The SEMNE organization landed an incredible opportunity last week with a guest lecture from Dan Crow. I've seen Dan speak once before several years ago and was shocked by his overly secretive conduct. Thankfully, Google, and apparently, Dan, have changed a lot since then. He had some remarkable...
Tonight, Matt McGee noticed that the supplemental results query at Google, using the format: site:yoursite.com *** -asdf is no longer functioning. I'm fairly certain that the source of this issue can be traced back to a Mr. Matt Cutts, who was permitted to sit in at the "Give It Up" session at SMX where one of the first broadly public mentions of th...
I came across a rather interesting discovery while doing some research for one of my small business clients today: it seems to take only one Local advertiser (different from a standard Web Search advertiser) to trigger an entirely new set of PPC results in Google Local.The easiest explanation is probably by example -- consider the difference between the following searche...
As my previous posts and articles have tended to be too technical, going forward I will simply try to provide the pieces that are relevant for the discussion, and point to the sources for learning more. After carefully reflecting on the article that prooves Google is u...
Vanessa Fox, Webmaster Central's long time head of operations, announced her departure from the company today. There's more specific news about that on her personal blog, so I won't dwell on it here. What I do want to do in this blog post, and hopefully in the comments below, is to express our thanks to Vanessa. I don't belie...
The other day I read a blog post that blew me away. Entitled "Google Bounce Factor Research Data Is In" and written by Visio, it was about the first real experiement that proves Google is using behavioral data in...
In the final interview installment of The SMX Diaries, Rand spends some quality time with Google's own Matt Cutts and learns all the magic behind the buttons, levers, switches and knobs that make the the interweb work. This was a long one, so we've broken it into two parts. Also, although I planned to offer this and all of the other SMX Diaries interviews on ...
The first video in The SMX Diaries, Rand interviews Michael Gray (aka Graywolf) about Google, Webmaster Central and the first inaugural SMX. Stay tuned folks, the action and adventure that is The SMX Diaries will continue! ...
I'm more than a little skeptical of mainstream media articles about the search engines. With so many terrible experiences - inaccuracy, bias, shallow information, agenda-based reporting - it's easy to see why. However, today I'm thrilled to see an article from Saul Hansel in the NY Times that's not only impeccably well-written, but informative to even those of in most deeply inside the search i...
Two days ago Agerhart.com posted their discovery that Yahoo! was cloaking their Autos page. As one of our resident programmers, Jeff, put it, Yahoo! was practicing in standard, run of the mill cloaking, where they look at the IP/user-agent and serve a different p...
I noticed an engaging blog post from Stoney DeGeyter over at SearchEngineLand this evening (or rather, morning/afternoon for our American & European readers) - The Ranking Roller Coaster Cause & Effect. It's definitely worth a read, but I also wanted to point out one specific area that we see causing the "rollercoaster&quo...
Mystery Guest and I cruised to Yahoo! this evening and were both suddenly taken aback by what we saw: _ _ Here's a...
I veered left, but it was too late. A wall of fire sprang up in front of me, blocking my path. I turned around and there he was: Googlebot, my old nemesis and lord of the search underworld. Even as the flames engulfed me, damning me to supplemental hell, his cold, metallic laugh froze me to my very soul…...
The search engines are considerably smarter than we often give them credit for, and one of the ways they've become so "intelligent" is through the data provided to them on the billions of web pages they crawl. ...
