Posted on April 30, 2012 by Hans Riemer
Google Products
In my last blog post, How to Sync Outlook With Your Smartphone, I mentioned looking at the Android phone and some of the neat features and tools Google offers, mostly for free. It is easy for me to put all of my personal data into Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Picasa, Google maps, etc. In fact, trying to use an Android phone without Gmail is actually quite difficult. So, if you use all of these different applications, what type of data can Google access?
Consider for a moment what Google knows about me if I use all of the offered Google functionality:
- Who I am and where I live
- All of my email addresses and passwords
- My Facebook and Twitter usernames and passwords and, by extension, what’s on my Facebook page, who my friends are, what I’m tweeting and about and who I am following
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who wants the worst website award?
In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.
Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.
For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.
Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)
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Posted on June 28, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Where did my website go?
Over the past couple of years, there’s been a sharp increase in complaints about poor quality websites showing up at the top of Google’s search results. In response, Google issued a software update, known as Panda, on February 23, 2011. The fundamental goal of the Panda Update was to downgrade the rank of websites that didn’t offer users unique, valuable information. One website that was mentioned in this regard was eHow.com, which offers many thousands of how-to guides, and has sometimes been referred to as an example of a “content farm.”
Panda had a powerful effect, banishing many formerly top-ranking sites to second-class status and elevating other, previously lesser known sites, to the top of the rankings. It didn’t have as significant an impact on eHow as Google wanted, so a subsequent release of Panda was made in April.
Panda is the latest escalation in the war between Google, which wants to rank websites by quality and usefulness, and people who want their website to appear at the top of Google’s search results for certain keywords whether they deserve to or not.
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Posted on June 14, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Personal Search Results
Last week, someone emailed me a link to a YouTube video that was recorded at a TED conference. In it, Eli Pariser makes a presentation about “Filter Bubbles” in which he demonstrates how our online behavior causes information providers to “filter” what we’re shown, with the result that we tend to see and hear only what they perceive we want to see and hear. He presents a compelling case and it’s worth the investment of nine minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
Eli, you may recall, is the former executive director of MoveOn.org, which means that I probably don’t share most of his political views, though I do understand his concern about the rapid growth of personalized news search results. However, I’m not so worried about personalized advertising and search results.
Recently, Time Magazine started showing up in my mailbox each week, which was puzzling because I knew I hadn’t subscribed. Then came Rolling Stone. Nobody has claimed credit, although I’ve made some discreet inquiries to several acquaintances and friends to try to identify my anonymous benefactor.
My hypothesis is that someone who knows me is trying to burst a self-imposed Filter Bubble,
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Posted on May 19, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Would you build your house with a Faulty foundation?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call that went something like this: “Hi, we just had our website completely redesigned and now that it’s live, we’d like the site to get more traffic from the search engines. Can you help?”
Of course we can help. But frankly, the correct answer is, “I wish you’d talked to me before you launched the new site.”
It’s a fact that most sites suffer a drop in traffic right after a re-build. Why? Most sites have search rank and traffic for at least SOME non-branded keywords before the rebuild. What often happens next is that they still show up in the same place in the organic search results for a while, but anyone clicking on the listing will land on a 404 error – Page Not Found because the content that Google was pointing to is now located at a new URL which Google doesn’t know about yet.
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Posted on April 15, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
301 redirects
Our previous article How Canonical URL Redirects (301 Redirects) Can Affect Your Search Rankings provided a brief overview of the effects a lack of canonical (301) redirects can have on your search rankings. Today we would like to tell you how to correct this issue on the major platforms.
A couple of notes to mention regarding the following instructions:
o For ASP platforms, you will need to create a script to be executed before the content on each page of the site.
- The Single Page redirects will only transfer one specified page to another individual page.
- For redirects on Apache servers:
o Create .htaccess file on root directory of site
o For sites hosted using Windows, you will need to contact your host provider
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Posted on April 2, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
How many home pages?
Have you noticed that when you type certain URLs, they are automatically redirected? For instance, whether you type market-vantage.com, market-vantage.com/index.php, www.market-vantage.com/index.php or www.market-vantage.com they all resolve to the same URL www.market-vantage.com/. This is called a “Canonical URL Redirect” or a “301 Redirect”. Now unfortunately, a lot of websites don’t have this redirect which can negatively affects their search rankings, though you probably don’t mind if they are your competition.
There are two reasons missing URL redirects is an issue: the page is seen as multiple pages and the “multiple pages” are seen as having duplicate content. Here is a brief look at both of these potential problems.
1. There are a number of different factors search engines look at to determine the page ranking of a website. For instance, Google uses about 200 signals in its algorithm. When Google looks at your home page, one of the elements it looks at is the number of page views your website has received. If your home page comes up as three different pages then, in essence, it may be competing against itself for rankings. So having them all redirect to one page is beneficial.
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