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Different Types of Searches, Are You Visible?

On March 17, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

We are all sort of accustomed to seek out rankings for organic search only but there are actually many different areas of search other than just organic that is equally important for online business to be visible in.
Below are a few of the more important ones all websites should keep an eye on:

• [...]

We are all sort of accustomed to seek out rankings for organic search only but there are actually many different areas of search other than just organic that is equally important for online business to be visible in.

Below are a few of the more important ones all websites should keep an eye on:

• Image Search – Many search online everyday through image searches to find what they need. If you have a website or blog that uses a great deal of images it is important to optimize those images so that can rank in image search as well. Make the URL of the image friendly along with your image alt tag. Over time you will notice in your analytics information how many people will make it to your website just from using the image search feature.

• Video Search – This is an area that has seen explosive growth over the last few years and will most likely continue to see even more as time goes on. Take the time and make an effort to put out some sort of company video for your business. Prospects will enjoy seeing the video appear in search results. There are ways to get this done on a budget.

• Social Search – You know social search? The thing that everyone is buzzing about now? Well search engines are starting to really index online conversations so it is time to take your online conversation to the next step. Get your audience bumping into your conversations online.

• Real Time Search – Real time search is happening right now! The search engines are getting super fast so they index material very quickly. Are you adding useful material everyday for the search engines to gobble up?

These are just some of the more important areas of search to be visible in. The search engines are starting to evolve and offer much more to the end user so it is important for your brand and your business to be visible in all the different areas of search not just the organic. A few years from now we will most likely see this list grow even more so take advantage of it while it is just beginning otherwise you could find yourself spending a great deal of time and resource to make up for lost time down the road.

Google Reader Tracks Changes To All Web Pages: Tips on How to Block It

On January 27, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

I live off RSS, live off of it. You don’t have an RSS feed, I don’t keep track of you. That is until Google Reader announced that they now can track changes to any web page out there (assuming they do not specifically block Google).

If the web page does not have an RSS feed, don’t worry. Take the URL, paste it into the subscription box at Google Reader and Google will create a custom feed out of the URL. It will then check the page for changes. How often will it check? Google doesn’t say, I assume it has to do with how often the page is crawled.

How is this useful?

Track product pricing changes on web sites
Track competitors web sites
Track terms of service or guideline changes
Track news feeds without them having a feed
Track anything!

There are other services that offer this type of service with even more features. However, it is nice to have them built into Google Reader.

A WebmasterWorld thread has feedback from Webmasters. In short, they do not like the opt out options. Either you block Googlebot completely from pages you do not want to be tracked, or you add a noarchive tag to the pages you do not want tracked. Noarchive will also remove the cache link in the Google search results. There is no specific tag to block only Google Reader from tracking changes to your pages – maybe there should be?

If you do not want to do any of these things and still do want to block Google Reader. Then set up an RSS feed and give that feed less content then you want. Google Reader should not override the auto-discover RSS feed and thus, it can stop people from tracking your pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I live off RSS, live off of it. You don’t have an RSS feed, I don’t keep track of you. That is until Google Reader announced that they now can track changes to any web page out there (assuming they do not specifically block Google).

If the web page does not have an RSS feed, don’t worry. Take the URL, paste it into the subscription box at Google Reader and Google will create a custom feed out of the URL. It will then check the page for changes. How often will it check? Google doesn’t say, I assume it has to do with how often the page is crawled.

How is this useful?

Track product pricing changes on web sites
Track competitors web sites
Track terms of service or guideline changes
Track news feeds without them having a feed
Track anything!

There are other services that offer this type of service with even more features. However, it is nice to have them built into Google Reader.

A WebmasterWorld thread has feedback from Webmasters. In short, they do not like the opt out options. Either you block Googlebot completely from pages you do not want to be tracked, or you add a noarchive tag to the pages you do not want tracked. Noarchive will also remove the cache link in the Google search results. There is no specific tag to block only Google Reader from tracking changes to your pages – maybe there should be?

If you do not want to do any of these things and still do want to block Google Reader. Then set up an RSS feed and give that feed less content then you want. Google Reader should not override the auto-discover RSS feed and thus, it can stop people from tracking your pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Custom Search Engine Management Bug

On January 6, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

For those of you who use the Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE), you may have run into an issue with modifying the settings for your custom search engine this morning and yesterday.

A Google Custom Search Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug that prevented users to maintain their Google CSE. There are several reports of the issue in that forum, but here is one report:

Today (january 06, 2010) when i access the URL http://www.google.com/cse/manage/all?auth=[BIG AUTH KEY HERE] to manage my custom search engine, i get ‘Server Error’:

We’re sorry.

The service you requested is currently unavailable.

Also the XML with the custom search results doesn’t work. I have a Business Acoount attached to my search engine. Thanks!

Google employee, Prathap Reddy, confirmed the issue and wrote:

We are aware of the issue; We are working very hard to fix this as early as possible.

This is an intermediate issue and will be addressed as early as possible.

I personally tried it myself and it seems to work fine. I guess at the time I tried it, it was working.

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help.

For those of you who use the Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE), you may have run into an issue with modifying the settings for your custom search engine this morning and yesterday.

A Google Custom Search Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug that prevented users to maintain their Google CSE. There are several reports of the issue in that forum, but here is one report:

Today (january 06, 2010) when i access the URL http://www.google.com/cse/manage/all?auth=[BIG AUTH KEY HERE] to manage my custom search engine, i get ‘Server Error’:

We’re sorry.

The service you requested is currently unavailable.

Also the XML with the custom search results doesn’t work. I have a Business Acoount attached to my search engine. Thanks!

Google employee, Prathap Reddy, confirmed the issue and wrote:

We are aware of the issue; We are working very hard to fix this as early as possible.

This is an intermediate issue and will be addressed as early as possible.

I personally tried it myself and it seems to work fine. I guess at the time I tried it, it was working.

Forum discussion at Google Custom Search Help.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – More Than Just A Broken Links Finder

On November 30, 2009, In SEO, by Tom_C

Posted by Tom_C

There are literally a bazillion SEO tools on the internet (literally!), this post discusses just one such tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Many people in the SEO industry are already aware of this tool but many people I’ve spoken to only treat the tool as a broken link finder. It’s so much more than that.

This post is aimed at those who haven’t heard of it before and those who do use it regularly – there are lots of nifty features that solve all kinds of SEO-problems and hopefully beginners and advanced alike will learn something from this post.

What is Xenu?

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a FREE download (everyone loves free) that runs on all versions of Windows (but not quite on Macs unfortunately). It’s a lightweight download and I’ve never had issues with it crashing or hanging. In a nutshell it’s a site crawler and once you point it at a URL it will crawl around the site and spit out a report at the end. It’s main focus and branding is all about finding broken links on your site (so where you link internally to a 404 error) but I’ve found that I use it to solve a whole host of different SEO-related issues which I will explain below.

Problem – How do I find broken links on my site?

This is the most basic use of Xenu in my opinion, but also the most common use. Simply point the program at the homepage of your site, check ‘skip external’ to avoid it crawling the entire web, and set it going!

Click here to view a sample report provided by Xenu for the Distilled site (note that this is a sample report only, not run across the whole site).

You can see that there is a handy section which reports any broken links that it finds, though in this case I’ve chosen a rather poor example since there are no broken links on the homepage of Distilled

Problem – How do I get a crawl of my site into microsoft Excel?

The answer to this one, as you may have guessed is also Xenu! Simply choose the following menu option once the report is run:

Click here for a google docs of a sample report from the Distilled site. As you can see you get some really useful data such as:

The status code of all pages crawled
The type of page crawled
The title tag of each page crawled

Problem – How do I check the length of my title tags across my whole site?

Looking at the above data sheet – simply filter for html pages and then check the length of the column titled "Title" – this will give you the length of the title tag. Filter for any above 65 and bingo – there’s your to-do list!

Problem – How do I analyse my site’s information architecture?

Yep, you guessed it – Xenu will do this too. This one requires a little more explaining however. Firstly, you see that in the spreadsheet above there is a column for "level" – what this column tells you is the number of links away from the initial link that you entered the crawled page is. So in the example sheet all the pages have a level of 1 since I restricted the crawl to just those pages 1 link away from the homepage.

This is really useful information as it tells you how many clicks it takes to get to a given page on your site from the homepage. Useful information! Especially in a large site where you have multiple levels of information architecture and several different types of navigation. Below is a quick screenshot of a report run 3 levels deep on the site. I’ve pivot-tabled the data (zomg – excel ftw) and selected the following options:

Of course, the beauty of pivot tables is that I can double click each of those rows and see which pages are contained within each level. This is of course, a pretty basic application of the data. But you see that once you start getting more data you can do more powerful things.

The second application of the very same data is the useful links in/links out column which looks like this:

There are other ways of getting this data for your site, Linkscape does it for example, but the good thing about Xenu is that you get the data structured in Excel and you have all the other page metrics alongside it. There’s plenty more you can do with this but at a very crude level you can use it to identify pages with more than 100 links on the page across your site!

Taking this data to the next level – here’s a glimpse at what’s possible, an analysis of type of page vs number of internal links shows you that for this site (not the distilled site) the money pages are getting very few internal links compared to top level pages and something is broken in the information architecture:

Problem – How do I find any 302 redirects on my site?

Xenu to the rescue! In order to catch redirects on your site you need to modify one of the settings on the crawl preferences to "treat redirects as errors":

Then, when you run the report and export to excel redirects will no longer get the status code 200 but will get the true status code, be it 301 or 302! Perfect.

Problem – How do I check the indexing of a test version of my site?

Xenu of course! If your test version lies at a public URL such as testsite.distilled.co.uk then you can just point Xenu at that URL. However, if that’s not an option then you can even run Xenu off a local HTML file which is pretty nifty:

Problem – How do I generate an XML sitemap for my site?

Although there are many many ways of generating an XML sitemap for your site, Xenu does this in a quite nice (if not particularly customisable) way. This is perfect for small site owners with limited technical knowledge I think:

Problem – How do I find images missing alt text?

If only Xenu would do such a thing…. Wait, it does! Simply filter your excel download to image files, then the "Title" column is the alt text of the image:

Well that’s just a few of the many many applications of the Xenu tool – hopefully it’s inspired you to go out and give it a try – I know I use it a lot for all kinds of things. I mean, once you get your data into Excel the world is literally your oyster. Mmmmmm data oysters.

But wait! That’s not all – I reached out to Rich Baxter as I know he’s a very knowledgeable and smart SEO and he uses Xenu a lot. I asked him if he had any killer tips and here’s his killer tip. Thanks a lot Rich for getting me this at short notice:

Crawling web directories, looking for errors (By Rich Baxter)

Xenu’s not just a great tool to look inside your own site, it’s also pretty powerful for crawling external resources like directories, particularly if you’re looking for a domain to buy.

Try crawling dmoz.org, being sure to restrict Xenu’s access to “editors.dmoz.org”, but allow the crawler to “check external links”.

Quite quickly you’ll start finding “not found” URL errors from directory entries that might have been forgotten, on domains that may not yet have expired. Just sort by “status” in the crawl results table in Xenu. Here’s one I found earlier. I’m pretty sure that with the right offer via SEDO, the owner of fridgemagnet.org.uk (with its 634 sub domain links) might be interested in selling before the domain expires.

I’ve always found the “Copy URL”, Google cache and Wayback Machine links invaluable on a right mouse click on the results you’re interested in:

As a side note: If you are crawling external resources, try to be a good citizen and crawl slowly. Set your maximum threads to a very low level, so as not to get your IP banned by your target host.

Thanks Rich! Great tips. Let’s get link sleuthing! If anyone has any other creative/useful uses for Xenu please share them in the comments.

In other news, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! (If Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010). SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal

You’ve also still got 7 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Tom_C

There are literally a bazillion SEO tools on the internet (literally!), this post discusses just one such tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Many people in the SEO industry are already aware of this tool but many people I’ve spoken to only treat the tool as a broken link finder. It’s so much more than that.

This post is aimed at those who haven’t heard of it before and those who do use it regularly – there are lots of nifty features that solve all kinds of SEO-problems and hopefully beginners and advanced alike will learn something from this post.

What is Xenu?

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a FREE download (everyone loves free) that runs on all versions of Windows (but not quite on Macs unfortunately). It’s a lightweight download and I’ve never had issues with it crashing or hanging. In a nutshell it’s a site crawler and once you point it at a URL it will crawl around the site and spit out a report at the end. It’s main focus and branding is all about finding broken links on your site (so where you link internally to a 404 error) but I’ve found that I use it to solve a whole host of different SEO-related issues which I will explain below.

Problem – How do I find broken links on my site?

This is the most basic use of Xenu in my opinion, but also the most common use. Simply point the program at the homepage of your site, check ‘skip external’ to avoid it crawling the entire web, and set it going!

Click here to view a sample report provided by Xenu for the Distilled site (note that this is a sample report only, not run across the whole site).

You can see that there is a handy section which reports any broken links that it finds, though in this case I’ve chosen a rather poor example since there are no broken links on the homepage of Distilled

Problem – How do I get a crawl of my site into microsoft Excel?

The answer to this one, as you may have guessed is also Xenu! Simply choose the following menu option once the report is run:

Click here for a google docs of a sample report from the Distilled site. As you can see you get some really useful data such as:

The status code of all pages crawled
The type of page crawled
The title tag of each page crawled

Problem – How do I check the length of my title tags across my whole site?

Looking at the above data sheet – simply filter for html pages and then check the length of the column titled "Title" – this will give you the length of the title tag. Filter for any above 65 and bingo – there’s your to-do list!

Problem – How do I analyse my site’s information architecture?

Yep, you guessed it – Xenu will do this too. This one requires a little more explaining however. Firstly, you see that in the spreadsheet above there is a column for "level" – what this column tells you is the number of links away from the initial link that you entered the crawled page is. So in the example sheet all the pages have a level of 1 since I restricted the crawl to just those pages 1 link away from the homepage.

This is really useful information as it tells you how many clicks it takes to get to a given page on your site from the homepage. Useful information! Especially in a large site where you have multiple levels of information architecture and several different types of navigation. Below is a quick screenshot of a report run 3 levels deep on the site. I’ve pivot-tabled the data (zomg – excel ftw) and selected the following options:

Of course, the beauty of pivot tables is that I can double click each of those rows and see which pages are contained within each level. This is of course, a pretty basic application of the data. But you see that once you start getting more data you can do more powerful things.

The second application of the very same data is the useful links in/links out column which looks like this:

There are other ways of getting this data for your site, Linkscape does it for example, but the good thing about Xenu is that you get the data structured in Excel and you have all the other page metrics alongside it. There’s plenty more you can do with this but at a very crude level you can use it to identify pages with more than 100 links on the page across your site!

Taking this data to the next level – here’s a glimpse at what’s possible, an analysis of type of page vs number of internal links shows you that for this site (not the distilled site) the money pages are getting very few internal links compared to top level pages and something is broken in the information architecture:

Problem – How do I find any 302 redirects on my site?

Xenu to the rescue! In order to catch redirects on your site you need to modify one of the settings on the crawl preferences to "treat redirects as errors":

Then, when you run the report and export to excel redirects will no longer get the status code 200 but will get the true status code, be it 301 or 302! Perfect.

Problem – How do I check the indexing of a test version of my site?

Xenu of course! If your test version lies at a public URL such as testsite.distilled.co.uk then you can just point Xenu at that URL. However, if that’s not an option then you can even run Xenu off a local HTML file which is pretty nifty:

Problem – How do I generate an XML sitemap for my site?

Although there are many many ways of generating an XML sitemap for your site, Xenu does this in a quite nice (if not particularly customisable) way. This is perfect for small site owners with limited technical knowledge I think:

Problem – How do I find images missing alt text?

If only Xenu would do such a thing…. Wait, it does! Simply filter your excel download to image files, then the "Title" column is the alt text of the image:

Well that’s just a few of the many many applications of the Xenu tool – hopefully it’s inspired you to go out and give it a try – I know I use it a lot for all kinds of things. I mean, once you get your data into Excel the world is literally your oyster. Mmmmmm data oysters.

But wait! That’s not all – I reached out to Rich Baxter as I know he’s a very knowledgeable and smart SEO and he uses Xenu a lot. I asked him if he had any killer tips and here’s his killer tip. Thanks a lot Rich for getting me this at short notice:

Crawling web directories, looking for errors (By Rich Baxter)

Xenu’s not just a great tool to look inside your own site, it’s also pretty powerful for crawling external resources like directories, particularly if you’re looking for a domain to buy.

Try crawling dmoz.org, being sure to restrict Xenu’s access to “editors.dmoz.org”, but allow the crawler to “check external links”.

Quite quickly you’ll start finding “not found” URL errors from directory entries that might have been forgotten, on domains that may not yet have expired. Just sort by “status” in the crawl results table in Xenu. Here’s one I found earlier. I’m pretty sure that with the right offer via SEDO, the owner of fridgemagnet.org.uk (with its 634 sub domain links) might be interested in selling before the domain expires.

I’ve always found the “Copy URL”, Google cache and Wayback Machine links invaluable on a right mouse click on the results you’re interested in:

As a side note: If you are crawling external resources, try to be a good citizen and crawl slowly. Set your maximum threads to a very low level, so as not to get your IP banned by your target host.

Thanks Rich! Great tips. Let’s get link sleuthing! If anyone has any other creative/useful uses for Xenu please share them in the comments.

In other news, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! (If Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010). SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal

You’ve also still got 7 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Google Now Enforcing 35 Character Display URL Policy

On November 20, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

First spotted by Kim at AdWords Help Experts Blog, a Google AdWords Help thread has reports that Google is now enforcing the 35 character display URL limit set on AdWords ads.

One advertiser asked for an exception, which Google did allow advertisers to do in the past, and received a reply that read:

Initially for URLs exceeding character limit we used to give exception on a case-by-case basis. However, please note we’ve revised our guideline on short display URL exception and sorry to inform you that we no longer provide exceptions to the display URL policy for domains that exceed the character space, which is limited to 35 characters for text ads and 20 characters for mobile ads.

There also use to be a way to use dynamic keyword inserting techniques to trick Google into giving you a longer title, but that no longer seems to work for the keywords I have tested. Yes, display URL and ad title are different, I just noticed this as well, when looking back at the history on this topic.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

First spotted by Kim at AdWords Help Experts Blog, a Google AdWords Help thread has reports that Google is now enforcing the 35 character display URL limit set on AdWords ads.

One advertiser asked for an exception, which Google did allow advertisers to do in the past, and received a reply that read:

Initially for URLs exceeding character limit we used to give exception on a case-by-case basis. However, please note we’ve revised our guideline on short display URL exception and sorry to inform you that we no longer provide exceptions to the display URL policy for domains that exceed the character space, which is limited to 35 characters for text ads and 20 characters for mobile ads.

There also use to be a way to use dynamic keyword inserting techniques to trick Google into giving you a longer title, but that no longer seems to work for the keywords I have tested. Yes, display URL and ad title are different, I just noticed this as well, when looking back at the history on this topic.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Google’s Safe Browsing Site: sb.google.com

On November 13, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread had one webmaster who received an email from Google warning of a phishing attempt on this person’s site. The webmaster asked if it was real. The email said he/she should “submit a safebrowsing report at http://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/.”

JohnMu from Google replied that if you want to make sure the email is real, that you should login to the Google Webmaster Tools and see if there is a message there about it. If yes, then it is legit, if not – not.

In addition, John explained that “the sb.google.com URL you mentioned is the correct one to submit feedback on the safebrowsing status of the flagged URL on your site.”

Give sb.google.com a try.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread had one webmaster who received an email from Google warning of a phishing attempt on this person’s site. The webmaster asked if it was real. The email said he/she should “submit a safebrowsing report at http://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/.”

JohnMu from Google replied that if you want to make sure the email is real, that you should login to the Google Webmaster Tools and see if there is a message there about it. If yes, then it is legit, if not – not.

In addition, John explained that “the sb.google.com URL you mentioned is the correct one to submit feedback on the safebrowsing status of the flagged URL on your site.”

Give sb.google.com a try.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Possible Google Removal Tool Bug: “You have already made this removal request”

On November 11, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion where one webmaster is having the hardest time removing a URL from the Google index. He/she used the Google Remove URL Tool only to find out that even though Google reported back the URL was removed, two weeks later, it is still there.

Susan from the Google Webmaster Central team told the individual to try again and select “outdated or dead link” option in the form. This time, the user received an error that read:

You have already made this removal request.

Susan confirmed that this was some sort of bug. Susan said:

Congratulations, you may have found a bug.

Our team is looking into it. I can submit that URL for removal for you in the meantime, since it 404s.

I believe in this case, the page has finally been removed due to Susan taking manual action. I don’t think this is a wide spread bug, but just a small bug.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion where one webmaster is having the hardest time removing a URL from the Google index. He/she used the Google Remove URL Tool only to find out that even though Google reported back the URL was removed, two weeks later, it is still there.

Susan from the Google Webmaster Central team told the individual to try again and select “outdated or dead link” option in the form. This time, the user received an error that read:

You have already made this removal request.

Susan confirmed that this was some sort of bug. Susan said:

Congratulations, you may have found a bug.

Our team is looking into it. I can submit that URL for removal for you in the meantime, since it 404s.

I believe in this case, the page has finally been removed due to Susan taking manual action. I don’t think this is a wide spread bug, but just a small bug.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

In the SEO World 2009 is Almost 1999!

On November 11, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

There’s no doubt that the practice and industry of search engine optimization has undergone some changes in the last ten years. What was important in 1999 is not necessarily still important today. Though, in many respects, the basics that are important for on site optimization, still remain just as important today.

In 1999, meta tags were [...]

There’s no doubt that the practice and industry of search engine optimization has undergone some changes in the last ten years. What was important in 1999 is not necessarily still important today. Though, in many respects, the basics that are important for on site optimization, still remain just as important today.

In 1999, meta tags were extremely important. Today, they’re only moderately so. Keywords in your URL fluctuate from a point of major importance to minor importance from year to year. But keyword positioning in the title of your page has grown in importance from moderately high to very high. With link building, link exchanges and Google page rank chasing used to be all of the craze in the SEO world, but it is not effective these days. Still, can we say definitively that there is one aspect of on site optimziation that is of supreme importance in SEO and should not be left out? I think so!

Based on my years of SEO and internet marketing experience (and of course, many other SEO folks in the industry would agree!) The most important aspect of on site optimization is the same as it was today as it was in 1999…drum roll, please! CONTENT! You guessed it, good quality, goal and user focused content is the king of all SEO efforts. If you content is not well written with your goals in mind, without call to actions, without a clear direction any visitors that you happen to achieve through your SEO and search engine marketing efforts are wasted. The bottom line is write your content for humans, your visitors coming to your website and optimize it naturally and you should be in good shape!

Google Caffeine Index Goes Live Right Before Holiday Shopping Season

On November 10, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Google has actually released a major Google index update before the holiday season. Yes, this is the Google Caffeine index, which has been in a Sandbox (testing environment) since August, is now being rolled out. If you visit the Caffeine URL at www2.sandbox.google.com, you are taken to a thank you page that reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Yes, this is being rolled out slowly, data center by data center. Some of you may already see it, while most of you probably don’t yet. The big question is when will this be fully rolled out? Some have been saying they have been seeing Caffeine in the live index already. I am not too sure.

Why in the world would Google do this right before the holiday season? Did Google forget how the Florida update had hurt online retailers right in the most important time of their shopping season? It was devastating to many small webmasters. I assume Google is confident this will have a small impact on businesses and they are confident it won’t shuffle things up too much.

Update: Matt Cutts of Google just promised it won’t be rolled out until after the holiday season.

I believe Google’s goal with Sandbox was more about infrastructure over the quality of those results. Yes, Google wanted to index deeper and faster and smarter, but the ranking of those results, I believe, they wanted to keep stable from the current index. I hope that makes sense to the readers here, i.e. indexing is different than ranking. But indexing does have an impact on what Google ranks, obviously.

The Google Caffeine Sandbox was shut down about a few hours ago. There is early discussion beginning at the various forums. No official blog post from Google, Matt Cutts or anything, except for that Thank You page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Google has actually released a major Google index update before the holiday season. Yes, this is the Google Caffeine index, which has been in a Sandbox (testing environment) since August, is now being rolled out. If you visit the Caffeine URL at www2.sandbox.google.com, you are taken to a thank you page that reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Yes, this is being rolled out slowly, data center by data center. Some of you may already see it, while most of you probably don’t yet. The big question is when will this be fully rolled out? Some have been saying they have been seeing Caffeine in the live index already. I am not too sure.

Why in the world would Google do this right before the holiday season? Did Google forget how the Florida update had hurt online retailers right in the most important time of their shopping season? It was devastating to many small webmasters. I assume Google is confident this will have a small impact on businesses and they are confident it won’t shuffle things up too much.

Update: Matt Cutts of Google just promised it won’t be rolled out until after the holiday season.

I believe Google’s goal with Sandbox was more about infrastructure over the quality of those results. Yes, Google wanted to index deeper and faster and smarter, but the ranking of those results, I believe, they wanted to keep stable from the current index. I hope that makes sense to the readers here, i.e. indexing is different than ranking. But indexing does have an impact on what Google ranks, obviously.

The Google Caffeine Sandbox was shut down about a few hours ago. There is early discussion beginning at the various forums. No official blog post from Google, Matt Cutts or anything, except for that Thank You page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Does Google Handle Canonical Issues Fully?

On November 10, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Tedster, WebmasterWorld’s Administrator, posted an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld asking how do you think Google handles the canonical issues they find on their own? By that he means, if webmasters don’t use a 301 redirect or use Google’s canonical header tag to instruct Google on how to handle that URL, how would Google handle it?

Would they cosmetically clean up the search results so that there does not appear to be any canonical (duplicate) URLs in the results? Or do they actually decide to implement a 301 on your behalf and pass all the ‘link juice’ from one canonical URL to the parent URL?

First, take my poll and then I will give you my thoughts on it:

How Does Google Handle Canonical URLs on Their Own?(polls)

I really think for the most part, where Google is not confident on which should be the main URL, Google will only apply this cosmetically to the search results. I remember when the new canonical tag came out and Google warned to use this carefully, because it is as powerful as a 301, but without actually being physically redirected. For Google to apply their own 301s, hidden be that, is extremely dangerous for both Google and the webmaster. I would assume, in certain cases, Google does do this, but I am not sure if they do this in most cases. Of course, this is just my thoughts – I have no hard evidence, since I never really tested it myself.

I would assume Google would want to be right 100% of the time on this. I would think that would be a goal. And when they are 100% or even 99% right, implementing this would make sense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Tedster, WebmasterWorld’s Administrator, posted an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld asking how do you think Google handles the canonical issues they find on their own? By that he means, if webmasters don’t use a 301 redirect or use Google’s canonical header tag to instruct Google on how to handle that URL, how would Google handle it?

Would they cosmetically clean up the search results so that there does not appear to be any canonical (duplicate) URLs in the results? Or do they actually decide to implement a 301 on your behalf and pass all the ‘link juice’ from one canonical URL to the parent URL?

First, take my poll and then I will give you my thoughts on it:

I really think for the most part, where Google is not confident on which should be the main URL, Google will only apply this cosmetically to the search results. I remember when the new canonical tag came out and Google warned to use this carefully, because it is as powerful as a 301, but without actually being physically redirected. For Google to apply their own 301s, hidden be that, is extremely dangerous for both Google and the webmaster. I would assume, in certain cases, Google does do this, but I am not sure if they do this in most cases. Of course, this is just my thoughts – I have no hard evidence, since I never really tested it myself.

I would assume Google would want to be right 100% of the time on this. I would think that would be a goal. And when they are 100% or even 99% right, implementing this would make sense.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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