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Search Engine Positioning News

It's a Google World

Google is flexing its vast corporate muscles in new areas. One proposed development is to scan in all books in the English language and make the content available online. Can they do this ? You bet, there is no restriction on books out of copyright but people are getting a bit more concerned about all the others. You can see the attraction though. You use Google and find that the information you want is in a certain out-of-print book, so the kind people at Google will then let you put in an order for a one-off print or let you find a copy. Amazon must be concerned about this, they have had a similar scheme for some time now.

If that wasn't scary enough , another development at Google is the WebAccelerator which operates as a fast cache of web pages for the Internet. For those willing to sign up they get much improve access speed as the data comes from super-fast Google servers rather than clunky little web servers in remotest Umbekistan. But this is more scary, as Google not only can track what you look at (and therefore target adverts etc.) but they control which web sites get in the cache. If you don't obey the Google rules your web site just won't be accessible to users using the accelerator. The days of the open Internet might well be numbered.

Ad Scam and Click Fraud

There's a popular scam around that is earning people 'real' money, at least the moment. It's StudioTraffic (I won't give a link to avoid promoting it) and for an investment you get paid 1% interest on that some - per DAY. What do you have to do ? Just run this clever program for one hour each day that cycles through a series of web sites that show advertisements, you don't even have to sit and watch the adverts. There's two scams here, the first is the obvious one that you give money up front to strangers that can easily cut and run with it. The second one is that these clever fellows have set up 'legitimate' web sites full of syndicated advertisements for which they get paid. At present they have to be pay per impression adverts rather than per click, but I can't imagine it will be long before they can harness that income to. What makes this tricky, is that it is difficult to detect as 'click fraud', thousands of different computers are viewing the pages, in isolation a web site owner could not in any way tell that these are fraudulent views. How to stop it ? Well it really means that you can't allow just anyone to show syndicated advertisements on their web site. It's also difficult to see what offence is being committed by the people running the programs that control the browsing. You'll hear more and more of this one soon.

Adding Sense to AdSense

More and more web sites are getting on the Google®' 'AdSense'® bandwagon. For the minimum of effort a new income stream is added to the web site. You may only get a few cents a day, but it's something and hope springs eternal. What irritates me and no doubt many others is the fact that the format of the advertisement panel is inflexible and often completely out of keeping with the rest of the web site. The answer may now be at hand (see AdSense Change

) as very soon Google will let you format the style of the advertisement panel so that it will merge seemlessly into the fabric of a web site. No more of those crude 'Ads by Gooooooooogle' panels that I always ignore.

.com Gone ?

Should web sites still always choose the .com domain extension ? The traditional advice is that .com is the key and only in exceptional circumstances should you make do with anything else (.info, .us , .eu or .co.uk or whatever). A recent article

describes the pros and cons in more detail. An important factor that the author misses is that now, for a lot of web sites a user will not need to type in a domain name any more, they'll get there from a search engine or a link. What search engines (and humans) do is take note of the domain name first and see if the name matches the sort of thing they are after and then take some account of the TLD, if it indicates it is national (.de, .fr, .cn etc.) then that may put me off clicking on the link. But will I falter if it is .info or .net rather than .com ? Probably not any more.

The problem with .com is that all sensible (and many not very sensible) two word combinations are registered already, to buy the .com name you are then looking at spending $1000 rather than $20 so it's an expensive decision to make. At some stage the companies squatting on thousands of domain names will reduce prices to a more sensible level, I'd personally prefer an auctioning process when a name becomes available rather than first come first served. I'd also ban the squatters for registering the name for no good reason, but that might be considered a bit extreme,

Dense Keywords

I received yet another junk e-mail today claiming that one of the web sites I administer needs search engine optimization. Pity they hadn't checked that the site wasn't doing too badly at present. It's alarming that people are still being taken in by the lure of guaranteed placement. To prove how futile this is, select any web page (but not a news page) and copy any six consecutive words from the page. Put this as the keyword for Google and press Search. Voila ! The web page will normally be at the top spot. This is just working on the huge number of available words and the low probability that this same sequence will occur elsewhere.

There's a new authoratitive article on keyword analysis Keyword density analysis that reinforces the point that just working on an overall keyword density is no longer any good. Context and semantics now have their part to play. It's another welcome setback for automated generation and analysis tools. Engines will look increasingly for related keywords and distance between words not just a bland overall average.

4th April 2005

Specialist Search Engines

Now that we all use Google for all our searches (well most people do) do we need more search engines ? Well, a number of people, no doubt eyeing the immense fortune made at Google, are having a go. One new entrant is Search Word Pro

which concentrates on selected words and phrases to home in on results, a sort of cross between a search engine and a directory. This is not new, Turbo 10

tried this some years ago and have yet to make much of an impact. What is worse, you have to pay Search Word Pro before you can even try it out - and how many people are going to do that ? Dead in the water, I think, somehow.

Become are taking a different approach. Here they want to concentrate on the lucrative 'product search' niche. Many people don't want a search of the whole Internet, just the subset of what's relevant, if you are searching for a 'hair dryer' to buy then you're not interested in news stories or the history and development of technology, you just want companies offering hair dryers. They may be on to a good thing, but my experience of Google searches is that you do get a fair proportion of product related results for these sort of search terms. As Google make their money from product related advertising I can't really see them giving up this niche quickly.

15th March 2005

Google AutoLinks Debate

The Google AutoLink feature available in the next release of their toolbar continues to fuel debate. It's an ingenious idea. Because the Google browser add-in can control how any web page is displayed it can also add its own links. That means for the first time the links that you see on a page may not be those intended by the web page designer. The Google algorithm will pick out certain keywords for which it has a good ranking page. The benefit to the end user is that they see top ranking 'useful' links in the page they are viewing taking them to other web sites, however, the web site developer will be concerned that the new 'links' will take the user away from the web site they are seeing. Although the option will be, at least, initially only enabled by the user clicking on the toolbar for each page they choose to show auto-links perhaps it won't stop there. To implement this feature will require even more information about what you are viewing to be sent back to Google, so there is a little bit of a privacy concern too.

It's interesting to speculate how this would have been viewed before Google achieved its current market dominance, it may even have been widely welcomed as a useful new feature.

7th March 2005

Firefox Fireworks

Firefox have got themselves into their first major fix over an over-zealous patch. Quite a few phishing scams have been using domain names to 'look like' the genuine bank's domain name. By using exotic character sets its quite easy to come up with that a casual glance will confuse with the real thing (little marks at the top of vowels, characters that look a bit like consonants). So Firefox have issued a patch to ban these exotic characters from domain names. All very public spirited one might think, except for the people who happen to live in countries using these extended character sets ! It's one of the first mistakes made when a major product starts gaining acceptability: to forget that not all your customers speak the Queen's English.

2nd March 2005

Another Search Engine Usage Survey

Yet another survey has added some statistics to the way that people use search engines. The report by Pew Internet shows how conservative most people are in using search engines. 44% only use one search engine while 48% use only two or three. Most users are not aware of the distinction between featured sites that have paid for a good position in the results and ordinary non-promoted ones but the majority are OK about seeing both paid and other search results mixed together - as long as its clear which is which

24th February 2005

Blind Linking is no longer good enough

It's been known for some time that the best way to get a good search engine placement is to have quality incoming links from prestigious web sites. Getting these quality links from high ranking web sites is now nearly impossible. New strategies are emerging, a recent article discusses a range of options, and just as importantly strategies to avoid. It can be summarised in terms of making links as natural as possible, using assorted keywords as link text (not always the same). Making sure that links are to related web site, a good way to achieve this is to use a product like Site Position to discover links to related sites on search engines. If your site has links to some of the top sites listed for a keyword, then that is bound to influence a search engine's decision as to whether your site is relevant or not.

15th February 2005

Google to sell Domain Names

Just as MSN is aggressively marketing its much improved search engine, there is news that Google will become a Domain Reseller. This makes interesting news. It has long been known that Google takes note of domain names as keywords (see What's in a name) so if you want a high ranking site choose a matching name for the top keyword. In the future, when you choose online advertising with Google it could offer to sell you domains that would go along with the keyword. Probably a nice little earner for Google.

8th February 2005

Top Search Engine list revised

We've been busy updating information on the main search engines. Our search engine page gives lots of information about each one. Over the last year there have been a number of takeovers and mergers so there is less competition. We've taken appropriate action in the search engines we support for scanning. Because Teoma gives the same results as Ask Jeeves we've removed it. Similarly AllTheWeb is the same as Yahoo! and Hotbot the same as Lycos. For some time now About has only given results in its own web pages so that's been dropped too. On the plus side we've added Excite still somewhat languising but still independent. More significantly the A9 search engine has been added and, with the resources of Amazon it should be quite a useful new search engine.

2nd February 2005

MSN revamp their Search Engine

In one of their technical surveys the BBC have looked at the changes in the search engine sector. This time they focused on the revamped MSN search engine and were quite impressed. We are too, with Microsoft's backing they may be able to give Google a run for their money in the long term.

12th November 2004

Search Engine Popularity

Yet more statistics on search engine usage are available from Hitwise

. These seem to correct the notion from the following item that Google is actually streets ahead of the competition. Of the also rans it is Excite

that is doing surprisingly well. The report also shows the more telling underlying picture, most search engines rely on just two databases - provided by either Google or Yahoo!. Now that Microsoft are investing heavily in their own independent data source we can expect the relative proportions to shift in the next year.

24th July 2004

AllTheWeb Takeover

Yahoo!® is once again in the news this time for finally changing their acquired search engine All the Web. Currently AllTheWeb is shutdown, but it now has Yahoo! emblazoned on the page. We await further developments.

29th March 2004

Yahoo! launches new advertising service

Yahoo!® have released details on how they plan to scan web sites and make money from it. The free service will only scan static links in standard web pages, to add material in databases or other data sources you will need to pay a fee. The fee will not guarantee a good search position listing, but no doubt it may help.

1st March 2004

Letting users boost relevance

As we vaguely predicted for this year, a new style of search engine is being launched Eurekster. What makes this engine different is that it uses a network of users to boost rankings. This should mean that sites of common interest to that group of users will percolate to the top of the list. It tracks what people search for and which result in the list that they select. This approach has some promise as it makes search engine position depend on user rather than robot preference. However it can't really judge whether the site they go to offered the information they wanted, it could be just a misleading site description. I am not all that sure I want to share all my strange and obscure search requests with just anyone, let alone my closest friends !

2nd February 2004

Statistical Analysis of Google

A new in depth study of Google® search engine page optimization for pages is available showing the successful levels of keyword density, link text, ALT text, Header text etc. It all goes to show how complex life has become, you need a PhD in statistical analysis to make sense of it all. Our recommendation is still very much to invest in actual factual content on your web site without over-emphasis on what the top search engines happen to be looking for this week.

26th January 2004

Optimization Tools fail on Google

Working out what happened to people's ranking on Google® has been a major activity by Search Engine Optimization firms. It now seems that pages can be too heavily optimised for Google's taste. If you slavishly follow the suggestions made by optimization tools then your ranking may drop. Google wants good, rich content not a set of 'algorithmically' generated pages. Human generated text should always win out in the end. This is quite a blow for the optimization tools industry which must now diversify their offerings or wither on the vine, who's going to continue to use tools if they have a negative effect on placement ?

Advertisement Killers

Now that paid advertisements on Search Engines are such big businesses and so important to Internet business a new menace has emerged. Remember the days when 'popups' were the cool way to promote your goods and services ? Then came the 'popup' killers that rather spoilt the fun. [Google offers a free popup killer in its free Toolbar add-on, so there is no reason for anyone to be continue to be irritated by this 'nuisance']. Well it may be that the list of sponsored and paid adverts on search engine results may go the same way. Some new web sites are being developed that filter out those pesky advertisement to give the users a clearer, cleaner list of just search engine results. Lets hope it doesn't catch on too well.

17th December 2003

SitePosition keeps you abreast of changes to search engines. It has regular updates to keep up with changes to the search engines