Japanese Search Engine Goo (Funny)

March 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I thought this was kinda funny and another light-hearted break in the action here while I prepare my next post.

I’m not quite sure I understand the message though. Are they saying that the search engine “Goo” works harder and gives you more personal, hands on results? Or are they saying that they’re technology is so backward and non-technical that every time you hit the search button to get some results that you have to wait for an army of people to research your inquiry?

I’m just being a smarty, but this is funny regardless. Enjoy.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Google and Privacy (Funny)

March 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

This is a good time to take a fun break from the serious issues of SEO and competing online and just take a few minutes to laugh. On that note I offer you a humerous video skit about Google and privacy.

Some people are really scared by Google. They complain that Google knows too much about us and their increasing power is dangerous and monopolistic.

I’m not one of those people but man did I find this video on YouTube hilarious. I originally found this on Jon Myers blog so I thought he deserved a shout out.


Do you think that Google is too powerful? Personally I don’t fault people for doing a great job, growing big and making a ton of money. That’s what Google has done and I don’t feel that they have any “Dr. Evil” ambitions. They simply want to provide the best services possible and dominate. So do you. So do I. What’s wrong with that?

They better stay out of my kitchen though. ;-)

Check out Google street view btw. Pretty darn cool.

My only question is “Why Detroit and Pittsburg and not Cleveland?“


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Inside Microsoft’s Bid for Yahoo

February 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

As usual, Microsoft is trying to play catchup and boost their position in the marketplace by trying to acquire rather than innovate. Microsoft recently announced that they’re willing to plunk down (ready for this?) $44.6 billion dollars for a hostile takeover of Yahoo; the web’s second leading search provider (among other things). Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Tidbits: Underscores vs. Dashes

January 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment

There has been some discussion recently about how to properly name the files on your website and server. An obvious decision would be to name them something that makes sense to you. This will help you stay sane and organized but the question I’d like to ask you is “Do your file names make sense to the search engines?”.

If you’ve build a website I can guarantee that you’ve made a decision regarding the name of your site, a directory or a file name. The most important thing to remember is to name your files with words that describe the content; you want to do this in as concise manner as posssible. This will certainly help the search engines determine what your content is about. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Sitemap news and FAQs

January 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Sitemaps are an important part of any successful website and SEO campaign for two main reasons: The search engines use sitemaps to index all of your content and pages and it helps human users find their way to all of your content. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

The end of the supplemental index?

December 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment

For those of you not familiar with the Google supplemental index, I found the best ever summary of this indice (In´dice - n. 1. Index) at Tropical SEO to sum up what this is. Quote: “The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.” I find that statement hilarious and I laughed out loud.

In the past, if you’re website had pages that Google didn’t trust or had a lot of inlinks that were suspect, Google would place your pages in a huge, dark, dusty database where you would technically be “indexed” and could “possibly” show in the search results, but the chances were slim. The official Google statement on this subject was that they would search this index if and when they had to fulfill a harder or more esoteric (obscure) search query. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Google Analytics: Content Analysis and Sitemap improvements

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Google has released an update to their much loved Analytics tool that provides basic content analysis and another improved feature that details out important information about your sitemap. The new tools will give you information about meta tags, meta description tags and information about content on your site that Google has trouble indexing. Google says:

To help you improve the quality of your site, our new content analysis feature should be a helpful addition to the crawl error diagnostics already provided in Webmaster Tools.

The new sitemap tools reveal how your sitemap was processed by the Googlebot and it should be a useful addition so you don’t have to spend the time trying to figure out if Google actually indexed all of your important pages.  Information includes:

  • The number of the pages from your Sitemap that were indexed
  • lists any errors or warnings for specific pages

Google continues:

Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Google about your site’s most important pages, especially if you have new or updated content that we may not know about. If you haven’t yet submitted a Sitemap or have questions about the process, visit our Webmaster Help Center to learn more.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Hyphenated domain names are BAD

December 12, 2007 | 5 Comments

For those not familiar with this subject, let me give you a quick background summary.

Domain names can be purchased as “yourdomainname.com” or “your-domain-name.com” and you don’t automatically get both when making the purchase. Site owners have chosen to market their site this way for several reasons.

First, the domain name without the hyphens might not be available so the site owner opts to go with the next best thing.

Second, people have chosen to go this route to clearly place their specific keywords and key phrases in their domain name and separate them with hyphens to clearly spell out the words for the search engines. It’s not a bad idea to have your keywords in your domain name but the goal here is to target a very specific, high traffic key phrase and the practice has been abused. This technique has been popular for long, targeted key phrases that are commonly used by shady, spammy and illegal sites. For example, “buy-viagra-online-cheap.com”.

Google has said in 2005 that it doesn’t matter if you have hyphens but does this still stand up in 2008?

To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while- consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas- holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.

In 2008 it’s becoming clear that the search engines might be starting to consider domain names like this to be less relevant and spammy than domain names without the hyphen. Many prominent figures in the industry have said that more than 3 hyphens in a domain name can raise a red flag.

We’ll keep an eye on this subject and we welcome your participation in the comments below. As a general practice try to choose a domain name without hyphens. It’s easier to remember and it reduces the risk that you might rate with lower relevance in the SERP’s due to your domain name style. Of course there is nothing wrong with securing your domain name with and without the hyphens to reduce confusion but I would definitely recommend using the non-hyphenated name whenever possible.

Where’s a good place to register domain names? Check out GoDaddy.com and NameBargain.com


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Your content structure and organization

December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I’ve wondered for a long time regarding the choice of some sites to build their content out within directories, sub-domains or as static pages positioned at the top of the root directory. I’ve always had it in my mind that the static page (or at least a short path to the page) is the way to go - that Google would consider that page “more relevant” because it was higher up in the directory. The answer turns out to be none of the above. To the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

The current state of meta tags

December 5, 2007 | 1 Comment

Back in the day, meta tags were all the rage. Webmasters spent a lot of time crafting the perfect tags for the headers of their page that included keywords, descriptions and all sorts of other fancy tags that ultimately accomplished very little. Today, it’s an ongoing SEO urban myth that you need keyword meta tags on your pages.The truth is that some rogue search engines still use tags like the keyword tag but overall the engines that we really care about ignore them completely. Google has confirmed this. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

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