SEO Blog

Yahoo! Opens Up

Diana — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:11:02 +0000

After all the recent talk of people trying to buy Yahoo! I would have placed bets that it was on it’s way out, but from the smouldering embers rises the announcement that they’re going to open up their search results. This means that all website owners will be able to collaborate on the search results by feeding extra information about their site directly to Yahoo! Yahoo’s intent is to improve the search experience by making the results more useful, richer. So the search results will move away from the traditional title and description to an extended listing that will include ratings, reviews, maps, as well as plenty of other useful information that the user would normally have dig deep into a site to find. I would hazard a guess that this will be an extension of their current SSP (Search Submit Pro) monetised by way of the pay per click (PPC) model which of course means that strictly speaking none of their results will actually be organic. It’s also a move closer to the semantic web which in my opinion is brilliant. It will certainly be very interesting to watch how this develops over the coming months…

How to get a number one ranking in Google in 1 hour

John — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:31:57 +0000

I love Yahoo Answers. Not only is it a great source of entertainment, but it can actually be really helpful if you want to know something quickly or want other people’s opinions on pretty much anything. The game element of trying to improve your level (I’m only level 2 at the moment so a long way to go before I become an Ambassador) is also fun and keeps me returning everyday.

Besides being fun, Yahoo Answers can also be a useful tool to leverage your search marketing and SEO. I have often seen questions and answers appearing in the search results but have only just realised how often Google is actually crawling and indexing content from Yahoo Answers. In fact I don’t think it stops!

I was working on something for a client this morning and wanted to quickly know whether “Buxton” is located in the East or West Midlands. So I asked the question in Yahoo Answers. I got the answer I needed in record time (and with low effort required on my part). Later on in Google, I noticed the following result:

Forget about the fact that I asked this question In the Canadian version of Answers, what’s amazing is that Google had already indexed and ranked my question and answer – just a few hours later.

So why does Google love Yahoo Answers so much?

It’s fresh – Due to it’s nature, YA is probably one of the most frequently updated websites on the net
When a site is constantly updated this encourages Google to visit more often to re-index
It’s a useful information resource that people love

This is yet more evidence that User Generated content continues to be popular on the web and it’s a great way to build a massive information rich site without actually writing anything yourself.

Google Sitemaps for Video Content

Penelope — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:27:14 +0000

Announced at the beginning of the week by Google is an option to submit a sitemap of online video content and relevant metadata to Google to make it more searchable within Google’s video index.
We think this is pretty cool.

It will allow addition of video title, description and other information. This will mean that your video search results will contain a thumbnail image within the search results, and traffic will go to your site for a full playback

With the increasing emergence of Google universal, this will be a nice way to get more rich media presence in search results, where video content has been dominated by results from YouTube, Metacafe and VideoJug.

It will be interesting to see how the Google universal algorithm works in response to this – will YouTube be favoured in the search results? What other forms of optimisation will get good visibility for video content? What other types of content will soon need to be submitted in a similar way?

Google’s Odd Mathematics

John — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:12:20 +0000

Google’s algorithm may be the most advanced searching algorithm on the planet, but it would appear that simple math skills are evading it.

Google exact match, as defined by Google themselves, is data returned from a search:“that precisely matches the keyword you have chosen — without any additional words or letters before, between, or after the keyword.” when searching Google normally, search results will return in order of relevance from pages that match the keywords you have entered or simply contain the keywords. They may not be in the same order or even together on the page. An exact match search, using “KEYWORD or “KEYWORD” will return pages, in order of relevance, which have the keywords entered in the exact order that they have been entered, with no words between them. So, when searching for ‘careers advice’ we obtain 3,820,000 results - as shown below:

When doing an exact match for ‘ “careers advice” ‘ we obtain 34,000,000 results - as shown below:

Google is telling us there are more pages that contain just the phrase ‘careers advice’, in that exact order, than there are pages which contain the two terms in any order (including that exact order).

A silver lining for northern rock?

John — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:07:50 +0000

The recent crisis at the Northern Rock bank was heavily publicised, with coverage across
a range of media. Whilst this is obviously very negative press and damaging to the
companies reputation, effects in the search engines are mixed.
Brand related searches, such as ‘northern rock’, give results of news articles from the
BBC, Guardian and other sources. These are obviously a reputation management issue for
the company, but can such negative coverage actually help?

Google’s relevancy algorithm focuses heavily on inbound links. In very simplified terms,
if a site has a lot of links pointing to its domain, then it is perceived to be an
important site. This will help the site rank better in relevant search results. The
problem with this ranking method is that the algorithm cannot distinguish between a site
linking positively and a site linking negatively. So for example, if many sites link to
site X to inform visitors that the site has malware and should not be visited, Google
will see the links and assume they are an indication that websites are recommending site
X.

So, is there a silver lining for northern Rock to take from this crisis? Google ‘quality’
link totals (obtained with the ‘link:www.domain.com’ search query) recorded at the
beginning of September was 164. This total has shot up 64% and is currently 456, which
may cause a rise in PageRank and will undoubtedly give northernrock.co.uk an uplift in
Google rankings. Yahoo totals have also increased, with a 68% change from 11,225 inbound
links at the beginning of September to the current total of 34,800. Again, site wide
visibility increases are likely to result in Yahoo search rankings.

ASK leads search privacy

John — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:39:59 +0000

Ask.com - the former Ask Jeeves search engine - has just released a new privacy protection tool for its users. The tool, shown below, features on the Ask.com homepage.

AskEraser, the name given to the new tool, will delete all search query data and associated cookies in the future for that user - if enabled. The Chief executive at Ask, Jim Lanzone, commented:

“For people who worry about their online privacy, AskEraser now gives them control of their search information”

It is important to note, as some critics have, that not all search query data is actually removed. Query data relating to the advertisments supplied by Google will still be passed on to Google.

Online privacy is a big issue these days, especially when AOL famously released the query data of 650,000 of its US subscribers. More recently, Facebook had to alter their new advertising system, Beacon, after 50,000 users complained. The system tracked shopping on partner sites in order to deliver targeted ads to its users. The system is now an opt-in system, rather than opt-out.

With privacy issues also rife offline (a few missing discs here and there), the subject is front of mind for consumers. As such a hot topic, it is not surprising Ask have jumped on the band wagon in yet another effort to distinguish itself from its competitors and increase its current 4.7% steak in the search engine market (Figure from Comscore)

Google and Yahoo both stand by their current privacy policies and say they have no plans to implement similar services.