Search Engine Optimization-Social Media Optimization-Internet Marketing

Happy 4.04 Day!

pinkyseo — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:58:57 +0000

Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day — even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser requests a web page that the web server doesn’t have.

If you have no idea what a status code is, start with these two posts about HTTP Headers and what they mean, followed by an introduction to common status codes used by web servers.

A few months ago, Maile Ohye organized a “404 week” on the Google webmaster blog. You can learn what a 404 is, how to make a 404 page more useful, why you should avoid “soft” or “crypto-404s”, plus read some Q&A about 404s and see examples of good 404 pages

There’s also a great feature in Google’s webmaster portal to show you who links to the 404s on your site.

Happy 404 day! Today is best celebrated by making 404 jokes with friends (“404 error: beer not found”), posting pictures of good 404 errors, and general merriment.

Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

pinkyseo — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:55:05 +0000

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search somewhere else. Luckily, due to an April Fool’s joke about the Mentalplex, you can still see what these links looked like:

Many of these search engines consolidated or changed focus over time. Plus I’m guessing that every search engine in the world wanted to be on the list, which must have been really annoying for whichever Google person had to maintain that list of links. I think the list of other search engines dwindled down and eventually Google just turned the feature off.

Recently I was describing this feature to Tiffany Lane, another engineer at Google, and she had a great idea. Why not recreate this search feature on Google with modern search engines and websites? Because of the pain of maintaining an “official” list, we probably couldn’t turn this on for every user (plus not every user wants a lot of extra links added to their search results). But why not provide a completely unofficial option that people could install?

Thus was born Retro Links, which is a Greasemonkey script to add new search options to Google’s search results page. When Retro Links is installed, it looks like this:

Unlike the original feature, Retro Links lets you select which search engines to show from 42 different websites and search engines, then saves those preferences. It’s also very easy to add a new search engine in the JavaScript file.

Installation

Get Retro Links here: http://www.mattcutts.com/retrolinks/retrolinks.user.js

To install Retro Links you will need to be using Firefox and have Greasemonkey installed. Once Greasemonkey is running then you can click on the link above and you will be prompted to install the script. To see that it is working you can do a Google search – the links will be inserted near the bottom of the Google search results page.

Configuration

Configuring Retro Links is really simple. Suppose that you want to change the default Amazon link to search on Yelp. Just click on the [+] link to the right of the search engines and select Yelp from the drop-down box:

When you’re happy with your search engines, click the “Save” button to save your preferences.

Questions

What if the site I want is not one of the 42 options?
You can add more sites to the options by making a simple code change. To edit the code go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage User Scripts, select Retro Links and click the Edit button. Simply add the name and url of the new site to the RL_LINK_OPTIONS array, following the examples that are already there.

How do I turn on/off the update notification?
The script checks to see if a newer version is available once per day. If an update is available a red box will appear in the bottom right corner of the page with a link to download the latest version. If you want to stop checking for updates go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> User Script Commands and select Retro Links -> Never check for updates. To start checking again select Retro Links -> Check for updates daily.

Disclaimer

Finally, Tiffany wanted to make sure that I included this quick disclaimer: “Retro Links is not an official Google project. I chose which links to include based on my personal preferences and web surfing habits. These decisions do not represent the opinions of my employer.” Tiffany, thanks for writing this great script!

Local news in more places

pinkyseo — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:50:00 +0000

Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and this week we launched this feature of Google News to users in the UK, India, and Canada.

Local news sections let you keep track of current events in your area. We analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results, and our rankings also take into account a publication’s location to promote local sources for each story.

To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city, state, or postal code in the local search bar, shown here:

If you don’t see this section, you can also set up your local news by clicking “Personalize this page” on the top right of the page. On the menu that comes up, click “Add a local section”:

Once you’ve clicked the link, you’ll see a place to enter a postal code or city. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you’d like to see. To finish, click “Add Section” and you’ll see this local section on your personalized Google News page.

New Insights for your Search

pinkyseo — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:52:24 +0000

Some of you may already be familiar with Google Insights for Search, which launched last August.

Much like Google Trends, you can use Insights for Search to analyze search volume patterns over time, as well as related queries and rising searches. You can also compare search trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Insights for Search can help you can analyze everything from interest levels in rival soccer teams to the relative popularity of politicians.

Today the Insights for Search team launched additional features that allow you to see what the world is searching for beyond Google Web Search, by adding new data sources including Google News, Image Search, and Product Search. The new Insights for Search lets you break down search data in several ways. For starters, you can take a look at the rising News searches over the past 7, 30, or 90 days.

You can also view the popularity of a given query across different geographies, from country-level down to individual metropolitan areas. For journalists and newspapers, this feature could be a useful tool to gauge interest levels in different subjects among a reader base.

For instance, with March Madness in full swing, I was curious to see if interest in basketball runs equally high throughout the U.S. I tried a search for “NCAA” queries on Google News over the past 7 days, and found that interest was predictably high across much of the U.S. yet markedly higher in Kentucky, Iowa, and Kansas, as you can see on the map below:

Of course, Insights for Search can’t quite explain these search asymmetries, but they’re interesting to note nonetheless!

To learn more about this new release of Insights for Search, head over to the Inside Adwords blog, or start exploring right away on the Google Insights for Search homepage.

Wordle for Nancy Grace TV Show

pinkyseo — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:56:29 +0000

I recently completed a huge “Media and Journalism” project: I transcribed over 500 hours of the Nancy Grace TV show on CNN. It took a long time, but here is an exhaustive Wordle tag cloud of all the words used in those 500+ hours of television:

It appears that all 500+ hours consist of those six words repeated over in different combinations.

I’m not serious and didn’t really watch or transcribe 500 hours of Nancy Grace. In reality, Nancy Grace uses more and different words. It only feels like every sentence is “little Caylee” or something similar.

The Madness of King Google

pinkyseo — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:59:27 +0000

When Google arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, they came in with a new idea of how to rank pages. Until then, search engines had ranked each page according to what was in the page – it’s content – but it was easy for people to manipulate a page’s content and move it up the rankings. Google’s new idea was to rank pages largely by what was in the links that pointed to them – the clickable link text – which made it a little more difficult for page owners to manipulate the page’s rankings.

Changing the focus from what is in a page to what other websites and pages say about a page (the link text), produced much more relevant search results than the other engines were able to produce at the time.

The idea worked very well, but it could only work well as long as it was never actually used in the real world. As soon as people realised that Google were largely basing their rankings on link text, webmasters and search engine optimizers started to find ways of manipulating the links and link text, and therefore the rankings. From that point on, Google’s results deteriorated, and their fight against link manipulations has continued. We’ve had link exchange schemes for a long time now, and they are all about improving the rankings in Google – and in the other engines that copied Google’s idea.

In the first few months of this year (2006), Google rolled out a new infrastructure for their servers. The infrastructure update was called “Big Daddy”. As the update was completed, people started to notice that Google was dropping their sites’ pages from the index – their pages were being dumped. Many sites that had been fully indexed for a long time were having their pages removed from Google’s index, which caused traffic to deteriorate, and business to be lost. It caused a great deal of frustration, because Google kept quiet about what was happening. Speculation about what was causing it was rife, but nobody outside Google knew exactly why the pages were being dropped.

Then on the 16th May 2006, Matt Cutts, a senior Google software engineer, finally explained something about what was going on. He said that the dropping of pages is caused by the improved crawling and indexing functions in the new Big Daddy infrastructure, and he gave some examples of sites that had had their pages dropped.