Google

Google Reindexing, How often?

BlueSEO — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:37:40 -0500

Google is constantly reindexing the web. Active portions of the web may be visited several times a day. Less active portions may be spidered once or twice a month or so.

Earlier this year they appeared to have created a filter on new links / new sites to where it takes a while for your rankings to really go up in competitive markets (especially if your site is new and does not have much linkage data pointing at it yet)… it will typically take 90 days for most people to start seeing decent movement in Google in competitive markets.

Don’t forget to mix up your link text using various different descriptive link text combinations when you get your inbound links. Some directories will only let you use your official site name and some are a bit more lenient.

Also keep in mind some of the other things you can be doing to boost your site: writing articles, participating in communities, logical link swaps, asking for links, etc.

Best of luck with your site!

Can Google Do No Wrong?

BlueSEO — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:26:13 -0500

While the internet giant which is Google continues to dominate the superhighway, many people are now beginning to ask the question “Can Google do no wrong?”.

Despite problems with the recent Page Ranking exercise, during which many webmasters reported confusing changes in many of their website page rankings, it seems as though the hold which Google has over the internet is still as strong as ever. There have also been recent concerns about changes in Google’s advertising program, Adsense, with many participants reporting significant falls in their income over the last few weeks.

While Google continues to invest in the future, with the $1.4 billion dollar acquisition of YouTube and a $700 million advertising deal with MySpace, some are suggesting that the company may be over stretching resources. Google have also moved into the web hosting industry (offering free hosting) which will help to install further customer loyalty.

While the likes of Yahoo and MSN struggle to compete with Google in the search engine market place, Google continue to entrench their position as the most powerful search engine (if not Company) on the internet. If Google were to take their eye off their traditional search engine business over the months ahead, it may leave a gap for competitors to prosper - but are Yahoo and MSN up to the task?

Google Finally Listens To The Webmasters

BlueSEO — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:07:20 -0500

While Google have for some time been at the forefront of online diagnostics and the analysis of websites, one area in which they have not been forthcoming is link analysis - until now.

There has always been the most basic of functions on the Google search engine which allows you to enter your website URL and receive a very bland and unhelpful display of all pages with a link to your site. While useful in certain circumstances, it was very hard to review in details as the number could literally run into 100s or even 1000s of pages.

After much questioning and requests from some of the more prominent webmasters, Google have now given in to the pressure and added a new tool to their Webmaster Tool. The new Google Webmaster Tools allows you to receive a clear and very helpful summary of sites linking to your website, with a total of the pages linking from each site.

The service splits the numbers between internal links - links from other pages of your website - and external links - links from pages and websites not under your control. There is also the option to filter certain criteria form the results, thereby giving the webmaster exactly what they require. As well as allowing you to drill deeper into the figures, there is also the opportunity to download the information to spreadsheets, etc for further analysis.

Google Supplemental Results

BlueSEO — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:44:54 -0500

Google’s search results are now set up in a two-tier system. You have the main, or regular search results, and the supplemental results. Supplemental results will generally show up at the very end of keyword search results. The odds that your ’supplemental’ page will be available to someone performing a search isn’t very good.

Let’s see Google official definition from their webmaster page

"A supplemental result is just like a regular web result,
except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to
place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental
index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For
example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from
being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still
be crawled and added to our supplemental index."

To find out how your own website (or a competitors site) is doing in the two-tier system go over to Google and type in site:www.yourdomain, of course you will have to put in your actual url. If your pages are relegated to the supplemental results you will actually see “Supplemental Result” written to the right of the url below the description in the listing.

The most common reason that your pages may be in the supplemental results is duplicate content. Pages with little, or no content will also be placed in the supplemental results. Another possibility is that you may have identical title and Description meta tags on all or many pages.

The best advice is to take actions to avoid having your pages placed in the supplemental results in the first place. However, it is possible to get pages back into the main listings.

Make a serious effort to provide unique and original content on all your pages. If in question you may check your pages for originality at copyscape.com. Write a unique title and description meta tag for each page. If you have pages that consist mostly of images add text so that Google will ’see’ content. There are different opinions as to how much content you need on a page but 500 words or more is best.

When you work on your inbound links do not make all of the links point to your home page. Whenever you have the opportunity get backlinks to internal pages of your website. The lack of inbound links or having only reciprocal links has often been pointed to as a cause of pages being placed in supplemental results.

Finally, don’t give up or lose hope. Most all websites have pages listed in the supplemental results. Concentrate on providing good original content as that is, by far, the most significant factor affecting how your page will be treated by Google’s two-tier system.