Cameron Alister has created a search engine for search engine marketers. It pulls its data from Lee Odens List of top search engine marketing blogs. I’m not on there yet, but this is a brand new site with 0 PR and no reputation. Give it a year and we’ll see what happens. Anyway, if you want to try it, I’ve posted the search here:
There is word out from Search Engine Marketers that Yahoo is using a form of black hat marketing by making Yahoo the default search engine when you download Internet Explorer 7 when you upgrade Yahoo messenger. Is this really black hat marketing? I think it’s more gray than black. When you download Google toolbar, it asks you if you want to make Google your default search engine. I know MSN does things very similar to this. I do have to say that if I downloaded something and it changed the default settings of a different program without notifying me, I would be upset. So, I guess it’s a darker gray than I thought after first glance.
It sounds like DMOZ is back up and running. After a lot of technical difficulties in October of 2006, DMOZ stopped accepting submissions to their open directory. They now say that most of the site’s features are back up and they are accepting submissions again. This is good news for search engine marketing because DMOZ is a great directory to be listed in.
At SEO book Aaron Wall suggests that since Google Page Rank is very slow to update, you may consider the date of your last Google cache to show you what they consider as important. Although I still feel like there is more relevancy to Google Page Rank than many others do, I also think that this is a good little trick to see how often Google updates your site. It seems kind of obvious that they would cache the sites they considered to be most important more often than the sites they feel are less important. For Example I have 3 sites who’s last caches are December 28th, December 29th, and January 9th (that’s this site).
It sounds like Google is letting people know if they have malware on their site, and more importantly, they’re letting search users know about these sites. I think this is another great tool from Google that will help searchers stay away from sites they don’t really want to visit. And it seems like there are some sites out there that don’t think they have malware on their site but do. It’s a good way to check.
I recently read that Microsoft has an Analytics program similar to Google Analytics that is currently in the Alpha stage. It sounds like they will start giving people access by invitation as soon as it hits it’s beta stage. I wonder who I’d have to know to get that invitation?
Google has recently changed the frequency of one of their “data pushes” from once every 3-4 weeks to once every day or 2. This simply means that if you are suddenly showing up #1 in the search results for one of your keywords, you may only be there for a day. We have had a site do something very similar to this. It showed up on the first page for a day, then it was on the second, then back on the first the next day.
This news isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it just means that Google has taken another step in making their results more beneficial to their users.
If you look at all of your indexed pages on Google (by searching “site:www.yourwebsite.com”) you may see that just after your URL in green it says “Supplemental Result.” What is this and is it a bad thing?
A supplemental result is something that is not in the main results of Google. These will show up in Google searches only if there are no other main results to show. Having your pages indexed as supplemental results does not mean that your site has been penalized by any means. It is not a bad thing. Obviously you want the majority of your pages to be in the main results of Google, but if you have a few pages that are supplemental, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Matt Cutts says that there is a main results Google bot and a supplemental results Google bot. This means nothing to you and me, but I still thought it was interesting to note.
He also says that the supplemental results are being indexed quicker now and will probably start to get a little more traffic than they have in the past.
One of the most common questions/concerns I get is why Google indexes less links than the other major search engines (Yahoo and MSN). Today, Matt Cutts answered this question for me. He said, “the link: operator only shows a subsample of the links to a page that we know of.” I have always told people that I thought Google actually did index the same amount of links as the other search engines and simply didn’t show users all of them, but now I can say that with some confidence. It’s always nice to be backed by Matt Cutts.
*For those of you who are new to SEO, you can see all of the links that point to your site by going to any of the three major search engines and typing in “link:www.yourwebsite.com”.
I have a lot of people come to me with a brand new site or no site at all who are asking for search engine optimization. They are certainly on the right track (looking for SEO), but a problem arises when these people expect to show up #1 in the search results within a week. The fact is, search engines do look at how long a site has been online. It’s only a small factor in their complex algorithms, but it is a factor. Why? Because there are hundreds of thousands of brand new sites being born every day and only a small percentage of those sites make it past a year of life. An even smaller percentage of those are even worth indexing to the search engines. Even if your site is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you are still in that mix of new sites.
So, How do you battle this?
There are a couple of ideas out there on how to make a new site show up regardless of it’s age. One is to go and buy an old site that has been indexed in the search engines and maybe even has a few links to it. But be careful with this because some people are selling their domain names because they are blacklisted by the search engines. If your domain name means a lot to you however, you can go with another idea: buy the domain name for a few years in advance. Supposedly, this says to the search engines that you are going to stick around for a while. Remember that both of these ideas are simply ideas right now. There hasn’t been enough testing to know if this really makes that big of a difference.
I must also say that I have had a few clients come to me with this dilemma (a new site or no site at all) and after some high quality SEO work (thanks to yours truly) they showed up for their keywords very quickly - I’m talking a matter of weeks.
So, the conclusion to this post is YES it matters…Sometimes….A little.