Archive for the ‘Search Engines News’ Category
Saturday, December 31st, 2005 |
Spotted via LifeHacker is this post on how to increase traffic to your blog.
The 3 techniques mentioned there are:
1. Technorati tags. Ok this one is good but not always a valid ideea. It depends on how you formulate your tags and your field of blogging. Not all subjects/tags receive the same traffic and you have to research a lot in order to have maximum profit. Why tags are important:
- some of them are closely monitored through RSS feeds by a lot of people and you get instant traffic after publishing a post.
- due to the fact that Technorati site is extremely SEF they score well on Google (some may argue that this is because of their partnership with Google Adsense but that’s another story).
- Technorati links are clean, without condoms. They might help you as external links. So choose carefully your post’s titles.
2. Feedburner headline animator. Blablabla. Not a bad ideea but for sure not a great one. Instead or complementary you can use personal content aggregators.
3. Trackbacks. A good point if used properly:
- When writing a post check Technorati for others that have approached the same subject. Look for those with many incoming links, they will get you the traffic you want. This is the technique that Techcrunch used on the early posts and now is on the A-List. Best way to do this: Write your post and at the end make a section like “Additional infos” where you put apx 3-5 external links. Don’t forget to send the trackbacks
- Look for those blogs that put trackbacks above regular comments or react fast to market trends.
- Don’t be an idiot. Don’t just write smthg like “X has said this” and send the trackback. Bring your personal view into the post
Beside those above you can use the following too:
- Comments. Comment as much as you can but again avoid being an idiot. Try developing a relationship with the bloggers you are commenting on. Identify valuable posts as on trackbacks
- Use social bookmarking sites for SEO and organic traffic. Barry Schwartz used to do that on Yahoo’s MyWeb but there are at least 5-10 valuable ones. Properly tag your posts of course.
- Inspired by the original post: Use a mischivieng title like “Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days” :). I say that because it may take longer than 30 days but what a hell we are the fast-food/fast-fuck generation and we want to believe is possible. And….it only applies to blogs not to all websites (static ones for examples). If you have a static website though, you can create a blogger account and you can deploy that blog on a directory or a subdomain of your main site.
- Use all the Google Publisher Tools available, especially Google Analytics.
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Saturday, December 31st, 2005 |
We have re-enabled the “Add Profile” feature for a limited number of Google Analytics customers. These customers will be able to add a limited number of profiles to their account. As we continue to expand capacity, the limit will gradually be increased up to the original limit of 50.
Source
It was about time….
Posted in General, Google | No Comments »
Friday, December 30th, 2005 |
Pimp Your Search
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Almost every user and especially peoples from the SEO field, make at least one daily visit to Google. In time all the power searchers feel the need to enhance their experience with useful addons. Fortunately Firefox users have the chance to tune their favourite search engine. Using an ego search, here is my personal list of Google steroids:
This will give you acess to Google Personalized Search. Using this you will get:
- View and manage your past searches.Browse and search over your past searches, including the web pages, images, and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can remove items from your Search History at any time.
- Create bookmarks you can access anywhere.Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.
After you log in start tagging your search history, and the labels you use will show up on page results helping you to quick locate the results you have used before.
More details about this on:
2. Install BetterSearch extension for Firefox.
This will enhance not only Google but also a few other search engines:
According to the official homepage, BetterSearch is :
An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com (web results), AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.
This extension will allow you to open search results in the same page for a quick overview using an iframe. See screenshot.
3. Install Bumble Search extension for Firefox.
This extension has just been released and it offers a lot of useful features like:
- Customise Google. Google is extended to include a diverse range of specialised search engines, optionally remove commercial results, and enable new methods for digging deeper into promising results.
- Sidebar: Notes & Searching. A discreet Firefox sidebar grants you rapid access to Google or MSN, and gives you space to make quick notes on interesting pages you’ve found. Notably, it also introduces two highly unique search techniques for finding additional worthwhile webpages - related to a group of pages you’ve already discovered. Thus letting you search confidently at your own pace, whilst locating pages you would not normally uncover.
This short description shows only a small part of the full functionalities it brings to the user. Check the screenshot for more in depth details.
I also liked a particular line from the extension’s homepage:
Respecting Websites
Bumble Search is in the relatively unchartered area of modifying websites (such as Google).
We recognise that utmost care must be taken to respect the needs and intentions of the original authors.
In the case of Google:
- The modifications benefit everyone.
- Google does not lose visitors to competing search engines; and people can see Google’s benefits in comparison.
This ethic side is something that another popular firefox extension should learn. You cannot base your business on screwing those that feed you. Especially by giving users a broken condom (blocking Google Analytics will not protect web users privacy).
4. Get the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
After you have installed it, go get some scripts to enhance your browsing from UserScripts.org. You can find all the Google Scripts here. One of the most useful scripts and which is used in th the screenshot is Google Counter. This script will put a number near all the results allowing you to quickly determine a website position in SERPs. To get the full use of this you can tweak Google to show more than 10 results per page.
After 4 simple steps you can consider yourself now a power searcher.
Enjoy your searching!
Note:
All the Firefox Extensions mentioned above fully work on Firefox 1.5 but haven’t been tested on previous versions.
Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | 2 Comments »
Friday, December 23rd, 2005 |
I spotted via Search Engine Watch Blog that Webmaster World has open its doors gain for the search engine spiders. Brett Tabke has started an quite original Web 1.0 alpha blog 
in the robots.txt file. And he seems quite pissed off at Google:
Lets be crystal clear - the G Toolbar is spyware at it’s finest. The cool thing is they actually get people to download it, install it, and agree to use it. I have no doubt, that the majority of people that use the toolbar in advanced mode, do NOT know that their urls are being tracked. I also belive that the majority of people that turn on “Advanced” mode, do NOT know what it is about and turn it on to be one of the cool advanced people.
Yeah….I have the slight ideea that for some people that is NEWS
Also he has a plan (most of the steps are very logic) on how Yahoo and MSN could win the search game. Number one tip is the most important but unfortuantely very unlikely to be put in practice
1 Grab a quality, short domain name. (say http://www.av.com)
All in one that’s a very nice TXT file worth reading
Posted in Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 |
Yahoo "forcing" default on Firefox
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Spotted via this post about Yahoo pushing Firefox users to switch the default engine from Google to Yahoo.
First reaction: “whatever another dumb Yahoo joke”.
Second reaction few seconds later was much accurate.
- Google is doing the same crap on Internet Explorer 7. See this screenshot to see what I am talking about
- Yahoo doesn’t modify anything on your browser, registry and so on. The only thing it does is too suggest to try the Yahoo engine and if you don’t like it you can switch easily back
- Yahoo doesn’t install a thing…it’s a matter of choice
- You can make the Yahoo “tip” go away for ever
Conclusion…in some matters Yahoo’s strategies are more user friendly and competition friendly. In other matters they can be….Childish
Posted in Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Thursday, December 15th, 2005 |
Fresh from the Google labs come out 2 new Firefox extensions:
- Google Safe Browsing for Firefox
Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. That’s why it’s important to browse safely with Google Safe Browsing. By combining advanced algorithms with reports about misleading pages from a number of sources, Safe Browsing is often able to automatically warn you when you encounter a page that’s trying to trick you into disclosing personal information.
- Blogger Web Comments for Firefox
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.
Blogger Web Comments seems like a fun and usefull tool. It also has an “Add Comment” option wich unfortunately works only if you have a blogger account. I just hope that Technorati comes up with a similar extension with a more flexible blogging functionality (allowing multiple blogging platforms)
Posted in General, Google | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 |
Both Google News and Yahoo News are theoretically free of splogs due to manually check of any source (at least in the approval stage). Unfortunately it seems that both news channels started to put a greater accent on quantity instead of quality.
A few moths ago I have used Google News and email alerts for certain keywords but I have gave up due to the great amount of duplicate news created by splogs allowed in the system. One site in particular it was the most annoying. I am talking about addict3d that even for a blind brain dead person looks like a splog but unfortunately not for quality checkers at Google.
Today, to my surprise Yahoo News sent me a IM alert from the same .02 website.
Why this sucks? Well…for the following reasons:
1. Real news producers are left out and don’t receive the deserved traffic
2. It shows a lack of interest from the news channels
3. It makes people gave up on service that it might be useful, and in turn news channels will quit developing further
4. It just SUCKS
Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Saturday, October 8th, 2005 |
Google Reader
Originally uploaded by andy z.
In the past 2 year the internet mob praised every new Google feature no matter how usefull or not has been. But yesterday things have suddenly changed with the release of Google Reader. From what I am seeing in Technorati more than 50% have negative reviews on it.
Possible explanations for this:
- The “ultimate feed” that is Slashdot. With more than 50.000 subscribers (acording to Bloglines), Slashdot has the power to change opinions and trends. Heh I even know someone that believed on April Fools that Google has it’s own satellite because he has read that on Slashdot. What I cannot understand though is the sudden change of opinions
- The share market of Bloglines. Due to the fact that Google Reader introduces quite an innovative navigation system for an rss reader is troubling for most users that are not prone to change and therefore very strong biased
And if you connect those 2 pices of informations through the fact that Bloglines has named Slashdot the ultimate feed things are more obvious.
This post is not an absolute truth or anything similar just a speculation and a try to answer myself some questions
Posted in General, Google | 2 Comments »
Saturday, October 8th, 2005 |
I am missing for 2h from computer and Google launches a new service. It looks pretty nice and at least for me it’s kind of bye bye Bloglines. Considering the fact that it’s Ajax one of the first reviews I saw it’s from Ajaxian Blog
Apparently this is no new news, Chris Sherman new about this one since August. You should check also:
Of course in oder to have acess you need a Google account. If you are outside US and you still don’t have a Gmail account send me a message through the contact form and I’ll mail you an invite.
Edit:
But of course..scalability seems to be an issue for Google. Now it’s down, and it hasn’t been Slashdoted yet…
Posted in Breaking News, General, Google | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 |
Last week, rumors of a Google Calendar started showin up. The rumors were based on the aquisition of the gcalendar.com and the activation of the subdomain calendar.google.com. The subdomain pointed to the main google.com, but as of today is pointing to Google’s personalized homepage.
Ar they really doing something?
EDIT:
After I pushed the post button, I saw the Yahoo’s reaction to the calendar rumors :). To be honest I would have expected more from Yahoo…
Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »
