Google moving to Ajax based result pages:

It seems Google is now moving into Ajax based result pages. As per the Google analytics blog “Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”,”

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of “/search?” the URL contains a “/url?”. If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the “/search?” portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click.

New parameters as per Google blog:
——- old
http://www.google.com/search
hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new
http://www.google.com/url
sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

According to Mattcutts a senior Google employee this change is to make sure search results are retrieved faster than it usually does. Matt says “The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically.”

Stealth links and Googlebot :

Webmaster world owner and senior webmaster Brett Tabke posted an interesting thread what he calls stealth links in Google. Links that are not the same HREF links but still seem to count in Google. He calls them stealth links according to him following are some prominent stealth links:

• another site links to your graphics (img src)
• a site links to your javascript files
• a site links to your css files?
• rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
• links in email that some se’s can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
• links marked with noindex
• links marked with nofollow
• urls within javascript or js comments
• raw urls within css or css comments
• urls within meta data of graphics and video files
• urls within html comments
• urls within the head section or meta data of a html page
• links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
• the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
• links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
• Domains that have been 301’d with links.
• Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
• non href’ed url’s. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com)
• Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
• blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.

According to me most of links from the above sources are not counted by Google atleast for ranking purposes. Brett came up with the above list because of the discussion that was started in another thread about pages getting pagerank without any external links. I feel most of the people who are complaining about pages getting pagerank without external links either don’t know to check backlinks or just rely on yahoo and Google backlink data which is totally unreliable.

Does Protected Whois affect Google rankings?

Many of us prefer to protect our whois data to avoid spammers and scammers getting our email addresses for potential abuse. We protect our privacy on some of our sites though we don’t do it on our company website. Many of us know Google uses whois data in for search engine rankings. They primarily use this to avoid spammers capturing expired domains and using the backlink power of those domains and use it for their own website.

This Google patent already describes Google’s usage of whois for ranking purposes.

(http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=

HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=

1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 )

Some extra from that Google patent:
1. A geographic information system (GIS) comprising information about a plurality of geospatial entities and configured to prioritize the geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data about a meta attribute of a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity’s priority.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: quality of information available about the geospatial entity, an attribute of a description of the geospatial entity, and an attribute of a definition of the geospatial entity.

4. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises an indicator of the geospatial entity’s popularity.

5. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: an age attribute, a stature attribute, and an importance attribute.

6. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises a relationship of a geospatial entity to its place in a hierarchy of geospatial entities.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a collection of geospatial objects and wherein the priority of the entity is determined responsive to a characteristic of the collection of geospatial objects.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a geospatial entity defined in an on-line forum and wherein the ranking mechanism uses data generated in the on-line forum to determine the rank of the geospatial entity.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data harvested from a website on the internet about a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity’s priority.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism determines a geospatial entity’s priority from a combination of weighted data from a plurality of meta attributes of the geospatial entity.

11. A computer-implemented method for ranking geospatial entities, the method comprising: receiving geospatial entity data; evaluating attributes of geospatial entities included in the received geospatial entity data; ranking the geospatial entities based on the evaluation; and storing the ranked geospatial entity data.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data generated in a community forum.

13. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data associated with a specific user and further comprising using the ranked geospatial entity data to generate a map for the specific user.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities for a geographical display based on the rankings of the geospatial entities.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to a map system configured to generate a map that includes ranked geospatial entities and unranked geospatial entities.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities to include in navigation instructions based on rankings of the geospatial entities.

17. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting a geospatial entity to associate with an advertising term based on the geospatial entity’s ranking.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to an application for generating a search result based on the ranked geospatial entity data.

19. The method of claim 11, wherein evaluating is performed responsive to user instructions for providing personalized geospatial entity rankings.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the user instructions comprise a weighting to be applied to an attribute of a geospatial entity identified in the geospatial entity data.

21. A system for ranking geospatial entities, the system comprising: an interface for receiving ranking data about a plurality of geospatial entities; an entity ranking module for generating place ranks for geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism based on the ranking data; and a database for storing ranked entity data generated by the entity ranking module.

22. The system of claim 21, wherein the interface is configured to provide the ranked entity data to a requesting application.

23. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to evaluate a plurality of diverse attributes to determine a total score for a geospatial entity.

24. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to organize ranked entity data into placemark layers.

25. The system of claim 24, wherein each placemark layer corresponds to at least one of: a level of detail, a density, an altitude, and an entity category.

26. The system of claim 21, wherein the requesting application is a map server system configured to use the ranked entity data to generate a map including entities selected on the basis of place ranks.

27. The system of claim 26, wherein the entity ranking module is hosted on the map server system.

28. An entity ranking module hosted on a client device, the module for generating rankings for a plurality of geospatial entities and the module comprising: an interface for receiving entity data that defines a plurality of geospatial entities and ranking data that describes the plurality of geospatial entities; and a ranking engine for generating rankings for the geospatial entities, wherein the rankings are used to select which of the geospatial items to include in a map to be displayed on the client device.

29. The module of claim 28, further comprising a memory for storing data about a user of the client device and wherein the ranking engine is configured to apply a ranking mechanism responsive to the user data.

30. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises user preferences about the relative weightings of attributes evaluated by the ranking engine.

31. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises a user defined geospatial entity.

32. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises an indication of a user’s interest in a geospatial entity and wherein the ranking mechanism assigns a rankings premium to the geospatial entity based on the user’s interest.
What I am trying to say is you need to be careful when changing whois info or trying to suddenly protect your privacy by hiding your whois data. If there is sudden change you can expect some sort of problem but if done correctly I am sure you wont have any problem with whois privacy protection.

Does Googlebot crawl videos:

Recently I have noticed surge in videos from YouTube ranking for competitive phrases. If you see YouTube page all you see is a video without proper text, few comments shown and all other are just junk data. So here are my questions?

1. How a video ranks on top of Google results when it doesn’t have any proper optimization done or it just has keywords in title.

2. How does Google determine the content of a video? Does it have a program that somehow analyzes the video and evaluates its content, even when there are no spoken or written words, as in this case. Or does a Google employee actually watch the video and personally evaluate its content?,

Doing a bit of more searches I feel Google will be seeing the popularity of the video, real backlinks coming to the video, no of instances the video has been embedded etc.

Google can also see the comments and valuate the quality of the video some videos attract 1000s of comments so I feel Google will have ability to crawl all the comments though many contents are hidden.

Also the quality of the domain itself matters youtube.com is PR 9 domain which signals very high level importance and popularity in Google’s eyes. You can expect pages under youtube.com to rank because of the quality of YouTube domain.

Video views can also signal Google that the video is important.

In fact only Google knows the algorithm behind ranking YouTube videos. I will leave it to them.

Google introduces broader keyword suggestions and longer snippets:

Google on 24th march released a new technology that can better understand concepts and associations related to the search done by end users, this advancement will help provide more related keyword suggestions on top and bottom of the search result pages.
Example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Longer snippets in Google results page:

Now Google in offering longer snippets for longer queries. A snippet is the dark blue title and is followed by few lines of text which was previously indexed from your website. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word “sun” in context, suggesting that the page doesn’t talk about Earth’s distance from the sun:

Unable to get rid of potential penalty?

You know your site is penalized. You cleaned up what you thought was the trigger. Filed re-inclusion request. After that you are in the dark. The chances are you never get reincluded-

– Your site might never have had a problem to begin with. It might have been one of those Google’s freak collateral damage issues that landed you in the soup.

– You correctly identified the issue, cleaned it up, filed a request, but you are in the mandatory penalty period, which you don’t know is how long and when will it end.

– You haven’t identified the problem or have partly addressed it and Google wants you to do more, a fact you are not aware of and are waiting endlessly for the penalty to end.

– It might never have been a penalty by Google’s definition, but an algorithmic tweak that has affected a select set of keywords. If the overall traffic hasn’t been affected drastically, perhaps a perceived penalty might belong to this category.

– Your site is affected (penalized or algorithmically tweaked), you undertake damage control efforts, file a request to Google citing what might have been the problem that you addressed, which might be a news to Google! So, they use the stick you gave to beat you.

It might just be best to clean up issues that you are aware of and leave the rest to destiny.
Google penalties are vague and sometimes affect high quality sites I feel best is to go for re-inclusion requests.

Is Google devaluing forums:

Several people have reported that Google is devaluing forums and not indexing them well these days. I did notice something similar in couple of forums we monitor. Google stopped indexing our PHPBB forums. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn’t index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.
My rankings of what is already indexed didn’t drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. And yes, we checked: our board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn’t display any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-February than in November-December. It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has “better things to crawl”. Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.
We did some research on few of the other PHPBB sites we monitor, and even those boards faces the same situation. I suspect this could just be a temporary glitch with Google. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Google and Brand Authority

A webmaster world member has started a discussion whether Google is giving brand authority to certain results. When you say Brand Authority it means if you are the top brand for that particular search you will be ranking for that term.

For example:

Keyword: Laptop
#1 – Apple
#2 – Dell

Keyword: High Speed Internet
#1 – ATT
#2 – Comcast

Keyword: Quit Smoking
#1 – SmokeFree.gov
#2 – CDC.gov

I have seen this in many cases there are some keywords where a top brand for that keyword ranks even if their website is all flash or just a splash page. Google’s Eric Schmidt has already said there needs to be some sort of Authority / Social Buzz for a top brand to rank. Its not just about onpage factors or offpage factors for top brands if a particular brand is top on a particular search I am sure they will be ranking atleast for Google. I wonder how Google does this they always say their results don’t have manual intervention but it seems to make a top brand rank without proper web popularity should come from some extra ordinary human based algorithm. Most top brands have good offline popularity but not web popularity but still they rank well for their phrases.

Google says its not just about factors influencing the site alone but the social media factor also boosts top brands. Especially this year many users begin to notice brand authority. Probably google has figured out a way to make the top brands rank for their corresponding keywords. The real question are Google users happy to see their top brands on top of Google results for major keywords if yes I don’t think Google need to worry how they get them out there. Users come first and I feel most users are happy to see top brands on top of results for brand related keywords.

Does meta descriptions still helping in Google?

Meta descriptions were never ignored by any search engines. It’s the meta keywords tag that got booted for over spamming. Meta description tag is still very important for major search engines especially Google. Google had long stated that they don’t use meta description for ranking purpose but are using it only for snippet purposes. But this snippet is what your users see so its important to make sure it has the right combination of keywords as well as marketing strength. Most people prefer to use their phone numbers directly on title or meta description tag this is an effective way but you might loose the chance of adding some important phrases if you are adding too much marketing words so make sure you also include good keywords you are targeting. Google will try to relate the keywords on your page with meta description tag to valuate the effectiveness and accuracy before it shows up in search engines. So better have good keywords on the description tag.

Google does take lot of effort and show in your webmaster tools whether you have duplicate descriptions if Google is taking so much care I am sure it considers meta description tag important. For one client who came to us recently his site never had any meta descriptions written Google was able to figure out something from his page but it looked really bad. Google took the menu of his site as the description and it looked spammy so better write good descriptions so Google will use it.

Remember Google’s algorithm and search is very complicated and they need to return results from billions of pages within a fraction of a second. So when they get a query first they try to find relevancy from meta description and then they go to the actual page. Better the meta description faster the results will be. Also Meta description helps in increasing click through rates if they are written well. To conclude write what is best for your users search engines will endorse that for sure.

An experimental search tools launched by Google

Google started as a search engine company and from that time it is working as same. But on January 12th, 2009 Company released a new quick search box for Macs that aims “to make it jus as easy to search outside your browser.”

The quick search box included in Google desktop is similar to command button that comes up anytime you double-click. But according to Google result it says it is similar to the Google Mobile App for the iphone. This search box is more experimental.

Google says it works fairly well but a bit faster than the Apple’s own spotlight search feature. Google search box includes more web result, which people no doubt spend more time for it than something else on their computers.

This new tools allows you with the option to make search in the specific area.

You can see the new Google search box on Google Code Page.