Google and Their New Quote Feature
Posted by reviews on Apr 19, 2008
A new feature that Google announced is that when you do a search for a person’s name, a recent quote may appear above the search results. Google is making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.
Maybe eventually Google will put the quotes into an RSS feed for blogs and sites about these people. Pretty cool!
The Google Experiments
Posted by reviews on Apr 16, 2008
Google keeps coming up with new features and you can check them out on their Google Labs area.
The latest features include:
Alternate views for search results - You can do a variety of search types including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.
With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.
Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.
Keyword suggestions - You can view different keywords to improve your search results. As you type your search, Google’s technology will provide alternative suggestions to your queries in real time. *This could be helpful in coming up with good keywords for SEO as well!
Keyboard shortcuts - Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard shortcuts include:
Key Action
J - Selects the next result.
K - Selects the previous result.
O - Opens the selected result.
/ - Puts the cursor in the search box.
Google Now Crawling Forms and More
Posted by reviews on Apr 13, 2008
Google recently announced that they can now crawl data submitted via forms.
The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!
Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.
In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a
Google Alerts: How to Use It to Monitor Link Building
Posted by reviews on Apr 4, 2008
Google Alerts: How to Use it to Track Backlinks
If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.
Click Here: Google Alerts
The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:
link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com
The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.
It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.
You can set the frequency to:
- as soon as it happens
- once per day
- once per week
Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.
What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?
You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.
Googles Death ‘knol’
Posted by reviews on Mar 27, 2008
Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?
First, what is Knol?
Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:
It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”
What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?
Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.
NoFollow is Not the Only Way to Block Link Crawling
Posted by reviews on Mar 18, 2008
Other Ways to block search engine spiders from crawling
Actually, NoFollow does not “stop” the search engine spiders (robots) from crawling, but instead Google and others simply do not pass “link juice” to the backlink.
| rel=”nofollow” Action | Yahoo! | MSN Search | Ask.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Follows the link | Yes | Yes | Not proven | Yes |
| Indexes the “linked to” page | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shows the existence of the link | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
| In SERPs for anchor text | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
However, as Geoland points out so well, there are other ways to block the crawling of links. The other methods are much more limiting than rel="nofollow", because at least NoFollow still allows the crawling and indexing.
Normal methods to check for NoFollow will not show you if a link is truly crawlable (including SEOQuake, right-clicking on a link and looking at properties, etc). In other words, “what you see is not always what you get.”
Robots.txt
One method is to use Robots.txt to control the crawling of spiders. Robots.txt is kept in the top level of the domain.
Examples
Blocks all robots
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Blocks all robots from crawling specific directories
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /administrator/
Meta Elements
The robots attribute is used to control whether or not the search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow links from a page. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, while the NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled.
The robots attribute is supported by all of the major search engines. In addition there are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file.
NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page.
NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.
NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.
NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.
Example
<html> <head> <title>Create Backlinks to My Site</title> <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> </head>
Javascript
Any link written in javascript is not crawlable by search engine spiders. It will look like a normal link and will not be lined through (SEOQuake addon) or highlighted (Search Status addon)
Dynamic URLs
Some spiders may also avoid crawling any url that has a “?” in it (dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps which may then cause the crawler to download an ‘infinite’ number of URLs from a Web site. Thus it would probably prevent links on these pages from being crawled.
Google Analytics for Tracking Google Base (Froogle) Visitors
Posted by reviews on Dec 3, 2007
For those of us that sell products via an ecommerce site, you probably are familiar with Google Base (formerly Froogle) where you can list your products on Google Product Search. You may wonder if you are getting many visitors from Google Base. You will likely get visitors if your pages are fairly well designed in Google Base and the pricing and attributes are good. The question would be; how does one track Google Base visitors using Google Analytics?
Google has an answer on their Official Google Base Blog, however their advice is odd and a pain in the arse at best, and very bad advice at worst. Their answer is to create another page just for the Google Base visitors, thus creating duplicate content, which contradicts Google’s own webmaster guidelines. Nice.
Regular landing page: http://example.com/page1.html
Unique Base landing page: http://example.com/page2.htmlBy creating two versions of the same page on your website and submitting the unique landing page URLs to Base, Google Analytics can show you exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website from Base. Just make sure to include the unique landing page URL in the link attribute of your bulk upload file.
A much, much better answer was supplied by Scott Horne over at WebProNews. They even provide great graphics to help you. He suggests adding a query string to the end of the url link in Google Base, such as ?ref=base.
It would look like this: http://www.example.com/nifty-product.html?ref=base
You would then log into Google Analytics, go to the specific domain, go to Content, Top Landing Page, and do a search for ref=base.
Very simple!