Google trifecta successful free Google 3some seminar

Google recently conducted the Google trifecta seminar which was successful. First time webmaster tools, Website optimizer and Google analytics came together for a free online seminar. It was a grand success. Event is currently available as an archive. Enjoy it here

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=113541&s=1&k=CB05AB57071FCC9968D5BAE69762C198

Interesting post in webmasterworld on how punctuation in keywords affect results.

Andy of webmasterworld made an interesting post on how punctuation in keywords affects search results and search engine rankings

Read the post

“Various punctuation characters have a noticeable impact on search results – mostly from a searcher perspective. As a webmaster, you may find that your users include punctuation in some keywords, and so it can be of use to know what the effect on the results they see is. And besides, knowing how to search Google is one step towards understanding how Google works. This is a spot check of the current handling of punctuation by Google.
Indexed punctuation
Key_word
Underscores are treated as a letter of the alphabet, which is why you can search for an underscore directly. Use underscores in content if your visitors include an underscore when searching (e.g. if you had a programming site).
Key&word
Ampersands or ‘and symbols’ have fairly unique handling. They’re both indexed and also treated as the equivalent of word “and”. If there are no spaces separating the symbol and the adjacent letters, the search results are an approximate equivalent of combining results for [“key and word”] and [“key & word”] (note the phrase matching). Use ampersands in copy as is natural for your target audience.
Explicit search operators
Many punctuation characters are explicit search operators, with a documented effect on results. Search operators are not indexed (or at least, they can’t be searched for) and so are usually treated as word separators when found within website copy:
Key¦word
An (unbroken) pipe character is the equivalent of boolean OR: a search for [key OR word]. It can be a handy shortcut when conducting complex queries.
Key”word
A double quote triggers an exact or phrase search for the proceeding words (whether you include a closing double quote or not). So in this instance, it’s the equivalent of a search for [key word] since a single word can’t be a phrase. [“key word] is the same as searching for [“key word”].
Key*word
An asterisk is a wildcard search for zero or more words: [key … word]. Putting numbers on both sides will trigger the calculator. Occasionally, Google delivers (strange!) results if you search for an asterisk directly.
Key~word
A tilde triggers Google’s related word operator – in this instance, a search for both ‘key’ and ‘word’, as well as other words related to ‘word’ – like ‘Microsoft’, ‘dictionary’ and others.
Search operator oddities
Key-word
A hyphen (as is probably consistent with language use) returns a mix of results for the words both used separately, and joined together – somewhere between [key word] and [keyword]. It’s the preferred word separator within website URLs, since other punctuation characters that are treated as a word-separator have specific functions within a URL.
Others
A few punctuation characters have a strange impact on results – returning far fewer results than for either separated or concatenated words. They are neither known search operators, or indexed characters. These are . / \ @ = :
As far as I’m, aware, all other punctuation characters are treated as simply a space or word separator.
So, do I have too much time on my hands? Probably. But why not confuse whoever looks at Google’s search logs by trying a few punctuation searches yourself? 😉
Do you know any punctuation with an effect on results not discussed here, or more about the effect on results of the punctuation above? “

Youtube not private anymore after viacom lawsuit ruling.

Following up on Viacom lawsuit where Google might loose their internet freedom , now the judge has ruled saying Google has to handle all username and IP addresses for Youtube account holders. This is an horrible situation for internet freedom.

“Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.
The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.
Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema.
Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons. “

I already said if losing this lawsuit will lead to various other lawsuits which will totally affect internet freedom and some point internet will be a whole regulated place than what it is now. I hope Google comes out well with this lawsuit.

Google guide on reclusion request after penalty

Google Webmaster Central Team comes up with an other useful posting on how to submit your site for reinclusion in care you fear your site banned or penalized by Google. Google has recently been imposing lots of penalties to a site though they are not totally visible to users. If you suspect your site is in someway penalized read this post on how to remove the penalty.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html

Yahoo Search Index and ALgorithm Update July 2008

Yahoo Recently updated their Search index. As per their official announcement changes were made to the ranking, indexing and crawling issues. I have seen recent surge in Yahoo’s crawling capabilities. Their Crawler Yahoo Slurp has been hitting hard on our sites and our client sites. Infact on some sites Yahoo has more indexed pages than Google. Also traffic from Yahoo has increased in double the numbers i am sure this is due to the change in their ranking algorithm. Lots of our inner pages rank in Yahoo now which looks like a very good indication of top rankings for many inner pages.

I hope yahoo doesn’t mess with the current algorithm since it looks very much rewarding.

Official News here ysearchblog.com/archives/000596.html

Search Engine Genie Solves your SEO problems

This post is a bit of a Marketing hype. We at Search Engine Genie had been helping Webmasters and Site Owners solve lot of problems with their site. Most of them come to us asking us to fix a flash or dynamic site in SEO point of view, with Search engine penalties etc. We do our best and guide them or work on their site to get it out of any potential Search Engine Problems. If you are looking for solutions to your Search related problems contact us by sending an email to our support team.

Google comes closer to ethical SEOs and SEO companies

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can’t and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Adobe provides technology to Google and yahoo to crawl flash

Adobe in their recent press release said they have given Google and Yahoo their technology to access and crawl RIAs and flash files. Till now search engines had lot of restrictions crawling flash content but now we can see a lot of improvement and lot better crawling by Search Engines.

“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently un discoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

Read press release here

Google uses Search Logs effectively to combar Webspam

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

“Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. Really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don’t like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here

Use Custom Search And Adsense For Search Live better – Google Says

Here in Google we are passionate about Search we are passionate about users and passionate about what they are looking for. obviously Google.com. As a search user you love the Google’s powerful search platform but what about putting a custom Google search engine on your site and now our custom search offers more custom options than never before not only have you control over the look and feel of your search result you now have full control of what’s being searched. Also with relevant search results Google will deliver relevant search results on what you are looking for where you can earn revenue as well as have a positive search experience on your own site. To tell you about some of our new features, i would like you to introduce to matt one of our search engineers who has been actively working on Adsense for Search.

Matt: With the new custom search engine you can customize Adsense for Search used just for your site. A collection of sites you specify say all travel blogs or the entire web we are also working on improving the color of site search so that you can
display a better format which will be good looking for your site.

That’s great matt tell us about getting relevant Ads and results on your site. Ofcourse with the new keyword feature you can continue search engine to your sites topic you have an other website say that is looking for Yoga class. So when you search matt in search box instead of getting results for Yoga maps you will also get results for commercial Mats and forum mats. I am not sure you have the yellow color for the floor mat.

So you define your search engine for keyword such as Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. So next time when you search for results for mat you will get results related to Yoga. That’s perfect

Ofcourse users will get quality and relevancy of Google search results. More customization means more control to you and better experience for your users. And its quick and easy to setup just click on the setup tab and under adsense account click Adsense for Search and if you don’t have an account today sign-up under www.google.com/adsense or www.Google.com/afs

Vijay