SEO Adept

Opting Out of the Use of DMOZ Descriptions in Search Results

2006-05-26T12:53:00.000-06:00

MSN Search has started to act upon a new robots meta tag that tells the MSN search bot not to use the description in your DMOZ directory listings as the description in your search results. This new meta tag will be welcomed by webmasters who prefer to have control over the descriptions in their search listings.

(full article)

How to Display Better Targeted Google AdSense Ads

2006-05-24T08:20:00.000-06:00

Here's a relatively unknown but very important feature that Google offers with their AdSense program. It's called "Section Targeting", and it can increase your AdSense revenue if properly implemented. It's all about helping Google to send you more relevant AdSense ads to display on your pages.

(full article)

Google Ban Checker Tool Available

2006-05-15T11:19:00.000-06:00

One factor that helps to determine the search engine ranking of a website is the quality of the sites that it links to. It's important not to link to websites that are themselves blacklisted in some way. There's a great free tool available that can help you determine if any of the websites that your site links to have been banned by Google (a strong indication that the site has a very bad reputation).

(full article)

Finding the Best Pages on a Website to Get Links From

2006-05-04T13:31:00.000-06:00

Here's a great tip from Jim Boykin, Internet marketing specialist. Must have information for anyone doing link building... How do you find the pages on someone's website that would be best to ask for a link to your site on? There are really two different types of pages you should look for.

(full article)

New Google Sitemaps Features

2006-04-27T13:23:00.000-06:00

Google has recently added new features to its Sitemaps service. In addition to a revamped interface, there's a new verification method, a new summary page that provides a quick snapshot about the state of your site in the Google index, and a notification of violation of Google's webmasterguidelines with a request for reinclusion (not yet available for all sites).

(full article)

Competitive Link Analysis Tool -- Highly Recommended

2006-04-21T10:36:00.000-06:00

One of the keys to a successful inbound linking strategy is to find sites in "good neighborhoods" that are willing to link to you. Here's a tool that can help you find such sites.

(full article)

Google Increases US Search Share

2006-04-18T15:13:00.000-06:00

Figures just released from comScore, a global marketing information provider, indicates that Google has continued to increase its lead as a provider of online searches. According to their March 2006 Search Engine Rankings report which tracs competitive search engines, Google gained in market share over the previous year for the eighth consecutive month.

(full article)

What's Your Home Page URL?

2006-04-18T10:58:00.000-06:00

This simple question may not be as simple as it sounds. Your answer is probably something like "http://www.mysite.com/". But if you take a good look at the links to the home page in your site's navigation system, you may find a different answer.

(full article)

New Study of Search Engine User Behavior Available

2006-04-11T16:22:00.000-06:00

iProspect and Jupiter Research released today a new study on the behavior of search engine users. Key among the findings, when compared to 2002 and 2004 results for a similar survey, is that the importance of ranking high in the search results has increased over time. Today, 62% of search engine users are clicking on a first page result, compared to 60% in 2004 and only 48% in 2002.

(full article)

Google Real Estate

2006-04-10T09:21:00.000-06:00

Google has integrated it's Google Base database with Google Maps in a way that will be of interest to real estate agencies, and may hurt existing sites like craigslist.com and realtor.com, and even compete with newspaper classified ads. Google Real Estate, one of many Google "products" said to be in "beta test" mode, provides a display of homes for sale in a specified region next to a map with pointers to those homes. Clicking on a pointer displays a photo and further information about the particular home.

(full article)

Getting Your Pages Deleted from Google's Cache

2006-04-07T10:07:00.000-06:00

Here's a Google feature that not too many people know about. Say you had a web page that was (perhaps mistakenly) exposed to the Internet on a web server, and Google found and indexed this page. Sure, you can take the page down or put the offending machine behind your firewall, but what do you do about the copy of the page that Google happily continues to display from its cache?

(full article)

Google Adds Midpage "See Results For..." Section

2006-04-06T08:36:00.000-06:00

Google has begun displaying, for certain searches that it feels could benefit from a refinement, a new section in its results pages beginning with the words "See results for:" and followed by a search phrase containing the word(s) you searched for with one or more additional words added. Presumably, these new "See results for:" phrases are pulled from very popular searches containing the word or phrase that you searched for. You can see this behavior (at least at the time of this writing) if you do a Google search for "relentless". You will see, in a section after the first few natural results, "See results for: relentless records", with "relentless records" set up as a link to a new search on that phrase.

(full article)

Staying out of Google's Supplemental Index

2006-04-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

In late 2003, Google unveiled a new index, separate from its main web index, that it queries if it fails to find good results in its main index. For unusual or obscure queries, you may see some of these results. They'll be flagged with the text "Supplemental Result" next to the URL.

Google's supplemental results have become a topic of conversation again recently, in the early days of the BigDaddy rollout. During the last few weeks of the BigDaddy rollout, large numbers of otherwise well-linked web pages were showing up as Supplemental Results. Google acknowledges that they are working to fix the problem.

(full article)

Google Improves AdWords Keyword Tool

2006-03-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

Google has recently made some improvements to their AdWords Keyword Tool. The new Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaigns and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends.

(full article)

Google's BigDaddy Switchover

2006-03-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

In early 2006, Google rolled out it's "BigDaddy" upgrade. BigDaddy is a major change to Google's datacenters. It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration. Word at the end of March is that the upgrade is pretty much complete.

(full article)