Denial Design search engine & optimisation tips

Removing Voltrank Increased My Rankings

2011-10-27T13:12:00.000Z

Following on from my recent post about Voltrank's ineffectiveness at increasing rankings I thought you may be interested to know what effect that has had on rankings. A week on from deactivating and uninstalling Voltrank my rankings for my entire site have shot up considerably. I mentioned 2 target phrases in my original post and for the the first of these, "bra measuring guide," my site is not firmly in the top 10 of Google UK and for the second, "lingerie guide," the page is hovering around postion 15 or 16. Rankings across the site have improved immensely for many of the keywords I'm tracking for the site with a few top 10 and top 20 results just a week after being nowhere in the top 200! I am aware that some of this boost may be coming from the links I placed in my previous post but that wouldn't really explain the site wide jump. I mean this blog isn't exactly popular so there's very little link juice flowing around. I think this just reinforces that my experience with Voltrank was bad. To back this up, here's a screen shot from my Google Analytics account for this site:

Yep that's five fold increase in traffic after the site was re-ranked. Yes it's only 14 or 15 a day but it's a lot better than 2 a day!

Free Link Exchange Programs That Don't Work - Linkalizer

2011-10-21T11:46:00.061Z

In the second post in my series of Free Link Exchange Programs That Don't Work I'm looking at Linkalizer. I'd like to start by pointing out that it's been a few years since I actively used Linkalizer as I realized a while ago that it was crap! I checked my records and I signed up in 2007. It may have changed in the last few years but by looking at the website I'd say it hasn't! One quick glance through the Link Exchange Directory on the site (where all sites that join Linkalizer are listed) shows us that there is very little care or attention put in to this system. Looking at the Arts section of the directory shows us that Linkalizer is full or spam and misfiled sites. There's a Nigerian Job Centre site, Google Classified Ads site, NTFS data recovery, college party tips, Warcraft sites, a technology new blog, corsets site, the obligatory Vietnam travel site and "Medical tourism in India" all on the first page of the Arts directory. This tells us the sites aren't being reviewed and anyone can join. I tested a handful of links from various pages in the directory on Yahoo! Site Explorer and none of them showed a backlink from Linkalizer's directory so it's not even worth joining for a free followed link from their directory as it will never be counted!

Linkalizer is a simple link exchange system, you link to someone else's site and they will link back to you. Free members can send a limited number of link requests per day and respond to incoming requests. Members can search the directory and request links from any site in any category. Unfortunately this means you will be inundated with link requests from poor quality sites, unrelated sites and makes finding the good sites even harder. The directory lists the PageRank for each site (because that's such a reliable metric...) and a link to the Alexa data for the site so if you want to find any good sites you're going to have to do some serious digging with 3rd party tools. You can't search the directory, only browse the listings which makes finding link prospects even more time consuming.

As I said before it's been a few years since I used Linkalizer and maybe if you were determined enough and did enough analysis of your link exchange prospects you could get some strong backlinks from this system but you would spend most of your time in the dashboard rejecting link requests from spammy sites. If you are looking for sites to exchange links with then avoid this system and stick to looking for link exchanges manually.

Don;t forget to check out part one of this series, our review of Voltrank.

Free Link Exchange Programs That Don't Work - Voltrank

2011-10-19T12:38:00.000Z

For the past several months, since May to be precise, I have been experimenting with a link exchange system called Voltrank. Voltrank promise "quality one-way links" on a system that's been "built by SEOs for SEOs" and best of all it's completely free. The set up procedure is simple, you sign up for Voltrank, install a widget on your Wordpress blog or a piece of code on any site capable of running PHP scripts, check your installation is working and then set up the links to the pages you want to promote. Voltrank then puts your link on other sites and gets different sites to link to your site. The widget displays up to 6 one-way text links from the Voltrank network and each link is different on each page of your site and each link is permanent so there's very little link churn. The links only change if the link's site leaves the network or changes the advert text. Your site earns "Volts" per page on your site. The more Volts you have, the more sites on the network your ads will appear on. Naturally this system benefits larger sites and sites that add a lot of new content like blogs. It all seems like the perfect link exchange system, one-way links, automated, nice and simple to use but... it doesn't make any difference to search engine rankings.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I've been using Voltrank for 5 months now on an affiliate blog and had 2 ads running, one for a "bra measuring guide" and another for "lingerie guide". Voltrank's dashboard features some very comprehensive reports including a breakdown of every page your link appears on. The first link appeared on 71 sites and the second on 37. However out of the 71 sites that Voltrank reported my first link to be active on, 22 of the sites had no link on them. For the second link, 9 out of 37 sites had no active link and 2 were infected with malware. The rest of the linking sites low quality sites, foreign sites (even though you specify your language during the set up phase), 404 blog pages and all were of absolutely no relevance at all to my site's niche (fashion / lingerie). Many of the sites were advertising illegal downloads of TV shows or were so blatently spam domains and made for adsense sites that you wonder how they ever get through Voltrank's review process in the first place. After 5 months the "bra measuring guide" page has a whopping 3 inbound links from Voltrank sites according to Yahoo! Site Explorer and 4 according to Google Webmaster tools and the "lingerie guide" page has none, zero, zilch. The first page doesn't even show up in Google searches for it's target term according to Google Webmaster Tools and is not in the top 200 results whereas the second shows up in Google Webmaster Tools but not in the top 200 results. Both pages are indexed and cached in Google.

I will admit that my test pages were not optimized beyond adding a heading tag and a title tag but this was an experiment to see if Voltrank could power my pages to the top on link juice alone. Unfortunately it seems that in this case Voltrank's batteries are flat.

I did try to add another Wordpress blog to the Voltrank system to double check my findings but even though the blog was on the same server with the same set up and same plug-ins the Voltrank script would not validate the set up.

Bye bye Yahoo! UK

2011-08-03T16:27:00.000Z

Well it's finally happened, Yahoo UK search is no more. Yahoo UK (and European properties) are now powered by Bing. Just over 2 years after Microsoft bought Yahoo for (apparently $0!) and about a year after the US and Canadian Yahoo portals, the once great search giant has finally abandoned the fight against the mighty Google and going the same way as Altavista, Inktomi and AllTheWeb (all bought by Yahoo! ironically in an attempt to use their search engine know how to bolster Yahoo's search algorithms). Officially Bing will power Yahoo! search for 10 years but the deal also gives Bing access to Yahoo's search technology and the right to integrate it within Bing search. Yahoo is rumoured to have laid off as much as 20% of it's workforce so I can see no going back from this. I predict Yahoo! will be wholly owned by Bing in the next few years. Yahoo's much loved site explorer tool will close at the end of the year and Bing are working on a replacement within the Bing Webmaster Toolbox. With Google properties now accounting for a massive 92% share of the UK market and Yahoo and Bing combined on 5.84% the future seems bleak for any competing search engines against the behemoth that is Google.

The browser wars look to be going the same way as well with Google's Chrome browser now the second most used browser in the UK with a 22.1% market share and Firefox at 22%. Internet Explorer dropped a massive 15% to 41% in July.

So where did Yahoo go wrong and why hasn't Bing made any in roads against Google in the UK? Personally I think the answer lies in Google's focus on search as it's main product. Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz (the head honcho, the big cheese) said in a 2009 interview:

"The priority was to get the fog away from the company. Yahoo got pegged as a search company and we’re not a search company. Search is only one aspect of what our customers do."

Yet Yahoo! Search was where the majority of their visitors came from and losing focus on their main source of traffic (and therefore money) shows how little respect and knowledge the company's top brass had of their own business. If you can't draw visitors to your "portal" with the promise that they'll find what they want then you won't have any visitors to sign up for Yahoo mail or a small business listing or Yahoo shopping listings (the latter 2 are powered by a third party). Basically Yahoo just aggregates stuff that you can find quicker and easier in other places (e.g: Google). When was the last time you saw an advert for Yahoo in the uk? Yep it was probably this truly forgettable and overly long ad from 2009:

Doesn't exactly get the pulse racing does it?

How about this one:

Better isn't it? That advert was for the launch of Bing (formerly MSN Live Search) and does everything the Yahoo ad doesn't, it tells you how to solve a problem.

Finally a Google advert from 2010 showcasing (almost) everything Google can do in one simple, effective advert:

Simple and effective, just like Google really.

Links, links and more links...

2011-07-05T21:49:00.000Z

Recently I've been overly obsessed with getting ultra-focused, one-way, followed links to my client's sites. And after a while of course it starts to get harder and harder to find these links. Then I noticed that some link exchanges I'd set up on a test site were really starting to bear fruit. The sites with the links back to my test site were barely related (think "shopping" rather than "wine") and the test site was climbing the rankings for all the specified anchor texts I'd set up in the link exchange. Now this is early days and the effect may wear off as quickly as it began but I'll keep you posted.

I also noticed that reciprocal links were starting to bear fruit as well. Higher rankings every time a link was added to the linking domains report in Google Webmaster Tools across the board for all keywords. Now these links are all from related sites (travel oriented) but the difference is quite marked. For years we've been told that link exchanges are dead or harmful to your site's rankings but since the Panda update I've noticed that reciprocal links definitely help... at the moment.

So what about those ultra-targetted, one way, followed links... they've not really had an impact on rankings. Strangely I've had more results from adding a few nofollowed links from related blog posts with no real targetted anchor text. The site-wide boost these links have given has helped. Maybe my link model was too unnatural as it contained no nofollowed links at all and now that it does Google thinks more highly of the site, maybe it is just the pure number of links that matter. I'll keep you updated with what's working!

One Schema to rule them all...

2011-06-06T12:18:00.000Z

The official Google, Yahoo! and Bing blogs have all published news of a new joint schema that these search engines have developed to enable content publishers and webmasters to mark up their content in a way that is readable to all these search engines without adding 3, 4 or 5 different types of markup or just choosing the one that Google wants. This joint markup, called Schema.org, uses microdata to allow webmasters to markup specific types of content such as reviews, movie information, tv series, people profiles and more that can be easily extracted from the page and displayed in the search engine results page. Google have already been experimenting with this type of thing with "rich snippets" for places, recipes, reviews, events and products. The problem was Bing and Yahoo weren't using this data and it was hard to get Google to correctly display the data so it was often seen as an extravagance and an unneccessary use of a programmer or web designer's time to implement it. With the introduction of Schema.org this all changes and sites with any of the content that the schema can handle should implement it as soon as possible. Early adopters will benefit from the increased exposure in the search engine results as their content is indexed quicker and correctly and the search engines promote their new shiny features. Contact Denial Design today to find out how we can help your site get the benefits of this new search engine friendly code!

Google Panda Update Hits The UK

2011-04-14T10:26:00.000Z

It's been very quiet on this blog for far too long so it's time to rectify that. I can't promise regular updates but I'll try and post something at least monthly! The big news of the last month or so is the latest Google algorithm update nicknamed "Panda" officially by Google after an engineer on their team or "Farmer" as the algorithm attempts to weed out so-called "content farms" that scrape content from the web and wrap it in adsense adverts.

There have been hundreds of posts on various SEO forums and news sites describing the "pandapocalypse" as sites in the US were hit by Panda and tumbled down the Google rankings and lost traffic and income as a result. On Monday 11th April the update was rolled out to Google's other English properties such as Google UK and UK-based SEOs were braced for a similar drop. I'm pleased to say that absolutely none of the sites I perform search engine optimization on have been affected by Panda in an adverse way and have even benefitted from some of the lower quality sites have dropped. So forgive me for blowing my own trumpet but it speaks volumes about the quality of content that our clients have produced and the work I have done on my clients' sites to help them up the rankings.

Google celebrates Lennon's 70th Birthday with first movie Doodle

2010-10-08T14:01:00.004Z

Google celebrates John Lennon's 70th birthday today with this fantastic animated Doodle on the Google UK home page which I believe is the first movie Doodle ever. In other Lennon news, the FBI have confiscated a set of John Lennon's fingerprints today. Google Argentina has a doodle for César Milstein, a biochemist.

In other Google news, the search giant has launched Google Instant, a new look for Google Images, celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Flintstones, added Latin the list of languages available in Google Translate, and for those of you looking for some SEO help the Google Starter Guide has been updated. The Starter Guide is recommended reading for anyone running any kind of business on the Internet in my opinion and covers the basics of SEO and how Google works.

Ch-ch-changes at Google

2010-09-08T07:47:00.005Z

Today marks an important event for Google as they switch their results to the new HTML standard, HTML 5. HTML 5 allows more interactivity whislt using less additional languages like JavaScript, ActiveX plugins and so on. This will allow Google to embed videos and other interactive features straight into the results set without the need to worry about if a user has JavaScript turned on or has the right plugins installed to view a video. From tomorrow (or possibly sometime later today in the UK), Google's search results pages will be AJAX powered meaning that as you switch pages of Google results they will load almost instantly, like the new Google Image search results. Google tested AJAX results in February this year and it seems this will be included in this latest update. It is anticipated that the results will also show 30 results per page rather than the standard 10 blue links.

Google showcased some HTML 5 capability yesterday with it's floating balls logo that was controlled by your mouse (but wasn't fully HTML 5 driven, it used some JavaScript).

Today's logo is even funkier in my opinion, a plain grey Google that colours in as you type!

5 surefire ways to build quality links

2010-08-17T09:25:00.005Z

Link popularity has always been an inportant factor in ranking well in the search engines but over the years the emphasis has shifted from just quantity to quality and quantity. Now your links need to be finely crafted, super-targeted pointers to the part of your sites where they will do the most good. So how do you get both quality and quantity? Here's 5 surefire ways to build quality links in high volume.

1) Social Media
There is no denying that social media is here to stay and the current two "big daddies", Facebook and Twitter are excellent ways to gain links, interact with your audience and get your message out in front of millions of users for next to nothing. Of course that's easier said than done and leveraging these social media giants in the right way is a whole other story but suffice to say it can be done and can have a great effect on your rankings and more importantly, the number of visitors to your site. For certain searches Twitter "tweets" are even displayed mixed in with the search engine results.

Of course social media doesn't begin and end with Facebook and Twitter. Depending on your niche there is a social media site out there for you. From travel to dog lovers, almost all aspects of human interest are covered.

Social bookmarking is a quick and easy way to gain links (although search engines often don't or can't index your list of bookmarks, this may depend on your privacy settings on the sites in question though) and news bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are great ways to bring in large amounts of traffic in a short space of time.

2) Paid Directories
This is probably the oldest link tactic in the book that still applies today. Submitting to the major paid directories can gain you some serious link-juice but it doesn't come cheap (most of the time!) and there's no guarantee your site will be accepted. If you do make it in though you can expect to see a good boost in rankings. The major directories are:

JoeAnt ($40)
Gimpsy ($49)
GoGuides ($70)
Best Of The Web (BOTW) ($69.95 per year)
Business.com ($199 per year)
Yahoo ($299 per year)

An honourable mention must go to DMOZ (aka the Open Directory Project) which although free was once considered an equal to the paid directories in terms of importance and influence on rankings. There's some debate as to whether DMOZ still has that influence but it's free so it doesn't hurt to submit your site there just in case.

3) Blog Comments / Forum Posts
Blog comments and forum posts have a 2-fold use, they create links to your sites and they increase your reputation as an expert in your field (if done correctly!) There are those that say you should only comment on blogs and forums that do not "nofollow" your links to your site whereas I'm of the opinion that for most sites all traffic is good traffic and visitors from a blog or forum that is relevant to your area of business are more likely to be interested in what you have on offer and therefore more likely to buy / sign up / convert.

4) Articles
Like social media and blogging, articles are a way to establish your expertise in a field. Writing about your area of interest and getting your name out there all build a perception of expertise that can pay huge dividends. There are 2 ways to use your articles to spread the word. First you can write your article, publish it on your site and spread the link to that article via social media outlets. Secondly you can distribute your article through article sharing sites like ArticleBase that allow you to list your article for anyone to use. Include a link to your site in the article and the person using your article must leave it in there.

5) Press Releases
Submit your press releases to sites such as PRWeb and include a link to your website in the press release. PRWeb and companies like them will spread your message across the world and every site that publishes your story also creates a quality, targeted back link to your site.

Let the search engines do the work

2010-07-08T10:24:00.003Z

Things have come a long way since the late 90's when I first started learning SEO. Back then you'd submit to Altavista or Lycos or Inktomi and wait and hope that the search engines would spider you.

Nowadays it's so much easier. The major players, Google and Bing/Yahoo, have their own dedicated "Webmaster Toolboxes" where you simply verify your site, submit an XML sitemap and watch as they crawl your site and give highly detailed reports on it's progress. They'll even help you create the sitemap! These toolboxes will then tell you how many pages the search engine has indexed, how often your site is visited, your top keywords, the number of links to your site, broken links, malware infected pages and much more, free of charge! Google even tells you how fast your site loads and how to improve.

Let's look at each one in a little more detail:

Google Webmaster Tools

The daddy of the search engine world and probably the most useful of the lot. Google Webmaster Tools shows you your site's top queries, where the site ranks over time for each query and a click-through rate for each position and keyword. It shows any crawl errors, the most used keywords on your site, the number of links to your site and each page that has external links, the submission status of your sitemap, allows you to quickly and easily point Google to your new domain if you are moving your site, internal links, and subscribers to your rss feeds. There's also a section telling you how you can improve your site's ranking, from HTML considerations (duplicate or short title and description tags), site speed performance, malware infections, broken links, robots.txt checks and adding content to your site's sidewiki. YOu can even request removal of a plage from Google's index here. You will need a Google account to access the tools.

Bing Webmaster Center

Bing's Webmaster Center will become more important now that Bing owns Yahoo! and will soon be powering Yahoo! search, giving Bing a much larger share of the market. Of course you'll need a Windows Live account to access the toolbox.

Once inside the toolbox you'll see a range of reports on your site, from the date it was last crawled by Bing to Bing's very own Domain Score. Bing ranks each page on your site out of 5, with 5 being the best. Now it's not hard to get a 5 out of 5 rating for each page with a little bit of thought but the rating system is a handy way of showing you what pages you need to improve. Unfortunately it only shows you the top 5 pages on your site. You'll also see the language of the page, it's last crawled date and if it's blocked by robots.txt or other factors. You'll also see a count of the total number of indexed pages.

Like Google each site has a profile page where you fill in your sitemap address, manage verification settings and an optional email address where Bing can alert you to periodic news and updates, although I've yet to receive any mail from Bing and I've been using the toolbox for a long time!

Again like Google, you can view crawl issues, malware, broken links, etc., view backlinks and outbound links by domain and subdomain.

Where the Bing Webmaster Center fails to match Google is the Keywords area of the toolbox. Bing does not give you any reports on your top performing keywords at all and their keyword tool is shockingly bad. Basically you type in a keyword or phrase in to the tool and it returns a list of pages on your site that feature that word or phrase along with a domain rank score for each page. There is no data on click through rates, positions, the number of times your page appeared in the search results for that phrase, nothing useful in short.

Yahoo Site Explorer

The Yahoo! Site Explorer is probably on it's way to the scrap heap now Bing are in charge yet Site Explorer can still provide some useful information in the meantime. You will need a Yahoo ID to access the full features of Site Explorer. Like the other two you can manage yor sitemap feed here, view the number of indexed pages and crawl errors. Site Explorer also shows you the number of domains that link to and from your site and like Google shows your top performing keywords although in far less detail than Google. Like Google you can request page deletions.

Where Yahoo! surpasses the others is in it's reporting of backlinks. Yahoo seems to list every single link to your site and you can filter by domain, subdomain and page. Yahoo also lists every single page on your site that it has indexed.

What about Ask?

Ask is the only one of the big search engines that have yet to roll out a webmasters area but it does support xml sitemaps and allows you to ping the sitemap so they know of any changes.
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

So take the hard work out of the basics, submit your site to these webmaster toolboxes, wait whilst they gather some information on your site and follow their suggestions and your search engine traffic will start to increase. The toolboxes take away some of the guesswork of improving your rankings allowing you to concentrate on writing quality content and gaining links.

Back to basics

2010-06-22T13:04:00.007Z

Well I've been neglecting my blog for some time now and I've decided it's time to go back to basics. The blog is billed as "tips, tricks, rants and raves" so I'm going to start a semi-regular series of tips and tricks to help your site rank well.

The first tip is:

Semantic Markup

What is semantic markup? Well it's basically using existing HTML elements to mark up or style your web pages in a way that makes sense to both users and search engines so that the meaning of the content is the same no matter what method the content is being accessed by (different browsers, mobile phones, interactive tv, games consoles, etc). Take the heading above for example (the bit that says "Semantic Markup" in big letters). In old fashioned print terms that's a "headline", so on the web you should use your headline elements (H1, H2, H3, etc). As it's our first headline in this item it's marked up with an H1 element. As you work your way down the page you would use the other headline elements to define the headings in descending order of significance. Search engines can read these elements and see what is the most important part of the page by it's corresponding tag. Similarly the use of other tags or elements such as <address>, <abbr> and <acronym> all give clues to search engines about the content contained within the tags, in this case an address, an abbreviation (such as F.B.I.) or an acronym (such as SEO). Lists should be displayed using the Unordered List or Ordered List elements, for example:

This list was created by simply typing in the numbers
1) This is a fake list item
2) This is also a fake list item

This list was created using an <ol> element

This is a real list item

This is also a real list item

No only is the second list easier for search engines to understand it's easier for humans too, not only to read but to create as the numbers appear automatically!

So make it easy for the search engines and humans and use semantic markup.
For more information visit this page on Future Media Standards and Guidelines from the BBC.

It's Official, Google Is Using Site Speed To Rank Your Site

2010-04-12T08:35:00.005Z

The Official Google Webmaster Blog announced on Friday that Google are using the loading time of your sites as a ranking factor. It's been rumoured for some time, especially when Google announced Google Page Speed and integrated their findings into Google Webmaster Tools, but now we have confirmation from the big G itself. Google are playing down it's impact saying:

Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Even so 1% of sites on a competitive query that returns 750,000,000 results is still 750,000 results. I'm sure everyone would like to rank 750,000 places higher and a few simple optimization tricks can help.

5 simple tricks to speed up load times

1) Optimize your images for the web. Back when we were all on dial-up modems this practise was the norm but it has fallen by the wayside as we switched to big fat broadband connections. With the increase in mobile Internet use, optimised images are again in demand. Most image editing programs have a "save for web" feature that will walk you through the image optimisation process.

2) Reduce code bloat. Cut out some of the bells and whistles on your site if they don't add to the user experience. Chances are they are just slowing your site down for no benefit. Compress javascript and CSS files where possible. Valid, accessible, html code loads far faster than bloated table-dependent code.

3) Use a fast, reliable hosting company. At Denial Design we have optimised our hosting environment to give the fastest response times we can to user requests. We've enabled on the fly compression of various file types to improve loading speeds. Most sites we host have seen a 10 - 15% decrease in load times due to the optimisation of the servers, and all for just £65 a year per site.

4) Avoid "hotlinking" to images. Not only does it earn you the wrath of the original host but it increases load times as extra DNS requests are needed to find the site you've linked the image from.

5) Avoid dead links. Make sure every image, css file and javascript file you link to is present and correct. Load times suffer as the browser twiddles it thumbs waiting for the server to find a file you've linked to that doesn't actually exist. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check your site for dead links.

April Fools from Google

2010-04-01T15:19:00.002Z

Google has 2 April Fools Day jokes running today.
The first, visible on the Google home page, is a link to Google Animal Translate.

Making the world's information universally accessible is a key goal for Google. Language is one of our biggest challenges so we have targeted our efforts on removing language barriers between the species. We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We've always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.

The second, from the Official Google Blog is that Google has changed it's name to Topeka.

Google UK showing site country in SERPS

2010-02-26T16:38:00.003Z

As you can see from the screen grab on the right, Google UK is now showing what country some sites are hosted in alongside the URL. You can see "United States" next to the mashable entry on the screen grab. What does it mean? Frankly I have no idea... AS far as I can tell it's not related to Caffeine as performing the same search on a Caffeine Powered (Caf Pow?) datacentre produces different results and no country codes.

Google tracking clicks again

2010-02-02T16:06:00.004Z

Whilst checking out the competition on Google for "web design prestwich" I clicked a few results and noticed Google has inserted a redirect page between the results and the target web page. You have to be quick to notice it but it's definitely there. The redirect URL is:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=12&ved=0CA8QFjABOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.qype.co.uk%2Fukd31-manchester-prestwich%2Fcategories%2F8-services&rct=j&q=web+design+prestwich&ei=UU5oS-i9G4v-0gS_k420CA&usg=AFQjCNHQWtA8GXpLqL0NhUciYRX7USHMnA

As you can see, that result is for the site "Qype"

If you mouseover the results when they first load you'll see the site's address in your browser status bar, but click on the link and then go back to Google and mouseover and you'll see the Google redirect URL instead. See the before and after screen grabs below:

Why are Google doing this? In December Google announced they were rolling out personalized results for everyone, not just logged in users. Google are tracking what you click and using that data to change the results you see.

Google celebrates Sir Isacc Newton's Birthday

2010-01-04T16:21:00.002Z

The Google home page celebrates Sir Isacc Newton's birthday today with it's first ever animated Google Doodle, and it's all done with JavaScript which makes the first apple in the logo fall. Very nice.

Google integrates real time search.

2009-12-09T21:37:00.003Z

Launched a few days ago in the US and now in the UK, Google has integrated real time search within their search engine results as this search for iPhone demonstrates (see screenshot on the right!). Real time search integrates posts from blogs, news sources, twitter and facebook posts to bring up to the second results. The interface is a bit clunky which is surprising for Google who pride themselves on simple and clean as their new homepage shows. For those of you who haven't seen it the "new" Google homepage has a fade in effect for it's menu items when you move your mouse over the screen.

In other Google news, yesterday's Google doodle featured Popeye to celebrate his creator (E.C. Segar)'s birthday, 8th December 1894. Maybe next year we'll get a Dimebag Darrell doodle?

Google celebrates St. Andrews day with doodle

2009-11-30T13:30:00.002Z

Google celebrates St. Andrews day today with a new Google Doodle (right). Yahoo and Ask haven't bothered whilst Bing has a lovely picture of the Old Man of Stor and the same hidden links they used for Remembrance Day.

New features from Bing and Google

2009-11-12T12:19:00.008Z

Bing have rolled out more features as part of "Bing Wave 2". These include:

Integration with Wolfram|Alpha in the diet and fitness category allowing you to work out your BMI and other useful things.

Improved "hover preview" (where you hover your mouse over an icon and see a preview of a website without actually clicking through to the site) which adds customer service phone numbers, search within this site, a Google Site Links style list of deep links, a screenshot of the webpage and for Facebook accounts you'll see a picture of the account owner, who is in their Facebook network and send them a message or friend request.

Weather / Event results which brings together news, events, xRank results, Twitter feeds, images, Best Match results and content from trusted sites for the Weather / Events results.

Share Search Results on Facebook and Twitter, email to a friend or print results.

The Travel tools have a makeover as well. If you hover over Travel on the homepage you'll see options to search airfares and hotels. Going into the travel category will bring up an Instant Answers box where you can enter your travel dates, starting point and destination and narrow your search to sites that can match this data. City results now include events listings.

Health has received a makeover to make it more organized.

Of course all these options are on the US version of Bing, looks like the UK users will have to wait.

Google's new features include:

World Bank public data such as GDP of Indonesia, internet users in the united kingdom and more. This data is available on Google US and UK (and probably worldwide).

Locking Safe Search in Google Images. Stop your young ones from seeing things they shouldn't by locking Safe Search on which includes a handy graphical clue so you can see from across the room is Safe Search is on. See the video below for more info.

More images Universal search. For example search for digital cameras in Google.com and you'll see a range of images of digital cameras so you can see the variety of makes and models on offer.

"On broader queries, this helps you get a sense of the range of products available to you for the query."

says the Official Google Blog. This feature is not currently active on Google UK.

Google Music Search. Again not available in the UK but I'm sure we'll get it soon. It's probably due to copyright and licensing issues. This feature lets you enter an artist's name, lyrics or song title into Google and you'll be able to preview the song from selected media partners of Google.

There's also a whole host of updates to the Movies search feature, see the Official Google Blog for more information. Again this doesn't work in the UK.

Google have also updated the keywords tool in the Webmaster control panel.

"We'll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful of URLs that contain a specific keyword. The significance column compares the frequency of a keyword to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your site. When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword."

The World Bank data looks to me like Google missed out on a deal with Wolfram|Alpha to Bing so went for the next best thing. Safe Search locking seems like an excellent idea to me and will be very useful in schools and to parents. Personally I can't wait for Google music search to be available in the UK but I imagine the amount of paperwork and feet-dragging by the major labels may delay this for a long time until they can work out how to make a quick buck from it. The improvements to Bing show they're finally serious about search but until UK users get similar features then Google will remain number one in the UK.

Yahoo snubs Armistice Day

2009-11-11T13:03:00.011Z

Today is Armistice day, marking the end of the First World War. Google, Bing and Ask all have commemerative logos / layouts whereas Yahoo has nothing. No poppies, no special logo. Now I don't know if Yahoo had something on Remembrance Sunday but considering this marks the end of one of the bloodiest global conflicts in human history I expected something.

The logos for Google, Ask and Bing are below.

If you mouse over several parts of the Bing image it presents you with facts about Armistice Day, Poppies, World War 1 and related poetry.

Google Caffeine goes live - kinda

2009-11-10T16:20:00.004Z

Google have closed down their Caffeine "sandbox" testing area and have put their new infrastructure in place and live on the Internet just in time for the holiday season. However it seems Google have learnt from the debacle of the "Florida Update" of 2003 and have only put the new, improved Google on one datacenter. Therefore only a small number of Google users will see the new stuff, the rest of us will have to wait. The Florida Update was released just before the Christmas holiday shopping season started and caused a lot of distress as website owners saw their sites plummet in the rankings and therefore sales fell. With the news that Caffeine was going live there was some rumblings of a similar panic occuring with this update. However Google's Matt Cutts has promised that Caffeine won't be rolled out to the rest of the datacenters until the new year and the current roll out is merely for live testing, a sort of "open beta" if you like.

Of course if Google had rolled it out the more skeptical online store owners would have cried foul and pointed to Google's recent release of Google Commerce Search, a paid for inclusion shopping portal, as the reason Google borked the search results. During Florida it was claimed that Google deliberately messed up peoples rankings so they would have no option but to open and Adwords account.

It's finally the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street!

2009-11-10T10:59:00.007Z

As you'll know from our previous posts Google has been counting down the the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street on it's home page all week with a different character every day. Today's ensemble picture (right) is the final doodle in the series as today is the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Sesame Street. The series of images were intended to help the Sesame Workshop and support it's goal of educating children.

Google has released a high resolution gallery of all the images suitable for use as desktop wallpapers, etc. including a behind the scenes look at how today's image was created (right).

Here's a quick run-down of the images they've used so far:
Today - Ensemble
Monday 9th- Count Von Count
Sunday 8th - Elmo
Saturday 7th - Oscar the Grouch
Friday 6th - Bert & Ernie
Thursday 5th - Cookie Monster
Wednesday 4th - Wallace & Gromit on Google UK, selected Sesame Street characters on various international sites.

Of course there are some people unhappy at the repeated use of Sesame Street characters and some people unhappy at the use of Elmo on Rememberance Sunday or the Count on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (although Google.de did have a special logo (right).

Personally I think Google can do what they like whith their homepages and helping educate children is a good way to prevent things like the Berlin Wall and global conflicts happening again.

Ask Jeeves have also put in a little dig via their Twitter account: "I hate to be bitchy but is anyone else bored of Google's Sesame Street logo- I'm all for cookie monster but us Brits are more about Rainbow". Seems you really can't please all of the people all of the time.

Now Google UK has a Sesame Street logo!

2009-11-06T11:48:00.005Z

Following on from our Wallace and Gromit post the other day where we mentioned that most of the other Google sites around the world had Sesame Street themed logos whilst Google UK had Wallace and Gromit, Google UK (and Google France, Spain, Australia, Arabic, Canada, Belgium, Finland, Hong Kong, Hrvatska, Indonesia, India, Israel, Japan, Korea and many more) has a Sesame Street logo today. Again it's celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street but I can't help wondering if Google got their dates wrong as according to the official Sesame Street site the show was first broadcast on November 10th 1969, so Google is 4 - 6 days off.

*Update* Missed this yesterday but Google UK had Cookie Monster on the home page so it looks like Google are doing some sort of countdown to the 40th Anniversary.

And of course don't forget that since 2001 Google has been available in Swedish Chef as well as Elmer Fudd, Klingon, Pirate and Hacker.

Aye up lad we're on Google!

2009-11-04T13:11:00.004Z

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the landmark occassion of man and dog walking on the Moon in the search of cheese. Yes it's 20 years since Wallace & Gromit's Grand Day Out. The doodle is only showing on Google.co.uk.
*Update*
Search Engine Roundtable has a nice round up of today's Google Doodles from around the world as it is also Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary today.

Google experiments with Social Search

2009-10-27T14:23:00.003Z

Google, Bing and Yahoo are all showing twitter content in their search results now but Google have taken things a step further with Google Social Search from Google Labs.

Matt Cutts explains how it works:

Note the emphasis that Matt places on the fact that all this data is already publically available!

Basically Google rounds up your social networking activity (such as Twitter, friend feed, blog subscriptions, picassa and so on) and spiders the hell out of it so it can return stuff from your friends and social connections in the search results pages of Google, if you are signed in to your Google account. Only you will see stuff from your network.

The meta keyword tag is dead.

2009-10-08T14:47:00.002Z

Yahoo! has publically announced it no longer uses the Meta keyword attribute for ranking sites. Apparently they stopped using is a few months ago but today at the SMX East conference's "Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices" seminar, Yahoo Search's Senior Director, Cris Pierry, let slip that Yahoo no longer uses the keywords tag when ranking pages.

So is that it for the keyword tag? Is it now just a part of Internet history? Google has never used it, Bing does not support it and now Yahoo doesn't. Of the major players that only leaves Ask and I can't find any recent concrete evidence that says they use the tag either. The specifications for HTML 5 don't include the keywords name although it has been proposed as an addition.

So should you ignore keywords from now on? Yes, unless you're optimising for a custom search engine for your site or Intranet.

Google's Bar Code logo

2009-10-07T16:26:00.003Z

Today's Google Doodle on the Google home page is a barcode, which when converted into English reads "Google" of course. The doodle is in honour of US Patent 2,612,994 which was issued on the 7th October 1952 for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver described both the linear and bullseye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code.

We also forgot to mention the Google Doodle for Gandhi's birthday on the 2nd October.

Google SideWiki

2009-09-23T15:43:00.002Z

The Official Google Blog has just announced "Google SideWiki" and it looks mighty interesting. Basically this sidebar for your browser (which comes with a new version of the Google Toolbar and is compatible wit IE6+ and Firefox 2+) allows you to see user submitted information about any web page you are visiting.

"Today, we're launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page."

"In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you'll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed."

"Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to."

Sounds like a fantastic way to drive traffic to your own site from related pages. It remains to be seen how Google will cope with business competitors wiki-ing on each others pages and so on. It could be a reputation management nightmare waiting to happen or the best thing since sliced bread. For information and academic sites it seems like a wonderful addition.

New look Yahoo! goes live worldwide!

2009-09-23T09:05:00.003Z

Although we've already had access to Yahoo!'s new look here in the UK and in the US, the redesign and new features are now live worldwide.

At first glance basically everything is purple instead of red. It has a choice of skins or colour schemes to choose from, switch to "compact view" (change the page size so it fits on 800 x 600 monitors by getting rid of the left hand "My Favourites" column) and "Move News To Top", which moves the headlines from Yahoo! News, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Mail to the top of the page. According to the BBC the new look is now "the second-largest source of online traffic to the newspaper's website". Of course Yahoo! are taking a share of the revenue the traffic generates.

Hovering over on of the "Favourites" in the "My Favourites" list brings up a list of headlines from the site if it's a news site, you can watch your eBay auctions from the Yahoo front page, see customized sports results and more. Of course most of the content that appears on the portal page is customizable too, but it seems like an awful lot of effort to set up. Personally I go to Yahoo! for search, not to organize my life. According to Yahoo's senior vice-president for Europe, Rich Riley, surveys suggest that 60% of Yahoo users in the UK want a one-stop shop to organise their life on the Internet. But that's a survey of Yahoo users, not the general public or the average user. Whilst I applaud Yahoo! for listening to it's users I think they should be catering for the mass market rather than the 1% of UK search users who use Yahoo. In a word that means fixing it's search engine rather than investing in skins and customizable home pages.

The new look isn't powered by Bing yet, as the tie-up between Microsoft and Yahoo is still being scrutinized by the regulators. Even if Yahoo! does begin to use Bing, will it bring back the visitors?

There are some nice features about the new Yahoo search. As well as the list of search results you can also search for related MySpace sites and Wikipedia articles from the left hand column, see related searches (like Google has at the bottom of the page), and of course there are sponsored ads. The search suggest tool is still clumsy and shifts the whole content of the page about which I dislike immensely.

Finally we come to "Search Pad". I have absolutely no idea what this does at first glance. I can type notes in it. What these notes do I really can't say. I can re-order them by dragging them but that's it. I have to have a Yahoo! account if I want to save them, although it does seem to remember your search pad entries as long as your session is valid. After watching the tutorial videos I'm still at a loss to explain why I'd need "search pad", surely I can just bookmark the results that interest me?

On the plus side, Yahoo! search retains it's tie up with McAfee Safe Search so you know if a site is safe to visit or not. Unfortunately Safe Search is off by default and you have to enable it in the preferences. Again you need to be signed into your Yahoo! account to make sure the option stays on. I tried to turn Safe Search on, without signing in, and the default preferences say it's already on yet the icon in the search results says it's off. Safe Search also relies on user submissions to tell you if a site is safe or not, unlike Google's malware warnings which are automatic.

So in summary it's all very pretty and purple, but it's still not as fast, relevant or as good as Google and all the bells and whistles aren't going to change that.

Third Martian Google Doodle sighted

2009-09-21T08:43:00.004Z

Google have completed their series of Martian related Google Doodles with this image showing the famous Martian walkers from War of The Worlds. It celebrates H.G. Wells' birthday today (21st September).

The official Google Blog says: "Inspiration for innovation in technology and design can come from lots of places; we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond. And maybe have some fun while we were doing it.

The invasion of the logo by alien crafts and pods makes our series complete, but you'll have to read the book to find out how Wells' story really ends"

Google under attack from UFOs!

2009-09-15T11:06:00.007Z

It looks like Google is under attack from aliens. On the 09/09/09 a UFO beamed up the second O in "Google" and today's Google Doodle shows the L has been taken! Google's twitter feed also had this cryptic message: 51.327629, -0.5616088 which if you put into Google Maps leads you to:

1-7 Woodham Rd
Woking, Surrey GU21 4, UK

Woodham Road was the site of one of the first Martian landings in War Of The Worlds.

The first "sighting" was accompanied by this message on Twitter "1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19" which when replaced by the corresponding letters of the alphabet reads "All your O are belong to us", a reference to "All your base are belong to us" from Zero Wing.

Ask Jeeves is on a mission to be indispensable - Times Online

2009-09-14T14:30:00.001Z

According to the Times Online Ask Jeeves is on a mission to be indispensable. The article highlights the hiring of former Google employee, Cesar Mascaraque, who is tasked with leading a revival of the search engine's fortunes. Mascaraque brought back Jeeves to the UK and it's associated marketing campaign but importantly backed up the hype with major improvements in Ask's core search technology.

“Relevancy — that is, getting the right answers — speed and the site interface — these are what makes a good search engine,” says Mascaraque.

Search times are down from 1.2 seconds to under half a second, relevancy is better and the site's home page is simpler and easily personalized. The "question of the day" feature supplies actual answers rather than just links to sites where you might find the answer. Amusingly today's question is "Am I better than Google?" to which Jeeves answers:
"I'd like to think so, I'll get your questions answered and I'm devilishly handsome even if I do say so myself
If you like numbers you may be interested to know that in a blind trial 81% of users either prefer Ask Jeeves or couldn't tell the difference between Ask Jeeves and Google for the majority of the time*. So why not give me a try."
* Data from a trial conducted for Ask Jeeves by Ipsos Mori on 1000 users
between July 1st and July 14th 2009

The Times reports that Ask is the third biggest UK search engine, with Google dominating 90% of the UK search market, Bing with 6 - 7% and Ask with 3 - 4%, which leaves Yahoo with less than 1%. So is Yahoo on the ropes now? It seems so, as even Yahoo are turning to Google for search solutions, as the recent deal for the BT Yahoo! portal to use Google search shows.

Is bigger better?

2009-09-10T08:41:00.002Z

Google continues to change things around in their never-ending effort to provide a better search service for us. Today's change is called Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! on the Official Google Blog. The home page search bar is bigger, the text you type in the search bar is bigger and the text on the search form buttons is bigger. Looking at it it's about 20% larger so now "you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements" says Googler Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience.

Click image for larger view.

Google needs more caffeine

2009-08-12T13:33:00.003Z

The official Google Webmaster Blog has released details of a major update to Google, code named "Caffeine." Basically "Caffeine" is an update to the search engine's code and although these happen quite frequently this large code update warrents a press release and a bit of hype in their book. Google claims only "power users" will really see the difference and are asking for their feedback on the new infrastructure from them. Currently the update is live only on a testing sandbox address: www2.sandbox.google.com.

This update allows Google to index more documents faster, and display them to you, the user, faster. Of course they have also tweaked the ranking algorithm and the importance of sites such as Wikipedia has been dowengraded very slightly. Universal search has also been demoted slightly, instead of image, news and video results at the top of the page these will usually appear lower down the page on "Caffeine" powered searches. Books and Shopping results are also noticeably absent although these may return once the new code is put onto the live Google servers.

Search Engine Watch blog has some excellent comparison screenshots.

Google's Matt Cutts explains a bit more about the update at the SES Conference in San Jose to Web Pro News:

More WebProNews Videos

Using Alexa for visitor demographics

2009-07-07T14:29:00.001Z

Alexa often gets bad press for it's inaccurate statistics but in many cases it's surprisingly accurate. A quick look at the Traffic Details from Alexa for The Sensualist shows that not only do they have the top keywords exactly the same as Google Analytics reports them but I also discovered some useful marketing data. Alexa shows basic demographic data for your visitors in a series of basic graphs. A quick look will show you the Age, Gender, Education, Browsing Location (home or work) and whether your visitors have children or not, relative to the general Internet browsing population. In The Sensualist's case you can see that males are under-represented, eg the site attracts mainly females, which is good for a lingerie site and that, understandably, most people visit the site from their home computer.

So it seems that whilst the traffic stats may be out the other data seems pretty much on the money and is worth a look if you're after some free demographics information.

Google UK celebrates 25 years of Tetris

2009-06-06T09:31:00.001Z

Google UK have a special logo (Google Doodle) today to celebrate 25 years of Tetris. Originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov, it became one of the most popular and addictive games of all time. Pajitnov was originally a computer engineer for the Soviet Union and as such made very little money from the game because of Communism. The game was based on a board game.

Pajitnov eventually moved to the USA where he worked for Microsoft before joining Wildsnake Software in 2005 and creating puzzle games for the Xbox 360.

A review of Bing

2009-06-01T08:08:00.004Z

Microsoft's Bing is live and in beta and seems to have completely replaced Live Search across the Microsoft network of sites. MSN still sports a "Live Search" graphic next to it's search box but entering a query takes you to Bing.

I did a few comparison tests with the beta version of Bing on some of my recent Google queries and compared the results. Overall Bing performed well. Not quite as on the money as Google and unsurprisingly Microsoft owned sites ranked better for some searches than on Google. For example a search for "HTML 4.0 doctype" returns the W3C site first in Google but the MSDN site in Bing with the W3C coming in a lowly tenth place. Bing does give a nice pop-up snippet box next to each result showing the relevant text from the the search result so you don't have to click through to the site. I can see this ticking off a lot of webmasters if the general public realise this feature is there. It's not immediately obvious and took me a few searches to spot it.

Bing still has a way to go on blended results from first glance. Using my search history again for an example search I typed "blackberry way" into both Google and Bing. Both return the wikipedia article for the song as the top result but Google then shows stills and links to videos on youtube whereas Bing just shows one standard link in it's results. Bing's video search does return a variety of versions of the song though and to my eye is more visually appealing than Google's by a large margin.

Book searches seem to return far too many Amazon results in Bing. For example: a search for "Shadows of the empire" (a Star Wars novel and video game) returns results for the book, the game, the cast list, videos and reviews from the game in Google but 3 results from Amazon in Bing, 2 from the Star Wars wikia and 2 unrelated results.

Results times seem fairly similar, both engines return their results extremely quickly. I imagine Bing would be slower to load on a slow connection as it uses more images but in these days of super fast connections hardly anyone will notice. Search suggestions on Bing is a bit more limited than on Google but I'm sure that will change as more people use Bing and Microsoft have more data to feed into the suggestion box.

So in conclusion, Bing may look prettier than Google but Google is still king of the castle, for now... Bing is a good step forward by Microsoft and given a few more tweaks and a bit more work may yet challenge Google's dominance.

Google Search Options

2009-05-28T16:04:00.007Z

Google has added an extra feature to it's search results that they're calling "Search Options". The options take the form of a link near the top of the page that toggles an sidebar with extra options to refine your results.

Clicking the link shows options to choose between video, forum and review results, by time scale, to show images from the pages or more text and finally my personal favourite options where things get a bit more interesting.

The last set of choices are:

"Standard View" - the basic Google results view

"Related searches" - the suggestions you sometimes see at the bottom of the search results page

"Wonder Wheel" which appears to show related search terms in a wheel shaped diagram which then spin off to show other related terms. Perfect for researching keywords and semantics!

And finally there's "Timeline" view which shows a potted history of the thing you're searching for, in our example it's a timeline of the light bulb, from Edison to the present day.

Seems I'm not exactly on the ball here as Google's Matt Cutts showed this feature on the 12th May on his blog!

Introducing Bing!

2009-05-28T16:02:00.001Z

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer revealed Bing! to the world tpday at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier today and now the Live Search Blog introduces the rest of us to the sound of found: Bing!.

"Today we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine." says the blog entry.

"Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days."

Personally I'll be interested to see if it produces relevant results, is easy to use and helps me find things quicker. In other words all the things Live Search doesn't do!

Topsy - New search engine

2009-05-28T15:47:00.001Z

Topsy launched earlier this week claiming to be a "search engine powered by tweets" and promising "a new way of looking at the Internet". "Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations" it claims, "When you search for something on Topsy, such as "free music", it finds snippets of conversations that match what you're looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to, when they're talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them."

Basically it seems to return a series of blog posts that people have linked to on Twitter. Topsy also seems to search Digg, Flickr, Yelp, blogs and other communities in an attempt to return results that are relevant now. However a search on Manchester United returned a stram of stories talking about "tonight's final against Barcelona" when the final was last night so their results are already out-of-date. Compare the same search on Google news or Twitter itself and you'll find pages of up to the minute news, articles and blogs.

So it seems Topsy has some way to go yet. Whether they'll make a dent into Google's 90% market share remains to be seen.

D7: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz | John Paczkowski | D7 Highlights | AllThingsD

2009-05-27T21:12:00.000Z

Highlights of the Q & A session with new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at the D: All Things Digital conference. Some interesting things said, looks like Yahoo! could be slimming down over the next few months. Good to see that they seem to know what the problems are (except for thinking that people use Yahoo, which most people don't).

Search With KISS

2009-05-25T19:13:00.001Z

This is probably one of the oddest search engine stories I've seen but rock band (and personal faves of mine) KISS have teamed up with Google and Ask to create Search With KISS!
Search the web using www.searchwithkiss.com and receive results from Google & Ask.com.
Swag Bucks are periodically awarded as you search the web. Redeem your "Swag Bucks" for exclusive Kiss products and more in the Swag Store.

Only UK, Canadian and US residents can register at the moment.

Interestingly Search With Kiss seems to return a very limited number of results, for example a search for "kiss" returns just 33 results compared to 224,000,000 on Google. And of course they're all about the band. The search engine is powered by InfoSpace, a meta search engine that collates the results from various engines, in this case Ask and Google.

Tip of the Week: McAfee SiteAdvisor

2009-05-25T13:20:00.004Z

This is the first of a new (hopefully) weekly series of posts to help your site in the search engine rankings and gain more visitors. Todays top tip is to submit your site for McAfee SiteAdvisor testing. It's free and almost instant and gives feedback on whether McAfee, one of the leading online security companies knows of any security problems with your site. Used in addition to Google Webmaster Tools this site can help you to really cover your bases and find out if your site is hosting malware or other nasties, if you've been flagged as a spammer and more.

How can this help your search engine rankings you ask? Well those clever folks at Yahoo are integrating McAfee SiteAdvisor information into their search engine results pages (SERPS) as seen on the screen shot to the right. It goes without saying that a safe site will inevitably get more clicks than an unsafe site as the screen shot below for warez (illegal downloads) sites shows. You can clearly see the warning mark from McAfee on the first result in the image below. This was the second page of results, the first page all featured "clean" results.

So this week's top tip: Show your site is secure, build trust, gain rankings and clicks.

SEO News round up

2009-05-24T09:45:00.005Z

It's been a hectic week here at Denial Towers so I've not been able to blog about this week's stories so I thought I'd do a quick round up of the SEO news headline.

Microsoft will unveil their new look search next week at the D: All Things Digital conference before going live at the SMX Advanced conference a week later. Developed under the codename "Kumo" there has been speculation as to what Microsoft will call this new search technology. Will it use an existing brand like Live or MSN Search or even it's codename, Kumo? Or something else entirely new like Sift, Hook or Bing? Sift.com is owned by someone else and Microsoft's Sift seems to be a mobile search platform, Hook.com is also already taken which leaves us with Bing. Bing.com is owned by Microsoft but Google's Matt Cutts posted on Twitter that the US Trademark Office rejected the application due to the fact a similar mark is already registered to Bing Mobile Inc.

Yahoo is also getting ready to revamp their search. Apparently they want to get rid of the "10 blue links" and change to a system they are calling "WOO", or Web Of Objects" instead of the current "Web Of Pages". WOO is an attemopt to return "a better representation of the “real world” in search results. In other words: more closely aligning user intent with search results and mapping those to real-world tasks." and will include multi-media elements.

Yahoo have also been singing the praises of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey (which is now 1 year old).

Google are changing the way Google Suggest works (the drop down that suggests queries as you type). See the Official Blog for more information.

And finally Google founder Larry Page is at today's Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix as a guest of Vodafone (and by extension, Ferrari who Vodafone sponsor). Maybe Google are looking at some sort of deal with Vodafone or maybe Mr. Page is just trying to score a new Ferrari!

Wolfram Alpha is live

2009-05-16T12:22:00.006Z

Following on from last night's live launch, Wolfram Alpha is now live. I've had a quick play and it seems very good at what it does. Wolfram Alpha is mainly a "fact engine" and the usage examples on the home page reinforce this with questions such as "population France/Germany" and prompts to enter dates such as my birthday. Entering a date brings back a lot of facts for that date. In my example it says that I was born on a Monday, exactly how many days have passed between then and now and any notable events such as births, deaths and historical events such as D-Day. It even tells you the phase of the moon on that day! The most impressive part is the ability to download the data as either a PDF or a NB file for Wolfram's Live Mathematica.

Wolfram Alpha seems to be running at maximum load, probably due to all us search engine geeks hammering their servers! Amusingly if Alpha can't perform a task it returns "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that...", a reference to HAL in 2001:A Space Odyssey of course.

While Alpha is obviously of use to students and academics it remains to be seen whether the general public will embrace it in great numbers.

Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight!

2009-05-15T16:47:00.002Z

Over the past few weeks we've mentioned Wolfram Alpha a few times and we're pleased to annouce that it goes live tonight at 7pm CST (that's midnight for us Brits I think!).
You can watch the launch too as they bring it online for the first time!

Google adds "Rich Snippets"

2009-05-14T09:21:00.003Z

Google has updated their results pages with an improvement to the "Snippets" area of the results. The "Snippet" is the short description of a page under each result, usually taken from the page itself but occassionally pulled from DMOZ or the Google directory. The New "Rich Snippets", seen on the right add extra information pulled from the page and currently covers people and reviews.

Now here's the best part, by utilising certain markup formats (microformats and RDFa), you can control the data that Google shows. "By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google's search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we're excited about the possibilities." says Google Engineers Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, and Othar Hansson in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Rich Snippets also support existing vCard and hReview types."Sites that use Google Custom Search will be able to define their own types, which we will index and present to users in rich Custom Search results pages."

The new "Rich Snippets" will be rolled out gradually and improved as Google recieves feedback.

Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”

2009-05-04T15:31:00.001Z

The well respected Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has published a very in-depth and interesting article about The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” as he's calling it. As you may know from previous posts, Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram and uses a collated set of publically available data to provide answers to questions, rather than pointing you to the answers to your question like Google and Ask Jeeves do.

Danny covers the basic functionality of Wolfram Alpha in his article before raising some very interesting points about it's future such as funding and whether people will actually use it:

"For reasons I’ve never seen fully researched or explained, people simply do not go to specialty search tools in mass numbers. Even at Google, the percentage of people going directly to its image or local search services is appallingly small, which has why it has made such an effort with universal search & blended results."

Can Wolfram Alpha overcome this? As "unlike Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha likely won’t get a chance to rank in Google’s own results. There’s no set number of pages that Google can crawl, though it will be interesting to see if some pages start getting listed if people link to specific searches (if someone links to a Wolfram Alpha search request, that might generate a page that Google and other search engines can read)."

Only time will tell, but hopefully we'll all get to have a play later this month as Wolfram hopes to launch the engine before the end of May.

Technology Review: TR10: Intelligent Software Assistant

2009-05-01T15:03:00.001Z

I've just been alerted by Live Search's Twitter to this article:
Technology Review: TR10: Intelligent Software Assistant.

Silicon Valley start up company Siri are working on a virtual personal assistant to help users complete tasks rather than simply searching for things.

"Mindful of the sometimes spectacular failure of previous attempts to create a virtual personal assistant, Siri's founders have set their sights conservatively. The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context. Siri is connected to multiple online services, so a quick interaction with it can accomplish several small tasks that would normally require visits to a number of websites. For example, a user can ask Siri to find a midpriced Chinese restaurant in a specific part of town and make a reservation there."

Sounds somewhat similar to Wolfram Alpha which we've covered before.

Start placing bets now on how long it'll be before Microsoft buy Siri. If they're tweeting about it, maybe they're keeping a close eye on it too?

Moving hosts but worried about losing rankings? Google has the answer.

2009-05-01T14:54:00.001Z

If you are moving hosting companies and want to avoid any problems with Google rankings here's a few tips:

1) If possible don't move your domain name to the new host until the site is up and running on the new host.

2) If that's not possible then John Mueller's Twitter Tip of the day: "If you have a generic "your site will be hosted here soon" page, use "noindex" or 503 result code, thanks!" could be the answer.

A site owner recently posted in the Google Webmasters Help Forum about a loss of rankings after moving hosts. Google's JohnMu had this to say:
"It looks like your site might have shown a generic server start page for a while (a "This is the default ... server page. (...)" page). When this happens over a few crawls, it can confuse Googlebot enough to cause problems with the indexing of your pages. At the moment it appears that this is no longer happening, so I imagine it'll just resolve itself automatically over time."

Combined with John's Twitter post he's given us the answer, add the relevant status code or noindex if possible and all will be sorted.

Google commemorates Samuel Morse's birthday.

2009-04-27T16:33:00.002Z

Google reminds us all it's Samuel Morse's birthday today (27th April, 1791). Morse of course invented Morse Code and the logo is a representation of Google in Morse code.

Google makes it easier to find yourself

2009-04-22T08:09:00.000Z

The Official Google Blog details how to truly find yourself on Google by simply performing a "Search for "me" on Google"

"It's no secret that from time to time many of us have searched on Google for our name or someone else's. When searching for yourself to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren't always what you want people to see — whether it's someone else with your name, or the finishing time from that 5K you ran back in 2002. We want to make that better and give you more of a voice.

To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we've begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We've also added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn." reports Brian Stoler, a Google Software Engineer.

As he says, it's only available on US searches at the moment but I'm sure it won't be long until it's rolled out worldwide (unless the privacy nuts have something to say about it!)

The Return of Jeeves

2009-04-20T18:28:00.001Z

Jeeves is to make a UK only return to Ask.com this week according toThe Guardian and other sources. Three years after being put into retirement, PG Wodehouse's famous butler character Jeeves is returning to help UK users with their searches and to help Ask take on the might of Google.

A national TV, press, radio and online campaign will kicks off this week to revive the butler after research showed that 83% of UK consumers still referred to Ask.com as Ask Jeeves, a name it ditched over 3 years ago in a re-branding exercise. Jeeves has been made over by Saville Row tailors Gieves & Hawkes while the ad campaign has been masterminded by Hanft, Raboy and Partners. The campaign includes adverts tailored for popular shows such as Hell's Kitchen which features Jeeves and asks "why do onions make you cry?"

Jeeves will also gain a Twitter and Facebook profiles showing pictures from his 3 year hiatus. The TV ads start tomorrow but Jeeves is online now and waiting for your questions, such as "Why am I back?.

Official Google Blog: Google becomes more local

2009-04-07T09:16:00.000Z

Official Google Google becomes more local as it rolls out more local search results. Previously you'd get Google Local listings in your search results if you typed in something like "dentists in Manchester", now Google have rolled out worldwide a feature that will return local listings for non-geographic specific searches like "dentists."

Google guesses where in the world you are based on your computer's IP address and returns results relevant to that location. I guess if you're using some kind of proxy server you could potentially see some strange results being returned.

Anyway it's good news for small local businesses as they'll automatically be at the top of the search engine results now without spending money on SEO. However a well optimised local listing can also help!

CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

2009-04-01T08:51:00.000Z

Google rolls out AI for Google Search! Nicknamed CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity it is already influencing results and other Google properties such as Blogger. In fact it's created it's own blog based on it's analysis of social media!
The developers say: "These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken."

Are we all doomed? Has Google really become Skynet?

Happy April Fools!

Two new improvements to Google results pages

2009-03-25T13:35:00.000Z

The Official Google Blog details two new improvements to Google results pages. The first is:

More and better search refinements: "we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page)."

And the second is longer snippets for search results (the descriptive text that appears under the web page title in the search results).
"When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page."

I did a quick test using the example given in the blog, "earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun" and I did get a longer snippet on Google UK for a few results.

Good to see Google aren't ignoring their core search functions and are still finding ways to improve the user experience.

Google celebrates the first day fo spring with a new doodle

2009-03-19T23:29:00.004Z

Google UK celebrates the first day of spring with a special Google doodle by Eric Carle based on his hugely successful "The Very Hungry Caterpillar
" book.

*UPDATE* Search Engine Round Table has posted the logos from other search engines, except Yahoo!

Google Maps Streetview UK

2009-03-19T11:37:00.002Z

It's not often I write about a non-search related part of the Google empire but I'm excited that Google street view has finally launched in the UK. Now we can zoom down our own streets like Manchester's Oxford Road and see the Manchester Academy up close or anywhere in 25 UK cities that were rolled out yesterday.

The BBC reports that there's a hidden Wally from Where's Wally somewhere in one of the cities...

The full list of cities:
Aberdeen
Belfast
Birmingham
Bradford
Bristol
Cambridge
Cardiff
Coventry
Derby
Dundee
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Leeds
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Manchester
Newcastle
Norwich
Nottingham
Scunthorpe
Sheffield
Southampton
Swansea
York

2009 St. Patrick's Day Search Logos

2009-03-17T15:06:00.000Z

Search Engine Roundtable has an excellent round up of the 2009 St. Patrick's Day Search Logos from the major search engines and search related forums.

British scientist to launch Google killer?

2009-03-09T23:30:00.000Z

Stephen Wolfram, a British scientist, is set to launch a new search engine in May 2009 called Wolfram|Alpha. Utilising Wolfram's Mathematica and NKS inventions, Wolfram and his helpers created a system that "knows a lot and can figure out a lot".
"With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything, as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules," according to Wolfram's blog.

"Armed with Mathematica and NKS I realised there's another way: explicitly implement methods and models as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."

The system supposedly understands natural human language queries. But then didn't Ask Jeeves promise that back in the day? We'll see if it works in May! Could this be a Google killer? The last search engine claiming this title Cuil seems to have fallen off the radar of late until it announced a makeover recently along with some technical tweaks like ajax page turning, also trialled by Google recently.

Google trumps Yahoo! and Live for speed and relevancy

2009-03-06T11:30:00.003Z

As an avid Formula 1 fan I've been closely following the fate of the old Honda F1 team after Honda announced on the 5th December that it was selling the team and pulling out of Formula 1 due to the economic downturn. At midnight last night ex-Honda team principal Ross Brawn announced he had completed a management buy-out of the old Honda team and was renaming the team "Brawn GP". What does this all have to do with the search engines you ask? Well the new Brawn GP website was launched sometime in the early hours of this morning and a quick search on the major UK search engines (Google, Live, Ask and Yahoo!) for "brawn gp" revealed some interesting results.

Predictably Google has got it spot on and indexed and ranked the Brawn GP site within hours of it's launch. It's ranked third at the moment but expect that to change very soon. The index date says it was indexed around 8 hours ago from the time I'm writing this article. It's rankings are probably helped by a link from the BBC Sport website's story about the takeover.

Yahoo has some nice relevant results, mainly news stories about Ross Brawn and a wikipedia entry for him but no Brawn GP website. It's not even indexed.

Ask similarly returns a glut of news results and F1 related sites but no official website.

Live / MSN fails miserably. There are some relevant news results at the top of he SERPS but the main results are atrocious. For some reason it thinks I typed Brown GP so returns sites for a Chartered Accountant (???!), a GUI Package, Pony Club classified ads and pages about Gordon Brown and the health service. Sigh. Until Microsoft work out that this kind of thing is preventing them from dominating search they'll continue to stumble around blindly trying to invent the next big thing when all we want is relevancy and speed. Squirrelled away at the top of the page it does say "Results are included for brown gp. Show just the results for brawn gp." and clicking on this returns some relevant results but again no official site. While Google and Yahoo! both suggest that I may have misspelled something they at least return results for what I've actually entered, not what it thinks I wanted. It's like that damn Office paper-clip all over again...

Google likes green eggs and ham.

2009-03-02T08:32:00.001Z

Google has another special logo today to celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday!

Google celebrates St. Davids Day, no one else bothers.

2009-03-01T15:02:00.003Z

Google continued it's tradition of special logos today for St. David's Day (The Patron Saint Of Wales) but it seems they were the only search engine that bothered. Live, Yahoo and Dogpile all had their normal logos although they usually create special holiday logos or themes. You can guarantee they'll do something for St. Patrick's Day on the 17th though...
The Google St. David's Day logo is below.

Google joins Twitter

2009-02-27T10:27:00.001Z

Google joins the micro-blogging service du jour Twitter (Twitter.com/google) and just a few hours later has 25,279 followers. The tweets so far are mainly links to the existing Google blogs but it's nice to have everything in one place.

Yahoo and Live Search also have twitter accounts but far less followers (4,567 and 1,334 respectively) showing that it dominates even this area of the Internet. They still have a long way to go before they pass Stephen Fry in number of followers though (239,321)!

I will be watching with interest to see what nuggets of useful search information they let out. There's an interesting Tweet by Matt Cutts responding to the question of why the brand new Google Twitter page already has Page Rank. Apparently the account was registered unofficially in 2007 and Google have just taken it over. Wonder how much they paid for that? And don't forget to follow me on Twitter.

Google launches YouTube Webmaster Help Channel

2009-02-24T09:51:00.000Z

Google's Webmaster Tools Help Team are planning to roll out a series of videos to help webmasters and have launched their own YouTube Channel to keep the videos all neat and tidy. The first video is up, Matt Cutts "State of the index" address.

Yahoo! Search Results now with added video and images!

2009-02-20T13:52:00.000Z

Yahoo! has launched it's new look search results complete with image and video results on Yahoo.com as seen on this search for pedigree. A quick search on Yahoo UK for pedigree shows we don't have it over here yet.

All about bounce rate

2009-02-17T23:54:00.000Z

The official Google blog has posted the first in a series of articles aimed at helping you understand your website performance, mainly through the use of Google Analytics. The first article by Avinash Kaushik, entitled "Stop bouncing: tips for website success" is up now and offers a simple insight into Bounce Rates and how to use it identify which of your visitors are bouncing, where they are being referred from and some tips to improve your site's Bounce Rate.

Google helps you sort your duplicate content

2009-02-13T09:52:00.001Z

Firstly let me apologise for not posting more often!
Secondly, Google has specified a way in their Official Google Webmaster Central Blog for you to "Specify your canonical", or in layman's terms, say which of your duplicate content pages on your site is the original.

Whilst it's not a problem for any of the sites I look after or run (I think it's so much easier just to avoid the whole duplicate content minefield, and why would you want the same content on several pages of your site anyway?) at least I can tell you all that there is a way to fix it.

Add the following code to all the pages the duplicate content appears on, changing the URL to your preferred version of the content: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish">

This tells Googlebot that although a page may have the same content as another page, Googlebot knows which is the "proper" version of the page.

But as I said earlier, surely it's easier to just avoid the whole situation in the first place.

Google updates Analytics Dashboard

2008-11-12T13:42:00.000Z

Google has updated it's already excellent Analytics package with a makeover of the Accounts Overview page. Once you've logged in you'll be greeted with a list of all your Analytics accounts in one easy to reads table with quick access to comparison data such as increases or decreases in visitor numbers, bounce rates, conversions, goals, etc. Each view can be customized to show comparisons by day, week, month or year. You can also filter the view to show only websites you've "starred", eg: you click on the star icon to select them instead of those boring checkboxes.

The screenshot below shows the new look interface:

Wordtracker launches Keyword Questions tool

2008-11-10T16:48:00.000Z

Wordtracker have launched an extremely useful keyword research tool, Keyword Questions. If you've ever wondered what questions people are asking in your industry on search engines then this tool has the answers. Simply type in a keyword for your industry, for example: "safety" and the tool will return a list of questions people have entered into various search engines containing your phrase. For our example word "safety" the tool returns such questions as "why is internet safety important", "why is safety important", "what is the meaning of safety", "why is workplace safety so important", "health and safety what you need in the workplace" and many more. Obviously the more obscure the phrase the less results you'll get.

This tool could easily take some of the guess work out of keyword research and if you're looking for articles to write this could give you the title you need to get started.

Google Updates Image Search

2008-11-07T17:13:00.001Z

Google Image Search now features a new function to help you refine what you're searching for. Next to the drop down for image sizes there now appears a drop down allowing you to filter results by faces, news content or photo content. Very useful!

Google helps Paddington Bear celebrate his 50th Birthday

2008-10-13T16:15:00.000Z

The Google UK homepage today shows a special logo dedicated to none other than Paddington Bear. Today (13th October 2008) is Paddington's 50th birthday and in keeping with Google's policy of commemorating special events by creating special logos to mark world events, Google has created this version of the Google logo featuring the bear from darkest Peru.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

2008-10-10T15:49:00.000Z

Following Yahoo!'s recent acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo! have launched their competitor to Google Analytics at Yahoo! Web Analytics. Yahoo! Web Analytics, like Google Analytics is free but boasts real-time analytics as opposed to 24 hour delayed tracking offered by Google.

Apparently the package is currently only available to Yahoo! Small Business customers who host e-commerce sites on Yahoo and Yahoo! Custom Solutions/Yahoo! Buzz Marketing advertising partners.

The IndexTools package that Yahoo! Web Analytics is based on was $400 a month so that gives you some insight into how powerful a tool this could be when used correctly. I certainly be trialling it in the near future so watch out for a compare and contrast article to follow!

Google launches new "Submit Your Content" guidelines

2008-09-29T09:40:00.000Z

Google has updated it's guidelines on how to "submit your content" to Google. Basically they've detailed a 3 stage process for webmasters:
1) Submit an URL for inclusion in Google's index.
2) Submit a stiemap through Webmaster Tools.
3) List your business in Local Business Center.

Also supplied are links to various other means of adding content to the Google index such as through YouTube, the Book Search program, Google Base (for shops), Travel and much more.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

2008-09-23T11:28:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has a very interesting post on "Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs" and how Google deals with them as well as demystifying some of the rumours surrounding dynamic URLs.
The article starts by explaining the basic difference between the two types of URL and goes on to explain that, yes, Google can crawl and index dynamic URLs and has been able to do for a very long time. Personally I've known that and observed it in practice for several years whilst performing SEO on Action Figure Supplies, a site that uses dynamic URLs and has a very large number of number 1 rankings on all the major search engines.
A few parts of the article in particular caught my eye:
"One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It's always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static."

And...

"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases... However, if you're using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good."

These recommendations certainly underline the results of a recent experiment I did with URL rewriting on a client's site, Rainbow Signs and Safety. I installed a third-party rewriting module into the customer's third-party shopping cart software to create "SEO friendly URLs" which I hoped would help improve the site's rankings for it's sub-pages and large product catalogue. Basically it took URLs such as:
http://www.rainbowsafety.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=117&products_id=504
and turned it into:
http://www.rainbowsafety.co.uk/arc62-female-toilets-p-504.htm
Useful as it's putting the product name in the URL, which has to help rankings, right? Wrong. Apart from the numerous sitemap errors that Google Sitemaps threw up (mainly about 302 redirects) and the incorrect stats that Google Analytics reported it also adversely affected the site's rankings. Although the effect wasn't massive, it was noticeable and also happened on MSN and Yahoo rankings as well. So I recently turned the module off and resubmitted the un-rewritten URLs to Google, Yahoo and MSN and the rankings are returning.

Google Chrome - The New Browser On The Block

2008-09-02T00:26:00.000Z

The Official Google Blog team has posted "A fresh take on the browser" which is a teaser for Google Chrome, a new, open-source, browser from Google. Promising a browser that will enable us to use the web browser to chat, watch multi-media content, view email, interact with friends and more, the beta version (windows only for now with a Mac and Linux version in the works) will be released later today.
The team boast that they were "able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers."

Sounds good!

Yahoo! Site! Explorer! Gets! Makeover!

2008-08-22T14:40:00.000Z

Yahoo! Site Explorer has been updated with new features and a slightly new look. The new interface now shows more detail about your sites such as number of pages Yahoo! knows about, the number of pages crawled, number of hosts on this domain name (useful for sites on shared hosting), inbound links and outbound links. The whole thing seems to work quicker than before as well which is a welcome bonus.

Below is a screenshot of the new look interface and statistics panel:

My only gripe is that it's not immediately obvious how to access the statistics from the main dashboard. I had to click the feeds link and then the sub-menu became accessible to me.

Windows Live updates Webmaster Tools console

2008-08-08T09:00:00.000Z

Live Search has updated it's webmasters' tools console with new features. Now those handy folks at MSN (sorry Live Search) can tell you how many backlinks your site has, and also if there are any issues with your site to stop it being indexed. Whilst the interface is not as easy to use, nice to look at or as polished as Google's equivalent it certainly does the job.

A new tab has been added to the console called "Crawl Issues" and this shows a form where you can choose from "File Not Found (404)", "Blocked by REP" (that's Robots Exclusion Protocol), "Long Dynamic URL" or "Unsupported Content Type." There's also an option to filter your results by sub-domain or sub-folder.

The backlinks section has been expanded to now showhow many backlinks you have and the ability to download the data of all the links as a CSV file. However the console itself only shows the first 20 backlinks but there is the option to filter by domain, sub-domain or sub-folder. Downloading the list gives you the same comprehensive information such as page title, url, page score (from 1 to 5), region and language as the console.

Overall a welcome addition to their console and gives me much more reason to use what was a pretty useless application until now. All we need now is for Yahoo! SiteExplorer to start giving us some useful info and all will be good.

Google's advice on: How to start a multilingual site

2008-08-07T21:00:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted an article on "How to start a multilingual site." I'm often asked about multilingual sites and targeting users in other countries and this article by the Google Webmaster Help Team lays out some useful ideas and practices that will help all your hard work creating multilingual articles get indexed by Google and more importantly targeted at the correct user base.

Well worth a read if you've got plans for global domination!

Google Announces PageRank Update

2008-07-25T14:48:00.000Z

Google's Matt Cutts has posted in his blog about a forthcoming PageRank Update:
"Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites."

Good news.

The Local Search Ranking Factors: Ranking High in Google Maps and Yahoo Local

2008-07-09T11:49:00.000Z

David Mihm has followed SEOMoz's example and created a roundtable discussion with local search experts and drawn up "The Local Search Ranking Factors: Ranking High in Google Maps and Yahoo Local."

There's some very interesting theories, tips and tricks in this informative article for small business owners looking to increase their online presence. I expect this will become an ongoing series of articles like Rand Fishkin's Search Engine Ranking Factors.

If you are looking to improve your local listings on Google or Yahoo why not drop me a line and we'll discuss how to improve your company's exposure online.

Improved Flash indexing

2008-07-01T08:33:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has announced Improved Flash indexing. Now Googlebot will see all URLS and text in your Flash files and crawl through your SWF files like a user would; clicking buttons, entering input and so on.
The article also highlights the remaining limitations Google has indexing Flash content, including Flash content in bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Using ALT attributes smartly (featuring Matt Cutts)

2008-06-25T13:12:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has updated with this article about "Using ALT attributes smartly" which details how to effectively use alt attributes (sometimes called alt tags) to optimize your images for search engines, specifically Google in this instance.

Matt Cutts talks us through the use of alt attributes in this video on youTube.

There is some confusion between the use of title attributes and alt attributes. Alt attributes are the correct way to label an image whilst the title tag is used for supplemental information. Accordingly Google, which cannot see images, places more emphasis on the alt attribute than the title attribute. However the title tag is useful and Google suggests you use it if it adds value to your users.

Why your site NEEDS a robots.txt file

2008-06-19T11:53:00.000Z

GoogleGroup's JohnMu recommends in this thread "Site Disappeared from Google & Reconsideration.Request - Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups" that "When we can't access the robots.txt properly (when it times out like this or is generally unreachable), we tend not to crawl the site at all just to be safe."

So make sure that a) you have a robots.txt file and b) it's accessible, otherwise your site may not be crawled by Googlebot at all.

Google Search Update - May 2008

2008-05-07T10:02:00.000Z

Whilst searching for a client's site on Google today I noticed that Google are now pushing their Google Books service in the main SERPS. As this search for "restaurant designers" shows the results are liberally sprinkled with results from books.google.co.uk.

This update also shows a marked downturn in rankings for sites with high numbers of reciprocal links. The last major update started this process and now it seems to be complete with reciprocal links seeming to bear very little weight anymore. Search Engine Roundtable also reports the update has introduced some more improvements to Google's semantic search and the ability to recognise more complex plurals.

Google's VisualRank

2008-04-29T13:45:00.000Z

The Register reports that two researchers from Google recently presented a paper called "PageRank for Product Image Search." The new system uses image recognition software and also seeks to understand what is pictured in the image and assign it to a "visual theme", similar to how the main Google index ranks websites and pages in themes. The images are also run through an iterative procedure based on Google's PageRank computation so a numerical weight (or rank) is assigned to each image. This early version of the algorithm reportedly cuts irrelevant results by as much as 83%.

Google and other image search engines usually rely on the text around an image, it's alt and title attributes and the file name for indexing and ranking purposes and although VisualRank is merely an idea at the moment it seems highly likely this system could be applied to the whole Google images database within the next few years.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites

2008-04-23T10:43:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has this very interesting post on "Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites" and offers some useful information for not only reaching visually-impaired users but also helping the search engines spider your site.

Can mini-sites help your rankings?

2008-04-03T13:59:00.000Z

I'm often asked if mini-sites can help search engine rankings. These mini sites used to be called doorway sites back in the bad old days of SEO but now it seems like the mini-site is making a comeback.
Once upon a time a doorway page or site was a heavily (usually over) optimized page or site that ranked highly for a single keyword or phrase and pointed the user to your main domain, sometimes via a redirect command, sometimes by a hyperlink. Of course the search engines eventually got wise to this practice and banned all the doorway pages and the practice all but died out.
In these times of over-optimization penalties, cross-linking penalties and duplicate content penalties it seemed like the doorway site had no place in the modern SEO arsenal however the doorway site has re-invented itself as the mini-site. By creating multiple, highly-focused, mini-sites you can boost your site's rankings. Of course links from sites that are related to your topic are always useful but there are several things to watch out for:

Don't repeat content that's already on your main site.

Keep your page on theme and focused on one small area of your business or a particular product.

Don't inter-link your mini-sites. Yes it's fine if they all link to your main site, that's the point afterall, but don't try to boost your mini-sites link popularity by linking them all to each other. Down that path lies disaster and poor rankings.

Keep the content fresh, add to or makeover the site from time to time. Make sure the links still work at regular intervals and make sure the spiders keep coming back. Of course blogs are great for mini-sites as they can be highly focused in their subject matter, are easy to set up and they generate fresh content via comments from visitors.

Don't forget to SEO your mini-site! If the spiders don't visit, the site won't be worth anything!

And the evidence for my claims? A client of mine, Safety Services Direct, recently built a number of mini-sites for his Health and Safety site focusing on different aspects and products such as Safety Check Direct, focusing on Contractor Competence Assessments, which is generating some nice backlinks for his main site. I also recently created Safety News and Reviews which also links to Safety Services Direct and another health and safety client of mine. This site takes the form of original articles on health and safety with recommended products on each page deep-linking to the respective clients' sites.

Another client, Cox and Plant, created a series of mini-sites for their ranges of bucket conveyors and other products with great success. Each mini-site ranks well for it's respective keywords and in turn lends some potent link juice to the parent company's site.

In conclusion, as with any site if you stick to the guidelines you won't go far wrong and you'll improve in thos all important rankings.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for making information universally accessible

2008-03-19T11:21:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted these "Tips for making information universally accessible". Written by a visually impaired researcher at Google it offers some simple, common-sense tips to improve your site and also help your search engine rankings at the same time, not to mention opening up your site to thousands of visually impaired web users / potential customers.

The article also shows us Google Accessible Search, a beta product that ranks accessible sites higher than their non-accessible equivalents. Of course in a perfect world where every site was web standards compliant and accessible such a feature would not be needed but unfortunately whilst we still have WYSIWYG editors that created non-standard code or use their own proprietary code there will always be a need for accessible search engines.

Denial Design aims to make all the sites we develop as accessible as possible and to W3C web standards. For more information visit our accessibility page.

Yahoo Layoffs Begin As Microsoft Bid Rebuffed

2008-02-14T15:57:00.000Z

ABC News reports that the Yahoo Layoffs Begin. Up to 1000 Yahoo! employees are being laid-off as part of job cutbacks. The news comes just a few days after Yahoo! rejected a bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. News then emerged that Yahoo! may ally itself with AOL in a bid to fight off the Microsoft takeover. Although in my opinion this could be a very bad move given the company's track record with other firms such as Netscape.

Optimizing using one way links only

2008-02-05T11:44:00.000Z

I've recently been experimenting with optimizing a site using just one-way text links and am having some success. Using a mix of social bookmarking sites and directory submissions I have been able to get a site ranked in the major search engines with absolutely no on-page optimization. The site ranks for phrases such as "central heating", "central heating supplies", "towel radiators" and "towel rails" which are fairly competitive terms. Now I just need to work on "gas boiler" and "gas central heating"... And of course the deep links in this post should help ;)

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search

2007-12-23T11:33:00.000Z

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog recently featured meta tags and web search which includes some interesting information about meta tags, their correct usage and how useful to Google each tag is. Interestingly there is no mention of the keywords meta tag...

MSN drops link command again

2007-12-18T11:07:00.000Z

I noticed today during my monthly link popularity check of my clients' sites that MSN / Live Search have stopped their link command working again.

Google Toolbar Updates to Version 5

2007-12-15T17:19:00.000Z

The official Google Blog has announced the next version of Google Toolbar is available for Internet Explorer. The new features are explained in the video below:

Interestingly they've kept the PageRank indicator despite rumblings that it would be phased out. Hopefully an updated Firefox version won't be too long.

The World of Star Wars

2007-11-29T08:56:00.000Z

Yahoo and Lucasfilm have teamed up to present a new site they are calling Y2-D2 or The World of Star Wars. a combination of Star Wars and Web 2.0. The new site will connect fans and include "a daily update of new and exclusive content - from videos, photos, events, and blogs - and a fresh new look at tagging and community involvement to seamlessly connect characters, places, ships, weapons and more."
Star Wars fans can create their own profiles and get involved with the creation of this site and it's sure to be an authority site for all things Star Wars so will be an excellent place to link to your Star Wars related sites or stores.

Holiday cottage in Harlech, near Snowdonia, North Wales

2007-11-26T10:49:00.000Z

At this time of year it's important for certain sectors of business such as the travel and tourism industry to start thinking about next year, specifically next year's bookings in the case of the travel industry. Most spring and summer holiday breaks are booked in the first few months of the year, straight after the Christmas and New Year holidays. With more and more holidaymakers booking or researching holidays online now is the time to focus on your website in time for the new year rush. One of Denial Design's new clients rents out his holiday cottage in Harlech, near Snowdonia, North Wales and realises the importance of looking ahead so is looking for high search engine rankings by the beginning of the year to get maximum bookings for the year ahead.
Denial Design's UK search engine optimization service can help your site achieve high organic results for just £34.99 a month. Take advantage of our service now to get high rankings for January and February.

Google unveils gOS

2007-11-21T14:22:00.000Z

Google has revealed it's operating system "gOS" to the world. Currently in the alpha stage of development it's avaliable for download for developers and early-birds. There's also a $199 Walmart exclusive gOS enabled PC available, bargain!

Live Search Webmaster Center goes Live!

2007-11-14T13:50:00.000Z

Microsoft has opened up it's Live Search Webmaster Center as a public beta. Unfortunately and predictably you need a Windows Live account to sign in. Once in however the interface is simple, straightforward and looks easy to use, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. Upon adding a site for the first time you receive the ever-so-helpful error message "Sorry, something went wrong" and an authentication error. However you can't authenticate your site without first adding your site, which doesn't work.

Microsoft's Live Search link command lives again!

2007-11-13T10:44:00.000Z

Live search has re-enabled it's link function after many, many months and this time it has a slightly different syntax. A search for "+linkdomain:www.denialdesign.com" returns a linkdomain result and a search for "+link:www.denialdesign.com/link-popularity.asp" returns the results for the number of links to a particular page. I've updated the Denial Design free link popularity check tool to match. A word of warning however, Live Search does seem to give different results for the same search. The first time I checked denialdesign.com had 109 back links and the second time a few minutes later it had 116, so it seems the function returns a rough result only or the number of links on the particular datacentre your query reaches.