a study that offers valuable insight into how SEO works in 2009 … but also shows how little it’s changed in recent years. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the 72 contributors.) You can read the survey here, and […]
The next Ask.com personality to leave Ask.com is Antonio Gulli who was hired about four years ago to lead up the technology team in the European R&D center. Antonio announced he is leaving and explained what he worked while at Ask.com. He worked on: Image Search News and Blog search Video News Search DailyBeast Core […]
If you’re still trying to compare Google results with the new “Caffeine” sandbox, be prepared to wait while Google makes some datacenter upgrades. Matt Cutts just posted the news on Twitter that the sandbox is being taken down, and that it’ll be back online “late Thursday afternoon-ish.” Insert your own “Google goes decaffeinated” punchline here.
Google has just unveiled a “secret project” of “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. Instead, they’re providing a developer preview and are asking webmasters and power searchers […]
The “Kay Bailey Hutchinson for Governor Official Website” put up by “Texans for Kay Bailey Hutchison, Allan Shivers, Jr., Treasurer” over the weekend in support of Kay Bailey Hutchinson for Texas governor was briefly in Google but now appears to be completely missing. Huh. Odd since Bing seems to have indexed it just fine, although […]
By now, everyone has read all about the news that Yahoo is replacing its search index with Microsoft’s Bing. In a way, it’s a great story of complete reversal, as in 2002, Microsoft didn’t have its own index and instead used Inktomi. Late that year, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, which spurred Microsoft to start building its […]
Microsoft announced that MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta, may be ramped up a lot more and webmasters might begin to notice the new bot in their log files. The new bot has been out there since December 2008, and the useragent is just about the same as the original bot. New Bot: msnbot/2.0b […]
Google announced a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools named change of address. This feature allows webmasters to notify Google when they move domain names. When used, Google will update the index to reflect your new URL. The change will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time Google would have crawled and indexed […]
The Yahoo Search Blog has announced an index and algorithm update, aka a “weather report.” Yahoo said, “we’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” I spotted this update a couple […]
There’s a much longer post to be written on Google and so-called “real-time” search. Twitter is both more and less than a search engine, but there are lots of third parties doing search-like things around the Twitter data. However, yesterday at an event in London, Loic Le Meur elicited this response from Google co-founder Larry […]
With support from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR) has forced some of its members to stop allowing certain MLS listings to be crawled and indexed by Google because Google (and other search engines) is considered a “scraper” site. This is the latest episode in a long-running battle […]
Cool changes coming to Twitter Search from News.com reports Twitter will be improving Twitter Search to index content beyond Twitter.com by crawling links within Twitter posts and also by adding a ranking algorithm to the search results. In a one-to-one conversation with News.com’s Rafe Needleman and Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram – who […]
On the journey from HTML to SERP, a Web site may face a number of potential pitfalls. Pinpointing the obstacles on the path was the focus of the first Jane and Robot meetup in Los Angeles last Tuesday night. Nathan Buggia and Vanessa Fox, the pair behind search and search-friendly web development site JaneAndRobot.com, held […]
A little over a week ago we reported on the March ’09 Yahoo Search update. Yahoo has finally confirmed the update with a weather report on the Yahoo Search Blog. Dan Rampton from Yahoo Search said: We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and […]
SEOs and Webmasters are noticing major shifts in the Yahoo Search results over the weekend. I reported the threads discussing the changes at the Search Engine Roundtable and noted that Yahoo has yet to post a “weather report” on this update at the Yahoo Search Blog. Yahoo promised that they would continue to provide “weather […]
As Barry Schwartz points out today on Search Engine Roundtable, the Google Blog Search team is rolling out fixes to how it separates blogrolls from actual blog posts. Back in December, we wrote about Google’s switch to full-text indexing for Blog Search, but that led to problems identifying blogroll links as part of blog posts. […]
Google is announcing two changes to search results this morning. The first involves the use of longer “snippets” (text extracts containing the keywords) when users input queries of three words or more. The objective is to provide more context to help the user determine if the site is worth visiting. Many search engines have attempted […]
The Live Search blog posted a comprehensive guide on how to determine if your site is penalized in Live Search and if so, what actions you can take to remedy the issue. I’ll highlight some of the key points in this excellent blog post. Microsoft said, “most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened.” […]
I am fairly confident that Yahoo Search is currently updating their index and algorithm now. Dozens of webmasters and SEOs are noticing this update and discussing it at WebmasterWorld, but the Yahoo Search Blog has no mention of it. Typically, Yahoo posts updates — which they call weather reports — when Yahoo is updating their […]
In the on again off again debate about whether Ask remains serious about search, a new blog post suggests that Ask is making a bid to improve its search index and efficiency, having completed a move to a new datacenter: Our engineers were going to have to spend more time on improving efficiency, and less […]
I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that […]
President Barack Obama took office officially today plus launched a new White House web site as part of his transition. But the major search engines have yet to catch up with the power change. Google still lists President George W. Bush as being in power, sort of: The screenshot above shows what you get in […]
An SEOMoz post has documented statistics on how submitting a Sitemap to Google and Yahoo impacts the rate of crawling that web site. The results show that submitting a Sitemap to Google and Yahoo decreased the time it took Google and Yahoo to crawl the page. It is important to note that the test was […]
Everywhere you look right now, there's another headline pointing to another story that in either a direct or subtle way affects link building.
Google has upgraded its Site Search tool to give users more control over the frequency that Google spiders a site. But, if you think this is something that will help your site’s performance on Google.com search results, it won’t. Site Search is Google’s on-site tool for individual websites; you use it to add a search […]
Google’s long had a “First Click Free” program that allows news publishers to make their content accessible to search spiders but requires human visitors to login if they’ve already viewed one page on the site for free — hence the “first click free” name. Earlier this year, Google said this program was OK for web […]
Last year, Common Craft produced a great, short video explaining RSS “in plain English.” The company is back now with another wonderful one, Web Search Strategies in Plain English. It’s less than three minutes long and does a great job explaining how to use some of the most simple “power” commands at searchers’ disposal — […]
Yahoo has announced another search index update this morning: “We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” Yahoo seems […]
Small business owners are often curious, and sometimes desperate, to understand why their web sites are doing well — or doing poorly — when it comes to search engine visibility. Online forums and message boards are filled with questions like “Why is my competitor outranking me?”, “Why doesn’t my new product page bring me any […]
Almost two years ago, Google updated their guidelines to say that they can now properly handle crawling dynamic URLs. But last night, Google posted a blog entry now telling webmasters not to use rewrite rules for dynamic URLs, at least in most cases. Google say, in bold, “avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it […]
Live Search September 2008 Update Underway from the Search Engine Roundtable reports discussion at WebmasterWorld that Live Search is undergoing a major index and ranking update. The Live Search results seem to have changed, and webmasters and SEOs are taking notice. I personally noticed referral increases and drops from Live Search on some of the […]
Michael Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is the exact issue that influenced United Airlines stock price drop just a week ago. Google blamed the Tribune for the article not containing a date, which is a fair accusation. But As Michael shows, Google […]