Useful Google demographics (& website):
Increase website traffic methods for optimizing press releases from SEO-PR:
Friday, October 17, 2003
A "Fireside Chat" with Google's Sergey Brin: "Sullivan: 'What do you do to go beyond links as a way of improving results?'
Brin: 'There are completely new ranking technologies that we are working on. We try about a half-dozen a month and launch on a limited test basis. We fundamentally work with all of the world's knowledge. There are just different ways to approach that. There are many, many things you can do, and we're not going to exhaust them any time soon. Over time, our searches will only get better.'
Sullivan: 'Will you ever consider supporting paid inclusion?'
Brin: 'You want to keep any kind of payment separate from organic search results. I think it's important to distinguish those things.'
Sullivan asked, 'What do you think remains largely unknown about Google?'
Brin answered, 'The tilde operator,' a new search command that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box. He also mentioned, 'The calculator,' which enables users to solve mathematic problems by entering numeric expressions into the google.com or the Google Toolbar search boxes. The engineer who created the calculator was supposed to be working on our 'spelling system,' added Brin."
Brin: 'There are completely new ranking technologies that we are working on. We try about a half-dozen a month and launch on a limited test basis. We fundamentally work with all of the world's knowledge. There are just different ways to approach that. There are many, many things you can do, and we're not going to exhaust them any time soon. Over time, our searches will only get better.'
Sullivan: 'Will you ever consider supporting paid inclusion?'
Brin: 'You want to keep any kind of payment separate from organic search results. I think it's important to distinguish those things.'
Sullivan asked, 'What do you think remains largely unknown about Google?'
Brin answered, 'The tilde operator,' a new search command that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box. He also mentioned, 'The calculator,' which enables users to solve mathematic problems by entering numeric expressions into the google.com or the Google Toolbar search boxes. The engineer who created the calculator was supposed to be working on our 'spelling system,' added Brin."
Telegraph | News | Bags go by road for travellers on new Virgin trains: "Sir Richard Branson has come up with a novel way to make more space on his overcrowded Virgin trains: send passengers' luggage separately by road and charge them for the 'service'."
Google Guy - URLS & session ids
Google makes inferences about URL paramters: "Google can do some smart stuff looking for duplicates, and sometimes inferring about the url parameters, but in general it's best to play it safe and avoid session-ids whenever you can. ...A session-id lets a site owner give each user a unique identifier. That identifier can reference customer data like the shopping cart contents stored in a database, for example.
Some people would mention that you could use a cookie to do the same thing and keep the urls much cleaner. That's true, but not every user has cookies enabled. Using session-id's is one way to try to guarantee that you know that state of a user, even if they don't allow cookies, for example.
So what's the problem with a session id, and why doesn't Googlebot crawl them? Well, we don't just have one machine for crawling. Instead, there are lots of bot machines fetching pages in parallel. For a really large site, it's easily possible to have many different machines at Google fetch a page from that site. The problem is that the web server would serve up a different session-id to each machine! That means that you'd get the exact same page multiple times--only the url would be different. It's things like that which keep some search engines from crawling dynamic pages, and especially pages with session-ids.
"
Google makes inferences about URL paramters: "Google can do some smart stuff looking for duplicates, and sometimes inferring about the url parameters, but in general it's best to play it safe and avoid session-ids whenever you can. ...A session-id lets a site owner give each user a unique identifier. That identifier can reference customer data like the shopping cart contents stored in a database, for example.
Some people would mention that you could use a cookie to do the same thing and keep the urls much cleaner. That's true, but not every user has cookies enabled. Using session-id's is one way to try to guarantee that you know that state of a user, even if they don't allow cookies, for example.
So what's the problem with a session id, and why doesn't Googlebot crawl them? Well, we don't just have one machine for crawling. Instead, there are lots of bot machines fetching pages in parallel. For a really large site, it's easily possible to have many different machines at Google fetch a page from that site. The problem is that the web server would serve up a different session-id to each machine! That means that you'd get the exact same page multiple times--only the url would be different. It's things like that which keep some search engines from crawling dynamic pages, and especially pages with session-ids.
"
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
New search syntaxes:
Google Help: "' ~' Searches
You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Indicate a search for both by placing the tilde sign ('~') immediately in front of the keyword.
For example, to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, use:
Phrase Searches "
Google Help: "' ~' Searches
You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Indicate a search for both by placing the tilde sign ('~') immediately in front of the keyword.
For example, to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, use:
Phrase Searches "
Google IPO & search wars:
Fool.com: Gunning for Google [Motley Fool Take] October 13, 2003: "according to a recent Barron's article, the IPO market may see fireworks from a Google public offering.
Many forces are driving Google to an IPO. One is a technicality; there is a regulation on the books, crafted in 1934, that forces companies to report to the SEC if they have at least $10 million in assets and 500 shareholders.
Another force: greed. Venture capitalists desperately need to show their investors that they can make some money.
But perhaps the real reason is that Web search has become a war."
Fool.com: Gunning for Google [Motley Fool Take] October 13, 2003: "according to a recent Barron's article, the IPO market may see fireworks from a Google public offering.
Many forces are driving Google to an IPO. One is a technicality; there is a regulation on the books, crafted in 1934, that forces companies to report to the SEC if they have at least $10 million in assets and 500 shareholders.
Another force: greed. Venture capitalists desperately need to show their investors that they can make some money.
But perhaps the real reason is that Web search has become a war."
Ad sense & premium Ad sense explanation:
Contextual Advertising, Part 2 of 2: "Google has two programs for content publishers: AdSense for smaller publishers; and Premium for large ones. Ad Sense is easy for publishers to set up.
Susan's description of the process is as follows: '[Publishers] fill out a form. We [review] their Web site [for quality]. They log in, get a piece of code. They can choose different ad formats, customize the color [and background], and have access to [near real-time] online reporting so they can log in and see how much money they're making.'
Google works directly with larger publishers through the Premium Ad Sense program, and even offers a revenue share. In many instances, Google will actually buy the ad space on a CPM basis."
Contextual Advertising, Part 2 of 2: "Google has two programs for content publishers: AdSense for smaller publishers; and Premium for large ones. Ad Sense is easy for publishers to set up.
Susan's description of the process is as follows: '[Publishers] fill out a form. We [review] their Web site [for quality]. They log in, get a piece of code. They can choose different ad formats, customize the color [and background], and have access to [near real-time] online reporting so they can log in and see how much money they're making.'
Google works directly with larger publishers through the Premium Ad Sense program, and even offers a revenue share. In many instances, Google will actually buy the ad space on a CPM basis."
Monday, October 13, 2003
Overture Services Inc. Investor Relations: "Yahoo! and Overture Announce Completion of Acquisition"
Pandia Search World October 11 2003 On searching
"This means that Yahoo! is now the proud owner not only of its own directory (Yahoo!) and search engine (Inktomi), but also of a pay-per-click text ad provider, Overture, and Overture's two regular search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb.
Overture is expected to merge AltaVista and AlltheWeb into one search engine shortly. It is unclear, however, whether Yahoo! would like to joint the Inktomi and AltaVista/AlltheWeb teams, in order to develop another unified search engine"
Pandia Search World October 11 2003 On searching
"This means that Yahoo! is now the proud owner not only of its own directory (Yahoo!) and search engine (Inktomi), but also of a pay-per-click text ad provider, Overture, and Overture's two regular search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb.
Overture is expected to merge AltaVista and AlltheWeb into one search engine shortly. It is unclear, however, whether Yahoo! would like to joint the Inktomi and AltaVista/AlltheWeb teams, in order to develop another unified search engine"
Sunday, October 12, 2003
Not recommending this tool in particular 9assume the stats could be recovered from site log files....but would be of interest to know how far google spiders & how often it shallow v deep crawls...
If you're interested in tracking spider traffic, Robot Manager Pro
is a killer program. It's a lot of fun to see how many times
Googlebot, for example, visits your site in a month, and how far
down into your site the spider crawls.
http://www.websitemanagementtools.com/robot.html
If you're interested in tracking spider traffic, Robot Manager Pro
is a killer program. It's a lot of fun to see how many times
Googlebot, for example, visits your site in a month, and how far
down into your site the spider crawls.
http://www.websitemanagementtools.com/robot.html
Now here's an absolutely KILLER strategy, compliments of Michael
Campbell (http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com). Go back through
your Web site and change the "home" links pointing back to your
main page to "Keyword Phrase Home." You'll be amazed at what a
difference it could make in your Google rankings. One of our
workshop students did this with her site, and in a two-week time
period, her PageRank went from 6 to a 7! Go for it!
Campbell (http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com). Go back through
your Web site and change the "home" links pointing back to your
main page to "Keyword Phrase Home." You'll be amazed at what a
difference it could make in your Google rankings. One of our
workshop students did this with her site, and in a two-week time
period, her PageRank went from 6 to a 7! Go for it!
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