Google's head of web spam (a division of the engine's search quality division) recently posted a piece entitled, Why Google Won't Remove that Page You Don't Like. An excerpt: Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on ...
My coworker Mike and I were pondering lunch options today and decided to order from the Honey Hole, one of Seattle's best sandwich places. Every day the place has a line out the door because it's a popular haven for hungry Seattleites who want a belly full of sandwichy goodness, so sometimes we elect to call our order in and pick it up.
I was pinging people on Twitter about what to blog about, and Michael Vandemar suggested I take a look at his post about Google web search switching to AJAX. He and some other SEOs have recently noticed that Google search results URLs have been displaying the search query string after a ha...
Thousands of posts, news articles and analysis pieces have covered the central topic of battling Google's dominance in web search, but I've seen very few that have discussed what is, in my opinion, the most telling example of the search giant's dominance. The latest (made popular across Techmeme and many individual blogs) was this piece from C|Net's Don Reisinger:
With every tweak and change that Google brings to its search result pages, the "potential-ROI" balance on search tips ever more towards PPC and away from SEO. I realized this when I read Aaron Wall's Marketing Lessons from Google. Search marketing leaders demand results, so it's irrelevant that the means of practicing SEO remain the same. What is relevant is that Google is decreasing the ability of SEO to provide stable, measurable results. As Aaron points out in his post, Google seeks to undermine competing business models.
When search marketers get together at a pub and talk, the conversation inevitably turns to Google's near-monopolistic share of web search. For many of us that are new to the field, Google has always been the market leader and the focus of most of our efforts. But historically, this wasn't the case. Have a look from a historical perspective: ...
Recently I was working with a client and I decided to do a little experiment, because sometimes I have nothing better to do. I wanted to know whether changing the crawl rate in Google’s Webmaster Tools really made a difference. Part of me felt Google just put it there to make people feel that Google will come to their site more often, but part of me wanted to trust Google.
Rand has talked before about the need to think like a search engineer when you are doing what we do. So a week or two ago, I came up with a theory about how I would look at things if I were a search engineer and set out to prove it. I was wrong.
As I was stumbling around the web today, building some slides out for my Pubcon sessions next week, I came across some search results I couldn't help but blog about. Have a peek: ...
One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search r...
After watching Nate Buggia a few weeks ago speak about Live's Webmaster Tools I was struck by his statistic about the number of domains on the web. He suggested that there are 78 million domains. Could we manually review all of them?
What's the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google's size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice.
I've been meaning to do a "fun" post for awhile, but haven't had the time or gotten around to it. A reality shared by many, no doubt. With the recent launch of the Professional's Guide to Advanced Search...
Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'. I've collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I'd share them on the blog with the hopes of g...
