Google acquires urchin web analytics software – Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin

press release on Urchin site,

Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 28, 2005 – Google Inc. today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users’ experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.
Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.
“We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users’ experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. “This technology will be a valuable addition to Google’s suite of advertising and publishing products.”
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.

http://www.urchin.com/company/news/03282005.html

Does search engines crawl Javascript links ? – search engine optimization tip – march 13th 2005

Scripts are complex codings which difficult for some browsers and crawlers to read, Some tough javascripts are read only by advanced browsers, search engine crawlers are not advanced browsers some of the browsers that search engines use find difficult to index high graphics, So it is best to avoid too much javascript,

Prevent creating menus in javascript or in any scripting language, Create menus in simple html or other crawler understandable language, Javascript menus wont be crawled by search engines, Best is to avoid using clickable menus and other important inner page links in javascript,

if you cannot avoid using javascript menus just add the links to a sitemap and attach the sitemap to the homepage or any other important page,

SEO BLog Team,

Does outgoing links affect your site – seo tip march 12th 2005

Outbound links are links going out from a site to an other site, Whole internet/WWW was built upon links, Inbound links and Outbound links make up the web, Outbound links are good to maintain the quality of a site, search engines like links, they like outbound links too, If you link out to a collection of quality sites then definitely there is a small boost to that page,

Jon M. Kleinberg proposed that hubs are a collection of quality links, More information on hubs and authorities in this paper, http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf

Outbound links are good for usability too, For certain references it is important to give the source so that people are guided in the correct way, Especially non commercial sites need to link out freely for people to find relevant information if they are found elsewhere on the web,

SEO Blog Team,

Does H1 header tags help in search engines? – search engine optimization tip – march 11th 2005

Header tags used to carry weight in search engine algorithms, Today header tags carry very low weightage in search algorithms, Infact you can build sites without it, It is never needed infact, Quality contents and high quality backlinks are more important than header tags,

It never hurts to use header tags, It doesnt help too much too,

SEO BLog Team,

Do tracking parameters dilute ranking of page? – search engine optimization tip march 10th 2005

tracking parameters dilute ranking of page?

many will be having question whether tracking URLs like the one below will dilute pagerank/link popularity/ranking,

www.myURL.com/page.htm?trackingid=theirURL

Nope they dont dilute much, if you think they are diluting the link better option is to 301 redirect them to the main URL, that way all link popularity is passed to the main URL and no duplicate pages are formed,

Do search engines index flash?? – search engine optimization tip march 9th 2005

Flash is not good for search engines, Most of the search engines have difficulty in parsing code from the complex DHTML coding of flash, Google has been recently reported on following links from flash .SWF files, We have seen google read text within a flash file and follow links from a flash file,

But yahoo don’t read flash they are not sophisticated to do so, Similarly MSN, gigablast and lot of other search engines don’t follow flash, Best bet is to avoid flash sites if you are planning to do search engine optimization,

Flash has always been a hindrance for search engines better avoid designing full sites with flash,

SEO BLOG TEAM,

An other excellent post by brett tabke of webmasterworld.com on duplicate content issues with search engines,

A great post in webmasterworld by brett tabke explains how search engines treat duplicate content, It is worth a read by everyone,

What is dupe content?
a) Strip duplicate headers, menus, footers (eg:
the template)
This is quite easy to do mathematically. You just look for
string patters that match on more that a few pages.
b) Content is what is
left after the template is removed.
Comparing content is done the same way
with pattern matching. The core is the same type of routines that make up
compression algos like Lempel-Ziv (lz).
This type of pattern matching is
sometimes referred to as a sliding dictionary lookup. You build an index of a
page (dictionary) based on (most probably) words. You then start with the lowest
denominator and try to match it against other words in other pages.
How
close is duplicate content?
A few years ago, an intern (*not* Pugh) who
helped work on the dupe content routines (2000?), wrote a paper (now removed).
The figure 12% was used. Even after studying, we are left to ask how that 12% is
arrived at.
Cause for concern with some sites?
Absolutely. People that
should worry: a) repetitive content for language purposes. b) those that do auto
generated content with slightly different pages (such as weather sites, news
sites, travel sites). c) geo targeted pages on different domains. d) multiple
top level domains.
Can I get around it with random text within my template?
Debatable. I have heard some say that if a site of any size (more than
20pages) does not have a detectable template, that you are subject to another
quasi penalty.
When is dupe content checked?
I feel it is checked as a
background routine. It is a routine that could easily run 24×7 and hundreds of
machines if they wanted to crank it up that high. I am almost certain there is a
granularity setting to it where they can dialup or dial down how close they
check for dupe content. When you think about it, this is not a routine that
would actually have to be run all the time because one they flag a page as a
dupe, that would take care of it for a few months until they came back to check
again. So I agree with those that say it isn’t a set pattern.
Additionally,
we also agree that G’s indexing isn’t as static as it used to be. We are into
the “update all the time” era where the days of GG pressing the button are done
because it is pressed all the time. The tweaks are on-the-fly now – it’s pot
luck.
What does Google do if it detects duplicate content?
Penalizes the
second one found (with caveats). (As with almost ever Google penalty, there are
exceptions we will get to in a minute).
What generally happens is the first
page found is considered to be the original prime page. The second page will get
buried deep in the results.
The exception (as always) – we believe – is high
Page Rank. It is generally believe by some that mid-PR7 is considered the “white
list” where penalties are dropped on a page – quite possibly – an entire site.
This is why it is confusing to SEO’s when someone says they absolutely know the
truth about a penalty or algo nuance. The PR7/Whitelist exception takes the
arguments and washes them.
Who is best at detecting dupe content? Inktomi
used to be the undisputed king, but since G changed their routines (late
2003/Florida?), G has detected the tiny page to the large duplicate page without
fail.
On the other, I think we have all seen some classic dupe content that
has slipped by the filters with no explaination apparent.
For example, these
two pages:
The original: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm
The
duplicate: http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm
The
10,000 unauthorized rips: (10k is best count, but probably higher): Successful
Site in 12 Months with Google Alone
All-in-all, I think the dupe content
issue is far over rated and easy to avoid with quality original content. If
anything, it is a good way to watch a competitor penalized.

What is duplicate content for search engines – search engine optimization tip March 8th 2005

Various search engines have various thresholds on duplicate content issues, Some search engines like yahoo, exalead are unable to detect duplicate contents across sites, they seem to detect within a site but are not able to detect across sites, Best is to make the pages atleast 5 to 7% different from other pages of the site,

Google is the best search engine on detecting dupe contents, They strip away the main template of the site and take the remaining part into their algorithm consideration, We recommend making the page atleast 8 to 15% different from other pages to avoid dupe content penalty for a particular page, Remember to give proper file names if you cant create too unique pages, File names are indexed by search engines and good 5 or 6 word file names add upto unique contents,

Overall 10% is the best bet to make pages different,

SEO BLog Team,

Google guy responds to Attack on google for potential cloaking of some pages of their site

Many forums and blogs blame Google’s is keyword stuffing, cloaking their title etc in their support, that page was fixed and removed from google index now, Googleguy immediately responded explaining what has happened behind the screen,

Hey everyone, I’m sorry that it took me a while to post about this. I
wanted to make sure I completely understood what was going on first.
Those
pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site
search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that
search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google
Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for
the user agent of “Googlebot” (the Google Search Appliance uses “Googlebot” as a
user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user
support database into the title.
The issue is that in addition to being
accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be
accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the
user support system thinks that it’s the Google Search Appliance (the code only
checks for “Googlebot”) and adds these additional keywords.
That’s the
background, so let me talk about what we’re doing. To be consistent with our
guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are
already gone from most of our data centers–a search like
[site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once
the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that
anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion
request” to explain the situation).

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/1621206

Is alexa ranking worth looking at ? search engine optimization tip March 7th 2005

Alexa has a unique ranking system where the measure the ranking of a site based on their toolbar users visiting certain sites, Alexa’s ranking criteria can give you an idea how good a site is and how well they get traffic from various sources,

But it is not a definite measure since there are not many Alexa toolbar users, Only Alexa toolbar users are taken into consideration for ALexa site rankings and it is not a good measure,

But Alexa will give an idea of the quality of the site, If there is a hike in traffic to a particular site as reported in Alexa then we can judge definitely there is some increase in popularity for that particular site,

SEO Blog Team,