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.

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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?“

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Microsoft owns and operates their own search portal (MSN) which constantly ranks far behind Yahoo and even farther behind the world search leader–and ever dominating internet giant–Google. Even if (BIG if) Microsoft is allowed to acquire Yahoo, they’ll still be far behind their target. In fact, Google might even retain twice the overall search traffic after an acquisition is completed. That’s a massive hurdle to overcome when you’re already behind.

So, why would Microsoft invest in such an effort when they’ve clearly lost and their web glory days are but a memory? The answer is within the clouds. Specifically “The Cloud” which is the term that’s been given to the web’s next big growth area.

“The Cloud” is a term that refers to “cloud computing” which allows consumers to use web-based applications to share photos, create documents, run web-based applications similar to traditional apps and manage their calendars. In the past (Microsoft anyone?) consumers purchased applications that ran on their computer hard drives. Those days are not completely over but the days are numbered. All three competitors we’ve mentioned are ramping up to become the owner of “The Cloud” and (as Microsoft has demonstrated) there is BIG, FAT money that will be rewarded to the winner.

This is why Google is threatened. Microsoft has demonstrated it’s ability to create and market software and they have the bank account to back it up. Yahoo is currently the second leader in search (far behind Google) plus they’ve done an adequate job building their Yahoo portal around many of the important “cloud” applications. With sites like Flickr.com and their powerful “My Yahoo” portal that provides calendars, email and more they’re well positioned. Millions of people have a Yahoo account that they use for email and other things which is an intriguing base for a Microsoft aquisition.

All of this is just a dream at this point; a bad dream actually. Thanks to U.S. and European regulators the merger may not go through which is good news in my opinion. Europe’s top antitrust enforcer, Neelie Kroes has had Microsoft on her target list for years and it’s a good bet that she’s already all over this.

So what happens if the merger doesn’t go through? Currently, Yahoo is set to officially reject the offer. Microsoft will look to compete and aquire and continue to drag along behind the leaders while they watch and steal ideas and hope to catch the scraps as they fall. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer will say “Well, we tried.” and he’ll blame it all on the regulators.

If it does go through? Well, they better start to step it up right out of the gate to catch Google. They’ll need to retain their top talent and sell them on the “new and exciting future of the company.” The ultimate embarrassment would be losing to Google after spending over $44 billion and losing. Yes, that’s 44 multiplied by 1,000,000,000 plus an extra $600,000 of Bill’s lunch money. Ouch.

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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.

A second consideration is how you space out multiple words within a directory or file name. You shouldn’t leave actual blank spaces anywhere; so what’s the best practice? According to Google, they’re spiders separate words efficiently by punctuation. So a best practice is to use a dash between words instead of using an underscore or letting the words all run together. Underscores are not punctuation so they should be avoided.

Google is a smart animal though and it’s a good bet that they know the difference between words if they’re all running together like they tend to do in your domain name. As a general best practice I would recommend using a dash and shy away from any other separators. Google specifically recommends this:

Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time.

So in summary, be descriptive, concise and separate your file names with a dash when building out your website pages for SEO.

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To accomplish these two important goals you actually need two types of sitemaps. First, you need an HTML version which is used and navigated by humans. Then you need to build an XML version that the search engines spiders use to index your content.

Google recently posted some information and answers about sitemaps and below is a summary of the important points.

1) Sitemaps do not guarantee inclusion in search results, they just help Google find your pages and they augment their usual crawl and discovery processes. It simply helps them understand your site better.

2) A sitemap by itself will not guarantee a higher ranking but if it helps the search engines find and index more of your pages then you have a better chance of being found.

3) The page importance number that’s used in a sitemap does not figure into your ranking. It simply tells Google the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site.

4) You will not get penalized for submitting a sitemap unless it helps Google discover spammy or low quality content.

5) You don’t have to put your sitemap in your root directory but it’s still probably a good idea in my opinion.

6) A standard HTML sitemap is good but it’s a better idea to have both HTML and XML. If you have an easily navigable site you could probably just stick with the XML version. Plus it will help you get more out of your Google Webmaster Tools account.

7) Placement of information within your sitemap (beginning or end) does not matter.

You may use multiple sitemap files and you may consider using a sitemap index file to list them all.

For more information about sitemaps please search our site or visit the following site to read more.

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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.

I actually had an entire site removed from the index and place in the supplimental index because I had one link to a forum on the site that we thought was removed. This forum had turned into a haven for sex and spam and when Google followed the obscure link on the site it looked like we were operating a shady site! The site has still never recovered from this error.

If you have pages that do not show up in the search results it’s a good chance that you were placed in web page Siberia. Chances are you’re pages don’t have good, descriptive title tags, meta description tags, trusted links to your content or good, useful content in the first place so they’re not worth ranking anyway.

In addition to the need to always serve high quality search results, Google has eluded that the technical hurdle required to search every available web page was a daunting undertaking.

It appears that they have been working to eliminate the supplemental index in recent months by increasing the crawl frequency, and removing the supplemental result tag that was applied to web pages in the first place. To put a final nail in the coffin they’ve just announced that they’ll be searching the supplemental index all the time and provided us with the following tidbits about new search results:

• When doing a search, Google will now search every page, every time. This has required (as Google says) “truly amazing technical feats“.
• Searches will return a much deeper slice of the web and more relevant results
• You’ll see more results for non-English queries
• Less visible pages that were indexed will show more often now

I can’t tell from the official announcement post if they’ve completely eliminated the supplemental index and lumped everything together or if it still exists in some way. What I would guess is that Google still suppresses pages that are suspect and not trusted. I think it only makes sense for obvious reasons. The announcement does not confirm this but I highly doubt this announcement will benefit any shady websites or websites that simply provide lousy content. What’s good is that websites that are just starting out have a better chance of being found and eventually improving their ranking if they’re truly useful. It’s also good for people doing deep research on a subject. I know that I’ve ran out of relevant results at times so this may be a welcome change.

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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.

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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

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What Google says:

Google has confirmed that it’s all about the content (as usual). If you have great content it can be presented within any of the above presentations. What’s important to know though is Google uses what they call “host crowding,” which restricts a domain in the listing to 1-2 appearances. They say there are some exceptions to this rule but for the most part they don’t want someone doing a search and then being presented with results that show pages from multiple sub-domains or sections of the site. From Matt Cutts:

For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen.

What we should take away from this development:

In my mind it makes sense that a search engine would treat a page more favorably if it’s named in a relevant way and positioned at the top of the directory structure but Matt does not list this as a concern. As a best practice I’m still going to follow this rule regardless. But again, if you offer great content and people link to it, this should mean that it’s worthy of a good ranking regardless of where the content is found within your site structure or how long the URL is to the content.

If you have a large site and the content is completely different use a subdomain to separate it from the main domain so as to not dilute the main content and to keep yourself organized. Ex: chairs.yoursite.com vs. tables.yoursite.com. What’s important to note when using this technique is if content from yoursite.com overlaps from one subdomain to the other, only two results will show. So, for example, if someone is searching for “kitchen furniture” and your products that fit this search are broken up between sub-domains, Google will only show two direct results. Is this a big deal? Probably not for most sites. We’ll be glad to just get the listings and allow people to browse the site further once they click the first link.

The bottom line:

The use of a sub-domain does not make it more likely you’ll get multiple listings in the search results and they’re use does not hurt your potential ranking either (for most sites). If you have a large site, feel free to break up the content as you need to keep yourself sane. For smaller sites, keep it simple and place your pages in the main directory of your main domain. Just make sure you write great content and build your site so the resulting pages are highly relevant to your target audience and you’ll be well positioned.

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You can feel free to use this tag on your pages and it will not count against you.For site designers interested in meta tags there are only two left that we need to be concerned about on a regular basis. Actually there’s really only one true meta tag, the other is the title tag. If you follow the link above you’ll see that there are instances where you might want to use meta tags for very specialized reasons but the bottom line is that you need to have a title tag with your keywords in it and a description meta tag that will show your site summary within the search listings.

If you’re not familiar with these tags I’ll provide an example of them below and you simply paste them somewhere between the HEAD tags in your html.

<title>The title of the page</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page”>

Other meta tags of interest are as follows:

<meta name=”robots” content=”value here”>

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”value here”>

According to Google you can modify the value’s as follows:

• noindex: prevents the page from being included in the search engines
• nofollow: This tells the search engines to not follow links on this page when looking for new pages to crawl
• nosnippet: This will remove any snippets when the search results are shown for this page.
• noodp: Don’t use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project)
• noarchive: Don’t display a “cached” link for this page in the search results
• unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time

I hope this quick start tidbit clears up a few things and helps you spend less time on building meta tags and more time on building great content and researching keywords that return real traffic. Using these keywords in your title, description and throughout your content should be your MAIN focus when dealing with SEO on your site.

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