When Google Changes Page Titles
As most webmasters are aware, the text put within a page’s <TITLE> tags appears in two places – at the top of the browser window when a user is viewing a page, and it appears as the link anchor text on Google’s and other search engine results pages. But there are some rare occasions when Google will display different link text on their result pages than what is used in the <TITLE> text. So, why is this happening, and could it be happening to you?
I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/12/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, Google, HTML Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO DMOZ, Google, html-title, html-title-tag, Open-Directory-Project, page-titles, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERP-display
Yahoo’s Recent Spider Improvement Beats Google’s
Yahoo!’s Search Blog announced yesterday that they were making some final changes to their spider, (named “Slurp”), standardizing their crawlers to provide a common DNS signature for identification/authorization purposes.
Previously, Slurp’s requests may have come from IP addresses associated with inktomisearch.com, and now they should all come from IPs associated with domains in this standard syntax:
[something].crawl.yahoo.net
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/06/2007
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Filed under: Google, Spiders, Yahoo bot-detection, bots, Googlebot, slurp, spidering, Spiders, user-agents
Google Map API to Now Include Ads
InfoWorld reports that at a conference yesterday, Google Maps engineer Andrew Eland announced that Google has integrated its AdSense program with Google Maps so that those using their Maps API and developer tools would be able to derive money off the clickthroughs to the map ads when displayed on their site pages.
Detail – Google Map Ads
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/01/2007
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Filed under: Advertising, Google, Local Search, Maps AdSense, Affiliate Marketing, Google, Google-Maps, Map-APIs, Mapping
New Results Filtering Parameter for Google Image Search
The Google Operating System blog reported this past weekend that Google Image Search introduced a new parameter that can allow you to pull up only images of people’s faces or only images from news sites/stories.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/29/2007
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Filed under: Google Google, image-search
Google Calendar Goes To Mobile
Google just launched their shareable Calendars via Mobile today. Here’s the entry about it at the Google Blog.
I love the concept! I’m excited to see this innovation.
Unfortunately, I have a small problemmo. My company uses Google Calendar for us to all share schedules and invite each other to meetings and such. But, when I try to login to Google Calendar sometimes with my netconcepts.com email address, Google Calendar is a bit confused and says I can either set up a custom calendar for myself, or I can click through into the company calendar.
This issue has transitioned over to the Mobile version, apparently, because when I login to the Mobile Calendar, it isn’t giving me the branching page to choose the company calendar. So, it shows no items scheduled for me. I can click through into one of my coworker’s calendars, since she apparently has shared those with others such as myself.
Hopefully, this little blip will be fixed soon. I like everything I see so far!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/25/2007
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Filed under: Google Google-Applications, Google-Calendars, Google-Mobile
Experiment with Google Voice Local Search
Google recently released their new Voice Local Search in beta, also known as “GOOG-411”, and I thought I’d kick the tires a bit. They also mentioned it on their new Google Lat Long Blog.
I used to work for a major telco (Verizon), and we had a number of researchers working on various voice recognition systems. I’ve also tinkered a bit with applications using text-to-speech voice synthesis software such as the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech software, so I’m familiar with some of the issues that are commonly associated with these types of systems.
I was curious about whether Google’s clever engineers had perhaps improved upon some of the issues involved with having software recognize spoken words, and I also wondered how the quality was of their voice-synthesis.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/23/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search Goog-411, Google, Google-Voice-Local-Search, Voice-Recognition, Voice-Synthesis
Google Confirms New Local OneBox Placement in SERPs
I earlier reported that Google SERPs were now showing the “OneBox” containing Google Maps listings embedded throughout the listings in the results pages, not just at the very top any more. Days later, Google has now confirmed this new layout on the new Google LatLong Blog:
You’ve probably heard Google’s big announcement about Universal search. As part of this, when you search for local businesses on Google.com, listings from Google Maps are now blended into the results page. These listings may appear at the top, middle, or bottom of the page based on their relevance compared to the other web results.
Previously we only showed local listings at the top of the results page, and since this was prime real estate, we would not display the listings if we were not certain that you were looking for a local business. Within the Universal search framework, we are now able to more smartly handle ambiguous queries. For example, for the query [san francisco bar] we can now satisfy users who are looking for the website of the Bar Association of San Francisco as well as those looking for a local place to get a drink.
Well, you heard it here, first! 😉
I’ll probably circle back around and comment about Google’s new “Universal Search” later on.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/20/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps Google-LatLong, Google-Maps, Local Search, Universal-Search
New Google Analytics UI – A Downgrade
Google Analytics is updating their user interface and report presentation, and just as I feared, some of it is a downgrade in usefulness. I’ve been using metrics/analytics packages for ages now. At my old company many years ago, I helped set up and use NetGenesis NetAnalysis product to generate reports from our log files. We later used SurfAid and Coremetrics and Omniture. We also built our own, in-house reporting system to supply stats that we couldn’t get via off-the-shelf packages, and I personally programmed some of those and managed other developers who worked on them as well. So, I’m pretty familiar with analytic reporting systems, and I know what’s possible in designing them. I don’t like some of Google’s changes to their service.
Google Analytics has done what I’ve seen so many other analytics companies do: they’ve dumbed down the reporting presentation capability of their service, apparently gearing it primarily toward less-technical marketers and people who run Google ads on their sites or who advertise through Google. The trend with all these analytics companies seems to be to evolve solely towards generating report charts for marketing departments, focusing mainly on conversion statistics and prettified reports that have extracted the ability to easily see quantitative amounts over timeperiods, lulling the brain with pretty colors and obsessing more over slick Ajax/browser interactions than delivering statistical content in a meaningful way.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/18/2007
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Filed under: Analytics, Google, Tools, Tracking and Reporting Analytics, Google-Analytics, Internet-Statistics, Statistics
New Layout for Google Local Search Onebox Results
Chris Sherman earlier reported that Google was to begin displaying their OneBox content for news anywhere within the search results page, not just at the top of the organic results as they have been for some time. I’ve just in the last few days run across instances where the OneBox for local keyword searches has been appearing lower down in the page. Check it out:
This was a search for “San Antonio Sea World”. Read on for another example and comments.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/14/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps Google-Maps, Local Search, SERP-Layout, User-Interface
Google Maps Now Displaying Buildings in 3D
In some major metro areas, Google Maps has quietly begun displaying 3D building wireframes, visible when you’ve zoomed into the more close-up street level views. Here’s the Empire State Building:
[Google 3D Map of Empire State Building]
The 3D building shapes are apparently adopted from Google Earth, indicating further possible convergence may be on the horizon between the related Google projects.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/09/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps 3D, 3D-Maps, Google-Maps, Local Search
