Just as I thought. Google seems to be ranking wikipedia pages even higher than they already were. Se Roundtable has a post that shows some words they think that Wikipedia is showing up TOO well for. The fact is, Wikipedia made a very smart move by making their external links nofollow. But good news to all the relevant linkers from wikipedia: it sounds like this is not a permanent thing and that they will attempt to take the nofollow link off of any relevant links. They just need to figure out how to do that first.
Wikipedia recently had a Search Engine contest that was apparently held to give them ideas on how to become more search engine friendly. The biggest thing that came from this contest is the announcement from Wikipedia that all external links are now “nofollow” links.
Nofollow links are links on a site that the major search engines will not follow and so the link is not worth anything as far as search engine optimization goes. This decision came about because wikipedia was getting spammed by search engine marketers who would put links up on wikipedia to their sites which would help their rankings. This obviously wouldn’t have been a problem except that people were abusing wikipedia.
I think that this was a great move by Wikipedia because now, their results will be more accurate and more objective. The external links will also be more objective because most of the usefulness was removed by the nofollow link rule. Of course, people will still be able to receive traffic from these sites which will still be enough reason for some people to spam wikipedia.
I’m trying out Windows Live Writer to write this post. I just barely found out about it and it’s in Beta right now. We’ll see if it works. It seems to be pretty cool. You can preview what you’re writing in web layout and you don’t need to be connected to the internet to do so. It also looks like it’s a whole lot easier to post pictures and videos with it.
Download Squad came up with a post install checklist for wordpress that seems to be pretty good. I like a lot of the ideas there. If you are looking to build a wordpress site or already have one installed, you may want to see what types of things they suggest.
Have you ever wondered which search engines are the most popular? Which are getting used the most?
I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that Google is the biggest search engine out there with 47.3% of search engine usage. In a way, this number is at least 5% over what comscore says it is because there are other small search engines out there that use Google’s search in their engines. Oh, and Google is still growing.
Yahoo comes in second with 28.5% of the market share.
MSN or Live comes in 3rd with 10.4% of the market share. Sadly, MSN is still on a trend downward. I say sadly, but really, I’m kind of tired of Microsoft dominating the world. I think we should give someone else a turn….like Google.
All other search engines are significantly smaller than these three with Ask.com in 4th place.
SE Roundtable had a post today that said and I quote “bots are not obeying” the robots.txt files. That’s a little scary to me and I don’t even have a robots.txt file. But there are sites out there that have pages that should not be indexed by search engines under any circumstances. I’m sure Yahoo will be able to put these disobedient bots in time out for a while and get them to behave soon. I wouldn’t worry about that.
If you have ever searched for a location on Google, you have most likely seen that the top result is links to different maps like Yahoo maps, mapquest, and of course, Google maps. Google has recently removed all other mapping links from its results besides its own Google Maps.
I’m fine with this because I think that Google Maps far surpasses the other mapping results on accuracy and quality. I also think it makes the results look a little cleaner and more simple for the user. Anything that facilitates ease of use is a good thing.
My home page was indexed by Yahoo today. When I looked at the cache, I could tell it happened on the 16th (yesterday). Anyway, nothing too exciting, but I wanted to keep track of all of these things so that people can get a feel for how long it takes for these things to happen. Obviously there are a lot of factors in play here, but I think it will be nice to see anyway.
So I just noticed today that Google cached my website again. The first time they did it was the 9th of January, and this second caching says it was done on the 13th. It obviously takes a few days for Google to change their cached links in the search results because I checked yesterday and still had my January 9th cache.
Rumor has it that Matt Cutts is going to leave Google in the near future. The rumor stems from a pretty legitimate source however: Cutts himself. He recently wrote in his blog, “I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say ‘Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?’”
I don’t actually see him leaving yet, and I think the rumor is a little early, but when he leaves, he’s going to create some big waves in the seo world. He has quite a following and has helped to brand Google as an ethical and honest company.