Double Your Trouble: Google Highlights Duplication Issues
Maile Ohye posted a great piece on Google Webmaster Central on the effects of duplicate content as caused by common URL parameters. There is great information in that post, not least of which it validates exactly what a few of us have stated for a while: duplication should be addressed because it can water down your PageRank.
Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Google’s workings that are interesting, including: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/12/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Dynamic Sites, Google, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, URLs Canonicalization, duplicate-content, duplication, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Google Dance
Here are some of my pix from the Google Dance last week.
Google Dance 2007 logo & party invite
Google Dance, if you don’t know, is humorously named after “Googledance” a colloquialistic term used by webmasters to describe how the Google search results used to sort of “dance around” for a few days during major PageRank or indexing updates. Google re-co-opted the term, if that’s the right word, and use “Google Dance” to refer to the annual party they throw for search engine marketing experts attending the Search Engine Strategies (“SES”) Conference every year.
Click through to see more pics from Google Dance as well as some from the SES Conference. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/27/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Google Google, Google-Dance, Googledance, SES-Conference
Google Phone – ‘Gphone’ launch rumors
News is abuzz with the report that Google could launch the Gphone within a fortnight. As you may recall, I’d earlier resurrected the rumors of Google working on the “Gbrowser” – their own browser software when I learned they’d recently hired on browser security expert Michal Zalewski. I then reported a confirmation of sorts via a Wall Street Journal report, since Google is apparently working on a mobile phone browser in their Boston offices to go along with a new mobile phone they’re wanting developed.
I have a bit of insider information on this subject that might prove interesting.
Two days ago, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, Marissa Mayer commented on the iPhone, highlighting how well Google applications worked on it, and admiring the rich user-interface features: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/24/2007
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Filed under: Google, Mobile Search Gbrowser, Google, Google-Phone, Gphone, iPhone
Marissa Mayer demos the iPhone at SES San Jose
At this morning’s keynote conversation between Marissa Mayer (Google’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience) and conference co-chair Danny Sullivan, when asked some questions about Google’s interests in mobile search and wireless applications, Marissa whipped out her iPhone and showed some features and user-interface aspects that she particularly admired by pulling up Google Maps and Google Voice Local Search service on the phone:
As we recently highlighted Google’s mobile phone development project, they apparently have quite a bit of interest in the mobile space. Obviously, they consider the iPhone to have very good user-interface design, since this very nearly amounted to a product endorsement. From watching this, I’d predict that Google is likely to be in talks with Apple to see if they couldn’t partner with them in some major way in order to get prominent placement through the iPhone platform, or perhaps even to persuade Apple to develop the hardware for the Google phone on their behalf.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/22/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps, Mobile Search, News danny-sullivan, Google, Marissa-Mayer, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, SES-Conference
SES Session on Universal & Blended Vertical Search
I’m busy attending this year’s Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in San Jose, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to pause for half a minute in the flurry of sessions and networking to mention a couple of interesting things I heard from Google in yesterday’s session on Universal and Blended Vertical Search.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/21/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Searching David-Bailey, Google, Google-Universal-Search, search-engine-strategies, SES-Conference, Universal-Search, Vertical-Search
Google Browser Development Confirmed
At the end of July, I wrote that it looked like the Google Browser might actually be in the works after all, based upon their recent hire of a browser security expert. I now see this in this Wall Street Journal article from August 2nd about Google’s push into creating their own wireless phone that they are indeed working on a browser — built specifically for these proposed cellphones:
“Now it is drafting specifications for phones that can display all of Google’s mobile applications at their best, and it is developing new software to run on them. The company is conducting much of the development work at a facility in Boston, and is working on a sophisticated new Web browser for cellphones, people familiar with the plans say.”
Could this be what they’ll have that browser hacker working upon?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/16/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Mobile Search, News Geolocation, Google, Google-Browser, GPS, Mobile Search
Google News comments likely to be panned by major corporations
Google today introduced a new experimental feature in their News – they’ve added story participant comments into their listings of stories.
I think it’s a cool idea, since it invites more community participation in story threads – sort of an evolutionary step on the old threaded format of the old Usenet layout paradigm. If you’ve ever had a story written about you in news media, and were disappointed to see that the reporter made a mistake or neglected to mention something that you felt was important, this would be a convenient route to mitigating it.
But, from what I’ve seen commonly happening in the contemporary business community, I’d bet that most of the major, publicly-traded companies will not engage in commenting on stories about themselves. Read on and I’ll describe… (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/08/2007
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Filed under: Google, News blogging, Google-News, user-generated-content
Target Universal Search via Image SEO – SES San Jose 2007
I’ll be speaking at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose later this month, on the “Images & Search Engines” panel on the second day. The topic of my presentation will be on using Image Sharing Sites for SEO, and I focus particularly upon optimizing through Flickr. I’ll again be speaking with Liana Evans, and Shari Thurow, and we’ll be joined this time with Cris Pierry who is Director of Web & Multi-Media Search at Yahoo!, as well as James Jeude who is Senior Product Manager at Ask.com.
If you’ve missed this session previously, I’d encourage you to consider attending it. The advent of Universal Search at Google has resulted in the integration of top results from other areas of Google’s various vertical searches, smashing together their previous “siloed” sections. Clearly, top placement in each of those silos can now improve your chances of having content appear on the first page of the core web search results, so tips on top placement in Image Search may now be a vital strategy for you as you work upon improving and maintaining rankings on various keyword terms.
I’ve previously written and spoken on optimizing for Image Search, and using images for SEO purposes, and I recently wrote some tips on using images for local search optimization – another of the top three most-popular vertical searches.
Even if you’re working on a site that you don’t feel really lends itself to an image optimization strategy, I’d challenge you to rethink that! Even if you’re in a particularly “dry” industry, you likely could take photos of your products or your employees performing your services, and you could be using those photos for the purposes of SEO. How about even photographing portions of your fabrication process? Not only could those pix get you placement in Image Search as well as with the images component of Universal Search, uploading those pix into some of the more popular image sharing sites out there could result in improving your inbound links, helping to build your overall PageRank. Industries which don’t immediately seem compelling subjects for images may enjoy even greater potential in this area, because the competition might never clue into the advantages of integrating images into the site and into an overall search marketing strategy.
Also at SES San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, one of the core inventors of their Universal Search design, will be participating in the keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan on Day 3 of the conference – a session I’d highly recommend as “not-to-be-missed”!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/06/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Google, Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Image-Sharing-Sites, Images-&-Search, Marissa-Mayer, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, SES-San-Jose, Universal-Search
Google license plate covers
I saw that the Searcharazzi report at Search Engine Land mentioned this guy who got “Google” custom license plates, so I thought I’d show the Google license plate covers I’ve seen driving around in my area here in Texas:
I took these pix just this morning.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/03/2007
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Filed under: Google Custom-License-Plate-Covers, Feeling-Lucky, Google, License-Plates
Now MS Live Search & Yahoo! also treat Underscores as word delimiters
So, I earlier highlighted how Stephan reported on Matt Cutts revealing that Google treats underscores as white-space characters. Now Barry Schwartz has done a fantastic follow-up by asking each of the search engines if they also treated underscores just like dashes and other white space characters, and they’ve verified that they’re also handling them similarly. This is another incremental paradigm shift in search engine optimization!
I’ve previously opined that classic SEO may become extinct in favor of Usability, and announcements like this fluid handling of underscores would tend to support that premise. Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search have been actively trying to reduce barriers to indexation and ranking abilities by changes like this plus improved handling of redirection, and myriad other changes which both obviate the need for technical optimizers and reduce the ability to artificially influence rankings through technical improvements.
I continue to think that the need for SEOs may decrease until they’re perhaps no longer necessary, so natural search marketing shops will likely evolve into site-building/design studios, copy writing teams, and usability research firms. The real question would be: how soon will it happen?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/02/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Link Building, MSN Search, URLs, Yahoo
